America (live or die)

No: this is not some ‘vote or die’ political post but is, in fact, the third installment of my series on Baudrillard’s “AMERICA”.  One thing in particular I like about Baudrillard is his ability to interject deep meaning into the mundane.  For example, merely glancing at a piece of graffiti can prompt this response…

‘LIVE OR DIE’: the graffiti message on the pier at Santa Monica is mysterious, because we really have no choice between life and death.  If you live, you live, if you die, you die.  It is like saying ‘be yourself, or don’t be!’  It is stupid, and yet it is enigmatic.  You could read it to mean that you should live intensely or else disappear, but that is banal.  Following the model of ‘pay or die!’, ‘your money or your life!’, it would become ‘your life or your life!”.  Stupid again, since you cannot exchange life for itself.  And yet there is poetic force in this implaceable tautollogy, as there always is when there is nothing to be understood.  In the end, the lesson of this graffiti is perhaps: ‘ if you get more stupid than me, you die!’

I like how he doesn’t see a need for some ultimate conclusion on the meaning of the statement… nothing irks me more then philosophers who get caught up in the meaningless questions.  Even so, it seems he contemplates the statement long enough to expose it for what it is–and in doing so causes his reader to view the common and banal with a fresh perspective.  And you wondered why I like this guy so much…