“Profits as the Telos”: The Logic of Reaganomics and Wallace’s Technologies of Efficiency

Abstract

David Foster Wallace’s unfinished novel The Pale King considers the IRS’s usage of the fictional ANADA (Audit-No Audit Discriminant Algorithm) as a tool for maximizing profit and increasing taxpayer compliance using the threat of information-based surveillance. Despite being a government entity, the novel’s IRS begins to increasingly resemble a for-profit corporation, and Wallace uses the ANADA to explore the economic, political and social conditions that have led to the technologization of human workers. The threat of worker obsolescence looms in the background of this novel, set during the Reagan era but published posthumously in 2011, and the novel draws a connection between early neoliberalism and the persistence of its values into the age of the Internet. Wallace suggests that the human phenomenon of boredom becomes an ameliorative to dehumanizing techno-capitalist structures and emphasizes the importance of recognizing the material foundations on which technologies of efficiency rely.

Keywords

Neoliberalism, Reaganomics, Worker Obsolescence, Cybernetics, Postmodernism

In the introduction to Cybernetics, Norbert Wiener describes the “first industrial revolution” in evocative terms as being “the revolution of the ‘dark satanic mills’” that led to “the devaluation of the human arm by the competition of machinery.” He goes on to predict that “the modern industrial revolution is similarly bound to devalue the human brain, at least in its simpler and more routine decisions” (27). The central conceit of David Foster Wallace’s last novel, The Pale King, assembled by Michael Pietsch and published posthumously by Little Brown in 2011, considers exactly this tension between forms of human labor and the automated systems against which they compete in a capitalist context. For Wallace, the human brain finds its machinic counterpart in the computer algorithm, and he thus examines the life of the human mind against a backdrop of neoliberal capitalism that increasingly values efficiency as the single most important aspect of work. Wallace employs the threat of the novel’s Internal Revenue Service examiners being made redundant—or, in his word, “otiose” (545-6, §30^[1])—by technological developments that would allow for faster tax return processing. This threat encourages human workers to become more automaton-like, minimizing their unpredictable behaviors in order to maximize efficiency.In his experiment to represent the human parallels to computing, Wallace depicts examination rooms that bring together a cluster of wigglers—human tax form examiners—who engage in the iterative and mind-numbingly repetitive activity of checking tax forms. Human brains are here made algorithm-like, executing the same decision-making process over and over. Running up against the uniquely human experience of boredom, however, the human wigglers constitute imperfect machines. The neuroplasticity of the human brain—its flexibility, its ability to adapt to changing circumstances, and its ability to update its understanding upon receiving new information—becomes a model for information management that automated systems try (unsuccessfully, in The Pale King) to replicate. Wallace thus juxtaposes human boredom with technological efficiency, suggesting that the former may function as an ameliorative to the social conditions that the pervasive presence of the latter creates.

Published after Wallace’s death in 2008, the published novel was assembled from Wallace’s notes by his editor Michael Pietsch, and the text is thus unfinished and provisional. Regardless, The Pale King takes up the same concerns that animated Wallace’s acclaimed earlier novel, Infinite Jest (1990), and this final, posthumous novel also tasks itself with considering the problem of human self-determination in a technologized age. Set in the 1980s, while the U.S. was experiencing the consequences of Reaganomics with its large-scale military spending and the related threat of Cold War hostilities, The Pale King features mundane office technologies that pose their own threat to the security of the individual. In this novel, Wallace suggests that the processing of large amounts of information has come to define all dimensions of contemporary American life, and that the machines designed to perform this processing pose a new risk to individual will. Technologies that prioritize efficiency act in a consistent way, using algorithms to make predictable decisions that are always for profit-interested ends, andsuch technologies thus represent an undeviating order that is incompatible with the unpredictability of human behavior. The Pale King suggests that this disempowering technological landscapereduces human users to “wastoids” (164), the character Chris Fogle’s term for the passive, nihilistic media consumer determined entirely by his media environment. The Reaganomics philosophy of corporate growth and profit-making by cutting taxes and decreasing government oversight of business indicates for Wallace a changing collective psychology among Americans. Moreover, the economic policies inspired by Reaganomics incentivize corporations to move away from imperfect human workers and toward the ever-greater automation of labor in the interests of efficiency.Wallace identifies in the 1980s the origin of a corporate mindset that would go on to pervade American culture into the twenty-first century. This mindset, originally born of for-profit corporations, has leaked with neoliberalism into the broader culture and is now present in various social and institutional (and notably governmental) structures that also prioritize profit and efficiency, a development that Wallace predicts in The Pale King with his description of the IRS as a government entity that has begun to increasingly resemble a corporation. The hyper-efficient corporate mindset adopts the language of the machine (as an entity capable of performing tasks with the greatest possible efficiency and without the need for human guidance) and applies it to the institution’s own operations. These institutions do, in fact, exist under human control, but the use of mechanical language in describing their aims and operations lends them an air of inevitability that eclipses the role of any individual responsibility within them.Adopting machine-based language divorces the corporation from moral intervention or personal oversight on the part of those who constitute it.  

For Wallace, the lie of the machine image as one of extra-human efficiency and control is revealed through the problems that arise when these machines run up against their ethical, physical, and structural limitations. The public relations initiatives of the IRS, in their attempts to maximize profit from returns and create a self-surveilling taxpayer who perceives the Service as having a totalizing catalog of knowledge, rely on mechanisms like the ANADA algorithm in order to automate the Service’s previously human tasks. The operations of the Fornix computer system, however, which include the ANADA, suffer from the presence of bugs and of general technological malfunctioning created by the IRS’s use of outdated hardware that has been recycled in order to support the organization’s newer automated systems. The wigglers, however, are able to continue their work through the practice of deliberately focusing their attention, and Wallace demonstrates how the wigglers’ machine-like characteristics derive not from social programming that entails a loss of the individual will, but actually rather from its repeated exertion and triumph over physical pain.  

Cybernetic Control

Wallace’s criticism of how neoliberal capitalism functions in the Information Age identifies as central to its continued power its ability to take the chaotic practices of human behavior and make them into useful data, rendering them both predictable and programmable. The mid-1980s setting of Wallace’s Peoria REC allows him to suggest that the Reagan era laid the groundwork for the possibility of digital surveillance and social control through technology that would be used more widely after the turn of the century (and especially in the aftermath of 11 September) when Wallace was writing. He thus predicts the extent to which capitalism of the 2010s and after will rely on the hoarding of information that allows all facets of human behavior and personality to be targeted through increasingly personalized advertising, a strategy that was becoming central to profit-making enterprises at the time of Wallace’s writing. Wallace understands this practice as a cybernetic one that connects the late twentieth century in which the novel is set to the civic conditions of the early twenty-first century in which he is writing. As a discipline, cybernetics examines the regulatory functions of systems that enable them to fulfill a particular purpose: the “control and communication,” as Norbert Wiener terms it, in which these systems can engage (as its etymology suggests, deriving from the Ancient Greek “κυβερνᾶν” meaning “to steer” [“Cybernetics,” OED]). The cybernetic view of social reality that concerns Wallace is, moreover, fundamentally totalizing—all ways of being become grist for the corporate mill, such that even traditional forms of social rebellion like anti-government aesthetics and lifestyles are commodified and sold back to those who think of themselves as subversive.

The published version of The Pale King gestures to the possibility that a more-finished version of the novel may have had at its center the question of how automated bureaucratic processes imperil human self-determination. At the outset of the novel, the Peoria REC is at risk of being overtaken by Systems Director Merrill Lehrl, who aims to restructure the REC to maximize its efficiency in processing returns, mainly by replacing human examiners with the ANADA algorithm. The “§30” note of Wallace’s “Notes and Asides” informs us that Lehrl is “preparing to computerize Exams” in Peoria “the way he computerized [the] Automated Collection System in Collections . . . Invented the IRP^[2] that compares W2s and 1099s to Returns—made Examiners’ jobs otiose” (546, s30). The novel’s central struggle, the note tells us, exists between “LEHRL & PRO-TECH VS. GLENDENNING & DISTRICT DIRECTORS,” because the

Project is replacing human Examiners with computers the way Lehrl invented Automated Collection Systems—the District Directors don’t want it, because they’re Old School IRS-as-Civics believers, whereas the new school has a corporate philosophy: maximize revenue while minimizing costs. Big Q is whether IRS is to be essentially a corporate entity or a moral one. (545)

This final question is the moral conundrum at the heart of the novel. Lehrl’s approach to management is one that relies on maximizing efficiency (and thus by extension profits), primarily through computerization, a strategy that eliminates the need for actual human workers. Lehrl’s approach aims to create a surveillance state through the automation of tax examining that will coerce the taxpaying public into compliance. Wallace’s ultimate concern is the role of automation in the degradation of the civic sphere (in which citizens participate because of fear rather than out of belief in the public good), and Lehrl emblematizes the surveilling, profit-motivated interests that The Pale King cautions against.

It is not coincidental that Reynolds and Sylvanshine, Lehrl’s aides, use his innovations to justify referring to Lehrl as “a reader of people” and “an administrator of administrators”: to wit, “a cyberneticist” who is able to manage the IRS in its capacity as “a system comprised of many systems” (534). Following Wiener’s vision of cybernetics as a discipline for understanding the control mechanisms of both animal and machine, the designation of “cyberneticist” identifies Lehrl as having a management style that understands human labor according to the language of technological systems. Calling Lehrl a cyberneticist seems to stem from his ability to understand human workers as directable in the same ways that machines are.Given enough information on any given employee, the two aides suggest, Lehrl would be capable of altering that person’s behavior—i.e., making them essentially programmable—in order to increase their usefulness within the IRS as a larger, controllable network. The section containing this conversation (§49), in which the aides assess examiner Chris Fogle as he waits to meet with Dr. Lehrl, comes near the end of the novel (537), representing one of the most detailed discussions in the body of the text itself of the conflict between automated systems and the civics-based values of older examiners that Wallace sketches out in the “Notes and Asides.”Lehrl’s job, Reynolds and Sylvanshine note, is “to come in and redesign Posts to get the most out of them. To find ways to streamline and enhance productivity, remove bottlenecks, debug. This blends an expertise in automation, personnel, support logistics, and overall systems” (534, emphasis mine). Lehrl thus represents the unique kind of contemporary power that derives from the management of information.

The efficacy of Wallace’s IRS directly depends on curating its public image as maximally efficient and precise in identifying tax filing violations, creating a system in which taxpayers are self-surveilling. Automation, Wallace suggests, has become a key tool for the unique public relations efforts that the contemporary capitalist era requires, in which even non-corporate entities—individual people or government bodies like the IRS—must approach their social roles according to the framework of the marketplace. Fogle explains during an extended discussion of the mechanics of the IRS that its functioning “still proceeds largely on voluntary compliance,” such that the IRS must carefully manage its public image in order to evoke a psychological response from taxpayers that will maximize compliance (243). As part of this mission, the IRS implements the use of “computers and a high-powered statistical formula known as the ANADA (for ‘Audit-No Audit Discriminant Algorithm’)” in 1987, the creation of which is in process at the time the novel is set (70n3). The IRS’s strategy relies on the ability of the fictional ANADA to identify the most profitable returns to audit, and on taxpayers knowing that their tax returns are subject to possible review, but not knowing how the process itself functions. The institution of algorithms and computerized systems for Collections and Examinations is central to this process of constructing an image of thorough, personalized attention given to each tax return. Taxpayers thus become voluntarily self-surveilling in response to their perception of the IRS’s ability to keep a comprehensive catalog of personal information on each taxpayer that is carefully monitored for non-compliance.

The result of the contemporary neoliberal corporation modeling itself on the image of computer efficiency is that the language associated with computing has pervaded corporate functioning with consequences for how the corporation understands its civic responsibility. The conceptualization of the corporation as an artificial body that is fundamentally mechanical invokes an image of corporate expansion as unstoppable, self-perpetuating, and amoral, existing outside of the interference of any individual person and thus erasing the role of individual choice and responsibility. In §19, a number of examiners (most of whom are unnamed, with the entire section lacking dialogue tags with the exception of a single first-person speaker [141]) are stuck together in a malfunctioning elevator. The mechanical failure of the elevator fosters a moment of in-depth, face-to-face conversation (albeit in the dark, as one of the speakers notes that the power is out [147]), in which the examiners discuss the current state of American democracy and consumption practices within a context of evolving capitalist enterprise. Wallace uses this scene to mount a criticism of technology’s impact on democracy, and he suggests that the civic responsibility necessary for democracy’s continued function relies on the breakdown of growth-producing mechanisms like the ANADA that are inextricably linked to the expansion of the marketplace. Conley Wouters draws a direct connection between problems of concentration and the development of the Information Age, observing that in the elevator scene, the character who represents the old-school IRS morals, Glendenning, “seems to be motioning toward something like the paradox of self-inflicted slavery that might be Americans’ undoing, an unthinkably destructive political maneuver that is uniquely postindustrial and, in this novel, dependent on machines and information” (451). With The Pale King, Wallace emphasizes the importance of readers willingly confronting and attempting to process overwhelming amounts of information, however dull or boring this task may seem, and he suggests that this effort has high stakes, among them the preservation of U.S. democracy, as it may be an ameliorative to a dehumanizing consumer landscape.

The elevator scene lays out the key ideas around which Wallace structures the novel: American capitalism, the examiners suggest, has grown itself into a corner and has found itself at odds with the originary principles of American democracy like self-determination, equality, and freedom from tyrannical control. Democracy, they theorize, began as what one of the examiners terms a “production-model,” in which individual American citizens had an awareness of themselves as having certain ethical obligations toward the general health and stability of the larger civic body to which they belonged. However, the expansion of industry, wealth, and commerce that is necessary for the capitalist system to sustain itself has triggered a move from this production-model of American democracy that existed in in the nineteenth century to a late twentieth century “consumption-model” (148). In this new stage of democracy, increasing consumption by any means becomes an economic priority, and collecting data allows companies to exploit personal information by creating images to which a customer is likely to respond, a process that leads to the creation of the individual in the company’s image of the ideal consumer. The American citizen is, within this framework, reduced to categories that can be advertised to, with the capitalist system expanding such that it is capable of co-opting even modes of civic life that ostensibly exist in contradiction to it, like countercultural movements. The irony here, for Wallace, is that it is exactly this desire for ever-escalating production—i.e. for maximization of profits—that has led to cybernetic capitalism in its current form. This form is responsible for the erasure of the specific individual, who is reduced to a set of demographic metrics that allows them to be more effectively advertised to.

The mechanistic dimension of the corporation is one that the examiners correctly identify as amoral in its single-minded, profit-driven motivation, and an economic system that incentivizes such behavior has led to what the examiners describe as “the soulless inhumanity of corporate life” (151). Wallace has an examiner repeat the word “soulless” thrice in a single sentence here, stressing the extent to which the machine-like characteristics of the corporate body distinguish it from the human capacity to act morally. Joel Bakan argues that corporations are able to possess an outsized degree of power in contemporary society by resisting any governmental regulation that would prevent their prioritization of financial self-interest over all else, even at the expense of social good (102-3). Discussing the absurdity of assigning Fourteenth Amendment protections to corporations, one examiner argues that “corporations aren’t citizens or neighbors or parents . . . They don’t have souls. They’re revenue machines . . .” (139).

More urgently for Wallace, the amoral efficiency of machine-like corporations is not confined to the corporation itself, but has begun to infect the individual citizen. “Corporations are getting better and better,” one examiner argues, “at seducing [U.S. citizens] into thinking the way they think—of profits as the telos and responsibility as something to be enshrined in symbol and evaded in reality” (133). Corporate modes of thinking and means of assigning value have usurped the individual’s control over their own cognition, and the examiners in this section thus make the explicit argument that the mechanical functioning of corporations dehumanizes by extension the consumer who engages with them. One examiner observes how such corporate behavior transforms the human psyche, noting that “we as individual citizens have adopted a corporate attitude,” he argues. “That our ultimate obligation is to ourselves” (139). The examiners ultimately suggest that human consumers adopting the same amoral, self-privileging attitude that drives mechanical efficiency leads to not only the corruption of the civic sphere, but to a collective dehumanization and removal of individual will.

The Bugs of the System

In The Pale King, the most ironic instance of a dehumanizing corporate body adopting the language of the human body for its own ends appears in the example of the IRS’s computerized Fornix system, named after a part of the human brain, and its ANADA (Audit-No Audit Discriminant Algorithm). The IRS’s use of these technologies of efficiency are central to its evolution into a corporation-like entity, and Wallace’s description of the algorithm (and of the entire Fornix system) illustrates how the IRS has adopted the language of the human brain while devaluing the real brains of the human examiners, whose jobs are at risk because of the ANADA’s implementation. The novel establishes the algorithm as the conceptual structure on which the IRS’s more abstract ideals of flexible data categorization are based, attempting to incorporate the adaptability of human thought while serving the needs of corporatist efficiency.Merrill Lehrl, the “cyberneticist,” intends to accomplish his goal of maximizing IRS efficiency in part by automating Service work by way of the ANADA and the high-speed processing of the Fornix computer system that forms the digital infrastructure of the IRS with its computers and the “high-powered statistical formula” of the ANADA (70n3a).

Wallace’s creation of the Fornix system allows him to emphasize the extent to which mechanical systems attempt to replicate the flexibility of the human brain. The Fornix system shares a name with the part of the hippocampus that is responsible for regulating nerve output and the retrieval of memory, which in turn was named for the Latin word fornix.^[3] The anatomical fornix joins disparate parts of the brain, creating links between the regions of the human mind. Wallace’s description of Fornix is central to the novel’s interest in the relationship of abstract data to the material roots of the computer systems responsible for processing it: in his creation of the IRS Fornix, Wallace attends to the notion that underlies automated systems that the human brain’s decision-making processes can be recreated as a mechanical system divorced from the human body. The fact that the human fornix is responsible in part for retrieving memories is of central importance here. The outsourcing of our cognitive structures like memory and decision-making to machines is one of the characteristics of the Information Age that, for Wallace, threatens our capacity to pay attention to what we determine meaningful (rather than what corporate interests insist is meaningful). Though he does not deal with Fornix and the ANADA, Stephen Burn has argued that human cognition is one of the novel’s central topics under examination, considering in particular how the brain acts as a filter for the enormous amount of information to which we are always being exposed in the Information Age. Burn links Wallace’s meditations on the conscious directing and redirecting of one’s attention in The Pale King to the automatic mechanisms by which our brains determine whether the information that we encounter is meaningful or useful (Burn 384). The mechanical systems themselves, moreover, are imperfect, generating confusion rather than clarity. As the novel points out, then, there are consequences to transgressing the boundaries of the human body and recreating the components of the brain as objects that exist apart from the rest of the physical body as a system.

Wallace identifies how the problem of human agency and self-creation has taken on new dimensions in an Information Age in which the process of decision-making, especially regarding where to direct one’s attention, has been largely outsourced to technology and its corporate creators. The ANADA, representing Lehrl’s possible automation of the jobs of the wigglers, also threatens by extension the purposeful choices and thus autonomy that such work entails. The wigglers’ positions are, Wallace suggests, existentially-generative precisely because they require the wigglers to make the meaningful choice of returning their attention to their work over and over. The “NADA” contained in the algorithm’s name therefore reflects its status as existentially perilous given its potential to undermine the human capability for productive choice. The David Wallace character remarks in a footnote on the “heavy, almost thanatoid-sounding” name of the ANADA formula (70n3a). The nothingness evoked by the “NADA” also recalls the fear of individual mortality and oblivion that Wallace lays out in the elevator scene as being a central terror of contemporary life, the fear against which U.S. citizens react with their consumer decisions (145-6).

The Fornix system and its offshoots are riddled with bugs, malfunctioning throughout The Pale King in ways that severely impair the efficiency of the IRS as an institution, and Wallace uses these bugs to explore how the physical world remains capable of asserting itself against the control of technology. The Fornix system, intended as an “Integrated Data System” (325) for streamlining the processing of annual tax returns, instead becomes shorthand for the chaos and disorder that results from attempts of old technological systems to keep pace with and adapt to new scales of information processing for which they are physically unequipped. The IRS’s treatment of its computer system’s hardware reveals the dependence of informatics on physical structures, with these structures compromising the efficiency of automation efforts. One key example is the novel’s treatment of obsolete punched cards: “Until mid-1987,” Wallace notes, “the IRS’s attempts at achieving an integrated data system were plagued with systemic bugs and problems, many of them exacerbated by Technical Branch’s attempts to economize by updating older Fornix keypunch and card-sorter equipment to handle ninety-six-column Powers cards instead of the original eighty-column Holleriths” (412). The violence (and questionable judgment) of attempting to alter the old, pre-existing Fornix equipment so that it can read new Powers cards parallels the Service’s attempt to impose a plasticity akin to that of the highly-adaptable human brain upon a technological system that is unable to accommodate it. The sheer quantity of information that the IRS is required to process outpaces its hardware, such that the Service resorts to stopgap strategies that attempt to amalgamate many incompatible mechanical systems. 

Fittingly, given Wallace’s longstanding interest in metafiction, the potential of language to shape social reality, and the ambiguities of meaning that pervade linguistic communication, the novel’s most notable example of computer malfunctioning involves a failure of language. In §38 of the novel, David Wallace explains the circumstances that led to his being mistaken for a higher-ranking specialist who shares his name, referring back to the “systemic bugs and problems” that have resulted from attempts to update the outdated Fornix equipment (412). One such bug in the Service’s “COBOL-based” data systems creates “‘ghost redundancies’ in the processing of employee promotions” wherein any time that an employee is promoted within the Service, the system “generate[s] a whole new personnel file, and thereafter would recognize two separate files for what appeared to be two separate employees” (412-3). It is the Service’s debugging attempts that lead to the confusion of the two David Wallaces. The automated Personnel system is programmed with a “ɢᴏ ᴛᴏ subroutine” such that whenever it encounters two profiles with the same name, it automatically absorbs the lower-ranking profile into that of the higher-ranking. In the case of two examiners who happen to share the same name, only the profile of the higher-ranking employee remains in the system. “In effect,” Wallace tells us, “David F. Wallace, GS-9 . . . did not exist; his file had been deleted, or absorbed into, that of David F. Wallace, GS-13” (413). What is important here is that it is the IRS’s attempts to fix the system’s “ghost redundancies” that worsen the situation. The same technologies that are slated to eventually replace human examiners are capable of literally erasing the existence of these humans within the system’s records. Ironically, this erasure has the consequence of requiring extra work on the part of human examiners—the need to reread lines of computer code in order to manually override the systemic shortcuts that, under the guise of efficient information management, have produced an ironic inefficiency and disorder that must be corrected by human workers. Wallace suggests that reducing human lives to information—to the existence of a record within a larger system of data—may give rise to an image of systemic social control, but in fact renders the entire system more vulnerable to confusion.

The identity-confusion bug is not an isolated error for the IRS’s technological structures but rather one of many situations in the novel where the mechanical attempts to mimic the cognitive abilities of the human and malfunctions as a result. In one of the novel’s longest footnotes, Wallace elaborates on the “additional bugs or systemic weaknesses” responsible for aggravating the mistaken identity situation: “Due to limitations imposed by the reconfiguration of certain core programs to accommodate round-hole ninety-column Powers cards, the Personnel computer system’s file labels could accommodate only an employee’s middle initial,” and, since both David Wallaces had a middle initial of F., they were indistinguishable on the basis of middle name (415n4). Moreover, IRS personnel are assigned a new Social Security number upon their induction into the system, one that replaces their previous SSNs. In its efforts to streamline its automated processes, the IRS in fact makes its information management more Byzantine and chaotic and conceals the specificity of individual records under layers of nigh-impenetrable noise. Wallace thus shows how images of identity and individual selfhood are subject to erasure or distortion when they become datasets within the domain of automated systems.

Although the same philosophy of maximal efficiency through mechanical organization underpins both the creation of the ANADA and the consequent restructuring of the human workers, one of the novel’s greatest ironies is that the examiners prove themselves better able to perform work of consistent quality than the machines can. While the brains of human examiners are capable of adapting to new circumstances and transcending the physical limitations of the body through the conscious exercise of will, the machines only end up causing greater disorganization and even violence. The growing amount of data outpacing the hardware infrastructure that supports it produces chaos—and a measure of physical violence—into the system. The central tension in the novel between the human examiners and the automated systems is predicated on the belief that the machines will be more efficient and thus will yield greater revenue because they are not subject to the unpredictability of the human body. The violent results of automation, though, show that the machines are ultimately less reliable than the human examiners, precisely because machines lack the adaptability of organic human brains and bodies.

Manual Transmissions

For Wallace, the digital is never reducible to idealized notions of independent, free-floating, abstract data, dwelling in the metaphoric “cloud,” and is instead always indebted to the physical conditions of its existence, to the organic oddities of the human brain and body. One of the most striking features of The Pale King is Wallace’s attention to how the language that we have adopted to describe technology derives from the physical body, and especially from the human hand. He returns to the notions of the “digital” and the “manual” throughout the novel and the extrapolation of these terms to mechanical contexts. In his 2003 non-fiction book Everything and More: A Compact History of ∞, Wallace draws a direct link between the digits of the hand and of numbers, examining in more detail the relationship between the embodied basis of mathematics and the abstractions that “concern . . . only relations between numbers” (29). Wallace notes: “Consider the facts that numbers are called ‘digits’ and that most counting systems—not just our base-10 but also the base-5 and -20 systems of prehistoric Europe—are clearly designed around fingers and toes” (29). Our bodies form the basis for our mathematical and symbolic systems, such that we can never totally abstract ourselves from our bodies. The fingers, moreover, are the site of interaction with mechanical objects, like touchscreens and calculators, that make us cyborg-like, according to Haraway, and these tools become effective extensions of our bodies that increasingly influence our behavior, acting on us as much as we act on them (152-3). The body thus extends itself into the objecthood that exists outside of the self both physically and symbolically in its use of the hand.

For Wallace, the hands indicate the extent to which the examiners are immersed in their work—or are not—and the physical consequences of that immersion. Work, for Wallace, becomes a practice that is not dehumanizing for the examiners; instead, their work allows the wigglers to experience the direct, unmediated effect of their individual will. Severs has noted how hands, in The Pale King, are described as being “especially close to your idea of your identity of who you are” (Wallace 351-352), and the physical condition of the hand directly reflects each Examiner’s ability to work. For instance, Shane Drinion’s “left pinkie finger is noticeably puckered and pale from wearing the rubber all day in Exams” (456). During a meeting for incoming GS-13 examiners, the novel describes Wallace’s personal method of note-taking, which has made his left hand “way more muscled and substantial—especially the muscle between his thumb and forefinger, which bulged when the pencil was pressed to the paper—than his right. He could transcribe like the wind” (337). This transcription has deleterious physical consequences, however: Wallace finds himself “flexing and unflexing his hand to ameliorate something that happened if he transcribed for more than a few minutes, which is that his left hand assumed a sort of automatic writerly claw shape . . . sometimes for more than an hour, forcing him to hide the hand in his pocket” (337).The deformations of the hand that accompany repetitive work remind the reader of the mechanical qualities of the physical body and its limitations.

In hands, Wallace sees the place where limits are negotiated and where the effects of these negotiations make themselves visible. In our present digital era, we use our hands to negotiate our relationships to technology on a daily basis—our fingers operate the touch screens, mice, and track pads with which we navigate our digitized environments. For Kant, the threat of heteronomy—being determined not by the self but by external factors that act on the self, in contrast to autonomy—was a condition that precluded freedom, and thus the ability to act morally. If one cannot make the free decision to act morally because one has no choice except to do so, the decision is not truly a moral one (Kant 44). Wallace’s novel warns that the constant use of our fingers in touching screens, tapping and clicking, reflects a growing heteronomy of the mind: a cognitive occupation on the part of our technologies. The characters’ strange relationships to their hands in The Pale King  reflect the extent to which our agency is imperiled by the world around us—the extent to which our hands begin to act in automaton-like ways mirrors the extent of our heteronomy. For Wallace, the curative comes in the wigglers’ reassertion of conscious control over their hands, recognizing the hand as the potential site where the self can exercise its influence on the world. Such conscious, non-automatic (i.e. manual and voluntary) return of one’s attention to work repeatedly not only gives the human examiners an advantage over the ANADA that threatens to render them obsolete, this focus also acts as a means by which the individual can regain autonomy in a dehumanizing technological landscape that increasingly makes decisions for them.

It is fitting that one of the novel’s most hopeful (and perhaps most comical) images features the reaching-out of hands. Unlike the isolated fingers in contact with objects like tax forms and soccer balls in other scenes of the novel, this section shows the possibility of togetherness and community that can arise through the examiners’ shared experience of their work at the Peoria REC. In §24, David Wallace describes his experience of being driven to REC for the first time. He observes that employees in the more peripheral [parking] lots were required to walk along the narrow, ditch-flanked access road . . . which resulted in a great deal of teetering along the access road’s unpaved edge, plus some staggering and windmilling of arms; and we saw at least one employee slip and cartwheel into the drainage ditch by the road’s side and have to be pulled manually back up by two or three others. (279-80)

In addition to the literal attempts to keep balance here with the arms, this scene raises the possibility that when balance does fail, it can be restored by a taking of hands, a voluntary reaching out to meet the hands of another. The image of togetherness in this scene thus offers an antidote to Wallace’s reference to Sisyphus on the very next page and the novel’s general considerations of boredom and repetition—unlike the “maddening Sisyphean so-near-and-yet-far stasis” (281) that the Wallace characters experience while sitting in the traffic or while watching television (any time when they are not immersed in their work), their hands moving automatically, the fallen (and resurrected) employee suggests the possibility of overcoming individual limitations through collective effort, even while the physical body is damaged in the process. Wallace calls for exactly this kind of mutual recognition from the first section of The Pale King—our deliberate attention, for him, is central to the awareness that “we are all of us brothers” (5), a recognition of the necessity of the organic human body in a technologized age when this body is under erasure.

Works Cited

Bakan, Joel. The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power. Toronto: Viking Canada, 2004.

Burn, Stephen J. “‘A Paradigm for the Life of Consciousness’: The Pale King” in David Foster Wallace and “The Long Thing”: New Essays on the Novels, ed. Marshall Boswell. New York: Bloomsbury, 2014.

“Cybernetics, n.” OED Online, Oxford University Press, December 2020, www.oed.com/view/Entry/46486. Accessed 14 February 2021.

“Fornicate, v.” OED Online, Oxford University Press, March 2021, www.oed.com/view/Entry/73553. Accessed 23 May 2021

Haraway, Donna. “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century.” Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. New York: Taylor and Francis, 2013. 149-181.

Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Practical Reason. Trans. Lewis White Beck. New York: Liberal Arts Press, 1956.

Severs, Jeffrey. David Foster Wallace’s Balancing Books: Fictions of Value. New York: Columbia University Press, 2017.

Wallace, David Foster. Everything and More: A Compact History of Infinity. New York: W. W. Norton, 2003.

– – -.. The Pale King: An Unfinished Novel. Ed. Michael Pietsch. New York: Little, Brown and Co., 2011.

“What David Foster Wallace Circled in His Dictionary.” Slate, 14 Apr. 2010, http://www.slate.com/articles/life/the_good_word/2010/04/what_david_foster_wallace_circled_in_his_dictionary.html

Wiener, Norbert. Cybernetics Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine, Reissue of the 1961 Second Edition. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2019.

Wouters, Conley. “‘What am I, a Machine?’ Humans, Information, and Matters of Record in David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King” in David Foster Wallace and “The Long Thing”: New Essays on the Novels, ed. Marshall Boswell. New York: Bloomsbury, 2014.

^[1] The novel uses sections (§) in lieu of conventional chapters, mimicking the layout of the IRS’s Tax Code.

^[2] “Information Returns Processing” System.

^[3] The Latin word fornix means “arch” or “vaulted chamber.” (In Latin, the word eventually came to signify a brothel, giving rise to our contemporary “fornicate.” “Fornication” is another of the words found circled in Wallace’s American Heritage Dictionary, according to the Ransom Center (“What David Foster Wallace Circled”), and he may thus have been aware of its etymology, as the dictionary includes the Latin roots of its various entries.)