(71) Susan Sontag, "The Image-World". On Photography. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux 1978, p. 151-180. Here p. 161. BACK
(72) Jean Baudrillard, Simulations. New York: Semiotext(e) 1983, p. 146. BACK
(74) Klepper, p. 346. BACK
(75) Jean Baudrillard, "The Ecstasy of Communication". In: Hal Foster (ed.), Postmodern Culture. London: Verso 1987, p. 126-134. Here p. 133. BACK
(76) Leonard Wilcox, "Baudrillard, DeLillo's White Noise, and the End of Heroic Narrative". Contemporary Literature 32:3 (1991), p. 346-365. Here p. 348. BACK
(77) ibid. BACK
(78) Wilcox, p. 347. BACK
(79) cf. Wilcox's definition of this highly modernist notion: "a moment of profound imaginative perception in which fragments are organized and essence revealed" (p. 349). BACK
(80) Douglas Keesey, Don DeLillo. New York: Macmillan/Twayne 1993, p. 138. BACK
(81) Frow, p. 178. BACK
(82) Wilcox, p. 352: "Any semiological network can become a hermetic system into which the individual subject can be inserted and which constructs the self." BACK
(83) Reeve/Kerridge, p. 315. BACK
(84) Klepper, p. 343. BACK
(85) Klepper, p. 353. BACK
(86) Michael Valdez Moses, "Lust Removed From Nature". In: Lentricchia 1991, p. 63-86. Here p. 76. BACK
(87) Mink's paranoia about mere words resembles the paranoia about violent movies which haunts western societies. As visual representations of violence proliferate, society seems less able to concentrate on the causes and implications of the real thing and instead turns its anger towards horror movies. They are nowadays often perceived as the real source of all evil instead of just reflections of the existing one. Perhaps Mink is not such an extraordinary character after all. BACK
(88) Sontag, p. 158. BACK
(89) Jean Baudrillard, Die fatalen Strategien. München: Matthes & Seitz 1991, p. 20. BACK
(90) cf. Jean Baudrillard, "Die Präzession der Simulakra". Agonie des Realen. Berlin: Merve 1978, p. 7-70. Baudrillard illustrates this process with a bomb attack which is successively "explained" with different, even opposing interpretations: first it was the political right, then the left and finally the powers of the middle who are said to be responsible for the bombing. For the subject all these competing interpretations have the same truth and leave him unable to arrive at a stable understanding: "diese Präzession [...] läßt in jedem Fall Raum für alle möglichen Interpretationen, selbst für die widersprüchlichsten. Alle Interpretationen sind wahr; ihre Wahrheit besteht darin, sich in einem erweiterten Kreislauf auszutauschen, und zwar nach Maßgabe von Modellen, denen sie selbst vorgeordnet sind." (p. 30/31) BACK
(91) Scott Bukatman, Terminal Identity. The Virtual Subject in Postmodern Science Fiction. Durham and London: Duke University Press 1993, p. 41. BACK
(92) Reeve/Kerridge, p. 312. BACK
(93) Mark Edmundson, "Not Flat, Not Round, Not There. Don DeLillo's Novel Characters". The Yale Review (April 1995), p. 107-124. Here p. 119. BACK
(94) ibid. BACK
(95) Reeve/Kerridge, p. 312. BACK
(96) Mark Conroy, "From Tombstone to Tabloid: Authority Figured in White Noise". Critique 35:2 (Winter 1994), p. 97-110. Here p. 101. BACK
(97) "Diese letztere [gemeint ist die Aura, V. H.] definieren wir als einmalige Erscheinung einer Ferne, so nah sie sein mag." - Walter Benjamin, Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit. Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp 1977, p. 15 (my translation). I decided to use the most literal translation of Benjamin's definition I could find. Another possibility would be: "the unique manifestation of distance, however near it may be." The words "appearance" and "manifestation" both are chosen to suggest that aura does not designate absolute and objective features of an object but certain subjective impressions it evokes. BACK
(98) Benjamin, p. 17. BACK
(99) David E. Nye, American Technological Sublime. Cambridge: MIT Press 1994. In his introduction, Nye does not give a precise definition of the sublime, but his description of the Golden Gate Bridge as a sublime object offers some features of sublime experiences: the sublime object "cannot be comprehended through words and images alone" (p. xi); "when experienced by large groups the sublime can wield society together [...]. The sublime taps into fundamental hopes and fears." (p. xiii) BACK
(100) Nye: "This book is about the social construction of certain powerful experiences in industrial society, which is to say about the politics of perception." (Introduction, p. xvi) "I do not take the sublime to be immutable, and therefore its changing cultural and political meaning must form part of the subject." (p. xvii) BACK
(101) Nye, p. 287. BACK
(102) For Kant, the "consumer's sublime" would belong to the category of the beautiful which "brings with it a direct feeling of the expansion of life." For him the sublime experience also involves negative feelings: "[T]he mind is alternately attracted and repelled by the object, the satisfaction in the sublime implies not so much positive pleasure as wonder or reverential awe, and may be called a negative pleasure." (quoted in Nye, p. 6/7) BACK
(103) Nye, p. 290. BACK