Satin Island by Tom McCarthy Read Free Book Online

and mayors, or just generally helping draw up blueprints for the future of the world. Sometimes I almost doubted his existence. Not literally, of course: I knew that the dusty-skinned man bearing Peyman’s name was Peyman. But I wondered sometimes whether, like in that Hitchcock movie North by Northwest , whose lead character finds himself inhabiting a role that’s been established elsewhere and already, Peyman didn’t function as some kind of construct, a convenient front. For whom? I don’t know. What Machiavellian cabal, what shady interest group, what nefarious—if inspired—alliance of the influential and manipulative, with what tools and channels at their beck and call, could maintain this type of illusion? In reality, no such cabal was needed. Gods, for many tribes, are self-sustaining, and perpetuate their operation without ranks of priests pulling the witch-hut’s levers and ventriloquising for the carved idols. Like a god, Peyman withdrew, secluded himself from us, took up spectral residence within some sacred recess full of ministers and moguls over whom he held sway, not the other way around. I’d imagine him consorting with them all, surrounded by them like a sultan by his harem. But, of course, for them as well, he was secluded; from them, too, withdrawn. He, after all, would drop into their offices and ministries, then jet back out again. They probably envisioned him consorting with us back in his (to their minds) mystical headquarters—and (who knows?) maybe also wondered, in their more reflective moments, whether he wasn’t some kind of collective fantasy, a self-sustaining deity whose nature they didn’t really understand but in whom they still hadto believe , because, well, if not him, then … what? 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.
    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. I read this for the first time,long before I worked for him, in Creative Review; then later, with slight variations, in Design Monthly, Contemporary Business Journal and Icon .
    5.6 Another concept that he put about a lot, that was much quoted: narrative. If I had, he’d say, to sum up, in a word, what we (the Company, that is) essentially do, I’d choose not consultancy or design or urban planning , but fiction . Fiction? asks the interviewer (this one comes from Consulting Today —but he says the same thing in his Urban Futures profile; and in the RIBA transcripts). Fiction, Peyman repeats. The city and the state are fictional conditions; a business is a