The Solipsism of the Quantified Self: Working Bodies in David Foster Wallace's Body of Work
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Eerily prophetic in many regards, David Foster Wallace's 1996 novel »Infinite Jest«, this paper argues, can be seen to discuss the all too current phenomenon of the Quantified Self. Within its wider critique of American neoliberalism as producing a culture of solipsism, Infinite Jest portrays self-optimization through quantification in the context of labor as detrimental to the formation of stable and meaningful Selfhood and deforming the laboring body. Redefining tennis, usually a playful, non-productive activity, as a form of labor, students at Infinite Jest's Enfield Tennis Academy are prepared for the »Show«, having their bodies turned into a commodity in a marketplace of spectation. Thus, training at ETA centers on practices of self-quantification. Students' selves are exclusively understood as their body and its statistical representation in rankings, resulting in exchanges such as: »"Hey there, how are you?" "Number eight this week [...]"« The self-objectification that prepares ETA students for their work in the entertainment industry not only defers the Self but the materialist philosophy of ETA also deforms the body, creating grotesque bodies that »look [...] like a gorilla's arm [...] pasted on the body of a child«. Concurrently, digitization in Infinite Jest's entertainment industry also solipsizes and deforms the spectator. Thus, measuring the addictive potential of the »Entertainment«, a movie so effortlessly gratifying its viewers watch it until they die, the Canadian terrorists of Infinite Jest employ a macabre digital method, computing the statistical relation between how many digits viewers are willing to saw off to continue watching and the amount of time a viewer hesitates to do so. Digitization and self-quantification in postmodern capitalism endanger both the producer's and the consumer's Selfhood and body. Infinite Jest can be seen as a literary representation of the quantified self, linking materialist notions of self-quantification to neoliberal, solipsizing logic while proposing a Wittgensteinian solution to the problems arising from such a self-objectifying, materialist and poststructuralist culture. (Artistic) work, the novel continuously linking tennis to the work of the author, should be viewed as a reciprocal interaction between subjects rather than an objectified »body in commerce with bodies«.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.010 | 0.045 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.011 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".