Radiohead and Philosophy - Brandon W. Forbes [92]
Kid A, Heidegger, and the Question of Technology
Science fiction writer William Gibson says that cyberspace is where telephone conversations take place. I imagine this is the same place where we listen to In Rainbows (and a case could be made for that, I’m sure), but what interests me most about Gibson’s definition is not necessarily the space we occupy when on the phone, but the role of the phone itself. It shimmies between connection (as it presents our voice to the person on the other end) and distortion (as it makes that voice different, distorted, and electronic). The telephone determines and enables. Conversations may take place in cyberspace, but they get there through an electrocution that seems to manipulate and facilitate our voices equally. Or, switching metaphors, imagine listening to your voice played back on tape. That’s not what you sound like. Is it? Yep, Kid A says, that’s you.
That’s the best way I can explain the kind of anxiety I feel when I listen to Kid A. Actually, scratch that—it’s not anxiety. It’s familiarity, philosophically speaking, especially when I hear Yorke’s distorted voice, digitally bubbling up, saying something like “Kid A, Kid A/Kid A, Kid A.” This kind of disfigurement recurs again after the distorted voice of “Everything in Its Right Place” blurs and repeats. It asks, “What was that you tried to say?” while the disfigured samples cycle through their own continual distortions in the background. The album’s title track, “Kid A,” is so disfigured we can’t even understand it. We hear the technology. Its part of the song. Somebody made this, it says. Listen.
Martin Heidegger had a lot to say about such disfigurement in his analysis of Being and the notion of presence in western philosophy. In Being and Time, he claimed that technology amounted to a collective human effort to control and manipulate nature, at the expense of understanding the ways in which technology turns around and controls and manipulates us. This is a lesson that we’ve learned well from Radiohead. It’s right there in the band’s name (bringing to mind images of machine-like brains working through millions of signals that register and millions that don’t). It’s there in OK Computer (“I might be paranoid, but not an android,” the computerized voice reassures us). And it’s there in Kid A (“Strobe lights and blown speakers / fireworks and hurricanes / I’m not here / This isn’t happening”). The world of Kid A, after all, is one in which we’re here, but we’re not here. “In Limbo” says we’re “living in a fantasy world,” and then “Idioteque” tells us “this is really happening.” We’ve shimmied in between space and cyberspace. And we get there through the technological atmosphere Kid A orchestrates around us.
In Being and Time, Heidegger argues that most of our everydayness is spent firmly in the realm of the ordinary—we need to study, go to work, buy groceries, pay bills. In the process, much of what enables such ordinariness retreats from our attention and becomes invisible to us. For Heidegger, western philosophy has spent far too much time investigating what is present to us—or presence (or existence), more generally—and too little time investigating the ways such presence tends to erase that which enables it by virtue of rendering it ordinary. Technology is one of mankind’s biggest enablers of ordinary lives, and yet, when all is working appropriately, it retreats from our daily attention. The dangers of technology (such as the risks of identity theft or car accidents on the way to the grocery store) actually help right this imbalance by pointing us to the world that lies ordinarily withdrawn from view or experience—an absence that is so very important for Heidegger