Author: joseph

Morning Bell is a painting (c. 1870) by Winslow Homer.

Correction, Jan 1 2021: The above link no longer works. Instead you can view The Morning Bell at the Yale University Art Gallery.

“…our faulty representations of some immense communicational and computer network are themselves but a distorted figuration of something even deeper, namely, the whole world system of a present-day multinational capitalism. The technology of contemporary society is therefore mesmerizing and fascinating not so much in its own right but because it seems to offer some privileged representational shorthand for grasping a network of power and control even more difficult for our minds and imaginations to grasp: the whole new decentered global network of the third stage of capital itself. This is a figural process presently best observed in a whole mode of contemporary entertainment literature…” (37-8).

Jameson, Frederic. Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham: Duke UP, 1991.

Green Plastic Radiohead.

Jacques Lacan’s analysis of objet a may illuminate the “a” of Kid A. According to James P. McDaniel, “For Lacan, the objet a fails to signify in the symbolic economy of intersubjective relations, i.e., it is ‘shit.’ So it is that the objet a is closely linked with anality.”

The title of Radiohead’s latest album is likely derived from a trading card set entitled Kid A in Alphabet Land. An educational and artfully illustrated tour through psychoanalysis guided by the eponymous jargon-fighter, Kid A.

AND NOW THE SHIPPING FORECAST ISSUED BY THE MET.OFFICE
AT 1130 ON MONDAY 22 JANUARY 2001

LUNDY
SOUTHERLY 6 TO GALE 8, DECREASING 5 FOR A TIME.
RAIN OR SQUALLY SHOWERS. MODERATE OR GOOD

FASTNET
SOUTHWESTERLY 5 TO 7, OCCASIONALLY GALE 8.
SHOWERS THEN RAIN. MODERATE OR GOOD

IRISH SEA
SOUTH OR SOUTHEAST 6 TO GALE 8, DECREASING 5 FOR A TIME.
RAIN OR SHOWERS. MODERATE OR GOOD

The first words to Radiohead’s song, “In Limbo,” are taken from the BBC shipping news. The names designate three contiguous, specific areas of sea between England and Ireland. The weather report for those areas is announced in that order: Lundy, Fastnet, Irishsea. These excerpted words (found poetry, perhaps) geographically locate the listener “in limbo,” so to speak: between England and Ireland. That is, if location is the point. If location is not the point, then the point is also NOT standard commercial shipping meteorological communication (obvious, not obvious). This mass-produced song can be read as a self-referential commodity, one that situates itself within another, presumably more important and simultaneously more mundane, commercial discourse: a daily weather forecast for shipping, for exchange of commodities.