Dirty Media: Tom McCarthy and the Afterlife of Modernism

Justus Nieland

MFS Modern Fiction Studies, Volume 58, Number 3, Fall 2012, pp.569-599 (Article)

Published by The Johns Hopkins University PressDOI: 10.1353/mfs.2012.0058

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MFS Modern Fiction Studies, Volume 58, number 3, Fall 2012. Copyright © for the Purdue Research Foundation by the Johns Hopkins University Press. All rights to reproduction in any form reserved.

dirty media: tom mccarthy

and the afterlife of

modernism

Justus Nieland

If his most enthusiastic recent reviews are to be believed, the very future of the novel lies in the hands of British writer and artist Tom McCarthy. The authenticity and newness of McCarthy's voice—we are told—hinges on his bold return to modernist styles of novelistic antihumanism, or his cheeky repetitions of dada, or Debordian, or Warholian performances in the guise of the International Necronauti-cal Society (INS), a semi-fictitious avant-garde network founded by McCarthy in 1999. In her 2008 essay "Two Paths for the Novel," for example, Zadie Smith pitted the regnant tradition of "lyrical real-ism" and its latest sentimental avatar, Joseph O'Neill's Netherland (2008), against the clever, cold geometries of McCarthy's first pub-lished novel, Remainder. McCarthy's book follows a trauma victim's attempt to restore an idealized fullness of being through a series of compulsive, highly formal, and increasingly baroque reenactments—all comically stained by materiality (for McCarthy, the original trauma of being). For Smith, the more alluring path to the novel's future is the colder, iterative one embodied in Remainder, a novel she hailed as the decade's best. Following Smith's lead, admiring reviewers of McCarthy's third and most recent novel C (shortlisted for the 2010 Man-Booker Prize) have read this bildungsroman's knowing return to 1922, modernism's annus mirabilis, as a way of laying claim to "the future of avant-garde fiction."1

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McCarthy, like his conceptual coconspirator and INS Chief Phi-losopher Simon Critchley, is suspicious of the residual humanism that mars the praise of even his most sympathetic critics. The historical avant-garde, McCarthy knows, is history. Its utopian, transcendent fusions of form and spirit, flesh and metal failed, often catastrophi-cally, in the fashion of F. T. Marinetti's legendary car crash, brilliantly restaged in C. McCarthy is more than a casual student of these disas-ters. At the 2009 Tate Modern exhibition on futurism, he addressed the possibility of a Marinettian contemporary literature. In the same year, he co-taught a seminar on catastrophe with Marko Daniel at the London Consortium. McCarthy's work stands not as the empty resuscitation of an avant-garde idiom but as its crypt, as a way of presiding over modernism's death by reenacting it traumatically, by lingering in the remains of its most fecund catastrophes, which are also those of the twentieth-century itself.

Why all the modernist necrophilia? I want to address this ques-tion in what follows by taking up one productive strand of McCarthy's project—his understanding of modernism not as a repertoire of forms, per se, or a utopian technopoetics, but as a series of mediations between the noble subjectivity of the human and inhuman media. McCarthy's picture of modernism is telluric—embedded in specific media environments, or ecologies, built fragilely over traumatic voids. I understand McCarthy as a kind of forensic scientist of modernism—or more specifically, a media archaeologist compelled by modernist thought about technology, techne, and mediation to disinter modern-ism's catastrophic scenes, which have so often unfolded as political fantasies about media and technology.

By invoking the term media archaeology, I mean to put Mc-Carthy's returns to the medial scenes of the modern in dialogue with a subfield of contemporary media theory and artistic practice—one that has gained intellectual coherence in the digital wake of so-called "new media" (a term media archaeology views with suspicion). As Erkii Huhtamo and Jussi Parikka explain in their recent demarcation of this emergent field, media archaeology is inspired variously by a Foucauldian archaeology of knowledge, Friedrich Kittler's attempt to supplement Foucault via information theory and the German "techno-hardware" tradition of media history (8), and urgent returns to a host of "medial archaeologists avant la lettre" (2): Walter Benjamin, of course, but also the likes of Swiss architecture theorist Siegfried Gideon, Marshall McLuhan, and art historians like Aby Warburg. Broadly antiteleological, media archaeology is suspicious of deter-ministic approaches to technology and media, as well as positivist historicism's accounts of the evolution of medial history from past to present, accounts that overlook both epistemic ruptures and unfore-

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seen continuities between medial pasts and presents. Instead, media archaeology opts for a "reading of the 'new' against the grain of the past" (3); it "rummages textual, visual, and auditory archives as well as collections of artifacts, emphasizing both the discursive and mate-rial manifestations of culture"; and it invests in past media cultures, especially the unredeemed technological utopias of the historical avant-garde, to understand contemporary network culture, giving obsolete medial objects an afterlife in the fashion of what Benjamin once called the revolutionary energies of the outmoded.

McCarthy has been doing media archaeology for some time, although, if he is to be believed, he only recently began reading it in earnest. In a recent, elegiac piece on Kittler in a November 2011 London Review of Books blog, McCarthy happily recounted his two personal encounters with the late master of German media theory, and his "groupies," the Kittlerjugend. He had heard "all about Kittler," the "Derrida of the digital age," for some time, and his friends had told him he "had to check out Gramophone, Film, Typewriter" while he was working on C. But, McCarthy insists, he "held off, not wanting to cloud [his] primary research on technology and melancholy with academic 'takes' on the subject" ("Kittler and the Sirens"). It is a curious claim, not because it may not be true, but because McCarthy's work blurs boundaries between theory and fiction, and has never shied away from academic takes, as his superb 2006 study Tintin and the Secret of Literature attests. More uncharacteristically, it erects a boundary between the creative mind of the writer, inside, autonomously toiling at his work, and a buzzing world of thought and language outside that, McCarthy knows, is an unkillable humanist fiction.

The claim, of course, is especially ironic in the case of C—an un-bildungsroman, a portrait of the artist as a young arthropod. The novel could be read as an extended fictional disinterment of modernist "insect media," as Parikka has described it in his media theoretical book of the same title published, like C, in 2010. Parikka considers the insect a model for the complexity of non-human forms of organization—swarms, modes of distributed intelligence—that have "infiltrated both the design of digital technologies and cultural theoretical analysis of such media systems" (xi). Parikka's insect is "a philosophical figure for a cultural analysis of the nonhuman ba-sics of media technological modernity, labeled not by the conscious unity of Man but by the swarming, distributed intelligence of insects, collective agents, and the uncanny potentials of the 'autonomity' of affect" (xxxv). C's protagonist Serge Carrefax is a similar bug at the nonhuman, medial center of various modernist networks: the tele-communications hub of his Edison-like father Simeon, metaphorized through the moths and silkworms that link the webs of the Carrefax's

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tapestry production to Simeon's dreams of communicative transpar-ency; the total mobilization of Britain's war machine, in which Serge, erstwhile wireless bug, rechannels Ernst Jünger's insect fantasies of the self's prosthetic metamorphosis in ecstasies of techno-violence; the scarabs, inscribed with secret writing, littering despoiled Egyptian tombs; the encrypted Freudian psychic network that binds Serge to his dead sister Sophie, and McCarthy's antihero to Freud's Wolf Man, thereby bringing the novel's central couple into an obscene union in the novel's climactic "Incest Radio" phantasmagoria. Insect. Incest. The words are themselves, like the siblings, secret doubles of each other, enacting linguistic metamorphoses and marking the novel's fascination with codes and encryption.

C's insect, like Parikka's, is just one rebus for the work of media archaeology. In what follows, I will pursue three other such ciphers in McCarthy's work: gravity, grid, and gramophone. Through them, McCarthy explores the inhumanity of media in either specifically modernist environments or in environments whose dynamics bear directly on the past and afterlife of modernism in media theory. As its manifestos attest, the INS is one mode of this media archaeology, devoted as it is to the cross-medial exploration and colonization of the space of death (which is also, following Blanchot, the space of literature), to the critique of authenticity in all its forms, and most recently, to a vehement rejection of the "the concepts, presumptions, and ideologies embedded in this overstuffed and lazy meme—'The Future.'"2 But the INS is also animated by, and could not exist with-out, an aesthetic legacy of modernist experimentation—its interme-diality. In fact, it is the avant-garde's sustained investment in dirty media—the constitutive impurity, otherness, or heterogeneity of media, its way of being technically contaminated by alterity, noise, and the stochastic—rather than its more notorious insistence on medial specificity or purity that McCarthy's archaeology finds worth recovering at the scene of the modern. To frame it in the recursive logic of the archive, dirty media is both the yield of the dig and its fractured origin. Dirty media is the historical and aesthetic condition of possibility for the media spaces that McCarthy's fiction and art archives, inhabits, and reenacts. Positioning McCarthy's archaeology of modernist media alongside recent scholarly approaches to modern-ism's media environments, I explore their shared attentiveness to the inhuman and suggest how McCarthy's insistence on a modernism mired in media aligns his work with the renewed prestige of certain strands of modernism in contemporary media theory and the so-called post-medium condition.

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Gravity

Gravity is the ur-medium in McCarthy's work, the invisible sub-strate of our finite being in time and our thingness. The "fall within gravity," as McCarthy describes it in Tintin (and via de Man), is "also the fall toward the grave. Gravity, like repetition, opens up the dimen-sion of time by testifying to 'the temporal reality of death'" (171). But gravity is also the force to which McCarthy subjects modernism, bringing its transcendent aesthetic operations back to earth. The inhu-man strains of modernism rescued in McCarthy's media archaeology are perhaps most reminiscent of the revision of the modern produced by Yve-Alain Bois and Rosalind Krauss in their landmark exhibition Informe: Mode d'Emploi ("Formless: A User's Guide"), held at Paris's Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris 1996. The exhibition, inspired by the antihumanism of renegade surrealist Georges Bataille, proposes the philosopher's theory of the formless (informe) as a term "which serves to bring things down in the world" (18), allowing the curators to "operate a declassification, in the double sense of lowering and taxonomical disorder" (16). Bois and Krauss sought to fissure the unity of modernist aesthetics as canonized by Clement Greenberg, and to challenge a series of myths constitutive of the Greenbergian ontology of pure opticality: that matter exists insofar as it is made into visible form; that pictures reveal themselves instantaneously and address only the eye of the viewer; that art, in its orientation toward the visual, is the work of sublimation; and that aesthetic pleasure is linked to formal and semantic plenitude, a bounded, autotelic work with a beginning and end. Indeed, the Bataillean terms with which they mounted this challenge resonate throughout McCarthy's work: "horizontality" (the lowering of sign production to the work of things, the refusal of humanist erectness); "base materialism" (an investment in forms of excessive matter that refuse all idealist systems); "pulse" (a form of temporal endlessness that reintroduces the carnal into vision); and "entropy," the "constant and irretrievable degradation of energy in every system, a degradation that leads to an increasing state of disorder and non-differentiation" (34).

This fissuring of Greenbergian modernism so powerfully staged by the Informe exhibition, was, as Bois and Krauss remind us, always internally underway within modernism itself, even if it was perhaps most obvious in modernism's new orbits and environments at midcen-tury, when it was liberated from Greenbergian gravitas. The pervading horizontality of McCarthy's work, like its investment in temporal end-lessness, loops, and entropic systems, is decisively shaped by—and often returns to—this midcentury transformation of modernism: the pressure put on the Greenbergian model by attempts to rethink the aesthetic experience within both environmental and communica-

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tion paradigms.3 In the first, Greenberg's bureaucracy of the senses squared off against a host of new site-specific embodied approaches to art; in the second, 1960s art turned toward non-teleological, re-cursive, and serial models of temporality, a tendency influenced by concepts of organization and communication developed in postwar cybernetics and communications theory. In the process, we might say, modernism at midcentury got its media dirty all over again.4

McCarthy's work returns with surprising consistency to these midcentury environments—to their conditions of medial impurity, to their forms of temporal ongoingness, and to their interest in systemic organization and chaos. This may be what it means to feel intensely the gravity of Gravity's Rainbow (1973), perhaps postwar fiction's most sustained reckoning with these environments. McCarthy has explained that his interest in how the literary "interfaced with cinema and art," or more messily, how "it all goes together in this massive thing" ("Interview"), was spurred by the midcentury intermediality of William Burrough's cut-ups and the cross-medial experiments of Andy Warhol. Attempting to capture this condition of "horizontality" in a 1968 lecture at the Museum of Modern Art, art historian Leo Steinberg remarked on a radical shift in the 1950s and 1960s toward a pictorial field no longer "the analogue of a visual experience of na-ture but of operational processes," comparable to "tabletops, studio floors, charts, bulletin boards—any receptor surface on which objects are scattered, on which data is entered, on which information may be received, printed, impressed—whether coherently, or in a state of confusion" (84). In this informational aesthetic, embodied, for Steinberg, by the assemblages of Robert Rauchenberg, art became a communicative "surface to which everything would adhere" (100). The result, in many of Rauchenberg's paintings, was a kind of "optical noise. The waste and detritus of communication—like radio transmis-sion with interference; noise and meaning on the same wavelength, visually on the same flatbed plane" (88).

The crackling static of this postwar communicative condition—what Steinberg calls "optical noise"—is heard everywhere in Mc-Carthy's work. We hear it in Remainder's obsessive reworking of the positivist opticality and cybernetic clarity of Alain Robbe-Grillet's La Jalousie (1957)—its way of defensively pitting geometric order and the non-linear temporality of "prolapses, analepses, loops, and rep-etitions" against the visceral violence of a buried trauma (McCarthy, "Geometry"). Notice how the forensic, dematerialized aesthetic of 1960s conceptualism bumps up against the relentless too-much-ness of contingency in the archive in McCarthy's many failed figures of bu-reaucratic rationalization: Remainder's Nazrul Vayas, confronted with the sublime task of managing the excessive logistics of the narrator's

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reenactments; or the anonymous Interpol agent and radio spy in Men in Space, charged with listening in on the entropic universe of a col-lapsed Soviet empire. In fact, Men in Space and Double Take (2009), a film about Alfred Hitchcock that he helped script with director Johan Grimonprez, could be described as companion pieces in a Cold War media archaeology. Men in Space—set largely in Prague on the eve of the birth of the Czech Republic—explores the Cold War's end in a form of post-totalitarian, democratic drift. This condition of suspen-sion is figured in the novel's stranded cosmonaut, bereft of a state to recognize him; in the non-transcendent flight path of its central, forged painting; and in the novel's fragmented collection of émigrés, exiles, and expats. Double Take, by contrast, explores the height of Cold War paranoia, and the competing, uncannily doubled visions of postwar modernity represented by the US and the Soviet Union—from the launching of Sputnik and the famous Nixon-Khrushchev "kitchen debates" in Moscow in 1957 to the precipice of disaster of the 1962 Cuban missile crisis.5 It does so through the Borgesian conceit of Alfred Hitchcock's fateful encounter with his aged, 1980 future self one strange day in August 1962.

If Men in Space's governing aesthetic metaphor for medial and political ontology in the space of the post-Soviet void is assemblage (with overt nods to Rauschenberg, as well as the pop aesthetics of Warhol and Lichtenstein), Double Take stages the paranoid relation-ship between competing superpowers through the anxious confron-tation between cinema and broadcast television, its most menacing media rival. Both works' retrospective vision of midcentury space-age achievements in media and technology—atomic energy, the launching of Sputnik, the "magic in the air" of global communications networks like broadcast television—begin and end in disasters of gravity, the catastrophic falling of bodies and bombs.

Fig. 1. Airborne disaster. Double Take. Dir. Johan Grimonprez. Kino, 2009.

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Fig. 2. Falling man. Double Take. Dir. Johan Grimonprez. Kino, 2009.

Double Take's opening movement, for example, returns to "Disaster on 34th Street" with archival footage of an army bomber's collision with the Empire State Building in July 1945, and includes grainy, slow motion images of a falling body. The sense of déjà vu that the script comments on directly, and that Hitchcock experiences in his fateful encounter with his doppelganger, is doubled in the viewer. The inaugural falling man seems like nothing so much as a repetition (or an anticipation) of the trauma of 9/11, and the post-9/11 return to a world divided again between an "us" and "them," liberal democracy and its putative other. It is, as the 1980 Hitchcock explains to his younger counterpart, "the destiny of every medium to be devoured by its off-spring." As the being of media goes, McCarthy implies, so goes our being in the world. "Time edits out as much as it records," the elder, melancholic Hitchcock intones in voiceover heard over im-ages of an atomic blast. "The world will overtake you," he continues, over canned footage of a flood, and the cinematic images of a cata-strophic nature that his younger self will shortly imagine in his own modernist hymn to the force of the nonhuman, The Birds (1963). "History, certain catastrophe, will play themselves out in ways more spectacular than your films."

McCarthy's work is not just about such media environments but also, like the kinds of inhuman selves that interest him, in and of them. His undergraduate intellectual training (literature at Oxford University, New College) and location in contemporary scenes of British art and experimental writing have conspired to produce a particular reading of modernism's media environments that he has articulated eloquently and enacted with brio in various contexts: in his INS activities, in his regular contributions to newspapers, maga-zines, and periodicals specifically devoted to contemporary art and

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culture, and his cheeky, dazzling work of literary criticism, Tintin and the Secret of Literature. Consider the list of "Suggested Readings" that concludes this monograph on Hergé's (Georges Remi) most fa-mous character—for McCarthy, a cipher for the void at the heart of identity, or "as Derrida would say . . . the avatar of the secret whose possibility guarantees the possibility of literature, the condition of this secret being visible" (162).

Fig. 3. A Modernist hymn to the inhuman. The Birds. Dir. Alfred Hitchcock, Universal 1963.

Fig. 4. Radio poetics. Orphée. Dir. Jean Cocteau. DisCina, 1950.

The claim is typical of the book as a whole, which illuminates the Tintin universe with a roster of poststructuralist heavyweights, all handled artfully, and cited in the bibliography: Barthes's S/Z (1970), a text whose theory of narrative is given a thorough hearing in Tintin's introductory chapter, and whose internal taxonomy of codes are put to use, and self-consciously re-encrypted; Derrida's Given Time 1: Counterfeit Money (1991), whose meditations, via Marcel Maus and

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Charles Baudelaire, on the temporality of giving, literary authenticity, and an economy of expenditure allow McCarthy to unfold a theory of the false that joins this comic strip to the provocations of the INS; inspired turns to Bataille, Blanchot, and de Man; and Freud on "the wolf man," as well as Nicholas Abraham and Maria Torok's well-known "cryptonymical" reading of Freud's analysis of an infamous obses-sional neurotic. McCarthy's work with this thick theoretical archive is, of course, also performative. Comprised of bravura readings of readings of readings, Tintin joins McCarthy's critical method to the interpretive dynamic he shows at play in Hergé's books, filled with "brilliantly allegorical" scenes of hermeneutic comedy. Unlike McCar-thy, an acutely self-aware reader, Hergé's characters "fail to recognize that they are not only reading their own mark, but reading their own reading of the mark, their interpretation of their own interpretation" (24). A key figure for this quality of "the endlessly regressive" is the loop, at once an interpretive, spatio-temporal, and systemic dynamic that repeats obsessively through McCarthy's work, and joins him not just to Freud or Robbe-Grillet, but also the abiding temporality of midcentury art history's confrontation with postwar systems and communications theory.

Part of the challenge of writing on McCarthy is escaping the gravitational pull of his own avowed theoretical investments while also taking seriously the intellectual traces of this conceptual archive in his work. To produce, say, a Derridean reading of fiction that is so avowedly Derridean is not much of a critical trick. The rabbit is already in the hat, winking at you. Nor can criticism do justice to McCarthy's work by pretending it is not one of contemporary prose fiction's most urgent and innovative pleas for the continued relevance of poststructuralist thought. It is. In fact, one of the provocations of reading McCarthy lies in explaining his works' overt returns to, and reencryptions of, canonical theoretical problems as something other than a fictional echo of a familiar, even banal, theoretical idea—the way C's Serge Carrefax reworks the drama of Freud's wolf-man, Sergei Pankeiev; or, more subtly, the way Remainder's unnamed narrator, who experiences a tingling sensation by pretending to be a beggar in a crowded street asking for spare change, takes up the 1869 Baudelaire short story "La Fausse Monnaie" ("Counterfeit Money") at the heart of Derrida's Given Time 1; or the way Remainder's termi-nal movement from reenactment to real event in the climactic bank heist might serve as an extended riff on Jean Baudrillard's example in Simulacra and Simulation (1981) of the simulated hold-up as a means of testing the violence of repressive apparatus.

For McCarthy's readers, these theoretical commitments are of interest because they conspire to produce a theory of media that

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McCarthy is always asking us to listen to, or hear again. The four overlapping, mutually determining principles of this theory, what we might call McCarthy's medial a prioris, can be described as follows:

1. Only transmit! McCarthy's understanding of media, and one of its governing metaphors, "transmission," is of a piece with how he understands literariness. Literature, or better, writing, is and has always been a technology not of expression—with the humanist myths of the self that undergird the expressive hypothesis—but of transmis-sion, an act of broadcasting, a scattering of seeds, a dissemination without origin and within an undecidable horizon of listeners. In a recent keynote address to the Louisville Conference on Literature and Culture Since 1900 titled "Transmission and the Individual Remix" (recently released as a Vintage ebook), McCarthy announced the principle of transmission as fundamentally "modern," but expanded this modernity from Aeschylus's The Oresteia and Ovid's Orpheus to Jean Cocteau's astonishing art film Orphée (1950).

Fig. 5. Calling All Agents: INS Broadcasting Unit. Transmission Room, Institute for Contemporary Art, London, 8–14 April 2004. 3040 x 2016 px, Grey, TIFF (David Boulogne)

The poetic act, recast through this genealogy, and by reference to Barthes's famous description of writing as the "negative where all identity is lost," is the work not of origination but listening and repeating, cohering and disarticulation, of being spoken by language

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(168). We are always in media because we are always in language, and the best writers, McCarthy is always saying, are those who ap-preciate literature and the self's shared condition of inauthenticity, of being in media. Literature shares this dirtiness with the self that finds its noble subjectivity undone by the inhuman dimension of language: techne that hopelessly exceeds the anthropos. What we encounter in literature, then, is "not a self, but a network" of transmissions of the kind McCarthy began first to explore in 2002 in the INS's Second First Committee Hearings on "Transmission, Death and Technology" (McCarthy, "Technology"). He has continued this exploration in the INS's installation of an operational radio station within the gallery space of London's Institute of Contemporary Art in 2004, and, in 2008 and 2009, with the installation of INS "black box transmitters"—the faked flight recorders of fallen aircraft, and their ghostly transmis-sions of INS propaganda—at art exhibitions in Sweden and Germany.

Fig. 6. Tom McCarthy and Rod Dickinson. Greenwich Year Zero. Multimedia installation. The Western Front Gallery, Vancouver, 2005. Photo courtesy of Tom McCarthy and Rod Dickinson.

2. Prosthetics Forever! By privileging the figure of transmission over expression, the poet as the coherer and scatterer of voices, Mc-Carthy extends and radicalizes the Eliotic principle of impersonality

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echoed in his talk's title. Literary modernism, McCarthy knows, had a thing for the spectral voice thrown or ventriloquized across dis-tances of time and space, and across boundaries of otherness. And yet such voices, and the prosthetic medial forms that would carry them, or make them present across vast expanses, are haunted by loss and absence. Modernist experiments in writing as a medium of transmission were hatched in anxious competition with new tech-nologies of transmission within earthly air like the radio and the wireless.6 Such media promised a particularly expansive quality of communication that Douglas Kahn has called "globalness," a dream that "collapsed space to an ideal of instantaneous transmission and reception, a communication without mediation" (21). As John Dur-ham Peters has argued, these communicative fantasies—transmis-sion without loss, the soul's fusion with another, the happy sharing of psychic property, the "dream of telepathy, a meeting of minds without remainder" (16)—abounded during the 1920s, the heyday of literary modernism, but were consistently challenged by modern-ism's attunement to communicative failure, loss, noise, or the threat of solipsism. Modernism, for McCarthy, is especially aware of what Hal Foster called the "double logic of prosthesis": technical media's status as both an extension and constriction of the body, a fetishistic monument to a foundational lack in the self and its disavowal in a form of technological overcoming (5). Foster's avant-garde avatar of this medial logic, like McCarthy's, is Marinetti. In fact, McCarthy's research on C involved not just a productive encounter with the past and future of futurism, but an exploration of two very different scholarly studies of the relationship between loss and mourning and the early-twentieth-century fantasies surrounding modern technical media: Lawrence Rickels' Aberrations of Mourning (1988) and Jeffrey Sconce's Haunted Media (2000). Both studies take up directly, but in different ways, what Peters has called the "debt that the dream of communication owes to ghosts and strange eros" (29).

3. Media Encrypts. What is haunted in media? There is the work of encryption foundational to the operation of literature-as-écriture (literature as, in McCarthy's terms, a "continuous embedding and reincrypting; it is the internment, disinternment, and reinternment of other literature" ["Radio, "Archaeology"]), and then there are the more specific psychic crypts built around the meeting of bodies and their medial extensions—contact zones that, for Rickels, are "al-ways the site of some secret burial" (McCarthy, "Radio"; McCarthy, "Technology"). Modernism, as the literature that emerged in the era of communications technology, is thus, for McCarthy, that cult of mourning's literary "expression, its record, its holy script" ("Technol-ogy"). Here, McCarthy is particularly interested in the psychoanalytic

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dynamics of encryption: the mind as hieroglyph; psychic architecture as a space of burial; the analyst as a code-breaker tuning into the cryptic transmissions of the unconscious, which emerge from the voids surrounding familial traumas. This "crypt," as Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok describe in in their reading of Freud's Wolf Man, produces an encrypted subject—a radically other subjectivity beyond the cure of language, one who speaks in noisy, coded "cryptonyms" that "both reveal and re-encrypt: a double move, both uncovering and hiding" (82, 84).

Part of what draws McCarthy to the figure of encryption in this tradition is the way it joins psychic and medial operations. The crypt, Akira Lippit explains, is "the effect of psychic techne," an "artificial unconscious," thoroughly technological in nature (189). As Derrida frames it in his discussion of Abraham and Torok: the crypt is "never natural through and through. . . . The crypt is not a natural place, but the striking history of an artifice, an architecture, an artifact" ("Fors" xiv). The crypt, then, offers more testimony to the primordial role of techne in the self, its foundational inauthenticity. But McCarthy's cryptic obsessions also remind us that Freudian psychoanalysis, as a number of scholars have recently insisted, is also media theory: Freud "thought of the body/mind as a storage and recording medium as well as an input/output device" (Elsaesser 100). Psychoanalysis shares with modern technical media like the cinema an anxiety about the archivability—the representation and storage—of time—time haunted by loss, absence, or contingency as meaninglessness and excessive detail.7

4. Being Fallen like Media. Remainder begins with a traumatic head wound caused by sheer contingency: junk, stuff, bits of tech-nology falling from some unseen communications network in the air above. McCarthy's media archaeology is a story of medial catastro-phe, its gaze trained on an ever-mounting pile of wreckage, much like Benjamin's angel of history. In a recent review in Bookforum, McCarthy mused that "every technological invention creates its own disaster" ("Jaws"). Medial fantasies of technological self-overcoming are inextricably bound to fall back to earth, often destructively so, like C's fallen airman Beswick, whose body, in dropping three thousand feet to land in a field, incarnates the materialism that humans share with media. The fallen body leaves a "Beswick-shaped mark . . . in the grass for weeks: head, torso, legs, and outstretched arms" (129). "All his memories," Serge's compatriot Stedman remarks, "and everything he ever thought about or did, reduced to battery chemicals." Serge, whose entire worldview assumes the superficiality of Steinberg's "flatbed picture plane," replies with typical flatness, "Why not? . . . It's what we are."

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Serge, like his creator, is no sentimentalist. He is, instead, a figure for what is inhuman in us and our relationships to media. Re-thought as a kind of media pedagogy, high modernist media experi-ments have recently been recast as so many ways of domesticating and estranging the inhuman dimensions of media of mechanical reproduction by forging fragile human intimacies with it. This has been described by scholars in a variety of ways. First, as a defensive process of homeopathic inoculation, in which the gambit of modern-ist materiality (here meant as medium specificity) is understood—in Julian Murphet's story—as a traumatic assimilation of an early twentieth-century moment of mediatic convergence. Second, as a more ambivalent lesson in how to feel about mechanical prosthesis: about media's inhuman "will-to-automatism," as David Trotter has it (10); or, as Michael North argues, about how such visual technolo-gies destroyed the so-called reality of the senses and thus became a powerful weapon in modernism's battle against mimetic realism. Third, as a lesson in what Juan Suárez has characterized as modern-ism's creative receptivity to noise—to everyday modernity's shadow domain of meaninglessness, opacity, and asignifying matter—that finds its model in the indiscriminate recording media and its capac-ity to register the stochastic disorder of bodies and things. Fourth, as a coping mechanism for the early twentieth century's climate of excessive information. Mark Wollaeger, for example, has recently cast a series of modernism's more infamous technical gambits—its dream of lyric immediacy, its desire for a humanizing impression, its mythic schemes of order or encyclopedic totality—as ways of dealing with information flows that exceed the mind's ability to process them. For Wollaeger, modernism's strategy is to find subtle modes of valuation and more authentic modes of communication within modernity's pseudo-environment of propaganda and informational density.

As a result of revisionist work like this, interwar literary mod-ernism has been brought back to earth. It now seems less special or heroic as a cultural formation and more embedded in a dirtier ter-rain of media practices and users. If part of modernism's on-going legacy is its way of resisting and accommodating media's challenges to the prestige of the human, then where to place McCarthy in this new scholarly narrative of modernist media experiments and their relationship to sites of historical catastrophe?

Grid

Consider McCarthy and Rod Dickinson's 2005 multimedia instal-lation Greenwich Year Zero, an exploration of French anarchist Martial Bourdin's alleged, unsuccessful campaign to bomb the Greenwich

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Royal Observatory in 1894. Bourdin's botched attempt is also the basis for the plot of Joseph Conrad's superbly ironic metropolitan melo-drama, The Secret Agent (1907). McCarthy, like Conrad and Bourdin before him, understands the Observatory as a "perfectly symbolic place," the "seat of time itself" ("Artists Talk").The Observatory is also an early manifestation of another key McCarthyian figure: the grid. As a medial trope, the grid is at once topographic and temporal. It allows McCarthy to take up a series of relationships—between form and matter, the systematizable and the contingent, the aesthetic and the historical—that, for McCarthy, define our being in media and shape the time in which events take place. In summoning this figure, I mean to recall Rosalind Krauss's famous reading of the two ways in which the grid, for modernists, declared the modernity of modern art:

One is spatial; the other is temporal. In the spatial sense, the grid states the autonomy of the realm of art. Flattened, geometricized, ordered, it is antinatural, antimimetic, an-tireal. It was what art looks like when it turns its back on nature. In the flatness that results from its coordinates, the grid is the means of crowding out the dimensions of the real and replacing them with the lateral spread of a single surface. . . . The grid declares the space of art to be at once autonomous and autotelic. In the temporal di-mension, the grid is an emblem of modernity by being just that: the form that is ubiquitous in the art of our century, while appearing nowhere, nowhere at all, in the art of the last one. ("Grids" 9–10)

McCarthy doesn't take up the pictorial dimensions of the modernist grid as directly as he does the temporal and spiritual aspirations of its visual geometry. McCarthy's grids, while mindful of the aesthetic history of autonomy and the repressions it demands, are mapping other kinds of movements, just as the force of "gravity" in his work relentlessly brings the body into medial systems it cannot transcend.

Recall the grid Bourdin seeks to destroy. With the creation of Greenwich Mean Time at the International Prime Meridian Conference in 1884, the Observatory became the standard of Universal time, the sign of modernity-as-standardization, and of London as the heart of global, homogeneous time. Thus the Royal Observatory fashioned what Adam Barrows has described as a "global grid whereby every spatial point on the map could be temporally fixed in relationship to England" (262), an "international symbol of British imperial power responsible for dictating cosmic or cosmopolitan time on a daily basis to a now universal clientele" (262–63). That this integral, though entirely arbitrary map of space-time could falter, or be revealed to

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have nothing at its core, would underscore a similar lack within the seemingly universal power it instantiates. Conrad's Mr. Vladimir an-ticipates this when he singles out the "wooden-faced panjandrum" as a possible target for Verloc's "revolutionary" network: it is "science," as incarnated in the Observatory's system of standardized space-time, that is the "sacrosanct fetish of to-day" (26). As Vladimir plays the game, the bombing—a fake event provoked by Verloc—would be read as serious enough to shake London's jaded public, to alert them to the vulnerability of the nation, and thus to justify (in the self-preserving logic that typifies the novel's characters) repressive counter-measures in the form of heightened security and tighter surveillance. As the infrastructure of imperial power, the grid in Conrad's novel sustains itself by internalizing its own unseen, catastrophic outside. On the grid, movements are mapped, and contingency is structured, but nothing really changes.

The gambit of Greenwich Year Zero is to imagine the event as having happened, to produce a revolutionary starting-over after massive trauma of the kind implied in its titular gesture to the final film in Rossellini's postwar trilogy Germany Year Zero (1948). The installation redoubles Conrad's own original attentiveness to the me-dia networks and economies of information in which the police, the anarchists, and the novel's famously lazy, "thoroughly domesticated" double agent (5), Mr. Verloc, gain knowledge about traumatic events like the anarchists' plan in the first place. Conrad's take on the bomb plot derived from the Times' highly contradictory coverage of the event, which for weeks afterward "devoted nearly half of its world coverage to descriptions of anarchist arrests, police raids, seizures of underground newspapers, attempted and successful bombings, and bomb threats," thus locating the challenge to Greenwich Mean Time in what Barrows has called a "shadowy yet endlessly proliferating foreign presence against which England had to take staunch retribu-tive action" (266). McCarthy and Dickinson's installation thus includes reproductions of documents from the 1894 media coverage of the plot, but doctors them, turning Bourdin's failure into a success, and thereby changing the course of history.8 Bourdin really did destroy the observatory, their faux historical archive confirms, and what's more, the installation invites viewers to witness the immediate aftermath of the bombing in a one-minute black-and-white film, shot with an antique, hand-cranked movie camera, that observes the smoking Observatory—manipulated digitally in post-production, in a long shot.

The installation exaggerates what Conrad understood as the foundational uncertainty surrounding "the event" and its mediation, the gap between trauma and its registration. As Wollaeger recently argued, at stake in The Secret Agent's anxiety about the facticity of

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the event—whose truth may be missed by an indifferent public, or disappeared by newspaper coverage—is the relationship between the matter of Conrad's own medium—namely, the modernist novel—and a host of other cultural forms (advertising, pamphlets, journalism) in a media ecology shaped by a surfeit of information that skewed the balance between facts and values. The work of the novel, in part, is to perform the force of modernist style itself as a means of producing a particular kind of attention—of exacting a form of control over its readership "within the crowded space of aesthetic experimentation early in the century, and to compete with a mass culture partly formed on shocks and their replication" (Wollaeger 43), traumas embodied most directly by the medium of film (43).

Forced to compete with the potently indexical technical media of film, part of the novel's fear is the failure of the written word to leave a mark, an anxiety picked up in Conrad's description of a row of newspaper sellers, as The Professor and Ossipon debate the effects of the bombing gone awry: "the grimy sky, the mud of the streets, the rags of the dirty men harmonized excellently with the eruption of the damp, rubbishy streets of paper soiled with printers' ink. The posters, matriculated with filth, garnished like tapestry the sweep of the curbstone. The trade in afternoon papers was brisk, yet, in comparison with the swift march of foot traffic, the effect was of indifference, of disregarded distribution" (79). This is Conrad on dirty media. Encrusted by muck, forced to compete with the sheer numbers of non-readers, these words are destined for oblivion. Con-rad's wish is for arresting language that cuts through the filth, a force most obvious in his brutal treatment of Stevie, the disabled younger brother of Winnie Verloc, who is manipulated by the rhetorical force of the revolutionaries, and, in being blown to bits while unwittingly carrying Verloc's bomb, stands in for the historical Bourdin. But the linguistic reality of the novel is "words in space"—verbiage adrift in the general entropic condition of the novel's universe, a clockwork mechanism winding down. It is the fate of Winnie, after murdering her husband, to embody this condition of medial disappearance at the novel's end, when her death appears only as a vanishing trace in a ten-day-old newspaper article held by Comrade Ossipon: "Suicide by Lady Passenger from Cross-Channel Boat" (253).

McCarthy and Dickinson's installation, by contrast, imagines Stevie as a kind of hero, an "artist of the impossible" (McCarthy, "Artists Talk"), whose potential to escape modernity's grid of ho-mogeneous, abstract, empty time is marked in the chaotic orbits of Stevie's scriblings: "innumberable circles, concentric, eccentric; or coruscating whirl of circles that by their tangled multitude of re-peated curves, uniformity of form, and confusion of intersecting lines

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suggested a rendering of cosmic chaos, the symbolism of a mad art attempting the inconceivable" (Conrad 39). McCarthy's Bourdin is not, like Stevie, the object of rhetorical violence, or an obscure tool of historical impotence. Rather, Bourdin is the secret agent of a logic of reenactment that links this installation's medial concerns directly to those of Remainder. McCarthy is nothing if not aware of the con-nections between Bourdin's symbolically charged attempt to explode time and the emergence, in the same year, of cinematic time. In an artist's talk on Greenwich Year Zero given at the London Architectural Association's School of Architecture, McCarthy noted the historical coincidence that the day after Bourdin's failed attack, the Lumière brothers debuted their marvelous new invention, the cinematograph.9 As Mary Ann Doane has brilliantly argued, early cinema of the sort McCarthy's installation reenacts was part of a "larger cultural impera-tive: the structuring of time and contingency in capitalist modernity" (Emergence 5). As a technology or representation, cinema abetted the rationalization, standardization, and structuring of time incarnated at the Royal Observatory, but it also was incessantly confronted with the reality of contingency—the lure and threat of the singular, the unique, the fleeting unrepeatable moment: presence itself. "What cinema archives" above all, Doane insists, "is the experience of pres-ence, but it is the disjunctiveness of a presence relived, of presence haunted by historicity" (25). In a McCarthyian idiom, we can say that contingency is cinematic time's remainder—the excrescence that promises and threatens to escape its grid.

In this way, the logic of reenactment, as McCarthy explores it in Remainder, is specifically cinematic. Or better, "the cinematic" is McCarthy's central medial metaphor for the "disjunctiveness of a presence relived." Doane's phrase nicely describes the experience of the novel's unnamed protagonist, unable to access the space of self-presence prior to his traumatic encounter with gravity and fallen things—a space of authenticity embodied, for him, by the seamless movements of Robert De Niro's celluloid body in Mean Streets (1973). His post-traumatic alienation comes with a healthy financial settle-ment, of course, and his girlfriend Catherine proposes that he invest it in acts of global philanthropy, specifically, in a "resource fund" that would help underdeveloped Africa become "autonomous." Hers is a logic of global "connection" linking the operations of markets and the workings of conscience (Remainder 33). The narrator, struggling to understand such extensivity, such economies of feeling and giving without loss, conjures a grid:

I wanted to feel some connection with these Africans. I tried to picture them putting up houses from their housing kits, or sitting around in schools, or generally doing African things,

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like maybe riding a bicycle or singing. I didn't know: I'd never been to Africa, any more than I—or Greg—had ever tried cocaine. I tried to visualize a grid around the earth, a kind of ribbed wire cage like on the champagne bottle, with lines of latitude and longitude that ran all over, weaving the whole terrain into one smooth, articulated network, but I lost this image among disjoined escalator parts, the ones I'd seen at Green Park earlier. I wanted to feel genuinely warm towards these Africans, but I couldn't. Not that I felt cold or hostile. I just felt neutral. (37–38)

The passage insists that the grid's dream of seamless connectivity, a fantastic figure of a perfectly articulated system, finds its riposte in the Green Park escalator under repair: "You think of an escala-tor as one object, a looped moving bracelet, but in fact it's made of loads of individual, separate steps woven together into one smooth system. Articulated. These ones had been dis-articulated, and were lying messily around a closed-off area of the upper concourse. They looked helpless, like beached fish" (16). Staring at this disarticulated system, the narrator gets on the wrong escalator, and his sleeve is stained by grease. He has, "right to this day, a photographically clear memory" of standing and looking at his "stained sleeve, at the grease—this messy, irksome matter that had no respect for mil-lions, didn't know its place. My undoing: matter" (17). It's one of the novel's iconic passages, and it describes what persists for the narrator—the stain of materiality—through a metaphor of the photo-graphic index suggesting presence relived and embalmed time. The photo-indexical image testifies to the narrator's basic disjunctiveness for which McCarthy is always finding analogues in the object world. Here, the disarticulated system of the escalator, a gizmo that is, the next chapter makes clear, much like the traumatized brain that must learn to rearticulate, or "reroute" through physiotherapy, the "loads of individual, separate steps" in the brain's system of articulation (23). Similarly, the narrator's memory returns cinematically, "in moving images . . . like a film run in installments, a soap opera, one five-year episode each week or so."

Remainder's narrative proceeds by following the narrator's in-creasingly orchestrated, often comic attempts to reenact, and thus structure through traumatic repetition, moments of contingency. It is no coincidence that the company the narrator hires to manage the excessive logistical details and massive amounts of information required to run his reenactments is dubbed "Time Control, UK." The narrator's gambit is to relieve his affective neutrality by reliving moments of presence, plenitude, or authenticity—moments either imagined to have happened in an irrecoverable past or associated

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with the Real as deathly limit of representation. It is a poststructural-ist allegory about representation, of course, and its temporal model is a specifically cinematic spectrality that, McCarthy insists, is far preferable to a grid of total connection and immanent co-presence. "I preferred her absence, her spectre" (Remainder 39), the narrator says of Catherine. A similar penchant can be said to underlie McCar-thy's critique of the perfect grid, a global gift economy without loss. The narrator enacts this cinematic time in his running and rerunning of fleeting details of an imaginary past in the apartment complex reenactment. Paradoxically, the reenactments depend on both the temporal reversibility and manipulation of cinematic time—the narra-tor rewinds and slows down the movement of his actors—and on an obsessive cycling around cinema's capacity to deliver an asymptote of the real. Thus, the narrator insists on his actors' fidelity to his at-tempt at authenticity. When the actors substitute recordings of their performances for the real, the narrator is enraged. But when, in the course of their reenactment, they improvise, and produce in the process something new and unexpected, he is delighted, and quickly turns these sparks of contingency into new scenes of reenactment.

As in the early cinematic "actuality" genre that McCarthy fakes in Greenwich Year Zero, or indeed in realist theories of photographic ontology like André Bazin's, the pursuit of authenticity in Remain-der—the degree zero of representation—is bound tightly to death. The form of aesthetics most directly commented on by Remainder's narrator, and the one whose formal, diagrammatic operations remind him of "abstract paintings, avant-garde ones from the last century," is forensic procedure (185).10 Unlike modernist abstraction, the nar-rator notes, forensic diagrams are "records of atrocities." What he appreciates about forensics, and what links it to the modernist grid, of course, is its formalism, the systematicity of its search for patterns, the "chain of actions you must follow when you conduct a forensics search" (186). Forensics requires not just noticing patterns—the im-prints of tires or shoes or fingerprints—but recording them, capturing them by sprinkling powder over fingerprints, or making molds of the negative "space hollowed out by action," thereby turning absence into "solid matter," or making "constant sketches," or taking various types of photographs (188). This obsession with forensics as both a form of interpretation and a practice of representation circling around the missed event of death is sparked by the narrator's near miss of another traumatic scene: the fatal killing of a black man in Brixton in a drug deal gone bad. For the narrator, this man's falling and dy-ing on the black tarmac—the way he "merged with the space around him, sunk and flowed into it until there was no distance between it and him" (197–98)—becomes the "ground zero of perfection" (198),

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a sacred space he shortly attempts to enter, first by buying access to the forensics reports, then by reenacting the shooting.

The forensic grid cordons off space to close in on its hidden se-cret. One might, the narrator proposes, "cut up an area by laying a grid across it and assigning each investigator one of the grid's zones" (187). But if he "were a head investigator," the narrator imagines, he'd "plump for a figure of eight, and have each of my people crawl around the same area in an endlessly repeating circuit, unearthing the same evidence, the same prints, marks, and tracings again and again, recording them though afresh each time." By replacing the centripetal, terminal force of the forensics grid with the figure of the endlessly repeating loop, the narrator suggests what McCarthy hints at often: the narrator's desire to cut out the detour between him and a zone of authenticity is doomed from the start. The secret at the heart of the tarmac where the black man died can't be enclosed by the grid's formalism because its matter is basically excessive:

If you were to cut out ten square centimeters of it like you do with fields on school geography trips . . . you'd find so much to analyze, so many layers, just so much matter—that your study of it would branch out and become endless until, finally, you threw up your hands in despair and announced to whatever authority it was you were reporting to: There's too much here, too much to process, just too much. (202)

This, what Doane calls the "excess of designation," and that cinema also produces in the way it unfolds the sublimity of contingent matter, points to the trauma of endless, inhuman time (Emergence 32). Part of what is most endearing about Remainder's affectless narrator is the enjoyment he takes in being in this experience of endlessness. We see it in the novel's running gag with the narrator's coffee loyalty card: "if I got all ten of its cups stamped," he enthuses, "then I'd get an extra cup—plus a new card with ten more cups on it. The idea excited me: clocking the counter, going right round through zero, starting again" (52). In the card—Cappuccino Year Zero—is the promise of the pleasure of being in a loop, in the kind of recursive temporality that, McCarthy knows, was the end of modernism's enduring aesthetic fiction—autonomy, what Michael Fried called the "grace" of temporal presentness (168). But the card also marks the beginning of another style of modernist antihumanism: the looping, cybernetic circuits of Remainder's midcentury inspiration, Alain Robbe-Grillet.

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Gramophone

Kittler has given the modern discourse network of phonography one influential hearing, and Derrida, via Joyce, has given it another. McCarthy, for his part, takes up the gramophone most directly in C's knowing riff on Virginia Woolf's Between the Acts, not just one of the novel's many acknowledged homages to the high-water marks of lit-erary modernism, but also a thoughtful final example of the contours of McCarthy's archaeological thought. Largely composed during the Blitz, Woolf's country house novel takes Miss La Trobe's pageant play at Pointz Hall in June 1939 as an occasion to explore forms of English national culture on the precipice of total war. Woolf's turn toward the pastoral, the conservatism of the country house novel, and the cultural form of the pageant play itself have recently been read as part of late modernism's various forms of "home anthropology" (Esty 17)—its ways of compensating for imperial decline and the attendant loss of meaning at the core of empire by shoring up a humane, insular Englishness. The archaeological impulse of the novel—its attempt to track the evolutionary line of descent back through deep time to an abiding unity—is perhaps best captured by Lucy's Swithin's "Outline of History," in which she reads of a time when "rhododendron for-ests" covered Piccadilly," when "the entire continent, not then, she understood, divided by a channel, was all one" (8).

This relationship to English national culture is given form in La Trobe's pageant play, a series of amateur performances or, to use a McCarthyan term, reenactments of episodes in English literary history, scenes both highly citational and sonically orchestrated by La Trobe's offscreen gramophone. The machine's crackles, hisses, and repetitions, like its movements between signal and noise, are, after all, what gives this authentic communal "we" an acousmatic, mediated body—perpetually calling the community into coherence and dispersing it, vanishing it into wind and air. Beyond that, the phonograph codes the novel's anxieties about the communicative potential of media, and of aesthetic experience itself. Woolf's gramo-phone is thus an exemplary artifact of late modernist dirty media. It enacts the forms of inhuman automatism that draw a community into absorbed listening masses in spite of themselves, a power Woolf often associated with fascist spectacle. Under the inhuman regime of mechanical reproduction, the gramophone ironizes the voices of cultural authenticity given living form in the performance of La Trobe's players, whose liveliness would stanch an imperial lack.

McCarthy is drawn, I suspect, to the generally befouled airspace of Woolf's final novel, and deftly extrapolates its abiding specter of the inhuman into the broader ontological conditions of C's media

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environment. Perhaps most telling of the media-archaeological technique of the novel is its dense clustering of media technologies, forms, and protocols—its picture of technology as always layered in assemblages, much like those clustered in the surname "Carrefax." These assemblages sediment heterogeneous temporalities at once archaic, modern, and futural. This ups the ante on Between the Acts' already layered array of medial forms that, Woolf makes clear, enact modes of time and relationships to history, and begins to suggest the kinds of non-teleological history or historiography allowed by McCarthy's media networks. Something like La Trobe's gramophone presides over the pageant at the Versoie Day School for the Deaf, its "electric crackle whipping the crowd into attentiveness" (C 51), but the gramophone has also been displaced into the abyssal, depthless, disc-like eyes of Serge's owl mask, and the wheels of Dis's chariot, bound for the underworld. And beyond that, McCarthy buries the gramophone in a noisy array of competing medial forms. There is the communicative work of the annual pageant itself as an example of Simeon's vision of human perfectionism through speech, but also as a way of staging the ongoing debate between Simeon's logocentric fidelity to communicative transparency and Widsun's argument for the political pragmatics of coded language, principles enacted silently in the messages sent during the pageant between him and Sophie, his apt pupil in the erotics of encryption.

And then there is the mutating figure of the linen screen. It is first introduced to display the attraction of Widsun's "Projecting Kinetoscope," and cinema's astonishing spectacle of movement and life. For Serge and McCarthy, cinema operates under the sign of the inhuman, of life's original supplement by techne, carbon (C) by car-bon copy (CC). The eager spectators at Versoie gather to watch early trick films in which clothes jump out of laundry baskets "all without any human interference," and Serge finds himself transfixed by the screen's outrageous metaphoric potential (45). He watches "moths' and mosquitoes' shadows on the screen turn into jumping hairs and speckles, then the first unsteady pictures, empty linen springing into artificial life" not unlike the uncanny reanimation of the family cat Spitalfield by Sophie's feat of electric taxidermy (46). Later in the chapter, the screen plays another, stranger "shadow display" (61) as Serge observes, presumably, the coupling silhouettes of his sister and Widsun, perceived flatly as "some kind of moving thing made of articulated parts . . . its spine wobbling as the whole contraption rocks back and forth, pulsing like an insect's thorax" (60). Later, observing Sophie's reanimation of Spitalfield, which he reads as a code, mor-bid and hypnotic, but finally uncrackable, Serge is reminded of the screen's inhuman play of articulated parts, as McCarthy reminds us of the uncanny vitality that joins cinema, eros, and technology itself.

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Of course, Serge is always finding himself bound and unbound, articulated and disarticulated by media that are never one, but rather complex assemblages. In fact, the gramophone itself, prior to its role in the pageant, has been introduced in the same chapter as not at all a singular techno-figure, but part of a mediatic assemblage and a cipher of Serge and Sophie's intimacy. In the same attic of wonders in which the siblings play the Realtor's Game and fantasize about materializing the games' imaginary Ting-a-Ling Telephone Company into a network covering the family estate, they are fond of "fiddling with their father's archive" of old and new media (42). Simeon's archive includes glass phonautograph plates; now-obsolete zinc master discs that seem to Serge like "coins of some exotic currency gone out of circulation—miniature, round islands of arrested time"; wax cylinders containing Simeon's recordings of the halting efforts at speech of the Day School pupils, and played back by Serge and Sophie on "an old Edison phonograph"; and other material inscrip-tions also recorded and replayed on a "newer Berliner gramophone, not as cylinders but as discs" (43). The siblings play and replay not only voices but also silence, "a silence which is in fact anything but silent, bursting as it is with a crackle and snap." Like McCarthy, Serge and Sophie are drawn obsessively to the materiality of inscription and playback, which are always codes in the novel of the inhuman dynamism of matter. Consider the needle's "constant hostile struggle with the furrow" of the disc—a disc made of "black material," shellac, fashioned, or so Sophie explains to Serge, "from the secretions of the lac bug." Serge, of course, is just this kind of bug, and McCarthy's pun prompts Serge both toward thoughts of the constitutive trauma of his being, and—as he hears replayed the lost, of Rilkean voice of Rainer, an ex-Versoie student and cancer victim, and looks into the gramophone's reproducing horn for its absent source—toward "en-trances of caves and wells, of worm- and foxholes, rabbits' burrows, and all things that lead into the earth" (44).

Thus is Woolf's gramophone recast as an abiding ontological con-dition of the novel, and McCarthy's media archaeology reveals itself, in its archive fever, to be as suspicious of teleology as of origins. Its investigation into the temporality of network cultures, as the overlap-ping times encrypted in these assemblages reveal, is never linear, or progressive. Instead, it opts for strategies of ironic anachronism that play on our desire for retrospective media teleologies, revealed to be recursive fantasies. Here, I have in mind the way Simeon's Car-refax's utopian dreams of a global communications network seems to anticipate the birth of the internet; or the way MacCauley's riffs on Imperial Communication's spy games in Egypt uses, and then retracts, the language of cybernetic communication theory, or sys-

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tems-theoretical insights about observation, or the untimely specter of Cold War paranoia; or the way Sophie and Serge's Realtor's game is dreaming of Monopoly. These progressive medial inevitabilities are revealed to be techno-fantasies. All that is inevitable in the novel is entropic movement into the earth, the subterranean, the burrow, the underworld. These obsessive movements toward matter in C, these ways of making dirty media dirtier, or turning it to dust and oblivion, are perhaps first evident in the pageant's restaging of La Trobe's progressive, if revisionist, literary history of England—and beyond that, Woolf's vision of civilization on the edge of historical catastro-phe—alongside the death-bound erotic trajectory of Persephone and Hades. Such movements acknowledge the deep, inhuman time of the media, relativize all human acts of archaeological disinterment, and carry the mark of what Serge, near the novel's end, calls the "real disaster," which is just the loss of human "catastrophe" itself—its "rubbing out" in inhuman, geological time, in non-geometric scales of unformalizable materiality of the desert itself that dirties every dig in the archive, including McCarthy's own (278).11 If Woolf's pageant would stanch the loss attending late modernist imperial decline with ritualized, authentic Englishness, McCarthy's return to the modernist archive buries Britain's nascent imperial communications network in what Falkiner calls the sedimented histories of looking in the longue durée of imperial ambition and hubris: "The mistake most of my contemporaries are making is to assume that they're the first" to dig—the arche-archaeologist, or "even when it's clear they're not, that their moment of looking is somehow definitive, standing outside the long history of which it forms merely another chapter" (278).

McCarthy's investment in modernist encounters with the in-human materiality of media comports well with another modernist legacy in contemporary media theory. I have in mind here Krauss's pioneering efforts to shake the Greenbergian legacy of medial purity and specificity—one notorious way of keeping one's media clean, and which was being canonized in "Toward a Newer Laocoon" in 1940, the year before Woolf's death. In "A Voyage on the North Sea," Krauss defines "the specificity of mediums, even modernist ones, as differential, self-differing, and thus a layering of conventions never simply collapsed into the physicality of their support" (50). While af-firming the salience of any given medium's physical substrate, she argues for a thinking of media as an "aggregate" condition in which media ontology is defined recursively in their aesthetic instances and reworkings (24). What she offers, as Doane describes it, is a material aesthetics in which "proper to the aesthetic . . . would be a continual reinvention of the medium through a resistance to re-sistance, a transgression of what are given as material limitations,

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which nevertheless requires those material constraints as its field of operations" ("The Indexical" 131).

I hear in Krauss's insistence on medial ontology as aggrega-tive and self-differing something like the technological assemblages everywhere unearthed in C, attentive as McCarthy's language is to both the material specificity of media and their transgressive dis-embedding in C by what is least human in matter.12 C's fidelity to this inhuman dynamism is McCarthy's way of staying faithful to his version of modernism—modernism "not as a movement, nor even a way of thinking, but as an event: an event to which any serious writer has, in some way or another, to engage, and to which they should respond" (McCarthy, "McCarthy's Top 10"). The response may be especially worth hearing now, when influential theories of new media, in their efforts to bring the body back into the produc-tion of information, come packaged with a "new," old vitalism; or when our conceptualizations of contemporary network culture return suspiciously to notions of digital utopia that resurrect Enlightenment models of the self. These, McCarthy's work helps to remind us, may just be our latest political fantasies of technology—an empire of open, dematerialized connection without end or internal limit.13 They too, McCarthy knows, are stained by contingency, matter, and the spectral at the heart of the living. The medial objects of human culture are never, for McCarthy, ways in which humanity overcomes its finitude. Instead, it is just this inhuman mediation at the core of the human and its cultural and media artifacts to which the least sentimental strains of modernism have always been attuned. Serge, McCarthy's least human character, confronts it too near the end of the novel. Asking after the forces motivate his agency, he casts himself as a dirty medium, one sent through "endless counterflows of sediment," a moving decoy or dummy chamber "slowly dragged across the sur-face of events" (280).

Notes

Thanks to Aaron Jaffe for inviting me to participate in the Tom Mc-Carthy/Simon Critchley conference paper "stream" at the Louisville Conference on Literature and Culture Since 1900 in February 2012, as well as the members of the audience for their questions and provoca-tions, especially Jaffe, Pat O'Donnell, Keith Johnson, Kate Marshall, and Seth Morton. Tom McCarthy was a delightful and generous inter-locutor during the panels, a dinner at the aptly named 21C, and in email exchanges since the conference. Many thanks also to Dennis Duncan at Birkbeck College, University of London, for sending me videos of the proceedings at "Calling All Agents: A Symposium on

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the Work of Tom McCarthy," the first academic conference devoted to McCarthy's work, held at Birkbeck in July 2011.

1. See Kirsch's bold subtitle, and beyond that, his enthusiastic appraisal of the book's vanguard status. In "Radio, Archaeology, Literature" an interview with Tom Vandeputte, McCarthy explained the logic of C's terminus: "The year in which C ends, 1922, is the year in which the BBC was founded, Tutankhamen was disinterred and Egypt got its independence. But it is also the year in which James Joyce's Ulyss-es and T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land were both published."

2. See the International Necronautical Society's "Declaration on the Notion of 'The Future.'" For an electronic archive of INS activities, manifestoes, and transmissions, see www.necronauts.org. For an online archive of McCarthy's writings, reviews, and press coverage, see www.surplusmatter.com.

3. This midcentury horizontality is, as I see it, a repudiation of the Greenbergian variant of flatness described in "Toward a New Lao-coon":

Under the influence of the square shape of the canvas, forms tend to become geometrical, and simplified, because simpli-fication is also part of the instinctive accommodation of the medium. But most important of all, the picture plane itself grows shallower and shallower, flattening out and pressing together the fictive planes of depth, until they meet as one upon the real and material plane which is the actual surface of the canvas. (Greenberg 35)

For a helpful discussion of "flat unreality" as "McCarthy's space of literature," see Critchley's "Afterword" to Men in Space (282).

4. For art-historical accounts of these developments see Jones, Lee, and Reiss.

5. Like Hannah Arendt, McCarthy and Grimonprez cast Sputnik as a midcentury figure for the inhuman in the human condition; see Ar-endt's prologue to The Human Condition (1958).

6. For an influential reading of modernist poetics and the radio, one strongly informed by Maurice Blanchot, see Tiffany. For more recent work on modernism and the radio, see Campbell, and Cohen, et al.

7. For a discussion of Freudian psychoanalysis along these lines, see Doane, Emergence 68.

8. For an interesting discussion of the logic of reenactment in contem-porary art and experimental film, see Pierson.

9. This happy synchronism is not quite historically accurate: Bourdin's failed plot took place on February 15, 1894, while the first private exhibition of the Lumière Cinématographe was held on March 22,

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1895, and the first public exhibition took place on December 28, 1895.

10. For an intriguing exploration of the "forensic aesthetic" of contem-porary art, see Rugoff.

11. See Zielinski, as well as Derrida's exploration of mal d'archive, and the way the archivist always produces more archive, in Archive Fever.

12. For a rigorous discussion of this technical dynamism in Derrida's understanding of the inhuman, see Cheah, Inhuman Conditions and "Mattering."

13. The most influential of such theories is Mark B. N. Hansen's New Philosophy for New Media. For a compelling critique of the "open architecture" model of utopia that underlies Hansen's work, see Amiran.

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