The Ubiquitous and Panasonic Kipple: Tracing the Consumption of Death, from Philip K. Dick to Don DeLillo’s White Noise
The original title for Don DeLillo’s White Noise (1984) was, but for a legal injunction, supposed to be Panasonic (Hearst), a neologism that roughly translates as “all sound” or “ever present sound.” While “white noise” is certainly an appropriate title for a novel that deals with the ubiquitous infusion and intrusion of consumer culture, death, and sex (inexorably intertwined concepts in Western capitalism as well as in the novel), panasonic has the added benefit of also being an “imaginary word” invented by marketers. A word without real origin but seeming to indicate one in its quasi-Latinate morphemes. A word that seems to exude a mystical, hermetic meaning””but in actuality is nothing but a semiotic sign representing a quasi-real entity refered to as a corporation. Panasonic is a word that is both magical and meaningless””a perfect word for a postmodern novel in which the characters are mortally beset on all sides by the detritus of consumer culture: objects and signs of mediated culture and even sublimated culture where the real no longer even exists amidst the signs that have replaced them, exemplifying Baudrillard’s hyperreality. Whether the title invokes a persistent sound that carries no signal (white noise) or a cynically manufactured word that has no meaning beyond the ephemeral and subjective (panasonic), DeLillo’s novel could just have easily taken on the name of Ubik: The Prequel for the way it continues the commentary established by Philip K. Dick in the novel Ubik, fifteen years earlier.
.
Dick’s Ubik (1969) is a novel that straddles the line between modern and postmodern: It presents a narrative that does not adhere itself to strict limitations of time and place, objective reality, or even plot. What it is primarily concerned with is the encroachment of the commodified culture, the decay of the root or primary meaning of the sign, as the development of hyperreality solidifies and the nature of mortality in a society of death denial. Heinrich, the son of White Noise’s main character, Jack Gladney, recognizes the root value of the commodities of their modern culture when he challenges his father to imagine explaining the modern versions of things to people from an ancient past. Everything regresses to basic items, their roots, when you try to explain the modern extrapolations. Heinrich imagines everything comes back to the question of component atoms, basic elements such as light and fire, when you try to explain modern objects to a hypothetical ancient Greek (142-3). In Dick’s Ubik, the main character, Joe Chip, ruminates about the nature of the prime versions of things as everything around him literally regresses into earlier, more basic versions of commodities: “Perhaps this weirdly verified a discarded ancient philosophy, that of Plato’s ideal objects, the universals which, in each class, were real” (132). Dick, through his characters, questions where the real in the commodities are. Both DeLillo and Dick point an unforgiving magnifying glass at the modern, western human nature to attempt to fight death by accumulating objects we assume have innate permanence. We deny our mortality by surrounding ourselves with items that we imbue with the magical ability to provide meaning, filling our Lacanian “Lack” with what should be meaning derived from the “Real,” but instead is just flotsam and jetsam of consumer culture that once separated from the false meaning imposed upon them, become simply society’s debris. Douglas Keesey explores, in his book Don DeLillo, the nature of objects, manufactured and natural, even people, that are replaced by simulacra””distancing us from the original: “If signs of the natural world have come to replace the real thing, so too have media representations of human nature worked to distance us from ourselves” (137). Keesey considers what is leftover of a sign, or simulation of the Real, when the sign is discarded.
