In Simulacra and Simulation, Jean Baudrillard contends that simulation was once a false representation of the real but, unlike a representation that relies on the equation between the sign and its reference (the real), it has managed to defeat all references and become a self-contained system. He asserts that the sign becomes “the reversion and death sentence of every reference” (6). Baudrillard’s distinction between representation as disguising the essential or a utopian principle, and simulation which “envelopes the whole edifice for representation itself as a simulacrum,” is supported by Don DeLillo’s White Noise throughout the novel as seen in Jack’s understanding of death leading to his realization that death is the ultimate end to all meaning.
Baudrillard finds a critical difference between a representation of the real and a simulation. In Simulation and Simulacra, he argues that there has been a distinct change in the world marked by a new arrangement of meaning. To pretend is to imply a presence of something that isn’t, whereas, to simulate implies a negation of something that is (3). To use Baudrillard examples, an icon of Jesus recognizes the character’s faith in God and ethnography of a tribe is material to be used as reference for the science community. However, these images negate the meaning of Jesus’ faith or the tribe’s ancient practices because they are themselves a simulacrum. This is important to Baudrillard because creating images in today’s world is dangerous. The image replaces God and the tribe because it reduces the signs that constitute the real into simulated parts that then enter a network of signs upon their creation. Without its image, an idea is dead because it cannot have agency in the system. It’s precisely the creation of the image that resurrects this idea and gives it meaning because it then has a point of entry, marked by the image, into the preexisting network of meaning that knows only how to interpret the image and not the idea of the image.
This “murderous power of images” (5) is brought about because the image, or simulation, does not preserve the real because it does not succeeded it, like a representation does. Instead the simulation replaces the real itself because it regenerates “an operational double, a programmatic, metastable, perfectly descriptive machine that offers all the signs of the real and short-circuits all its vicissitudes” (2) thus destroying the real. Unlike a representation, a simulation assumes reference is dead because the images have killed them (6) which leads to another danger: unmasking the image reveals that there is nothing behind it (5).
This revelation of image without meaning becomes the conclusion to a primary plot strand in White Noise. DeLillo punctuates Jack’s personal understanding of death at three turning points within the novel signaled by Jack’s speech about the death sentence of every plot (26, 199, 291). His first encounter with death is the moment a student asks him about the plots against Hitler. Jack “finds himself saying” that “…All plots tend to move deathward. This is the nature of plots” (26). Jack surprises himself because he gets caught in an exchange of meaning he did not anticipate. Jack has entered and taken agency in a network of preexisting meaning at the expense of his own logical rhetoric and experience. This moment puts Baudrillard’s point to play. Death is the simulacrum that envelops Jack’s personal system of reasoning and memory becoming its own self-contained system of meaning as channeled through Jack.
Another crucial encounter with death for Jack takes place when Babette reveals that she has taken the potentially dangerous drug, Dylar, obtained by deceiving Jack and discrediting her marriage to him. Her tragic conclusion begins with her hope to understand her condition “by reducing it to its parts” (192). This is supposed to advert her fear of death because, from her own experience, making lists and analyzing them solves any problem (191). She then finds the quasi-medical ad for Dylar and agrees to become the subject in exchange for the possibility of destroying her marriage and her body. Jack’s response to Babette is an account of the enormous damage she’s done to their marriage. He conjures the image of death again: “All plots move in one direction” (199).
Baudrillard’s understanding of simulacra is resurrected throughout this moment. Babettes inclination to classify and reduce her fear of death into parts threatens to destroy her. If she dies as result of the experiment, Baudrillard is wins the game because death enters the world of simulation, as no longer in representation form as myth or fear, which the medical system cannot translate into a diagnostic, but an actual chemical component in Babette’s brain, while destroying what it replaces: Babette. Jack brings this plausibility of destruction into reality when he reminds Babette of the irreversible damage she’s done to the marriage. Her infidelity has introduced death into Jack’s network of meaning. Jack has encountered the death of his “simple pleasures” (199) and understanding of Babette playing the role of his confiding wife. These immaterial pleasures and emotions are lost because they represent the edifice of Babette and because they have been defeated by infidelity, which has more weight in the system of simulacra. Babette has become a cheating wife and Jack attempts to reverse this reality by destroying the process that, he thinks, caused this reality to surface.
Jack recalls death a final time as he confides in Murray. Contrary to his former prophecy that death is the goal of all plots, Jack reveals that his own death feels completely artificial (283). Murray convinces Jack that “to plot is to live… You whole life is a plot, a scheme, a diagram… to plot is to affirm life, to seek shape and control” (291-292). Murray supports Baudrillard’s claim of simulacra because the plot or the simulation is the translation of body into the network of meaning, or life. Contrary to Jack’s earlier understanding of plots as death sentences to meaning, plots become the door for meaning because, as Jack admits, death feels shallow, unfulfilling, and artificial (183).
Death is the ultimate end of meaning because it is the affect of simulation and not a simulation itself, as Baudrillard would argue. A simulation is complete only when it takes on agency and therefore meaning in a system. Jack and Mink, or Mr. Gray, both come out alive in the end because plots cannot simulate death. Death is the ultimate end of meaning and the negation of simulation. To represent death as fear, like Winnie Richard’s story of the bear in the forest introducing a horrific experience of mortality (229), rather than attempt to simulate it is to keep the idea or myth of death alive.
Baudrillard, Jean. Simulacra and Simulation. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004.
DeLillo, Don. White Noise. New York: Penguin, 1986.
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