The Illusion of Autonomy and the Fact of Recursivity: Virtual Ecologies, Entertainment, and Infinite Jest

The Illusion of Autonomy and the Fact of Recursivity: Virtual Ecologies, Entertainment, and Infinite Jest N. Katherine Hayles (bio) To begin, two paradoxes. One comes from C. B. Macpherson’s analysis of the conceptual foundations of the liberal subject, especially the writings of Hobbes and Locke. 1 Macpherson traces those passages in which Locke argues that the independence and autonomy of the subject stem from his ability to sell his labor, which in turn implies that first and foremost, the individual owns himself. In a state of nature a man owns himself even if he owns nothing else, and it is this ownership of self that precedes market relations and makes them possible. Yet as Macpherson observes, possessive individualism, as he calls this model of the self, obviously derives from a market economy that locates authenticity in ownership. Hence the paradox: the ownership of self must precede the market for the market to arise, yet ownership of self also derives from the very market it is supposed to underlie as a foundational premise. The second paradox is pointed out by William Cronon in his provocative essay, “The Trouble with Wilderness: or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature.” 2 In U.S. discourse about wilderness, wilderness stands for what nature is in itself, before it was despoiled by human beings. “Wilderness is the natural, unfallen antithesis of an unnatural civilization that has lost its soul,” Cronon summarizes. “It is a place of freedom in which we can recover the true selves we have lost to the corrupting influences of our artificial lives. Most of all, it is the ultimate landscape of authenticity” (80). But this view of nature requires that humans be absent from it, which leads to the following paradox. “If we allow ourselves to believe that nature, to be true, must also be wild, then our very presence in nature represents its fall. The place where we are is the place where nature is not.” As a result, wilderness loses its power to authenticate our lives as soon as we try to take advantage of its redemptive potential (80–81). On the one hand, then, we have a paradoxical relation between the liberal subject and market economy; on the other, a paradoxical relation between American individualism and wilderness. Just as the liberal [End Page 675] subject has its historical roots in the ideologies of the Enlightenment, so the individual who will be redeemed by wilderness has its historical basis in the peculiarly American experience of a frontier that was no sooner proclaimed than it began disappearing. The historical specificity of the American idea of wilderness can be measured by juxtaposing it with the Malaysian proverb that comes from a country where people have traditionally been considered the valuable resource without which neither economic prosperity nor national existence would be possible. “Soil, yes,” the proverb runs, “but no people. Soil without people is but a wilderness.” 3 In this formulation, the freight that wilderness carries is precisely the opposite of redemption, signaling not only loss of use but of political integrity and economic subsistence. It is no accident, I will argue, that the paradoxes of possessive individualism and redemptive wilderness come together in American culture and on American soil. At the center of both paradoxes is a privileging of autonomy, a very American virtue. Possessive individualism seeks foundations for market exchange in the autonomy of the individual; redemptive wilderness seeks foundations in the autonomy of the wilderness, which can then serve as a basis to restore the authenticity of the individual. 4 For those who start from possessive individualism, the environment can easily appear as a “natural resource” whose main importance is what it can yield in capitalist commodities. For those who start from redemptive wilderness, humans can appear as a biohazard to the earth, to be restrained or eliminated wherever possible. 5 In the one case, the environment is to be sacrificed for the people; in the other, people for the environment. The two paradoxes thus have similar structures and mutually reinforce each other. 6 They are created when coproduction is mistaken for a hierarchical dichotomy in which the privileged term acts as ground or origin for the belated...