Satin Island

by Tom McCarthy

5.5 The Company’s logo was a giant, crumbling tower. It was Babel, of course, the old biblical parable. It embodied one of Peyman’s signature concepts. Babel’s tower, he’d say, is usually taken to be a symbol of man’s hubris. But the myth, he’d carry on, has been misunderstood. What actually matters isn’t the attempt to reach the heavens, or to speak God’s language. No: what matters is what’s left when that attempt has failed. This ruinous edifice (he’d say), which serves as a glaring reminder that its would-be occupants are scattered about the earth, spread horizontally rather than vertically, babbling away in all these different tongues—this tower becomes of interest only once it has flunked its allotted task. Its ruination is the precondition for all subsequent exchange, all cultural activity. And, on top of that, despite its own demise, the tower remains: you see it there in all the paintings—ruined, but still rising with its arches and its buttresses, its jagged turrets and its rusty scaffolding. What’s valuable about it is its uselessness. Its uselessness sets it to work: as symbol, cipher, spur to the imagination, to productiveness. The first move for any strategy of cultural production, he’d say, must be to liberate things—objects, situations, systems—into uselessness.