Headless Commercial Thriller
Reflections on Alexander Proven’s article about the Headless project on triplecanopy:
Headless means a break from hierarchy? But how does anyone break from hierarchy?
One notably disturbing instance comes in Anthony Trollope’s Can You Forgive Her?: Alice Vavasor must be forgiven for attempting to break from hierarchical marriage, and when you forgive her, because the narrator asks you to, you participate in her self-chastisement, yet another laceration upon her killed identity. Once married, Alice slips away metaphorically and literally into Grey. Hierarchy proves too powerful; its entrenchment in Trollope’s Victorian society is too strong, and eventually everyone must yield to it, or be crushed by its divined structural force.
How could Alice have overcome hierarchical marriage? She could have kept secrets. However, the only character that kept secrets, George, ends up on a murderous rampage and flees to America. His enflamed and isolated wanderings around London parallel Raskolnikov’s, arguably schizophrenic, wanderings around St. Petersburg. I bring in Dostoevsky because his novels are constructed on hierarchies. Crime and Punishment is full of pyramid structures; even the color scheme has a hierarchy ranging from life to death. Crime and Punishment and Can You Forgive Her? were published just two the years apart: the latter in 1864, and the former in 1866. Though Trollope’s an unorthodox, western society is often incomparable to Dostoevsky’s Orthodox East, they’re both controlled by hierarchy. And, each novel feels the moral pull of an offshore vacuum. George’s character resembles Svidrigialov, Raskolnikov’s homicidal double, who jokingly throws out the option of flying to America in a hot air balloon, but ends up simply shooting himself.
For these 19th century characters, America is an offshore; these are characters whose conscience’s woes are bound with their bodies and need a physical palliative—a new environment. Keep in mind, though Raskolnikov doesn’t kill himself, imprisonment in Siberia offers a possible moral redemption through complete bodily control.
Are the contemporary Offshores that Goldin+Senneby focusing on similar to this world of genuine escape? Angus Cameron, a major character in the Headless project, argues that the offshore, or xenospace, Sovereign Group of today, attack contemporary hierarchies by creating a space where money escapes to and vanishes. They are vacuums that consume the West’s symbol of power, and, perhaps, have begun to sever this power source.
In 2006, Goldin+Senneby began to investigate one particular offshore company, Headless Ltd.. They believed it linked to Bataille’s 1936 secret society Acéphale, and decided to explore the links between Acéphale, Headless Ltd., and Sovereign Group as chain links to a potential whole. Cameron has gone so far as to conjecture that Sovereign Group’s worldly effect correlates with the original agenda of Acéphale so strongly that he cannot help to, at least, consider that Sovereign Group is Acéphale’s contemporary form.
From what is currently online, this is the extent of their investigation: that these companies or secret societies do exists; that they conspicuously correlate. What draws the most attention to this work is the form they are presenting their investigation in; its form matches its content.
How does a secret society affect a fictional space? The hired, yet completely visible, ghostwriter, John Barlow, attempted to write a successful crime thriller narrating the investigation, but at some point his own character became too real or himself too unreal, and the editor of triplecanopy was dragged into the mess. By the end of Provan’s introduction to the forthcoming novel, to be published by triplecanopy, a decidedly uncommercial publishing outlet, we wonder if Provan is not at the center of the novel. There’s a hint that he has been tricked into writing it, or has consciously allowed himself to be tricked by Barlow. At what point does Provan’s introduction become fictional? From the beginning, it reads like a novel, with an external narrator who maybe focalizes through the Nordic modernist furniture. Then we are drawn through the intricacies of the project, and seamlessly weave into the travel-blogs of John Barlow, who both uses the blog to safeguard his identity, and to further fictionalize himself in the project.
The novel’s process dizzyingly displays how this type of secret society, with a brooding power of its own, backed by money, slashes semblances of reality. How secrets, when effective, cannot create mainstream realism; instead the novel creates a realm with jarringly missing or false parts. Its framework is systematic but its product is chaos, and we’ll never know who or what caused these pains of indeterminacy.
Is the only person completely doped by this whole scheme the Academic, who gives surprisingly engaging yet nervously serious lectures on the topic? Right now, he seems the least self aware in the project, the most willing to follow its structure, leaving the others to dance around him. In the last statements of his youtube lecture, he offers the contrary opinion that Sovereign Group is by no means headless but multi-headed, and functions on a hierarchy; he leaves us off with that to ponder. It’s like a brief moment where he, the least self-conscious character, catches a glimmer of the surface, but can’t figure out how to swim there.
I look forward to the novel’s publication. The project shows how the novel’s form is not antagonistic to conceptual art but deeply akin to it, and will thrive with it.
It’s hard to imagine that so much of the project was already taken from the introduction. I would even suggest that the introduction positions itself as above the novel, as it’s head. But will the novel rise above this position? It will be difficult for a print version of the novel to subsume its introduction’s online publishing technique, which shows the videos, blogs, art, and personal websites of its real life/questionably real characters.
To return to my first thoughts on 19th century novels that have offshore possibilities: for those entangled in these places, a fine line exists between opportunity for renewed life and its opposite of chosen death. Michael Haneke’s film Der Siebente Kontinent can leave us with the image of a thriller where the line is crossed, but we can’t say quite when, and we don’t want to believe that the reason was narrated by the film. Do contemporary offshores only create escapes of renewal?
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