On Wallace's Jest: Introduction to Language-Games

I have decided to commence on a pseudo-project involving the deconstruction of a few themes in David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest. The novel is not just a work-of-genius in the most sincere sense of the term, but it happens to be my favorite work of fiction, and is an important piece of literature in its own right: it attempts to redefine what the novel and author can and should do in the wake of postmodernism’s moral decadence.

Wallace admitted to being heavily influenced by Wittgenstein, and Wittgenstein’s influential concept of language-games. The classic example (here, of "builder’s language") can be found in his Philosophical Investigations:

"The language is meant to serve for communication between a builder A and an assistant B. A is building with building-stones: there are blocks, pillars, slabs and beams. B has to pass the stones, in the order in which A needs them. For this purpose they use a language consisting of the words "block", "pillar", "slab", "beam". A calls them out; — B brings the stone which he has learned to bring at such-and-such a call."

The builder can use the word "block" because his language-game allows for the possibility of the other words. A language instantiates the logical combinations of all its elements according to a specific set of grammatical rules. These combinations are the boundary of the builder’s understanding (hence the famous quotation, "The limits of my language mean the limits of my world"). If the language does not permit the expression of a thought because there is no grammar for it, then we cannot, as participators in that language-game, possibly conceive of that thought.

Thus, there is no metaphysics. For Wittgenstein, language is the world, and the language-games we participate in are constructed in such a way that cannot penetrate the world through accurate description. Interestingly, we must look to language in order to find the structures of our worlds (Wittgenstein always thought philosophy was a descriptive task, not a cutting-away of layers to find meaning in things that were not in front of the philosopher the entire time), but we can never know it as a result. Wittgenstein could show us how language produced metaphysical contours, but not actual things themselves. Value and meaning are evident in language, but not described by it; thus, we act and speak ethically (through the language-game), forever failing to systematize ethics (or metaphysics).

This is why, in his Investigations, he made his most profound move: Wittgenstein threw his early methodology out the window. The language-game contoured all individual meaning. What language could not describe, the philosopher could not know. Then, to come into dialogue with the traditional philosophical questions (even if to reject them), we must forget the analytic method:

"Philosophers constantly see the method of science before their eyes, and are irresistibly tempted to ask and to answer questions in the way science does. This tendency is the real source of metaphysics and leads philosophers into complete darkness. I want to say here that it can never be our job to reduce anything to anything, or to explain anything. Philosophy really is 'purely descriptive.’"

Next time I will discuss Infinite Jest’s treatment of the notion of freedom in America as a way of critically considering libertarianism as philosophy in light of its adoption of a particular language-game.