Surplus Matter

The International Necronautical Society will hold a general meeting in London on Monday 14 December to mark the 10th anniversary of the publication of the INS’s founding manifesto.

Tom McCarthy interviewed about the International Necronautical Society in French weekly magazine Le Nouvel Observateur.

“Trying to beat death isn’t interesting — any dumb Christian thinks that’s possible.” Tom McCarthy, General Secretary of the International Necronautical Society (INS), firmly believes in the virtues of demanding the impossible: “What was interesting was launching an absurd, metaphor-laden conceit and using it as a tool and structure to make meaning happen.” The absurd conceit in question — “death is a type of space which we intend to map, enter, colonise and, eventually, inhabit” — was contained in the organisation’s founding manifesto drafted ten years ago. The sheer barminess of such a mission statement placed it squarely “in the zone of silence and impossibility from which,” according to the INS, “all good art stems”.

Andrew Gallix on the International Necronautical Society in the summer 2009 issue of Flux Magazine.

We begin by congratulating the Obama Administration on commissioning this report from the INS. Turning to an organization whose thinking is steeped in literature, philosophy, and the arts in the hope of acquiring insight into the economic recession and suggestions as to how this hardship might be overcome may to some smack of desperation. Yet the INS commends the administration’s decision to do so as both courageous and enlightened. In (implicitly) acknowledging the critical role played by art in creating (and subverting) value, President Obama has, symbolically at least, righted the wrong done to the poet Seanchan in W. B. Yeats’s play The King’s Threshold.

Simon Critchley and Tom McCarthy’s “Interim Report on Recessional Aesthetics” from the June 2009 issue of Harper’s Magazine.

Tom McCarthy and Simon Critchley publish the International Necronautical Society’s Interim Report on Recessional Aesthetics in the June 2009 issue of Harper’s Magazine.

A link to a Russian radio (Svobodanews) feature on the International Necronautical Society.

Really good art and literature is always political—perhaps all the more so the less directly it seems to be. In a way (I’m being provocative here, but I believe this, too), engaging with the symbolic order directly, with the realm of meaning, hacking right into its source code, is more radical than taking meaning for granted in order to simply make a statement.

Tom McCarthy takes part in a roundtable in the latest issue of Bookforum.

I’ve been working with Tom McCarthy for nearly ten years now. It began as this strange project of trying to construct an avant-garde group along the lines of the Surrealists and the Futurists, and to do that in an impersonal form, to write collectively and construct manifestos and develop a Soviet-style aesthetic we’ve used in the events we’ve done. It’s fascinating to inhabit the persona of society, when me and Tom write, it’s genuinely interesting. He’s a novelist, I’m a philosopher: we pull in different directions; it’s very interesting. In many ways, we’re going back to what we were speaking about, we’re trying to do for death what the Situationists did for sex, that’s one way of looking at it. How serious is it? It’s serious, the ideas are absolutely serious, if you read the declaration we did at the Tate, it’s shot through with ideas I’ve developed elsewhere and ideas Tom’s developed elsewhere, but we do it in the form of a conceit, using actors to play us. Because they might actually be better than us. That’s the awful truth.

An interview with INS Chief Philosopher Simon Critchley from 3:AM Magazine.

The Joint Statement was presented at Tate Britain this January and revolves around the notion of “originary inauthenticity” — the trauma of materiality which prevents us from feeling at one with ourselves or the world. Art and literature frequently try to deal with this problem by sublimating matter and “elevating it into form”. Necronauts reject this temptation — they are “modern lovers of debris” who choose to “celebrate the imperfection of matter”. McCarthy points out that “what makes the trajectory of Yeats’s work so fascinating is the shift from early idealism to late materialism, And that’s where Joyce begins: debris, detritus, fragments, Stephen Dedalus squelching rubbish on the beach. That’s the landscape that has to be navigated, here, now — and celebrated, not transcended.”

Andrew Gallix on the International Necronautical Society in the March issue of Dazed & Confused.

The video of the controversial Tate Declaration is now up on the Tate’s website.