DFW visits Italy (Le Conversazioni, Capri, 2006)

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TL;DR

Short edited Q&A footage from the June 2006 Le Conversazioni festival on Capri — among the last substantial DFW video. Four compact riffs: failure and being "reduced to the status of a baby" in a language he doesn't speak; the kisses-seen-before-kissing argument about image culture; American identity vs. "something larger"; and the clearest one-paragraph self-placement he ever gave — "using postmodern formal techniques for very traditional ends."

Key claims

(Speech is paraphrase throughout.)

On failure: "fail," he warns, is a dangerous word — once he starts thinking in failure terms the depression arrives and the game is already decided against him. Most of what he starts he doesn't finish; what survives nearly always changes in the doing. Being language-less in Italy is "humiliating" but profoundly good for him — he attends to faces and emotional cues like a child instead of living only through language.
The kiss genealogy (image culture): grandparents had seen ~100 kisses before kissing; parents thousands (Hollywood); by his own first kiss he carried tens of thousands of seen kisses, and much of his mind was on whether he was doing it the way he'd watched it done. And the kicker: it is past winning now — battle-talk no longer even makes sense, since the very language for describing the battle would arrive already made of images.
American identity: the US reflex is individual uniqueness ("what makes David, David?"); the American struggle, as he frames it, is conceiving of identity as part of something larger, with almost no cultural support for doing so — and without it the country fragments and atomizes. Symptom: not one writer he knows thinks of himself as like other writers.
The self-placement: many writers he admires take the post-modern toolkit and aim it at the old traditional human verities — spirituality, emotion, community — "using postmodern formal techniques for very traditional ends"; if such a group exists, that is the one he'd want membership in.
Comic aside: World Cup conversion ("Italy versus Australia with Antonio and David") and a prediction that soccer will conquer American childhood — the soccer people, he deadpans, will cheat and simply outspend everyone.

Themes

Image saturation vs. lived life (the Entertainment's groundwork); identity and the hunger for something larger (worship thesis, gentler register); post-postmodernism / New Sincerity self-definition; failure and depression logic.

Cross-references

E Unibus Pluram: the kiss genealogy is the essay's image-precession argument in anecdote form; "the language of the battle will already be the language of images" concedes the essay's pessimistic case.
Kelly, New Sincerity / White Guys & New Sincerity: "post-modern techniques for traditional ends" is the primary-source definition the scholarship keeps reconstructing.
This Is Water: identity as part of something larger, delivered the previous year as commencement doctrine.
ZDF 2003: atomization and the worship thesis, the longer treatment.
IJ connections: characters who've only seen feelings on screens (Orin's choreographed seductions; Joelle and the camera); fragmentation/atomization as O.N.A.N.'s social physics.

Notable moments (paraphrase)

Tens of thousands of kisses seen before the first one given — and the first one shadowed by the question of whether it matched the screen.
The battle over images already lost at the level of language: any description of the fight would itself be made of images.
The self-placement formula: "using postmodern formal techniques for very traditional ends" — the group he'd want to belong to.