Addiction and the Societies of Control: David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest

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TL;DR

A 2002 Lancaster conference paper reading Infinite Jest through Gilles Deleuze's "Postscript on the Societies of Control." Harris's frame: modern culture is passing from Foucault's disciplinary societies (discrete enclosures, "molds") to societies of control ("modulation" — a "self-deforming cast", permeable boundaries, "limitless postponements"), and, following Eve Sedgwick's "Epidemics of the Will," the late-20th-century explosion of addiction-attribution (until it is "will itself that has come to appear addictive") is exactly this passage from discipline to control. The paper's thesis is a threefold homology: addiction (chemical), sport (E.T.A. tennis), and telematics (the Entertainment / InterLace media-world) are not three analogies but three expressions of one logic — modulation/control. Along the way Harris reads addiction as an excess of will and rigid self-regulation (not its loss); AA through Derrida's pharmakon (the "higher power" as a "heuristic fiction," recovery as "interminable" limitless postponement rather than a cure — "the exchange of one will obliterating habit for another," yet existentially distinct from the addict's spurious solution); sport through Derrida's "anti-drug" and Schtitt's bounded-infinite court (the true opponent is the self; "The Show" is a cage); and the Entertainment as the limit-case where displaced desire is finally closed and the social order collapses (Virilio's "vegetative state"; Notkin's joke-citation of a "posthumous" Deleuze). The conclusion: the novel's "anti-confluential" form is itself modulation, and its faint hope ("a cage or really a door") lies in a Heideggerian dwelling "between two limits" — AA's temporal fragmentation and Schitt's [sic — the paper's spelling throughout] world-within-a-world — "the caged bird must learn to sing." A theory-forward companion to Daverman: same primary-text exhibits, an entirely different (Deleuze/Sedgwick/Derrida) apparatus.

Key claims

Discipline -> control; addiction is the symptom of the transition. Deleuze's molds/modulation distinction: "Enclosures are molds, distinct castings, but controls are a modulation, like a self-deforming cast that will continuously change from one moment to the other". Via Sedgwick, the modern evacuation of the addiction concept — until every behavior (Wallace's endnote-70 list, IJ:996: "yoga, reading, politics, gum-chewing... religious zeal") is potentially addictive — corresponds to that passage, so that addiction resides "only in the structure of a will that is always somehow insufficiently free".
Addiction is an excess of will, not its loss. "Wallace stresses the fact that addiction is not so much a loss of will or violation but an excess of will, an excessive desire for control that paradoxically leads one into ever increasing powerlessness"; the novel's addicts run "baroque self regulations" ("not before 0900h... only in the company of Swedes," IJ:346) and "operate on an extremely rigid physical schedule of need and satisfaction" (IJ:57). The addict is not mindless but over-mindful — "addicted to thinking" (IJ:203), "Analysis-Paralysis."
AA as pharmakon — antidote and poison. AA "productively adopts and exploits the inherent instability of the concept of 'addiction'": the disease-of-the-will ("your personal will is the web your Disease sits in and spins", IJ:357), powerlessness as first step, the "higher power" substituted for the substance, and "temporal fragmentation" ("one day at a time"). Yet "there's an inescapable sense that AA... consists in 'the exchange of one will obliterating habit for another'" — a "new but equally exacting master". Via Derrida's "Rhetoric of Drugs," the higher power is a Sedgwickian "heuristic fiction, ever 'receding but structurally necessary'"; the Betty Crocker cake-mix (IJ:469) makes it a belief-free procedure. The crucial difference: the addict seeks a solution (intoxication) for the problematic moment; AA offers "not so much a solution but the interminable extension of the problem... the 'limitless postponement' of the solution" — "freedom lies in the moment of choice rather than in any choice itself." Gately's medication-refusing hospital endurance ("build a wall around each second", IJ:860-61) is the heroic instance.
Sport as the same control-logic (the coincidentia oppositorum with drugs). Ennet House sits at the foot of the hill crowned by E.T.A.; the dichotomy is unstable (widespread ETA drug use, IJ:53). Sport, per Derrida, is "the anti-drug itself... the pharmakon of the pharmakon," yet "the zone closest... to the evil it excludes." Harris reads tennis's "supplementarity" (hypertrophied arms; prosthetic self-extension), its "repetition... over and over until...they sink and soak into the hardware" (IJ:110), the "disappear into the loop" video-drilling (IJ:111), and "The Show" as poison-and-cure (Lyle to LaMont Chu: "Do not believe the photographs. Fame is not an exit from any cage" — page-uncited in the raw; the nearby "keep winning" line is IJ:677). The escape is Schitt's [sic] world-within-a-world: the true opponent is "the self out there, on court" (IJ:84), and "Be here in total. Is nothing else" (IJ:460-61).
The Entertainment as the terminal case of modulation. Deleuze's control-machines are "computers"; Wallace's InterLace/T.P. mediascape realizes Derrida's "technological supplementarity," a "general crisis of the interior." Hal's cannabis-withdrawal insight — everyone existing "basically as Fourier Transforms of postures and little routines... call-uppable for rebroadcast" (IJ:966) — merges tennis's "machine language" with the mass media. The Entertainment short-circuits displaced desire: "Here satisfaction is truly met, here the gap is closed and as a result the entire social system is fundamentally threatened" — Virilio's "'vegetative state' of home inertia", the auto-stimulating rat dying at the lever (IJ:471; the raw space-pads "p - terminal"). Notkin's droll citation of "M. Gilles Deleuze's posthumous Incest and the Life of Death in Capitalist Entertainment" (IJ:792) reads the lethal cartridge as a "classic illustration of the antinomically schizoid function of post-industrial capitalist mechanism".
The novel's form IS modulation. In endnote 7 Harris argues the "threefold homology" is not analogy but "reciprocal presupposition" (a Deleuzian abstract machine / "diagram"), and that "This process of co-articulation presents a possible explanation for Infinite Jest's self professed 'anti-confluential' structure" — the non-linear pro/analepses, the "plateaus", the "indulgent" style — "an expression of the manner in which modulation operates". "Indeed it is possible that his true originality resides in this formal fidelity to the anfractous and ultimately toxic forms that modern subjectivity assumes."
The exit: dwelling in the between. Modulation "operates via the middle." The Entertainment-victim operative is "trapped in some sort of middle... Pulled apart in different directions" (IJ:647). Against modulation's false paradoxes, Harris (via Heidegger in Zimmerman) posits a second "between" — "to experience the fact that we are placed between two limits" — enacted by AA's temporal fragmentation and Schitt's world-within-a-world. Escape is "not an escape from the cage, but a conversion of the cage into a door-the caged bird must learn to sing" (hyphen as written).

Theories & evidence

THEORY: Addiction in Infinite Jest is an EXCESS of will and rigid self-regulation (control), not a loss of will — the addict's "baroque self regulations" and "Analysis-Paralysis" are the apotheosis of routine, not its abandonment

Crux: thematic (addiction reading); no plot-crux home (bears on aa-seriousness / reading-as-rehab only obliquely)
Stance: advances
Evidence:
- [text] "addiction is not so much a loss of will or violation but an excess of will, an excessive desire for control that paradoxically leads one into ever increasing powerlessness".
- [text] (IJ 346, via Harris) the "baroque self regulations": "e.g. not before 0900h, not on a worknight, only when the moon is waxing, only in the company of Swedes"; (IJ 57) addicts "operate on an extremely rigid physical schedule of need and satisfaction."
- [text] (IJ 203, via Harris) "Substance-addicted people are also addicted to thinking... they have a compulsive and unhealthy relationship with their own thinking" — "Analysis-Paralysis." (raw cites this "JJ:203," a typo.)
- [secondary] Sedgwick, "Epidemics of the Will": once "will itself... has come to appear addictive," the addictive activities are "precisely those areas that capitalism presents as the triumph of the self" ("workholism, shopholism" — the raw's spellings).
Notes: An anthology-level thematic reading (addiction-as-control), not a plot crux. Genuinely additive as a frame, but its IJ exhibits (346/57/203) are the standard addiction-passage set. No new slug warranted — record as a thematic contribution and a distinctive gloss on the addiction lane.

THEORY: AA is a pharmakon — antidote and poison at once ("the exchange of one will obliterating habit for another"), and its efficacy lies not in cure but in the "limitless postponement" of the solution: freedom in the moment of choice

Crux: ij-aa-love-letter (qualified/ambivalent support); aa-seriousness (support)
Stance: advances (with a raised counter — is AA a new cage?)
Evidence:
- [text] (IJ 357, via Harris) "your personal will is the web your Disease sits in and spins... Its now shot through with the spidered fibrosis of your Disease."
- [text] (IJ 707, via Harris) the broken "don't care about stuff like substitution and banality, they'll give their left nut to trade their original dependence in for robotic platitudes and pep-rally cheer."
- [text] (IJ 469, via Harris) Betty Crocker cake-mix — "It didn't matter one fuckola whether Gately like believed a cake would result... if you just followed the motherfucking directions... a cake would result" (belief-free procedure; SHARED anchor with Daverman & the addiction lane — CURLY-BYTE span, see ledger).
- [secondary] Derrida, "The Rhetoric of Drugs": the pharmakon "always... apprehended as both antidote and poison"; Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow "parallelism between analgesia and addiction." Sedgwick: the higher power as a "heuristic fiction, ever 'receding but structurally necessary'".
- [inference] The existential difference: the addict seeks a "spurious solution"; AA is "the interminable extension of the problem... the 'limitless postponement' of the solution" — Gately's medication-refusing "build a wall around each second" (IJ:860-61) as the model.
Notes: A qualified, theory-mediated AA reading. Where Daverman reads AA as the novel's winning narrative form and the archive's ij-aa-love-letter treats AA warmly, Harris keeps the ambivalence sharp (AA as a "new cage" / "new but equally exacting master") while still conceding its efficacy — a useful counter-weight sighting for ij-aa-love-letter and aa-seriousness. The "limitless postponement" = Deleuze's control-temporality is the distinctive contribution; the exhibits (357/469/707/860) are shared with Daverman/Wayne.

Crux: entertainment-lethality (support — a control-society mechanism); book-as-entertainment (support)
Stance: advances
Evidence:
- [text] "the entertainment short circuits the logic of displaced desire or endless postponement... Here satisfaction is truly met, here the gap is closed and as a result the entire social system is fundamentally threatened".
- [text] (IJ 471, via Harris) the auto-stimulating rat: "the rat would press the lever to stimulate his p - terminal over and over... stopping only when the rat finally died" (the raw space-pads "p - terminal" and runs its own ellipses); the Entertainment as "neurological distillate of orgasm... religious enlightenment [and] ecstatic drugs" (473 — print reads "neural distillate," see cite-as-written).
- [text] (IJ 647, via Harris) the exposed operative "if stuck in some way... fixed.Held.Trapped. As in trapped in some sort of middle. Between two things. Pulled apart in different directions." (Harris's splice, cite-as-written; print reads "More as if… stuck in some way." and opens Steeply's word-list with "Stuck.")
- [secondary] Virilio, Polar Inertia: "a pathological fixedness" that "leads to the 'vegetative state' of home inertia". Notkin's citation of a "posthumous" Deleuze title (IJ:792) — the lethal cartridge as "the antinomically schizoid function of post-industrial capitalist mechanism".
- [inference] The macguffin: the A.F.R. promulgate the claim that the Entertainment "extends the nation's 'self destructing logic to its final conclusion'" — terror as the "ultimate embodiment of choice".
Notes: A distinctive control-society mechanism for entertainment-lethality: the kill is not the film's contents but the closure of the desire-gap that the whole social order needs kept open (modulation works "by always placing itself in the between"). Complements Chapman's clinical-neglect mechanism and the archive's "lethality continuous with real TV" pole (Harris's TV = drug analogy, note 6 quotes the TV essay (unnamed there; = "E Unibus Pluram"): TV "malignantly addictive... offers itself as a relief from the very problem it causes" — the same DFW line Wayne uses).

THEORY: E.T.A. tennis and the Entertainment/media are the SAME control-logic as chemical addiction — a "threefold homology" of modulation — and Infinite Jest's "anti-confluential" form is itself an enactment of that logic

Crux: eta-aa-mirror (support — ETA/Ennet as two poles of one logic); annular-structure (support — anti-confluential form as modulation)
Stance: advances
Evidence:
- [text] Sport's "supplementarity": hypertrophied arms; repetition "over and over until... they sink and soak into the hardware, the CPS, the machine language" (IJ:110); "You're supposed to disappear into the loop" (IJ:111).
- [text] "The Show" as poison-and-cure; Lyle to LaMont: "Do not believe the photographs. Fame is not the exit from any cage" (page-uncited in the paper, which renders it "an exit"; this archive places the passage at p. 390 — see cite-as-written; nearby "keep winning" = IJ:677); Schitt [sic]: the true opponent is "the self out there, on court" (IJ:84), "Be here in total. Is nothing else" (IJ:460-61); the Gymnasium Kaiserslautern motto "WE ARE WHAT WE WALK BETWEEN" (page-uncited in the raw; the motto sits at digest-model p. 81, where print ties it to Schtitt's boyhood training facility — tying it to Kaiserslautern by name is Harris's conflation, see cite-as-written).
- [text] (IJ 966, via Harris) Hal's withdrawal insight: everyone "basically as Fourier Transforms of postures and little routines... call-uppable for rebroadcast" — tennis "machine language" merged with mass media; Gately (834) "a drug addict's second most meaningful relationship is always with his domestic entertainment unit".
- [inference] (endnote 7) the homology is "reciprocal presupposition" producing a Deleuzian "abstract machine," and IJ's "self professed 'anti-confluential' structure" — the pro/analepses, the "plateaus" (a Deleuze & Guattari echo the paper flags at IJ:115) — is "an expression of the manner in which modulation operates".
Notes: The threefold homology is Harris's architectural signature — it rhymes with Daverman's rival-systems (tennis/terrorism/tv/therapy) but INVERTS the move: Daverman disqualifies the rivals so AA can win; Harris unifies them under one immanent control-logic (no hierarchy, "a single 'plane'"). The endnote-7 reading of the anti-confluential form as modulation is a genuine formal claim — a clean annular-structure support (form-mirrors-content) distinct from the annular/ Sierpinski readings already on file.

Themes

Addiction and recovery (as control/modulation; AA as pharmakon; the "higher power" as heuristic fiction; temporal fragmentation / one-day-at-a-time); form and freedom (discipline vs. control; molds vs. modulation; "limitless postponements"; the anti-confluential structure as modulation); sport and the body (supplementarity; hypertrophied arms; repetition/machine-language; "The Show" as cage); entertainment and media (InterLace/telematics; the Lacanian media-history mirror-stage; the Entertainment as terminal desire-closure; Virilio's inertia); will and choice (addiction as excess of will; "freedom lies in the moment of choice"); the between / the cage (modulation operates via the middle; Heidegger's "placed between two limits"; "conversion of the cage into a door").

Cross-references (targets verified on disk)

hf-daverman-limits-of-the-infinite-aa — the primary comparison. Both cite the AA "stories... basically alike" material (345), Betty Crocker (469), the Schtitt/Schitt bounded court (Daverman 82-83; Harris 84), and the Gately "Now" (860). Daverman = AA as narrative form vs. postmodernism; Harris = addiction/AA/sport/media as one Deleuzian control-logic. (Daverman's note names the RAIZMAN thesis, not this paper, as its companion.)
hf-addiction-to-itself-thesis (Teddy Wayne, promoted alongside this note) — three-way shared exhibit set with this paper and Daverman: Gately's hospital "Now"/build-a-wall (860), the AA cliché/Identification material, the Entertainment-as-recursive-death, and the same "E Unibus Pluram" TV-as-malignant-addiction line. Wayne = self-consciousness/dialogism; Harris = control/modulation. (The rat-lever IJ:471/473 and Fourier-Transforms IJ:966 exhibits belong HERE, not to the Wayne note.)
chapman-bodies-in-ij — complementary entertainment-lethality mechanism (Chapman: clinical "neglect" of the body; Harris: Virilio's "vegetative state" / closure of the desire-gap) and the same rat-lever / vegetative-viewer material.
Note the SHARED Schtitt-coach spelling error: Harris (like Daverman) writes "Schitt" for Schtitt throughout — a cite-as-written cross between the two siblings.