Technology, Temporality and the Postmodern Mimesis in David Foster Wallace’s “The Suffering Channel”
Dr. Zuzanna Ladyga (Warsaw University, Poland)
David Foster Wallace is sometimes dubbed one of the true heirs to the tradition of American avant-garde writing in the 60s and 70s, and considered as one of just a handful of artists who actually manage to mix literary experimentation with a kind of definite yet elusive mimetism. Wallace’s “The Suffering Channel,” a story from his most recent collection Oblivion, is a perfect example of this mixture. What it demonstrates so well is that the poetics of the experimental postmodern mimesis starts with an exploration of the rhetorical no man’s land between the dynamic temporal patterns of experimental performatives, on the one hand, and the teleological linearity of realist discourse on the other. Similarly to other stories in the collection, “The Suffering Channel” exhausts the signifying possibilities of modern corporate jargons and mobilizes a variety of cultural references in order to produce an unsettling – or, as one critic puts it – “creepy effect, like an X-ray of one of John Updike’s classics of interpersonal strain” (Troy). Mercilessly dissecting contemporary reality, this X-ray image of contemporary America erases all traces of depth, commentary, significance. But what makes “The Suffering Channel” different from other stories in Oblivion is that the sharpness of its image is achieved through a distinct poetic strategy of incorporating and manipulating the motif of modern communication technologies. Rather than disingenuously using techno references as realist shortcuts, “The Suffering Channel” employs the notion of technologization, with all its ideological implications, to dictate the temporal structuration of the text’s subjectivity. What follows is therefore an analysis of David Foster Wallace’s spatio-temporal dynamics of a technologically-inscribed literary subject.
Composed in journalist jargon, “The Suffering Channel” is a story about a soft-news reporter Skip Atwater on an in-field research assignment in Indiana. The assignment is about one Mr. Brint Moltke, who possesses a rather unusual gift for producing bowel movements that are readymade replicas of famous sculptures. The Indianan narrative thread runs parallel to the detailed, almost minute-by-minute account of everyday business at the Manhattan offices of Skip’s company, the Style magazine. It is there, on the 42 floor of WTC South Tower that Skip’s supervisors are developing a new reality TV called the Suffering Channel, a cable venture planned to screen sequences of 30-second shots of people in pain, in 6 hour loops, 24 hours a day.
As if the risk of certain clichédness of those plot-elements was not enough, the narrative’s present tense, evoking the ominous imparfait of the nouveau roman, situates the events in the summer of 2001 and in the context of the upcoming 9/11. Announced in the form of short, intrusive reminders as in: “the executive intern let her hair fall graciously; she had 10 weeks to live” (326), the context of the 9/11 imposes on the story the unsettling mode of reminiscence. What’s disturbing here is the insistence with which Wallace’s teleological maneuver imposes a reading of “The Suffering Channel” as recollection, that is, as something that has more at stake than just literary experimentation. In total violation of the intuitions of the literarily competent postmodern reader, the story forces this reader to participate in a type of temporal synthesis whose processes depend on a promise of teleological closure. A promise of signs actually anchoring meanings, of there being a possibility to re-humanize, re-familiarize and restore coherence of the subject construct in Wallace’s text. “The Suffering Channel” never fulfills this promise, but as the story develops, it becomes clear that Wallace’s emphasis on re-memoration is not only stylistic but also, and most importantly, thematic. What makes the promise of closure untenable in the story, thus creating the effect of the uncanny, is the gradually complexified theme of technological usurpation and irreversible de-humanization of the very phenomenon of memory.
How does Wallace play with the idea of human memory becoming technologized? A helpful framework for the inquiry into this problem can be found in J. F. Lyotard’s concept of technologized subjectivity presented in The Inhuman. Speculating about the cultural role of techno-software solutions, Lyotard proposes to distinguish three types of technology-induced memory effects: Borrowing his terminology from psychoanalysis he differentiates between breaching, scanning, and anamnesis. The first, also referred to as “frayage,” is a mode of repetition whose temporal dynamics does not involve the movement backward into the past, but a constant “mooring of time in habit” (Harris 140). As Lyotard explains, current technology “removes the close contexts of which rooted cultures a woven,” and forces upon these cultures a manner of memorization that is “freed from the supposedly immediate conditions of time and space” and thus based exclusively on “spontaneous production of the past in habit” (50). The same historical context gives rise to the second type of memory-effect: the mode of aimless rememoration and classification of information called scanning. In contrast to frayage, scanning
implies not only the retention of the past in the present as present, but the synthesis of the past as such and its reactualization as past in the present (of consciousness). Remembering implies the identification of what is remembered, and its classification in a calendar and a cartography. (Lyotard 51)
While breaching and scanning are ways in which a contemporary mind deals with informational overload, a slightly different mechanism characterizes the third kind of memory-effects of technological inscription that Lyotard, still using Freudian terminology, chooses to label anamnesis. This mode of recollection consists in the “working through” of the past by means of available “frayed” threads and elusive echoes of this past, the result of which is that of slowly inscribing onto memory that which the latter had never registered.
Lyotard’s strategy of borrowing from psychoanalysis has its purpose. Its perverse application of familiar psychological notions allows the French philosopher to illustrate accurately the paradox of a techno-colonized mind; although in today’s techno-reality we may still believe that memory, and human thinking in general, is conceivable predominantly in human terms, the reality is that the mechanism of mental processes has internalized the information processing patterns of technological devices. Frayage as thought-habituation, scanning as information’s mental design, and anamnesis as the process of personal re-signification are completely redefined and restructured by our experience of technology. How can we witness the event of this redefinition and restructuration? One answer to this question is offered by “The Suffering Channel,” since the three operations of breaching, scanning, and anamnesis that Lyotard associates with the phenomenon of technologization seem to correspond to the three basic patterns of temporal structuration of the story’s technologized subjectivity.
Wallace’s first take at the relationship between technology and memory-processes is in the main character of the reporter Skip Atwater himself. Skip is one of the few “rare and old school” journalists at Style who have outstanding verbal memory, use shorthand, and do their own in-field research. He is also a journalist who, being an excellent rewrite himself, rarely needs much rewriting. What additionally distinguishes Skip from his coworkers is that he always devotedly searches for the UBA (the jargon for the upbeat angle, the story’s hook) for his pieces until he finds one. Not that he is some sort of an idealist; he is “normally a consummate pro” who knows well the terrain covered by Style’s feature called what in the world, and “has no history of instability or substance issues” (240). It’s just that due to some unresolved matters from his past – his first employer accused him of lacking “an innate sense of tragedy” (270) – he aims with desperate consistency at undoing his journalistic curse.
In a sense, Atwater stands in total contrast to the endlessly hierarchized world of the unpaid interns and overambitious editors at Style, who while perfecting their Gaultier or Issey Miyake outfits and mechanically retaining professional demeanor they’d learned at Wellesley, seem hardly human in their interactions, and turn out invalid as far as journalistic skills are concerned. For instance, Laurel Manderley, Skip’s editorial intern achieves cyborgian perfection in the role of a gracious e-mail coordinator, and story-pitch forwarder to the head intern and then Style’s editor in chief, but is completely incapable of writing simple declarative sentences. Similarly, Skip’s assistant editor is famous for not taking off his headset phone and typing two or three things at the same time, but despite this talent is said to never have written or rewritten anything in his life. Compared to them, Skip Atwater represents the apparently more human side of the entropic system of the soft-news industry. However, his apparent “old school rarity” is anything but an instance of Wallace’s nostalgically moralistic tribute to the old, pre-digitalized modes of thinking. From the beginning of the story, the displays of Skip’s amazing verbal memory and rewrite skills serve a double function: on one level, they are supposed to verify the character’s independence from technology, but on the other, they expose his narrative’s total dependence on the digitalized modes of thought transmission.
Let us, for instance, look at a fragment when, reporting to Style’s headquarters on his first encounter with Mr. Moltke and his publicity-hungry wife from a Holiday Inn in Mount Carmel, Indiana, Skip resolves to using dated communication devices. First of all, his mobile does not have a reliable signal, so, in a clichéd-movie gesture, he contacts Style’s editor from an obsolete payphone in the hotel lobby. Also, when he wants to send pictures of Moltke’s pieces to the office, he has to rely on black-and-white Xeroxes and a half-broken, low resolution fax machine. Finally, since his subject, Brint Moltke refuses to answer any questions, Skip cannot use his high-tech recorder and resolves to shorthand to document his impressions and create report material. All this would suggest that once cut-off from online contact with his editors, Skip’s narrative will move him in the direction of recovering his lost “sense of tragedy.” Or, as we may also put it, that the narrative’s unveiling will adopt the pattern of a search for the originary lack.
But in Skip’s case, technological deprivation does precisely the opposite. At the first glance, it seems that we are dealing with a classic example of textualized repetition-compulsion: the circumstances make Skip reminisce about his past and his memories are notoriously interrupted by a question to the artist: “I think I speak for a lot of folks when I say how curious I am to know how you do it. Just how the whole thing works.” However, the frayage-pattern of the repetition cannot be explained in psychoanalytic terms, as a language symptom of experiencing the inaccessibility of the object of primary desire. What the content of Skip’s utterance suggests is that in his memory the structure of a quest for the originary lack – the primary cause – has been replaced by the structure of a quest for its opposite, the upbeat angle, the final, commercial effect. In other words, though the narrative readily invites a Lacanian interpretation, the actual time vector of Wallace’s poetics of recollection is radically reversed from the past to the future: memory is effect not cause-oriented. “The Suffering Channel” offers a helpful metaphor of this process in the image of Skip’s “old-school” tape-recorder he uses for the interview with the Moltkes. Just like this old-fashioned machine turns out to be a fancily disguised high-tech electronic device, the cause-seeking memoir form of his narrative turns out to conceal its real temporal structure which is that of effectiveness. We are thus dealing with a complete temporal reversal within the construction of the literary subjectivity. And it is highly significant that the manifestation of this temporal reversal coincides with the description of the main character’s technological isolation, because this coincidence foregrounds the extent to which Skip has assimilated the technological/commercial patterns of temporal synthesis. In other words, Atwater’s story might be read as one of Foster Wallace’s X-ray visions of how thoroughly the human thinking processes have become altered by their participation in social systems where information (as fax, as voicemail, as e-mail) circulates without any links to its spatio-temporal context, and how irreversible this change really is. The technologized mode of thinking is the thinking freed from any constraints of space and time, and therefore, as in Skip’s case, it finds the old “human” pathways and their metaphors useless and unproductive (or counterproductive in the Marxist sense of the word).
In this context, it comes as no surprise that Skip’s narrative abounds in moments of spatio-temporal decontextualization. Whenever Skip’s account of the Moltkes becomes interrupted by flashbacks from his childhood, he stumbles upon an inability to locate their spatio-temporal frame of reference. For example, his perception of the oppressive presence of Mrs. Moltke’s overweight body brings about the idea of Skip’s mother’s intrusive parenting but not the actual memory of Oedipal desire or sexual abuse: the reporter may be jotting down some impersonal shorthand notes about a possibility of having been abused or about family history of whipping, but the memories as such are never recounted. They are re-lived. Skip is driving the gigantic Amber Moltke to a Xerox place in the nearby Scipio, and throughout the trip feels suffocated by the proximity of the woman’s huge body so that whenever she leans to say something to him, he feels his knee breaking under her soft touch. Although there is no actual abuse, Atwater spends the next day staring at a real, aching bruise on his knee. He cannot identify its cause since the memories have irreversibly mixed with reality. He feels as a “bodyshaped area of space” (313) and stares at an Archimboldo print on the wall, completely unable to recognize in it anything more than a chaotic heap of vegetables.
Skip’s memories lack a determinate spatio-temporal context and his mind fails to sort the context out. When, a couple of hours later, he is trying to make his mind “process disparate thoughts and impressions much faster than [at] its normal rate” (287), his efforts bring him, the verbal memory pro, to the brink of a
lengthy and uncomfortable attack of what felt like aphasia that sometimes afflicted him with incidentals, Atwater was able to remember that the correct term for the apple [resting on Mrs. Moltke’s lap] was simply: pin cushion. One reason it was so discomfiting was that the detail was irrelevant (252)
In view of what Lyotard has to say about technologized modes of thought-organization, we might detect in this episode an instance of what the philosopher calls “scanning,” that is a rememoration without any specified aim. As the quoted passage demonstrates, Skip’s memory is retrieving, labeling and categorizing information, but unlike in scanning understood conventionally, this retrieval proceeds in violation of the principle of relevance.
Because the mechanism of randomized scanning is a property of a technologized mind, its manifestations are, understandably, even more prominent in those narrative episodes which feature interactions at _Style’_s high-tech Manhattan offices. One of these episodes is a conversation at the gym between one brilliant executive intern and Skip’s supervisor Ellen Bactrian. As the two women synchronously pedal on the elliptical trainers, their conversation about the controversy of Skip’s “miraculous poo story” is gradually drowned by a flood of details which obstruct its flow. There is a growing number of insignificant detail in description of their attires (the Gaultier slacks, the strapped Laurent open-toe heels). The amount of unrelated information about the girls’ pasts (e.g. that they both had fathers who were MDs) increases all the time. And in addition to this, we are given every tiny detail of the characters’ gestures such as every moment of the executive intern checking time on her wristwatch or shaking her wet hair “to let it fall graciously.”
The proliferation of this irrelevant information is, however, only a background to the more profound foreclosure of ends. As the editorial intern is trying to make Ellen Bactrian understand that _Style’_s aim is “not to create a controversy but to cover it” she deliberately complicates the conversation to make it look like a brainstorming session whose outcome, however, she had known from the start:
The way Ellen Bactrian now pressed at her forehead in unconscious imitation of the executive intern was a sign of just the kind of core insecurity the executive intern was trying to mitigate by bringing her along slowly and structuring their conversations as brainstorming rather than, for instance, her simply outright telling the girl what to do (324).
Again, we are dealing with a temporal reversal of the cause and the outcome. If the aim of the communicational effort is a known — the idea of coverage is there from the start — then the information exchange loses all sense of telos. Its only function is, as Wallace calls it at some point, “the management of insignificance,” typical for the technologized mind’s manner of scanning. Bactrian speaks in “a half dreamy way of classic brainstorming” but all she does is rephrase the words of the executive intern: ‘Meaning we don’t totally sacrifice the scoop element. We need just enough of a prior venue so the story already exists. We’re covering a controversy instead of profiling some freakoid whose b.m. comes out in the shape of Anubis’s head (325)” She does the paraphrase twice in the conversation, and each time, although she does not have a clue what the “coverage” should be like, her words are followed by a mention of her constructing “mental flowcharts” of the yet-unspecified editorial procedures in her head. The implied purposelessness of her mental effort and the gradual complexification of its image – in the second instance, the mental charts contain “actual boxes, Roman numerals, and mutliarrow graphics” (326) – combine into a vivid illustration of scanning as rememoration for its own sake.
The idea of “story’s coverage” brings us back to Skip Atwater. If you remember, Atwater is an excellent rewrite; he can create a good story out of virtually any set of random notes, and therefore could be expected to eventually manage to find the UBA for the controversial Moltke story. However, _Style _choose not to rely on Atwater’s rewrite skills and decide to cover the story by making it a live broadcast of Brint Moltke’s act as a sequence of personal anguish on the Suffering Channel.
How are we to interpret this move? To answer this question, let me make one more analogy to Lyotard, who actually invokes the process of journalistic rewriting in his discussion of technologized memory effects. He says that the creativity pattern of a rewrite’s work aptly characterizes the mechanism of stitching of the frayed bits of memories in the process of anamnesis. This idea finds a vivid illustration in Skip’s narrative, since, as I said earlier, whenever the character’s ability to recalls the past and associate it with the present fails him, he sutures his text with the story of Moltke. That’s on the one hand. But on the other, as I argued earlier, Skip’s memory processes, being irreversibly technologized (i.e. commodified), work not towards the primary loss but towards a future gain. If so, then the decision of Style’s executives to rescue the UBA by covering the Moltke story on the Suffering Channel is, technically speaking, an upgrade on Skip’s old-school technique of rewriting. On the Suffering Channel, the UBA of the live shots of Moltke producing his art-faeces is to derive its power from the fact that the story is presented as the account of a painful personal exposure. The commercial effect of controversy, which would have probably been the UBA of Skip’s piece, is now to be disguised as a truth-seeking account of human distress. Therefore, if in the case of Skip’s quasi self-writing it was possible to talk about the temporal reversal within the mechanism of the memory processes – the structure of archeological quest for the originary lack, the Lacanian Thing, the ultimate emblem for the primary experience of anguish, was replaced by the structure of pursuit of the commercial effect, then in the case of the Suffering Channel’s broadcast we are dealing with another turnabout. It is not just that the televised version assumes the image of elemental suffering. The underlying temporal pattern of the UBA’s being disguised as authentication is such that the controversy, which is already there as “a given” to be “covered” becomes the actual object of desire. It becomes the actual object of desire in the sense that the UBA moves into the position normally occupied by the figure of a primary lack and assumes its cause-oriented dynamics.
Consequently, if we interpret Wallace’s narrative as an enterprise in textualizing the cycle of technology-induced displacements of the sense of identity within the structure of a contemporary mind, then this moment in the story can be read as the event of this cycle coming full circle, or as the Suffering Channel creators would put it, the event of this cycle’s forming a loop. The UBA is internalized, assimilated into subjective processes in the text to the effect of undermining the significance of the principle of memory as the basis for subject structuration. It is as if temporality itself was put into question and made redundant, thus textualizing the post-contemporary experience of technologized thinking. This, at least, seems to be the meaning of the closing scene of Wallace’s story. Its final passage, which depicts in great detail the problems of the technical preparations for the live coverage of Moltke’s artistic performance, ends with the following image:
There’s also some eleventh hour complication involving the ground camera and the problem of keeping the commode’s special monitor out of its upward shot, since video capture of a camera’s own monitor causes what is know in the industry as feedback glare – the artist in such a case would see, not his own emergent Victory, but a searing and amorphous light. (329)
The image of the feedback glare, or rather a lack thereof, is a perfect realization of the temporality-free anamnesis. Interestingly, a very similar visual metaphor for this memory process is invoked by Lyotard himself, when he talks about the effect of technology-inscribed anamnetic effort. To explain the temporal implosion of memory in the act of “working through” that reverts into self-annullment, Lyotard makes an analogy to Dôgen’s idea of a “clear mirror” which when facing another mirror breaks everything into ‘smithereens’ (Lyotard 55). This moment of reflection is not a moment when we can witness any image breaking, because breaking is that which has already taken place, and all an observer manages to capture is how the breaking gains momentum. Thus, Lyotard explains, “there is a breaking presence which is never inscribed nor memorable. It does not appear. It is not a forgotten inscription, it does not have its place and time on the support of inscriptions, in the reflecting mirror. It remains unknown to breachings and scannings” (55). Otherwise put, the defining moment of the anamnetic effort of a subject striving for the knowledge of his/her past, is paradoxically the moment of a total erasure of this knowledge, an instance of the subject’s radical self-cancellation.
And it is precisely this effect that the “feedback glare” in the final scene of Wallace’s story has on the temporal structure of the text’s subjectivity. It is that moment which cancels out, fragments, overlays all time-anchors of that subjectivity’s history. The whole point of filming Moltke is for the TV viewer to see the expression of total torment and self-humiliation on his face as he sees his Victory sculpture, that is to reflect the experience of controversy, humanity, sensation, and anguish all merged into one. The eleventh hour complication foretells the radical de-temporalization of this mergence in the figure of the blinding glare that annuls the difference between rememoration with oblivion. In the experience of watching the Suffering Channel, the effort of anamnesis is thus to be aimed not at self-recognition but at the amorphous act of self-cancellation.
Of course, this is just one way of reading Wallace’s story. However, it does seem to demonstrate a noteworthy aspect of the mimetic effect of “The Suffering Channel” namely, its underlying strategy of textualizing the incursion of technological mode of signification into the construction of the postmodern subject. Without moralizing, Wallace explores the figure of memory and manages not only to reflect this process stylistically and thematically but also to emphasize its irreversible nature.
Works Cited
Harris, Paul. “Thinking @ the Speed of Time: Globalization and Its Dis-Contents or, Can Lyotard’s Thought Go on withour a Body.” Yale French Studies 99 “Jean- François Lyotard: Time and Judgement (2001), 129-148.
Lyotard, Jean-François. The Inhuman: Reflections on Time. Trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby. Stanford CA: Stanford UP, 2004.
Patterson, Troy. Rev. of Oblivion by David Foster Wallace. Entertainment Weekly (18 Jun 2004). 20 Oct 2007 http://www.ew.com/ew/article/0,,649829,00.html
Wallace, David Foster. “The Suffering Channel.” Oblivion. Boston: Backbay Books. Little, Brown and Company, 2004 (238-329).
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