The GrogMonkey

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.

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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.

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This examination of the waste of consumerist culture begins its Dickian life as the same commodities that DeLillo uses as part of the white noise, in Dick’s 1955 short story, “Foster, You’re Dead.” The father (who had refused to fully embrace the capitalist ideology) of the main character, observes:

You know, this game has one real advantage over selling people cars and TV sets. With something like this we have to buy. It isn’t a luxury, something big and flashy to impress the neighbors, something we could do without. If we don’t buy this we die. They always said the way to sell something was to create anxiety in people. Create a sense of insecurity–tell them they smell bad or look funny. But this makes a joke out of deodorant and hair oil. (233)

Philip Dick gets to the root of the commodity culture by forcing us to examine the impetus that drives us to accumulate objects. Our very mortality is addressed by consumerism, preyed upon by the marketers and pitchmen, as we are convinced that our very identity, nay, our very life, is at risk if we do not buy into the mass consumption—figuratively and literally. Babette, Jack Gladney’s wife in White Noise, realizes this on some level: “’It is all a corporate tie-in,’ Babette said in summary. ‘The sunscreen, the marketing, the fear, the disease. You can’t have one without the other’” (252). Jesse Kavadlo writes in his essay, “Recycling Authority: Don DeLillo’s Waste Management,” “Waste conveys power and aura; as the excess of photographs in the much-discussed ‘Most Photographed Barn’ passage ‘reinforces its aura’, so repeated spending and Jack’s own sense of buying power reinforces his frail feelings of self worth…” (165-6).

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But death invariably comes, as the scientist who DeLillo’s Jack intends to kill, comes to understand. The scientist who attempted to create the pill “Dylar,” for eventual consumer purchase of course, that would allow one to forget their fear of death—the supreme analog for this commodity-as-panacea theme: the ultimate, “super piece of engineering” (216), manufactured, packaged, and marketed commodity to fulfill the ultimate human desire of repressing (or eliminating altogether) the ultimate human fear. And following that, “…a greater death. More effective, productwise. This is what the scientists don’t understand, scrubbing their smocks with Woolite. Not that I have anything personal against death from our vantage point high atop Metropolitan County Stadium” (294).

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The theme of death and consumption plays heavily in Dick’s story, “Pay for the Printer” (1955) in which he envisions a world where anything and everything is for the taking thanks to a helpful alien race. At least, until the aliens wear out, at which time not only can they no longer produce but everything they produced in the past deteriorates and crumbles away. This is a story that takes the additional step beyond examining the consumerist drive for commodities, as propelled by the consumerist culture which serves to perpetuate the commodification of itself, and toward the underlying issue of commodity fetishism. The entire time the aliens, called the Biltong, have been producing everything from cups and forks to cars and houses for society, no one has stopped to think what the implications might be. What the effects this gross consumption may have on the aliens, and what the overall effect this mass consumption and mass production might have on society in general. The question is answered when in the narrative of the story society begins to crumble with the objects. Western society had grown so dependent upon the labor of others, nondescript, non-human, that when the cheap (free) labor comes to an end, people realize the objects they have taken for granted have history and real cost. At first the victims of this realization can do nothing but lament their helplessness and loss of things, as seen when one character can do nothing but cry “My things!” (244) even when she is hurt by the collapsing of her house and its contents into rubble. The end of the story, however, implies hope for society as people slowly come to realize the objects and their use-value have more significance when they have to make them themselves: The person, their labor, the object, and its value return to a state of balance. But it is in this story in which Dick, acutely aware a the mid-point of the 20^th century, critiques not just commodity fetishism but the accumulation of things in an orgy of consumption driven by the implication of crisis (evidenced in the “Foster” story), to be viewed as debris on the landscape. What is the ultimate end of the mass produced accumulation of society’s consumables and commodities of all sorts? Formless dust and debris which grows and surges and threatens our physical, mental, perhaps “spiritual” space. In “Printer,” from dust the objects arise and to dust they return, calling to mind a certain funerial theme.

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So the product of consumer culture builds and collects, gathers around us. What is so expertly packaged and displayed in garish and eye-catching presentation, (or in ironically plain generic labels), patiently laying in wait on store shelves and dealers’ lots, collects helter-skelter as they are activated from their state of potential fulfillment of desire to discarded remnants of unfulfilled desire, upon purchase. A condition of all things associated with consumerist society made readily observable in the consumption of objects. Dick moves his critique of commodification from the manufacturing of desire and its manipulated (non) fulfillment, to the condition of the debris in his 1968 novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep. One of the characters, living in an abandoned apartment building surrounded by the objects left behind by people who have emigrated off-world, tries to explain the nature of these cast-off commodities, or kipple:

“Kipple is useless objects, like junk mail or match folders after you use the last match or gum wrappers or yesterday’s homeopape. When nobody’s around, kipple reproduces itself. For instance, if you go to bed leaving any kipple around your apartment, when you wake up in the next morning there’s twice as much of it. It always gets more and more.”

“I see.” The girl regarded him uncertainly, not knowing whether to believe him. Not sure if he meant it seriously.

“There’s the First Law of Kipple,” he said. “‘Kipple drives our nonkipple.’ Like Gresham’s law about bad money. And in these apartments there’s been nobody there to fight the kipple.”

“So it has taken over completely,” the girl finished. She nodded. “Now I understand.” (57)

Later in the narrative, the protagonist, Rick Deckard, extrapolates the kipple from simply the remnants of commodities to the entire of human production, if not humanity itself, by ruminating, “This rehearsal will end, the performance will end, the singers will die, eventually the last score of the music will be destroyed in one way or another; finally the name Mozart will vanish and the dust will have won” (86). Patricia S. Warrick writes succinctly in “The Labyrinthian Process of the Artificial: Philip K. Dick’s Androids and Mechanical Constructs,” when she explains, “’Kipple’ accumulates as the process of entropy advances” (189) and poses the question both Dick and DeLillo seek to answer: “How is a man to survive and remain human in this desert of decay” (190)?

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DeLillo’s Jack Gladney makes the same realization Deckard does regarding war with the dust. He discusses with his friend and colleague, Murray, the work of Nazi architect Albert Speer and the Law of Ruins (in a title echoing the Law of Kipple). He explains that Hitler had, despite his range of mental and moral defects, an uncanny appreciation of the temporal nature of things. He understood that despite the best efforts of an individual or even a society, everything eventually crumbles. So Hitler entreated Speer to create Reich structures “that would decay gloriously, impressively, like Roman ruins” (246). Murray’s ending remark in this conversation hints at his understanding that the effort to avoid the ruin, the decay into dust, may be futile when he ironically comments, “In any case, prevention is the thing, isn’t it? I’ve just seen the latest issue of American Mortician. Quite a shocking picture. The industry is barely adequate to accommodating the vast numbers of dead” (249). Murray later poses the question to Jack: “’That’s what it all comes down to in the end,’ he said. ‘A person spends his entire life saying good-bye to other people. How does he say good-bye to himself?’” (280). In answer, Jack continues his ongoing campaign of throwing away the kipple that he has accumulated throughout his life—discarding everything from crusted paintbrushes and clothes hangers to items that represent his own identity: “diplomas, certificates, awards and citations” (280). Things that are not just commodities but objects that culturally serve as signs of the person, the semiotics of the personhood. Kavadlo describes it as, “The temporary satisfaction from consumption is surpassed by the thrill of disposal; Gladney attempts his own form of existential waste management, discarding the items he had previously used for protection” (166).

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During an emergency evacuation, Jack discovers his brief exposure to a toxic waste spill may or may not cause a “premature” death sometime in the next…thirty years (136). His sentence is given to him by an emergency preparedness simulation worker who is disgruntled by the fact this real emergency is not providing the most useful simulation conditions. (In other words, the Real is intruding itself upon the simulacrum—where it is unwelcome. The hyperreality is preferred!) While Jack appears unaware of the fact the information he is given about his possible death is no more reliable or specific than a fortune cookie’s message of “You will one day meet your destiny,” his manic disposal of accumulated consumerist rubble and reified identity is an attempt to hold back the death sentence his close encounter with a toxic cloud made him more aware of. Even so, he continues to live in an environment in which his and his family’s vitality and shared, cohesive spirit are fed and nurtured by the hermetic powers of the consumerist media. Babette feels that once-a-week television watching under the auspices of parental figures would demystify and “de-glamorize” the object and the medium (16), although we see throughout the novel that the television appears to move almost of its own accord around the house, from room to room, constantly broadcasting its mystical incantations to buy product, examine the modification of the natural world into new and improved signs and symbols, and to pay attention to your financial well-being. The television in White Noise is, despite the parents’ best efforts to minimize its impact upon the family, ironically a central character in the Gladney household. It is the means by which daughter Steffie acquires her sleeping vocabulary, such as “Toyota Celica” (148), that sooth Jack like a magical totem. The only time the family really seems to notice Babette is when her light-generated image, the mediated sign that represents Babette and may be more real than Babette herself (or at least hyperreal), is projected to the family through the television. The television is constantly spilling the symbols of kipple into the Gladney house; the family constantly bring it in from the malls and shops. Mark Poster, in his article “Future Advertising: Dick’s Ubik and the Digital Ad” is referring to Dick’s Ubik when he is discussing the power of advertisements, but the same observations apply equally to White Noise: “…commercials are cultural objects, strings of words, images, and sounds. And they are so arranged as to fascinate all who encounter them. They constitute the highest promise of happiness and fulfillment of any experience in capitalist society” (30).

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Jack may try to rid himself of the collected objects that are a recursive reminder of material mortality while at the same time serving as a material salve for the fear of death; however, the very sign of commodification has transcended the objects in White Noise and have come to exist without the need of the root item. The reader is shown this in the way the objects of marketing and consumerism permeates the novel, disconnected in any concrete manner. From out of nowhere we are reminded of “Kleenex Softique, Kleenex Softique” (39), “MasterCard, Visa, American Express” (99), “Dristan Ultra, Dristan Ultra” (159), even a passing woman on the street is heard chanting, “A decongestant, an antihistamine, a cough suppressant, a pain reliever” (250). The mystical non-words of commodities take on the feeling of a weight they intrinsically do not have, imbued with meaning that seems to transcend the objects they are supposed to represent. In the book, Muse in the Machine: American Fiction and Mass Publicity, Mark Conroy maintains: “DeLillo is most conscious of how the more elaborate forms of spirituality that preceded consumer culture still inhere, in a degraded and superstitious form, within consumer culture itself” (153). We see the magic of the commodity everywhere—ubiquitous.

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Philip K. Dick reveals this is the nature of commodity, of the marketing that serves as the magical rites and processes that transform meaningless sounds into hyperreal signs, or signals, in the novel Ubik. Where in White Noise DeLillo ends certain sections and chapters with incantations without context like:

PLEASE NOTE: In several days, your new automated banking card will arrive in the mail…. WARNING. Do not write down your code. Do not carry your code on your person. REMEMBER. You cannot access your account unless your code is entered properly. Know your code. Reveal your code to no one. Only your code allows you to enter the system. (281)

Dick begins each of his chapters of Ubik with almost cliché and panasonic marketing spiels like:

We wanted to give you a shave like no other you ever had. We said, It’s about time a man’s face got a little loving. We said, With Ubik’s self-winding Swiss chromium never-ending blade, the days of scrape-scrape are over. So try Ubik. And be loved. Warning: use only as directed. And with caution. (61)

Each chapter begins with similar epigraphs in which the unknown product “Ubik” stands in for various common commodities from coffee to cars, cleaner to bras. Each commercial injected into the narrative reveals the marketer’s objective of creating an anxiety that can only be alleviated by the product being sold, as explained by Dick’s Mr. Foster and DeLillo’s Babette. And each ad/epigraph carries a reminder of the inherent threat the commodity poses with the disclaimer: “Use only as directed,” an admonition DeLillo injects when Jack is on his way to kill Dr. Gray: “Void where prohibited” (289). The more overt theme of magical mysticism in commodification, the capitalist ideology, and in the thematic elements of the novels which exemplify and attempt to deal with them, will be addressed more thoroughly later in this article.

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The preeminent science fiction critic, Darko Suvin, uses the metaphor of noise, signal, and channels when investigating Dick’s fiction, in his article, “Goodbye and Hello: Differentiating Within the Later P.K. Dick.” He writes, “Given a stream of information, signal means all that informs us about the source of that stream or that has ‘meaning’…. However, noise gives us another type of information, that about the channel. It is autoreferential information” (371). Suvin uses this metaphor to help us understand Philip K. Dick as an author better, but it is wonderfully suited to help us understand the relationship we have to the messages we receive through the methods of mediation—whether that is consumerized society, or more specifically, the television. In White Noise, DeLillo has the noise of mediated culture come through the television: the advertisements, the cultural wisdom, and the family’s wife and mother at one point. In Ubik, Dick has the corporate patriarch communicate to the main character through various consumerized media, such as matchbook covers—and the television. Where DeLillo’s Babette’s very essence is imagined to enter the house and permeate the family with her radiant image (102-4), Dick’s Glen Runciter is actually dead and literally communing with the protagonist through the same device that disseminates the advertisements and symbols of consumerist culture (124-9). Christopher Palmer sees Ubik as an example of Dick’s growing obsession with communication and its modes and methods in his article “Philip K. Dick.” Palmer examines the implications of using the objects and products of capitalism to communicate amongst themselves and with their boss, Runciter, as he points out the way Dick uses style and structure to foster a feeling of horror borne from “inertia, entrapment, the encroachment of entropy, the chill of decay and dissolution” (390). Mark Osteen examines the way in which the television and the media at large serve not only as a material but spiritual medium as well, in his book American Magic and Dread: Don DeLillo’s Dialogue with Culture: they “regale viewers with commercials bearing the gospel of consumerism: that consumption provides therapy for body and soul.” These advertisements, or, “channels of desire,” Osteen contends, “also describes a popular form of New Age spirituality, the practice of ‘channeling,’ in which dead souls… allegedly speak through living humans, or ‘channels’” (166). The device for entertainment that is often used as a means to carry advertising into the home, is the device that mediates, or “channels,” major characters in both novels—creating a deeper confusion of the Real with the symbol for it.

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Note that in all of Jack Gladney’s purging of kipple from his home, he never considers removing the television as part of the problem, part of the source for the desire to horde as a way of mitigating the fear of death, confusion of identity, and succumbing to manufactured material need. Jack, as a participant in his own commodification (through his career in which he was “shrewed” enough to find a way to sell himself, and then maintain the illusion by creating a false identity for his students and colleagues, and himself, to buy into), and a participant in the ubiquitous consumerist society, spends incredible energy and takes incredible risk to try to free himself from this situation that he must ultimately succumb to. In contrast, note how Jack’s German tutor, the reclusive Howard, gives-in to the kipple. Upon each of Jack’s visits, Howard’s boarding room becomes increasingly similar to the abandoned apartments of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep. In each instance the waste and furnishings amass until finally Jack says, “I went to one last lesson. The walls and windows were obscured by accumulated objects, which seemed now to be edging toward the middle of the room. The bland-faced man before me closed his eyes and spoke, reciting useful tourist phrases. ‘Where am I?’ ‘Can you help me?’ ‘It is night and I am lost.’ I could hardly bear to sit there” (227). One can easily imagine that if Jack were to return to Howard, he might be discovered to have actually disappeared into the waste of objects, turning to the dust that Rick Deckard foresees as the fate of everyone and everything from Mozart to himself.

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Eugene Warren examined the idea of identity and reality in the article “The Search for Absolutes” in Philip K. Dick. He observes that:

Dick’s protagonists generally begin as naive realists, firmly convinced that their perceptions provide them with knowledge about what is actually present in the world around them. But then an encounter with the radical uncertainty of reality throws the protagonists into a world where both external reality and their own identities are drastically questioned. (161)

This is certainly the case to some degree with Deckard in Androids, and to an extreme with the protagonists of Ubik. In Deckard’s case, reality is constantly at risk of complete sublimation as it is inundated with simulacra in the form of robotic animals; although, as most people who have remained on Earth, Deckard has come to accept this condition. The limits of his blasé acceptance of questionable reality, jaded even further by the use of machines which induce on command any of hundreds of emotions from the general to the absurdly specific, get pushed when his encounters with the androids he is tasked to eliminate spark uncomfortable realizations regarding his own humanity, and theirs. Joe Chip’s identity crisis is rooted in his reality crisis. His questioning of a Platonic root to all objects, including, one surmises, the person, is directly tied to the shifting realities of the objects around him. For White Noise’s Jack, the encounter with the realization of death was brought about by the encounter with the “toxic event” cloud that was born amidst uncertainty as the news, mediated through his son’s precocious yet deadpan translation, constantly changed its reality with new descriptions. While the nature of the cloud itself never changed, its reality shifted constantly with new attempts to name it, and thus created new realities for Jack and his family to react (or pointedly not react to). Interestingly, the cloud which brings death (or at least the fear of it) that seemed to exist on the liminal edge of reality, is the catalyst for Jack’s removal of the cloud of delusion over his own reality and identity—or rather, his attempt to remove the cloud, for as both Carl Freedman in his article “Towards a Theory of Paranoia: The Science Fiction of Philip K. Dick,” and Fredric Jameson exposes in Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, those on the inside of an all-pervasive ideology have little hope of estranging themselves from the cultural logic enough to actually, objectively, apprehend their role within it.

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Peter Fitting identifies Jack Gladney’s problem in his article “Reality as Ideological Construct” (which is principally an analysis of five of Dick’s novels) when he writes, “Accordingly, ideology is no longer a simple misapprehension of reality… but a collective human means for bestowing meaning on the world and for defining oneself and one’s place in that world” (108). Jack thinks he recognizes the reality of his mediated existence: he comments of the fact that shopping gives him a feeling of power, he seems to understand when his friend and colleague explains to him the nature of of the supermarket as a postmodern temple, he even remarks in self-deprecation the way he lucked into his privileged position as a specialized scholar and must maintain a contrived para-identity in order to maintain a level of both use and market value. But even as he seems to recognize his place in consumer culture and his own commodification, being part of the cultural logic prevents him from being able to properly recognize the true form and shape of the cultural logic and truly remove himself from it. Fitting: “Under capitalism, bourgeois ideology works not only to ensure the reproduction of the capitalist system, but also seeks to deny its status as ideology and to present its own particular constitution of reality as natural and universal” (108). It is no wonder Jack fails to understand the full nature of his entanglement in the consumerist machine and confuses the debris of consumerism with the mechanisms of it, has projected his identity and fear of death into the objects he has acquired to create and maintain identity and stave off death which in time and accumulation have become kipple—which can be only temporarily eliminated and mainly as a token effort. No matter what Jack gets rid of, whether is actual useless trash he has inexplicably held onto, or icons of identity such as diplomas and awards, he can not ultimately affect the process of decay any more than Joe Chip can by using Ubik to temporarily keep the actant for gross consumption, Jory, from consuming object, body, and spirit in Joe’s reality. As Michael Bishop observes in “In Pursuit of Ubik,” “Half-life in Ubik is entropy not at bay but temporarily in abeyance” (142). Bishop also remarks on the interesting and probably intentional similarity of Ubik’s “half-life” and the half-life of nuclear physics which is defined as “the ‘decay coefficient’ or ‘disintegration constant,’” (141). Bishop goes on to state: “In fact, the single most striking instance of devolution and decay in Ubik is Dick’s oblique demonstration that, for many of us, a crass materialism has supplanted spiritual resilience as our chief ‘reality support.’…. Because it has, entropy has overwhelmed another of our barricades, and we have retreated willy-nilly closer to the brink of chaos” (146). Yet this does not deter neither Joe nor Jack in their heroic attempts to, they hope, keep the entropy (death of body, death of identity) at bay. A task Bishop describes on more than one instance as “Sisyphean” in his article in describing Joe (143 & 147), and Leonard Wilcox uses to describe Jack in his article, “Baudrillard, DeLillo’s White Noise, and the End of Heroic Narrative,” where he says, “In modernist fashion, he struggles in an almost Sisyphean way to glean meaning from the surrounding noise of culture and is drawn toward occasions of existential self-fashioning, heroic moments of vision in a commodified world” (349). This is a quality in both stories that counters Ursula K. LeGuin’s contention: “There are no heroics in Dick’s books, but there are heroes” (176). What more striking a heroic act is there than to attempt to hold reality in place, or keep death and identity conflict at bay by fighting entropy mano a mano? It is unfortunate, because of the maniacally persistent and omnipresent nature of the capitalist ideology, that the heroic efforts are ultimately in vain. Stanislaw Lem recognized this in his article “Philip K. Dick: A Visionary among the Charlatans” when he writes:

Ubik moreover plays in the novel the part of its “internal micromodel,” since it contains in nuce the whole range of problems specific to the book, those of the struggle of man against Chaos, at the end of which after temporary successes, defeat inexorably awaits him. The Absolute canned as an aerosol, which saves Joe Chip at the point of death—though only for the time being: will this, then, be a parable and the handwriting on the wall for a civilization which has degraded the Sacred by stuffing it into the Profane? (62)

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One of White Noise’s working titles was The American Book of the Dead (Barrett 186). Just as Panasonic would have been an infinitely appropriate title, so would that fictional addition to the line of ancient Book of the Dead tomes. Howard had a copy of the Egyptian Book of the Dead in his room, and Jack refers to the Tibetan Book of the Dead—the novel White Noise is in many ways a modern equivalent of these religious texts. It provides consumerist chants such as “Coke is it, Coke is it, Coke is it” (51), and “Leaded, unleaded, super unleaded” (189) as non sequiturs in context to the narration, and describes the manner of persistent dying in the western culture in relation to the stuff we accumulate, whether it is to forget death or with the wish to be able to take it with us like the pharaohs of Egypt. In many ways we share the same belief as these dead cultures in that we believe the things we acquire transcend their physical form, just as we believe we do upon death, and will carry on with in some ethereal consumerist existence. Mark Osteen suggests: “People desire containers that fulfill their spiritual yearnings, and consumer packaging fills the void created by the disappearance of traditional religious icons. Thus…for Jack and many contemporary Americans, consuming attaches persons to the things whose reproducibility betokens immortality” (171). In some subconscious manner we tie our identities to the things we own, expecting them to exist apart from and beyond their reality. Commodity fetishism reverting from a modern ideological abstraction back to an ancient connotation of magical fetishism—the totems that have spiritual and mystical life beyond the physical.

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Interestingly, Ubik is acutely associated with the Tibetan Book of the Dead as well. In Dick’s world of Ubik, people can actually exist beyond death in direct keeping with the beliefs of “waiting places” and reincarnation found in the ancient religious book. More than that, people can communicate with the living thanks to the miracle of modern technology—so long as you have enough money to buy space in a moratorium and can afford the upkeep. Within this limbo, called “half life,” all the trappings and accoutrement of the consumerist society remain. You really can, in a sense, take it with you. Except, as Ubik’s Joe Chip discovers, the assumed persistence of commodities, both mystical and material, can not be relied upon as things regress back to earlier more primitive versions of themselves. Or, in the case of people, revert back to the dust from which they were created: “But this old theory—didn’t Plato think that something survived the decline, something inner not able to decay? The ancient dualism: body separated from the soul…. Maybe so, he thought. To be reborn again, as the Tibetan Book of the Dead says” (132).

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Does DeLillo’s Jack come to the same realization Joe Chip toys with but in the end fails to accept? That despite the encroaching kipple and its ultimate decay, we are not doomed to be completely swallowed up by it? Jack begins White Noise as part of the culture, so enmeshed in the commodification that he is himself commodified. He recognized the hyperreality of the world around him, but he participates in the evolution of the simulacra to the hyperreal. When faced with the reality of his own death he tries to deny it ridding himself of the debris society convinces us we need to live, but remains a subject of the process. Finally, Jack does learn that death is inescapable—a lesson Joe Chip does not recognize and absorb. Laura Barrett observes in her article: “’How the Dead Speak to the Living’: Intertextuality and the Postmodern Sublime in White Noise,” how “the novel’s most powerful mystery, death, supplied the very fabric of Jack’s salvation; his near-death experience allows him to move beyond his paralyzing fear of death” (191). Ubik leaves Joe Chip in a situation in which he is so ultimately beholden to consumerist culture that the ideology of commodification (in the physical form of the product “Ubik”) is his temporarily effective weapon against the manifestation of the ideology of consumption (in the form of the novel’s antagonist), trapped in an existence that is literally all appearance and illusion. Jack, on the other hand, while also still trapped in a world of illusion, has come to realize his place in it and its inescapableness. Joe is left in the constant battle against the encroaching kipple, decay, and death; Jack seems to resign himself to it and simply appreciate the ironic beauty of it.

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Lem contends: “In Ubik,… a conjectural solution which refuses to explain events in terms of some vision of occultism or spiritualism finds support in the bizarre technology of ‘half-life’ as the last chance offered by medicine to people on the point of death” (56). While half-life, nor Ubik itself in Ubik, nor the Dylar tablets in White Noise, provide any solutions to the spiritual problems presented in the novels, it is the very soul of the individual which is at stake in the works of Dick and DeLillo. The inclusion of the various Books of the Dead in both novels attest to the question of the soul, or spirit, the authors attempt to deal with. Joe Chip briefly recognizes this problem, but is not given much time to mull it over as the events of the narrative unravel around him. Jack Gladney has the span of nearly a year, within the novel’s timeline, to wrestle with the question of the spiritual. In Ubik the issue is dealt with superficially but blatantly with the topic of after-death existence, reincarnation, mystical tomes, and the Biblically worded final epigraph in which we witness Ubik speaks for itself:

I am Ubik. Before the universe was, I am. I made the suns. I made the worlds. I created the lives and the places they inhabit; I move them here, I put them there. They go as I say, then do as I tell them. I am the word and my name is never spoken, the name which no one knows. I am called Ubik, but that is not my name. I am. I shall always be. (215)

The problem Lem may be referring to when he says Ubik refuses to explain events in terms of a spiritual nature, is not that the attempt is not made (for the elements of occult, religious, and spiritual answers are there in the novel) but rather the real problem being addressed is obfuscated by the distraction of the spiritual—exactly as the distracting presence of commodity hides the true problem of the commodity culture and the ideology which drives it. Whereas Dick uses overt symbols and signs representing spiritual matters to deal with the issue of human identity, personality, labor, and even language being overtaken and devoured by the capitalist trinity of consumerism, commodity, and marketing, DeLillo uses the concepts of religion to investigate and illuminate the commodity fetishism and cult of consumerism in society. Dick begins the conversation by tying elements in Ubik to symbols of religion: Ubik to Logos, the lights at the ends of the tunnels out of half-life with the promise of escape from the limbo of consumerism, The Tibetan Book of the Dead as justification for the continuance of applying market-value onto the life of a person. DeLillo continues the conversation by then exposing these connections, often in the voice of the character Murray, as he does in this passage where he describes the supermarket in religious terms:

“Tibetans try to see death for what it is. it is the end of attachment to things. The simple truth is hard to fathom. But once we stop denying death, we can proceed calmly to die and then go on to experience uterine rebirth or Judeo-Christian afterlife or out-of-body experience or a trip on a UFO or whatever we wish to call it. We can do so with clear vision, without awe or terror. We don’t have to cling to life artificially, or to death for that matter. We simply walk toward the sliding doors. Waves and radiation. Look how well-lighted everything is. The place is sealed off, self-contained. It is timeless. Another reason why I think of Tibet. Dying is an art in Tibet. A priest walks in, sits down, tells the weeping relatives to get out and has the room sealed. Doors, windows sealed. He has serious business to see to. Chants, numerology, horoscopes, recitations. Here we don’t die, we shop. But the difference is less marked than you think.” (38)

Dick leaves Joe Chip unable to free himself from his attachment to things. The entire narrative thread of Ubik has Joe fleeing death and searching for the promised commodity that will save him from the all-consuming monster of consumption—never realizing that it is a circular trap which perpetuates his quasi-existence in a land of shifting commodities and shifting realities. Mark Poster recognizes the ultimate, underlying problem of the confusion of the symptom with the illness: “the spirit of capitalism rests not with the commodity as object, but with the culture developed to promote it…. [C]ommercials are cultural objects, strings of words, images, and sounds. And they are so arranged as to fascinate all who encounter them. They constitute the highest promise of happiness and fulfillment of any experience in capitalist society” (33). The entropy, chaos, and ravages of mass consumption, in the form of Jory, exist because of society’s conviction that everything, including people, is consumable. The salvation from this entropy and loss of identity is sold to us as commodities which in turn feeds the problem, and the encroaching entropy remains—if temporarily. Scott Bukatman analyzes the role of Ubik in maintaining the illusion and ideology in the article “Who Programs You? The Science Fiction of the Spectacle.” He writes, “Ubik first seems to stand as a Platonic mediation on the rift between appearance and reality” (235), but soon the true purpose of Ubik becomes clear: it locks in place a reality which “is itself only a shadow; the reification of the real…replaced by a recursive structure of infinite regression. Ubik presents, not a dichotomy of appearance and reality, but an unresolved dialectic” (235). So long as this cycle is perpetuated, the ideology succeeds and there is no hope. The tragedy of Ubik is that Joe never realizes this. He will forever participate in the search for the commodity which will simply feed the monster, not defeat it. “Ubik is the product which permits the maintenance of appearance…. In becoming a consumer, the subject overcomes perceived lack, fixes appearance, becomes an image” (Bukatman 236).

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Jack Gladney faces the same problem: he too is stuck in a limbo of quasi-existence in a mediated culture where reality is as subjective as Joe’s. Where Joe faces a changing reality created by another, communicating with spirits of others through simulacra of consumerist communication (the television, money, matchbooks), Jack has his reality dictated to him through the signs and signals of media and corporate machinations. The marketing found in shopping centers, the newscasts, the spokesmen for the corporations which run the emergency simulations, his own university which sells his made-up identity, all these create the reality Jack first sleepwalks through like a consumerist zombie, then actively but ineffectually fights when he begins to see the nature of his life and impending death. But even as he tries to rid himself of the kipple that is a symptom of the problem, not the problem itself, he fails to see until the very end that he continues to live life at one remove—just as Joe does, in a manner of speaking, for most of Ubik. For example, it never occurs to Jack that his entire identity as a preeminent Hitler scholar is based solely on second-hand material and mediated experience. The fact he can not understand German means his entire career has been based on studying what other people have written about Hitler and Nazi Germany. The closest Jack can come to “experiencing” the original historicity is through video of Nazi rallies and speeches, and even then it is a reality created by the videographers, editors, and translators. Never mind for the moment that this is the closest anyone from a later period in time and different place can come to experiencing historicity—a simulation by at least one remove. According to Fredric Jameson, history can only be experienced through signs and symbols that exist along a signifying chain in which each remove takes us away from the original referent and closer to a simulacra, until the chain breaks and all we are left with is the unconnected sign without meaning (25-27).

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This Lacanian semiotic “schizophrenia” is a place of comfort for Jack. When the identity as a tough, imposing, even somewhat frightening identity Jack has tried to cultivate is challenged and he is exposed as being a soft, nice guy, his first impulse is to shop (83), where his buying power, each accepted credit card swipe, is an affirmation of his existence and ability to affect the world—even if it is an illusionary effect, which Jack does not mind. He enjoys the various conversations in the college cafeteria where the New York émigrés discuss issues of pop culture with the utmost seriousness, as ways of measuring history and their place in it. When the “toxic event” starts out as being called a “feathery plume” and then “billowing cloud” by the media, Jack allows his reality to be based on the implications of the innocuous significations. The course of Jack’s fraying comfort and his identity crisis begins when he discovers he is going to need to learn enough German to maintain appearances during a conference with other Hitler scholars. When he needs to move a step closer to the authentic, Jack’s sense of reality starts to shake. His problems mount when the emergency simulation worker informs him of his uncertain death in an uncertain time after encountering the cloud that symbolized an objective reality mediated by subjective apprehensions of it, and then sent on a crash course when he learns his wife is trading sexual favors for the Dylar in an attempt to escape (the realization of) death—a betrayal more because of his belief they shared an equal fear of death and equal activity in staving it off through standard consumerism. While he later projects his angst and anger at the doctor with whom his wife has the rendezvous with, his real rage is directed at the fact she is seeking a way to transcend the “normal” routine of avoiding death by buying into the myth of buying, joining the church of commerce, and leaving Jack behind to deal with his fear of death on his own. Only at the end of the novel does he come to realize escape is impossible: fear of death is too powerful to eradicate. A lesson he learns from the doctor who has, in his overdose of Dylar, become like a babbling oracle for the consumerist gods, his words no longer anything but direct messages from advertising and marketing. In the doctor’s act of trying to remove his own fear of death in one fell swoop, he has become a living Ubik epigraph: injecting his dialog with the semi-mystical incantations and hermetic chants from television advertising. Yet, “[the doctor's] spells, however, don’t work. What’s worse, he can no longer distinguish signifier from signified” (Osteen 187). The doctor has succeeded in continuing on the path Jack had been on, all the way to its extreme and become truly semiotically schizophrenic.

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Yet all characters in both Ubik and White Noise are on this same path, at risk of losing their identity, their soul, to the machinations of capital and the mediated culture which sustains it—ironic considering their identities are created and nurtured by a culture which demands each person develop a paradoxically unique cookie-cutter identity. This leads to a suffering from a cultural paranoia which comes from living in society in which webs of commodities and their mysticism, and the culture which drives the consumption and reinforces the impression of crisis which demands solution through consumption, collude to create the over-arching ideology that foists upon us the impression that we all must seek our true identities while at the same time creating our identities for us. Peter Fitting uses this concept as his primary thesis in “Towards a Theory of Paranoia: The Science Fiction of Philip K. Dick.” Fitting focuses primarily on literal conspiracies and actual paranoia experienced by the characters of Ubik, but eventually analyzes the greater meaning and implications of paranoia in the conspiracy of cultural commodification. Can understanding the paranoia experienced by the characters lead to a hermeneutic understanding of the capitalist ideology in general? Ultimately, no: “It can no more be identified with theoretical knowledge than commodity fetishism can be identified with Marx’s discovery of the basis of generalized commodity production, or the paranoiac structure of the ego with Lacan’s concept of the de-centering of the subject” (117-18). However, we can learn something about the way in which the ideology of consumerism creates the Ouroboros (in the hermetic, Platonic, and symbolic senses) of consumption, mysticism, reification, fetishism, and Lack. How can a person not feel some subliminal, even overt, sense of paranoia when on the periphery of understanding they can sense the conspiracy of the elements of capitalism working against them, creating their identities, their reality? The characters of Ubik and White Noise serve as representations of all of us living under the influence of consumption. Cultural critic and philosopher Slavoj Žižek, in The Sublime Object of Ideology, sums up the underlying instability with reality, preventing us from fully grasping our condition:

The Real is therefore simultaneously both the hard, impenetrable kernel resisting symbolization and a pure chimerical entity which has in itself no ontological consistency. To use Kripkean terminology, the Real is the rock upon which every attempt at symbolization stumbles, the hard core which remains the same in all possible worlds (symbolic universes); but at the same time its status is thoroughly precarious; it is something that persists only as failed, missed, in a shadow, and dissolves itself as soon as we try to grasp it in its positive nature. (169)

It would be easy to take nearly any novel written in the late 20^th century, critical of materialism, consumption, and commodification, and connect a lineage back to Philip K. Dick. He had an almost preternatural way of putting into fiction the ways in which media would work to mediate reality, and how the interests of capital would create realities for us in a technological world. Warrick writes in her book, Mind in Motion: The Fiction of Philip K. Dick, that “[h]e had a remarkable sense of the cultural transformation taking place in the last half of the twentieth century. He pointed out the cracks in our institutions, our ideologies, and our value systems that would inevitably lead to their collapse” (112). Dick used the trope of decay quite often in his work as a means to show the destination of consumerist culture, and an environment from which hope and rebirth can spring forth. But as Warrick continues to point out, it is the former which tends to take thematic center stage: “the images in Dick’s fiction declare, we live in a new kind of wilderness, a wasteland wilderness, because those cities and the culture that built them are in decay” (112).

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Bukatman, Scott. “Who Programs You? The Science Fiction of the Spectacle.” Liquid Metal:

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DeLillo, Don. White Noise. 1984. New York: Penguin Books, 1999.

Dick, Philip K. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep. 1968. New York: Del Ray, 1982.

---. “Foster, You're Dead.” 1955. The Philip K. Dick Reader. New York: Citadel Press, 1987.

---. “Pay for the Printer.” 1955. The Philip K. Dick Reader. New York: Citadel Press, 1987.

---. Ubik. 1969. New York: Vintage, 1991.

Fitting, Peter. "Reality as Ideological Construct: A Reading of Five Novels by Philip K. Dick."

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Freedman, Carl Howard. “Towards a Theory of Paranoia: The Science Fiction of Philip K.

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Hearst, Andrew. “An Annotation of the First Page of White Noise, With Help From Don

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Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham: Duke

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Keesey, Douglas. Don DeLillo. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1993.

Le Guin, Ursula K. “Science Fiction as Prophesy: Philip K. Dick.” The New Republic. Vol. 175.

 1976. Rpt. “The Modest One.” The Language of the Night: Essays on Fantasy and

 Science Fiction. Ed. Susan Wood. New York: HarperCollins, 1992. pp. 175-78.

Lem, Stanislaw. “Philip K. Dick: A Visionary among the Charlatans.” Trans. Robert Abernathy.

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Osteen, Mark. American Magic and Dread: Don DeLillo's Dialogue with Culture. Philadelphia:

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Warren, Eugene. “The Search for Absolutes.” Philip K. Dick. Ed. Marin Harry Greenberg and

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---. Mind in Motion: The Fiction of Philip K. Dick. Southern Illinois UP, 1987. Rpt. in

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Works Consulted

Baudrillard, Jean. “The Murder of the Sign.” Consumption in an Age of Information. Ed. Sande

 Cohen and R.L. Rutsky. New York: Berg, 2005.

“the object only exists as an exchange-value—caught up is an incessant process of sign differentiation” (9). 

“The digital has replaced signs? Yes, the digital is not a sign, but a signal…. This isn’t difference in the same sense that language makes differences. Language is a system of differences between signs. The interplay of signs in language through their differences is what allows for signification. In digital technology, this type of interplay is gone. It doesn’t coordinate, it conceals signals. It is information: you can move about it in any direction because there is no longer any mediation. There is an immanence, an immediation of things. That’s what is new. It isn’t the death of reality since reality as a whole passed into the sign. The sign absorbs reality. Images devour reality. Then the Images devour themselves…. Then information technology reduced it all to the same level with an even greater abstraction where the sign disappears. It is not even sublimation. It’s beyond sublimation. Sublimation in the strongest sense: transcendence” (11).

Fitting, Peter. “Ubik: The Deconstruction of Bourgeois SF.” Science-Fiction Studies. 2.1 (March

 1975): 47-54. 

Fitting strives to show how Ubik may be one of the most important works of science fiction of the 1960’s for its deconstructionalist way of questioning the standard form and function of the genre—perhaps fiction in general and even the ideology of science. He uses Ubik to show “how Dick’s SF presents a model of a more subversive form of writing, undermining rather than reconfirming the repressive system in which it has been produced, and acting as a critique of the ideological presuppositions of the SF genre and the traditional novel” (47).

Hayles, N. Katherine. How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature,

 and Informatics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999. 

Hayles examines the preternatural decay of reality throughout Ubik and examines the power of commodification and capitalism in the situation in which the real villain of the story is able to feed off the characters in half-life. She addresses what she sees as a lack of general critical acknowledgment of the way the item known as Ubik goes through the process of becoming a symbol for wanton excess to symbolizing the omnipresent God.

Rabkin, Eric S. “Irrational Expectations; or, How Economics and the Post-Industrial World

 Failed Philip K. Dick.” Science-Fiction Studies. 15.2 (July 1988): 161-172. 

Rabkin recognizes the devaluation of objects, and people, in their replication in society. Ubik mirrors this devaluation as both objects and people devolve and decay. Rabkin closely examines how the devolution of life, a rational “half-life” as exhibited in Ubik, affected the themes Dick sought to present: “[P]ost-industrial  Philip K. Dick is much more likely to see the rational…as both the cause of our special anguish and as the sole, inadequate solace we can find” (162).

Stableford, Brian M. “Philip K.Dick.” Science Fiction Writers: Critical Studies of the Major

 Authors from the Early Nineteenth Century to the Present Day. Ed. E.F. Bleiler. New

 York: Scribner, 1982. 337-343.

The application of psychoanalytical criticism continues when Brian Stableford argues that the uncertainty inherent in a non-objective reality might have been considered a “good thing” in the novel Ubik. He finds that the questions of “who” and “what” posed in Ubik by both characters and the reader are more of a metaphysical nature rather than the superficial practical nature.