“On the Porousness of Certain Borders”:
Attending to Objects in David Foster
Wallace’s Infinite Jest
Brian Douglas Jansen
University of Calgary
Roughly halfway through David Foster Wallace’s mammoth and
labyrinthine 1996 novel Infinite Jest, the character Don Gately—a recovering 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 commencement speech delivered at Kenyon College in 2005 (collected posthumously 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 immediate 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
Brian Douglas
Jansen is a doctoral
candidate in English
literature at the
University of Calgary,
specializing in
contemporary American
literature and creative
writing. His current
research explores
the intersection of
commerce, ethics, and
agency in the reading
and writing of popular
fiction. Brian’s work
appeared most recently
in Literature, Rhetoric,
and Values (Cambridge
Scholars Publishing,
2012).
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
sacred, on fire with the same force that lit the stars—compassion, love, the
subsurface unity of all things” (93).
That Wallace chose to emphasize in this speech the “unity of all things”
is, I think, a telling detail. For although he contended elsewhere that writing is “about what it is to be a fucking human being” (McCaffery 131), his
criticism and his fiction grapple extensively with developments in technology, media, and science that collectively give the lie to what N. Katherine
Hayles has described as the “comfortable liberal assumptions about the
sovereignty of the human subject” (Giles 329). As Paul Giles has pointed
out, Wallace’s conception of what it is to be human is therefore intimately
tied up with an awareness of a world of uncertain epistemological status—
of cyborgs and machines, of the “categorical distinctions between human
and nonhuman … becoming ever less self-evident” (328). And although
Wallace’s persistent search for human truth marks him in Giles’s eyes as
a kind of “sentimental posthumanist … for whom the legacies of human
spirit still carry a cathectic charge” (341), Wallace’s work returns regularly
to certain values: those of paying attention (to ourselves, to each other,
to our surroundings), of exteriority in the face of an urge to retreat into
solipsism, of shattering illusions of autonomy, of a desire to bridge the
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 Infinite 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 activity 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 multifaceted 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 complexity, 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 “antiinteriority” (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 boundary 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 collection 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 illusory 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. It would seem that, for Latour, material existence is not necessarily a prerequisite for status as a thing (although given the
nature of Latour’s theories, even abstract things must necessarily be tied up
in networks of actors, human and nonhuman, nature and culture). Latour’s
definitional expansiveness with regard to things, however, is understandable
given the way Latour defines “thing” by way of its root etymology as a “gathering” (“Critique” 233).
58 | Jansen
between entirely new types of beings, hybrids of nature and culture” and
the other, purification, that creates “two entirely distinct ontological zones:
that of human beings on the one hand; that of nonhumans on the other”
(Modern 10–11). But of course, these practices present a false dichotomy,
and although we conventionally define modernity in terms of humanism,
doing so “overlooks the simultaneous birth [in modernity] of ‘nonhumanity’—things, or objects, or beasts” (13) and the efforts to mask and
separate these entities. Latour explains that for as long as we consider
these practices separately, we are modern, “that is, we willingly subscribe
to the critical project, even though that project is developed only through
the proliferation of hybrids down below” (11). The metaphorical parallel
Latour offers here is to the constitutional division of government powers. Even the established legal separation of, for example, the executive
and judiciary branches is in fact largely a ruse, “powerless to account for
the multiple links, the intersecting influences, the continual negotiations
between judges and politicians” (13).
The demarcation between human and nonhuman similarly cannot
hold; modernity’s practices of translation and purification cannot hold
off the onslaught of hybrids that populate our world and cannot entirely
obfuscate the fact that (as the aforementioned title of one of his most
famous monographs suggests) we have never been modern. To even hold
a hammer, for Latour, is to “become literally another man, a man who
has become ‘other’, since from that point in time [he] pass[es] through
alterity” (“Morality” 250). To discover the jawbone as a tool and weapon,
as a primate does in Stanley Kubrick’s film 2001: A Space Odyssey, and
to throw it in the air “so high and far that it becomes the space station
of the future” is to reflect the fact that “all technologies incite around
them that whirlwind of new worlds” (“Morality” 250). Technology, our
natural environment, objects, tools—these are not mere instruments or
extensions of ourselves or spaces we occupy; they are “actors” or “actants,”
making everything “including their own frames, their own theories, their
own contexts, their own metaphysics” (“Using ant” 67). At root in all of
these arguments lies a deceptively simple observation. As Latour tells us
in his essay “The Berlin Key,” “Consider things, and you will have humans.
Consider humans, and you are by that very act interested in things” (20).
It is worth mentioning here that Latour himself openly acknowledges
that the Actor-Network Theory (ant) with which his work is strongly
associated is useful “only if it does not ‘apply’ to something” (“Using ant”
62), and that it in general aims to critique “explanations that decode”
(Luckhurst 8) in favour of “follow[ing] the link[s] among elements” (“Using
“On the Porousness of Certain Borders” | 59
Thematically,
formally, and
narratologically, Infinite Jest
offers at times a
kind of
Latournian
reading of the
world.
ant” 63). Latour encourages his students to “[j]ust describe…. [and] be
attentive to the concrete state of affairs” (64–65), adding furthermore that
“an application of anything is as rare as a good text of social science” (75).
And thus one must acknowledge the tremendous difficulty of applying
Latournian thought to a text in the same way that we might apply other
“theory.” But my contention is that thematically, formally, and narratologically, Infinite Jest offers at times a kind of Latournian reading of the
world—if not a Latournian reading explicitly, then a reading that encourages us to “shed the illusion of autonomous selfhood” (Hayles 693) or to
return “back to the object” (Latour, “Using ant” 66) and acknowledge that
the “being-as-another” or “alterity” (Latour, “Morality” 256) of an ethical
mode of existence includes also an awareness of how we are networked
with, affect, and are affected by things.
“Things,” of course, is a difficult word (it poses a problem, according
to Bill Brown, “because of the specific unspecificity that ‘things’ denotes”
[3]), and the distinction between “things” and “objects” is worth exploring. Although it has its roots in the philosophy of Martin Heidegger, 3 the
object-thing distinction finds maybe its most well-known manifestation
in recent work on thing theory articulated by Bill Brown. For Brown, there
is a thingness in all objects, a “latency (the not yet formed or the not
yet formable) and … an excess (what remains physically or metaphysically irreducible to objects)” (5); he suggests, however, that our default
perception is to look through objects, “because there are codes by which
our interpretive attention makes them meaningful, because there is a
discourse of objectivity that allows us to use them as facts” (4). Brown
argues that we begin to perceive the thingness of objects only when they
stop working for us: cars breaking down, windows becoming dirty, and
so on. The relevance of things and objects to us here, however, lies in the
way they suggest a shift in the relationships between subjects and objects.
“The story of objects asserting themselves as things,” Brown contends, “is
the story of a changed relation to the human subject and thus the story of
how the thing really names less an object than a particular subject-object
orientation” (4). The problem of things is that “they lie both at hand and
somewhere outside the theoretical field, beyond a certain limit” (5).
Latour’s account of objects and things echoes Brown’s in many ways,
particularly in the sense that the thing, for Latour, suggests a reorientation
of the subject-object divide. And for Latour, too, the thingness of objects
3 See Latour (“Critique” 232–36 and “Dingpolitik” 12–13) and Brown (5 n13) for
more on Heidegger.
60 | Jansen
is perceived most clearly at moments of breakage or rupture—one such
instance being the Columbia space shuttle disaster, when “a completely
mastered, perfectly understood … taken-for-granted, matter-of-factual
projectile [was transformed] into a sudden shower of debris falling on
the United States” (“Critique” 234–35). But in challenging the subjectobject divide, Latour has more recently also been drawn to the etymological root of the word “thing” as a gathering (245; “Dingpolitik” 12–13),4
and thus for him the call of the thing—and here also its usefulness—is
its invitation toward “a multifarious inquiry launched with the tools of
anthropology, philosophy, metaphyiscs, history, sociology to detect how
many participants are gathered in a thing to make it exist and to maintain
its existence” (246). Objects become things when we identify in them the
“complicated matters that unite physical objects, assemblies of people, and
modes of learning, showing, and arguing” (Colloredo-Mansfeld 739). They
become “matters of concern” (Latour, “Critique” 245). In contrast to an
object, which Latour characterizes as “simply a gathering that has failed”
(246), a thing—a gathering, an issue—can have tremendous explanatory
power, can be sturdy “on the condition that the number of its participants, its ingredients, nonhumans as well as humans, not be limited in
advance” (246). Latour’s cry, a slightly verbose echo of Archimedes, follows
from this conception of the thing: “Give me one matter of concern and
I will show you the whole earth and heavens that have to be gathered to
hold it firmly in place” (246). Latour’s Actor-Network Theory, then, in its
aforementioned call to describe, seeks to make sense of those matters of
concern by way of deep explanation, in the process returning the object—
long ago “thrown out of the political sphere,” designated as objective and
independent—to its place of prominence as an actor among other human
and non-human actors, returning to it the meaning of the “Ding or Thing
[that] has for many centuries meant the issue that brings people together
because it divides them” (“Dingpolitik” 13). In the spirit of Latour, I characterize the objects of Wallace’s Infinite Jest as Latournian “things” precisely
because their various functions in the novel invite the deep description of
Actor-Network Theory and the “multifarious inquiry” that Latour calls for
when we gather around a thing.
And if nothing else, Infinite Jest—at 1,079 pages, including 388 endnotes taking up nearly one hundred pages at novel’s conclusion—certainly
fulfils the Latournian call to “describe,” particularly insofar as how many
4 As well as his use elsewhere of the word “association” to describe objects of
science and technology (245).
“On the Porousness of Certain Borders” | 61
of those pages are dedicated to illustrating the complex network of actors
circulating through the text,5 without necessarily attempting to explain
those relationships (indeed, as will be discussed later, the novel quite often
deliberately sets out to withhold explanation). And much description is, as
it turns out, needed, given the project’s panoptical scope. Set in a dystopian
near-future in which the names of years are sold to the highest bidder (in
what is referred to as “subsidized time” [234], inaugurated with the “Year of
the Whopper” [223]) and the United States has been subsumed under the
mantle of the intracontinental “Organization of North American Nations”
(or “O.N.A.N” [36]), Infinite Jest tells three different stories which both,
Samuel Cohen explains, “do and do not converge” (61). The first story is
that of Hal Incandenza—a so-called “lexical prodigy” (ij 30), marijuana
addict, and son of a physicist and experimental filmmaker named James
Incandenza—who is a student at the Enfield Tennis Academy, a boarding
school for young, elite tennis players. The second story revolves around
Don Gately, a drug addict and former criminal who is currently live-in
staff at Ennet House, a halfway house facility located just down a hill from
the tennis academy in Enfield, Massachusetts. The third story describes
the conflict between the onanite government and Québécois separatists
(and in particular a group of largely legless, wheelchair-bound separatists
known as Les Assassins des Fauteuils Rollents [afr] or the Wheelchair
Assassins) over the knowledge and possession of a film (made by Hal’s filmmaker father James before his grisly suicide and referred to alternatively
as Infinite Jest, the samizdat,6 or the Entertainment) that is allegedly so
radically compelling as to be lethal to whomever views it—thereby making it, according to Cohen, “an attractive weapon to those who would
like to see the U.S. addiction to entertainment literalized and lethalized”
(62). The third story effectively connects the first two through a cast of
characters that includes the Entertainment’s star (Joelle van Dyne, who
is also a resident of Ennet House), Hal’s older brothers (Mario and Orin,
5 Appropriately here, members of the novel’s lay following have often been driv-
en to diagram the networks between characters in the novel and make them
available for public consumption (see, for example, the pdf diagram prepared
by Sam Potts at www.sampottsinc.com/ij/file/IJ _Diagram.pdf ). What I find
particularly compelling about diagrams such as Potts’s is the surprising extent
to which nonhuman actors fit into a “character” diagram. Note for example in
this particular diagram the presence of Tenuate (a stimulant drug), Poor Yorick
Entertainment (a film distribution company established by a character in the
novel), and the James O. Incandenza filmography.
6 A Russian word that Hal explains is used to denote “politically underground or
beyond-the-pale press or the stuff published thereby” (IJ 1011 n110).
62 | Jansen
the latter of whom is a former lover of Joelle’s), Hal’s mother (who may or
may not be a Québécois agent herself), and his peers at the tennis academy.
If all of this seems confusing, it may be the case that that is the point,
insofar as the novel sets out to demonstrate the vastness of the subsurface
connections between all people and all things and of the inadequacy of
solipsistic interiority and an orientation of self versus other in a world
where this is the case. Take, for instance, what Marshall Boswell has
described as the novel’s nontrivial number of lengthy “comic set pieces”
(142), many of which attempt to trace the rise and fall of various nearfuture technologies in terms that Latour might describe as “thick” (“Using
ant” 68): accounting for how the technology has been shaped, continues
to shape, and is part of a larger thread that connects it to entire varied
networks.
The rise of the video telephone—“videophony” (144) in the novel—is
not about the rise of a new technology for Wallace. It is about the rise of a
new technology that is itself informed by past technologies, by the changes
those past technologies have engendered in humans, by the changes that
technology itself engenders in its users, by political and economic and
ecological circumstance, by the tendencies of capitalism, by technical
and feasible limits, and so on. Users are changed by videophony, and their
use of videophony in turn changes it. In lieu of the hammer (or rather in
addition to the hammer), Latour might also have written that thanks to
videophony he becomes “literally another man” (“Morality” 250). Videophony is, in the novel, ultimately rendered commercially unviable—owing
to callers’ fears of “how their own faces appeared on the tp [Teleputer]
screen” (147)—but the technology’s very development, establishment, and
fall act upon those with whom it comes into any sort of contact. The rise
of videophony in the novel, for example, is dependent on internet technology and on the “fiber-digital grid” (144) used by phone companies, both
developed through government involvement (and often, as in the case of
the internet, with military applications in mind) and ultimately gifted to
the private sector as part of the logic of capitalism. Videophony is similarly
limited by actual technical limitations, its “cameras being too crude and
narrow-apertured for anything much more than facial close-ups” (144),
but even those limitations become part of how the technology acts upon
its users. As the narrator points out, the technical limits of traditional
aural-only telephony actually have ramifications for those who use them,
allowing “you to presume that the person on the other end was paying
complete attention to you while also permitting you not to have to pay
anything even close to complete attention to her” (146). The “highway“On the Porousness of Certain Borders” | 63
hypnotic semi-attentive fugue” (146) of aural-only telephone conversation
is rapidly naturalized, and one of the reasons videophony is so jarring in
this near-future world is that it seems to necessitate a complete reorientation of human interaction—to look up and see your partner engaged in
“little genital-adjustments” is to realize that “you were commandeering not
one bit more attention than you were paying” (147).
Moreover, the fascination with watching oneself is replaced by revulsion and self-consciousness as the quality of cameras improves, that selfconsciousness then fueling the development of new technology by entrepreneurs (some of whom are economically devastated by the collapse of
the technology—with investments in video telephony “very nearly wiping
out the Maryland State Employees’ Retirement System’s Freddie-Mac
Fund” [144]—while others make solid gains in a capitalist system that values short-term profits) developing “High-Definition Photographic Imaging”
(148), “Optimistically Misrepresentational Masking” (149), and “Transmittable Tableau” (149), all advances that disguise the video-conversants
from their conversational partners and thereby end up “undercut[ting]
the original high-tech advance” (150). The failure of videophony (failure
which itself becomes tied up further in issues of class, as the technology
is ultimately only held on to by the same kind of people who embrace
“leisure suits [and] black velvet paintings” [151]) is therefore tied up in a
conception of humanity and human interaction that is itself irrevocably
informed by technology (which is itself informed in turn by technical limits, political systems, religion, government intervention, private enterprise,
fiction, metaphors of human cognition which are themselves influenced
by technology and religion, and so on, and so on7). There is perhaps no
better way to describe the network of actants behind the rise and fall of
videophony in the novel than with Latour’s own term: it is an “imbroglio,”
a kind of chaotic uncertainty in which “it’s never clear who and what is acting” (quoted in Bogost 19). The videophone, owing to its origins, is a hybrid
creation; its commercial failure is the response of a hybridized audience.
Another example from the novel that even more clearly demonstrates
the way any activity muddles us in an imbroglio of different fields and areas
can be found in Wallace’s imagined account of the failure of network tele7 One could obviously continue, nearly endlessly, which again may conceivably
be the point. As Latour perhaps not-so-helpfully points out in “On Using ant
for Studying Information Systems,” a complete description is (on a practical
level) nearly impossible. His suggested alternative, then, to doctoral students
interested in incorporating ant in their dissertations: “You stop when you have
written your 80,000 words or whatever is the format here” (68).
64 | Jansen
vision and the consequential rise of a monolithic Microsoft-like company
called InterLace, which manufactures and distributes “a complex system
of rentable ‘cartridges’ … with additional programming provided through
‘spontaneous transmissions’ via a vast ‘grid’ that seems modelled on our
own Internet” (Boswell 123). Wallace as a critic had recognized, previous
to Infinite Jest, the extent to which televisions “act” upon humans. In his
essay “E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction,” Wallace observes
that television is not just a “toaster with pictures” (27)8 but that it “influences the whole psychology of one’s relation to himself, his mirror, his
loved ones, and a world of real people and real gazes” (53). And if that is
the case, then it is no wonder that in the world of the novel it is replaced
by a system of television broadcasts in which one can “more or less choose
100% what’s on at any given time” (ij 416). But the actual causes of the rise
of InterLace in the novel are considerably more complex than issues of
human choice, not just because the rhetoric of “the Freedom to Choose
and the Right to Be Entertained” (ij 412) that feeds the success of InterLace
is one already reshaped by a televisual entertainment culture but because
its root causes are entirely, in Ian Bogost’s words, “a tangle of different
fields and areas” (19).
Owing its original existence to government mandates and technological limits, and already endangered by the spectre of technology vis-à-vis
the vcr, the remote control, and the proliferation of cable, the television
networks are further marginalized in the novel by their complicity in a capitalist economy that makes their existence dependent on advertisements
(advertisements that, as it turns out, feed into the mass consumption that
has left the onan of the novel an ecological wreck). Those advertisements
in turn necessitate advertising agencies like the novel’s “Viney and Veals
Advertising” whose disturbing-yet-vivid ads for “LipoVac” liposuction and
“No-Coat tongue-scrapers” (ij 412, 413) turn viewers off of network television at the very same time as they embody a desire to purge the self of the
otherness of bodily effluvia—metaphorically encapsulating, I suggest, the
unanticipated consequences of what Latour views as a(n ultimately futile)
modern desire to purify subject from object. Viney and Veals, as the narrator explains, simultaneously profit from and accelerate the death-knell
8 Latour might admittedly take issue with this dismissal of toasters’ potential as
actants. So too might Thomas Thwaites, whose 2011 book The Toaster Project
chronicled the author’s attempt to build, entirely by his own hands, a toaster
from scratch. The result of the experiment reveals, amongst other things, the
extent to which even a toaster is inimically tied up in networks through which
it acts and is acted upon.
“On the Porousness of Certain Borders” | 65
Wallace as a
critic had
recognized,
previous to
Infinite Jest, the
extent to which
televisions “act”
upon humans.
of the network television in a kind of recursive move that inevitably spells
their own doom. For when the big four networks fail, they take countless
casualties, a mass collapse that is even yet just the tip of the iceberg in
terms of revealing the complexity of networks: “production companies,
graphic artists, account execs, computer-enhancement technicians” all
go down, and the remaining television broadcasts—literally just an endless cycle of Happy Days reruns (415)—drive domestic crime and suicide
rates sky high. The rise of InterLace in network television’s stead is just
as tangled, as technology, politics, and economics lead the bankrupt big
four to reunite and develop a system of distribution based on pc-diskette
cartridges, the internet (again, a project developed by the government, at
least partly out of military interests), and advertised by way of the very
same appeal to freedom of choice and freedom to be entertained that was
instilled in us by television, the novel suggests, in the first place—a desire
to be entertained in turn exacerbated by a system that, with the immediate
gratification of content delivered directly to the user at the push of the button, and now absent any advertisements that might otherwise make producers reluctant to make a show “too entertaining for fear its commercials
would pale in comparison” (417), conditions people to freely “choose even
more” (167 emphasis added). Of course, that choice has costs. Not insignificantly, the rise of InterLace and the absence of television advertising
revenues lead directly not just to subsidized time (a “revenue-enhancing”
[223] strategy) but to a blighted material environment. “Billboards,” the
narrator explains, “sprouted with near-mycological fury.… No bus, train,
trolley, or hack went unfestooned with high-gloss ads. Commercial airliners began … to trail those terse translucent ad-banners usually reserved
for like Piper Cubs over football games” (418).
That desire to choose even more has another cost, which comes in the
form of the entertainment produced by James Incandenza—a film whose
power over its audiences demonstrates that things are not to be underestimated, that they can act and act sometimes even in ways that could not
be foreseen by those who made them. Things do more than fill a function;
they do, in fact, to return to Latour’s maxim, “incite around them that
whirlwind of new worlds.” Thus it is no surprise that Lyle—something of a
guru, who lives in the weight room of the Enfield Tennis Academy and who
offers philosophical wisdom in exchange for the sweat of students—tells
Ortho Stice, a student grappling with the fact that his bed moves across
the room under its own power while he sleeps, “Do not underestimate
objects! Lyle says he finds it impossible to overstress this: do not underestimate objects.… Do not leave objects out of account. The world, after all,
66 | Jansen
which is radically old, is made up mostly of objects” (394–95). Incandenza’s
filmography, the novel tells us, is seemingly filled with attempts to make
sense of objects and of technology, including a piece titled Various Small
Flames which attempts to visually enumerate “myriad varieties of small
household flames, from lighters and birthday candles to stovetop gas rings
and glass clippings ignited by sunlight through a magnifying glass” (988
n24) and another titled The American Century As Seen Through A Brick, a
synopsis of which explains that “As U.S. Boston’s historical Back Bay streets
are stripped of brick and repaved with polymerized cement, the resultant
career of one stripped brick is followed, from found-art temporary installation to displacement by E.W.D. catapult to a waste-quarry in Southern
Québec to its use in the F.L.Q.-incited anti-O.N.A.N. riots of January/
Whopper” (989 n24).9 Yet for all his desire to make sense of objects and to
make sense of the world, Incandenza’s films seem inevitably to be turned
radically inward. They are “self-reflexive and postmodern” (Boswell 162),
as well as almost painfully self-conscious. Joelle Van Dyne offers the most
damning critique of the auteur’s body of work: “[t]echnically gorgeous.…
But oddly hollow, empty, no sense of dramatic towardness … like a very
smart person conversing with himself ” (740). It is no coincidence, after
all, that the family’s nickname for the elder Incandenza is “Himself ” (29),
designating a sort of crippling interiority.
Incandenza’s self-reflexivity leads to films that attempt to understand
the world and the connections between things but cannot because they
are ultimately projects that—in their radical interiority—enact a schism
between subject and object, self and other. Incandenza’s Infinite Jest is not
explicitly a film about objects (what little is known about the film suggests
that large chunks of it consist of Joelle Van Dyne shot from the perspective
of an infant’s crib, apologizing to the camera), but it nevertheless takes
this logic to its conclusion. A film made, the director’s wraith confesses, to
bring his son Hal “ ‘out of himself,’ as they say.… A way to say i am so very,
very sorry and have it heard” (839), has precisely the opposite effect
because the elder Incandenza’s self-reflexivity prevents him from truly
9 When Incandenza returns from the dead as a wraith to haunt the eta, it should
come as no surprise that he does so by (the novel strongly implies) manipulating objects, an approach that draws attention to conventional object-subject
relations, perhaps in the process helping those objects in (Bill Brown might
suggest) “asserting themselves as things” (4)—Stice’s bed included. As Elizabeth Freudenthal suggests, “That Incandenza chooses objects instead of words
ascribes to those objects some kind of power greater than that of language.…
[H]e trusts these objects to speak for themselves and for him.… [M]ateriality
insists on itself ” (204).
“On the Porousness of Certain Borders” | 67
granting objects the respect they deserve or of understanding the danger
of something so radically entertaining. The film, intended to prompt communication and exteriority, instead focuses its viewers so far inward that
they become catatonic and lost within themselves, literalizing modernity’s
insistence on a rupture between interior and exterior, and demonstrating
the violence of this rupture through the manner in which the cartridge
brings “the entire family, and indeed the nation, into imminent danger”
(Hayles 692). Wallace’s novel in fact ends at its beginning, its opening scene
taking place one year after the conclusion of the novel’s main action and
featuring a Hal Incandenza focused so radically inward (although whether
this is because he has viewed the film or it is for another reason is never
actually specified in the novel10) that not only is he unable to communicate
(12), he is unable to make sense of his material surroundings or even his
own body’s facial movements (5). As he informs the reader, “I am in here”
(5), meaning, one surmises, trapped within his own head.
The novel is not kind to its other characters for whom this interior
orientation is the case as well, and it is no surprise that radical interiority in the novel is so often associated with mistreatment of other people,
objects, and particularly nonhumans. Take for instance Randy Lenz, a
small-time cocaine dealer who is staying at Ennet House primarily as a
way to hide out from both the federal agents and gangsters who are after
him (276). He is certainly not at Ennet House in an attempt to shed his
addiction, given that he rewards himself for his sobriety with regular doses
of cocaine.11 More centrally, it seems noteworthy that Lenz’s cocaine stash
is hidden in a large-print edition of William James’s Principles of Psychology (543), what the narrator describes as “a volume that’s come to mean
a great deal to Lenz” (1037 n224). The evocation of James in this context
might perhaps recall his claim that “[t]o perceive another’s thought, we
must construct his thought within ourselves … [and that] this thought is
10 Stephen J. Burn’s Infinite Jest: A Reader’s Guide explains the (at least) two other
possible explanations for Hal’s interiority: that it is simply the result of marijuana withdrawal or that he has ingested a radically powerful psychoactive drug
(whose effects are said to be “almost ontological” [ij 170]) known as dmz (44).
11 Drugs are, perhaps significantly, personified throughout Infinite Jest. Cocaine is,
for example, referred to as “Bing Crosby,” while marijuana is colloquially known
as “Bob Hope” (994 n27). Jane Bennett’s Vibrant Matter argues persuasively
that we might view edible matter as an “actant” (39) on human bodies; Infinite
Jest’s fixation on drugs, their origins, and their effects, might show that they
too could be understood in the same way, revealing “the swarm of activity
subsisting below and within formed bodies and recalcitrant things, a vitality
obscured by our conceptual habit of dividing the world into inorganic matter
and organic life” (50).
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our own and is strictly original with us” (219). James’s argument, that to see
or comprehend a thing we must be able to construct it within ourselves,
would seem to precipitate the possibility of a kind of empathetic (or at
least sympathetic) connection between the mind and the outer world—and
yet the risk of James’s view, with its emphasis on cognition, seems to be
toward a kind of radical solipsism in which we are all inevitably locked
inside ourselves. It would seem that for Hal that has literally become the
case, but it may be so for Lenz as well, whose method of coping involves
torturing and/or killing small animals—a habit that rapidly escalates from
throwing rocks at rats (544) to suffocating cats in Hefty bags (541) to cutting dogs’ throats (546).
But Hal and Lenz’s problems, and the lethal self-reflexivity of the Entertainment, are ultimately all local instantiations of the logical consequences
that arise from a world that has done its best to face inward, to demarcate
between inside and outside, and maintain “purity” in the face of hybrids.
It is in this sense that the political world of Infinite Jest is perhaps best
understood, for the masturbatory, Onanistic connotations of the name
onan are hardly accidental. onan’s rhetoric of international co-operation
and “interdependence” are merely a cover for what N. Katherine Hayles
calls “rampant nationalism under another guise” (658) and a desire to keep
the self separate from all the complicated “things” with which it is inexorably tied up. Johnny Gentle, a compulsive clean-freak and Vegas lounge
singer turned president under the banner of the Clean U.S. Party (cusp),
promises to clean up America. But his idea of doing so involves embracing
the impossible notion that the self can ever be purified of those things that
have shaped it. Thus cusp’s campaign slogan—“Let’s Shoot Our Wastes
Into Space” (382)—and its solution to rampant ecological crises, which is
to secretly move all of the United States’s waste into areas of upstate New
York, New Hampshire, and Vermont, declare those regions uninhabitable,
and then forcefully “cede” the area (called “The Great Concavity” [58] in
the U.S. and “The Great Convexity” [59] by its northern neighbours) to
Canada in order that “it will not soil U.S. cleanliness” (Hayles 685). The
project of the Great Concavity is, the narrator explains, one of “experialism”
(385) and ties into the novel’s tennis narrative through the idea of tennis as
a sport in which the aim is “to send from yourself what you hope will not
return” (176), even if we know this task is ultimately impossible. What we
have here, Latour might suggest, are the politics of modernity at work—
a politics at once “inflexible and often violent … [in which] nature is to
be dominated [and] … other cultures … are regarded as objects, sunk in
nature” (Luckhurst 9). There is no true “Interdependence” in this vision of
“On the Porousness of Certain Borders” | 69
It is only a
radical kind of
self-absorption
that allows us
to maintain the
illusion that we
could ever
separate ourselves from our
things, waste or
otherwise.
onan, only—as Hayles suggests—a “masturbatory engagement with one’s
own interests” (685), an attempt to purify what are in actuality unpurifiable imbroglios. To divorce ourselves from things is no more possible
than to divorce us from those abject parts of ourselves we deem unclean:
hence the novel’s preoccupation with bodily waste and effluvia. Witness,
for example, the aforementioned LipoVac and No-Coat tongue scrapers,
or the drug addict Poor Tony whose “nose [runs] like twin spigots” (301).
The Great Concavity serves another purpose, however, supplying
power to the United States through a newly-developed process called
“annular fusion” (64), a complex and highly recursive technology in which
power plants in the Concavity paradoxically use toxic waste to create
energy that aids in the consumption of toxic waste, a process that itself
results in more toxic waste that is then used to create energy and on again
through the loop—constantly creating “like hellacious amounts of highly
poisonous radioactive wastes” (571) as one eta student explains. Annular
fusion is said to enable energy independence, but, as the novel points out,
any such independence is at best “approximate” (64). More importantly,
the illusion of a self that can be separated from the material it produces
and the environment it inhabits is undercut by the fact that annular fusion
as a process forcefully enrols its consumers into a culture of consumption where ever more waste is continually needed to fuel a process that
risks spiraling out of control—a fact that recalls but takes to an extreme
Latour’s observation that even turning on his computer in the morning,
even simply using electricity, effectively enables an entire nuclear power
industry whether he approves of that industry or not (“Morality” 255). The
safeguards meant to separate self from other, subject from object, human
from waste matter are ultimately doomed to fail, because it is impossible to truly separate them. The Great Concavity leaks; birth defects have
skyrocketed; the Charles River has turned an eerie robin’s-egg blue (233);
irradiated feral hamsters occasionally escape the confines of the Concavity
(540). A Québécois film scholar in the novel is overheard to explain: “Fans
do not begin to keep it all in the Great Convexity. It creeps back in. What
goes around, it comes back around. This your nation refuses to learn. It
will keep creeping back in. You cannot give away your filth and prevent
all creepage, no? Filth by its very nature it is a thing that is always creeping back in” (233). It is only a radical kind of self-absorption that allows
us to maintain the illusion that we could ever separate ourselves from
our things, waste or otherwise. And it is for this reason, in turn, that so
many of the afr’s terrorist enterprises—like their attempts to secure and
distribute the Entertainment, like their tactic of setting up large mirrors
70 | Jansen
across U.S. highways and thereby encouraging motorists to literally crash
into themselves (1056 n304)—exploit that kind of personal interiority. The
message of the Québécois, as articulated by one of their operatives, that
one must “choose [their] attachments carefully.… Choose with care” (107),
is related to a lesson Don Gately picks up in Alcoholics Anonymous: “it
takes effort to pay attention” (202) but to cope effectively in our tangled
world ultimately requires that we do so “without running away” (176).
Somewhat ingeniously, Infinite Jest to an extent embodies these conceits—that we must pay attention and that we must focus on something
beyond ourselves—in its very physical form. That the novel itself shares
the title of the lethal film therein is no coincidence, nor is the novel’s tremendous physical size (as Wallace biographer D. T. Max has pointed out,
virtually every initial review emphasized the literal as well as metaphorical
dimensions of the novel [216]) and aforementioned circuitous structure
(with the novel’s first scene being, chronologically, its conclusion). Wallace,
however, originally intended to subtitle the novel “A Failed Entertainment”
(Max 183), and the novel’s ergodic qualities—the constant flipping forced
by endnotes (and endnotes within endnotes), the technical explanations
that virtually necessitate an oed and medical dictionary be handy, the
complex web of allusions to Hamlet, The Brothers Karamazov, Don DeLillo’s End Zone, and other sources both contemporary and classical12—are,
I suggest, invested in constantly reminding the reader of the book’s status
as a Latournian gathering, a thing that exists in relation to others and to
those who approach it as a text. The conceit goes so far as to deny the
reader any kind of traditional closure; at the book’s end, literally none of
the major plots are resolved, only hinting toward what may come. Wallace,
Max explains, “was never going to let the reader settle” on one explanation,
because to do so would be reductive (193). Indeed, Christopher Hager has
suggested that, given that the resolution is not in the text but outside of
it, the novel might be better understood less as a novel than “as a satellite
dish … focus[ing] myriad rays of light, or voices, or information” (quoted
in Max 321 n19). To fail at entertaining (particularly through the use of
its more ergodic impulses), as Infinite Jest purportedly aims, is to offer a
glimpse of the book-as-object’s thingness by challenging the traditional
subject-object relationship between reader and book and in the process
12 For more on the network of allusions to Hamlet and Brothers Karamazov, see
Boswell (165–67, 166–68); for End Zone and a web of classical Greek references,
see Burn (70, 60–63).
“On the Porousness of Certain Borders” | 71
is to succeed at something greater by forcing the reader to pay attention
to the world and to the innumerable webs that world consists of.
Of course, Latour’s attention to things, and Infinite Jest’s argument
for their agency raises ethical questions, and ethics has been one of the
grounds on which Latour’s work has been contested. Katinka Waelbers
and Philipp Dorstewitz, for example, have claimed that although Latour’s
approach is rich in its ability to show the interrelation of many complex
factors, they nevertheless find it ethically lacking because “it focuses only
on behaviour, and the doings of people are viewed merely as functions
within a technological environment” (24). Latour, they claim, neglects
“desires, ideas and beliefs” as well as the “moral motives behind routines
and transactions,” ultimately failing to offer “a normative viewpoint that
would be able to address questions of responsibility in techno-social networks” (24). Elsewhere, David Bloor, although he does not engage in a
discussion of ethics explicitly, allows them to lurk in the background when
he wonders what the consequences are of Latour’s theoretical program—
“deliberately inverting our usual conceptual conventions, using a purposive vocabulary for things which don’t have purposes, and a mechanistic
vocabulary for things that do” (97).13
And reading Latour and Infinite Jest in tandem, particularly in the
context of these ethical objections, does raise one potent further question,
that being whether Infinite Jest’s call to objects enacts the same schism
between subject and object, in reverse, that Latour’s theorizing seeks to
complicate. Is attending to objects, as weight room guru Lyle suggests,
implicitly a good thing, and if so why? What is it about things that act as
a spur toward a more ethical way of being?
In attempting to answer these objections, I first turn briefly to Aaron
Smith, who has explored the ethical dimensions of Latour’s theoretical
framework through the lens of legal culpability and who has argued that
Latour’s actor-actant associations and his attention to things are useful in
13 Bloor concludes that Latour’s work is merely “obscurantism raised to the level
of a general methodological principle” (97), ordinary sociology of scientific
knowledge masquerading as something more profound. He also takes issue
with Latour’s belief that science and nature are co-produced, rather than science and accounts of nature (87). For further critiques of Latour’s thinking
(ethical and otherwise), see Amsterdamska (495–504), Collins and Yearley
(301–26), and Gingras (123–48). See also Cole (106–18) for a critique of objectoriented ontologies more generally. Cole is particularly astute in pointing out
that philosophical projects to decentre the human not only still rely on human
“self-presencing” but also on traditions of “mysticism and idealism by which
things speak and propose” (112).
72 | Jansen
framing cases where culpability is difficult to locate, for example the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima (191–92), liability claims for the
health issues of smokers (192), and the global degradation of environmental air quality (192–93). Smith finds, in these examples, that the Latournian framework is useful “because it helps us sift through the multiple
layers of non-human activity to discover the actors” (192). In analyzing
environmental degradation, for instance, Smith observes that seemingly
everyone behaves in ways that negatively affect air quality. But so too do
companies and nations, and—even further still—so do volcanoes, cosmic
radiation, and forest fires. In an example like this, the ethical value of
turning to things and of Latournian analysis lies in its ability to spread
culpability where it is deserved. As Smith points out, “Approaching this
problem only in terms of subjects and objects makes it difficult to bring
the political, scientific, and philosophical aspects together and recognize
they are part of a larger whole. Worse, it denies the possibility of placing
some of the responsibility on actants in the association that do not have
any human lurking behind them” (193). The ethical value, then, of turning
to things in the Latournian sense, lies in the enhanced ability to take up
“large complex questions” to clarify the “organic relationships between
many disparate parts” and “distribute potential responsibility throughout
a group of actors and actants” (193).
Smith’s analysis does call attention to a fact worth emphasizing again,
in case it has not already been made clear: that it is not turning to objects
per se that is the desired ethical move, so much as it is turning toward
objects on the way to ultimately “Retying the Gordian Knot” (Modern 3)
between humans and nonhumans, culture and nature. It is about acknowledging how “[s]ociety and nature are ‘co-produced’ ” (Bloor 84). But turning to things does, for Latour, offer productive potential in its capacity
to turn us away from what he terms matters of fact in favour of matters
of concern. In two recent essays, “Why Has Critique Run out of Steam?”
and “From Realpolitik to Dingpolitik,” Latour tentatively sketches a vision,
which I have already gestured to briefly above in discussing Latour’s use
of the word “thing,” of what turning away from political philosophy’s
“object-avoidence” (5) and toward things might achieve. Latour, in asking
whether we can devise a “powerful descriptive tool that deals … with matters of concern and whose import … [is] to protect and to care” (“Critique”
232) suggests that in a world where 9/11 conspiracies are commonplace
(228), the overwhelming evidence of anthropomorphic global climate
change can be widely denied (226), and Colin Powell can stand before
the United Nations and declare the “unambiguous and undisputable fact
“On the Porousness of Certain Borders” | 73
of the presence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq” (“Dingpolitik” 8),
indisputable, transparent facts have become rare, messy, pesky, risky, and
insufficient (9). Politics has for too long treated objects as matters of fact,
objective and independent, but this treatment is “unfair to them, unfair
to science, unfair to objectivity, unfair to experience” (9). Facts “are much
more interesting, variegated, uncertain, complicated, far reaching, heterogeneous, risky, historical, local, material, and networky than the pathetic
version offered for too long by philosophers” (9–10).
And thus in lieu of matters of fact, Latour proposes a politics that
orients itself by matters of concern—a shift away from Realpolitik, which
Latour contends lacks realism in its conception of power relations and
cannot deal with indisputability (12), and toward Dingpolitik, a movement
in which politics is “no longer limited to humans” (31), a politics whose
emphasis on connections and gatherings is generative, additive, instead
of the subtractive, “partial and … polemical” (“Critique” 232) nature of
matters of fact. In answering the question of why attending to things is
good, Latour contends that “[w]e might be more connected to each other
by our worries, our matters of concern, the issues we care for, than by
any other set of values, opinions, attitudes or principles” (“Dingpolitik” 4).
Latour’s call, then, is for critics who do not “debunk” but who “assemble,”
who do not lift “the rugs from under the feet of the naïve believers” but
who offer the participants “arenas in which to gather” (“Critique” 246).
Making connections, in Latour’s eyes, is preferable to the critical groundclearing that has become rote in contemporary scholarly critique. And in
any movement toward making connections—toward Dingpolitik—Latour
informs us, objects must “become things” and “matters of fact [must] give
way to [things’] complicated entanglements” (“Dingpolitik” 15). “All entities,” he writes, must “cease to be objects defined simply by their inputs
and outputs and become again things, mediating, assembling, gathering”
(“Critique” 248).
With Latour’s words in mind, and even acknowledging that turning
our attention to objects is only part of the equation of Latour’s theory, it
should nevertheless come as no surprise to readers that the characters
in Infinite Jest who are most valued (and in some cases, oddly enough,
deemed most human) are often those who are themselves aware of things
or aware of themselves as hybrids. The student athlete Ortho Stice, who
“has a secret suspicion about a secret that has more to do with the actual
table than with the people at the table” (635) radically improves his tennis
game by internalizing the advice from Lyle not to underestimate objects;
Hal’s brother Mario Incandenza is a wildly deformed medical miracle
74 | Jansen
whose present condition is largely the result of attempts at regenerative
plastic surgery and who cannot even stand up without a “thoracic policelock” (153) and cement block to hold him in place, yet is nevertheless at
the novel’s moral centre, a “born listener” (80) and unironic devotee to
what is “really real” (592). Infinite Jest suggests that there is a lesson to be
taken away from these characters, that there is something to be found in
what Elizabeth Freudlander calls the “generative embrace of the material
world of objects” (205). Such an embrace becomes necessary when we
realize that, as the side-view car mirrors upon which James Incandenza
apparently built his fortune suggest, “Objects … Are Closer Than They
Appear” (1036 n218).
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