Radiohead and Philosophy - Brandon W. Forbes [129]
If the superficial abyss is a mirror that can reflect the infinite, transforming it into appearance and surface only, then the trompe l’oeil is a magic mirror, a superficial abyss that can re-enchant appearance. In this re-enchanted appearance, the trompe l’oeil draws the viewer into its deception and annihilates the subject-object relation in the aesthetic sphere of seduction.
In this enchantment, even death itself is a sign to be caught in the feedback loop, to be seduced and to seduce. “All I Need” is narrated by Death, personified as a stalking lover seeking a partner for its own seduction, as it has been re-enchanted in the middle of a picture, a superficial abyss that deceives by hypersimulation.
I am the next act
Waiting in the wings
Death unveils itself in “All I Need” through a series of metaphors: a doomed animal, an ignored day, an insect wandering in the night. But it’s unveiling itself by further veiling itself in these metaphors, hovering in the wings of the stage and yet lurking ever-present in the tall grass, right there in the middle of any photograph of someone you love. From this voyeuristic position, death longs to seduce, as it has always already been seduced by life even unto its own end, as a moth drawn to its death by the illumination of a bright light.
There’s No Real Reason
By entering the feedback loop of seduction, death offers itself as a sacrifice to artifice. The trompe l’oeil, or hypersimulation, re-enchants that artifice into the indefinite play of signs. The Enlightenment stripped us of our myths, our gods, and our eternal souls. The enchanted artifice is the only immortality we have left, as signs endlessly seduce each other. In this sacrifice, death itself shines by its absence and is transformed into a “brilliant and superficial appearance, that it is itself a seductive surface” (p. 97).
And yet there are many who find themselves in seduction who feel the risk is too great, as with the narrator of “Weird Fishes / Arpeggi.” Often, they flee the seduction to return to the familiar and comfortable life of Enlightenment sexuality with its safe orgasms and objects. Still others attempt to maintain the relation of seduction, but at a distance great enough to allow them to keep one foot in the old Enlightenment sexuality, perhaps with another partner. In other words, some people are cheaters.
The Infrastructure Will Collapse
Cheating says, “Look around you! Your love and your marriage are arbitrary and meaningless contingencies! The Natural Law is survival and reproduction!” What cheating doesn’t know is that in the risk of seduction, the arbitrary and aleatory have been embraced in the artificial perfection of the sign. Seduction already knows that it is a game of signs and not meaning.
Because seduction is a game, it follows the Rules of games and not the Natural Laws of the Enlightenment. The difference between Rules and Laws, Baudrillard says, is that “The Rule plays on an immanent sequence of arbitrary signs, while the Law is based on a transcendent sequence of necessary signs” (p. 130). Consider baseball. There is no universal Natural Law that says that when you hit a ball you must run to first base instead of third base. This is a completely arbitrary and meaningless response to hitting a ball with a stick, but for the sake of the game, it is observed. Unlike Laws, Rules are not believed but observed. The Rule is a parodic simulacrum of the Law; it ridicules the Law. That means it simulates a Natural Law that never existed as a way of challenging the Natural Law that says there are Natural Laws.
Rules