| Chapter 1: | Shopping for its Own Sake: Don Delillo's System of Objects |
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a whole amounts to an extended examination of consumer culture's efforts at organizing society in a way that proffers the ritual of shopping as a means of holding death at bay even as we move inexorably toward it.
To be sure, consumer culture can be regarded as largely benign; social theorists like Rob Shields and Michel de Certeau argue that consumption, the driving force behind consumer culture, allows for “an active, committed production of self and of society which, rather than assimilating individuals to styles, appropriates codes and fashions, which are made into one's own” (Shields 2). Accordingly, consumption provides a flexible social code within which the subject is free to produce a persona or multiple personae that are not mere embodiments of popular trends but reflect instead the attitudes and values of the subject. In White Noise, for example, Jack adopts the persona of “J.A.K. Gladney” whenever he appears on campus in his capacity as Chair of Hitler Studies. To bring this persona to life, Jack dons dark glasses and a black tunic (17). By arranging the commodities at his disposal in a particular way, then, Jack (the subject) creates “J.A.K.” (the persona). This persona is more imposing and commands greater respect than the mild-mannered family man Jack embodies at home, and it also gives Jack the opportunity to allow certain of his quirkier personal traits to surface—his mild fetish for checking the time, for example, and his fascination with Adolf Hitler. This fascination with Hitler, however, draws attention to the ways in which Jack's adoption of the “J.A.K. Gladney” persona complicates the largely benign vision of consumption espoused by theorists like Shields and Certeau.
As Slavoj Zizek observes in The Sublime Object of Ideology, the purpose of culture is to limit and cultivate the death drive, which is exactly what consumer culture does in White Noise. Yet as Zizek further argues, fascism, which demands uniformity and forbids the reshaping of ideology, represents the concept of culture carried to an extreme insofar as “the source of the totalitarian temptation” is the aspiration to abolish (rather than to limit or cultivate) the death drive (5). In White Noise, this temptation is embodied in