The KFC is on Fire: On the Loss of Identity
by Jason Gilbert
The township that I was raised in, Delhi, is a small suburb that sits just outside of Cincinnati. James Pogue, a native son of the city, wrote in the “City by City” essay he wrote for n+1, that growing up there felt like “living outside of history.” Delhi (we pronounce it Del-high), is a township of 29,510 people, and it advertises itself as the “Floral Capital of Ohio.” It’s true that a few greenhouses are nestled in the hills, but the more usual sight is of abandoned hothouses squatting in fields of scrub weeds.
Prior to World War II, Delhi must have been true to its slogan, but post-war prosperity led to international growers undermining the local floral market. Property that belonged to local greenhouses was mostly sold for development, becoming suburban tract houses or business chains. The photos of pre-development Delhi are black and white, so the colors of a pastoral landscape framed by bloom-filled greenhouses are forever gone.
The Delhi that I’ve grown up with is defined mostly by housing developments. There is something liminal about the township. Outside of the small business district that bisects the landscape, the suburbs fan out. The style of houses mutates from 1950s Cape Cod, 1970s bungalow, to the current vogue for oversized McMansions, but the neighborhoods repeat endlessly, giving one the feeling that you could die of thirst on someone’s lawn in front of a de Chirico desert of empty windows. The business district, which stretches along a single road (Delhi Pike), presents a half-life of vape stores and fast food chains. Past the businesses, the road slopes down a hill of decreasing house prices, intersecting with River Road, in a predominantly white, impoverished community called Sedamsville, rucked up along the banks of the Ohio River.
I guess, in one sense, Cincinnati does, like most midwestern, mid-size cities, sit outside of history. Local history takes the form of boosterism, and the large sweeps of cultural movements have only arrived here in murmurs. In another sense, Delhi functions as a kind of prototype monoculture that now seems to encompass even coastal, cosmopolitan cities. As a lifelong resident, I feel a sense of schadenfreude that even larger cities are trying to create a sense of community out of a landscape where the storied buildings are a Burger King and a McDonald’s. Living within a mid-sized city, or small town, often means that seeing your home referenced within mainstream discourse triggers a feeling of jouissance. A larger city is used to being viewed by the outsiders, having its stories told and re-told, having its view of itself rewritten. Smaller places are much easier to sum up. The details are abstracted by having such a small frame of reference. This often means that within issues of identity, the global travels downward toward the local, rather than vice-versa.
Take J.D. Vance as an example. He has tried to portray his upbringing in the nearby community of Middletown as Appalachian. Middletown straddles Butler and Warren counties, and is one of several Ohio cities that has seen its sense of community, built around the dying US steel industry, dissolved by the problems of poverty. Middletown does not, however, lie on the eastern bib of counties that form a portion of Appalachia. Its problems are contemporary, created by neoliberal policies which have impoverished communities around the world. Heritage is a difficult concept to fold around Middletown’s issues, which include fentanyl addiction and violent crime. By filtering the frame of reference around these issues to an Appalachian identity, Vance can portray himself as an inheritor and restorer of tradition.
Identity, the way it looks when it is focused downward, versus how it looks when being focused upward, the way a place may be described by someone who has access versus someone who does not, has come to be defined by the former. On December 16, at 9:30pm, fire crews were called to the 900 block of Delhi Pike. The Kentucky Fried Chicken, long an anchor point of the business district, had erupted into a column of flame. Watching the fire on a local Facebook group, this absurd juxtaposition seemed to me to sum up the issues around identification in a small community, outside of a mid-sized city. It was absurd, sad, and (once the news reported that nobody had been injured) somehow wistful. A Biblical tusk of fire was consuming a chain restaurant that has 4,269 locations in the US alone.
The ethnologist Marc Augé, in Non-Places: An Introduction to Supermodernity, states that “If a place can be relational, historical, and concerned with identity, then a space which cannot be defined as relational, historical, and concerned with identity is a non-place.” Augé published his study in 1992, providing a conceptual framing of the globalist infrastructure he saw creeping out from exurban into provincial France. What I think he would have found endlessly fascinating in 2025 is the environment that results when place and non-place grow around each other, and into one another.
People of the west side of Cincinnati, which include Delhi and the adjoining neighborhoods of Price Hill and Covedale, form community around the monoculture. One of the most successful local businesses on the West Side is the Brazilian jiu jitsu gym that my kids attend (Cincinnati has a thriving and robust mixed martial arts culture). Mothers and children will meet up at the trampoline park, or the Target, or triangulate their opinions about local controversies in Facebook groups.
These communities exist parallel and overlapping with the familiar ravages of 21st century life in the midwest. The once bustling shopping plazas that would have in themselves signaled to Augé the end of an “anthropological place” of community, have been gutted by online shopping, the shrinking of the middle-class, and the rise of violent crime. The business nexus at Glenway Crossing has gradually seen most of its chain stores close, replaced by a drug treatment center. The West Side, host to a vibrant community held together by the ties of Catholicism, is also a place where hopelessness has reached such a terminal peak that it presents itself almost immediately in public. The mentally ill and chronically addicted haunt cracked parking lots like the ghosts of some neo-medieval future. At the Delhi Pike Chipotle, a visibly disturbed man has stalked in and out of the restaurant alternately mumbling and screaming, for years. On one visit I made, he was perched on an industrial chic chair wearing a double bandolier of receipts. On another, his voice was turning, glitching, and worrying the phrase “Dukes of Hazard” to the mixed bewilderment, sadness, and resignation of the staff.
Identity, what it constitutes, who deserves it and who doesn't, is increasingly being determined by people from a position to look at it from above. Lived experience, the environment described by those who are living within it, is increasingly being replaced by discourse.
Ironically, an age that has seen the rise and recent fall of the Woke movement, which was based overwhelmingly on the prevalence of identity politics, has smothered the local in all its forms. I think of William Gibson’s Hypermart, the shopping center he envisioned within his novel Count Zero, as the fictional inversion of this tendency. A kind of Chungking Mansions imagined within a future megacity called the Sprawl, it represented a detritus of individualism built out of the accumulated pressure of unbridled corporate freedom. Small shop owners enacted community under superstructures too large to even notice them. This Utopia out of Dystopia vision was something he would expand upon in his Bridge trilogy (Virtual Light, Idoru, All Tomorrow’s Parties) which all take place partly in a shantytown constructed on the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge. What we are actually seeing in the trends that Gibson envisioned reverses this. Rather than the globalist superstructure becoming so shadowy and distant that the local flourishes under and in spite of it, the global parasitizes and simulates the local until the two are indecipherable from each other. My question is, where are the artists who are seeing this happen? Why are their voices not being heard?
Erik Hoel, in his Substack article How the MFA Swallowed Literature, anatomizes the contemporary literary scene:
But a majority of people under the age of 50 successful in publishing today literally got A+s. They all raised their hands at the right time, did everything they needed to get into Harvard or Amherst or Williams or wherever, then jumped through all the necessary hoops to make it to the Iowa Writers’ Workshop or Columbia University, etc.
Hoel compares the current scene to two of the modernist giants of the past.
Faulkner didn’t finish high school, recent research shows that (sic) Virginia Woolf took some classes in the classics and literature but was mostly homeschooled.
The Iowa Writer’s workshop list of corporate sponsors include the State Department and the Farfield Foundation, a now defunct philanthropic society revealed to be a CIA front. There is a reason why, looking over contemporary literary titles at a Barnes and Noble, the themes never stray far from approved discourse engagement. If the local is presented at all, in novels like those of Donald Ray Pollock, it becomes a kind of miserabilist Gothic as stereotypical, in its own way, as a fantasy novel, a kind of household substance abuse middle-earth. Stereotyping is also a way of dismissing, because once the circle has been closed, you can shrug your shoulders and say “that’s just the way it is.”
I believe that literary fiction is at the lowest ebb of its ability to address the contemporary problems of living under neoliberalism. Hoel outlines a compelling reason why this is true. Contemporary literary fiction prioritizes minimizing its attack surface. By this, he means that literary fiction is afraid to make an ontological salient entry into mainstream discourse. Hoel believes that the primary orientation of literary fiction is defensive. He writes:
Consider the minimalism of many current novels, their brevity—all to shrink the attack surface. Oh, the prose is always well-polished, with the occasional pleasing turn of phrase, but never distinctive, never flowery nor reaching. This defensiveness extends even to the ontology of their fictional worlds.
He goes on to extend this paradigm into the current prevalence of autofiction, writing, “What is auto-fiction but a form of defense? For if it really happened, who can criticize?” Rather than explore why the current parameters of approved discourse exist, contemporary literary fiction advocates for the approval of discourse. So who could possibly be the author to describe the contemporary loss of identity, especially if most literary writers are creators and beneficiaries of the image screen that the real problems which bedevil modern society hide behind?
Thomas Ligotti is an American writer whose fiction is, reductively in my opinion, classified as horror. He was born and spent the majority of his life in Detroit. He now lives incongruously in south Florida, although in interviews he claims to enjoy cold climates, while describing the Sunshine State as “a tropical sewer.” The story collections he is most famous for, Grimscribe and Songs of a Dead Dreamer, trade in the more obvious horror tropes. Murderers and hidden gods are the currency of most horror stories, but under the bogeys, and in one story in particular, “Dream of a Mannikin,” the themes of his more mature collection, Teatro Grottesco, start to take shape. Ligotti has claimed in interviews that he suffers from “anhedonia,” a psychological condition which prevents its sufferer from experiencing pleasure. The irony of his condition is that his mature stories are so deeply unsettling that the shock of their ideas can provide a great deal of pleasure. Like the stories and novels of Philip K. Dick, his ideas are torrential subterranean rivers of unease flowing beneath the pulp landscape which hides them.
The stories of Teatro Grottesco are misnomered as horror stories. None of the stories feature evil concentrated into the form of an antagonist. His stories share more in common with the work of Bruno Schulz, who Ligotti has cited in interviews as an influence, than Stephen King. “The Red Tower” even lacks a human protagonist with whom to orient oneself. Rather, the whole story plays out like a post-human allegory, with a mineral contempt for the ancestors whose characteristics the narrator feels compelled to relate. The titular tower juts out of a desolate factory, planted within “an otherwise featureless landscape.” The narrator leads the reader through a history of items produced by the factory, which begin with aberrant novelties, like “an ornate music box that, when opened, emitted a brief gurgling or sucking sound in emulation of a dying individual’s death rattle.” As this floor of the factory closes, a basement subfloor opens, in which a luminous chamber of “birthing graves” produce creatures with “degeneracy and death written deeply upon them.”
One of the most powerful stories of the collection, “The Shadow, the Darkness,” relates the story of an artist, Reiner Grossvogel, who only achieves success after he undergoes a profound psychological reorganization. He realizes that what humans understand as individuality is an illusion required to feed an underlying darkness that, while unable to manifest itself, can manifest the autonomy it lacks by convincing us that we are autonomous beings. When Grossvogel stops attempting to succeed as an individual, when he learns to “think with his body” is when he begins to achieve artistic success.
Ligotti is an anti-natalist, a view he nurtured from the philosophy of Peter Wessel Zappfe, who viewed human consciousness as an ontological catastrophe. While I disagree with Ligotti’s wholesale condemnation of humanity, his stories offer profound insights into the conditions that predicate the loss of identity.
Another story from Teatro Grottesco, “The Town Manager,” is a fable of entropy under both cosmic and capitalist predation. The unnamed town suffers manager after manager, losing whatever authentic vitality it possesses, until under the last manager, who lives in solitude in a shed outside of the business district, it undergoes an absurd gentrification project that destroys what little income and dignity it had left.
Ligotti’s fiction, especially his work in Teattro Grottesco, presents two faces of identity loss, it is both the problem and its solution. The loss of identity can be read not simply as a catastrophe. Frederic Jameson, in his famous tome Post-Modernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism offers a description of schizophrenia:
...first the breakdown of temporality releases this present of time from all of the activities and intentionalities that might focus it and make it a space of praxis; thereby isolated, that present suddenly engulfs the subject with undescribable vividness…
Jameson describes the schizophrenic episode as a nuclear fission of meaning, but, in my opinion, the description works equally well as a moment of artistic inspiration. Identity loss doesn’t need to be the suffocation of meaning. It can also be an opportunity to rethink, to map in new terms, who our society benefits. In order for that to ever happen, though, we as readers, as consumers of art and culture, need to begin rejecting the schlock of discourse that is being offered to us. Small publishers need to begin to publish local voices, not just voices that escaped the local via privilege and connection.
I’m happy to see that Ligotti is still in publication, but he, and writers like him (Brian Evenson, Kathryn Davis, Rikki Ducornet) are woefully underread. Writers that challenge us to derange our identity are being pushed to the margins. The same is true for filmmakers and musicians. Streaming and corporate sponsorships are closing the gaps that we were once able to peer behind. The people who had the skill to lead us there, made up of the curiosity, anger, hate, love, whatever, that their environment engendered in them, are routinely replaced by people who have the right connections.
The critic Mark Fisher, who had a remarkable ability to explain the haunted environment we inhabit, characterized the eerie as “constituted by a failure of absence or a failure of presence.” What could better describe the 21st century of midwestern monoculture? Lives are dictated by forces that remain unseen. Through terminal addictions, the components of human personality are ravaged until the shape of a person envelops a void. Maybe the cure for our ossified globalist culture, our ossified globalist politics, is to embrace the loss of an identity that is to some extent secondhand. The person most able to do this is the person looking at identity from below, instead of above.