David Foster Wallace’s E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction is a long, detailed, complex essay from 1993, but still current in its fundamental arguments. Here I summarize it with some commentary. I remember being irritated with the pervasive culture of irony in America since College in the mid-nineties. This essay discusses the origins of this cultural pathology. It derives from the ironic, rebellious postmodern movement of the early sixties provoked into existence by the rampant hypocrisy in American popular culture—corporatism, bureaucratization, racism, domestic spying, and phony television shows too. This postmodernist countermove may even have impacted some of these issues, though the trendlines were already in place from other sources of power. But, postmodern sensibilities definitely impacted television. In fact, it largely dominated televisual culture by the eighties.
Now that postmodernism’s irony has infected popular culture and attained ubiquity, however, its purely negative nature becomes a problem. It is useful for “ground-clearing,” not for any positive or constructive mode. Any long exposure, such as we have been subjected to for decades and “one ends up feeling not only empty but somehow…oppressed.” All values are laid waste, except irony. But is irony even a value? It is a tool (of destruction), not a value, and its long tyrannical reign has made a wasteland. “And make no mistake: irony tyrannizes us. The reason why our pervasive cultural irony is at once so powerful and so unstaisfying is that an ironist is impossible to pin down. All irony is a variation on a sort of existential poker face.” If asked what he means, “most likely, I think, today’s irony ends up saying: ‘How very banal to ask what I mean.’…And herein lies the oppressiveness of institutionalized irony…: the ability to inderdict the question without attending to its content is tyranny. It is the new junta, using the very tool that exposed its enemy to insulate itself.”
“What do you do when postmodern rebellion becomes a pop-cultural institution? For this of course is the second clue to why avant-garde irony and rebellion have become dilute and malign. They have been absorbed, emptied, and redeployed by the very televisual establishment they had originally set themselves athwart.” This is television giving people what it thinks they want. “But, the harvest has been dark: the forms of our best rebellious art have become mere gestures, shticks, not only sterile but perversely enslaving…It’s almost a history lesson: I’m starting to see just why turn-of-the-century America’s biggest fear was of anarchists and anarchy. For if anarchy actually wins, if rulelessness becomes the rule, then protest and change become not just impossible but incoherent. It’d be like casting ballots for Stalin: how do you vote for no more voting?”
Though the essay discusses some intimations of the coming Internet Age, it’s neither quite accurate nor very detailed in analyzing this eventuality. The internet represents a massive interposition upon the long rule of televisual culture—though it is far from sufficient to end this reign. Thus far, the internet’s impact in this direction has manifested in the transformation of certain details of this culture, rather than undermining its commitment to its now traditional ironic stance. For example, TV shows are far more convenient by virtue of DVRs, Netflix, iTunes; ephemeral entertainments like those YouTube specializes in have grabbed market share; technical quality has improved, accelerating the talent and money shift from cinema to television. Notice that these changes have made the televisual-type of experience--image intensive fantasies--more appealing on multiple levels. The ability to tailor entertainments to individual tastes and the endless quantities available increase the sense of dependency on this televisual culture. Given that the ironic tone seems potent enough to hold fast through the upheaval, what we have is more entropy. “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.” Wallace wants cultural values, since without values there is no culture. But where do cultural values originate if not in moral and religious values and beliefs? An atheistic or agnostic society therefore can only have a dead or dying culture. And by a dying culture I mean the memory of a culture, of a time when culture was still possible.
