Labor de Retazos, pt II

As Kings describes in the Old Testament we need not a monarchy or figure of authority, but shared responsibility and a common love that goes beyond any sense of singular individual greatness. If David Foster Wallace's writing is anything to go by, the individual does not exist; the world is defined by the experiences of others. This is why with symbols he allows our sense of time to unravel, our perception of depth and possibility in other personalities to unfold. Like he said, our default solipsis is a denial of life, a linear order with beginning and end; even our particular notion of free will is suspect.

Foster Wallace's novel Infinite Jest describes an "entertainment" that denies people the ability to choose not to watch it and it kills them; the ultimate symbol of detachment which appears as the most profound symbol of involvement. Consider an orgasmic moment or the moment it appears that a piece of music has stemmed from a specific free will or identity. It is untrue that sex is in the particular; it is a confluence of many lifespans that have created this moment. Music is creates outside of the self almost in an involuntary moment. The "entertainment" is a failure in the novel because it points to the lack of control and lack of freedom involved, just like the intensity of mass production, over-systematized manufactures; the consequences are always extremes and solipsism is something produced, something absurd in nature that causes mass distress, hysteria, and a certain lone-wolf syndrome. So in pointing respectively to the limits of the self, of physics, of telecommunications, that are only surface-deep phenomena, of devastating apathy within an extreme self-fixation and specialization, in sum the inability to see that the genera equates to the same as the specific and can only be stabilized by difference and complexity, and marked humility.

Even more distressing is the unreal nature of reality wherein development into full consciousness, an understanding of presence and adjustment that takes place in others too, cannot take place if people cannot identify themselves as a whole (never as a child, never an adult), but something that belongs to an entirety, as Aldhous Huxley writes. Otherwise begins addictive, neurotic behaviors which are fundamental to a form of commercial enterprise, but antithetical to a varied, direct form of life. What happens is that life is reflected into normative forms of narrative, regulation and restraints. Life is seen and not experienced, and tradition and almost cult-like forms of order deprive people of flexibility and the ability to think and learn for ourselves. A dictatorship of symbols and idioms which creates a world of children and men, establishes ultimate control over words like "sex", "crime", "addiction", and renders complexity within these terms impossible.