Find an Interzone, Find Yourself an Interzone to Live in
I saw this graffiti stencil in a park in Bogota:
It’s a nod to David Cronenberg’s Naked Lunch, a cinematic tribute to William Burroughs’s novel of the same name. Cronenberg’s version is a mash up of Burroughs’s works and autobiography that is more about the writing of the novel than the novel itself. Here’s the original monster, the Mugwump, from the film:
The Mugwump is something of a mascot of the Interzone, a figurative city Cronenberg adopts from the novel to stand in for the life Burroughs created for himself as a writer and queer man. The Interzone is a literal city in the film that serves as a metaphor for the psychological places and lifestyle choices Burroughs made as he worked out his sexual and creative desires. The Interzone is depicted as a surreal shadow city of doubling and rot, populated by doppelgangers and telekinetic conversations, where subconscious desires surface and bits of discarded drug paraphernalia are transmuted into writing implements.
The Interzone might be a metaphorical city, but it’s a city—a place we live. The places we live can tell us a lot about the types of beings we are. How we design our human nests reflects the nature of our bodies, our societies, our inner worlds. David Byrne of Talking Heads fame nicely captures this in Bicycle Diaries:
Cities are physical manifestations of our deepest beliefs and our often unconscious thoughts … you don’t need CAT scans and cultural anthropologists to show you what’s going on inside the human mind; its inner works are manifested in three-dimensions, all around us … Riding a bike through all of this [urban settings] is like navigating the collective neural networks of some vast global mind … A Fantastic Voyage but without the cheesy special effects.
Cities are our attempt to change the physical world to suit our inner worlds. In this way, they reflect the stuff of our subjectivity, how our minds work. Byrne considers this on a macro, cultural level, describing the bike ride dérive as a way to explore the “collective mind” of a society.
In that passage, Byrne’s spec lit allusion is to Fantastic Voyage and not Naked Lunch, though the cheesy sci-fi movie to come to mind for me in this case is Forbidden Planet because that one is about how suppressed desires can puncture the rational façade of modernism. Indeed, implicit in Cronenberg’s hallucinatory metaphors is a critique of bourgeois conformity, hypocrisy, and repression, particularly of homosexuality. This can take on tedious undertones of misogyny and juvenile self-indulgence, as we all know was often the case with the Beats and is no more interesting or excusable for being widely acknowledged as such.
In one scene, a character describes the Interzone as a “boil on the underbelly of the West.” In the film, Burroughs’s sexual identity and general outsiderism force him to build his new universe in this underbelly of Western modernity. The stencil points out that people in the Global South may be forced into oppressive urban settings by virtue of the extractive practices of imperialism and the racialized ideologies of colonialism woven into our conception of the human—that is, modernism’s uninterrogated answer to the question we are using cities to consider (viz., the types of beings we are).
On this application of the film’s central metaphor, the Interzone is the physical instantiation of modern society’s attempt to compartmentalize our covert desires, the parts of the psyche, the parts of the system—and thus the parts of the global “city”—unacknowledged. It’s akin to how the kinda sorta sanctioned illegalities of the black market serve the desires that the market will satisfy but the culture ostensibly disowns.
If we were so inclined, we could reverse our approach and come at this investigation from the bottom up by starting with an individual object rather than Byrne’s “collective mind” of the whole of the city. Heidegger famously notes in Being and Time how a tool implies a network of linked purposes and meanings. It makes no sense, for example, to think of a pen in an empty universe; rather, the fact of a pen implies paper, desks, a desire to communicate with other people—the existence of other people to communicate with in the first place. Tools point beyond themselves, giving us clues about the minds that designed them.
The point could be made, for example, that the telephone pole reflects the triumph of our desire to be social over the constraints of physical distance. On the other hand, essayist Eula Biss traces the history of the telephone poll in American society as a tool for lynching. From both standpoints, the telephone poll tells us a lot about the types of beings we are and what we want. The park where I found the stencil has hosted an off-and-on-again protest encampment of displaced indigenous Colombians for the last while.
While Byrne might be right that we don’t need an anthropologist to see the city this way, we do need an anthropologist’s perspective. Even social scientists don’t experience the city as an object of contemplation in their day-to-day lives. For them as for all of us, the city is a collection of taken-for-granted tools until something shakes them out of their quotidian perceptual haze. That’s when anthropologists start thinking anthropologically.
Something has to knock us out of our daily perspective to step back and reflect on our hives from the detached viewpoint of the scientist, as the bicycle helps Byrne do in Bicycle Diaries. Heidegger says it’s when a tool breaks that we stop to think about it as an object.
Maybe street art can still be like the broken tool in Heidegger’s workshop, jostling us out of the everyday to confront the unacknowledged desires behind the worlds we’ve built. Maybe not. Plenty of things are broken.