Late-Night Calls

Well, where are we?

And why am I here?

We worked together on an exhibition I guest-curated at KunstNernes Hus in Oslo, a brutalist building that would not be out of place among some of the architecture in this neighborhood. We chose the title Holding Pattern for the exhibition, that is Warteschleife, because the show was about the sense of humans being embedded in technological systems that they don’t fully understand. When you’re in an airplane in a holding pattern, you understand that you are controlled by some big network of radar and radio technology. There is also a sense of choreography. Holding patterns are very complex and very beautiful, like vorticist geometric shapes. We had a work in the show by Harun Farocki, Deep Play (2007), which is all about the patterns and choreographies of a football game. Not just the match: it also shows the police controlling the crowds in the stadium, and the media controlling which camera angle to film it from. We had a piece by Susan Philipsz, Ambient Air (2021), where she’s flying above Tegel Airport, Berlin, and hums Brian Eno’s Music for Airports into a radio tower over a radio headset. The humming of her voice was transmitted throughout the airport. And we had your work, Freeroam À Rebours, Mod#I.1 (2016).

It was based on Grand Theft Auto.

Some of your earlier works sampled self-optimization and motivational speeches, and mixed them with scripts from megachurches and car manuals. The way you collaged it made the monologues glitch and interrupt, like a Gertrude Stein text. The ideology and the aesthetic of the game are about the fantasy of smooth traversal of space, but you managed to draw out the exact opposite.

This is where our work intersects.

In my last couple of books, the technological matrix has been more evident. It is harder to ignore it in the age of smartphones, when algorithms wage war and decide who lives or dies. Even before that, in Remainder (2005), the first novel I published, which is not really about technology per se, but it has a logic of people being trained. The protagonist is in an accident and has lost some motor function. He has to be trained by physiotherapists to do basic movements by repeating them, again and again and again, even if he is just picking up a cup of coffee. After that, he is ninety-five percent recovered, but he still moves like your dancers in Free Roam. He is imperfect when he walks down the street, not doing it quite right. He has a sense that he is imitating the ideal movement of walking down the street rather than just walking: he is reenacting it. He has moments where he watches other people, and he can identify a group of cool teenagers moving and turning in a particular way, and recognize which ad or movie they have internalised and reproduced. Interestingly, when the book came out, one reviewer suggested that I’d read “Über das Marionettentheater” (1810) by Heinrich von Kleist and that this book was an updated version of it. But I hadn’t, so I immediately read it. Kleist’s idea is that marionettes are perfect because they have no consciousness. Gravity and physics make them flow into their movements. Even the best dancer can never be as good as a marionette because there will always be this gap, a décollage, a disconnect. The short circuitry of being aware of what they’re meant to be doing as they do it–it is interrupted. Kleist turns this into a theological configuration when he says you have to either be a marionette: a puppet without consciousness, or a God with total consciousness. Anything in between is imperfect, and that is the condition of being human. This theme seems to run through literature, because even earlier than Kleist, in Cervantes’s Don Quixote (1605), it is almost like a Grand Theft Auto video game fantasy. He wants to move across a landscape in a particular way. He aims to inhabit a narrative in which he is a knight who kills giants. But he doesn’t get it right because his horse is lame, and he’s an idiot. The visor of his helmet is made out of cardboard, and he can’t see. He falls and reboots. There are interesting moments in your film, and they connect directly with Remainder. There is a scene in the novel in which the protagonist reenacts the death of a local gangster. He wants to play the role of the victim himself, again and again and again, to experience the almost transcendental moment of being shot, like a martyr–but without actually dying. In your work, you concentrate on the moment where someone is shot, and they fall but then bounce back up.

They are in limbo.

I guess for every marionette there is a puppeteer, right? You get this a lot in David Lynch's movies. In these technological worlds, there exists the fantasy of a control room somewhere, especially in Inland Empire (2006), where there is an inner chamber with mechanical rabbits. In Mulholland Drive (2001), you have a strange meeting with a little man called Mr. Roque in a control room. He speaks into a microphone and seems to be issuing instructions.

He is. His network is everywhere, and he is speaking through code. It is very paranoid, conspiratorial, a structure that Thomas Pynchon’s novels often play with. Where is the secret backroom where all of this is being manipulated from?

It is good architecture. Beautiful public libraries and curved cinemas.

We just walked past that big monument; they’d removed the fasces but not the writing.

You mentioned Futurism as well. Marinetti is such an important figure for modernism, and he started on the left but became a fascist. His work is important to me as a writer. I couldn’t have written my novel C (2010) with all its reflections on man multiplied through the machine age, and I don’t think Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari would have written A Thousand Plateaus (1980), or Donna Haraway would have written her Cyborg Manifesto (1985), had it not been for Marinetti. That high modernist moment is interesting. You had Gabriele d’Annunzio and Ezra Pound. These are good artists. In the last decade or so, a young Italian ‘post-fascist’ group has taken up Pound’s name, calling itself Casa Pound. But if we’re thinking about technology and the figure of the worker, let’s consider Ernst Jünger: An important writer, but also a German fascist. He wrote a book about the worker as a machine-like assemblage of body parts–like in your piece Free Roam, when you consider how parts move and how they are integrated into an aesthetic and social order. But he has a left-wing parallel in a figure like Aleksei Gastev, from whom I stole a lot for my last book, The Making of Incarnation (2021). Until he was killed by Stalin, he was a committed communist, an artist who believed that factories, tools, and the physical gestures of proletarian labor are a way of liberating not just the workers from capitalism, but also from bourgeois, humanist individualism, unlocking that reactionary configuration into something expanded and socialist. It is interesting how close Gastev is to Jünger, although one is far left and the other far right. Maybe Rome is the ideal place to talk about this, a city full of ruins and ruined projects. What do you do with all this stuff? Is it toxic? Some people say, don’t touch Heidegger, he is a Nazi. I think it is interesting that many of the people who took the opposite approach to this–Hannah Arendt, Jacques Derrida, Emmanuel Levinas–are Jewish. There is this amazing moment in Derrida’s book, The Post Card: from Socrates to Freud and beyond (1980), where he writes about Heidegger in relation to philosophy and being, postal systems, and communication. There is a long footnote where he says that at 1am, when he was typing up these notes, the telephone rang and the operator said there was a long-distance call from America, and that there is a Martine or Martini Heidegger on the line, who wants you to pay for the call. Do you accept? Heidegger had been dead for four years at this point. Derrida was listening to the static, the Geräusch. He thinks he can hear voices on the other end, and he says, no, this is a joke, I don’t accept. He hangs up. Then he has a footnote to the footnote that says, of course, I accept. I will always accept that the network of my hook-ups is on the burdensome side, and I need more than one switchboard to digest the overload. A beautiful moment! It’s probably the most important moment in the history of philosophy, maybe after the poisoning of Socrates: the moment where Derrida could have said no or yes, and he says neither. I’m not paying–but then, like Joyce’s Molly Bloom, he says yes.

He says no to the call, but in the book, and through the often-repeated words j’accepte (which is also Jacques and the seven–sept–letters of his last name), he lets Heidegger flow through that moment and through the rest of his work. I guess so much of our work is navigating toxic ruins, and the question is what to build from them.

I owe that passage, in which the character is daydreaming his way into a video game, to your work, and to a couple of pieces by Harun Farocki. I started looking at GTA gaming sequences on YouTube, and it seemed very classical. Tomorrow I’m recording a discussion for the London Review of Books about Frankenstein (1818) by Mary Shelley, and this monster, who again moves imperfectly and is neither alive nor dead. He is a technological creation and goes around trying to be good. But he always just kills people. Then his inventor is trying to kill him. Who is the agent, who is the puppet? In gaming, is it the person playing this game? Or is it the designers who have plotted it? My new novel is about the law. The hero is a jurist, a legal theorist at the Court of Justice of the European Union. But he’s also a drug addict. He leaks secret, sensitive documents to shadowy networks that have links to Silicon Valley and Moscow. I’m fascinated by this relation to the law and criminality in Frankenstein or Grand Theft Auto: the ambiguous situation where the hero is at once an outlaw, or, to put it in Agamben’s term, a homo sacer–a person outside the law who is nonetheless contained by the legal system, but as an exception. The avatar in Grand Theft Auto is a criminal who goes around stealing cars and killing people. But he is almost like an agent of the law, like the gun-slinging sheriff in the Wild West, Clint Eastwood, or the hero of High Noon (1952), who has to kill everyone in order to create justice. I find that ambiguity fascinating. Before my character was a jurist, he was a surveyor in the British army in the second Iraq war. I found out in my research that the vocabulary of law and justice arises from the vocabulary of geometry and surveying: measuring, ruling, règles, Regeln, Recht. The idea of right, as in right angles, and something being ‘justified’, comes from geometry. It has to do with the apportioning of space, the demarcation of boundaries, and the laying out of geometries of ontological and political civic space.

Visually and aesthetically, the glitches are incredibly beautiful. They are like collages or assemblages, cubist and surrealist, of different bits of a body, cars, and guns.

I found out that the technical term for the mistakes in a visual interface is an artefact–a synonym for glitch. Like an object in a Roman museum or a work of art.