Habits, Infinite Jest and the recoveries of pragmatism

ABSTRACT

Behaviourists treat habits as thoughtlessly undertaken actions. Pragmatists, by contrast, emphasise the role intelligence plays in habit’s cultivation. Although organisational analysts have tended to prefer behavioural approaches to habit, pragmatism has been recently resurgent. This paper analyses how David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest dramatises this hermeneutical dichotomy. The novel, we demonstrate, represents the difference between terminal decline and lasting sobriety by opposing the fates of two characters: the suffering addict (Randy Lenz) is characterised mechanistically whereas the recovering addict (Don Gately) is characterised experientially. Infinite Jest’s fictionalisation of addiction and recovery, we claim, emphasises the saving power of pragmatism. Wallace’s novel can therefore be read as another contribution towards the ongoing recovery of pragmatism both within and beyond organisation studies.

KEYWORDS:

• Habit
• pragmatism
• behaviourism
• David Foster Wallace
• literary theory

Introduction

Michael Pemulis has this habit of looking first to one side and then over to the other before he says anything. It’s impossible to tell whether this is unaffected or whether Pemulis is emulating some film-noir character. [Emphasis Added]. (IJ, 211)¹

Habit, as Paul Ricoeur (1966, 297) put it, is ‘at the same time a living spontaneity and an imitation of the automaton, reversion to the thing’. Contemporary social scientific research bears out both sides of this hermeneutical puzzle (Barandiaran and Di Paolo 2014). On the one hand, social scientists regularly encounter habits behaviourally, as non-deliberative phenomena. Two-system thinking (Kahneman 2012) and nudging (Thaler and Sunstein 2021) are perhaps the most notable examples of this tradition. To interrogate habits in such a way is to claim that they ‘require no thought: they are automatic’ (Feldman and Pentland 2003, 97). Herbert Simon’s Administrative Behaviour and the subsequent work of the Carnegie School have played a crucial role in calibrating and disseminating this investigative tradition (Crowther-Heyck 2005). Its’ abiding legacy has been a ‘long decline of concepts of human habit and emotion in scholarly and journalistic interpretations of organizational action’ (Cohen 2007, 505; see also Camic 1986). For the behaviourist habits are unintelligent: such work exemplifies the automated thing-ness theorised by Ricoeur.

On the other hand, contemporary research in the humanities and the social sciences emphasises the value of pragmatist approaches to habit.² As Turner and Cacciatori (2016, 79) explain, habits, for the pragmatist, represent our ‘ability to act competently in a pre-reflective but intentional and intelligent way’. The ongoing recovery of the pragmatist tradition within the social sciences owes much to the re-reading of the work of William James, of John Dewey and – via Félix Ravaisson – of Aristotle’s notion of hexis (ἕξις), often translated as ‘disposition’ (Carlisle 2010).³ In this pragmatist tradition habits involve intelligence: this is the ‘living spontaneity’ Ricoeur recognised.

This paper demonstrates how David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest dramatises this hermeneutical dichotomy. Originally published before the turn of the millennium and set in a not too distant future, which has since become our quite recent past, Wallace’s novel created a world within which a video cassette, when watched, was so addictive that it would captivate its spectators onto addiction and ultimately death. The book – ‘1,079 pages long … not one lazy sentence … drum-tight and relentlessly smart’ (Eggers 2012, viii) – tells a story of international espionage, of intergenerational haunting, of hopeless dependency, of devastating loneliness, of competitive tennis, of wheelchair-bound terrorists, of sweat’s nutritional qualities, of the optics of aesthetics, of existential incandescence, and of many more things besides. More importantly for us, Wallace’s novel also presents recovery as a triumph of pragmatism above behaviourism. The next section characterises our character-oriented reading of Wallace’s novel while our analysis of the text itself, which highlights Infinite Jest’s character-oriented opposition between behaviourism and pragmatism, follows that. The papers’ concluding discussion emphasises the value of Wallace’s juxtaposition of pragmatism and behaviourism to contemporary socio-organisational analyses of habit.

Infinite Jest’s contribution to the literature on literature

The academic literature has repeatedly highlighted the value of fiction to socio-organisational investigation⁴ and even regularly indicated the fictionalising aspects of academic writing itself.⁵ These are not recent developments. At the turn of the millennium, Christian de Cock, through the example of Borges, could already claim ‘no special originality’, for his exploration of ‘narrative fiction for academic purposes’ (2000, 589).⁶ David Beer’s (2016, 409–410) recent emphasis of the tradition’s pedigree reaches back to C. Wright Mills’s suggestion (2000, 232) ‘that fiction in some way performs a similar role to social science’⁷ whereas Śliwa et al. (2013, 868) claimed that William Whyte (1956) was one of the tradition’s initiators. de Cock himself (2000, 589), following the evidence provided by Monk (1991, 355), suggests the tradition goes at least as far back as Wittgenstein and, with Land (de Cock and Land 2006, 518), to Marx. Plato’s indebtedness to Homer suggests that the gesture is at least as old as the ancients.⁸

In a recent editorial overview, Beyes, Costas, and Ortmann (2019, 1788) propose ‘a literary study of organization’, the central premise of which, following de Cock and Land (2006) being, ‘that literature and organization studies are interdependent rather than exclusive forms of discourse’. Novels, they continue, ‘can contain, invent and perform organizational thought’ (2019, 1789). They:

do not merely represent an object of organizational analysis. They may also form a medium of organizational thought in their own right, and organization studies might depend in significant ways on this kind of organizational imagination (Harrington 2002, 60). Engaging with novels therefore calls for a radically literary study of organization. (Alworth 2016, 4; Beyes, Costas, and Ortmann 2019, 1789)

This paper treats Infinite Jest as a medium of organisational thought in its own right.

Bracketing concerns with the story (this happened, then this, then this …), and the plot (this happened because this …), we focus upon how particular characters behave within and experience their own worlds (see also Forster [1922] 2005 and Kermode 2005) by means of their habits. That we are our ongoing negotiation of our habits, as the pragmatists claimed, this is what Wallace’s novel shows us within and across the organisations populating its world. Infinite Jest, we claim, provides its readers – organisational analysts included – with reasons for prioritising pragmatism above behaviourism.

Wallace’s novel raises specific methodological challenges for the prioritisation of characterology above narratology and dramaturgy since most of it describes events that took place during what it calls the Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment (Y.D.A.U). The scene with which the book closes is set a year earlier, in the Year of Dairy Products from the American Heartland (Y.D.P.A.H). And the scene with which the book opens – itself the story’s last – is set during the Year of Glad, the year after Y.D.A.U. Readers begin to suspect a chronological puzzle runs throughout the novel quite early on but have to wait over 200 hundred pages for the clue which solves it (IJ, 223).

‘Subsidised Time™’ is both an important feature of Infinite Jest’s story as well as a plot device mediating the reader’s sense of chronology. Even following the sound advice to read the book with the aid of multiple bookmarks and copious notes (e.g. Bucher, Maniatis, and Fitzpatrick 2009), the reader’s ability to join up the various narrative threads laid out up until page 223 by no means follows automatically. This is the case quantitatively, because of the sheer volume of information we are already required to have coordinated by that stage. It is also the case qualitatively in that by page 223 we will have already suspected – amidst considerable cacophony – that many of these characters are duplicitous and conceited: likely unreliable narrators of their own experiences. The disorientation produced by such technical gestures, by the regular footnotes (and the not-irregular footnotes to footnotes), and by a variety of stylistic features besides, requires a lot of the reader.⁹ Hence, the decision to focus upon characters.

Infinite Jest grants the capacity for reflection to some characters but not to others: this is the hinge on which our analysis turns. Literally, hundreds of characters populate the world of Infinite Jest and so, for reasons of space, our analysis is limited to two of these. We have selected Randy Lenz – a relatively minor character – and Don Gately – one of the novel’s main protagonists. Randy and Don occupy the same organisation – the Ennet House, a half-way house for recovering addicts – and so they are both obliged to follow its very strict rules and routines, on the threat of expulsion. While they are both obliged to habituate along heavily circumscribed lines, they both experience and act upon the organisation’s rules in very different ways, as we will demonstrate.

Analysis

The behavioural perspective: Randy Lenz

[w]hen we look at living creatures from an outward point of view, one of the first things that strike us is that they are bundles of habits. (James 1890, 104¹⁰)

All of the time we spend with Randy Lenz takes place during Y.D.A.U. A resident of the Ennet House Drug and Alcohol Recovery House (IJ, 137–138 & p. 995, fn. 49), the first time the novel suggests his presence comes in the form of a complaint made about an unnamed farter to the House manager, Patricia Montesian (IJ, 181). Lenz has, we hear, a ‘PAMELA’ tattoo on his right hip, which he cannot remember receiving. He cannot even remember knowing anybody called Pamela (IJ, 207). His seating posture affects ‘the don’t-fuck-with-me slouch of the streets’ (IJ, 274) and when he is formally introduced to us, it is as ‘a small-time organic coke dealer who wears sportcoats rolled up over his parlor-tanned forearms and is always checking his pulse on the insight of his wrists’ (IJ, 276).

Both the supply chain higher-ups and the police are pursuing Lenz for his having ‘free-based most of a whole 100 grams he’d been fronted by a suspiciously trusting Brazilian’ (IJ, 276) Whereas many residents have checked-in to Ennet House in order to avoid the deadly temptations residing outside, Randy Lenz, it is clear, ‘is here mostly just to hide out’ (IJ, 276). From Don Gately’s perspective, Lenz is ‘like a wide-open interactive textbook on the Disease’ (IJ, 279), a test to his own developing sobriety (IJ, 270–281). Gately’s impressions of Lenz guide those of the reader. Not only do we learn from his early encounters that we are not going to be able to trust Randy Lenz. We also realise early on that we are not going to be able to comprehend him. Some of the enigmatic character’s habits – obsessive compulsive or otherwise – presented though not really explained – include his:

1. ‘strange compulsive need to be north of everything, and possibly even northeast of everything’ (IJ, 270–281).

2. thinking ‘of himself as a kind of hiply sexy artist-intellectual’ (IJ, 279).

3. ‘fear of disks’ (IJ, 279).

4. ‘tendency to constantly take his own pulse’ (IJ, 279).

5. ‘fear of all forms of timepieces’ (IJ, 279).

6. ‘need to always know the time with great precision’ (IJ, 279).

7. performance of ‘headstands against the closet door in his jockstrap’ (IJ, 209).

Intriguing as each of these habits is in their own right, it is the combination of two more that ensure his eventual expulsion from the Ennet House. The first is that Lenz, despite the obligation to stay sober, ‘has gotten high on organic cocaine two or three, maybe half a dozen times tops, secretly, since he came into Ennet House’ (IJ, 543). That he can get away with drug use when the house rules prohibit it and when most of his co-residents would gladly rat him out, suggests a highly developed capacity for prevarication. Lenz is a habitual shape-shifter who inexplicably takes to donning ‘a white toupee and mustache and billowing tall-collared topcoat’ (IJ, 539) when attending the obligatory meetings. His reasons for doing this seem known only to him and he remains as much a peculiarity to the reader as he is an irritant to his fellow residents. Wallace has Lenz conceal his stash:

in a kind of rectangular bunker razor-bladed out of three hundred or so pages of Bill James’s gargantuan Large-Print Principles of Psychology and the Gifford Lectures on Natural Religion. (IJ, 543)

We suspect a source for Lenz’s intellectualised self-ideation here and Wallace’s choice of a stash receptacle is revealing. The Principles of Psychology is William James’s most sustained account of habit and one of the intellectual pillars upon which AA’s programme of recovery was built. Lenz didn’t own a copy of James’s work, instead commandeering one from ‘behind a bookshelf along the north wall of the Ennet living room’ (IJ, fn. 224, 1037). He incorporated this book both into his deception of others and into his instructing of himself. While Randy Lenz has read some of James’s work, he doesn’t seem to have understood his philosophy. Certainly, his interpretation of James’s account of habituation is extremely unorthodox.

James writes in the Varieties of Religious Experience of ‘that latent process of unconscious preparation often preceding a sudden awakening to the fact that the mischief is irretrievably done’ (2012, 142; see also Henry 2015)¹¹, regarding the experience of falling in love. Lenz, however – and this is the second habit precipitating his subsequent expulsion and eventual demise, takes James’s meaning here to lie in just so many mischiefs not yet realised. ‘He scans for several nights, Wallace writes, ‘before he even becomes aware of why or what he might be scanning for’ (IJ, 540). Lenz comes to encounter what James describes as a religious experience not in the acceptance of God as he understands Him but through his habitual destruction of the external world. Starting with two gutter rats, one of which got away, he stomps down and ‘consciously discovered what he liked to say at the moment of issue-resolution was: “There”’. Turning to other forms of street vermin, Randy progresses through the wilful destruction of cats, a big dog and ultimately, the head of a gun wielding Hawaiian Shirt wearing Canadian human man (IJ, 538–547, 553–559, 560–562, 575–589, 601–619).

We witness most of this destructive behaviour as just so many instances of psychological acting-out, ideational projection, de-repressive sublimation and, like, whatever. That, following his opportunistic interpretation of James’s philosophy of habituation, is probably how Randy likes to think of it. This questionable epiphany animates his voyage of queasily destructive existential discovery. As his anguish grows in stature, so too does the size – and moreover the danger – of the object upon which he chooses to aggravate it:

Then it was discovered that resolving them directly inside the yards and porches of the people that owned them provided more adrenal excitation and thus more sense of what Bill James one time called a Catharsis of resolving, which Lenz felt he could agree. (IJ, 544)

The occasional recourse to the stash coupled with the penchant for killing animals is Lenz’s principal means of dealing with his addiction. In as much as his behaviour seems pathological, it should not be dismissed as such. For even so called pathologies can instruct us as to the nature of habituation. ‘Habit’, James claimed, ‘simplifies the movements required to achieve a given result, makes them more accurate, and diminishes fatigue’ (1890, 112). Since there is always both a passive and an active element within any habituation process, there is more to be suspected within Lenz’s nocturnal behaviour than unreflective pathology. For also present here is the development of a series of habits and dispositions which enable Lenz to contravene the Ennet House’s routines. Lenz acts as the Pavlovian might expect him to (living breathing animal = resolution opportunity) and in so doing he ‘becomes a connoisseur of cats the same way a deep-sea sportsman knows the fish-species that fight most fiercely and excitatingly for their marine lives’ (IJ, 541). It is a peculiar form of connoisseurship but it is connoisseurship nonetheless.

Lenz’s trail of destruction is morally suspicious but not cognitively mindless. Through it, we bear witness to what Felix Ravaisson called ‘the development of an unreflected spontaneity’ (2008, 53) in habit. Lenz’s agency is neither completely active nor passive: it oscillates between both extremes. For habit, as Ravaisson suggested, is ‘a moving middle term’ between instinctive and intelligent acts, ‘a dividing line that is always moving, and which advances by an imperceptible progress from one extremity to the other’ (2008, 59). Randy Lenz seems to know both what he is doing and why he is doing it, even if we don’t know and can’t empathise. What we do know, as readers of Infinite Jest, is that it all ends up badly for him.

Throughout the novel, Lenz’s behaviour comes to us as in part as an abomination, in part as dark hilarity yet almost entirely as an enigma. On the one hand, we are provided with the means for describing some of his idiosyncratic habits as archetypically pathological. On the other hand, we are denied the means for accessing these alleged pathologies’ underlying aetiologies. The explanatory sources of Lenz’s navigational imperatives, of his zoological acting out and of his entrepreneurial use of seminal works on the psychology of habituation, are tantalisingly evoked but essentially concealed, hidden, black-boxed. Perhaps Wallace, through Lenz, is provoking us to appreciate that addiction is never without agency.

The pragmatic perspective: Don Gately

What Gately primarily needs out of believing in and praying to a Higher Power is not the belief itself nor the symbolic guarantee that his Higher Power can or even will do anything to help him (which he doesn’t at first believe) … The habits that keep Gately sober do so because they constitute a practice of humility. (Gerdes 2015, 353)

There are two methodological reasons why Don Gately’s case is less enigmatic than Lenz’s. First: Infinite Jest provides information concerning Gately’s recent and not so recent past. This material entitles us to infer reasons underpinning his habituation. We don’t get that with Lenz since most of his habits suggest themselves as forces of nature – demonstrably present yet experientially inexplicable. Gately’s case, by contrast, provides us with a backstory. Second, representations of Don’s history are compounded by representations of his subjectivity. The novel, that is to say, not only represents Don’s habits to us, it also relates his experiences of their aetiology and development to us. We may assume that Randy Lenz has both a complex past and a subtle mind but Infinite Jest only permits us to speculate upon their possible contents and mechanics. Those contents and mechanics, by important contrast, exist both textually and speculatively in the case of Don.

This opportunity raises its own challenges. Gately’s past and present experiences interact across a series of almost punishingly convoluted streams of consciousness. Throughout these, Gately is attempting to ‘abide’ within the pain of a gunshot wound without pharmaceutical aid (e.g. IJ, 854–864). Pain may greatly aid memory but it is no friend of testimony (Scarry 1989). Don’s streams of tortured consciousness regularly doubt the veracity of their own contents – falling, as they do, in and out of dreams, questioning, as they do, whether the presence of visitors is real or imagined and conversing, as they seem to do, with a spectral wraith within a language that could not be his own. The sheer fact of this material’s availability nevertheless gives more to textual analysis than Lenz’s case did.

With the exception of our first encounter with him back in the Autumn of Y.D.P.A.H., all the time we spend with Don Gately occurs during Y.D.A.U. Not yet episodically recalling himself to himself while lying flat out on a hospital bed with his mind running amok, this first scene provides a straightforward description of how Don used to be (IJ, 55–60). He is introduced to Infinite Jest’s readers in the midst of two habit-enabling burglaries, both of which went wrong. Such mishaps were quite out of character for the younger Gately who back then was a ‘gifted burglar’ (IJ, 55). These two mishaps precipitate Don’s hitting of his bottom: his realisation that his addiction is a formidable existential antagonist, his recognition that he now must change, his resignation to the lack of an alternative to sobriety. The reader’s encounter of Don’s bottom is a long time coming: it’s not actually revealed until the very final scene of the book (IJ, 972–980).

These two burglaries also prefigure Don’s redemption. The physiological and psychological anguish we spend so much time witnessing him suffering through, the book’s penultimate scene reveals, is rewarded in front of the reader but behind the back of the protagonist. Unbeknownst, Don Gately is pardoned for the clear criminal transgressions of his past life and for the possible transgressions perpetrated in the events leading up to his getting shot (IJ, 601–619) by one from whom he could not reasonably have expected forgiveness (IJ, 960–964; see also IJ, 55–60). Don’s physical and spiritual struggle, which we bear constant witness to throughout the final third of the book, might have been more bearable for him if he knew grace was to be bestowed upon it. That he did not know this and still abided with his demons, makes his efforts all the more commendable and his character all the more forgivable. The countless minor actions and fewer but plentiful decisions he made as a means of keeping his habit at bay, both in general but also in particular when he turned down many offers of painkillers for fear of the habit’s return, all turn out to have been worth it in the end.

Long before we get to the end of the book within which Don Gately’s formidable will to abide ultimately draws its meaning, and just over one hundred pages after our brief first encounter with him doing the sorts of things functioning drug addicts have to do, we reach the second scene of Infinite Jest in which he figures (IJ, 176–181). This second scene contrasts sharply with the first, suggesting a before and after story in which the habits of the past literally, figuratively and incessantly haunt those of the present. For it is here, no longer shunting alarm systems, clambering walls, scoring with his crew and ‘promoting’ merchandise, that we meet a seemingly changed man, well over a year into alternative modes of habituation.

The Don Gately of Y.D.A.U, in marked opposition to the Don Gately of Y.D.P.A.H. is a clean, sober, fight-dispersing, toilet cleaning, halfway house resident with managerial responsibilities for all sorts of formal and informal institutional tasks. There are so many aspects of his role as a non-addicted bureaucrat this new Don evidently detests, the daily handling of one Randy Lenz not least among them, but he always finds a way. This Don now knows what he could not have known earlier, namely, that just so many small feats of patience and self-discipline are entirely inseparable from the big miracle that is 421 days, and counting, of sobriety (IJ, 270–281).

The recovering addict’s own thoughts concerning the automatic and deliberative nature of recovery begin surfacing soon after (e.g. IJ, 270–281). The manner of habit’s automation itself becomes an object for reflection for the one who pursues recovery not in the abandonment of habit but through its reorientation. The recovering addict, as one of the many clichés go, must be the very change they want to see, through the constant pursuit of just so many deliberated upon achievements of sobriety. Recovery by the AA book – indebted as it is to the work of William James (Walle 1992) – suggests a classically Aristotelian notion of habituation in which a new character is produced through just so many acts of repetition. Whereas the non-addict would be the one whose habits of acting and thinking are independent of substance dependence mediation, the recovering addict cannot but make a cognitive issue of the distance between their character as it habitually behaves and the substance – the habit – they always remain capable of succumbing to. Don Gately, that is to say, cannot ever allow himself to forget what he is – an addict – even as he grows more and more sober.

The imperative never to forget addiction’s lurking presence, even as one suppresses it through alternative modes of habituation, is not a battle primarily waged upon an intellectual terrain. For habit, Don knows, isn’t quite like that. One of the first things Gately learned, early in sobriety, is the futility of outthinking addiction (e.g. IJ, 343–367). He now just gets on with the habit of not succumbing to his lingering addiction’s many charms and snares, allowing the clarity to come when it might. The sheer simplicity of the interminable process of recovery – one day at a time and all the rest of it – is what Don experiences as its most remarkable characteristic. The most remarkable thing about experiencing each and all of the 12 steps, that is to say, is that their invocations are both demonstrably banal and profoundly true. Despite how stupid its routines are and require you to be, they actually work: this is the truly remarkable thing about AA, as far as Don sees it.

The habits underpinning lasting sobriety – Don comes to realise – are largely predicated upon the suspension of one’s impulse to rationalise the process of staying sober. Shrugging his shoulders for newcomers still offended by the requirement to suspend thought in order to survive, he relates his own experiences of how stupid he too used to believe this invocation to be (IJ, 367–375). Back then, he explains, he too protested about the wilful mindlessness required by the programme as loudly and as frequently as possible, only to have his protests met not with opprobrium but validation. Even more frustrated by this response, he then vented his frustrations to anybody with commendable amounts of sober time behind them. Here’s the narrator, part-channelling Don:

how can you pray to a ‘God’ you believe only morons believe in, still? – but the old guys say it doesn’t yet matter what you believe or don’t believe, Just Do It they say, and like a shock-trained organism without any kind of independent human will you do exactly like you’re told, you keep coming and coming, nightly, and now you take pains not to get booted out of the squalid halfway house you’d at first tried so hard to get discharged from, you Hang In and Hang In, meeting after meeting, warm day after cold day. (IJ, 350)

Patricia Montesian tells a similar story. For her, much like for any long recovering addict, the trick, as it were, is not to be found in thinking one’s way into sobriety but in doing the things that a sober person does for long enough (IJ, 461–469). This is what it means to change oneself by changing one’s habits. These moments of clarity, within which the profound simplicity of mantras dawned on him, helped hardened Don’s resolve to stay sober and not succumb to his old ways of being. It becomes ever easier, with time, for him to adopt the persona of the recovered person that his new habits are ever changing him into:

Gately usually no longer much cares whether he understands or not. He does the knee-and-ceiling thing twice a day, and cleans shit, and listens to dreams, and stays Active, and tells the truth to the Ennet House residents, and tries to help a couple of them if they approach him wanting help. (IJ, 468)

Don Gately comes to form a learned disposition towards the power of cliché, the trappings of irony, the virtue of selective attention, the know-how of abidance and the literal ‘difference between abstinence v. recovery’ (IJ, 277). Recovery from addiction, he learns, necessitates not the absolute suspension of thought in favour of action, not the triumph of a recovery willing mind over a substance addicted body, and not the replacement of one set of thought suspending distractions with another. The recovering addict is present throughout their habituation but that presence is much more enacted than it is imagined, much more performed than it is substantiated and much more a matter of practical wisdom than it is a matter of technique, intuition, contemplative wisdom or knowledge.

Gately, unbeknownst, habitually expresses the virtues of recovery. The normative foundation of this practical wisdom, built up through habit, is that it allows Don not to succumb to addiction. The Habit will never disappear; its presence will always follow him around, a recovering drug addict is always a drug addict. That Don, reminded of his capacity for violence when the situation requires it, manages to abide through his recovery from a gunshot wound while recovering from drug addiction, to the point of literally grabbing a persistent painkiller prescribing Doctor by the balls (IJ, 883–896), evidences his heightened sense of suspicion towards his will and ability to cultivate his character.

Concluding discussion

Wallace endeavoured to somehow inform and perhaps even improve the lives of his readers. For him fiction, as he put it around the time of Infinite Jest’s composition, ‘is about what it is to be a fucking human being’ (McCaffrey 1993). In this, he ran the risk of anachronism, naivety and cliché.¹² This is why we have treated Infinite Jest’s characterisations of habit as both hermeneutically instructive – here’s a way of reading the novel – and also ethically instructive – here’s a way of enduring organisational life. So if Randy Lenz is one of the novel’s villains then it is largely because he adopts a behavioural perspective towards his habits, experiencing them as actions undertaken without conscious thought. And if Don Gately is the hero of the novel then it is not because he has mastered his habits but rather because he, the pragmatist, has found a way to live with and through them.

Recall that for the behaviourist, habits are unintelligent: such is the automated thing-ness theorised by Ricoeur. This is also the terrain of environmental stimuli and automatic responses Infinite Jest represented through the character of Randy Lenz. His tics, his time asking, his northeast bearing, his pulse obsession, and so on, bracket off the role deliberation might have played so as to describe whatever gives itself to external observation. Randy Lenz acted out on many bodies in the world. His demise gestures towards a potential for recovery that he continuously chose, for whatever reasons, not to actualise. Impulse regularly overrides intelligence, compulsion continually overrides restraint, addiction ultimately defeats sobriety. In our final encounter with him, Lenz seems to have succumbed to the animal state from which his time in the house was supposed to release him.

Don Gately, on the other hand, exemplifies pragmatism by characterising Ricoeur’s living spontaneity of habit. In going through the motions of the AA programme, no matter how stupid he suspects them to be, he strengthens his capacity to keep his addiction in abeyance. The autobiography we witness him recounting to himself is one in which he characterises his ever-evolving self as always an addict. The addict Gately knows itself to be also knows recovery isn’t just a matter of abandoning old habits but also a matter of building a new character through new habits. He has experienced action as more reliable than intention and skill as more reliable than will. Conscious thought, for its own part, has taught itself not to think so highly of itself. There are just so many thoughtless motions Don knows he must go through in order to stay well. What Gately develops, as Clare Carlisle puts it (2010, 141), is the recognition that habits are ‘cultivated at the level of sensations, feelings, and involuntary thoughts’. Such awareness, which Aristotle called hexis, can:

be understood as a determinate, formed capability to execute a certain range of action – a capability that mediates between pure potentiality and activity itself, and which is a form of power distinct from both of these. (Carlisle 2010, 126)

To develop such a hexis towards his own habituation, Gately has to become mindful of his own habits. His performance of the AA rituals constantly reminds him of the fact of his addiction: their role is not to waste his time practicing thoughtless obedience but rather to help him become acutely aware of his predicament. So Don Gately experiences himself cultivating an embodied awareness about how to abide, moment by moment, in the position of a perennially recovering addict. To recover is to move ever away from the disease, moment by moment. It isn’t to know that you must continue or how you might continue. It is both as simple and as difficult as continuing to recover, continuing to abide. In the presence of the programme, and of his thoughts about it, Gately rivets himself to the fact of his being in time. He obeys instructions, he performs rituals and he accepts inscriptions about how he must be. He does all of this with gratitude to any time that might remain. That habit forms our character in ways that can be our prison and our sanctuary, our sin as well as our salvation, our addictions and our aspirations: these are themes that recur throughout the novel.

It is in this sense that we have claimed that Infinite Jest is a medium of organisational thought in its own right. It is a work of fiction that provides moral instruction about how to live with (in) institutions. An ethical argument, then. There might well also be lessons there about how to apply pragmatism, rather than behaviourism, to organisational analysis. But the real contribution of Infinite Jest to organisation studies, on our reading, is that it provides us with reasons for prioritising the former above the latter. The novel’s exhortation to the saving power of pragmatism should facilitate pragmatism’s ongoing recovery.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Subsequent references to Infinite Jest (Wallace [1996] 2012) are denoted as (IJ, pp.) and highlighted in the main-text while all ceremonial citations have been relegated to the endnotes. Not all these endnotes are instances of performative scholarship but most of them are.

2 e.g. Bennett et al. 2013; Bridge 2020; Carlisle 2014; Farjoun, Ansell, and Boin 2015; Lorino 2018; Simpson and Lorino 2016; Howard-Grenville et al. 2016; Sparrow and Hutchinson 2013; Winter 2013.

3 See also Pedersen and Muhr 2021; Pedersen and Dunne 2020a; 2020b; Pedwell 2017a, 2017b; Styhre 2017.

4 e.g. Beyes, Costas, and Ortmann 2019; de Cock and Land 2006; Glaubitz 2016; Land and Śliwa 2009; Longo 2016; Michaelson 2015b; 2017; Savage, Cornelissen, and Franck 2018; Schoneboom 2015; Śliwa, Sørensen, and Cairns 2015; Sliwa and Cairns 2007.

5 e.g. Phillips, Pullen, and Rhodes 2014; Rhodes 2009b; 2019; Rhodes and Brown 2005; see also Golden-Biddle and Locke 1993; Knorr-Cetina 1994; van Maanen 1979.

6 See also Brown 1999; Czarniawska 1999; Easton and Araujo 1997; Parker et al. 1999; Phillips 1995; Stern 1989.

7 See also Carlin 2010; Dallyn and Marinetto 2022; Golden-Biddle and Locke 1993; Holt and Zundel 2014; Parker 2012; Penfold-Mounce, Beer, and Burrows 2011; van Maanen 1979; Weber 2010.

8 The works of Ballard (e.g. Bradshaw and Brown 2018; Fitchett 2002; Zhang, Spicer, and Hancock 2008), Bolaño (e.g. de Cock et al. 2020), Bukowski (e.g. Rhodes 2009a), Camilleri (e.g. Furu 2012), Christie (e.g. Kociatkiewicz and Kostera 2019), Conan Doyle (e.g. Kociatkiewicz and Kostera 2012), Defoe (e.g. Hamilton and Parker 2016; Knowles, Ruth, and Hindley 2019), Homer (e.g. Murtola 2010), Houellebecq (e.g. Cnossen, Dekker, and Taskin 2017), Huxley (e.g. Bristow 2012), Kafka (e.g. Huber 2019; Huber and Munro 2014; Munro and Huber 2012; McCabe 2015, 2014; Warner 2007), Le Guin (e.g. Sayers and Martin 2021), McEwan (e.g. Armstrong 2009), Melville (e.g. Benozzo, Koro-Ljungberg, and Adamo 2019; Beverungen and Dunne 2007), Miéville (e.g. Otto, Pors, and Johnsen 2019), Mitchell (e.g. Pick 2017), Murakami (e.g. Śliwa et al. 2013), Pynchon (e.g. Beyes 2009; Styhre 2004), Musil (e.g. Loacker 2021), Rowling (e.g. Bristow 2007), Sophocles (e.g. Contu 2014); Tolkien (e.g. Roundy 2021), Tolstoy (e.g. Michaelson 2022, 2019), Trollope (e.g. Calvard 2019) and, most importantly for our purposes, of Wallace (e.g. Dunne 2018a, 2018b; Michaelson 2016, 2015a; Parker 2016; Styhre 2016), have all since been previously mined for social-organisational insights. This list is indicative of a tradition, not exhaustive of its examples.

9 The painstaking work undertaken by Sam Potts [http://www.sampottsinc.com/ij/] and Keith O’ Neill [http://faculty.sunydutchess.edu/oneill/Infinite.htm] warrants special mention in this regard. Their schematic depictions of the book, of character and story respectively, compelling in their own right, informed our analysis from the outset and buttressed it throughout. The Great Concavity podcast and The Howling Fantods website are active community hubs regularly visited by Wallace newcomers and veterans alike. These, too, were indispensable to what follow. Characterological analysis provides a means of orientation throughout the world of Infinite Jest.

10 See also Evans 2013; Moran 2017 and Morris 2001.

11 Footnote #222 cites this passage from ‘The Principles of Psychology with The Gifford Lectures on Natural Religion, by William James (obviously), available in EZC large-font print from Microsoft/NAL-Random House – Ticknor, Fields, Little, Brown, and Co., © Y.T.M.P’ (IJ, 1037). This version of James’s work doesn’t exist in our world but in that of Infinite Jest. The deliberate misattribution is instructive: Lenz did not read a version of James’s work which actually exists but the fictionalised representation of James’s work which he misread is real.

12 See Ahn 2019; den Dulk 2012; Goerlandt 2006; Hayes-Brady 2016; Hering 2016; Kelly 2010a, 2010b, 2014; Konstantinou 2016; Max 2013; McGurl 2009.