Egotopia

Egotopia begins where other critiques of the American landscape end: identifying the physical ugliness that defines and homogenizes America's cities, suburbs, and countryside. Believing that prevailing assessments of the American landscape are inadequate and injudicious, John Miller calls into question the conventional wisdom of environmentalists, urban planners, and architects alike. In this precedent-shattering examination of what he sees as the ugliness that is the American consumer society, Miller contends that our aesthetic condition can be fully understood only by explorers of the metaphoric environment. Metaphorically, the ugliness of America's great suburban sprawl is the physical manifestation of our increasing narcissism - our egotopia. The ubiquity of psychotherapy as a medium promoting self-indulgence has deified private man as it has demonized public man. The American landscape, Miller argues, is no longer the physical manifestation of public and communal values. Instead, it has become a projection of private fantasies and narcissism - a plastic, protean phantasmagoria that exists to stimulate aggregate levels of consumption through ever-changing modalities of seduction and anesthetization.