Right around the time I opened Infinite Jest, a friend happened to be reading Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death. (Incidentally said friend is now reading IJ after I brought it up.) I haven't read Postman's book myself, but the title seems almost suspiciously reminiscent of Infinite Jest. Literally so, if you consider the implications of the Entertainment, for example.
I found an amusing (uh-oh) graphic interpretation by Stuart McMillen of the book's foreword, in which Postman compares Orwell and Huxley's famous premonitions of a horrifying technological future. It seems that Postman finds Huxley's argument the more compelling, which I think is consistent with DFW's perspective. Unlike DFW, Postman's argument concerns the more basic characteristics of visual entertainment, such as its inability to portray "rational" content. From the little I know of his writing, I assume it precedes the irony frenzy of modern entertainment that clearly concerns DFW in "E Unibus Pluram." Nonetheless it seems appropriate, even obvious, to consider Postman a predecessor.
In a 1995 PBS interview with Charlene Hunter Gault, he poses the frightening question, "Am I using technology, or is it using me?"--a concern that DFW ostensibly generalizes to drug addiction, depression, sports, and entertainment in Infinite Jest. (Interestingly, DFW was probably in the process of finishing his book as this interview took place.) An even more compelling addendum to this question that I see between the lines of IJ is how volitional our fatal (otherwise fateful but not quite deadly) interaction with entertainment is. What factors may compromise one's voluntary involvement with television/movies or drugs, for example? Can we assume that all individuals naturally possess the free will to choose?
Some food for thought comes from Marathe:
"This appetite to choose death by pleasure if it is available to choose--this appetite of your people unable to choose appetites, this is the death. What you call the death, the collapsing: this will be the formality only." (319)And:
There is plenty more, of course. Just about Infinitely."No, you say, not children? You say: What is the difference, please, if you make a recorded pleasure so entertaining and diverting it is lethal to persons, you find a Copy-Capable copy and copy it and disseminate it for us to choose to see or turn off, and if we cannot choose to resist it, the pleasure, and cannot choose instead to live?" (321)
Something I've been thinking about along these lines is what it means to make an informed choice, and what it means to make a choice in general. For instance, it seems like part of making an informed choice is understanding what you are choosing or not choosing, and while some information is possible to get easily and accurately (to whatever extent) second-hand, many people want to actually experience something- to smoke a cigarette before they decide that the noxious smell and all the health benefits in fact do outweigh whatever the experience is like. Or maybe they don't. Of course responsibly, these kinds of experience might be overseen by experience individuals and carefully planned out. For instance, as Weil says in his book "The Natural Mind" experimentation with drugs should be done in a carefully supervised situation with people who are knowledgeable (ostensibly drug users themselves) about the drug in question.
ReplyDeleteThe interesting facet of choice that IJ brings up is what happens when becoming informed about something takes away the choosing ability we were trying to inform? For instance what if cigarettes were so addictive that you couldn't simply see what one was like without being hooked forever. Even if the situation was not as dire as say certain death, what if after one taste of a drug you were left with the life-long desire, longing even, for that drug? What if you had to spend the rest of life struggling to not want to sit in front of the cartridge viewer, peeing on yourself as you watched a loop of a video of a woman in a veil over and over? Is this how David Foster Wallace envisions addiction? That there are all these substances out there just waiting to snare you if you give them a chance?
And if that is the case, that in at least some situations certain drugs or forms of entertainment can be so addictive that to even sample them is to enter the realm of the addicted, then what does it mean to make an informed decision? Generally the idea of choosing is that one choice, once made, leads to other choice points. But what if making one choice takes away all further ability to choose?