Mat Keel PhD

Marooned in the Swamp of Spots: Space, Dissociation, and Aesthetics, After a Baton Rouge Plantation

PhD Dissertation, Department of Geography & Anthropology, Louisiana State University, 2026.

Abstract

This dissertation offers an ethnographic and theoretical account of an ostensible plantation afterlife, arguing that its continuity is best understood not through repression and return but through dissociation. Where Freudian models render persistence as depth, burial, and the return of the repressed, I develop a critical revivification of Pierre Janet's theory of dissociation that is articulated through two concepts from Félix Guattari, asignifying semiotics and transversality, and woven together with Frantz Fanon's colonial geography, to argue that unassimilated material produces temporalities embedded not only in individual psyches but in places. Persistence, on this account, is not what is hidden and recovered but what operates alongside but unintegrated and registers as temporal convergence.

The research is sited at Yes We Cannibal, a multimodal platform for new art and thought I co-founded and co-directed at 1600 Government Street in Baton Rouge from 2020 to 2025. Five years of ethnographic immersion, conducted primarily as curatorial practice, ground four empirical chapters, each developing a distinct dissociative operation. Chapter 1 introduces representational foreclosure, an institutional dissociation that instrumentalizes the non-assimilation of material to prevent certain assemblages from reenactment. Chapter 2 extends this to a police black site, the Brave Cave, where people vanish and the city redacts itself. Chapter 3 follows a figure named Peter-Johnny -- a split name, a maladjusted house, an oscillating state of ownership -- to show a grammar shared between personal dissociation and the legal infrastructure of Louisiana civil law. Chapter 4 tracks reappearance as the other side of the relation, through a temporary restaurant event that precipitates the surfacing of unassimilated material.

The dissertation's primary theoretical contribution is a theory of dissociative instruments: a repertoire of institutional, legal, and curatorial forms -- representational foreclosure, redaction, affective constituencies -- that share a common grammar with financial instruments, operating by dissociation rather than repression. Read together, they describe how the plantation and other episodes of historical political violence persist not as memory but a type of operation, and how they remain, for that reason, vulnerable to disassembly.

---

From Chapter 2 — The Brave Cave: Black Sites, Black Square Dancing

Two excerpts.

[T]he movement of desire is sterilized by a relationship of representation; the image becomes the memory of a reality made impotent, and its immobilization establishes the world of dominant significations and received ideas. This operation of controlling all the intensive multiplicities constitutes the first act of political violence.
— Félix Guattari, Towards a Micro-Politics of Desire¹

We need to give history a break… we can't fetishize history. It is not an object. It's also not subject to revision. But there are gaps. Might we even say that there are black sites?
— Jeremy Toussaint-Baptiste, Baton Rouge, February 2, 2025

Niggas can't see me
They can't see me
Which way did he go, George?
Which way did he go?
Oh!! Which way did he go?
Which way did he go?
— Tupac, “Can't C Me” (1996)

1.

The image that Guattari invokes here, native to the operation from which political violence begins, has two senses in this chapter. In the first sense, which is closer to his original statement, the image operates as a privileged index; it fixes dominancy and it constrains intensive multiplicities. The second sense points to the circulation of images which operates as unassimilated material in an assemblage, and within the specific register of political violence.

Immediately after the 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center, German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen told a reporter that the day's events must have been the "the greatest work of art that has ever existed for the whole cosmos." When he was pressed to elaborate on the incendiary remark, he only slightly relented. Stockhausen clarified that while he did acknowledge the event was a crime - because no one attended the happening willingly – he still thought of it as an instance of pure art. It reflected a "jump out of security," he said.²

The phrase immediately recalls a particular image that is aesthetically imbricated with the attacks: The Falling Man (2001) by AP Photographer Richard Drew in which an unidentified man leaps from the burning World Trade Center. But Falling aesthetically restages an earlier image, Leap into the Void (1960) by Yves Klein. Both images appear to document bodies falling freely but only Leap is a conventional illusion. Klein's image prefigures The Falling Man in an aesthetic register. From this vantage, it is a historically precocious photographic composite, an assertion of art as total control: the artist imbuing his own body with "full powers."³ In Falling, an unidentified man commits his body to space to escape consumption by the rapidly approaching flames. This photograph is a documentary about submission - the body tenders its essential quality of physical mass when the subject is confronted with an unthinkable decision: how to disappear. The pair of images forms an oscillation between dominating space and submitting to it.

In 1983, popular illusionist David Copperfield announced that he would make the Statue of Liberty disappear in the presence of a live television audience. The event was a massive and costly production, performed as a haughty flex of financial muscle with little theoretical dressing: pure force. Frank Capra, a famous and highly influential early Hollywood director, wrote the script for the event. During World War II, only four days after Pearl Harbor, he had been directly appointed to the U.S. Army Signal Corps where he produced and directed wartime propaganda films.⁴ Two leading "illusion engineers" named Jim Steinmeyer and Don Wayne designed its architecture.⁵ The illusion's sleight of hand relied on exploiting sound and vibration. Its mechanism was a bass-heavy soundtrack that was deployed tactically, overwhelming the full sensory register of the audience at the same moment that massive hydraulics rotated the bleacher seating atop a bandstand which operated like a massive lazy Susan. Capra's script instructed that Copperfield would dramatically raise the curtain and that, when it dropped, the statue would be gone. Because the bleacher had fully rotated without the audience's awareness, the statue would be fully obscured by a pillar: functionally obliterated.

In each of two pairs of images – Leap and Falling, Copperfield and the attacks on the World Trade Center - the first image is an illusion, and the second image is documentation of a real event. The relationship that is internal to each pair is neither causal nor incidental. The illusion does not cause the event, nor is it coincidental. But it is also not the later event that gives meaning to the illusion, an explanation that would resemble the Freudian model of Nachträglichkeit: a temporal delay in which a later scene retroactively re-signifies an earlier scene to explain how trauma operates in time. An illusion is pure surface. It has no hidden content to recover; it can only rehearse a form, the same form through which the later event also takes place. It is not meaning but form that repeatedly re-instantiates and persists.

Stockhausen was almost universally excoriated for his comments about 9/11, but twenty-five years later, the episode still marks something insistent about how aesthetics and political violence are entangled. The spectacular negation at the heart of Copperfield's Statue of Liberty illusion is a diagrammatic show of force. It resembles representational foreclosure and the machete in the previous chapter. Both episodes ask how the aesthetic register governs affective capacities through the management of force, but Copperfield makes use of a different dissociative instrument: redaction.⁶

---

4.

The appearance of the Brave Cave is what compels the Water Man to finally come inside, a disappearance off the street. The gallery is between exhibits, and our big white soundproof curtains hang in the windows. It is nearly dusk. His voice is already raw from the first moment he begins talking.

"How could you do that to another person?"

He says it over and over again.

His eyes are tearing.

"That's a person. That's a person."

Other people have come forward by now with additional allegations, but the Water Man is still talking about the appearance, the first figure, the man who heard the name in the back of the police car when he was rendered from his home near Scotlandville.

"How could you do that to another person?"

He sounds like he is trying to push something out.

Months earlier, the Water Man and I stood outside chatting on 16th Street. He was leaning, only just barely inclined, against his truck and I was standing on the street maybe ten feet away. That was the day he told me about the first time that he vanished. He was a little boy when he first appeared in Baton Rouge. His father moved the family from Mississippi after the Ku Klux Klan attacked their house. Baton Rouge was a safe space.

You got Black folks to come into a space called Cannibal – that's something, Thomas Stanley says in my head.

While I am listening to him, I am thinking about the gallery at the same time. I am thinking about how it is soundproofed and my mind draws itself to the labor that we put into treating the space, how Austin Franklin came by late one morning and played testing tones, then plotted the measurements he took in pencil as waveforms to better understand the problem posed by the concrete box and to figure out how to prepare it so that performances could be heard more clearly. The waves bounce endlessly and recursively off all the concrete walls. There is too much force in the room. When Matt Viz comes to visit the next year, he suggests curtains like these, moving blankets sewed inside of heavy marine fabric to absorb sound.

I can hear the Water Man very clearly. I think to myself that he sounds like a child whose pet has died. The pitch of his voice is sped up. I think to myself that he sounds like this is the first time he has ever met grief. He sounds like a little boy, like he is about to vanish.

In late fall 2021, a young rapper messages me that we need to talk. He performed to a small audience at the space about ten days ago. This was during the earliest days of in-person programming, which had been stalled by the pandemic. Our audience is tiny and the events are still mostly aspirational proof of concept. The rapper had performed to a nearly empty gallery with Liz and me as the only audience members who were not closely connected to either of the two performers. Today on the phone, he sounds nervous. His words arrive as staccato. It's not clear what he wants to say but he spits it out.

"It's like Get Out in there."

I feel slapped. I start talking faster, trying to explain what it is that we are attempting to do. The biggest thing on our horizon at this point is Tunde's project and I begin telling him about the concept, but he cuts me off.

"See, that's what I'm talking about."

I pause, and say his name first, then: "Are you saying, like, that I'm saying I have Black friends?"

"That's exactly what I'm saying" he says without contrition.

We end the call a few beats later.

"How could you do that to another person?"

Now I am thinking of Catherine Keener's character and the slow and insistent stirring sound from her teacup.

The Water Man is rocking rhythmically but only very slightly.

It is like he is in a minor trance.

Soon, he disappears.

---