Radiohead and Philosophy - Brandon W. Forbes [90]
Unlike pessimists such as James Lovelock, I don’t believe we are all doomed. It was good to hear Professor Sir David King recently saying he was an optimist and human behaviour is changing. As I heard George Monbiot saying not long ago, isn’t it funny how in the space of a year we went from listening to sceptics who denied this was happening to suddenly saying we’re all doomed - how interesting that both scenarios demand that we do nothing. That can’t be right. You should never give up hope.
The Self and Politics
The key to this transformation may lie in the picture of evil Hail to the Thief explores. Does its metaphysics of self-and-other really make sense? It may have at one time when, under the ideals of the Enlightenment, human culture aspired to develop a complete and total knowledge of the world. What remained outside, what could not be assimilated or known, remained a threat to this ideal. Michel Foucault identifies this remainder or unreason with madness itself, and traces its rise to the classical age of enlightenment. If the essential quality of humans is their rationality and reason, then exceptions to the order of reason or rational discourse cannot be truly human and become identified with evil. In other words, what is classified as inhuman comes to be feared as parasitic or, in the case of our current political situation, potential terrorists.
But the ideal fails to understand how reason is in fact enmeshed in the world, and not soveriegn over it. This is why Badiou’s and Rimbaud’s conception of philosophy as a kind of poetry-of-revolt is important for understanding Radiohead. Because philosophy navigates and creates the border between self and other, it creates the space of politics within which we think and experience the world and do philosophy. Philosophy is part of the world, not above it, and therefore must reflect and learn from those transformations happening in contemporary situations. Philosophy is no longer sovereign. Rather, it is as if philosophy has finally heard that cry addressed to it for decades, a cry voiced by so many artists, scientists, activists and lovers whose activities it has deafly appropriated from on high: You have not been paying attention.
Thinking in Rainbows
And you have not been acting. For Yorke’s optimism seems not only connected to a new way of thinking, but also a new way of behaving and acting in the world. Radiohead embraced the notion of acting without reciprocity when they left their label EMI, and offered In Rainbows for download at whatever price people wanted to pay for it. And perhaps interpretations of Radiohead’s earlier music that compared it to Pink Floyd and stressed its negativity were wrong. Once again, “You Have Not Been Paying Attention”. Although this does sound like a vicious school teacher barking at a child, as depicted in Pink Floyd’s 1982 film, the point was, and still is, act before it’s too late, as the tagline for 28 Days Later that began this chapter suggests.
There is in much of this music an encounter with a feared Other, but discourse with the Other is a discourse of continual revelation. Like listening to the music and finding hidden revelatory depths, its tongue is that of the absolute Other, and its name is responsibility, the call to respond ethically. It all depends on you.
Radiohead, Heidegger, and Technology. (Our Iron Lungs.)
16.
The Mutilation of Voice in “Kid A” (Or, My John Mayer Problem)
ADAM KOEHLER
When I was a kid, back in the era of cassettes, my friend Brandon made me a copy of Pablo Honey. He pressed his stereo up against mine, hit “play,” and then hit “record” on mine. Since we used the external mic on my stereo, Pablo Honey came through layered with echoed static and the sounds of Brandon trying to be quiet: taps set to the beat of the songs, his dog running through the halls in the background, and later, Brandon’s mother calling him over to eat. You can also hear him shout: Quiet, Mom! I’m recording!
I loved that tape. Before it went the