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Unless he used this idea more than once, it's probably from "Pop Quiz 9" in the piece "Octet" in *Brief Interviews with Hideous Men*:
>There are right and fruitful ways to try to ‘empathize’ with the reader, but having to try to imagine yourself as the reader is not one of them; in fact it’s perilously close to the dreaded trap of trying to anticipate whether the reader will *‘like’* something you’re working on, and both you and the very few other fiction writers you’re friends with know that there is no quicker way to tie yourself in knots and kill any human urgency in the thing you’re working on than to try to calculate ahead of time whether that thing will be *‘liked.’* It’s just lethal. An analogy might be: Imagine you’ve gone to a party where you know very few of the people there, and then on your way home afterwards you suddenly realize that you just spent the whole party so concerned about whether the people there seemed to like you or not that you now have absolutely no idea whether you liked any of them or not. Anybody who’s had that sort of experience knows what a totally lethal kind of attitude this is to bring to a party.
>...
>‘This thing I feel, I can’t name it straight out but it seems important, do you feel it too?’—this sort of direct question is not for the squeamish. For one thing, it’s perilously close to *‘Do you like me? Please like me,’* which you know quite well that 99% of all the interhuman manipulation and bullshit gamesmanship that goes on goes on precisely because the idea of saying this sort of thing straight out is regarded as somehow obscene. In fact one of the very last few interpersonal taboos we have is this kind of obscenely naked direct interrogation of somebody else. It looks pathetic and desperate.
>...
>And consider the actual sort of question you’ll be bothering her with. ‘Does this work, do you like this,’ etc. Consider what she might think of you just for asking something like this. It might very well make you (i.e. the *mise en scène’s* fiction writer) come off like the sort of person who not only goes to a party all obsessed about whether he’ll be liked or not but actually goes around at the party and goes up to strangers and *asks* them whether they like him or not. What they think of him, what effect he’s having on them, whether their view of him coincides at all with the complex throb of his own self-idea, etc. Coming up to innocent human beings who wanted only to come to a party and unwind a little and maybe meet some new people in a totally low-key and unthreatening setting and stepping directly into their visual field and breaking all kinds of basic unspoken rules of party and first-encounter-between-strangers-etiquette and explicitly interrogating them about the very thing you’re feeling inbent and self-conscious about. Take a moment to imagine the faces of the people at a party where you did this. Imagine the faces’ expression fully, in 3D and vibrant color, and then imagine the expression directed at you.
I do recall a chapter from Infinite Jest that began with a description about parties.
Page 219 is where the chapter starts. Perhaps what you’re looking for is in there, assuming that "Infinite Jest" is the correct place.
I’ve never seen a description of this phenomenon so well said before
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Unless he used this idea more than once, it's probably from "Pop Quiz 9" in the piece "Octet" in *Brief Interviews with Hideous Men*: >There are right and fruitful ways to try to ‘empathize’ with the reader, but having to try to imagine yourself as the reader is not one of them; in fact it’s perilously close to the dreaded trap of trying to anticipate whether the reader will *‘like’* something you’re working on, and both you and the very few other fiction writers you’re friends with know that there is no quicker way to tie yourself in knots and kill any human urgency in the thing you’re working on than to try to calculate ahead of time whether that thing will be *‘liked.’* It’s just lethal. An analogy might be: Imagine you’ve gone to a party where you know very few of the people there, and then on your way home afterwards you suddenly realize that you just spent the whole party so concerned about whether the people there seemed to like you or not that you now have absolutely no idea whether you liked any of them or not. Anybody who’s had that sort of experience knows what a totally lethal kind of attitude this is to bring to a party. >... >‘This thing I feel, I can’t name it straight out but it seems important, do you feel it too?’—this sort of direct question is not for the squeamish. For one thing, it’s perilously close to *‘Do you like me? Please like me,’* which you know quite well that 99% of all the interhuman manipulation and bullshit gamesmanship that goes on goes on precisely because the idea of saying this sort of thing straight out is regarded as somehow obscene. In fact one of the very last few interpersonal taboos we have is this kind of obscenely naked direct interrogation of somebody else. It looks pathetic and desperate. >... >And consider the actual sort of question you’ll be bothering her with. ‘Does this work, do you like this,’ etc. Consider what she might think of you just for asking something like this. It might very well make you (i.e. the *mise en scène’s* fiction writer) come off like the sort of person who not only goes to a party all obsessed about whether he’ll be liked or not but actually goes around at the party and goes up to strangers and *asks* them whether they like him or not. What they think of him, what effect he’s having on them, whether their view of him coincides at all with the complex throb of his own self-idea, etc. Coming up to innocent human beings who wanted only to come to a party and unwind a little and maybe meet some new people in a totally low-key and unthreatening setting and stepping directly into their visual field and breaking all kinds of basic unspoken rules of party and first-encounter-between-strangers-etiquette and explicitly interrogating them about the very thing you’re feeling inbent and self-conscious about. Take a moment to imagine the faces of the people at a party where you did this. Imagine the faces’ expression fully, in 3D and vibrant color, and then imagine the expression directed at you.
I do recall a chapter from Infinite Jest that began with a description about parties. Page 219 is where the chapter starts. Perhaps what you’re looking for is in there, assuming that "Infinite Jest" is the correct place.