Don't Clean Out the Fishbowl: Reflections on David Foster Wallace's Commencement Speech a la Marx and Althusser

Renowned American novelist David Foster Wallace's 2005 commencement speech went viral when The Glossary, a video production company, put portions of it to dramatic reenactment, lauding it as "the best life advice we've ever come across." 

Amidst its circulation, news and social media sites are referring to the advice of the late Wallace as "brilliant" and potentially "the best graduation speech of all time." 

Given such praise, our cultural studies course undertook an analysis of this artifact based on our readings of Marx and Althusser. 

The speech and video begin with an anecdote meant to inspire critical awareness of our surrounding environment: a sage older fish poses the question "how's the water" to two younger, who retort "what the hell is water?" 

The video, then, skips a large chunk of Wallace's speech that elaborates on this critical awareness and zeros in on the "day in, day out" of everyday life in a [capitalist] system of production--a life organized around labor as its central purpose, which therein produces: "boredom, routine, and petty frustration" 

Here we see the critique shift from being critical of the system to being critical of my thoughts towards others in the same system. 

How are we interpellated in this video? Who are we meant to identify with? The young, white, slim, privileged protagonists who have to deal with... changing the system? No. Bodies of difference: non-white, older, bigger, sloppier, lazier, who aren't as privileged as "me." 

Privilege, here, is reinscribed through imagined relations the graduates articulate with the "others"--relations of pity, transitory encounters, and a sense that the only way to forget oneself as the meaningless center of the world is to reinforce yourself as the meaning of the world. 

There is no recourse to how some have the capacity to do this with more ease. Instead it would have us assume we are all free to consciously think with similar clarity, and such enlightenment would allow us to be "forgiving" of others for their [different] behaviors.

The directors and producers of the video hope for viewers to have compassion and get beyond "generation me" by thinking differently. But the video is encouraging viewers to think about themselves, NOT the larger structure that created these conditions. 

In other words, don't worry about the circumstances that led to the banal predictable boring life that will come after your graduation, just perform benevolently within it. Rather than ask: should we live this way? We are encouraged to be complicit.

David Foster Wallace committed suicide in 2008 after a long struggle with depression. 

Let us not forget this lesson too: how we think emerges from our material conditions and thinking otherwise is  a constant struggle when you are not acting towards its change.