8.12 Later that evening I sat down, once more, to plot the framework of my Great Report. The clearing I’d made on my desktop was still there, untouched and un-encroached-on — save by a small, dead moth whose corpse had landed there after whatever parachute it had put its faith in had failed. I swept it aside; and, once again, the space was pristine, perfect, blank. Tabula rasa: I pronounced the words aloud as I surveyed the leather, breathing in its smell of cut grass and detergent. Just sitting before it, above it, filled me with a sense of infinite possibility. I pictured myself as an industrialist, viewing a clearing in the forest where his factory would go; or as an urban planner, given carte blanche to design from scratch a new, magnificent cosmopolis; a mathematician, a topologist or trigonometrist, contemplating space in its most pure and abstract form; an explorer, sea-discoverer, world-conqueror from centuries gone by, standing at his prow as his dominion-to-be hove into view: this virgin territory that he would shape after himself and make his own. Placing my laptop in the middle — the exact, geometric centre — of this clearing, I opened a fresh document and stretched its borders out until it filled my screen entirely. As I did this, though, just as the document’s expanding lower boundary reached the bottom of my screen, my finger momentarily lost contact with the glide-pad; when the finger made contact again, it caused the applications docked invisibly at the screen’s base to pop up, impinging on the clean neutrality both of the screen and of my mind. Trying to hide them once more, I accidentally tapped on the docked news page, which slipped from its box, inflating as it rose, like some malicious genie, taking the screen over — and in an instant, all the extraneous clutter, all the world-debris, that I’d so painstakingly eliminated flooded back into the clearing, ruining it.
8.13 The news page carried new news of the oil spill — of the current one, I mean, the one that had been playing out for the last few weeks. The worst-case scenario, the event that the authorities, environmentalists and the oil-company itself most feared, had come to pass: the oil had reached the mainland. The coastline was snowy; more than just snowy, it was completely snow-covered, swaddled in a huge, unbroken blanket of the stuff. The contact between oil and snow, the impact of the former on the latter, was being shown in close-up, from the land, and long-shot, from a plane — but the same effect could be seen in both views. The snow seemed to absorb and drink in the oil in an almost thirsty way: to blot it up, then pass it onwards through its mass, as though, within the architecture of its vaulted and communicating chambers, their crystalline ice-particles, a series of distribution hubs were secreted. Still sitting at my desk, looking down at the laptop, at the picture on its screen, the streaks and clusters taking shape as oil spread slowly inland, I saw ink polluting paper, words marring the whiteness of a page.
9
9.1 The next week, I flew off to Frankfurt to speak at a conference. It was held in a new, glitzy building: smart-seats, ambient lighting, corporate logos everywhere. The papers delivered there weren’t really papers as such — more like sales pitches or motivational speeches, each of which, backed by the latest AV software, advanced a “paradigm” for the delectation of assembled delegates. The event was invitational; to be invited was an honour, confirmation that the invitee belonged to the world’s very top rank of paradigm-advancement. I was met at the airport by a man holding a card on which my name was neither handwritten nor printed but rather embossed, then dropped at a hotel that boasted not one but two saunas (the first dry, in the Finnish style; the other, in Turkish, wet). The theme of the conference was — for once! — not The Future. It was The Contemporary. This was even worse. It was, of course, a topic to which I’d been giving much thought: radiant now-ness, Present-Tense Anthropology™ and so forth. But I wasn’t ready to give all that stuff, all those half-formed notions, an outing. Besides which, I’d started to harbour doubts about their viability. These doubts themselves, I told myself in the days before the conference, were what I’d air. To air the doubt about a concept before airing the concept itself was, I thought, quite intellectually adventurous; it might go down well.
9.2 Talks were limited to fifteen minutes each. The other speakers’ PowerPoint presentations moved with sub-second precision from one image to the next as they talked with evangelic zeal of neuroscience, genomics, bio-informatics and a dozen other concepts currently enjoying their moment in the sun. When my turn came, I didn’t have any slides or clips. I started by saying that The Contemporary was a suspect term. Better to speak, I proposed, of a moving ratio of modernity: as we straddle the dual territories of a present that, despite its directional drive, is slipping backwards into past, and a future that will always remain notional, we’re carried through a constantly mutating space in which modernity itself is no more than a credo in the process of becoming “dated,” or at least historical. The term epoch, I informed my listeners, originally meant “point of view,” as in the practice of astronomy; only later, I said, did it start being used to organize the world into fixed periods. This latter use, I argued, was misguided. Instead of making periodic claims which, since they can’t be empirically justified, only produce an infinite regress of detail and futile quibbling over boundaries and definitions, we should return to understanding epoch as a place from which one looks at things. From that perspective, I went on — the perspective of shifting perspectives — we can still pose the question of the difference introduced by one day, one year, one decade, in relation to another. To understand that question fully, though (I concluded), what we require is not contemporary anthropology but rather an anthropology of The Contemporary. Ba-boom: that was my “out.” My talk was met with silence, then, when my audience realized that I’d finished, a smattering of polite clapping. No one approached me to discuss it afterwards. Later that evening, in the “wet” or Turkish sauna, I recognized one of the other delegates. He recognized me too, but broke off eye-contact immediately before slipping away into the steam.
9.3 While I was in Frankfurt, I dropped in on a friend of mine who ran the city’s anthropology museum. The museum was housed in two nineteenth-century villas: one for the public galleries, the other for administration. I met her in her office in the second; when she picked her coat up and announced that she would show me the collection, I presumed that we were heading for the first. But instead she led me to her car, and we drove for ten or fifteen minutes to an industrial part of town. There it is, she said, as the car double-bumped over an old freight-train track. Following her gaze, I saw a concrete bunker rising up beside the road. We pulled into a docking bay beneath this building, parked beneath huge arches and got out. Around us, large as totem poles, parts of old electric circuits lay about: fuse-boxes, regulators and capacitators, ribbed ceramic insulators and so on. The building used to house a transponder for the city’s transport system, Claudia explained; that, she said, pointing to the grille that slid by as we took the roomy, doorless lift up to the fourth floor, was a Faraday cage.