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[Death] generally stands as a cipher for the outer limit
of description, for the point at which the code breaks down—a
point that is often alive, as McCarthy points out, with secret
desires ... It seems that this is what the INS stands for:
a horror of finished truths and a compulsive probing of the
possibilities and failures of language ... The INS is a group
of rogue agents who have infiltrated the worlds of art, literary
criticism and philosophy. (Marcus Verhagen) |
Full text:
Deathly Pursuits, profile of INS General
Secretary, Tom McCarthy by Marcus Verhagen
“Death is a type of space, which we intend to map,
enter, colonise and, eventually, inhabit.” So begins
the First Manifesto of the International Necronautical Society,
a group of wayward literati and sweet-talking parodists who
got together in 1999 under the guidance of “General
Secretary” Tom McCarthy to study the representation
of death, the history of encryption and the connections between
them.
In 2001-2002 the INS held a series of discussions and “hearings”,
first at the Austrian Cultural Institute’s Office of
Anti-Matter and then at Cubbitt, interviewing “witnesses”
such as writer John Cussans and sound artists Manu Luksch
and Mukul Patel. Cussans spoke of Houdini’s efforts
to communicate by code with his deceased mother and of Thomas
Edison’s ambition to create a machine that would allow
the living to make contact with the dead. Luksch and Patel
told of their residency at a former Soviet spy base in Latvia,
where they intercepted, manipulated and retransmitted ship-to-shore
communications. Other witnesses talked about Nazi broadcasting
during the war (Jane Lewty), code and melancholia (Cerith
Wyn Evans), surfing and mortality (Melissa McCarthy) and the
ideal of a non-reductive, anti-Hegelian philosophy (Simon
Critchley). Later McCarthy commented on the hearings in two
“reports”, interleaving his observations with
fizzingly inventive readings of texts—including Moby
Dick, Tintin and the Cigars of the Pharaoh and Sigmund Freud’s
“Wolf Man” case—that touch on the topics
of death, encryption and technology. The second report also
paved the way for the INS Broadcasting Unit, outlining its
aims and precedents. The reports were delivered with bureaucratic
pomp, the first in 2002 at the Royal Geographical Society
and the second in 2003 at the ICA.
The ICA more recently served a base for the Broadcasting Unit,
which operated for a week from April 7th. In a darkened transmission
room that was also intended as a kind of crypt, “agents”
culled bits and pieces of text from a variety of sources before
recombining them at a central table and reading them out on
air. Each day’s transmission had a theme. On the Sunday,
when it was “Flight”, snatches from Ovid’s
account of the fall of Icarus were interspersed with fragments
from the flight log of an American pilot and references, drawn
from live radio commentary, to the “clipped wing”
of Jenson Button’s formula one car. The text streams,
which were read out by a woman with a slight Swedish accent,
were punctuated by short bursts of crackle. As the INS well
appreciates, discontinuous near-nonsense is, to the paranoid
mind, a coded message that is waiting to be deciphered.
One inspiration for the Broadcasting Unit, as McCarthy indicated
in the second report, was Jean Cocteau’s 1950 film Orphée,
in which the dead poet Cégeste sends out cryptic messages
that are received on a car radio by another poet, Orphée,
who publishes them under his own name. McCarthy is like Cégeste
in that he enjoys nonsense and repetition and like Orphée
in that he samples existing texts. The messages in Orphée
were based on coded poems broadcast by the BBC into occupied
France, so McCarthy looks next to the autobiography of the
master code-breaker Leo Marks, who sent agents into France
with poems of his own. Poetry turns into code which, in Orphée,
turns into poetry again, with McCarthy listening in all along
and noting echoes before moving on to other narratives and
testimonies.
His thinking, in the reports, is fantastically mobile. He
is a kind of sub- or supra-academic jay-walker, passing restlessly
from text to text in literary dérives that encompass
high modernism and mass culture, historical reporting and
philosophical inquiry. And his writing, which is constantly
looping back on itself, revisiting favourite refrains and
making extravagant detours, has a fine obsessive quality.
He has a liking for neologisms and multiplying footnotes and
his arguments often turn not on logical connections but on
puns and etymological felicities.
A gentle irony runs through the reports, colouring McCarthy’s
talk of death and secret communications, but those concerns
hide—are code for—another question that cuts through
the wit. In examining codes, he is really addressing the business
of reading, or listening, and understanding. Believing that
every text is coded, he looks to writers like Freud and Jacques
Derrida, who hold the same view, only to find, of course,
that their writings are coded too. Every text, it turns out,
is at once a nexus of hidden messages and a key to reading
other texts. His interest in death is not in the empirical
event; in his thinking it generally stands as a cipher for
the outer limit of description, for the point at which the
code breaks down—a point that is often alive, as McCarthy
points out, with secret desires. And he is drawn to it himself,
witness his taste for gibberish, broken threads and repetition.
It seems this is what the INS stands for: a horror of finished
truths and a compulsive probing of the possibilities and failures
of language.
The INS models itself on the modernist avant-gardes. It even
mimics their ideological disputes; a year ago McCarthy, remembering
André Breton, ejected most of the founding members.
But it also plays, with its “General Secretary”,
its “hearings” and “reports”, on the
terminology and protocol of the Kafkaesque bureaucracy. It
satirises the old avant-gardes by hinting at repressive undercurrents
while suggesting, in effect, that their time has passed and
that today’s cultural networks are based on virtual
intimacies, like those that exist between radio operators
and their listeners.
The INS is a group of rogue agents who have infiltrated the
worlds of art, literary criticism and philosophy. Above all,
it is a showcase for McCarthy’s intertextual jaunts
and a means of turning them into performances. It only takes
a nudge. His texts are framed by performance, by the dialogues
that trigger them and the (occasionally heated) discussions
that follow their delivery. And performance is a fitting medium
for a writer whose writing performs reading, with all the
panache that the verb implies.
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