20 - Screen, Image and the Technological Sublime

Summary

Cable Health, Cable Weather, Cable News, Cable Nature

Don DeLillo, White Noise

The fiction of Don DeLillo presents the particular irony of our media ecology, in which the saturation of archived, broadcast and digital information miserably fails to explain the iridescent sheen of the Airborne Toxic Event in White Noise (1985), the gunman/men in Dealey Plaza on 22 November 1963 in Libra (1988), the ‘Shot(s) Heard Round the World’ on 3 October 1951 in Underworld (1997), or the collapse of the World Trade Center towers on 11 September 2001 in Falling Man (2007). While the biosphere ecology of the Anthropocene might be characterised by extreme shortages and extinctions – of petroleum-based energy sources, potable water, the ozone layer, the Arctic icecap and biodiversity – twenty-first-century media ecology suffers from an explosive surfeit of information.

The novels of DeLillo's high period, especially White Noise and Mao II (1991), are expressions of the postmodern sublime, defined by Jean-Francois Lyotard in The Postmodern Condition (1984) as the post-industrial, technological successor to the natural or Romantic sublime that was posited by Edmund Burke in the Sublime and Beautiful (1757) and Immanuel Kant in The Critique of Judgment (1790). The total saturation of visual media in our culture instantiates that postmodern sublime. Friedrich Kittler observes that all streams of information once had to pass through ‘the bottleneck of the signifier’, or the ‘alphabetic monopoly’ of print (Kittler 4). But in the age of digital media, any content form – audio, video, text – is converted into patterns of binary digits without discrimination, which destroys the perceptual monopoly of print. While the literary author was once engaged in shaping the principal medium of communication, now the writer might no longer be regarded as practising in the dominant medium of the post-war period. DeLillo accepts the challenge that televisual and digital media present to the writer, both recuperating and critiquing various forms of visual media in his novels. Whereas Jack Gladney in White Noise or Scott Martineau and Brita Nilsson in Mao II appear to fall prey to visual projections of reality, DeLillo's fiction establishes a hermeneutic space around these protagonists in which the politics of our visual culture might be ironised; it is the subject in which and against which he writes. Confronted by our cultural imaginary, DeLillo resists the absorption of the aesthetic experience of the sublime into televisual and digital media.