The David Foster Wallace Reader by David Foster Wallace
For Gilder, the new piece of furniture that will free Joe Briefcase from passive dependence on his furniture will be “the telecomputer, a personal computer adapted for video processing and connected by fiber-optic threads to other telecomputers around the world.” The fibrous TC “will forever break the broadcast bottleneck” of television’s One Over Many structure of image-dissemination. Now everybody’ll get to be his own harried guy with earphones and clipboard. In the new millennium, U.S. television will finally become ideally, GOPishly democratic: egalitarian, interactive, and “profitable” without being “exploitative.”
Boy does Gilder know his “Larger Agenda” audience. You can just see saliva overflowing lower lips in boardrooms as Gilder forecasts that the consumer’s whole complicated fuzzy inconveniently transient world will become storable, manipulable, broadcastable, and viewable in the comfort of his own condo. “With artful programming of telecomputers, you could spend a day interacting on the screen with Henry Kissinger, Kim Basinger, or Billy Graham.” Rather ghastly interactions to contemplate, perhaps, but then in Gilderland each to his own:
Celebrities could produce and sell their own software. You could view the Super Bowl from any point in the stadium you choose, or soar above the basket with Michael Jordan. Visit your family on the other side of the world with moving pictures hardly distinguishable from real-life images. Give a birthday party for Grandma in her nursing home in Florida, bringing her descendents from all over the country to the foot of her bed in living color.
And not just warm 2-D images of family: any experience will be transferrable to image and marketable, manipulable, consumable. People will be able to
go comfortably sight-seeing from their living room through high-resolution screens, visiting Third-World countries without having to worry about air fares or exchange rates…, you could fly an airplane over the Alps or climb Mount Everest—all on a powerful high-resolution display.
We will, in short, be able to engineer our own dreams.
So, in sum, a conservative tech writer offers a really attractive way of looking at viewer passivity, at TV’s institutionalization of irony, narcissism, nihilism, stasis, loneliness. It’s not our fault! It’s outmoded technology’s fault! If TV-dissemination were up to date, it would be impossible for it to “institutionalize” anything through its demonic “mass-psychology.” Let’s let Joe B., the little lonely average guy, be his own manipulator of video-bits. Once all experience is finally reduced to marketable image, once the receiving user of user-friendly receivers can break from the coffle and choose freely, Americanly, from an Americanly infinite variety of moving images hardly distinguishable from real-life images, and can then choose further just how he wishes to store, enhance, edit, recombine, and present those images to himself in the privacy of his very own home and skull, then TV’s ironic, totalitarian grip on the American psychic cojones will be broken.!!!
Note that Gilder’s semiconducted vision of a free, orderly video future is way more upbeat than postmodernism’s old view of image and data. The novels of Pynchon and DeLillo revolve metaphorically off the concept of interference: the more connections, the more chaos, and the harder it is to cull any meaning from the seas of signal. Gilder would call their gloom outmoded, their metaphor infected with the deficiencies of the transistor:
In all networks of wires and switches, except for those on the microchip, complexity tends to grow exponentially as the number of interconnections rises, [but] in the silicon maze of microchip technology… efficiency, not complexity, grows as the square of the number of interconnections to be organized.
Rather than a vacuous TV-culture drowning in cruddy images, Gilder foresees a TC-culture redeemed by a whole lot more to choose from and a whole lot more control over what you choose to… umm… see? pseudo-experience? dream?
It’s wildly unrealistic to think that expanded choices alone will resolve our televisual bind. The advent of cable upped choices from 4 or 5 to 40+ synchronic alternatives, with little apparent loosening of television’s grip on mass attitudes. It seems, rather, that Gilder sees the ’90s’ impending breakthrough as U.S. viewers’ graduation from passive reception of facsimiles of experience to active manipulation of facsimiles of experience. It’s worth questioning Gilder’s definition of televisual “passivity.” His new tech would indeed end “the passivity of mere reception.” But the passivity of Audience, the acquiescence inherent in a whole culture of and about watching, looks unaffected by TCs.
The appeal of watching television has always involved fantasy. And contemporary TV has gotten vastly better at enabling the viewer’s fantasy that he can transcend the limitations of individual human experience, that he can be inside the set, imago’d, “anyone, anywhere.”34 Since the limitations of being one human being involve certain restrictions on the number of different experiences possible to us in a given period of time, it’s arguable that the biggest TV-tech “advances” of recent years have done little but abet this fantasy of escape from the defining limits of being human. Cable expanded our choices of evening realities; handheld gizmos let us leap instantly from one reality to another; VCRs let us commit experiences to an eidetic memory that permits re-experience at any time without loss or alteration. These advances sold briskly and upped average viewing-doses, but they sure haven’t made U.S. televisual culture any less passive or cynical.
Of course, the downside of TV’s big fantasy is that it’s just a fantasy. As a Treat, my escape from the limits of genuine experience is neato. As a steady diet, though, it can’t help but render my own reality less attractive (because in it I’m just one Dave, with limits and restrictions all over the place), render me less fit to make the most of it (because I spend all my time pretending I’m not in it), and render me ever more dependent on the device that affords escape from just what my escapism makes unpleasant.
It’s tough to see how Gilder’s soteriol vision of having more “control” over the arrangement of high-quality fantasy-bits is going to ease either the dependency that is part of my relation to TV or the impotent irony I must use to pretend I’m not dependent. Whether I’m “passive” or “active” as a viewer, I still must cynically pretend, because I’m still dependent, because my real dependency here is not on a single show or a few networks any more than the hophead’s is on the Turkish florist or the Marseilles refiner. My real dependence is on the fantasies and the images that enable them, and thus on any technology that can make images both available and fantastic. Make no mistake: we are dependent on image-technology; and the better the tech, the harder we’re hooked.
The paradox in Gilder’s rosy forecast is the same as in all forms of artificial enhancement. The more enhancing the mediation—see for instance binoculars, amplifiers, graphic equalizers, or “moving pictures hardly distinguishable from real-life images”—the more direct, vivid, and real the experience seems, which is to say the more direct, vivid, and real the fantasy and dependence are. An exponential surge in the mass of televisual images, and a commensurate increase in my ability to cut, paste, magnify, and combine them to suit my own fancy, can do nothing but render my interactive TC a more powerful enhancer and enabler of fantasy, my attraction to that fantasy stronger, the real experiences of which my TC offers more engaging and controllable simulacra paler and more frustrating to deal with, and me just a whole lot more dependent on my furniture. Jacking the number of choices and options up with better tech will remedy exactly nothing so long as no sources of insight on comparative worth, no guides to why and how to choose among experiences, fantasies, beliefs, and predilections, are permitted serious consideration in U.S. culture. Umm, insights and guides to value used to be among literature’s jobs, didn’t they? But then who’s going to want to take such stuff seriously in ecstatic post-TV life, with Kim Basinger waiting to be interacted with?
Oh God, I’ve just reread my criticisms of Gilder. That he is naïve. That he is an ill-disguised apologist for corporate self-interest. That his book has commerc
Well, but at least good old Gilder is unironic. In this respect he’s like a cool summer breeze compared to Mark Leyner, the young New Jersey medical-ad copywriter whose My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist is the biggest thing for campus hipsters since The Fountainhead. Leyner’s novel exemplifies a third kind of literary response to our problem. For of course young U.S. writers can “resolve” the problem of being trapped in the televisual aura the same way French poststructuralists “resolve” their hopeless enmeshment in the logos. We can resolve the problem by celebrating it. Transcend feelings of mass-defined angst by genuflecting to them. We can be reverently ironic.
My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist is new not so much in kind as in degree. It is a methedrine compound of pop pastiche, offhand high tech, and dazzling televisual parody, formed with surreal juxtapositions and grammarless monologues and flash-cut editing, and framed with a relentless irony designed to make its frantic tone seem irreverent instead of repellent. You want sendups of commercial culture?
I had just been fired from McDonald’s for refusing to wear a kilt during production launch week for their new McHaggis sandwich.
he picks up a copy of das plumpe denken new england’s most disreputable german-language newsmagazine blast in egg cream factory kills philatelist he turns the page radioactive glow-in-the-dark semen found in canada he turns the page modern-day hottentots carry young in resealable sandwich bags he turns the page wayne newton calls mother’s womb single-occupancy garden of eden morgan fairchild calls sally struthers loni anderson
what color is your mozzarella? i asked the waitress it’s pink—it’s the same color as the top of a mennen lady speed stick dispenser, y’know that color? no, maam I said it’s the same color they use for the gillette daisy disposable razors for women… y’know that color? nope well, it’s the same pink as pepto-bismol, y’know that color? oh yeah, I said, well do you have spaghetti?
You want mordant sendups of television?
Muriel got the TV Guide, flipped to Tuesday 8 P.M., and read aloud:… There’s a show called “A Tumult of Pubic Hair and Bobbing Flaccid Penises as Sweaty Naked Chubby Men Run From the Sauna Screaming Snake! Snake!”… It also stars Brian Keith, Buddy Ebsen, Nipsey Russell, and Lesley Ann Warren
You like mocking self-reference? The novel’s whole last chapter is a parody of its own “About the Author” page. Or maybe you’re into hip identitylessness?
Grandma rolled up a magazine and hit Buzz on the side of the head.… Buzz’s mask was knocked loose. There was no skin beneath that mask. There were two white eyeballs protruding on stems from a mass of oozing blood-red musculature.
I can’t tell if she’s human or a fifth-generation gynemorphic android and I don’t care
Parodic meditations on the boundaryless flux of televisual monoculture?
I’m stirring a pitcher of Tanqueray martinis with one hand and sliding a tray of frozen clams oreganata into the oven with my foot. God, these methedrine suppositories that Yogi Vithaldas gave me are good! As I iron a pair of tennis shorts I dictate a haiku into the tape recorder and then… do three minutes on the speedbag before making an origami praying mantis and then reading an article in High Fidelity magazine as I stir the coq au vin.
The decay of both the limits and the integrity of the single human self?
There was a woman with the shrunken, wrinkled face of an eighty- or ninety-year-old. And this withered hag, this apparent octogenarian, had the body of a male Olympic swimmer. The long lean sinewy arms, the powerful V-shaped upper torso, without a single ounce of fat.…
to install your replacement head place the head assembly on neck housing and insert guide pins through mounting holes… if, after installing new head, you are unable to discern the contradictions in capitalist modes of production, you have either installed your head improperly or head is defective
In fact, one of My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist’s unifying obsessions is this latter juxtaposition of parts of selves, people and machines, human subjects and discrete objects. Leyner’s fiction is, in this regard, an eloquent reply to Gilder’s prediction that our TV-culture problems can be resolved by the dismantling of images into discrete chunks we can recombine however we wish. Leyner’s world is a Gilderesque dystopia. The passivity and schizoid decay still endure for Leyner in his characters’ reception of images and waves of data. The ability to combine them only adds a layer of disorientation: when all experience can be deconstructed and reconfigured, there become simply too many choices. And in the absence of any credible, noncommercial guides for living, the freedom to choose is about as “liberating” as a bad acid trip: each quantum is as good as the next, and the only standard of a particular construct’s quality is its weirdness, incongruity, its ability to stand out from a crowd of other image-constructs and wow some Audience.
Leyner’s own novel, in its amphetaminic eagerness to wow the reader, marks the far dark frontier of the Fiction of Image—literature’s absorption of not just the icons, techniques, and phenomena of television, but of television’s whole objective. My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist’s sole aim is, finally, to wow, to ensure that the reader is pleased and continues to read. The book does this by (1) flattering the reader with appeals to his erudite postmodern weltschmerz and (2) relentlessly reminding the reader that the author is smart and funny. The book itself is extremely funny, but it’s not funny the way funny stories are funny. It’s not that funny things happen here; it’s that funny things are self-consciously imagined and pointed out, like a comedian’s stock “You ever notice how…?” and “You ever wonder what would happen if…?”
Actually, Leyner’s whole high-Imagist style most often resembles a kind of lapidary stand-up comedy:
Suddenly Bob couldn’t speak properly. He had suffered some form of spontaneous aphasia. But it wasn’t total aphasia. He could speak, but only in a staccato telegraphic style. Here’s how he described driving through the Midwest on Interstate 80: “Corn corn corn corn Stuckeys. Corn corn corn corn Stuckeys.”
there’s a bar on the highway which caters almost exclusively to authority figures and the only drink it serves is lite beer and the only food it serves is surf and turf and the place is filled with cops and state troopers and gym teachers and green berets and toll attendants and game wardens and crossing guards and umpires
Leyner’s fictional response to television is less a novel than a piece of witty, erudite, extremely high-quality prose television. Velocity and vividness replace development. People flicker in and out; events are garishly there and then gone and never referred to. There’s a brashly irreverent rejection of “outmoded” concepts like integrated plot or enduring character. Instead there’s a series of dazzlingly creative parodic vignettes, designed to appeal to the 45 seconds of near-Zen concentration we call the TV attention span. In the absence of a plot, unifying the vignettes are moods—antic anxiety, the overstimulated stasis of too many choices and no chooser’s manual, irreverent brashness toward televisual reality. And, after the manner of films, music videos, dreams, and television programs, there are recurring “Key Images,” here exotic drugs, exotic technologies, exotic foods, exotic bowel dysfunctions. And it is no accident that My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist’s central preoccupation is with digestion and elimination. Its mocking challenge to the reader is the same one presented by television’s flood of realities and choices: ABSORB ME—PROVE YOU’RE CONSUMER ENOUGH.
Leyner’s work, the best Image-Fiction yet, is both amazing and forgettable, wonderful and oddly hollow. I’m concluding by talking about it at length because, in its masterful reabsorption of the
It’s entirely possible that my plangent noises about the impossibility of rebelling against an aura that promotes and vitiates all rebellion say more about my residency inside that aura, my own lack of vision, than they do about any exhaustion of U.S. fiction’s possibilities. The next real literary “rebels” in this country might well emerge as some weird bunch of anti-rebels, born oglers who dare somehow to back away from ironic watching, who have the childish gall actually to endorse and instantiate single-entendre principles. Who treat of plain old untrendy human troubles and emotions in U.S. life with reverence and conviction. Who eschew self-consciousness and hip fatigue. These anti-rebels would be outdated, of course, before they even started. Dead on the page. Too sincere. Clearly repressed. Backward, quaint, naïve, anachronistic. Maybe that’ll be the point. Maybe that’s why they’ll be the next real rebels. Real rebels, as far as I can see, risk disapproval. The old postmodern insurgents risked the gasp and squeal: shock, disgust, outrage, censorship, accusations of socialism, anarchism, nihilism. Today’s risks are different. The new rebels might be artists willing to risk the yawn, the rolled eyes, the cool smile, the nudged ribs, the parody of gifted ironists, the “Oh how banal.” To risk accusations of sentimentality, melodrama. Of overcredulity. Of softness. Of willingness to be suckered by a world of lurkers and starers who fear gaze and ridicule above imprisonment without law. Who knows. Today’s most engaged young fiction does seem like some kind of line’s end’s end. I guess that means we all get to draw our own conclusions. Have to. Are you immensely pleased.