SOURCE: "The Politics of Fear: DeLillo's Postmodern Burrow," in Reading the Postmodern Polity: Political Theory as Textual Practice, University of Minnesota Press, 1992, pp. 122-39.

In the following essay, Shapiro discusses the textual framework provided in Don DeLillo's White Noise for experiencing fears that are typically obscured in modern life by a complex of social codes and distanced by the prevalence of electronic media.

Video is a weapon that takes over consciousness itself.

—Paul Virilio

Kafka's Burrow

By the time Franz Kafka wrote his story "The Burrow" (early in this century), the age of merchandising had arrived, and people in industrial societies were beginning to experience a saturation of private, commercially oriented appeals, along with all the publicly disseminated codes aimed at producing docile, officially approved forms of citizen consciousness. Our "postmodern condition" experiences a density of messages and images, a cacophony of codes, competing for pieces of contemporary...