Radiohead and Philosophy - Brandon W. Forbes [82]
If Hail to the Thief resembles Jameson’s concept of utopian thinking as a contemplation of a future (even a horrifying one) that breaks away from the present, then this means that utopian thought must have a primarily negative, critical function (much as with Bloch’s “abstract utopia”). Stopping short of concrete plans for utopia means, as Jameson writes, adherence to “the obligation for Utopia to remain an unrealizable fantasy” (p. 227). It becomes a necessary critique of the here and now, an insistence that whatever the future may look like, it will not be, and cannot be, like this. The horrifying and oppressive world of Hail to the Thief is built out of pieces drawn from the political situation of the twenty-first-century western world. The fragmentary critiques of contemporary politics like the album title and the hope for a president who will “know right from wrong” are unmistakable. Yet, the protestations by members of Radiohead that this album is not immediately political are important to remember as well (remember Yorke’s “trying to express the absurdity of everything”).
Hail to the Thief creates imaginative worlds that draw us out the situation of the present day. Even in a highly exaggerated manner, this, too, is an essential part of utopian thinking. As Jameson notes: “at best Utopia can serve the purpose of making us more aware of our mental and ideological imprisonment” (p. xiii). This is a doubly negative critique, a ‘no’ to the never-ending present of this world, but also a ‘no’ to concrete utopias. Hail to the Thief does not reach for some embarrassed, ironic distance from utopia. Rather, it offers a full recognition of the difficulty and, yes, impossibility of imagining a better world, along with an equally resolute refusal to let the impossible get in the way of the necessary. It brushes the cobwebs out from the sky.
14.
Where Power Ends and Violence Begins
BRANDON W. FORBES
Power grows out of the barrel of a gun.
—Mao Zedong
Power is everywhere; not because it embraces everything, but because it comes from everywhere.
—Michel Foucault
Little babies’ eyes
—“I Will (No Man’s Land),” Hail to the Thief
“All power tends to corrupt,” goes the tired aphorism from Lord Acton, “and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” One need only look to recent political history to see the seeming resonance of this statement, as the list of despots and dictators that haunt the twentiethth century, as well as the twenty-first, is long indeed.
Farther back, the political evils perpetrated by the aristocracies of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the kings of the Middle Ages, and the tyrants of ancient civilization further confirm the evils of power when it is consolidated in the few, or worse, in the one. In our current political climate in the West, we associate such evils as torture, terror, and the existence of a dreaded secret police with totalitarian power—the ultimate form of absolute power, a power that crushes individual freedom, the fundamental principle of liberal democracy, through violence and terror. The many books and films about the problem of totalitarianism speak not just against the possible rise of absolute power in our governments, but also of our intense fear and anxiety about losing freedom and democracy to a violent power. The War on Terror’s desperate co-opting of the Manichean rhetoric of the World War II/Cold-War era is one example of this fear’s hold on contemporary America’s national conscience. Its very name is another.
Radiohead seem especially attuned to this fear of the tie between violence and power. From OK Computer to Hail to the Thief, their records consistently portray a world rife with terror, despondency, and violence. Piggies squeal, bruises don’t heal, and police