Las Vegas marks itself out by nothingness. All the negative descriptions that can generally be used in labelling a city apply to it, for its absence of consistency actually makes its existence doubtful: no man's land, waste ground, non-place, ghost town, urban simulacrum, nowhere city, etc. For us it is Zeropolis, the non-city which is the very first city, just as zero is the very first number. The nothing that counts, the nothingness of neon.
In Las Vegas, everything takes place as if the absence of any sense of belonging to the environment entailed a hypertrophied sensitivity to details. There is no possibility of visual escape into perceptual horizons of indeterminateness (left-right, forward-back, near-far), but, instead, only the pregnancy of enlarged, exaggerated and highlighted forms. Behind each lit-up sign no space is hollowed out, no incipient world. Everything is there, everything is flat. As thick as the giant advertising billboards that ubiquitously package it, loading it with naïve and comic symbols, crude, schematic messages, Las Vegas is a city of literal superficiality.
|
