Evasion: Responsibility and Rebellion with CrimethInc. and Wendell Berry

(anti-© 2001)

The ‘90s hardcore scene was a wild and wooly place: fights interrupted performances, militant straight edgers attacked people who drank beer, and the Animal Liberation Front hosted fundraising events. As I see it, hardcore was an adaptive response of people born into a culture of nothing and thus with no choice but to make that nothing be everything. It was an evasion in search of something else.

In that regard, it’s incredible to see how many of the perspectives put forward in ‘80s and ‘90s hardcore circles have surfaced in mainstream discourse over the last 10-15 years. Despite its limitations, the culture was light years ahead of its time in discussing animal rights, police violence, and racial inequality.

CrimethInc. was one of the more overtly political participants in the culture. It was (and I guess still is) a type of anarchist cooperative that released books, records, fanzines, etc. I remember seeing their Adbusters-style spoof advertisements and vaguely Situationist publications at shows and thought they were intriguing enough. This was before everything could be traced to its Instagram page thirty seconds after seeing it, and stray photocopies of provocative hoax articles could elicit a sense of genuine mystery.

“The opium of a new generation.” One of the original CrimethInc. flyers (anti-© 1990sish?)

So, CrimethInc. was already on my radar when Evasion was first released in 2001. I don’t remember where I got it. Looking at it now, I see the copyright page mentions an address in Atlanta, and I guess I must have ordered it from there.

Evasion is part Yippie how-to manual and part Kerouac-style travelogue. It was something of a Steal This Bookfor the militant vegan/straight edge set. The book documents the author’s (likely somewhat fictionalized) lifestyle of squatting in buildings, dumpster diving for food, hitchhiking, attending punk rock concerts, and shoplifting.

At the time, the author was a shadowy figure known as “Mack Evasion.” Not a lot of his back story was publicly known, though virtually all indicators point to him having been Peter Young. As it turns out, Young had originally xeroxed ten copies of Evasion as a fanzine that then found its way into the hands of the CrimethInc. folks who published it as the book that made its way into my disaffected teenage hands a few years later.

The book isn’t subtle in its attempt to politicize degeneracy. Time and again it bludgeons the reader with some version of Brecht’s famous quip “What is the robbing of a bank compared to the founding of a bank?” (slightly more modest, the Evasion version might run “What is the theft of organic orange juice compared to the founding of a Whole Foods?”). It paints a number of villains of the sort one would expect, but the main target is wage labor.

If he’s to be believed, “Mack Evasion” has a hilarious origin story. As Young tells it, it was none other than Bill Nye the Science Guy, apparently an acquaintance of Young’s father, who issued the germ of Evasion when he told an adolescent Young to avoid work at all costs. A great story, and actually quite fitting—Bill Nye’s response to climate change deniers was pretty punk.  

“A liberating tale for anyone told that they must go to school, get a job, and give up their values”

It must be an unwritten law of the universe that anyone who has heard of Evasion make the same critique: Mack’s model doesn’t scale. After all, the dumpster would dry up if we all tried dumpstering our soy milk, right?

True as far as it goes, but I always thought the ritual of running through that critique was a little tedious. I mean, to be fair to both Young and the CrimethInc. editors, they’re clear from the outset that the book doesn’t aspire to set forward a revolutionary program.

If the first obligatory critique is the book’s lack of a substantive social vision, then the second is its suburban self-indulgence. It’s important but trivially easy to make the case that Mack’s lifestyle had quite a bit to do with his ethnoracial identity and social class background. Some version of the modern account of that critique goes back to Updike’s savaging of Harry Angstrom and Mailer’s of the beat generation, and it’s not wrong. Really, Mack is his own worst enemy here. He was probably in his early twenties when he wrote Evasion, and the book has the shrill tone of the overly literal, know-it-all teen.

However, as above, one wonders if there might not be more here. As it turns out, the reason Young hid his identity wasn’t merely a matter of fashion--at the time that Evasion was rocketing up the punk rock charts, he was living underground and on the run from the FBI.

Long story short: the FBI had categorized Young as an ecoterrorist after he’d released minks from a factory farm in Wisconsin. Why did he do that? The living conditions for animals are famously bad on factory farms, and of course the minks were likely to be killed to make clothing, so Young felt his choice to risk imprisonment for the sake of decreasing animal suffering was justified. Ultimately, he spent two years in federal prison after living under assumed identities for nearly seven.  

Peter Young

The point isn’t whether there is anything to Young’s analysis or methods. Rather, the idea is that the author’s suburban silliness looks different when seen from the perspective of someone willing to go to federal prison for their beliefs; if nothing else, it casts the self-indulgence of Evasion in a different light.

Interestingly, Young himself seems to speak to this point in a 2012 talk when he says the following (25:01):

[After prison] I sort of stepped into another life. But it was one I could feel a lot better about because I’d spent a lot of years sort of being…an unintentional spokesperson for like [a] hedonistic punk rock lifestyle…and that was great…and it helped a lot of people…you know, it was cool, but I felt a lot better being back in the animal rights movement, doing something I felt really good about, helping, you know, animals that have no voice, and that was something I just felt so much better about in terms of like having a role in this world.

Doubtless part of his response centers as much on impatience with the role of being a spokesperson of the lifestyle as much as the lifestyle itself. Still, while Young doesn’t disavow the methods detailed in Evasion, he does refer to the lifestyle as “hedonistic” and imply that he felt better when he moved on to more substantive ethical commitments.

This brings us to the thorny relationship between personal responsibility and juvenile self-indulgence in a culture that can’t quite sort the two out. Perhaps this is yet another case where the hardcore vanguard was just a little ahead of the curve: the question of immaturity feels very much of the moment.

America is looking rather gawky in its awkward adolescence and can’t seem to quite get its footing in figuring out its relationship with responsibility. One detects a certain distrust of American self-indulgence in so much of contemporary criticism (Jordan Peterson, Jocko Willink, David Goggins, etc.). Even Bill Nye in the clip cited above refers to the self-infantilizing of climate change deniers.

However, from another perspective, this is less a recent crisis than an articulation or exacerbation of an underlying cultural dynamic. It is perhaps fitting that the brilliant Wendell Berry’s “Writer and Region” diagnoses a similar cultural impulse at work in Huckleberry Finn—one of the canonical entries in the genre of which Evasion partakes. Consider:

The real ‘evasion’ of the last chapter is Huck’s, or Mark Twain’s, evasion of the community responsibility  which would have been a natural and expectable next step after his declaration of loyalty to his friend….Huck, whom we next see, not as a grown man but as a partner in another boyish evasion….I am supposing, then, that Huckleberry Finn fails in failing to imagine a responsible, adult community life. And I am supposing further that this is the failure of Mark Twain’s life, and of our life, so far, as a society (20).

The repetition of the term “evasion” in the passage above is delicious for our purposes. Yet, in “Writer and Region,” Berry points to a different evasion than that given in Evasion. On this account, instead Mack’s principled, Thoreauvian version of evasion, Berry instead points to a regrettable, childish evasion of meaningful responsibility that is at the heart of American society.

The disjuncture is clear. On the one hand, Mack’s Evasion is premised on social critique. And it’s not altogether wrong—the organization of labor in post-industrial societies has obvious issues. Given the realities of managerial capitalism, it’s hard not to blame anyone for wanting to dumpster dive rather than spend the rest of their short life on yet another Zoom call.

On the other hand, it’s easy to throw the baby out with the bathwater. A rejection of alienated labor and consumer responsibility can easily slip into a rejection of meaningful labor and substantive responsibility. Separating one from the other is no easy task in a society that is at best experiencing growing pains and at worst providing evidence that it is fundamentally misguided. It’s hard not to be of two minds on this, and one of my favorite parts of Berry’s essay is his open discomfort with its conclusions (19-20).  

Then again, maybe I’m just struggling with my own veneration of frivolity: despite my best efforts, I’m as American as they come (my Colombian girlfriend once teased me that the reason why I’m never homesick is because I spontaneously generate a field of Americana wherever I go). Maybe I just don’t want to give up my own knee-jerk romanticizing of the “spirit of youth.”

Despite seeming like overgrown adolescents, maybe we’re not quite adolescent enough. Or maybe too much? What’s medicine and what’s candy here?

For me, and I think for a lot of us, that really is a question at the heart of how to be an adult in contemporary America. Who knows—maybe a mature Mack Evasion can give us insight into exactly what it is that we want to evade.

The Most Interesting Scene in Clive Barker’s Nightbreed (1990)

Credit: Morgan Creek Productions. Distributed by: 20th Century Studios

Nightbreed (1990) is a visually striking movie with no shortage of provocative scenes: urban legend has it that at one time it was in the Guinness Book of World Records for having the most monsters on screen at one time.

Despite its striking scenes (or because of them), I’m of two minds on Nightbreed. On the one hand, it feels like a missed opportunity. On the other hand, I’m not the first to see that there’s something deeper going on behind the film’s gross-out monsters and cheesy gags.

Indeed, no less an authority than Chilean experimental filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky (whose best-known work was funded by John Lennon and Yoko Ono and is somehow still alive despite being like 100) praised Nightbreed, calling it “the first truly gay horror fantasy epic” and a probing examination of the “unconsummated relationship between doctor and patient.” 

While some have questioned Jodorowsky’s emphasis on psychiatry (while agreeing with the gay subtext, which it seems everyone acknowledges), it’s somewhat obvious that he has put his finger on a key theme. However, an often-overlooked scene indicates that the film’s examination of psychiatric power is even deeper than Jodorowsky recognized.

Film Overview

Nightbreed follows Aaron Boone (Craig Sheffer), a factory worker who’s been having nightmares about a city called Midian that is populated by monsters. At the start of the film, Boone is working with Dr. Philip K. Decker (that’s gotta be a Philip K. Dick allusion, right?), played by the marvelous David Cronenberg.

At the start of the film, Decker convinces Boone he is a serial killer and drugs him with LSD. After attempting to kill himself while on the drug, Boone meets Narcisse, a disturbed man ranting about Midian, where he suggests Boone will be able to find forgiveness for being a murderer (after which he removes his own face with two knives—the film has an interesting preoccupation with the face; in one scene, Decker says each person has a “secret face,” which is interesting phrasing given that the face is the outwardly facing part of ourselves that we present to others—a more pedestrian choice of language would have been “secret life” or “secret desire”).

Credit: Morgan Creek Productions. Distributed by: 20th Century Studios

From there, the plot largely centers on Boone’s attempt to escape Decker (revealed early in the film as the actual serial killer) and join the monsters of Midian. As it turns out, the monsters are in fact remaining members of races that had been persecuted by humans to the point of extinction and were thus forced to form their own supportive community outside of the confines of normal society. The film culminates in a violent showdown between the misfit monsters and the town’s ignorant rednecks.

The Scene

The film’s thematic content isn’t subtle (“ordinary” people are the true monsters, we destroy what we envy, etc.). I’m sure it would surprise no one to find out that the film has a considerable cult following amongst people who identify as misunderstood outsiders.

The link to psychiatry that Jodorowsky points out is similarly overt given the confrontation between Boone and Decker. Nevertheless, one scene casts the film’s approach to psychiatric violence in a new light and with greater depth than even Jodorowsky seems to have acknowledged.

Credit: Morgan Creek Productions. Distributed by: 20th Century Studios

The scene I’m thinking of comes up at 51:48 of the director’s cut released in 2014. In the scene, Boone is engaged in a fistfight with Decker when Narcisse happens upon them, announces his desire to kill Decker, and says:

Remember me? Doctor? I was dying when you had your way with me. You made me give up my secrets when I was feeling particularly vulnerable. Now, is that a nice thing for a doctor to do?

As suits the film, Narcisse’s message here is not subtle (and certainly the phrasing of “had your way with me” is evocative).

There are a few ways to come at this, as the violence of the psychiatric relationship operates on a few levels. The first stems from the power asymmetry of the interpersonal relationship between doctor and patient. The psychiatric relationship inherently entails that one party divulge their secrets, which the other to varying degrees forcefully extracts. This style of violence is arguably inherent to the therapeutic relationship, though it can be mitigated to varying degrees. On this account, Narcisse’s phrasing can be taken to suggest the sense of humiliation and exploitation that can stem from the therapeutic exchange.

Moving on, given the film’s focus on the (homoerotic) outsider, an obvious rendering would be to see Narcisse’s remarks as communicating a more general anti-psychiatry message. Seen from this perspective, the film would present a critique of how the clinical relationship can enforce stifling conformity.

Anytime therapeutic practice aims to reconfigure someone’s psyche, the obvious question becomes why that is being done and in service of what goal. If the classic Freudian point is that all socialization entails some repression, then the question becomes which types of repression we tolerate and why. As Marcuse famously pointed out in his handling of psychoanalysis, some forms of repression might be necessary while others are not. The challenge is how to sort out one from the other.

Credit: Morgan Creek Productions. Distributed by: 20th Century Studios

The film’s queer subtext provides one register on which to digest this point: after all, homosexuality was treated as a mental health disorder up through the 1970s. However, the metaphor can be broadened beyond that to take on the question of mental health care for misfits more generally, and for that reason it has long served as the basis of the classic (perhaps facile) critiques of the sociologist Talcott Parsons’s functionalism. In a different form, the topic was of course taken up by folks like Deleuze and Guattari.

Conclusion 

There certainly are other ways to come at this, but the point for our purposes is that the scene with Narcisse we’ve just highlighted indicates the potential depth of the film as an examination of psychiatric violence.

Still, even its most interesting scene isn’t enough to make the film interesting in its entirety. In many ways, the tragic story of the film’s production and the compromises Barker had to make to get it made replicates the film’s theme of the oppressive effects of ignorance.

Depending on how you count, we currently have roughly four versions of the film. Maybe the next ten years will give us yet another version of Nightbreed, and perhaps the director’s cut of the director’s cut will be wise enough to give Narcisse the final word.

Horror and the Glib Comforts of Reason

I’ve been reading a ton of Colombian horror comics the last few months, which has led me to think about what horror can do for us as a genre and the blind spots that at least this particular iteration of it can underscore.

Horror isn’t altogether new terrain for me. When I was little, I wrote endless stories modeled on the slasher B-movies I’d tape off HBO. People thought I’d be a horror writer. I grew away from it, but I never rejected it as I did some of my other youthful tastes. I’ve remained a reasonably committed but casual horror fan.

But over the last year or two, it’s become central to what I read and watch. A key part of this has been the heap of local Colombian horror comics I’ve devoured. The Bogota Zombie Massacre, Saic, SRT, and Hvamincide are some titles that stand out. They’re a great way to refine my understanding of Colombian society as well as my Spanish linguistic facility.

I’m always a little skeptical of attempts to read socio-political import into pop culture products, which often seems like people looking for excuses to talk about their pet tastes. At its worst, it can feel a little frothy and like a distraction from more demanding but salient ventures. This obviously isn’t always true, but you don’t have to try too hard to find that dynamic at work.

However, that is clearly not the case with huge swaths of Colombian horror comics or heavy metal (there’s quite a bit of overlap between those communities in Bogota, as I suspect is the case more generally). Not only is the socio-political critique not subtle, but the authors often directly say that their work explores weighty topics like colonialism, political corruption, global inequality, and race relations.

By focusing on what frightens and makes us uncomfortable, horror has a general affinity with socio-political critique. It’s nicely primed to raise questions about troubling norms or social practices. It pushes buttons that can lead us to ask about the sociocultural undercurrents behind our anxieties and fears. Understanding what scares or disgusts us can tell us a lot about the type of society we live in. This is a classic form of the social as the personal — and few things are more personal (but often generalizable) than what we fear.

In hindsight, I was too quick to underestimate the utility of horror as a vehicle for challenging social inequities. This probably happened for a few reasons, including the peculiar form of provincialism characteristic of those critiques seeming almost too familiar.

In that sense, I remember once talking with a brilliant cognitive scientist who responded impatiently to an anthropologist’s work in which an interviewee took pains to emphasize that both she and her community cared about the well-being of her/their children.

The point seemed absurd to the cognitive scientist: of course they cared about their children. From an evolutionary standpoint, how could they do otherwise?

A reasonable question, but the absurdity is of course the point. It’s ridiculous to suggest that entire communities don’t care about their children. Unfortunately, we live in a ridiculous world. Some arguments are worth refuting not because they’re the best version of the argument but because they’re the version that’s on the table.

Thinking about this, not to push my Sartre a little harder than it might deserve, but part of me wonders if that tendency towards over-emphasizing reasoned insight might not be a way to impose a comforting illusion of order on an often absurd world. In a darker vein, it can easily mask or even foster hatred.

In that sense, part of what makes horror powerful is that it is a potent rallying point. The audiences are huge, and people derive real meaning and power from its messages. This sociological thrust is worth noting both on its own and because it shapes the work itself. There’s a certain gestalt to this and something of a synergistic effect. The material takes on another meaning when situated in another setting. This is true both sociologically and aesthetically.

On one level, this of course all sounds obvious, and I’ve read enough social science and social movement theory to know better. Still, at the risk of stating the obvious to diagnose a problem of stating the obvious, it’s awfully easy to have one’s lived perspective be out of step with one’s better judgment (before laughing, recall the last time you were genuinely but privately astounded by a platitude like “life is short” when it hit you that, well, life really is kind of short).

And, of course, that’s what my motivation to obsessively read about zombies devouring a person’s brain stems from: my struggle to wrap my head around the obvious. How could it not?

The Long Take as Argument: Editing in Bela Tarr’s The Turin Horse (2011)

“Don’t be too sophisticated. Just listen to your heart and trust your eyes.”

I guess you could say I trusted my eyes when I rolled them after reading that comment from Bela Tarr. That was his answer when asked about the allusion to Nietzsche in his film The Turin Horse (TTH) (2011).

I mean, seriously? Don’t be too sophisticated about your 2.5-hour, black-and-white avant-garde film that opens with an explicit allusion to Nietzsche? No, we don’t want to risk overthinking that one.

But, as I thought about it further, I wondered if there might be something to Tarr’s idea of letting the film speak on its own terms. I began to wonder: what would it mean to approach the film in the way he describes? What could such an approach tell us about TTH, film, or the cosmic collapse we apparently are all facing?

The Turin Horse

What is TTH about? As with any rich parable, the film requires either no explanation or extensive explanation.

It opens with an allusion to the (likely apocryphal) account of Nietzsche breaking down and weeping when he saw a recalcitrant horse being beaten. As the story goes, this event heralded the start of the nervous breakdown that led Nietzsche to convalesce in his mother’s home for the last ten years of his life.

So, if we take the story at face value, we know what happened to Nietzsche, but we don’t know what happened to the horse. The film explores that premise.

We follow the horse to the home of an older man and his adult daughter. The film then tracks the Beckettian father-daughter duo through six days of endless routine, repetition, and silence in their one-room cabin. A storm rages outside. A visitor shows up looking for booze. The two occasionally attempt to leave, only to have their attempts thwarted by the disobedient horse or the brute fact that there is simply nowhere to go.

As the film progresses, things gradually decline: the horse refuses to leave and eventually stops eating, the well goes dry, and the electricity fades (which geographer Franklin Ginn interestingly interprets as a comment on the Anthropocene). As the storm continues to rage, the two characters progressively decline until the daughter ceases eating in a way that parallels that of the horse. As the film closes, the end is clearly near.

What is it all About?

Commentators have seemed a little unsure about what to make of TTH. Some focus on the theme of mortality (though Tarr has said that wasn’t his intention, which may or may not mean anything), others on ecological collapse, and some even on extracting a gritty, Zizekian optimism from the film’s bleak vision.

It’s an elusive film, and I’m inclined to think each of the commentators is picking up on something. Tarr has given us quite a bit of help in thinking through what to make of the film. In one interview, he said:

The Turin Horse is about the heaviness of human existence. How it’s difficult to live your daily life, and the monotony of life. We didn’t want to talk about mortality or any such general thing. We just wanted to see how difficult and terrible it is when every day you have to go to the well and bring the water, in summer, in winter… All the time.

In another, later interview, he said of his work more generally:

At the beginning of my career, I had a lot of social anger. I just wanted to tell you how fucked up the society is. This was the beginning. Afterwards, I began to understand that the problems were not only social; they are deeper. I thought they were only ontological. It’s so, so complicated, and when I understood more and more… I could understand that the problems were not only ontological. They were cosmic. The whole fucked up world is over.

So, it looks like Tarr’s work is setting out a few layers of collapse: social, ontological, and cosmic (I’m admittedly not 100% clear on the distinction between the last two, but in the spirit of Tarr’s remarks, let’s not dwell on that). I guess the tedium and heaviness of human existence would fall in the “ontological” category (for Tarr) while the forces personified in TTH’s storm would operate at the “cosmic” level he specifies.

It’s interesting to note that some of these considerations (e.g., getting the water from the well) would seem to speak to ineluctable, universal features of human experience, while others would seem to be more historically or socially contingent — even if that contingency is raining down upon us from some cosmic height.

Needless to say, the explanation we have here is a little fuzzy, but I’m inclined to think that fuzziness nicely operates on two levels. The first is that the layered series of failures Tarr sets out reflects the way that humans are facing a confluence of factors contributing to a broad form of collapse that isn’t amenable to simple explanation. I suppose it’s not a simple matter when the “whole fucked up world is over.”

The second reason this fuzziness is valuable is that it speaks to a certain lived experience. Part of what I take Tarr to be saying is that regardless of the details of these successive layers of failure and the complexities of how they interact, one simply has the sense that things aren’t right. We lived in the midst of an intuitive, lived feeling of collapse (or as Leonard Cohen said, “Everybody knows the boat is leaking; everybody knows the captain lied. Everybody’s got this broken feeling, like their father or their dog just died”).

I suspect this second consideration is at least part of why Tarr discourages the viewer from overinterpreting the Nietzsche reference: the film communicates a type of nebulous existential anxiety and discomfort because at least some dimension of human experience entails nebulous existential anxiety and discomfort. There’s no sense in being overly literal in trying to sort out the terms of the experience or put it on a Nietzschean register, or a Marxist register of social critique, or whatever else.

Why bother with the irritating literalism of soporific footnotes to Beyond Good and Evil, when everybody has no choice but to breathe the air of knowing that the world is fucked up and, besides, over anyway. At least that’s what I hear Tarr saying.

What Does it Mean to Treat a Film as a Theoretical Text?

Moving forward, one way to look at Tarr’s remarks would be to see them as a way to preserve the integrity of the film as a theoretical text.

What do I mean by that? There’s been a debate going back to at least Eisenstein’s claim that he could produce a film version of Marx’s Capital as to whether film is capable of making a conceptual argument. Indeed, Deleuze commentedthat it was possibly only with Godard that film became properly philosophical, suggesting that:

Godard transforms cinema by introducing thought into it. He doesn’t have thoughts on cinema, he doesn’t put more or less valid thought into cinema; he starts cinema thinking, and for the first time, if I’m not mistaken. Theoretically, Godard would be capable of filming Kant’s Critique or Spinoza’s Ethics, and it wouldn’t be abstract cinema or a cinematographic application (141).

Interesting idea, right? Of course, not everyone has had so sanguine a view of film’s conceptual potential (e.g., Kracauer, Mitry), but I’m inclined to think that (however indirectly) a film, like any artwork, is perfectly capable of putting forward a theoretically interesting perspective, but I’d rather not have a horse in the arid race of that debate.

Regardless of the medium’s potential, I understand the filmmaker’s desire to have their work taken seriously as its own theoretical text. What would that mean? Well, on a basic level, it would treat the film as a primary source that advances its own claims. This approach would run counter to one that treats film merely as a vehicle for communicating raw material that can then be theorized (such as a thought experiment), a dramatization of theoretical perspectives, or — God forbid — a bland pedagogical accounting of “what the philosophers thought” (though we all love a good documentary).

Instead, an approach that treats a film as a primary source would see it as utilizing film’s unique blend of sound, image, and text as a way of putting forward at least an interesting perspective if not what our more literal friends might accept as an argument.

To return now to TTH, what I’m trying to suggest is that it’s possible that in his dismissal of “sophistication,” what Tarr might have been getting at was his resistance to turning TTH into just another commentary on (or — worse — a dramatization of) the Nietzschean perspective. Rather, he requests that the film be taken seriously as its own theoretical intervention.

The Long Take

It’s worth pausing to look a little more closely at the mechanics of how this might be achieved. How might The Turin Horse make use of film’s unique traits to insert thought into cinema (to borrow Deleuze’s phrase from above)?

As with anything in film, the editing process would be foundational here. Editing is how the film artist organizes the cinematic experience. Without editing, one would simply have a videoed account of what happened to end up in front of the camera (which arguably would still represent a form of editing insofar as the scope of the frame would dictate the scope of the viewer’s experience).

Given its obviousness, part of me is almost embarrassed to focus on TTH’s editing technique: the entirety of the film’s two-and-a-half-hour runtime only includes 30 cuts (the average number of cuts in a typical ninety-minute Hollywood film is over 1100).

So, our reflections have brought us to Tarr’s famous long take. The long take is great for letting us watch things unfold, but in this case, we have the long take with nothing unfolding. The camera in TTH dwells at length on the characters as they stare longingly out the window and watch the storm outside. It focuses for long periods on the horse’s sad face (apparently Tarr went to great lengths to choose a suitably sad-looking horse). We get several extended shots of the characters lying silently in bed.

There are a few ways to come at this. Perhaps one of the more obvious approaches would be to see the long takes as simulating the experience of the characters — which, in turn, would of course underscore Tarr’s point about the tedium of human existence. Fair enough.

However, what interested me about the long take was how it both brought me deeper into the film and took me out of it. For me, the long take didn’t just generate a feeling of boredom and frustration: it edged me out of the film’s world and led me to reflect on myself. In this way, it left me to feel a disturbingly empty form of human experience by slowly withdrawing any source of distraction.

In this regard, the long take didn’t just generate boredom in a way that mirrored that which the characters were obviously experiencing — rather, the film itself was a type of machine for engineering a rendering of human experience evacuated of content other than desire for something more.

One way to think about this filmic mechanism is as a vehicle for setting forward a type of argument for Tarr’s rendering of cosmic collapse. The film engineers an experience where I am torn out of the film and thrown back on myself in a way that argues for the type of tedium and collapse that Tarr’s film sets forward.

Depending on your approach, the long take then becomes an argument for either the existence of the type of cosmic collapse that Tarr gestures toward or for the lived sense of human experience as characterized by that sense of collapse (or both).

Conclusion

There’s a certain irony to the path we’ve taken: we’ve ended up overthinking Tarr’s request that we not overthink his film.

But it seems to have been a productive trip following out the complexity so often housed in simplicity as we made sense of TTH, film’s potential for theorizing, the tedium of human existence, and the possibility of cosmic collapse.

But, then again, we don’t want to risk being too sophisticated about it.

Ray Bradbury on the Existential Yearning of Editing

This morning I came across this beautiful passage in Ray Bradbury’s A Graveyard for Lunatics (1990):

I moved up the stairs toward the flickering firefly light and the stuttering chatter of the Moviola as the shadows blinked on her high ceiling.

I stood for a long moment in the night, gazing in at the one place in all this world where life was sliced, assembled, then torn apart again. Where you kept doing life over until you got it right. Peering down at the small Moviola screen, you turn on the out-board motor and speed along with a fierce clacking clap as the film slots through, freezes, delineates, and rushes on. After staring into the Moviola for half a day, in a subterranean gloom, you almost believe that when you step outside life itself will reassemble, give up its moron inconsistencies, and promise to behave. Running a Moviola for a few hours encourages optimism, for you can rerun your stupidities and cut off their legs. But the temptation, after a time, is to never step out in daylight again.

Of course, Bradbury is talking about video editing (the Moviola being an outdated tool for editing physical film), but I think the underlying psychological dynamic applies to any form of editing. I particularly like the final line about the almost addictive properties of editing.

I’ve been an editor for about four years. I do a bit of it all — copyediting, line editing, developmental editing, proofreading, etc. I suppose I primarily identify as a copyeditor (focusing on sentences and paragraphs).

My sense is that editors often think about their choice to enter the field as a reflection of their love for language or ideas. On the surface, of course that’s the case. One wonders, however, about the underlying psychological motivation behind the choice to engage in editing (as a profession, hobby, or arguably even general human activity).

Seen from that perspective, a focus on text editing (rather than video and/or audio) might simply be a matter of choice of vehicle to scratch an underlying existential itch regarding the immutability and incomprehensibility of the world.

Thinking of the Bradury quote, one wonders not only about the existential satisfaction that can come from editing but also that which can be fueled by it. On the one hand, editing allows for the chance to pick apart the material and reorient it in a way that smooths over the rough edges. One doesn’t often get that chance in life, and it can be satisfying on a deep level to have that opportunity.

On the other hand, I guess Bradbury is hinting at the potential disappointment that can follow from that experience. The causality could also go the other way: the ability to rework the world of the text is intensely satisfying — perhaps so satisfying that it could have a blowback effect. The experience might be so out of step with the realities of life that on some subconscious level it might lead to feelings of disappointment or disenchantment with the intractability of the world outside of the editable sphere.

I’m not sure exactly if or how any of this plays out. I can say, however, that I certainly wish the world were more amenable to my edits. One of the common inquiries I put in the margins of documents I’m editing is “Please clarify” before highlighting some ambiguous facet of the text (e.g., “Please clarify: is the antecedent of this pronoun X or Y?”).

I wish I could put that question in the margins of the text of the world and be able to reasonably expect a response.

Indeed, please clarify.

One of Larry Clark’s Kids

There was a canon of the lowest common denominator when I was in high school.

This was stuff that you could count on being in most people’s collections most of the time. It varied in quality, but it was assumed everyone could tolerate it — or at least did. It was great for parties or when someone new gave you a ride home.

Eminem’s Marshall Mathers record was in it. Sublime was definitely a key part of it. Some classic rock would probably fit the bill.

Larry Clark’s Kids was part of the canon. It was ubiquitous and made up the cultural repertoire and atmosphere of the time. Sometimes this was literal: I entered more than one teenage bedroom that had it muted and playing on loop (of course it would have to be periodically rewound because this was the VHS era).

The film was part of a vocabulary we all knew. A number of scenes were iconic, including the famed Central Park fistfight that ends with a man being brutally beaten with a skateboard.

Everyone knew that scene. I remember once a rollerblader at whatever skate spot we were at trying to recruit me to jump in during an upcoming fight. His vision was that at the end I would hit his opponent across the face with my skateboard “just like in that movie” (I didn’t, and the two fought in the way people fight in real life — mostly pushing and yelling).

I’m convinced the scene’s lingering presence in our collective unconscious saved me from getting jumped at least once when I was leaving an underground parking garage that I’d been skating by myself (“Put that skateboard down! I don’t want that hit across my face,” one of the group had yelled. I responded by subtly brandishing it, and the situation ended the way most fights do — they walked away yelling, and I skated off while trying to maintain my dignity).

When I was home last month, it occurred to me how weird it was that the film had held that place in our lives. I ended up rewatching it for the first time in probably twenty years.

Kids is an ugly film, both in its themes and cinematography. There isn’t much plot — it follows a group of teenagers as they have sex, fight, and do drugs. To the extent that there is a narrative, it centers on Jennie (Chloe Sevigny) trying to locate Telly (Leo Fitzpatrick), who she finds out had given her HIV after manipulating her into having sex the previous summer. Meanwhile, he tracks down virgins to sleep with and drinks forties with his buddy Casper (Justin Pierce).

In terms of cinematography, the film’s pseudo-documentary format feels creepy and unpleasant. Shots are held for long periods. The sex is not just unglamorous but often hideous. As virtually every commentator has noted, the entire film has a troubling voyeuristic undertone.

Kids isn’t Van Wilder or American Pie — two of the other party movies of the time. Even if those movies have the same troubling undertones, they at least present a facade of lightness and humor. It’s hard to imagine anyone ever having found Kids funny or particularly fun to watch.

Yet, everyone I knew seemed to have fun watching it — or at least voluntarily chose to watch this film about HIV, rape, and nitrous. How was that the case?

On a first pass, it’s easy to think of potential explanations: it provided access to 90s skateboarding culture, it fed into an exoticization of the big city, it yielded the titillation of watching your peers have sex and do drugs, etc. Keep in mind this was pre-Internet after all.

But it went beyond that.

During that period, I remember my older sister (who for a variety of reasons was from a very different socio-cultural world) bringing up one of the film’s leads, Casper, to me. “Yeah, he’s cool,” I’d said ironically. She’d just looked at me uncomprehendingly. The irony was lost. She seemed a little weirded out by me.

Of course the irony was lost, and of course she was weirded out — Casper is a rapist and morally bankrupt creep. Who the hell would he think he was cool?

A lot of people I knew. For more than a few, the film’s appeal went beyond voyeurism to identification if not borderline veneration of the film’s protagonists.

As many have noted, the film fails as sociology. I wasn’t surprised to find out that many of the street kids they’d cast as actors later came forward to say that they felt exploited by the film, that it hadn’t accurately reflected their lives, that it didn’t capture the emotional depth of their relationships, and that many were even virgins. A lot of the female leads initially didn’t want to be in the film.

Everything about Kids is clearly designed to convince you that it’s the real, unvarnished, and painful truth, but even the least discerning viewer will smell bullshit.

The main objection I remember hearing back then was that the level of the kids’ drinking seemed implausible. That is probably true, but ultimately, I think that critique stood in for a deeper skepticism.

The film’s preoccupation with the kids’ sleaziness eclipses any deeper insight it could have provided. The characters have no inner worlds, no personal histories, no social histories, no social context, and no shade of emotional depth or nuance (seen from this perspective, the scene where Telly gives change to a disabled beggar is a rare and interesting exception).

That made for a missed opportunity: if anything, Kids could have been more transgressive and confrontational if it hadn’t gone for the cheap thrills. Children can be dark and complex beings in a way that the surface-level shock of forties and blunts can’t begin to touch.

Again, it’s not surprising that in my day (or any day), most teenagers weren’t clamoring for greater emotional depth in the films they watched.

Instead, on my recent viewing, what struck me as surprising — but in retrospect shouldn’t have — was how morally conservative the film is.

As Henry Giroux rightly pointed out at the time, Kids is hobbled by its heavy-handed morality. The male protagonists are presented as moral monsters; the women are depicted as victims who pay the ultimate price for having been unchaste or otherwise reckless. Social problems are presented as matters of personal failing.

Further, as bell hooks pointed out in an interview with the Media Education Foundation in 1997, while the film presents the characters’ casual homophobia and misogyny in terms that are supposed to be bold and brave, the film often ends up unwittingly replicating those same troubling racial and gender stereotypes.

Now, whether you’re willing to buy people like Giroux’s or hooks’s reading of the film or not, I have the firm suspicion that from a viewer’s standpoint, the reason it was popular in my high school milieu was because its underlying conservatism, homophobia, and racism resonated with what people at least intuited if not explicitly thought to be right.

Clearly, the various forms of cruelty were the point: this is true both cinematically and thematically. It was an ugly, mean, and willfully obtuse film, and that is what people liked about it.

This point might be analogous to Clark’s own seemingly ambiguous response to the adolescent sexuality and violence he depicts. I’m not the first to get the impression that Clark exaggerates these things because he takes pleasure in being exposed to them.

In this way, the film succeeds as sociology despite itself. Its attempt at “making a statement” doesn’t get off the ground, but what it unwittingly revealed about at least some viewers is illuminating.

The question is what did it reveal? Even if the cruelty was the point, one wonders what was going on under the hood. Was it a matter of infinite moral regress?

I’m not quite sure, but my sense is a lot was going on. Part of the dynamic was likely the justification of the film’s celebration of cruelty that a reactionary ideology could provide (“they deserved it!”). I suspect another part of it was the strange sort of push-pull between the pleasure of seeing the characters engage in some version of one’s own dark and hedonistic desires at the same time that the guilt of those desires triggers one to condemn them. I think a similar dynamic sometimes happens when academically underperforming teenagers oddly express a passionate belief in the importance of academic success.

That’s just a start — doubtless more was at work.

I wish I could remember what I thought of all of this as it was happening. I do remember feeling that the film had correctly diagnosed something about some type of psychic crisis, but I don’t know if I could have articulated what it was all about. Clearly, I still can’t.

One wonders how much of the dynamics described above were grounded in a fairly universal drive to cruelty and how much of that was more specific to a certain thread of American culture (or perhaps the one cloaked in the other). Is what I observed with Kids the same impulse that twenty years later curdled into the culture wars of today?

Perhaps seen from that perspective, Larry Clark’s Tulsa might be the more telling of the two works. Tulsa traffics in the same basic territory as Kidswhile documenting Clark’s own adolescent methamphetamine milieu.

Tulsa suffers from many of the same exploitative schlock limitations as Kids, but its use of classic American iconography (guns, flags, etc.) arguably might put it more on the mark. Doubtless Clark had imagined Tulsa as a corrective to stifling 1950s conformity, or whatever, but maybe it was actually the best distillation of what that conformity really meant. Is this yet another case of Clark succeeding despite himself?

In the end, as with everything in Kids, perhaps Casper’s immortal final line rings truer than it should:

“Jesus Christ, what happened?”

The Poisoned Offerings of Travel and Trust

Travel is core to my life: for the last six years, I’ve lived as an expat or nomad. Most recently, Bogota, Colombia, has been my home. Before I was 18, I barely left my rural hometown (population: 7000), and then just to live a 90-minute drive away, so I guess I’ve been making up for lost time.

It’s a platitude that travel can teach us about ourselves, but of course that’s true. For me, travel generally reinforces two incompatible realizations at once — or, if not incompatible, then realizations that at least tilt in different directions. For example, for me, travel emphasizes the myriad of lives I could realistically live and the versions of myself I could be. At the same time, it underscores that these will all be versions of myself: as an entity, I’m at least as fixed as I am open.

I read Alphonso Lingis’s reflections on travel, Trust (University of Minnesota Press), in this spirit. Lingis rightly points out that travel highlights that trust is a foundational trait of what it is to be human, though I think it’s worth tempering his enthusiasm for trust by acknowledging some of its more self-serving dimensions. Lingis uses travel as a vehicle for examining trust, and as elsewhere, the insights garnered from travel are puzzling, pointing in two directions at once.

Trust

As I noted in a previous post, Trust is a weird book. Lingis is a (quite quirky) academic philosopher, though Trust is far from a traditional academic text. It makes its argument slowly by gradually unpacking vignettes based on Lingis’s travel experiences. I bought a used copy, and as the previous owner noted (rather unkindly), the prose is quite lofty.

Fittingly, Trust isn’t super clear on its methodological approach, though the reader can discern one. The book isn’t just a collection of anecdotes. For my money, I read Trust as a type of phenomenological investigation. I love the branch of philosophy innovated by Husserl and the like, though I hate the word “phenomenology.” The word refers to a method, but people forget that, and social scientists in particular have a way of treating it as a needlessly fancy synonym for “experience.”

Phenomenology is a philosophical approach that aims to learn about consciousness by systematically investigating it from the inside. There’s been quite a bit of debate about the best way to do that. Heidegger’s Being and Timedemonstrates one approach: it starts by looking at human behavior in action to identify structures in human consciousness. The idea is to start by noting how humans behave before working backward to determine what type of being a human would have to be to demonstrate that behavior.Heidegger’s ultimate aim was broader (to get clear on “Being” more generally), and he ended up jettisoning this path, feeling it was uselessly anthropologized.

But we don’t need to follow him on that, and Lingis certainly doesn’t in Trust.If you start with this method, then you can quickly see how taking ourselves out of our ordinary settings can cast our behavior or thought in a new light that might elucidate something unexpected or unappreciated about our minds. Travel can provide us with a different vantage point that might underscore previously unrecognized or underappreciated structures in human consciousness.

Seen from this perspective, Lingis’s take on travel is that it demonstrates that humans are fundamentally trustingbeings. What is trust? At this point, I probably don’t need to say that the book doesn’t bother with a definition. But what I take from its handling of trust is largely consistent with the general definitions of trust in the scholarly literature: a psychological state in which one accepts a position of vulnerability based on positive expectations regarding others’ intentions or predicted behavior. There’s a kind of leap of faith in trust: when trusting someone, you take a chance and make yourself vulnerable and hope the trusted entity doesn’t leave you hanging.

Types of Trust

Trust specifically calls out at least two levels or types of trust. I wish it had said more about how those relate (maybe something is buried in one of the vignettes). We trust different things in different ways, and I would love to see a more systematic working out of those relationships.

Anyway, Trust gets us started by pointing to at least two types of trust: what I might call interpersonal trust and foundational trust. Interpersonal trust is what we mean when we say we trust a person. In this case, I take the chance of making myself vulnerable with you because I think that you aren’t going to harm me.

Lingis dwells at length on interpersonal trust. He emphasizes the way that trusting someone is a way of pushing past social roles to make a deep statement about the trusted person. On Lingis’s account, trust pierces the quotidian, superficial level of engagement we normally demonstrate when occupying social roles. You may have certain duties or responsibilities by virtue of your social position, but to trust you is a statement on you and your likelihood of carrying them out (at least as Lingis tells it).

Foundational trust is a more subtle concept that the text itself handles more subtly. I think Lingis’s point there is that the choice to travel, to leave the comfort of one’s home, is a decision that is fundamentally predicated on an attitude of trust. When you travel, you willingly make yourself vulnerable by going to a place in which you are unfamiliar with the customs and people, and you make that decision based on the assumption that your new setting won’t do you wrong. Seen from that perspective, the choice to travel to a place is a vote of confidence in the people, institutions, and general setting of that unfamiliar location.

This foundational level of trust isn’t specific to any given person; one assumes that there will still be people with poor intentions in the world, and you might think better of trusting the dubious guy staring at you in a dark alley. Foundational trust is a more general stratum of trust regarding a setting in general — and, arguably, the world at large. In this sense, there might even be another, truly foundational level of trust that makes life possible (e.g., trust in the predictability and consistency of the physical world) and is thus epistemologically prior to foundational trust, though I’ll leave such distinctions to the philosophers.

The Dark Side of Trust

The scholarly literature generally treats trust as an unqualified good, and Lingis is similarly effusive in celebrating trust. He writes at length about the joy that trust can engender, the pleasure a trusting form of recognition can yield, and the excitement and invigorating experience that trust can generate.

On a first pass, it’s hard to argue that trust is a bad thing. However, some commentators have pointed out that trust isn’t always benign. How so? Well, the most obvious starting point is that it can be misplaced. It’s not hard to see this one: when experiencing the vulnerability of taking a taxi in a new city, excessive fares are par for the course.

Fair enough, but there’s a deeper point here. Some people have pointed out that trust can be weaponized (or at least the appearance of trust; I’ll leave open the question of when and how we’re dealing with a sincerely trusting relationship as opposed to a simulated one). On this account, the choice to trust someone can be expressed in a way that plays on social norms or social psychology to lead others to feel indebted to you. The trust act can saddle the trusted entity with obligations. This might sound abstract until you think of when a parent or teacher has emphasized “I’m trusting you with this” before sending you out to run an errand or acknowledging the temptation to skirt a rule during recess. Isn’t it amazing how just having that said to you made you feel pressure to act in a certain way (there’s got to be a social psych study on this somewhere)? That’s the type of thing these commentators have in mind. Of itself, this isn’t necessarily a bad thing, and it can actually be a way to bring the best out of yourself and others. Still, it can be a little manipulative, and it’s not hard to see how the sense of obligation or exchange generated by this form of trust could be abused.

Returning to Lingis, it’s easy to see how this could apply to interpersonal trust. Trust is an effective strategy for playing on social conventions to engineer a pleasurable or self-indulgent travel experience. This could take a more material form, or it could be as simple as the pleasure of vulnerability: as Lingis says, “Travel far enough and we find ourselves happily back in the infantile world.” From one perspective, this is a nice opportunity to fully embrace the pleasure of being alive and the support that others can provide. From another perspective, it’s a means of orchestrating a self-indulgent form of infantilization.

Pushing a little further, I’m curious about how this sense of the weaponization of trust relates to foundational trust. A certain type of expat or digital nomad often talks about the sense of joy and release that can come from putting one’s trust in the world. Sometimes, this can take on something of a New Agey, pseudo-spiritual cast: by surrendering oneself to the world and embracing it with full trust, powerful serendipities open that smooth over a path to joy, enlightenment, maybe even material wealth — or whatever it is one is after. One hears this often in the Tulum, Mexico, variety of spirituality.

On the one hand, this can seem to be something of a vote of confidence in the inherent goodness of the universe, god, or whatever. And maybe it is. But it at least houses the danger of being a form of petty metaphysical calculation: by bargaining with whatever rendering of a cosmic order I’ve come up with, the pesos of my trust might lead “the universe” to yield an experience of plenitude that somehow just feels right (right?).

Conclusion

Travel underscores competing phenomenological extremes: trust is about me, trust is about you, trust is selfish, trust is altruistic. Which is it? Both and neither. There’s no sense in tying ourselves into knots trying to unknot ideal types, though the poisoned offerings of trust and travel are certainly worth bearing in mind after we’ve deplaned and forked over our passport.

The Time Out of Joint Investigation

I’ve spent the last few weeks visiting my hometown. I haven’t lived here full time in over twenty years, though I spent the first eighteen years of my life here. Of course, the point of going home is to see the people I love, but from another perspective, I see it as a natural experiment in consciousness.

I’ve been thinking about this recently since looking back at Alphonso Lingis’s Trust, which is a weird book (weird book by a weird guy — my favorite Lingis anecdote (possibly apocryphal) is of him visiting a graduate class to read an essay on Deleuze, which he delivered over a soundtrack of Nine Inch Nails’ “Closer” on loop while wearing face paint, a miner’s helmet, and pants with the seat cut out). The way I read Trust is of Lingis setting out a series of vignettes that subtly treat travel as a vehicle for teasing out insights into the mechanics of human consciousness.

It’s a sort of phenomenology-in-action: by inserting oneself in different settings at different times, we disrupt our normal routines in a way that can help us to notice things about how our minds operate that we might not otherwise, and which, in turn, might provide some insight into the type of thing we humans are.

Trust is a book that focuses on travel to foreign places, and as an expat, it resonates with me on that level — I plan to write a companion post to this one that will more directly riff on Lingis’ book and the experience of travel to foreign locales. But, of course, we travel to places that are familiar just as we do to unfamiliar ones (indeed, isn’t it interesting that I still unthinkingly refer to my hometown as “home” despite “home” in any meaningful sense having been elsewhere for some time now).

I was thinking about all of this on a recent trip to my childhood mall. It had been well over twenty years, so I wasn’t sure how I would feel visiting it. I’ve had so many layers of experience in relation to it — and since — that I didn’t know what to expect. Would the feelings of my earlier adolescence win out and lead me to feel nostalgic? Or would I respond with a dismissal bred of the glib cynicism of my older adolescence? Then again, maybe the temperate diplomacy of my middle age would surface and yield something altogether different.

I decided to run a test and investigate. Truth be told, the idea of the test came second. As is generally the case in life, the material conditions carried the day: even this relatively mild New England winter is still a New England winter. It’s cold, man. When the idea of a heated walk in the mall hit me, it seemed too good to pass up, so on one particularly dreary day, I found myself engaged in my own phenomenological investigation at that now-fading citadel of American consumerism.

At one time, the idea that you could have an emotional attachment to a specific chain franchise, or a cluster of them as the case may be, would have seemed absurd. Chain stores are strategically designed to be bland and interchangeable. I suppose I would have understood someone developing an attachment to Dunkin’ Donuts as a brand in general, but the idea of developing an attachment to a specific Dunkin’ Donuts restaurant would have seemed a stretch.

In hindsight, that was a naïve view. Humans are meaning-making machines, and we make meaning of specific physical spaces — no matter how vapid or tackily consumeristic — just as much as grand settings, artworks, people, or anything else. The gas station where I worked as an attendant one summer has as much emotional resonance for me as any place I’ve been (though certainly not all fond).

So, I carried out the test. Pulling in, I couldn’t help but notice the basic infrastructure hadn’t changed much, though I availed myself of the new parking garage. Inside, many of the same stores were there but in vaguely new garb, seeming like an uncle you haven’t in a while and who has put on a little weight. For some strange reason, if the signs were to be believed, a branch of the local library had apparently relocated to the mall, but it was closed on the I day went, and from what I could tell by peeping in the window, might have moved on to greener pastures.

I can break down my history at the mall into a few key epochs: ages 10–13, it was a gathering spot for hanging out. This was the era of playing lookout as my friends made off with Spencer’s Gift keychains gotten via five-finger discount (one sticks with me: “Look…my key ring says shit on it.” And I wonder why I still feel like I’m making up for having gone to public school). I wouldn’t go so far as to say I enjoyed the mall itself during that period, but I spent a lot of time kicking around there, and it’s tied to vaguely positive memories that are generalized in the way repeated experiences tend to blur together.

Later, as a somewhat older adolescent (say, 13–18), the mall became the far-too-obvious target of my far-too-obvious rhapsodizing on the dangers of consumerism as cribbed from Adbusters and threads of primitivism that I found illuminating in a way that in retrospect might not have suggested top-shelf mental health. I didn’t visit the mall much during this period, though it was definitely on the periphery of my perceptual horizon as something I rejected. Later, say, at 21, my teenage targeting of the mall seemed a little provincial and sad (which now itself seems a little provincial and sad for different reasons).

More recently, approaching middle age, I’m much more forgiving of all of those periods. More than that, I see elements of all of them surface in my thinking at various times and in various ways. It’s a weird type of almost Hegelian totality where all of the strains of my past development and their corresponding negations surface and resurface in different iterations, informing how I think and feel. Sometimes this influence is fairly direct, and other times it’s subtle. I believe it’s in Rabbit is Rich (1981) that Updike mentions the idea of selves dying. I’ve certainly felt that way, but when I zoom out, it’s the Hegelian angle that fits my experience. I don’t feel so much that my successive selves have died as that they carry on a peculiar afterlife that takes many — often unexpected — forms.

I’ll open a weird parenthetical: (When I was ninth grade, we read “Eleven” by Sandra Cisneros (“What they don’t understand about birthdays and what they never tell you is that when you’re eleven, you’re also ten, and nine, and eight, and seven, and six, and five, and four, and three, and two, and one.”). I remember my English teacher Mr. Seible saying he had been thinking of me when he chose the reading. As I write this, I think of him, and of Hegel, and of what he saw in my thinking that has made my preoccupations so bizarrely consistent over the years.) And now I’ll close it.

If pressed, I would have guessed the 40-year-old version would have won out as my experimental result. But, instead, something totally different happened.

My response was predictable given my experience of the last few years, though would have been unexpected otherwise. Since getting back from China in 2020, I’ve had occasional bouts of a peculiar disassociation. I haven’t quite worked out the terms of it, but the temporality of the whole thing is weird — it’s a kind of present-as-projected-future-of-the-past. I guess part of what I mean by that unwieldy hyphenated construction is that in those states, I experience the present specifically in relation to the past. This might sound obvious, but if you think about it, it’s not: just as often, you project forward from the present to a future state of affairs, focus more specifically on the present, or experience any number of other orientations toward the passage of time. Instead, in this case, the present is felt as the realization of a variant of the future as expressed in the vocabulary of the past.

I don’t think I understand the dynamic well enough to articulate it with the precision I’d like, but I hope what I’ve said captures something of it. It’s a strange feeling. The metaphors aren’t perfect, but it’s the sort of lived equivalent of the Pottersville scenes in It’s a Wonderful Life or the ones in Back to the Future Part II where Marty visits a future in which Biff has taken control. In those works, the central characters feel their present as a distinct outcome of a range of possible futures or worlds as judged from a version of the world they take as default.

Thinking about it now, I guess The Man in the High Castle would be another suitable example. I suppose, in a sense, this is a way of digging into the “parallel world” literary trope to identify the ways it serves as a metaphor for a certain lived experience of time. The Man in the High Castle, both the book and the vastly superior show, obviously traffics in social critique and broad metaphysical musings, but I guess this line of inquiry brings us to an existential reading of the text.

Furthermore, all three of those works similarly capture the dystopian dimension of the experience. It’s an open question if this type of temporal experience will inevitably take a dystopian cast, I don’t see why it would have to, but it has often done so with me. I’m hesitant to pass off this feeling as sociological insight, though it can feel like sociological insight.

I had expected those episodes to pass after I’d gotten over the reverse culture shock of getting back from China. Up to a point they have, though they still occasionally surge up. Doubtless at least some of the trigger behind this particular instance was the state of the mall. It had a pronounced zombie wasteland feel: barren and creepy, with at least 20% of the stores vacant. All of the anchor stores except Boscov’s were closed. It was also a lot smaller than I remembered, but I think that was just the result of me getting older.

At the risk of stating the obvious, all of this fed a certain apocalyptic feeling. Again, I’m inclined to see this impression as a tepid basis for cultural criticism, but I’d be lying if I said I didn’t experience it as gesturing toward the direction of things. On that front, I couldn’t shake the sense that what we’d had before had been hideous, and we’d had no choice but to find meaning on its edges. There’s a certain burdened beauty in that. While what we’re replacing it with has its merits, I couldn’t help but feel that large swaths of the current order are an elaboration on the worst undertones of what had come before.

However, at the end of my walk, as I returned to my car in my weirdly dissociative haze, I was hopeless to separate existential insight from sociological intuition.

Making Sense of My Mutations: Personal Reflections on Body Horror

Afew weeks back, I finished David Huckvale’s Terrors of the Flesh: The Philosophy of Body Horror in Film (2020). I’m always interested in the intersection of philosophy and horror, but I was particularly curious about the implications of body horror.

Why? Well, on the one hand, my tastes have unexpectedly come to skew heavily towards body horror, which itself presents an interesting puzzle. Beyond that, the body is both old and new ground for me a basis for theorizing, and it continues to strike me as fertile ground for reflection. The question then becomes what body horror might have to tell us about the human experience — in this case, for me, spontaneous and unwilled bodily change (mutation).

What is “body horror”? I’m far from an authority, but a quick definition would see it as a sub-genre of horror that specifically focuses on disturbing changes of the human body (e.g., mutilation, transformation, and the like). Good representative films might include Society, Eraserhead, The Fly, and Re-animator.

I’m new to body horror but not new to “the body” as a theorized subject (though certainly have some acquaintance with the body as a corporeal reality — you could even say I use (am) it every day).

Indeed, “the body” was a hugely popular topic in the threads of continental philosophy in which I dwelled. The emphases were endless: the body as the locus of perception (Merleau-Ponty), the body as gender-socialized performance (Butler; Iris Marion Young), the body as racialized embodiment (Fanon), the body as reflecting social class (Bourdieu), the body as the object of power/resistance (Foucault), the body as weirdly absent (Heidegger), etc.

When I delivered a (now very embarrassing) commentary on Heidegger at a conference I’d organized as an undergrad, I put forward my theme of how the body contained echoes of history (which I dubbed the “invested body” in my adolescent attempt at academic jargon — hey, I tried, right?).

So, the body as a starting point for understanding human experience wasn’t new to me, and body horror naturally starts with that insight. The master himself, David Cronenberg, put it admirably in a 1997 interview:

For me, the human body is the first fact of human existence. I do feel that death is the end, there is no afterlife, and therefore the existence of the body is the existence of the individual; and therefore the focus of the films on the body, as a way of exploring the various aspects of life as a human, seems obvious. … I’m saying that there is no morality or ethics that is other than what we create; there are no absolutes that come from outer space or from God or religion, or whatever — that in fact we create them and therefore they are very changeable, and very malleable (Huckvale 9).

I was certainly with Cronenberg on this, but I guess I was all bodied out after a certain point. Doubtless the fact that I was an able-bodied white guy had quite a bit to do with not having to think about it.

But it went beyond decadent apathy: for all of my interest in “the body” as a topic of discussion, I was actually fairly disgusted by the body in its lived, physical form. Body horror of course gleefully aspires to feed that disgust, so I largely rolled my eyes and kept my distance.

One wonders: did this haughty disdain reflect a certain contempt for human experience? A bourgeois ethics of decorum fed by social class anxiety? The tedious fear of death we’re all tired of hearing about but can’t stop thinking about?

In short, it’s distinctly possible that all of my blather about “the body” was a way to not think about the host of anxieties that were coming through my shoddy attempt at escape.

In this sense, appropriately, it was physical pain much more than Merleau-Ponty that brought me back to the body. This seems common: Huckvale mentions he found his way to body horror after witnessing the deaths of his parents (10), and in that way he followed Cronenberg’s example of turning to body horror after observing his father’s physical decline and subsequent death (7–8). Feminist writer Anne Elizabeth Moore has suggested that it was the changes in her body stemming from an autoimmune disease that brought her to body horror.

There’s no shortage of ways our bodies can change or fail us, and for that reason, Terrors of the Flesh is organized by type of bodily process/transformation (e.g., copulation, digestion, infection). Cute, right? The chapter on “extinction” was interesting, but it was the one on “mutation” that stood out to me.

I’ll be turning 40 this year and have been thinking a lot about the mid-point of my life. In a certain symbolic sense, I suppose it’s fitting that I’m kicking off the second half of my life (assuming I live to average life expectancy) with rapid bodily mutation given that the start of the first half of my life was characterized by the rapid bodily change of puberty.

When I say that, I’m not thinking of the normal changes of increased weight gain or graying hair. I’m almost entirely gray now, though that started when I was 18, which made it particularly irritating but also took some of the sting out of it.

Instead, I’m thinking about things that are a little more enduring. Three big mutations come to mind: twitching, nerve pain, and a new personal science of digestion.

One of the interesting things about these mutations is that from the start, I experienced them as carrying inherent meaning. Anne Elizabeth Moore reports that her autoimmune disease made her feel like a “monster.” My mutations were a little different, so my reaction was a little different, but I similarly did not experience my bodily changes in purely mechanical terms. They always had an interpretation woven into them.

One wonders: does pain ever come to us as a matter of raw physicality? Or is pain more like sound in the sense that I never experience raw, unmediated sound — I always hear something (e.g., I don’t hear random wails but rather perceive police sirens; I don’t hear undistinguishable roars but rather a dog barking). We rarely if ever hear the sound itself. Similarly, does pain always come to us with a built-in interpretation (even if rendered as blandly tedious, as in the torture scenes of Godard’s Le Petit Soldat).

Of my mutations, the twitch is an interesting one. I first took on a nervous twitch when I was writing my undergrad thesis. It was weird having my body suddenly start doing a new thing, and I remember at first wondering if I was hallucinating. It passed for a good number of years and then came back in my early thirties.

The twitch is one of those odd experiences that exists at the threshold of both active and passive action — in some ways, it feels like I’m the one making it happen and in other ways it feels like something that is happening to me. It reminds me of how Jonathan Lethem describes the feeling of having Tourette’s Syndrome in Motherless Brooklyn.

Even now, I have the sense that the twitch was releasing stress or anxiety in a way that seemed healing. It feels like an escape valve. I’m not sure how much better it has ever made me feel, but I have the sense that it is venting repressed feelings that I often imagine as a type of sickness.

I still occasionally twitch, but only when sitting quietly in a theatre for a movie or concert. I don’t know why.

Chronic pain stands out as my second mutation. This one is the result of nerve damage stemming from poorly implanted hernia mesh (or inherent difficulties stemming from the mesh technology, depending on who you ask).

Of my mutations, this one has had the most enduring psychological impact. Chronic pain really is world-destroying (I believe that’s Elaine Scarry riffing on Sontag?). The only thing I’ve experienced that was even close to that style of utterly alienating discomfort is extreme anxiety.

The ambiguity of the pain stands out to me. One morning, I woke to notice what looked to be shingles marks on my abdomen above where I’d had my hernia repaired. Those passed quickly enough and didn’t scab over in the way a shingles infection usually does (I still remember from when I had shingles in 2013). What followed was a long period of disabling pain that only got better after the nerves in my abdomen were cut.

The faux-shingles marks (if they were faux) were just the start of what became a long series of confusing coincidences (or not). The specialist who performed my surgery, one of the world’s foremost experts in the area and who made my pain (largely) go away, later politely dismissed the idea of the marks as having anything to do with my nerve damage.

Of itself that’s fine, but then I find myself wondering what those marks were and why their onset seemed to coincide almost perfectly with that of my pain. A lot of odd coincidences like that turned up during that time.

Our crunchier, hippier friends might love to talk about the power of synchronicity, but when it comes to synchronicity, I’m more likely to think of the awkwardness and ambiguity of failed signals and thwarted coincidences. Jim Jarmusch’s movies nicely explore that, and the unexplained associations I experienced around the onset of chronic pain remind me of the scenes in Broken Flowers where Bill Murray’s character glimpses what may or may not be significant coincidences all through the film as he searches for his lost son.

My final mutation was a complete overhaul of what I can and can’t eat: oddly, out of the blue at 38 years old, I suddenly had a profound transformation in what I was able to properly digest. Things I had eaten my entire life made me overwhelmingly sick. Despite being squeamish, I’d had never had a sensitive stomach, but one day I woke up embodied in such a way that a single dietary misstep could generate non-trivial stomach pain.

The weird thing about this one isn’t that it happened — I have a very firm suspicion it’s a result of antibiotics I took around the time of my surgery, along with stress and a few other things. Rather, what’s odd about it is how predictable and systemized it is. I’ve developed an entire science of the self around what I can and can’t eat. It’s idiosyncratic and bizarre. This doubtless makes me look crazy and probably feeds the troubling Howard Hughes temperament I’ve developed the last few years, but the science works, and I seem to be getting better.

Returning to Huckvale from what can only seem like a very odd and perhaps overly personal detour, I think my mutations brought me back to the body precisely in a way that theorizing had helped me escape.

Of course, I didn’t consciously become attuned to body horror to make sense of all of this. I think I subconsciously developed an appetite for what could help me straighten out the anxiety that resulted from the most profound period of bodily transformation I’d experienced since puberty.

What’s come from all of this (aside from an appreciation of horror movies that center on bodily disfigurement)? I can’t be sure, but I do think there’s been a change in my standpoint that has made the body seem both less foreign but also less reliable, and, in that regard, more a source of fear than ever before.

It would be a convenient though saccharine explanation to say the gross-out horrors of body horror contributed to this change in perspective, but, as my mutations have made clear, the embodied world is full of meaningless serendipities and unquenched yearnings.

What is Called Listening? Patti Smith and the Soundwalk Collective’s Correspondences

I originally wrote this short reflection on Patti Smith and the Soundwalk Collective’s exhibit Correspondences, which I visited at Bogota’s El Centro Nacional de las Artes Delia Zapata Olivella in September 2023

I’m glad I got to see Patti Smith and the Soundwalk Collective’s exhibit Correspondences before it closed. The organizers fought hard to have it brought here to Bogota, and it was worth it.

The basic setup was a series of 8 screens, ambient musical accompaniment, two physical installations, and recordings of Patti Smith reading poems layered over the audio. The screens showed a variety of images, so the visual mash-up changed depending on the combination of screens you watched at that time (audio was consistent).

I stayed for more than an hour and saw maybe 3–4 of the poems. I think I missed quite a bit. I’d hoped to make it back, but I believe it just closed.

Outside of the installation, the organizers had posted the transcript of a conversation between Patti Smith and Soundwalk Collective member Stephen Crasneanscki. Something Crasneanscki said about listening stood out to me:

Listening… As I said before, in listening, there’s an act of presence. And what I notice most often when I’m recording is that it requires me to be present. When we are in the present time, then synchronicity happens; you see the world. Most of the time, we are hijacked by our mind or the talking of ourselves or others. The field recording is a practice of presence. It’s a very slow process. Some times we think there’s something and then, no, we go somewhere else. Progressively, layer by layer, it gets solidified and crystallized, in a sense. These little stones or truths or little clarity or little peradam… they come during the journey and eventually the piece is created slowly, by having back and forth conversations, but also different studios where we’ll go, in London, Berlin, New York, Paris. We’ll go back and sometimes Patti will redo everything from scratch. There’s a piece we’ve redone many times over many years and suddenly something happens, and then that’s it: we know this is working, it’s there. We don’t have a goal, and it’s just in the process that it becomes clear.

I think it’s important that Crasneanscki emphasizes that listening is not a passive activity or form of absence. Much to the contrary, listening is about being present and attentive to one’s surroundings. Particularly in educational circles, people can forget that to listen quietly isn’t to be absent.

From this, it makes sense then that listening can allow for synchronicity to happen. I see Crasneanscki’s point. Close awareness of one’s surroundings can facilitate recognition of weird coincidences or opportunities that might not be obvious even if one is paying attention — much less if one is distracted by conversation with others, one’s own inner dialogue or one’s own expectations.

Indeed, one’s setting addresses you. A lived environment isn’t inert: as is implicit in Crasneanscki’s remarks, it calls out to you in different ways (“Wow, what a weird coincidence. I hadn’t noticed that. I wonder if ….”). I seem to remember Heidegger discussing a similar idea in What is Called Thinking? (1952), though it’s been several years since I looked at that one.

So, I like this idea of listening as an active form of receptivity. On one rendering, this variety of listening is about trying to minimize the impact of one’s biases and preconceived expectations (the “beginner’s mind,” and so forth). Furthering this point, one could make the case that this style of listening has a certain ethical basis. Listening is about being addressed, but it is also a manner of addressing. This operates in a lot of ways: what you pay attention to can reflect your values, as well as our choice to work to minimize your biases (which of course as an aspiration reflects a certain value orientation).

Beyond all of that, to meet something on its own terms by listening reflects an implicit attitude of respect or regard. Attentive listening is not just a matter of being perceptually aware of something but also having the personal willingness to attend to the results of that awareness, which requires that one have enough respect for the results of that awareness to take them seriously.

From that insight, it’s only a short jump to recognizing the link between love and listening. To know how to love) is to know how to listen. A relationship will fail if one doesn’t know how to hear as well as attend to the address issued from the beloved (whether human or not).

The question then is how to respond when those signals fall flat. It seems to me that art (broadly conceived) can play a role in those cases. Artistic address can foster attentive listening by aggressively speaking to the listener or emphasizing particular considerations. It can underscore them — sometimes forcefully, if necessary. The world can and does call out to the interlocutor, and receptivity to that address requires a certain ethical comportment. However, one thing that’s unique about art is that it is consciously designed to address human subjectivity on its own terms, which makes it powerful.

Of course, this isn’t a guarantee of anything in terms of receptivity, but it can make an address be a little harder to ignore. Reaching for a metaphor here, there’s a wonderful scene in the horror movie Hostel where a German tourist requests to have his torture victim muzzled when the victim begins addressing him in his own language (German). The murderer can tolerate listening to his victim plead for his life in a foreign language, but he can’t tolerate hearing those pleas in his own. Art can issue an address put in a parlance that is just a little harder to ignore.

There are of course many varieties of listening, and they can reveal and communicate different things at different times. I don’t remember where, but I seem to recall an interview in which Foucault refers to styles of silence. I would argue listening is similarly diverse. I would be curious to see a typology of listening — particularly in its relationship with different styles of ethical comportment, perceptual awareness, and lived experience.

Put differently: I’d be willing to listen to the address such a typology would make.

Let the Right One In: Inner Dialogue in Upgrade (2018)

I was cautiously optimistic when I heard about Upgrade on the Brattle Theatre podcast.

I love the idea of pulpy, sci-fi philosophizing, but in practice I often struggle to get through it (with some very notable, obsessive exceptions). Part of me never wants to deflate my love for the idea of that type of sci-fi by actually consuming it.

But the comments on the BT podcast made Upgrade sound like a promising blend of some of my pet tastes (cyberpunk, body horror), which made it seem worth risking disappointment.

The idea behind Upgrade is that a luddite auto mechanic in a cyberpunk future is implanted with a chip that gives him superhuman physical abilities (increased strength, martial arts, etc.) after a mugging leaves him paralyzed. The chip “speaks” to him as a type of voice in his head, so he engages with it as he would another person. With the help of the chip, he seeks revenge on the people who’d mugged him and killed his wife.

The critique of technology is obviously the main dish here — and the film is not subtle about that. But what stood out to me was the theme of inner dialogue.

“Inner dialogue” refers to the inner monologue happening in a person’s mind. It’s the voice(s) you hear in your head when you’re thinking.

I’ve been interested in inner dialogue for years. I used to have the (incredibly socially awkward) habit of asking people what the voice in their head sounded like (for what it’s worth, the answers were interesting and varied quite widely). When I was going through a phase of setting my academic career on fire, I even briefly entertained the idea of writing a dissertation on it, which I’m sure made me seem deranged to my committee (and probably everyone else — that is, if me asking them earnestly about “the voice in their head” didn’t already do that).

The lived experience of inner dialogue is weird for a few reasons. One strange part of inner dialogue is how oddly passive it can be. Think, for example, of when a parent’s or former teacher’s voice surges up into your mind. Of course you are the person thinking those things, but those thoughts can certainly feel like they have a life of their own.

Seen from that perspective, inner dialogue indicates a sort of split in the construction of consciousness. Consciousness has this way of bifurcating into two and making it feel as though at least one dimension of itself is somehow separate or “other.”

Another weird feature of inner dialogue, which is related to the one above, is that it represents a case of us taking things in from the outside that we then weave into the most private parts of our subjectivity. After we’ve met a person with a strong personality, there’s a very definite way that we can then internalize our experience of that person before engaging with that projection.

This often happens when writing, for example — we might “hear” the voice of a former, demanding professor when putting our thoughts together. This can be empowering, or it can be stifling — I seem to remember reading a dissertation years back exploring the experience of writer’s block amongst undergrads that treated it at least in part as a result of oppressive inner dialogue (which, in turn, often reflects larger socio-structural patterns).

Inner dialogue is complex and can take a lot of forms. In one case, for example, I think of Heidegger writing about the “call of conscience” in Being and Time (1927), which may or may not take a verbal form, but can certainly be understood on the register of inner dialogue. Leaving the details of Heidegger aside, inner dialogue can be a way that we experience our conscience and in that regard reflect at least some facet of what we “genuinely” think or believe to be best (whatever that might mean).

On another register, I seem to recall George Herbert Mead’s Mind, Self, and Society (1934) treating inner dialogue as one of the hinge points between society and the individual. Inner dialogue then becomes the way (or one of the ways) that we internalize society’s values and one of the primary ways we engage with our society. One wonders if you couldn’t put it on an evolutionary register and think of it as a way that societies of the past speak through and to us by virtue of their teachings having provided an evolutionary advantage that then surfaces as instinct expressed verbally in our heads (maybe?).

Ultimately, I’m inclined to think inner dialogue probably does all of those things and more as we spin off different parts of ourselves within our convoluted inner worlds. All of this is of course neither inherently good nor bad — it’s just what it is to be human.

To return to the film, the voice in Upgrade assists the protagonist in tracking down the murderers, but there is of course something creepy and invasive about it. The voice walks the line between intruder and assistant, and one is never quite sure how autonomous it is. The film hints at this in a nice fight scene towards the beginning in which the voice demonstrates a callous disregard for murder (while raising the kind-of-too-obvious-but-also-kind-of-interesting question of if and how the protagonist is morally responsible for the murder the voice commits using his body).

The obvious point here about the upgraded “voice” in the head of the protagonist of Upgrade is how modern technology can colonize our subjective worlds, act according to its own agenda, challenge the boundaries of what it is to be human, potentially destroy something precious about our humanity precisely by challenging those boundaries, and so on.

Those points certainly seem more timely than ever in our increasingly AI-infused world. But I also wonder if the reflections on inner dialogue in Upgrade might not gesture towards another, potentially ineluctable, dilemma about what it is to be human.

Aside from the more topical critique of contemporary technology in Upgrade, one can take from it an expression of a deeper, more existential challenge of what it is to be human. To put it bluntly: we don’t have a say in which voices end up getting braided into our consciousness, and it’s not always clear how to get rid of them once they’re there. If you think about it, that can be a disturbing feature of what it is to be human.

As much as we want to let the right ones in, much of the situation is out of our hands. The door is largely open because we are fundamentally open to and vulnerable to our environment. As the saying goes, “be careful who you let in your head,” which is certainly true insofar as it goes, but not only can we of course miscalculate (as is suggested by the plot of Upgrade) but it’s not wrong to say that much of what we metabolize into being what we know as ourselves (or “our selves”) just isn’t up to us.

It makes sense that this would reflect an inevitable and enduring anxiety, but there is profound beauty here as well. I seem to recall Derrida writing movingly about the internalization of a dead friend’s voice in The Work of Mourning.

Hearing a dead friend in one’s head can be seen as a complex form of commemoration. This facet of the phenomenology of inner dialogue speaks to me now after having recently lost a number of people close to me. Hearing one or another’s voice surge through my thought with a force of its own and communicating a perspective that is recognizable as that of a friend who is no longer here can be seen as a comforting memorial in the mind (or “memorial of the mind” or “memorial that is the mind”?).

On that note, an inner voice (maybe internalized from somewhere — an old friend? Something I read? An old teacher?) chides me now not to succumb to my tendency to overexplain.

So, in tribute to that peculiar memorial of the mind, I’ll leave this line of thought here for now….

In the end, Upgrade was the type of pulpy sci-fi that has its imperfections and often ludicrous plot holes make it all the more charming. I wouldn’t be heartbroken if it were to surface in my inner dialogue.

The Puzzles of Appetite: Why I Started Reading Philip K. Dick Again

For the last few years, I’ve been hiding out in Philip K. Dick’s head. As Orwell said of Wigan Pier: “The path has been a long one, and the reasons for taking it aren’t immediately clear.”

Up to a point I’m kidding, of course. I appreciate what’s valuable about PKD. I just wouldn’t have guessed I’d keep reading him despite how little I often like his writing.

I tore through a bunch of PKD in high school. No surprise there — our “homegrown Borges’s” work is a capsule summary of my adolescent worldview: amateur philosophy, weirdo metaphysics, charismatic paranoia, social critique, the working class, a shaggy, stonerish aesthetic, and so on.

I lost touch with him as I exited my teens, and I hadn’t read much PKD since then (which, for me, somehow now amounts to the better part of two decades).

I started reading him again around 2020 after getting back from China. Since then, I’ve revisited a bunch of PKD I’d read as a kid and read a bunch I hadn’t.

I’m inclined to think our aesthetic tastes, particularly when they’re as obsessive as this, can tell us something about ourselves. They’re not random. The challenge is in decoding what they tell us.

My return to PKD hasn’t always been a warm homecoming. Even his better works have been tough for me to swallow on this go around. I was just barely able to get through the decent-by-PKD-standards Clans of the Alphane Moon. The ones that even PKD devotees admit are bad were truly intolerable — yes, like Vulcan’s Hammer, but also much but not all of the Valis trilogy, A Crack in Space (which seems like such a missed opportunity), and (at least for me) basically anything from before 1955, if not 1958.

What are some of the better ones? Jonathan Lethem seems to be on the mark in “You Don’t Know Dick.” His suggestions: “Castle, Stigmata, Ubik, Valis, Androids, Bloodmoney, The Transmigration of Timothy Archer, A Scanner Darkly, Martian Time-Slip, Confessions of a Crap Artist…Now Wait for Last Year, Time Out of Joint, A Maze of Death, Galactic Pot-Healer… (127).”

I might quibble over Bloodmoney, and The Transmigration didn’t totally resonate with me (though was probably one of his subtler and better written ones). The last four are definitely more central than the first four, though I took particular pleasure in Time out of Joint and A Maze of Death and am happy to see them included. I might suggest substituting The Penultimate Truth and/or Flow my Tears for one or another of the entries, but I’m nitpicking at that point.

I always like Lethem’s writing, but it’s his biography that is illuminating for me here. I feel like his troubled and obsessive relationship with PKD was a version of my own turned inside out. In places like “My Crazy Friend,” Lethem talks about his youthful discomfort with Dick’s status as a mere genre writer. Of course, part of what was behind that, both explicitly and implicitly, is Lethem’s discomfort with his own working-class background, relationship with the art world, etc., and PKD then became a means for him to sort that out.

The similarities are almost eerie. I think in hindsight I used PKD — and continue to use him now, really — as a vehicle to struggle through a somewhat similar constellation of issues.

Our responses seem to have been different. From his essay, it sounds like Lethem set out to rehabilitate PKD by emphasizing his literary merit. He launched his own little PKD gentrification campaign (a proxy for his own).

I feel like I went the other way: rather than emphasize PKD’s importance, I dismissed him. Particularly as I entered college, I had the sense that I’d graduated from PKD to the strong stuff. After cramming myself full of Heidegger et al., to say nothing of the real Borges, it was hard to take PKD seriously in quite the same way.

Needless to say, this had a heavy social class component — I’d followed my interests and unwittingly boarded a bus to the middle class (was it really so unintentional, though?). The results could be baffling.

Lethem launched a private gentrification campaign through Dick; I launched a private gentrification campaign by spurning him.

The reasons for this might seem obvious: the late 90s/00s when I was reading PKD were a different time from when Lethem read him in the pre-Bladerunner 70s. Given PKD’s current ubiquity, it’s safe to say that folks like Lethem won the war on that one. Maybe I just didn’t have a battle to fight.

There’s probably some truth there, but in the time before Total Internet Armageddon, I don’t know to what degree I would have known or cared that PKD was taken seriously. Later, I would get impatient with his trendiness, but this was well before that time (at least in my rural New England bubble).

Before 2020, my road from PKD seemed to only be accelerating. The basis of one of the many symptoms of this comes out in Lethem’s introduction to The Selected Stories (2002), where he refers to Dick’s tendency to find “a spark of life or love arising from unlikely or ruined places.”

That’s definitely an orientation towards the world that defined my youth. I think on some intuitive emotional level this came to seem embarrassing when I decided that “looking low for insight” seemed more about self-justifying mediocrity.

Looking low for insight can take many casts. For me, it often had a political undertone: “You don’t need a weatherman, etc.” If sociologist Paul Willis overtheorized the way that anti-social adolescent behavior can have a socio-political critique marbled into it, I was much more excessive, much less sophisticated, and much more sincere in my thought on that front. Not promising.

Was I overthinking things? These days I’m of two minds about that one, but I wasn’t of two minds during my period of spurning Dick. It seemed embarrassing and childish, and now that we were on the topic, stoner sci fi writers kind of did, too.

My contempt accelerated as the political currents changed along with those of my life. By that point, I rarely went home (literally or figuratively), but when I did, I watched in horror as the vague “damn the man” wink between dissident co-conspirators became the much more grounded tea party, then pizzagate, then lizard people, and finally Trump.

Maybe I’d been wrong — maybe you did need a weatherman — or at least some form of respect for expertise.

Of course, none of this had anything to do with PKD himself. It was more of a reaction to a personal association I had assigned him, and even then it was pretty nebulous — I doubt I had the thought of directly linking any of this with PKD in particular.

Actually, one could make the case his writing provides an excellent diagnosis of a world that arguably seems more Dickian than ever before (cryptofascism and all). I suspect at least on some level part of why I found myself going back to him in 2020 was because I had returned to the US after some time away and had landed in the dystopian reality of Trump’s America (after an all-too-vivid simulation of the Maoist era had by living through China’s Covid lockdowns). PKD was cathartic and possibly illuminating.

Then again, it might not have all been personal association and projection on my part. A troublingly direct demonstration of this is Alex Jones’s appearance in the film version of A Scanner Darkly — one of the more faithful adaptations of a PKD novel in film (and which makes wise edits to the final 20% of the original work).

It wouldn’t require particularly advanced psychoanalytic training to see all of this as my diary of a repetition syndrome: as I teetered closer to middle age, I turned PKD into a stand-in for parts of my adolescent self I hadn’t full digested. I keep returning to him because I haven’t fully integrated my past, and my obsessive review of his work indicates a resurgence of an undigested part of myself that will continue to haunt me until I’ve come to terms with it. The fact that I often dislike PKD’s writing adds an almost-too-obvious layer of psychological weight to the dynamic.

There’s definite truth to that, but the story is not quite that neat. I lost interest in PKD, but I never lost interest in a Dickian aesthetic, and I remember being thrilled to find a collection of his short stories in the lobby of my apartment six or so years ago (in fact, the same one with the Lethem intro cited above). In short, the break wasn’t quite so harsh or so clean, and I think I’d actually settled a lot of my kind-of-quarter-kind-of-midlife crisis before PKD had gotten back on the stage for me.

From another standpoint, as disappointing and irritating as PKD can be, I haven’t found an adequate substitute. I keep going back to him because I want the aesthetic he sets out: the synthesis of Cheever Americana with hallucinatory realities and pulpy tropes is definitely a distinct flavor. I keep exploring ever-more-obscure corners of the master’s bibliography (small “m” for me), trying to get at least a bite of what might have previously been a meal.

Sometimes the band doesn’t have any other songs (possibly because they’re dead), so I listen to the same tired tracks or search out b-sides that even I think kind of suck as a way to at least blow air at the itch if not scratch it.

PKD is particularly fertile territory for that compulsion because you never know when he happened to have had a lucid morning and buried something valuable in one of the eight rushed novels he wrote in some odd, drug-addled year in the 1960s. I guess in its own perverse way, that’ll keep you coming back.

In hindsight, the unevenness of PKD’s writing and thought was one of the reasons he resonated with me in the first place. It telegraphed how I saw (see) myself: a little wobbly, but with occasional flashes of talent if you look from the right angle. (Gee, you don’t say — I wonder if that played some role in my hang up on his work?)

I guess I wanted a PKD without PKD. I definitely wanted a me without me. Maybe I wanted an everything without an everything.

Which reminds me: I still haven’t read The Man Who Japed, and someone was telling me The Zap Gun is good….

Aesthetics of the Unrepresentable: Reflections on Varas-Diaz’s Decolonial Metal Music in Latin America

I feel like I’ve been a detective when it comes to heavy metal since moving to Colombia.

My tastes have skewed towards the more musically sedate for the last two decades, but my background in extreme music sensitized me to its presence in Bogota.

I don’t know how effective of a detective I’ve been in investigating any of this — I’ve been more of the clueless Philip Marlow from Robert Altman’s satirical version of The Big Sleep (minus the Rip van Winkle anachronisms) than the Chandler one. But, as a guest/observer, I’ve had the sense that I’ve intuited something in the way that Colombian metal seems to reflect undercurrents of socio-political critique and a defiant form of historical memory.

So, when I saw a post about Nelson Varas-Diaz’s Decolonial Metal Music in Latin America (Intellect 2021) on Instagram the other day, I had to drop everything to read the chapter on Colombia along with the one outlining the theoretical framework. I worked through some of the remaining chapters over the next day or two.

It’s based on nearly a decade of ethnographic research and really nicely clarifies how extreme music in Latin America fosters what Varas-Diaz calls “extreme decolonial dialogues” aimed at coping with and transforming the impact of the region’s colonial history/ongoing experience.

I’m a guest in Colombia, not a Latin American studies scholar by any measure, and have limited understanding of the country and region (I’m working on it). Still, speaking from that perspective, I took a lot from the text.

It condensed in really powerful analytic prose the sense of the Colombian metal underground that I had intuited. Perhaps most essentially, Varas-Diaz underscores how Latin American metal refashions metal aesthetics in a way that is political, yes, but also distinctly Latin American and decolonial (the former a disposition furthering the goal of the latter). He persuasively demonstrates that this version of metal is not a rehashing of Tampa death metal expressed in Spanish, though the metal scene of the Global North may mistake it as such. It is a spontaneous creative expression that draws on a metal register while reflecting a unique ethical (Dussel) and epistemological (Mignolo) commitment to local knowledge(s). On that note, I thought it was nice the text addressed the celebratory facets of metal, which are particularly important in a colonial/post-colonial context, and often underappreciated in general, I think.

As Varas-Diaz points out, both the lyrical content and artistic imagery of a large part of metal in Latin America are often overtly decolonial. In this way, it can serve the Friereian goal of starting a non-hierarchical educational dialogue regarding the region’s colonial experience. I was particularly interested in how it serves as a bottom-up movement to preserve the face of those who’ve suffered (thinking of Levinas), which was the theme of the chapter on Colombia. On this account, decolonial metal is a type of insurgent democratic monument to memorialize the face of those who’ve suffered when perhaps the state might not provide such (or may even try to actively erase it).

As I was reading the text, I started to wonder about the sonicality of the music. What I mean by this is the form or character of the sound of the music (as opposed to the lyrics, album art, or stage show). For example, Varas-Diaz points us to the use of indigenous instruments in some decolonial metal. I found myself wondering about how those instruments can be a type of symbol, certainly, but also how the sound they produce might generate a sensory experience that implies an idea or perspective. I think Merleau-Ponty might talk about sound in that way in the Phenomenology of Perception.

One then wonders the same of metal. Perhaps something about the experience that the sound of that music generates might be conducive to certain ways of thinking. Is there something about the harsh sonicality of metal that may have marbled into it ideas or perspectives that might even go beyond verbal expression but nevertheless communicate a certain standpoint?

If that is the case, then the aesthetic experience of decolonial metal could be thought to work on two levels simultaneously. As a slight riffing on Claude Lanzmann’s language regarding the image in his films, decolonial metal might entail lyrics that understand what they represent and music that maybe doesn’t (to be clear: in the case of metal sonicality in particular). On this interpretation, metal sonicality might be thought to reach beyond the literal content of the music (which is explicitly decolonial) to gesture towards suffering that, again thinking of Lanzmann and now Ranciere, might be unrepresentable (which would then be implicitly decolonial). If that is the case, then something like decolonial metal’s lyrical content might lead us to enter into a vigorous form of decolonial dialogue while the sonicality and general aesthetics might point towards dimensions of social trauma that overflow or cannot be fully addressed by that lyrical content. The two levels would work in tandem.

That line of inquiry then leads me to wonder about the history of the genre in the region. It was interesting to hear about how some of the originators of Colombian death metal, such as Masacre in the 1980s, had found themselves almost inventing the genre as they went due to a lack of international exposure. That’s fascinating for a lot of reasons, not the least of which being the question of why those fans settled on metal rather than a related but more overtly political genre such as punk, which particularly in its 1980s form may have ostensibly been a more congenial vehicle for overt social critique. It might have just been a matter of exposure, or it had something to do with the phenomenology of the sonic experience of metal. Likely both, I guess, as well as other considerations, too, I’m sure. I’d be curious to see the results of further historical scholarship that would build on what Varas-Diaz has given us.

To put my cards on the table, some of this line of thinking might stem from my own musical biases: I grew up going to shows in the 90s, which was well after the “crossover” era of the 1980s had blended metal and hardcore/punk, but the genres still didn’t mix much at that point. I’d listened to metal in elementary school, but it seemed very Dungeons and Dragons — especially when compared to the likes of groups like Crass, Gang of Four, or Bad Religion.

Maybe I’d underestimated metal. As Varas-Diaz points out when discussing the indifference and condescension of the Global North’s metal community to decolonial metal, the genre can be reactionary, but perhaps it also has the seeds of a counter-thrust woven into it. That’s certainly how I related to and defended the more boneheaded, macho sides of 90s hardcore, which at least at that time I made endless excuses for.

I don’t quite know. My sleuthing continues.

A few of the Colombian groups Decolonial Metal Music in Latin Americafocuses on: Tears of Misery, Corpus Calvary, and Masacre.

Selected Bibliography

Dawes, L. (2013). What are you doing here? A Black woman’s life and liberation in heavy metal. Bazillion Points.

Derrida, J. (1999). Adieu to Emmanuel Levinas. Translated by Michael Naas. Stanford University Press.

Drabinski, J. (2011) Godard between identity and difference. Continuum.

Dussel, E. (1985). Philosophy of Liberation. Wipf and Stock.

Friere, P. (2000). Pedagogy of the oppressed, 30th anniversary edition. Bloomsbury.

Levinas, E. (1985). Ethics and infinity. Translated by Richard Cohen. Duquesne University Press.

Mignolo, W. (2000). Local histories/global designs: Coloniality, subaltern knowledges, and border thinking. Princeton University Press.

Ranciere, J., and Murphy, T. (2002). “The saint and the heiress: A propos of Godard’s Histoire(s) du cinema.” Discourse 24(1), 113–119.

Varas-Diaz, N. (2021). Decolonial Metal Music in Latin America. Intellect.