VOL. IV (XXI) 2009 - Departamentul de Filosofie si Stiinte ale ...

ADINA BAYA 103
collective sacrifice of sheet-metal, machinery and human lives.” He thinks
“the Accident” is “that gigantic ‘happening’, the finest offered by consumer
society, through which society affords itself in the ritual destruction of
materials and life the proof of its excessive affluence.” 42
Jack’s role as a university lector is also built on an image of himself
wearing “an academic gown and dark glasses day and night,” as well as
being called “J.A.K. Gladney”—a name and appearance that he adopted
early in his career with the purpose of being “taken seriously as a Hitler
innovator” and that now he wears “like a borrowed suit.” 43 This orientation
toward visible appearance rather than substance, together with the general
elevation of irrelevant details to the level of academic subjects, represent a
clear result of the commodification of education and DeLillo’s ironies in
connection with it reveal his implicit criticism toward the degradation of
culture in the age of hyperconsumerism.
To conclude, the world reproduced in White Noise is one in which all
areas of life, whether material or spiritual, are undergoing an intensive
process of commodification. From family life to education, and from
consumer products to healthcare, every aspect of this media-saturated
universe seems to stand under a constant pressure for perpetual renewal,
targeting the hyperconsumer’s ever-growing hedonism and desire to acquire
and possess novel-seeming assets. However, in the same environment that
is driven by the fulfillment of pleasure and wellbeing, necrophobia plays a
paradoxically central role. As works by Baudrillard and other theorists
concerned with consumer society show, death should be regarded as an
element integrated in postmodern identity, as a symbol of the imminent
disappearance that permits a constant renewal, meant to shift forward the
continuous cycle of consumerism.
42 Baudrillard, 1998, p. 49.
43 DeLillo, 1986, p. 7.