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

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 Radiohead’s song “How to Disappear Completely” and Jasper Johns’s 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.

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.

“I’m not here; this isn’t happening.” These six words are the chorus of Radio-head’s song “How to Disappear Completely.” This song, featured on the group’s 2000 album Kid A, begins with these lines: “That there / That’s 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 / I’m not here / This isn’t 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 Dublin’s 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 song’s following stanza creates a tense temporal disconnection: “In a little while / I’ll be gone / The moment’s already passed / Yeah it’s gone.” These lines lead directly into the chorus, “I’m not here / This isn’t happening,” as time and space become disconnected from the speaker’s 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 subject’s connection to that context: “Strobe lights and blown speakers / Fireworks and hurricanes / I’m not here / This isn’t happening.”

This sense of disconnection from stage and storm, from time and place, is reinforced in the song’s 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, 44–46). In describing this “noise,” Letts says that “the synthesized strings seem to be simply lying in wait to engulf the voice...