Radiohead and Philosophy - Brandon W. Forbes [44]
In my employment of religious language to describe The Eraser, I don’t mean to imply, within the work, a subtle adherence to any particular tradition of avowedly religious confession. But I would like to characterize the concerns of the album as ineluctably religious insofar as the songs bring, in an undeniable way, a profoundly ethical dimension to the quotidian dimensions the listener is already in, an emerging sense of responsibility animated by the demands of being (as well as receiving) a witness. This is the realm of concern that any sense of religiosity worthy of the name will name, a sense of the ultimate that challenges the status quo. Derrida names the concern most provocatively: “Religion is responsibility or it is nothing at all.”27 It is an investment in mind-fulness.
This scruple, the unbearable lightness of actually paying attention and listening for the voices of other people, is at work in every act of witness, self-described religious or otherwise. In any case, it will keep such high-sounding words (true, just, responsibility, religion) in the Derridean sense, under erasure, because the question of its faithfulness has to be constantly deferred. It can’t legitimate itself. The good witness won’t name itself as such, because so much remains to be seen. Like philosophy, the work of witness is always before us and always only underway, a work that’s never exactly done. Like poetry, it can’t be a choice or decision so much as it’s a verdict, a verdict to be rendered on the strength of someone else’s listening and attentive testimony. The question of its ethical coherence, the resonance of a witness, whether in a body of work or a single piece, in the deepest sense, won’t be decided, for instance, by institutions, units sold, mercantile trends, or philosophy departments. It will be decided by a future that impinges upon our present even now, a future whose criteria for just witness, the witness that did justice to and for the events and contexts of its own time, might differ radically from our own.
The music might prove to be a hit, as the saying goes, in the short run, but did it bear meaningful, redeeming witness? Was it good? Poetry, after all, is the news that stays news. The work that illuminates and, over time, goes on illuminating. The classic that says something and never stops saying it.
Yorke recalls sitting in a car in Japan, stalled like myriad others in traffic around the world, emitting exhaust uselessly and harmfully and thinking, “A million engines in neutral.” Committing the phrase to paper (later collated within “And It Rained All Night”) doesn’t change the fact that Yorke, like the rest of us, has been routinized into submission to a death-dealing system for organizing the movement of people and product in our worlds, but it’s a start. It can be one of a series of small feats of attentiveness which, as movements go, have a way of adding up. The words, the lines, and the songs expand the possibility of resistance to the thought patterns, the failures of imagination, the obstructions to seeing what’s in front of us that pre-empt the possibility of knowing what’s going on, what devastation we’re so easily corralled into funding by way of our seeming inability to pay adequate attention. Perhaps there’s more than one way to get from point A to point B. Maybe the work can get done without moving at all. It might be that lyrics prove to be the unacknowledged legislation of new worlds on the way, better cultural forms, better economies, better ways of being a rock band.
Yorke views the state of global carbon emissions and the denial of the long-term consequences of any number of standard operating procedures (backed by people and governments ostensibly generated by their consent) in product manufacture, war-making, and cutthroat trade laws as an ongoing assault on human dignity now and a brutal squandering away of an inhabitable environment for generations to come. In view of this, the question of how to be a responsible historical consciousness, how to live a life of non-indifference,