DFW's E Unibus Pluram
I was so delighted by David Foster Wallace's submission for the Atlantic's "Future of the American Idea" piece (I think Joyce Carol Oates had a pretty good one as well) that I looked him up and downloaded several essays; I think his recent one on Roger Federer is really the only thing I'd read by him previously.
"E Unibus Pluram," a musing on/diatribe against the cultural ubiquity of irony as promulgated by television since about 1960, is interesting for at least a couple reasons, largely as it pertains to the present although I also enjoyed his analysis of TV/irony's effect on the prototypical young American personality--ironically defensive, unwilling to pay too much attention to anyone or anything, too scornful to be scorned.
Written in 1990, Wallace spends some paragraphs near the end of the piece on the future, particularly as his theoretical couch potato, Joe Briefcase, gains the ability to record bit-perfect copies of television programs and remix and share the results of his newfangled labor via "a kind of interactive net." Basically he's discussing Tivo, DVD, and YouTube roughly a decade and a half before the fact.
What I notice in particular is his failure to connect this idea to something he mentions early on, that broadcasting is ontologically prone to "low" art, as crude and vulgar humor/drama/etc. is more broadly appealing than more difficult, esoteric forms of high art. He understands that somehow televised commodities will naturally become more differentiated in this new marketplace, but doesn't make the connection that proliferation of content will result in "narrowcasting," ambitious stuff like you see on HBO and Showtime and which has now filtered back to the networks. There was a recent episode of KCRW's "The Business" in which an executive from the WB discussed the financial failure of her network and UPN, but she claimed that they prefigured the current TV landscape by pioneering strong brand identities and focusing on specific demographics.
Wallace also makes points about irony in television resulting from the cognitive dissonance whereby television commercials and programming glorify the experience and values of the group while simultaneously cultivating a pathologically lonely viewer. The only way to resolve this dichotomy successfully is for television to parody itself, thus removing any possibility of successful critique from any other source.
He repeats the depressing mantra of "six hours a day per household" constantly, implying that such a behavior pattern seems unchangeable, although it's obvious now that television networks are really worried about dwindling audiences. I read in Variety today, though, that the last writers strike back in 1988 caused a never-reversed 5% drop in audience across the board, but I suspect no one brought this to Wallace's attention during the writing of this essay.
"E Unibus Pluram," a musing on/diatribe against the cultural ubiquity of irony as promulgated by television since about 1960, is interesting for at least a couple reasons, largely as it pertains to the present although I also enjoyed his analysis of TV/irony's effect on the prototypical young American personality--ironically defensive, unwilling to pay too much attention to anyone or anything, too scornful to be scorned.
Written in 1990, Wallace spends some paragraphs near the end of the piece on the future, particularly as his theoretical couch potato, Joe Briefcase, gains the ability to record bit-perfect copies of television programs and remix and share the results of his newfangled labor via "a kind of interactive net." Basically he's discussing Tivo, DVD, and YouTube roughly a decade and a half before the fact.
What I notice in particular is his failure to connect this idea to something he mentions early on, that broadcasting is ontologically prone to "low" art, as crude and vulgar humor/drama/etc. is more broadly appealing than more difficult, esoteric forms of high art. He understands that somehow televised commodities will naturally become more differentiated in this new marketplace, but doesn't make the connection that proliferation of content will result in "narrowcasting," ambitious stuff like you see on HBO and Showtime and which has now filtered back to the networks. There was a recent episode of KCRW's "The Business" in which an executive from the WB discussed the financial failure of her network and UPN, but she claimed that they prefigured the current TV landscape by pioneering strong brand identities and focusing on specific demographics.
Wallace also makes points about irony in television resulting from the cognitive dissonance whereby television commercials and programming glorify the experience and values of the group while simultaneously cultivating a pathologically lonely viewer. The only way to resolve this dichotomy successfully is for television to parody itself, thus removing any possibility of successful critique from any other source.
He repeats the depressing mantra of "six hours a day per household" constantly, implying that such a behavior pattern seems unchangeable, although it's obvious now that television networks are really worried about dwindling audiences. I read in Variety today, though, that the last writers strike back in 1988 caused a never-reversed 5% drop in audience across the board, but I suspect no one brought this to Wallace's attention during the writing of this essay.
Posted on Saturday, November 17, 2007
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