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The Aesthetics of Dissociation:

2013; Penn State University Press; Volume: 96; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.5325/soundings.96.1.0085

2161-6302

Shawn R. Tucker,

Contemporary Literature and Criticism

Seeing a thing can sometimes trigger the mind to make another thing. In some instances the new work may include, as a sort of subject matter, references to the thing that was seen. And, because works of painting tend to share many aspects, working itself may initiate memories of other works. Naming or painting these ghosts sometimes seems to be a way to stop their nagging.—Fred Orton, Figuring Jasper Johns This essay uses the psychological concept of dissociation to describe one way that Radiohead's song “How to Disappear Completely” and Jasper Johns's Device paintings seem to function. In their formal elements, content, and context, these works show the detachment, depersonalization, and automatization that are hallmarks of what psychologists describe as dissociation. The song and paintings do not show these qualities in exactly the same way, but the triangulation of song, paintings, and psychological concept shed light on all three. This examination also reveals a dynamics at the heart of this triangulation. While the aesthetics of the song and paintings demonstrate the above-mentioned dissociative qualities, they do so in a manner that is so lush, sumptuous, and inviting so as to make them very engaging. Consequently, the works invite mental and emotional engagement partly by their dense yet luscious formal qualities and partly by their detached content.The tension created by works that evoke detachment in such an engaging manner creates yet another parallel with psychological insights about dissociation. Contemporary dissociation experts have noted how dreams can often make otherwise invisible dissociative structures or patterns visible. In this respect, the song and paintings function like dreams, as they symbolize such structures and patterns, give them objective form, bring them into the open, and make them available for examination and analysis. By bringing such patterns into the open, into the light of day, these works name or paint or sing about what would otherwise be haunting and spectral, and by doing so create an opportunity to end that ghostly nagging.“I'm not here; this isn't happening.” These six words are the chorus of Radiohead's song “How to Disappear Completely.” This song, featured on the group's 2000 album Kid A, begins with these lines: “That there / That's not me.” Subsequent lines evoke an immaterial, ghostlike irreality on the part of the speaker: “I go / Where I please / I walk through walls / I float down the Liffey / I'm not here / This isn't happening.” In these lines there seems to be a sense of freedom in the image of walking through walls and of escape by floating down Dublin's Liffey, but, as the next lines show, both freedom and escape come from a negation of the self and physical, spatial reality, or at least from a dissociation from those realities. Where these lines evoke a spatial disconnection between subject and surroundings, the song's following stanza creates a tense temporal disconnection: “In a little while / I'll be gone / The moment's already passed / Yeah it's gone.” These lines lead directly into the chorus, “I'm not here / This isn't happening,” as time and space become disconnected from the speaker's sense of reality. This disconnection reaches both a musical and lyrical crescendo in the last stanza and chorus. Here there is the tempestuous combination of both concert stage and natural disaster imagery and the ubiquitous denial of the subject's connection to that context: “Strobe lights and blown speakers / Fireworks and hurricanes / I'm not here / This isn't happening.”This sense of disconnection from stage and storm, from time and place, is reinforced in the song's music. The opening bars, which seem to emerge ex nihilo, are a dense combination of strings reminiscent of the orchestration of Krzyszlof Penderecki. These strings have a vague and unresolved quality that Marianne Tatom Letts connects with the musical concept of “noise” (2005, 44–46). In describing this “noise,” Letts says that “the synthesized strings seem to be simply lying in wait to engulf the voice” (71). This “noise” continues throughout the song, accentuated with the occasional descending electronic guitar call. It is in the midst of this noise that a plaintive guitar emerges, followed by a bass guitar moving through a pentatonic scale. Against this rich musical texture the voice surfaces, with the lyrics sung in a long, conjunct, almost elegiac melody. The vocal line's threnody-like quality over the song's complex musical textures adds to the sense of a disembodied speaker. Each chorus begins with a form of “I'm not here; this isn't happening,” and the “noise” above the second chorus has what Letts calls “horn-like sounds” moving down and up the scale (72). This form of the omnipresent “noise,” which alters slightly as the chorus continues, has a more computerized sound, but it gives the sense of a malfunctioning computer. In the song's third verse, where the voice sings about “Strobe lights and broken speakers / Fireworks and hurricanes,” the “noise,” which has become richer and more complex, seems even more poised to “engulf” the voice. By the end, the falsetto voice parallels the descending electronic guitar call, and the song moves toward a final climactic dissonance. It is amid this dissonance that the voice is completely engulfed. Finally, the song descends into an uneasy resolution of “noise” and bass guitar scales. Letts describes this not as a resolution but as the “voice's” final dissolution, a dissolution brought on by the subject's inability “to cope in the soul-draining alienation of modern society” and the soul's subsequent longing “for release” (76).While Letts places this dissolution within the context of the entire Kid A album as she describes it, the subject's dissolution or disintegration is not unique to Radiohead's “How to Disappear Completely.” Several songs on the band's 1995 album The Bends also give a strong sense of a disintegrated or disconnected subject. “Fake Plastic Trees” evokes such a disconnection with the image of “A green plastic watering can / For a fake Chinese rubber plant / In the fake plastic earth,” a “polystyrene man,” and the chorus's lament about how “She looks like the real thing / She tastes like the real thing / My fake plastic love.” “Fake Plastic Trees” seems haunted by an irreality born of a consumerism that reduces subjects to polystyrene people among plastic objects where real connection is impossible. “Street Spirit (Fade Out),” another song on the same album, paints a picture of a subject fleeing an oppressive reality. The song begins by describing “Rows of houses all bearing down on me / I can feel their blue hands touching me” and a machine that “will not communicate / These thoughts and the strain I am under.” It is in response to this mechanized oppression that the voice pleads: “Be a world child, form a circle / Before we all go under / And fade out again and fade out again.” This desire to form a circle or be a world is a drive to create a protective barrier between the subject and the outside world or reality. Such a need is perhaps explained by the song's violent imagery of “Cracked eggs, dead birds” that “Scream as they fight for life.” It is little wonder that, in such an environment of identity by consumption or horrific violence, another song on the album is named “Bulletproof … I Wish I Was.” Two Radiohead songs written after Kid A also deserve mention in this respect. The sixth track on the 2003 album Hail to the Thief, titled “Where I End and You Begin,” features these dissociative lyrics: “I'm up in the clouds / And I can't, I can't come down / I can watch but not take part / Where I end and where you start / And you, you left me alone.” Finally, the last song on the In Rainbows bonus CD, titled “4 Minute Warning,” is dominated by these lyrics: “This is just a nightmare / Soon I'm going to wake up / Someone's gonna bring me round.”While all of these songs touch on a disconnection between the self and outside reality or between different faculties within the self, this dissociation has its best expression in “How to Disappear Completely,” and some evidence and reasonable conjecture around the song's inspiration may help account for its dissociative qualities. On the origin of “How to Disappear Completely,” it has been written that lead singer Thom Yorke said the following: That song is about the whole period of time that OK Computer was happening. We did the Glastonbury Festival and this thing in Ireland. Something snapped in me. I just said, “That's it. I can't take it anymore.” And more than a year later, we were still on the road. I hadn't had time to address things. The lyrics came from something Michael Stipe said to me. I rang him and said, “I cannot cope with this.” And he said, “Pull the shutters down and keep saying, ‘I'm not here, this is not happening.’” (Green Plastic Radiohead News 2000) We cannot know exactly what the “things” were that Thom Yorke hadn't had time to address, but a few seem clear. While he was surely exhausted from all of the touring, Yorke has also mentioned that he felt angry because he had given over the control of his life and his music to the demands of promoters, managers, record companies, and others. The demands of the “Rock and Roll mythology” (Reflections on Kid A2000) seem to have left him feeling exhausted, disillusioned, and disconnected from his band mates, from audiences, and from the very music he felt forced to perform relentlessly.One symptom of this crisis was Yorke's debilitating two-year bout of writer's block. In Reflections on Kid A (2000), a documentary with performance clips and an interview with Yorke directed by Rob Hodselmans, Yorke said that one way around this block was to take the fragments of lyrics he had written and, instead of throwing them out, pull the snippets out of a top hat and use them at random. What made this so effective for Yorke is that it “managed to preserve whatever emotions were in the original writing but in a way that it is not trying to emote” (Reflections on Kid A2000). Yorke reported that most of the songs on Kid A were put together using this method, one that preserves the evocative qualities of the lines but which is ultimately impersonal, non-emotive, and “automatic” in the Dadaist or Surrealist sense of the term.Yorke used this “automatic” approach as a way around his block, but the most glaring example on the Kid A album not created in this manner is “How to Disappear Completely.” Yorke reported that “How to Disappear Completely” is an older song that predates the writing of other songs on Kid A, and that he liked the lyrics because they were “written quite quickly” (Reflections on Kid A2000). He elaborated that it was written during the most difficult and chaotic time with OK Computer. Of its lyrics, Yorke reported that the chorus “was like a mantra to get out of it, or ‘I'm not here, this isn't happening’” (Reflections on Kid A2000). This “it” seems to be the trauma of that time, and “How to Disappear Completely” was his way to escape. In the interview, as Yorke says these words from the song's chorus, he makes a gesture with his hands like something coming down and says “blinds down sort of thing,” and then comments that this “kept [him] going for a very long time” (Reflections on Kid A2000). It seems reasonable to conclude that the song expressed Yorke's desire to rise above and escape the chaotic loss of control he felt by detaching and disappearing, at least during this one song.While Yorke's experience at the time of its composition helps substantiate a reading of “How to Disappear Completely” that connects it with dissociation, the center of this examination is not the creator's (or one of the creators') biography. What makes the song such a compelling example of the aesthetics of dissociation has less to do with the creator's personal context than how the music and lyrics in the piece evoke elements of what psychologists describe as dissociation. Psychologists define dissociation as “two or more mental processes or contents [that] are not associated or integrated in the normally expected manner” (Encyclopedia of Mental Health1998, 756). In addition, dissociation includes “disruptions of the integrative functions of consciousness, memory, identity, or perception of the environment” (756). The disruptions serve a number of functions. Dissociation “automatizes behavior so that some actions and thought processes can occur without direct conscious attention and hence with increased efficiency” (756). Psychologists point out that dissociation “may permit a form of resolution for irreconcilable conflicts by keeping dissonant issues in different areas or levels of consciousness” (756). Furthermore, it “may allow an escape from reality, giving the illusion of mastery or escape from intolerable circumstances” (756). Finally, “dissociation can isolate catastrophic experiences until an individual is better able to integrate them into mainstream consciousness” (756).Philip Bromberg's elaborations on dissociation further this exploration. Bromberg notes how, “through the creative use of dissociation, the mind selects whichever self-state configuration is most adaptive at a given moment without compromising affective safety” (2006, 4). In everyday life, we switch between self-states, selecting the one that best fits the context. We are not exactly the same when we are sitting in church as we are when we are coaching a kid's soccer game as we are when we are in our lover's arms. We select the best self-state configuration, differentiating between each one, and using dissociation to make each at least somewhat autonomous. Montaigne seems to have this in mind when he observes that “we are all patchwork, and so shapeless and diverse in composition that each bit, each moment, plays its own game” (1958, 244).In such a “patchwork” of self-states, dissociation is both useful and healthy. Dissociation is unhealthy when there is a loss of an overarching and unifying self-coherence. Bromberg notes that this overarching self-coherence is sacrificed when “what was formerly a fluid and creative dialectic between self-states through the normal process of dissociation is slowly replaced by a rigid Balkanization of the various aspects of self” (2006, 5). “Balkanization” here is an evocative term to vividly contrast the healthy dissociation of differentiated yet harmonious self-states sharing an overarching whole against the unhealthy isolation of self-states that lack a unifying self-coherence. Bromberg further elaborates on this disintegration with the image of islands. He explains that what were formerly interrelated and connected self-states become “sequestered islands of ‘truth’” where “each island vigilantly protects itself from potentially disjunctive input of the other by the dissociative ‘gap’ surrounding it” (5).When explaining the impact of these gaps within the self, Bromberg points out that because of such a Balkanization “past trauma is not allowed to enter narrative memory as an authentic part of the past” (2006, 5). Such an unhealthy dissociation “is a defense unlike any other. It protects the stability of the self by controlling unsymbolized traumatic affect that it cannot regulate…. It functions because conflict is unbearable to the mind, not because it is unpleasant” (7). Overwhelming conflict, in the form of “unsymbolized traumatic affect,” is sequestered into sharply divided self-states. Such a sequestering provides relative security, but it comes at the cost of integration and self-coherence. Bromberg and others propose dreams as a way to symbolize traumatic affect and invite reintegration, insights which this essay will address later.What comes to the fore as we examine the song carefully is how well its many elements match up with elements of dissociation. The bass guitar moving up and down the pentatonic scale in regular, repetitive, and predictable ways evokes how dissociation “automatizes behavior” to maximize efficiency by sidestepping “direct conscious attention.” The song's violent imagery and dissonant “noise” contrast sharply with the voice's long, almost monotonous melody. Such a contrast could demonstrate the song's “form of resolutions for irreconcilable conflicts by keeping dissonant issues in different areas.” It is as if some of the musical elements were sonically “sequestered islands.” The possible context for the song's creation shows how it may have allowed Yorke, while performing it, to “escape from [an intolerable] reality.” It certainly seems reasonable that Yorke appreciated the song's dissociative qualities as a way to “isolate catastrophic experiences until” he could “integrate them into [his] mainstream consciousness.” The song's lyrics and music work together to evoke the Balkanization of self-states vigilantly protecting themselves “from potentially disjunctive input.” In the context of the song, “I” am not here precisely because self-coherence's fluidity has become replaced by dissociation's frightened rigidity, resulting in the voice's final disintegration and dissolution.Radiohead's song and the aesthetics of dissociation come into sharper focus when we compare both with Jasper Johns's Device paintings. In 1959 Jasper Johns created Device Circle (see Varnedoe 2006 for this image). The painting has collaged pieces of newsprint on the surface with the pigments in an encaustic medium. This was one of Johns's preferred techniques of the time, used in many, many works, including 1955's Target with Four Faces. Device Circle is also a square, like the square canvas of Target with Four Faces. Both Device Circle and Target with Four Faces feature a centrally placed circle or concentric circles as the key motif. While it lacks the anthropomorphic and enigmatic “four faces,” Device Circle includes the seemingly found object of a stick nailed to the center of a canvas. This stick is used like a compass to inscribe a circle into the painting's surface. Finally, the work's title is stenciled onto the lower portion.In 1961 Johns returned to this motif with Device. This work also has the title stenciled at the bottom and uses similar brushwork, though it is done with oil. Device is a much larger painting than Device Circle, and it employs two sticks used like compasses. But where the stick of Device Circle inscribed a circle into the surface, thicker sticks of Device scrape across the surface. Device's sticks seem more like found pieces of canvas stretcher than a random stick. In 1962 Johns made another version of Device, this time smaller and with what are clearly two rulers and a large, centrally placed piece of wood over a field of black and gray oil paint. The large, centrally placed board in this work is reminiscent of the vertically placed thermometer in the 1959 painting titled Thermometer.A common reading of all of these works places them as responses to the New York Abstract Expressionist school. Such a reading originates with Johns himself, who famously said: I have attempted to develop my thinking in such a way that the work I've done is not me—not to confuse my feelings with what I produce. I didn't want my work to be an exposure of my feelings. Abstract Expressionism was so lively—personal identity and painting were more or less the same, and I tried to operate the same way. But I found I couldn't do anything that would be identical with my feelings. So I worked in such a way that I could say that it's not me. That accounts for the separation. (Raynor 1973, 22) One way to see how Johns's work rejects “lively” Abstract Expressionism as part of his effort to make work that is not identical to his feelings is by comparing his 1959 painting Thermometer to Barnett Newman's 1950–51 Vir Heroicus Sublimis. Newman's tremendous work conveys human nature's heroic and sublime grandeur with a monumental red canvas made all the more vast by subtle modulations and vertical stripes called “zips.” Newman sees his work as part of the grandest traditions of art, and his attempt to engage the viewer in the largest themes of the human drama uses an artistic method as simple yet powerful as the first notes of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony. Johns's Thermometer does not make any of these grand claims. Thermometer is on a more modest scale, less than 5 feet by about 3 feet instead of almost 8 feet by almost 18 feet. The vertically placed thermometer at the center of Johns's work replicates and even mocks Newman's zips. Johns's stenciled numbers along the thermometer copy the instrument's temperature calibrations. The thermometer and its stenciled numbers emerge from a field of brushstrokes not unlike those of de Kooning and other Abstract Expressionists, but the work's banality seems to mock Abstract Expressionism's “overheated” subjectivity and quest for sublime spiritual or psychological “heights.”There seems to be something even more aggressive in the Device paintings' interrogation of Abstract Expressionist subjectivity. Device Circle includes a found object, a device, that actually inscribes an almost mechanized circle across the field. The other Device works go further, smearing and blurring the individual paint marks and gestures. This can be read as having profound artistic and even ontological implications. For some Abstract Expressionists, the mark, the drip, or the brushstroke, like the handprints in cave paintings, were existential if not cosmic assertions of self upon the void of nothingness. Johns's devices literally smear and obliterate the individual qualities of the marks and distort beyond recognition the very vehicle of self, of identity, and of existence. Johns's Devices, with their blurred fields, leave traces of what has been lost and can never be recovered. The devices are small, subject-removal machines, machines that erase the gesture and its existential assertions.As an erasure of the subjective and of subjectivity, Johns's Device paintings embody his attempt to make art that is “not him,” art that is not “an exposure of [the artist's] feelings.” Seen in the light of the psychological ideas of dissociation, Johns dissociates what he makes from who he is. The Device paintings isolate or separate the objective and the subjective, functions that the Abstract Expressionists collapsed. These seemingly mechanized paintings, or, better said, anti-painting mechanized “devices,” demonstrate a level of detachment, depersonalization, and automatization that suspends if not eliminates emotional involvement.Where “How to Disappear Completely” features a voice and melody seemingly cut off from an otherwise overwhelming reality, a disconnection seen in the contrast between the voice and its musical environment, the Device paintings employ a gesture-erasing machine that breaks the connection between the subjective and the objective. These are not identical dissociations, but both works function against “associations or integrations in the normally expected manner,” and in doing so evoke a lost integration of fluid self-coherence. Though dissimilar from the song in many ways, it seems that a very fitting subtitle for Johns's Device paintings could be I'm Not Here.While such a subtitle does seem appropriate, given the artist's statement, the seeming “objectivity” of the works, and their simultaneous denial and even erasure of subjectivity, there is still a very strong sense in which even these works by Johns and Radiohead say something very different from “I'm Not Here.” The very vehemence of the denial invites one to look deeper; the gaping absence beckons one to look for an otherwise invisible or unrecognized “ghostly” presence.In July of 2006 Thom Yorke released a solo album called The Eraser. The title track from the album includes this lyric: “The more you try the eraser / The more, the more / The more that you appear.” What Yorke's song says about the eraser can point toward a complementary crosscurrent at work in the song and paintings that are the focus of this study. In the aesthetics of dissociation, the greater the attempt to dissociate, to disintegrate, and to erase, the more powerfully that which is erased appears or that which is separated invites connection and engagement. As cool and emotionally inert as Johns's Device paintings might seem, the richness of the thickly gestural passages has a powerful subjective appeal. The contrast between blurred and unblurred fields of gestural marks makes the erasure of those marks of subjectivity all the more obvious and subjectively engaging. In addition, the contrast between the “automatic” stenciled title and movement of the “device,” and the sumptuous gestural field heightens the tension between the objective and subjective, throwing the contrasts, the crosscurrents, into relief instead of making them disappear completely.We find the same dynamic undertow in the Radiohead song. The seemingly unemotional singing, accompanied by the plaintive guitar set against such a rich musical texture brings to the fore the conflictive dynamics of the voice that says it is “not there,” but whose presence and subjectivity are all the stronger for its constant denial. The lyrics hold out hope that “in a little while / I'll be gone,” but, of course, that “little while” never comes; the voice that says that “it is not there,” and says that over and over again, is all the more “there” each subsequent time it denies this fact. This does not eliminate the original dissociation, but places it in a powerful, contrasting tension. Both works evoke dissociations, but as they do, and the more strongly they do it, the more they make those dissociations visible. Struck by those dissociations, the tensions invite an even more “associative,” connected, and engaging response from an audience.This tension, the way that the works seem to evoke dissociation or disengagement in such an engaging manner, leads to one more important connection between these works and psychological insights about dissociation, specifically, the connection between dissociation and dreams. As mentioned previously, Bromberg holds the view that dissociation “protects the stability of the self by controlling unsymbolized traumatic affect that it cannot regulate” (2006, 7). Sequestered and isolated, unsymbolized traumatic affect not only cannot be regulated but it cannot be integrated. Among Bromberg's contributions to his field is how enactments between an analyst and a patient can symbolize such affects so that they can be integrated. One phenomenon that Bromberg often finds helpful for such enactments are dreams, and part of the reason he calls his book Awakening the Dreamer is because he notes how effectively traumatic affect is symbolized in dreams. To awaken the dreamer is, among other things, to invite otherwise isolated self-states to become aware of one another, to speak, to begin to communicate, and finally to negotiate a shared, fluid relationship. On the role and function of dreams, Bromberg notes that dreaming might be considered among the most routine day-to-day dissociative activities of the mind—its nocturnal function being an adaptational effort to cope with minimal levels of affectively disruptive not-me experience without interfering with the waking illusion of central consciousness. One of its manifestations in psychoanalysis is to contain and hold, as a separate reality, unprocessed affective experience that is not safely containable at that moment within the “I” that defines the analytic relationship for the patient. (38–39) As a container and “separate reality,” dreams keep traumatic content at bay, but they also keep it at hand and within the possible reach of a consciousness willing to wake up to its reality.Bromberg connects these ideas about dreams with those expressed by Cecily de Monchaux. De Monchaux explains the important therapeutic role of communicating one's dreams by first noting that “dream telling is a dissociated action itself, and the content of what is told is experienced as such by the teller—as different from the content of day thinking, and in sanity, not to be confused with it” (1993, 203). De Monchaux, while noting the dissociative nature of relating one's dreams, further elaborates that it may be precisely because of its dissociative characteristics that the dream becomes the vehicle, the container, of split-off elements. Since the dreamer has the illusion that he is not responsible for his dream, it is safe to put unwanted thoughts into it. It functions as a place of asylum, in which split-off elements can be kept alive until conditions are propitious for their integration with consciously acceptable elements. (203) Dreams, and therefore dream-telling, are not identical with the speaker, and it is precisely because of this separation, this dissociation, that they can provide a safe place or asylum where otherwise threatening material can be contained until it can be integrated. But the tremendous advantage that dreams provide is that through dreams one can begin to deal with dissociation. Therefore, with the aid of dreams, continues de Monchaux, “dissociation with no access to consciousness, as in the numbing or freezing stages of the primary stress response, gives way to dissociation with partial access to consciousness via night thinking, and this provides a trial ground, a way station on the road to integration” (203).In this respect “How to Disappear Completely” and the Device paintings function like dreams. While these “dreams” may hold a particular purpose for their “tellers,” and we have touched on how they may function for Yorke and Johns, for other audiences these dreams are expressive yet objective “containers.” The song and paintings are “not me,” and one can look or not look, play, pause, replay, or stop them whenever one would like. One is safe to listen to them or look at them, and then free to stop as soon as one feels threatened. And why might an audience feel threatened? While the works do not specifically point toward any particular danger, they powerfully evoke what for an audience may be previously unsymbolized trauma. They also demonstrate how one might deal with that trauma; by dissociating. By evoking the trauma that triggers dissociation and then by revealing dissociation as a method of containing that trauma, these works make the otherwise invisible dynamics of dissociation visible, at least to an audience willing to “awaken” to that dream. And though the paintings and song seem haunted by trauma, the works themselves, like dreams, provide an asylum, “a trial ground, a way station on the road to integration” as a means to examine and potentially put an end to the ghostly nagging. These are indeed “haunting” works of art, but they may help to make visible and finally exorcize the very ghosts they evoke.