I ssue 4 • 2023 47 “SYSTEMIC BUGS AND PROBLEMS”: ACID FUGITIVITY, NEOLIBERALISM, AND THE PALE KING Ryan Kerr Introduction 1 J effrey severs, In hIs stuDy David Foster Wallace’s Balancing Books: Fictions of Value, argues that The Pale King attempts “to restore the spiritual potency” of labor and to “illustrate work’s potential for codifying and sharing values.” 2 Moreover, Stephen Shapiro similarly argues that the novel constitutes “an illustrative critique of coherent individual subjectivity.” 3 On the other hand, Richard Godden and Michael Szalay argue that the laborers in The Pale King gradually “tend towards the abstraction required of them by the form of their labour . . . dissolving into equivalency, . . . abstract and therefore sin- gle-bodied.” 4 +WV[QLMZQVO PW_ ?ITTIKMｼ[ ]VﾅVQ[PML VW^MT KWV\IQV[ 1 I would like to thank Dr. Susan Hegeman and the two anonymous reviewers at The Journal of David Foster Wallace Studies for their helpful feedback on this article.  2MٺZMa ;M^MZ[ David Foster Wallace’s Balancing Books: Fictions of Value (New York: Columbia University Press, 2017), 203. 3 Stephen Shapiro, “From Capitalist to Communist Abstraction: The Pale King’s Cultural Fix,” Textual Practice 28, no. 7 (November 2014): 1250. 4 Richard Godden and Michael Szalay, “The Bodies in the Bubble: David Fos- ter Wallace’s The Pale King,” Textual Practice 28, no. 7 (November 2014): 1299.