Death’s Vanguard

A review of Tom McCarthy, Simon Critchley, et al., The Mattering of Matter: Documents from the Archive of the International Necronautical Society. Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2012. Print.

Since 1999, Tom McCarthy—recently heralded as the “standard-bearer of the avant-garde novel”—has served as General Secretary of a “semifictitious avant-garde network” called the International Necronautical Society, or INS (Kirsch; McCarthy, Remainder). In its “Founding Manifesto,” the group declares its commitment to “bring[ing] death out in the world.” Death, necronauts insist, “is a type of space, which we intend to map, enter, colonize, and, eventually, inhabit.” Vowing to “sing death’s beauty—that is, beauty,” they “tap into its frequencies,” which suffuse our daily life, from communication technologies (radio, television, the internet) to “dustbins of decaying produce.” Even “our very bodies” are “no more than vehicles carrying us ineluctably toward death”: “we are all necronauts, always, already” (Mattering 53). Under McCarthy’s leadership, the INS has engaged in a variety of activities—conducting interviews, staging “hearings,” delivering and publishing “reports,” and exhibiting installation pieces across Europe and the U.S.—which address topics such as language, technology, art, politics, and money.[1] The Mattering of Matter, a new collection of selected INS documents published by Sternberg Press, includes transcripts of key interviews, public addresses (principally by McCarthy himself and INS Chief Philosopher, Simon Critchley), and all of the group’s previously published statements, with an introduction by Nicolas Bourriaud, contemporary curator and theorist of “relational aesthetics.”
 
McCarthy’s rise to literary prominence began in 2007 with the U.S. publication of his debut novel Remainder (originally published by the Paris-based Metronome Press in 2005),[2] and he became a full-blown literary success after his third novel C (2010) was a finalist for the Man Booker Prize. Yet many of McCarthy’s admirers are unaware that his INS activities not only preceded the publication of his fiction, but were integral to it. McCarthy has consistently relied on the INS to explore the inchoate themes of his fiction in extra-literary form.[3] Blurring the boundaries between high art and commercial culture, the INS consciously recalls the historical avant-garde’s assault on the familiar social and institutional confines of artistic production. As Bourriaud points out in his introduction, like the Futurists, Dadaists and Surrealists before it, the INS draws explicitly on “the dominant forms of its era” (11): commercial enterprise, mass communication, and politics. For the INS, this includes the language of investment banking, venture capital, and social networking as well as conspiracy theories, bureaucratic proceduralism, spying, and terrorism; in a typical recent statement, the INS claims to be “recruiting agents, sleepers and moles throughout American institutions and networks” (220). Onto these pervasive rhetorical forms the INS projects the untimely concerns of an outmoded and apparently retrograde modernism: “transgression, death and sacrifice” (Mattering 207).
 
Their “Founding Manifesto” clearly signals this affinity with the modernist avant-garde, boldly announcing the group’s arrival in The Times of London ninety years after the Italian Futurist F.T. Marinetti published “The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism” in Le Figaro. In contrast to Marinetti’s florid narration, dripping with disgust at the Italian bourgeoisie, the INS proceeds less confrontationally, putting forward a terse four-point plan that reads more like a shareholder memo than an artistic credo.[4] They conclude with a promise that their research into death’s myriad forms will culminate in the construction of a “craft that will convey us into death” (53). The First Committee, we are told encouragingly, is already considering a variety of projects, including the “patenting and eventual widespread distribution of Thanadrine [TM]” and the “building of an actual craft” (Mattering 54).
 
McCarthy and Critchley’s “Joint Statement on Inauthenticity” (2007) provides the most concise summary of necronautical philosophy. Drawing on the opposition between form and matter fundamental to Western thought, McCarthy and Critchley argue that art follows one of two paths: artists can either emulate Hegel’s privileging of the concept and “soak up” the material world until there is nothing left; or they can “let matter matter” by affirming the specificity and particularity of the material world, which disrupts any attempt to assimilate it completely (224). Affirmation, however, turns out to be too strong a word for what it takes to capture this “experience of failed transcendence” (Mattering 222). Rejecting naturalism and traditional realism, McCarthy privileges an experimental, often abstract aesthetic that is marked by continual attempts at conceptualization gone awry.
 
The tautological simplicity of the phrase “letting matter matter” therefore belies the technical difficulties of getting language to evade its tendency to mean and signify. Here the INS’s philosophical framework, provided mostly by Critchley, gives way to McCarthy’s specific interest in “craft,” a term he uses to foreground the relationship between language and technology, art and exploration. In “Calling All Agents,” McCarthy argues that language is fundamentally a means of transmission that projects the self not only into, but physically onto the world. Yet as such, language contains a material remainder that cannot itself signify—a mark of death that dooms all attempts at self-projection to failure. For the INS, old communication technologies like the radio—in which the apparent instantaneousness of communication is tainted intermittently with the faint but discernable crackle of materiality—offer a more direct means of accessing this dark underbelly of language than today’s newest technologiesThe INS literalized this understanding of writing as transmission in a 2009 gallery installation entitled “Dortmund Black Box,” in which they broadcast spliced texts lifted from local media in twenty-four-hour streams for five months, through a radio transmitter lodged inside a black box flight recorder. This audio homage to Burroughs’s “cut-ups,” also inspired by Jean Cocteau’s use of the car radio as a means of communicating with the dead in Orphée, serves to illustrate the technological enmeshment of the supposedly “free” and “autonomous” individual, one of the crucial themes of McCarthy’s anti-humanist bildungsroman, C.
 
For McCarthy, necronautical insights are not limited to specific writers but pervade all artistic traditions. Several pieces in this volume (“Navigation Was Always a Difficult Art” and “Calling All Agents” in particular) are devoted to McCarthy’s bravura elucidation of the intertwinement of language and death in Shelley, Melville, Stevens, Rilke, Joyce, Faulkner, Cocteau and Beckett. Yet with the exception of a memorable discussion of Queequeg’s coffin in Moby Dick, McCarthy’s identification of necronautical tendencies in art and literature tend to be more interesting when they move beyond the familiar modernist literary canon that McCarthy repeatedly praises in his frequent pieces of literary journalism—when located, for instance, in Lewis Carroll’s Hunting of the Snark, or in the array of contemporary writers, visual artists and musicians that McCarthy discusses or has interviewed directly on behalf of the INS (including Stewart Home, Jean-Phillipe Toussaint, Mark Aerial Waller, and the Fall). This more catholic strain in INS thought helps to explain why his own fiction, while indebted foremost to modernist abstraction and anti-realist experimentation, relies heavily on traditional genres of literary narrative like the bildungsroman and the historical novel, as well as the low-brow mode of Buster Keaton’s slapstick comedy (72). This is also why his novels are so funny, though they have won mainstream critical acclaim for their obvious formal and philosophical sophistication. McCarthy sees literature as inherently comedic, and thus as an antidote to philosophy’s investment in tragedy. Necronauts reject tragedy because its emphasis on suffering and death confers meaning and authenticity on life. By contrast, comedy involves a doubling of self that highlights the inescapable inauthenticity of existence, as Baudelaire noted. In a comment that clearly echoes the central episode of Remainder, in which the hero momentarily believes that he has somehow managed to “transubstantiate” his car’s wiper fluid (before it ends up spilling all over him instead), McCarthy suggests that Beckett is about “the failure of tragedy, the failure of matter to get aufgehoben, to go up there and be sublime. We want to go to the heavens as heroes but we trip over our own shoelaces and piss ourselves” (Mattering 73).
 
There is thus a strong element of performance art chicanery to the INS’s activities, a theatricalized seriousness that, while signaled throughout this volume, can’t be fully appreciated through documents alone. For instance, after McCarthy and Critchley delivered their “Joint Statement on Inauthenticity” in New York City, they subsequently hired actors to impersonate them, delivering the written statement and taking questions. In 2002, the INS held its Second First Committee Hearings, a set of interviews with artists and academics focused on the themes of “encryption, sound, communication and broadcasting” (160) on a stage-set specifically designed precisely to mimic famous moments of public, state-sponsored interrogation: the HUAC hearings and Stalin’s show-trials. In 2003, the INS expelled five of its original members and blacked their names out of all INS documents for various offenses, including “not being dead” (214). And the group claims to have produced their recent “Interim Report on Recessional Aesthetics” at the request of the Obama Administration in response to the recent economic crisis. Drawing on Shakespeare, Joyce, and Faulkner, the report fervently recommends that Obama keep Finnegans Wake on his bedside table, and that we celebrate the death-like event of recession as the “muted truth” of all economics (Mattering 244).
 
Much of the INS’s antics can—and perhaps should—be taken quite simply as mere posturing: a deadpan, ironic pose that today’s readers might expect from a novelist fluent in post-structuralist theory. Not surprisingly, a knowing irony pervades the scant coverage of INS events in the literary press. The group, one assumes, is a joke or parody, a manifestation of what Paul Mann has called the “theory-death of the avant-garde,” a condition in which art’s commitment to the “new” dooms it to a perpetual obsolescence that serves merely to spur further, empty repetitions. Yet the reduction of the INS project to postmodern irony doesn’t quite capture the nuance of the group’s relation to its modernist predecessors. I would suggest that the INS represents more than a rehearsal of the avant-garde’s death, which has been declared repeatedly for more than half a century, in the wake of a triumphant postwar capitalism and the assimilation of modernist experimentation into a corporate-led culture industry. Instead, by making death the object of its absolute commitment—to “do for death,” as an early interviewer has put it, “what surrealism did for sex” (“Repeating”)—the INS reevaluates the meaning of the avant-garde project today.[5]
 
Consider the group’s approach to a topic crucial to any idea of an avant-garde: the future. McCarthy begins the most recent piece published in this volume—the elaborately titled “INS Declaration on the Notion of ‘the Future’: Admonitions and Exhortations for the Cultural Producers of the Early-to-Mid-Twenty-First Century”—by returning to the text that many would consider the primal scene of the modernist avant-garde, Marinetti’s Futurist manifesto. Not surprisingly, given the INS commitment to death, the future holds little appeal for them. McCarthy aims to interrogate this “lazy and overstuffed meme” by reminding us that, even in Marinetti’s text, which is famously driven by a desire for the “new” to be ushered in by an open embrace of futurity, “the future begins with a car crash” (267). That is, before Marinetti can get his movement started, he crashes his car into two cyclists and ends up in a sewer ditch. McCarthy argues that Marinetti’s car crash does not give birth to the Futurist movement so much as “derail[s]” it before it gets under way. The avant-garde succumbs to a “literal retrenchment [that] form[s] part of its raison d’être” (Mattering 268).
 
McCarthy does not return to Marinetti here simply to mock his predecessor, or to repeat the now-familiar charge that the avant-garde itself should be discarded as false or ideological. Rather, he suggests that buried within the familiar progressive vision of the avant-garde is an alternate message we have not yet decoded. We should ignore this emphasis on the future—a notion endemic to the narratives of progress that remain prevalent despite their increasing implausibility—so that we might focus instead on the avant-garde’s overlooked but equally persistent commitment to the past: its preoccupation with “the circular structure” of traumatic repetition, with temporalities of “loops, not lines,” with “gazing in the rearview mirror” (272, 276). Marinetti’s crash does not represent modernism’s famous historical break with the past, which gives birth to the future; instead, McCarthy insists that the “crash” is another name for what Benjamin and Blanchot considered the “catastrophe” of history itself, which is occluded by the liberal humanist fetishization of the future (270). In contrast with Marinetti, then, there is nothing futuristic or utopian about the INS obsession with technology. McCarthy scathingly dismisses today’s would-be futurists—technological “posthumanists” like Michel Houllebecq who actually represent a “Humanism 2.0” (271)—and instead emulates figures like Beckett’s Krapp, for whom time does not move forward in a line but “in a loop” like the audio tapes of himself that he replays obsessively, or Ballard’s Vaughn, the anti-hero of Crash who “archives” famous crashes and then reenacts them (271, 275). Likewise, McCarthy argues, we should shun the future “in the name of the sheer radical potentiality of the past, and of the way the past can shape the creative impulses and imaginative landscape of the present. The future of thinking is its past, a thinking which turns its back on the future” (Mattering 270).
 
This radical commitment to the past offers a framework through which to understand the INS’s engagement with the modernist avant-garde that goes beyond parodic repetition.[6] For McCarthy, to look to the past is not merely to repeat it on its own terms. Today, the avant-garde’s “radical potentiality” does not lie in its differentiation of the new from the old, as Marinetti claimed. Rather, it paves the way for something completely different, “the sudden, epiphanic emergence of the genuinely unplanned, the departure from the script” (276): more like the anticipation of death than of a new, future life. Like death, this event would not be part of any linear narrative—not even a narrative of avant-garde innovation to which McCarthy’s work is consistently assimilated and which echoes contemporary corporate rhetoric of “disruptive innovation,” as McCarthy himself surely recognizes. It would be an abandonment of narrative progress altogether. Instead of re-enacting the avant-garde’s demise, the INS recuperates an avant-garde committed to death as a way of signaling its own possibility today, when the idea of an avant-garde itself seems merely laughable. It may be that the avant-garde has not gone away, but that, as if to elude the authorities, it has simply started to broadcast on a different frequency.

Footnotes

[1] In accordance with the group’s devotion to bureaucratic process, INS activities are thoroughly archived on their website (http://www.necronauts.org/).
 
[2] Rejected by mainstream publishers, Remainder was picked up by Metronome, a publisher of fiction by artists, after its editors met McCarthy in his capacity as head of the INS. Initially, the novel was available only in art shops until it was bought by the independent UK press Alma, and ultimately by Vintage in the US. See McCarthy, “Interview.”
 
[3] McCarthy claims that the INS developed in part because the art world provides a more hospitable environment for experimentation than mainstream literary publishing: “It seems to me that art is now the place where literature can happen. Almost all the concerns of the INS come from literature, but art has provided the place for it to unfold…. The art world is definitely the more literate place. There’s definitely a more intelligent set of conversations around culture and around literature going on in the art world” (“Interview”).
 
[4] Indeed, in a coincidence the INS surely relished, their manifesto appeared alongside a news story about the impending financial takeover of the British department store chain, Marks & Spencer (55).
 
[5] See, for instance, John Roberts’s concept of a “suspensive” avant-garde that persists beyond and within the failure (death) of the historical avant-garde.
 
[6] McCarthy insists that contemporary writers must confront this legacy, whether they like it or not: “For us to dismiss [modernism’s] legacy as if it was just some irritation that got in the way of an ongoing rational enlightenment is negligible to say the least. In fact, I think it’s actually offensive…. Modernism is a legacy we have whether we want it or not. It’s like Darwin: you can either go beyond it and think through its implications, or you can ignore it, and if you do that you’re a Creationist” (“Conversation”).