elizabeth freudenthal - anti-interiority: compulsiveness, objectification, and identity in infinite...

7/30/2019 Elizabeth Freudenthal - Anti-Interiority: Compulsiveness, Objectification, and Identity in Infinite Jest.

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Anti-Interiority: Compulsiveness, Objectication,and Identity in Infnite Jest

Elizabeth Freudenthal

In david foster wallaces 1996 behemoth Infnite Jest, everyone is anaddict. More precisely, everyone is a compulsive user: o crack, De-merol, booze, elite competitive tennis, M*A*S*H, household bleach.

Recovering drug addict Don Gately emerges as one o the sprawlingnovels heroes, in part because o his success in recovery. Readers wantto let Wallace o the hook or the clichd contradictions o working-class identity dening Gatelyhis sweet navet and brute, bearlikestrength, his wide-ranging, deep insight and lack o ormal education,his ability to get the uptown girl despite his downtown backgroundbecause hes so dang likeable. Gatelys struggle to work the program,

to apply the rules o Alcoholics Anonymous to his own lie meaning-ully and eectively, drive much o the novels emotional power. Anddespite the problems one may have with AA as a vehicle or healthyliving, Gatelys mode o ghting addiction is the only one in the novelthat actually works. In Wallaces obsessive-compulsive, entertainment-addled, apocalyptically consumption-based society, everyone would dowell to act like Don Gately.

In one example o Gatelys recovery process, he ollows AAs dictum

to pray to a higher power, even though he has no idea who, what,where, why, or how such a power might exist. Gately simultaneouslyconesses and complains to an AA meeting that he

takes one o AAs very rare specic suggestions and hits the knees in the A.M.and asks or Help and then hits the knees again at bedtime and says Thank You,whether he believes hes talking to Anything/-body or not, and he somehowgets through the day clean. This, ater ten months o ear-smoking concentrationand refection, is still all he eels like he understands about the God angle.

. . . He eels about the ritualistic dailyPleaseand Thank Youprayers rather likea hitter thats on a hitting streak and doesnt change his jock or socks or pre-game routine or as long as hes on the streak W/sobriety being the hitting


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Gately ghts addiction by replacing his compulsive drug use with thiskind o repetitive, perormative, bodily ritual. He doesnt use talktherapy, he doesnt articulate how he eels, he cannot intellectualize

how or why it works. In act, when he tries to speculate what his higherpower might be, he eels a Nothing so prooundly terriying that itmakes him want to puke (IJ444). Though the narrative nods to child-hood trauma, memories that his addictions buried and that he revisitsin recovery, Gatelys recovery is largely depicted as a compulsive, ritual,and physical investment in an entity outside o himsel that may ormay not exist. Despite his ambivalence about the nature o the powerscontrolling him, he creates a unctional but empty signier or them,

using his own body as a similarly unctional instrument o ree-foating,originless well-being.I call Gatelys ritual anti-interiority, and I nd it in a number o

major contemporary novels where biomedicine, individual power, anddestructive social orders collide. Anti-interiority is a mode o identityounded in the material world o both objects and biological bodies anddivested rom an essentialist notion o inner emotional, psychological,and spiritual lie. Anti-interiority is a subjectivity generated by the ma-terial world and yet works against oppressive political, economic, and

social orces in that same world, not in the ideal realm o interiority,with its normative modes o agency and its metaphysical connotations.In act, it replaces the reerents associated with interior and exteriorwith a dynamic, generative materiality, itsel composed o both objectworlds and biomedical realities. In several cultural productions, o whichInfnite Jestis a compelling example, I nd anti-interiority in representa-tions o obsessive-compulsive disorder, Tourettes syndrome, and com-pulsive consumption behaviors, along with other biomedically dened

mental illnesses o bodily repetition and iteration, such as amnesia anddementia. This essay ocuses on Infnite Jestto introduce more ully theconcept, contexts, promises, and hazards o biomedical anti-interiority.I argue that the novel uses compulsiveness to depict not an erasure osel within an overpowering commercial culture, as some critics argue,but a continuous reestablishment o selhood contingent on externalmaterial reality. Anti-interior selhood exists as a paradoxically dynamicthinghood between material and subjective realms, in the space whereboth Gately and his Higher Power live.

Scholars o contemporary literature and theory have already beguna broad-based investigation o selhood in relation to both interiority


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the humanities and sciences. Similarly, research is fourishing on objectsand things as crucial to establishing human experience; this approachhas reinvigorated cultural studies. Further, a handul o recent works

directly address compulsiveness and changing views o bodily objecti-cation. Jennier Fleissners Women, Compulsion, Modernity argues thatcompulsion is endemic to modernity itsel.2 Her attention to compulsivebehavior and gender in naturalist ction rerames scholarship aboutthe nineteenth century; her locating women as central to the naturalistmovement contests perceptions o what had been considered the mostmasculine aesthetic in American literature. Disability studies scholarLennard Davis has written a cultural history o obsessive-compulsive

disorder.

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And Ian Hacking is concerned with a shit, in the last twenty-ve years, to a neo-Cartesian mode o objectiying the body throughmechanistic knowledge o its parts, including the brain, as separate romthe mind and sel.4 Along with these scholars, humanists are increas-ingly interested in cognitive science, neurology, and genetics as ways toretool their objects o inquiry and their disciplinary methodologies. Thebrain/mind complex had its own currency, with universities investingin programs studying the mind rom as many scholarly perspectives aspossible.5 And, o course, scientic research in biotechnology, genetics,

neurology, and related sciences o human consciousness and experienceis fourishing.

This scholarly attention to the multiple modes o sel-knowledgeand sel-consciousness has paralleled a tremendous rise in pharma-ceutical use.6 Biomedical approaches to identity are steadily increasingthroughout contemporary culture. Indeed, as Hacking notes, we viewour body partsincluding our brainsas machinelike, controllable,in a neo-Cartesian light. The increase in psychiatric medications which

act upon neurochemical processes suggests a sweeping cultural move-ment toward the voluntary objectication o personality.7 It also drivesincreasing media attention toward what one may call the medical ob-jectication o subjectivity. Slaterecently reignited what seemed an old,closed debate about a genetic basis or race-based IQ discrepancies intheir 2007 series on the topic by William Saletan.8 Spurred by disgrace-ul and career-ending comments by James Watson, this series incurreda wide swath o angry responses criticizing Saletans scientic evidence,which itsel had been discredited by all but the most ervent believers

in essentialist racial dierence.9 That this spurious debate continues tothrive in mainstream newspapers indicates a persistent cultural xation


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racial categories. Even partisan political debates about social policyatwhat stage does an embryo become human lie, or how deeply shouldscience and religion infect public-school instruction about the origins

o human lie?have at their heart anxiety about using science to denehuman experience.

Wallaces novel is part o a wider trend o ction that contextualizesthe biomedical in relation to contemporary social, economic, and politi-cal threats. Following the general timeline above, much literary ctionater 1990 tends to register social crises in terms o biologically oundedillnesses such as obsessive-compulsive disorder, autism spectrum disor-der, eating disorders, substance dependency, or Tourettes syndrome.

Moreover, in these novels, these illnesses are narrated as anti-interiorphenomena, as existing separate rom internal psychological and emo-tional lie. Characters in books such as Jonathan Lethems MotherlessBrooklynand Jonathan Franzens The Corrections, as well as Infnite Jest,experience their illnesses primarily as relationships with the mundaneobjects and material worlds external to their bodies. In particular, thedominance o objects in these novels suggests an objectication similarto that enacted by biomedical treatments or psychological and socialproblems. These novels break with older trends o representing social

anxieties through a generally Freudian conception o interior lie, as istypical o late nineteenth- and early to mid-twentieth-century depictionso hysteria and neurasthenia, and modernist texts more generally.10Though Fleissners study views nineteenth-century compulsiveness as anembodiment o modernity, and though eminist studies o hysteria andneurasthenia demonstrate historical continuity with contemporary depic-tions o such illnesses, the specically biomedical register used in the latetwentieth century signals an important dierence in representation.

However, despite the overwhelming scholarly, popular, and literaryinvestment in scientic and medical approaches to identity, literarytheory has not signicantly pushed questions about such subjectivity pastlimiting arguments about determinism. Rather than debating whether ornot, or to what degree, biology orms us, we should be asking questionsabout the cultural signicance o such widespread preoccupation withbiological approaches to subjectivity. And Infnite Jest, with its welter obiologically dened illnesses, its depiction o political, corporate, andmedia-driven apocalypse, and its persistent popularity among scholars

and critics, is a tting source or answers. In particular, this novel portraysanti-interiority as both positive and negative, enabling both liberation


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anti-interiority to characterize the worst kinds o authoritarianism. Theoverwhelming evidence o biomedicine as a cultural dominant suggeststhat anti-interiority is a particular maniestation o a powerul orce in

contemporary culture, a mode o subjectivity that is not necessarily tied toethics. Descriptive rather than prescriptive, anti-interiority oers insightsinto the promises and dangers o dening people biomedically. Similarly,aspects o obsessive-compulsive disorder are highly assimilable to thecontemporary high-speed, detail-oriented, pressure-cooker economy,while simultaneously enabling potential resistance to it; or example, aseverely compulsive person cannot get out o bed, down the stairs, outthe door, and to her job without a prohibitively expansive list o neces-

sary rituals.

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Accordingly, anti-interiority describes a mode o subjectivityintimately tied to contemporary structures o authority and power.

Compulsive Anti-Interiority in Innite Jest

As noted above, Infnite Jest eatures mental illness, in particularobsessive-compulsive disorder, ad nauseamin a narrative abounding withgarbage and bodily excretions. All major and most minor characters

have crippling OCD, crippling compulsive substance abuse, or both.Also, the novels near-uture world is dominated at every level by a globalcommodity system, rom the plethora o brand-name goods to energysourced rom toxic nuclear waste. Most characters compulsive behaviorsconnect directly with the multinational economic and nuclear-industrialsystems at the plots center. Compulsiveness links together the novelsamily, halway house, and political-economic plots. Still, no criticshave perormed a sustained analysis o the relation between the novels

portrayal o multinational commodity capitalism and the corporeal sub-jectivities o its characters. Further, critics have not directly addressedone o the more engaging emotional draws o Infnite Jest: its portrayalo interior-ocused, rational, sel-conscious intellectuality as emotionallydebilitating. 12 OCD in Wallaces novel is a way to channel the debilityo interiority, and it is also an eect o multinational corporate politicalpower. Paradoxically, by orcing an embrace o the reality o objects,even o the waste spawned by contemporary capitalism, compulsiveanti-interiority can provide some mobility within this system. And this

ambivalent portrayal o OCD demonstrates the utility o seeking agencyvia what is conventionally known as ones inner lie.


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liberal subject through two technologies o the sel: elite tennis at theEneld academy, where protagonist Hal Incandenza and his brothershave gone to school, and which his late ather ounded, and Alcoholics

Anonymous, as represented by Don Gatelys narrative. Both regimes ex-ternalize collective will, recognize that individual actions have communalconsequences, and replace the logic o autonomy that will inevitably leadto environmental devastation. Many critics agree that some aspect osubjectivity in Infnite Jestis created by and dependent on a community.How can we reconcile the various critical interpretations o Wallacescharacters subjectivity with their oten debilitating corporealities? Soar, however, critics have not used embodiment to understand Wallaces

depiction o selhood, despite the novels xation on medical disorders,physical and mental disabilities, bodily addictions, and grotesque physi-cality. Critics approach this topic rom various directions, but a sustainedreading o the biomedical body clearly connects experientially exteriorpolitical-social structures and ostensibly interior subjective experiences.A critique o the body makes room or a more coherent study o bothemininity and masculinity, as each is constructed by Wallaces absurdlyrendered world o corporate media. Bodily compulsiveness ties togetherthe novels genders, classes, and ethnicities, its themes o pleasure, con-

sumption, intellectualism, ritual, sel-control, and waste, and its examina-tion o the negligible dierences between the inside and outside oselhood. Compulsiveness is clinically understood as a means o graspingor personal control over anxieties about control itsel. Wallaces charac-ters use it as a tool or autocratically dominating shared and genderedspacesboth geopolitical and domestic. CertainlyInfnite Jests distinctiveorm is compulsive: the hoarded collections o endnoted inormation,the sentences both excessive and obsessively precise, the drive to pack

as much as possible into the syntactic and narrative spaces. As a modeo anti-interiority, as a means o rejecting the siren call o a closed-oinner lie and embracing instead objects and bodies in their materiality,compulsiveness can also empower characters. That is, the biomedicalis both the oundation o the novels stuctures o oppression, and alsothe main way characters resist and negotiate them.

Compulsive Domination

In Infnite Jest, compulsiveness helps the bad guys get badder. Com-


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United States into a nuclear waste dump or the entire ssion-ueledcontinent. That Gentle annexes this dumping ground to Canada spursQuebecois terrorists to seek their own lethal samizdat, a mass-media-en-

abled event that would eliminate the U.S. citizenry. Second-in-commandRodney Tine conceives o Subsidized Time, selling whole years to thehighest corporate bidders, to nance Reconguration and its myriadconsequences, including relocating vast numbers o people and buildinggiant ans that purportedly contain the toxic gases o radioactive waste.Gentle and Tine are thus responsible or the most absurdist aspectso Wallaces world, his unhouse mirror refection o our own danger-ously corporate government, our potentially apocalyptic addictions

to consumption, and our democracy usurped by multinational mediacompanies. Both Gentle and Tine have obsessive-compulsive disorder,and their biomedical subjectivity is central to their desire or radicalgeopolitical domination.

Gentles OCD inorms every level o his presidency, rom his upstartcampaign to his major policies. His compulsions about hygiene and earo contamination structure his Clean U.S. Party. With platorms such asLets Shoot Our Wastes Into Space, C.U.S.P.s compulsive nationalismsimplistically equates political undesirability with garbage and promises

to clean it all up (IJ383). Gentle sees every aspect o domestic policy insweeping terms o garbage and waste. The narrator sardonically describesGentle as the president whose

Inaugural Address heralded the advent o a Tighter, Tidier Nation. Who prom-ised to clean up government and trim at and sweep out waste and hose downour chemically troubled streets and to sleep darn little until hed ashioned away to rid the American psychosphere o the unpleasant debris o a throw-awaypast, to restore the majestic ambers and purple ruits o a culture he now prom-ises to rid o the toxic efuvia choking our highways and littering our bywaysand grunging up our sunsets and cruddying those harbors in which televisedgarbage-barges lay stacked up at anchor. (IJ38283)

Gentles compulsive xation on contamination turns major political is-sues into garbage: government ecacy, urban unrest, national history,and even, through those garbage barges taking up space where reightcould anchor, international trade. This nation that elects a presidential

candidate with hardly any political experience wears the same trash-colored glasses. Domestic politics are entirely compulsive.G tl R ti h th t dl i i t


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this compulsion by making the narratives main events happen in the Yearo the Depend Adult Undergarment and the Year o Glad. Both yearsare sponsored by products that contain waste while creating more o it.

These symbols o Reconguration make spectacular the annular natureo Gentles compulsive power: his ear leads to the urther prolierationo what makes him so araid. This spiral has multiple eects. Gentles an-nular power structure ensures its own perpetuation by never eradicatingthe contamination it is set up to destroy. In addition, the prolierationo waste provides a justication or all the obsessive-compulsive ears otoxic, inectious, and cancerous trash. While clinical diagnosticians dis-agree about whether or not an OCDer must understand that her ears

are irrational and excessive, a compulsive ear o garbage is entirelyrational in Infnite Jest.14 The biomedical is a structure by which one canear contamination by radioactive garbage, contain its eects, prolierateever more toxic waste, and renew the ears driving the system orward.This compulsive, anxious cycle has the same annular structure as thenuclear ssion producing the waste that uels this mirror U.S. And just asan obsessive-compulsive person always nds new germs to ear, GentlesReconguration will always produce skyrocketing amounts o toxic wasteand leverage an extensive, expensive system to ght it.

As suggested by its role in the near-apocalyptic nuclear energy system,and as experienced by people with serious cases o the disorder, compul-siveness is bound up in threats to eliminate bodies. In Infnite Jest, thesethreats are produced by economic power. For example, Gentles OCDis explicitly compared to that o Howard Hughes, the amous mediamogul who imposed his compulsions upon legions o employees in waysthat both ed his symptoms and consolidated his power. The narratorcontinues his forid description o Gentle:

This is Johnny Gentle, . . . or two long-past decades known unkindly as theCleanest Man in Entertainment (the mans a world-class retentive, the late-Howard-Hughes kind, the really severe kind, the kind with the paralyzingear o ree-foating contamination, the either-wear-a-surgical-microltration-mask-or-make-the-people-around-you-wear-surgical-caps-and-masks-and-touch-doorknobs-only with-a-boiled-hankie-and-take-ourteen-showers-a-day-onlytheyre-with-this-Dermalatix-brand-shower-sized-Hypospectral-Flash-Booth-that-actually like-burns-your-outermost-layer-o-skin-o-in-a-dazzling-fash-and-leaves-

you-babys-butt-new-and-sterile-once-you-wipe-o-the-coating-o-ne-epidermal-ash-with-a-boiled-hankie kind. (IJ381)


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skin several times a day. Reminiscent o the nuclear technology uelingthe nation, the Dermalatix-brand light shower obliterates cutaneousborders in the name o cleanliness. This violent biomedical technology

echoes the myriad other ways military and political technologies threatento obliterate bodies in Infnite Jest, the ways that money depends on andacilitates this constant low-level destruction, and the ways that compul-siveness is the cause and eect o bodily destruction.15 Further, Gentleand his Clean U.S. Partys compulsiveness is specically gendered, anannular agnationa cyclical, exclusively male lineageo politicalpower (IJ382). Tines OCD maniests as a compulsion to measure hispenis every day and record that days measurement. Tine and Gentle

turn boyish potty humor into political power: their rst campaign catch-phrase is Lets Shoot Our Wastes Into Space (IJ382). C.U.S.P. inscribesthe rules o domestic privacyfush away your excrement and take outthe trashonto the public sphere o electorate, nation, and globe. Thisis a domestic drama inscribed in patriarchal terms o maniest destiny.Political, technological, and social power unite in Gentle and companyspublic psychodrama.

Gentles outlandish, destructive compulsiveness is a mode o anti-interiority. A Dermalatix fash shower burns the outer borders o

ones body, creating a new exterior without aecting internal bodyparts. C.U.S.P. envisions domestic recovery as an essentially aestheticaair, changing the way America looks instead o changing its underly-ing systems and structures (IJ383). Gentles disorder has nothing to dowith his inner psychic lie. (For contrast, see Martin Scorseses Freudianspectacle The Aviator, which interprets Howard Hughes as plagued byOedipal neurosis.16) Gentles power lets him manipulate the materialconditions o his own, his employees, and his constituents worlds,

and his OCD ensures that he will. His deep emotional investment inthe objects around himthe doorknobs, the Kleenex boxes, the acemasksdenes him, his presidency, and the daily lives o everyone liv-ing under Subsidized Time, a dening o time itsel as a commercialproduct. And OCDas a phenomenon o gender and classis a socialdisorder as much as a medical one.

While Gentle and Tine turn the whole continent into their ownbathroom, Avril Incandenza and Joelle van Dyne each use OCD toturn her private domestic space into an autocracy. Their compulsions

subvert traditional wie and mother roles and allow them to achievesome amount o control within the densely pervasive power structure


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boyriend, the oldest Incandenza son (IJ 736). Avril Incandenza usesher maternal anxiety, in concert with her OCD, to control the physical,temporal, and emotional experiences o her amily. Van Dynes com-

pulsiveness thus enables an autonomy and sexuality outside normativeheterosexuality, while Incandenzas creates the appearance o perectmaternal nurturing that conceals a sel-interested abandonment o thepatriarchal womans role. By operating within, while also subverting, theiremale roles, their compulsiveness establishes a corporeal relationship tothe exterior object world that allows them to manage the absurd worldo annular usion, Reconguration, and Subsidized Time. Intimatelytied to gendered power structures, anti-interiority enables subversion o

them alongside C.U.S.P.-like reinorcement o them. Though van Dynesand Incandenzas political clout goes no arther than their domesticspheres, Incandenzas home includes an elite tennis academy, whereshe is a earsome headmistress. Her ironic gender subversion may alien-ate even her own sons, her oldest in particular, but her compulsivenessacilitates more control over the sights, smells, objects, and people oher domestic space than shed ever get by directly embodying eithertraditional motherhood or its opposite.17 Anti-interiority may not oeraccess to ull power, but its emphasis on materiality may be the only way

to negotiate this caricatured world.

The Debility o Radical Interiority: Addiction,Consumption, and Hals Crisis

I anti-interiority rules these characters, what does interiority itsellook like? In short, it looks like the dramatic episode opening the novel,

where Hal is trapped in a pseudoautistic state, where his thoughts andeelings have no way out o his head. He cant even smile. Hals experi-ence o addiction, and Gatelys o Alcoholics Anonymous, suggest thathuman intellect and rational thought are debilitating and threatening.Sel-awareness, refexivity, and meta-consciousness pervade the text atevery level, rom narrative to characterization. However, the politicalconsequences o so much rationalization are dire. As Marshall Boswellnotes, Enlightened sel-interest in Wallaces novel generally takes theorm o cynical sel-refexivity, a orm o meta-sel-awareness that cor-responds in many ways to the sel-conscious metactional strategies oBarths literature o exhaustion. In both cases, the end result is a orm


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in this view, makes addiction worse. The passages about AA dont simplyreplace ree will with twelve steps, as many critics correctly argue, butcritique intellectualism itsel, repeatedly emphasizing that the process

o rational thought makes one vulnerable to addictions usurpation osel-control. For example, Its the newcomers with some education thatare the worst, according to Gene M. They identiy their whole selveswith their head, and the Disease makes its command headquarters inthe head (IJ272). But the novel doesnt condemn educated and intel-ligent people and romanticize the unwashed masses; rather, it isolatesa particular compulsive, refexive mode o interiority, thinking aboutthinking, associated with addiction as either its cause or eect.20 Ac-

cording to the omniscient narrator, one learns that this refective inte-riority is especially pernicious when an addict practices it: one learns byspending time in Boston AA

that most Substance-addicted people are also addicted to thinking, meaningthat they have a compulsive and unhealthy relationship with their own thinking.That the cute Boston AA term or addictive-type thinking is: Analysis-Paralysis.. . . That 99% o compulsive thinkers thinking is about themselves; that 99%o this sel-directed thinking consists o imagining and then getting ready or

things that are going to happen to them; and then, weirdly, that i they stop tothink about it, that 100% o the things they spend 99% o their time and energyimagining and trying to prepare or all the contingencies and consequences oare never good. Then that this connects interestingly with the early sobriety urgeto pray or the literal loss o ones mind. In short that 99% o the heads thinkingactivity consists o trying to scare the everliving shit out o itsel. (IJ2034)

In Hayles analysis oInfnite Jest, recursivity reers to a utopian embraceo social responsibility as a way to escape the destructive solipsism o

illusory autonomy. However, this passage articulates a darker side orecursivity. This kind o addiction thinking is a destructive mode osel-conscious, refexive interiority, o sel-consciousness eeding into asystem o sel that is experienced as closed. As Mary K. Holland notes,Even as Wallace struggles to create or his characters a way out o thecultural quagmire in which his novel places them, Infnite Jest depictswhat happens when recursivity, through the society o consumptionand mediation, becomes pathologicaltrapping one within the selrather than reeing one rom it.21 Wallace uses AA to locate this kindo pathological thinking in the addict community (most stunningly inthe depiction o Ken Erdedys nal marijuana binge) but he has also


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accompanying interrogation o the boundaries between interiority andexteriority. In act, AA objecties compulsive drug use, reerring to thedisease as an external entity, such as The Spider (IJ357), or tecato gu-

sano, an immortal, insatiable worm (IJ200). Paradoxically, AA also insistson an internalized personal responsibility to the exclusion o externalcauses, which can slide, in the addictive mind, so insidiously intoExcusethat any causal attribution is in Boston AA eared, shunned, punished byempathetic distress (IJ374). Ones addiction is ones own ault, but itsalso caused by a parasitic Spider or worm. Either AA philosophy is pre-posterous, or, more generously, The Spider, tecato gusano, and personalresponsibility are entities or which interior and extrerior have no

relevant meaning. Analysis paralysis seems an inevitable consequence oan imperative to look only within or the origins o The Spider or theworm. The rational sel cannot be a closed system, as an intellectualized,recursive sel-consciousness alsely assumes.

Now, destructive, refexive ratiocination is not just or addicts. In act,on nearly every page oInfnite Jestone nds compulsiveness linked toprocesses o introspection and extroversion, sel-conscious rationalizationand ratiocination, and paralyzing refexivity. For example, Charles Tavisscompulsiveness is characterized by the [pathological] way he thinks

out loud about thinking out loud (IJ519). Kate Gomperts psychiatristdescribes clinically depressed patients as sharing a common tendencytowards paralyzing introversion (IJ72). In cases like Kates, destructivelyradical interiority crosses into the medical register, itsel a blurry categoryin the novel. (See or example the unstable categorization o addictionas a physical, psychological, medical, or spiritual problem [IJ 203]).What I call interiorityitsel a relative term hereemerges as a stateo compulsiveness turned inward, recursive compulsive cogitation that

renders people unctionally static.This exploration o the relationship between compulsiveness andinteriority sheds new light on the stupeying eects o mass media, andin particular on two crucial, yet underexamined, aspects o the novel:the zombiying eect o the Infnite Jest cartridge on its viewers, andHal Incandenzas startling episode o pseudoautism. Undercover agentHugh Steeply hypothesizes that the victims o James Incandenzas lmare not, as many believe, comatose. Their expressions seem [m]ore asi . . . stuckin some way. . . . Stuck. Fixed. Held. Trapped. As in trapped

in some sort o middle. Between two things. Pulled apart in dierentdirections. . . . As i he were stuck wondering. As i there was something


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the look in his athers and the cartridge victims eyes, that they ap-pear to have misplaced something. Marathe insists that they have lostsomething (IJ64748). This something reers clearly, in the context

o the novels larger interrogation o subjectivity, to selhood; Steeplysinsistence that selhood is not lost, but rather misplaced, disproves thenihilist interpretation o the novel as portraying a complete loss o selin the ace o mass-mediated corporate-political culture. Selves in Inf-nite Jestare not absent or eradicated; they are dislocated, but present,somewhere outside o immediate apprehension.

This notion o radical interiority claries the well-known episodeopening the novel, which critics have yet to explain convincingly. In this

scene, Hal believes he is speaking clearly to the University o Arizonaadmissions committee, but they perceive only Hals grotesque, silentgrimacing. Steeplys theory about the existentially misplaced InfniteJestviewers suggests that Hal is paralyzed by a radical interiority, likelycatalyzed by his ingestion o the designer drug DMZ. But whether ornot this symbol o consumer culture causes Hals stateand in act,similar episodes toward the novels end suggest otherwisethe episodedepicts in stark relie the pain o a tendency towards isolated intro-spection, ratiocination, and introversion. Hals traits are aggravated by

his marijuana addiction, according to the novels marijuana-ocusedNarcotics Anonymous group. They agree on these eects o the drug:Social isolation, anxious lassitude, and the hypersel-consciousness thatthen reinorced the withdrawal and anxietythe increasing emotionalabstraction, poverty o aect, and then total emotional catalepsytheobsessive analyzing, nally the paralytic stasis that results rom theobsessive analysis o all possible implications o both getting up romthe couch and not getting up rom the couch (IJ503). While this ac-

count does notcannotdescribe what it is like to die rom watchingInfnite Jest, it links the novels portrayal o ratiocinating interiority to itsvarious states o paralysis, including general drug addiction, comas andpseudocomas, the catatonics and the veterans with Alzheimers in thestate-unded homes neighboring Ennet House, as well as the victims othe Infnite Jestcartridge.

Importantly, radical interiority remains an experience tied to a physicalbody, as Hal shows in his utile insistence on his own subjectivity in thatadmissions interview, when he describes communicating as shouting into

the darkness o the red cave that opens out beore closed eyes (IJ11).Made signicant as the novels only instance o rst-person narration,


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thing that, though indescribable, has a material shape and presence(IJ649). The clear debility o interiority here, the destructive potentialo xated, rationalist introversion, shows the powers o commodity so-

ciety to penetrate what may be our most intimate spaces. The ailureso interiority demonstrate as well the importance o relying on bodilypractices and knowledge making to withstand the threats o ratiocinativethought. But more completely than materialist philosophy, Infnite Jestdepicts a world in which people are most able to cope with their worldwhen they view themselves as dynamic objects in relationships to otherpeople and objects.

Ideal Compulsive Anti-Interiority: Objects and Don Gately

In act, as the novels narratives begin to converge and climax, ob-jects begin to dominate the Eneld Tennis Academy (IJ 632). Theystart moving, apparently under their own powers, in August (IJ671).By November they are dominating Eneld Academy lie, as the novelsother plots accelerate:Quebecois terrorists begin to converge upon theacademy to nd the original copy o Infnite Jest; Hal and his riends

head towards both their championship tournament and their possibleingestion o DMZ; Don Gately attempts to recover rom his wounds; andJames Incandenzas ghost begins haunting Gatelys hospital room. Whilethe objects seem to be moving themselves, the narrative strongly suggeststhat the ghost o patriarch Jim Incandenza is moving the objects at thetennis academy to warn its residents that ruthless Quebecois terroristsare ater the master Infnite Jesttape. However, that possibility leads toseveral questions without convincing answers. I the wraith can move

objects, why not grasp a pen to write more useul and specic verbalwarnings? Why choose only some o Enelds players and not those whomay believe him, such as his unazeable son Mario? Why ocus on objectswith no logical relationship to the Quebecois threat or to those who mayhead it o? That Incandenza chooses objects instead o words ascribesto those objects some kind o power greater than that o language. Ihe is moving them, he trusts these objects to speak or themselves andor him. I not, they are the entities at Eneld demanding attention.Either way, materiality insists on itsel.

Eneld tennis star Ortho Stice, in particular, is aware o this primacyo objects and attributes to them his sudden tennis success. Earlier in the


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is radically old, is made up mostly o objects (IJ39495). Indeed, laterin the novel, Stice becomes convinced o the autonomy o crucial objectsin his lie (IJ637). His xation contextualizes the ot-quoted passage

about Stices brain as a soulless machine: I you could open Stices headyoud see a wheel inside another wheel, gears and cogs being widgetedinto place (IJ635). Many critics use this passage to argue that Stice hassucceeded at abandoning his selhood to a machinelike athleticism, aneo-Cartesian project that E.T.A.s coaches preach exhaustively withinthe novel. However, these critics never quote the sentence immediatelyollowing the mental wheels, cogs, and gears: Stice has a secret suspi-cion about a secret that has more to do with the actual table than with

the people at the table (IJ635). Stice is not simply a robotic symbol othe ways media culture reies our brightest youth. Indeed, one o thecharms o Wallaces tennis academy scenes is his humanizing embodi-ment o boystheir toenails, their smells, their anxieties, the shells othickly sprayed Pledge they use as sunscreen. Stices awareness o thetables secret powers reveals a sel-objectication that is more complexthan that o a simple Descartes-ication o himsel as a machine. Sticehas deep ears. He uses clothes to assert his personality, like any teen.He has a ridiculous nickname conveying outsized machismo. And he has

decided to let the autokinetic objects in his lienot just his bed, butthe tennis balls crucial to his successrule him. Is he the books rolemodel? O course not. Hes another o the books teen athletes, handlinghis conusion by choosing to be a robot instead o choosing Hals moreempathetic, though more tortured, embodiment o Hamlet. But Sticesinsight into the primacy o objects urthers the novels anti-interioragenda. Anti-interiority recasts Stices supposed hollow machine-ness as,instead, a generative embrace o the material world o objects. There is

no soul or mind separate rom and superior to his cog-and-gear-lledhead; in act, the anti-interiority throughout the novel locates mindprecisely in the cogs, gears, and wheels o the brain. Stice is winningat tennis because he embraces materiality, not because he negates hisideally humanistic selhood.

A better example o the positive potential o anti-interiority is DonGately, the widely acknowledged hero o Wallaces novel and, alongwith the less prominent Joelle van Dyne and Mario Incandenza, one oits most genuinely sympathetic characters.22 Gately is a hero, at least in

part, because o how seriously he takes AAs prescriptions o ritual anti-interiority. While Hayles notes that AA replaces illusory ree will and


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any inner essence. The most stunning example o Gatelys anti-interiorsurvival method occurs in the hospital, where he lies almost atallywounded, as a result o trying to protect Ennet House residents rom

local thugs. Despite his extensive knie and bullet wounds, he reusesto receive narcotic painkillers. Gatelys narrative peaks in this episode,which also represents the climax o his accumulated wisdom about theAA program. His realizationat this crucial narrative moment whenthe other plots are convergingshows the extent to which Infnite Jestsportrayal o subjectivity subverts the Cartesian tradition. Rather thanretreat into his head to cope with his shattering physical pain, Gatelyconceives o his head as the pains source. To withstand his pain without

narcotics, Gately leverages the AA mantra to abide in the present. Heexperiences AAs highly abstract notion o a timeless innity o presentmoments as a bodily, anti-intellectual endeavor because he believes thatthe human minds capacities o empirical observation and rationalizationintensiy pain, not lessen it: Whats unendurable is what his own headcould make o it all. What his head could report to him, looking overand ahead and reporting (IJ860). At rst glance this may be read asan inverted neo-Cartesianism, a rejection o the head in avor o theessentially dierent and separate body. However, in this episode, dualism

itsel is the problem. Gatelys pain comes rom a dualistic conceptiono the head as the location o abstract thinking detached rom physi-cal experience, the head as looking over and ahead and reportingon physical experience. Though each present moment o sensuousexperience is almost unendurably painul, abstract rationalization othat moment, intellect detached rom the physical, is that pains source.Gately abides without narcotics by keeping his mental lie thoroughlyphysical. His mind is an additional sensory experience o clueless noise,

a part o physicality without intellectual, empirical authority. Whetheror not Gately survives, his example o embracing his exterior, mate-rial environment may be as good a solution as any to dealing with thecorporation-dominated, consumption-obsessed, mass-mediated UnitedStates. Anti-interiority, i we can truly perorm it, may oer the best shotat negotiating our own stifing worlds.

Biomedical Anti-Interiority: Subjects Outside oThemselves


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general poststructuralist model o the subject as incoherent, marginal,and composed o an innite number o parts and orces. Though themateriality o the body is always understood through a social lens,

impairments such as amputated legs, muscular dystrophy, and blind-ness will always provide physical limitations to those who experiencethem. Elizabeth Groszs metaphor o identity as a Mbius strip, with anoutside and inside that are inseparable and irreducible yet unstableand dynamic, helps reconcile the overly oppositional notions o sociallyconstructed and biologically determined identity. A Mbius strip showsthat there can be a relationship between mind and body or abstractionand tangibility which presumes neither their identity nor their radical

disjunction, a model which shows that while there are disparate thingsbeing related, they have the capacity to twist into the other.23 Such amodel allows or the biological and social to be intertwined, mutuallydening, and twisting into each other. Biomedical identity can be parto the social without either infexible division or mutual assimilation.As one among several intertwined aspects o personhood, the biomedi-cal oers the same kinds o socially dened and material limitations asclass and gender status, sexual orientation, or skin color. All o theseactors, fuid but all signicantly outside o ones direct control, help

create a persons identity.The biomedical is dierent rom other identity categories, however, be-

cause medical science is ounded upon the promise o benecial changethrough the scientic objectication o the bodys component parts andprocesses. I we conceive o ourselves biomedically, as objects o a positivistscience, then we can improve ourselves, or at least optimistically pitchour eorts toward that horizon o surere therapeutic success. But thispromise is deceptive or so many reasons, not only because that horizon

may orever recede. More to my point here, the utopian positivism oobjectiying the biological body requires separating the objecticationprocess rom the innity o its material and immaterial contexts. How-ever, the biomedical body conounds such a process o objectication.It is permeable in a number o ways. Scientic medical research, evenin its most objectiying orms, is o course prooundly social. Moreover,medical science requires a standardizing o biological models o sel-hood into categories: individual bodies are always understood in thecontext o statistical norms, research results, and medical hypotheses.

Such knowledge requires a grouping o typed bodies into a collectiono research objects. The process o producing medical knowledge is in


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cal, which is always both inside and outside. Those terms have lost theirtraditional clarity, having little reerent other than the relational andrelative. People with OCD certainly have emotional experiences, but in

general, their meaningul symptoms depend on their material worlds.(The most eective psychological treatment or OCD, cognitive behav-ioral therapy, can be described as generally working rom the outsideinchanging ones physicality in order to change ones thoughts andthen, third in the process, ones eelings.) Biomedical anti-interiority isa way o investing materiality with meaning, regardless o its locationon the inside or outside o ones dermis.

As Hacking argues, contemporary biomedical practices objectiy bodies

such that they are other to sel. His observations about contemporarymedical practices such as genetic analysis and organ donorship certainlyt a neo-Cartesian ramework. However, compulsive anti-interiority as Ivedescribed above can counteract the pernicious eects o neo-Cartesianismby generating a body that is both object and subject, both other to andpart o selhood. This mode o subjectivity locates identity in objects,in materiality, and in the body as part o the material world. Infnite Jestand other representations o the biomedical show that new attachmentsto the body as a dynamic, uncontrollable, generative object, as part o a

world o objects with lived relations to each other, improve our ability tonegotiate our chaotic contemporary world. In these novels, inseparablesocial, economic, and biological orces dene us. Anti-interiority opensthis hybrid material reality to view by embracing and exploiting such amode o sel-denition. Sel-objectication in these novels is generative,not reductive; the happiest characters invest in themselves as a literal,tangible part o the material world without any Cartesian transcendence.Avril and Hal Incandenza, Ortho Stice, even Don Gately may be imper-

ect role models or new, empowering subjectivities, but they have madethemselves into dynamic objects that generate and prolierate power.One may interpret the dominance o the biomedical as precisely this:the promise o a generative objectication o our reality, the wastes ocommodity culture turned into a new kind o selhood thats investedin immanent materiality. Thats a pill I could swallow.

Georgia Institute of Technology

NOTES


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3 Lennard Davis, Obsession: A History(Chicago: Univ. o Chicago Press, 2008).4 Ian Hacking, Our Neo-Cartesian Bodies in Parts, Critical Inquiry34, no.1 (2007):78105.5 As just one recent example, Columbia University has committed twenty million dol-

lars to expand its neuroscience programs into interdisciplinary approaches to mind andbrain. Motoko Rich, Oliver Sacks Joins Columbia Faculty as Artist, New York Times, Sept.1, 2007.6 We took an average o seven prescription medications per person in 1993, and by2004, the national average rose to twelve. People in the United States have spent 77%more on drugs or childhood and adolescent behavioral disorders between 2000 and 2003.Greg Critser, Generation Rx: How Prescription Drugs Are Altering American Lives, Minds, andBodies(New York: Houghton Mifin, 2005), 2. Psychiatric medications were prescribed bygeneral practitioners to 13.8% o their patients rom 199596 and to 27.8% in 20022003.National Center or Health Statistics, Ambulatory Health Care Data, in Health, United

States, 2005, with Chartbook on Trends in the Health o Americans(Hyattsvile, MD: U.S. Depart-ment o Health and Human Services, 2005), http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/about/major/ahcd/ahcd1.htm#Micro-data, (accessed 11 July 2007): 334. Those numbers, o course,would be ar greater in a survey o psychiatric specialists.7 Joseph Dumit has described this as objective-sel ashioning, the complex processby which mentally ill patients crat a narrative o sel based on the evidence o themselvesas objects o biomedical research and testing. Is It Me or My Brain? Depression andNeuroscientic Facts,Journal o Medical Humanities24, no. 1/2 (2003): 3547.8 This our-part series was called Created Equal, and the most controversial entry isthe rst, Liberal Creationism, originally posted November 18, 2007, at http://www.slate.

com/id/2178122/entry/2178123.9 Response to this series, as one might expect rom the blogosphere, was rapid, over-whelming in both quantity and emotion, and dicult to catalogue. The New York Timesrana comprehensive review o the incident, IQ Debate Adds a Chapter Online, December1, 2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/01/books/01race.html?_r=2&pagewanted=all.And Slateitsel ran a scathing response to Saletan, Dissecting the IQ Debate: A Responseto William Saletans Series on Race and IQ, Stephen Metcal, December 3, 2007, http://slate.msn.com/id/2179073/r/rss.10 In act, a simple historicist ramework would attribute the shit in representation romFreudian to biomedical rameworks to a similar shit in clinical psychiatry ater World

War Two. See Nikolas Rose, The Politics o Lie Itsel: Biomedicine, Power, and Subjectivity in theTwenty-First Century(Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press, 2007) or a generally Foucauldianinterpretation o the biomedical turn in psychiatry; Jonathan Michel Metzl counters thisdominant assumption by nding psychoanalytic principles at work within the biomedicalturn in Prozac on the Couch: Prescribing Gender in the Era o Wonder Drugs(Durham, NC: DukeUniv. Press, 2005).11 And compulsiveness is not just appropriate to late-capitalist modes o labor. Fleiss-ners analysis puts compulsiveness in the context o industrialization, arguing that it is anambivalent embodiment o modernity itsel.12 I believe this eature oInfnite Jest is also connected to Wallaces larger project o

creating dialogue with and stylistic development o high postmodernism, whose aes-thetics o sel-consciousness many argue have exhausted themselves. A handul o criticssuggest this link in more directed comparisons o Wallace to postmodern authors; I quote


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13 N. Katherine Hayles, The Illusion o Autonomy and the Fact o Recursivity: VirtualEcologies, Entertainment, and Infnite Jest, New Literary History30, no. 3 (1999): 692.14 An OCDers level o insight into the rationality o his or her obsessive ears is central incurrent clinical controversies about diagnosing, treating, and understanding the disorder.

For interpretation o the role o insight in diagnosis, please see Fugen Neziroglu, TheRole o Overvalued Ideas and Biological Markers in the Diagnosis o Obsessive-CompulsiveDisorder and Ahmed Okasha, Diagnosis o Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder: A Review inObsessive-Compulsive Disorder,2nd ed., ed. Mario Maj, Norman Sartorius, Ahmed Okasha,and Joseph Zohar (West Sussex, UK: Wiley, 2002), 3739 and 119. For psychological re-search on the role o insight, see P. M. Salkovskis, Understanding and Treating Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder, Behavior Research and Therapy37, suppl. 1 (1999): S29-52; A. L. Wroeand P. M. Salkovskis, Causing Harm and Allowing Harm: A Study o Belies in ObsessionalProblems, Behavior Research and Therapy38, no. 12 (2000): 11411162; P. Van Oppen andP. M. G. Emmelkamp, Issues in Cognitive Treatment o Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder,

in Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder: Contemporary Issues in Treatment, ed. E. K. Goodman, M.V.Rudorer, and J. D. Maser (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 2000), 11732.15 While Gentles practice o abjection lurks throughout the novel, it does not entirelyexplain or equate with the process o compulsive anti-interiority. Julia Kristeva, Powers oHorror: An Essay on Abjection (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1982). C.U.S.P. is an ex-ample o the dierence: a masculinist legacy o ringe political groups built on equatingpreservation and destruction. For example, C.U.S.P. wants to save the whale, ozone, andrainorest while reserving the right to hunt with automatic weapons (IJ382). Put simply,preservation through destruction is not the same as abjections preservation throughejecting the other.

16 The Aviator, directed by Martin Scorsese (New York: Miramax Films, 2004).17 Few critics directly address the novels suggestions o incest: Orin exclusively datesyoung mothers and passionately hates Avril; Avril is caught in her oce wearing acheerleaders uniorm while student John Wayne wears nothing but Orins ootball shirt,recreating Orins relationship with Joelle. These episodes strongly suggest that Avrils andOrins relationship was more explicitly Oedipal than most. While this essay is not aboutsexuality, I can say at minimum that Avril Incandenza reminds us that emale power in apatriarchy is always ambiguous.18 Marshal Boswell, Understanding David Foster Wallace(Columbia: Univ. o South CarolinaPress, 2003), 136.

19 Wallace has requently articulated his own relationship to the politics and aestheticso postmodernism, most amously and clearly in E Unibam Pluram: Television and U.S.Fiction, rom his essay collection A Supposedly Fun Thing Ill Never Do Again: Essays andArguments(Boston: Back Bay, 1998), 2182.20 O course, a critique o the ways the novel is ambiguously classist would be importantnot only on its own merits. Much discourse about the inheritors o postmodernism xateson a alse dichotomy o populism versus elitism. Wallace writes an extremely smarty-pants,1000-page-plus novel starring a sweetly nave, muscular, working-class hero with barely ahigh-school diploma, which or all its faws should surely complicate a debate about classand aesthetics.

21 Mary K. Holland, The Hearts Purpose: Braving the Narcissistic Loop o David FosterWallaces Infnite Jest, CRITIQUE: Studies in Contemporary Fiction47, no. 3 (2006): 225.22 However just as Marios physical deormities stereotypically coincide with his genuinely


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o the most admirable characters are such stereotypesone a stereotype o disability andthe other o class, and that the third admirable character has a possible physical disabilityas wellis one o the unortunate low points o this otherwise breathtaking novel.23 Elizabeth Grosz, Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism (Bloomington: Indiana

Univ. Press, 1994), 20910.


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CONTRIBUTORS

Karl Heinz Bohrer is editor o the German literary magazine Merkur (theGerman journal o European thought), proessor emeritus or Modern GermanLiterary History at the University o Bieleeld, and currently Visiting Proessor atStanord University. He is the author o numerous books, includingDie gefhrdetePhantasie (1970), Die sthetik des Schreckens (1978), Nach der Natur: ber Palitikund sthetik(1988),Das absolute Prsens: die Semantik sthetischer Zeit(1994), and

Pltzlichkeit: Zum Augenblick des sthetischen Scheins(1981), translated as Sudden-ness: On the Moment of Aesthetic Appearance(1994).

Joseph Carroll is Curators Proessor o English at the University o MissouriSt.Louis. He has published monographs on Matthew Arnold and Wallace Stevens.His more recent books include Evolution and Literary Theory (1995); LiteraryDarwinism: Evolution, Human Nature, and Literature(2004);and Reading HumanNature: Literary Darwinism in Theory and Practice(orthcoming). He is a coeditoroEvolution, Literature, and Film: A Reader(2010) and oThe Evolutionary Review:

Art, Science, Culture. He has also produced an edition o Darwins On the Originof Species(2003).

Elizabeth Freudenthal received her PhD rom the University o Caliorniaand a postdoctoral ellowship rom the Georgia Institute o Technology. She isworking on a book about the relationship between biomedicine and contem-porary subjectivity.

T. Austin Graham received his PhD rom the University o CaliorniaLos

Angeles and will be a Visiting Scholar at the American Academy o Arts andSciences during the 2010-2011 academic year. He is at work on a musicologi-cal study o American fction and poetry during the late nineteenth and earlytwentieth centuries. He has previously published articles on T. S. Eliot, F. ScottFitzgerald, and Philip Roth.

Bonnie Honig is Sarah Rebecca Roland Proessor o Political Science at North-western University and senior research proessor at the American Bar Foundationin Chicago. She is author oPolitical Theory and the Displacement of Politics(1993),Democracy and the Foreigner(2001), andEmergency Politics: Paradox, Law, Democracy(2009), and is currently working on a book titled: Antigone, Interrupted.


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