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Baudrillard prophesies the future of the ever-crowded
'mediascape,' a space in which existential consciousness
evaporates with continual productions of out-of-time /
out-of-space picnoleptic experiences. These are indeed
deceptive evaporations, for the "smooth operational
surface of communication" simply appears as an innocent
evolution in the co-symbiosis of semiotics and technology
(1983: 127). The tacitness of
this "surface" consumer semiotics, with its presumed
immutability, ignores the ideological power of advertising
as a new discourse collapsing distinctions between the
mediascape and the 'brandscape.' The more they become
indistinguishable, the more readily advertising conquers the
world of meanings, signs, representations, perception, and
power. Their amalgamation means that advertising is becoming
or will become a dominant and privileged source of information and
that ultimately 'product data' will form and shape
consciousness. In the end, people will 'become' products
because their identities will be derived from the semiotic
lexicon of Sony, Tommy H, DKNY or BMW designer markets.
A case study for this fusion is Don Delillo’s
White Noise (1984) with its dystopian prophecy, a warning that in
an increasingly digitally mediated world the profound
meaning-producing relationship between signs, signifiers,
and reality is being blurred, if not obliterated. This demolition is
itself obscured by the exponential proliferation of
informational simulation and replication, but it is also one in which
the resulting world of "circuits and networks" composes an
omnipresent brandscape (Baudrillard, 1983: 130). Despite this,
"Delillo's attitude towards the world of his novel is
generous" (Bonea, 1996: 40). While Delillo's desire to "complicate
the stiff categories of ideological or cultural critique"
is noteworthy, the resigned act of silently observing the drowning of meaning
and personal identity within a corporately controlled
deluge of information is not so admirable (Bonca, 1996: 40). Although solutions
cannot be sought within White Noise, a shamelessly
nostalgic and politically passive text, they may be seen to emerge from
the outside via a theoretical combination of Donna Haraway
and the Critical Art Ensemble.
'What was the barn like
before it was photographed?' he said. What did it look
like, how was it different from other barns, how was it
similar to other barns? We can't answer these questions
because we've read the signs, seen the people snapping
pictures. We can't get outside the aura. (Delillo, 1984: 13)
AS/SA nº 15,
p.6
Attempting a critical analysis of the infamous
"barn scene" throws one into precisely the same conundrum
as Murray and Jack face when visiting the barn. Rummaging
through the critical aura surrounding White Noise, it is
impossible not to encounter treatment of the barn. Noel
King even uses the sequence to explain White Noises's
peculiar trait of internal literary ficto-criticism,
usually coming from the character of Murray. Critics commenting
upon Delillo's internal criticism on his own text ...the
layers add upon each other, constructing an 'aura' of
colonized meaning around the sequence. Such intertwining
of text and several layers of criticism create a true
intertextuality, where meaning flows both ways between text and criticism. Of
course, metatextualizing the sequence, much less the entire
novel, risks obfuscating all meaning in the larger cultural
and critical onrush of information. In White Noise, single
pieces of information can only establish themselves within
the larger semiotic circuit through association with larger
auras, much like the barn. Baudrillard explains that the
dominant paradigm of the modern communication networks is
"one of superficial saturation, of an incessant
solicitation, of an extermination of interstitial and
protective spaces" (131).
In the network, facts are stripped
of there autonomy of meaning and are forced to rely on the
entire network for their power. This same erosion of
interstitial spaces applies to the individual, "We are no
longer part of the drama of alienation, we live in the
ecstasy of communication "(Baudrillard, 1983: 130). Actions carry
no inherent meaning in White Noise's ecstatic world of
severed connections between sign and signifier. As such,
individuals trying to validate their words, actions, or
selves must apply the rules of Baudrillard's rampaging
media to themselves. Facts and locic submit to celebrity
charisma, access to the role of speaker, and raw noise. The
entire faculty of College-on-the-Hill, Delillo's parodic
institution of higher (read: higher as in physically
elevated on the hill) learning, defines themselves in this
fashion: ... the chancellor had advise me, back in 1968,
to do something about my name and appearance if I wanted
to be taken seriously ... We finally agreed that I should
invent an extra initial and call myself J.A.K. Gladney, a
tag, I wore like a borrowed suit ... I had the advantages
of substantial height, big hands, big feet, but badly
needed bulk ... (17). Authority stems from the simulation
of a name that looks distinguished on a plaque or from
increasing one's receptive power through size. The faculty
even gains authority from "the mere fact of having the
enunciative role"(Conroy 101). The role of speaker commands
importance for Heinrich, one of Jack's children. During the
airborne toxic event, Heinrich carves out a space for
himself as a distributor of information, publicizing
himself through this 'aura:'
AS/SA nº 15,
p.7
People listened attentively to this adolescent
boy in a field jacket and cap, with binoculars strapped
around his neck and an Instamatic fashioned to his belt.
No doubt his listeners were influenced by his age. (Conroy, 130)
While characters can elevate their 'auras' by
simulating celebrity, this rush of media and information
constantly threatens the deconstruction of internal
identity. Such is Jack's fate after encountering Nyodene
D, the leaking chemical composing the "airborne toxic
event"(117). The toxic event symbolizes the pollution of
the holistic, existential self by the relentless ecstasy
of communication. Literally floating above the country
side, the event constantly changes names, from a "feathery
plume" to a "billowing black cloud" (112-113). In the
cloud's wake, meaning is totally uprooted, "Remarks existed
in a state of permanent flotation. No one thing was either
more or less plausible than any other thing. As people
jolted out of reality, we were released from the need to
distinguish"(129).
Exposed to the cloud, Jack wanders to
a 'SEWUVAC' table seeking information on the chemical, a
Sisyphean task given the complete destabilization of
meaning. The SEWUVAC team demonstrates the complete
confusion of symbol with referent, simulation with reality.
Jack learns that SEWUVAC used the real toxic event in order
to plan out their periodical simulated disaster drills,
"The insertion curve isn't as smooth as we would like ...
You have to make allowances for the fact that everything
is we see tonight is real" (139). SEWUVAC similarly
undercuts Jack's perception of himself as a unique,
autonomous ontological entity, handing him down a bizarre
computerized sentence of certain death somewhere in the
future. Afterwards, Jack ruminates on the experience, "It
is when death is rendered graphically, is televised so to
speak, that you sense an eerie separation between your
condition and yourself A network of symbols has been
introduced, an entire awesome technology wrested from the
gods. It makes you feel like a stranger in your own
dying"(142). What else could be expected from a man who was
just told, "You are the sum total of your data" (141). Jack
is now digitally encoded, a series of data point located
within the larger network without, as Baudrillard noted,
private space or barriers. Jack's fear at dying from
exposure to the cloud hints at a process of cultural and
semiotic annihilation on a broader scale: the destruction
of the existential individual by the data flow. Jack spends
the entire second half of the novel plagued by constant
fear of death, but his death is symbolic and ontological.
Jack, finding that his "older modernist subjectivity is in
a state of siege in the information society ... exhibits
a Kierkegaardian 'fear and trembling ...' (Wilcox 348).
AS/SA nº 15,
p.8
If the dissolution of semiotic logic and meaning
into a state lingual affairs not only governed by endless
simulation and a penetrative media but also powerful enough
to upstage the existential self wasn't disruptive enough,
the fluctuating mediascape seems everywhere to be colonized
with product names and advertising. Frederic Jameson, in
"Postmodemism and Consumer Society," links postmodern
aesthetic and ontological developments, including the
"death of the subject, to "New types of consumption;
planned obsolescence ... the penetration of advertising,
television and the media generally to a hitherto
unparalleled degree throughout society... "(124). For
Delillo, the nuclear family constitutes an engine of
meaning, although not necessarily truth, "The family is the
cradle of the world's misinformation ... The family process
works towards sealing off the world"(82). While the family
dynamic renders truth irrelevant, it does create stability
and comfort through an array of fictitious yet reliable
meanings. Jack's house and family, however, are prey to the
shifting influx of meaningless braid signification, mostly
via the television. TV, in both the Gladney house and in
the postmodern world, occupies a position of factual and
moral authority while broadcasting pieces of the brandscape
everywhere. The Gladney TV and radio punctuates Jack's
narrative with bursts of pure media, "The TV said: 'And
other trends that could dramatically impact your portfolio
... “ (61).
Similar eruptions of consumer White Noise begin
to form in Jack's narrative independent of the
construction, "and the TV said." Leonard Wilcox glosses
several, "MasterCard, Visa, American Express ... Lead,
unleaded, superunleaded, Dristan Ultra, Dristan Ultra
...Clorets, Velaments, Freedent"(348). Wilcox's
interpretation of this fact, however, is less than
satisfactory, "These 'eruptions in the narrative imply the
emergence of a new form of subjectivity colonized by the
media ... They imply the evacuation of the private spheres
of self'(348). In a utopian situation of equality in the
politics of sign production, media access, and reception,
the complete permeation of life by the brandscape wouldn't
signify anything more sinister than techno-democracy at
work. In White Noise, and the 'real' world at large, this
is hardly the case. Baudrillard points out that in an
environment characterized by "free speech" and a slanted
playing field of reception, "Speech is free perhaps, but
I am less free than before: I no longer succeed in knowing
what I want, the space is so saturated..." (132).
AS/SA nº 15,
p.9
The
mediascape of pure surface is disorienting enough, yet the
brandscape's imperative of identity reconstruction based
on consumption is purely nefarious. After a colleague
refers to Jack as "A big harmless, aging, indistinct sort
of guy," Jack undertakes a consumer rampage through the
mall: I shopped with reckless abandon. “I shopped for
immediate needs and distant contingencies. I shopped for
its own sake, looking, and touching merchandise I had
no intention of buying,, then buying it ... I began to grow
in value and self-regard. I filled myself out, found new
aspects of myself, located a person I'd forgotten existed”.
(84) The synthesis of media dislocation and consumer
slavery occurs with the discovery of Dylar, Babette's
experimental drug meant to combat death fear. Listing
Dylar's sideeffects, Babette recites, "I could not
distinguish words from things, so that if someonesaid
'speeding, bullet,' I would fall to the floor and take
cover" (193). Hardly a side effect, Dylar deconstructs any
remaining boundaries between sign, signifier, and referent.
The unbridled force of the ecstasy flows through anyone
taking Dylar. Fear of death is tied to existential
interiority, and Dylar erodes precisely this interiority.
Foolishly, Jack calls Dylar, "the benign counterpart of the
Nyodene menace"(21 1). ln fact, Dylar is pure menace. Jack
locates Willie Mink, the project director, holed up in a
hotel room, slamming, Dylar by the handful. Mink's diction
is purely schizoid, "Do not enter a room not agreeing to
this. This is the point as opposed to emerging coastlines,
continental plates. Or you can eat natural grains..."
(311).
Mink's narrative continues without beginning or end,
punctuated only by Jack's own internal monologue. Mink, and
Dylar, exist beyond the level of pure Baudrillardian
schizophrenia. They point to something understated in White
Noise yet utterly sinister: But as the one-time project
manager of the Dylar research group, which is supported by
a multi-national giant,” he is also connected with a global
economy. The Mink/Gray composite in fact is associated both
with informational flow and transnational monopoly, a New
World of multinational capitalism whose channels of control
are so widespread...” (Wilcox 359).
The final chapter of White Noise presents a
microcosmic pastiche of the larger text's movement from
isolated floating signifier disruption to sinister
corporate and machinic encoding. Wilder, Jack's son, rides
his tricycle over and embankment and onto the freeway, "The
drivers could not quite comprehend. In their knotted
posture, belted in they knew this picture did not belong
to the hurtling consciousness, the broad- ribboned
modernist stream. In speed there was sense. In signs, in
patterns..."(322- 323). Postmodern events, primarily
floating signifiers and continual simulacra such as the
“most photographed barn in America" appear on the horizon
and gradually encroach. Of course, these disruptions in
semiotic and perceptual coherence are rendered irrelevant
by the novel's conclusion, in a supermarket, "But in the
end it doesn't matter what they see or think they see. The
terminals are equipped with holographic scanners, which
decode the binary secret of every item, infallibly"(326).
The only true, "infallible" language left is that of
digital machines harnessed to the lar er cultural enoine
of consumer capitalism. Delillo seems content to nostalgize
over tabloid racks on the checkout counter while the
critical brandscape swarms uncontrollably. Jameson, less
determined to "complicate the stiff categories of
ideological or cultural critique" than to locate a way out
of the infoarchy of the brandscape, ask, "We have seen that
there is a way in which postmodernism replicates or
reproduces-reinforces-the logic of consumer capitalism; the
more significant question is whether there is also a way
in which it resists the logic" (125).
AS/SA nº 15,
p.10
Postmodern forms of resistance cannot mirror
precisely how "modernism functioned against its society in
ways which are variously described as critical, negative,
contesting, subversive, oppositional, and the like"
(Jameson 125). Reasserting the modernist paradigm of
opposition between the existential self and society
produces rebellious forms poorly equipped for the
postmodern simulacra of surface, screen, and network. In
a digitally mediated world, clarity of perception and the
reintroduction of depth into the object become paramount
to resistance. The Critical Art Ensemble corrals the
mediascape and brandscape into a singular, interrelated
paradigm of the war and sight machines. The war machine is
the "apparatus of violence" utilized to maintain the global
political and economic order. The sight machine is literal
Dylar, its goal is "to control the symbolic order"(173).
However, as the sight machine's scope of penetration
reaches apotheosis in the Internet, its ability to control
the interior of that scope progressively diminishes. White
Noise, written in 1984, had to rely on television as its
primary symbol of media penetration. Television represents
an earlier form of penetration than the computer: although
its dynamics of reception are far more hierarchical than
the World Wide Web's, its symbolic scope is smaller. Within
the free- flowing (at least to those with access) dynamics
of the web, it's possible to use technology created to
facilitate cold war geopolitics to mark out spaces of
symbolic resistance to the sight and war machines, "In
these free zones, one can get information on anything, from
radical politics to the latest in commodity development.
As to be expected, a lot of information floating about is
resistant to the causes and imperatives of
pancapitalism..." (C.A.E. 181-182).
In Delillo's world, the
sight machine effects a unique form of self-censorship: by
destroying the notion of meaning, pieces of resistant
information lose their political edge and are swallowed up
in the breadth of the flow of empty advertising. On the
other hand, the rules of ecstatic media operant in White
Noise such as celebrity power and volume, are ripe for
subversion. Hackers should turn their sichts from cracking
into obscure areas of State Department netspace to
appropriating, the coded volumes and 'auras' of
pancapitalism for the dissemination of resistant messages.
White Noise features a seared, mediated, and utterly
receptive populace that accepts whatever comes loudest over
the circuit. What if the loudest messages were "meta-mes
sages" explaining, decrying, or demonstrating the nature
of the circuit itself in deconstructing meaning and
therefore political resistance? What if the circuit is
jammed with messages deconstructing itself.
AS/SA nº 15,
p.11
Jameson's "death of the subject," Baudrillard's
death of "the drama of alienation," and Jack's feared
dissolution of identity within the sphere of media
illustrate the critical links between media and identity
in a postmodern state of affairs. Donna Haraway's
"Manifesto for Cyborgs" essentially interiorizes hacking.
Haraway welcomes the "reconceptions of machine and organism
as coded texts which we engage in the play of writing and
reading the world"(30). The body is a site for symbolic and
political representation that must hack into its own
identity to resist, "the informatics of domination"(32).
Delillo's silent supermarket terminals, restructuring the
world around a binary monocode, a corporate DNA, are
congruent with Haraway's cyborg struggle "against the one
code that translates all meaning perfectly, the central
dogma of the phallogocentrism"(35). Whereas hacking
Delillo's ecstatic world Art Ensemble style means turning
the replication of codes within itself onto the very
process of replication, a cyborg resistance opens up the
Western dichotomies of self/other and machine/organism to
allow deeper permeation by the larger symbolic order, to
allow a greater informational scope for the creation of
further resistance strategies.
Resisting the endless simulation of the sight
machine's brandscape and the deeper monocode of the
phallocapitalist war machine in Delilo's world of eroded
identity and meaning necessitates simultaneously opening
the self to information and possibility while also seeking
disruptions in the meaning-destroying integrated cultural
and semiotic circuit. Modernist methods beyond pure Luddism
are rendered ineffective, subverting the machine mandates
imitating it, entering its domain and altering the
fundamental paradigms of brandscape, sight machine, and war
machine that make it so sinister:
We have to acknowledge that the new
communications technologies will only further democracy if,
and only if, we oppose from the beginning the caricature
of global society being hatched for us by big multinational
companies throwing themselves at a breakneck pace on the
information superhighways. (Virilio, 2001: 26)
AS/SA nº 15,
p.12
Works Cited
Baudrillard, Jean. (1983) "The Ecstasy of
Communication." The Anti-Aesthetic. Ed. Hal Foster.
Port Townsend, WA: Bay Press. 126-133.
Bonea, Cornel. (1996) "Don Delillo's White Noise: the natural
language of the species." College Literature 23 (June 1996): 25-44.
Conroy, Mark. (1994) "From Tombstone to Tabloid: Authority Figured in White
Noise." Critique 3 5.2 (Winter 1994): 97-110.
Critical Art Ensemble. (2001) "The Coming of Age of the Flesh Machine." Reading Digital
Culture. Ed. David Trend. Malden, MA: Blackwell
Publishers, pp.172-182.
Delillo, Don. (1984) White Noise. New
York: Penguin Books.
Haraway, Donna. (2001) "A Manifesto for
Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism
in the 1980's." Reading Digital Culture. Ed.
David Trend. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, pp.28-37.
Jameson, Frederic. (1983) "Postmodernism and Consumer Society."
The Anti-Aesthetic. Ed. Hal Foster. Port Townsend, WA: Bay Press, pp.111-125.
King, Noel. (1991) "Reading White Noise: floating
remarks." Critical Quarterly 33 (Autumn 1991): 66-83.
Virilio, Paul. (2001) "Speed and Information: Cyberspace Alarm!" Reading Digital Culture.
Ed. David Trend. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers,
pp.23-26.
Wilcox, Leonard. (1991) "Baudrilard, Delillo's White Noise, and the End of Heroic Narrative."
Contemporary Literature 32 (Fall 1991): 346-365.
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