Postmodern Prophet: Tocqueville Visits Vegas
If in the year 2000 Alexis de Tocqueville could somehow be given the opportunity to revisit the United States, he would be gratified to see how many of his observations concerning the country had proven to be correct. Yet for all his prescience, Tocqueville would find much to surprise him in contemporary America. Take Las Vegas, for example. Given Tocqueville’s emphasis on America’s Puritan origins and its austere republican morality, he might well find it odd that a community essentially founded by gangsters has become one of the most popular family vacation spots in the United States. And yet Las Vegas would not catch Tocqueville entirely by surprise. He did, after all, argue that American commercial society had emancipated the love of money and had even turned the willingness to take chances into a new kind of virtue. What is more interesting is that Tocqueville anticipated Las Vegas as a cultural phenomenon. Many commentators have claimed that Las Vegas has become the central cultural symbol of contemporary America, and that if we want to see what the United States will look like in the future, we need only turn to Las Vegas today. The post-modernist architect Robert Venturi has suggested by the very title of his book that we should all be Learning from Las Vegas. My contention is that, by reading Democracy in America carefully, we might have learned the same cultural lesson from Tocqueville.
Tocqueville in fact had a premonition of Las Vegas—at the very first moment he caught a glimpse of America:
When I arrived for the first time at New York, by that part of the Atlantic Ocean which is called the East River, I was surprised to perceive along the shore . . . a number of little palaces of white marble, several of which were of classic architecture. When I went the next day to inspect more closely one which had particularly attracted my notice, I found that its walls were of whitewashed brick, and its columns of painted wood
(II, 52).
Tocqueville recounts this incident in the course of explaining how and why democratic societies cultivate the arts differently from aristocratic societies. He points out that aristocratic societies turn out artistic products that are long-lasting and of high quality, whereas democratic societies are obsessed with producing goods cheaply, swiftly, and abundantly:
The productions of artists are more numerous, but the merit of each production is diminished. No longer able to soar to what is great, they cultivate what is pretty and elegant, and appearance is more attended to than reality. In aristocracies a few great pictures are produced; in democratic countries a vast number of insignificant ones. In the former statues are raised of bronze; in the latter they are modelled in plaster (II, 51).
Tocqueville is chiefly struck by the cheapness of American building materials: What looked initially and from a distance like “white marble” turned out on closer inspection to be only “whitewashed brick” and “painted wood.” But he is making a cultural point, not just an economic one. The cheap American building materials are used to imitate the great cultural monuments of Europe, its “palaces” and “classic architecture.” Tocqueville generally presents a brash America taking on the challenge of conquering nature on a new continent, exulting in its technological and economic power. Yet when it comes to cultural matters, Tocqueville’s America is timid, following in Europe’s footsteps, trying to democratize an aristocratic artistic heritage by making the cultural icons of Europe available cheaply (and hence widely) to the common man.
In that sense, Las Vegas is the fullest and most perfect embodiment of Tocqueville’s cultural vision of America as a democratically inspired (and cheap) imitation of Europe. If Tocqueville were to visit Las Vegas today, he would find the “palaces” and “classic architecture” he first saw on the shores of the East River recreated many times over and on a scale he would have found unimaginable in the 1830s (indeed he would all but see the East River itself recreated at the New York-New York Hotel & Casino). Tocqueville might first visit Caesar’s Palace, with its Roman architecture, Armitronic classical sculptures, and a restaurant named Nero’s, together with the Cleopatra’s Barge Nightclub. If that sparked his curiosity about Egypt, Tocqueville could book himself into the Luxor Las Vegas, where he would see Cleopatra’s Needle, the Sphinx, and a 30-story pyramid—and he could relax in Nefertiti’s Lounge or indulge himself at the Pharaoh’s Pheast buffet. If Tocqueville were looking for something more modern, he could turn to The Venetian, with its reproduction of the Doge’s Palace, St. Mark’s Square, and the Campanile, together with a few canals. And of course if Tocqueville were to become homesick, as of September 1999 he could check in to the Paris-Las Vegas Casino Resort, which sports a 50-story recreation of the Eiffel Tower, as well as replicas of the Arc de Triomphe, the Paris Opera House, and the Louvre. The Frommer’s guidebook to Las Vegas describes the rooms in the hotel as “French Regency style, probably not good enough for Louis XIV, but just fine for you and me.” 1 Tocqueville himself could not have better expressed the relation of European aristocratic culture to American democratic culture.
Las Vegas thus fulfills a deep-seated American dream—to be able to pack the whole family into the station wagon and drive to Europe. But the city does more than just give Americans a chance to visit a reasonable facsimile of Paris or Venice at a reasonable cost. The real point is to have Paris, Venice, Rome, and, what is more, Monte Carlo and Lake Como just down the Strip from each other, not to mention New York, New Orleans, Rio de Janeiro, and other New World sites. Frommer’s jokes that the next attraction in Las Vegas should be a “Hoover Dam Hotel & Casino”—“Why drive 30 miles? See a quarter-scale replica right here on the Las Vegas Strip!” 2 True to Tocqueville’s understanding of America, Las Vegas compresses everything, including space itself. Its ultimate and underlying aim is to reproduce the whole world in miniature—and in Tocqueville’s terms, that is a democratic goal, since it would make everything readily accessible to the democratic masses, if only in reduced form.
In a further democratic gesture, Las Vegas makes travel in time as well as space possible and even convenient. Why should Americans be restricted to traveling only to sites available in their own era? If one goes to Rome or Egypt today, one sees them in ruins—hardly an edifying sight for Americans, who are used to keeping things in good repair. At Caesar’s Palace or the Luxor, Americans can view ancient Rome or Egypt as they ought to be—alive and kicking. In discussing how Americans practice the arts, Tocqueville points out that “they substitute the representation of motion and sensation for that of sentiment and thought” (II, 52). That is certainly the principle on which Las Vegas operates. Why muse over the ruins of the Colosseum in Rome and try to imagine the ancient combats, when one can watch an Armitronic gladiator strut his stuff at Caesar’s Palace? For Americans, the ancient past comes to life in Las Vegas. Architecturally and in every other way, the city has become a cross between a historical museum and a theme park.
Anticipating Las Vegas
The key concepts behind Las Vegas are reproducibility and availability, the attempt to make everything in time and space simultaneously present and accessible to the American people. In aesthetic terms, the simultaneity of all historical periods is the formula for what is known as postmodernism, especially in architectural style. Modernism was the last of the exclusive architectural styles, one that claimed to be true and hence to have invalidated and displaced all previous styles of building. Postmodern architecture no longer claims to be “true”—it is the first architectural style that admits that it is merely a style, and hence it is open to any and all influences from the architectural past. In the most exuberant (or most decadent) of postmodern structures, elements from different architectural traditions can mix freely: a Roman arch here, an Egyptian pyramid there, further on a Gothic turret—all joined by a Renaissance colonnade. Taken as a whole, then, Las Vegas is the greatest monument to postmodern architecture on earth. As Venturi’s writings suggest, postmodernism as an architectural style had its origins in Las Vegas, and the city continues to point the way to our postmodern future. Thus if I am right that Tocqueville in effect anticipated Las Vegas in his cultural analysis of America, then he can help us to understand the phenomenon of postmodernism, even though he never used the word. Tocqueville helps reveal that postmodernism is a democratic aesthetic, that its basic principle is the anti-aristocratic impulse to level distinctions, between high and low culture, for example, or among the different historical styles in any given art. 3 Tocqueville would have seen the characteristic multiplication of images in postmodernism (think of Andy Warhol’s Marilyn Monroe paintings—the sense of endless reproducibility, the feeling of recycling an artistic heritage) as a natural consequence of the democratization of art.
One of the central concepts of postmodernism, as theorized by Tocqueville’s countryman Jean Baudrillard, is the simulacrum. In post-modernism, we enter a world of copies of copies, hence a world in which the distinction between copy and original begins to be effaced, until we reach the point where there are only copies and no originals anymore. Las Vegas is the living temple of the simulacrum, whose high priests are the host of Elvis imitators populating its lounges. Their patron saint was of course Presley himself, who spent his last years doing bad imitations of himself—in Las Vegas hotels (not to mention his movie Viva Las Vegas). But the principle of the postmodern simulacrum is uncannily similar to Tocqueville’s principle of democratic adulteration:
The handicraftsmen of democratic ages not only endeavor to bring their useful productions within the reach of the whole community, but strive to give all their commodities attractive qualities that they do not in reality possess. In the confusion of all ranks everyone hopes to appear what he is not. . . . To satisfy these new cravings of human vanity the arts have recourse to every species of imposture; and these devices sometimes go so far as to defeat their own purpose. Imitation diamonds are now made which may be easily mistaken for real ones; as soon as the art of fabricating false diamonds becomes so perfect that they cannot be distinguished from real ones, it is probable that both will be abandoned and become mere pebbles again (II, 51).
Tocqueville may have underestimated the durability of diamonds as luxury items, but he was right on target in foreseeing the rhinestone cowboys of Las Vegas. It is only a short step from his definition of democratic adulteration to Baudrillard’s definition of the simulacral reality of the contemporary world:
The very definition of the real becomes that of which it is possible to give an equivalent reproduction. . . . The real is not only what can be reproduced, but that which is always already reproduced. . . . The hyper-real transcends representation . . . only because it is entirely in simulation. 4
Tocqueville’s remarkable anticipation of the theory of the postmodern simulacrum is rooted in his understanding of American culture as derivative from European and hence fundamentally imitative. Attempting to democratize an aristocratic heritage, Americans are condemned in Tocqueville’s view to follow European models:
At the head of the enlightened nations of the Old World the inhabitants of the United States more particularly identified one to which they were closely united by a common origin and by kindred habits. Among this people they found distinguished men of science, able artists, writers of eminence; and they were enabled to enjoy the treasures of the intellect without laboring to amass them. In spite of the ocean that intervenes, I cannot consent to separate America from Europe. I consider the people of the United States as that portion of the English people who are commissioned to explore the forests of the New World, while the rest of the nation, enjoying more leisure and less harassed by the drudgery of life, may devote their energies to thought and enlarge in all directions the empire of mind (II, 36).
Tocqueville is too polite to come right out and say it, but what he is really telling Americans is: “Go ahead and develop economically, but leave culture to the English.” The source of the icons of aristocratic culture for Americans must always remain European, especially since the democratization of America forecloses the possibility that it will develop its own aristocratic culture. Las Vegas confirms Tocqueville’s intuition perfectly. More than two centuries into the history of the United States, at the very cutting edge of its cultural development, America finds itself still endlessly reproducing Europe, reconstructing the Eiffel Tower and dressing hotel personnel in togas. America’s idea of a “class act” is still haunted by the shadows of its aristocratic European past.
The Colonists’ Revenge
Thus Tocqueville understands American culture as “postcolonial,” to use another buzzword of contemporary criticism that he never heard but would have understood. The word postcolonial has generally been used in connection with the cultures of Africa and Asia—countries like Nigeria and India, for example, that underwent decolonization in the decades following World War II. Yet Tocqueville provides a good reminder that in many respects the United States was the first postcolonial country in the modern sense. Literary and cultural critics are increasingly using concepts derived from studying twentieth-century African and Asian literature to illuminate nineteenth-century American literature.
Take, for example, a familiar work of American literature like Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. This novel is an example of what has come to be known somewhat facetiously in postcolonial criticism as the genre of “the empire writes back.” 5 Twain uses the opportunity to rewrite classic English romances like Sir Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe or Rider Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines in much the same way as Salman Rushdie uses Midnight’s Children to rewrite Kipling’s Kim or as Chinua Achebe uses Things Fall Apart to rewrite Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. In A Connecticut Yankee, America, the former colony, gets its revenge on the mother country. Faced precisely with the American author’s burden of being derivative—just as Tocqueville would have portrayed him—Twain turns the tables on his English masters, literary and otherwise. Writing in nineteenth-century America, he seems far removed from the source and center of English literature, but he uses the fictional device of time travel to place himself through his narrator at ground zero of English literature—King Arthur’s Camelot. He then shows, paradoxically and comically, that English culture is derivative from American. All the political and economic developments the English prided themselves on in the nineteenth century—their rule of law, their free press, their free trade—turn out to have been learned from a Connecticut Yankee. Twain manages to portray England as what today might be called an underdeveloped country, economically backward compared to America, mired in superstition, and primitive in its customs. In short, Twain portrays England the way it used to portray its colonies, and he has his Yankee treat England as if it were an American colony—an undeveloped market to be exploited by superior American business sense.
Twain also emphasizes this reversal in purely literary terms. By liberally quoting from Thomas Malory’s accounts of King Arthur—written in the fifteenth century and hence nine centuries after the Yankee’s story takes place—Twain cleverly manages to make even the English literary tradition seem derivative from an American source. A Connecticut Yankee is filled with Tocquevillean reflections on the distinction between aristocratic and democratic life, mostly to the advantage of the latter. Twain juxtaposes Yankee ingenuity and the progress it makes possible with the tradition-bound class system of England, which produces only stagnation and decay.
As the example of A Connecticut Yankee reveals, Tocqueville underestimated the potential of American culture and in particular American literature. He did not anticipate someone like Twain; he did not foresee how American authors could turn their “postcolonial” status to their advantage. Indeed, by making their problematic cultural heritage thematic in their works, writers like Twain—and Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, and Henry James—succeeded in creating a distinctively “postcolonial” American literature, in which copying literary works becomes a form of rewriting them. Twain’s Connecticut Yankee shows that imitating a European cultural model need not, as Tocqueville assumes, be a largely passive process. A Connecticut Yankee, in fact, represents an American triumph over its European models. Just as Cervantes debunked traditional tales of chivalry in Don Quixote, Twain subjects the novels of Walter Scott to withering ridicule in his own novel. In the process he exposes the nostalgia for the world of feudalism that infected nineteenth-century Britain and that was partly responsible for the way the United States supplanted Britain as a world power in the twentieth century.
Even Las Vegas need not be viewed simply as a symbol of American cultural inferiority. Tocqueville liked to emphasize the cheapness of American building materials, but when dealing with hotels where just the periodic renovations cost hundreds of millions of dollars, the word cheap no longer seems fully applicable. Las Vegas is as much a monument to American exuberance and extravagance as it is to the derivative character of American culture. Every hotel palace in Las Vegas is a nod to the priority of European culture, but it is a nod paired with a wink, embodying that American sense of “we may be imitating Europe, but we can do it better.” As Frommer’s describes The Venetian: “Stone is aged for that weathered look, statues and tiles exactly copy their Italian counterparts, security guards wear Venetian police uniforms—all that’s missing is the smell from the canals, but we are happy to let that one slide.” 6 Score one for the Americans—when they rebuild Europe, they correct it, they improve it, they get it right. Though Democracy in America offers remarkable insights into even the most postmodern aspects of contemporary American culture, perhaps Las Vegas would hold some surprises for Tocqueville after all.
1. Mary Herczog, Frommer’s 2000: Las Vegas (New York: Macmillan, 1999), 79–80.
2. Mary Herczog, Frommer’s 2000, 70.
3. I discuss this point at greater length in my essay “Waiting for Godot and the End of History: Postmodernism as a Democratic Aesthetic” in Democracy and the Arts, Arthur M. Melzer, Jerry Weinberger, and M. Richard Zinman, eds. (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1999), especially 172–78.
4. Jean Baudrillard, Simulations, Paul Foss, Paul Patton, and Philip Beitchman, trans. (New York: Semiotext[e], 1983), 146–48 (emphasis in the original). Baudrillard’s principal example of American hyperreality in this book is Disneyland, not Las Vegas, but the point is the same. At one point, Baudrillard traces the emergence of hyperreality to the transition from aristocracy to democracy, or as he puts it, from the feudal to the bourgeois world (83–85)—thus revealing his affinity to Tocqueville. Tocqueville’s aristocratic heritage left him with a lingering sense that the real can still be distinguished from the fake. But as his discussion of diamonds shows, he was well aware of how the distinction between originals and copies might someday be effaced, and that takes him to the brink of theorizing postmodernism.
5. See Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin, The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures (London: Routledge, 1989).
6. Mary Herczog, Frommer’s 2000, 80
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