WHY COME BACK ?

Jeff Brouws California'lı bir fotoğrafçı ,geçen sene Baudrillard'ın America'sını okurken tek tük beliren görüntülerin hepsi Brouws'un American typologies serisiyle tekrar gözümde canlandı.Terkedilmiş moteller, otoparktaki tek tük arabalar,bomboş otoyollar, yokluğun ve aşırılığın aynı çerçeve içerisinde kendine has bir uyumla yeralabildiği mekanlar.Bomboş dinerlar,arabalar, arabalar ve hep arabalar.Seçtiğim fotoğraflar Brouws'un Approaching Nowehere ve Highway- America's Endless Dream kitaplarından. Kitapaki fotoğraflara baktıktan sonra Baudrillard'ın Amerika gaezisi sonrası Sylvére Lotringer'la yaptığı söyleşide sarfettiği cümleler aklıma geldi.Eğer Baudrillard yaşamış olsaydı ve Brouws'un bu kitabını görmüş olsaydı sanırım Lotringer'le yaptığı söyleşi sırasında sarf ettiği bu cümlelerin kitaptaki fotoğraflarla birebir örtüştüğünü görünce kendisi de şaşırabilirdi.

Bu söyleşide Lotringer Baudrillard'a Willam Burroughs'la aralarında geçen şu diyologtan bahseder:

" Every time I meet William Burroughs, I feel I'm in the presence of a fiesty corpse. As a living person he seems rather bored. I asked him if he would go to the moon. " Of course" he replied. " I'd go anywhere; I'd leave the solar system if they came to get me in a flying saucer." " Even if there is no coming back?" I asked. He looked at me. " Why come back?"

Baudrillard Lotringer'in bu anlattıkların üzerine şöyle söyler:

" I experienced the same feeling of no return during a trip to the United States a few years ago. It was a real shock. I had the revelation that I was entering the period f the rest of my life from another point of view; in a state of complete irony with respect to what had gone before. When there is no fundamental passion, when life or love dissepears, there is no longer any possibility of a multicipility of modalities,with respect to love or existence. It's an extra helping, a little bit ecstatic, a little bit residual, but also profoundly melancholic. Death is an event that has already taken place.

Ve America'da geçen en sevdiğim bölüm:
VANISHING POINT
Caution: Objects in this mirror may be closer than they appear!

Nostalgia born of the immesnsity of the Texan hills and the seirras 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...

Jean Baudrillard