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By Root 958 0

Radiohead have come back to the mute and solitary background of experience on which culture is constructed. They throw their songs toward us like the first human beings speaking their first words without knowing if they’ll be anything more than a shout. They play their songs without knowing if they will detach themselves from the flux of their individual lives and experience in which they have been born and lived. With this experience, they can present—whether to themselves in the future, to the others who coexist with them, or even to unknown others in the future—the independent existence of an identifiable meaning which they can claim as an expression of their own life.

Many artists create and express ideas in ways like this in the hope that they will awaken in us experiences that will give root to the idea of change and revolt in our own experiences. The meanings they flesh out in their songs, from their lives and their experiences, give to our experiences and to our lives a shape and a meaning that wasn’t there before we heard them. And if this is possible at all, it is because they pull us toward them, they show us how they experience, hear and see the world, they make us hear and see it in a bit more of a similar manner. Ultimately, their songs make the world a bit more common between them and us—and between us, you and I, who are listening to the music.

Merleau-Ponty describes how the lasting expressions and actions of artists and politicians shape us, more than they try to please us: as their public, we don’t pre-exist to their songs or actions, we’re not waiting for them. It’s their work, their actions and their songs that call and summon us to them, that create a public around them. They shock us into listening to them. They try to grab a hold of us. They shape us so that they can live with us.

Merleau-Ponty calls this an “action of culture”: through their songs, artists like Radiohead find a place in other people’s lives. They confront their lives to ours and they show our lives to each other to let us see how alike they are (and in what essential ways they are different). They create a sort of universal life that we can all share. Their words and music, because of the meanings they have for us as we come in contact with them, pull us into a common universe with them and with the others who are listening and will potentially listen to them. Why else would we push the music we love on others?

How to Misunderstand Politics Completely

Once we start to compare art and politics as Merleau-Ponty does, “political” action becomes something other than passing laws and getting elected. The popular debate about whether Hail to the Thief is “political” for instance—something most listeners assumed, but which Yorke and others emphatically denied (at least at first)—refers to a traditional understanding of politics. Instead, Radiohead are political in all their albums as they unveil the world to us and show it in a new way. This unveiling is completely different from the “action of governing.” The unveiling goes beyond government and beyond the state, although it does try to influence government and cannot take place without it.52

What Radiohead say about politics shows a certain understanding that in a sense, they’re not that different from those they criticize—an understanding, too, that they’re not just appealing to those like them who feel that things are uneven and that only certain people get to dictate their rules, but even to those “others” as well. Take “Electioneering,” for instance. There’s a menace here: when they go forward, when they advance, we go backward, we recoil. And if we take the chorus in a different direction, when they get what they want, when they gain, we lose something, we go backwards. But that’s what Radiohead do in their interviews: they try to sell us their albums and their concert tickets, they’re trying to get our vote, our money. When “electioneering,” when trying to sell something, they must say the right things.

For Radiohead to say “somewhere we will meet” may sound ironic,