Satin Island (5 page)

5.

5.1
On the Company. No: on companies; on companies and crowds; whatever. In the fifties and sixties, people like me started conducting studies of corporations, presenting their findings back to the academy, for consecration as pure, unconditional knowledge. But, sometime in the seventies or eighties, all that changed: now anthropologists found themselves working
for
the corporation, not
on
it. So it was with me. It was the Company itself within whose remit I was operating. To whom did I report? The Company. Nonetheless, it was hard not to analyze the Company’s own make-up along anthropological lines. In fact, it was impossible. Forget family, or ethnic and religious groupings: corporations have supplanted all these as the primary structure of the modern tribe. My use of the word
tribe
here isn’t fanciful; it’s
modern
that’s the dubious term. The logic underlying the corporation is completely primitive. The corporation has its gods, its fetishes, its high priests and its outcasts (Madison was right about that part—just wrong in thinking this makes it exotic). It has its rituals, beliefs and superstitions, its pools of homespun expertise and craft and, conversely, its Unknowns or Unspokens. Peyman understood this. When he
first hired me he told me that the Company needed an anthropologist because its entire field of operations lay in analyzing groups, picking apart their operations and reporting back on this, while at the same time both appreciating and refining its own status as a group,
de facto
subject to the same ongoing (and productive) scrutiny. At base, it’s all already anthropology, he said.

5.2
Peyman said lots of things. That’s what he did: put ideas out, put them in circulation. He did this via publications, websites, talks at conferences; via the quasi-governmental think tanks he was constantly invited to head up, or the interviews he’d give in the trade press. His ideas took the form of aphorisms:
Location is irrelevant: what matters is not where something
is,
but rather where it leads … What are objects? Bundles of relations …
 Each of these nuggets was instantly memorable, eminently quotable. On urbanism:
A city has no “character”; it is a schizoid headspace, filled with the cacophony of contradiction
. On design:
The end point to which it strives is a state in which the world is one hundred percent synthetic, made by man, for man, according to his desires …
 These aphorisms were his currency; he traded in them, converting them, via the Company, into tangible undertakings that had measurable outcomes, which in turn helped spawn more concepts and more aphorisms, always at a profit. The concepts were all generated in-house and collectively: that’s how his outfit worked. We’d come at briefs, and at the big ones in particular, from several angles, bringing
all our intellectual disciplines to bear on them—the Company had people who’d trained as economists, philosophers, mathematicians, architects and who knows what else on its books—and, slapping the pertinent offerings of each of these down on the collective table (or up on the collective sheet of glass), formulate new concepts that Peyman, as the Company’s public face and poster-boy, would then launch into circulation. Seeing these in print, observing them being cited, appropriated, sampled, cross-bred, both by others and by Peyman himself, was like encountering an amalgam of our own minds, our own thoughts, returning to us on a feedback loop. Without Peyman, though, without the general—and generative—mechanism he had set in place and over which he constantly presided, we would never have come up with these thoughts in the first place: they were quite beyond us.

5.3
Thus Peyman, for us, was everything and nothing. Everything because he connected us, both individually and severally, our scattered, half-formed notions and intuitions, fields of research which would otherwise have lain fallow, found no bite and purchase on the present moment—he connected all these to a world of action and event, a world in which stuff might actually
happen;
connected us, that is, to our own age. And not just us: it worked the same way for the Company’s clients. That’s what they were buying into: connection and connectedness—to ideas, expertise, the universe of consequence, the age. It sometimes seemed as though the very concept of
“the age” wouldn’t have been fully thinkable without Peyman; seemed that he invented, re-invented it with every passing utterance, or simply (with the overlay of continents and times and cultures stored up in his very genes, his mixed Persian, South American and European ancestry) by existing. He connected the age to itself, and, in so doing, called it into being. And, at the same time, he was nothing. Why? Because, in playing this role, he underwent a kind of reverse camouflage (some anthropologists do speak of such a thing). The concepts he helped generate and put in circulation were so perfectly tailored
to
the age on whose high seas they floated, their contours so perfectly aligned with those of the reality from which they were drawn and onto which they constantly remapped themselves, that you’d find yourself coming across some new phenomenon, some trend—in architecture or town planning or brand strategy or social policy, in Europe, the States, India, it didn’t matter what or where—and saying:
Oh, Peyman came up with a term for this;
or:
That’s a Peyman thing
. You’d find yourself saying this several times a week—that is, seeing tendencies Peyman had named or invented, Peymanic paradigms and inclinations, movements and precipitations, everywhere, till he appeared in everything; which is the same as disappearing.

5.4
He disappeared in a quite literal sense for us, his Company underlings. I mean that he was hardly ever actually, in an in-the-flesh way,
there:
on almost any given day he’d be off in Oslo, or São Paulo, or Mumbai, meeting with high-powered
clients, advising presidents 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 had
to
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 fictional entity. Even if it’s real, it’s still a construct. Lots of the Company’s projects have been fictions that became real. For example? asks the interviewer. For example, Peyman answers, the EU commissioned us to imagine what a concrete affirmation of a European commonality might look like—purely speculatively, you understand. So we designed a flag. It didn’t really look much like a flag—more like a rainbow bar-code formed of strips of all the colours of the member-nations’ flags. Once we’d come up with it, we Photoshopped it into a bunch of pictures: of the EC President giving a speech; finance ministers from member-states sitting round a table; even entrances to governmental buildings in a range of European capitals. We’d find a suggestive photo, then adapt it. The images caused a furore. No one stopped to ask if they were real. The conservative press denounced these bar-code ensigns, called them illegitimate; progressives,
though, adopted them, so real ones started springing up. Thus the facts, in this case, followed from the fiction. Fiction was what engendered them and held them in formation. We should view all propositions and all projects this way.

5.7
His most famous riff, perhaps, was about knowledge. Not knowledge
of
anything in particular; just knowledge in and of itself. Who was the last person, he would ask, to enjoy a full command of the intellectual activity of their day? The last
individual
, I mean? It was, he’d answer, Leibniz. He was on top of it all: physics and chemistry, geology, philosophy, maths, engineering, medicine, theology, aesthetics. Politics too. I mean, the guy was
on
it. Like some universal joint in the giant Rubik’s Cube of culture, he could bring it all together, make the arts and sciences dance to the same tune. He died three hundred years ago. Since Leibniz’s time (Peyman would go on), the disciplines have separated out again. They’re now on totally different pages: each in its own stall, shut off from all the others. Our own era, perhaps more than any other, seems to call out for a single intellect, a universal joint to bring them all together once again—seems to demand, in other words, a Leibniz. Yet there will be no Leibniz 2.0. What there
will
be is an endless set of migrations: knowledge-parcels travelling from one field to another, and mutating in the process. No one individual will conduct this operation; it will be performed collectively, with input from practitioners of a range of crafts, possessors of a range of expertise. Migration, mutation, and what I (Peyman
affirmed) call “supercession”: the ability of each and every practice to surpass itself, break its own boundaries, even to the point of sacrificing its own terms and tenets in the breaching; and, in the no-man’s-land between its territory and the next, the blank stretches of the map, those interstitial zones where light, bending and kinking round impossible topographies, produces mirages,
fata morganas
, apparitions, spectres, to combine in new, fantastic and explosive ways. That, he’d say, is the future of knowledge.

5.8
When I went up to meet him on the fifth floor—whenever I went there, I mean—the thing that would impress itself upon me most, the thing I’d most remember afterwards, wasn’t the meeting itself, but rather its peripherals: the angle of approach towards his office; the tap my heels made on the wooden boards; the reflections in the glass partition separating his room from the rest of the floor—reflections of reflections, since the whole floor had (as I mentioned earlier) these glass screens that ghost-doubled one another. The few feet just before this last partition lay within a blind spot whose occupant, or traverser, would be hidden from the rest of the floor’s view—invisible, in other words, to the many people who worked in all the other glass-partitioned spaces. Each time I entered and moved through this stretch, I’d hold my right hand up beside my head and click its fingers—three times,
click-click-click
. I don’t know why I did it; it was a kind of tic, made all the more enjoyable by the knowledge that only
I
would ever experience
or even know about it; in the midst of all the overload and noise, a small, private act, and a small, private enclave for the act’s appreciation. I did it every time I came to visit Peyman—and, each time I did, the couple of seconds it took me to do it merged with the couple of seconds it had taken me to do it last time, and the time before, and every time since I’d first done it, not to mention all the times that I would do it in the future; so I found myself transported, for those—for all those—seconds, into a kind of timelessness in which only this act and its unfolding, this now-eternal
click-click-clicking
of my right hand’s fingers, did or could exist.