Radiohead and Philosophy - Brandon W. Forbes [104]
I Feel My Luck Could Change
Modern life takes place in a world ruled by technology (in both the every-day and essential senses); these are dark times, indeed. But when Heidegger asks the question, “Why Poets?” he is taking up a question asked by the German poet Hölderlin: “And why poets in a desolate time?” Even in a world where technology holds sway, there is yet another way of looking at things: “poetically.” It’s the poets who are still capable of showing us the truth.
Technology acts to further obscure the roots of alienation, but those roots remain, in one sense at least, intact: alienation is still a symptom of inauthenticity, the handing ourselves over to an impersonal system, and a simultaneous inability to see that this is what we are doing. The first step toward disalienation, then, still must be a recognition of our true alienation. We still have to see—and then really understand—the problem before we can even think of solving it. If we are to ever attempt a non-technological solution to the problem of technology, we must stop trying to master it long enough to look around and really understand ourselves and our human condition within the modern world. This is the role Heidegger sees for “poets” (and the role Lester Bangs and I see for authentic rock’n’roll bands—the true poets of the modern age).
The true poet’s job is not to solve the problem of alienation, but to experience it in its fullness and help us experience that alienation in its fullness. “Those who risk more experience defenselessness in unwholeness,” Heidegger says; “Those who risk more, as singers of what is whole, are ‘poets in a desolate time’” (“Why Poets?” p. 240). If our alienation is characterized by the ignorance of our own true alienation, poets set themselves the task of opening our eyes, that we might all experience our alienation together. To do this they must truly experience the “defenselessness” of our existence in the void; they must truly experience the “unwholeness” of the human condition; and they must “sing” this whole of the human condition back to us, that we might experience it as well.
If You Think that You’re Strong Enough . . .
In a typically sarcastic passage, Bangs writes:
Shit. Who needs songs like that, that give off such bad vibes? We got a groovy, beautifully insular hip community, maybe a nation, budding here, and our art is a celebration of ourselves as liberated individuals and masses of such—the People, dig? And antisocial art simply don’t fit in, brothers and sisters. Who wants to be depressed, anyway? (Psychotic Reactions, p. 32)
Bangs is defending the “antisocial art” of The Stooges. But the spirit of his defense applies just as well to Radiohead. The demand that all art be uplifting and celebrate the human spirit is only the demand that art lie to us, help us pretend that we are not alienated. Instead, what we need are the poets who can help us experience our alienation as alienation, so that we might begin to really own up to and understand the problem.
To avoid falling back into technological attempts to solve the problem, however, the poet needs to limit him or herself to a genuine experience and understanding of alienation. True art must be limited to staring into the abyss (at least, “standing on the edge”) in order to better understand it. Radiohead has moved in this direction with each successive album following Pablo Honey; OK Computer already shows a more complete understanding of the technological character