The Postmodern Suicide, Part 1, by Adam Lehrer

In this essay originally published in 2021, Adam Lehrer analyzes the eerie similarities in mindsets of three men and thinkers who all killed themselves in the 21st Century...

On September 12, 2008, novelist David Foster Wallace wrote a two-page letter to his wife and arranged the manuscript for his posthumous unfinished novel THE PALE KING before hanging himself from a rafter of his house. He was 46.

On September 13, 2012, contemporary artist Mike Kelley killed himself through what appeared to be carbon monoxide poisoning, according to his autopsy’s reports. The circumstances, as with many a postmodern suicide, are strange, disconcerting, and begging of conspiratorial ruminations. Kelley was 57. 

On January 13, 2017, cultural theorist Mark Fisher hanged himself shortly before the release of his last book The Weird and the Eerie after publicly discussing his extreme depression for some years before. His death marked the end of something, of which I’ll discuss later. Fisher was 48.

Artaud said that Van Gogh was “suicided by society. [1]” The phrase is one I consider often. Earlier this year, I wrote about the epistemology of “the blackpill”: what is it exactly, and what are we expressing when we say that we’ve taken it? My co-host on the System of Systems podcast, the Perpetual Self Optimizer, says that the only way to truly take the blackpill is to push nihilism to its logical conclusion and bite the bullet – that is, to kill yourself. There is no pill blacker than death itself. But if Van Gogh was suicided by society, what does it mean to be suicided by a society that doesn’t exist? “There is no society”, or so says the aphoristic ruling class mantra (Thatcher’s influence remains omnipotent). If Van Gogh was force fed his blackpill by a society at the dawn of modernism in rapid evolution, is it somehow worse to be force fed the blackpill now – by a society that doesn’t exist? The postmodern blackpill — the contemporary suicide — is given to us by the simulation of a society that isn’t real. A postmodern suicide is the only real action that can be taken in a society gone hyperreal. The postmodern suicide follows the logic of postmodernism itself, making the postmodern suicides its prophecies.

Though these three aforementioned thinkers — David Foster Wallace, Mike Kelley and Mark Fisher — all worked in different disciplines and had different politics and beliefs, they all eerily landed on similar critiques of culture and political economy in late capitalism and postmodernism itself. They developed a systematic critique of the non-society they inhabited, finding fraudulence, conformism, cynicism, escapism, nostalgia, and pure alienation beneath the simulacra projected by the culture industries and the entertainment industrial complex. These men, despite their numerous faults and ideological limitations, saw through the culture itself and what they glimpsed on the other end was so unfathomably horrific they saw no other option but to end life all together. 

 What does this mean for the rest of us?

“I think there must be probably different types of suicides,” writes Wallace in Infinite Jest [2]. “I'm not one of the self-hating ones.” The postmodern suicide is distinct in the sense that it is not a suicide of self-obsession. It cannot be dismissed or judged as the kind of “weakness” we might have historically projected onto suicide victims. He continues: “I just wanted out. I didn't want to play anymore is all.” The postmodern suicide then is a rational response to the contemporary conditions of the “unsociety.” Wallace, Kelley, and Fisher all unearthed the essential, tragic, and related truths about the unsociety.  It was through their strength of thought and spirit that these thinkers were able to make these observations; thus, postmodern suicides are at face imbued with a cosmic power that those who continue to live can’t access. But is the postmodern suicide short-sighted, even if a rational response to the schizoid contradictions of the decaying unsociety? That’s where things get more complicated.

Should we look to Wallace, Kelley, and Fisher as sages of infinite wisdom and follow their lead, burying ourselves in our own shallow graves, or should we use the realizations they made about our world, learn to live and cope with them, and fashion a way forward? Should we, along with them, swallow the only proverbial blackpill that follows its logic and drift into the eternal void? Or, do we internalize these men’s ideas, hold onto them, and resist the blackpill’s temptation? I don’t know the answers to these questions, exactly. First, we must understand what Wallace, Kelley and Fisher saw so clearly to understand what compelled them towards their macabre final acts.

DAVID FOSTER WALLACE AND THE PERILOUS DIVORCE WITH NIHILISTIC IRONY

David Foster Wallace occupies a peculiar and alienating position within the American literary canon. In many ways, his work represents the apotheosis of the postmodern literary style. His writing, laced in cynicism, references to pop culture, and a vague apolitical streak not inconsistent with Generation X’s approach to art making and uncritical stance towards liberalism at the “end of history,” is hard to separate from the generation that it emerged from. But Wallace’s statements often directly contradict the way of thinking that manifests in his actual artistic practice. Wallace hated postmodernism. He fucking despised detachment, irony, and cynicism. “Postmodernism has, to a large extent, run its course,” he said in an interview with Charlie Rose in 1997. “A lot of the shticks of postmodernism — irony, cynicism, irreverence — are now part of whatever it is that’s enervating in the culture itself.”

He wanted to break out of the milieu of cynicism and detached irony that defined the burgeoning unsociety of postmodernism. But did he succeed? Not even close. Inevitably, Wallace’s divorce with irony only brought him closer to the despair and inescapable blackness that lurked beneath it. Wallace’s excavation of the bleak undercurrent of postmodernism was arguably the unnamable force that would overwhelm and kill him. In Wallace’s famous 1996 essay on the luxury cruise liner MV Nadir, “Shipping Out”, Wallace is both too cultured and pretentious to wholeheartedly enjoy the cruise’s luxury amenities while simultaneously too contemptuous of his own cynicism to derive even an ironic pleasure from his experience aboard the ship.

“Celebrity brochure does not lie or exaggerate, however, in the luxury department,” writes Wallace, “and I now confront the journalistic problem of not being sure how many examples I need to list in order to communicate the atmosphere of sybaritic and nearly insanity-producing pampering on board the MV Nadir [3].”

Wallace’s interpretation of the vulgar commercialism and pre-packaged luxury of the cruise liner is a microcosmic facet of his despair in postmodern society. He’s seduced by the entertainment of it all, and understands its power. But, like a druid, he sees through it. He knows that beneath that spectacle is emptiness, decay, and collapse. But his cynicism doesn’t afford him the gift of ironic detachment. For Wallace, detachment would have been nothing short of a fucking miracle. It would have been a welcome shield, and without it, he was left defenseless and subsumed by the despair of the contemporary condition. His extreme clinical depression cursed him with a thirst for transcendent meaning, for realness, and for sincerity. There is simply no way to approach culture in late capitalism and postmodernism with this mentality and come out alive. In his literary masterpiece Infinite Jest, Wallace writes

 What passes for hip cynical transcendence of sentiment is really some kind of fear of being really human, since to be really human [...] is probably to be unavoidably sentimental and naïve and goo-prone and generally pathetic.

Infinite Jest is arguably the last great American novel. On a recent “4chan/Lit” pol of the 100 greatest novels of all time, Wallace’s 1996 masterpiece was selected as the 10th best work of fiction of all time, just behind The Iliad and just before Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian. Perhaps you take issue with the idea that 4chan users are arbiters of literary taste (you’d be wrong, but that’s neither here nor there), but Infinite Jest’s status is important to consider regardless. It is the most recent work of fiction on the list,save for Harry Potter which appears towards the end. Why?

Steven Moore, a literary critic best known for his analyses of William Gaddis (a noted influence on Wallace), narrowed on Infinite Jest’s conception of addiction in his early review of the novel and noted a distinction between the way that addiction functions in Wallace’s work versus the way it did in the work of Burroughs. “While Burroughs dwelled with sadistic glee on the horrors of addiction, Wallace takes on the horrors of withdrawal;” writes Moore. “Addiction in Burroughs was largely a response to the need to conform in the Eisenhower fifties, while in Wallace addiction is a response to stress, to the need to excel in the Reagan eighties (the novel's "ethical" setting, if not its historical one).”

Burroughs wrote about addiction as the deadened response to the repressed 1950s, but Wallace wrote about recovery as the delusional response to the social collapse of neoliberalism (to the “unsociety” as it were). The screenwriter and showrunner Mike White, a fellow Gen X misanthrope with a similarly (if, more commercially minded) brutal clear-headed understanding of the contemporary condition, depicted recovery in a similarly depressing way with his mid-’00s HBO series Enlightenment. The show stars Laura Dern as a corporate executive who comes undone on drugs, madness, and an intra-office affair. She goes through rehabilitation in Hawaii at a highly corporate “wellness” retreat and the series illustrates her commitment to “recovery” as little more than a new opportunity to assert herself, gain vengeance on those who wronged her, and be respected. Recovery itself becomes little more than a branding signifier. Nothing, not even enlightenment, is pure or free of the political economic system that we’re all embedded in. This is the “recovery” philosophized by Wallace’s writing.

Wallace’s influence is all over White’s shows (on both Enlightenment and his masterful recent mini-series The White Lotus), and more broadly Wallace’s insights have infiltrated the larger media apparatus. Infinite Jest is about addiction and recovery, but more so about recovery. He deliberately obscures the decision to pursue recovery as one of clarity or one that is spiritually beneficial. The aspirant tennis prodigy and heir to a massive fortune Hal Incandenza (I have weird personal connections to Hal—the school where he has a mental breakdown, University of Arizona, is my alma mater and my brother attended his private high school Tabor Academy in Massachusetts) seeks treatment for his chronic marijuana use but finds himself no closer to enlightenment or meaning. On the contrary, his recovery partly precipitates his downfall altogether. Hal, an academically gifted, marijuana addicted tennis prodigy, is likely Wallace’s doppelgänger in the text (all three descriptors equally apply to Wallace). Hal is the fun house reflection of Wallace’s doubt riddled psychology. One interesting difference between Wallace and his literary alter-ego is that while Hal is essentially asexual if not some kind of incel, Wallace was a prodigious cocksmith known for fucking many a literary groupie and is plagued by his womanizing even in death. Hal then is the loser that Wallace, despite all his financial, cultural, and sexual success, worries himself to be.

Through Hal’s narrative, we can interpret the despair that Wallace harbored towards the unsociety. After ingesting the drug that once made him emotionally blank as a child, Hal is able to feel once again. But his divorce with apathy precipitates the decomposition of his entire psyche – by the end of his narrative, Hal is incapable of vocalizing the feelings that he’s experiencing and has a nervous breakdown. We realize then that Wallace did have contempt for his own apathy, but he also knew that his own apathy was that which allowed him to keep steady. Without detachment, he’d be too emotionally destroyed to even communicate the meaning that he’d found. If he was truly to transcend it and come one to one with the reality of the universe, the truth would disintegrate the delicate fabric of his psyche. His detachment was a coping mechanism, but the coping mechanism made him despondent. There is no fucking escape.

But another major character, the rehab orderly and reformed cat burglar Don Gately, best embodies the contradictions inherent to recovery. Despite a brute exterior and criminal past, Gately is sincere and sensitive, perhaps to a fault. He deeply, deeply longs for redemption, but can redemption really present itself to anyone in a world dominated by Control systems, markets, and omnipotent advertising? Wallace is as curious here as we are, and the question is never answered.

 After so long not caring, and then now the caring crashes back in and turns so easily into obsessive worry, in sobriety.

Addiction takes on many forms throughout the text and can only be understood within its context as a perfectly rational response to an unsociety of collapsed meaning. Some of the characters are addicted to drugs, while others are addicted to other substances, but not to chemicals specifically. “The Entertainment” in Infinite Jest is the directorial feature of Hal’s elusive father James Incandenza – a cinematic triumph so seductively entertaining that it renders its viewers incapable of engaging with anything other than it.

It is also Wallace’s metaphor for what we can accurately describe as an entertainment industrial complex. Wallace knew how seductive and over-powering postmodern entertainment was, but it was in his attempts to rebuke it that he got even closer to the truth of it. There is, unfortunately, nothing that stands outside these complexes and they all form one interwoven, immane society of Control. Deleuze pinpointed postmodernism as an era in which the “society of Control” was in the process of replacing the “disciplinary societies” of the earlier modernism and the disciplining of wage labor by capital. The finance-driven society of Control (this is essentially what I’ve taken to referring as “unsociety”) offers infinite consumer choices, quite different from the days of TV being host to no more than four mega-channels that represented  the entire power apparatus, and those choices create the fragile illusion of freedom. But we are still vying for attention and capital in a marketplace driven by essentially the same power structure, even if it looks different.

 Maybe it's the fact the most of the arts here are produced by world-weary and sophisticated older people and then consumed by younger people who not only consume art but study it for clues on how to be cool, hip - and keep in mind that, for kids and younger people, to be hip and cool is the same as to be admired and accepted and included and so Unalone.

This passage from Infinite Jest defines Wallace’s ultimate despair. As an artist, even as an artist of such profound insight, Wallace could still not exist outside those systems that so deeply despaired him. Consider much of how Wallace is received now. With all his public denunciations of irony, detachment, and cynicism, he has still been reduced to a meme in the time passed since his death. The “New Sincerity” movement, for instance, is an assortment of meme accounts on Instagram that largely seem to use Wallace’s own ideas against him. Wallace’s terrific posthumous unfinished novel The Pale King is the literary embodiment of his end of life despair. The text isolates boredom and alienation as the de facto emotions of the contemporary subject; ‘tis alienation that we suppress with drugs, entertainment, and all the other bullshit we’re fed by our rulers to keep us docile, pliant, and under control. It was this realization — no matter how hard Wallace tried, the sincerity and meaning he strived for was dead and his attempts to revive them would only be fed back into the totalizing system — that killed him.

“The variable here is the other terror, the fire’s flames: when the flames get close enough, falling to death becomes the slightly less terrible of two terrors,” writes Wallace, beautifully, on suicide itself. The variables he faced were the postmodern life and the postmodern death. Knowing what he knew of the postmodern life, he opted for the slightly less terrible of two terrors.

Wallace’s postmodern suicide was not an act of cowardice, but an act of profound understanding. That doesn’t mean he made the right choice, however. And I would argue that the man had limitations as a thinker consistent with the postmodern suicide writ large.

But more on that later.

This article was originally published in September of 2021 by apophenie