Radiohead and Philosophy - Brandon W. Forbes [117]
After “Kid A” comes the steamrolling force of “National Anthem,” where Yorke sings “Everyone is so near, everyone has got the fear, it’s holding on.” Another defining characteristic of Lyotard’s postmodern condition is an “incredulity toward grand-narratives.” This means that when one slips into the postmodern condition, even if it happens for a moment, the stories that used to make sense, such as stories about nationalism and patriotism that move people on a large-scale social level, suddenly fail to inspire. For a moment we hesitate to believe that (for example) progress is occurring, or that the United States is forever building a more perfect union as a nation. Yet we still have to live within a social system that is dictated by meta-narratives, or large-scale storytelling.
The national anthem is an example of the use of meta-narratives within society. Even though we may carry doubts about nationalism, we realize that “it’s holding on” because these national anthems serve a necessary social function by providing a sense of national unity. Lyotard responds to this circumstance in The Postmodern Condition, in which he touts the importance of “little narratives” along with the proliferation of multiple narratives within a single culture. These smaller stories can undercut grand-narratives and produce what he calls “language games” that multiply and criss-cross throughout society. This dissemination of little narratives creates a society which enables individuals to create their own narratives rather than subordinating their thinking to the logic of a large-scale nationalistic grand-narrative.
Lyotard is a pluralist. Creating a pluralistic society where everyone has a voice can seem a bit chaotic (not unlike the battling horns at the end of “National Anthem”). But Lyotard’s pluralism is not chaotic or frivolous. He advocates that we play the game of the just (as in “justice”) and play by the rules and preserve the autonomy of these rules in different language games in local, decentralized narratives. Instead of deriving justice from the meta-narratives of national anthems, society justice should think of justice as local, multiple, and provisional, and subject to contestation and transformation. For Lyotard, justice is never eternal, like that portrayed in a national anthem for instance, but is rather the result of the contingency of social circumstances through which it is produced.
This One’s Optimistic
Another unexpected turn is found on “How to Disappear Completely.” With the lyrics “I’m not here, this isn’t happening” and “in a little while, I’ll be gone, the moment’s already gone, yeah, yeah, yeah,” Yorke becomes a person who doubts his existence. This too, Lyotard suggests, reflects a residue of modernity. “Modernity, in whatever age it appears,” he writes, “cannot exist without a shattering of belief and without the discovery of the ‘lack of reality’, of reality together with the invention of other realities” (p. 77). In the postmodern we must learn to live within this pluralism of realities and, consequently, suffer pervasive doubts about our own being.
As if to drive that point home, “How to Disappear Completely” is followed by the instrumental “Treefingers.” Yorke has disappeared leaving us with another postmodern moment of silence:
In the differend, something ‘asks’ to be put into phrases, and suffers from the wrong of not being able to be put into phrases right away. This is when the human beings who thought they could use language as an instrument of communication learn through the feeling of pain which accompanies silence. (The Differend, p. 13)
Some things resist being said and are best communicated by saying nothing at all. “Treefingers” is absent all narrative—it’s just a space, with a mood, for introspection.
Yorke returns in “Optimistic,” an odd choice for the first radio single from Kid A. The chorus is a line inspired by Yorke’s partner, who reportedly said to him when he felt worn down from the grind of touring, “you can try the best you can, the best you can is good enough.” If this