Satin Island (8 page)

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 enough, 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 my 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
now
ness—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.