David Foster Wallace, Marx, Nietzsche

There’s this ongoing, annoying, but perhaps inevitable thing going around where people are trying to synthesize Marx and Nietzsche; or to show how Nietzsche can be made compatible with “the Left” (whatever that is supposed to signify). Marx and Nietzsche (along with Freud, but thankfully he is increasingly left out of this, aside from the braindead “Lacanian Leftists” who refuse to go away) are the two foremost critics of modernity, but they are so obviously on extreme opposite ends of the political spectrum, that cross-pollination between them makes little sense. Yet their stature as being the two main critics of modernity, whose work not only endures but seems to be proven right with each passing year, causes them to return together in this kind of sought-after fusion. I wrote about how Maoism is probably the best purely theoretical avenue for finding some common ground between them a few years ago when I reviewed a shitty book about Marx and Nietzsche; but what’s more interesting to me now is realizing how David Foster Wallace (DFW) kind of achieved this perfectly in the 1990s; and that’s kind of why he’s still so enduringly relevant (while being kind of despised by most or at best tolerated). Isn’t that exactly how Nietzsche (and to some extent Marx) functions in the intellectual world today?

DFW is still talked about a lot today, always on Twitter; usually invoked as a problematic writer-bro, who would be canceled if he was around today, blah blah and so on. His magnum opus, the novel Infinite Jest, is basically a meme at this point; people post pictures of it to signify a kind of writer-bro, pseudointellectual, annoying kind of guy. But Infinite Jest isn’t really that interesting to me; I think he was far better as a nonfiction writer. His book A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again is one of the best things I’ve ever read (I read Infinite Jest too, and it’s good, but it doesn’t stay with you in the same way). The title essay of A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again is about his experience going on a cruise ship vacation; it’s a supposedly fun thing that actually is not fun at all. That, I want to argue, is his best achievement of combining Nietzsche and Marx.

What was Nietzsche really about? The debate about if he was “left wing or right wing” is asinine, unimportant, and just done as a kind of cheap marketing tactic; it feeds into culture wars and little else. The more interesting question is—was he a philosopher or writer, or some kind of weird combination of the two that never quite existed before him or since (with the possible exception of Kierkegaard).

I think the answer is this: Nietzsche inherited the tradition of German philosophy, from Kant to Hegel; it was somewhat recent; Kant and Hegel both lived only a few decades before Nietzsche was born; but they had already become such mythic, massive figures by the time Nietzsche was becoming a writer, that their influence had to be reckoned with. That’s what Nietzsche was doing—figuring out what the ideas of Kant and Hegel meant, how they could be applied and lived with, on the level of the human person; what the experience of living after them meant, what it was like; how consciousness itself had changed, but written from the perspective of consciousness experiencing itself on a human level, not on a kind of hermetico-cosmic level, like Hegel.

Marx also did this—famously, Marx turned Hegel on his head, with the change from an idealist to a materialist dialectic; this was on a more collective level, the proletariat itself was the subject of history; it was a class subjectivity rather than an individual one, as it was for Nietzsche.

Marx didn’t write so much about what it was like for individual consciousness to experience capitalism; although there are some hints at this here and there. Other Marxist philosophers have attempted it, but never in a fully satisfying way, I don’t think. DFW did achieve this, I feel, in his essay on the cruise ship; his writing is so defiantly, maximalistically, annoying subjective—it is a big brain with an eyeball attached to it and nothing else; pure subjectivity experiencing itself experiencing the world; that is the style that he perfected more than anyone else.

I won’t go into too much detail with examples from the essay—that would just go on forever. But go read it! I’ll sum it up a bit: it’s all about managed fun; having your pleasure guaranteed and efficiently micromanaged; ending up achieving a bovine existence, which does not feel good at all. This is the contradiction of capitalist consciousness—you are alienated from your labor, and the system tries to compensate you for this alienation, in various ways; but you can never quite shake the feeling that you are being robbed, that things are backwards; they force fun on you, like medicine almost; and that is the most grotesque thing of all, having joy itself bastardized and weaponized.

That’s what DFW captures so well in this essay, and it is by far the best thing he ever wrote (in my view). His novel Infinite Jest expands on this theme greatly (too much really!) But the core idea is just as compellingly captured in this essay, which, though a very long essay, is far shorter than Infinite Jest!

Anyway—Nietzsche and Marx; this is what it would be; a capturing of the implications of capitalist consciousness on a subjective level; done as fully and relentlessly as possible. Nietzsche was relentlessly subjective; he knew that this was the best way to etch out an objective picture of what the world is really like. One of my favorite passages anywhere in Nietzsche is this: “All seeing is essentially perspective, and so is all knowing. The more subjectivity we allow to speak in a given matter, the more different eyes we can put on in order to view a given spectacle, the more complete will be our conception of it, the greater our ‘objectivity’.” This is DFW in this essay—an explosion of subjective states, adding up to an objective picture of capitalist consciousness. Nietzschean method applied to Marxian ends.