Players and Spectators: Entertainment and Disembodied Agency in Infinite Jest

Abstract

This essay examines how entertainment culture in David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest reshapes human agency by encouraging forms of passive spectatorship that displace embodied discipline. The essay dissects the modern portrayal of television and the lure of televisual fame, drawing on Lacanian psychoanalysis, to suggest that media encourages identification with images above all else. The essay then turns to Tennis as a mode of agency grounded in discipline, and deferred gratification. The key perspective of this essay is to showcase that Infinite Jest ultimately exposes the hollowness of modern culture; posing the question whether meaningful agency can be sustained within contemporary media environments.