In the Fishtank
The Biopolitical Imagination in David Foster Wallace’s This Is Water and The Pale King
Pieter Vermeulen
Abstract
This essay locates the late work of David Foster Wallace in contemporary debates about biopolitics. While work on various states of exception has provided critical and novelistic discourse with many lurid figures of bare life, the insidious, nonspectacular, everyday aspects of biopolitics – what I describe, following Simon During, as ‘the mundane’ – are less frequently the object of literary representation. The essay shows how Wallace’s 2005 lecture This Is Water dramatizes this difficulty, and that his posthumously published novel The Pale King more successfully figures the ‘mundane’ effects of the biopolitical reorganization of life in the neoliberal age.
Résumé
Cet article situe l’œuvre tardive de David Foster Wallace dans les débats contemporains sur la biopolitique. Alors que le travail sur différents états d’exception a donné lieu à un discours critique et littéraire sur les nombreuses formes sordides de la vie nue, les aspects insidieux, non-spectaculaires et quotidiens de la biopolitique – ce que je décris, suivant Simon During, comme le « monde ordinaire » (the mundane) – font moins fréquemment l’objet d’une représentation littéraire. Cet article montre comment la conférence de 2005 de Wallace, This is Water, met en scène cette difficulté, et comment le roman The Pale King, publié posthumément, représente de manière plus réussie les effets « ordinaires » de la réorganisation biopolitique de la vie à l’ère néolibérale.
Keywords
David Foster Wallace, literature & concepts of biopolitics, Giorgio Agamben, literature & the mundane
In the last decade, the notion of ‘biopolitics’ has acquired a remarkable popularity and legitimacy in academic and intellectual circles. Biopolitical analyses seem capable of describing phenomena that resist the categories of traditional political theory: one can think of developments such as the increasing colonization of private and social life by the dictates of capitalism or the massive arrogation of power by militarized states and the curtailment of personal liberties in the wake of 9/11. While the label ‘biopolitics’ operates in many different fields – from political theory to the more quantitatively oriented social sciences – this essay focuses on a distinction that is particularly relevant for an understanding of how contemporary literature can respond to the ongoing biopolitical reorganization of life. I argue that
there are two very different notions of unbearableness circulating in biopolitical discourse, and that the more lurid and spectacular of these has had a far greater appeal to the contemporary imagination than the more mundane one. While the former can easily be associated with the work of Giorgio Agamben, the latter is in fact much closer to the notion of biopolitics that Michel Foucault coined in his lectures at the Collège de France. I first introduce these two kinds of unbearableness, and then turn to the late work of David Foster Wallace, which explores the tensions between these forms in a particularly intense way. I argue that his 2005 lecture This Is Water tests (only to ultimately give in to) the temptations of the more lurid version of the intolerable, while The Pale King, the novel project that occupied him in the last years of his life, is a sustained attempt to attend to the more mundane kind of insufferability. It does so by focusing on a historically specific mutation in the history of biopolitics – the moment in the late 70s and 80s of the previous century when it shifted into its late capitalist phase. Read together, Wallace’s two late works highlight the difficulty of making visible – let alone bearable – the decidedly unheroic dimension of the impact of biopolitics on quotidian life.
1. Biopolitics and the Two Kinds of Unbearableness
Even if the term ‘biopolitics’ already circulated at the beginning of the twentieth century (Esposito 16), it owes its recent career to different series of lectures that Michel Foucault gave at the Collège de France in the 1970s. Foucault coined the term to capture the specific form of power that has increasingly come to control and determine life since the eighteenth century. For Foucault, this form of power is marked by the fact that it cancels the separation between the biological and the political determination of human life, which modernity borrowed from ancient Greece: biopolitics names “the set of mechanisms through which the basic biological features of the human species became the object of a political strategy” (Security 1). Modern power increasingly treats man as a biological species, as a race, as a population, rather than simply as an individual body to be disciplined (“Society” 243). Biopolitical power, in contrast to disciplinary power, is not concerned with punishing and correcting criminals and other marginal figures; instead, it targets the overall well-being of the population. It aims to “achieve overall states of equilibration or regularity,” and therefore “security mechanisms have to be installed around the random element inherent in a population of living beings so as to optimize a state of life” (246).
Foucault’s suggestions leave a lot of room for interpretation, to the extent that the afterlife of his work has generated both decidedly ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ versions of biopolitics. The ‘hard’ version takes on board Foucault’s contention that biopolitics consists in the power “to make life and to let die” (241), and that every biopolitics is also a form of ‘thanato-politics,’ a management of death. On this account, which is most influentially articulated in the work of Giorgio Agamben, the paradigm of the “security mechanisms” that must temper the “random element” in a population is the concentration and extermination camp; in a complementary way, every politics of life is a management of death that perpetuates a fateful paradigm whose perverted logic is emblematized by the Holocaust. This ‘hard’ biopolitical doctrine focuses mainly on the zones where the distinctions between life and death or between human and nonhuman life are blurred by the operations of power: think of the radical hopelessness of the stateless or the braindead, the Muselmänner in extermination camps, or the broken lives of Terri Schiavo and Guantanamo. These zones have in the last decade exercised an undeniable fascination
on the critical imagination as images of contemporary unbearableness and as examples of how every politics of life can degenerate into a spectacle of death. Indeed, this kind of unbearableness can easily be converted into moral and cultural capital: contemporary culture is populated by traumatized wrecks, figures of bare and unhoused life, Odradeks, and other silent representatives of the remainders of broken life.1
The ‘soft’ version of biopolitics is much harder to convert into literature. This version, which is actually closer to Foucault’s original account of biopolitics, does not situate the security of life in genocidal scenarios, but rather in more familiar, and decidedly less spectacular aspects of the organization of contemporary life: safety rules, hygienic measures, insurance systems, retirement plans, and the likes (“Society” 244) – a set of provisions that renders the life of the population as regular and predictable as possible, while protecting it from great risks through the application of a calculus of probability. In this ‘soft’ version, biopolitics is intertwined with what Foucault has influentially called ‘governmentality’: “the ensemble formed by institutions, procedures, analyses and reflections, calculations, and tactics” (108) that makes it possible to maximize the vitality of the population. In this version, the emblematic biopolitical figure is not the homo sacer, but rather, as Mika Ojakangas has noted, the Scandinavian middle-class social-democrat (27).
Even if these ‘soft’ biopolitical operations seem to be designed to make life bearable, and to neutralize the contingencies endemic to man’s biological constitution, they yet have a more sinister aspect. Middle-class Scandinavians are “an object – and a product – of the huge bio-political machinery” (Ojakangas 27): this machinery that is dedicated to the optimization of life almost invisibly infiltrates their relation to their food (multiply tested), their bodies (constantly monitored), their mobility (compulsory moose tests), their jobs, their lifestyles, and their consumption patterns. In one of the most inspiring updates of Foucault’s work, Jeffrey Nealon has argued that the biopolitical regulation of life has been ‘intensified’ since the 1980s and has, with the help of omnipresent information networks, led to a near-total colonization of life by the laws of capitalism. These laws have infiltrated the workings of the state, and of state institutions such as taxation and employment offices, and they now decisively shape contemporary human life. Far from neutralizing the contingencies of biological life, late capitalist biopolitics in fact exploits what Paolo Virno calls man’s “biological invariant” (92). Human beings, according to Virno, differ from other animals in that they are not born with specific instincts that will tie them to a well-defined occupation for the rest of their lives. Instead, and thanks to their “constitutively immature birth,” human beings are by definition merely “potential animal[s],” whose instincts are fatally non-specialized (95, 96). Human beings, in other words, are fated to be flexible, mobile, and capable of life-long learning, elements that late capitalist biopolitics “mobilizes to its advantage, in a historically unprecedented way” (92). Man’s first nature – that is, his lack of a determinate nature – has become second nature. The late capitalist mutation of biopolitics constitutes the horizon of contemporary human existence to the extent that it becomes hard to even apprehend its insufferability. Following a
1. This is obviously not a generous or even a fair representation of the work of Agamben, and of work inspired by him. My (much more limited) argument here is that some aspects of theories of the biopolitical more readily allow for cultural and imaginative uptake than others. While a more fine-grained consideration of the cogency and plausibility of Agamben’s thought is obviously indispensible, and has over the last decade in fact become an academic industry in its own right, this essay aims to interrogate an imaginative dynamic to which such questions have only a limited relevance. For good introductions to biopolitics, see Campbell and Lemke.
suggestion of Simon During to which I return below, we can call this quotidian manifestation of the intolerable a ‘mundane’ unbearableness, which resists cognitive mastery or comparison to other forms of insufferability. This non-dramatic, banale unbearableness of contemporary life is hard to render in literature. In the rest of this essay, I argue that the late work of David Foster Wallace offers a sustained effort to address this difficulty.
2. Is This Water: The Mundane and the Temptations of the Biopolitical Imagination
Banality infuses David Foster Wallace’s This Is Water in several ways, and not least on the level of its discursive context, which Wallace, in one of his signature stylistic moves, compulsively thematizes in the text. The text originated as a commencement address to the 2005 graduating class at Kenyon College. After Wallace’s suicide in 2008, it began a popular career as a graduation gift when it was published as This Is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life in an edition that spreads the lecture’s 3800 words over 137 pages.2 This swift process of commodification makes clear that the battle against banality – or, for that matter, irony, as suggested in the rather grandiose title – cannot be won.3 Wallace knows this, and this is why the address starts with a cliché that Wallace knows to be a cliché – that he even says he knows to be a cliché, without pretending that there is any other way to start:
There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says “Morning, boys. How’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes, “What the hell is water?” (3-4)
Even if Wallace warns that he will not play the role of “the wise old fish” (7), this disclaimer does not stop him from identifying the “immediate point of the fish story” (8): “the most obvious, important realities are often the ones that are hardest to see and talk about” (8).
The ending of Wallace’s address makes its official point explicit: “real freedom” (121) consists in an “awareness of what is so real and essential, so hidden in plain sight all around us” (131).4 Yet before
it turns to its official message, the address directs most of its energy to unusually animated descriptions of particularly unbearable elements of contemporary life that are so familiar that we tend to overlook them. The analogy of the fish – which resurfaces at the very end of the speech – makes clear that it is impossible to simply escape or transcend these elements, as this is not exactly an option for the fish either: for the fish, water is the only medium in which they can hope to live and thrive. In the same way, the late capitalist mutation of biopolitics constitutes, for better or for worse, the banale but unavoidable horizon in which contemporary life can be lived. Because biopolitics has become second nature, many
2. See Roiland 45-46 n1 for more elements of the speech’s cultural life.
3. For Wallace, irony and banality were inextricably linked in contemporary media culture. The locus classicus for this issue is his famous essay “E Unibus Pluram.” For a sustained interrogation of Wallace’s take on “the status of fiction in a time when irony and popular nihilism seem to prevail” (460), see Staes.
4. See De la Durantaye for a particularly illuminating account of Wallace’s case, in This is Water as elsewhere, for the importance of free will.
decisions, ideas, and lifestyle preferences operate by default; as they are situated on a pre-reflective level, they are often simply absorbed from the culture in which people find themselves. Wallace brings this out in a second anecdote, following close on the heels of the fish story, in which he imagines a discussion between a religious person and an atheist. Inevitably, the conversation turns to the existence of God:
And the atheist says, “Look, it’s not like I don’t have actual reasons for not believing in God. It’s not like I haven’t ever experimented with the whole God-and-prayer thing. Just last month, I got caught off away from the camp in that terrible blizzard, and I couldn’t see a thing, and I was totally lost, and it was fifty below, and so I did, I tried it: I fell to my knees in the snow and cried out, ‘Oh, God, if there is a God, I’m lost in this blizzard, and I’m gonna die if you don’t help me!’” And now, in the bar, the religious guy looks at the atheist all puzzled. “Well then, you must believe now,” he says. “After all, here you are, alive.” The atheist rolls his eyes like the religious guy is a total simp: “No, man, all that happened was that a couple Eskimos just happened to come wandering by, and they showed me the way back to camp.” (19-23) Wallace notes that the story illustrates that “the exact same experience can mean two completely different things to two different people, given those people’s two different belief templates” (24). This begs the question where these meanings, these “individual templates and beliefs,” come from (26): it is as if “a person’s most basic orientation toward the world and the meaning of his experience were somehow automatically hard-wired, like height or shoe size, or absorbed from the culture, like language” (27). The terms Wallace uses here – automatic absorption, meanings that are hard-wired, the comparison of meaning with measurables like height and shoe size – show, together with the analogy of the fish in the water, that Wallace is dealing with the juncture of culture, biology, and information technology where, as I showed, the biopolitical reorganization of contemporary life operates.5 Biopolitics invisibly
mediates cultural behavior and naturalizes certain patterns that can be streamlined with the biopolitical requirement to optimize the vitality of the population. Like water for fish, certain lifestyle preferences and behavioral patterns have become fully naturalized as the self-evident horizon of life for contemporary human beings. They are no longer the object of conscious decisions or projects, but have become the medium in which contemporary homo sapiens thrives – a medium that fully encloses and saturates the human life world.
In a recent essay, Simon During has coined the notion of the ‘mundane’ to describe “those forms of life and experience that are not available for our moral or political or philosophical or religious or social aspirations and projects” (113). In contrast to more current notions such as ‘everyday life’ or ‘the ordinary,’ the ‘mundane’ does not hold the promise of social or epistemic gain; it completely falls outside of the system in which positive or negative coding is possible (114). The mundane, for During, encompasses ever larger chunks of contemporary life: it names “the social system that we actually inhabit” (118). This system “is marked by the unprecedented degree to which the media, the state’s disciplinary, educational, and welfarist apparatuses, its techniques of monitoring and surveillance …
5. Paul Giles remarks that the world of Wallace’s fiction (before The Pale King) is not only furnished by popular culture, but also by “developments in information technology, as well as in scientific fields such as biology and genetics” (328). The fateful meeting of these different fields has to a large extent determined the face of biopolitics in the last decades.
finance capital, the forces of material, intellectual, and cultural production, and the market, have become technologically and ideologically integrated” (118). During’s ‘mundane’ offers a convenient shorthard for the banal, quotidian kind of unbearableness spread by contemporary biopolitics.6 Like the strategies,
tactics, and technologies that now constitute biopolitics, During’s mundane is so thoroughly integrated that it is hard to imagine ways of facing up to its unbearableness, rather than thoughtlessly inhabiting it. During underlines that one time-tested strategy that is bound to fail consists in returning the mundane to a hierarchy – putting it in relief by measuring it against other forms of the unbearable; the mundane is, after all, precisely that which lies outside hierarchical systems. A second strategy that is foreclosed consists in taking up a cognitive distance from the mundane. Late capitalist biopolitics incessantly targets both cognition and affect; it constitutes the way in which biopolitical subjects relate to the world. The mundane is radically “unmappable,” “as it provides no possibility of an external or Archimedean position for an objective totalizing conspectus” (119). Because it fully saturates contemporary life, the mundane is as constraining as water for fish – for whom, of course, hierarchies and cognitive gains hardly constitute viable alternatives either.
The notion that the biopolitical condition pre-empts traditional existential, analytical, and intellectual solutions is relevant for an adequate understanding of Wallace’s late work. It makes it possible to see that This Is Water ultimately fails to resist the temptation of these obsolete solutions, and that it thus falls short of achieving a writing of the mundane – a project that Wallace would continue to explore in his last, unfinished novel. Somewhere in the middle of the address, the official message – the importance of “being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience” (54) – makes room for an evocation of the insufferable nature of daily life, even if that is not a proper subject for commencement speeches, for very specific reasons: Wallace notes that “[t]here happen to be whole large parts of adult American life that nobody talks about in commencement speeches. One such part involves boredom, routine, and petty frustration. The parents and older folks here will know all too well what I’m talking about” (64-66). Again, the text evokes a situation that one can only experience from within – like fish in water. What follows is an extraordinarily energetic and ruthless description of the banal unbearableness of mundane life.
By way of example, let’s say it’s an average adult day, and you get up in the morning, go to your challenging, white-collar, college-graduate job, and you work hard for nine or ten hours, and at the end of the day you’re tired, and you’re stressed out, and all you want is to go home and have a good supper and maybe unwind for a couple hours … But then you remember there’s no food at home – you haven’t had time to shop this week because of your challenging job – and so now after work you have to get in your car and drive to the supermarket … You have to wander all over the huge, overlit store’s crowded aisles to find the stuff you want,
6. It is important to underline that ‘the mundane’ is not the secularized world that the novel genre has historically taken as its province. The mundane, During writes, “is the philosophical concept that names what stands outside the division between the secular and the religious” (113); unlike the former, it is not even marked by the lingering absence of the latter. What Ian Watt has influentially called “[t]he novel’s serious concern with the daily lives of ordinary people” (60) is still animated by this tension between the religious and the secular; in Erich Auerbach’s defense of realism, to give another famous example, the representation of reality is sustained by a belief in the significance of historical time (see Géfin). More recently, Franco Moretti has shown that the prevalence of objects, descriptions, and what he calls “filler” in the nineteenth-century novel was “an attempt at rationalizing the novelistic universe” (381). Such assumptions and such ambitions can no longer serve the novel in a mundane age, which is situated outside of the modern contest “between enchantment and disenchantment, between religion and the secular, between the transcendent and the material” (During 114).
and you have to maneuver your junky cart through all these other tired, hurried people with carts … and eventually, finally, you get all your supper supplies, except now it turns out there aren’t enough check-out lanes open even though it’s the end-of-the-day rush, so the checkout line is incredibly long. Which is stupid and infuriating, but you can’t take your frustration out on the frantic lady working the register, who is overworked at a job whose daily tedium and meaninglessness surpasses the imagination of any of us here at a prestigious college … and then you have to drive all the way home through slow, heavy, SUV-intensive, rush-hour traffic, et cetera, et cetera. (67-72)
This is a sample of the “routine” and the “petty frustration” that make up mundane life, “day after week after month after year” (73). The passage’s sheer intensity and its awkward hilarity also intimate what a literature of the mundane – rather than of everyday life, which has traditionally been the province of the novel genre – might look like. Focalizing a comically overspecified series of events through a generic “you,” it evokes the insufferability of mundane life from within, without (for now) giving in to the temptation to reject or transcend it; there is no foreseeable end to the banality we inhabit (“et cetera, et cetera”). This moment in Wallace’s address suggests that the experience of being in line or in a traffic jam together can to some extent be redeemed as a shared moment in which all unwilling participants recognize themselves and each other as the targets of late capitalist biopolitics – infinitely creative and flexible workers, as well as docile and manipulable consumers. With Jacques Rancière, we could say that the literary imagination here replaces a “hierarchical law” that differentiates people with a rigorously “egalitarian principle of indifference” (14), and that it constructs a more egalitarian “partition of the sensible, of the visible and the sayable” (10) that promises a veritable political intervention within the biopolitical field.
This Is Water does not sustain this writing of the mundane for very long. In fact, the difficulty of
evoking a common unbearableness is already signaled in the passage above, where one figure is consciously excluded from the experience of mundane insufferability: “the frantic lady working the register,” the “tedium and meaninglessness” of whose job, Wallace writes, “surpasses the imagination of any of us here at a prestigious college.” Apparently, class differences between people doing a “college-graduate job” and people working cash registers pre-empt an imagining of the mundane as a shared condition.
Interestingly, The Pale King, on which Wallace was working in the years before and after the delivery of this address, collapses precisely this distinction. The novel is set in the IRS’s Regional Examination Center in Peoria, Illinois, where, the novel’s back cover tells us, “the minutiae of a million daily lives are totted up, audited, and accounted for.” The Regional Examination Center can in a way be considered as a giant cash register. Working there involves “[r]outine, repetition, tedium, monotony, ephemeracy, inconsequence, abstraction, disorder, boredom, angst, ennui” (Pale King 233), and these experiences are also explicitly shared by college graduates – the very people who were said to be unable to imagine the tedium of working a register in This Is Water: not in the story of the novel’s “David Wallace” character, who circumstantially informs the reader that he ended up at the IRS after having been sent away from his “extremely expensive and highbrow” college before graduation, which temporarily put an end to his dream of being “somebody whose adult job was original and creative instead of tedious and dronelike” (75), but rather in the story of Chris Fogle, a character who is converted from
a “wastoid” to a dedicated examiner by a particularly inspiring lecturer at DePaul. As I will outline in some more detail below, The Pale King is, among other things, a prolonged attempt to imagine the unbearableness of mundane life without having recourse to hierarchies. In the realm of the mundane, a privileged epistemological perspective is simply not on offer.
As I noted, this is exactly what This Is Water fails to do after the project of The Pale King has briefly surfaced in the long passage I quoted. The evocation of the mundane makes room for the imagining of a more radical and lurid unbearableness – as if the mundane cannot be counted on to inspire an awareness of the intolerable.
… there are obviously different ways to think about these kinds of situations. In this traffic, all these vehicles stuck and idling in my way: It’s not impossible that … the Hummer that just cut me off is maybe being driven by a father whose little child is hurt or sick in the seat next to him, and he’s trying to rush to the hospital, and he’s in a way bigger, more legitimate hurry than I am … most days, if you’re aware enough to give yourself a choice, you can choose to look differently at this fat, dead-eyed, over-made-up lady who just screamed at her kid in the checkout line – maybe she’s not usually like this; maybe she’s been up three straight nights holding the hand of her husband, who’s dying of bone cancer … (84-89)
The address returns from the mundane to a hierarchy of different kinds of unbearableness; it suggests that the way to make the triviality of the quotidian bearable is to turn to a superior insight (“if you’re aware enough”) and to a free choice – the very escape routes that the mundane closes off. It seems that only the comparative imagining of a more horrible suffering can serve as a compass in the mundane world. Wallace here gives in to the very temptation that also besets some biopolitical discourses: the failure to sustain the flat field of the mundane, of the procedures, technologies, and tactics that govern contemporary life, and the irresistible inclination to abandon them for the zones that lie at the borders of the mundane – the world of extreme bodily suffering, of inhuman exhaustion, of total abjection, … as if these extremities offer consolations for the unbearableness of normal life. The different argumentative, imaginative, and affective swerves in This Is Water betray a deep awareness of these issues, as well as an inability to resolve them. And if The Pale King does not exactly offer a solution – which is in any case more than one can expect from an unfinished work – it at least constitutes a sustained attempt to confront these issues head-on.7
3. The Pale King: The Writing of the Mundane
The Pale King’s intention to confront the realities of the biopolitical mundane without neutralizing
it through a cognitively privileged perspective is indicated by the text’s radically decentered nature,
7. Lee Konstantinou articulates the difference between The Pale King and Wallace’s early masterpiece Infinite Jest in terms congenial to my argument. He writes that “where Infinite Jest was concerned with the ways we use addictive substances and entertainment to paper over our pain ... The Pale King attempts to confront directly whatever it was we were so desperate to avoid in the first place” (“Unfinished”). Elsewhere, he writes that “The Pale King, though unfinished, has much more to say about solving the specifically structural and institutional causes of postmodern suffering than does Infinite Jest” (“No Bull” 110 n13). I argue that these “structural and institutional causes” are best analyzed as aspects of biopolitics.
and its careful avoidance of a controlling or even a privileged intelligence.8 The novel’s first – and
particularly intense – focalizer is Claude Sylvanshine, a character who returns repeatedly throughout the novel, but who also disappears for long stretches of time. The most likely candidate for the role of organizing consciousness is that of “David Wallace,” who first appears in an “Author’s Foreword,” which only figures as the novel’s ninth chapter. Even though the chapters in which this character appears are focalized through him, he turns out to be merely one character among others – sufficiently close to another character, for instance, for him to feel the need to reassure the reader that he is not Chris Fogle (261). The story of his initiation into the IRS, moreover, centers on a confusion of identities as the result of an imperfect process of computerization, which has led the service to confuse him with a considerably more senior person of the same name. In two notes appended to the text, Wallace writes of his plan for the novel that “David Wallace disappears 100 pp. in” and that “David Wallace disappears – becomes creature of the system” (548). No real candidate emerges for the role of protagonist in the novel’s 540 pages. Instead, the text aims to confront the mundane realities of contemporary biopolitics without deploying narrative and imaginative devices to transcend them.9
The mundane colonization of everyday life and the neoliberal transformation of capitalism are two sides of the same biopolitical coin. The Pale King exposes both sides together by locating its narrative in a tax office in 1985, a time when the role of the state was radically revised under the influence of Reagonomics and what is commonly called neoliberalism. In his book The Birth of Biopolitics, based on lectures delivered in 1979, Foucault presciently links Chicago School economics (among others) to the neoliberal phase of biopolitics that was then just beginning to take hold. For Foucault, “American neo-liberalism seeks ... to extend the rationality of the market, the schemes of analysis it proposes and the decision-making criteria it suggests, to areas that are not exclusive or not primarily economic” (79). An economic logic comes to infuse all aspects of contemporary life, and, as The Pale King shows, also the operation of the IRS.10 The novel maps the effects of what it refers to as “the Spackman Initiative,” or
simply the “Initiative,” on the operation of tax auditing. The key change is that from now on, examination units will function as if they were for-profit businesses. The result is an “anti- or post-bureaucratic” bureaucracy (81): instead of the “diffusion of authority and adherence to inflexible rules of operation” that supposedly used to limit the efficiency of bureaucracy (82),
Under the initiative, Regional Service and Examination Centers are allowed considerably more latitude in structure, personnel, systems, and operations protocols, resulting in increased
8. This is of course reinforced by the novel’s “unfinished form” (Konstantinou). Michael Pietsch, who edited the “hundreds and hundreds of pages of [Wallace’s] novel in progress” into its published form, notes that Wallace did not leave an outline or any other indication of the order in which its fifty chapters were to be arranged (Pale King viii-ix). As I try to show in this section, this contingency does not exclude the possibility that there are more interesting reasons for the novel’s decentered status. See Wouters 461-62 for a congenial suggestion.
9. This immanence dovetails with Wallace’s more general literary practice. Paul Giles remarks that “[r]ather than allowing his characters an estranged perspective on the degradations of commercial culture … Wallace’s positions his dramatis personae as caught up inexorably in the belly of the beast” (332).
10. While neoliberalization entails a radical reorganization of the workings of the state, it does not automatically entail an aspiration to reduce it to a “minimal” state. As is familiar enough, the reduction of the state’s mandate to intervene in the operations of business and the regulation of markets is more than compensated for by the increasing prerogatives of state power in other domains such as security, the military, or the penitentiary.
authority and responsibility on the part of these facilities’ Directors. The guiding idea is to free these large central processing facilities from oppressive or hidebound regulations which impede effective action. (116)
Adaptability and latitude instead of strict, unbending rules: this, according to Foucault, is the flexibility of a biopolitics that no longer insists on the observation of rules, on “a binary division between the permitted and the prohibited” (Security 6), but that rather mobilizes a whole set of technologies, strategies, and calculations in order to a promote a desirable outcome. This means that the Initiative not only consists in the implementation of a culture of flexiblity: “At the same time, extreme pressure is applied with respect to the one and only one primary, overarching goal: results. Increased revenue: Reduced noncompliance. Reduction of the gaps” (116). This neoliberal reorganization of biopolitics constitutes the backdrop against which the novel paints the dull and boring lives of the people who are hired to execute it.
The office’s changed rationale also affects the lives of the people it employs; it is inculcated during in-house training sessions, during which employees are told to discard “the idea that [they]’re guardians of civic virtue” (341); instead, “in today’s IRS, [they]’re businessmen,” or “businesspersons,” “in the employ of what [they]’re urged to consider a business” (340). In his “Author’s Foreword,” the novel’s David Wallace identifies The Pale King as both a “vocational memoir” and “a portrait of a bureaucracy – arguably the most important federal bureaucracy in American life – at a time of enormous internal struggle and soul-searching” (72). Because of this institution’s changing and ever-intensifying impact on American lives, it also affects the work of writing fiction – and therefore, as Lee Konstantinou has remarked, The Pale King is a “vocational memoir” in the sense that a large part of its drama consists in Wallace’s struggle with his own craft, with what it means to imaginatively address a situation that is, as the novel notes, “dull,” “[m]assively, spectacularly dull” (85). Losing himself in a long and extensively footnoted excursion on legal issues surrounding the publication of his “memoir,” the novel’s David Wallace remarks that “[i]t’s hard to put all this very smoothly or gracefully” (71). This lack of narrative smoothness and novelistic grace marks Wallace’s loose baggy monster as a whole; even if the many recurring tropes and thematic echoes make it clear that the novel is more coherent than may initially appear, it still forces readers to undergo what the novel calls “the rote, the picayune, the meaningless, the repetitive, the pointlessly complex” (440) without offering them any sense of closure.
One problem with biopolitics is that its unaccountable, decentered nature and its total saturation of contemporary life make it immune to political contestation. Biopolitics does not depend on democratic legitimation, nor is its networked power embodied in one place or institution that resistance can target.
The Pale King points out that the spectacular dullness of administration contributes to its ability to fly
below the radar of contestation: “The IRS was one of the very first government agencies to learn that [‘the dull, the arcane, the mind-numbingly complex’] help insulate them against public protest and political opposition, and that abstruse dullness is actually a much more effective shield than is secrecy” (85). Dullness, that is, functions as a tool of depoliticization.11 This tendency toward depoliticization
makes an understanding of the effects of biopolitical institutions on our lives all the more vital; this is why Wallace’s exploration of a biopolitical Urszene – the wedding of population management and the
11. See Clare 436-440 for a reading of The Pale King that maps the relation between boredom and depoliticization through David Harvey’s account of neoliberalism.
logic of capitalism in the country whose name is a byword for neoliberalization – counts as a timely critical intervention in what the novel refers to as “the cultural present of 2005” (82) – or today, for that matter.12
In the project of The Pale King, “dullness” serves as a hinge that connects the exploration of the historical mutation of biopolitics to the issue that was central in This Is Water: the tension between automation and attention in everyday life. This Is Water ended up fleeing the unbearable dullness of mundane life by contrasting it to a more lurid form of suffering, a gesture that was coded as a form of attentiveness that offered a temporary consolation from mundane life. In The Pale King, dullness is squarely identified as unbearable, and yet confronted head-on. At the same time, it forces its readers to sustain that dullness by confronting them with long, repetitive, uneventful passages that only intermittently offer relief, excitement, or change. Near the end of the “Author’s Foreword,” the novel makes this logic explicit:
… dullness is intrinsically painful … something that’s dull or opaque fails to provide enough stimulation to distract people from some other, deeper type of pain that is always there, if only in an ambient low-level way, and which most of us spend nearly all our time and energy trying to distract ourselves from feeling, or at least from feeling directly or with full attention. (87) The novel refuses distraction from the unbearable, and instead mobilizes a remarkably varied set of literary devices to dwell in it. At one point, for instance, it uses a particularly intense form of focalization to register the relentless and “soul-murdering” psychological effects of routine work on the character of Lane Dean (378-79); at another, it refrains from focalization altogether to render the monotonous choreographies and rhythms of tax examination work: “Ken Wax turns a page. Howard Cardwell turns a page. Kenneth ‘Type of Thing’ Hindle detaches a Memo 402-C(1) from a file. ‘Second-knuckle’ Bob McKenzie looks up briefly while turning a page. David Cusk turns a page” (312). And so on. Throughout, the novel aspires to a realism proper to a mundane – rather than a merely secular or everyday – life, peopled by the unlikely kind of heroes these times require. As the substitute Jesuit teacher who triggers Chris Fogle’s conversion to bureaucracy notes, “[e]nduring tedium over real time in a confined space is what real courage is. Such endurance is, as it happens, the distillate of what is, today, in this world neither I nor you have made, heroism” (231). As one of Wallace’s working notes for his project has it: “Central Deal: Realism, monotony. Plot a series of set-ups for stuff happening, but nothing actually happens” (548).
So on the one hand, we have the exploration of the recent history of neoliberalism; on the other, the task of fashioning an ethic and an aesthetic of attentiveness to the mundane unbearableness that the process of neoliberalization sustains. In This Is Water, the case for attentiveness was supposed to alleviate man’s default self-centeredness – what Wallace called “[man’s] deep belief that [he is] the absolute centre of the universe; the realest, most vivid and important person in existence.” It was Wallace’s ultimate inability to believe in the redemptive role of attention that necessitated the broader
12. Interestingly, the novel identifies this cultural present with the colonization of private life when it adds that in the cultural present “there is no longer any kind of clear line between personal and public, or rather between private vs. performative” (82).
exploration of mundane unbearableness in The Pale King. In one of the scenes that is appended to the published version of novel, the task of helping overcome people’s selfishness is wishfully shifted from an aesthetics of attentiveness (which failed in This Is Water) to the institution of taxation itself:
One of the biggest services the Service provides consists in acting as an antidote or antagonist to people’s natural selfishness. We are there – liberally empowered – to remind Americans that they are part of something larger than themselves or their families, and that they owe this larger collective tribute. It is possible to see the federal government as a parasite feeding on the lifeblood of the taxpayer. But blood is made to circulate, to replenish; it moves or there is death. It is also possible to see the federal government as the people’s heart … and the Service as the forceful contractions of that heart. (551)
The somatic imagery makes clear that the novel is here – in a scene that the editor not coincidentally failed to integrate with the rest of Wallace’s Nachlass13 – placing its bets on a different, more positive
biopolitics – a politics of life that will take care of life, rather than remold it in accordance with the dictates of capital. The erratic trajectory of Wallace’s late work testifies to an awareness that in 1985, as in 2005, as today, this is a future that remains to be achieved.
Works Cited
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13. The novel recycles the ‘lifeblood’ trope as part of a crude promotional video that aims to “humanize, demystify” the IRS (102). This humanization effort presents the IRS employees not as “faceless bureaucrats,” but as “men and women” who “keep the lifeblood of government healthy and circulating” (103-104). If anything, the awkwardness of this campaign underlines the difficulty of imagining a different biopolitics.
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Pieter Vermeulen is Assistant Professor in English literature at Stockholm University. He works in the fields of critical theory, the contemporary novel, and memory studies. His writing has appeared or will appear in journals such as Arcadia, Criticism, Journal of Modern Literature, Memory Studies, Modern
Fiction Studies, Studies in the Novel, and Textual Practice. His book Romanticism After the Holocaust
was republished in paperback by Bloomsbury/Continuum in 2012. He is currently at work on a book-length study of the paradoxical productivty of the notion of the end of the novel in contemporary fiction. E-mail: pieter.vermeulen@english.su.se
