Technologically Constituted Spaces: David Foster Wallace, Martin Heidegger, and Technological Nostalgia

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article traces David Foster Wallace’s dialogue with Martin Heidegger’s thinking on technology and space across three texts from different stages of Wallace’s career. In the story “Here and There,” Wallace presents a critique of what Heidegger calls “calculative thinking,” especially as applied to literary esthetics; responding to Heidegger’s call for a different way of relating to technology, Wallace makes a nostalgic form of outmoded domestic technology into a counterpoint to the “enframing” logic of technical domination. In Infinite Jest, this dynamic of enframing and nostalgia is extended to the scale of 1990s Boston, a city transformed in the late twentieth century into a center for technology and high-tech finance; two monumental signs that appear in the novel form nodes for these opposed technological modes. The later story “Oblivion” charts the subsumption of nostalgia into a regime of technological domination, embodied in data-driven corporate medicine and insurance, and playing out in a totally enframed version of the domestic scene. Wallace’s engagement with Heidegger is shown to form a crux for his response to the conditions and experiences of American life at the end of the twentieth century, and to be intimately connected to his concerns for literary form and practice.