Tom McCarthy, in the Guardian, on the links between technology and the novel:
Where the liberal-humanist sensibility has always held the literary work to be a form of self-expression, a meticulous sculpting of the thoughts and feelings of an isolated individual who has mastered his or her poetic craft, a technologically savvy sensibility might see it completely differently: as a set of transmissions, filtered through subjects whom technology and the live word have ruptured, broken open, made receptive. I know which side I’m on: the more books I write, the more convinced I become that what we encounter in a novel is not selves, but networks; that what we hear in poems is (to use the language of communications technology) not signal but noise. The German poet Rilke had a word for it: Geräusch, the crackle of the universe, angels dancing in the static.
As part of an evening devoted to Freud and Surrealism at the Barbican Art Gallery on 29 July, the International Necronautical Society will hold forth on “Architecture, Neurosis and Death”:
7-10 PM: International Necronautical Society INS Commission on Crypts: Architecture, Neurosis and Death
An evening of discussions and interrogations organised by the International Necronautical Society. The INS is a semi-fictitious organisation founded by author and artist Tom McCarthy, closely modelled on the European avant-gardes of the early twentieth century. McCarthy will be joined by award-winning novelist Chloe Aridjis and scholar Richard Martin as they interrogate acclaimed writer and psychoanalyst Darian Leader and leading architect Patrick Lynch. The proceedings will be monitored by INS Chief of Propaganda Anthony Auerbach and INS Environmental Engineer Laura Hopkins.
First posted: Monday, July 26th, 2010.
