IJ study archive

David Foster Wallace unedited interview (German TV / ZDF, 2003)

source

TL;DR

The raw ~84-minute tape of the famous German-TV interview (done for the German publication of Brief Interviews; the interviewer's aside about that Tuesday's elections dates it to the Nov. 2002 midterms). Probably the single densest late statement of the IJ worldview on video: addiction's addicere etymology and "we all worship," irony as the caged bird singing its love of the cage, the want→need shift, the attack-on-entertainment double bind, reading as vaulting the wall of the self, and the quiet-unsexy-rebellion answer. Being unedited, it also shows the meta-layer — battery changes, crew banter ("pontificating"), DFW repeatedly asking what will be cut — which itself enacts the media-self-consciousness he's describing. Five shorter Manufacturing Intellect uploads are cuts from this same session (see Cross-references).

Key claims

(Interview speech is paraphrase throughout; short coinages stand. Two of the tape's most-quoted lines are spoken variants of print originals, noted in place below.)

  • Irony, two-edged: humor can offer escape from pain or transfigure it; in US entertainment, irony poses as protest without protesting — Wallace recalls someone likening irony to a caged bird singing its love of the cage (his spoken variant of Lewis Hyde's line, which EUP quotes in print as the voice of the trapped who have come to enjoy their cage) — capable of being wake-up call and anesthetic at once. Also the Kafka-laughing-while-writing anecdote.
  • IJ's origin in sadness: written after a couple of acquaintances his own age — not close friends — killed themselves, and it became obvious something was going on: upper-middle-class material comfort coexisting with a great sadness and emptiness.
  • The worship thesis, fully stated: the English root of addict is the Latin addicere — religious devotion; everyone worships, the religious impulse is universal, and what can be chosen (to an extent) is the object; the myth of worshipping nothing merely sets you up to give yourself away to something unchosen — pleasure, drugs, money, or (the tennis academy's version) disciplined individual achievement. This is This Is Water's centerpiece, two years early, tied explicitly to IJ.
  • The American ideology: you matter most, your wants matter most, and life's job is gratifying them — a message nobody states aloud but a great many messages deliver, because flattering the selfish and self-centered parts of a person is the surest way to sell things. Obeying every impulse amounts to "a strange kind of slavery" that advertises itself as freedom of choice.
  • Marketing feeds on the wound it makes: the unease and emptiness the system produces render people easy to market to — feeling uneasy? life feels empty? here's a purchase — the economics term being "inelasticity of demand."
  • Want → need: drug logic as the natural extension of corporate-capitalist logic — the demand to feel exactly as one wants to feel — and a lie, since the control drains away; the slide from wanting a thing to feeling one needs it is, he says, the big shift.
  • The lecturing paradox: discussing citizenship he reports hearing, live, an inner voice mocking the very points as he makes them — the predicament, as he frames it, of being a halfway intelligent American now — the irony trap applied to himself mid-sentence.
  • Silence-dread: friends who can't read feel something close to dread of being alone and quiet; American public space no longer goes quiet; the gratification-self starves the part of a person that hungers for silence and for thinking hard about one thing for half an hour rather than thirty seconds. (Proto-Pale King boredom material.)
  • The double bind of attacking entertainment: aim the attack at people patient enough for complexity and you miss everyone entertainment actually enslaves; make the attack entertaining and the thing you're fighting has captured you. (IJ's own design problem, stated as a trap.)
  • Reading vs. loneliness: reading lets him vault the wall of the self and inhabit someone else — discovering that others think and feel what he'd secretly feared was his private defect; a tremendous reassurance of communion and empathy. TV, though easier, is far lonelier. Books allow mobility inside directed time — a paragraph can be reread — unlike film and music.
  • Tennis: in the book because it was the one sport he knew well enough to explain the beauty of, and because the game is two bounded spaces exchanging an object — a geometry with further work to do in the book; chess-like four-moves-ahead thinking (Becker/McEnroe example); combat at a distance, something colder. Schtitt got a name that merely sounds vaguely Germanic to Americans — not, he grants, the subtlest character in there.
  • On the depressed person (BIWHM): self-hatred, he observes, carries a lot of narcissism; she's the rare protagonist he didn't like; the wounded-inner-child pop-psych paradox — the more thoroughly people are taught to inventory and resent childhood deprivations, the more thoroughly they stay children.
  • Post-9/11 politics: he's more scared of us than of anybody else; SUVs as the national response to fear; nobody hates freedom — people hate people.
  • Rebellion: the meaningful rebels he knows buy little, don't take their world-picture from television, and will happily sink four or five hours into researching an election; whatever rebellion ends up changing anything here will be very quiet, very individual, and probably dull to watch from outside.
  • Mass culture's lowest common denominator and the niche prediction: what makes us a mass, he argues, are our basest and most childish interests; meaningful change requires the entertainment industry fragmenting, magazine-style, toward niches. (Reads now as a forecast of streaming/algorithmic media, with IJ's cartridge menus as the fictional version.)
  • Media meta-layer worth noting: he keeps checking that stretches won't be used, and narrates the fraudulence of pretending the cameras aren't there — the Marketing of Writing cut is built from exactly this material.

Themes

Addiction as displaced worship; entertainment/irony (the cage-loving bird, the double bind); consumerism and the engineered self; communication/solipsism (wall of self); boredom and silence (Pale King pre-echo); citizenship and politics; tennis geometry (Schtitt, bounded spaces).

Cross-references

Notable moments (paraphrase)

  • Irony as the bird's song in praise of its own cage.
  • Worship nothing and you've merely handed the choice of god to someone else.
  • The slide from wanting a thing to needing it named as the big shift.
  • Make the attack on entertainment entertaining and the enemy has already captured you.
  • Reading as vaulting the wall of the self into someone else.
  • More scared of us than of anybody else.
  • The rebellion that will matter predicted to be quiet, individual, and boring to watch.