Radiohead and Philosophy - Brandon W. Forbes [101]
Part of being inauthentic, again, is not really understanding that you’re inauthentic. But by “hitting bottom,” so to speak, we dive into the abyss; by turning to face the problem head-on, we finally come to see our own inauthenticity. Heidegger here calls this experience “profound boredom” (in Being and Time, he will talk about the same turning-point in terms of “anxiety”), by which he means something like Radiohead’s “emptiest of feelings”—not merely “empty,” but something worse and more profound. The turning point happens at the emptiest of feelings.
And then what? Heidegger says that, face-to-face with our own inauthenticity, we might finally take back ourselves. “We may not, therefore, flee from ourselves in some convoluted idle talk about culture, nor pursue ourselves in a psychology motivated by curiosity. Rather we must find ourselves by binding ourselves to our being-there and by letting such being-there become what is singularly binding for us” (Fundamental Concepts, p. 77). By finally facing up to our own alienation, then, we might finally stop looking to the world ‘outside’ of ourselves for meaning and instead take up the responsibility of creating that meaning for ourselves. We “bind” ourselves “to” ourselves, and create ourselves, almost like a work of art: we create a “role” for ourselves, something like the part played by the guitarist in a rock and roll band.
Think of the famous diagram from the punk ’zine Sniffin’ Glue (or was it Sideburns?) with three guitar chords and the captions: “This is a chord; This is another; This is a third; Now form a band.” Inauthentic life assures us that music can only come from musicians. Everybody plays their special role. “Everything in its right place.” In the face of this, punks, Radiohead, and all the disalienated insist: anyone can play guitar, anyone can take control of their own lives, anyone can be the star. Stop worshipping false (American) Idols, and start your own band. “Stop whispering; start shouting.”
Starting and then Stopping
And it might really be that simple to overcome alienation, were it not for “the alienating effects of modern living” as Paul Cantin’s review of OK Computer put it. In both the early Heidegger and the early Radiohead, we find a proposed solution to alienation that hides a simplifying assumption: authenticity and inauthenticity are equally possible for us—it’s simply a matter of choosing or not choosing ourselves, winning or losing ourselves. But in the pursuit of authenticity, seeking “bottom” and its turning-point, both Heidegger and Radiohead look more closely at the roots of inauthenticity and make some rather startling conclusions.
Read against the picture of alienation in Pablo Honey, “Planet Telex”—the opening track of The Bends—becomes a sliver of nagging doubt: “You can force it but it will not come.” It is as if, two years on from Pablo Honey, we’re still waiting for the return to authenticity to happen, and we’ve started to wonder: what’s gone wrong? “Everyone is, everything is broken / Why can’t you forget?”
The song’s title is a clue: “Planet Telex” was in fact originally called “Planet Xerox.” This image of an entire world filled with artificially reproduced items and copies seems to be more than just a metaphor for inauthenticity and its consumer-society trappings. Where Pablo Honey was filled with natural images (the sun, the moon, the stars, and—oh yes—fire, lots of fire), The Bends creates a aural world where nature is slowly pushed out by the creeping tide of technology,