Radiohead and Philosophy - Brandon W. Forbes [33]
From the viewpoint of Pink Floyd’s ‘existentialist aesthetics’, we’re all wearing dark-tinted reflector shades. Echoing the existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre’s famous claim that the gaze of other persons only reflects us back upon our own lonely and alienated condition (“Hell is other persons,” as the line from his play No Exit reads), Pink Floyd presents us as enmeshed in a solid, walled-in world where the colors are mainly grey and the only responses are either angry protest or anxiety-ridden acceptance of our alienated condition.
Radiohead’s abject shades are dramatically different than either of these. On the one hand, there is little hint of the possibility of transcendence in any of Radiohead’s work. Like Pink Floyd, for Radiohead there’s also ‘no other place to be than where you are’: there’s no possibility of escape from yourself. But ‘where we are’ looks entirely different when seen through the abject lenses of Radiohead than through the existentialist shades of Pink Floyd.
For Pink Floyd’s existentialist aesthetic, the major issue is that we, as potentially free, creative, and fulfilled individuals (roughly, what Sartre calls ‘Beings-for-ourselves’) continually find ourselves hemmed in, blocked, and hence alienated from an indifferent if not hostile world of objects and institutions (‘Beings-in-themselves’). We are continually alienated from this world because, while we know ‘for ourselves’ what it would be like for our lives to be meaningful, the world of objects ‘in itself’ neither recognizes nor responds to any such meaning: at most, it merely reflects our own gaze and indifferently turns us back upon ourselves.
The abject aesthetic of Radiohead differs from this in several important ways. First, that there are any clear or stable meanings, whether of our lives, our world, or even language, always remains questionable. Meanings are fluid and just as we think we’ve gotten something into focus, it seems to dissolve before our eyes. If Radiohead’s music often expresses a sense of anxiety sometimes resembling that of Pink Floyd, it is not that the meaning of my own life is continually challenged by an indifferent world, but that I can never quite succeed in bringing into focus what that meaning might be. Even more, because abject aesthetics emphasizes the importance of the body as itself a part of the world, there cannot be the firm boundaries between self and world (‘Being-for-itself’ and ‘Being-in-itself’) invoked by any existentialist aesthetic. In the more fluid, boundary-less aesthetic of Radiohead, it makes little sense to speak of some sort of existential alienation or revolt against an indifferent world, because I myself, as an embodied being, am part of the world and that world is, at least in part, the foundation for any meaning that I might encounter.
Rise and Shine It’s On Again Off Again
If, for abject aesthetics, neither psychic transcendence nor existential revolt is an option, then should we conclude that, in Radiohead-world, everything is ‘painted black’, that it finally amounts to the dead end of nihilism? If so, why would anyone want to buy or even try on a pair of such opaque black lenses? My answer to this final question is to suggest that abject lenses are neither opaque nor necessarily dark after all. Rather, abject aesthetics represents one aspect of the broader movement of ‘postmodernism’, specifically that derived from the work of one of Julia Kristeva’s teachers, the controversial