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

That the students appear midway through this passage, buffered almost equally on both sides by descriptions of their possessions, suggests that the students, like their possessions, are links in a chain, comparable elements in what Baudrillard terms the system of objects. This impression is heightened in the subsequent paragraph when Jack describes the parents of these students as being nearly identical to each other, marked by well-made faces, wry looks, diettrim bodies, and a sense of “massive insurance coverage” (3). What unites these parents more than anything else, however, is the long line of station wagons in which they have arrived, which “as much as anything they might do in the course of the year, more than formal liturgies or laws, tells the parents they are a collection of the like-minded and the spiritually akin, a people, a nation” (4). Here, the sense of collective identity the parents find in their cars mirrors the relationship between the students and their own possessions. Where the station wagons serve to set the parents apart from other groups (e.g., retirees, childless adults, those unable to afford college tuition), the stereo sets, radios, personal computers, and other paraphernalia belonging to the students speak a complex language that identifies those students as members of a relatively affluent youth culture and sets them apart from their parents and other groups, yet at the same time unites them with everyone who speaks their language, the language spoken by consumer culture, or in Baudrillard's terms, the language of the system.

In addition to illustrating ways in which parents and their children construct worlds through their possessions, the opening pages of White Noise also hint at the distinction Baudrillard draws between utensils and objects. The possessions in this passage place their possessors in a matrix of abstract values, many of which have less to do with the “real” world than with what Baudrillard describes as a “hyperreal” system of