Radiohead and Philosophy - Brandon W. Forbes [31]
Where I End and You Begin
Kristeva explains that, in one way or another, the abject is connected with the body and its processes and immediate sensations, rather than external objects or ideas, since it is the body that forms that often amorphous region between ‘where I stop and the world begins.’
You can’t listen to Radiohead long without noticing how frequently Thom’s lyrics employ physical, bodily references (rather than, for instance, psychological imagery or poetic metaphors). For example, in “Bones” (The Bends, 1995), he sings,
I don’t want to be crippled and cracked
Shoulders, wrists, knees, and back
Ground to dust and ash
Crawling on all fours
On the same album, “My Iron Lung” has the lyrics,
My brain says I’m receiving pain
A lack of oxygen
From my life support
My iron lung
On another occasion (“Knives Out,” Amnesiac, 2001), a whole song is devoted to death in a very physical sense: the corpse of a mouse “bloated and frozen” to be “put in the pot” and cooked up.
How to Disappear Completely
Kristeva, in her psychoanalytic mode, explains the connection between the abject and the body by referring to that earliest human state where the newborn organism, still literally on the boundary between life and death, has yet to establish any firm boundaries between its own body and that of its mother. All its experience consists solely of its amorphous bodily states as it encounters the uncertainty and trauma of the alternating presence and absence of the mother. Because the infant is as yet unable to speak or understand language, it lacks any words or concepts that would allow it to describe its situation or understand its meaning, so its prelinguistic world is nothing but the formless and ever-changing flux of its own bodily states.
Everything changes when the infant later learns to speak, understand, and communicate with others. It is at this point that the infant first becomes a ‘subject’ capable of distinguishing itself from other ‘objects’. However, at a deeper psychic level, the memory of this original state is never entirely forgotten and continues occasionally to erupt into consciousness when something, usually connected with the body, is encountered. As Kristeva views it, the abject is encountered as a visceral, bodily reaction to certain things that remind us of that primordial, formless, fluid state that was suppressed and rejected when, thanks to language, we became a ‘subject’ in world of ‘objects’ that are meaningful for us.
Radiohead is definitely not a psychoanalytic collective, so we can’t expect to find such themes articulated the way Kristeva does. However, she does make another important point which gives us a clue about where to look. If the linguistically articulated, social world is one of definition, clarity, and meaning, then the eruption of the abject in experience threatens the collapse of all meaning and distinction, a key symptom of which is the disruption and fragmentation of language.
A recurrent device of the art of Stanley Donwood, the band’s constant graphic collaborator beginning with The Bends, provides a perfect illustration of this. The most memorable example is the artwork filling the inside jacket of Kid A. Scattered across it we can make out fragments of letters, words, and phrases that seem on the verge of sinking into the chaotic background from which they seem to have only temporarily emerged.
Radiohead’s lyrics also rarely tell stories or follow any clear logic or set pattern. Instead, they often have a quality of visceral but precarious meaning: such images as “a pig, in a cage, on antibiotics” and ‘a cat tied to a stick” (from “Fitter Happier,” OK Computer) pack just such an immediate punch even before we have time to process them intellectually. At other times, some scene, insight, or feeling seems to hover before us only to recede from our grasp and then evaporate by the end of the song. Their openings