Don DeLillo, Jean Baudrillard, and the Consumer Conundrum By Mar ...

false needs; the English and Western saddles are not strapped to horses, the rafts are already inflated despite being far from any discernable bodies of water, the controlled substances foreshadow the appearance of Dylar (the fictional drug purported to insulate its users from anxiety over death), and the food is described as “junk”—suggesting that even provisions have ceased to function in any practical way insofar as they provide no real nourishment, only empty calories. As Richard Lane notes in Jean Baudrillard, this blurring of the line between reality and hyperreality is a major theme throughout White Noise, and the novel's characters are particularly concerned with the distinction between being in the world and being isolated from it: “There is a constant teasing-out of any hint of inauthenticity, a constant bantering between characters about the disjunction between information overload and the feeling that nothing about the world, about being in the world, is known” (Lane 122). For Baudrillard, however, this sense of isolation from the “real” world is not up for debate; it is a direct consequence of the proliferation of consumer goods throughout society.

Although he works within a Marxian framework through much of The System of Objects insofar as his rhetoric centers primarily on production, Baudrillard concludes with an attempt to define consumption. Consumption, he argues, has nothing to do with needs and is “surely not that passive process of absorption and appropriation which is contrasted to the supposedly active mode of production” (199). Rather, consumption is “an active form of relationship (not only to goods, but also to society and to the world), a mode of systematic activity and global response which founds our entire cultural system” (199). Where such “traditional symbolic objects” as tools and furniture “bore the clear imprint of the conscious or unconscious dynamic” of human activity, objects now function as signs, and their organization forms a signifying fabric constituting the “virtual totality of all objects and messages ready-constituted as a more or less coherent discourse” (200). This discourse encompasses everything and reduces all human relations to forms of consumption. We can neither live in the “real” world nor respond to each other as human beings because the objects we possess divorce us from both.