Contents
Cover
About the Book
About the Author
Also by Tom McCarthy
Title Page
Transmission and the Individual Remix
Copyright
About the Book
Listen…
A set of signals has been pulsing, repeating, modulating in the airspace of literature…
This essay is an invitation to listen to those signals, as they travel through and shape the work of Aeschylus and Ovid, Rilke, Conrad, Burroughs, Joyce and others. To retune our idea of what a writer does, of what the very act of writing ‘is’. To rethink literature itself along the lines of transmission and reception, signal and noise…
Listen: two times. I repeat…
Message ends.
About the Author
Tom McCarthy was born in 1969 and grew up in London. His creation, in 1999, of the International Necronautical Society (INS), a ‘semi-fictitious organisation’ that combines literature, art and philosophy, has led to publications, installations and exhibitions in galleries and museums around the world, from Tate Britain and the ICA in London to Moderna Museet in Stockholm and The Drawing Center in New York. McCarthy regularly writes on literature and art for publications including The New York Times, The London Review of Books and Artforum. His most recent novel is C, which was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2010.
Also by Tom McCarthy
Remainder
Men in Space
Tintin and the Secret of Literature
C
Transmission and the Individual Remix:
How Literature Works
Transmission and the Individual Remix
How Literature Works
i)
THERE’S A SONG by the German electronic band Kraftwerk called Antenna. It features, amid zaps, beeps and a looping melody that escalates in tone and charge until it nears a kind of ecstasy, a vocoder-filtered voice repeating, mantra-like, the phrase:
I’m the antenna, catching vibration.
You’re the transmitter, give information!
I say ‘repeating’, but in fact a more fitting term would be ‘modulating’: as the tune loops round, the singer inverts the role of sender and receiver – so in the second verse, I become the transmitter and You become the antenna – before reverting these roles back in the third, only to switch them once more in the fourth. The song was released in 1975, on the album Radio-Activity. The same year, a video was produced to accompany the track. You can watch it on YouTube. It shows a giant satellite dish scouring the skies for messages; an electromagnetic wave jumping and writhing on a detector’s screen; and, in keeping with the reversibility attested to by the song’s lyrics, aerials first thirstily soaking up incoming signals, then spewing these back out. In the video, as in the song itself, the question of who transmits and who receives – Who speaks? Who listens? – is deliberately left open; and to this unanswered question we could add a second: What is said?
Why start this essay – about literature and how it works – with a pop song? Let me pause for just a moment before answering that, and affirm, in no uncertain terms, that here, as elsewhere in my writing, I have nothing to say. Indeed, I’d go as far as to claim that no serious writer does. If you’ve got something to say, send a letter to The Guardian, or stand on a crate in Speakers’ Corner: you’re not a writer. This claim is hardly new: it has been made over and over again, by Kafka, Beckett and just about every major writer who ever reflected on the issue. And that’s part of my point. My aim here, in this essay, is not to tell you something, but to make you listen: not to me, nor even to Beckett or Kafka, but to a set of signals that have been repeating, pulsing, modulating in the airspace of the novel, poem, play – in their lines, between them and around them – since each of these forms began. I want to make you listen to them, in the hope not that they’ll deliver up some hidden and decisive message, but rather that they’ll help attune your ear to the very pitch and frequency of its own activity – in other words, that they’ll enable you to listen in on listening itself.
ii)
To talk of origins – beginnings – is always problematic, and especially in the realm of culture. Every groundbreaking or innovative work turns out, when probed a little, to be piggybackingBCOresteiamodernpolisOresteia