Nothing in the modern world is more capitalist than television advertising. It is the sole medium that can convince millions of people at once to continue buying in to the market, that simultaneously unifies and alienates its audience as it creates and prescribes needs that do not apply to everyone. But the advent of television advertising complicates the economic and political schema of capitalism that Karl Marx described in the nineteenth century: with television as a part of the cultural landscape, capitalism is no longer allowed to subversively perpetuate itself through the silent disenfranchisement of the proletariat alone. Certainly 1980s America still successfully accomplished everything Marx’s capitalism did, but at the same time it sets out to accidentally destroy itself through television. In producing and reproducing a mass media that is supposed to appeal to everyone, television creates a faction that realizes it is no longer a part of the audience. Capitalist society in the 1980s reached a point of un-sustainabilty: how could it resolve its goal, the reproduction of the means of production, with its own side effect of the awakened and anxious bourgeoisie? This is the entropic death of capitalism, which “developed countries” are in the midst of in contemporary society. So perhaps Marx could not have imagined television when he wrote of the exponentially increasing rate of change in production necessary to keep the bourgeoisie secure in their power, yet his theories are alarmingly relevant when we examine what television has done to American society.

    In Don DeLillo’s White Noise, protagonist Jack Gladney is such a member of the bourgeoisie who has — consciously or unconsciously — placed himself outside of the television audience, who has a keen eye for observing the mechanisms of thought production around him. What Jack sees makes him anxious, unsure of his privilege, and unable to reconcile his place in society with the fact that he is as mortal as any man. Jack’s society has completely alienated him from the material world — his possessions mean nothing to him, his body means nothing aside from projecting a certain image that Jack associates with his profession — and so he is entirely unequipped to deal with his own death. Jack’s particular anxiety is something of an anomaly, in that neither Marx nor his successors explicitly mention a denial of mortality as a symptom of the bourgeoisie, but this essay will examine Jack as a specimen from the entropic death of capitalism, the end result of a century of orgiastic consumerism.

    Early in the novel, Jack reveals his curious attitude toward the possessions he and his family have amassed. “Things, boxes. Why do these possessions carry such sorrowful weight? There is a darkness attached to them, a foreboding. They make me wary not of personal failure and defeat but of something more general, something large in scope and content,” (DeLillo 6) he says, and this is the thesis statement of Jack Gladney.  He will spend the entire novel explaining things and what they mean: his possessions, the possessions of others, the shrines to capitalism that are his world. Here he lets us know that he is unlike the traditional capitalist because his anxiety is not drawn from wanting more things; quite the opposite, he wants things to mean less. In his essay “Alienation and Social Classes,” Marx explains that the bourgeoisie “feels satisfied and affirmed in this self-alienation, experiences the alienation as a sign of its own power, and possesses in it the appearance of a human existence” (Marx-Engels Reader 133). The problem for Jack is that he is almost accidentally aware of the phenomenon Marx describes; he knows that his alienation from himself and his property makes his existence somehow haunted, and he does not know why. He is supposed to look at his things and wonder why he does not possess more, have more money to spend on more and better objects. He has, in a way, not fulfilled his role as a capitalist. In “Estranged Labor,” Marx says that man “duplicates himself not only, as in consciousness, intellectually, but also actively, in reality, and therefore he contemplates himself in a world that he has created” (Marx-Engels Reader 76). But when this created world holds no consolation for Jack, he must question the meaning of his property. He can’t take it with him, so to speak, and so the things he acquires can only serve as mementos mori.

    DeLillo does not leave Jack the lone contemplative intellectual in the novel. Jack’s friend and colleague Murray Jay Siskind appears as the cynical but fascinated critic of all vestiges of 1980s consumerist culture. In the grocery store, where so many of the novel’s more important conversations take place, Murray remarks, “here we don’t die, we shop. But the difference is less marked than you think” (DeLillo 38). According to Marx, the consumerist tendency of the bourgeoisie is correlative to the bourgeoisie’s self-destruction: “Every real and possible need is a weakness which will lead the fly to the gluepot,” (Marx-Engels Reader 94) because, in a capitalist society, the need for money and property is self-perpetuating. The idea that shopping equals death is somewhat problematic in the face of Marx’s explanation of capitalism because the bourgeoisie creates itself through amassing its wealth and oppressing the proletariat; it thrives on consuming, on consuming more than it did yesterday, and so on. Why, then, is Murray entirely correct in saying that to shop is to die? Perhaps because the appetite of the capitalist can never be sated, because shopping — even for groceries — is a kind of addiction for the bourgeoisie: the more he gets, the more he wants, unto death.

    Has Jack recognized this in himself? For all of his intelligence, Jack is still bound heavily in what Althusser calls ideological state apparatuses, those mechanisms that maintain “the reproduction of the relations of production, i.e. of capitalist relations of exploitation” (Althusser 154). By profession he is a teacher, he is a part of the educational ISA that reproduces the ruling class. Perhaps his existentialist thought processes is somehow tied to the amount of time he must spend contemplating the ideology he instills; Althusser says that “ideology is conceived as a pure illusion, a pure dream, i.e. as nothingness. All its reality is external to it” (Althusser 159). If Jack has discovered that the role he plays in perpetuating a formless, meaningless set of ideas may be equated with his constant consumption, he has little left to tie himself to, to ground him in life, to keep him in touch with his species.

    The theme of breaking off from the crowd holds a great deal of weight for both Jack and Murray. Murray, who is drawn to television as a way to understand culture, believes that nothing can enforce a group mentality as well as advertising. Murray is also fascinated with children and the way they interact with the world; he believes they create themselves as children through the advertising they are exposed to. He tells his college-aged students:

You are spinning out from the core, becoming less recognizable as a group, less targetable by advertisers and mass-producers of culture. Kids are a true universal. But you’re well beyond that, already beginning to drift, to feel estranged from the products you consume. Who are they designed for? What is your place in the marketing scheme? Once you’re out of school, it is only a matter of time before you experience the vast loneliness and dissatisfaction of consumers who have lost their group identity. (DeLillo 50)

The concern of the television era bourgeoisie is to make sure that the television is speaking to them specifically. All of their anxiety is the result of no longer being in the target group; the bourgeoisie can only reproduce itself if its goals are internally common, if the ideology is readily digestible by all of its members.  In “Enlightenment as Mass Deception,” Adorno and Horkheimer explain the evolution of the culture industry into something that no longer serves the ideology of the masses, it produces the ideology that serves the ruling class. They argue that “the shamelessness of the rhetorical question ‘What do people want?’ lies in the fact that it appeals to the very people as thinking subjects whose subjectivity it specifically seeks to annul” (Adorno and Horkheimer 116). Advertisers do not wonder what their public wants, do not really try to understand the needs and desires of the masses; they seek only to find the most efficient means of telling the people what they should want. Advertising is effective only as long as it renders the public as de-individualized as possible. Adorno and Horkheimer later make an argument that we may connect to Murray’s theory about people who “grow out” of their adherence to the prescribed group mentality: “As individuals they are absolutely replaceable, pure nothingness, and are made aware of this as soon as time deprives them of their sameness” (Adorno and Horkheimer 117). Once the members of the target audience no longer recognize themselves as such, they encounters a serious problem: having been denied subjectivity, how does one discover it again?

    Advertising no doubt plays a strange role in Jack’s life and in the novel. Our narrator continually refers to the background noise of his home, things he overhears on the television or radio when he is not consciously paying attention. In the beginning of the novel, these asides are whole phrases out of context, clips from nature shows like “this creature has developed a complicated stomach in keeping with its leafy diet” (DeLillo 95). But later, the snippets of background noise brought into the foreground grow more ominous, more drenched in ad-speak and less meaningful by themselves; when Jack is on his way to kill Mr. Gray, we have “Random Access Memory, Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome, Mutual Assured Destruction” (DeLillo 303). (It is difficult for the contemporary reader to step out of her historical moment and imagine that “Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome” did not carry with it the same connotations it does in present-day America, but let us assume for the sake of the argument that it would have been possible in 1985 for an educated man to have been unfamiliar with AIDS and, even if he were familiar with the abstract condition and symptoms of the disease, the words did not refer to the same suffering and destruction they currently do, and they did not connote race, sexuality, class, disenfranchisement, etc.) Adorno and Horkheimer tell us that “the more completely language coincides with communication, the more words change from substantial carriers of meaning to signs devoid of qualities; the more purely and transparently they communicate what they designate, the more impenetrable they become” (Adoro and Horkheimer 133). Most of what Jack overhears means nothing out of context; this last string of words, especially, had almost nothing to do with Jack’s subjective reality and everything to do with itself.

    So the communication that constantly bombards Jack, that means nothing to him because he has not been made familiar with its language, functions as a barrier between him and the rest of society. But when Jack examines the way groups function, his concern is not a loss of consumer identity. Instead, he returns to the fear of death, believing that death is easier in a group. When Jack discusses Hitler with his class, he explains the appeal of Nazism: “To become a crowd is to keep out death. To break off from the crowd is to risk death as an individual, to face dying alone. Crowds came for this reason above all others. They were there to be a crowd” (DeLillo 71). Both Jack and Murray are correct in saying that in a capitalist society nothing is more frightening for the bourgeois than to find himself on the outside of the main group, but they say so for different reasons. But perhaps these reasons — advertising for Murray and death for Jack — are more related than they appear; the ad that does not appeal to the bourgeois forces him to the periphery, denies him his place in the group. The ejection kills him, and he must “face dying alone.”

    The other problem for Jack is that he experiences his world as technologically advanced, insulated, full of unnatural language and man-made toxic clouds. There is virtually nothing in the novel about his connection with nature; even his son Heinrich questions whether or not water is wet (DeLillo 22-24), favoring abstraction and a post-Existential form of reasoning above the sensory. So in a world that is made up of the artificial, how is Jack to believe that he is an organic being capable of something so natural and inevitable as death? Marx tells us that “the identity of nature and man appears in such a way that the restricted relation of men to nature determines their restricted relation to one another, and their restricted relation to one another determines men’s restricted relation to nature” (Marx-Engels Reader 158). Perhaps it is because Jack has lost his ties to his fellow man that he has lost the ability to see himself as a natural being. Jack admits that “there’s something artificial about [his] death. It’s shallow, unfulfilling” (DeLillo 283). Jack’s intimate relationship to the history of Nazi Germany must be addressed here: we can only speculate that his fascination with Hitler’s systematized killing could be contributing to his idea that death is a part of the machine and not something that can possibly occur naturally. Murray tells Jack:

Fear is unnatural. Lightning and thunder are unnatural. Pain, death, reality, these are all unnatural. We can’t bear these things as they are. We know too much. So we resort to repression, compromise and disguise. This is how we survive in the universe. This is the natural language of the species. (DeLillo 289)

Only capitalism can create a bourgeoisie that is so entrenched in its own concept of the natural that it denies the naturalness of death. Capitalism acts on the body in such a way that when the bourgeoisie creates itself, it must do away with death and disease unless these can serve the market.

    Jack’s wife, Babette, has perhaps the most intimate connection with this particular aspect of capitalism. We can examine her understanding of the relationship between capitalism and disease/death based upon two examples. First, Babette teaches a class on posture and comportment to the elderly in her community. When Jack describes it, he muses, “we seem to believe it is possible to ward off death by following rules of good grooming” (DeLillo 27). By adhering to the bourgeoisie’s prescribed protocol, by making one’s body as bourgeois as possible, one can become a part of the class that is so elevated above the natural its members are immune to dying. According to Marx, the bourgeoisie prioritizes intellectualism above the sensual, natural experience of the worker; this false hierarchy produces a class that, when brought to the extreme, denies the legitimacy of the physical. This is the illusion the ruling class promotes: join, and you may be lifted so far above the working man that his condition does not apply to you. Second, Babette makes a remark about her daughters’ learned paranoia: “It is all a corporate tie-in … The sunscreen, the marketing, the fear, the disease. You can’t have one without the other” (DeLillo 264). Again, we see the relationship between advertising and its subjects: the audience is not permitted to choose what they need. Members of the bourgeoisie are free to convince themselves they are sick as long as there is a product to cure whatever they have. Disease is not a burden but an opportunity to consume.

    Jack’s society has taught him that he is not susceptible to death because of his privilege, because of the advances his society has made on his behalf. His dilemma is one from the entropic death of American capitalism: the noise has grown too loud, the signs have been made too obvious, and Jack and the people around him are too aware of the mechanisms at work. If Jack had the ability to buy in to the illusion, he would fear death in the abstract, impotent way he is supposed to, the way generations before him did. Could Marx have foreseen this particular destruction of the bourgeoisie, when its own methods of reproducing itself are so grotesque that a few of its members begin to slide irrevocably toward the periphery? Only television is capable of being so loud.

Works Cited

Adorno, Theodor W. and Max Horkheimer. “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception.” Dialectic of Enlightenment. Ed. Gunzelin Schmid Noerr. Trans. Edmund Jephcott. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002.

Althusser, Louis. “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses.” Lenin and Philosophy.

DeLillo, Don. White Noise. New York: Penguin Books, 1985.

Marx, Karl and Friedrich Engels. The Marx-Engels Reader. Ed. Robert Tucker. 2nd ed. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1978.

Brooklyn, Autumn 2007.

Critical Theory, Professor Jon Beller.

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