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By Root 674 0

are translated. In the world of bits, distinctions between surface and depth, high and low, original and reproduction, fall away. This was the world described by the French sociologist Jean Baudrillard, who, in Simulacra and Simulations, declared the death of a stable world of correspondences, in which, say, the relationship of physical territory to map was understood as that of a real thing to its abstract representation. By contrast, in a world of simulations and infinite reproduction, Baudrillard writes, “The territory no longer precedes the map, nor survives it. Henceforth, it is the map which precedes the territory— precession of simulacra—it is the map that engenders the territory.” The map engenders the territory: the TV show creates our sense of the reality of the place; the street figure as well as the toy store dissolves into “brand identity.” And the territory—the original—does not survive the reproduction: “No more mirror of being and appearances,” Baudrillard writes.

Like Taylor, Baudrillard is fascinated by the emerging world of global imagery; he has written an almost Tocquevillean account of America. And yet he describes the precession of simulacra as a species of death. “Something has disappeared,” he writes: “the sovereign difference between [territory and map] that was the abstraction’s charm. For it is the difference which forms the poetry of the map and the charm of the territory, the magic of the concept and the charm of the real.” One might well say much the same thing about this new Vegas-ized Times Square whose advent Taylor was announcing. I asked Taylor how he felt about the place. Did it have any of the attributes of a “place”? Could you situate yourself in it, even find yourself at home in it, as people have found themselves at home in Times Square for a hundred years? Taylor considered this for a moment—he is a very fast thinker—and replied, “The question of home, and feeling at home, is a crucial one. In some sense, the real is always elsewhere. Part of the dilemma is to get over it and get on with it.” Perhaps, Taylor said, the wish for familiarity, for charm, was itself an anachronism in the global city. “I don’t think that kind of cozy gemütlichkeit is attainable, and I’m not sure it’s desirable.”

Isn’t it, though? Are we really equipped to occupy a world of simulacra? Am I? I assume it’s just that wish for “a cozy gemütlichkeit” that attracts me to the Howard Johnson’s, and the Polish Tea Room, and McHale’s. And surely what draws so many people to Broadway theater is the wish for a familiar, anachronistic kind of simulation, where the gulf between being and appearance is perfectly stable and legible, and where the very setting provides a powerful link to the past. (Mark Taylor himself lives in Williamstown, Massachusetts, a place redolent of its eighteenth-century origins.) We crave, still, not only the magic of the concept but the charm of the real, even if we no longer know exactly what we mean by the word “real.” And that is why it is hard to share Rem Koolhaas’s deadpan embrace of the rootless, postmodern “generic” city.

Standing at the corner of Broadway and 42nd Street, with Disney duking it out against Viacom, and Reuters against Condé Nast, we do, indeed, feel that we are occupying “an imagistic, virtual space.” And it is a thrilling space, the crossroads of the colossal enterprise of pop culture—just as it was, mutatis mutandi, a hundred years ago. It is both a particular place and a virtualized, electronic no-place. The giant cylindrical NASDAQ sign reminds us of this new world, whose lifeblood is a bit-stream. There may be no other spot on earth where we feel so utterly a part of our new millennium. Baudrillard would, I’m sure, be mesmerized. And yet at the same time, we draw back—from the bit-stream, from the simulacrum, from the millennium itself. We stand in awe of this stupendous contrivance; but we are happy, in the end, to slip away to the quiet side streets toward Sixth Avenue, to the little bars and shops and restaurants that occupy an older, localized place where