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For the desert is simply that: an ecstatic critique of culture, an ecstatic form of disappearance. // Like a fibrillation of muscles, striated by the excess of heat and speed, by the excess of things seen or read, of places passed through and forgotten. The defibrillation of the body overloaded with empty signs, functional gestures, the blinding brilliance of the sky, and somnambulistic distances, is a very slow process. Things suddenly become lighter, as culture, our culture, becomes more rarefied. And this spectral form of civilization which the Americans have invented, an ephemeral form so close to vanishing point, suddenly seems the best adapted to the probability—the probability only—of the life that lies in store for us. The form that dominates the American West, and doubtless all of American culture, is a seismic form: a practical, interstitial culture, born of a rift with the Old World, a tactile, fragile, mobile, superficial culture—you have to follow its own rules to grasp how it works: seismic shifting, soft technologies. // Everything here testifies to death having found its ideal home.”

-Jean Baudrillard
America