In closing, I wonder if nationalism in the late capitalist era can indeed be reduced to something as trivial as a set of like purchasing practices. Is there no more substance to our cohesion? Has modern-day consumerism divested nationhood of its deeper significance?

Got Stuff? Make a Clean Break!
In partnership with the Rhode Island Donation Exchange Program, Society
of Saint Vincent de Paul and Cleanscape, EcoReps and Facilities
Management have arranged to put used stuff to new use. Thirteen
donation stations will be erected around campus from May 6th through
May 8th for the convenience of departing students.

Upon reading this, I was immediately reminded of our earlier discussions on Appadurai. Such an advertisement speaks to the perpetually fluctuating nature of the commodity, and the various types of value that a commodity is invested with as it progresses from one state of its social life to another, a phenomenon defined by Appadurai as “convertibility”. Here, our used and no longer useful objects become another man’s treasure, for a time, until they again lose their status as objects of interest and pass on to a new “moment in a longer social trajectory” (Appadurai 15). In Appadurai’s words, “Today’s gift is tomorrow’s commodity. Yesterday’s commodity is tomorrow’s found art object. Today’s art object is tomorrow’s junk. And yesterday’s junk is tomorrow’s heirloom…” (15). This announcement reminded me of the myriad ways in which objects in our society acquire new value. There are examples all around us, in every day life. The Salvation Army, the used thrift store on Thayer (full of designer brands, nevertheless), and now this. Prior to taking this course, such a broadcast in the Morning Mail would have passed beneath my eye with barely more than a moment’s acknowledgement; Now, however, I find I have become acutely aware of the role that objects play in our everyday lives. I can attribute this hypersensitivity to all that I have learned in this class, so thanks again, Sarah.

This was inspired by a book featuring art made by 11 different Jens (Jen, plural ?):

http://www.book-by-its-cover.com/fineart/jen-11

-Jess

[Everyone should educate themselves about Swine Flu, because we walk around like we're these brilliant people who are all about what's happening in our heads, but we're fighting with other species to stay alive. I've been thinking more and more that human beings need to stop thinking of themselves as a species removed from evolution.

HOW WEIRD IS IT THAT BROWN UNIVERSITY PAYCHECKS COME FROM "THE OFFICE OF THE CONTROLLER?" I just looked at my paycheck, and that's terrifying! What are they controlling? Why is that their title? Oh, Brunonia, you are an institution just like any other!]

-N.S.

“Are you Facilities?” is a decidedly strange thing to ask someone.

The culture of White Noise is one in which consumerism reigns. The opening scene of the novel describes the annual arrival of the local college students, who bring with them carloads overflowing with “stuff.” The random TV and radio advertisements scattered throughout the text are always selling, selling, selling; selling anything and everything to the mass consumerist culture. The act of purchasing a product becomes a form of therapy and a safeguard against the unknown, and Jack and Babette are not immune to this contagion. In an early scene at the supermarket, Jack describes how “in the mass and variety of our purchases, in the sheer plentitude those crowded bags suggested, the weight and size and number, the family bargain packs with Day-Glo sale stickers, in the sense of replenishment we felt, the sense of well-being, the security and contentment these products brought to some snug home in our souls—it seemed we had achieved a fullness of being that is not known to people who need less, expect less, who plan their lives around lonely walks in the evening.” (20) Thus the overindulgent consumer is the one who triumphs, for in accumulating these unnecessary objects he believes he is surrounding himself with walls of bulletproof glass.

As the hub of consumerist culture, the supermarket itself represents an impenetrable haven from the terrors of death. This is made clear by Murray’s analogy to the supermarket as a Tibetan transitional state, a place that “recharges us spiritually, prepares us…a gateway or pathway.”“Here,” Murray says, “we don’t die, we shop.” (38) Shopping thus becomes the antithesis of dying. The more a man consumes, the less susceptible he is to his fate.

Another point of interest is this: Although children in the novel are consistently portrayed as more intelligent and level-headed than adults, they too fall prey to consumerist culture. In fact, they are consumerisms’ biggest proponents. Consumerist society, Murray states, “is a society of kids.” As children grow older, they become “less recognizable as a group, less targetable by advertisers and mass-producers of culture. You begin to feel estranged from the products you consume…it is only a matter of time before you experience the vast loneliness and dissatisfaction of consumers who have lost their group identity.” (50) Even Denise, the most logical of the bunch, seeks protection from material objects. She refuses to remove her green visor, which functions as her “interface with the world,” (37), and her room is cluttered with objects from her childhood that she has long since outgrown. This is simply “part of her strategy in a world of displacements to make every effort to restore and preserve, keep things together for their value as remembering objects, a way of fastening herself to a life.” (103) We can draw parallels here to Benjamin, who believed in collecting as a form of remembrance. Denise’s passion for collecting does indeed border on the chaos of memories.

There are several instances in which Jack blatantly uses consumerism as a form of protection and/or therapy. After running into a colleague at the local hardware store, Jack finds that his identity has been compromised. Eric Massingale tells Jack he looks like a “big, harmless, aging, indistinct sort of guy.” (83) These remarks flatly contradict the imposing image that Jack struggles to maintain. After this encounter, stripped of his defenses, Jack finds himself in the mood to shop. He heads to the Mid-Village-Mall and goes absolutely wild, buying anything and everything in sight.
“I began to grow in value and self-regard. I filled myself out, found new aspects of myself, located a person I’d forgotten existed. I traded money for goods. The more money I spent, the less important it seemed. I was bigger than these sums.” (84)
Shopping, like Hitler, becomes a shield that protects Jack from the world as he constructs his indestructible identity.

A similar situation occurs after Babette confesses to Jack and he learns the truth about the Dylar. As the foundations of his life crumble around him, all Jack wants to do is consume—in the most literal sense of the word. He drives the family to a chicken restaurant, where they sit in the car and stuff their faces. There is no talking, no thinking; they do not even bother to leave the car. “We wanted to eat, not look around at other people. We wanted to fill our stomachs and get it over with. We didn’t need light and space. We were content to eat facing in the same direction, looking only inches past our hands.” (231) Here, the act of consuming directly functions as a form of therapy, protecting Jack against the strange and terrible world that he is forced to confront.

Jack’s consumerism, however, ultimately betrays him, and for this reason he takes to throwing his possessions away. As Jack learns more about his impending death following the Airborne Toxic Event, he realizes that his possessions do not guarantee immortality. His death is approaching; it is unavoidable; and all of his meaningless purchases cannot save him from this ineluctable fate. They have failed him; but what is worse, they have betrayed him. Murray tells Jack that his fear of death is so profound because he is unable to “say goodbye to himself.” (294) Following this realization, Jack returns home, where he discards of almost everything he owns. “I was in a vengeful and near savage state. I bore a personal grudge against these things. Somehow they’d put me in this fix. They’d dragged me down, made escape impossible.” (294) How is this so? According to Appadurai, our human projections onto our personal possessions allow them to acquire lives of their own. Essentially, objects become physical manifestations of their human owners. Thus all of Jack’s possessions, these physical representations of himself, do not save him from his fear of death, but rather make it inescapable. As DeLillo’s traditional American consumer, Jack believed that amassing an infinite collection of objects would protect him from his inevitable death. Paradoxically, Jack himself has become so invested in these possessions that their very presence reinforces his inability to part with himself. His possessions have betrayed him, and he must throw them away.

At the novel’s end, the reorganization of the supermarket ultimately signifies the betrayal of objects to promise immortality to their consumers. The shoppers, unable to find anything, are in a state of “agitation and panic.” (325) “There is a sense of wandering now, an aimless and haunted mood, sweet-tempered people taken to the edge. They scrutinize the small print on packages, wary of a second level of betrayal. Smeared print, ghost images. In the altered shelves, the ambient roar, in the plain and heartless fact of their decline, they try to work their way through the confusion.” (326)
Consumerism is revealed as it truly is: not as an unbreakable shield against the fear of death, but as the embodiment of death itself. This must be what Murray means when he says, “the difference (between shopping and death) is less marked than you think.” (38)

Consider the other novels we have read throughout this course. What role do possessions play in determining a character’s identity? (Jack has his purchases, his dark glasses; Invisible Man had his briefcase; Hazel, his car; etc…) What similarities can we draw? What differences?

In what other ways does consumerism function as a form of protection against death in the novel? (Consider Dylar as a prime example—Babette literally consumes the drug with the hope that it will eliminate her fear of death.) Does anything else in the novel function in a similar manner?

“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.”

“‘It’s like we’ve been flung back in time,’ he said. ‘Here we are in the Stone Age, knowing all these great things after centuries of progress but what can we do to make life easier for the Stone Agers? Can we make a refrigerator? Can we even explain how it works? What is electricity? What is light?…If you came awake tomorrow in the Middle Ages and there was an epidemic raging, what could you do to stop it, knowing what you know about the progress of medicines and diseases? Here it is practically  the twenty-first century and you’ve read hundreds of books and magazines and seen a hundred TV shows about science and medicine. Could you tell those people one little crucial thing  that might save a million and a half lives?’” (147-8)

1. Heinrich talks about how, in this day and age, man has been separated from more than just his labor and, by extension, all that he produces. Knowledge itself–the knowledge of production–has been separated from the object. Now, more than ever, things seem capable of their own production–that is to say, they just happen–because humans know neither the details of their manufacture nor how to manufacture them.

2. Heinrich later adds: “‘What good is knowledge if it just floats in the air?’” (148) This led me to a series of questions: Who is responsible for producing, recording, and sharing knowledge? How has trusting objects with the knowledge of their own production–for instance, programming computers to make other computers–affected our own understanding of the knowledges we ought to record in our own minds? This seems to suggest that the supposedly inanimate world around us is actually quite alive, because we seem to have given it the ability to reproduce. This ties back to Appadruai’s essay on the social lives of things: the distinction between the commodified and the singular, the alive and the dead, becomes so blurred as to become indistinguishable.

3. This passage provides a nice contrast between Scientific Knowledge (how to prevent an epidemic) and All Other Knowledge (Hitler studies). I’m particularly interested in the differences between the two, if there are any, and how value is arbitrarily assigned to either–is scientific knowledge more important because it has the potential to increase a human life span? What is the difference between being shot through with an X-ray and being shot  through with Babette? Perhaps knowledge, in order to be applied and doled out, must be commodified to a certain extent: the names of body parts must be learned (158); Hitler’s life must be put into print so that he can be explored through the same ideas, again and again; evacuation procedures all must adhere to the same general procedure (139).

“No one seemed to know how a group of microorganisms could consume enough toxic material to rid the sky of such a dense and enormous cloud…’I don’t doubt for a minute they have these little organisms packaged in cardboard with plastic see-through bubbles, like ballpoint refills. That’s what worries me’” (160).

1. Here, Babette worries about the consequences of mass producing something that is considered biologically alive. It is unsettling for her to consider that something that is alive can be commodified: the product at the end of an assembly line, made and distributed just as efficiently as ballpoint refills. Yet the mass production of things–of  those shapes that constitute the object world–is no different than, and ought to be just as unsettling as, this attempt to meddle with biology.

2. This rumor is also troubling because of the paradox it presents: how can the living (the bacteria) interact with the lethal and still remain alive? Yet Jack, despite his brief exposure to Nyodene D., still has some chance of, interestingly enough, outliving his death, which seems to suggest that when death is objectified, it can be cleanly separate from the notion of life. Being able to trace the imprint of death on Jack’s body transforms it into an object, whether it’s a star-shaped hole or a tumor from carcinogens in sugar-free gum. This need for an objective account of death, one that literally rubs off onto the body, tends of reify it; death becomes a thing, one that can potentially be avoided, given other, more effective “things,” and so is no longer an idea, a happening, an unavoidable event.

3. The bacteria are alive, but they were also produced–they both “happened” and were “made” and so force the reader to examine what, if anything, is considered alive and what is considered an inanimate object. Just as how the bacteria have been packaged, it would be foolish to think that mass production and commodificaion doesn’t package human lives: what are the forces that “make” us–everything from radiation to Babette (19) to the culture of the places we grew up to the car commercials that enter our subconscious (155).

Apologies for how scattered this post ended up.

–N.S.

http://www.nytimes.com/indexes/2009/04/19/style/t/index.html#pagewanted=0&pageName=19brubach&

Much of the article touches upon elements of design and art history that are really not relevant to our studies, but I felt like the end of the column was interesting because it questioned the future of our consumerist culture as well as the impact of our current economic state:

Sudjic writes from the perspective of a willing participant in the consumerist binge we’ve all been on, noting the “bulimic fluctuation between gratification and self-disgust that comes from the compulsion to acquire too much too fast.’’ In an epilogue that feels like a hasty addendum, he wonders what will happen to our ‘‘narcotic addiction’’ to acquiring new things. “After excess comes sobriety,” he predicts, not by choice but because we can’t afford to get high. A nation of addicts forced into sobriety is not a happy prospect. Time to rethink the pursuit of happiness. After two decades of defining ourselves in terms of our possessions, we now need to figure out who we would be without them.

Also:

 Andy Warhol’s screen-printed paintings of multiple car crashes keeps coming to mind as I read White Noise. Jack’s description of a car crash he sees on the way to the rescue center seems to be a textual version of the emotional   detachment Warhol depicted:

Just beyond him was the scrap- metal burial mound of a Winnebago and a snowplow. The huge and tortured wreck emitted a wisp of rusty smoke. Brightly colored plastic utensils were scattered for some distance [...]

‘I saw all this before,’ Steffie said.  (125)

As seen in Warhol’s painting, the constant use of sensational imagery in media makes a car crash seem like old news. Murray notes that he will teach a course on car crashes next semester. Maybe this is Delillo’s intentional shout-out to Warhol (an edition of his novel Mao II features Warhol’s portraits of the chairman)…

‘There’s no media in Iron City.’

‘They went through all that for nothing?’” (92)

The media is an ever-present being in Delillo’s novel, from the random television lines revealed sporadically, to Heinrich’s incessant listening to the radio to find out the symptoms related to the airborne toxic event. These things make up the ‘white noise’ in the characters lives, ever-present, never turned off, always ‘informing’ the characters. The symptoms that the radio literally shape Steffie and Denise’s feelings, for, as the radio tells them what exposure to Nyodene D. causes, they begin to think they have these symptoms. Whatever the media says is real. If it is not televised or broadcast on the radio, then the event is implied not to be significant, as revealed by Bee’s words. But, even though the media was not there to capture the story of the people who thought they were going to crash, their experience, despite what Bee thinks, is no less real, no less harrowing. In a way, it was even more harrowing and true, as Jack gets an unadulterated account of the experience. “They were content to let the capped and vested man speak on their behalf. No one disputed his account or tried to add individual testimony . . . They trusted him to tell them what they’d said and felt” (91). If the media had been there, more people surely would have spoken, trying to make the experience has harrowing and exciting as possible, to make an ultra-good story.

The alteration that the media causes ‘reality’ to undergo is shown clearly when Babette is on television. “Either she hadn’t known there would be a camera on hand or she preferred not to tell us, out of embarrassment, love, superstition, whatever causes a person to wish to withhold her image from those who know her” (104). The fact that Delillo acknowledges that people often don’t want people they know to see them on television implies that people feel different on television; they portray a different image, or, as Delillo says, “It was but wasn’t [Babette]” (104). No matter what, the media seems to misconstrue even the most basic realities. Interestingly, no sound comes through on Babette’s transmission. But that only makes the white noise even more present; “once again I began to think Murray might be on to something. Waves and radiation. Something leaked through the mesh” (104). Wilder’s reaction to his mother being on the screen seems to show the alteration of reality the most, as he tries to touch her body on screen. But her body isn’t there. She isn’t really there. And then he starts “crying softly, uncertainly, in low heaves and swells” (105).

How else does the media function in White Noise? What do the kids, especially Wilder, reveal about society? Why is Jack so obsessed with sex and death? What do the repeated mentions of heat and rain in the novel symbolize?