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    I. Introduction: Test Specimens

    Figure 1
    Figure 1

  1. The blinking icon you see above is called a "test specimen." Wide-eyed bears with murderous grins, drawn alternately as symmetrical, disembodied heads or frantically sketched, stiff-limbed figures, they punctuate the art of the music group Radiohead, from CD packaging and packing slips to web site images and promotional stickers.

  2. Although directly analogous to easily recognizable character-mascots used to establish a product's unique brand identity, the bears function like painter Philip Guston's hooded men, with a difference (see Guston's "City Limits"). While Guston's figures, versions of Ku Klux Klansmen, gave a disturbingly organic shape to American civil unrest and racial injustice in the late 1960s and early '70s, Radiohead's test specimens are protagonists in a self-referential aesthetic that pastiches the band's commodification and the operation of capital at large.[1]

  3. In what follows, I explore the bears' appearances in QuickTime computer-animated music video shorts released concurrently with Kid A, the band's critically anticipated fourth album.[2] Titled "antivideos," or "blips," the short videos (10-30 seconds in duration) were released only on the internet, a virtually inexhaustible distribution channel. Via this medium, the antivideos provide a useful plateau from which to consider popular art's current state and future potential in the age of electronic reproduction.

    II. Commodified Culture, Culturalized Commodification

  4. In The Fragile Absolute, or Why is the Christian Legacy Worth Fighting For?, Slavoj Zizek observes that "today's artistic scene" consists of two opposed movements. The first is the "much-deplored commodification of culture (art objects produced for the market)," while the second, and "less noted but perhaps more crucial opposite movement," is "the growing 'culturalization' of the market economy itself." He elaborates:

    With the shift towards the tertiary economy (services, cultural goods), culture is less and less a specific sphere exempted from the market, and more and more not just one of the spheres of the market, but its central component (from the software amusement industry to other media productions). (25)[3]

  5. We can add to this latter list the music industry. The paired phenomena of commodified culture and a culturalized market are nowhere more evident than in the music business, and it is these movements of commodification and culturalization that Radiohead's antivideos thematize.

  6. Originally released on the band's web site (<http://www.more-radiohead.com/alps.html>) several weeks before the 2 October 2000 release of Kid A, the antivideos jettison the standard hierarchy between song and music video as elaborated by media critic Jody Berland. According to Berland, "the 3-minute musical single" is a music video's

    unalterable foundation, its one unconditional ingredient. A single can exist (technically, at least) without the video, but the reverse is not the case. As if in evidence of this, music videos, almost without exception, do not make so much as a single incision in the sound or structure of the song. However bizarre or disruptive videos appear, they never challenge or emancipate themselves from their musical foundation, without which their charismatic indulgences would never reach our eyes. (25)

  7. As if in direct response to Berland's phonocentrism, the antivideos do exactly what music videos do not and/or should not: make radical incisions and changes to the sound and structure of the songs they promote.

  8. The web site's title introduces the antivideos bluntly as "brief films used as promotional material." Immediately, visitors are alerted to the antivideo's situation within a matrix of capitalist exchange, an unusual acknowledgment in an industry that regularly denounces any discernible trace of commercialization. As music critic Lawrence Grossberg has noted, "Rock fans have always constructed a difference between authentic and co-opted rock. And it is this which is often interpreted as rock's inextricable tie to resistance, refusal, alienation, marginality, etc." (Grossberg 202). Authentic rock has as its ideal a "collective, spontaneous creativity," in the words of Kalefa Sanneh, critic for the New York Times, that is unfettered by the crass demands of capital. Co-opted rock, however, is an example of what Zizek calls the "much-deplored commodification of culture (art objects produced for the market)"; co-opted rock is commercially successful music with an international distribution that fails to hide adequately its commodification, thus opening itself up for censure. Radiohead's music, videos, cover art, and packaging, however, expose its commodification and culturalize it.

  9. As one example, the CD packaging for Kid A foregrounds its own commodification. A limited number of CDs contained a supplementary text hidden beneath the jewel case's polystyrene tray. The untitled booklet by Stanley Donwood, the band's artist, and Tchock, a pseudonym for Thom Yorke, the band's lead singer, comprises fragmentary phrases juxtaposed against images of test specimens posed as either cartoonishly violent corporate sycophants or traumatized victims of surveillance. Rarely are listeners asked to disassemble the object that distills a performer's presence for uniform portable consumption, only to find a text that decries consumption. Radiohead's antivideos work similarly as agents of disassembly, leading consumers into a labyrinthine network of hyperbolic images that pastiche commodification.

    III. Flying Bears

  10. The first antivideo on the Radiohead site is titled "Flying Bears," a nineteen-second movie that imagines limitless reproduction with a twist of surreal horror. The scene opens on two figures, both of which stare up in horror at a murky sky crowded with flying test specimen bears (see Figure 2).

    Figure 2
    Figure 2

    The movie then fades into an exclusive focus on the flying bears, the brand icons for Radiohead, while the antivideo's soundtrack plays an excerpt from the song "In Limbo." Yorke's voice unhurriedly croons the refrain, "You're living in a fantasy / You're living in a fantasy" (see Figure 3).

    Figure 3
    Figure 3

    Finally, our view shifts to a close-up of a frightened onlooker, eyes fixed upward and mouth opened in muted fear. Furiously he clutches a mobile phone, a device that may be his last connection to the world: a connection enabled and mediated by an electronic communication network (see Figure 4).

    Figure 4
    Figure 4

  11. The fantasy, then, of which the lyrics speak and that the onlookers inhabit is not a pleasant one, as the alarmed facial expressions evince. Instead, it is the ultimate fantasy of the capitalist/Communist dyad: "unbridled productivity" (Zizek 18). As Zizek notes, it is no accident that capitalism and Communism rose simultaneously: "Marx's notion of Communist society is itself the inherent capitalist fantasy--a fantasmatic scenario for resolving the capitalist antagonism he so aptly described" (Zizek 19). The bears metaphorize the boundless commodification that modern technologies facilitate. Radiohead's symbols threaten to overcome the onlooker. In this way, the antivideo critiques its own medium--the internet, a technology that allows endless and nearly effortless production. Once an antivideo reaches the internet, it can be accessed indefinitely by multiple viewers simultaneously.

  12. The limitless reproducibility of visual and aural art objects that the internet enables is the apogee of simulation, as it is defined by Jean Baudrillard. Via digital technologies, "The real is produced from miniaturized cells, matrices, and memory banks, models of control--and it can be reproduced an indefinite number of times from these" (Baudrillard 2). The real or the authentic ceases to matter, an inevitability that Radiohead's music and art incorporate.

  13. Nevertheless, the real is what audiences, music critics and fans alike, desire. Critic David Fricke commented in Rolling Stone that despite the experimental sounds of Radiohead's electronic music, what you actually hear is "real rock singing and chops, altered beyond easy recognition" (Fricke 48). What Fricke fails to grasp is that Radiohead's aesthetic undermines the real that he attempts to recuperate on the band's behalf. This misreading of Radiohead's music by Fricke and others has a venerable antecedent: Walter Benjamin's "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction."

  14. Fricke would agree with Benjamin that mass reproduction corrupts the art object's authenticity, an essential, if intangible, element of art: "that which withers in the age of mechanical reproduction is the aura of the work of art" (Benjamin 221). But, unlike Benjamin, Fricke and the sum of music industry rhetoric stops there. Benjamin's anxiety gains a dimension as he considers the possibility that the real may cease to exist at all. As he explains in the case of photography, the question of authenticity "makes no sense" when one can make innumerable prints from a photographic negative (Benjamin 224). Similarly, the internet acts as a spectral production line, an immense factory, open to all comers, that has transcended production's physical limitations.

  15. A fear that authenticity will lose significance animates Benjamin's essay but does not explain Fricke's naïve praise for a hidden, real rock music underlying Radiohead's experimentation. The band's music, I argue, is not a distortion of real rock, but an uncovering of its absence, its phantasmic structure. Fricke assumes that the real continues to bloom when, as Baudrillard told us and as Benjamin knew would happen, it has long since been a desert.

  16. Benjamin's anxiety is the emotion that animates the onlookers' faces in "Flying Bears." The antivideo's countless test specimens are the epitomic image of electronic reproduction, specifically, the internet's realization of the fundamental capitalist fantasy of unimpeded production. But here the capitalist dream is refigured as a nightmarish scenario of flying bears looming over frightened mobile phone users. However, the precession of simulation, to use Baudrillard's phrase, is that capital desires its own undoing, as I argue in the following section.

    IV. "I'm not here / This isn't happening"

  17. The fourth song on Kid A is titled "How to Disappear Completely." The lyrics, while supposedly based on a dream, eerily narrate the singer's subject position as experienced by the listener: "I'm not here / This isn't happening." The point is so simple as to go unnoticed: when I hear Radiohead's music the band is not here, where I am at the moment of listening; and the performance is not happening, and may have, in fact, never happened. Like Miles Davis's Bitches Brew, an achievement not of instrumental virtuosity but of production technique ahead of its time, Kid A is the record of a performance never performed, an electronically constructed collage of disparate studio recordings, found sounds, drum loops, samples, and other forms of noise.

  18. While Kid A challenges authenticity, the antivideo "Screaming Bears" pastiches it. "Screaming Bears" casts the test specimens as performers furnishing what spectators crave--an authentic performance. Gradually, five agitated bears (notably, Radiohead has five band members) appear from stage-left on a flat, desolate landscape (see Figure 5) populated randomly by pyramids, resembling Cy Twombly's Anabasis. The performance is blatantly pointless: the bears enter, the bears leave.

    Figure 5
    Figure 5

    Nevertheless, the bears' performance is more compelling than what the performers of Radiohead offer. In "Morning Bell," Thom Yorke plays a piano, face averted from the camera and downcast, in a lonely, possibly domestic setting. We are given an authentic band member, but the authentic person, compared to the screaming and dancing test specimens, is far less thrilling. It is the simulation that captures our attention, not the authentic. The intimate, if artificially staged, mood of "Morning Bell," signaled by the black and white film and overhead film angle--the common position of surveillance cameras--is more akin to voyeurism than to spectatorship (see Figure 6).

    Figure 6
    Figure 6

  19. Whatever authenticity "Morning Bell" lays claim to is dissolved by "Yeti," another antivideo that calls attention to the band's role as victims of surveillance and status as objects, or rather of an institutionalized gaze so well given voice by David Fricke, above. To return to Fricke's assessment, Radiohead's music is "real rock singing and chops" (48). Fricke's desire to establish the band's music as real rock is a near-death symptom of capitalism. Capitalism, especially its embodiment in the music industry, frequently reminds us of "its foundations in real people and their relations" (Zizek 16). Underneath the mysterious celebrity-identity there is a real person, which the hunched-over Yorke of "Morning Bell" perfectly signifies. Another example proves instructive: on 8 August 2001, fans had the chance to chat online with Jonny Greenwood, the band's lead guitarist and keyboardist. An event hosted by the Yahoo! web site, such a promotional move is not unlike another that Zizek describes: "Visitors to the London Stock Exchange are given a free leaflet which explains to them that the stock market is not about some mysterious fluctuations, but about real people and their products--this is ideology at its purest" (16). Being able to chat with Jonny Greenwood in real time: this, too, is ideology at its purest.[4]

  20. But this reassertion of the real, Baudrillard argues, is capital's attempt to calm its characteristic powers of "abstraction, disconnection, deterritorialization" (22), the very powers that now threaten it. To confront the oceanic elision of difference it inaugurated, capital re-injects the real, but to no avail:

    as soon as [capital] wishes to combat this disastrous spiral by secreting a last glimmer of reality, on which to establish a last glimmer of power, it does nothing but multiply the signs and accelerate the play of simulation. (22)

    It is this reassertion of the real that "Yeti," the next antivideo, pastiches.

  21. In "Yeti," a test specimen bear is caught on camera, much in the same way the appearances of supposedly mystical monsters, such as Bigfoot and the Loch Ness Monster, are captured on videotape. To reinforce the antivideo's relation to surveillance footage, the movie begins with and is interrupted by moments of static (see Figure 7). Most often a nuisance, the camera's disruption of images, its intrusion as creator of artifice into a reality that would ideally otherwise remain unaltered, here signals reality. Between these staged disruptions, the camera slowly pans across an empty snow field (see Figure 8) and eventually locates a test specimen (see Figure 9) who flees upon realizing that he has been discovered.

    Figure 7
    Figure 7
    Figure 8
    Figure 8
    Figure 9
    Figure 9

  22. Like Sartre at the keyhole, hearing footsteps approaching from behind, the test specimen turns in shock: "Someone is looking at me!" (Sartre 349). Presumably, the test specimen escapes into the forest; the antivideo ends before the bear is captured. We are left with a noisy image of the bear running away (see Figure 10).

    Figure 10
    Figure 10

  23. Surveillance video, the electronic gaze with which authorities establish incontrovertible fact, is used frivolously--to follow a cartoon bear. Comparatively, this antivideo renders the ostensibly authentic scene of "Morning Bell" artificial and thus simultaneously lampoons authenticity more generally, exposing capital's covert insistence that commodified celebrities are real people.

    V. Is a Music Video Without Music a Music Video?

  24. Slavoj Zizek tells an interesting personal story in The Fragile Absolute worth quoting at length. During a trip to Berlin he

    noticed along and above all the main streets numerous large blue tubes and pipes, as if the intricate cobweb of water, phone, electricity, and so on, was no longer hidden beneath the earth, but displayed in public. My reaction was, of course, that this was probably another of those postmodern art performances whose aim was, this time, to reveal the intestines of the town, its hidden inner machinery, in a kind of equivalent to displaying on the video the palpitation of our stomach or lungs--I was soon proved wrong, however, when friends pointed out to me that what I saw was merely part of the standard maintenance and repair of the city's underground service network. (n. 13, 162)

    Before recounting the story of what he terms a blunder, Zizek contextualizes his confusion, citing the example of a recent art performance in Potzdamerplatz in Berlin, where the movements of several gigantic cranes were orchestrated for an art performance. A similar performance, he fails to note, happened in Helsinki in the early 1980s.

  25. In this context, Zizek's confusion in Berlin is understandable, and, I argue, symptomatic of the postmodern era. What begins to emerge is that postmodernism cannot be regarded merely as a set of objective attributes for which objects can be tested, but might instead be considered a perspective, a condition of the subject as well as objects. Not a radical thesis, by any means, but an important one that marks the difference between Jean-François Lyotard and Fredric Jameson: the former promoting distrust of metanarratives, a subjective state, as distinctive of postmodernism (Lyotard xxiv), the latter elaborating a stylistic description with architecture serving as the "privileged aesthetic language" (Postmodernism 37).

  26. Another example of confusion symptomatic of postmodernism is my own. Thirteen of sixteen antivideos released in June 2001 in support of the band's fifth album, Amnesiac, are musicless. These latest antivideos, to reuse Jody Berland's vocabulary quoted above, emancipate themselves from their musical foundation so thoroughly that the foundation is abandoned altogether. My initial response to these musicless antivideos was to declare myself in the presence of a postmodern pastiche of John Cage's revolutionary 4'33".

  27. At 8:15 p.m. on 29 August 1952, an audience gathered at the Maverick Concert Hall in Woodstock, New York to hear the pianist David Tudor perform John Cage's latest composition. They heard nothing, a nothing entitled 4'33''. Inspired by Robert Rauschenberg's three-paneled White Painting of 1951, Cage's handwritten score indicated a silence of three movements. Music without music: is it still music? Cage, of course, thought it was. Cage's modernist aesthetic was heavily influenced by Eastern philosophy. The point of the performance of 4'33'' was to force the listener to listen closely, to close read his or her immediate sonic environment. The common reference to 4'33" as Cage's "silent piece" is, from the composer's standpoint, a mistake. For one aim of the piece is to underscore Cage's belief that silence does not in fact exist (Cage 8).[5]

  28. Radiohead's aesthetic, then, in this instance, was Cage's impulse turned against the commercialization of music through the relentless promotion of music videos. Music videos are promotional materials, but without music, what can they promote? Nothing, and by promoting nothing they become advertising simply for advertising's sake. Further, the resulting affect isn't modernist shock (what have I endured!?), but what Jameson termed the postmodern sublime: a panic-boredom (I have to endure this for how long!?) (37-8).[6]

  29. My theory of the antivideos along these lines was disturbed, however, by information I received from the primary artist responsible for Radiohead's antivideos, Chris Bran, one of the self-titled Vapour Brothers. In July of 2001 I interviewed Bran via email. Responding to a question regarding how and when the Amnesiac antivideos were created, Bran wrote that they were "just out takes, left overs, works in progress. they were all created for the current radiohead project I am doing. we just decided to put these online and try to build up a gallery of video ideas" [sic]. When asked specifically why a majority of the shorts do not use music, Bran referred to his earlier response: "as i said these are all works in progress, unfinished ideas or out takes." The last comment Bran added was, "check out radiohead.com in the next few weeks." What was to come was the release of "I Might Be Wrong" (available at <http://www.radiohead.com/009.html>), an internet only, traditional music video constructed from the various musicless antivideos and created entirely on a laptop computer.

  30. What Bran's comments required of me was to erase the earlier response, or at least to rewrite that response, in this way: the soundless antivideos are not the postmodern descendents of John Cage's famous silence; they are, instead, waste, leftovers--in a word, excrement. While Bran's comments frustrate the genealogical connection to John Cage, his they open up a new set of theoretical problems. Waste, in its various forms, is now routinely handled by critical theory and theorists.

  31. Zizek, leaning on the work of his former mentor and analyst Jacques-Alain Miller (the son-in-law of Jacques Lacan), offers a compelling description of what material condition is historically particular to postmodernism: waste. Late capitalism, Zizek writes, has "introduce[d] a breathtaking dynamics of obsolescence" (40) that generates massive mounds of waste. I quote Zizek quoting Miller:

    The main production of the modern and postmodern capitalist industry is precisely waste. We are postmodern beings because we realize that all our aesthetically appealing consumption artifacts will eventually end as leftover, to the point that it will transform the earth into a vast waste land. (qtd. in Zizek 40)

    Along these lines Zizek notes that

    in today's art, the gap that separates the sacred space of sublime beauty from the excremental space of trash (leftover) is gradually narrowing, up to the paradoxical identity of opposites: are not modern art objects more and more excremental objects, trash (often in a quite literal sense: faeces, rotting corpses...) displayed in--made to occupy, to fill in--the sacred place of the Thing? (25-26)

    Perhaps the most famous example of this is Chris Ofili's 1996 painting "The Holy Virgin Mary," a portrait of the religious icon as a black woman decorated with elephant dung. The painting was featured in the 1999 Museum of Modern Art exhibit "Sensation: Young British Artists from the Saatchi Collection," an exhibit former Mayor of New York Rudolph Giuliani called "sick stuff."

  32. Back in Berlin, the aesthetic wonder Zizek felt at seeing the innards of the city exposed need not necessarily be considered a blunder. The actual circumstances of any situation, the ultimately phantasmic Real, is, as Lacan instructs us, only a fantasy that has yet to be unveiled. Instead, what we witness in Zizek's confusion (which was, interestingly, submerged in a footnote--the semi-exposed innards of the book, the book's waste products) and in my own is the epitome of the postmodern condition--the subject thrust into a state of perpetual awareness, never knowing where art will come from next.

    VI. In Place of a Conclusion: A Myth

  33. With the release in June 2001 of Amnesiac, the band's fifth album, the test specimen bears of Kid A have been replaced by crying minotaurs. While the bears were adaptable to various situations, the minotaurs are unambiguously and consistently modeled as victims. In one interactive portion of the Radiohead web site <http://www.waste-game.com/hogger/numeeja/minotaur.html>, visitors can participate in "Experiment #6: Torturing the Minotaur" where they have a chance to inflict pain upon a crying minotaur using a small trident. The game, if it can rightly be called a game, is in the tradition of Stanley Milgram's psychological experiments conducted from 1961 to 1962. A somewhat milder version of the same experiment is available at Capitol Records' Radiohead site, <http://hollywoodandvine.com/radiohead/>, a separate site not directly maintained by the band. At the top of the main page, one click will cause a minotaur to weep while a continuously depressed mouse button intensifies the minotaur's sorrow, prompting him to ruefully rub his tearful eyes as he shakes his head.

  34. Unlike Milgram's experiments, however, these opportunities to torture a minotaur test not our willingness to obey, but the limits of curiosity--our desire for knowledge. However, like Milgram's experiments, and more significantly, "Experiment #6" is a simulation. We torture nothing. We instead simulate a torture, a process far more dangerous according to Baudrillard. Comparing a simulated and a real hold-up, he writes:

    the latter does nothing but disturb the order of things, the right to property, whereas the former attacks the reality principle itself. Transgression and violence are less serious because they only contest the distribution of the real. Simulation is infinitely more dangerous because it always leaves open to supposition that, above and beyond its object, law and order themselves might be nothing but simulation. (20)

    Capital attempts to stabilize its power through the maintenance of reality. This, to reiterate Zizek, "is ideology at its purest" (16). Simulation resists this stabilizing influence.

  35. However, the band's reflexive aesthetic effectively disrupts naïve consumption, confronting the listener with music and art that adhere to opacity versus authenticity as a guiding principal. As the novelist Nick Hornby wrote in a New Yorker review deriding Radiohead:

    You have to work at albums like Kid A. You have to sit at home night after night and give yourself over to its paranoid millennial atmosphere as you try to decipher elliptical snatches of lyrics and puzzle out how the titles ('Treefingers,' 'The National Anthem,' and so on) might refer to the songs. ... Kid A demands the patience of the devoted .... (qtd. in Dettmar)

    That a listener would be given pause by a mass-produced art object troubles Hornby, who prefers not to enter Radiohead's maze of possible meaning.

  36. Thus, explicitly evoking the myth of the minotaur with Amnesiac, Radiohead has found an icon more fitting than the test specimens. A limited-edition CD of the album is packaged in a cloth-bound book. Inside we find the following disclaimers: "This book is to be hidden. Labyrinthine structures are entered at the reader's own risk. Nosuch Library and Lending Service cannot be held responsible for Misuse." Radiohead's music and art are, finally, as Hornby acknowledges, a labyrinthine structure that, once entered, baffles with its mesmerizing difficulty.

  37. While Radiohead's music and art together sustain a significant critique of capitalist ideology, the band has no pretension of saving the world single-handedly. Instead, their web site at <http://www.radiohead.com/00.html> recommends links to alternative news and information sites with similarly worthy, if unattainable, goals: to revise the relationship between consumer and commodity. The goal of both Kid A and Amnesiac, however, is far more modest: to revise our relationship to popular music and forms of popular culture more generally, a goal that Radiohead, I argue, achieves.

    38. Department of English
    University of Washington
    jtate@u.washington.edu

    Talk Back

    COPYRIGHT (c) 2002 by Joseph Tate. READERS MAY USE PORTIONS OF THIS WORK IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE FAIR USE PROVISIONS OF U.S. COPYRIGHT LAW. IN ADDITION, SUBSCRIBERS AND MEMBERS OF SUBSCRIBED INSTITUTIONS MAY USE THE ENTIRE WORK FOR ANY INTERNAL NONCOMMERCIAL PURPOSE BUT, OTHER THAN ONE COPY SENT BY EMAIL, PRINT OR FAX TO ONE PERSON AT ANOTHER LOCATION FOR THAT INDIVIDUAL'S PERSONAL USE, DISTRIBUTION OF THIS ARTICLE OUTSIDE OF A SUBSCRIBED INSTITUTION WITHOUT EXPRESS WRITTEN PERMISSION FROM EITHER THE AUTHOR OR THE JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY PRESS IS EXPRESSLY FORBIDDEN.

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    Notes

    1. I follow Fredric Jameson's assertion that, in postmodernism, pastiche eclipses parody. His definition is useful: "Pastiche is, like parody, the imitation of a peculiar or unique style, the wearing of a stylistic mask, speech in a dead language: but it is a neutral practice of such mimicry, without parody's ulterior motive, without the satirical impulse, without laughter, without that still latent feeling that there exists something normal compared with which what is being imitated is rather comic" (Cultural Turn 5).

    2. Kid A, which received a Grammy Award for Best Alternative Album in 2000, was highly anticipated due to the success of OK Computer, the band's 1997 album which was among the top-ten highest selling albums in Great Britain. In 1998, OK Computer received a Grammy Award for Best Alternative Album (Hale 127) and the band was nominated for four MTV awards (133). Comprehensive indexes of the band's album reviews and awards are available in both Jonathan Hale's Radiohead: From a Great Height and Martin Clarke's Radiohead: Hysterical and Useless.

    3. This echoes Jameson's claim that "aesthetic production today has become integrated into commodity production generally" (Postmodernism 4).

    4. Discussants' questions remained superficial throughout the chat. At one point, Greenwood comments, "Apparently 90% of your questions are about hair."

    5. A now-famous anecdote tells of Cage visiting NASA's soundproof room at Harvard University. Expecting absolute silence, he instead heard two sounds: "one high and one low" (8). The first, he was told, was his nervous system, the second his circulatory system. Even silence could not be silent.

    6. One antivideo, "minotauralley," makes an excellent case for Jameson's postmodern sublime. For 46 seconds the viewer watches a cartoon minotaur weeping with inexplicable calm in a deserted, wet alleyway.

    Works Cited

    Baudrillard, Jean. Simulacra and Simulation. Trans. Sheila Faria Glaser. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1994.

    Benjamin, Walter. "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction." Illuminations. Ed. Hannah Arendt. Trans. Harry Zohn. New York: Schocken, 1968. 217-251.

    Berland, Jody. "Sound, Image and Social Space: Music Video and Media Reconstruction." Frith et al. 25-43.

    Bran, Chris. "Re: questions." Email to the author. 15 July 2001.

    Cage, John. Silence: Lectures and Writings by John Cage. Hanover, NH: Wesleyan UP, 1973.

    Clarke, Martin. Radiohead: Hysterical and Useless. London: Plexus, 2000.

    Dettmar, Kevin. "Is Rock 'n' Roll Dead? Only if You Aren't Listening." The Chronicle of Higher Education. 11 May 2001 <http://chronicle.com/free/v47/i35/35b01001.htm>.

    Fricke, David. "Radiohead: Making Music That Matters." Rolling Stone. 2 August 2001. 42-48, 73.

    Frith, Simon, Andrew Goodwin, and Lawrence Grossberg, eds. Sound and Vision: The Music Video Reader. London and New York: Routledge, 1993.

    Greenwood, Jonny. Online chat. 8 August 2001. <http://hollywoodandvine.com/radiohead/rha_primary_frame.html?chat>.

    Grossberg, Lawrence. "The Media Economy of Rock Culture: Cinema, Post-Modernity and Authenticity." Frith et al. 185-209.

    Hale, Jonathan. Radiohead: From a Great Height. Toronto: ECW, 1999.

    Jameson, Fredric. The Cultural Turn: Selected Writings on the Postmodern, 1983-1998. New York: Verso, 1998.

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

    Lyotard, Jean-François. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1984.

    Saneh, Kalefa. "Rock Groups that No Longer Rock." New York Times on the Web. 1 July 2001 <http://www.nytimes.com/2001/07/01/arts/01SANN.html>.

    Sartre, Jean-Paul. Being and Nothingness. 1943. Trans. Hazel E. Barnes. NY: Washington Square, 1992.

    Zizek, Slavoj. The Fragile Absolute, or Why Is the Christian Legacy Worth Fighting For? London: Verso, 2000.

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