Radiohead and Philosophy - Brandon W. Forbes [83]
This world not only sounds nightmarish, it looks it, too. Stanley Donwood’s sleeve art, from Kid A and after, especially, depicts wide-eyed demonic creatures weeping, screaming, or perpetrating violent acts. The hidden booklet behind the CD tray on Kid A is especially disturbing. Creatures kick each other with razor-sharp feet, drip blood from their claws, and gather with machine guns and masks under the ironic headline “Glamorous.” The cover of Hail to the Thief, which uses a painting of Donwood’s called “Pacific Coast,” further exemplifies the terror and anxiety found in these disturbing creatures. Utilizing blocks and blocks of text, the painting translates social anxiety into a wall of media-crazed buzz words like “Oil,” “Fear,” and “Security,” all the while aping a map of Los Angeles. One can easily recall the alienated fear of Pink from The Wall here, as each block adds yet another moment to the individual’s feeling of separation and powerlessness.
Yet Radiohead also present an optimism—of sorts, at least—in the face of power. They depict moments of resistance in which they rear a defiant head. The moving “I Will” from Hail to the Thief features a resilient Yorke promising to “rise up” in the face of overwhelming odds, promising not to let anything happen “to my children.” Amnesiac’s “I Might Be Wrong,” while channeling an anxiety that sees “no future left at all,” still urges us to “think about the good times and never look back.” And Kid A’s “Optimistic” offers the consolation that trying the best you can is good enough, even if one feels utterly powerless, like “nervous messed up marionettes floating around on a prison ship.”
So Radiohead raise a variety of questions about violence, power, and resistance in our world. How are we to understand power and violence as political subjects? Does power always give
I Am Born Again
Immediately following World War II, political and social philosopher Hannah Arendt (1906-1975) penned a three-volume investigation into the origins of totalitarian power—the Communist and Nazi states. Covering the trial of Nazi criminal Adolf Eichmann for The New Yorker, Arendt coined the phrase “the banality of evil” and in her book Eichmann in Jerusalem suggested that the bureaucratizing of barbarism—the meetings, memos, uniforms, and schedules that Eichmann described during his trial—blunts the psychological power of violence, allowing normal people to facilitate horrific ends. Arendt’s treatise On Violence and her earlier study of modern political subjectivity, The Human Condition, offer the best interrogation of the philosophical concepts of power and violence.
In The Human Condition, the philosophical concept of action is the fundamental element of politics. Action is made possible only by the “human condition of plurality,” and allows humans to begin anew, to create new possibilities and break with the mistakes of the past.54 Arendt calls the possibility to create the new in action “natality,” in reference to the new beginning of human birth: “Action has the closest connection with the human condition of natality” because the newborn “possesses the capacity of beginning something anew, that is, of acting” (p. 9).
A few songs off of OK Computer get at Arendt’s notion of natality. The hopefulness of the air crash survivor in “Lucky” channels this idea that new action or a new event can move social life in a different direction: “It’s gonna be a glorious day! / I feel my luck could change.” Similarly, after having emerged unscathed from a car crash on album opener “Airbag,” Yorke proclaims: “I am born again.” These near-death experiences create a space for the narrator in each song to realize his capacity to act again in society, just as if he was given