Radiohead and Philosophy - Brandon W. Forbes [102]
The paradigm of this metaphoric trend is “Lurgee,” a wonderfully layered British slang word. Lurgee can be a vague, unspecified (and even sometimes imaginary) disease—one might complain of having “the dreaded lurgee” when either sick with a generic flu bug or when calling in sick from work. But British children will also use the word lurgee the way Americans use the term “cooties”; in other words, it will mark a person as “unclean” and, hence, alienated from the group. In Northern Britain “fever-lurgee” is slang for lazy or idle—in other words, passive, inactive. These biological metaphors are used to build a picture of the fundamentally individualistic, human condition of alienation in Pablo Honey. But the power chords opening up “The Bends” jettison these human, biological and psychological metaphors and replace them with technology. On its own, the song contains more technological imagery than all twelve tracks of Pablo Honey put together.66 Two tracks later, “Fake Plastic Trees” offers a new standard for thinking about the problem of alienation: It’s not simply that we can’t act in a world we find hostile, but rather that all action is meaningless (and “wears me out”) in a world that is itself inauthentic.
Why does the problem need to be rethought in terms of technology? Because of our plan to deliberately retake “possession” of ourselves. As Heidegger points out in his 1946 essay, “Why Poets?” animals can act “in” the world, but humans act “on” it. An animal (or even a plant) interacts within a world, but does not really transform its environment. Yet when someone takes a “properly human” action, he or she transforms raw, given nature into a meaningful world. To create ourselves as meaningful, authentic individuals, we must take “possession” of our entire world; in other words, we must act “technologically.” Heidegger writes:
Accordingly, human willing can also be in the mode of self-assertion only by forcing everything into its realm in advance, even before it surveys anything. For this will, everything, already in advance and therefore in the consequence, is relentlessly turned into the material of self-asserting production. Earth and its atmosphere are turned into raw material. Man becomes a human material that is applied to goals that have been set out before him. The absolute self-assertion of the deliberate production of the world is unconditionally established as the condition of human command; this is a process that comes out of the hidden essence of technology. (“Why Poets,” pp. 216-17)
In order for the voluntary, romantic action proposed in Pablo Honey to be possible as a solution to alienation, we must identify ourselves with our will, acting upon both nature and ourselves as “raw material.”
This Machine Will Not Communicate
Both Radiohead and Heidegger relate this way of looking at things to technology; but this does not mean that we should demonize technology itself. On The Bends, the metaphors for alienation are unequivocally technological, yet we are clearly reminded that technology is what supports, sometimes even makes human life possible: the iron lung (“my life support,” the narrator calls it), the “Prozac painkillers.” OK Computer will do an even better job of thinking about both sides of the issue, opening with the “Airbag” that “saved my life.”
So what then is the problem with technology? It has to do with the “hidden essence of technology” Heidegger speaks of. In “The Question Concerning Technology,” Heidegger takes us looking for this “hidden essence of technology” and says that we are accustomed to thinking about technology as a human contrivance, an instrument that serves as a means to an end (p. 312). In this sense, technology is something we use for some further