Radiohead and Philosophy - Brandon W. Forbes [130]
If games did have finality, the only true players would be the cheaters. Laws establish universal lines of the real, and in so doing, establish linear horizons that delimit but also reveal the beyond. That is to say, Laws draw a line that must be crossed because seeing the line always already suggests its other side. But Rules are arbitrary interdictions. They establish no horizon and, as such, one cannot transgress them, only fail to observe them. And if you aren’t observing the Rules, then you aren’t playing the game anymore.
The aesthetic problem with cheating in relationships is not that it breaks a universal Natural Law of fidelity. Cheating still operates in fidelity, but in fidelity to the disenchanted simulation of sex, the real, anatomical determinism and Law. Cheating substitutes the Law for the observation of the arbitrary Rules of seduction, hurling the cheater out of the feedback loop, the game of relation and signs. With regard to seduction’s re-enchanted sex, cheaters simply aren’t playing anymore.
Kiss Your Husband Goodnight
“House of Cards” traces this same idea by painting a marriage as a fragile and contingent stack of playing cards set upon each other to resemble a house. The narrator addresses another man’s wife, making sexual advances toward her through precisely the same line of argument that we see from the Law: your marriage is an accidental contingency, a house of cards, and there is no reason you can’t step outside the arbitrary Rules of fidelity to your husband.
Forget about your house of cards
And I’ll do mine
But we know that if she assents, she has left the endless game of her marriage. This is not the same thing as an ethical or moral indictment of infidelity. Those indictments are still established in terms of Law, and as such, are perpetually transgressed. The aesthetic indictment simply removes her from the story without judgment. She was, perhaps, a sign seducing and being seduced and is no longer. But in leaving the game, she is also leaving sex for the sake of Enlightenment sexuality. She transforms seduction into its negative form, production, of which cheating is a simulation. And this is why her repeated response in “House of Cards,” her only response to the aesthetic indictment, is a refutation: “Denial.”
This Place Is on a Mission
So it is production, not seduction that tends to give seduction its bad name. Production dictates that “everything is to be transcribed in relations of force, systems of concepts or measurable energy; everything is to be said, accumulated, indexed and recorded” (pp. 34-35). The story of “Jigsaw Falling into Place” is a tale of this production, as the narrator lays out a strategy of production in the place where seduction should be. The song is a chess match, tracing the moves from the dance club to the bedroom, from sobriety to addiction. The sexual imagery is opaque and flippant, with a fumbling prosody leading us through the back alleys of sex-as-production. Everything in the song is scented with a tangible sexuality, even the description of the lines the narrator uses in his seduction.
Words are blunt instruments
Words are sawn off shotguns
The song presses harder and harder up against its sexual goal, the tension building, and finally releasing in the refrain.
A jigsaw falling into place
So there is nothing to explain
The production ends with the prospect of intercourse. The double-suggestion of the imagery perfectly reflecting the production, as the final piece of his negative seduction falls into place, strongly couched in the male-female image of a jigsaw puzzle piece, extending