Recessional- Or, the Time of the Hammer

by Tom McCarthy

  Audience

  Yes, but buffering is exactly not that. Buffering is recollection in anxiety. The Romantic position is no longer an option, nor is it desired I think. It’s just much too self-conscious for our modern identities.

  T.MC.

  Yes, but with U’s anxious recollecting there’s all his whimsical stuff where he ponders a parachutist’s death he’s read about in the news, and muses on and on about parachutes while he’s meant to be doing productive work, and even pins diagrams of parachutes to his walls; and when his boss, Tapio, calls him out on it and says, “what is all this crap?” he just makes something up, about how the parachute is a perfect structural illustration of the project the company is working on—which actually turns out to be true; it turns out to be a useful insight. And pondering this second fact, U cites the passage from Tristes Tropiques where Lévi-Strauss asks what a con is, and wonders if all of anthropology (and perhaps by extension, literature) is a con. Isn’t knowledge a con? And then there’s the whole question of stealing time and experience from work, from one’s boss, from productivity and the general advancement of capital. Even walking down a corridor to his boss’s office, moving through a blind spot hidden from the rest of the work-floor and clicking his fingers, and relishing that moment as it joins with all the other times he has clicked or will click his fingers as he moves through that same blind spot (like Hans Castorp waiting for his soup), U is entering another buffer zone or recess. I was reading lots of Michel de Certeau when I wrote Satin Island, and he talks a lot about the worker’s small moments of private time grabbed back from the boss. But in a way that buffering is actually quite generative and quite useful. For example, Google says you’ve got to spend 20% of your time just wasting it, because they know that that’s when the good stuff is going to come—which they will own. They force their employees to spend 20% of the time not doing what they’re meant to be doing.

  Audience

  I think the paradox with the buffering is that once you see the epiphany, for example once you see the digitalness of a video stream that all of a sudden becomes much clearer when frozen, and once you recognize that as a moment to cherish or as a productive moment, it stops being that. Once you’ve realized you now have these free twenty minutes in which things happen, then it just becomes work.

  E.B.

  But isn’t this like: you have to ejaculate now; you must enjoy now? How are you going to enjoy?

  Audience

  Yes, I think that’s a good example.

  T.MC.

  The artist Omer Fast made a film about the porn industry. He goes on a pornography film set and just films what happens and it is exactly that: it’s about this regulation and control of pleasure, which of course then isn’t pleasure any more, it’s just chemicals and bodies.

  Audience

  Yes, but I think the interesting thing is that you take the outtakes of a porno shoot, for example, and you turn that into pornography. You have people who are into the bits in between where nothing really happens: when the actors talk to each other or when you have someone like the fluffer girl who is only there so that the guy remains hard. You have people who are making that into the main subject. But that’s the Marxist logic: you can feed everything into the machine and make a product out of it, even the bits that at first could not be used; the waste.

  E.B.

  Warhol has written about that in his From A to B and Back Again where he talks about outtakes. He thinks the outtakes of movies are what things really should be about. I had the feeling that what you’re also picking up on here is what the most serious of pop art is interested in. I was reading it in relationship to a project I’m working on regarding series and seriality, so I was very interested in the way the whole book keeps circling around: these people keep repeating things. They do it again and again and again and each time they do it, difference is brought into the sequence and you have the feeling that with each new repetition, it’s not just that something was added, but, in fact, what was there before changes in retrospect because of the whole question of the repetition. What Warhol is so interested in with his silkscreens, for example, is that you have many images that keep getting repeated and all of them in a sense are the outtakes because none of them are the real image; they are the offcuts. So I think that in itself is an interesting aesthetic that one could think about.

  T.MC.

  U points out that as an anthropologist you’re not interested in unique events, you’re interested in generic events; in seriality and repetition. When U goes to the museum his friend who runs it explains to him that it’s no good getting one fetish or cooking pot; you need a hundred, because then you study the morphology and it’s in that repetition with difference that you can actually make a taxonomy of culture. This is very counterintuitive to a humanist or even a contemporary middlebrow literary credo where you’re meant to be unique and have an absolutely unique remarkable thing. It’s very much like Warhol: the boringness of just repeating the same with a difference is much more interesting.

  Talking of outtakes, there’s a very good contemporary Dutch artist called Aernout Mik. He’s a video artist and his work is all about outtakes. He did a series which is very anxious to watch because he got hundreds of hours of footage of the Yugoslav wars and just took the outtake bits; not the horrible bits, not the bits where people are being shot or bombs are falling, but just the bits in between where nothing is happening. A bomb will have landed an hour ago or will land in another hour. It’s incredibly boring—people are just milling around—but it’s horrific too. He did the same thing when he staged a stock market crash: he showed the interim bit where people are just sitting around on the trading floor and there’s all these chits of paper and the screens are all red and, again, nothing is really happening. These as well are the outtakes.

  Audience

  I just read Remainder a couple of weeks ago in preparation for this seminar and putting my impressions together now I wonder what importance authenticity has. I think in Remainder it’s quite important: he wants this genuine feeling of being in the place. This is not so prominent here, but, at the same time, there is this idea of using things in different contexts and there is still the big Project that is supposed to accomplish something. There are levels of truth, particularly in the part when he complains that some tribes don’t make any sense at all and are too mysterious. There is the right mixture between understanding and not understanding, little pockets of mystery that need to remain in order to keep humankind going. And authenticity seems to be part of all of this, but I can’t really put my finger on it.

  T.MC.

  In Remainder the hero believes in authenticity—he’s a naïve hero. The hero of Satin Island is not naïve; he’s a knowing subject, of course, as he’s read his anthropology—whereas the guy in Remainder hasn’t read his anthropology. But it still comes to the same thing because the guy in Remainder believes in authenticity and believes you can arrive at that moment of authenticity and, of course, he doesn’t arrive at it. But then what happens is the accident: the radical, unplanned departure from the script where his bank heist, which is meant to be a simulation, goes wrong and the real jumps out. But the real is not authenticity anymore; it’s a radical eruption within the inauthentic which is basically just pure violence. I guess here as well, it’s in these interruptions, in these glitches and buffer zones that something else emerges—whether that’s a vision of the whole fabric or what Derrida would call a space of unresolved difference or “différance.” So in that sense they have that in common.

  E.B.

  I’m thinking of two other concepts: one is Duchamp’s idea of that interval, that “infra-mince” where things don’t ever fully come together but they’re very close. And it seems to me that all of your novels are also an attempt to think around what Swiss curator Harald Szeemann, who did a big show here thirty years ago, called “Gesamtkunstwerk”; totalized art work. I think one can say that the whole 19th century moves towards tha
t. One could think of someone like Wagner as an embodiment of that impact. But so much of the modern—call it the 20th century—could begin earlier with Baudelaire already. There’s this desire for a “Gesamtkunstwerk” which brings together the different modes of perceiving the world and of understanding the world.

  T.MC.

  That would be the Great Report that U is meant to be writing throughout Satin Island—which he never actually gets round to writing.

  E.B.

  Yes, that’s my sense. And it seems to me that if one were to compare this with Remainder, you would say you’re getting at it from two different sides. The one guy believes in the authentic and he’s trying to recreate that in these various architectural spaces. And what I’m interested in is the idea of trying to move towards that: constructing that, performing that, even if this inevitably always has to fail—that’s Duchamp’s point. That for me is the gesture of the modern, which, for all I care, begins around 1800, or actually, even with Shakespeare.

  T.MC.

  I completely agree. Regarding the “Gesamtkunstwerk,” Mallarmé writes about “The Book.” He says everything exists in order to be in The Book that is to come. One day “The Book” will come but it won’t even look like a book. I was looking at his notes towards “The Book” and they’re amazing: he’s imagining rituals and hymns and sometimes it seems like Christians in the catacombs of Rome. And at other times it’s a bit like theater, but he hates bourgeois theater so it’s not going to be in a theater. It will be a book, but it also won’t; it will be on and off the page. All the stuff that U is going on about, his musings about multimedia and performance and cult-activity and even revolution in relation to the Great Report, is just straight from Mallarmé. What would this transformative Great Report be and is it possible? At first U says it’s not possible; and then an even worse thought strikes him, which is that it’s already been done—by software. Every time we go on Amazon or Facebook, the networks of kinship are being mapped, our own likes and buyings and linking to others who we know or don’t know but with whom we share liking or buying patterns, are being mapped, written—but we can’t read it; only software can read software. It’s this kind of Kafkaesque moment when he realizes that “The Book”, like the plan for the Great Wall of China, has always–already been written and that we’re already in it.

  E.B.

  For Mallarmé’s Book to come, I would emphasize this notion that works in French: “à venir” which is also the future, “l’avenir.” This is what Derrida does with his idea of the rogue and democracy. For him democracy is something that is always still to come. So if I’m trying to describe why I think there is an epiphany in Satin Island—the way I think there are epiphanies in the best of DeLillo’s novels, while they are completely lacking in authors such as Paul Auster and Eugenides—it’s because of this sense of a movement towards something which you want to reach, but which you also know you can never reach. It’s this idea of something that is achievable, but is not yet achieved and should never be achieved because you want to keep that little bit of movement going. It seems to me that that’s what you’re bringing in here as well.

  T.MC.

  Derrida is huge for me and I love it when in The Post Card he spends his whole time trying to decode this post card he finds where he thinks Plato and Aristotle are having sex together. He thinks it’s the secret of philosophy: Plato is transmitting while pretending to receive, and Aristotle is being ventriloquized by Plato, and it’s all to do with transmission and obfuscation about transmission’s networks. He basically spins the whole of Western philosophy out of this post card—and still then says that he’s barely begun. He says that if only he could crack the post card that would be it; but then he realizes that would be horrific: the day there’s a definitive reading of the post card is the end of philosophy, and democracy, and it’s the end of love as well; it’s the end of the world; it’s fascism. This is why I hate what Quentin Meillassoux has done with Mallarmé in that idiotic book, The Number and the Siren, where he basically says, “I’ve cracked it: if you take the number of words in it and divide it by Mallarmé’s birthday and my social security number you get the true answer, which is Jesus”—it’s appalling. So I agree that this sense of incompletion is incredibly important and the whole of literature depends on the Book not being written.

  Audience

  But again, I think the danger here is of course that you start to fetishize the interval; you start to fetishize the incompletion, the lack. That’s very much what one could criticize in Derrida.

  T.MC.

  Yes, it becomes buffer porn.

  Audience

  Yes, exactly. And that’s why I’m still fascinated by this image that keeps coming up in Satin Island: of pulp, the messy “medium” or between-space that you envision as (for example) the middle of a piece of paper on either side of which are different types of meaningful writing. You would hold on to it and not call it a cut, or an emptiness, or a lack, but pulp; there is something.

  T.MC.

  That’s the remainder; that’s Bataille’s base matter: the thing that’s always there no matter how much you systematize it and think it; it’s still just there, messy and unassimilable.

  Audience

  Talking about these zones of unresolved in-betweenness makes me think of Resnais’ film Nuit et brouillard. The most interesting parts are when you see the surroundings of Auschwitz. It’s made in ’55 and he visits Auschwitz when it’s not yet a museum. So you have these shots of the landscape surrounding Auschwitz and what is so haunting is that you don’t see anything. And that is haunting in the sense that you feel you are responsible for filling in this void. The film does not remember for you; you have to remember because the film cannot capture what happened there; what it captures is really the in-between.

  > E.B.

  I think this is what you, Tom, mean with the pulp.

  Audience

  Yes, something that is not nothing; it’s in fact everything and that’s what is really there. It’s not something you can show to people.

  T.MC.

  U describes the pulp as “the middle, at whose outer edges the others hover like mirages.” So epic art is a mirage at one end and science is a mirage hovering at the other and I guess the pulp would be another real as well. But it’s not an epiphany in and of itself, because then the others would be fake epiphanies.

  E.B.

  It seems to me that you are talking about two reals: one is that moment of violence.

  T.MC.

  That’s Leiris’ moment where the bull’s horn kills the matador or Ballard’s moment where the car crash goes wrong and it’s a real car crash. That’s the violent real.

  E.B.

  Yes, and the other real is that material that is always there and that can’t be brought into the grid but it’s also not outside the grid. How do emotions come into play in all of this?

  T.MC.

  A criticism that some maybe more conservative critics or journalists have leveled about Remainder is that the character is so unfeeling: he doesn’t have any compassion and he’s just killing everyone or making them become automata in his almost Nazi control architecture. But then, when the man the hero doesn’t even know has been shot in the street and the police take their photos, wash the blood away and reopen the street within three hours so that capitalism and life can continue, the hero is the one who goes: no, that’s not enough; somebody has died here and we need to attend to it. And he goes back and back and re-enacts the death-moment—like people in the Philippines who nail themselves to crosses every Easter. Again and again, he places himself in the other’s position, but not in some interpretative way. I hadn’t read Levinas when I wrote that book, but I read him afterwards and thought that that’s exactly what ethics is. That’s another interruption: the interruption that comes back and snags itself again and again on that same glitch moment. So I’d say Remainder is actually a very ethical book—which is almost a perverse claim becaus
e he kills everyone. Levinas talks about ethics as happening at the moment where the bullet penetrates the skin—which is a very counterintuitive kind of language. In Satin Island as well, U becomes obsessed with a parachutist that he’s never met. For him it’s an individual—although it’s not because there’s one in Canada and one in New Zealand and it’s happening everywhere, a series as you say—but there’s also a kind of compassion for humanity there. And when he wants to become this anarcho-revolutionary saboteur, I would say that’s also compassionate. It’s political but I think there’s a real passion in that as well. So I always try to displace the passion from one thing to something else. Even when he’s passionate with Madison, it’s actually about the other thing; it’s about seeing the buffering through her eyes. There’s another bit in The Post Card where Derrida talks about a lover of his who was always very passionate, but who could only have an orgasm if she was thinking about someone else. No matter who she was making love with, she had to think about someone or something else.

  Audience

  That’s very normal. Lacan would claim that that’s exactly how it works: there’s always someone else.

  E.B.

  There’s M always watching Bond and the Bond girl.

  T.MC.

  Yes, don’t get me started on Bond.

  E.B.

  Okay, I won’t start you on Bond because, in fact, we have come to the end of our discussion. What in fact we did here I thought was staged buffering. I thought that for one and a half hours we were putting time on hold. Thank you for sharing this with us.

  Editorial Note

  This book is based on a talk given by Tom McCarthy at the Cafe Voltaire in Zurich on the 8th of December, 2014. The seminar the next day, at the University of Zurich, also included a discussion of Tom McCarthy's newest novel Satin Island. A second reading of this essay along with a further discussion of it took place on the 19th of June, 2015, during a conference on “Imaginations of Disturbance,” organized by Lars Koch and Elisabeth Bronfen at the Technical University, Dresden. All the discussions were transcribed by Georgina Wood.