The BEST: E Unibus Pluram

“The BEST” series features writers considering what elements in our culture still inspire us to live better and seeks to share what we find that might still be described as “the best that has been thought and said.” Click here to read about “The BEST” and to see the index of all columns in this series.

Summary
David Foster Wallace’s 1993 essay, “E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Culture” (in the journal Contemporary Fiction; collected in his A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again) assesses the challenges for post-modern fiction posed by an all-pervasive “televisual” culture. The first half of the lengthy essay analyzes:

• Fundamental elements of a fiction writer’s craft – observation and study of people, which television could ostensibly augment;
• The absurdities of television watching as an activity;
• The tension between “highbrow” arts and criticism and TV culture;
• The methods employed by TV to ensure continuous, exceedingly high rates of TV consumption despite the absurdities of TV watching as an activity;
• A brief history of post-modern American fiction; and
• The increasing use of pop images and self-reference and the development of metawatching and metafiction.

In his inimitable style, seasoned with much humor and great learning, Wallace deftly deconstructs the complicated relationship between television and its audience. With incredible prescience, he dismantles the argument proffered by some cultural critics in the early 1990s that advances in technology, such as fiber-optic transmission and the digitalization of images, plus the advent of “personal computer[s] adapted for video processing and connected … to other [computers] around the world” would grant viewers “discretion over selection, manipulation, and recombination of video images” and the ability to liberate themselves from the passivity of TV consumption and the other negative features of televisual culture. Wallace foresaw (here and in his 1996 novel, Infinite Jest) with impressive granularity the internet, how it would develop, and how humans would interact with the internet and with each other. Although in 1993 he was referencing TV and “televisual culture,” many of his observations are equally germane today by substituting “internet” for “TV.”

The essay proceeds to argue that irony is the central mode of communication in modern America. Wallace traces the history of irony in late 20th century culture and its impact on the very nature of art: instead of art “being a creative instantiation of real values” it shifted to “being a creative instantiation of deviance from bogus values.” He further argues that “irony and ridicule are entertaining and effective, and that at the same time they are agents of a great despair and stasis in U.S. culture… [and that television] has become able to capture and neutralize any attempt to change or even protest the attitudes of passive unease and cynicism TV requires of Audience in order to be commercially and psychologically viable at doses of several hours per day.”

Why this is The BEST
Screens are the ubiquitous and unique feature of our modern life. They surround us and demand our attention. Negotiating screen culture as a religious person involves some fairly obvious challenges, but Orthodox educators and religious authorities (as well as parents) have largely focused on content and/or the consequences of all the watching.

Wallace does not concern himself with content. Rather, his concern centers on the corrosive nature of the irony and cynicism that suffuse screen culture and which work to reinforce the supremacy of irony.

[T]o the extent that [TV] can train viewers to laugh at characters’ unending putdowns of one another, to view ridicule as both the mode of social intercourse and the ultimate art form, television can reinforce its own queer ontology of appearance: the most frightening prospect, to the well-conditioned viewer, becomes leaving oneself open to others’ ridicule by betraying passé expressions of value, emotion or vulnerability.

David Foster Wallace (1962–2008)

He rails against “televisual disdain for ‘hypocritical’ retrovalues like originality, depth and integrity” and how that has left the contemporary art world desiccated.

Applying Wallace’s critique of irony to our community, the Orthodox world frets about the philosophical implications of post-modernism and challenges to Orthodox dogma squired by a relativist worldview (see the writings of Rav Shagar and R. Jonathan Sacks). But writing as a literary and cultural critic, Wallace occupies himself with literary or aesthetic concerns and not necessarily philosophical matters. To him those are human concerns. “Insights and guides to human value used to be among literature’s jobs, didn’t they?”

He explains how a post-modern aesthetic of irony stunts human values and enfeebles human spirit and sincerity. “Irony tyrannizes us … [because] an ironist is impossible to pin down. All irony is a variation on a sort of existential poker-face. All U.S. irony is based on an implicit ‘I don’t really mean what I say.’”

Irony and cynicism may not be cardinal sins or even formally prohibited by halakha, although no less a writer on Jewish ethics than R. Moshe Hayyim Luzzatto (Mesillat Yesharim, ch. 5) called out “mockery” for its “great corruptive power” and for being antithetical to the ideal of vigilance (zerizut). R. Aharon Lichtenstein explained Maimonides’ warning against hittul (frivolity) as encompassing latzon (scoffing) and kalut rosh (lightheadedness). While in Return and Renewal: Reflections on Teshuva and Spiritual Growth he calls out hypocrisy, self-delusion, cant, shallowness and shoddiness, false spirituality, superficiality and pallid performance, and more, R. Lichtenstein does not specifically touch upon irony and cynicism. However, one of his primary teachers, R. Yitzchak Hutner, in the first essay in his Pahad Yitzhak on Purim, analyzes how Amalek differed from the other nations in the aftermath of the miracle of the Red Sea and the revelation on Mount Sinai and hones in on the trait of mockery as what drove them to attack and ignore the aura surrounding bnei Yisrael. He describes that trait as a deeply rooted human vice—the inability to countenance meaning and importance and the resultant desire to “find the gaps in any structure of importance in order to fully destroy the structure.” This is not so far from Wallace’s working definition of irony: “exploiting gaps between what’s said and what’s meant, between how things try to appear and how they really are.” In post-modern culture irony “serves an exclusively negative function. It’s critical and destructive, a ground-clearing … [but it is] singularly unuseful when it comes to constructing anything to replace the hypocrisies it debunks.”

For Wallace, current visual media and post-modern literature run on an operating system powered by irony and cynicism which engender disdain for and fear of sincerity. This negates the possibility of conversation let alone art intended to deal with human values. Wallace describes this problem to point the way to a different kind of fiction—which could be called post-post-modern or just be said to “back away from ironic watching, [that has] the childish gall actually to endorse single-entendre values [and] which treat[s] old untrendy human troubles and emotions in U.S life with reverence and conviction [and] eschew[s] self-consciousness and fatigue.” Wallace attempted to do much the same in Infinite Jest, especially in his sympathetic and empathetic treatment of recovering addicts and alcoholics.

As the stultifying and stunting effect of irony and cynicism go beyond the realm of literature and art and seeps into spiritual life, Wallace’s essay represents the best kind of criticism: writing which appraises current culture, explains clearly and coherently why it is lacking, and in so doing points the way back to an examined life.

David S. Glatt is a partner at Meitar Law Offices in Israel.