3.3 Auratic and sublime experiences 
in a media-culture

Despite the subject's efforts to ward off reality and its unpleasantries, one encounters threatening moments throughout White Noise, fear, death, awe, horror and a host of experiences one would not expect to find in the midst of the white noise of the media. Reality spills over in "toxic events", death returns as an inscrutable data-base tally, the showdown is intense if not heroic or epiphanic. In addition, there are other, more spiritual moments in the novel which betray traces of experiences that reach beyond mediation and are commonly connotated as profound moments. To understand the nature of these profound moments, it is useful to turn to the concepts of "aura" and the "sublime". Both terms are epistemological, i.e. they involve subjective perceptions rather than objective qualities of things.

According to Murray Siskind, the communal perception of the "most photographed barn in America" affords a "religious experience, in a way." (p. 12) If the reader takes this notion seriously, he must question the mechanisms involved. After all, people are mesmerized by a barn! How can such a profane object evoke such religious feelings? To answer this question, one has to take a closer look at the concept of aura, as Murray relates it: "Every photograph reinforces the aura." (p. 12) The term traces back to Walter Benjamin, who in his essay "Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit" defined it as "the unique appearance of a distance as close it may be."(97) The term does not designate inherent features of an object, but the way it is perceived.

To understand the aura of the barn one therefore must consider the way it is perceived. First of all, the barn is viewed by all tourists from one designated spot. It is thus always perceived from a distance. The elevated spot could have been much closer to the barn, i.e. the range of the view is of no consequence. It is only important that all tourists make their photos from the same spot and always capture the same image. The impression the barn leaves with the beholder is also unique. The barn's uniqueness rests in its claim to fame as being photographed more than any other such structure and thus is designated as a singular object.

The paradox of the singularity of such a familiar object as a barn is at the core of the perceptual processes which DeLillo tries to elucidate in his novel. We already encountered this paradox at the showdown: the intense newness which Jack perceives in the things around him is nothing but the flipside of their over-familiarity as televisual props. The barn is perceived as unique because millions of people gaze at it. Thus, we are still dealing with an auratic experience, but the locus of the aura has shifted:

In dem Maße, in dem der Kultwert des Bildes sich säkularisiert, werden die Vorstellungen vom Substrat seiner Einmaligkeit unbestimmter. Immer mehr wird die Einmaligkeit der im Kultbilde waltenden Erscheinung von der empirischen Einmaligkeit des Bildners oder seiner bildenden Leistung in der Vorstellung des Aufnehmenden verdrängt.(98)

The "religious experience" which the auratic barn affords is very similar to other awe-inspiring experiences which are described in the book. One example is the "postmodern sunset" (p. 227), which mysteriously appears after the airborne toxic event. Jack describes the crowd which assembles in order to gaze upon the sunsets:

The waiting is introverted, uneven, almost backward and shy, tending toward silence. What else do we feel? Certainly there is awe, it transcends previous categories of awe, but we don't know whether we are watching in wonder and dread, we don't know what we are watching or what it means, we don't know whether it is permanent, a level of experience to which we will gradually adjust [...]. (p. 324)

Like aura, the term "sublime" does not describe inherent features of objects or landscapes but a certain perceptual mode which they inform. Therefore, the sublime is no absolute and unchanging category but a historical one. As the perceptual processes of the subject change (e.g. because of the emergence of new technologies), so too do the sublime experiences themselves.(100) Nye describes in his book the emergence of a new kind of sublime experience which he calls the "consumer's sublime". This new sublime is "built on a pleasure of a positive kind, for it concerns an apparently successful representation of man's ability to construct an infinite and perfect world."(101) The experience of this new kind of sublime is afforded by man-made objects (factories, bridges, buildings, highways, etc.) or by remodeled natural landscapes (the Grand Canyon turned into a theme park).

What is lacking from this new kind of sublime experience, as described by Nye, are the fundamental fears which vast landscapes and grand natural vistas inspired in the viewer. If the seemingly controlled technological landscapes of the modern age only afford a positive pleasure, it remains to be seen if this experience can still be considered sublime.(102) Nye is aware of the paradoxical status of this newly emerged sublime: "The notion of a consumer's sublime is ultimately a contradiction in terms."(103)

The "toxic sunsets" which Gladney describes are a strange mixture of natural and man-made elements, and therefore would seem to belong into the category of the consumer's sublime:

If the special character of Nyodene Derivative (added to the everyday drift of effluents, pollutants, contaminants and deliriants) had caused this aesthetic leap from already brilliant sunsets to broad towering ruddled visionary skyscapes, tinged with dread, no one had been able to prove it. (p. 170)

The "airborne toxic event" gives rise to a similar sublime experience. Speaking for all evacuees, who stare in "outlandish wonderment" at the black billowing cloud, Gladney describes the scene in the following way:

We weren't sure how to react. It was a terrible thing to see, so close, so low, packed with chlorides, benzines, phenols, hydrocarbons, or whatever the precise toxic content. But it was also spectacular, part of the grandness of a sweeping event [...]. Our fear was accompanied by a sense of awe that bordered on the religious. [...] This was death made in the laboratory, defined and measurable, but we thought of it at the time in a simple and primitive way, as some seasonal perversity of the earth like a flood or tornado, something not subject to control. Our helplessness did not seem compatible with the idea of a man-made event. (p. 127/128)

The toxic sunsets are as much natural as they are man-made; and they are as much startling objects as they are imbued with familiarity. Jack's use of language in describing the sunsets is stereotypical, always minimizing the strangeness of the event:

Another postmodern sunset, rich in romantic imagery. Why try to describe it? It's enough to say that everything in our field of vision seemed to exist in order to gather the light of this event. Not that this
was one of the stronger sunsets. There had been more dynamic colors, a deeper sense of narrative
sweep. [...] We stood there watching a surge of florid light, like a heart pumping in a documentary on color TV. (p. 227)

The familiarization is incomplete though; the sunsets remain fascinating and sublime precisely because they represent a part of nature not entirely under control. Gazing at them, man encounters himself and his (uncontrollable) technologies. Similarly, the tourists gazing at the barn perceive an auratic reflection of themselves rather than seeing a building. Like all other emotions and fears in White Noise, auratic and sublime feelings are shown to be only insufficiently supressable as they return in an altered form and haunt the subject. The representation of these "profound moments" in an age of their presumed control through the media can be considered the main achievement of DeLillo's novel.