Radiohead and Philosophy - Brandon W. Forbes [111]
For Radiohead, technology isn’t something admirable and impressive. It’s estranging, debilitating and quite confusing—as “Paranoid Android” shows. The song, it seems, isn’t meant to make sense. As a combination of three very different kinds of songs—the acoustic intro, the Cantata-like middle, and the hard-rock parts surrounding it—it seems to represent a psyche that is confused. The narrator has “chicken voices” in his head and wants to be King. Technology has made his world dirty and dangerous—filled with panic and vomit, “yuppies networking,” and that wishful-thinking robot repeating “I may be paranoid but not an android.” The singer is human, but the non-human voice says he isn’t. He’s so wrapped up in technology that he doesn’t even know it. If you stay here, it seems to say, you’ll become a part of the dust and screaming. You’ll rely on airbags to save your life. And you’ll become just as confused about your humanity.
Kid Absurdity
In several of his writings, but especially The Myth of Sisyphus and The Stranger, Albert Camus writes about what he calls “absurdity.” Absurdity is the clash between our longing for the world to have meaning and an irrational world that offers none. Absurdity can grab us at any moment—when we’re walking down the street, when we’re talking to a friend, simply while we’re going through our daily routines. There are different types or levels of absurdity in life as Camus sees it. There is the absurdity of our realization of death (How are our actions significant if we’re all going to die?); there’s the absurdity of realizing the absence of any objective goodness in the world; and there’s the absurdity that comes when we realize the lack of clarity and unity in the world. But they all point to the fact that the world offers no meaning, and our search for it is futile. Now, what happens once we’re confronted with the absurd? Strangeness overcomes us. We feel divorced from everyone and everything. We’re trapped in a dark world we can no longer call home.
In The Myth of Sisyphus,67 Camus tells the story of a mythical figure he calls the absurd hero. Because he betrayed the gods, Sisyphus is sent to the underworld and given the endless task of rolling a large rock up a hill only to have it roll back down each time. Having to perform this futile struggle, Sisyphus’s life is a meaningless one. His effort is “measured by skyless space and time without depth,” and his purpose, although always achieved, falls back down upon him (p. 121). As the rock rolls back down the hill, Sisyphus must brace himself to perform the same task that has now become his fate. His effort comes to nothing. His routine accomplishes nothing. His life is one of mechanical gesture and meaningless struggle. And this is the absurd life.
For Camus, Sisyphus’s futile struggle is our own. Like him, we partake in mechanical lives, as we go through our routines “Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday and Saturday according to the same rhythm” (pp. 12, 13). But a moment comes when the “‘why’ arises” (p. 13). And in this moment, we’re confronted with the absurd. For, rather than finding our actions to be meaningful, we see how futile our efforts are. Everything is robotic, much like Sisyphus’s task. We’re caught in a mechanical world of routine, strangers to ourselves because we realize how devoid of meaning our lives are. All along, we’d thought that everything made sense. But we realize that none of it does. Our tasks are interminable and insignificant. And the world retains none of the meaning we’d searched for. With this realization, we feel estranged.
This notion of “man faced with