Abstract

Within the technological terrain we now inhabit, the idea of the subject began to disappear. The subject, as “he” and “she” has been reduced to a consumer and an object who has a deep nostalgia for the past as s/he cannot grapple with the organization of his/her coherent existence in the postmodern consumer society since technological systems have come to regulate almost the whole of their existence. This nostalgia is an escape from the postmodern loop since it closes the subject’s end. In the twenty-first century, as a post-industrial society, many postmodernist theorists and critics point out that the contact with reality or the real has been disconnected and lost. The dominant consumerism and proliferation of simulacra have come to define reality or the real. Contemporary American writer Don DeLillo’s White Noise explores how the Americans have resorted in an unreal life to consumption and how they relentlessly pursue a quasi-salvation in the supermarkets as quasi-sacred places, and how they are erased in these environments. Baudrillard, McLuhan, and Zygmunt Bauman will constitute the theoretical backbone of the paper.