Dissociation + Radiohead

The Aesthetics of Dissociation: Radiohead's How to Disappear Completely and Jasper
Johns's Device Paintings

Author(s): Shawn Tucker
Source: Soundings: An Interdisciplinary Journal, Vol. 96, No. 1 (2013), pp. 85-98
Published by: Penn State University Press
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soundings sgnidnuos
Soundings,
Vol. 96, No. 1, 2013
Copyright 2013
The Pennsylvania
State University,
University Park, PA
The Aesthetics of Dissociation:

Radioheads How to Disappear
Completely and Jasper Johnss
Device Paintings
Shawn Tucker
Seeing a thing can sometimes trigger the mind to
make another thing. In some instances the new work
may include, as a sort of subject matter, references to
the thing that was seen. And, because works of painting tend to share many aspects, working itself may
initiate memories of other works. Naming or painting
these ghosts sometimes seems to be a way to stop their
nagging.
Fred Orton, Figuring Jasper Johns
This essay uses the psychological concept of dissociation to describe one way that Radioheads song How
to Disappear Completely and Jasper Johnss Device
paintings seem to function. In their formal elements,
content, and context, these works show the detachment, depersonalization, and automatization that are
hallmarks of what psychologists describe as dissociation.
The song and paintings do not show these qualities in
exactly the same way, but the triangulation of song,
paintings, and psychological concept shed light on all
three. This examination also reveals a dynamics at the
heart of this triangulation. While the aesthetics of the
song and paintings demonstrate the above-mentioned
dissociative qualities, they do so in a manner that is so
lush, sumptuous, and inviting so as to make them very
engaging. Consequently, the works invite mental and
emotional engagement partly by their dense yet luscious
formal qualities and partly by their detached content.
Soundings 96.1_03_Tucker.indd 85
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The tension created by works that evoke detachment in such an engaging

manner creates yet another parallel with psychological insights about dissociation. Contemporary dissociation experts have noted how dreams can often
make otherwise invisible dissociative structures or patterns visible. In this
respect, the song and paintings function like dreams, as they symbolize such
structures and patterns, give them objective form, bring them into the open,
and make them available for examination and analysis. By bringing such patterns into the open, into the light of day, these works name or paint or sing
about what would otherwise be haunting and spectral, and by doing so create
an opportunity to end that ghostly nagging.
Im not here; this isnt happening. These six words are the chorus of Radioheads song How to Disappear Completely. This song, featured on the
groups 2000 album Kid A, begins with these lines: That there / Thats not
me. Subsequent lines evoke an immaterial, ghostlike irreality on the part of
the speaker: I go / Where I please / I walk through walls / I float down the
Liffey / Im not here / This isnt happening. In these lines there seems to be a
sense of freedom in the image of walking through walls and of escape by floating down Dublins Liffey, but, as the next lines show, both freedom and escape
come from a negation of the self and physical, spatial reality, or at least from a
dissociation from those realities. Where these lines evoke a spatial disconnection between subject and surroundings, the songs following stanza creates a
tense temporal disconnection: In a little while / Ill be gone/ The moments
already passed / Yeah its gone. These lines lead directly into the chorus, Im
not here / This isnt happening, as time and space become disconnected from
the speakers sense of reality. This disconnection reaches both a musical and
lyrical crescendo in the last stanza and chorus. Here there is the tempestuous
combination of both concert stage and natural disaster imagery and the ubiquitous denial of the subjects connection to that context: Strobe lights and blown
speakers / Fireworks and hurricanes / Im not here / This isnt happening.
This sense of disconnection from stage and storm, from time and place,
is reinforced in the songs music. The opening bars, which seem to emerge ex
nihilo, are a dense combination of strings reminiscent of the orchestration of
Krzyszlof Penderecki. These strings have a vague and unresolved quality that
Marianne Tatom Letts connects with the musical concept of noise (2005,
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tuck er The Aesthetics of Dissociation
4446). In describing this noise, Letts says that the synthesized strings seem
to be simply lying in wait to engulf the voice (71). This noise continues
throughout the song, accentuated with the occasional descending electronic
guitar call. It is in the midst of this noise that a plaintive guitar emerges,
followed by a bass guitar moving through a pentatonic scale. Against this rich
musical texture the voice surfaces, with the lyrics sung in a long, conjunct,
almost elegiac melody. The vocal lines threnody-like quality over the songs
complex musical textures adds to the sense of a disembodied speaker. Each
chorus begins with a form of Im not here; this isnt happening, and the
noise above the second chorus has what Letts calls horn-like sounds
moving down and up the scale (72). This form of the omnipresent noise,
which alters slightly as the chorus continues, has a more computerized sound,
but it gives the sense of a malfunctioning computer. In the songs third verse,
where the voice sings about Strobe lights and broken speakers / Fireworks
and hurricanes, the noise, which has become richer and more complex,
seems even more poised to engulf the voice. By the end, the falsetto voice
parallels the descending electronic guitar call, and the song moves toward
a final climactic dissonance. It is amid this dissonance that the voice is
completely engulfed. Finally, the song descends into an uneasy resolution of
noise and bass guitar scales. Letts describes this not as a resolution but as
the voices final dissolution, a dissolution brought on by the subjects inability to cope in the soul-draining alienation of modern society and the souls
subsequent longing for release (76).
While Letts places this dissolution within the context of the entire Kid
A album as she describes it, the subjects dissolution or disintegration is not
unique to Radioheads How to Disappear Completely. Several songs on the
bands 1995 album The Bends also give a strong sense of a disintegrated or
disconnected subject. Fake Plastic Trees evokes such a disconnection with
the image of A green plastic watering can / For a fake Chinese rubber plant /
In the fake plastic earth, a polystyrene man, and the choruss lament about
how She looks like the real thing / She tastes like the real thing / My fake
plastic love. Fake Plastic Trees seems haunted by an irreality born of a consumerism that reduces subjects to polystyrene people among plastic objects
where real connection is impossible. Street Spirit (Fade Out), another
song on the same album, paints a picture of a subject fleeing an oppressive
reality. The song begins by describing Rows of houses all bearing down on
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me /Ican feel their blue hands touching me and a machine that will not
communicate / These thoughts and the strain I am under. It is in response to
this mechanized oppression that the voice pleads: Be a world child, form a
circle / Before we all go under / And fade out again and fade out again. This
desire to form a circle or be a world is a drive to create a protective barrier
between the subject and the outside world or reality. Such a need is perhaps
explained by the songs violent imagery of Cracked eggs, dead birds that
Scream as they fight for life. It is little wonder that, in such an environment
of identity by consumption or horrific violence, another song on the album is
named Bulletproof . . . I Wish I Was. Two Radiohead songs written after Kid
A also deserve mention in this respect. The sixth track on the 2003 album Hail
to the Thief, titled Where I End and You Begin, features these dissociative
lyrics: Im up in the clouds / And I cant, I cant come down / I can watch
but not take part / Where I end and where you start / And you, you left me
alone. Finally, the last song on the In Rainbows bonus CD, titled 4 Minute
Warning, is dominated by these lyrics: This is just a nightmare / Soon Im
going to wake up / Someones gonna bring me round.
While all of these songs touch on a disconnection between the self and
outside reality or between different faculties within the self, this dissociation
has its best expression in How to Disappear Completely, and some evidence
and reasonable conjecture around the songs inspiration may help account for
its dissociative qualities. On the origin of How to Disappear Completely, it
has been written that lead singer Thom Yorke said the following:
That song is about the whole period of time that OK Computer
was happening. We did the Glastonbury Festival and this thing in
Ireland. Something snapped in me. I just said, Thats it. I cant take
it anymore. And more than a year later, we were still on the road.
Ihadnt had time to address things. The lyrics came from something
Michael Stipe said to me. I rang him and said, I cannot cope with
this. And he said, Pull the shutters down and keep saying, Im not
here, this is not happening. (Green Plastic Radiohead News 2000)
We cannot know exactly what the things were that Thom Yorke hadnt had
time to address, but a few seem clear. While he was surely exhausted from all
of the touring, Yorke has also mentioned that he felt angry because he had
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given over the control of his life and his music to the demands of promoters, managers, record companies, and others. The demands of the Rock and
Roll mythology (Reflections on Kid A 2000) seem to have left him feeling
exhausted, disillusioned, and disconnected from his band mates, from audiences, and from the very music he felt forced to perform relentlessly.
One symptom of this crisis was Yorkes debilitating two-year bout of
writers block. In Reflections on Kid A (2000), a documentary with performance clips and an interview with Yorke directed by Rob Hodselmans, Yorke
said that one way around this block was to take the fragments of lyrics he
had written and, instead of throwing them out, pull the snippets out of a
top hat and use them at random. What made this so effective for Yorke is
that it managed to preserve whatever emotions were in the original writing but in a way that it is not trying to emote (Reflections on Kid A 2000).
Yorke reported that most of the songs on Kid A were put together using this
method, one that preserves the evocative qualities of the lines but which
is ultimately impersonal, non-emotive, and automatic in the Dadaist or
Surrealist sense of the term.
Yorke used this automatic approach as a way around his block, but the
most glaring example on the Kid A album not created in this manner is How to
Disappear Completely. Yorke reported that How to Disappear Completely
is an older song that predates the writing of other songs on Kid A, and that he
liked the lyrics because they were written quite quickly (Reflections on Kid A
2000). He elaborated that it was written during the most difficult and chaotic
time with OK Computer. Of its lyrics, Yorke reported that the chorus was like
a mantra to get out of it, or Im not here, this isnt happening (Reflections
on Kid A 2000). This it seems to be the trauma of that time, and How to
Disappear Completely was his way to escape. In the interview, as Yorke says
these words from the songs chorus, he makes a gesture with his hands like
something coming down and says blinds down sort of thing, and then comments that this kept [him] going for a very long time (Reflections on Kid A
2000). It seems reasonable to conclude that the song expressed Yorkes desire
to rise above and escape the chaotic loss of control he felt by detaching and
disappearing, at least during this one song.
While Yorkes experience at the time of its composition helps substantiate a reading of How to Disappear Completely that connects it with dissociation, the
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center of this examination is not the creators (or one of the creators) biography.
What makes the song such a compelling example of the aesthetics of dissociation has less to do with the creators personal context than how the music and
lyrics in the piece evoke elements of what psychologists describe as dissociation. Psychologists define dissociation as two or more mental processes or contents [that] are not associated or integrated in the normally expected manner
(Encyclopedia of Mental Health 1998, 756). In addition, dissociation includes
disruptions of the integrative functions of consciousness, memory, identity, or
perception of the environment (756). The disruptions serve a number of functions. Dissociation automatizes behavior so that some actions and thought processes can occur without direct conscious attention and hence with increased
efficiency (756). Psychologists point out that dissociation may permit a form
of resolution for irreconcilable conflicts by keeping dissonant issues in different
areas or levels of consciousness (756). Furthermore, it may allow an escape
from reality, giving the illusion of mastery or escape from intolerable circumstances (756). Finally, dissociation can isolate catastrophic experiences until an
individual is better able to integrate them into mainstream consciousness (756).
Philip Brombergs elaborations on dissociation further this exploration.
Bromberg notes how, through the creative use of dissociation, the mind
selects whichever self-state configuration is most adaptive at a given moment
without compromising affective safety (2006, 4). In everyday life, we switch
between self-states, selecting the one that best fits the context. We are not
exactly the same when we are sitting in church as we are when we are coaching a kids soccer game as we are when we are in our lovers arms. We select
the best self-state configuration, differentiating between each one, and using
dissociation to make each at least somewhat autonomous. Montaigne seems
to have this in mind when he observes that we are all patchwork, and so
shapeless and diverse in composition that each bit, each moment, plays its
own game (1958, 244).
In such a patchwork of self-states, dissociation is both useful and healthy.
Dissociation is unhealthy when there is a loss of an overarching and unifying
self-coherence. Bromberg notes that this overarching self-coherence is sacrificed when what was formerly a fluid and creative dialectic between selfstates through the normal process of dissociation is slowly replaced by a rigid
Balkanization of the various aspects of self (2006, 5). Balkanization here is
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an evocative term to vividly contrast the healthy dissociation of differentiated

yet harmonious self-states sharing an overarching whole against the unhealthy
isolation of self-states that lack a unifying self-coherence. Bromberg further
elaborates on this disintegration with the image of islands. He explains that
what were formerly interrelated and connected self-states become sequestered islands of truth where each island vigilantly protects itself from potentially disjunctive input of the other by the dissociative gap surrounding it (5).
When explaining the impact of these gaps within the self, Bromberg
points out that because of such a Balkanization past trauma is not allowed
to enter narrative memory as an authentic part of the past (2006, 5). Such
an unhealthy dissociation is a defense unlike any other. It protects the stability of the self by controlling unsymbolized traumatic affect that it cannot
regulate. . . . It functions because conflict is unbearable to the mind, not
because it is unpleasant (7). Overwhelming conflict, in the form of unsymbolized traumatic affect, is sequestered into sharply divided self-states. Such
a sequestering provides relative security, but it comes at the cost of integration and self-coherence. Bromberg and others propose dreams as a way to
symbolize traumatic affect and invite reintegration, insights which this essay
will address later.
What comes to the fore as we examine the song carefully is how well its
many elements match up with elements of dissociation. The bass guitar moving up and down the pentatonic scale in regular, repetitive, and predictable
ways evokes how dissociation automatizes behavior to maximize efficiency
by sidestepping direct conscious attention. The songs violent imagery and
dissonant noise contrast sharply with the voices long, almost monotonous
melody. Such a contrast could demonstrate the songs form of resolutions
for irreconcilable conflicts by keeping dissonant issues in different areas. It
is as if some of the musical elements were sonically sequestered islands.
The possible context for the songs creation shows how it may have allowed
Yorke, while performing it, to escape from [an intolerable] reality. It certainly seems reasonable that Yorke appreciated the songs dissociative qualities as a way to isolate catastrophic experiences until he could integrate
them into [his] mainstream consciousness. The songs lyrics and music work
together to evoke the Balkanization of self-states vigilantly protecting themselves from potentially disjunctive input. In the context of the song, I am
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not here precisely because self-coherences fluidity has become replaced by

dissociations frightened rigidity, resulting in the voices final disintegration
and dissolution.
Radioheads song and the aesthetics of dissociation come into sharper focus
when we compare both with Jasper Johnss Device paintings. In 1959 Jasper
Johns created Device Circle (see Varnedoe 2006 for this image). The painting has collaged pieces of newsprint on the surface with the pigments in an
encaustic medium. This was one of Johnss preferred techniques of the time,
used in many, many works, including 1955s Target with Four Faces. Device
Circle is also a square, like the square canvas of Target with Four Faces. Both
Device Circle and Target with Four Faces feature a centrally placed circle or
concentric circles as the key motif. While it lacks the anthropomorphic and
enigmatic four faces, Device Circle includes the seemingly found object of
a stick nailed to the center of a canvas. This stick is used like a compass to
inscribe a circle into the paintings surface. Finally, the works title is stenciled
onto the lower portion.
In 1961 Johns returned to this motif with Device. This work also has the
title stenciled at the bottom and uses similar brushwork, though it is done
with oil. Device is a much larger painting than Device Circle, and it employs
two sticks used like compasses. But where the stick of Device Circle inscribed
a circle into the surface, thicker sticks of Device scrape across the surface.
Devices sticks seem more like found pieces of canvas stretcher than a random
stick. In 1962 Johns made another version of Device, this time smaller and with
what are clearly two rulers and a large, centrally placed piece of wood over a
field of black and gray oil paint. The large, centrally placed board in this work
is reminiscent of the vertically placed thermometer in the 1959 painting titled
Thermometer.
A common reading of all of these works places them as responses to the
New York Abstract Expressionist school. Such a reading originates with Johns
himself, who famously said:
I have attempted to develop my thinking in such a way that the work
Ive done is not menot to confuse my feelings with what I produce.
I didnt want my work to be an exposure of my feelings. Abstract
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One way to see how Johnss work rejects lively Abstract Expressionism as
part of his effort to make work that is not identical to his feelings is by comparing his 1959 painting Thermometer to Barnett Newmans 195051 Vir Heroicus
Sublimis. Newmans tremendous work conveys human natures heroic and
sublime grandeur with a monumental red canvas made all the more vast by
subtle modulations and vertical stripes called zips. Newman sees his work as
part of the grandest traditions of art, and his attempt to engage the viewer in
the largest themes of the human drama uses an artistic method as simple yet
powerful as the first notes of Beethovens Fifth Symphony. Johnss Thermometer does not make any of these grand claims. Thermometer is on a more modest
scale, less than 5 feet by about 3 feet instead of almost 8 feet by almost18 feet.
The vertically placed thermometer at the center of Johnss work replicates and
even mocks Newmans zips. Johnss stenciled numbers along the thermometer copy the instruments temperature calibrations. The thermometer and
its stenciled numbers emerge from a field of brushstrokes not unlike those of
de Kooning and other Abstract Expressionists, but the works banality seems
to mock Abstract Expressionisms overheated subjectivity and quest for sublime spiritual or psychological heights.
There seems to be something even more aggressive in the Device
paintings interrogation of Abstract Expressionist subjectivity. Device Circle
includes a found object, a device, that actually inscribes an almost mechanized circle across the field. The other Device works go further, smearing and
blurring the individual paint marks and gestures. This can be read as having profound artistic and even ontological implications. For some Abstract
Expressionists, the mark, the drip, or the brushstroke, like the handprints
in cave paintings, were existential if not cosmic assertions of self upon the
void of nothingness. Johnss devices literally smear and obliterate the individual qualities of the marks and distort beyond recognition the very vehicle
of self, of identity, and of existence. Johnss Devices, with their blurred fields,
leave traces of what has been lost and can never be recovered. The devices
Expressionism was so livelypersonal identity and painting were

more or less the same, and I tried to operate the same way. But I
found I couldnt do anything that would be identical with my feelings. So I worked in such a way that I could say that its not me. That
accounts for the separation. (Raynor 1973, 22)
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aresmall, subject-removal machines, machines that erase the gesture and its
existential assertions.
As an erasure of the subjective and of subjectivity, Johnss Device paintings embody his attempt to make art that is not him, art that is not an
exposure of [the artists] feelings. Seen in the light of the psychological ideas
of dissociation, Johns dissociates what he makes from who he is. The Device
paintings isolate or separate the objective and the subjective, functions that
the Abstract Expressionists collapsed. These seemingly mechanized paintings, or, better said, anti-painting mechanized devices, demonstrate a level
of detachment, depersonalization, and automatization that suspends if not
eliminates emotional involvement.
Where How to Disappear Completely features a voice and melody
seemingly cut off from an otherwise overwhelming reality, a disconnection
seen in the contrast between the voice and its musical environment, the
Device paintings employ a gesture-erasing machine that breaks the connection between the subjective and the objective. These are not identical dissociations, but both works function against associations or integrations in the
normally expected manner, and in doing so evoke a lost integration of fluid
self-coherence. Though dissimilar from the song in many ways, it seems that a
very fitting subtitle for Johnss Device paintings could be Im Not Here.
While such a subtitle does seem appropriate, given the artists statement, the
seeming objectivity of the works, and their simultaneous denial and even
erasure of subjectivity, there is still a very strong sense in which even these
works by Johns and Radiohead say something very different from Im Not
Here. The very vehemence of the denial invites one to look deeper; the gaping absence beckons one to look for an otherwise invisible or unrecognized
ghostly presence.
In July of 2006 Thom Yorke released a solo album called The Eraser. The
title track from the album includes this lyric: The more you try the eraser/
The more, the more / The more that you appear. What Yorkes song says
about the eraser can point toward a complementary crosscurrent at work in
the song and paintings that are the focus of this study. In the aesthetics of dissociation, the greater the attempt to dissociate, to disintegrate, and to erase,
the more powerfully that which is erased appears or that which is separated
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invites connection and engagement. As cool and emotionally inert as Johnss

Device paintings might seem, the richness of the thickly gestural passages has
a powerful subjective appeal. The contrast between blurred and unblurred
fields of gestural marks makes the erasure of those marks of subjectivity all the
more obvious and subjectively engaging. In addition, the contrast between the
automatic stenciled title and movement of the device, and the sumptuous gestural field heightens the tension between the objective and subjective,
throwing the contrasts, the crosscurrents, into relief instead of making them
disappear completely.
We find the same dynamic undertow in the Radiohead song. The seemingly unemotional singing, accompanied by the plaintive guitar set against
such a rich musical texture brings to the fore the conflictive dynamics of the
voice that says it is not there, but whose presence and subjectivity are all the
stronger for its constant denial. The lyrics hold out hope that in a little while /
Ill be gone, but, of course, that little while never comes; the voice that says
that it is not there, and says that over and over again, is all the more there
each subsequent time it denies this fact. This does not eliminate the original
dissociation, but places it in a powerful, contrasting tension. Both works evoke
dissociations, but as they do, and the more strongly they do it, the more they
make those dissociations visible. Struck by those dissociations, the tensions
invite an even more associative, connected, and engaging response from an
audience.
This tension, the way that the works seem to evoke dissociation or disengagement in such an engaging manner, leads to one more important connection between these works and psychological insights about dissociation,
specifically, the connection between dissociation and dreams. As mentioned
previously, Bromberg holds the view that dissociation protects the stability of
the self by controlling unsymbolized traumatic affect that it cannot regulate
(2006, 7). Sequestered and isolated, unsymbolized traumatic affect not only
cannot be regulated but it cannot be integrated. Among Brombergs contributions to his field is how enactments between an analyst and a patient can
symbolize such affects so that they can be integrated. One phenomenon that
Bromberg often finds helpful for such enactments are dreams, and part of
the reason he calls his book Awakening the Dreamer is because he notes how
effectively traumatic affect is symbolized in dreams. To awaken the dreamer
is, among other things, to invite otherwise isolated self-states to become aware
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of one another, to speak, to begin to communicate, and finally to negotiate

a shared, fluid relationship. On the role and function of dreams, Bromberg
notes that
dreaming might be considered among the most routine day-to-day
dissociative activities of the mindits nocturnal function being an
adaptational effort to cope with minimal levels of affectively disruptive not-me experience without interfering with the waking illusion
of central consciousness. One of its manifestations in psychoanalysis
is to contain and hold, as a separate reality, unprocessed affective
experience that is not safely containable at that moment within the
I that defines the analytic relationship for the patient. (3839)
As a container and separate reality, dreams keep traumatic content at bay,
but they also keep it at hand and within the possible reach of a consciousness
willing to wake up to its reality.
Bromberg connects these ideas about dreams with those expressed by
Cecily de Monchaux. De Monchaux explains the important therapeutic role
of communicating ones dreams by first noting that dream telling is a dissociated action itself, and the content of what is told is experienced as such by
the telleras different from the content of day thinking, and in sanity, not to
be confused with it (1993, 203). De Monchaux, while noting the dissociative
nature of relating ones dreams, further elaborates that
it may be precisely because of its dissociative characteristics that the
dream becomes the vehicle, the container, of split-off elements.
Since the dreamer has the illusion that he is not responsible for
his dream, it is safe to put unwanted thoughts into it. It functions
as a place of asylum, in which split-off elements can be kept alive
until conditions are propitious for their integration with consciously
acceptable elements. (203)
Dreams, and therefore dream-telling, are not identical with the speaker, and it
is precisely because of this separation, this dissociation, that they can provide
a safe place or asylum where otherwise threatening material can be contained
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until it can be integrated. But the tremendous advantage that dreams provide
is that through dreams one can begin to deal with dissociation. Therefore,
with the aid of dreams, continues de Monchaux, dissociation with no access
to consciousness, as in the numbing or freezing stages of the primary stress
response, gives way to dissociation with partial access to consciousness via
night thinking, and this provides a trial ground, a way station on the road to
integration (203).
In this respect How to Disappear Completely and the Device paintings
function like dreams. While these dreams may hold a particular purpose for
their tellers, and we have touched on how they may function for Yorke and
Johns, for other audiences these dreams are expressive yet objective containers. The song and paintings are not me, and one can look or not look, play,
pause, replay, or stop them whenever one would like. One is safe to listen to
them or look at them, and then free to stop as soon as one feels threatened.
And why might an audience feel threatened? While the works do not specifically point toward any particular danger, they powerfully evoke what for an
audience may be previously unsymbolized trauma. They also demonstrate
how one might deal with that trauma; by dissociating. By evoking the trauma
that triggers dissociation and then by revealing dissociation as a method of
containing that trauma, these works make the otherwise invisible dynamics of
dissociation visible, at least to an audience willing to awaken to that dream.
And though the paintings and song seem haunted by trauma, the works themselves, like dreams, provide an asylum, a trial ground, a way station on the
road to integration as a means to examine and potentially put an end to the
ghostly nagging. These are indeed haunting works of art, but they may help
to make visible and finally exorcize the very ghosts they evoke.
Works Cited
Bromberg, Philip. 2006. Awakening the Dreamer. Mahwah, NJ: Analytic Press.
Encyclopedia of Mental Health. 1998. San Diego: Academic Press. s.v. Dissociative
Disorders.
Green Plastic Radiohead News. 2000. November 30, 2000. Green Plastic Radiohead
News. http://www.greenplastic.com/news/archives/102000012001.html.
Letts, Marianne Tatom. 2005. How to Disappear Completely: Radiohead and the
Resistant Concept Album. PhD diss., University of Texas at Austin.
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de Monchaux, Cecily. 1993. Dreaming and the Organizing Function of the Ego. In
The Dream Discourse Today, edited by Sara Flanders, 195212. New York:
Routledge.
Montaigne, Michel. 1958. Complete Essays. Translated by Donald Frame. Stanford:
Stanford University Press.
Orton, Fred. 1994. Figuring Jasper Johns. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Raynor, Vivian. 1973. Jasper Johns: I Have Attempted to Develop My Thinking in
Such a Way that the Work Ive Done is Not Me. Artnews 72:2022.
Reflections on Kid A. 2000. Directed by Rob Hodselmans. VPRO. Uploaded by
SpoonHysteria, March 22, 2008. YouTube. http://www.youtube.com/
watch?v=CkzmyarSNzQ.
Varnedoe, Kirk. 2006. Jasper Johns: A Retrospective. New York: Museum of
Modern Art.
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Dissociation + Radiohead

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The Aesthetics of Dissociation: Radiohead's How to Disappear Completely and Jasper

Johns's Device Paintings

The Aesthetics of Dissociation:

The tension created by works that evoke detachment in such an engaging

tuck er The Aesthetics of Dissociation

tuck er The Aesthetics of Dissociation

tuck er The Aesthetics of Dissociation

an evocative term to vividly contrast the healthy dissociation of differentiated

not here precisely because self-coherences fluidity has become replaced by

tuck er The Aesthetics of Dissociation

Expressionism was so livelypersonal identity and painting were

tuck er The Aesthetics of Dissociation

invites connection and engagement. As cool and emotionally inert as Johnss

of one another, to speak, to begin to communicate, and finally to negotiate

tuck er The Aesthetics of Dissociation

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