Don DeLillo on modern media as a return to a mythological form of consciousness, an anima mundi of sorts:

You have to learn how to look. You have to open yourself to the data. TV offers incredible amounts of psychic data. It opens ancient memories of world birth, it welcomes us into the grid, the network of little buzzing dots that make up the picture pattern. There is light, there is sound. I ask my students, ‘What more do you want?’ Look at the wealth of data concealed in the grid, in the bright packaging, the jingles, the slice-of-life commercials, the products hurtling out of darkness, the coded messages and endless repetitions, like chants, like mantras. ‘Coke is it, Coke is it, Coke is it.’ The medium practically overflows with sacred formulas if we can re-member how to respond innocently and get past our irritation, weariness and disgust.¹

In this scheme celebrities play the role of archetypes of the contemporary psyche (2.17). Possibilities of representation that crystallize during a casting audition.

The process of hypersecularization described by Redeker is even more evident in Kingdom Come, J.G. Ballard’s final novel, in which the suburbs of London are described thus:

Whatever the name of this town, there where no drifting newspapers and chewing-gum pavements, no citizenry of the cardboard box. This was a place where it was impossible to borrow a book, attend a concert, say a prayer, consult a parish record or give to charity. In short, the town was an end-state of consumerism […] History and tradition, the slow death by suffocation of an older Britain, played no part in these peoples’ lives. They lived in an eternal retail present, where the deepest moral decisions concerned the purchase of a refrigerator or a washing machine.²

The eternal present, an old promise of the Kingdom of God, finds its most recent incarnation in a commercial culture that creates a temporal bubble completely separated from the time of human experience, from any notion of “duration.” This new circular time, lacking in quality, depends entirely on the cycles of the market. It is the time of fashion seasons, off-season sales, film premieres and TV series. In a world ruled by fiction, Ballard says, “the future has ceased to exist, devoured by an insatiable present.”³

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1. Don DeLillo, White Noise, 51. ↩︎
2. Ballard, Kingdom Come, 14. ↩︎
3. Pablo Capanna, J.G. Ballard, el tiempo desolado, 109. Author's translation. ↩︎