Recessional- Or, the Time of the Hammer

by Tom McCarthy

  Audience

  How would you connect your discussion of recessional time with the violence that a philosopher like Badiou connects with what he calls the event?

  T.MC.

  I think that in “Action Restrained” Mallarmé does seem to elide and to blur the political and the aesthetic. For him, it doesn’t seem like you can separate them out into different fields; and yet interestingly, while all his friends were running around throwing bombs, he did not. I think “Action Restrained” is almost his apologia for not being a card-carrying anarchist at the time. There is this sense of deferral and imminence and to-come-ness. Everything in Mallarmé is to come and that is what Derrida loves: democracy to come, the book to come—but it is not now. But also when he says “an event I have yet to name”—“j’ai toujours à nommer”—it has the double sense of “I have not yet named the event” or “I am always having to name it, I am always only talking about that”; everything is the event and its imminence. It is very double-edged.

  “Something that is not nothing”

  Zurich seminar

  Elisabeth Bronfen

  Tom, our idea here was that you would give us a little insight into how you find your themes, how you use theory for your texts.

  T.MC.

  I’m not really sure what is and what isn’t theory. I don’t really know where theory stops and fiction begins. If you take someone like, for example, Derrida: half of The Post Card is basically an epistolary novel; it’s fiction, there are characters, there is a character speaking to another character—even while he’s conducting a “theoretical” analysis of Heidegger. I think it’s very hard to pin down that border-line between it being theory/fiction or not theory/fiction. So theory wouldn’t just be a reflection on something else which is somehow more integral; it’s more fluid than that.

  A figure like Lévi-Strauss is just wonderful in this respect: Tristes Tropiques is one of the most brilliant books and it’s much better as literature than almost all of the fiction that was being produced in France at that time—with the possible exception of Robbe-Grillet or Claude Simon. When he describes the sunset for example; it’s amazing. But it’s also an undermining of any “natural” experience of sunset: he’s describing it and theorizing it; the theorizing becomes not just part of the description but of the experience too. Lévi-Strauss clearly wants to be a great writer or to be a poet and doesn’t quite manage. He always feels like he’s doing the wrong thing, but in that very mode of “missing his calling,” he produces almost a whole new field of discourse. There’s that wonderful bit that I have my narrator reproduce almost word for word in Satin Island, where Lévi-Strauss is losing it and going a bit insane in the jungle and he decides to become a great playwright; so he turns his research notes over and starts writing an “epic” play on the flip side. I love the idea of the actual piece of paper: on one side you’ve got supposedly empirical, scientific, evidence-based research—although empiricists would say it’s just speculative theory—and then on the other side you’ve got this attempt at epic art, which fails as well. Then, somewhere in the middle, if you could enlarge that physical piece of paper into three dimensions with a microscope, you would see this mulchy, messy pulp—and I think that would be the space of literature, which is neither one nor the other; it’s this messy, unresolved between. This kind of slippage between not one thing and not quite another, this falling between two chairs or two horses all the time is one thing I was interested in.

  When I started writing this novel, U, the character, was going to be a writer. I hadn’t thought of anthropology, I just thought: he’s a writer working for a contemporary consultancy, as Head of Semiotics or some such (this role really exists). Then I thought: do I really want to write a novel about a writer? It’s been done a million times. Then I stumbled across the anthropologist as a much more interesting figure than a writer; but who is also to a large extent a stand-in for the figure of the writer. And I think it’s significant that my hero is so compromised politically (feeding left-wing theory back into the corporate machine) because I just don’t buy the myth of creative autonomy: this idea that the artist operates in some elevated space “outside,” unbesmirched by society and politics and commerce and all the rest. Of course, we don’t; you’re inside the grid, you’re operating in a relationship with power, always. So I think that’s an aspect of what U, my hero, does in this book. Basically, theory, fiction and capital form the triangle around which this whole book is slipping between messily the whole time.

  Audience

  Could we relate recessionality to the idea of buffering that is so central to Satin Island—especially buffering the relation to narration? There’s this idea developed by Peyman if we go into the text at chapter 7.7 and read: “We require experience to stay ahead, if only by a nose, of our consciousness of experience—if for no other reason than that the latter needs to make sense of the former, to (as Peyman would say) narrate it both to others and ourselves, and, for this purpose, has to be fed with a constant, unsorted supply of fresh sensations and events,” which he bases of course on the idea of the YouTube lines. It comes up again on page 127: there’s the scene where Petr is dying in hospital and he’s talking about narrating events, and the impossibility of narrating the most important event—your own death—when you die. It seems to me that U is cut short at that point: he was trying to utter that it’s a buffering problem, but he just gets buffered himself. I was wondering if this would really be a problem of buffering, or if it’s rather a problem of the end of narration. The book narrates and then it ends: there’s the last word, the last line, the last dot and it ends and then, there’s a new idea of buffering which seemed to be in the middle of narration.

  T.MC

  What Petr is describing isn’t exactly a buffering problem, it’s a more Blanchotian thing about how to narrate the instant of your death. It’s what he says in L’Arrêt de mort: these things only get interesting when I stop. The really meaningful stuff will communicate itself when I stop writing about it, but of course, at that point, who can read it? I think that’s the problem Petr is describing there. But then he’s thinking back to when he was in Berlin and the wall fell and even as he watched the wall fall he was thinking: “I’m going to tell everyone about the wall falling and how incredible it was.” This happens in Don Quixote: the first time he rides out on one of his re-enactments as the noble knight Don Quixote, he basically plays himself a soundtrack in his head. He says: “When the book comes to be written of this moment, it’s going to begin like this …”—and he starts writing it in his head. So in order to experience the presence of his present moment he has to detour it, wire it via its imaginary future mediation. And then it’s a very strange temporality and he does this in order to be authentic, but he’s radically inauthentic at that point. I was thinking about that a lot when I wrote Remainder.

  But coming back to buffering, I tried to use that word and echo it in other parts in the book: when U meets the woman in the bar she’s got a “buffer zone” of objects (cigarette lighter, drink, metro ticket etc) around herself; and when the Charon-like ferry arrives at the end, there are buffers to stop it smashing the peer and the dead parachutist is being “buffeted” by wind. It’s not like there’s one coherent thought behind it, so I can’t really answer the question. I was just trying to kind of constellate some thoughts around the variations on this term, buffering.

  Audience

  However, you gave us a very interesting image, the image of Lévi-Strauss of the two sides of the paper, and then you said to imagine enlarging the middle. This idea of theory on one side and the literary text on the other side, or, one could also think of the sujet barré in Lacan—the barred subject. But normally when one talks about the bar, one just calls it a cut or trauma; an emptiness. What I found interesting in what you presented us in this image is that there is something. You called it “pulp,” which is of course also a highly charged word in relation to literature: pulp fiction. Therefore, tha
t’s what I’m interested in: it’s not just negativity; it’s not just that there’s nothing there, but there is something.

  T.MC.

  Yes, it’s a material negative. And this is what the Satin Island is in the protagonist’s dream. The same as when in Remainder the hero is trying to have his ideal moment of the liver lady frying liver and wants to smell it—what this actually creates is a massive mountain of congealed liver fat around the ventilator shafts. That would be another kind of Satin Island. This goes back to the material–immaterial thing: I think there is no immaterial; everything is material. Even digital culture is totally material. There are big black boxes in Nevada, Uzbekistan and Finland; there are wires. In C as well, radio is a material phenomenon; it’s about pulses and atmospheric materiality moving through the air. Just because you can’t see it, it doesn’t mean it’s not material. And writing would be a material practice—which is why U is so obsessed with the spilled oil. Particularly that moment when the black oil hits the white snow is a beautiful moment for him because this is writing. This is the moment of writing; it’s ink polluting paper, or words marring the whiteness of a page. So it’s another messy, fluid, material process.

  Audience

  When it comes to buffering in video images, we would normally think that it’s just a disruption, it’s just an interruption of the video stream, but it happens that when you have a frozen frame, you see something that you cannot normally see. All of a sudden you have a facial expression that you thought never existed.

  T.MC.

  Yes, it’s fascinating. When the World Cup was on, I spent half the time just taking iPhone snapshots of the moment when the image froze. If you’re watching it on a laptop it keeps freezing and pixelating in sometimes absolutely beautiful ways—bits of grass and player and sponsors’ ads and overlaid broadcaster’s text, all these blocks of color and movement collaging in every which arrangement—it becomes this really avant-garde piece of visual art. The interruption is a wonderful moment and it’s not nothing, it’s something much more interesting than the other thing.

  E.B.

  Would you say we’re still in the modern period?

  T.MC.

  I don’t know. You go back and read the Oresteia and it begins with an account of a signal network linking all of space together. At the beginning of Agamemnon you see this signal and then Clytemnestra comes out and says that Troy has fallen. She spends about two lines saying that and then another seventy lines or more describing every beacon between Troy and Argos. She’s a nerd: she’s describing a data network. And all this heroic stuff that follows, about vengeance and justice, is preconditioned on the fact of being in a communication grid. Is that modern then? That seems incredibly modern to me. Hamlet is also all about data surveillance and scanning private correspondence. I have a real problem saying this is modern and this is pre-modern. Also, I think the term “postmodern” is a real red herring. In his book The Postmodern Condition Lyotard says postmodernism isn’t what comes after modernism, but it’s an attitude of incredulity towards grand narratives. It’s the interruption within the modern; the tendency to crack and split. So that’s not really a temporal thing, even though clearly things are a bit different in different times.

  E.B.

  Probably it’s the way one approaches texts rather than what they do. But I say this because I think there is a great epiphany in your novel. It’s the same as in a Joyce novel or a Woolf novel: you can’t grasp it, but it’s just that something has actually happened. Something has changed, and he turns back to the sea. So, in fact, I see this very much in continuation with the people that you are invoking. I would agree that postmodernism is a red herring and even regarding what Lyotard says about the interruption within the modern: the modern always had that interruption within it to begin with. In fact, the early modern already has that interruption within it so that on some aesthetic, epistemological level, although there are historical differences, there is a clear continuum. Although, of course, how do we know? We’re reading Shakespeare now through our eyes, so who knows how they would have read him in the 19th century. That’s what I’m saying: part of it is definitely on the reception end. Nevertheless, I am taken with what I would call a quiet epiphany in your book, an unmarked epiphany, not an ecstatic, emphatic epiphany.

  T.MC.

  U thinks he has an epiphany about the parachutist—that he’s “solved” the enigma of why parachutists are dying in series or parallel or whatever, by deciding it’s a secret Russian Roulette cult, dispersed around the globe, whose members agree to randomly sabotage chutes, perhaps their own, to get an extra adrenaline rush—but the epiphany turns out to be totally bogus.

  E.B.

  Yes, that is bogus but then at the end of the book I would just say that something has actually become clear; it’s only that it didn’t matter whether he went to Staten Island to receive the epiphany that may or may not have been awaiting him there. That decision is both meaningless and in that sense also meaningful.

  T.MC.

  Yes, talking of the end, I more or less lifted that straight from Balzac’s Le Père Goriot. The hero, Rastignac, goes through Paris and learns how dreadfully corrupt it is and at the end of the book (if I recall correctly—it’s ages since I read it) he’s standing on this hill above Paris and he looks one way out to the rest of the world and he realizes: I could just leave this shithole and turn my back on it and go out and discover new worlds. Then he turns back to Paris and he looks down on it and says “À nous deux”—“me and you”—and he walks back down the hill and goes back into the city. And I wanted that ending too. I think it’s really important that U goes back into the heart of the machine with all his unresolved, restless anger. Staten, or Satin, Island would just be another city; it would be beyond, it would be leaving it all and walking out. It might even be death. But he goes back into the city and he continues to be this Kafka-like bug at the heart of the machine, the glitch. Even the machine operator is a piece of virus in a way.

  E.B.

  But I would say that that’s a much more honest way of approaching the whole problem that you talked about at the very beginning—which is that we can’t get outside the system. This is the Derridean idea that there is no “hors-texte.” But there is actually something that somehow or other impinges on a text and there are moments when we recognize that. I think this is your point with the frozen pixelated image: there’s a moment when the glitch becomes clear. In The Matrix it’s that moment when the cat comes twice and you realize that this is the Matrix. It’s not either you’re in or your out of the system; we’re always in the system, but that doesn’t mean that we have no intimation or perhaps even perception of that which could be outside or beyond. I’m also thinking of Blanchot when he talks about “autre nuit,” for example, as that which is beyond representation, but which can only really be thought of within the grid of representation. Great literature for Blanchot seeks to move beyond that; move outside, “hors.” For him that whole idea of the “hors” is very important. This is what all of the work of literature is for: it’s for the day; it’s not for that other night, because we can’t, in fact, fall out of the coordinates of the day. I could probably name hundreds of films that end with this idea of turning back, of going back into the machine. I looked at so many films where people move through the night, and at the end of the night, they turn back. They go back into the machine; they go back into the city. I was also thinking about Céline’s Voyage au bout de la nuit, even though it has that emphatic epiphany: at the end of it all he sits on the bank of the river and says “I just want this all to be over,” which, of course, it won’t. Whereas here, U has seen something and he turns back. I think there’s an honesty to that because, thinking about events, we grasp these events after they’ve happened as something that has happened, but not while they’re happening. And that too means that everything is always part of the system. That’s how I understand this buffer: we’re just caught in that little ball and we ke
ep spinning and spinning.

  Audience

  I’ll ask one more thing about the buffering. In Satin Island there’s a scene where U and his museum-curator friend are driving fast across a bridge in Frankfurt; and they see a crane turning; and the box suspended from its arm is moving down the arm—so everything is moving fast, but due to the relative speed and position of everything, it all seems still. Would you say that’s a kind of buffering as well? The illusion of stillness only occurs because three movements in space are coordinated in such a way that only from this vantage point would that effect arise. So buffering as a conception of stillness when there isn’t any: data packets are actually being exchanged and things are happening. Do you ascribe any productivity to the buffering itself? You talked about negativity a lot, but it seems to me that there is also productivity in the negativity. Would you say that’s true?

  T.MC.

  Yes, it’s a generative space. It’s like in photography where it’s the negative that produces the photo. It’s almost the first image in Satin Island as well: a photographic image looming into view from noxious, poisonous, polluted chemicals in a dark room. And regarding the stillness, Eliot also talks about the still point of the turning world and this whole Romantic idea of tranquillity and emotion recollected in tranquillity.