The (Super)Marketplace of Images: Television as Unmediated Mediation in DeLillo's White Noise

JOHN N. DUVALL The (Super)Marketplace of Images: Television as Unmediated Mediation in DeLillo's White Noise Fascism sees its salvation in giving [the] masses not their right, but instead a chance to express themselves. The masses have a right to change property relations; Fascism seeks to give them an expression while preserving property. The logical result of Fascism is the introduction of aesthetics into political life. Walter Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age ofMechanical Reproduction" We know that now it is on the level of reproduction (fashion, media, publicity, information and communication networks), on the level of what Marx negligently called the nonessential sectors ofcapital . . . , that is to say in the sphere ofsimulacra and ofthe code, that the global process of capital is founded. Jean Baudrillard, Simuhtions Don delillo's White Noise comically treats both academic and domestic life. Yet both of these subjects serve primarily as vehicles for DeLillo's satiric examination of the ways in which contemporary America is implicated in proto-fascist urges.1 In making this claim, I do not mean to erase the enormous differences between contemporary America and Europe ofthe 1920s and 1930s, particularly Germany and Hitler's National Socialists, which DeLillo's novel invokes. The United States, of course, neither maintains an official ideology of nationalism and anti-Semitism, nor overtly silences political opposition through Arizona Quarterly Volume 50, Number 3, Autumn 1994 Copyright © 1994 by Arizona Board ofRegents issN 0004-1610 128John N. Duvall storm-trooper violence and state control of the media. Nevertheless, our national mythology that tells us we are free, self-reliant, and autonomous citizens, when enacted as moments of consumer choice, produces a cultural-economic system that, in several Marxist and postMarxist accounts of postmodernity, is more totalizing than Hitler's totalitarian regime. German fascism prior to World War II was a modernist phenomenon, linked to monopoly capitalism.2 DeLillo's American proto-fascism, however, functions in what Fredric Jameson has identified as the cultural logic of multinational or late capitalism in which the social, the political, and the aesthetic flatten out into what Jean Baudrillard calls the simulacrum.3 White Noise performs its critique not simply because its central character and narrator, Jack Gladney, is Chair of the Department of Hitler Studies at an expensive liberal arts college, but rather because each element of Jack's world mirrors back to him a postmodern, decentralized totalitarianism that this professional student of Hitler is unable to read. Jack's failure to recognize proto-fascist urges in an aestheticized American consumer culture is all the more striking since he emphasizes in his course Hitler's manipulation of mass cultural aesthetics (uniforms , parades, rallies). This failure underscores the key difference between Hitler's fascism and American proto-fascism: ideology ceases to be a conscious choice, as it was for the National Socialists, and instead becomes in contemporary America more like the Althusserian notion of ideology as unconscious system ofrepresentation. In WTu'te Noise two representational systems in particular produce this unconscious: the imagistic space oí the supermarket and the shopping mall coincides with the conceptual space of television.4 Both serve the participant (shopper/viewer) as a temporary way to step outside death by entering an aestheticized space of consumption that serves as the postmodern, mass-culture rearticulation of Eliot's timeless, high-culture tradition. Because of this linkage, the market within supermarket serves as a reminder that television also is predicated on market relations. The production and consumption of the electronic image of desire is a simulacrum of the images (aesthetically displayed consumer items) contained in the supermarket and the mall. This hinged relationship between the supermarket and the television is signaled by the twin interests of Murray Jay Siskind, the visiting professor in the Department ofAmerican Environments at the College-on-the-Hill. Siskind, a Television as Unmediated Mediation129 student of the "psychic data" of both television and the supermarket, acts as an ironized internal commentator on the family life ofthe Gladneys as bodi shoppers and television viewers. Siskind's celebration of the postmodern becomes highly ambiguous because, against his celebrations , White Noise repeatedly illustrates that, within the aestheticized space of television and the supermarket, all...