Death Lives in DeLillo’s White Noise and Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation

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.

Baudrillard's Simulacra and Simulation: Getting our fill of the real without the danger of the real?

I will dedicate my discussion of Baudrillard's Simulacra and Simulation to the medium of film since we like to associate The Matrix with this particular theorist. Baudrillard makes the opening statement that "It is no longer a question of either maps or territories. Something has disappeared: the sovereign difference, between one and the other, that constituted the charm of abstraction." A modern Surrealist or Abstract expressionist film is blase precisely because the collective conscious has given up with distinguishing between the map and the territory, so high art abstraction is now in the realm of mundane everydayness. As an example, I can't help but think of Jan Švankmajer's Lunacy, a regurgitation of every conceptual dinosaur of Western ideology all mashed into an intentionally indecipherable film; more on the film can be found here and here. Although the film doesn't look at all like our reality, the tropes bring reality to mind and their chaotic orchestration is about as annoying as a traffic jam.

The documentary film is instead more in vogue having achieved commercial status this century for the first time ever, and signifying a new interest in the closest to the sense of unmediated real that the film industry can come up with. Producer of Voices of Iraq Eric Manes explained that "Without Iraqis as the directors, we would have seen Iraq and its people only through the filter of Western eyes. We certainly would not have had the access or the emotional intimacy that was captured in the film." Benjamin, who is en route to Baudrillard, might disagree with Manes in the sense that it takes creating, distributing, and utilizing vastly intricate equipment as well as having a huge tech crew on hand to offer the average American a chance to view real Iraq. The reality, free of mediation, we are looking for when we seek a documentary is made possible precisely through media, the more technologically advanced, the less mediated the story feels. But the nature of any simulation offers us the kinds of emotions much like the unmediated real does. Manes substitutes the Western director with the Iraqi and we all then surmise that it is much closer to the real so long as Iraqis are directing.

Film critics speak of the camera lens as though it were literally a human eyeball attached to a memory, much like our own eyes and brains work as humans. It is as though the camera lens itself is not a medium, but a true Iraqi perspective in its own right. Baudrillad takes the logic of personifying our technological communication channels a step further into abstraction asserting that there is no real, only simulacra; or the real and the simulation of the real are both equally true. The hyperreal is what we get when the simulacra precedes the territory.

Film does a fine job of this. The real is a desert until the simulacra sows the soil on location. Once we have access to a concept through media, we can begin to impose a multitude of meanings, eventually cultural value, and ultimately posterity. America's illegal occupation of Iraq isn't real to the extent that American masses feel "emotional intimacy" until we have what we consider as credible access, the documentary film in this case. We may begin to talk on deeper critical levels of the occupation and the state of Iraq with some more credibility now that we have had some experience with Iraq after having seen the film. The hand held DV cameras and documentary replace the physical country of Iraq in this sense, which is fine because we still see the kind of positive results over on the American end as if a rush of people took flights to the military bases and interviewed the locals: we see emotional intimacy and open fervent discussion from a broad audience, without the danger of even more people standing in the middle of a violent illegal occupation and civil war environment.

Pynchon's and McLuhan's Coy Pessimism: Marching Towards the Age of Technological Mass Communication

In his popular "cult" book The Medium is the Massage, Marshall McLuhan writes, "Societies have always been shaped more by the nature of the media by which men communicate than by the content of the communication" (8). Thomas Pynchon's novel The Crying of Lot 49 takes on a cynical tone as it grapples with this new age of technological media. Pynchon's protagonist, Oedipa Maas, is the executor of her wealthy late boyfriend's will. As she takes on that role, she stumbles upon an international conspiracy all seemingly signifiers of her ex Peirce Invararity's alleged master plan.

Oedipa becomes immersed in history and connections which captivate her. Inclined to find some deeper meaning or solution, She travels California with faith that she will solve the supposed mystery of the conspiracy with the aid of the quirky people she encounters. Oedipa's cause is motivated not by the content of the media, the history of the symbols for example, but by her own interpretation of the content so long everything lines up with an assumption she holds about the content; that it is all in some way related to her ex. However, as we discover more and more while the novel progresses, the content is not decipherable. The more "clues" she finds, the more complex her search becomes. Potential conclusions, not the fragmented content, push her forward. Oedipa's demise is brought about because she does not accept that there is no single conclusion. Only possibility and overlap; eternal intertextuality like hyperlinks on the internets. Her paranoia transforms to schizophrenia precisely due to the content of media having no apparent connection or unifying master narrative.

To bring McLuhan back into the picture, Oedipa's journey is shaped by the nature of media because she feels like she is on to something, slowly piecing together a myth that she herself invented. "We march backwards into the future" (75). Oedipa is navigating backwards during her journey to uncover what may or may not be a worldwide conspiracy, the plan of her late boyfriend Peirce Inverarity, or symptom of her own paranoia. Her eyes are in the past as her body moves forward through time, just like the rear view mirror image in McLuhan's book. Serge's Song in chapter 6, in reference to Nabakov's Lolita offers commentary on Oedipa's situation:

And the older generation/ Has taught me what to do--I had a date last night with an eight-year old, And she's a swinger just like me.

The song is a sardonic parody of generational inheritance. The Paranoids, cloaked with the venerable pop-rock Beatles look, cynically point out the redundancy of cultural ailment passing on through the generations. We are romantically linked with the idea of youth just as our predecessors but rather than our desires translating into hope and eventually progressive and adaptive results, our ideals again and again, create dysfunctional situations for ourselves. Oedipa's mystery is really all in her head. The outdated tools she brings to the situation are intended to create order from disorder but since the chaos that surrounds her is completely out of her control, she of course breaks down. Her will to bring order to the chaos can be understood as inherited from Pynchon's fictional original settlers of America. "Nothing ever happen by accident for the Scurvhamite, Creation was a vast, intricate machine" (155). Pynchon provides his reader with the fictional historical narratives so that the reader can draw parallels with past and present. We can surmise that Oepida's world is not conducive to thriving in the narrative's present environment.

It is clear that Oedipa knows no other paradigm other than the ontological. For this, Pynchon punishes his protagonist with her mental breakdown, leaving the reader with absolute possibility: "Oedipa settled back to await the crying of lot 49." Pynchon is clearly telling a story of extreme skepticism towards the age of technological communication as it relates to the generation from which the novel is born, unlike McLuhan who takes on a very coy and playful posture. "Innumerable confusions and a profound feeling of despair invariably emerge in periods of great technological and cultural transitions" (McLuhan 8). Oedipa embodies social angst in a time of transition. She takes on "today's jobs" with "yesterday's tools" (McLuhan 9) with her insistence upon the existence of a single meta-narrative to organize all of the chaos she encounters then falling prey to the unnamed omniscient narrator's insistence upon entropy, rather than embracing the confusion.

As with most open endings, however, I am always inclined to feel that the author wishes to convey some questioning or doubt of the total pessimism we get up until this last sentence. The Crying of Lot 49 is Pynchon's period piece that leaves us feeling that the 60s cannot handle the new media transformation but over time the tensions of "cultural transitions" fade as the fire of technological revolution eventually cools down and the changes become the everyday.

Response to Walter Benjamin's "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction"

In his essay "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," Benjamin describes a significant departure in the function of art around 1900. His essay is ultimately a theory of art that can overcome fascism. Benjamin writes, "the process of pictorial reproduction was accelerated so enormously that it could keep pace with speech." The speed of speech was accelerated hundreds of years before the speed of art in its mechanical reproduction age. Speech was mass produced and distributed with the invention of the printing press. The printing press provided the world with quick and uniform dissemination of knowledge which could inform, motivate, and ultimately congregate huge groups of people with newly acquired power, who would be otherwise powerless and exploited by those in power.

As result, society can be revolutionized at a rate faster than ever before. Fliers, pamphlets, manifestos, dripping with the voices of the oppressed and filtered through a handful of talented writers-- ripped through history like wild fires, destroying ancient regimes and replacing them with an upgrade. Texts such as Martin Luther's Ninety-Five Theses, The United States Declaration of Independence by America's Founding Fathers, Thomas Paine's pamphlet Common Sense, Voltaire's Dictionnaire Philosophique, Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations, Thomas Hobbes' Leviathan, Mary Wollstonecraft's Vindication of the Rights of Woman, W.E.B. DuBois' The Souls of Black Folk, The Communist Manifesto by Marx/Engels, The King James Bible etc. have brought about irrevocable change in society that will continue to ripple through the minds of generations. Every single person born into a society that offers training in literacy will shape an understanding of the world through the filters of each author lucky enough to distribute a work on the massive scale.

If a newly informed individual discovers the concept of oppression and can identify with this word, when that very special solar eclipse comes around again, she or he may choose to lead colleges towards yet another vision of a brave new world. Every wave of feminism, each cultural soldier armed with the red book, every proponent of civil rights, each and every revolutionary in history can thank the medium of literature and the mode of print or for the liberation of Jane and John (and the translations of Jane and John in X number of languages all over the world).

Mechanical reproduction and distribution of another creative medium has a place somewhere in the heart of a volatile society. For every action there is an equal but opposite reaction. Every rise of a new regime creates a new kind of oppression and a new population of the oppressed.

Exposure to visual art is instantaneous. Everyone knows what the Mona Lisa looks like but only a tiny percentage of us have made the pilgrimage to the Louvre. Mona Lisa's umbilical cord has been cut by this new age of mechanical preproduction because the painting can no longer rely on its context for meaning. Before mechanical reproducibility of art connoisseurs experience art which has a definite aura. Benjamin calls it the "unique phenomenon of distance however close it may be." The work is distant to a spectator looking at the painting through bullet proof glass because it is a relic of a distant society. After its reproduction, the context is further away and the art is left naked in a sense, vulnerable to the spectator's interpretation. Mona Lisa herself is smug to some and forlorn to others. Maybe she is part of a grand conspiracy. Maybe she's a refrigerator magnet. The masses can make what they choose of art conceptually and physically. "Technical reproduction can put the copy of the original into situations which would be out of reach for the original itself."

Originality seems to be under threat as more and more copies are made, the harder it is to find the original since its copies have given society an excuse to endowed the original with so much more value. It is rare because there are thousands or millions of not so rares. The higher value is set for the original, the cheaper the copies.

However, Benjamin makes the point that art created after mechanical reproducibility would anticipate reproduction upon conception which would still leave possibilities for the germination of critical masses. "Mechanical reproduction emancipates the work of art from its parasitical dependence on ritual." Diego Rivera's mural Detroit Industry relies on aura in the ritualistic sense. We get a vague understanding of his depictions of industry and capitalism when we look at postcard with Detroit Industry printed on the front. However, the sheer grandeur of the original mural moves us in a way a reproduction could not. We are in the corridor of the DIA, in Detroit, Michigan where Fordism all started. Our besotted eyes take in the bright colors, metaphysical symbolism, and historical references as we slowly piece together an overarching story about this place and time, however we choose to spin it. We feel engulfed by the art; by its size, floor to ceiling, telling us this story of industrialization and exploitation.