#satinisland

[cheioleggo-blog]

Satin Island

... which, in turn, prompted him to pluck me from the dying branches of academia and re-graft me inside the febrile hothouse of his company.

[bibliotique]

Admittedly, the bedside book collection is getting a tad out of hand. 🙈 #books #bookstagram #bookworm #booklover #booklr #bibliophile #reading #bed #alittlelife #theblazingworld #didyoueverhaveafamily #julietwasasurprise #amongothers #satinisland #hanyayanagihara

[mitchellcliftonbarton]

November 1, 2016

Section 4.3 from “Satin Island” by Tom McCarthy.

“Le Pli. While my supposed business, my ‘official’ function, as a corporate ethnographer, was to garner meaning from all types of situation--to extract it, like a physicist distilling some pure, unadulterated essence out of common-mongrel compounds, or a miner drawing gold ore from deep within the earth’s bowels--I sometimes allowed myself to think that, in fact, things were precisely the other way round: that my job was to put meaning in the world, not take it from it. Divining, for the benefit of a breakfast-cereal manufacturer, the social or symbolic role of breakfast (what fasting represents, the significance of breaking it); establishing for them some of the primary axes shaping the way in which the practice of living is, or might be, carried out; and watching the manufacturer then feed that information back into their product and its packaging as they upgraded and refined these, I understood the end-result to be not simply better-tasting cereal or bigger profits for the manufacturer, but rather meaning, amplified and sharpened, for the millions of risers lifting cereal boxes over breakfast tables, tipping out and ingesting their contents. Helping a city council who were thinking of creating parks and plazas but had yet to understand the ethnographic logic driving such an act; laying out for them the history of public (as opposed to private) space, making them grasp what these zones fundamentally embody, what’s at play in them from a political and structural and sacred point of view; and doing this in such a way that this whole history is injected back into the squares, sports-fields and playgrounds millions of citizens will then inhabit--same thing. Down in my office, stirred and lulled by ventilation, I would picture myself as some kind of nocturnal worker, like those men who go out and repair the roads, or check the points and switches on the railway tracks, or carry out a range of covert tasks that go unnoticed by the populace-at-large, but on which the latter’s well-being, even survival, is dependent. While the city sleeps, bakers are baking bread in night-kitchens, milkmen are loading crates onto their floats; and river-men are dredging riverbeds or checking water-levels, while other men in buildings with nondescript exteriors track storm surges and spring- and neap-tides on their screens, and activate the flood defences when this becomes necessary. When the populace-at-large wakes up, they just see the milk there on their doorstep, and the fresh bread in the shop down the street, and the street itself still there, unflooded, un-tsunamied from existence; and they take it all for granted, where in fact these men have put the milk and bread there, and have even, in deploying the flood defences, put the city there as well, put it back there every time they deploy them. That’s what I was doing, too, I told myself. The world functioned, each day, because I’d put meaning back into it the day before. You didn’t notice that I put it there because it was there; but if I’d stopped, you’d soon have known it.”

[invisiblexarchive-blog]

What do I do? I am an anthropologist. Structures of kinship; systems of exchange, barter and gift; symbolic operations lurking on the flipside of the habitual and the banal: identifying these, prising them out and holding them up, kicking and wriggling, to the light — that’s my racket. When these events (events! If you want those, you’d best stop reading now) took place, I found myself deployed not to some remote jungle, steppe or tundra, there to study hunter-gatherers and shamans, but to a business. Deployed there, what’s more, not by the austere dictates of a Royal Anthropological Society or National University, but by the very business to which I’d been dispatched: I was the in-house ethnographer for a consultancy. The Company (let’s continue to call it that) advised other companies how to contextualize and nuance their services and products. It advised cities how to brand and re-brand themselves; regions how to elaborate and frame regenerative strategies; governments how to narrate their policy agendas — to the press, the public and, not least, themselves. We dealt, as Peyman liked to say, in narratives.

Tom McCarthy, Satin Island

[svamfafinearts]

Read the Salon piece about the collaboration between Johan Grimonprez (Faculty) and Tom McCarthy for this short film based on McCarthy's new book, Satin Island here.