It is a tape recording

When I wrote my book I was trying to find something that had gone missing; I was trying to account for a phenomenon that seems to me to pose an all too immediate threat to the social body, at all times but most especially in this moment, and to the myriad forms of life with which we share this planet. The psychoanalytic term for the phenomenon I hoped to describe is “negative hallucination.” For psychoanalysis, "negative hallucination" describes a condition in which a person cannot see another person or an object that should be immediately available to the field of sense perception. We have likely all found ourselves in a situation in which we are desperately searching for some small, seemingly inconsequential object—our wallet, a set of keys—only to discover that it is sitting right that, out in the open, on our desk, or the kitchen table, perfectly obvious to anyone in full command of their senses. To paraphrase mothers everywhere, the concept of negative hallucination is one way we might talk about those moments when we cannot see what is right in front of our face, instances often accompanied by the admonition that we would lose our heads if they weren’t screwed on. We might also think about this term in relation to the blindnesses impede our ability to understand ourselves and our relationships to those around us, particularly as it concerns negative emotional dynamics. A person enduring some form of abuse is often the least capable of recognizing that abuse, yet is incredibly adept at elaborating a fantasy of happiness that disguises the fact of intolerable misery. In this instance, the negative fantasy I hoped to examine concerned the enduring unrecognizability of indigenous presence within the culture of settler colonialism, a negative fantasy that we might extend to include a wide range of historical fantasies that touch upon and obfuscate the dialectics of capital, nation, and empire. While I am fully aware that I am by no means the first person to address myself to such concerns, it has been my hope that, by approaching the culture of settler colonialism through interpretive methods resonant with techniques of drawn from psychoanalytic dialogue, one might reconsider the wide ranging social consequences of that refusal, inasmuch as they are the unavoidable patrimony of we crises bedeviled moderns. Like psychoanalysis, this process is necessarily interminable, and one reaches conclusions advisedly, with great trepidation and deep reserves of caution. To claim certainty with respect to any such endeavor as the one I propose is not only an expression of sublime hubris, it betrays what to me seems to be a near foundational principle of any worthwhile intellectual or political endeavor; namely, that we cannot know, beforehand, the consequences of our choices, what we chose to do, or not to do, what to say, or what we leave unspoken. In short, we do not know where the path will lead. To believe we know is to indulge a fantasy of control that is not only presumptuous but ultimately destructive. It is to wander perilously close to psychosis, to tempt a complete shattering of the skein of lies we must tell ourselves so that we might endure. The denial of aggression may succeed in momentarily keeping aggression at bay, but like a silt choked river after the punishing rain, it will eventually find an outlet. I speak of psychosis tentatively, but with some small degree of expertise in the matter, having undergone a psychotic break not all that long ago. The circumstances of this break are too numerous to parse, and not necessarily germane; nonetheless, I would like it known that this break occurred on the eve of my return to the United States after a period of nearly fifteen years living abroad. I was well on my way to being crazy long before this trip began, yet something about the idea that I was going home, triggered a most violent physical and emotional response. While in the Paris airport, I experienced a series of seizures; during the last of these, I was assaulted, stripped of my clothes and my belongings, and left alone in a pool of piss and blood. When I was later found, I was taken into police custody, handcuffed to a chair, interrogated and beaten, before eventually being dosed with morphine to make me compliant. After what seemed like several hours, I was taken to a nearby hospital, where I was outfitted with a catheter and a pick-line, tied to my bed frame, and injected with further doses of who knows what. Long before the injections or the beatings, however, I had slipped into an impenetrable fugue. I was absolutely convinced that I was part of some horrible experiment in enhanced interrogation techniques; that the police and their lackeys were trying to get some piece of information from me; that they had mistaken me for somebody who knew things. Eventually, I began to entertain this notion, to take it seriously; not because I had come to accept the terms of the reality that was being presented to me, but because I was more and more convinced that none of what was happening was real; that, if not a dream, I was likely trapped in some bad long-form improv; and that, as such, I could say anything I wanted to as long as I was agreeable, and as long as what I said somehow advanced the story we were all telling. Lost in the throes of a most vivid hallucination, I decided to provoke the muses, and to approach the whole situation as if it were best regarded as an opportunity for anarchic creativity; for flamboyant wordplay; for comedy. It is this aspect of my psychosis that I want to highlight because I believe it has something to say with respect to the social and psychic dynamics of settler colonialism. By definition, the word psychosis describes a break with reality, a pronounced absence of sense that luxuriates in the hallucinatory. This was certainly one of the most glaring elements of my evening among the gendarmes. What I find more worthy of note, however, is the sheer delight I came to take in these most peculiar of circumstances; a delight underwritten by the ways in which the hallucination takes on the characteristics of luxury by relieving the subject of the burden of the symbolic; as well as the ways in which my running monologue constituted an attempt at reparation, at recovery; a reaching for the symbolic in which one signifier would again resonate with another and another, constituting a chain of meaning, of sense, of reality. Spinning a yarn, I found my place in the web, even as the finding constituted another instance of forgetting, of drawing together a new unreality. Indeed, one might notice that, by the end of this ordeal, even as I was being crushed to the floor under the heel of some fearsome jackboot, I was enjoying myself hugely, if only because the whole thing was just hysterically funny. Words became narcotic, simultaneously analgesic and stimulant, a breath of cocaine that allowed me to carry on with my delusion, to live within the terms of my psychosis, to ignore the residues of the emotional and physical damage that preceded it, and those new forms of pain that would most certainly emerge in its wake. I had made it back to the river but I had not anticipated the strength of the current. The image is not incidental. Part of the story acknowledged by but largely untold in The Corpse in the Kitchen is the story of the Mississippi River as an extraordinary feat of industrial engineering; the story of how the historical river has been remade, its geophysical dynamics grafted into the body of the nation so to better facilitate the realization of surplus-value. Even before the advent of the steam boat, settlers sought ways to manage the river and its rate of flow; hoping, on the one hand, to make the Mississippi safe for commercial navigation, while envisioning techniques by which to manage the inevitability of the seasonal flooding that posed a obstacle to the commercial development of the river valley, whether that development be agricultural or industrial. Subtracting general operating costs, as of 2021, at some $210 million, the largest single dedicated appropriation granted the US Army Corps of Engineers remains the management of the Mississippi River and its tributaries, which does not include an additional $77 million for flood protection, or the discretionary emergency funding allocated in the event of a cataclysmic natural disaster. Of course, the history of the industrial engineering of the river over the past two centuries has been one of near constant catastrophe, wiping out ancient ecosystems and the forms of life they sustained, dooming hundreds of species to the brink of extinction, and dooming those forms of human life that took shape on its banks to the ponderous routine of industrial scale flooding. The slow violence done to the river over two hundred years is instructive. It is evidence and allegory, an object lesson in the prose of counter-sovereignty as it infests the substance of everyday life, drawing out the geophysical consequences of the lies we tell as they overwhelm the story that is unfolding around us, as they render us incapable of reading the most obvious cues, even as we might remain sensitive to certain pervasive dynamics we might characterize as mood. This is about the dynamics of feeling, about the feeling of a place and what the place is telling us, about how the living and the dead, the animate and the inert, manifest the sensibility of a place.