The Poststructuralist Broom of Wallace’s System: A Conversation Between Wittgenstein and Derrida

David Foster Wallace famously characterized his first novel, The Broom of the System, as ‘a conversation between [Ludwig] Wittgenstein and [Jacques] Derrida.’ This comes as little surprise, given the ubiquity of the question of language in the works of these two thinkers, and given the novel’s constant reflections on the relation between language and world. Broom’s protagonist, Lenore Beadsmen – in search of her eponymous great-grandmother – is preoccupied with the dread that ‘all that really exists of [her] life is what can be said about it,’ that is to say, that reality is entirely coextensive with language. If, as Wittgenstein says, ‘The limits of my language mean the limits of my world,’ and, ‘I am my world,’ then it stands to reason that ‘the limits of my language mean the limits of myself.’ This is the fearful hypothesis that drives The Broom of the System. Much of the scholarship surrounding the novel has interpreted Wallace’s remark as an assertion that the novel constitutes a debate between Wittgenstein and Derrida, and has, more often than not, assumed that Wittgenstein ‘wins’ that debate for Wallace. In his groundbreaking work, Understanding David Foster Wallace, Marshall Boswell writes that for Wallace, ‘the job of the post-Barth [i.e., John Barth, with whom Boswell lumps Derrida] novelist is to ‘… overturn the related insistence that texts are “closed systems” that produce their own meaning through endless self-reference.’ The ‘self-conscious meta-fictional novel,’ he writes, ‘in David Foster Wallace’s hands, becomes an open system of communication—an elaborate and entertaining game—between author and reader,’ and Boswell credits Wittgenstein as the inspiration for this thought of the open system. Alternatively, some scholars have left Derrida out of the discussion entirely. Despite the oft-cited quotation from Lipsky’s book, it remains the case, as Bradley Fest has noted, that Derrida’s ‘influence on Wallace’s work still remains largely unexplored.’ There are a number of likely explanations for this privileging of Wittgenstein. The most obvious is the fact that Wallace himself addresses Wittgenstein far more frequently and directly than he does Derrida. Wallace famously wrote a review of David Markson’s Wittgenstein’s Mistress, which includes a fair amount of broader commentary on Wittgenstein’s project. While Derrida’s name does not appear in The Broom of the System, Wittgenstein’s name is mentioned multiple times, as the ‘mad crackpot genius’ who had been the inspiration for Gramma Lenore’s philosophy, which is the source of Lenore’s aforementioned dread. Wittgenstein was the author of the Philosophical Investigations and of an apparently esoteric green book without which Gramma Lenore never left her home at the Shaker Heights nursing facility. Indeed Wittgenstein, represented by the ever-elusive Gramma Lenore herself, wafts like a specter through the entirety of the novel. However, any simple valorization of Wittgenstein in the thinking of Wallace risks overlooking what Wallace characterizes as the ‘horror’ that Wittgenstein leaves us with. In the famous interview with Larry McCaffery, Wallace cites Wittgenstein as ‘the real architect of the postmodern trap,’ the worry, indoctrinated into Lenore by her great-grandmother, that ‘a life is words and nothing else,’ that there is no ‘extra-linguistic anything.’ The dread that burdens Lenore also burdens Wallace, and it is this dread for which Wallace seeks a solution in his writing, both in The Broom of the System and beyond. As Wallace says to McCaffery, ‘If the world is itself a linguistic construct, there’s nothing “outside” language for language to have to picture or refer to. This … leads right to the postmodern, poststructural dilemma of having to deny yourself an existence independent of language.’ If the novel is indeed a ‘conversation between Wittgenstein and Derrida,’ and if it is Wittgenstein, and not Derrida, whose thinking points toward the ‘postmodern trap,’ then perhaps we should consider that Derrida may have been a source of hope for Wallace. In this essay, I therefore invite Derrida into this conversation, arguing that, contrary to popular intuitions, Derrida might just be the thinker who points the way in Wallace’s system beyond the ‘postmodern trap.’ As noted, Wallace grapples with the ‘horror’ of language with no ‘outside’. We can think of this ‘anxiety of the outside’ in two ways: (1) that my language belongs only to me, and so if there is no outside of language, there is no outside of myself – the problem of solipsism from the early Wittgenstein, about which Wallace worried extensively; (2) that the world itself is nothing more than language, and hence there is no outside of language that would constitute myself, nothing more to me than the language that is used to describe me – I am not truly a self at all. As Lenore’s significant other – Rick Vigorous – says of Lenore, ‘she simply felt … as if she had no real existence…’ It is Derrida – the silent interlocutor in the book – and not Wittgenstein, who disrupts this double bind, with his famous ‘non-concept’ known as différance, the differential play of force at the heart of all language (and life). Différance points toward an essential exteriority at the heart of the self, thereby avoiding the solipsistic danger of the self-enclosed world. Moreover, différance also points toward an essential outside to language, according to Derrida, and in so doing, it points toward dimensions of human life – intensity, desire, affect, force – that elude the grasp of language, precisely because they too are part of the differential play. Before addressing these characteristics of différance, I shall first discuss Wallace’s anxiety of the outside through the ‘double bind’ he sees in Wittgenstein

Provocations in Consideration of Thomas Nail\u27s The Figure of the Migrant

I am delighted to be part of the conversation surrounding this important work. Thomas Nail’s The Figure of the Migrant is one of those rare works that is at once timely and timeless. It is timely in the sense that the figure of the migrant has become a ubiquitous and undeniable reality of our time. As I write this at the end of spring 2016, the number of Syrian citizens displaced by civil war since 2011 has climbed to roughly 13.5 million; the United States is in the middle of its most racially charged presidential election of my lifetime (with one of the top party candidates running on a popular platform of draconian deportation of undocumented laborers and the severe restriction of immigration); the populations of Central Pacific island nations are being displaced in record numbers due to the effects of global climate change; and within the past week, several small boats carrying refugees from Libya have capsized off the coast of Italy, resulting in over one thousand deaths.These are but a few examples. As Nail notes, “At the turn of the century, there were more regional and international migrants than ever before in recorded history. Today, there are over 1 billion migrants. (excerpt

All the World Is Shining, and Love Is Smiling through All Things: The Collapse of the Two Ways in \u27The Tree of Life\u27

Chapter Summary: From the blackness emerges a subtly scripted epigraph from the biblical book of Job, silently posing a question to the viewer on behalf of the almighty: Where were you when I laid the earth\u27s foundation...while the morning stars sang together and all the sons of God shouted for joy? Following thirty-five chapters of Job\u27s story, filled with relentless criticism on the part of Job\u27s friends in response to Job\u27s ongoing poetically formulated and impassioned lamentations, and the demands he places before God - demands for justice and an explanation for his suffering - at last the voice of the almighty speaks from within the raging storm, responding not with an answer but with a questions: where were you? - the very question Terrence Malick poses to us at the beginning of The Tree of Life. Thus, from the opening moments of the film Malick is signifying to the viewer that The Tree of Life is to be a meditation on the meaning of suffering. [excerpt] Book Summary: Amid all the controversy, criticism, and celebration of Terence Malick\u27s award-winning film The Tree of Life, what do we really understand of it? The Way of Nature and the Way of Grace thoughtfully engages the philosophical riches of life, culture, time, and the sacred through Malick\u27s film. This groundbreaking collection traverses the relationships among ontological, moral, scientific, and spiritual perspectives on the world, demonstrating how phenomenological work can be done in and through the cinematic medium, and attempting to bridge the gap between narrow theoretical works on film and their broader cultural and philosophical significance. Exploring Malick\u27s film as a philosophical engagement, this readable and insightful collection presents an excellent resource for film specialists, philosophers of film, and film lovers alike. [From the Publisher

Derrida\u27s Voice and Phenomenon: An Edinburgh Philosophical Guide

This work provides a detailed analysis of Derrida\u27s 1967 book, Voice and Phenomenon, contextualizing it in the broader history of French receptions of the phenomenological tradition.https://cupola.gettysburg.edu/books/1076/thumbnail.jp

Something to do With a Girl Named Marla: Eros and Gender in David Fincher’s Fight Club

David Fincher’s 1999 film, Fight Club, has been characterized in many ways: as a romantic comedy, an exploration of white, middle-class male angst, an existentialist search for meaning amidst the moral ruins of late capitalism, an anarchist manifesto, and so on. But common to nearly every reading of the film, critical and laudatory alike, is the assumption that Fight Club is indisputably a celebration of misogynistic, masculinist virility and violence. On its face, this assumption appears so overwhelmingly obvious as to render superfluous any argumentation in support thereof, and absurd any opposing argumentation. Consider the ubiquitous homoerotic adulation of the male body; or Tyler Durden’s (Brad Pitt’s) lamentation at being part of a “generation of men raised by women;” or the titular subject of the film – a self-help group for men only, founded on the principle of life-affirmation through physical pulverization; or the fact that, besides the momentary appearance of a terminally ill cancer patient, there is but one named female character in the entire film; or the obsessive fetishizing of male genitalia, coupled with anxieties over phallic substitutes and the concomitant fears of castration. From the opening scene – the narrator kneeling with a gun barrel forced into his mouth, to the film’s crescendo – the destruction of a dozen major credit card buildings, Fight Club relentlessly assaults the viewer with visceral images of shirtless, full-throated hyper-masculinity and violence, and with the quasi-philosophical misogynistic sermons of Tyler Durden. But in spite of all this, Fight Club’s thoughts on gender and violence are far more complex than they first appear. We should keep in mind that the film’s embodiment of hyper-masculine aggression, Tyler, is a projection of a suffering and fragmented subjectivity amidst a psychotic breakdown. His status as the film’s antagonist severely complicates any putative simple heroizing of Tyler’s character or philosophy. We would also do well to note that despite her singularity as the only named female character in the film, Marla Singer is arguably the most interesting and admirable character in the film, with an evolving character arc that does not easily conform to traditional gender stereotypes or to standard Hollywood conceptions of feminine love or beauty. She is both strong and nurturing, brazen and uncouth but beautiful, and by turns confident and independent, vulnerable and insecure. She is the catalyst for the narrator’s path to selfhood, without recapitulating the Western myth of the “eternal-feminine” – the pure, selfless, virginal ideal who, from her unattainable heights, motivates the “hero’s quest”. Marla does not “complete” him, nor he her. She conforms to no ideal, and she is neither a prize nor a simple plot device. Whatever else one might say about Fight Club, its attitudes toward gender and violence are not cut and dry

Becoming-Other: Foucault, Deleuze, and the Political Nature of Thought

In this paper I employ the notion of the ‘thought of the outside’ as developed by Michel Foucault, in order to defend the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze against the criticisms of ‘elitism,’ ‘aristocratism,’ and ‘political indifference’—famously leveled by Alain Badiou and Peter Hallward. First, I argue that their charges of a theophanic conception of Being, which ground the broader political claims, derive from a misunderstanding of Deleuze’s notion of univocity, as well as a failure to recognize the significance of the concept of multiplicity in Deleuze’s thinking. From here, I go on to discuss Deleuze’s articulation of the ‘dogmatic image of thought,’ which, insofar as it takes ‘recognition’ as its model, can only ever think what is already solidified and sedimented as true, in light of existing structures and institutions of power. Then, I examine Deleuze’s reading of Foucault and the notion of the ‘thought of the outside,’ showing the ‘outside’ as the unthought that lies at the heart of thinking itself, as both its condition and its impossibility. Insofar as it is essential to thinking itself, finally, I argue that the passage of thought to the outside is not an absolute flight out of this world, as Hallward claims, but rather, a return of the different that constitutes the Self for Deleuze. Thinking is an ongoing movement of deterritorialization and reterritorialization, or as Foucault says, death and life. Thinking, as Deleuze understands it, is essentially creative; it reconfigures the virtual, thereby literally changing the world. Thinking is therefore, according to Deleuze, thoroughly political

Solar collector performance evaluated outdoors at NASA-Lewis Research Center

An outdoor facility constructed to evaluate solar collector performance for conditions that would be encountered by collectors if they were incorporated in a solar heating/cooling system is described. Preliminary performance data is presented

Is War Necessary for Economic Growth? Military Procurement and Technology Development

New radical general purpose technologies have been the drivers of economic growth in the United States economy in recent economic history. In this paper I review the role of military and defense related research, technology development, and procurement in the development of the aircraft, nuclear power, computer, semiconductor, internet and the space communication and earth observing industries. The development of each of these industries would have been substantially delayed in the absence of support for research, technology development and procurement by the military and defense related agencies. Rates of productivity and output growth would have been substantially slower. By the early 1990's it was becoming clear that changes in the United States economy, of the defense industrial base, and in United States military and defense strategy meant that the defense and defense related industries would no longer play a prominent role in the development of new general purpose technologies. There has been a relative decline in investment in basic research and in early stage technology development in the private sector. The United States has yet to develop a coherent strategy for the public support of commercial technology development. My own sense is that when the history of United States technology development for the next half century is eventually written it will be characterized by incremental rather than revolutionary changes in both military and commercial technology. It will also be written in the context of slower productivity and output growth than the rates that prevailed in the United States during the first several post war decades or since the beginning of the information technology bubble that began in the early 1990s.International Development, Research and Development/Tech Change/Emerging Technologies,

Why Foreign Economic Assistance?

International Development,

Military R&D: the productivity puzzle

A number of very careful econometric studies have been interpreted as showing that publicly funded research and development conducted by private firms has had little discernable impact on firm level profits or productivity. In contrast historical studies have shown that military and defense-related research development and procurement conducted by private firms has been an important source of technology development across a broad spectrum of U.S. manufacturing industries. Careful narrative analysis represents a more effective way of capturing the complementarities between military and defense-related research, development, and procurement on commercial technology development than econometric analysis.Political Economy, Productivity Analysis, Research and Development/Tech Change/Emerging Technologies,