by Tom McCarthy
6.14 Madison phoned me while I was still on the train. When are you back? she asked. Tonight, I said. I want you here right now, she told me. Come straight to mine when you get in. I did. Lying in bed later, after we’d had sex, instead of picturing oil as I fell asleep like I had last time, my mind drifted through black streets. They were the streets of Paris—not so much the real Paris I’d just visited as an imaginary Paris formed in my head through the repetition of the fifty or so feet of it that had made up the background of Daniel’s roller-blading film. These streets, as I said, were black, all stripped of cobblestones and covered in a smooth, continuous tarmac coat. This coat was unrolling as I glided forward: unrolling more and more, decking the boulevards and avenues and alleyways in soft, black oblivion. Occasionally, as I passed such-and-such a spot, I’d be made half-aware that some historical event, some revolutionary episode, had taken place just there—but even as the knowledge flashed up it was extinguished, buried beneath the tarmac. This happened over and over again: whatever acts of insurrection, of defiance, or their markers and memorials, sprung up in an attempt to catch and trip the passing gaze, these were all smoothed out, muffled, drowned. The tarmac ran on endlessly, running each street into the next as I advanced along them, heading nowhere in particular, just gliding, on and on; on either side, at the periphery of my vision, coffee-chain concessions ran together, like the tarmac, in a smooth, unbroken blur. There was nothing dramatic about this; it wasn’t a disaster. No one was complaining, or even surprised: it was just the way it was. That’s just the way it is, a voice inside my head, perhaps my own, said. I might even have said it out aloud. Madison kind of grunted in her half-sleep. Then we were both gone.
7.
7.1 The Koob-Sassen Project. I won’t, as I’ve already stated, talk of this—and yet, during this period, everyone did, all the time. They discussed it not as people discuss things they know about, subjects whose properties and parameters are given, but rather as they try to ascertain those of a foreign object, one that is at once both present—omnipresent—and elusive: groping after its dimensions; trying, through mutual enquiry, to discern its composition, charge and limit. When, in the course of my professional activities, I asked people to provide a visual image that, for them, most represented it, I got answers varying from hovering spaceship to rabbit warren to pond lilies. I had my own, of course: I saw towers rising in the desert—splendid, ornate constructions, part modern skyscraper, part sultan’s palace lifted from Arabian Nights: steel and glass columns segueing into vaulted cupolas and stilted arches, tiled muqarnas, dwindling minarets that seemed, at their cloud-laced peaks, to shed their own materiality, turn into vapour. Below them, hordes of people—thousands, tens of thousands—laboured, moving around like ants, their circuits forming patterns on the sand; patterns that, in their amalgam, coalesced into one larger, more coherent pattern, just as the meandering, bowing, divagating stretches of a river delta do when seen from high enough above. What were they doing, all these ant-like labourers? Why, they were bringing in materials, or carrying out excavated soil, or delivering instructions they themselves, perhaps, did not quite understand, nor even, fully, did the person to whom they were relaying them, so complex was the logic governing the Project as a whole—instructions, though, whose serial execution, even if full comprehension was beyond the scope of any single point in the command-chain, had the effect of moving the whole intricate scheme towards its glorious realization, at which point all would become clear, to everyone, and ants would see as gods.
7.2 I had this vision often; as the weeks and months progressed, the edifice within it neared completion, its plan and outline growing more apparent. There were still unfinished bits, though: gaping lacunae where the carapace gave way to reveal guttery of half-laid floors, bare wiring, strata opening onto sub- and super-strata, down and up and every which way. The distances, the heights and depths and spaces in between, were huge—it was an entire metropolis, a Tower (and here, of course, the Company’s own logo wormed its way into the picture) of Babel. Peyman would always be there, in these visions: he’d be standing on the plain, perched on a balcony, or leaning against a half-completed buttress, consorting with engineers and princes, architects and sheiks and viziers, tweaking some finer point of the overall plan, or going over the logistics for the next phase, or some such activity—there in the thick of it, connected; and I, through my association with him, felt connected too. Even if this isn’t what the Project actually involved, this is how it presented itself to me, as I sat down in my basement, rode the tube, or drifted off to sleep.
7.3 The meeting with the Minister took place. It’s odd to spend time in the company of somebody with power—I mean real, executive power: to hang out with a powerful person. You would imagine they exude this power at every turn, with each one of their gestures; that their very bodies sweat the stuff, wafting its odour at you through expensive clothes. But in fact, the thing most noticeable about this Minister was her lack of powerful aura. She seemed very normal. She wasn’t physically striking in any way: neither particularly tall nor particularly short; neither fat nor thin; neither attractive nor ugly. Her accent bore no traces of excessive privilege, nor of its masking. She must have been about my age, early forties. She was wearing sober, business-like clothes, with the exception of her shoes, which had small faux-fur tiger-skin stripes on them. We were sitting around a table: Peyman, Tapio, myself, this Minister and two of her staff. The way we were positioned allowed me to see these shoes, and what she was doing with them. As first one, then another person presented, responded, queried, clarified, proposed, counter-proposed and so forth, she rubbed one of her feet against the other, so that her right shoe’s toe, its outer edge, moved up and down against the side-arch of its neighbour. She performed this activity non-stop throughout the meeting, even when she herself was talking. I thought at first that she was scratching herself, that she had a bite or irritation on her left foot that was itching. Twenty or so minutes into the meeting, though, I had to abandon this hypothesis: while even low-level scratching has a kind of franticness about it, an angry, stop-start rhythm, her movement was so regular and methodical that it seemed almost automatic. With each upwards motion of the toe against the arch, the tiger-skin, its fur, would be drawn upwards, ruffled until its hairs all separated, each one bristling to attention; with each downward or return stroke these hairs would all lie back flat again, losing their individuality amidst the smooth, sleek flow of feline stripes.
7.4 After the best part of an hour, I realized what this Minister was up to: she was attempting, with her right foot, to undo her left shoe’s buckle (which, unusually, fastened on the inward- rather than the outward-facing side). This, I realized as I watched her, was a quite ambitious undertaking. Buckles are finicky; once you remove hands from the equation, mastery of them becomes well-nigh impossible. Yet this is what her right foot, with a persistence and determination that I found increasingly admirable, was trying to do. The buckle had some give in it; the strap had been made pliant by (I presumed) repeated previous attempts to carry out this operation. At the same time, the strap still possessed enough stiffness to ensure that a push applied to its free end caused a whole stretch to be forced up towards—and ultimately through—the metal frame, rather than just crumpling. This didn’t, as I mentioned, happen all at once: it took an hour of tiny upward nudges, and of tiny corresponding downward smoothings of the shoe’s surrounding surface, for the strap to travel all the way up through the frame’s lower side; then, continuing its upward movement even though there was no further up for it to go, it snaked back over on itself in such a way that up turned into down with no perceptible change of direction—and, in performing this manoeuvre, cleared the central bar with all the grace of a pole vaulter, the prong falling away beneath its belly as it did so. Free of all encumbrances, the strap then slipped with rapid ease through the frame’s upper side; and presto! the operation was completed.
7.5 As if this weren’t impressive eno
ugh, the Minister then proceeded, using the outside edge of her right shoe’s toe once more, to re-do the sequence in reverse. It took the best part of another hour; but she managed it as well. As soon as she’d returned the buckle to its starting position, its original state, she called the meeting to a close. I found the whole experience of observing this small episode, this drama that (due to the shape of the table, its supporting legs, the layout of our chairs and similar factors) I alone could see, deeply satisfying. How do you think it went? Peyman asked me after we had left. Oh, I answered: excellently.
7.6 Back in the office, as our work on the Koob-Sassen Project kicked in and the general traffic-levels edged up, we started experiencing problems with our bandwidth. There was too much information, I guess, shuttling through the servers, down the cables, through the air. My computer, like those of all my colleagues, was afflicted by frequent bouts of buffering. I’d hear Daniel swearing in the next room—Fucking buffering!—and others shouting the same thing upstairs, their voices funneled to me by the ventilation system. The buffering didn’t bother me, though; I’d spend long stretches staring at the little spinning circle on my screen, losing myself in it. Behind it, I pictured hordes of bits and bytes and megabytes, all beavering away to get the requisite data to me; behind them, I pictured a giant über-server, housed somewhere in Finland or Nevada or Uzbekistan: stacks of memory banks, satellite dishes sprouting all around them, pumping out information non-stop, more of it than any single person would need in their lifetime, pumping it all my way in an endless, unconditional and grace-conferring act of generosity. Datum est: it is given. It was this gift, I told myself, this bottomless and inexhaustible torrent of giving, that made the circle spin: the data itself, its pure, unfiltered content as it rushed into my system, which, in turn, whirred into streamlined action as it started to reorganize it into legible form. The thought was almost sublimely reassuring.
7.7 But on this thought’s outer reaches lay a much less reassuring counter-thought: what if it were just a circle, spinning on my screen, and nothing else? What if the supply-chain, its great bounty, had dried up, or been cut off, or never been connected in the first place? Each time that I allowed this possibility to take hold of my mind, the sense of bliss gave over to a kind of dread. If it was a video-file that I was trying to watch, then at the bottom of the screen there’d be that line, that bar that slowly fills itself in—twice: once in bold red and, at the same time, running ahead of that, in fainter grey; the fainter section, of course, has to remain in advance of the bold section, and of the cursor showing which part of the video you’re actually watching at a given moment; if the cursor and red section catch up, then buffering sets in again. Staring at this bar, losing myself in it just as with the circle, I was granted a small revelation: it dawned on me that what I was actually watching was nothing less than the skeleton, laid bare, of time or memory itself. Not our computers’ time and memory, but our own. This was its structure. 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. But when the narrating cursor catches right up with the rendering one, when occurrences and situations don’t replenish themselves quickly enough for the awareness they sustain, when, no matter how fast they regenerate, they’re instantly devoured by a mouth too voracious to let anything gather or accrue unconsumed before it, then we find ourselves jammed, stuck in limbo: we can enjoy neither experience nor consciousness of it. Everything becomes buffering, and buffering becomes everything. The revelation pleased me. I decided I would start a dossier on buffering.
7.8 Bronisław Malinowski, the father of modern anthropology, said: Write Everything Down. That was his First Commandment. You never know (he reasoned) what will turn out to be important and what won’t; so capture it all, turn it all into data. I used to adhere devoutly to this commandment: as a student, during my clubbing-book research phase, and onwards. I’d keep field-notes which I’d type up in the evening, or first thing in the morning after each night-before: detailed accounts of even—especially—the preceding day’s most trivial encounters; impressions of the people and locations these involved; first-pass appraisals of the hue and undertone of situations. When Peyman, with his visionary vagueness, handed me my epic, my epochal, commission, this Great Report, the sense that anything might end up forming part of this made everything I came across, every event I lived through, glow and buzz with potential even more. Paradoxically, though, at the same time, the writing-down, the field-note-taking, tapered off. This wasn’t due to lack of commitment—far from it. It was a consequence of Peyman’s way of thinking. He didn’t, it was quite clear, want a standard ethnographic paper that would sit gathering dust, or cyber-dust, alongside others: he wanted something different and surprising; something bigger, more ambitious and, above all, new. It will find its shape, he’d said; I leave all that to you. This was the exciting part: this remit to leave all established ethnographic protocol behind, to go off-road, off-map, as radical and left-field as I wanted. Anything went. What if …? What if, rather than it finding its shape, the age itself, in all its shape-shifting and multi-channeled incarnations, were to find and mold it? What if the age, the era, were to do this from so close up, and with such immediacy and force, that the it would all but vanish, leaving just world-shape, era-mold? I started to think thoughts like this. They excited me. Beneath their vagueness, I felt something forming—something important and beautiful and momentous.
7.9 One evening, a few months after I’d joined the Company, and about half a year before we won the Project contract, I found myself, still in the throes of these thoughts, drinking with a woman in a bar—a random stranger with whom I’d struck up a conversation. At some point, I stopped listening to what she was saying to me and looked instead at the objects she had placed around her: a cigarette pack, a plastic lighter, a dog-eared travelcard and a key-fob, fanned out in a rough semicircle across the zinc counter, like a spread of cards. She was, like many single women in her situation, using these objects to create a buffer zone around herself, in which her lifestyle, personality and, not least, availability were simultaneously signaled and withheld. I’d bought her a fresh drink; beer-froth was brimming over her glass’s rim and running down onto the counter, where it streaked in rivulets between the objects, linking them together as it sogged their edges. Where previously I would have made a mental note of all these objects and then, à la Malinowski, written them down later so that each of them could, when analyzed, yield its semantic content (the key-fob had a picture of some elaborately hairstyled space-princess on it, a pre- or proto-Leian heroine dating right back to the days of silent cinema), now I simply looked at them, blurring my vision till my own gaze became soggy and I lost myself among them.
7.10 And as I did, I felt a fragile, almost epiphanic tingling of what-if-ness come across me. What if …? What if just coexisting with these objects and this person, letting my own edges run among them, occupying this moment, or, more to the point, allowing it to occupy me, to blot and soak me up, rather than treating it as feed-data for a later stock-taking—what if all this, maybe, was part of the Great Report? What if the Report might somehow, in some way, be lived, be be-d, rather than written? I didn’t go home with this girl, this frothy, streaky, princess-in-a-galaxy-far-away woman, and in fact never saw her again—but that didn’t matter. Fulgurate, Peyman had said. As I drank with her, and as I left the bar, and over the next days, and weeks, a new field, a new realm, a whole new Order of anthropological experience seemed to burst open and fulgurate before me, its pieces glittering and dancing madly as they started to take up positions within what I suspected might, one day, turn out to be a stable and coherent pattern—an Order of which I, not Malinowski, would be founding father. What if …? In my reverie, I saw a future where, with m
y name echoing inside their heads, ethnographers—U-thnographers!—no longer scrolling through dead entrails of events hoping to unpack the meaning of their gestures, would instead place themselves inside events and situations as they unfolded—naïvely, blithely and, most of all, live—their participation-from-within transforming life by bringing its true substance to the fore at every instant, in the instant, not as future knowledge but as the instant itself, which, like a ripened pod, would overswell its bounds and rupture, spawning meaning, spreading it forth to all corners of the world … Then the Great Report would not be something that was either to-come or completed, in-the-past: it would be all now. Present-tense anthropology; anthropology as way-of-life. That was it: Present-Tense Anthropology™; an anthropology that bathed in presence, and in nowness—bathed in it as in a deep, bubbling and nymph-saturated well.
7.11 And yet … And yet … And yet. The Great Report still had to be composed. That was the deal: with Peyman, with the age. Even if it wasn’t composed in a way that conformed to any previous anthropological model, it nonetheless had, somehow, to find a form. It was all a question of form. What fluid, morphing hybrid could I come up with to be equal to that task? What medium, or media, would it inhabit? Would it tell a story? If so, how, and about what, or whom? If not, how would it all congeal, around what cohere? How could I elevate the photos I had pinned about my walls, the sketches, doodles, musings, all the stuff cached on my hard-drive, the audio-files and diaries not my own—how could I elevate all these from secondary sources to be quantified, sucked dry, then cast away, to primary players in this story, or non-story? Above and beyond this, how could life as lived become transmogrified from field-work into work, the Work? Here my thinking, I’ll admit, got vague even by Peyman’s standards. What if …? I imagined cells of clandestine new-ethnographic operators doing strange things in deliberate, strategic ways, like those conceptual artists from the sixties who made careers out of following strangers around for hours on end or triggering unusual events, specific situations (fainting, or rather pretending to, or simply lying down, in a busy street, say, or staging a quarrel in a café)… Could that kind of stuff, that kind of practice, be applied to modern life? And then, as Present-Tense Anthropology™, could it be somehow passed on, communicated to (or even replicated by) collaborators who might, through the very act of recognizing it, cause it to be simultaneously registered, logged, archived … Could that be it …? How would it work …? I tried to picture cells, “chapters” of new-ethnographic agents, like you get with biker-gangs and spies, each of them primed, initiated, privy to a set of protocols and gestures, that a tacit call to order might activate, and re-activate time and again … And then the rituals and ceremonies that ensued—might that be the Report …? Would this new Order then, like a cult gestating in the catacombs of some great city it will one day come to dominate, pulsate and grow with each one of these covert iterations—until, eventually, it might, yes, fulgurate: erupt, break cover, soar upwards and, in the light of full, unhindered proclamation, found its Church? Then the world would be made over; there’d be jubilation, exaltation: I saw Nobel Prize dinners and tickertape parades and general dancing in the streets. But still—here was the catch; here, every time, even my wildest fantasies, with their champagne and bunting and confetti, came back full circle to their sober starting point—for all that to come to pass, for that whole sequence to be set in motion, the Great Report had first, somehow, to come into being.