Satin Island

by Tom McCarthy

For anthropologists, even the exotic’s not exotic, let alone the everyday.

I took some solace in the thought of them picturing us—me—haremed up with him, bathed in his connective radiance constantly, day after day. Although, of course, I wasn’t: I was sat down in a basement, listening to ventilation.

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.

by. As I listened to him talk about Koob-Sassen, it all made sense, even if it didn’t. Even the fact that it didn’t quite make sense made sense, while he was talking.

my hero finally alights, far up some river, on a tribe so fucking strange he can’t make head or tail of them. This exasperates him too: incomprehensible is no better than banal—it’s just its flip-side. But maybe, just maybe, he reasons, somewhere in between these two extremes—in between understanding so completely that an object’s robbed of its allure (on the one hand) and (on the other one) not understanding anything at all—there might be some “ambiguous instances” in which the balance is just right. These instances, he tells us, would be godsends; they’d provide us with the very reasons, or excuses, for our own existence. But wouldn’t these instances, too (he asks), be cons? Who’s the real dupe of the confusion sown by observations which are carried just far enough to reach the borderline of the intelligible, only to be stopped short there? It’s as though he, Lévi-Strauss himself, were now playing the role of the phony, hand-chancing, pen-wielding

using the Future to confer the seal of truth on these scenarios and assertions, making them absolute and objective simply by placing them within this Future: that’s how we won contracts. Everything, as Peyman said, may be a fiction—but the Future is the biggest shaggy-dog story of all.

if the city was the capital, the seat of empire, then this island was the exact opposite, the inverse—the other place, the feeder, filterer, overflow-manager, the dirty, secreted-away appendix without which the body-proper couldn’t function; yet it seemed, in its very degradation, more weirdly opulent than the capital it served.