Radiohead and Philosophy - Brandon W. Forbes [47]
“Don’t turn away,” Yorke pleads amid the sound of synthetic beats increasing in volume. And it brings to mind George Orwell’s vision of the future—the vision of a torturer whispered to the tortured actually—in which it is authoritatively observed that the end of human history is a black boot pressed on a human face forever. “Don’t turn away,” is the last spoken expression as Yorke’s crooning is eventually cut off by the beeps and beats that began the song. The spoken plea was done with even before we heard it. Words are always received, as it were, under erasure, their echo abiding insofar as we give them heed again, always vulnerable to being disregarded and ignored, their meaning depending on the receiver more than the sender. Every word, as the poet Robert Hass reminds us, is an elegy to what it signifies.
Ideology and Idolatry
To return for a moment to the question of genres, boundaries, and compartmentalizations, the terms we use to affirm (or to withhold affirmation from) the witness of other people, living or dead, as they come to us, I’d like to locate The Eraser within a mystic strand of the traditions called religious very broadly conceived. All our attempts at witness (sending and receiving) are acts of faith, a collating of what information we have with a strong sense of our own finitude, our own humanness. And we do less harm the more we keep this awareness in mind, maintaining a constant vigilance against our tendency to reify our favored abstractions. When we keep a vigil of this sort, we begin to get a sense of the Derridean view of religion, of pilgrims (everyone a pilgrim) moving through and moving by abstractions and (hopefully) seeking out more redemptive ones: “Should one save oneself by abstraction or save oneself from abstraction? Where is salvation, safety?”33 I think of The Eraser as an experiment—an offering—in robustly, self-conscious abstraction, the knowingly finite, inescapably social work of folk traditions, the traditions we sometimes call religion.
Derrida speaks of religion as our “clearest and most obscure” word, a touchstone of ethical alchemy, an arsenal of word and image out of which we sense an ethical summons, a river of song we do well to call sacred, even as we should probably employ the term with a sort of mandatory agnosticism if only for, in the deepest sense, religious reasons:
We act as though we had some common sense of what ‘religion’ means through the languages we believe (how much belief already, to this moment, to this very day!) we know how to speak. We believe in the minimal trustworthiness of this word . . . nothing is less pre-assured . . . and the entire question of religion comes down, perhaps, to this lack of assurance. (p. 3)
As Derrida pitches it (and as I mean to argue as well), religion isn’t best understood primarily as a collection of beliefs held by backward people with fear and trembling for most of human history (religion as brainwash). It is rather, among other things, a scriptorium of beleaguered witness, a record of collated information, both fragmentary and sometimes systematic, with which we may feel compelled to reckon as it somehow, across history, reckons with us, an inheritance, if you like, of difficult wisdom. Without wishing to contaminate its legacy with what could be taken to be a most poisonous form of bad press (Religious Rock) I locate The Eraser along this continuum, a work of witness to the possibility of witness, a witness that holds as sacred the witness of others, a grammar of grace, earthbound and ethereal. I imagine Bono of U2 had a similar affirmation in mind when he recently referred to Radiohead as “a sacred talent.”34
Sacred, I would say, not merely because the music inspires feelings of otherworldliness or transcendence or a haunting sense of the holy in the otherwise merely everyday, but sacred in the way that the music of The Eraser questions