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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 account of his interest in parachute deaths an originally un original event becoming even more un original and hence even more fascinating mccarthy has maintained the ins alongside long term collaborator philosopher simon critchley who published his own debut novel memory theatre last year the ins is commissioned for installations and presentations at galleries around the world and the two have on occasion sent actors in their places mccarthy won an inaugural 2013 windham campbell literature prize awarded by yale that appears to be for real a new novel from tom mccarthy is certainly an event it might not send ripples backwards and forwards through the continuum of history in the way that the event as theorised by alain badiou does but it does register with newsnight satin island is narrated by u a corporate anthropologist working for a company that is engaged at the bleeding edge of the contemporary u made his name by going native in the club culture of the 1990s this is a very pleasing detail there were ethnographers who did just that recognising the tribal nature of a culture that rapidly factionalised jungle drum n bass intelligent drum n bass techstep hardstep drill n bass droll n bass and evidenced ritualistic behaviour in its use of holy sacraments and gatherings of mass communion it happened it doesn t seem real in fact it seems like a parody of something that might have happened like so much that is actual today but it did happen it was real it left documents u is attempting to write a report his brief is broad the contemporary he follows his obsessions like the narrator of remainder he researches the deaths of parachutists whose chutes have failed to open the ins researched the deaths of surfers in shark attacks he relates anecdotes from a canonical work of french structural anthropology claude lévi strauss s tristes tropiques he has a girlfriend called madison with whom he has sex a colleague called daniel who projects quasi anthropological films onto the walls of his office and a friend called petr who develops a cancerous growth and dies his boss is called peyman and he occasionally sounds like bruno latour insisting that objects are systems of relations or maybe he sounds like paul rabinow who is name checked in the acknowledgements or any of a number of theorists i haven t read but perhaps you have peyman s name indicates that he fulfils the magical function of making the money appear in this sense this is mccarthy s second novel in the fantastic tradition in which he magics up the narrative cash to enable his protagonists to do what they want vanishing pecuniary concerns like this feels both terribly mundane and entirely radical they d simply get in the way of the business at hand and what is that well it s not characterisation if by that you assume characters who communicate to the reader the rich range of their emotions u doesn t feel a lot in fact he doesn t feel anything he thinks becomes obsessed with topics of thought loses interest in them and thinks some more events don t really connect with him petr s funeral registers only because it seems as if the presiding vicar has no idea who the deceased really was an experience that may well be familiar to readers who ve been to more than one funeral this is typical of a mccarthy protagonist c s serge was the same the things that do register are more difficult to pin down they re abstract but material taffy parachutes growths caoutchouc islands of waste lumps of matter in abstracted form i m tempted to think of these as unforms stuff that represents that which is beyond thought we might want to route direct to the ins s primary research area here these forms profoundly affect u i d stood rooted to the pavement in front of a candy store window in which taffy was being pulled transfixed by the contortions of the huge unmanageable lump what child could eat all that as the machine s arms plied it it s endless metamorphoses in which despite the regular repeating movements that stretched and folded stretched and slapped the taffy through the same shapes over and over again i knew even then that no part of it no molecule would ever occupy the same spot in the overall formation twice stylistically there is more that recognisably ...
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