Sentimental Posthumanism: David Foster Wallace

Abstract

If, as Edward W. Soja argued in 1989, postmodernism involved reassertion of a critical spatial perspective in contemporary social theory (2), then the post-postmodern era might be said to have moved beyond the spatial dialectics implicitly structured twentieth-century culture. contribution of geographers such as Soja and David Harvey was to restore what Harvey called a materialism (359) to sublimated forms of institutional cartography, thereby revealing ways in which modernist notions of hermeneutic and topographic centers, which were particularly prevalent between the world wars, encompassed hierarchical claims about authority their purported transcendence of spatial dimensions tended silently to occlude. This was the basis for the idealization of the city as a privileged site for modern art and architecture in the 1920s, and conversely, the representation of the American Midwest as banal and culturally stifling in the work of Sherwood Anderson, Sinclair Lewis, and countless other writers. It also contributed to the common idea in the 1950s and 1960s of the suburb as a bastion of conformity existing in a dialectical relationship with the intellectually vibrant metropolis (Jurca 3-6). Postmodernism, of course, tended ideologically to reverse the premises of this authoritarian distinction between center and margin, valorizing the latter at the expense of the former. However, one of the characteristics of David Foster Wallace's work it tends to flatten this distinction entirely, supplanting the defensive figure of the suburb as deliberately remote from urban concerns with a new model of the digital network, within which access to information becomes equalized and normalized. Whereas the suburban landscapes of John Cheever or John Updike promised, for good or ill, some kind of private retreat from a world of public anxiety, Wallace envisages American space as a level playing field where the electronic media operate in all zones simultaneously. Wallace's most famous articulation of this position comes in his 1993 essay E Pluram: Television and US Fiction, which has been seen as a kind of manifesto for his generation of fiction writers, enjoying the same kind of status John Barth's The Literature of Exhaustion (1967) did in an earlier era. In E Pluram Wallace argues American writers under 40 have been conditioned to a world in which the ubiquity of television a plain fact. Within this world of electric signal (172), stratification operates more by generation than by region: young Americans bond more easily according to which TV programs they have shared than according to the old tenets of geographical proximity. In contrast to the curmudgeonly liberal humanism of Saul Bellow, who complained in 1963 of how public nonsense of television ... threatens to turn our brains to farina within our heads (29), Wallace suggests the six hours of TV-training undertaken daily by the average American influences the whole psychology of one's relation to himself, his mirror, his loved ones, and a world of real people and real gazes (E Unibus 174). Other developments in information technology, as well as in scientific fields such as biology and genetics, permeate Wallace's fiction to such an extent the liberal humanist centers of gravity structured the worlds of Bellow and Updike now seem but a distant cultural memory. Wallace not a proselytizing or didactic writer, but his texts reflect a condition of confusion where the human sensibility left uncertain about its epistemological status in an environment where cyborgs and machines are becoming ever more powerful, and conversely, where the categorical distinction between human and nonhuman becoming ever less self-evident. For example, in Consider the Lobster, a 2004 essay about the Maine Lobster Festival, Wallace contemplates the festivities from the lobsters' point of view, questioning the received wisdom they cannot feel anything and wondering whether the lobsters' apparently desperate attempts to avoid being submerged alive in boiling water should not raise uncomfortable questions about the implicit power structures coded into traditional ideas of human authority: is it not possible, he asks, that future generations will regard our own present agribusiness and eating practices in much the same way we now view Nero's entertainments or Aztec sacrifices? …