2.1 Wallace's theoretical ideas

For Wallace the most precarious element concerning any TV-criticism is, "that we yield to the temptation not to take television seriously as both a disseminator and a definer of the cultural atmosphere we breathe and process."(19) More than just one art form among others, or a simple medium of entertainment, Wallace defines TV as a mirror of his society. It is perfect in finding out what people want to see and presenting them with it. Because TV is a financial business, and therefore dependent on enormous amounts of viewers, it is good at discerning patterns in the flux of popular ideologies: "television's whole raison is reflecting what people want to see. It's a mirror. [...] Television, from the surface on down, is about desire."(20)

According to Wallace, TV's ability to present the viewers with what they desire, leaving aside everything disquieting and unpleasant, has led to a state of affairs in which "irony, poker-faced silence, and fear of ridicule are distinctive [...] features of contemporary U.S. culture."(21) Since Wallace perceives this recognition as the main thesis of his essay, it is important to trace the ways in which this state of affairs has come about.

Wallace states that the central tension in U.S. culture is one between "the nobility of individualism on one side against the warmth of communal belonging on the other,"(22) i.e. between the point of view that it is good to be alone and one's own master, and the position that it is better to be a member of a larger group. The early TV of the 50s and 60s extolled the latter. Commercials from this time dealt with the community by associating the purchase of a special product with the inclusion into an attractive group. This changed in the 80s when "the individualist side [...] held sway in TV advertising,"(23) probably due to the pollsters and statisticians behind TV sensing the audience's discomfort in being associated as part of a mass-culture. Products were advertised as helping the viewer to express himself and stand out from the crowd. Paradoxically, the group is still central in these ads, both as the herd from which the viewer can stand apart, and as the mass of eyes that witness his individuality. This paradox leads to an uncomfortable tension for the lonely viewer: "The crowd is now [...] both the herd in contrast to which the viewer's distinctive identity is to be defined, and the impassive witnesses whose sight alone can confer distinctive identity."(24)

In order to keep the viewers in front of the tube, the TV-makers had to somehow transcend this paradox. For Wallace, the perfect means to keep the ordinary viewer both alienated from and integrated in the TV-crowd is irony:

television was practically made for irony. For TV is a bisensuous medium. Its displacement of radio wasn't picture displacing sound; it was picture added. Since the tension between what's said and what's seen is irony's whole sales territory, classic televisual irony works not via the juxtaposition of conflicting pictures or conflicting sounds, but with sights that undercut what's said.(25)

According to Wallace, this commercial flatters the ordinary viewer, because he is invited to recognize the ironic contradiction between the "choice"-slogan (sound) and what Wallace calls the "pavlovian orgy" (sight). The internal complicity between the ad's irony and the viewers nobody's-fool appreciation of it reinforces the watcher's feeling of being an individual who stands apart from the crowd. Thus, the tension between the need for crowd-transcending and crowd-integration is eased by inducing a feeling of superiority in the viewer. At the same time however, the viewer is kept dependent upon TV, because only watching can afford this feeling.

For Wallace, irony has become the main mode of representation on TV. The ironic representation of authorities on TV nowadays (not just in commercials but also in shows; for example, "Married, with Children" or "The Simpsons", in which a spokesman of hollow authority is constantly poked fun at by a bunch of irreverent kids, wives, colleagues, etc.) has two important effects: 1. An authority vacuum is produced, which is filled by the medium that created it, and now constructs people's view of the world. TV becomes the only authority.(27) 2. TV becomes invulnerable to critical charges of shallowness or lacking morals since such judgments appeal to exactly those conventional and authoritarian standards which are extratelevisual and therefore unhip.

Here we arrive at Wallace's main thesis. The constant ironic and irreverent representation of authorities and values deeply effects a culture of people who spend an average of six hours per day in front of the boob tube: ridicule becomes the ultimate art form and a mode of social intercourse; serious, personal affairs are related to in the same way as distant, far-off matters, which are seen as a spectacle separated from us; attention (instead of some kind of action) becomes the main commodity; and flatness (transcendence of melodrama), numbness (transcendence of sentimentality), and cynicism are now the main features.

Wallace states that the main problem with irony as the general mode of social intercourse is that it serves an entirely destructive function. Irony is useful in debunking phony values and hollow authorities, but it is "singularly unuseful when it comes to constructing anything to replace the hypocrisies it debunks."(28) Thus, TV has inverted the role irony played in the works of the classic postmodern authors,(29) who employed ironic devices to make the gap visible between what their society said about itself and what it really was like: "Irony in sixties art and culture started out the same way youthful rebellion did. It was difficult and painful, and productive ? a grim diagnosis of a long-denied disease."(30) By employing irony as its main mode of representation and continually perpetuating it, TV has inadvertantly drained irony of its liberating power and rendered it enfeebling instead.

Irony is not the only representational device "perverted" by TV. The mass media employ various modes of representation, such as rule-breaking, shock, innovation and avant-garde techniques, which previously served liberating purposes. Those techniques are no longer used to free people from certain habits of perceiving the world, but rather "lock us tighter into certain conventions, in this case habits of consumption."(31) This is what Wallace perceives as his (and all contemporary artists) dilemma: if formal inventiveness is inherent to the logic of the system one wants not to be part of, then how can one find new ways to express oneself that are not consumed in the same way as those commodified innovations? Do all forms of rule-breaking just confirm the (televisual) rule?

These questions, which recur throughout the interview with McCaffery, are essential for Wallace. For him there must be a way to distinguish between the two kinds of formal inventiveness. He perceives the difference as one between "low" and "serious" art:

But now realize that TV and popular film and most kinds of "low" art ? which just means art whose primary aim is to make money ? is lucrative precisely because it recognizes that audiences prefer 100 percent pleasure to the reality that tends to be 49 percent pleasure and 51 percent pain. Whereas "serious" art, which is not primarily about getting money out of you, is more apt to make you uncomfortable, or to work hard to access its pleasures, the same way that in real life true pleasure is usually a by-product of hard work and discomfort.(32)

A certain amount of Wallace's form-conscious writing can be seen as an active attempt at "serious" art: he neither wants to please the reader, nor to reward the passive modes of consumption that TV-watching promulgates. According to Wallace, TV induces a passive mode of consumption because through it the narrative consciousness is completely suppressed. The viewer need not work through the mediated voice presenting the material. This notion of "working-through" is exactly the pain that Wallace demands of serious art. For Wallace it is of great importance to stimulate the reader's awareness that what he is experiencing is mediated through a human consciousness.(34)

For Wallace this form of complication in the reading process is exactly what makes image-fiction "realistic". He understands realism in image-fiction as an adaptation and inversion of old realist techniques. Realist fiction intended to cross boundaries of culture, country, religion, etc. Before TV came into being, people from one side of the globe had no idea what life on the other side could possibly entail. Different countries and ways of living were unknown and strange, because there were no TV-pictures to make them seem familiar. Accordingly, one of realist fiction's main functions was to explore those unfamiliar places, and to present them to the reader. However,

fiction's presenting function for today's reader has been reversed: since the whole global village is now presented as familiar, electronically immediate - satellites, microwaves, intrepid PBS anthropologists, Paul Simon's Zulu back-ups - it's almost like we need fiction writers to restore strange thing's ineluctable strangeness, to defamiliarize stuff [...]. (35)

The basic opposition upon which Sklovskij bases his ideas is between colloquial and poetic language (Umgangssprache and dichterische Sprache). Sklovskij writes that the governing principle of colloquial language is to express the most with the least effort. Everyday language uses two techniques of rationalization: the reduction of topics and objects to their most common features (employment of synecdoches); and the use of formulas with which these topics or objects are reproduced (objects always appear in the same contexts, they always occupy the same place in a chain of associations). If, for example, a chair is the object of colloquial language, it is usually referred to as a thing with four legs and a back on which people can sit. It is thus reduced to its most common features, a back, four legs and its function. In an ordinary conversation it is usually unnecessary to be more specific. Also, in colloquial representations of a chair it usually appears in the same contexts (i.e. as a piece of furniture placed next to a table).

According to Sklovskij, the way we talk about an object also indicates the way we perceive it. Thus, colloquial language reduces our perceptions of things: they are only perceived as their most common features, they lose all their individual traits and become typicalized. Sklovskij writes that such a perception leads to the vanishing of the object: "Unter dem Einfluß einer solchen Wahrnehmung schwindet das Ding, es wird nicht mehr wahrgenommen und darum nicht mehr reproduzierbar."(37)

Art, or poetical language, restores the perception of its objects by prolonging and intensifying the perceptual process: "Um für uns die Wahrnehmung des Lebens wiederherzustellen, die Dinge fühlbar, den Stein steinig zu machen, gibt es das, was wir Kunst nennen."(38) Sklovskij discerns two techniques with which a writer can restore and intensify a reader's perception: defamiliarization (Verfremdung) and complication (Komplizierung) of the object. These devices make the perception (or recognition) of an object more difficult and prolong the perceptual process. The poetical description of a chair could, for example, be a detailed description of features which go usually unnoticed: the type of wood, marks, ornaments and carvings, the history of butts which once sat upon it. To visualize a chair thus described would afford much more perceptual work on the part of a reader than a colloquial description. The object is "complicated". To place the chair in an unusual context would be another way to intensify the awareness of it. A chair that hangs from the ceiling will cause more perceptual work than one placed on the ground.

The parallels to Wallace's ideas are obvious: similar to Sklovskij, he bases his concept of art on an opposition. The governing dichotomy of his essay is the one between "low" art (which is no art) and "serious" art (which is the true art). TV as the main example of "low" art tends to suppress anything which would afford some work on the part of the viewer. It presents all things, objects, and topics as familiar, thus numbing the perception of the viewer. Today people tend to believe they know something about a distant war if they see pictures of choppers, corpses on deserted streets, and tanks rumbling through an eery landscape. They only grasp the visual appearance of situations (their most common features) instead of concerning themselves with the convoluted set of problems and variety of antagonistic points of view which lurk underneath the surface.

Image-fiction as an example of serious art attempts to "restore strange thing's ineluctable strangeness." This is achieved by defamiliarization and complication of the things it describes. Such fiction does not necessarily have to deal with such complex and serious events as a war. After all, people glued to the set for six hours a day mostly watch game shows, soap-operas and trashy commercials. It is important for Wallace to defamiliarize exactly these seemingly banal products that people spend the most time viewing.