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.