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

their culture dictates the shape and fate of the self” (2). Lentricchia made this assessment in 1991, and it was reaffirmed in 1999 when DeLillo was awarded the Jerusalem Prize for the Freedom of the Individual in Society. In “From Valparaiso to Jerusalem: DeLillo and the Moment of Canonization,” John N. Duvall notes that DeLillo received this award because, in the words of the judges, his fiction partakes in “an unrelenting struggle against even the most sophisticated forms of repression of individual and public freedom” (563). Moreover, according to Duvall, DeLillo's novels “challenge the legitimacy of multinational capitalism and its manipulation of the image through media and advertising to construct first-world identity via the individual's acts of consumption” (563). DeLillo, then, offers solutions where Baudrillard only sees problems.

This is not to minimize Baudrillard's contribution to the field of social theory, particularly with regard to consumerism. To be sure, Baudrillard's unique intellectual pedigree makes him the perfect match for DeLillo. Trained as a sociologist, Baudrillard works within an intellectual framework that is Marxist in origin but also highly invested in the field of semiology, or the study of sign systems. Like many Marxist critics, Baudrillard is particularly concerned with ideology, or the means by which culture fosters the illusions that ensure the continued ascendancy of the dominating class. Yet for Baudrillard, the most instructive way to confront ideology is neither to critique the ways in which modes of production allow for the economic repression of the masses (as does traditional Marxism) nor, strictly speaking, to examine the ways in which the phenomena of everyday life reflect such repression (as does his first mentor, Henri Lefebvre). Rather, Baudrillard's critique of ideology focuses on the ways in which the structures of society mirror the structures of language. Following in the structuralist footsteps of Roland Barthes, whose own exploration of consumer and media culture draws heavily on the theories of linguist Ferdinand de Saussure, Baudrillard examines the ways in which all the elements of our cultural landscape interact to form a system that functions in much the same way as language.