Unsettling the Realness of Reality
In thinking about the role of representation in White Noise (and the Perec and Godard), I keep coming back to the problem of persuasion. In chapter 6, Jack is driving his son Heinrich to school. Heinrich is being a wisenheimer. What at first may appear to be a hackneyed episode of the teenage son pushing dad’s buttons, becomes a rumination on the challenges of apprehending truth and reality for oneself.
“It’s going to rain tonight.”
“It’s raining now,” I said.
“The radio said tonight.”
…
“Look at the windshield,” I said. “Is that rain or isn’t it?”
“I’m only telling you what they said.”
”Just because it’s on the radio doesn’t mean we have to suspend belief in the evidence of our senses.”
”Our senses? Our senses are wrong a lot more often than they’re right. This has been proved in the laboratory. Don’t you know about all those theorems that say nothing is what it seems? There’s no past present or future outside our own mind.”
…
“What good is my truth? My truth means nothing.”
…
“Is there such a thing as now? ‘Now’ comes and goes as soon as you say it.”
…
“First rate,” I told him. “A victory for uncertainty, randomness and chaos. Science’s finest hour” (22-24).
This exchange underscores the conflict between the mass-mediated experience and the senses of the individual. Which reference is more reliable? More accurate? More true? More real? What is the significance of the invocation of scientific language and the methodology of science in the novel?
Thinking about the radio as a form of mass media, how does it differ from television (image) and newspaper (text)? What is the significance of the auditory register in the novel’s representation scheme (and commentary)? What truth is revealed – or concealed – in moments where the “white-noise” of the background is fore grounded (often in statements which seem non sequitur. For example: “blue jeans tumbled in the dryer” (18), or “the smoke alarm went off in the hallway upstairs, either to let us know the battery had just died or because the house was on fire. We finished our lunch in silence” (8).
Heinrich’s philosophical play also points to the problem of event and presence. He seems to suggest that if the world is merely a construct of the mind, it has no fundamental timeframe: “There’s no past present or future outside our own mind.” Moreover, the simple act of trying to apprehend the “now” removes you from the present moment: “’Now’ comes and goes as soon as you say it.”
Interesting additional note about senses: what about the sense of smell? Is it different from sight in some way?I I’ve been thinking about AGENCY a lot-whether or not we have the ability to ignore our senses. Perhaps the white noise (and the capitalism) that surrounds us keeps us from fully experiencing this agency. Not only do we see (text) and hear (radio) things we don’t want to, we are even made to look–rather, see–things we don’t want to (the ability to move our eyes doesn’t keep us from imagining death).
Smell seems to be a little different, especially as is appears in the novel. Why does Murray smell everything? Has smell been commodified in the same way? Perhaps through perfumes and the like, but I would argue that it’s the least affected sense.
Just musing.
–N.S.
Science depends upon people figuring it out, and the machines that people create can obviously make errors, as Heinrich and Jack’s conversation points out (I’m assuming they used radar and such to create the weather report to which Heinrich is referring). What does being “more reliable, more accurate, more true, more real” entail? When Jack goes in for his screening to test for the effects Nyodene D. may have had on his body at Autumn Harvest Farms, the doctor says “knowledge changes every day . . . We have some conflicting data that says exposure to this substance can definitely lead to a mass” (280). Science changes over time; what may be accurate one day isn’t necessarily accurate the next. Heinrich’s denial that it is raining because the radio told him it would not rain until the evening is intriguing; equally interesting is how DeLillo (and we) always refer to “it” as “the radio.” “The radio” itself cannot speak; someone speaks over the radio, has their voice become waves and radiation. By saying just “the radio,” we take away the human aspect (and thus the error) that seems to, in some sense, undermine everything, even science.
And just some thoughts on commodification: I personally still do not believe that hearing a story or telling a story, as Jack hears from the people on the plane who thought they were going to die, necessarily commodifies the story. I think we need to clearly define “commodity.” Is a commodity merely a thing one possesses? Or is there another element to it? If the story were heard and then WRITTEN DOWN and then SOLD, that would clearly be commodifying it. But if they just wrote it down and did nothing with it? Then what is the media not telling us? And I believe that the lack of quotations when Jack retells the story of the plane almost crashing actually makes the story more authentic; really, in a first person story, how can one really remember every single dialog, word for word, that one had with someone else? In some ways, that makes me wonder about the conversations Jack has with everyone else in the novel, and how perspective and narration functions. By not having quotation marks during that passage, it is like an admission that some of it may be inaccurate, that parts of it may be left out.
Ashley, I agree that the act of telling a story does not constitute, in itself, a form of commodification. I would contend, however, that when a narrator relates an account to a third party on behalf of a group of witnesses (as is the case here), commodification of the narrative does take place. One of the defining qualities of a commodity (at least, as I understand it) is that its exchange value is agreed upon collectively by sellers and buyers operating within a free market (Let’s ignore trusts to simplify matters). None of the other survivors of the in-flight emergency “disputed [the narrator’s] account or tried to add individual testimony…[Instead,] they trusted him to tell them what they’d said and felt” (91). The general consensus of the group to the narrator’s version of events is like their settlement on the price of an item for sale. What is most striking about this passage is the peculiar disconnect between those who experienced the near-catastrophic event and the experience of the in-flight emergency itself. As Jack recalls, “It was as though they were being told of an event they hadn’t personally been involved in” (91). For me, this paradoxical situation is reminiscent of the estrangement Marx noted between a maker and his commodified product. The process of commodification—whether it is of an experience or a manufactured item—has a way of removing all human imprints such that the commodity assumes a quality of foreignness before those who should be familiar with it. By this light, I think it is fair to conclude that the narrator’s account of the in-flight emergency is something akin to a commodity for Jack’s mental consumption.
As I was reading the novel, I came to understand the repeated interjection of radio announcements as a metaphor for the ways in which the character’s subconscious minds are pervaded by advertisements and the media. This is even evident in the supposedly uncorrupted children – we witness Stephie mumbling “Toyota Celica” in her sleep. I think that Delillo does this as a way to portray the far-reaching effects of the mass media in modern society.
In terms of defining a commodity, it would probably be beneficial to look back at Marx’s definition in Capital. Not only does commodification involve a group’s agreement on an exchange-value, but the particular shift in emphasis from use-value (something which man provided through his labor on resources in nature) to exchange value. As Marx writes, “by an exchange, we equate as values our different products, by that very act, we also equate, as human labor, the different kinds of labor expended upon them” (Marx, 78). It is this process of equation, then, that the “sum total of [the producers'] own labor is presented to them as a social relation, existing not between themselves, but between the products of their labor” (77).
Ashley, though science does traditionally depend upon people figuring it out, I think that particular idea is largely lost in White Noise. Consider the passage that you quoted from Jack’s test at Autumn Harvest Farms. As the doctor says, “knowledge changes every day” (DeLillo, 280). Knowledge itself becomes the dynamic agent, rather than a human gaining, finding, or creating new knowledge every day. If we think of information (or knowlege… though we could probably have a whole different discussion on the similarities or differences of those words) as a commodity, this dynamism parallels Marx’s description in the following passage:
The character of having value, when once impressed upon products, obtains fixity only by reason of their acting and re-acting upon each other as quantities of value. These quantities vary continually, independently of the will, foresight, and action of the producers (79).
It seems like once we have branded something as knowledge or science, it is now valuable, but not necessarily based on the human labor put into producing it. Instead, it becomes valuable in itself and seems to dictate its own actions, effectively changing laborers’ “own social action” to “action of objects, which rule the producers instead of being ruled by them” (79).
Thanks for your insights, everyone. Beth, you’re right to re-ground our discussion of the commodity in Marx, since he provides the most thorough definition. Once we start talking about “knowledge” or “science,” however, our definitions of the commodity fetish and labor must also necessarily adapt. The question then becomes: how does a Marxian notion of the commodity form (or a Lukacsian definition of reification) help us describe what is largely an immaterial economy? That is, we’ve been talking about knowledge and science as if these things have materiality and density, when they are largely composed of facts, abstractions, lessons, etc. Of course, this does not by any means imply that knowledge and science (and their power relations) aren’t real, nor am I suggesting that they don’t have real effects.
Another way to consider “immaterial labor” is through _Never Let Me Go_–the economy of donors and carers relies on the production of affect (in this case, care) to function. Many have attempted to read Ishiguro’s novel in light of the increased demand of immaterial products generated by growing service economies.
Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt, two contemporary political theorists who affiliate themselves with a movement called “Autonomous Marxism,” have a couple of well-known and, for some, controversial books on this subject. They’re called _Empire_ and _Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire_.
Here’s the wiki entry on Autonomous Marxism, aka Autonomia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autonomism
Cheers–
so