Writing After the End — 3/4
From the archive: The extreme present, alternative temporalities, and the age of the corporate anthropologist — Tom McCarthy on Satin Island
On feeding Deleuze to jean manufacturers, writing with redundancy, and breaking news in the latest-old video apps, in part three from ‘Writing After the End of Writing’ feature, published in Near East magazine in 2015.
I fall back into the moment. A vibration in my pocket pulls me out of my thoughts. Glancing at the locked screen of my phone a notification pop-up from a new app I’ve recently downloaded. Periscope. Live shareable video streaming. Hans Ulrich Obrist is live. The Age of Earthquakes with Douglas Coupland. The extreme present. Watch. Now. Live. Sleepily I thumb-print myself into the stream.
Coupland is speaking, mid-sentence, answering a question from the sounds of it. I try to figure out what it might have been. He stands against a clean white wall. You can tell he’s standing by the way his weight shifts slightly from left to right, the way he leans a little against the wall, though really you can only see him from the solar plexus up. The Generation X author, original zeitgeist-y spokesman, is being loosely interviewed from off camera.
Behind the screen, presumably from a point equidistant to his own phone filming the scene as to where I am sitting holding mine watching it, comes the voice of Han Ulrich. They’re plugging their new book, The Age of Earthquakes — written with Shumon Basar. They’re talking about now. How the internet and digital technologies have sped up time. Our experience of time has changed. We now live in the extreme present, a moment caught in continual acceleration, ever faster, ever onwards — it sounds like falling upwards on the far side of some informational asymptote. Watching, I get a faint feeling, like a recollection, the afterglow of a vertiginous overload of information. It’s as if they’re grasping at something profound, if not quite ever reaching it. Heraclitus once, famously, said that you can’t enter the same stream twice. I tap out to see what’s happening on Instagram.
Maybe a fortnight later, I’m back on the call, watching T. on another screen, another stream, this one live from his living room. He’s talking about how he’s collaborated with Hans Ulrich a lot and thinks he’s a wonderful cultural presence. The Serpentine Gallery director being a driver of a lot of what’s happening in the cultural landscape. How T. and Coupland did a public dialogue in Toronto a few years back, but they have quite different positions on all this.
“Douglas is always talking about the future as though it were this fixed thing, and I’m suspicious of that,” he counters when asked about the ‘extreme present’. “I’m suspicious of an overall narrative where the future is inevitable, which is usually a narrative that capitalism is an inevitability to which the future belongs. Also, I’m suspicious of this linear idea of acceleration into the future. Hasn’t modernism given us different temporalities? Joyce and Beckett have given us gyres and loops and simultaneity. Benjamin argued for this notion of the angel of history always looking backwards."
With these new temporalities, I ask, should we be trying to develop new languages or new dispositions towards time? If the language that we use and the politics that we have is structured in such a way as to provide us with grand linear narratives, of progress and capitalism even, perhaps we should be trying to find ways to increase our literacy in different ways of living in time?
“Yeah, I think a backward facing politics would be really interesting,” responds McCarthy. “It’s what’s so interesting about punk. Every other political movement is about saying, ‘In the future… a better future…’. Punk just goes, ‘Screw that. No Future.’ Mallarmé was another big influence on Satin Island. He has these weird temporal models where a present doesn’t exist. There’s just this gap with past and future colliding, all strung around an event that he cannot name, that cannot be named. Alain Badiou gets his whole idea of ‘the event’ from Mallarmé, the event as the thing that makes thinking the event impossible, that vandalises its own possibility of being thought. My temporal model would be this out-of-jointness, these multiple slippages and in the middle of that, it would be pregnant with the possibility of an event."
Where did the idea of using the anthropologist as a model for the writer today come from?
“When I started this book U. was going to be a writer who’d written a mildly successful novel and then got picked up by the brilliant Peyman, founder of The Company, this super-zeitgeisty consultancy that has philosophers and urban theorists and filmmakers and mathematicians working for it and instructed to write a kind of literary report on the present moment. [But] I just really didn't want to write a book about a writer trying to write a book because there’s quite a lot of those all written by white men and I just felt that the world does not need another one."
“Then I thought, the anthropologist is an interesting figure because he’s a writer, who looks at the world and who write reports on it. Then I came across the figure of the corporate anthropologist, who’s just brilliant. He’s the perfect figure for our age. This collapse of any exteriority, any sense that you’re looking at things from the outside. You’re right in it, you’re in the heart of the machine, you’re totally compromised; and this was very attractive to me as a position to articulate and to map this whole situation from."
“I’ve done readings where the bit about U. feeding Deleuze back to jeans manufacturers [has] people roaring with laughter. I have to stop and say, ‘guys, this is no satire, this is true, this is totally true.’ This is what corporate anthropologists do.”
You can tell who works for the corporation, they’re the one’s laughing and crying, I offer, somewhat guiltily.
“Exactly. It just seemed so perfect to use a corporate anthropologist, like an anthropologist after the end of anthropology, as a kind of stand-in for the writer after the end of writing."
So if all the great writers, artists, thinkers or visionaries of today are now working for the Company like U., they’re at Google or have their own start-ups, what is the future of what might once have been called the avant-garde?
“I think writing is in an incredibly dynamic mode now, now more so than ever. But, paradoxically, only because it’s facing up to its own kind of death and its own impossibility. Writing for me is always most interesting when it’s in that incredibly threatened and challenged state. The same with painting. Painting only really becomes interesting when it’s made redundant by photography, that’s when you get Gerhard Richter and Andy Warhol. The really, really interesting stuff happens after the seismic traumatic apocalypse. And I think writing’s in that state."
“While I was writing this book, the whole Edward Snowden story was breaking. This is really interesting because it places questions of reading and writing right at the heart of political and of personal experience. Politics has become a question of reading and writing: who gets to read what, of legibility and encryption and illegibility. So writing is definitely a completely central cultural mode for me. At the same time, I think mainstream middle-brow fiction is not really engaging with this situation, or with these possibilities.”
“What’s interesting about more recent media is that they acknowledge and celebrate distraction and interference as central to the whole aesthetic experience. This is what writing should be doing."