Satin Island

by Tom McCarthy

  5.

  5.1 On the Company. No: on companies; on companies and crowds; whatever. In the fifties and sixties, people like me started conducting studies of corporations, presenting their findings back to the academy, for consecration as pure, unconditional knowledge. But, sometime in the seventies or eighties, all that changed: now anthropologists found themselves working for the corporation, not on it. So it was with me. It was the Company itself within whose remit I was operating. To whom did I report? The Company. Nonetheless, it was hard not to analyze the Company’s own make-up along anthropological lines. In fact, it was impossible. Forget family, or ethnic and religious groupings: corporations have supplanted all these as the primary structure of the modern tribe. My use of the word tribe here isn’t fanciful; it’s modern that’s the dubious term. The logic underlying the corporation is completely primitive. The corporation has its gods, its fetishes, its high priests and its outcasts (Madison was right about that part—just wrong in thinking this makes it exotic). It has its rituals, beliefs and superstitions, its pools of homespun expertise and craft and, conversely, its Unknowns or Unspokens. Peyman understood this. When he first hired me he told me that the Company needed an anthropologist because its entire field of operations lay in analyzing groups, picking apart their operations and reporting back on this, while at the same time both appreciating and refining its own status as a group, de facto subject to the same ongoing (and productive) scrutiny. At base, it’s all already anthropology, he said.

  5.2 Peyman said lots of things. That’s what he did: put ideas out, put them in circulation. He did this via publications, websites, talks at conferences; via the quasi-governmental think tanks he was constantly invited to head up, or the interviews he’d give in the trade press. His ideas took the form of aphorisms: Location is irrelevant: what matters is not where something is, but rather where it leads … What are objects? Bundles of relations … Each of these nuggets was instantly memorable, eminently quotable. On urbanism: A city has no “character”; it is a schizoid headspace, filled with the cacophony of contradiction. On design: The end point to which it strives is a state in which the world is one hundred percent synthetic, made by man, for man, according to his desires … These aphorisms were his currency; he traded in them, converting them, via the Company, into tangible undertakings that had measurable outcomes, which in turn helped spawn more concepts and more aphorisms, always at a profit. The concepts were all generated in-house and collectively: that’s how his outfit worked. We’d come at briefs, and at the big ones in particular, from several angles, bringing all our intellectual disciplines to bear on them—the Company had people who’d trained as economists, philosophers, mathematicians, architects and who knows what else on its books—and, slapping the pertinent offerings of each of these down on the collective table (or up on the collective sheet of glass), formulate new concepts that Peyman, as the Company’s public face and poster-boy, would then launch into circulation. Seeing these in print, observing them being cited, appropriated, sampled, cross-bred, both by others and by Peyman himself, was like encountering an amalgam of our own minds, our own thoughts, returning to us on a feedback loop. Without Peyman, though, without the general—and generative—mechanism he had set in place and over which he constantly presided, we would never have come up with these thoughts in the first place: they were quite beyond us.

  5.3 Thus Peyman, for us, was everything and nothing. Everything because he connected us, both individually and severally, our scattered, half-formed notions and intuitions, fields of research which would otherwise have lain fallow, found no bite and purchase on the present moment—he connected all these to a world of action and event, a world in which stuff might actually happen; connected us, that is, to our own age. And not just us: it worked the same way for the Company’s clients. That’s what they were buying into: connection and connectedness—to ideas, expertise, the universe of consequence, the age. It sometimes seemed as though the very concept of “the age” wouldn’t have been fully thinkable without Peyman; seemed that he invented, re-invented it with every passing utterance, or simply (with the overlay of continents and times and cultures stored up in his very genes, his mixed Persian, South American and European ancestry) by existing. He connected the age to itself, and, in so doing, called it into being. And, at the same time, he was nothing. Why? Because, in playing this role, he underwent a kind of reverse camouflage (some anthropologists do speak of such a thing). The concepts he helped generate and put in circulation were so perfectly tailored to the age on whose high seas they floated, their contours so perfectly aligned with those of the reality from which they were drawn and onto which they constantly remapped themselves, that you’d find yourself coming across some new phenomenon, some trend—in architecture or town planning or brand strategy or social policy, in Europe, the States, India, it didn’t matter what or where—and saying: Oh, Peyman came up with a term for this; or: That’s a Peyman thing. You’d find yourself saying this several times a week—that is, seeing tendencies Peyman had named or invented, Peymanic paradigms and inclinations, movements and precipitations, everywhere, till he appeared in everything; which is the same as disappearing.

  5.4 He disappeared in a quite literal sense for us, his Company underlings. I mean that he was hardly ever actually, in an in-the-flesh way, there: on almost any given day he’d be off in Oslo, or São Paulo, or Mumbai, meeting with high-powered clients, advising presidents and mayors, or just generally helping draw up blueprints for the future of the world. Sometimes I almost doubted his existence. Not literally, of course: I knew that the dusty-skinned man bearing Peyman’s name was Peyman. But I wondered sometimes whether, like in that Hitchcock movie North by Northwest, whose lead character finds himself inhabiting a role that’s been established elsewhere and already, Peyman didn’t function as some kind of construct, a convenient front. For whom? I don’t know. What Machiavellian cabal, what shady interest group, what nefarious—if inspired—alliance of the influential and manipulative, with what tools and channels at their beck and call, could maintain this type of illusion? In reality, no such cabal was needed. Gods, for many tribes, are self-sustaining, and perpetuate their operation without ranks of priests pulling the witch-hut’s levers and ventriloquising for the carved idols. Like a god, Peyman withdrew, secluded himself from us, took up spectral residence within some sacred recess full of ministers and moguls over whom he held sway, not the other way around. I’d imagine him consorting with them all, surrounded by them like a sultan by his harem. But, of course, for them as well, he was secluded; from them, too, withdrawn. He, after all, would drop into their offices and ministries, then jet back out again. They probably envisioned him consorting with us back in his (to their minds) mystical headquarters—and (who knows?) maybe also wondered, in their more reflective moments, whether he wasn’t some kind of collective fantasy, a self-sustaining deity whose nature they didn’t really understand but in whom they still had to believe, because, well, if not him, then … what? I took some solace in the thought of them picturing us—me—haremed up with him, bathed in his connective radiance constantly, day after day. Although, of course, I wasn’t: I was sat down in a basement, listening to ventilation.

  5.5 The Company’s logo was a giant, crumbling tower. It was Babel, of course, the old biblical parable. It embodied one of Peyman’s signature concepts. Babel’s tower, he’d say, is usually taken to be a symbol of man’s hubris. But the myth, he’d carry on, has been misunderstood. What actually matters isn’t the attempt to reach the heavens, or to speak God’s language. No: what matters is what’s left when that attempt has failed. This ruinous edifice (he’d say), which serves as a glaring reminder that its would-be occupants are scattered about the earth, spread horizontally rather than vertically, babbling away in all these different tongues—this tower becomes of interest only once it has flunked its allotted task. Its ruination is the precondition for all subsequent exchange, all cultural activity. And, on top of that, despite
its own demise, the tower remains: you see it there in all the paintings—ruined, but still rising with its arches and its buttresses, its jagged turrets and its rusty scaffolding. What’s valuable about it is its uselessness. Its uselessness sets it to work: as symbol, cipher, spur to the imagination, to productiveness. The first move for any strategy of cultural production, he’d say, must be to liberate things—objects, situations, systems—into uselessness. I read this for the first time, long before I worked for him, in Creative Review; then later, with slight variations, in Design Monthly, Contemporary Business Journal and Icon.

  5.6 Another concept that he put about a lot, that was much quoted: narrative. If I had, he’d say, to sum up, in a word, what we (the Company, that is) essentially do, I’d choose not consultancy or design or urban planning, but fiction. Fiction? asks the interviewer (this one comes from Consulting Today—but he says the same thing in his Urban Futures profile; and in the RIBA transcripts). Fiction, Peyman repeats. The city and the state are fictional conditions; a business is a fictional entity. Even if it’s real, it’s still a construct. Lots of the Company’s projects have been fictions that became real. For example? asks the interviewer. For example, Peyman answers, the EU commissioned us to imagine what a concrete affirmation of a European commonality might look like—purely speculatively, you understand. So we designed a flag. It didn’t really look much like a flag—more like a rainbow bar-code formed of strips of all the colours of the member-nations’ flags. Once we’d come up with it, we Photoshopped it into a bunch of pictures: of the EC President giving a speech; finance ministers from member-states sitting round a table; even entrances to governmental buildings in a range of European capitals. We’d find a suggestive photo, then adapt it. The images caused a furore. No one stopped to ask if they were real. The conservative press denounced these bar-code ensigns, called them illegitimate; progressives, though, adopted them, so real ones started springing up. Thus the facts, in this case, followed from the fiction. Fiction was what engendered them and held them in formation. We should view all propositions and all projects this way.

  5.7 His most famous riff, perhaps, was about knowledge. Not knowledge of anything in particular; just knowledge in and of itself. Who was the last person, he would ask, to enjoy a full command of the intellectual activity of their day? The last individual, I mean? It was, he’d answer, Leibniz. He was on top of it all: physics and chemistry, geology, philosophy, maths, engineering, medicine, theology, aesthetics. Politics too. I mean, the guy was on it. Like some universal joint in the giant Rubik’s Cube of culture, he could bring it all together, make the arts and sciences dance to the same tune. He died three hundred years ago. Since Leibniz’s time (Peyman would go on), the disciplines have separated out again. They’re now on totally different pages: each in its own stall, shut off from all the others. Our own era, perhaps more than any other, seems to call out for a single intellect, a universal joint to bring them all together once again—seems to demand, in other words, a Leibniz. Yet there will be no Leibniz 2.0. What there will be is an endless set of migrations: knowledge-parcels travelling from one field to another, and mutating in the process. No one individual will conduct this operation; it will be performed collectively, with input from practitioners of a range of crafts, possessors of a range of expertise. Migration, mutation, and what I (Peyman affirmed) call “supercession”: the ability of each and every practice to surpass itself, break its own boundaries, even to the point of sacrificing its own terms and tenets in the breaching; and, in the no-man’s-land between its territory and the next, the blank stretches of the map, those interstitial zones where light, bending and kinking round impossible topographies, produces mirages, fata morganas, apparitions, spectres, to combine in new, fantastic and explosive ways. That, he’d say, is the future of knowledge.

  5.8 When I went up to meet him on the fifth floor—whenever I went there, I mean—the thing that would impress itself upon me most, the thing I’d most remember afterwards, wasn’t the meeting itself, but rather its peripherals: the angle of approach towards his office; the tap my heels made on the wooden boards; the reflections in the glass partition separating his room from the rest of the floor—reflections of reflections, since the whole floor had (as I mentioned earlier) these glass screens that ghost-doubled one another. The few feet just before this last partition lay within a blind spot whose occupant, or traverser, would be hidden from the rest of the floor’s view—invisible, in other words, to the many people who worked in all the other glass-partitioned spaces. Each time I entered and moved through this stretch, I’d hold my right hand up beside my head and click its fingers—three times, click-click-click. I don’t know why I did it; it was a kind of tic, made all the more enjoyable by the knowledge that only I would ever experience or even know about it; in the midst of all the overload and noise, a small, private act, and a small, private enclave for the act’s appreciation. I did it every time I came to visit Peyman—and, each time I did, the couple of seconds it took me to do it merged with the couple of seconds it had taken me to do it last time, and the time before, and every time since I’d first done it, not to mention all the times that I would do it in the future; so I found myself transported, for those—for all those—seconds, into a kind of timelessness in which only this act and its unfolding, this now-eternal click-click-clicking of my right hand’s fingers, did or could exist.

  5.9 That Friday, when I went up to see him, he greeted me, without removing his gaze from the hand-held into which he was typing a message, with a question. As I stepped out of the blind spot back into time and his office, he asked: Have you ever been to Seattle, U.? Behind him, through the floor-to-ceiling windows, cranes, clouds, bridges, aeroplanes, the Thames all jostled for position. No, I answered. It’s interesting, he said. Oh yes? I asked. How so? Well, he replied, the truly striking thing about the city is its lack of Starbucks outlets: driving around, you don’t see a single one. That’s strange, I said; I thought Seattle was where Starbucks came from. Exactly, he said; you’d think the town would turn out to just be one giant Starbucks. But instead it’s all Joe’s Cappuccino Bar, Espresso Luigi, Pacific Coffee Shack and the like. So what’s the story there? I asked. What’s the story indeed? he repeated. This is exactly what I asked my driver; and do you know what he told me? Peyman looked up from his device. I shook my head. He told me, Peyman said, his gaze now drifting over to his monitor, that these were Starbucks: stealth ones. Starbucks’ management, their strategists, understand that no one actually wants to buy coffee from Starbucks; they do it for convenience, heads hung low with shame. People crave authenticity, locality and (here his speech slowed down a little, since he’d started typing again)… origin—everything that Starbucks, as a global chain, represents the polar opposite of. So the strategists (he went on) create these “local” figures—Joe, Luigi and the like—and launch a handful of outlets for each, not too near to one another, and see how they fare: real-world R&D. If one takes off, they’ll roll it out nationwide, and across Europe, Asia and the rest—and everyone will flock to it, because it isn’t Starbucks. Isn’t that brilliant? he asked. Yes, I replied; I guess it is.

  5.10 He proceeded to brief me on the Project; the Company’s role in this; my own within that. There’d be a meeting with the Minister in a few weeks’ time; he wanted me to come; he wanted me to go to Paris; he wanted me to continue following my own lines (or sidelines) of intuitive enquiry, and report back intermittently on these, as always; there was other stuff. I’m being quite vague, in part because I’m obliged to be; but in part because he was quite vague as well. He’d always been that way: his currency also comprised, as its reserve, a kind of systematic vagueness. Some spaces of ignorance do not need to be filled in—that was another of his aphorisms. His whole knack, the USP on which he’d built his business, was for managing uncertainties, for somehow joining isolated dots into a constellation-pattern people could just—just—recognize, and be seduced by. As I listened to him talk about Koob-Sassen,
it all made sense, even if it didn’t. Even the fact that it didn’t quite make sense made sense, while he was talking.

  5.11 Later that evening, I saw Madison again. Again we had sex. Afterwards, lying in bed, I found my mind drifting, once more, among images of oil. I moved through dark and ponderous swells, black-cresting waves and fleck-spattered shingles, before settling among pools in which oil, spent and inert, lay draped over rocks and animals alike. When it covered whole rocks and whole animals, it looked like PVC, like fetish gear. The rescue and clean-up teams’ protective suits looked both perverse and prophylactic at the same time. Offshore, where the waves were breaking, I could see a sluttish Aphrodite frolicking in blackened foam, her face adorned with the look that readers’ wives and models have in dirty magazines.