Trapped in the Experience Machine with David Foster Wallace
Wallace's prescient essay "E Unibus Pluram" cautions us about the consequences of mediated experience and makes a case for the importance of sincere Literature.
If science is the “view from nowhere,” as Thomas Nagel called it, then literature is the view from everywhere.
~Erik Hoel, “Fiction in the Age of Screens”
Robert Nozick, an eminent 20th century philosopher, devised a thought experiment which has come to be referred to as the Experience Machine. This machine can provide any desiderata or experience at any intensity imaginable. Nozick further stipulates that the experience machine would be so effective that the stimuli would be indistinguishable from reality. In other words, it is entering The Matrix of your own creation with it subject to your every whim. He then asks, if given the choice, would we prefer the machine to reality? Would we ever unplug? Nozick argues that if pleasure is the only intrinsic value (i.e. ethical hedonism), then people would all have overwhelming reason to be hooked up to an experience machine. Back in 1974 Nozick thought that humanity’s overwhelming preference would be for the red pill (reality) - that no one would knowingly choose an artificial simulacrum simply because it met every need and desire. Is this still true today? I’m less confident than Nozick was.
In our advanced technological age, we all have facsimiles of the experience machine in our pockets (smartphones), desks (laptops/desktops), walls (flatscreens and gaming consoles), or pretty much anywhere else we can fit a screen. And we definitely struggle to pry our eyes away from these devices yet they don’t seem to make us happier. This paradox can be read as either support for or refutation of the conclusions of Nozick’s thought experiment. We do see to by junkies for super stimuli, but satiation, habituation, and ennui are part of our physiology and psychology too. So Nozick is right in that it appears that humans aren’t satisfied with pleasure alone. We require troubled waters to navigate, hurdles to clear, battles to win. And the grander the scale and the bigger the audience for our triumps the better! We still have a social impulse too. Are these just things beyond the capabilities of our current experience machines? Will they eventually be able to push these buttons too? Will we still want to unplug then? It’s a high stakes question that hangs in the balance.
Ostensibly, there is quite a bit of complexity involved in human happiness and meaning so answers may vary for different people. And I can’t say that any and all experience machines would be bad? I can see having healthy, temporary relationships with them. The tech boom has had it’s upsides of course (I say as I order some scrumptious DoorDash and answer emails on my smartphone). Personally, I don’t see meaning drained from the world because of material abundance and the cornucopia of leisure activities. However, I think it would behoove us to opt for less addicting experience machines. The type that can balance the pleasure principle with meaningful vocation. We can only reap our rewards after a little pain. The real flesh and blood world has a deep pull, which is why Nozick was confident that humans would reject the experience machine. Romantic conquests of Nature, the challenges of institution building, and the warmth of communal life are more satisfying. The issue is that biologically we are fallible sensory machines so our interface with the world will always be prone to manipulations like addiction.
Can we strike this balance? Can there be an experience machine that actually makes us better at being real humans? I think there may be, and I think it already exists. It’s the novel. First, it clearly isn’t a supersensorium. It’s just text - page after page of it. The sensory intensity is dialed way back, and the demand for intentional focus is cranked way up. It is a training ground for the mind and for being a social creature. We do require children to read in school afterall. Novels as low tech experience machines still facilitate entry into worlds of dazzling possibility. Any interesting mind, exotic setting, or wholly original imaginative experience can be accessed. So then, if novels are a sort of optimized experience machine that balance meaning and pleasure, why are so few people reading them? This is a concern of mine. I do think novels are simply losing attentional share to flashier alternatives: TV, video games, social media, etc. But if we could finagle a reinvigoration in the quality of and interest in the novel, I’d wager that it’d improve our psychological wellbeing, our culture, and our politics. We can’t rollback technology, but we may be able to use it better.
In taking a closer look at what the experience machines of our age may be doing. I think the writings of David Foster Wallace are especially insightful. They’re also prescient on the recent failures of the novel and the dominance of technological replacements like TV. In the 90s and 00s, Wallace (aka DFW) argued that contemporary authors of literary fiction had neglected their obligation to deliver meaning, opting instead for ironic and cynical poses. He argued this was a function of the influence of television and related ideas that emerged alongside TV’s rise to cultural dominance. To get a good handle on this argument it important to understand a bit more about Wallace and the ideas he was concerned with, specifically postmodernism.
Just for disclosure purposes, I'd like to admit to being a big fan of David Foster Wallace (1962-2008). This admission may provoke dismissal or derision in some who have developed an ideological aversion to Wallace, but this seems to be the result cultural warring inside the literary world (see Fredrik deBoer’s Substack post for more context). But let’s get back to who Wallace was.
DFW was a writer with rockstar status, who was beset with both monumental ambition and psychological baggage. He achieved a type of literary fame that is seldom seen. We won’t see a comparable figure maybe ever again. Yet like many a rockstar, his personal life was fraught with troubles. He had tumultuous, tortured relationships with the women in his life. There is also, of course, his suicide. It is certainly a component of his enduring fame/infamy. It placed him in the annals of literary martyrology and cemented particular associations between him and literary ideas. These associations are mostly vague and heady notions about authenticity, addiction, and depression that permeate the younger segment of upper/upper-middlebrow culture. Of course, his trademark bandana, the type of readers who became his biggest fans, and his celebrated (maybe over-celebrated) “This is Water” speech contributed as well. But beyond the persona, DFW had real things to say and said them in such a distinct way. To read David, felt like knowing David - sometimes painfully so.
One of the recurring questions on Wallace’s mind was the state of the novel and Literature. Part of this stemmed from his professional ambition. Another part of it grew out of his intensely analytical and reflective perspective, one that can often be characterized as meta. And a final portion of it concerned technological changes in entertainment and cultural production. It was also a thorny question that was needling some of his writer friends, peers, and competitors. I don’t think it’s a tension that has alleviated in any way either since. If anything, the stakes seem higher. The problems seem worse. Altogether, this confluence of zeitgeist and authorial anxiety motivated Wallace’s writing. This of course includes his opus Infinite Jest, but also some of his nonfiction essays too.
Sometime in the six years after his debut novel, The Broom of the System, and in the three year before Infinite Jest, Wallace penned "E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction" (1993) for the journal Review of Contemporary Fiction. It was a whip-smart, funny, and heartfelt polemic that lamented the ubiquitous influence of postmodernism on Literature. Wallace traced how this malign influence played out through television and fed back into literature, wrecking havoc by encouraging a defensive and pervasive use of irony. The title is, of course, a play on the U.S. motto E Pluribus Unum – Latin for “out of many, one - where Wallace’s refraction means “from one, many.” This title refers to Wallace’s claim that televisual media is atomizing and anesthetizing. It is basically a Brave New World take replacing Huxley’s drugs and fornication with television and postmodernism (see related quote below from writer Erik Hoel essay). But what makes “E Unibus Pluram” an excellent and resonant essay is that Wallace doesn’t stop there. He extends his analysis beyond the sociological consequences of televisual media (concerns shared by other media theorists like Neil Postman in his book Amusing Ourselves to Death) to explore the pathologies of contemporary fiction. Plus, Wallace’s essay persuades us to care about fiction.
This year [2016] is the twentieth anniversary of Infinite Jest’s publication, and it, along with its spiritual predecessor Brave New World, now looks to be one of the major prescient books for the twenty-first century. Both anticipate that the greatest coming change will not be advancement in the sciences or the humanities or political ideas, but in our ability to fill our leisure time with ever more potent psychological rewards. For Huxley it took the form of drugs, but for Wallace there was a clear line between drugs and a more insidious form: the screen.
~Erik Hoel, “Fiction in the Age of Screens”
In “E Unibus Pluram,” Wallace isn’t muzzled by hidebound literary nicety. He fires shots immediately, indicting the lazy anthropology of many 90s fiction writers:
Self-conscious people’s oversensitivity to real humans tends to put us before the television and its one-way window in an attitude of relaxed and total reception, rapt.
The cowardly default to TV to learn about people, as opposed to venturing out into the world, stunts the imaginative capacities and perpetuated falseness. Wallace thinks this is particularly an issue with postmodern fiction:
American fiction remains deeply informed by television… especially those strains of fiction with roots in postmodernism, which even at its rebellious metafictional zenith was less a “response to” televisual culture than a kind of abiding-in-TV. Even back then [mid-1960s through early 70s], the borders were starting to come down.
TV is leading literature by the nose because it preoccupies authors. It provokes their anxiety about the value of their work and how it will be received. The enhanced awareness of the mechanisms of storytelling, the literary ideas of the past, and the latest intellectual trends, raises the stakes for authors. They know the risks that they may be eviscerated by those deemed smarter or more fashionable than them are real, and that the resulting ignominy could be amplified across infinite screens. Who dares to open their minds and hearts to scrutiny in this context?
In Wallace’s estimation, TV’s influence on fiction is a problem for culture at large. He points out TV is a low art, and low art ensnares its audience with appeals to their vulgarity. It preys on the limbic system, roping us into an addiction cycle. After trapping us, it fills us with tantalizing junk and makes us feel beautiful, understood, and heroic, and then leaves us empty with regret and on edge. When we turn off the glowing screen and look in the mirror, we are still plain old us again not the luminescent figures on TV. Wallace knew this himself intimately. He admits to being “a child of TV,” sharing his TV addiction and an imagined version through the eyes of a “Joe Briefcase.” But the existence of TV alone isn’t completely responsible for Wallace’s worry. He’s most concerned about the trajectory of the ideas that TV sustains and propels along, specifically its relationship with postmodernism and irony.
Postmodernism is a way of thinking that encourages skepticism of meta-narratives or what some would less charitably call myths. Models of Truth or history are anathema to postmodernists. They think these are convenient fictions invented to serve private interests. It is a cynical mode. Thus, postmodern literature is marked, both stylistically and ideologically, by a reliance on disorienting techniques like fragmentation, paradox, unreliable narration, convolution, parody, paranoia, authorial self-reference, and irony. DFW himself can be slotted into this tradition or at least adjacent to it, but he yearned to transcend it. He recognized that there was some value in postmodernism. Some of the experimentation was intoxicating, but he also felt that it had become a terrible trap for literature.
In “E Unibus Pluram,” Wallace identifies postmodern irony as the bedrock of TV’s content. It was a natural evolution of the medium after its early innocent years. He sees this irony as "a way of being both inside and outside of a particular experience at the same time." This detachment, he argues, allows writers to avoid confronting the emotional complexities of human experience. It is ultimately a defensive posture that defenestrates the power of art to move people or culture. This authorial position then bleeds into the zeitgeist and spreads stagnation and nihilism. Wallace doesn’t have a clear vision for a way out of this trap, but his plea is that authors start taking real risk and move beyond the postmodern mode. In this, I heartily agree with him.
“E Unibus Pluram” was an exacting analysis of the 90s zeitgeist and prophetic about the rapturous power of media technologies and the evolution cultural ideas. We have yet to escape from the irony trap, and we grow closer to catatonia with each new iteration of the experience machine. Literature that dared to lay claim to truths about the human experience and do so in courageous sincerity may indeed improve our individual and cultural wellbeing. I doubt that it’ll be a panacea either. Again, we are fallible sensory machines.
Plus, the artistic landscape is in some way much improved compared to Wallace’s heyday. Some creative productions still deliver authenticity and take risks even on TV. Prestige television shows like The Wire aren’t filled with knowing irony like Seinfield or Friends. They can reach the audience and plumb human nature just as well as some novels. So we shouldn’t overextend Wallace’s claims. The concerns he raises are real, still real today, but they are specific to a certain group of insecure elites. It does have a sort of miasmic influence beyond them but it isn’t totalizing. I wish that Wallace’s message would be heeded by this unsettled elect, but I find that unlikely. Everyday people can still of course make salutary choices. We can take time to put down the smartphones, turn off the screens, and log out of Twitter and read great Literature and connect with other people in sincere ways. To whatever extent possible, we can work against the tide of a decadent and cynical cultural moment and preserve the art, ideas, and technology that elevated communities and individual lives in the past. To end, let’s consider with Erik Hoel’s warning about losing the novel in his similar essay “Fiction in the Age of Screens:”
But at least, if the novel falls, it won’t be because of its artistic essence. It won’t be replaced in its effects by equivalent television or video games or any other extrinsic medium. If the novel goes, it will be because we as a culture drifted away from the intrinsic world. Left without the novel our universe will be partitioned up, leaving us stranded within the unbreachable walls of our skulls. And inside, projected on the bone, the flicker of a screen.