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

Jack's fascination with Hitler, which itself stems from Jack's own aspirations of escaping death. When a mysterious old man appears in his backyard one morning, Jack mistakes him for “Death, or Death's errand runner” and tellingly hides behind a copy of Mein Kampf for protection (243–244). While the old man eventually proves harmless insofar as he is not Death but Jack's father-in-law, Jack's fear of dying persists, and he continues to seek asylum in his studies of Hitler and his continued outings to the grocery store, shopping mall, and other sites of consumption. What Jack ultimately wants from his culture is protection from death. As a result, his desire to yield to the temptation Zizek describes is particularly strong, and through much of the novel he demonstrates a willingness to forego subjectivity and the potential to reshape his cultural landscape in exchange for amnesty from death. Rather than empowering him, then, consumer ideology threatens to neutralize Jack and rob him of agency—a hazard Baudrillard views as a fait accompli.

Unlike Shields and Certeau, Baudrillard focuses primarily on the downside of consumer culture. In his first major work, The System of Objects, Baudrillard argues that the relationship between people and the objects that constitute their world stifles subjectivity. In other words, rather than allowing for what Shields describes as an “active, committed production of self and society,” consumerism aims to assimilate everyone into what Baudrillard alternately terms the system of objects or simply “the system” (Shields 2). Within this system, according to Baudrillard, the apparent freedom to reshape ourselves and society through our purchases (i.e., “voting with our pocketbooks”) is ultimately illusory; the only real “freedom” we have within the parameters of consumer culture is the freedom to accumulate and arrange commodities in a way that reflects our continuing advances in social status. Thus where Shields and Certeau might read Jack's adoption of the “J.A.K. Gladney” persona in White Noise as an instance of empowerment, Baudrillard might argue that Jack's dark glasses and robe serve primarily to insulate him from the world at large, that these accessories are arbitrary signs of differentiation which signal Jack's superiority in a particular social arena