CallingAll Agents

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Society
Necronautical
GeneralSecretary'sReportto the International
2003
Calling All Agents
Generalsecretary'sReportto the International
Necronautical
society
Transmission, Death, Technology

by Tom McCarthy

VargasOrganisation,
London
2003
 Necronautical
the lnternational society' My first'
calling All Agents rs my second reportto
(whichgrew out of our 200'l residencyat the Austrian
Navigationwas Atwaysa DifficultArf
mapping,craft, matterand song. Thesethemes
Cu|tura||nstitute)'|ookedat the themeso{
oueequegcopylng
or'moments':Melville's
were playedout aroundseveral'nodesl'figures'
leadingFerdinandaroundProspero'sisland
his tattoosonto a coffin lid, shakespeare'sAriel
wi th h i s m us ic , Dona|d C a m p b e l | c ra s h i n g h i s Btu e bi rdi ntoC oni stonW ater,andsoon,
To w a rds t heendof t ha tre p o rt' o n e p a rti c u | a rmo ment,orrathersetofmoments' cameto
'l in whichthe hero
acquirespecialsignificance: the scenesin Jeancocteau's 950 ltlmorphee
p i cksupont her adios h o rt| i n e s o fp o e try tra n s m i i te dfromastati onnooneknow s,These
months.we suspectedthattheywerea
scenescontinuedto intriguethe INS in the following
cocteau'sfilm but alsowithinart' life and
cipherfor largerprocessesat play- not onlywithin
w h a ta n t hr opo|ogis t s a n d p s y c h o a n a | y s ts c a | | T h e S ymbo| i corderasaw ho| e,sostrongdi d
th i ssu s pic iongr owt h a te v e n tu a | | y a d e c i s i o n w a s t akenbythel N S E xecuti veC ounci | toset
otherbroadcasters to carryits signal'to con-
uo a radiobroadcastingunitand,by encouraglng
network'
structa radiotransmission
To|ay t hegr oundfo rth i s s c h e me ,w e c o n v e n e d theS econdFi rstC ommi tteeH eari ngs;
by Laura
Transmission,Death,Technology in London'scubitt Gallery'In a room designed

Ho p ki ns ' wr it er s anc| a rti s ts w i th e x p e rti s e i n th e fie| dsofsound,w i rel esse| ectroni ccommuni -
by a Delegationconsistingof mysel{'
cation,encryptionand broadcastingwere interrogated
(Archiving and Epistemological critique)AnthonyAuerbachand nov-
INS Chiefof Propaganda
elist and broadcasterZinovyTintk'
Aft er r ec or dings o fth e H e a ri n g s w e re b ro a d c a stontheradi o,w ebegantorecei veoffers
of majornewsorganisations volunteeringto insertour
fromsub-editors and web programmers
code. Soon afterwards,the ICA offered
propagandainto their emp|oyers,listingsand source
Unit'sfirst o{ficialincarnation' we accepted'An FM licencewas
to host our Broadcasting
2004'
appliedfor and grantedfor the firstweekof April
Be f or ewebegr n tra n s m i ti i n g ,th o u g h ' th e te s ti moni esneedtobeana| ysed,Thati sw hatl
h a vebeendoing. T h i s re p o rts h o u | d p ro v i d e a b ri dgebetw eentheH eari ngsandthe
Unititsell'outlininghow the lattershouldoperate'
Broadcasting

L e tu s r em indour s e | Ve s o fth e p a rti c u | a rs o fC o c teau' sfi | m.H i sThracei sanunmi stakab| y

mo d er nF r enc hone ' a w o r| d o fma c h i n e s ,F o | | o w i ngabraw | outsi detheC afedesP oetes,
He u r t ebis e, ac hau ffe u rw h o tu rn s o u tto b e a n a n ge| ,usesapub| i cte| ephoneboxtoca| | the
p o |i c e, whor o|lupt n a p a d d y w a g o n .| n th e m6 | e e thatfo| | ow stheyoungestanddrunkestof
th e poet s , J ac ques C 6 g e s te ,i s k i | | e d b y tw o s p e e di ngmotorcyc| i stsw hoturnouttobeagents
o ftheUnder wor |d.C e g e s te ,s b e n e fa c tre s s ,a fo rei gnpri ncessw hoturnsouttobeD eath,has
h i m| if t edint oher c a r-a n d ,w h i | e th i s i s b e i n g d o neandfornoapparentreason,shete| l s
 or pheet ojoint hem ' As t hey dr iv e o u t o f t o w n , t h e P r i n c e s s o r d e r s H e u r t e b i s e t o s w i t c h o n
Le silence va plus vite d reculons' Trois fois'
the radio. That is when we hear the {irst message:
. Si|enc egoes m or equr c k |y whe n p l a y e d b a c k w a r d s . T h r e e t i m e s ] T h e m e s s a g e i s r e p e a t e d '
night'
code. As they continue drivingthrough the
then {ollowed by tapped out lines oi Morse
as ec ondm es s age, at s or epeate d 'a n n o u n c e s t h a t a s i n g l e g l a s s o f w a t e r i l l u m i n a t e s t h e
well to reflect more'
world, and a third that mirrorswould do
W hent hec ar ev ent ua||y ar r i v e s a t a n a b a n d o n e d h o u s e t h e P r i n c e s s a n d C d g e s t e d i s a p -
pear t hr ougham ir r or , leav ingH e u r t e b i s e t o d r i v e o r p h e e b a c k t o t h e l a t t e r 's h o u s e a n d p a r k
to the radio
of the nextfew days in the car listening
the car in its garage.orphee spends most
.The bird sings with its fingers.Two times. I repeat.The bird sings
as it emrts more messages:
timesl They
littlewidows is a true feast of sunlight'Two
with its {ingersl 'The mourningband of
t ur nout t obegener at edby Ceg e s t e , w h o w e s e e u p s t a i r s i n o r p h e e 's b e d r o o m w i t h a t r a n s -
rend
the room's lights flicker on and off' Jupiter
mitter and a Morse tapper to whose rhythms
s ages c eux qu, ilv eut per dr e' A t t e n t i o n , 6 c o u t e 'l u p i t e r m a k e s w i s e t h o s e h e w a n t s t o | o s e ]
poet, recognisesthat just one of these lines is wotlh
orphee, the world,s most celebrated
m or et hanhis ent r r eoeuv r e. H e w r i t e s t h e m d o w n a n d p u b | i s h e s t h e m i n t h e n e w s p a p e r s ,
whic h|eads t ohis beinghar an g u e d b y s e | f - a p p o i n t e d a v a n t - g a r d i s t s w h o a c c u s e h i m 'n o t
work, or, less reasonably'of holding cegeste
entirelyunreasonably,o{ havingstolen c6geste's
c apt iv eandm ak ingh|m c om p o s e u n d e r d u r e s s 'o r e v e n o f h a v i n g m u r d e r e d h i m 'T h e a v a n t -
death threat' Then' grown tnto a bray-
gardists send him their own messageJa mirror-written
ingm ob, t hey t ur nupinc ar s an d k i | | h i m w i t h h i s o w n g u n , d i s p a t c h i n g h i m t o t h e U n d e r w o r | d
forever.Well, not quite: there will be a twist'
Ceges t e' s m es s ages ar e , a s t h e P r i n c e s s t e | | s h i m , t r o u v a i l l e s t o u t d f a i t e x q u | s e s . . e x q u l s -
of si|enceand p|ayback,i||umination, mourn-
ite finds - |yrica|fragments,miniaturecelebrations
ingandav iant r ans m is s ion, o f g o d s , w i s d o m a n d | o s s , T h e y s e e m t o b e h e | d t o g e t h e r i n s o m e
orph6e
numbers,counted off and repeated'when
mathematicalformation,led into by lists of
asked by the
through the film, he finds Cegeste being
enters the Underwortdhimselfhalfway
'l invent-
how he generatedthem' 'ohl he answers'
tribunalof which ours was a partialreprise
edphr as es andnum ber s . I ev e n s e n t p h r a s e s | 'd w r i t t e n b e f o r e ] Wh a t C o c t e a u i s d o i n g , b o i h
t hr oughCeges t eandt hr oug h t h e C e g e s t e - o r p h e e s e t - u p _ t h e t r a n s m i s s i o n s b e t w e e n a n o
bey ondt het wom en- is es t ab | i s h i n g a n a e s t h e t i c o | r e p e t i t i o n 'o r p h e e , t h e o f f i c i a l a u t h o r o f
consists first
rathertheir repeaterwhose composing
the fragments,is not their originatorbut

o andf or em os t ollis t ening' Ce g e s t e ( w h o w e n e v e r S e e c o m p o s i n g , o n | y r e p e a t i n g , a g a i n a n d

he is listeningto is himself'
|J
o
o again) is also a ltstener,even when what
(l
I This aes ihet ic is ent ir e|yc o n s i s t e n t w i t h t h e t h o u g h t o f M a r t i n H e i d e g g e r , w h o w r i t e s i n
.For the |ongesttime - before it comes to be said, that is, spoken
o The Way to Languagethat
o
I
- t hepoet ' s wor k is on|y a|is te n i n g J T h i n k i n g , s a y s H e i d e g g e r , s h o u | d a | s o t a k e t h e f o r m o f | i s .
o
z t ening: t hat is howwewi||s e e h o w i t a l | _ w o r l d , b e i n g , h e a v e n s , t i m e , a | l t h a t s t u f {- f i t s
o
tr
o t oget her , p|us howlanguag e i t s e | f w o r k s . T h e p h i | o s o p h e r n e e d s t o l i s t e n t o w h a i i n T h e N a t u r e
(!
of LanguageHeidegger c a | | s Z u s a g e , t o - s a y i n g , . S a y i n g t o w h i c h t h e n a t u r e o f l a n g u a g e r s
o,
ak inl. Speak ingis |is t ening ] h e d e c i d e s , , | i s t e n i n g t o t h e l a n g u a g e i h a t w e s p e a k , T h u s , i t i s a
 o
Ecoute,says cegeste, like one o{ those French
listening not whib buI beforewe are speaking) 3
=
et repdter;6coute,'listen"listeninginwardly
languagelearnrngtapes that tells you lo 6couter
GI

listen to and then repeat' For cocteau as for =

himself before repeatlng messages orphee will
GI
o
H eidegg er,spe aklng ,r eals peec h, t hes peec hof poet s a n d p h i l o s o p h e r s 'i s l i s t e n i n g 'a n d
o
is repetition'
speaking-as-listening
cubitt Hearingswere all seasoned lis-
The witnesses who came and testified before the
rest-
teners, and seasoned listener-repeaters. Manu Luksch and Mukul Patel told us about a
Radioastronomycentre, a former soviet spy
dency they had done at VentspilsInternational
analogue phone conversations with
base in the Latvian forests, picking up and retransmitting
Hollingsdescribed his collaborationwith the
the help of two grantsatellitetrackingdishes.Ken
pre-recordedsound into their live performances'a
rock group Biting Tongues:he had inserted
radio and TV Heath Bunting admitted to
loooed stream of voices culled from shori-wave
radio scannerstrapped to his back picking up
spendingtime riding around on a bicycle with a
pirate radio stations on which' rather
oolice communications;he had also founded countless
thandevisin gcon ten t, her e- br oadc as t ot her s t at ions . J o h n C u s s a n s e x p l a i n e d h o w h e h a d
of attempted radio and tape coniact with
researched and dramatised in his own work histories
and technologicalby announcingthe
the dead, historiesof 'sensitivity'which blur the biological
hearing 'apparatus'.Neiiher Cussans nor
main task at hand to be the perfection of our own
william Burroughs,for whom both man and
Hollings made any secret of their admirationfor
runningon a seven-secondloop' generatlng
God are tapes ano consciousnessan apparatus
intuitionthat the universemight be made up
sensory bursts of 'now'-ness.The Burroughsian
of pre-re co rdin gspro m pt edoneof t heHear ings , m os t a n i m a t e d e x c h a n g e s , i n w h i c h Z i n i k
an 'original'sound - or, indeed' whether he
asked Hollingswhether he had ever encountered
reply was unequivocal:'No and nol
could even entertainthe notion of such a thing. Hollings's
listeningand repeatingbut also of modi-
The testimonrespresented instancesnot only of
Luksch and Patel described their
fying, manipulatingor mutating - in short, of transforming.
found fragmentsin order to gener-
work at Ventspilsas 'sampling':morphing and re-arranging
with the Berlin techno-group
ate works of sound art. Hollings had also collaborated
up George w. Bush's 'war on
Rechenzentrum,arternaterysrowing down and speeding
T errorism'sp ee ch .Cer it hW y nEv ans , quiz z edabout t h e l o g i c o f t r a n s m i t t i n g f o u n d s l o g a n s
his desire to 'stack things up on top of one
through the found medium of fireworks,talked of
anoth er]to ge ne rate . c o||age' , , po|y phony , , a, s t r ang e e n m e s h i n g o f t h i n g s t h a t s e e m s a s i f
t hey,re co ming from v er y di{ f er ent r adios t at ions ] Cus s a n s d e s c r i b e d h o w , f o r t h e e a r | y
Jurgensen'the dead
,transcommunicative' sound techniciansKonstantinRaudiveand Friedrich

spo ke ina po |yg |otta |c ac ophony whic ht hes c ient is t , | i s t e n i n g 'h a d t o s t r i p d o w n a n d r e c o n -

multi-linguisticand quite possibly dead
figure into sense. Jane Lewty told us of the multiple,
of James Joyce's Finnegans wake's hero'
voices spilling from the radio set beside the bed
he iiddles with the dial' The dead cegeste
who, like orph6e, moves through the spectrum as
the air, sampling and enmeshingthem'
is also a dial{iddler of sor1s,pluckingfragmentsfrom
repetitionloops. so' too, is another Joycean
splicing in numbers, rearrangingsequences in
the beach, |ets sounds and phrasesspil|
hero' U/ysses,sStephen Daeda|us'who, standing on
 through him, moulded into waveformsby his elastic cheeks and jaw: 'ooeehah','Mouth to her
kiss ... Mouth to her mouth's kiss ... Mouth to her moomb. Oomb, allwombingtombl
(what the
To listening,repeatingand mutatingshould be added relocating.All transmission
Germans call Sendung) is a dispatchingfrom one place to another- but Bunting had empha-
The
sised this by re-broadcasting Hackney radio stations in Tokyo and Tokyo ones in Canada.
soundscapes Luksch and Patel teased out of the satellitedishes were also full o{ migrations:
they played to the Hearings a conversation,half in Englishand half in Tamil,in which a ship-
board son and his land-boundfather ask after each other's wives, a littlefamilystory sampled
{rom halfwayaround the world. A more sinistership-to-shoreexchangewas captured by one
of their collaboratorsat the RadioastronomyCentre: a captain in the Indian Ocean enquiring
of the South African coast guard what legal procedure to apply to stowaways discovered on
his ship. Like the hoily-contestedpractice of 'war-chalking',in which wireless activists mark
spots where corporations'bandwidth spills out into public space, these telecommunicative
interventionsturn the spotlight on ihe rules governlngspace'
clearly, this whole area is politicallyhighly charged. 'The question of powerl Jacques
Derrida asserts in The Post Card: from Socrafes to Freud and Beyond, 'is Jirst oi all that of
the post and telecommunicationslAs Cussans reminded us, mass media is a tool of mass
manipulation.Lewty outlinedthe career o{ anotherJoyce,William, betier known as Lord Haw
war
Haw, who, after studying literature at Oxford, became a radio propagandist for the Nazi
his
machine.ls Cegeste a propagandistfor a regime oi death? Maybe.What is certain is that
poem-messagesare oased on the real ones broadcastinto occupied France by the BBC dur-

ing World War ll (Cocteau tells us as much in his introductionto his screenplay),Media as
manipulation:for Burroughs,the'Control Machine'guaranteeingstate and private interesis
functions through playbackand repetition.What is needed to subvert it is counter-recording
and counter-playback. Takea tape machineand move things around: sounds, locations,situa-
he
tions. This works on time as well as space: 'mix yesterdayin with today and hear tomorrowl
playing riot
tells us in The tnvisibte Generation.You can even 'plant events',provoking a riot by
point-
sounds into a peacefuldemonstratron:screams,gunshots,things like that. As Hollings
the
ed out, Burroughs is merely updaiing the technique Sade used when incarceratedin
and,
Bastille: seeing crowds gathered outside, he poked his urinal spout through the bars
(which
using it as a megaphone,announcedthat the authoritieswere executingthe prisoners
they were not), thus precipitatingthe decisivemoment of ihe French Revolution.
o, And yet the Hearings left us with the impressionthat if (as Gil Scott Heron says) the
(J
o Revolutionwill not be televised,then perhaps its nucleuswill not be caught on audio tape
or
o
For
broadcast on the airwaves either - or if it will, then it will take the form of silence.
6
g

.!
tr
Heidegger,everythingstems from the Unspoken:Being calls us, but ii does so 'in the uncan-
o lan-
o ny mode of keeping silentl Burroughs'srevolutionarydrive extendsto a transformationof
.)
z guage that will help cast o{f the 'ls' of identity:this language,he tells us, will be a hieroglyph-
o
,will give one the option o{ silencel Hollings,discussing Burroughs in an article,
,9 ic one that
(g
,Recordedsilenceonly becomes a politicalact once it is playedbackl There are echoes
writes:
o)
(a about
of Cegesie's first message here. Hollingswas a contribulorIo Violent Silence book
 o
B atail| e)'a co ||ab ora tor wit hJ ohnCageandat t het im eoft h e H e a r i n g s w a s c o n d u c t i n g =
f
@
research into the era se dpas s ages inNix on' s W at er gat e t a p e s . Wh a t d i d h e m e a n . r e c o r d e d
it is played backl we asked him' 'Playing
a blank =
silence only becomes a politicalact once (o
and sticking it in a machineand listeningto o
tapel he told us, 'breakingthe seal on something f
o
inalienablesilence that is encrypted somehow?'
it, is an act of refusall 'so there is a kind of
contains the revolutionarymoment?' 'Exactly
Anthony Auerbach asked; And this potentially
father
of shakespeare's cordelia' who tells her
sol said Hollings.This is the violent silence
or of
.Nothing, - a sing|e word which |eads to genera| annihi|ation,wars and madness;
,Cordog|io' who, as he brings about .the ruin of a|| space'
Stephen Daedalus, se|f-sty|ed
I
time one lividfinal flamei says 'Nothungl' 'Maybel
shatteredglass and toppling masonry'and
suggeste d,,o urra dio pr ojec t s hou|dbeaques t f or t hat s i | e n c e '_ a s u g g e s t i o n t o w h i c h
H o| | ingsan swe red ,inw hat t ur nedout t obet heHear ings '{i n a l e x c h a n g e : . | w o u | d S t r o n g | y
recommend itl

T heB BCwa rttmep oe m { r agm ent s onwhic hCeges t e' s a r e b a s e d w e r e n o t 'j u s t m e s s a g e s :

theywe recod ed mess ages . Knownas enc lair es , t hes ep h r a s e s w o u | d b e r e a d o u t i n
seqUe ncespa cked tight wit h. dum m y , phr as es inor der t o a | | o w L o n d o n t o p u i p | a n s i n t o a c t i o n
the Resistance'These field agents' like cegeste'
which field agents in France had made with
(i
personal risk German direction-finding e'
also iransmitted - back to London, at enormous
and
more sophisticatedas the war progressed'
signal-tracing)equipment became more and
'oee-effed'A/ies was hln. To send their messages,agents used a'trans-
once an agent was
{or the messagesto be legibleto London'
position key, contarnedin a line of poetry.ln order
poem'
they had to tap out lines of the chosen
Th ep rocessisde s c r ibedat |engt hby LeoM ar k s inB e t w e e n S i l k a n d C y a n i d e : a c o d e -
(special
twenty-fourwas managinga whole soE
maker,s story1941 -1945. Marks, who at
Operatio nsExe cu tiv e) s ec t iont r ainingandr ec eiv ing m e s s a g e s f r o m a g e n t s a | | o v e r o c c u p i e d
trans-
and breaking code. Many of the messages
Europe, had two main tasks: setting code
,muti|ated'due to atmosphericinterlerenceor mistakeson
mitted from the fie|d had become
For
to be deciphered just as enemy codes did
the part of the transmittingagent, and had
tor frequenciesof repetition:once you had
Marks,the key to all code-breakingwas listening
and transpositionsthat had generatedthe code
these you could work out the set of mutations
that
sensibilitybecome ingrainedin Marks's mind
in the first place. So deeply did this listening
officersas code, listeningfor its repetition-
he started treatingthe speech o{ his commanding
reallysaying' lt extended outwards to the FANYs
frequencies in order to hear what they were
sets taking down the agents' mes-
(First Aid Nursing Yeomanry) who would staff the radio
four
of each of their work s|ipped for three or
sages: noticingthat the normal|yhigh standard
of their menstrual cycles from the archived recep-
days in each twenty-eight, he deduced each
level,leading him to describe his parents'
tion transcripts.lt even extendedto a metaphysical
syna go gu ea Sacoo e- r oom f r om whic hG odis c ont ac t e d t h r o u g h . p a s s w o r d s '.
 Marks's sense of a coded world is shared by Cerith Wyn Evans. He described to the
Hearings how Tokyo at night had seemed to him 'a synaptic matrix of different dots and bleeps
and dashes' which he was 'overwhelminglyconvincedwere communicationsystemslflashing
lights and signs which 'evoked this notion of Morsel Architecture becomes communication
becomes code. Wyn Evans's Tokyo experience inspired him to have the work of William Blake
translated into Morse and projected in light pulses from Tate Britain across the Thames onto
the headquariersof M15,SOE's descendants:a dead poet's words brought back to life only
to be buried again in code. And make no mistake:all code is burial.John Cussans,describing
another little family story, explainedthat Houdini became an escapologist because he was
convinced that when his mother died he would go mad (and therefore needed to practise
escaping from straight-jackets).To prevent this, he and his mother established a code by which
she would contact him i{ consciousness turned out to survive death (it did not: Houdini
became the scourge of spiritualistswho claimedto be in contact with his mother but failed to
give 'the Mother Code'). Cussans had made a work based on this story titled 'Buried Alive' -
iittingly,because within the code Houdini's mother was alreadydead and buried, even while
she was still alive.
All code is burial. To move towards it (as Orphee does) is to move towards death, and to
operatewithin it (as Cegeste does) is io be alreadydead, Burroughspostulatesthe existence
o{ a 'death code', speculatingthat a team of sound and camera men working with biochemists
might be able to synthesiseit sometime in the future. For Marks, that code existed back in
1g42.He recounts how, as he helped his agents memorisetheir poems in his office prior to
their being air-droppedinto France,he kept picturingthem dead - fittinglyagain, as the life-
expectancy of a Wireless Transmitteroperator in France was six weeks. When German code-
breakersstarted doing a crash course in Englishliteratureso as to be able to recogniseBritish
transpositionphrases,Marks countered by writing his own poems for the agents to use' One
of them, morbidly self-reflexive,speaks of

.,. an alphabet of death

Each consonant a breath
Exoired before its time.

All code is burial.lts proper architectureis the tomb. The secret society in Herg6's surre-
(, al masterpiece Tintin and the Cigars of the Pharaoh, an organisation steeped in passwords
()
o and ciphers and encoded wirelessbroadcasts,operatefrom a tomb. As soon as he penetrates
o
(E
(J their space, Tintin see his own sarcophagus.Soon he will lie in it while Morse messages
o
c decide his fate. Later he will be buried again; laterstill (at the beginningof The Blue Lotus,the
o
I second part of the two-volumeadventure),he will himsel{tune into Morse messages before
o
z
being drugged, trussed up again then woken up and reunitedwith his radio.The frequencyof
tr
o the story is burial and code, burialand code-transmission.
All code is burial,and to dwell within the space of code is to be alreadydead. But then
{,
perhaps the opposite is irue as well. The formula works backwards,d reculons. For Houdini,
 for christians and o
code maintainsthe possibilityo{ his mother's return,just as the sepulchre, !,

Realisingfrom a shiJt 5'

even more so for the Egyptians, preserves the possibility of resurrection' (o

in the rhythm of his transmissions that a Dutch agent has been captured
and is transmitting =
to transmttto tlt
under duress, Marks keeps him alive for the duration of the war by continuing o
it, the agent will no longer ('
and receivefrom him in the same code: he knows that if he changes
surviveshis own
be considered useful to the Nazis and they will kill him. cocteau's cegeste
and carrieson receiving'
death enough to transmit;Orphee comes back from the Underworld
this, for as long as his
Tintin survivesall his burials.He has to: the logic of the book demands
radio set awaits him.
as a tomb which perhapspermitsa double-movement, in and out: this
Telecommunrcatrons
appara-
paradox is lodged, via yet another family story' at the heart of the piece of comm-tech
most intimate - the tele-
tus that we all use every day, the one with which we are probably
a speakingautoma-
ohone. As children,AlexanderGraham Bell and his brother Melvillemade
say'Ma-ma"a word
ton in which bellows and rubber stood in for the lungs and tongue. lt could
would be named)
that their own mothel 'Ma Bell' (afterwhom the first giant phone company
of their speech-machine'
could not hear: she was deaf. Wanting to make a more lifelikeversion
onto human parts'
the brothers killed the family cat and stripped its larynx'Alex soon moved
,borrowing'a dead ear from a morgue.A few years later he brought home anotherobsoleteear
Bell married a woman
and, attached to it, the deaf woman he would marry,Mabel. Melville
named after his and
named caroline ottoway (Ear Canal), with whom he had, and lost, a son
Alex's dead brother Ted
whicheverone
Then Melvillehimsel{died - but before he did, he made a pact with Alex:
with the dead'
of them survivedthe other would build a device capable of communicating
a familyvault crammed
Whence the telephone.The prostheticear we carry in our pockets is
names of ghosts (Bell
full of absences, echotng with repeated, semi-repeatedand mutated
named after Ted and
also fathered two children who died in infancy, and two more who he
schizophrenia,
Melville). As Avital Ronell points out in lhe Telephone Book: Technology,
in whose 'asignifying
ElectricSpeech, the ground of Alex's discoveriesis an 'abyssal' one
replayssilentlyeach
breaks' dead siblings come to 'live',or live ones to die - a situationthat
beneaththe surface of
time we pickthe phone up, just as that of Houdini mdre et llls reruns
every escapologist's performance on TV.
ForRo ne ||,the ph oneis a|s ot het om bof philos ophy . T h e T e l e p h o n e E o o k r e v o | v e s a r o u n d
Party.Heidegger only
the moment in 1933 when Martin Heidegger is phoned up by the Nazi
Der Spiegel ('The
publicly discusses the episode once, many years later, in an interview with
Heidegger had one
Mirror'),whereas his teacher Edmund Husserl disliked the telephone,
Then,as he tells
installedin his otfice as soon as he took over as Rector of FreiburgUniversity.
Anruf, afar-
Der Spiegel,'After a few days came a long-distance call'- ern fernmilndlicher
join' He accepts' Ronell
mouthedto-call.lt is the sS stormtrooper Bureau,and they ask him to
in which Heidegger
reads this catastrophicdecision through a passage in Being and Time
again,a call-to'What
describes conscienceas 'havingthe characterof an appeal' - an Anruf
with the ss call's
she almost says, but does not quite, is that Heidegger's acquiescence

!{
 demand amounts not to an acceptance but rather to a refusal,a hanging up: on his Jewtsh
{riend and mentor Husserl,on conscience itsel{.

I have repeatedseveraltimes the mantras'all code is burial'and 'to operateor dwell within the
space of code is to be alreadydeadl but now I want to change them, or rather replace them
with a single word: crypt. Cerith Wyn Evans used the word during the Hearings,in relationto
the longer term encryption. lt was not a pun on his part. Both words have the Greek root kryp-
fos, hidden. Wyn Evans was thinking of a specific use of crypt, one made by the psychoana-
lyticalwriters Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok in relationto a familyvault no less extraordi-
nary than the Bells' one: that of Freud'spatient 'The Wolf Man'.
Freud's 1914 case historydescribes an adult neurotic 'for whom the course of the analy-
sis led away for a time from ihe present,and forced us to make a detour through the prehis-
toric period of childhoodl This detour teaches Freud that his patientwas brought up wealthy
on a Russiancountry estate.His immediateworld consisted of his parents,his sister,a nanny,
an Englishgovernessand lots of servanis.In his ihird or fourth year,he started behavingbadly,
flying into rages at the slightestprovocation.After his sister showed him a pictureof an upright
woli he developeda {ear of wolves.He also experienceda sudden fear for a yellow-stripedbut-
terfly he was on one occasion chasing. He started habituallymutilatingbeetles and caterpil-
lars. He also started changingthe meaningof words by coupling them with their opposite.By
this point he had developed what Freud calls 'an easily recognisableattack of obsessional
neurosisl
In his role as archaeologistof this prehistory,Freud unearthsa scene of seduction by the
patient'ssister,who had played with his penis when he was three while telling him lewd sto-
ries about the nanny and the gardener.A failed adolescentcounter-seduction,of her by him,
will follow. In her earlytwenties she will poison herselfand die, as will their father a few years
later. Most significantfor Freud, though, are not actual events but rather the way these get
stored, repeated and mutated in his patient's mind. All the scenes of the Wolf Man's drama
coalesce around two central 'moments',less events than 'sites' or'locae' of enmeshing.
The first of these is a dream he has when he is three or so, a dream of six or seven white
wolves sitting in a tree looking at him while he sleeps. For Freud this dream serves,via a set
c, o{ 'reversals','transpositions','distortions','transformations'and 'replacements',to encode a
(,
o
(,) primal scene which Freud also unearths:the Wolf Man watching his parents copulate. Freud
(E
I places the primal scene just before ChristmasDay, the Wolf Man's birlhday,when he is one
(g
and a half years old. They are copulating in ihe a tergo position,with the father behind the
o
g mother,upright like his sister's pictured wolf. The wolf dream, within which this Ur-scenehas
tu
z
been hidden,itselfserves,via severalstrandsof associationwhich involvemore transpositions
G

.9 and replacements,to anchor,enmesh and articulateother concerns. Freud follows the wires
o
backwardsto the fairy tales the Wolf Man would be read in which wolves lose their tails and
c)
to the epidemic which killed hundreds of the white sheep that used to roam the familyestate,
 o
chastised him when he mistranslated fli-
and {orwards to a Latin tutor named wolf who once i
a
ius as lrTsinstead of the Russian word syn'
cl

yellow-stripedbutier{ly'suspecting =
The second hotbed of enmeshingis the memoryof the
@
,screen memory' ('representrngsomethingo{ more importancewith which it was o
that this is a 3
the Wolf Man the opening and closing of a
o
in some way connected,),Freud discoversthat for
that the V-shape of both these evokes the
butterfly,swings evokes the image of girls' legs, and
romannu mera |forfive,thehour at whic hhes awt hepr im a l s c e n e a n d t h e h o u r a t w h i c h h e
that in Russian 'butterfly'is babushka'
regularlyfalls into a depression.Freud also discovers
,granny'.Not untilthe Wolf Man remembersa store-roomfull of yellow-stripedpears' grusha in
seduction - of an old nursery maid called
Russian,does he remember another attempted
kneelingin the same positionas his moth-
Grusha who he had come upon scrubbing the floor,
has a compulsivepredilectionfor copulating
er in the primal scene. As an adult, the Wolf Man
administeredto himself The break-
with women from behind, and also for having enemas
throughcome sWh en ,rec ount ingt oFr eudadr eam inwhi c h h e i s t o r t u r i n g a y e | | o w - s t r i p e d
w asp, th eWo l{Ma nmist ak enly m ut ilat es t heG er m anwo r d f o r 'w a s p ', We s p e , i n t o E s p e , t h u s
links all the screens together to
pronouncinghis own rnitials,SP. Freud now has the key,and
(for his father' mother and sister) and fears (of castra-
show how a raft of incestuous desires
network of transtormations and repeti-
tion and death) have coalesced around this elaborate
the wol{ Man in turn re-transposesano re-
tions - transformationsand repetitionswhich
repeatsthrough his compulsivebehaviour'
T he Wo|fMa n,sne ur os is is m anif es t , but inc ode. Bot h t h e d r e a m a n d t h e s c r e e n m e m o -

ryact aSmecha ntsmstoenm es h, t r ans pos e, ov er lay an d e n c r y p t . F r e u d 's j o b , | i k e M a r k s , s , i s

patternsof mutation,and so breakthe code'
to listenfor the frequenciesof repetition,trace the
the scene' Right from the beginning of
Then, sixty-twoyears rater,Abraham and Torok enter
they use a rhetoric of tuning in' describ-
their book cryptonomy: the wotf Man's Magic word,
job
to Freud'slisteningto his patient'Their
ing thousands of ears,their own included,listening
that Englishruns
as psychoanalysts, they say,is not interpretingbut translating'Theirdiscovery
leads them to tune into a polyglottal
alongsideRussianas the Wolf Man's childhood language
Behind these cracklingwords' they say' are
zone of words which they describe as 'crackling'.
,source-words'or 'archaeonyms"words whose exclusion'seemed to confer on them a
buried
but still activefrom within their hid-
genuinelymagic poweri Takenout of the circuit of speech
synonymsand allosemes(opposite words)'
ing place, these source-wordscommunicatevia
in iorm of dialogue"long metonymicchains'
transpositionsand mutationswhich are 'arranged
the signifiedsand searchingfor seman-
Abrahamand Toroktrack these chains,'movingacross
of wolves first cited' leads them to shiest
tic displacementslso (for example)'six"the number
thence, picking up some
(,six'in Russian)and on to siestraand siesforka'a group of six, and
'sister' - a world oJ 'locutions'that
inter{erencefrom the German schwester,to the English
,signalpleasure and allude to the sexual seduction scenel There are many other examples:
such chain{orming synonymsthey call
Abraham and Torok draw up whole charts of them.
,cryptonyms(words that hide)',adding that 'the presence o{ the cryptonym signals the exis-

tence o{ a crYPtl
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 crypt: this is the name Abraham and rorok give
the non-place at the heart of their thought,
this hidden fold or enclave from which
coded transmissionscome but which itself
always
remalns out of earshot, un-dee-effable
as it were. Tlid.conventionalnotion of the
Unconscious
is not enough, they say: we need a concept
that incorporates the Fractured symbol,
the Rift
or Tear in the Ego When not just the
self but also the languagethrough which
the self com-
municates with the Self is split (by part
of it being put out of reach),a crypt is
formed, and
'works in the heart of the Ego as a
special kind of Unconscious,'broadcastrng ,from
behind a
line of fracture'sequences strung out
on an 'instrasymbolicline,the twists and
turns of which
form the crypt's ,wallsl
I am not at all interested whether or not
Abraham and rorok are ,right,.What interests
me
is the model they are proposing:this architectural,
linguistic,psychologicaland above all
trans-
missiveformationwhich Derrida,introducing
their book, describesvariousryas a prosthesis,
a
cyst' a fortress or bunker and, more abstractly,
a 'pocket of resistance to reality' (he uses
the
word rdsrsfance, whose precise historical-political
associations take us straight back to
the
world of Marks'sagents and cegeste). As
a metaphor,the crypt is volatile,etectric-
and when
harnessedproperly,I propose that not only
will it act as a screen for all the information
in the
scope of this report, but it will also furnish
our organisationwith a model, ihe model,
for our
current project' For us the conventionalnotions
of Radio station or BroadcastingUnit are
not
enough' we need a concept that incorporates
rupture,withholding and, not teast,improbability.
To trace the outrineand wails of our
own crypt, then, I suggest we maKe our
own set of
detours. we shourd start by tuning into
the worf Man,s own account, pubrished .rg71.
in
sergei Pankejev,SP, confirmsboth that
he had a privilegedchildhoodand that he
was ,drawn
to abyssesas to a magnetl His familyis
deeply enmeshedwith three things: literature,
linguis-
tics and naturalscience' His mother calls
her brothers in-law 'The Brothers Karamazov,(their
father even tries to steal one of their
brides, like in the Dostoyevsly novel). Sergei,s
own wife
Teresa is described as 'the German Tatiana'
after the nurse in pr"t t r,. Eugene onegin.
His
maternal grandfather wants to conveft the
world to Esperanto. His second, French governess
speaks a'mutilated mixtureof French,Polish
and RussianlWhile sp mutilatesInsects,
his sis-
ter studiestheir mutations'she is linguistically
gifted and writes brilliantpoetry which
her father
comparesto Lermontov'Being an accomplished
o naturalist,she knows, like shakespeare,s
nat-
uralistFriarLaurence,ail about poison,
and ends up as dead as Juriet.Her father
seems to get
the mute reference:his choice of poison
is Veronal.He is buried in the same vault
as her. she
.9
(, seems to also get the referenceto a play
o in which a secret letter circulateswhile
the heroine
o lies in her crypt: suicidal,she makes sergei
promrseto write to her exactlyone week
(g
g after she
says good-bye to him for the last time. sergei
feels no sorrow at her death - but one year
later
is overcome by emotion at the spot near
o the river Tierek where Lermontovwas
(,) buried after
o betng killedin a duel with a man named
z Martinov,a duel which sergei describesto
us in metic-
G ulous,obsessivedetail.
.9 Here, already,is the crypt's main feature:
the fairureto mourn. For Freud the fairure
tr to
o, mourn properlyproduces meranchoria, a complex which ,behaveslike an open wound,,
infect_
ing the whole psyche' Abraham and rorok's
crypt is always born out of thrs failure,
which is
 straight- o
why it is like a poisonous cyst. What are Houdini's Mother Code ariQaccompanying ql

5'
jacket routine but indexesof melancholia,a {ailureto mourn his mother so pathologicalthat it GI

begins before she even dies? What is Bell's inventionbut an open wound,
the crypt in which =
enact a patholog- GI
he fails to mourn his brothers?Wyn Evans'sMorse light-pulsesdeliberately o
these might them- o
ical,repeated,displacedmourning- for Blake or Morse or SOE or whatever
bursts from the
selves be substitutesfor, light pulses as bright as the feast of sunlight that
he redirects his
black armbands of Cocteau's widows. When each of Leo Marks's agents dies,
with (and
grief into the poem which he will send the next one in to transpose,transmitand die
with a liitle cyanide
in dying, iqspirethe next poem). lt is a repeat-cycle.He also sends them in
that'
pill to pop when captured before they themselvesbecome mutilated,tortured in the hope

like SP's insecis,they will spill their code.

the field of
Failureto mourn, the crypt's chief attribute,links poison and pathologywithin
pings that came up in curi-
transmission,and thus goes half way at least to explaininga set of
both talked of
ously close proximityon the Hearings'ssonar.John cussans and Jane Lewty
described its
early twentieth-centuryfears that radio would cause mental disturbance;Lewty
pointed out that
influenceon both literatureand society as 'noxious'and 'infectious''Hollings
radio propagandist
both Sade and Blake were locked up in madhouses'as was the poet and
head had been cut
Ezra Pound who, Lewty told us, felt when incarcerated that the top of his
of frag-
off and was leaking caustic {luid; his poetry, like Cegeste's' became a hodgepodge
jingles wound into the
ments, shards of Confucian Odes, Iime Magazine articles and radio
'white noise''
typewriter as he typed. Eventuallythe cantos fade out into what Lewty called
of poi-
Marks describes SOE HO, buzzingwith messages and swelling with cupboards
of SOE lifel
son, as 'bedlam'.ReferencingFreud directly,he talks about the 'psychopathology
steady stream
Ronell notes in The TetephoneBook that Bell's inventionbrought to his door.a
voices, lodged
of schizophrenicswanting to share with him their own 'invention'for hiaring,
Wbtson poisoned
inside their skulls. She also notes ihat not only Bell but also his assistant
dial to Claudius's
their cats, and, likeningradio in the 1930s to a 'nationalear',zaps across the
- an act'
murder oJ the Danish nation'sfather Hamlet Senior by what she calls 'oio-injection'
mourn,not to men-
she could have added, ihat brings about literature'smost famous failureto
public announcements
tion a state cracklingwith se'cretmessages'cryptic performances,fake
cries 'Let me not be
and, of course, poison. Houdini is not alone in fearing lunacy:Hamlei,too,
mad! 'b efo reh ed iespo is oned|ik ehis f at her . . M ad! |' m g o i n g t o g o m a d ! 'w a i | s T i n t i n a s t h e
a straight-jacket
villaininjects him with insanity-inducingvenom. Tintin is even strapped into
favouriie tricks, the
after being placed in an asylum by a fakir who uses one of Hamlet's
do it all again -
switched letter.Like Houdini he escapes,then after being recapturedhas to
like Ho ud ini.
but most of all
The crypt is the site of failed mourning,pathologyand poisonousinfection,
listening is
it is the site of an encrypted primal scene. For Abraham and Torok, psychoanalytic
peeringin and unveilingthat scene. That is what Freud'sinterpretationof the wolf dream does
of his own'
for Sergei Pankejev- but even before Freud appears SP is doing some unveiling
her coverings "' or
In an early dream he sees himsel{violentlystripping his sister,'tearingoff
 veilsl The sight of trees on his eslqte wrapped around with thin white veils spun out by cater-
pillarsmarks him strongly.His main complaintto Freud is that 'the world was hidden from him

by a veill Just before the end of the treatment Freud discovers that SP was one of those
extremelyrare childrenwho are born with a caul around their head - a silken,envelopingmem-
brane' He will carrythe caul round with him for ever,Freuddecides; his whole life will be a long
unveiling.
Following a line of association, I want to hazarda guess that Marks is thinking of this when,
asked by a superiorwhat his interestsare, he replies:'lntercourseand incunabulalIncunabula,
the oED informs us, is'from swaddling-clothes,hence cradle,and /rg. childhood,beginning,
originl (lt also means 'books produced in the infancy o{ the art of printingJMarks's parents
were antiquarianbooksellers,and ran a well-knownCharing Cross Road shop in which Leo
spent days on end reading Freud.)Deliberatelyor not, in naming intercourseand incunabula,
Marks highlightsthe fact that the Wolf Man's earliest,most veiled or primal memory is of his
parents fucking. Abraham and Torok posit an even earlier one, a scene of sister-father incest
whose echoes he is hearingwithout fully understandingthem. For them, the Wolf Man's crypi
is like a porno-boothofferinga peep-showinto the past, sedimentedlayersof dirty pictures.lt
is a striptease,and like all good stripteasesit engages in a double-playof showing and hiding.
Echoing Burroughs'sdescriptionof his putativehushed-uplanguage,Abraham and Torok call
the booth's coy, encrypted ciphers'hieroglyphics'
Freud, casting around for things to compare SP's mind to, also invokes the culture of
ancient Egypt, which 'is so unintelligibleto us because it preservesthe earlierstages of its
developmentside by side with the end-products,retainsthe most ancientgods and their attrib-
utes along with the most modern ones, and thus, as it were, spreads out upon a two dimen-
sional sudace what other instancesof evoluiionshow us in the solidl Elsewhere,pondering
the lsraelitesflight from Egypt in Moses and Monotheism, Freud claims that 'something
occurred in the life of the human species similarto what occurs in the life of individualslNow
he is listeningto history'srepetitionfrequencies,tuning into the 'archaic heritage'of all of us.
Bataille,riffingoff Freud,sees in the cave paintingsat Lascauxthe primal scene of art, its ,lar-
val' stage. Derrida,riffingboth explicitlyand crypticallyoff Freud,finds on a postcard the veiled
primal scene of philosophy.In it, Socrates and fllato - S and p - are shown. Socrates was
(\|
Plato's master,of course, but Derrida plays theiscene backwards,A reculons,to unveilwhat
everybody always knew but had half-covered up, a secret of transmission: Plato 'has made
0) Socrates write whatever he [Plato]wanted while pretendingto receiveit from himl Derrida is
(,
o
o right: Socrates left no work of his own, He only 'speaks'when plato 'listens,to him. socrates
(!
g
has two instruments:one that writes and one that erases.Plato has an instrumentas well, and
(g
it is a big one: Derrida picks out, hiding behind the folds of his silk robes, an erection thrust
o
(,) into Socrates from behind. Incunabulaand intercourse,another histoirede cul per{ormedby
{,
z
(!
'two robed transvestiteslWe should, Derridatells us, re-imagtnePlato's oeuvre as a brothel,
.9 and all philosophyas a set of cryptogramssent through and from it.
G
For Marks,SOE is like a brothel.He describesofficersand FANYsscrewing in the coding
o)
tr rooms at night. Not only the building but also the very coding process itself are steeped in
 o
.Free your |anguage,Varyyour transposition-keys, don't fa|l into set patterns.Code !,
eroticism.
='
agents. He asks the FANYs to compose a
as if you,re making lovel Marks instructs Norwegian
GI

Charlesde Gaulle'sprick being twelve

transpositionpoem and they come back with one about D
GI
poem-codewith transpositiontables written on o
inchesthick. When he proposes replacingthe
o
for help.The Americanspromiseto procure
silk,the British,facing a silk shortage,ask America
West's titsl While waiting for this to happen'
enough for them 'even if it means stripping Mae g,

writes one about a boy getttng

Marks realises that obscene limericks are easy to remember,
agent into France with it, to tap it back to
blisters from screwing his sisters and sends an
London in a string of dots and dashes'
T hec ryp t,the sp acefr om whic ht r ans m is s ionc om es t m a k e s k n o w | e d g e i n t o p o r n o g r a p h y
buried even as it is revealed'The secret
and vice versa.lt is a site of pleasure- but of pleasure
Who or what decrees this? The |aw
scene contained inside it must be shown and not shown.
Freud tells us, we accept prohibitions:prohi-
does. In order to become modern adult humans,
prohibitionson types of instinct- there
bitionson God's name,prohibitionson certain images,
ones concern incest and death' with the
are many prohibitions,but the two most importani
injunct io nto exog amyan dt hes ac r alis ingot deat h' it s wr a p p i n g i n t a b o o 'm o d e r n s o c i a | s t r u c -
'Everyprohibitionconceals a desirel he
tures begin, and with them come moralityand iustice.
under'the embargo of impossibility'can
writes in Totem and raboo, adding that placingthings
,a mysterrousand dangerous magic power which communicatesitself by contact'
give them
butterfly,both entices and fright-
like an .electricchargel This charge, like SP's yellow-striped
and re-encryptecl'
ens, needs io be both enjoyed and renounced,revealed
and dashes it emits' The desire
This is the pattern set by the crypt, pulsed out in the dots
for repetition.Tintin,doped with noxious
for the return of the catastropheproduces a demand
and re-encryptsit, using a hermaphro-
fumes inside the Egyptiantomb, sees a primal scene
Thompsonand Thomson'detectives'
ditic contortionto produce two more robed transvestites:
Whose peep show are we |ooking at in
smoking opium{i|led cigars. P|ea$ureand the |aw,
Herg6,whose own father and uncle were
these scenes? lt is all but impossif,leio believethat
hushed-upfamilyscandal),Herg6 whose
twins (and illegitimateones at thatl the subjects ol a
played d reculons),is not simultaneously
very name is an encryption (George Remi's initials
the pyramid,bringing it to life and killingit
makinga confessionand buryingthis confessionin
again,cryp tan dcrib,a ||wom bingt om b. Lat er t heThom p s o n s , a g a i n i n d r a g 'w i | | p u | | T i n t i n f r o m
need to try: once you have hit these pat-
anothertomb in order to arrest him. He does not even
sP's whole life is led by them: they
terns they become second nature,self-repeatingendlessly.
knowing why, transferfrom Law school to
dictate that he will replay his primal scene without
choose for his first date with his
the Natural Science Facultyto Law School to the asylum,
(she stands him up), the Palaisde Justicefor their sec-
future wife the NymphenburgGardens
Dachau' 'then a popular excurslonspot
ond and, for the third (the one on which he scores)'
of the vault o{ modern history'He does
near Munichl His pleasureis given him on the future site
RG, he has a dowser's ability to find
not know this yet and does not need to: like Herg6,
to the pre-recordings'
abyssalground - to tune in, as Burroughswould say'
Liste nin gto an da r oundt heW ol{ M an, lpic k edupont h e s a m e f r e q u e n c y S o m e i n t e r f e r -

J
 ence from a work by VladimirNabokov.Early
on in his 1969 novel Ada he denounces Freud,
but the insistencewith which the book then pulses
out Freud's patterns makes me think that
the denunciation is an en claire dummy.
The book's full title is Ada or Ardor: a
Famiry
chronicle' In it, we find a wealthy Russian
boy on a famiry estate surrounded by governess,
garoener'servantsand, as it turns out, a
sister.occupying a multilinguisticzone whose
inhab-
itants speak a mutiratedmixtureof Russian,
Engrish,French and German, supposed
cousins
Van and Ada veen spend their time translating
poetry and studying naturalscience.
Ada has
her own larvariumfull of spotted and streaked
caterpillars,many of them porsonous,and of
but-
ter{lies such as the Nympharis carmen,
an ,odettian sphinx, which, mutating into ,an
ere_
phantoid mummy with a comicaily encased
trunk of the guermantoio typej emits ,mauve
shades of Monsieur Proustl Around the estate
firefliescan be seen transmitting,light code,
and 'pulsatingin photic response'- and the
novel pulsateswith what Nabokov,spupil
Thomas
Pynchon' when comparing a landscape to
the circuit board of a transistorradio in
his own
novel rhe crying of Lot 4g, cars 'a hierogryphic
rntent to communicatel
'Adais a novel of incunabulaand intercourse.The children
find up in the dusty attic porno-
graphic images of Ada's supposed father
dressed as an archaeologist.They also find,
encrypt-
ed into Van's mother's flower diary, a family
secret: that they are not cousins but half-brother
and half-sister,or perhaps even full siblings.
The mother poisoned herselfshortlyafter
writing
the entry, having first succumbed to an insanity
whose symptoms included hearing mutating
snatches of old poems and conversationsplayed
back in a polyglottalcacophony of voices
and believingin Antiterra,a mythicalland
which mirrorsthe real Russia Nabokov grew
up in
(and for the purposes of Ada has
relocatedto North America).
Ada is also a novelabout prohibition.Electric
telephonesare banned;etectricityis banned;
the very word 'electricity'is banned, 'even
in Lithuanianlwhy? Because it is the medium
of
'currents and circuitsi relays,pulses,flows -
the medium of technologicarcommunication.
lf,
as Freud would have it, every prohibitionconceals
a desire, then what desire is walled (or
wired) up in Ada's vault of prohibitions?The
answer is spelt out by the childrenat the site
of
a removed telephone: playing with scrabble
letters,they mutate ,insect,into ,scient,,,nicesti
t\n 'incesti soon after this, van and Ada
become lovers- and, in order to both continue
their
affa\ and keep it secret when Van leaves the
+ estate for boarding school, he devises a code
which'he tells Ada to first memorise then
swallow 'like a good little spyl rhis one is
soon
replaced by a poem-codewhose transposition
keys lie in Marvell,sThe GardenandRimbaud,s
o
(, M6moire. Thus their encrypted loop is formed.
o
o The incestuouscrypt turns out to be a deadly
one as well. Van teaches poems to another
E little spy, a second semi-sister Lucette who,
rike one of Marks,s agents, overdoses on piils
G and
dies, she leavesa suicide note, a message
o from the dead. Ada puns in one of her secret
o ret_
q, ters to Van that she, too, is contacting him 'iz
z ada,(out of Hades)rVan himserfmight be trans_
mittingfrom the dead: moments before fighting
a duel of the type ,describedby most Russian
(!

.9 novelists and by practically all novelists of gentle

G birthi he looks at a white butterfly and knows
() 'with utter certainty'that he has 'only
a few minutes to livel lt would be nice if his
adversary
were called Martinov, but his name is Tapper,
a mutated repetition of another of the novel,s
 o
!)
characte rs,MrsTa piro v . Thedue|pas s ageis a|s opac k ed t i g h t w i t h p e r m u t a t i o n s o n D o r a ='
.adored,, .doraphone', ,Dorofey'), the name of the mute hysteric in another of
(such as .dor,,
GI

Freud,shistories.some kind of code is being

tapped out here, if not broken' lf we take the
rest z
and ct
is nursed back to health' like SP' by a Tatiana' o
of the novel literally,Van is shot but survives,
('
agesa|o ng sid eAd ain towhat hec a||s an. ear - t r um pet age 'o f . d o t . d o t - d o t a g e i
oneo fAda 'se ar|ySc enes s hows Adac opy ingf |ower s a n d i n s e c t s i n s u c h a w a y a S t o or
twists and changes, concentratingso much
combine one spectes with another,introducing
that her tongue curls into the shape of the scarab-
while she copies and mutates (or mutilates)
simu| atin g-mo th-simu|at ing- f |ower s heis c r eat ing. W a t c h i n g h e r , V a n b e c o m e s s o a r o u s e d t h a t
hehasto |ea ve the roo m andm as t ur bat e. Thenhec om es b a c k f o r m o r e , Wh a t t u r n s h i m o n '
that
of transforming'of encryption- not anything
seduces him' is the process o{ enmeshing,
the
perfectly illustratesthe logic of the novel and of
might lie behind the screen. The scene
crypt itse|f:e ncryp t|on gener at es des ir eanddes ir egen e r a t e s e n c r y p t i o n . N a b o k o v , | i k e H e r g 6 '
draws Van's attention to 'some accursed insect
even allows himself to be drawn in. After Ada
leaves the estate, Van names the insect as the
that had sett|ed on an aspen trunk' as he first
but t erf|yNymph atisda naus Nab. ' new|y dis c ov er edby o n e P r o f e s s o r N a b o n i d u s o f N e b r a s k a .
or
being tapped out here. But is Nabokov, here
It is not hard to hear whose mutated name is
desire for his own sister? O{ course not:
e|sewherein the book, dec|aringsome incestuous
pleasuremeet, encrypt themselvesand, once
incest is a marker for the place where law and
encryPted, broadcast.
| ,he ard on eo the rs t at ionbr eak ingint er m it t ent |y t h r o u g h A d a , l t c a m e o n t h e b a c k o f t h e
the
mummies,the Nile telegramVan semi-quotes
Egyptianstuf{:the sphinxesand scarabs and
1922
half-hearingwere reports o{ the discovery in
first time he and Ada make love, what I was
Lord carnarvon (who Herge places in his
of Tutenkhamun'stomb. The expedition'sbacker,
.Carnava|,),came from a |anded {ami|ywhose father was so
tomb, mutating his name into
'l do four dilferent kinds of verse: Elegiacs'
adept at poetry that he could boast as a child:
S app hics,A|caicsa nd|am bic s , of whic hSapphic s ar em y f a v o u r i t e ] T h e E g y p t o | o g i s t , H o w a r d
C arte r,sp en thisch i|dhooddr awingins ec t s , Peepingi n t o t h e t o m b a n d p u s h i n g b a c k i h e . g o s .
(as he will write lated 'inlaid caskets " heaps of boxesl
samer' veil that lined it, Carter sees
I
A daan dVa n,p ee ptn gint ot heir anc es t r alat t ic ' f ind' t r u n k s a n d c a r t o n s 'a n d t w o b r o w n c o u c h -
a newspaperclipping in which the birth of
es one ion top of the other like copulating beetlesl
plus, of
,Adelaida,is announced beside a strip cartoon showing two siblings in beiJ together,
peeptng
own kinship,which they destroy'carter'
course,the encryptedannouncementof their
inonwha t,|ostforwo r ds , hec anon|y des c r ibeas . wond e r f u l t h i n g s , , p o s s e s s i o n s o f a p h a r a o h
w ho wastoma rryh issis t er but diedf ir s t ' f ee|s am ix t ur e o f . a w e a n d e m b a r r a s s m e n t ; c o v e r s
with an encryptedtelegram'
the hole up again and summons Carnarvon
Ma yb e,iu stma y be, lhear dCar nar v on, s deat ht ap p e d o u t t h r o u g h A d a | o o '| t r e s o n a t e d i n
o{ which lands on Ada's shin immediatelyafter
the hummingof the book's mosquitoes,the first
will follow, biting her repeatedly'These' via
she has completed the scrabble mutations.More
.curseof Tutenkhamun'which reput-
.accursedinsect,on Van,strunk,remindedme that the
the
of a mosquito that bit him as he packed his
edlv did for carnarvon in fact came in the form
 scient,havingseen
trunks to returnto Europe.The bite grew into a cyst and poisoned him.The
one' In his final
nicest things, a scene of arrestedincest,was bitten by an insect,an accursed
who nursed him:
deliriumhe receivedanotherencryptedtelegramof sorts, and told the friend
,l have heard the call. I am preparinglThe night he died the electricityin cairo failed and the
lightsin Cegeste's
lights kept going on and off, likeWyn Evans'sMorse Code messagesor the
r oom ,
of per-
The Wolf Man's cryptonomy,Abrahamand Toroktell us, runs through the spectrum
,like a textbook on poeticsl But among its crackling words, one alone does not
mutations
grind, scrape, wound. This
speak. For them, the truly magic word is tr'ere(Russianfor rub,
through Grusha
threads through a dreamt skyscraper (volkenkratzer) to volk, wolf, and on
(tierebit) the wasp's
scrubbing the floor,the Tierek River,Teresa (Tieretsain Russian),ripping
pleasure,violence,fear
wings oif and a host of other scenes. Not only does flerefbind sexual
process of markingand
and death together in a cryptonymicnetwork; it also stands for the
silent word is so
erasing through which the crypt itself is generated and maintained.This
it alone becomes the
charged and so seductive,Abraham and Torok conclude, that it and
'like a chrysalisin its
object of the Wolf Man's love.To keep it saie he buries it insidethe crypt
it without saying it'
cocoon, and carries it around for all his life, showing and hiding it, saying
it tighti"
'repeatingtirelesslyto one and all, especiallyto his analyst:"Here is nothing,hold
of synonyms
The INS BroadcastingUnit must do that too. Tracingand repeatingchains
not the former slip
and allosemes,it will perform the roles of both analystand neurotic' Does
Transformingand re-
into the latter always, like so many Egyptologists.ioiningthe carnaval?
rubber-radio
broadcastingthe vault's echoing song, the unit will be like stephen Daedalus's
technologicalnet-
mouth. A site of seduction and infection,it will ooze, leak and pulse along
Alcaics' 'Poetrylin
works, reelingout the names of God mutated into Elegiacs,sapphics and
'nothing' desig-
the words of Auden, 'makes nothing happen' - an active construct in which
ground' readingits
nates an event,pernaps even a momentousone. ln lookinginto the abyssal
that our culture also
source code and transmittingthis nothing outwards,maybe we will find
I suspect that ours
has a secret,silent word. For Abraham and Torok'sWolf Man, it was tieref.
I N S E C T'
will lie somewhereamong, between or beyond the permutationso{ the letters

@ 6

room, a traf-
o How will the BroadcastingUnit work? Like a Rlsistancecell or Allied operations
TJ
Working again with
fic or weather centre, a NASA ground control unit or a Bond villain'sHO'
p
{1
produce a Transmission
is Laura Hopkins,we will appropriateand enmesh all these settings to
from what we might
(! Room onto the walls of which staff will copy, paste and beam words culled
o German poetry or
() call the 'mediasphere':radio and televisionprograms' newspapercolumns'
0)
z Egyptian pharaohs At a
Shakespearesonnets, lists of prescriptionmedicines or poisons or
IE
new sequences which,
o central processing desk more staff will arrange the informationinto
o there, transmitted
wound through a printer,will be spoken aloud in a sound booth and, from
or the Shipping
over the radio. These sequences will loop and permutate, like Cegeste's
 o
Forecast's:fair io middling,good, blusteryat iimes, good, three times, I repeat,
=
=
This will not be an exercisein random, Dadaist cutting up. This will be surveying'A large GI

wallchartwill show which lines oJ fracture we are following.One that has been suggested
is =
'locked up or
the line that runs backwards from Patty Hearst to Antigone via Lucia Joyce,the
GI
o
t
encryptedwomen linel Another is a '{light line' that links banked screens of airlinetimetables,
o

(and, beyond thai, his

the names of aeroplaneparts and Ovid's descriptionof the fall of lcarus \|
place).Another
father'slabyrinth,a site of buried pleasurewhere the first ever surveyingtakes
century
is a line of capital and speculationmixing live stock prices with names of eighteenth
will show
bubble companiesand Indian lT assemblyworkers' salaries,A more literalwall map
tend to
which collaboratingstations are carryingthe broadcast at a given momeni. Staff will
throughout
these and to a three-dimensionalmap showing the strength of our FM signal
(in
London.This will be monitored by agents in the field - agents who will spread our signal
muttering
the words of Burroughs) 'up and down the balconies,taken up by barking dogs,
is a revolu-
bums, music tra{fic down windy streetsJacross parks and soccer fields. lllusion
tionaryweaPonl
ls our project revolutionary?or is it reactionary,ultra-reactionary even? Burroughs points
ClAand
outthatthetechniques he is proposing in lhe ElectronicRevolution'are in use bythe
who run 'The
agents of other countriesltechniquesof the all-powerful'boards and syndicates'
,Each time that it is a question oI courriel (messenger),Derridawrites in lhe
RealityStudio'.
post Card.,thereis police .,. and a basilica... an edifice or edificationof the lawl lf the law is

lodged in it, then whose side is the crypt on? And what law are we talking about? Antigone's
polis and that of
crypt emerges out of a clash between two versions of the law - that of the
broiher
the gods (and, wired through both of these, an excessiveattachment to her dead
polynices,her nicest brother),Plato writes in LetterVllllhaf 'God for wise men, is the laW for
his
the mad (aphrosin)it is pleasurel Freud, watching his grandson repeatedlyfail to mourn
mother,will add: beyond the law, beyond pleasure,death. Justice,Nymphenburg'Dachau'
lf I cannot provide an answer to the question I have just posed, this is because ultimately
the BroadcastingUnit's politicalscope lies not in what ii is saying but in how it is saying it. For
all his faults, Heidegger understoodthat languageis less a vehiclefor content than a structure
'Saying
that comes over and transformsus, placing us in the 'realm' or 'neighbourhood'of a
'resound-
which moves all thingsl ln The Natureof Language he talks about a 'summoning',a
- makes
ing assembly call which, open to the open, makes world appear in all things' and
mortals (Sterblichen,those who die) 'appropriatefor Sayingl Burroughs'sfriend Brion Gysin
reactive
also describes an assembly call in a sound piece in which the phrase 'Calling all
mutates into 'Recallingall active agentsf 'Reactiveagents all callingl 'Callingall active
?gents'
/agents re:' and so on. Gysin and Heidegger seem to agree: we become agents through the

call.
But a questronstill remains:who is calling whom, and why? For Jurgensenand Raudive,
the dead call the living; for Houdini and Bell, they do not call or they do not get through'
plan-
Watson thought that the cracklingstatic on his early line containedsignalsfrom another
by
et. Science tells us that it goes the other way: the INS Broadcasting Unit will be heard
 Do they have hearing'Hearings?This is
aliensand angels - if they are listening.But are they?
have executivecouncils and sub-
the first question of Rilke'sDuino Elegies.For Rilke,angels
c om m it t ees t oo; t hat is par t o{ wh a t m a k e s t h e m s o t e r r i f y i n g . Wa i t i n g f o r s e n t e n c e t o b e
the Princess,Death,describes
passed on her by the tribunalof death-bureaucratsin orphee,
messageson African signal drums, tom-
how the orders of the Underworldare passed on like
originatorand have her sentence over-
tom transmissions.orph6e says he will go to their
,He doesn,t live anywherej she answers sadly; 'some say we're his dream "' his bad
turned.
dreaml
cegeste's messages he is con-
who is callingwhom, and why? When orphee first hears
signal can only be picked up in the
vinced they are addressed only to him. He is right: the
he is there she orders Cegeste to trans-
Princess'scar parked in his garage.When she knows
as the messages' originator'For
mit, standing behind him like P behind s, masking herself
and who the receiver;it is also one of
Derrida,the questton rs not only who is the originator
whom us t pay . W hi|et y pingupt h e m a n u s c r i p l o l T h e P o s t C a r d , h e r e c e i v e s a | o n g - d i s t a n c e
a Martine or Martini
phone call. The operator asks him if he will accept the charges {rom

Heidegger ' |t is lgTg. Heidegge r , t h e t h i n k e r o f . t h e c a | | 'w h o t o o k t h e N a z i c a | | , h a s b e e n d e a d

that I thought I recognisedon the other
for three years.'l heardl Derrida,a Jew,tells us, 'voices
watching my reactionl Fernmiindlicher
end of the intercontinentalline, listeningto me and
masonryin that nothing,what livid
voices, saying nothtng.what shattered glass and toppling
pointing out that even if it is one of
final flames? Ronell discusses the episode at length,
who places the call, nonethelessit still
Derrida'sdrunken {riends and not Heidegger's ghost
tortured enough to muti|ate his name, a
transmits Heidegger,s conscience - a conscience
in the historyof philosophy'and
Martin with a twist, This is the single most importantmoment
another en claire dummy beneaih which
Derrida's response ('lt's a joke; I do not accept') is
own name' forwards the ca|| to
pulses the conStant|yrepeatedword that, encryptingDerrida's

us: j'accePte, I accePt.

one-to-oneto one-to-manyto many-
The historyof communicationhas seen a move from
simultaneouslymasked and multiplied'
to-many networks in which sender and addresseeare
displace-
circuit brings about orphic disintegrationand elaborate
The transmission-reception
Violette Szabo, into France wtth a
ments. when Marks sends a parlicularlybeautifulagent,
@
poem hewr ot ef or anot her wom a n , R u t h 'w h o d i e d i n a p | a n e c r a s h , s z a b o a s k s h i m w h o i t s
,l'll iell you when you come backl he replies.she does not, and years laier'after the
author is,
Marks if he will send the poem to his
(, ooem has been used in a film about her, a father asks
Derridamentionsa loverwho' no matter
I
o srck son, who likes it. Marks does, and the child dies'
o
else' The wolf Man and Marks
which man she is with, can only come by thinkingof someone
(!
I

love and mourningthe same thing? or is

o can only mourn when thinkingof someone else. Are
o crypt? Derrida'sown 'cryptograms are
o love more like the failureto mourn that glves rlse to the
o,
z of 'our amorous bureaucracy'our
full of love: he writes to The Post cards mysteryaddressee
G
you so, I have never been so sure of our
o erotic secretariatltelling her that'l have never loved
G
des c endanc ef or I am c a||ing y o u , | i k e t h e o t h e r , b e y o n d y o u r n a m e 'b e y o n d a l | n a m e s ] T h e c a | |
ll)
generateslove and love generatesthe call'

i
 addressedto a 'you'.lt goes like
poem is alsoapostrophic,
Marks'srepeatedly-displaced o
3
th i s: 3
CEI

=
D
The life that I have o
ls all that I have Ul

And the li{e that I have

(9

ls yours.

The love that I have

Of the life that I have
ls yours and yours and yours.

A sleep I shall have

A rest I shall have
Yet death will be but a pause.

For the peace of my years

In the long green grass
Will be yours and yours and yours.

'Yoursand yours and yours': do these words silentlyrepeat Ruth's name three times? Or do
they come to signal Ruth's, Violette'sand the boy's? Or Marks's future readers?Among the
poem's amorous,cryptic displacements,'you' become all of the above,and death becomes a
pauseJan asignifyingbreak in a long chain of dot-dot-dotage.
Death calls Orphee because she loves him. Through poetry and through technology,she
seduces him. Because he is seduced, he repeats and, failingto mourn Eurydice,falls in love
with Death. Death loves him so much that she plays him backwards,d reculons,returninghim
ihrough the current oi time that rushes like a wind. This is Cocteau's twist: helped by Cegeste
(as Auden knows, only a poet can bring this about), the Princessensures that by the end of

the film the clock has been set back to zero-minus-oneand nothing- the messages,the motor-
bikes,the bar-roombrawl - has happened.
We will be like Death, the Princess, and cegeste, this waspish duo, transmittingto
Orph6e. Which means that the public - them, you - will be placed in the role of Orphee.
Maybe Joseph Beuys, the German wartime radio operator turned artist,was right: everybody
can become an artist.Bui only if you tune in to the right siation. Even if you do not tune in we
will see to it that nothing happens to you. We will be the guarantorof this - in the silence
swirling around you on the air in waves, the unheard messages.Why will we do this for you?
Because we love you. And you love us too, even if we erase that knowledgefrom your mind
before you even come to know it in the first place, rub it out in the same movementwith which
we inscribe it. We love,we are loved,we are love.The rest, like the man says, is silence.
 Thanksto:

the SecondFirstCommitteeHearings:
PollyStapleand Cubittfor facilitating
Death,Technology' 16 November 2002'
Transmission,

Witnessesat the Hearings

HeathBunting
JohnCussans
Ken Hollings
JaneLewtY
Manu Lukschand MukulPatel
CerithWYnEvans

of this Reportand the

Gaskinand the ICA for hostingthe launch
Vivienne
INS Broadcasting
forthcoming Unit'

INS Communications Subcommittee

and Encodings

SimonCritchley(lNS ChiefPhilosophed
A n th o n y A u e rb a c h (| N SC hi efofP ropaganda,A rchi vi ng& E pi stemol ogi ca| C ri ti que)
Reviewer)
MelissaMcCarthy(lNS Chief Obituary
Communications Adviser)
PeteGomes (Technical

T h i s p u b | i c a tro n a n d th e B roadcasti ngU ni ti nsta| l ati onarefi nanci al | ysupportedby

Arts C o u n c i | E n g | a n d a n d the| nsti tuteofC ontemporaryA rts.

TomMcCarthy,GeneralSecretary'INS

ffi auts.org
htto://www.necron

.9
I
o London
Pressservice:VargasOrganistion'
o
fit uK
http://www.vargas.org'
o

(l

o
(J
o)
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o
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 London
Publishedby VargasOrganisation,
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