Attending to Objects in David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest

“On the Porousness of Certain Borders”: Attending to Objects in David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest Brian Douglas Jansen University of Calgary oughly halfway through David Foster Wallace’s mammoth and Rlabyrinthine 1996 novel Infinite Jest, the character Don Gately—a recov- ering drug addict and live-in employee of a halfway house in Boston, Massachusetts—encounters a biker named Bob Death at an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting. In an exchange between the two, Bob tells Gately a joke whose punchline becomes crucial in ferreting out the novel’s thematic crux and indeed the ethical perspective of its author. Having asked Gately whether he has “by any chance … heard the one about the fish” (445), Bob Death recites a joke that was later reused by the novel’s author in a com- mencement speech delivered at Kenyon College in 2005 (collected post- humously in a 2009 volume titled This Is Water): “This wise old whiskery fish swims up to three young fish and goes, ‘Morning, boys, how’s the water’ and swims away; and the three young fish watch him swim away and look at each other and go, ‘What the fuck is water?’ ” (445). The immedi- ate point of the joke, as Wallace explains in his speech, “is merely that the most obvious, ubiquitous, important realities are often the ones that are hardest to see and talk about” (Water 8), and to repeat the mantra of “this is water” is to remind oneself to be “conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from ESC 40.4 (December 2014): 55–77 experience” (54). And in turn, to choose to pay attention, for Wallace, to be aware of one’s surroundings and conscious of one’s place in the world, is to make possible an experience of life that is “not only meaningful, but Brian Douglas sacred, on fire with the same force that lit the stars—compassion, love, the Jansen is a doctoral subsurface unity of all things” (93). candidate in English That Wallace chose to emphasize in this speech the “unity of all things” literature at the is, I think, a telling detail. For although he contended elsewhere that writ- University of Calgary, ing is “about what it is to be a fucking human being” (McCaffery 131), his specializing in criticism and his fiction grapple extensively with developments in technol- contemporary American ogy, media, and science that collectively give the lie to what N. Katherine literature and creative Hayles has described as the “comfortable liberal assumptions about the writing. His current sovereignty of the human subject” (Giles 329). As Paul Giles has pointed research explores out, Wallace’s conception of what it is to be human is therefore intimately the intersection of tied up with an awareness of a world of uncertain epistemological status— commerce, ethics, and of cyborgs and machines, of the “categorical distinctions between human agency in the reading and nonhuman … becoming ever less self-evident” (328). And although and writing of popular Wallace’s persistent search for human truth marks him in Giles’s eyes as fiction. Brian’s work a kind of “sentimental posthumanist … for whom the legacies of human appeared most recently spirit still carry a cathectic charge” (341), Wallace’s work returns regularly in Literature, Rhetoric, to certain values: those of paying attention (to ourselves, to each other, and Values (Cambridge to our surroundings), of exteriority in the face of an urge to retreat into Scholars Publishing, solipsism, of shattering illusions of autonomy, of a desire to bridge the 2012). gap between self and other, of an understanding that (as Hayles suggests) “everything is connected with everything else” (693), of a conception of the self as what Elizabeth Freudenthal calls a “dynamic object … in relationship to other people and objects” (204). Nowhere are these values more evident than in the 1,079-page Infi- nite Jest, a novel intensely preoccupied with objects—drugs, technologies, maps, tennis rackets and balls, giant monsters formed from the remains of aborted fetuses, mysteriously moving beds, video cartridges of a film so entertaining that it is lethal to its viewers, and even (metatextually) the book itself—and how humans simultaneously shape and are shaped by those objects, making sense of themselves, each other, and their world through those objects. The centrality of objects to the networks of activ- ity in Infinite Jest, as we will see, in fact, may even point to “objects” here being the wrong word—for these objects, in their circulation, their multi- faceted connections, and their apparent agency, take on what we might characterize as a kind of “thingness” (in its various critical conceptions) that we will address momentarily. Beginning, however, with the work of sociologist Bruno Latour, I intend to argue that the object-things of 56 | Jansen Infinite Jest serve two closely related functions: first, that in their com- plexity, tangled causality, conflation of means and ends, and violence, the things of the novel undercut what Latour views as modernity’s obsessive attempts to categorize the world in terms of binaries that separate human and nonhuman, subjects and objects. Second, I will suggest that what follows from the rupture of these binaries is a celebration of the human subject who is turned outward, what Elizabeth Freudenthal terms “anti- interiority” (192)—that, in other words, “to be … human” is to be aware of our existence in relation to an exterior material world, to be aware of our roles in a large, complex, interconnected system.1 For, as Latour suggests, “Nothing, not even the human, is for itself or by itself, but always by other things and for other things” (“Morality” 256). In his work We Have Never Been Modern and elsewhere, Latour has argued convincingly, in the words of Roger Luckhurst, “that the world is not safely divided between society and science, politics and nature, subjects and objects, social constructions and reality, but rather is populated increasingly by strange hybrids … that cut across these divides and demand new ways of thinking” (4). The tendency of modernity to offer neat demarcations between subjects such as economy, politics, science, religion, and culture is problematic because all of these issues are intertwined in what Latour terms “imbroglios” (Modern 3). In an evocative anecdote, he offers the experience of turning through the pages of a daily newspaper, noting the way the newspaper’s neat section headings demarcate bound- ary lines between ideas in which so much is at stake, breaking up fragile threads “into as many segments as there are pure disciplines” (3) and obfuscating the way that “all of culture and all of nature get churned up again every day” (2). For Latour, an example suffices to illustrate his point about both these “imbroglios” and the ways in which they are dismissed. In We Have Never Been Modern, he argues: The smallest aids virus takes you from sex to the unconscious, then to Africa, tissue cultures, dna and San Francisco, but the analysts, thinkers, journalists and decision-makers will 1 I add the caveat here that the title of this paper is a playful partial quotation and deliberate misappropriation of a series of Wallace’s short fictions in his collec- tion Brief Interviews With Hideous Men, all titled “Yet Another Example of the Porousness of Certain Borders” and all depicting, as Marshall Boswell explains, “situations in which levels of consciousness and/or representation begin to bleed into one another” (198). The porousness I am noting here is not about consciousness per se but, rather, about what I view as Infinite Jest’s argument for a kind of porousness between subjects and objects. “On the Porousness of Certain Borders” | 57 slice the delicate network traced by the virus for you into tidy compartments where you will find only science, only economy, only social phenomena, only local news, only sentiment, only sex. (2) Those who attempt to separate these imbroglios are, he argues, cutting through a “Gordian knot” (3) and attempting to segment something that, ultimately, cannot be segmented: things—technology, science, objects in the world, the environment2—are intractably linked to “power and human politics” (2) even as we steadfastly pretend this is not the case. All of which is not simply to say, of course, that Latour’s philosophy is reducible to the stance that science is socially constructed. Rather, although Latour is indeed interested in “the rejection of cultural factors in science … he is equally concerned to reject facile accounts that reduce everything in science to social construction or matters of representation and interpretation” (Luckhurst 6). Merely arguing for the social construction of science ignores the extent to which the social is itself a problematic term, for the social “is not a sort of ether that invisibly permeates everything else as a hidden context, but is the result of the associations or links that bind together scientific, political, cultural, economic, and other practices” (Luckhurst 8). Put differently, what we think of as social is itself about more than people, because it is constructed by things. As Latour suggests, “scientific facts are indeed constructed, but they cannot be reduced to the social dimension because this dimension is populated by objects mobilized to construct it” (Modern 6). Neat divisions between human and nonhuman, nature and culture, for Latour, are at root the illu- sory products of modernity, a period whose emergence he loosely dates to mid-seventeenth century debates between political philosopher Thomas Hobbes and natural philosopher Robert Boyle (15). Using these debates as a case study, Latour argues that the word “modern” actually describes two sets of correlated practices: one, translation, that “creates mixtures 2 Simply skimming through Latour and Peter Weibel’s mammoth volume Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy, the near-encyclopedic companion to an art exhibit of the same name, sheds some light on how expansive Latour’s definition of a “thing” can be, jumping as it does from voting laws to atomic weapons, bodies of water to architecture and stock tickers, even to former President Bill Clinton’s cat Socks.

Load more