Radiohead and Philosophy - Brandon W. Forbes [131]
But to seduce is to die as reality and reconstitute the self and all signs as illusions in the great deception of the trompe l’oeil. We see that production obtains its power by producing real signs with fixed oppositions. But seduction, by producing only illusions, transfigures all powers. This transformation reveals production and reality to be illusions, returning them to the deceptions from whence they were produced, just as it challenged the Natural Law by mocking it with Rules.
You Are My Center when I Spin Away
What is the final word on seduction? Or how can we even settle on a final word for a challenge that refuses to end, an infinite game like seduction? While the world is filling up with Deleuzers, getting ever more Lyotarded, seduction sits back patiently, confidently. There is a great sense of predestination in seduction, as all tributaries inevitably wind their way to the feedback loop with nothing beyond it, precisely because there is nothing beyond it. But this is a bizarre sort of non-conclusion, cyclical and reversible as the signs of seduction.
“Videotape” stands us up at the pearly gates, again seating us at the foot of death as a way of establishing the severity of the moment. This is intensified further by bringing together many of the images from In Rainbows in this final scene in heaven: Faust’s Mephistopheles and his abyssal hell, cameras, death, the imbalance and rippling of a spinning center, a reunion of the threads we have seen interact throughout the album as a whole, creating the eternity of the instant.
Musically, the churning cycles of the piano unfold and give way to consistent and calculated beats, which in turn give way to a final deception, as the rolling snare suggests a phase that will cycle through its entirety but never deliver on its promise, increasing the anxiety and subtextual disquiet in the pristinely quiet song.
The narrator considers his life in the eternity of the instant. What was once reflection is now a prismatic refraction of a digital projector’s light as the movie of his life flickers on the screen.
This is one for the good days
I have it all here in red, blue, green
The movie of his life is at the same time a movie for those he loves, a way of saying goodbye in a home movie at some unknown date to come. It is a sort of non-conclusion for an eternal moment that hangs endlessly. Death may have the final word, but even that word is also a reversible sign to be seduced. To say that death is finality is to retread the abandoned anatomical determinism of our past. We have seen the signs transfigured before us in the ironic feedback loop of duel, agonistic relation, and by the transfiguring deception of the trompe l’oeil. There’s no need for the game of seduction to end, even in the physical absence of a character. The remaining proliferating signs are an ironic, aesthetic simulation of sexual reproduction. “Videotape” suggests that we always leave behind a sign, even in our departure, and that sign is immortal.
How Come I End Up Where I Started?
The immediate and obvious rebuttal to all of this nonsense will of course be that it is completely self-defeating to attempt to use meaningful words and concepts to suggest the withholding of meaning for the sake of a game of endlessly reversible signs. Simply describing the concept sort of unravels the whole project, silly. Signs must have fixed meanings, otherwise how could concepts be explained in the first place? To this Baudrillard sighs, “Perhaps signs are not destined to enter into fixed oppositions for meaningful ends, that being only their present destination. Their actual destiny is perhaps quite different: to seduce each other and, thereby, seduce us” (p. 103).
This is seduction