Equivocationary Horseshit: Post-Correlationist Aesthetics and Post-Critical Ethics in the Works of David Foster Wallace
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How to Cite: Eve, M P 2020 Equivocationary Horseshit: Post-Correlationist
Aesthetics and Post-Critical Ethics in the Works of David Foster Wallace.
Open Library of Humanities, 6(1): 8, pp. 1–29. DOI: https://doi.org/10.16995/
olh.538
Published: 24 March 2020
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https://doi.org/10.16995/olh.538
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Martin Paul Eve, ‘Equivocationary Horseshit: Post-Correlationist
Aesthetics and Post-Critical Ethics in the Works of David
Foster Wallace’ (2020) 6(1): 8 Open Library of Humanities.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.16995/olh.538
ARTICLE
Equivocationary Horseshit:
Post-Correlationist Aesthetics and
Post-Critical Ethics in the Works of
David Foster Wallace
Martin Paul Eve
Birkbeck, University of London, UK
martin.eve@bbk.ac.uk
This article argues that David Foster Wallace’s writing can profitably be
understood within paradigms of post-critique that show critical thought to
be a form of forever-deferred inaction. Beginning with an examination of
the histories of critique and post-critique, this article unearths the extent
to which a post-correlationist aesthetics appears in Infinite Jest, before
turning to the ways in which philosophical and literary representations
collide in a selection of Wallace’s short fiction and essays. In sum, this
article seeks to show how reflexive critical approaches to novels allow us
to interrogate that very reading model itself while also spotlighting the
problematic ethics of Wallace’s writing.
https://doi.org/10.16995/olh.538
mailto:martin.eve@bbk.ac.uk
Eve: Equivocationary Horseshit2
I. What is Critique?
Critics have frequently considered David Foster Wallace (1962–2008) to be a novelist
with philosophical interests.1 Stemming, at least in part, from the author’s own
philosophical writings and educational background, one recent work has noted
that the reception of Wallace is no less than that of a “philosopher-novelist” with
a “philosophically educated imagination”.2 Clare Hayes-Brady, as a second example,
has called Wallace “a writer who balanced philosophy and literature in unusual and
self-conscious ways, using both disciplines in concert to investigate the questions
that preoccupied him”.3 There has even been, in the near past, a collection on ‘David
Foster Wallace and Philosophy’ that seeks to explore the intersections between
philosophical thought and his fiction.4 Painting Wallace as the writer of philosophical
novels is now a routine manoeuvre, even when this is not the main point of the
critics in question.
Wallace himself was more sceptical of such appraisals. In an oft-quoted 2006
interview he disarmingly wrote that “If some people read my fiction and see it as
fundamentally about philosophical ideas, what it probably means is that these are
pieces where the characters are not as alive and interesting as I meant them to be”.5
Such a statement constitutes an assault on particular reading methods, while masking
1 See, for instance, Allard den Dulk and Preben Jordal, ‘Subjectivity and Faith in Updike and Wallace:
A Comparison of the Interpretation of Kierkegaard in Rabbit, Run and Infinite Jest’, The Journal of
David Foster Wallace Studies, 1.1 (2018), 17–54 and also the 2017 call for papers for a conference
entitled ‘David Foster Wallace: Between Philosophy and Literature’ at [accessed 10 March 2020].
2 Jeffrey Severs, David Foster Wallace’s Balancing Books: Fictions of Value (New York: Columbia University
Press, 2017), p. 3.
3 Clare Hayes-Brady, The Unspeakable Failures of David Foster Wallace (New York: Bloomsbury Academic,
2017), p. 9.
4 Gesturing toward Reality. David Foster Wallace and Philosophy, ed. by Robert K. Bolger and Scott Korb
(London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2014).
5 Ostap Karmodi, ‘“A Frightening Time in America”: An Interview with David Foster Wallace’, The New
York Review of Books, 2011 [accessed 9 April 2018].
https://www.dfwsociety.org/2017/12/08/call-for-papers-david-foster-wallace-between-philosophy-and-literature-department-of-philosophical-pedagogical-and-economic-quantitative-sciences-g-dannunzio-university-of-chieti-pescara/
https://www.dfwsociety.org/2017/12/08/call-for-papers-david-foster-wallace-between-philosophy-and-literature-department-of-philosophical-pedagogical-and-economic-quantitative-sciences-g-dannunzio-university-of-chieti-pescara/
https://www.dfwsociety.org/2017/12/08/call-for-papers-david-foster-wallace-between-philosophy-and-literature-department-of-philosophical-pedagogical-and-economic-quantitative-sciences-g-dannunzio-university-of-chieti-pescara/
https://www.dfwsociety.org/2017/12/08/call-for-papers-david-foster-wallace-between-philosophy-and-literature-department-of-philosophical-pedagogical-and-economic-quantitative-sciences-g-dannunzio-university-of-chieti-pescara/
http://www.nybooks.com/daily/2011/06/13/david-foster-wallace-russia-interview/
http://www.nybooks.com/daily/2011/06/13/david-foster-wallace-russia-interview/
Eve: Equivocationary Horseshit 3
itself as modesty. By claiming that philosophical readings demonstrate a failure of a
realist lineage that he (somewhat bizarrely, given the many surreal scenarios of his
novels) claims for himself, Wallace issues a pre-joinder to those who would attempt
to read his novels philosophically. Specifically, though, this statement takes aim at a
particular literary-critical approach that formed over the course of Wallace’s life and
that, some argue, is now in decline: literary theory and critique.
A key touchstone for Wallace and his contemporaries was the introduction of
literary theory, and with it philosophical reading methods, into the mainstream
curricula of English degrees in the USA in the 1970s and 1980s. While plenty of work
has already highlighted the role that the academy played with respect to creative
writing and the MFA programs for an entire generation of writers, including Wallace,
less has been written about the tectonic shift that literary theory represented.6 Indeed,
retrospective studies of events such as the “MacCabe Affair” in the UK – in which Colin
MacCabe was denied tenure at Cambridge for his advocacy of theoretical approaches,
making front-page news in the Guardian – show us the level of disruption that such
paradigms brought to previously formalist departments.7 As much as the emergence
of creative writing programs, the theoretical transformation of the critical scene of
literary studies, just as he graduated summa cum laude in English from Amherst in
1985, cannot but have been an influence on Wallace’s approach to literature.
Key to many strains of theory in literary studies has been the notion of “critique”.
However, in recent years there has been a prominent thrust in literary theory towards
a project that calls itself “post-critical”. This heterogeneous movement, spearheaded
by Rita Felski, asks probing questions of the general interpretative paradigms that
have arisen in literary studies over the past half century but also attempts to displace
6 Mark McGurl, The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 2009); although see Martin Paul Eve, Literature Against Criticism: University
English and Contemporary Fiction in Conflict (Cambridge: Open Book Publishers, 2016) for some work
on this.
7 Francis Mulhern, ‘The Cambridge Affair’, Marxism Today (March 1981), pp. 27–28; Marcus Morgan
and Patrick Baert, Conflict in the Academy a Study in the Sociology of Intellectuals (London: Palgrave,
2015).
Eve: Equivocationary Horseshit4
a strain of ethical and political philosophy that underpinned much of the discipline
for most of the twentieth century: Marxism, in its various forms.8 The surge in this
post-critical movement led Lucas Thompson in 2018 to ask the very question that
this article answers: “How, for instance, might the claims of post-critique scholars
alter our approach to Wallace’s work?”9
Critique, though, comes in several guises that must first be understood. In what
must be its most famous incarnation, critique is used in the philosophy of Immanuel
Kant to denote “conditions of possibility”. Hence, Kant’s 1781 Critique of Pure Reason,
for instance, attempts to schematize the conditions under which knowledge and
reason are made possible and the conditions by which they are limited. For example,
in the “transcendental aesthetic” portion of his first critique (1781), Kant asks
whether it is possible for humans to conceive of any object without time or space.
He concludes that it is not.10 Yet from this Kant reasons that sensory perception is
ideational, grafting atop objective realities the preconditions of human experience.
In other words, for Kant, time and space are not necessarily properties of reality and
objects but are, rather, the conditions of their comprehension by humans. This leads
to the famous divide in his work between the thing-in-itself (the noumenon) and the
way it is presented to us (the phenomenon).
This Kantian lineage of critique is exemplified in the work of Michel Foucault,
whose famous innovation was to examine not the perceptual conditions of possibility
that structure knowledge and reason, but rather the historically discrete epistemes
that perform the same function. That is, the transcendental critique of Kant is
transformed, in Foucault, into historical critique of thought possibility.11 For discrete
8 Rita Felski, The Limits of Critique (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2015).
9 Lucas Thompson, ‘Why a Wallace Studies Journal Now?’, The Journal of David Foster Wallace Studies,
1.1 (2018), pp. 7–10 (p. 9).
10 Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. by Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1998), pp. 155–200.
11 See Colin Koopman, ‘Historical Critique or Transcendental Critique in Foucault: Two Kantian Lineages’,
Foucault Studies, 8 (2010) [accessed 22 July 2010]; and
Colin Koopman, Genealogy as Critique: Foucault and the Problems of Modernity (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 2013).
https://doi.org/10.22439/fs.v0i8.2934
Eve: Equivocationary Horseshit 5
environmental and historical conditions are the object of Foucault’s famous citation
of Borges in the epigraph to The Order of Things: the impossibility, within an epoch,
of thinking that.12
In the literary space, however, it is the Althusserian strain of critique that has
most strongly inflected contemporary “critical reading” and “literary critique”.13
Since 1965, most politico-thematic approaches to the study of literature take a
historicist perspective that understands literary objects as ideological by-products
of their time. In a similar anti-humanist vein to Foucault’s epistemic project, textual
presuppositions reveal, Althusser claims, what a text cannot say as a result of its
ideological positioning within its own time. In this way, and although only an explicit
articulation of a set of practices that had been building for some time, “symptomatic
reading” was born: a model of reading that conceives of texts as ideological creations
with spoken and unspoken components – “sights and oversights” – that can be read
critically and reflexively.14 That is, texts exhibit symptoms – usually contradictions
or conceptual difficulties – of the unspoken ideological environment in which
they were written. These symptoms are the “absence of a concept behind a word”
and they become the excavation site of most methodologies in literary studies.15 As
these two metaphors of space put it – a concept behind a word and a site of buried
interpretative treasure to be dug up – symptomatic reading poses a text-behind-the-
text, a presupposition of “the existence of two texts” with a “different text present
as a necessary absence in the first”.16 This epistemology, in other words, is one in
which the effect of producing knowledge is conditioned by structures of ideology
and empiricism, which can be detected below the surface of any writing.17
12 Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (London: Routledge,
2007).
13 The account in this paragraph is derived from the author’s book: Martin Paul Eve, Close Reading With
Computers: Textual Scholarship, Computational Formalism, and David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas (Stanford,
CA: Stanford University Press, 2019).
14 Louis Althusser and others, Reading Capital: The Complete Edition, trans. by Ben Brewster and David
Fernbach (London: Verso, 2015), p. 17.
15 Althusser and others, p. 32.
16 Althusser and others, p. 27.
17 Althusser and others, p. 69.
Eve: Equivocationary Horseshit6
Although Althusser cites Hegel, Engels and Marx, Spinoza, and even Foucault
and Canguilhem as his diverse sources for this method, there is also a sense in which
symptomatic reading has a root in Kantian critique.18 For the model of symptomatic
reading is itself an analysis of the possibilities for writing and its reception under
ideology. It is a quest to examine the way in which knowledge effects and aesthetic
effects produce secondary, mediated, and structured outcomes of readerly and
writerly processes. It is also built upon a type of (post-)structuralist linguistics in
which chains of signification extend indefinitely from one surface to another depth,
which is in itself always another surface. As Althusser puts it, though, this is about
the “cognitive appropriation of the real object by the object of knowledge”; the
noumenon and the phenomenon.19 It is about the structuring effects of scientific
discourse and form on the production of knowledge. It is a form of critique.
In literary studies, this Althusserian project of critique becomes an ethical
and political reading project. Althusser et al. turn to Marx as a genetic source of
symptomatic reading. This had the effect of providing literary studies with a reading
method rooted in the social justice of communism, a justification and rationale for
reading literature as an ethical and political activity. The ongoing professionalisation
of literary studies sought such an ethical epistemic foundation in order to ground
the discipline in legitimacy and political efficacy. As such, symptomatic reading
became the bedrock for most of contemporary literary criticism’s hermeneutic
methods, particularly when seeking politicised readings. Hence, when we read
politics and ethics out of texts in the early twenty-first century, it is often within
the Althusserian lineage of symptomatic reading that we work, in turn itself a
mode rooted in critique.20 From such methods it becomes possible to see new and
powerful interpretative possibilities – say, for instance, postcolonial approaches – in
the texts-behind-the-text.21
18 Althusser and others, pp. 14–15, 25, 45.
19 Althusser and others, p. 69.
20 An interesting question to which I do not know the answer is the extent to which Roland Barthes was
influenced by Reading Capital (1965), which pre-dates his S/Z (1970) by several years.
21 One might only consider, for instance, the ways in which critique underpins a set of postcolonial
Eve: Equivocationary Horseshit 7
Despite the widespread proliferation and success of critique, there have also
been longstanding calls for its abandonment over a thirty-year period, most recently
led by Felski.22 As I have already noted, this has not gone unremarked upon in
the field of Wallace studies. Such a move represents a turn away from what we
traditionally consider “political” or “ethical” reading within literary studies. For it is
the claimed predictability of such critical against-the-grain interpretative paradigms
and politicized unveilings that has provoked the ire of the anti-critique brigade;
it seems to be the routinization of critique to which they object. There are also,
though, accusations that the critical reading method is paranoid and Felski’s work
places Althusserian symptomatic reading under the primacy of Ricœur’s phrase, the
“hermeneutics of suspicion”. This is, for Felski, an attitude that combines “vigilance,
detachment, and wariness (suspicion) with identifiable conventions of commentary
(hermeneutics)—allowing us to see that critique is as much a matter of affect and
rhetoric as of philosophy or politics”.23 The term is profitable, for Felski, rather
as “a stimulus to thought” than as a closely historicised phase within Ricœur’s
phenomenology.24
Felski’s text was met with significant attention, both positive and negative, upon
its publication and now forms an oft-cited touchstone for contemporary literary
studies.25 It is, though, only the latest in a long line of thought that has considered
the place of structuring possibilities, unearthed shadow-texts, and ideas of what it
means to think “critically” about literary works. Indeed, the space of the “post-critical”
readings, such as Spivak’s widely celebrated essay on Jane Eyre: Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, ‘Three
Women’s Texts and a Critique of Imperialism’, Critical Inquiry, 12.1 (1985), pp. 243–61.
22 See David Stewart, ‘The Hermeneutics of Suspicion’, Literature and Theology, 3.3 (1989), pp. 296–307
(p. 303); Cathy N. Davidson and David Theo Goldberg, ‘Engaging the Humanities’, Profession,
2004, pp. 42–62 (p. 45); Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus, ‘Surface Reading: An Introduction’,
Representations, 108.1 (2009), pp. 1–21 ; N. Katherine
Hayles, How We Think: Digital Media and Contemporary Technogenesis (Chicago, IL: University of
Chicago Press, 2012), p. 59.
23 Felski, p. 3.
24 Felski, p. 30.
25 Bruce Robbins, ‘Not So Well Attached’, PMLA, 132.2 (2017), pp. 371–76 .
https://doi.org/10.1525/rep.2009.108.1.1
https://doi.org/10.1632/pmla.2017.132.2.371
https://doi.org/10.1632/pmla.2017.132.2.371
Eve: Equivocationary Horseshit8
is large and diverse. How, then, can one deal with this heterogeneous proliferation
of what is meant by “post-criticality”? How can one get to grips with the breadth
of recent thought that has appropriated such terminology? In the first instance, I
would suggest – and in order to now broach some of these contexts with reference
to Wallace – we must turn back to Kant, speculatively.
To begin the literary investigation of this specific post-critical stance, I would
note that I am not searching for characters discussing Kant, or sly theoretical
side-swipes. For instance, that Schtitt, in Infinite Jest (1996), “was educated in pre-
Unification Gymnasium under the rather Kanto-Hegelian idea that jr. athletics was
basically just training for citizenship” yields to us but few insights into how epistemic
philosophies of critique operate within Wallace’s fictional worlds.26 Likewise, that
Schtitt “was pushing hard for some mix of theology and the very grim ethics of Kant”
in his youth-tennis training programme may provoke a laugh, but the line does little
more than to flaunt a supposed erudition without ever really showing us anything
about the ethical philosophy of Kant.27 Kant has certainly also featured elsewhere
in the scholarship on Wallace. As one example, Jeffrey Severs turns to the ways in
which, in “The Suffering Channel” (2004), Wallace presents a romanticized Kantian
mythology of “the effortless modern artist”, rooted in the Critique of Judgment
(1790).28 This, also though, is not the route that I will here take. Instead, I will next
turn to issues of ontology and epistemology in Infinite Jest’s fêted game of Eschaton.
II. Infinite Jest, Playing Games, and Kantian Aesthetics
What if philosophy has got almost everything wrong for the past 240 years? One
might think that such a broad and generalised proposition would be unlikely
to feature in a work of contemporary philosophy.29 Yet, as a succinct summary of
Quentin Meillassoux’s After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency (2008),
26 David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1996), p. 82.
27 Wallace, Infinite Jest, p. 188.
28 Severs, p. 193.
29 Although it is notable that the early Ludwig Wittgenstein also held such radical revisionist views.
Eve: Equivocationary Horseshit 9
one could do worse. It is also impossible to speak of Wallace within a contemporary
anti-Kantian turn – a post-critical turn, that is – without reference to this work.
At the risk of more extended and dense background philosophy, Meillassoux
seeks to defend the twofold thesis that “the sensible only exists as a subject’s relation
to the world” but that, at the same time, “the mathematicizable properties of the
object are exempt from the constraint of such a relation”.30 The reason this is such
a difficult task is that, as Meillassoux himself notes, “this thesis is almost certain to
appear insupportable to a contemporary philosopher […] because it is resolutely pre-
critical”; a thesis that claims to discriminate between the innate properties of the
world and those that come about in our relation to the world has seemed indefensible
“not only since Kant, but even since Berkeley”.31 It is not possible, this classical critical
reasoning would go, for us to think a relationship of the world to thought because,
the second it is thought, the relation of thought to the world comes into play. For
Meillassoux, this reveals that “the central notion of modern philosophy since Kant
seems to be that of correlation”, by which he means “the idea according to which
we only ever have access to the correlation between thinking and being, and never
to either term considered apart from the other”.32 This correlation also has other
forms of linkage, one of which, significantly for literary studies (and previous forms
of language philosophy), is the “language-referent” correlation.33
Let us take the post-critical stance here (note that Meillassoux uses the
phrase “post-critical” to mean everything after Kant, not everything after Kant that
disregards Kant). Imagine that we do not believe that thought can comprehend
objects without the presence of thought; the logical consequence of Kantian critique
– correlationism. What then do we make of the fact that “empirical science is capable
of producing [credible] statements about events anterior to the advent of life as
30 Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency, trans. by Ray Brassier
(London: Continuum, 2009), p. 3.
31 Meillassoux, p. 3.
32 Meillassoux, p. 5.
33 Meillassoux, p. 6.
Eve: Equivocationary Horseshit10
well as consciousness”?34 This pre-conscious epoch, described by empirical science,
is what Meillassoux calls “the ancestral” and the described objects that indicate
ancestrality are called “arche-fossils”. Such objects are, under post-critical thought,
literally unthinkable without the “codicil of modernity” that “event Y occurred X
number of years before the emergence of humans – for humans”.35
Meillassoux’s argument to refute correlationism is complex and not wholly
accepted. Suffice it to say, though, that it consists in asserting that the only thing
that can be totally necessary is contingency (non-necessity). For Slavoj Žižek, “what
this means is that, if a being is necessary, then it can always not exist. If, however, a
being is radically contingent, then something (contingent) has to exist”, a point that
he calls “wonderful”.36 Yet, in his view, Meillassoux also misses the key point: “the true
problem of correlationism”, Žižek asserts, “is not whether we can reach the In-itself
the way it is outside of any correlation to the subject (or the way the Old is outside
its perception from the standpoint of the New); but the true problem is to think the
New itself ‘in becoming’”.37 In a sense, this is a retrospectively historicized future; the
question becomes, from the position of ancestrality, how do we project the future
birth of subjectivity?
Mark Currie has also worked on Meillassoux’s challenge of contingency, even
as he manages to translate this philosophy into terms that can work for literature
– relevant for my reading of Wallace. For Currie, the question that Meillassoux
surfaces is the difference between an aleatory variability (when a die has not yet
been rolled) and epistemic uncertainty (when the die has been rolled but one does
not know the outcome), encapsulated in ontological uncertainty (“a condition
of absolute unpredictability, in which events are not only unforeseen, but are in
principle unforeseeable”, such as throwing a seven on a six-sided die).38 For, if one
34 Meillassoux, p. 9.
35 Meillassoux, p. 13.
36 Slavoj Žižek, Less than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism (London: Verso, 2012),
p. 628.
37 Žižek, p. 644.
38 Mark Currie, ‘Anticipation/Unexpected’, in Time: A Vocabulary of the Present, ed. by Joel Burges and
Amy J. Elias (New York: New York University Press, 2016), pp. 97–110 (p. 106).
Eve: Equivocationary Horseshit 11
takes Currie’s reading of Meillassoux’s line that “events always, necessarily, could
have happened otherwise”, then the totally unexpected, in narratological thinking,
is the perfect example of a speculatively realist philosophy that is, in this sense,
nonetheless post-critical.39 Translating such matters into narrative terms is complex,
for when the reader usually approaches a book, uncertainty is epistemic, rather than
aleatory, let alone ontological.
These two takes on Meillassoux nonetheless give us a route to the first post-
critical approach in terms of Kantian thought that I wish to broach with respect
to Wallace. For the question here is: how does Wallace represent our relationship
to objects? Are his worlds places in which the supposed overwhelming solipsisms
of his characters betray a correlationism that depends on the necessary presence
of the subject (and thus are post-critical in Meillassoux’s sense)? Or do ontological
uncertainties erupt ex nihilo in Wallace’s writings, events that truly place him within
a speculative frame (and, thus, are almost pre-critical, or post-speculative)?
In Infinite Jest, Eschaton is the geopolitical, tennis-derivative game played by the
denizens of the Enfield Tennis Academy.40 The specific game that is shown to the
reader takes place on November 8, Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment.41 The
game consists of players stationed on a fictional “map” of several geographical regions
with suggestive names spread over four tennis courts – AMNAT (Todd Possalthwaite,
Kieran McKenna, LaMont Chu), SOVWAR (Tim Peterson, Ann Kittenplan), REDCHI
(unknown players), INDPAK (J. J. Penn), SOUTHAF (Josh Gopnik), and IRLIBSYR
(Evan Ingersoll) – while Michael Pemulis, Hal Incandenza, Trevor Axford, Jim
Troeltsch, and Jim Struck watch. The “Game Master” is Otis P. Lord, who calculates
initial “megatonnage” distribution using the “mean-value theorem for integrals” via
39 Currie, p. 107.
40 There are some existing commentaries on Eschaton that are worth citing but that take a different tack
to the approach here. See, for instance, Daniel Grausam, On Endings: American Postmodern Fiction and
the Cold War (Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 2011); and Iain Williams, ‘“Something
Real American”: David Foster Wallace and Authenticity’ (unpublished Ph.D., The University of
Edinburgh, 2016) [accessed 23 September
2018].
41 Wallace, Infinite Jest, pp. 321–42.
https://www.era.lib.ed.ac.uk/handle/1842/31007
Eve: Equivocationary Horseshit12
“Mathpak Unltd.’s Endstat software”, and the derivative formulas known as “Peemster”
and “Halsadick”. Predictably, given the complexity of its setup and the breadth of its
imaginative range, the game rapidly descends into chaos.
Eschaton is a humorous set piece. The bathetic plunge from its deadly serious
subject matter (nuclear annihilation) to its actuality (young men and boys hitting
tennis balls at one another), all situated within an earnest rule-based framework,
itself undercut by the propeller-head beanies worn by the Game Master, mean that
the Eschaton oscillates between the sublime and the ridiculous. Yet, it is precisely
these two poles, overlaid atop one another – the map and the territory, the game
and the world, geopolitics and the tennis court, the serious and the amusing – that
makes Eschaton a good subject for an investigation of a post-critical aesthetic in
the novel. For when we are presented with such overlaid and layered modalities,
we can investigate whether the text vies for a correlation of the two, a metaphorical
representation of Meillassoux’s argument.
The above may be a broad description of Eschaton, but some close attention to
the way it is presented can also prove instructive. Eschaton is, in fact, a game that
draws in “children in the very earliest stages of puberty and really abstract-capable
thought, when one’s allergy to the confining realities of the present is just starting
to emerge as weird kind of nostalgia for stuff you never even knew”, an aspect that
Wallace glosses with an endnote reading: “This basic phenomenon being what
more abstraction-capable post-Hegelian adults call ‘Historical Consciousness.’”.42
That is, Eschaton draws in those who seek an a-historicizing fantasy game that
offers “a complete disassociation from the realities of the present”, all couched in
terms of an idealist history: the precise opposite of critique as presented in literary
studies environments. This challenging tension on “reality” vs. “game world” recurs
throughout the Eschaton. For instance, REDCHI attempts some INDDIR (Infliction of
Death, Destruction, and Incapacitation of Response) on INDPAK, the latter of whom
42 Wallace, Infinite Jest, pp. 321–22.
Eve: Equivocationary Horseshit 13
disputes the hit. This results in “an uneasy moment” since “a dispute such as this
would never occur in the real God’s real world”.43
This separation of one diegetic world from another is framed in the terms of
Alfred Korzybski. When J.J. Penn, playing as INDPAK, decides that the falling snow
should affect blast area calculations in the game, Pemulis snaps at him that “It’s
snowing on the goddamn map, not the territory, you dick!”.44 Indeed, Axford decides,
in the game, to take further advantage of Pemulis’s bad mood by asking: “Except is the
territory the real world, quote unquote, though!” The back-and forth with Pemulis
continues (“The real world’s what the map here stands for!”/“Real-world snow isn’t
a factor if it’s falling on the fucking map!”) and so far this appears as just the well-
known metafictional game-playing for which much American fiction of Wallace’s
predecessors was known.45 However, given Wallace’s situation of Eschaton within
a post-Hegelian philosophy of history, there is more at stake than a puncturing of
the text’s own diegetic layers. This is, instead, the very language-referent relation
to which Meillassoux gestured; a question of the interdependence of two or more
referential systems and our ability to distinguish between these layers, or otherwise.
In one sense, then, Eschaton metonymically represents a world and its subjects
in a “post-critical” (that is: Kantian) frame. For the subjects of the world of Eschaton
cannot find consensus on whether phenomena belong to the intra-diegetic world
of the game or to the “extra-diegetic” (but intra-diegetic for the reader) world of the
tennis academy. Indeed, the snow and the players’ arguments around it constitute
a philosophical discourse about idealism, perception, and the inter-relatedness of
objects and experience; what Wallace calls, “metatheoretical fuss”. The fact that this
is the narratological purpose of the Eschaton game is framed by Wallace through the
text’s narrative bias towards Hal, who starts and ends the entire novel and therefore
has a type of narrative priority.46 For Hal finds “the real-snow/unreal-snow snag
43 Wallace, Infinite Jest, p. 333.
44 Wallace, Infinite Jest, p. 333.
45 Wallace, Infinite Jest, p. 334.
46 Giuliana Adamo, ‘Twentieth-Century Recent Theories on Beginnings and Endings of Novels’, Annali
d’Italianistica, 18 (2000), pp. 49–76.
Eve: Equivocationary Horseshit14
in the Eschaton extremely abstract but somehow way more interesting than the
Eschaton itself” and this is, of course, the point.47 Indeed this narrative slippage from
Hal’s perspective to the general-narrated position becomes clear when the narrator’s
own voice tells the reader, after Kittenplan is hit in the head by a tennis ball, that
“No Eschaton Combatant has ever intentionally struck another Combatant’s physical
person with a 5-megaton thermonuclear weapon”.48 Here there is a direct metaleptic
violation, straight from the narrator, of the two senses of Eschaton. For players’
“physical person[s]” do not actually exist within the in-game frame to which the
“5-megaton thermonuclear weapon” (a tennis ball, in reality) refers.
In one sense, this is just another example of a metafictive practice that Wallace
inherited from his near-term forebears, Pynchon, DeLillo, and others.49 Metaleptic
slippage is one of the alienation techniques that a generation of postmodern writers
used to “disturb, to say the least, the distinction between levels” within a narrative.50
For instance, in Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon, released almost contemporaneously with
Infinite Jest, a sub-narrative of the “ghastly fop” initially appears as a nested story told
by a character in the main level of the text. Mid-way through the tale, however, the
main characters re-appear within the mise en abyme and the narrative continues,
presenting textual slippage.51 Marie-Laure Ryan separates such metalepsis into two
discrete categories: rhetorical (via Genette) and ontological (via Brian McHale), of
which it would seem that Wallace would here fall into the former category and
Pynchon’s example into the latter.52 However, Wallace’s particular violation of the
diegetic levels performs both rhetorical and ontological functions.
47 Wallace, Infinite Jest, p. 335.
48 Wallace, Infinite Jest, p. 336.
49 For more on this, see Graham Foster, ‘A Deep Insider’s Elegiac Tribute: The Work of Don DeLillo in
David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest’, Orbit: A Journal of American Literature, 4.2 (2016) .
50 Gerard Genette, Narrative Discourse Revisited (Ithaca, N.Y: Cornell University Press, 1983), p. 88.
51 Thomas Pynchon, Mason & Dixon (London: Jonathan Cape, 1997), pp. 511–41.
52 Marie-Laure Ryan, Avatars of Story, Electronic Mediations, v. 17 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 2006), pp. 246–48.
https://doi.org/10.16995/orbit.127
https://doi.org/10.16995/orbit.127
Eve: Equivocationary Horseshit 15
This dual function occurs because Eschaton can, in fact, be read as a philosophical
discourse on the ability of thought to think reality discretely from thought. The set
piece fields two opposing camps against one another: the naïve, pre-critical realists
who claim, perhaps in an antagonistic spirit that it “kind of looks like real-world-
type snow from here” while Pemulis, the critical voice, notes that “[i]t’s only real-
world snow if it’s already in the scenario!”53 In this case, the “scenario” is the interlink
between the real world and its representation within game space; it is the cognitive,
shaping bridge of thought that makes possible the manifold of the game. For it is
the inviolable “delimiting boundaries” that function as “Eschaton’s very life-blood”;
the separation of spaces into representation and represented that constitutes the
core of the critical spirit.54 The violation of the delimitation as a type of post-critical,
speculative realism (as in Meillassoux) is viewed by Hal – who nonetheless professes
an interest in the critical “map-not-territory equivocationary horseshit”, as Pemulis
terms it – as a more interesting line of debate. Otis P. Lord, in his role as game master
finally enacts the destruction of Eschaton’s critical possibility.
Indeed, Pemulis is the critical (as in post-Kantian) figure par excellence. He
speaks of the axiomatic and even “preaxiomatic” elements of Eschaton that render
its existence possible. Pemulis even worries that Lord’s interventions into the
conditions of possibility of the game could “very possibly compromise Eschaton’s
map for all time”.55 Pemulis is also perceived to have a “power of correction over
Lord’s calculations and mandate”, presumably to ensure, as it does, that no instances
of naive, pre-critical realism re-seep into the game. After all, as we are told, the degree
of “feel for realism var[ies] from kid to kid”.56
The philosophical debates that puncture the critical spirit of the game are not
meaningless, though. For, Wallace writes, “it is not a matter of the principle of thing,
53 Wallace, Infinite Jest, p. 334.
54 Wallace, Infinite Jest, p. 335.
55 Wallace, Infinite Jest, p. 338.
56 Wallace, Infinite Jest, p. 327.
Eve: Equivocationary Horseshit16
ever, in Eschaton”.57 It is the “animating realism” here that is crucial to mapping
Eschaton’s relationship to a critical spirit.58 The “realism” here “depends on buying the
artifice of 1300 m.2 of composition tennis court representing the whole rectangular
projection of the planet earth”.59 Yet, what is meant by the term “realism” in this
context? It is clearly supposed to refer to the ability of the game’s participants to
envisage themselves within the game world. That is, “realism” in this context – which
is also a literary context – consists of the mind’s ability to structure a space into
its own referential coordinates; realism is a critical, not pre-critical, realism.60 The
philosophical debate in Eschaton is about the ability of a world beyond this mind-
construct to penetrate such a realism; the conditions of imaginative (substituting
for sensory) possibility. While this only goes one level deep – there is no question,
at least not here, of whether the map is also a territory that can be burst – the
possibility of recursion is embedded in Infinite Jest, seen most clearly in none other
than the Eschaton guru, Mike Pemulis’s, answering machine: “This is Mike Pemulis’s
answering machine’s answering machine; Mike Pemulis’s answering machine regrets
being unavailable to take a first-order message for Mike Pemulis”.61 In this way, the
game of Eschaton at once signals its enclosure within a world shaped by Kantian
(transcendental) aesthetics but also rehearses the philosophical debates that have
accompanied such thinking and its potential undoing.
57 Wallace, Infinite Jest, p. 328.
58 Wallace, Infinite Jest, p. 333.
59 Wallace, Infinite Jest, p. 333.
60 Of course, there is a lengthy debate around Wallace and realism, sparked by James Wood’s controversial
labelling of Wallace and others as a ‘hysterical realism’. See James Wood, ‘Human, All Too Inhuman’,
The New Republic, 24 July 2000
[accessed 23 September 2018]; Jeffrey Staiger, ‘James Wood’s Case Against “Hysterical Realism” and
Thomas Pynchon’, Antioch Review, 66.4 (2008), pp. 634–54.
61 Wallace, Infinite Jest, p. 854. For more on recursion in the novel, see Eva Dolo, ‘Too Much Fun –
Endnotes in Infinite Jest’, in Symbolism 15, ed. by Rüdiger Ahrens and Klaus Stierstorfer (Berlin: De
Gruyter, 2015), pp. 75–100 (p. 86) ; D. T. Max, Every
Love Story Is a Ghost Story: A Life of David Foster Wallace, First Edition (New York: Viking Adult, 2012),
p. 183.
https://newrepublic.com/article/61361/human-inhuman
https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110449075-006
Eve: Equivocationary Horseshit 17
Eschaton is, further, a perfect metafictional representation of Infinite Jest as a
novel within a critical reading paradigm. Composed of multiple layers of reality, the
game-within-a-novel complicates our ability to read the “physical instantiations of
metaphysical states” towards which Severs gestures.62 The critical reader might here
retort, for instance, that the “physical” states that Severs mentions are not actually
physical, but literal; they are a representation within an aesthetic form – a well-
known existing argument to which I cannot fully do justice here but that might
bear additional exploration elsewhere. While this is in some ways an already over-
rehearsed point, the critical question is shown by Wallace to be one of infinite regress.
However, is Eschaton post-critical in the sense laid out by Meillassoux? Are
there objects that are really known within the world of the novel? Certainly, there
is a mathematical basis for Wallace’s tennis game (remember: certain mathematical
coordinates are the only things that Meillassoux proposes can escape the correlationist
circle). Otis P. Lord – the character whom Pemulis accuses of potentially destroying
the map-world boundaries – is described as a “calculus phenom”.63 Further, elements
of the game are defined with mathematical precision, such as the distribution of
“megatonnage” using a “continuous non-negative function on the interval [a,b]”.64 It
is also the case that, when Possalthwaite bewails the fact that “nothing’s true”, Pemulis
comforts him with the advice that “you can trust math”.65 These instances within
Eschaton, though, do not describe any reality outside of the map. For it is not just
any mathematics to which Meillassoux turns, but those that can produce meaningful
statements on real-world objects – even those outside of correlationist possibility
– and thereby invalidate the arche-fossil argument. Wallace’s mathematics are the
opposite of the speculative realist mathematical reality descriptions; they describe
the fictional (that is, post-critical, non-realist) world. For Wallace, mathematics here
describe an ideational reality, not a realist environment. Furthermore, even working
62 Severs, p. 16.
63 Wallace, Infinite Jest, p. 322.
64 Wallace, Infinite Jest, n. 122.
65 Wallace, Infinite Jest, n. 324.
Eve: Equivocationary Horseshit18
within the diegetic “reality” of the novel, the types of description are not usually
dimensional coordinates, but rather game rules and variables that are calculated.
Certainly, Wallace’s mathematics and their relationship to post-critical philosophies
deserve further exploration, but they are not, in Eschaton, abundant.
Instead, if we are to find elements of a speculative realist philosophy in
Eschaton, we need a metaphorical literary analogy that could identify such a stance:
that which Andrew Gibson calls a “post-correlationist aesthetics”.66 This aesthetic is
not concerned, as one might suppose, with undoing the correlationist principles of
linguistic and subjective referentiality that have dominated the history of the novel
(it is neither Jane Austen quoting Cowper’s “myself creating what I saw” nor Thomas
Pynchon questioning whether one should “project a world”).67 For Gibson, instead,
this aesthetic would privilege object relations within various types of formalism
(which Gibson takes to mean networks, patterns, arrangements, repetitions, etc.
rather than any reference to Russian Formalism and other extant formalist schools).68
There is also, for Gibson’s reading of Tom McCarthy, a type of “mortalism” in this new
aesthetic that registers a post-anthropocentric world through a focus on death, even
when that world is represented through that most-anthropocentric of media, the
novel.
There is a case to be made that Wallace’s Eschaton game could fit within such a
post-correlationist aesthetic. It is, after all, named for the end of the world; at least as
far as humans are concerned. The possibility of nuclear warfare that the game-world
depicts is the clearest event-point after which the world might become permanently
post-anthropocentric. Certainly, also, with its imagined-community nation state
abbreviations and their interrelations, one could make a claim that Eschaton
embodies the type of formalism to which Gibson gestures.
66 Andrew Gibson, ‘New Inhumanisms: Tom McCarthy and Speculative Realism’, in Tom McCarthy:
Critical Essays, ed. by Dennis Duncan (Canterbury: Gylphi, 2016), pp. 227–46 (p. 234).
67 Gibson, p. 238; Jane Austen, Emma (London: Richard Bentley & Sons, 1882), p. 295; Thomas Pynchon,
The Crying of Lot 49 (London: Vintage, 1996), p. 56.
68 See also Caroline Levine, Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 2015).
Eve: Equivocationary Horseshit 19
Ultimately, though, there is a difficult question at work here when we speak of
the representation of complex philosophical arguments within literary works. With
Kantian correlationism, it seems clear that Eschaton can be made to fit; the relationship
of one level of reality to another via an intermediating scenario is consistent. With
arguments about time, the arche fossil, and post-anthropocentrism, though, it seems
a push to find Wallace’s work moving in this direction, despite its mathematicization.
The conversion to narrative seems too “lossy” to accurately reflect the underlying
philosophical claim. There is also a historicist challenge here, since the speculative
turn had not really reached any prominence at the time of Infinite Jest’s publication.
This is not to say that such ideas were not already circulating in philosophical circles,
it is rather to note that if one sought any historicist basis for finding speculative
realism within Wallace’s work, one is faced with a timeline problem.
As might be expected when grafting this philosophical stance on top of a novel,
then, Wallace’s congruence with speculative realist philosophies is patchy, but
nonetheless present. There is, particularly in the Eschaton game, a sense in which a
transcendence of the self – core to critical philosophies – is key: “You seek”, Wallace
writes, in tennis, “to vanquish and transcend the limited self whose limits make
the game possible”.69 The scenario, for Wallace, is at once one in which games – as
maps or synecdoches of the world – are defined by limits or conditions of possibility
(whether rules or anthropocentric bodily constraints) but in which we seek to violate
those constraints, much as various modes of post-critical thought have striven to
transcend the correlationist circle through speculative materialist approaches. It is
this struggle to transcend the self that leads to a post-critical modality – in the sense
of surpassing Kant’s critical thought – within Wallace’s fiction.
III. From Philosophy to Politics and Ethics
Supposing that we can detect, in Wallace’s metaphors, a hint of a post-critical
(as in speculative realist) sensibility in the philosophical sense, how far does this
correlate with the post-critical mode as it is used in contemporary literary studies?
69 Wallace, Infinite Jest, p. 84.
Eve: Equivocationary Horseshit20
Certainly, the two spaces are connected by their shared underpinning: “conditions
of possibility” and a turn away from examining their buried presence. Yet, Felski’s
broadside is aimed more squarely at political and ethical readings within literary
studies. In particular, as just one example, Felski tells us, “the Marxist critic warms to
the utopian yearnings and subversive stirrings in the depths of bourgeois novels”.70
Such a method, for Felski – but also as Adorno put it – reads “out of works that it has
invested with an air of concretion nothing but its own theses”. 71
In the final part of this article I turn to the problems of paralysis and (non-)
decision-making in Wallace’s non-fiction writing, a core political and ethical concern
of the post-critical movement. How might we read critically the instances of literary-
political post-critique in Wallace? To put this otherwise: what are the conditions of
possibility for political action in Wallace’s texts? (And how do we reconcile Wallace’s
own potential personal-political hideousness, particularly with regard to misogyny
and sexuality, with such a stance?72) Wallace’s novels are saturated with characters
who are unable to act; they think, critically, often, to the point of non-action, such
as in Infinite Jest’s “analysis-paralysis” or in The Pale King’s (2011) “kind of paralysis
that resulted from Sylvanshine’s reflecting on the logistics of getting to the Peoria
047 REC”.73 The latter of these examples even sits within a sentence that runs to
approximately 1,200 words, an aesthetic structure of deferral and near irresolution.
Counter-intuitively in Wallace then, given that critical thought is so often branded
as political and ethical, such critical thought results in an inability to translate that
meta-ethical thought into action.
This stance of inaction can be seen, though, as standing in line with the formal
aesthetic of much of Wallace’s oeuvre, which tends towards an overloading and
70 Felski, p. 27.
71 Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, ed. by Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedemann, trans. by Robert
Hullot-Kentor (London: Continuum, 2004), p. 447.
72 For more on this, see Hayes-Brady; the forthcoming Edward Jackson, David Foster Wallace’s Toxic
Sexuality: Hideousness, Neoliberalism, Spermatics (London: Bloomsbury, 2020); and the chapter in
Amy Hungerford, Making Literature Now, Post 45 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2016) on
Wallace.
73 David Foster Wallace, The Pale King: An Unfinished Novel (London: Penguin, 2012).
Eve: Equivocationary Horseshit 21
accumulation; that is, a temporal structure of deferral, rather than decision-making.
Indeed, confirming the arguments made by others in the aesthetic realm, I argue that
it seems clear that Wallace’s writing project is also one of procrastination against
political and ethical decision, a cumulative temporal unfolding that pushes all final
decision making beyond the formal bounds of Wallace’s novelistic frames. In a sense,
this infinite deferral has been well noted by other critics. Most significantly, Clare
Hayes-Brady has made a protracted study of the fact that Wallace’s novels all feel, in
one way or another, unfinished.74 That is, in their very authorship, Wallace’s texts have
been said to exhibit a “resistance to closure” that, for Hayes-Brady, actually presents
an instance of generative failure.75 This is the “inevitable continuation” of Infinite
Jest, in which the reader must speculate on the action that takes place after the final
pages.76
Yet, in another sense, the aleatory variability to which Currie referred, there is no
action after the final pages of a book. As with the die that has not been rolled, these
are the pages that have not – and will not ever have – been written, barring the
launch of a Wallace fanfiction community. The action within the non-pages beyond
the end of Infinite Jest is purely speculative from the readerly perspective, as is the
hanging closing non-“word” of The Broom of the System.77 At the same time, however,
this non-space of writing is a structured non-space. It is not a space of ontological
uncertainty, because the preceding novel determines particular possibilities of its
outcome. This is a way of saying that Wallace’s novels provide a critical frame of
possibility for imagined future projections beyond their book-space.
The clearest instance, for me, of Wallace’s problematic political and ethical
deferrals, though, can be found in the unlikely space of his non-fiction review of
Bryan A. Garner’s A Dictionary of Modern American Usage.78 Certainly, Wallace deals
74 Hayes-Brady.
75 Hayes-Brady, p. 22.
76 Hayes-Brady, p. 39.
77 David Foster Wallace, The Broom of the System, Contemporary American Fiction (New York, N.Y.:
Penguin, 1987), p. 467.
78 In this article, I refer throughout to the version of this essay that was published as David Foster
Wallace, ‘Authority and American Usage’, in Consider the Lobster (London: Abacus, 2007), pp. 66–127.
Eve: Equivocationary Horseshit22
explicitly with the complex and cyclical politics of language in this essay, examining
variously the prescriptivist and descriptivist perspectives on definition and linguistic
evolution, even if critics have found his summary of this aspect lacking.79 It is not,
though, this matter to which I finally here wish to turn. It is, rather, Wallace’s remarks
on abortion within this piece that are the most politically problematic.
Wallace’s personal politics are tricky to define but recent essays have identified
a political conservatism within his life.80 Further, D.T. Max has claimed that Wallace
voted for Ronald Reagan and supported the independent candidate, Ross Perot,
against Bill Clinton and George Bush Sr. in 1992.81 Yet, the debate rages. Some critics,
such as Jeffrey Severs, have sought to salvage Wallace’s oeuvre from neoliberal
tarnish, while others, such as Edward Jackson, argue that Wallace’s political colours
were more nailed to the mast in his work than was previously thought.82
Wallace’s own political orientation is relevant to a discussion of his treatment of
abortion in “Authority and American Usage” since he explicitly states, in that essay,
“that [he] has encountered only one serious objection to this Pro Life + Pro Choice
position”, which concerns “certain facts about [Wallace], the person who’s developed
and maintained it”.83 Notwithstanding, then, the difficult positionality of Wallace,
the argument presented in the essay is that a form of simultaneous doublethink is
required wherein “the only really coherent” position is to be both “Pro Life” and “Pro
Choice”, at the same time.84 Wallace hinges this thesis on the vitalist tenet that “the
question of defining human life in utero is hopelessly vexed” and that, under this
situation of “irresolvable doubt”, “it is better not to kill”. At the same time, Wallace
resorts to an individualist (or even, one might posit, neoliberal-esque) screed that,
79 See Alexis Burgess, ‘How We Ought to Do Things with Words’, in Gesturing toward Reality. David
Foster Wallace and Philosophy, ed. by Robert K. Bolger and Scott Korb (London: Bloomsbury Academic,
2014), pp. 5–18.
80 James Santel, ‘On David Foster Wallace’s Conservatism’, The Hudson Review, 2014 [accessed 14 August 2015].
81 Max, passim.
82 Severs; Jackson.
83 Wallace, ‘Authority and American Usage’, p. 83.
84 Wallace, ‘Authority and American Usage’, p. 82.
http://hudsonreview.com/2014/02/on-david-foster-wallaces-conservatism/
http://hudsonreview.com/2014/02/on-david-foster-wallaces-conservatism/
Eve: Equivocationary Horseshit 23
under the same situation of doubt, he has “neither the legal nor the moral right to
tell another person what to do”. The paragraph ends with one of several of Wallace’s
indirect stereotyped attacks on feminisms, in which he interpellates a fictional man-
eater who brands him “Just Another Shithead Male”.85
There is, of course, a long school of post-structuralist thought from the 1960s
onwards that argues against reductivist binary thinking on ethical and political
grounds, most notably stemming from Jacques Derrida’s influential work on
presence. The holding of two beliefs simultaneously that are opposed to one another
indeed seems based on such a premise. Yet, is this not, to some extent, the very
“equivocationary horseshit” to which Pemulis referred in the Eschaton game? For, as
Derrida claimed, it was his belief that “deconstruction loses nothing from admitting
that it is impossible”.86
This is not just an excuse to throw stones at deconstruction from an ethical glass
house. Such ideas of non-contradiction run to the core of a post-critical philosophy.
Meillassoux notes, for instance, that contemporary correlationist philosophers must
take care not to justify “the universality of non-contradiction”.87 Yet, this is precisely
what Meillassoux goes on to do, arguing that “a contradictory entity is absolutely
impossible, because if an entity was contradictory, it would be necessary. But a
necessary entity is absolutely impossible; consequently, so too is contradiction”.88
Whether a “belief” can be construed as an “entity” in an analogous sense to
Meillassoux’s is another matter. However, it remains of interest that both Kantian
and speculative realist philosophies adhere to the principle of non-contradiction,
which Wallace’s essay violates.
85 Contrast this with the more neutral invented slander of the Pro Lifers – “Satan’s Minion” – and the
gendered aspect of Wallace’s critique becomes clear.
86 Jacques Derrida, ‘Psyche: Inventions of the Other’, in Reading De Man Reading, ed. by Lindsay Waters
and Wlad Godzich (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), lix, 25–65 (p. 36) [accessed 23 September 2018].
87 Meillassoux, p. 72.
88 Meillassoux, p. 110.
https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5749/j.ctttt3t9
https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5749/j.ctttt3t9
Eve: Equivocationary Horseshit24
It is also clear, though, that Wallace’s argument is an indefinite deferral of ethical
decision making on his part, since the doubt he has is branded as “irresolvable”,
even while he timestamps this doubt to “[a]s of 4 March 1999”. And, indeed, it is
“irresolvable doubt” on which Wallace’s argument for ethical inaction stands. For,
notably, Wallace displaces ethical decision making onto others, “especially if that
person feels s/he is not in doubt”. Doubt, then, but also affect; “feels”. Despite the
rigorously logical nature of Wallace’s argument, non-intervention turns on structures
of feeling and the belief, or otherwise, in a vitalist notion of sanctity of life.
Yet, there are also some extremely questionable comparisons made around this
affective structure of belief in Wallace’s essay. For instance, religious belief is held by
Wallace to be as strong a belief as a woman’s own belief about her bodily autonomy,
the “ideological or religious convictions” that Wallace says “override reason” and lead
to a “wacko dogmatic position”. Knowing the mind of God here is equated with the
embodied (“ideological”) knowledge that women might have of their own bodies.
In actual fact, though, if Wallace followed his own logic more thoroughly, he might
see that his argument for non-intervention on the Pro-Choice side is stronger. For
when the argument is reduced to participation within a liberal spirit of “democratic
tolerance”, the 1973 Roe vs. Wade decision gave the outcome of the US’s constitutional
stance on abortion (which is not to say, of course, that ethics and the law equate to
one another).89 Since Wallace couches his argument in terms of a democratic spirit,
though – and since he also notes that he has not the “legal” authority to override the
Pro Choicer’s stance (but he does not note that the Pro Lifers’ stance has already been
democratically, legally denied) – Wallace’s argument is, ironically, more in favour of
the Pro Life stance, even while it purports a balanced neutrality.
To conclude this article and to move beyond ideas of post-critique in Wallace, in
such an argumentative setup, one that attempts forever to defer and displace ethical
action, we can see how Wallace has provided only a partial set of the conditions
89 For more on the literary contexts of abortion with respect to Roe vs. Wade, see the recent Melanie
McGovern and Martin Paul Eve article, ‘Information Labour and Shame in Farmer and Chevli’s Abortion
Eve’, The Comics Grid: Journal of Comics Scholarship, 9.1 (2019), 6 .
https://doi.org/10.16995/cg.158
Eve: Equivocationary Horseshit 25
of possibility for decision making within his philosophical and novelistic worlds.
Wallace’s argumentative frame is only partially critical, non-exhaustively framing
the off-the-page conclusion that it is supposed to inspire. This is the same problem,
though, that could be seen in the depiction of the Eschaton game in Infinite Jest.
Wallace’s environment never gets beyond the ideational; his critique always remains
partial in its deferred framing. And while, in both these cases, there is no real
outcome of nuclear war, no true eschaton, David Foster Wallace remains a doubtful
moral guide – one I have not here sought to redeem – who structures his advice
through conditions of impossibility, through partial critique.
Acknowledgements
The work on this article was made possible by a Philip Leverhulme Prize from the
Leverhulme Trust, grant number PLP-2019-023.
Competing Interests
The author is an editor and CEO at the Open Library of Humanities. As such, the
peer-review process on this article has been handled independently by the OLH’s
Editorial Officer.
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How to cite this article: Eve, M P 2020 Equivocationary Horseshit: Post-Correlationist
Aesthetics and Post-Critical Ethics in the Works of David Foster Wallace. Open Library of
Humanities, 6(1): 8, pp. 1–29. DOI: https://doi.org/10.16995/olh.538
Published: 24 March 2020
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I. What is Critique?
II. Infinite Jest, Playing Games, and Kantian Aesthetics
III. From Philosophy to Politics and Ethics
Acknowledgements
Competing Interests
References