White Noise is a novel that hovers around ‘the system’ of capitalism and consumption. When I read it I constantly felt ‘logged into’ what Jameson termed the new technological or hysterical sublime. Jack, a reflexive intellectual with a high position in the College on the Hill, intermittently recognizes the presence of this ‘system’. However, in the nature of a true sublime, the ‘system’ is omnipresent and can never be pinned down or thoroughly comprehended. It is just there, as an overpowering ungraspable fact tapping into every aspect of postmodern life, to inspire fear and awe in those who catch a glimpse of it.
Jack’s fear of death, like his accelerated progression towards it, is a result of the power of this immense and indefinite capitalist system. Death, of course, is the closest we can come towards imagining a sublime: the fear of the great unknown, the ultimate void of non-existence. The text itself points out the great power of consumerism and, I would argue, connects it to death. Even in the quiet small town society of Blacksmith, the supermarket is the heart of existence. It represents “some form of swarming life just outside the range of human apprehension.” (36). As long as the supermarket is shining and bright, other signs of deterioration in the community can be overlooked. Shopping is a source of happiness. Money transactions equal life. As Jack goes on an unusual shopping spree, he reports how he “began to grow in value and self-regard. I filled myself out, found new aspects of myself, located a person I’d forgotten existed. Brightness settled around me” (84). Like making and having money, his ability to spend confirms his place within and blessing from the system (46). Likewise, Winnie Richards asserts that she is proud to be an American because America is the most sensory stimulating country in the world. It is the capitalism’s promised land: the ‘city on the hill’.
This positive image of consumption/ accumulation is countered later in the text (in “The Airborne Toxic Event”), when the byproducts of industrialization become acutely life-threatening. The effects of consumerism as a life-style does make the sky at sunset more beautiful, but the viewers’ awe of this beauty is accompanied by the fear that it is somehow caused by the accumulation of toxins and other pollutants in the air. The text creates a general feeling that the new technological developments – despite the beauty Jack finds in their incomprehensible levels of intricacy – represent an invisible force of death seeping into the human genome to thwart future generations. But perhaps just as disturbing is the discovery that immediate and familiar things constitute health hazards. To careful people like Denise, daily life becomes a constant negotiation between forever new and contradicting waves of information about the hazards of foodstuffs and medicines; the do’s and don’ts for a longer life. For every product, there seems to be a threat. And the products of capitalism are omnipresent. Several places in the text family scenes are interrupted by breaks in the text in the form of advertisements for new products like optical megabyte hard discs (112), or credit cards with rainbow holograms (122). As the text nears its conclusion, these breaks present darker ‘products’ of consumer society, such as “Random Access Memory, Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome, Mutual Assured Destruction” (303). At this point accumulation has come to signify death. This is evident in the room of Jack’s German teacher, Howard Dunlop. The objects that pile up in his room in stacks tall enough to keep all sunlight out reminded me of the piles of belongings that accumulated in German concentration camps during WWII. There is also the suggestion (made by Murray) that Howard finds death erotic. Jack on the other hand, who desperately tries to avoid death, empties his house of excessive possessions. Yet he cannot escape the fact that the career he has built up is based on death. The unprecedented magnitude of death Hitler instigated is what occasioned his founding of the department of Hitler studies at the College on the Hill. In this connection it seems possible to read the ‘city on the hill’ as a counterpart to the College on the Hill, and American society as comprising both the supreme bliss and the ultimate threat of consumption.