Shopping for the Real: Gender and Consumption in the Critical Reception of DeLillo’s White Noise

Don DeLillo’s novel White Noise has elicited an unusual critical consensus. Most critical readers tend to agree that because this novel represents an American culture given over to consumerism and its various mediations (primarily by television), in the America of the novel one can no longer experience an authentic relationship to oneself or to the social world. Seduced by the image, inhabiting a world dominated by Baudrillardrian simulacra, the novel’s characters passively embody the crisis of postmodernity, futilely seeking meaning in supermarkets and malls. As Mark Conroy puts it in an early article on the novel,
 

Gladney’s life has been in severe drift for many years, but his malaise may best be seen as a crisis of authority. His life is falling apart because it needs several registers of traditional authority in order to stay together. And all of them are coming under attack in the America of DeLillo’s text: not from revolution, of course, but simply from those acids of modernity.

(98)

Conroy argues that the novel shows us what happens when traditional modes of authority and “cultural transmission” (religion, humanism, the nuclear family, and community) have been replaced by “phony” institutions (99), “fake” religion (101), “compromised and meretricious” humanism (102), an “errant” family narrative in which parents have abdicated their authority (98), and an “expression of civicism in its most perverse form” (100). The novel ends, for Conroy, with Jack “doubly victimized by modernity. . . . Only as that quintessentially passive figure, the consumer, does Gladney have the faint glimpse of immortality now allowed him” (108). Like most critics of the novel, Conroy reads the last scene in the supermarket as the final nail in the coffin of an American culture and citizenship destroyed by the depredations of consumer culture and, as John Duvall says, its “proto-fascist” purveyor, television (128).¹ This reading of the novel allows no blurring of the authenticity/inauthenticity divide and related binaries.

 
Descriptions of the “consumer” as the “quintessentially passive figure,” and of consumerism as a replacement of authentic experiences with “phony” ones suggest, however, that consumerism is more nuanced in DeLillo than the criticism allows, and that the crisis of postmodern culture that consumerism subtends in the novel is a crisis of traditional masculinity. Critics who read White Noise as exposing the problems of postmodern consumer culture carry on a tradition of cultural critique which has dominated both left-liberal and conservative discourses invested in diagnosing what’s wrong with American culture and the American citizen. At least since the middle of the nineteenth century, what has come to be known as the “American jeremiad” has insisted that what’s wrong with American culture is that it “feminizes” American citizens.² As Philip Gould points out in a retrospective discussion of Ann Douglas’s influential The Feminization of American Culture, the feminization thesis “depended on the dual associations of mass culture with cultural totalitarianism and sentimentality with naïve ideology. Liberal politics, in other words, naturalized a masculine vision of ‘American’ culture that was perpetually endangered by feminization” (iv). The postwar critic, continues Gould, uses the logic of feminization “to the point of creating a cultural metaphor—indeed, a cultural history—of declension, where an originally masculine American political culture has lost its way. Put another way, this is a secular and exclusively masculine jeremiad of postwar American culture” (iv). In this narrative of crisis, “American” means masculine and, thus, this line of cultural critique naturalizes an equation between nation and gender, claiming as self-evident that which must constantly be constructed and naturalized. A masculinist version of liberalism, as Gould suggests, focuses attention less on the material effects of social and cultural systems, and more on the symbolic and individualist effects of those systems on “feminized” men. In doing so, narratives about feminization offer little insight into the exploitative relations of consumer culture, pursuing instead a fantasy about national disempowerment played out through the individual performance of “feminization.”
 
Although there has been surprisingly little work on gender in DeLillo (see Nel, Helyer, and Longmuir), the critical response to White Noise can be used to explore the gendered construction of consumerism and authenticity in postmodernism. In this essay I focus on the ways in which a certain mode of anti-consumerist critique carries with it a set of unacknowledged assumptions about gender. My goal is not to argue that DeLillo celebrates consumer culture, nor is it to contest critiques of commodity culture that have been articulated since Marx.³ Instead, I unpack the rhetoric of anti-consumerism within White Noise criticism in order to argue that a certain construction of “postmodernism” reproduces a version of a mass-culture critique that sees “feminization” as the primary ill of consumer culture and that figures consumerism as loss.⁴ At the same time, the narrative of crisis or decline that governs so many readings of this novel tends to be at odds with postmodern theory’s delegitimation of traditional familial, religious, civic, and humanist narratives. As feminist theorists and critics writing around the time of White Noise‘s 1985 publication suggest so forcefully, postmodernism offers an alternative to the master narratives of Western history that cloak the particularity of a masculine perspective with a sham universality.⁵ It is not necessary to rehearse these debates here; suffice it to say that the mode of postmodernism cited by the critics of White Noise has become its own master narrative of crisis that reproduces some of the same oppositions that were supposed to have gone the way of delegitimated master narratives: active/passive, intellectual/bodily, high culture/mass culture, abstract/material.⁶ The mark of this postmodernism is a nostalgic anti-consumerism that values a modernist and masculinist notion of individual autonomy, authenticity, and meaning, while (at least implicitly) degrading as feminizing anything that compromises these values.
 
Narratives of postmodernism which focus on the loss of the (modern) values of originality, authenticity, and individual autonomy—and the secure separation of high from low or mass culture that grounds these value—position the white middle class male individual as the victim of what Conroy calls the “acids of modernity.” Andrew Hoberek has recently argued that the postmodernism theorized by Fredric Jameson mistakes the “experience of the postwar American middle class in transition” for a more global cultural and political crisis and, thus, “requires us to understand postmodernism not as an external, reified phenomenon but rather as the universalized worldview of the new white-collar middle class” (Twilight 117, 120). Although Hoberek does not identify it as such, this theoretical account of postmodernism carries on a tradition of social critique, begun in the 1950s, which reads the alienation of the white, middle-class American man as the tragedy of postwar culture. It is this postmodernism that elevates consumerism to the status of a malevolent force intent on depriving a formerly autonomous male agent of the power not only to produce authentic culture, but also to distinguish between the authentic and inauthentic. In construing the postmodernized subject as that “quintessentially passive figure, the consumer,” to recall Conroy, and despite their explicit disavowal of both androcentrism and naturalization, such versions of postmodernism insinuate that one of the most damaging effects of postmodern consumer culture is to dilute the power of gender difference, making men more like the women who are “naturally” aligned with consumerism.⁷ As my emphasis on autonomy and individualism suggests, the crisis of postmodernism as imagined in the criticism of White Noise is an existential crisis, rather than a social, economic, or political crisis. This construction of the novel’s project in the criticism focuses not on the economic realities of consumer culture, but on the ways in which social forces affect the individual. In DeLillo criticism, postmodernism becomes a crisis of individualism, and of the death of the patriarchal subject and its patriarchal moorings. For example, in his reading of White Noise as exemplifying the end of modernist “heroic narrative” (361), Leonard Wilcox stresses what he takes to be the novel’s representation of “modernist subjectivity . . . in a state of siege” (348). While acknowledging that this state of siege is a “crisis in the deeply patriarchal structures of late capitalism, a world in which there is a troubling of the phallus, in which masculinity slips from its sure position” (358), Wilcox quickly generalizes from this crisis of masculinity to a cultural crisis tout court and, in doing so, aligns himself with critics who read White Noise as representing an unambiguous nightmare of postmodern loss and decline. Wilcox’s analysis raises the question of whether the crisis of postmodernism is only or primarily a crisis of heteronormative masculinity, going so far as to suggest that Jack’s confrontation with Willie Mink enacts a “confrontation with postmodern culture itself” (359), complete with an oedipalized struggle over the possession of Babette. He stops short of considering the gender implications of his own analysis, concluding that the novel offers a “grimly satiric allegory of the crisis of the sign in the order of simulacrum, the dissolution of phallic power, and the exhaustion of heroic narratives of late modernity” (361). The leap from a crisis of masculinity to a crisis in the “heroic narratives of late modernity” returns the subject and his narratives (even if in crisis) to the normatively masculine. Not interested in the question of whether the novel might do something other than mourn the loss of patriarchal structures, Wilcox misses the opportunity to ask whether we might read the novel as a parody of the idea of a masculine, phallic, autonomous self that is decentered by postmodernity. The thrust of Wilcox’s argument is that White Noise bears witness to a condition of general cultural decline coupled with, if not caused by, the crisis of an “autonomous and authentic subjectivity” (349). Wilcox concludes: “a failure at heroism, Gladney shops at the supermarket” (364). The interpretive framework here explicitly couples the “exhaustion of heroic narratives of late modernity” with “the dissolution of phallic power.” Because that failure is figured by shopping, we can only conclude that stories about consumerism replace those heroic narratives and, thus, render the erstwhile phallic subject emasculated or feminized.
 
Several critics of White Noise, like Wilcox, rely on unspecified notions of “authenticity,” using this relative term as if it were an absolute quality; “authenticity” stands in for a vaguely articulated set of values lost through the dominance of consumer culture in the novel’s world.⁸ These readings assume that consumer culture is always false, fake, and lesser than other, more “real” forms of culture. But “authenticity,” of course, is neither a self-evident nor an ahistorical term, and in contemporary culture it is constantly being negotiated. In a recent book on contemporary meanings of the “authentic,” Sarah Banet-Weiser argues that contemporary critiques of consumer culture can be linked to a philosophical tradition that “has contemplated the space of the authentic as a space that is not material” and perpetuates “the same distinct boundary between a consumer capitalist space and an authentic one.”⁹ Like the critics of White Noise, the cultural commentators identified by Banet-Weiser hold onto the bedrock (and modernist) assumption that “authenticity is still possible” in a “space [that] exists outside of consumer culture” (11-12). For example, critics have emphasized that Jack’s search for transcendence or existential value in shopping simply demonstrates the distance White Noise tracks between an authentic, modern sense of self and an inauthentic, postmodern illusion of self. Commenting on the scene in the Mid-Village Mall, John Duvall mocks the sense of “power and control” Jack derives from shopping: “Jack replaces his inauthentic Hitler aura with the equally inauthentic aura of shopping, which he experiences, however, as authentic” (137). Christoph Linder too notes that “the ‘fullness of being’ derived from the experience of shopping is nothing more than an illusory effect, a transparent state of delusion, a false and fleeting sense of well-being” (160). If Jack is “deluded” into misreading shopping as “authentic,” it is not clear where this “real” authenticity might reside. Such claims rely on the “common sense” that consumer culture, and the meanings found within it, are inauthentic because mass-produced and packaged; consumer culture, in this reading, is an affront to the creative (masculine) individual who no longer has the power to discern the difference between original and copy, the true meaning of art and the false meanings of mass culture. This discourse of authenticity betrays a retrogressive desire for some unspecified golden past before the age of simulations distanced us from the “real.” As Linda Hutcheon notes in her comments on Jameson’s Postmodernism; Or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, “it is precisely nostalgia for this kind of ‘lost authenticity’ . . . that has proved time and time again to be paralysing in terms of historical thinking” (“Irony” 203).
 
At stake in negative assessments of shopping is the cherished notion of an authentic self threatened by the forces of consumerism, a consumerism that has historically been gendered feminine. Mark Osteen, for example, concludes about this scene that “shopping produces a simulated self who is not an individual agent but an element of a system of capitalism. . . . [C]onsumption turns persons into packages radiating and receiving psychic data. We become spectacular commodities who consume everything we see, but most of all, ourselves” (171). The distinction between an “authentic inner self and the performative outer self” (Banet-Weiser 10) has been a fixture throughout the tradition of anti-consumerist critique to which I am tying White Noise criticism. Although Osteen does not identify this problem of the simulated self with gender, the very notion of the “authentic self” threatened by large social systems is a fiction of masculinity particularly pervasive in a postmodern culture characterized by “agency panic.”¹⁰ Critiques of contemporary consumer culture tend to reproduce the early Cold War rhetoric fueled by a suspicion that all systems, including consumerism, aim to rob the individual of his autonomy. As Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter point out, the “anticonsumerism [that] has become one of the most important cultural forces in millenial North American life” is less a “critique of consumerism” than it is a “restatement of the critique of mass society” that has dominated American social criticism since the middle of the twentieth century (98). Heath and Potter point to popular films such as Fight Club and American Beauty as rehashing this critique which is long past its “sell-by date” (102); but they also identify it in both the “high” theory of Baudrillard and Jameson and in the more popular critiques of consumer culture like No Logo and Culture Jam. What these critiques have in common, according to Heath and Potter, is an ultimately elitist (and Puritan) hostility toward shopping and shoppers; they all work to naturalize a construction of contemporary consumer culture as false and inauthentic, but also as feminizing.¹¹
 
In a particularly blatant example of this mode of critique, Benjamin Barber diagnoses consumer capitalism as producing a crisis in masculinity. Barber’s case for the emasculations of consumer capitalism relies on its difference from an earlier stage of capitalism, one peopled by the “swashbuckling” men (“they are rarely women”) who, “exuding virile recklessness,” were driven by “invention and discovery” (55). Against these pioneers, Barber imagines an emasculated heir, more “puerile” than “virile” :
 

The ethos animating postmodern consumer capitalism is one of joyless compulsiveness. The modern consumer is no free-willed sybarite, but a compulsory shopper driven to consumption because the future of capitalism depends on it. He is less the happy sensualist than the compulsive masturbator, a reluctant addict working at himself with little pleasure, encouraged in his labor by an ethic of infantilization that releases him to a self-indulgence he cannot altogether welcome.

(51)

The shopper envisioned here is a man who is “infantilized” by American consumer culture. While Barber wants to assign agency to capitalism and to argue that the compulsory shopper cannot help but fulfill the terms “demanded” by consumer capitalism, at the same time he chides this shopper for his laziness, his self-indulgence, and his lack of will. Barber needs to imagine his shopper as male in order to create a sense of crisis here; Barber does not worry that female shoppers might be “feminized” by consumer culture because the sense of gender reproduced in his text imagines women as always already feminized and men as always in danger of being feminized. Indeed, the female shopper who inhabits the pages of many postwar critiques of American culture functions primarily to reinforce a binary construction of gender based on the opposition between masculine production and feminine consumption. She is perhaps most famously enshrined in Vance Packard’s “Babes in Consumerland,” where she is made to embody the dangers of a consumer culture that “scientifically” engineers consent. Describing the techniques through which market researchers study how women get sucked into making “impulse purchases,” Packard wryly observes that the optimum goal is to put the “ladies” into a “hypnoidal trance” so strong that “they passed neighbors and old friends without noticing or greeting them,” had a “glassy stare,” and “were so entranced as they wandered the store plucking things off shelves at random that they would bump into boxes without seeing them” (92). Like zombies not even cognizant of their own will or identity, they passively embody the desires of the marketers and other professionals intent on ensnaring them in the consumer net. As Cecile Whiting comments, mid-century discourses about the female shopper represent her as “deceived by representation, los[ing] her grip on the real” (38).

 
The figure of the entranced female shopper lurks within readings of DeLillo’s supermarket, although critics have seemed mostly uninterested in tracing a history of this figure’s representation, or in DeLillo’s possible engagement in a cultural history of shopping.¹² For many critics, Jack’s delusion that he can find “a fullness of being” through purchasing goods in the supermarket (20) simply demonstrates the novel’s construction of postmodern culture as inauthentic and its subjects as zombies in Packard’s supermarket. It is worth noting, however, that it is the male characters who most compel the critics’ (and DeLillo’s) attention; it is the male characters who shop so enthusiastically; and, it is an entirely male faculty in the Department of American Environments who devote their lives to studying cereal boxes and other forms of mass or commodity culture. Might the masculinity of DeLillo’s shoppers and consumer-culture students contribute to the negative response to the novel’s representation of that culture? As histories of gender and consumerism have pointed out, women and men have experienced sometimes radically different material and symbolic relations to shopping and other activities of consumer culture. Because women have been relegated to the private sphere, historians have suggested that shopping has provided the main route toward women’s participation in the sphere.¹³ For women, consumption thus becomes a means toward the construction of public identity. For men, consumerism has been understood as threatening public identity, individual autonomy, and agency.
 
What these divergent histories suggest is that a particular mode of anti-consumerist critique—one that emphasizes consumer culture’s threat to autonomy, authenticity, and individualism—announces a crisis of masculinity rather than a broader cultural crisis. The focus in White Noise criticism on male shoppers and on the loss of the “heroic narratives of modernity” (Wilcox 361) is fueled by an unacknowledged but nevertheless pervasive assumption that the crisis of masculinity (and of the patriarchal subject) is the crisis of postmodern culture. As many feminists writing about the relationship between feminism and postmodernism in the 1980s made clear, men and women have historically had different relationships to the myth of the autonomous subject: women are unlikely to mourn the death of a privilege they have never had (theoretical) access to in the first place.¹⁴ Although this feminist critique of theories of loss in postmodernity did not directly tie the crisis of postmodernity to consumer culture, the rhetoric of loss and decline that marks the key texts of postmodern theory is virtually the same rhetoric of loss and decline I find in anti-consumerist discourse and in criticism of White Noise. The crisis of postmodernity as diagnosed in White Noise criticism is exacerbated by, if it does not originate in, DeLillo’s representation of men as pursuing what are more commonly understood as “feminine” pleasures and, in the process, as abandoning traditionally masculine pursuits. To cite Wilcox again, “A failure at heroism, Gladney shops at the supermarket” (364).
 
A closer look at the critical response to the scene in which Jack shops at the Mid-Village Mall supports my claim that shopping causes gender trouble for the novel’s critics. For Chistoph Lindner, shopping functions only as evidence of cultural decline, and Jack’s enthusiastic participation in it merely emphasizes his failure to detect the difference between the real and the simulated. Lindner couches this argument in a gendered logic when he notes that Jack’s “mall crawl” is provoked by the “emasculating” comments of his colleague, Eric Massingale, who shows Jack that “[e]ven when surrounded by the aura of machismo emanating from the hardware store, he still looks harmless and insignificant (read unmanly) to his male colleague” (162). Given the prevalence of a discourse about shopping as a feminine experience, however, Lindner’s suggestion that Jack seeks to “escape his feelings of inadequacy” by “los[ing] himself in the experience of shopping” seems counterintuitive (162). Lindner’s language, in fact, echoes accounts of women’s shopping “habits:” Jack engages in “retail therapy,” “reckless spending and impulse buying” (162), leaving the “masculine and masculinizing space” of the hardware store (161) to enter the mall, and is “alive with the delirium of shopping” (163). But Jack’s feelings of inadequacy may be addressed rather than exacerbated by his becoming-feminine. Lindner fails to consider that Jack might be pursuing a healthy therapy through a normatively feminine activity, a line of analysis that indicates DeLillo’s challenge to conventional ideas about gender and consumerism.
 
DeLillo’s representation of Jack’s enthusiastic shopping at the Mid-Village Mall suggests that shopping means pursuing communion with the female members of his family and entering into their world. It is Babette and “the two girls” who become his “guides to endless well-being,” “puzzled but excited by [his] desire to buy” (White Noise 83). Jack reports that “My family gloried in the event. I was one of them, shopping at last” (83) and, even if Wilder and Heinrich are included in the unit “my family,” Jack does not mention either one of them. The “retail therapy” in which Jack indulges at the Mid-Village Mall aligns him with women, and suggests his embrace of the feminine pleasures of shopping. The language he uses to communicate his experience certainly resonates with descriptions of female shoppers pursuing a “shop ’til you drop” strategy of retail therapy: he “shopped with reckless abandon,” being led by Babette and the girls and carried along on the wave of their desires (84). Because Lindner poses the feminine shopping that Jack pursues against the masculine realm of the hardware store, his gendered reading of the scene ties DeLillo’s negative assessment of the “depthless postmodern space” to the demise of the authentic, masculine self (Lindner 164).
 
Thomas Ferraro also connects the scene in the Mid-Village Mall to a series of losses bemoaned in the 1980s, particularly by conservative critics such as Christopher Lasch and Allan Bloom, and linked to the rise of feminism, “Me Generation” materialism, and the demise of the traditional nuclear family. For Ferraro, White Noise represents a dysfunctional family (made so by the “quicksand” of “no-fault-no-shame divorce” [20]) with patriarch Jack able to restore his authority and power only through the illusions of family solidarity found in the shopping mall. Although Ferraro demurs from assessing the politics of this representation and its relationship to the critiques penned by Bloom and Lasch, his analysis leaves the impression that White Noise is a part of that anti-consumerist tradition. Rather than read Jack’s shopping spree as feminizing him, Ferraro reads this scene as pointing to a false because consumer-mediated version of masculinity; the “structure of the family is regrounded in the actual business of consumption,” and Jack’s status as patriarch is guaranteed only within the realm of consumption, where each family member “knows his or her responsibility, his or her privileges,” rather than within some more real, less “illusory” realm not defined by the marketplace (22-23). Ferraro thus aligns White Noise with the (conservative) nostalgia that marks Lasch and Bloom.¹⁵
 
While Lindner, Ferraro, and other critics use this scene to further develop their reading of the novel’s representation of consumer culture as inauthentic, thus reproducing “the great divide” between a modernist hostility to mass culture and postmodern capitulation to it, such readings miss the opportunity to comment more critically on the gendering of consumerism. We might, instead, read the mall scene as DeLillo’s representation of Jack struggling to negotiate his own gender in relation to consumer practices. DeLillo’s challenge to conventional genderings of consumerism is further developed through his representation of Jack and Murray in the supermarket, which contests oppositions between passive consumption and active intellectual production, between shopping and reading, and between feminine and masculine. It would be hard to argue that what goes on in the supermarket in White Noise is only shopping, and harder still to argue that DeLillo presents shopping as passive. What Murray and Jack engage in is more like reading than shopping: they take pleasure in the act of interpretation in addition to the act of buying.¹⁶ Reading is everywhere foregrounded in these scenes of shopping, from the analysis of packaging to the “paperback books scattered across the entrance” of the store (20). This is not to say that “reading” is, somehow, better than “shopping,” or vice versa; it is to say that reading and shopping need not be understood as antithetical activities, the one “higher” and the other “lower.” As Meaghan Morris has suggested, consumer venues can and should be understood as “spaces of cultural production” (193). For Morris, this means displacing the assumptions about cultural value enshrined by modernism; she suggests “studying the everyday, the so-called banal, the supposedly un- or non-experimental, asking not, ‘why does it fall short of modernism?’ but ‘how do classical theories of modernism fall short of women’s modernity?'” (202).¹⁷ Morris gestures toward a complex set of oppositions here that poses women, stagnation, passivity, and everyday consumption against men, innovation, activity, and intellectual production. This version of modernism has spawned the particular version of postmodernism that dominates criticism of White Noise; the problem with this postmodernism for DeLillo’s critics is not that it “falls short of women’s postmodernity,” but that it threatens to make men themselves appear as modernism’s “other”: passive, consuming, stagnant, and stuck in the materialities of everyday life. Morris’s work suggests that an emphasis on the material relations of consumer culture produces a very different reading of the relationships between individuals, shopping, and cultural value than does a more abstract emphasis.¹⁸ Unlike the cultural critic who seeks a position above the practices of consumer culture, DeLillo’s shoppers simultaneously analyze and enjoy. The novel suggests that there is no disinterested position from which to launch a critique. As Linda Hutcheon argues in her elaboration of a feminist version of The Politics of Postmodernism, the fact of complicitous critique need not be cause for (modernist) despair. For Jack, “[t]here is no difference . . . between identification and resistance, or between enjoyment and critique. Like the supermarket’s own multiplication of lines, he seems to be energized by, to survive on, the proliferation of theories about what the supermarket is” (Bowlby 209-10).
 
DeLillo’s interest in shopping and domesticity is part of his larger interest in the “radiance of dailiness” that he describes in a much-cited 1988 interview. Asked about his “fondness” “for the trappings of suburban life” and the meaning of the “supermarket as a sacred place,” DeLillo clearly differentiates his point of view from those of critics who find that shopping distances us from meaning and, even, transcendence:
 

In White Noise, in particular, I tried to find a kind of radiance in dailiness. Sometimes this radiance can be almost frightening. Other times it can be almost holy or sacred. Is it really there? Well, yes. You know I don’t believe as Murray Jay Siskind does in White Noise that the supermarket is a form of Tibetan lamasery. But there is something there that we tend to miss. . . . I think that’s something that has been in the background of my work: a sense of something extraordinary hovering just beyond our touch and just beyond our vision.

(DeCurtis 70-71)

The language here—”radiance,” “holiness,” the “sacred,” “something extraordinary,” something “really there”—points not to the falsenesses of consumer culture, but to something not reducible to a nightmare image of the consuming self. To see the novel as “an extended gloss on Jean Baudrillard’s notion of consumer society” (Duvall 136) requires that we declare allegiance to a brand of anti-consumerism that appears, at best, at odds with DeLillo’s statements here, and, at worst, willfully uninterested in the possibility that the novel might challenge a simple opposition between the active critic and the passive consumer helplessly seduced by the supermarket. Without actually making an argument for what’s wrong with the supermarket, DeLillo’s critics tend to assume that the pleasures and reassurances sought and found there are necessarily inauthentic, and so destructive of any “real” meaning.¹⁹ Authenticity, wedded to masculinity, is endangered in the supermarket and mall, where the real (and the self) is always already commodified.

 
The “real” in this line of argument is not the “real” of material objects, but the “real” of some more abstract value having to do with independence from mediation, commodification and exploitation, and with “being” not determined by commercial interests. This approach is exemplified by Joseph S. Walker’s attempt to pinpoint the unmediated real in DeLillo’s fiction. Walker isolates moments of “criminality,” or more accurately moments produced as the effect or in the wake of criminality, as the places where DeLillo attempts to represent the real. But even to put it in these terms suggests the problem, because, according to Walker, any representation of a phenomenon—a sight, an experience, a sound, or what have you—is always already mediated. Walker suggests that the much-discussed “postmodern sunsets” that appear with the receding airborne toxic event might just be the “book’s most convincing instance of the real—indeed, [they] may be the clearest instance of the real in all of DeLillo’s work” (440). While it is unclear why it matters that this phenomenon appears in the wake of criminality, Walker emphasizes DeLillo’s narration of the crowd’s participation in the event of the sunsets. Contrasting this viewing experience with the earlier visit to the “most photographed barn in America,” Walker suggests that the instability, changeability, and unpredictability of the sunsets—in short, their mystery—elevates them above all other narrated events in the novel. Because they change from day to day, and because Jack and the others do not know how to react to them, the sunsets cannot “be contained by a single image endlessly repeated, assimilated, and commercialized. The crowds that gather to watch the sunsets are unmarked by the brand names that run through much of the novel; instead of the gaudily packaged products of the supermarket,” the watchers bring, as DeLillo tells us, “fruit and nuts,” a “thermos of iced tea,” and “cool drinks” (Walker 441; White Noise 324).
 
The idea that “fruit and nuts” are, somehow, outside commercialism or necessarily posed against the “gaudily packaged products in the supermarket” seems unconvincing to me, offering evidence only of this critic’s desire to imagine something “natural” that escapes the logic of consumer culture. The desire to find a “pure” experience uncorrupted by “intervening mediations” is fueled by an implicit assumption that “authenticity” must be sought in some pre-commercial paradise (Walker 434). As Daniel Miller points out,
 

most critics of mass culture tend to assume that the relation of persons to objects is in some way vicarious, fetishistic or wrong; that primary concern should lie with direct social relations and “real” people. The belief underlying this attitude is often that members of pre-industrial societies, free of the burden of artefacts, lived in more immediate natural relationship with each other.

(Material Culture 11)

Walker’s desire to find an unmediated real in DeLillo’s work is marked by a nostalgia for a (fantasized) pure past that DeLillo actually mocks in this scene by presenting the sunsets as completely mediated, even personified: “The sky takes on content, feeling, an exalted narrative life” (324). Like the evacuees’ response to the airborne toxic event, described by Jack as having an “epic quality” (122), “part of the grandness of a sweeping event” (127), the response to the sunsets can be understood only through the mediation of other narratives, other representations. To identify the sunsets as both “postmodern” and “rich in romantic imagery” (227) is to abandon the distinction between the false, the simulated, and the mediated, on the one hand, and the genuine, the authentic, and the natural, on the other hand. It is also to tie the postmodern to the romantic desire to find an “authentic” self and a pre-cultural, “‘authentic’ social relation” (Miller, Material Culture 41). ²⁰

 
As Kim Humphery argues, much anti-consumerist discourse depends on a set of oppositions that are never fully examined. “A life that is ‘really real,'” he writes, “is seen as residing principally in the world of the intellectual, the emotional and the spiritual,” and is posed against “the falsity of most commodity satisfaction, particularly the ersatz and temporary fulfillment of mass-produced things and media experiences, and of mainstream commercial space such as the shopping mall” (134). Critics of White Noise maintain that its engagement in consumer culture is meant to expose precisely the “ersatz and temporary fulfillment of mass-produced things and media experiences,” as evidenced by the nearly unanimous consensus that Jack experiences a “false sense of transcendence” when he hears a sleeping Steffie utter the words “Toyota Celica” (Duvall 135). But Jack concludes that Steffie’s words constitute a “moment of splendid transcendence” only after submitting those words to a series of questions—that is, after he critically considers the question of consumerism and transcendence from a variety of angles:
 

A long moment passed before I realized this was the name of an automobile. The truth only amazed me more. The utterance was beautiful and mysterious, gold-shot with looming wonder. It was like the name of an ancient power in the sky, tablet-carved in cuneiform. It made me feel that something hovered. But how could this be? A simple brand name, an ordinary car. How could these near-nonsense words, murmured in a child’s restless sleep, make me sense a meaning, a presence? She was only repeating some TV voice. Toyota Corolla, Toyota Celica, Toyota Cressida. Supranational names, computer-generated, more or less universally pronounceable. Part of every child’s brain noise, the substatic regions too deep to probe.

(155)

Critics who read this scene find that Jack mistakes a “false transcendence” for genuine transcendence by failing to see that Steffie’s words represent “a key moment in the production of consumers” (Duvall 135). But Jack has already considered this position, and nevertheless concludes that the transcendence is real and is “splendid”—what DeLillo describes, elsewhere, as “something nearly mystical about certain words and phrases that float through our lives” (Begley 97). That Steffie is simply “repeating some TV voice” does not disqualify her utterance as insignificant; instead, Jack reaches here for a way to interpret a transcendence that contradicts the philosophical certainty that it shouldn’t count as transcendence.²¹ Ferraro, similarly, makes a distinction between real and fake community when he argues that DeLillo “examines not so much the individuating force of consumer culture as its communalizing power. What he sees is the way consumerism produces what we can call an aura of connectedness among individuals: an illusion of kinship, transiently functional but without either sustaining or restraining power” (20).²²

 
This insistence on the difference between “real” transcendence and kinship and “false” or “illusory” transcendence and kinship evidences a fantasy of unmediated reality that DeLillo does not share. Rather than lament a state of crisis in which we can no longer distinguish between “real” and “false” emotions, commitments, and experiences, DeLillo represents the shifting epistemological ground of postmodern culture and the blurring of the boundaries between the real and the simulated. We can see this in his representation of the Gladney children responding to each newly announced symptom of Nyodene D exposure: “What did it all mean? Did Steffie truly imagine she’d seen the wreck before or did she only imagine she’d imagined it? Is it possible to have a false perception of an illusion? Is there a true déjà vu and a false déjà vu?” (125-26). Even though he plays this scene for laughs, DeLillo nevertheless suggests here that, even if we could confidently tell the difference between the “real” and the “false,” it would not matter because Steffie feels herself experiencing déjà vu, even if it is an illusion of an illusion. In insisting that consumer-mediated experiences are false or inauthentic because they are consumer-mediated experiences, we can only conclude that those experiencing them are suffering from a form of false consciousness.
 
The absolute self-evidence of the claim that consumer culture substitutes the false for the real and, thus, distances us from both an authentic selfhood and an authentic engagement in the social betrays, to conclude, an investment in what Miller calls the “discourse of shopping,” which is to say, the dominant narrative that intellectuals tell about consumer culture: according to this narrative, consumer culture is necessarily trivial and the “giant malls” are “symbols of sheer emptiness, crammed full of pure ephemera that have the power to dissipate the seriousness of labour into an objectifying of nothing” (Theory 96). This narrative serves the purpose of perpetuating the “exclusively masculine jeremiad of postwar American culture” (Gould iv), here couched in the vocabulary of critique. Miller argues that “the academic theory of postmodernism provides admirable service to our need for a vision of destructive consumption as pointless waste” (96), suggesting that this theory is less interested in describing a contemporary reality than it is in constructing that reality as a fall from an earlier, better, pre-consumerist reality. This “need for a vision of destructive consumption as pointless waste” both stems from and further entrenches a set of hierarchical distinctions that “we” need only if we are intent on safeguarding high culture from low, real value from sham value, consumption from production, masculinity from femininity.
 
When asked by an interviewer to comment on the “relationship between consumerism, the indifference of the masses and the loss of personal identity,” DeLillo zeroes in, not on the figure of the zombie shopper compulsively consuming or on the alienated individual subject to commodification, but on the homeless represented in Mao II, who “live in refrigerator boxes and television boxes. If you could write slogans for nations similar to those invented by advertisers for their products the slogan for the US would be ‘Consume or die'” (Naidotti 115). What DeLillo is getting at here is more than an abstract dissatisfaction with the postmodern condition of simulation, consumerism, and inauthenticity; he is foregrounding the ways in which such an abstract stance—as indicated in the interviewer’s question—fails to get at the lived realities of consumer. Clearly, DeLillo sees the problems engendered by rampant consumerism, but he does not see these problems as producing the existential crisis most often invoked by critics of White Noise. The implicit anti-consumerism characterizing this criticism furthermore continues to insist on an increasingly unstable distinction between the social and the commercial, the authentic and the inauthentic, and between intellectual production and passive consumption. Offering a more negative assessment of White Noise’s critical intervention than do most of the novel’s critics, Andrew Hoberek suggests that the focus in White Noise on processes of commodification obscures the larger economic forces affecting the middle class and, thus, repeats Jameson’s “symptomatically postmodernist turn away from production and toward consumption” (Twilight 118). For Hoberek, DeLillo’s failure to “allude to the possibility of some social horizon beyond [his] protagonists’ alienation” means that White Noise “eschews even the possibility of a social solution to [Jack’s] alienated, commodified existence” (Twilight 125, emphasis added).²³ While it is certainly true that DeLillo does not, in this novel, offer the kind of analysis that Hoberek traces in his argument about the “proletarianization of the middle class,” I wonder why it is necessary to uphold a clear distinction between the social and the (merely) personal, between a focus on labor and modes of production and a focus on consumption; the practices of consumption that DeLillo (and others) represent are political, but they are not always political in a clear or one-dimensional way.²⁴ Furthermore, I am not sure it’s completely useful, or even accurate, to speak of Jack or any DeLillo protagonist as “alienated,” because notions of alienation rely on assumptions about what would constitute the “unalienated”—a concept that is as problematic in DeLillo’s work as is the concept of an “unmediated” representation. DeLillo has, in all of his work, displayed an abiding interest in thinking through the mutual entanglement of subject and system, the complex ways in which individual agency is both constrained by and made productive through the networks of power and social organization that can only work through the individual’s participation in them. The narrative of decline that marks White Noise criticism fails, in my view, to acknowledge fully this aspect of DeLillo’s work. Instead, it gets hijacked by a modernist narrative of decline that also relies on the assumption that there is a social, political, or even literary realm that is, somehow, more real or authentic than the realm of consumption. In postwar social critique, white middle-class alienation is figured as a fall, not only in class terms, but in gender terms as well. The tendency to code the crisis of late capitalist, postmodern consumer culture as a crisis of masculinity—in readings of DeLillo’s novels and elsewhere—severely limits our understanding of both that culture and the possible modes for critiquing it. DeLillo’s representations of shoppers and shopping have been used to bolster claims for White Noise as an exemplary text of a postmodernism understood as a series of losses. Such a framework, I have argued, constructs the crisis of postmodern consumer culture as a crisis of masculinity. But, as recent work in material culture studies and in histories of shopping suggests, consumerism is not only an economic, political, or even symbolic system; it is also a series of material practices engaged in by human subjects whose needs and desires may not be fully accounted for within the theoretical accounts of postmodern consumer culture I have critiqued here. Attention to DeLillo’s representation of the material practices of consumer culture—the pleasures and pressures he so painstakingly represents in White Noise—might yield a different narrative, and one that might place Steffie or Denise or even Babette at its center; such a narrative, focusing perhaps on the intriguing life of things in the Gladney home and other of the novel’s environments might offer an alternative to readings of the novel as a “grim satiric allegory of the crisis of the sign in the order of simulacrum, the dissolution of phallic power, and the exhaustion of heroic narratives of late modernity” (Wilcox 361) that has dominated the critical conversation.