In the nearly nine years since David Foster Wallace’s death in September 2008, interest in his work has steadily increased. The period has witnessed a series of cultural and critical milestones: the posthumous publication of a Wallace novel, a book of non-fiction, a commencement speech, and an undergraduate philosophy thesis; a best-selling biography, three books of interviews, a number of dramatic performances, and two movies; multiple academic conferences, monographs, edited essay collections and journal articles; the opening of an archive, the establishment of an international society and a journal devoted solely to Wallace’s work. Amid this rush to canonise such a relatively contemporary author—there is no comparable figure of Wallace’s generation or younger whose writing has received such critical and popular attention—it is no surprise that voices have been raised querying the process. As early as 2011, the phrase “Wallace backlash” was being employed in online publications (Giardina 2011, Warnica 2011) in response to articles criticising Wallace’s writing and literary influence that had begun to appear in mainstream outlets including Prospect Magazine and The New York Times (Dyer 2011, Newton 2011). In the wave of responses that followed the release of the biographical film The End of the Tour in 2015, some commentators turned their ire on the “Wallace Industry” for an alleged hijacking of Wallace’s reception and public image (Shechtman 2015, Lorentzen 2015). More recently still, these two themes have sometimes combined in feminist commentary that connects the perceived maleness of Wallace’s writing with the makeup of his readership and his place within a broader patriarchal culture (Fischer 2015, Coyle 2017, Crispin 2017).
Within the academic reception of Wallace’s work, such a critical turn has taken longer to develop, but it has recently become a notable phenomenon. It appears to have been generated by two coalescing trends. As Wallace has entered into the mainstream of American literary culture, his writing has come to the attention of established scholars in the field (and in related fields), not all of whom have been impressed by what they see (Dreyfus and Kelly 2011, McGurl 2014, Hungerford 2016). Meanwhile, a younger generation of critics, whose graduate studies were undertaken in a milieu already steeped in Wallace’s influence, have begun to question elements of his work that have come to seem problematic from a political point of view (Williams 2015, Hayes-Brady 2016, Thompson 2017). While it has been interesting to see arguments about the “Wallace Industry” occasionally migrate from the broader culture into the assessments of academics—most notably in Mark McGurl’s diagnosis of Wallace’s readership in the Infinite Summer project (2014: 41–43) and Amy Hungerford’s complaint that Infinite Jest’s success owes more to clever marketing than to genuine literary merit (2016: 158–59)—it has been unusual to see specific individuals other than Wallace himself be held accountable for his commercial and critical prominence. Most of the recent scholarly critiques of Wallace have been directed squarely at his own writing, rather than at those who have offered prior readings of it. While interpretative disagreements have certainly emerged, it has been rare to see one scholar of Wallace being forcefully called out by another for what s/he has put into print.
Against this background, it was more than a little disconcerting to encounter the charges levelled against me and my work by Edward Jackson and Joel Nicholson-Roberts in “White Guys: Questioning Infinite Jest’s New Sincerity,” published by Orbit in March of this year. Reading the abstract to this article, I learned that I am a proponent of “an elitist understanding of the ‘literary’ text,” that I “misconstrue Jacques Derrida’s notion of iterability and undecidability,” that my work supports “forms of racist and sexist exclusion,” that my reading “works to restore white men to positions of representative cultural authority” (2017: 1). Continuing on through the piece, I found myself taken to task for additional sins: my treatment of affect, my alleged disdain for popular culture, my formalism. The first half of Jackson and Nicholson-Roberts’s article consists of a reading of my 2010 essay “David Foster Wallace and the New Sincerity in American Fiction,” with some glancing references to work I’ve published since that essay appeared. The second half marshals this reading in the service of a critique of the racial politics of Infinite Jest. Throughout, the authors’ target appears to be a dual one: their sights are trained both on Wallace himself and on a critic whose “influential reading” is taken (rightly or wrongly) to be celebrating Wallace’s writing (2017: 1).
When the initial shock of confronting such an aggressive attack on my work began to abate, the question of how best to respond necessarily raised itself. The issue of how Wallace’s fiction represents and handles racial and sexual difference is clearly a serious and important one, and it is a subject that has been taken up sensitively by a number of scholars (Fitzpatrick 2006, McGurl 2014, Morrissey and Thompson 2014, Araya 2015, Cohen 2015, Hayes-Brady 2016, Thompson 2017). In my current book project I devote individual chapters to the complex relationship between New Sincerity aesthetics and questions of gender and race, and had I the space here to respond fully to all aspects of Jackson and Nicholson-Roberts’s article I would explain why their approach to this political subject matter—which involves employing categories drawn from Denise Ferreira da Silva’s Toward a Global Theory of Race—seems to me less persuasive than approaches that emphasise historical and cultural context (e.g. Cohen 2015), style and genre (McGurl 2014), or archival research (Thompson 2017). In working on this response, however, I have found it impossible to approach these broader political questions without first addressing the specific technical and theoretical claims made by the article’s authors about my work on New Sincerity. Since Jackson and Nicholson-Roberts have elected to premise their critique of Infinite Jest’s racial and gender politics over the second half of their article on a reading of my work over the first half, it seems appropriate that my attention be directed to the part of their essay in which the key claims against my writing are made. In what follows, therefore, I have put the direct critique of Wallace to one side, and focused on correcting what I see as the article’s misrepresentations of my argument. In doing so, I have also taken the opportunity to re-articulate the core ideas of my position in positive form. Because the authors overlook so much of what I have published on New Sincerity in the years since 2010, I have found it necessary in this response to cite my own work far more frequently than I would normally consider doing. I hope that, in the circumstances, the reader will forgive such an approach.
My first qualms with Jackson and Nicholson-Roberts’s article emerge as early as its opening sentence. Here and throughout, the authors mobilise the term “affect” in a specific and symptomatic way. The reader is informed that in my early overview of Wallace studies as an emerging field (Kelly 2010b), I argued that an essay by A. O. Scott “helped engender the common understanding of Wallace’s work as an attempt to renew sincere affect in the face of postmodern affectlessness” (2017: 2). However, the notion of “postmodern affectlessness” (or further down the authors’ first paragraph, “affectless self-consciousness”) is nowhere to be found in my writing. This is an exemplary case of something that happens more widely in Jackson and Nicholson-Roberts’s article, where they conflate my account of New Sincerity with claims made by Wallace, particularly in his non-fiction but also in some of the more seemingly didactic passages of Infinite Jest. It may appear as if, in Wallace’s description of irony in “E Unibus Pluram” or his depiction of Hal in Infinite Jest, the primary target of his fiction is “postmodern affectlessness,” but even if one can argue that (and I think it’s a dubious argument), this is not for me the focus of New Sincerity writing. As I have argued in many places, New Sincerity primarily names an aesthetic response by a generation of novelists to the challenge to older forms of expressive subjectivity that coalesced in the period during which they began writing.1 In the original essay the authors discuss (Kelly 2010a), I focused on two contexts for understanding this challenge: the impact of “theory” (specifically Derrida’s theory of “general writing”) and the rise of advertising to central prominence in Western, and particularly American, culture. In work published since then, I have expanded this dual focus to enumerate and explore further contexts for understanding New Sincerity writing, contexts that are variously intellectual, institutional, technological, political and aesthetic.2 Rather than “postmodernism,” which has been the most prominent term used by critics to historicise the fiction of Wallace’s generation of writers, the term that I now think best encompasses all of these contexts is “neoliberalism”: hence the title of my monograph-in-progress, American Fiction at the Millennium: Neoliberalism and the New Sincerity.
What I have never implied in any of this work is that the self-consciousness dramatised and explored so thoroughly in Wallace’s fiction is somehow “affectless”: rather the opposite. By highlighting the intersubjective and social consequences of the historical situation he saw facing his generation, Wallace was led, I argue, to place great emphasis on the trope of sincerity, which Ernst van Alphen and Mieke Bal helpfully describe as “an indispensable affective (hence, social) process between subjects” (2009: 5, emphasis in original). But this turn to sincerity is not a renewal of affect from a non-affective state: my work is not “premised,” as Jackson and Nicholson-Roberts suggest, “on an unexamined binary of sincere affect versus affectless irony” (2017: 8). Rather, subjects in Wallace’s fiction are depicted as what we might call originally affected: they enter the world not as the autonomous and free subjects imagined by many traditions of philosophical and political liberalism, but as always already in a highly affective relation to themselves, to others, and to the conditions of their world. If they go on to perform an affectless pose, this is only as a pre-emptive defence against being further affected. I therefore agree fully with the line the authors quote from David Rando’s 2013 article – that affectless irony can be “described as a product of emotion, specifically the emotions of anxiety or fear about emotional vulnerability itself” (qtd. 2017: 8) – but would point out that it has a precursor in this passage from my 2010 New Sincerity essay:
David Foster Wallace’s fiction, in contrast, asks what happens when the anticipation of others’ reception of one’s outward behaviour begins to take priority for the acting self, so that inner states lose their originating causal status and instead become effects of that anticipatory logic. Former divisions between self and other morph into conflicts within the self, and a recursive and paranoid cycle of endless anticipation begins, putting in doubt the very referents of terms like “self” and “other,” “inner” and “outer.” (2010a: 136)
Perhaps I don’t make fully explicit here that this “recursive and paranoid cycle of endless anticipation” is an affective and emotional experience, as much as it is a structural outcome of life in a neoliberal order. But in a 2012 article I refer to what I call the “anxiety of anticipation” that Wallace appends to the Dostoevskian dialogic model he otherwise relies heavily upon. “Wallace adds an extra element to the mix,” I write, “which rests in the anticipatory anxiety his characters feel when addressing others. Speakers in Wallace’s fiction are often depicted as desperate for genuine reciprocal dialogue, but find that their overwhelming need to predict in advance the other’s response blocks the possibility of finding the language to get outside themselves and truly reach out to the other” (2012a: 270–71).
While I hope these quotations make my point, I would also say that one reason for leaving relatively implicit a discussion of affect in passages such as these is that I have always been wary of reducing Wallace’s literary intervention to his depiction of psychological or bodily states. Individual psychology is evidently a big part of his focus as a writer, but in my view an overemphasis on this aspect of his work risks overlooking other dimensions of his engagement with contemporary life, dimensions through which we might more clearly begin to derive a politics from the New Sincerity aesthetic. I have placed particular emphasis, in this regard, on reading Wallace’s fiction in relation to van Alphen and Bal’s call for a “new theorization” of sincerity, one that can rethink sincerity’s rhetorical basis “outside of its bond with subjectivity” (2009: 5) (or, as we might put it more precisely by importing the language of Lionel Trilling, outside of its bond with a certain conception of subjective authenticity). Van Alphen and Bal stress the formidable influence of a present-day media-sphere in which “performance overrules expression” (2009: 5), and it is precisely this shift from expression to performance that Wallace sees as both a threat to sincerity but also its condition of possibility in a “new” form. As I argue in my 2014 “Dialectic of Sincerity” essay, the epitome of this shift from expression to performance is the AA model in Infinite Jest.
Jackson and Nicholson-Roberts are broadly right to suggest, therefore, that on my reading of Wallace, “Performativity, then, is all there is” (2017: 5). Performativity is indeed the vehicle through which Wallace enacts his vision that—to quote the title of a course taught at Enfield Tennis Academy—“the personal is the political is the psychopathological” (1997: 307). But the claim that the authors twin with this insight about performativity, that in my reading of Wallace “there is no intentional subject either to know or to be known” (2017: 5), is a simplification of my argument about the role of intention in New Sincerity fiction. In order to explain why Wallace and his generational colleagues might be searching for a form of sincerity that does not reinstitute a traditional notion of expressive, authentic subjectivity, I have found it useful to reconstruct an implicit distinction made in Infinite Jest between “intent” and “motive.” These two poles of the broader category of intentional subjectivity capture concisely the problem Wallace saw with the version of the subject prevalent in his own time. On the one hand, there can be no sense of human agency without “intent”: this is the horror that lies behind the description of the eyes of those subjects who have viewed the “Infinite Jest” film as “Empty of intent” (1997: 508). “Intent” here names something like the minimal orientation towards the world presumed by phenomenology; it is a correlative of being “originally affected.” The victims of the film have lost intent and become affectless – in that they no longer respond to stimuli as brutal as having their fingers forcibly removed – only because they have been affected to a truly terrifying extent. On the other hand, Wallace’s narrator employs the term “motive” – in phrases like “sincerity with a motive” (1997: 1048) – to suggest a form of intention that sets out to manipulate the other in the service of self-interest. For Wallace the problem of resisting this form of intention – of identifying intent without motive – was less a conceptual conundrum than a historical one: the central anxiety his fiction performs and interrogates is that all relations towards the other exhibit only motive, that all characters (including the author himself) are no more than neoliberal entrepreneurs of the self. As we shall see more fully in my conclusion to this response, in Wallace and other New Sincerity writers this worry about motive leads them, in their representation of key characters and in the rhetoric of their narrative voice, to perform the negation of conscious intention altogether. This aesthetic negation of intention—which often doubles as a direct appeal to the reader to fill the gap left by this negation—is what makes sincerity impossible while simultaneously marking the possibility of its renewal.
This language of possibility and impossibility moves us inescapably into Derridean territory, which is where the thinking of New Sincerity began for me.3 But before fully embracing this move, it is worth observing that Wallace was hardly alone in his historical moment in taking up the trope of performativity against a perceived cultural overemphasis on the authenticity of the expressive, intentional subject. Around the same time, many radical theorists of gender were doing much the same thing. Judith Butler is perhaps the most celebrated exponent of an argument that places performativity at its centre, identifying in the repetition of acts both the naturalisation of oppressive gender norms and the means of subverting those norms. In Infinite Jest, Wallace’s vision seems less politically optimistic than the early Butler’s, in that the performative horizon for AA subjects is not the overturning of sociopolitical structures that oppress them but simply the possibility of surviving from day to day under those structures. Wallace therefore displays scepticism concerning the socially subversive or emancipatory qualities of performativity, and can be seen in this regard to share more with the humanist leanings of the later Butler. Wallace’s New Sincerity aesthetic can also be compared fruitfully to the work of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, and particularly her highly influential argument for “reparative reading” against “paranoid reading” (the earliest version of this argument was published in 1996, the same year as Infinite Jest). Wallace’s fiction consistently dramatises the negative consequences of paranoid reading—how it leads to the kind of solipsistic loop Sedgwick identifies—alongside the difficulties that attend any move to reparative reading. Indeed, it is particularly the way reparative reading can be mobilized and exploited by white males that is the central focus of Brief Interviews with Hideous Men. Throughout this collection, the hideous men being interviewed have an overtly paranoid relation to their own behaviour, interrogating what they have done in the past and are likely, on that basis, to continue doing in the future. Yet this self-analysis simply allows them to evade responsibility for their actions and turn a false power of decision over to the woman they address (often the silent interviewer Q.), asking for a reparative response.4 The move from paranoid to reparative reading is made particularly problematic in the final interview, “B.I. #20,” which concerns a female hitchhiker who tells the male interviewee a story of how she was raped and almost killed by a “mulatto.” Gender and race are clearly a big part of the subject matter for this story, and the interviewee’s attempts to mobilise the hitchhiker’s reparative reading for his own reparation—“I knew she could. I knew I loved. End of story” (1999: 318)—are evidently meant to be read in a paranoid or suspicious manner by the reader. In her essay, Sedgwick argued that the traditional epistemological question, “Is a particular piece of knowledge true, and how can we know?” should be displaced by the questions, “‘What does knowledge do—the pursuit of it, the having and exposing of it, the receiving-again of knowledge of what one already knows? How, in short, is knowledge performative, and how best does one move among its causes and effects?’” (2003: 124). This displacement is something that likewise occurs in Wallace’s writing: it is where much of the ethical energy of his fiction resides.
In my original essay on New Sincerity, I made many of the above points about Wallace’s relationship to the “hermeneutics of suspicion” (or “paranoid reading”) in connection with Derrida rather than Sedgwick (2010a: 138). This was largely because I preferred (rightly or wrongly) to stress the more theoretical side of Wallace’s innovations rather than the “touching feeling” side.5 My sense was that Wallace critics had mostly emphasised the latter, partly in recognition of the fact that Wallace’s readers so clearly responded to his fiction in surprisingly personal ways despite its intellectual complications. These critics had therefore failed to focus clearly enough, to my mind, on explaining what was new in Wallace’s treatment of sincerity, philosophically but also aesthetically. My primary interest when it comes to Wallace has always been in how he creates his effects (and affects) through singular sentences and complex story structures, and what larger lessons we might draw from his aesthetic experiments for our understanding of literary form in the twenty-first century. Each in their own way, his peers and inheritors—including figures like Dave Eggers, Jennifer Egan, Tom McCarthy, George Saunders, Colson Whitehead and Zadie Smith—have responded both to the affective quality of his fiction and to its technical brilliance, and I don’t think we can fully understand their work without reckoning with Wallace’s impact on contemporary writing.
If we now return to Jackson and Nicholson-Roberts’s mischaracterisation of my reading of Wallace “as regenerating sincere affect in the face of unemotional affectlessness,” we can see how this mischaracterisation leads directly onto their next charge against my work, which is “the cultural elitism that motivates the New Sincerity” (2017: 8). This cultural elitism has two related strands in their account: on the one hand my assumed disdain for “popular culture”—“the irony Kelly misreads as affectless is also an irony that he associates with popular culture” (2017: 8)—and on the other hand my supposed overemphasis on the literary text as the key site for encountering the New Sincerity aesthetic.
In addressing the first of these strands, I deliberately place “popular culture” in quotation marks because I’m not at all certain what Jackson and Nicholson-Roberts mean to signify in their use of the phrase. Early in their article, they contrast my “cultural elitism” with “a popular postmodern irony” that appears to be exemplified by “advertising in particular” (2017: 3). The phrase “popular culture” or “pop culture” comes up a few times over the next few pages, but each time it lacks positive content and seems only to name something I’m taken to be averse to. Later in the essay there is some implication that Wallace’s non-fiction—as opposed to his fiction—could count as “popular culture,” but none of this is very clear. A good example of how the authors use their own lack of clarity to tar me as a cultural elitist comes at the top of page 6, where I am taken to be promoting a distinction between “on the one hand, a pop culture irony that alienates the subject and, on the other hand, a literary irony that takes the death of the subject as a given.” They go on immediately to reiterate that “Kelly associates pop culture irony particularly with advertising,” which makes it seem as if, since I am critical of advertising, I am critical of all pop culture. But given that I never use the term “pop culture” or “popular culture” in any of the work they cite, the assumption that my critique of advertising is a critique of popular culture more generally is simply the authors’ invention. If it’s the case that Jackson and Nicholson-Roberts want to defend advertising as an exemplar of popular culture, adopting a once trendy but now dubious cultural studies approach that stresses the benign face of capitalism, then I would be comfortable lining myself up with the plethora of Marxists, from Horkheimer and Adorno onwards, whose critique of advertising as an enabler of the consumer society probably needs no glossing.
I would also point out that the phrase “New Sincerity” is itself drawn from what one could legitimately describe as “popular culture.” The authors acknowledge this in their first footnote: “Kelly’s use of the term ‘New Sincerity’ as the primary descriptor of his reading of Wallace (and various other writers he considers to be writing in Wallace’s wake) nonetheless situates it within this zeitgeist” (2017: 2n1). I would put this slightly differently: my impulse to use the term—capital letters and all—came from my encounter with it in various online manifestations during the mid-to-late 2000s. My sense then, as now, is that its application to Wallace’s fiction could help to explain both why so many critics and commentators seem compelled to describe Wallace as sincere (or as caught up with the problem of sincerity), and how his fiction might relate to a broader interest in sincerity within contemporary culture. Rather than dismiss popular culture as a sea of misinformation, in other words, my instinct is to assume that popular “memes” arise for good reason, and that if enough people are talking about a phenomenon then that phenomenon must be at least partially valid as a description of something real.6 So while I am glad that the authors think my work represents “the most thorough attempt to theorize how literary sincerity might operate in the aftermath of the purported death of the subject” (2017: 2n1), my initial aims were in fact more modest. I simply wanted to take a term that seemed to be prevalent in contemporary culture, and give it some historical weight and conceptual rigour. The positive response to my work in “popular” as well as academic venues has therefore been a gratifying development for me, which would hardly be the case if I were a card-carrying cultural elitist.
But the charge of cultural elitism brought by Jackson and Nicholson-Roberts contains a more substantial element than is present in their vague references to popular culture. This element is tied to my supposed misunderstanding and misapplication of the work of Jacques Derrida. The authors are in some ways quite careful in their reconstruction of my reading of Derrida. However, having outlined that reading in a mostly accurate way, they then attempt to correct my understanding of two key Derridean concepts, arguing that I “corral” the implications of iterability and undecidability “within an elitist understanding of the ‘literary’ text” (2017: 1). For them, this serves illegitimately “to tame the implications that Derrida’s work has for the formal boundaries [Kelly] seeks to uphold” (2017: 9).
The claim the authors’ argument rests upon here, that the distinction I make between literary and non-literary contexts is inconsistent with Derrida’s notion of general writing, is simply wrong. There is nothing in the theory of general writing that prevents making such a distinction, as long as we do not cast it as a hard-and-fast one, ignorant of institutional histories, social norms, and political projects. As is well known, Derrida himself set out to write a doctoral thesis on “The Ideality of the Literary Object,” and devoted a large number of essays to exploring the peculiar qualities of literary texts. A selection of these essays are collected in Acts of Literature, and in his introduction to that volume Derek Attridge quotes Derrida remarking in an interview that “my ‘first’ inclination wasn’t really towards philosophy, but rather towards literature, no, towards something that literature accommodates more easily than philosophy” (qtd. 1992a: 2). This “something” is best understood as a particular relationship between the singular and the general which is also the core of iterability, and which the texts we call “literary” enact in a particularly vivid way. So while, as Derrida writes in “The Double Session” (a text DT Max tells us Wallace “reveled in” while at Amherst [2012: 38]), “there is no essence of literature, no truth of literature, no literary-being or being-literary of literature” (1992a: 177), there is nonetheless a distinctive kind of reading that literature asks for. In Attridge’s helpful gloss, literature names a “linguistic practice in which we habitually celebrate the unique, instead of finding it a hindrance, in which we usually have little objection to the impossibility of abstracting a detachable meaning or moral” (1992a: 14). Moreover, this involves a particularly self-conscious performance of iterability by the literary text, which should be understood not as a static object but as an event: “it does not possess a core of uniqueness that survives mutability, but rather a repeatable singularity that depends on an openness to new contexts and therefore on its difference each time it is repeated” (1992a: 16).7