Radiohead and Philosophy - Brandon W. Forbes [29]
The music and art of Radiohead, like much of the art of the twentieth century, presents a direct challenge to prevailing aesthetic theories and invites us to try on ‘new shades’ when encountering it. In this essay, I suggest that you consider the quite recent (and, yes, now rather fashionable!) lenses of ‘abject aesthetics’ for approaching Radiohead’s work. But this comes with a warning: for a while, you’ll have to put aside the rather rose-colored psychedelic glasses of the 1960s and the dark reflector existentialist shades of the 1970s and 1980s. Looking at Radiohead through these new lenses, you’ll discover few catchy tunes or straight-ahead rock beats, and no anthems to psychedelic or spiritual transcendence. Instead, you’ll discover another world, one weirdly attractive, strangely unsettling, and yet maybe already somewhat familiar.
Meeting in the Abject
Have you ever wondered what the inside of your body really looks like? Why, sometimes when you look in the mirror in the morning, you can scarcely recognize the figure lurking there? Why, even though you know it will be upsetting, you can’t resist looking at the scene of a bad accident? Why you have that intense but strange and unsettling feeling when you see a dead body, especially if it’s someone you have known? Why things like feces, urine, semen, blood, and severed fingers or limbs automatically trigger a response of nausea or revulsion? Why we sometimes tend to avoid contact with homeless, physically deformed, or mentally ill persons? And, even further, why so many of these phenomena figure so prominently in the most ancient religious rituals as well as in a good deal of the most avant-garde art, not to mention popular culture? After all, most of these things are just as much ‘natural’ parts of our world as others which we encounter every day with little response at all; so why do we have such strange and extreme responses to these things and not most others?
The French philosopher, literary critic, and psychoanalyst Julia Kristeva wondered about all this too and, in 1980, proposed a new idea to help us understand them in her book, The Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. The work itself ranged over such diverse topics as contemporary philosophy, psychoanalytic theory, the history of religions, and such important literary figures as Fyodor Dostoyevsky, James Joyce, Marcel Proust, Antonin Artaud, and Paul Céline. However, probably the single most important legacy of her work has been providing the basis for a new way of viewing and understanding certain developments in contemporary art, literature, and popular culture—something that has come to be called ‘Abject Aesthetics’.
In a broad sense, ‘the abject’ has since become a new aesthetic category (a new ‘set of lenses’) to be added to such more traditional ones as ‘the beautiful’, ‘the sublime’, ‘the political’, ‘the abstract’, ‘the surrealist’, and ‘the authentic’. Today, Abject Aesthetics is frequently employed to help understand such otherwise difficult and troubling works as Robert Mapplethorpe’s graphic photos of the human body, Josef Beuys’s dead rabbits and garbage sculptures, Damien Hirsch’s segmented cattle encased in clear plastic blocks, and Chris Ofili’s infamous ‘Madonna’ decorated with elephant feces. This category has also been used to understand tattooing, body piercing and mutilation, and the many alien, zombie, and slasher films of popular culture. Though never quite as extreme as these, the art of Radiohead offers another example that can perhaps only be fully seen and appreciated when viewed through the lenses of Abject Aesthetics.
I Wish I Was Special but I’m Abject
Kristeva introduces the idea of the ‘abject’ by contrasting it with the ‘object’. Most earlier aesthetics