Don Delillo's novel White Noise (1985) addresses themes central to the Frankfurt school theorists, including the totalizing matrix of technology, consumerism, capitalism, and bureaucracy, labeled by Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno as the culture industry in their classic Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944). This paper delineates how the novel dramatizes the contention of Horkheimer and Adorno that Enlightenment betrays itself in an incipient totalitarianism and regression to the barbarism of domination. Keywords: DeLillo, White Noise, technology, totalitarianism, fascism, Frankfurt school, Horkheimer, Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, Enlightenment, consumerism, culture industry.
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