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By Root 968 0

presupposed an ‘object’, literally something ‘projected in front’ of a viewer and recognized by the viewer as possessing some (usually positive) properties. By contrast, the ‘abject’ is that which is ‘cast down’, ‘put aside’, rejected from even bare recognition. It is, of course, still ‘there’, it still exists, but it is excluded from the sphere of those ‘objects’ that are part of ‘the world’ of social discourse and interaction, like the ‘abject poor or homeless’ whom most of us learn early on to pass by and ignore or the bodily functions that all of us perform every day without ever mentioning them in ‘polite company’.

“Creep” (still Radiohead’s best known single) from their debut album Pablo Honey (1993) directly expresses this feeling of ‘abjection’, of being rejected or perhaps excreted from the world of ‘the beautiful people’.

You float like a feather

In a beautiful world

You’re so fucking special,

I wish I was special.

. . . But I’m a creep, I’m a weirdo.

The song goes on to suggest that the real problem with ‘creeps’ is that, like the ‘abject’, they’re usually not even noticed, that they fall outside any recognition of even being a person—to the ‘beautiful people’ they don’t even exist!

You Have Turned Me into This

Kristeva suggests that part of the reason why certain things become ‘abjected’ is because they lack the clear contours and definite forms that we ordinarily expect ‘objects’ to have. For instance, a person or artwork tends to be judged as ‘beautiful’ because it conforms to some clear model or ideal of proportion, regularity, and symmetry. The abject, however, tends to be something fluid, irregular, chaotic, or shape-shifting—something that fails to fit into any of our usual categories. Thom’s lyrics say this well when he sings, in “Bullet proof . . . I Wish I Was” (The Bends, 1995):

Wax me, mould me

Heat the pins and stab them in

You have turned me into this

The expression of this sense of being formless, without clear definition, ‘free-floating,’ occurs often in Thom’s lyrics, even in some of the latest work, such as “Nude” (In Rainbows, 2007):

Now that you’ve found it, it’s gone

Now that you feel it, you don’t

You’ve gone off the rails

Pull/Pulk Abject Doors

Whereas ‘objects’ are usually assumed to be clearly delineated (‘It’s this, not that’) and ‘subjects’ are clearly separate from their ‘objects’ (‘I’m me, not any other thing’), the ‘abject’ always occupies borderline territory (‘Both this and that’ or ‘Neither this nor that’). For instance, my severed finger is, in a strange way, both ‘me’ and ‘no longer me’; the corpse of someone I know is both that person and not that person. Or, an android (as in ‘Paranoid Android’) is neither a human being nor a mere machine. Such phenomena break down the boundaries that we usually assume to define the world.

In the case of Radiohead, the best illustration of this ‘borderline phenomenon’ can be seen in their overall musical style and its dramatic changes. Their sonic work up to OK Computer happens in the ‘border territory’ between Thom’s fragile and introspective vocals and Jonny’s slashing, dissonant, and extroverted guitar commentary. Then, beginning with Kid A (2000), this ‘both/and’—basically ‘both hard rock and alternative’—seems to implode into something else entirely, ‘neither rock nor alternative.’

Looking at their radical change of direction after OK Computer from this perspective may then help us understand something that has baffled their fans and critics alike. If Kristeva is right that the abject is always a borderline phenomenon, then we can think of the ‘pre-’ and ‘post-OK Computer’ work as two sides of the same coin, two different but complementary ways of exploring and negotiating boundaries. Either you can frame the boundary territory by two extremes (making it a ‘both this and that’) or you can collapse the extremes into something emerging from but different than either (making it a ‘neither this nor that’). It might not even be too much of a stretch, then, to suggest that their last couple of albums (Hail