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

other purpose than to be photographed, the tourists serve no other purpose than to photograph it. The tourists and the barn, then, are caught up in a tautological relationship in which each defines the other with no real reference to the outside world.

The relationship between the tourists and the barn in White Noise parallels the relationship Baudrillard sees between consumers and commodities within his system of objects in that no commodity within this system serves a purpose other than to signify the social status of its possessor while, in turn, the primary role of the commodity's possessor is to impute significance to the commodity. In The Consumer Society, Baudrillard expounds upon this theory by arguing that the proliferation of consumer goods in the developed world has caused us to “live at the pace of objects, live to the rhythm of their ceaseless succession” (25). This “ceaseless succession” stems from the fact that objects do not fulfill real needs but participate in what Baudrillard calls a “system of needs” in which objects produce neither enjoyment nor satisfaction but signify successful participation in society (75). Reinforced by the mass media, the system of needs presents a logic of social differentiation that induces individuals to “buy into an entire system of objects and needs through which one differentiates oneself socially, yet integrates oneself into the consumer society” (Kellner 15). Indeed, Baudrillard notes, the message broadcast by every outlet of the mass media is not necessarily to buy specific products but simply to participate in the system of needs (Consumer Society 122). Thus, borrowing Marshall McLuhan's famous phrase, Baudrillard argues that “the medium is the message,” and that the function of the mass media is to “neutralize the lived, unique, eventual character of the world and substitute for it a multiple universe of media which, as such, are homogenous one with another, signifying each other referring back and forth to each other” (123). What results from this self-referential “multiple universe of media” is an abstract yet coherent system of logic that not only imposes an ideology of consumption upon the masses but also substitutes itself for the referential or “real” dimension of lived existence (124, 125). Within this context, the affluence to which the individual aspires does not really exist but