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text of my talk is below we were limited to 15 minutes the same amount of time u has in which to give his interesting but ultimately baffling conference presentation in satin island i hope to archipelagise this at some point and to fill out the elisions sylvain_deleu_fig2_t_mccarthy_think_tank sylvain_deleu_fig2_t_mccarthy_think_tank https soundcloud com fig2 think tank as the representative of the literary point of our triangle i m going to offer some readings perhaps reading is the term under which our distinct operations might find common ground these will be in a hybrid mode part literary history part in response to theoretical writing and in the spirit of our engagement i ve gone to anthropological thinkers hopefully anthropological thinkers amenable to literature i hope the nature of the engagement with corporate culture will become apparent i m grateful that tom invited me to fail interestingly in attempting this triangulation although somewhat like u i became anxious that i might be unable to do even that in my desperation i went to marc augé s anthropology of supermodernity which may be familiar to some here there i found two images that resonated particularly powerfully in terms of satin island augé s remark that for an anthropologist the ideal vantage point is the deck of a ship putting to sea which put me in mind of satin island s closing scene and his final sentence a call for an ethnology of solitude so i m going to be alighting not directly upon satin island but upon other islands i realised that material i was looking at in a different context might offer a useful model for thinking our triangle and an ethnology of an earlier form of solitude specifically the life and strange surprizing adventures of robinson crusoe of york mariner who lived eight and twenty years all alone in an un inhabited island on the coast of america near the mouth of the great river of oroonoque having been cast on shore by shipwreck wherein all the men perished but himself with an account how he was at last as strangely deliver d by pyrates how so well robinson crusoe is frequently thought of as a pioneer of the realist novel crusoe himself is often read as an archetypal homo economicus an exemplary liberal capitalist at the birth of liberal capitalism an impression enhanced by the frequency with which his island has been used as a model by political economists certainly crusoe is a capitalist a sailor first but very soon a trader a merchant a plantation owner and a slaver a corporatist he experiences a series of encounters with ethnic others north africans west africans native central americans and in this he is perhaps also an anthropologist avant la lettre so crusoe emerges from the nexus of the flourishing of global trade and the present tense encounter with alien cultures accelerated by improvements in cartography the farther adventures of robinson crusoe published later in 1719 to monopolise on the popularity of the first story included a map of his routes the trade routes of the period essentially but perhaps not so far from the routes taken by levi strauss 250 years later my crash course in cartography identifies that as an azimuthal stereographic projection map by the way stereographic projection maintains angles between meridians but area becomes distorted perhaps we can return to the distortions of maps later a subject i know is of interest to tom crusoe also emerges in the context of an information boom a local english language boom provoked by the repeal of the copyright acts in 1695 crusoe may well be a liberal capitalist but i d like to suggest that he participates in this field as a processor of information as karl marx wrote of him in das kapital having rescued a watch ledger and pen and ink from the wreck he commences like a true born briton to keep a set of books his stock book contains a list of the objects of utility that belong to him of the operations necessary for their production and lastly of the labour time that definite quantities of those objects have on an average cost him we should note well that ledger for the nineteenth century scholar mary poovey double entry book keeping is a significant textual staging post in a new epistemological mode that insists upon abstraction and quantification the purification following bruno latour of nature from society as a book keeper crusoe is a participant in this emergent modern subjectivity master of a nature he reduces to information for michel de certeau another interested reader of crusoe this same epistemological shift is characterised as the establishment of a scriptural economy for de certeau crusoe masters the island nature a blank space and also the blank space of the page in his ledgers and his journal de certeau reads the first sign of the other the footprints on the beach as the rupture of wild untamed orality into crusoe s ordered space this is highly suggestive tables and lists abound information is processed yes but so too is information s other noise established in his essay on several projects published at the beginning of the 18th century defoe made a number of claims that might interest us here he declared the 18th century to be the projecting age and gave the true definition of a project as a vast undertaking too big to be managed he also had something to say on spoken english he favoured a plain style and described words without sense as noise which any brute can make as well as we and birds much better many readers of crusoe have remarked upon his first companion on the island his parrot poll who repeats his name back to him but it s not just poll crusoe catches and tames two further parrots which he also teaches his name he makes corporate the production of noise he sets up his own feedback loop one in which the signifier of his subjectivity is made into in defoe s own words noise indeed once you start reading the novel in informational terms intriguing details begin to present themselves in one fit of paranoia crusoe digs an escape route from his cave that emerges in his own garden he fashions himself a physical spatial loop around which he crawls and then there s my favourite informational table the list of the ways in which 23 cannibals are killed all of whose bodies are buried on the beach and about whom no more is said crusoe and friday make a record of their slaughter and then make the island into a vast tomb i wonder if these curiosities don t express an anxiety in the text about the modern liberal subject s attempt to process information a return of repressed noise insistent within processes of purification versions of the story robinsonades have proliferated it s a particularly noisy text i d like to embark briefly on a curiously overlooked robinsonade as a staging post on the way to satin island j g ballard s concrete island a triangular island no less closed off by the thundering traffic of the westway and into which the architect robert maitland plunges in crashing his jaguar the triangular model is also extended to the structure of his social relations with the two other inhabitants of the island a pre literate tramp called proctor and a prostitute jane sheppard alfie i suspect that maitland is corporate culture in this triangle clementine why not have proctor for anthropology and i ll take jane sheppard for literature i d like to draw attention to a couple of details the three sleep in the crypt of a church that is sealed into this overdetermined space a space teeming with multiple presents a surrealist assemblage of times that reflects the disordered state of maitland s psyche concrete island is consciously modelled on crusoe maitland creates an island estate from the ruins of his jag and sets the model for ballard s late fictions of enclosed communities in which psychopathologies are let run riot of particular interest is the chapter in which maitland pretends to teach proctor to write has him copy out messages requesting help in the hope of attracting the attention of passing motorists under the pretence of teaching him how to write his name he began to scrawl the letters across the concrete with both hands each word he started in the centre moving outwards to left and right again proctor maitland shouted above the roar of a truck climbing the feeder road in his excitement the tramp was garbling the letters together into an indecipherable mass maitland s scriptural machine another human subject produces noise where signal should be indeed maitland wants noise proctor simply gives him the wrong kind what do these examples tell us about literature s relationship to capitalism and to anthropology perhaps the distinction was always bogus another purification that can t be repressed literature offers itself as a site for speculative anthropology it can reach from the here and the now into the there and the then the where and the when it won t bring back facts or real encounters but it can select its objects with freedom and model systems of relations that are yet to come into being corporate culture perhaps already does this on our behalf it surely as was the case with crusoe describes new terrains i want to offer a new form of projection as a possibility for the future relationship of literature anthropology and corporate culture in fact it s a hybrid of two types of projection triangulation as a method for measuring space was superseded by satellite imagery in the 1980s essentially one point of the triangle has been cast into orbit in truth triangulation originated in the stars and so it has returned with force in postcards from google earth the artist clement valla documents anomalies in the satellite imagery produced by google essentially these are artefacts produced by the hybrid of algorithms used by google for marrying the planar photographic imagery generated by its satellites and the complicated topology of the surface of the earth in truth the failing is perceptual we read depth cues in the photographs that the algos don t yet google call this the universal texture these images seem to me fulfil the wilder aims of the cubists to visualise two distinct spatial perspectives in the same plane we might also think these with de certeau as a totalizing representation of space achieved from a godlike perspective i wonder if this form of noise produced through a corporation processing impossible volumes of information doesn t map a new projective landscape into which literature and anthropology might strike into which we might follow de certeau s calls to return to street street level to what new islands might these roads take us and more importantly what kinds of subjects might inhabit them mar 18 2015 leave a comment uncategorized think tank fig 2 12 50 tom mccarthy think tank mar 13 2015 2 comments review satin island the reviews of satin island have started coming out and tom mcc s doing the rounds and characteristically offering us ways to read his new novel seems like the appropriate time to dive in i m not entirely disinterested indeed i m actively interested i ve an essay on tom s work coming out in the collection calling all agents edited by the quietly brilliant dr dennis duncan which will be published later this year and of the writers who ve generously blurbed my novel tom is the only one i ve met i m also involved in an event that tom s curating that i don t think i can announce yet but which will happen before the end of the month that will involve a more para academic response to some of satin island s themes so it s safe to say i m an enthusiast for the work that s a slightly double edged sword it can mean that one awaits a new book with trepidation particularly when the last was a success the reasons i enjoyed satin island should be evident from the below but i want to headline it with a couple of observations first this is an incredibly generative novel by creating an oil spill of the thought that informs his work a spiral a taffy kneeding engine mccarthy creates a nexus of proliferation prompts a super abundance of readings i love this it s surely a characteristic of great work second mccarthy is a public intellectual of the kind that is very rare in this country one who takes continental philosophy and literature very seriously who navigates between the scylla of the middlebrow and the charybdis of pretentious mystical bollocks with a sharp eye on the compass huge power to that a new novel by tom mccarthy is certainly an event round these ends then though not perhaps in the way its author might conceive that term the background the publishing industry that initially ignored his debut remainder now routinely referred to as a cult book or a masterpiece has taken rather more notice since zadie smith claimed it as exemplary of one of the paths the english language novel might follow were it to turn away from sentimental realism the man booker prize short listing of c in 2012 was significant it s not that sentimental realism had been overturned rather that the uk s pre eminent literary prize was willing to recognise a book that wasn t that there s a film of remainder coming out this year directed by the visual artist omer fast for those who enjoy the more conceptual or theoretically led variant of the novel the positive reception of mccarthy s work has been an undeniably good thing to recap on the novels so far remainder the slow burn overnight breakthrough about a man who obsessively reconstructs events from a past made inaccessible to him through a neurological injury and which closes with a set piece responding to a thought experiment sketched by jean baudrillard men in space based on an earlier manuscript returned to after remainder set primarily in prague and amsterdam where mccarthy worked as an art critic in the 1990s and concerning the forgery of a russian icon men in space is frequently overlooked or under rated it might in fact be my favourite c the explicitly modernist period book a kind of thomas mann bildungsroman describing the life of serge carfax in four parts the densely cryptic style of which makes it seem in retrospect more like a tribute to joyce this is already a singular body of work and its interest to scholars of contemporary literature was recognised when it was made the subject of a conference at birkbeck college university of london in 2012 part of the singularity surely derives from mccarthy s background in conceptual art the first time a national newspaper took notice of him he apparently paid for the space there are images of a front page ad in the times for his fictitious avant garde art network the international necronautical society that seems to mimic the publication of marinetti s futurist manifesto in le figaro in 1909 try to find it in the times digital archive and you ll struggle the image is a post hoc mock up the rationale behind pretending to copy the actions of a movement that insisted upon its radical vanguardism can be found in satin island s narrator s accou...
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