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Response Paper 11In Preparation of Session 12

Denis Telofy Drescher

June 30, 2014

All throughoutInfinite Jest, we are faced with embodied processes of condition-ing, compulsion, habit, and ritual. Would you say that in the case of drug use anddrug withdrawal, a materialist understanding of the self (say, as biochemicallydetermined or neurologically hardwired) is both the problem (addiction) andthe solution (AA)?

I cant decide between noand mu. e question correctlytalks about a materialist understanding, which is just that,a powerful but still somewhat inchoate understanding of pro-cesses that take place almost irrespective of whether or not weunderstand them. Don Gately even goes so far as to believe thatAA works beer if you dont try to understand it, and that thepeople most capable of understanding it are also most capableof selectively reasoning themselves back into addiction. Sim-ilarly, drug addiction does not require any great knowledgeof the chemical processes involved, though Pemulis may dis-agree.

Drug addiction and AA conditioning seem rather differentto me (although there are probably also parallels). In my expe-rience and inInfinite Jest, a common reason for addictions is awill to suppress unwanted feelings and maybe a broad notion of escapism. ese go back totraumatic childhood experiences at least with Bruce Green and Don Gately. e mechanics

of AA seems to rely rather on the same principles that the community reinforcement approachexploits, a powerful evolved bias to conform to the expectations of ones peers. It is of coursepossible that on the biochemical and neurological level new, surprising parallels betweenthese phenomena become apparent.

What were your problems with the text(s)? What passages, ideas or concepts didyou find unclear, unconvincing or otherwise problematic?

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e onset of Sedgwick et al.s article got me worried that she would argue that a certainunavoidable level of uncertainty about the margins of the concept of addiction and a certainlevel of polysemy of the term addictionmeant that term or concept were all-encompassingand thus meaningless: It seemed logically clear from the moment of this development thatif exercise was addictive, nothing couldnt be (Sedgwick et al. 131). Merely because there

is disagreement about whether three pieces of soap constitute a heap (or one, or zero), itdoesnt follow that its useful to call a ferret or ones commute to work a heap. e tendencyto completely dismiss heuristics that have proved wrong in one instance even though theyhave been useful most of the time can be a bias in itself. As Box and Draper (424) said,Essentially, all models are wrong, but some are useful.

Luckily she doesnt dwell on the point, goes on to use the termaddictionrepeatedly, whichshe probably wouldnt if it were all-encompassingly meaningless to her, and soon steers thearticle in the more fruitfully confusing direction of the so-called free will, which leaves openwhat exactly it is that it is supposed to be free of. Generally, however, my takeaway from thearticle was too vague for me to critique it.

Ive also found it a lile distracting that Freudenthals article abounds in generalizationsand terse summaries of other critiques, especially whenever she wants to reiterate the nov-elty of her thoughts, summaries that seem unlikely to do justice to these critiques given thesummaries brevity. To guard her critiques of critiques against this sort of critique, however,she inserts qualifiers such assustainedordirectlyat times, so any qualitatively contradictoryevidence could just have fallen short of her quantitative expectations: Still, no critics haveperformed a sustained analysis (Freudenthal 195), Critics have not directly addressed oneof the more engaging emotional draws ofInfinite Jest (195), So far, however, critics havenot used embodiment to understand Wallaces depiction of selood (196), Many criticsuse this passage to argue . However, these critics never quote the sentence immediately

following the mental wheels, cogs, and gears (205). Fourteen years aer the publication ofInfinite Jest, it seems unlikely that someone could still perform the complete induction overeverything ever published on the novel to sustain these claims. Especially her claim aboutembodiment seems suspect in view of many of the other analyses we have read.

What did you find interesting about the text(s)? What aspects of the text(s) wouldyou like to know more about?

Sedgwick et al. seems to be more concerned with drawing aention to important ques-tions and establishing associations than with structuring and answering these questions. Itwould probably be more a testament to overdrawn expectations on my part than to objectiveshortcoming of the article to criticize that.

Apart from coffee, Im also subject to a number of addictions that would be classified asnatural in common parlance, and which I dont particularly enjoy. (Maybe also a reasonwhy I feel drawn to the visions of transhumanism.) She draws aention to this split, unfor-tunately without investigating it much further, like Hayles did.

Hers and AAs observation that an admission of (individual) powerlessness can be em-powering on a larger scale continues to intrigue me.

Freudenthal takes this phenomenon in a new direction. Following Lyles advice not to un-derestimate objects, she develops the concept ofanti-interiority, an active opposition by some

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characters against an inward-facing preoccupation with their own thoughts and feelings. Itsprobably moot to wonder whether this is a central theme ofInfinite Jest, but her examplesseem convincing to me. Maybe there is a place and time for rule utilitarianism aer all.

Works CitedBox, G.E.P. and N.R. Draper. Empirical model-building and response surfaces. Wiley, 1987.

Print. Wiley series in probability and mathematical statistics: Applied probability andstatistics.

Freudenthal, Elizabeth. Anti-interiority: Compulsiveness, objectification, and identity in In-finite Jest.New literary history41.1 (2010): 191211. Print.

Hayles, N. Katherine. e Illusion of Autonomy and the Fact of Recursivity: Virtual Ecolo-gies, Entertainment, and Infinite Jest.New Literary History30.3 (1999): 675697. Print.

Rier, Ben. Phonies: Michael Pemulis. 2012. Web.Sedgwick, E.K., et al.Tendencies. Duke University Press, 1993. Print. Series Q.Wallace, David Foster.Infinite Jest. Lile, Brown Book Group, 2011. Print.

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