The Political Reading

Initially, I was going to write something drawn out from some of the details of this section (the kid eating the pages out of his history textbook or the discrimination simulation), but while commenting I came across a topic which is more interesting for me – though I can only broach it now in the most cursory way. Namely, it is the too common critical perspective that DeLillo is a satirist with a grudge against the contemporary situation. White Noise especially is so often promoted or represented as a fierce and satirical indictment of an America operating in the sphere of hyper-modernity. I find this to be a limited reading, or rather, a very limited (and limiting) way to look at the world we live in. I think the portrayal of places like supermarkets, tourist attractions, and shopping malls was more enchanted and fascinated than anything else. In Underworld, waste management for Nick is not a calamity, nor is waste evil. Rather, it has an ordering effect, and also of allowing him to confront the modern world more fully.
Implicit in this reading of his work as “negative” is the desire for a return to some sort of natural or essential order. It’s a desire I don’t trust. I think there is a parallel experience in the introduction to theory. For the newcomer (and probably for myself, briefly) the initial reaction to Debord, Baudrilliard or even Derrida is feel that something is irreparably lost and to see things as lacking some sort of natural character or essential meaning. And this lack is always there of course, but it’s not the result of something recoverable being lost . And as long as the focus on some sort of recourse to a “natural” order is maintained, understanding and progress necessarily stagnate. As Zizek would say, we have to "assume the mistake" and move from there.
I was in Whole Foods grocery store the other day and a sign read “whole foods, whole people.” Disgusting. The final triumph of capitalism has been in its complete and utter cooption of the impulses and tendencies that would contradict it, and this mirage of “wholeness” “purity” or of “organic solutions” is precisely the Achilles heel of the left.
This is perhaps more elegantly explained in the publisher’s preface to Zizek’s Sublime Object of Ideology (which I read a few months ago). The book is part of a series, the manifesto of which is the following:

"There is today wide agreement that the left-wing project is in crisis. New antagonisms have emerged…that require the reformulation of the socialist ideal in terms of an extension and deepening of democracy. However, serious disagreements exist as to the theoretical strategy required to carry out such a task. There are those for whom the current critique of rationalism and universalism puts into jeopardy the very basis of the democratic project. Others argue that the critique of essentialism…is the necessary condition for understanding the widening field of social struggles characteristic of the present stage of democratic politics."

Of course, my sympathies are with the later.