Reconfigurations of Subjectivity

3.2 Reconfigurations of Subjectivity in White Noise

From: Television and Literature: David Foster Wallace's Concept of Image-Fiction, Don DeLillo's White Noise and Thomas Pynchon's Vineland



The use of conceptual language, deja vu, the blending of the real and the simulated: i.e. the ways in which the characters of the novel perceive the world are deeply influenced by the media. Jack Gladney's perceptions and thoughts are completely based on televisual stereotypes. He does not use the media in a conscious way, but rather his consciousness is remodeled along their lines of association and reasoning. At the "showdown" he appears less as an individual about to have an intense experience than as an actor distanced from himself and acting according to someone else's script. Instead of an epiphanic revelation of his own identity in this confrontation, Jack experiences the loss of a stable self: "I was a Buddhist, a Jain, a Duck River Baptist." (p. 310)

The form of subjectivity represented by Jack Gladney is comparable to the one described by Jean Baudrillard in his essay "The Ecstasy of Communication". Gladney's experience at the showdown with its emphasis on surfaces and "structures and channels" resembles Baudrillard's descriptions of schizophrenia, a state in which the subject completely loses himself into "networks of influence". For Baudrillard schizophrenia is "the absolute proximity, the total instantaneity of things [...] the overexposure and transparence of the world which traverses [the subject] without obstacle."(75)

This chapter explores the ways in which DeLillo represents the alterations in subjectivity which occur in a culture deeply informed by the media. The barrage of images, signals and stimuli, the "white noise" which surrounds the Gladney family, has led not only to changes in the ways in which subjects perceive the world, but also in their understanding of themselves, their relation to death, and the ways in which they relate to power and knowledge. Baudrillard's "schizophrenia" is only one way to conceptualize this new kind of subjectivity which rests at the heart of Don DeLillo's
novel.