This document discusses several postmodern concepts related to cultural identity in America including Jean Baudrillard's ideas of hyperreality, consumption and the collapse of meaning. It explores how mass media creates simulated realities that people confuse for the real world. Life becomes like a soap opera and the boundaries between reality and simulation disappear.

1. Cultural Identities America – Baudrillard and Wenders

3. Jean Baudrillard’s postmodernism

4. Baudrillard, consumption and identity.

5. A shifting world

8. Forgetting Foucault

10. America Nostalgia born of the immensity of the Texan hills and the sierras of New Mexico: gliding down the freeway, smash hits on the Chrysler stereo, heat wave. Snapshots aren't enough. We'd need the whole film of the trip in real time, including the unbearable heat and the music. We'd have to replay it all from end to end at home in a darkened room, rediscover the magic of the freeways and the distance and the ice-cold alcohol in the desert and the speed and live it all again on the video at home in real time, not simply for the pleasure of remembering but becasue the fascination of senseless repetition is already present in the abstraction of the journey. The unfolding of the desert is indinitely close to the timelessness of film...

11. America I went in search of astral America, not social and cultural America, but the America of the empty, absolute freedom of the freeways, not the deep America of mores and mentalities, but the America of desert speed, of motels and mineral surfaces. I looked for it in the speed of the screenplay, in the indifferent reflex of television, in the film of days and nights projected across an empty space, in the marvellously affect less succession of signs, images, faces, and ritual acts on the road; [I] looked for … a universe which is virtually our own, right down to its European cottages. I sought the finished form of the future catastrophe of the social in geology, in that upturning of depth that can be seen in the striated spaces, the reliefs of salt and stone, the canyons where the fossil river flows down, the immemorial abyss of slowness that shows itself in erosion and geology. I even looked for it in the verticality of the great cities. I knew all about this nuclear form, this future catastrophe when I was still in Paris, of course. But to understand it, you have to take to the road, to that travelling which achieves what Virilio calls the aesthetics of disappearance.