The Mysticism of the Object: Commodity Fetishism, and the Reification of Identity in the Fiction of Don DeLillo

Abstract

Don DeLillo’s novels are a strong criticism of the contemporary American culture and its reliance on commodities, mass media, consumption and systems of representation. This paper will explore the connection between commodity fetishism, reification and identity in DeLillo’s White Noise and Mao II. The light of Karl Marx’s notion of commodity fetishism and Georg Lukács’s analysis of reification is used to investigate the objects, images, brands, media technologies and values in the marketplace that become influential beyond their material function. The supermarket, consumer culture, commercial items and the culture of consumption emerge as sources of knowledge of security, status and identity in White Noise. The novel depicts an environment in which the commonplace objects have an almost magical influence on human consciousness and social relations. Here it unfolds in Mao II with the media of mass media, photography, publishing, celebrity, and political event, and individual identity becomes an image with the capacity to be reproduced, circulated, and consumed. Offering an alternative to theories of identity as a personal or consistent mode of being, the paper posits that DeLillo’s characters act out identity as an entity that is formed and circumscribed by objects, institutions, media representations, and capitalism. In these two novels, DeLillo showcases the more profound psychological and social effects of those lives that begin and end in objects and representations, in a culture where the human values are being quantified through objects and representations. His fiction thus offers an important literary critique of the ways in which consumer capitalism redefines the exchange value of things and the fascination, and control, of people.