Don DeLillo’s White Noise, is a quintessential postmodern novel. DeLillo’s novel focuses on a society that has become hyperreal. The real no longer exists in White Noise, it has just become an image that no longer has a true reality. Many of the themes are ones of images becoming something else entirely. Jean Baudrillard and Fredric Jameson theories relate to DeLillo’s postmodern consumer society and how signs create a hyperreality. Baudrillard’s post-humanist theory of the simulacra is showing in White Noise with “The Most Photographed Barn in America.” While Jameson’s postmodern theory of the consumer society relates with the simulacra of television, and consumer products. Jean Baudrillard’s posthumanism theory in his essay The Precession
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In White Noise, Jack accompanies Murray to see “The Most Photographed Barn in America” which becomes a simulacra. A simulacra is an image or representation of someone or something, and in relation to the barn it becomes something more than it is. First, the barn starts to become a simulacra because of the signs that Jack and Murray run across while driving. “We counted five signs before we reached the sight. There were forty cars and a tour bus in the makeshift lot” (DeLillo 12). When looking at the signs that they pass, these signs are there to bring an “aura” to the barn. The barn becomes a representation of a photographed barn, rather than a real …show more content…
In the novel, television is a very influential device in their life. Television has become a new reality, becoming more real than reality. In which, television becomes a simulacra for the consumer society. Frederic Jameson in his essay Postmodernism and Consumer Society”, talks about the “end of individualism” which Jameson believes happens for two reasons. The first being that “corporate capitalism” in relation to “that the older bourgeois individual subject no longer exists” (Jameson 1850). But, what links Baudrillard’s theory and Jameson’s in relation to White Noise is his second position, the “poststructuralist position.” The poststructuralist position believes that the person being an individual was never real, therefore it becomes “a philosophical and cultural mystification” (Jameson 1850). The characters in the novel believe nothing but TV, and the TV controls people. Murray talks about how TV gives
In White Noise, Jack accompanies Murray to see “The Most Photographed Barn in America” which becomes a simulacra. A simulacra is an image or representation of someone or something, and in relation to the barn it becomes something more than it is. First, the barn starts to become a simulacra because of the signs that Jack and Murray run across while driving. “We counted five signs before we reached the sight. There were forty cars and a tour bus in the makeshift lot” (DeLillo 12). When looking at the signs that they pass, these signs are there to bring an “aura” to the barn. The barn becomes a representation of a photographed barn, rather than a real …show more content…
In the novel, television is a very influential device in their life. Television has become a new reality, becoming more real than reality. In which, television becomes a simulacra for the consumer society. Frederic Jameson in his essay Postmodernism and Consumer Society”, talks about the “end of individualism” which Jameson believes happens for two reasons. The first being that “corporate capitalism” in relation to “that the older bourgeois individual subject no longer exists” (Jameson 1850). But, what links Baudrillard’s theory and Jameson’s in relation to White Noise is his second position, the “poststructuralist position.” The poststructuralist position believes that the person being an individual was never real, therefore it becomes “a philosophical and cultural mystification” (Jameson 1850). The characters in the novel believe nothing but TV, and the TV controls people. Murray talks about how TV gives