The International Necronautical Society was founded in London in 1999. Its First Manifesto declared that "Death is a type of space, which we intend to map, enter, colonise and, eventually, inhabit". Revolving around a central committee of  writers, artists and philosophers, it has adapted and morphed to fit the institutions that have hosted its events. The most recent of these was a two-week residency in London’s Austrian Cultural Institute. INS General Secretary Tom McCarthy talked to Cameron Bain shortly after the residency had ended.

(...we are in a tower. somewhere in the vicinity there are ballerinas. Also probably somewhere, cursing into the empty air in a room or a doorway, there’s a drunk, suddenly ambushed by the memory of some weird choice or utterance once fatefully made... But I only thought of this later...)

C: When I first met you, you stated quite emphatically that the INS is not an art project...

T: It’s not at all an art project.

C: What did you originally conceive of it as being?

T: OK, well, the best way to answer that is to do a whole genealogy of it. It came about because I’d been thinking a lot about death in literature, which has a very long history, both as theme and as organising structural principle. Greek tragedy is completely configured around death. For example, "Antigone": the whole rites of burial, where she’s allowed to bury her dead brother, or not allowed to, demarcate what’s the polis and what’s outside the polis; what’s society, what’s outside society; laws... The whole political and symbolic and sexual and ontological sphere revolves around death. And this goes in a pretty much uninterrupted line (of course, it's always been transformed by different eras and different writers) all the way up to writers like Faulkner, whose "As I Lay Dying" is, well, exactly the same: death is what anchors...

C: It’s the centrepoint of the moral compass...

T: And the spatial compass and the symbolic compass. It’s perhaps at its most interesting for me in a certain moment in Modernism when you get, specifically, writers like Maurice Blanchot and Kojeve, with his readings of Hegel, where death is central to the whole process of cognition. According to Hegel, objects have to die in order to become, in order to accede to the realm of representation and understanding.

C: They have to be finite to be grasped?

T: No, they have to actually disappear. He says, in order to represent a flower I have to take its flowerness away from it, I have to kill it. I have to stop it being a flower, in order for it to become a flower-concept. Kojeve pronounces this "murder", well, it’s in Hegel as well: he says Adam was the first philosopher and also the first murderer; he had to kill everything in order to comprehend it.

With Blanchot you get this transposed into the aesthetic realm, specifically the realm of writing. In his essay, "Literature and the Right to Death", he says that to write is to move into a space that’s governed by the sign of death. It’s a space in which meaning disappears as you move towards it. As Blanchot puts it in one of his best essays, "The Gaze of Orpheus", the success of writing lies in its failure with relation to death: in order to write you have to continually die. You have to deal with your vanishing, continued vanishing, the impossibility of your own meaning, the complete rendering valueless of all values...

C: To write is to continually address absence...

T: And in such a way that the absence invades it, I mean GOOD writing. It can’t close or erect its own meaning, it’s seeping away....                          

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(Manifestoes)

....Marinetti’s 1909 First Manifesto of Futurism, which is incredibly funny, violent, bombastic; it’s a magnificent document. The era (of the manifesto) really went from Whistler, 1840-something, with his "10 O’Clock Lecture", in which he outlines this pre-Symbolist, pre-Wildesean, very elitist aesthetic vision, all the way up to Gary Snyder and the L-A-N-G-U-A-G-E poets, but by 1960 the manifesto is dead. The whole social and artistic landscape for it isn’t really there anymore. It’s the postmodern era, everything’s been done, blah, blah, blah, everything is possible, so that makes the manifesto particularly interesting, because an art manifesto now could only always already be ironic or a pastiche, and yet it still carries the same sort of rhetorical force. I looked at various ones. I was quite disappointed with the Surrealist one; it’s actually a very boring document. The Futurist one was just bang on the money, so I wrote quite a close pastiche of that as a manifesto of Necronautism and tried to infuse it with various Hegelian and Derridean terms.

So, the manifesto was declaring that death is a type of space: we should map it, enter it, colonise it, inhabit it; that death is linked to beauty; the importance of "craft", that we should develop a "craft", which could be an actual vehicle, like, for example, the Belgian artist, Panamarenko’s contraptions, but it could also be a set of practices, "craft" in that sense... I just wanted to float it and see what would happen. There was this Gavin Turks Articultural Fair in ’99, where loads of people got little tables to do whatever they wanted, so I printed 200 of these manifestos and handed them out. Then the Lux Gallery in London asked if we wanted to do something there, so we held an Annual General Meeting, appointed a committee, they gave depositions...

C: That’s the stuff that’s currently on the website...

T: Yeah. I wanted to go for a half-corporate, half-Soviet look, you know, 2nd Sub-Committee of the 3rd Hearings into the 4th Report - long table with microphones, powerpoint presentations etc... That was semi-successful. It was quite interesting to see how people responded. I think the irony was a bit too emphasised at that time. But then the Office of Anti-Matter at the Austrian Cultural Institute said "come and do a residency here", and that’s when I had the idea of inviting "experts" in the fields of literature, art, philosophy, in order to develop our craft. There we totally collapsed the irony - it’s not a joke, it was totally serious. We did what we said we’d do: we interviewed them, we recorded them. The office was not an installation; it functioned as an office. And now we have a very rich archive, which I’m just in the process of transcribing. Anyhow, that’s how it all came to the point it’s at now... [

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(Failure)

...one writer who really understood failure was Beckett, and one philosopher who really understands failure is Derrida. The notion that great projects must fail. For example, what differentiates the artistic field from the political field is that in the political field projects have to succeed. They have to be watertight (discourses, ideologies); they don’t really tolerate ambiguity, paradox and self-contradiction very well, whereas that’s the very stuff of art and poetry...

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C: ...I think, for failure to have any value, a sincere effort needs to have been made. Half-assed readings of Derrida, for example, produce lazy, half-assed art, which, maybe it fails, but it doesn’t fail sincerely, if you know what I mean....

T: Yes! Exactly. There’s a lot of closed-system art that’s gone on, particularly in London, in the last few years. Sarah Lucas is an interesting example of a very good bad artist. Her jokes... I mean, her works, function within a very closed system: if you’ve read Freud and get the reference points in Freud, then you get the work. It’s like, get it, got it, move on...

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(Metaphor)

...metaphor is a sort of vehicle that autodestructs even before the task is quite done. It will carry meaning a certain distance and then the vehicle sinks, founders and again you’re left with a very sincere failure... To come back to the INS, I would say that this organisation is not metaphorical. It functions LIKE a metaphor, but it is not a metaphor for anything else. There’s no other agenda. It works as a vehicle which can only fail, on its own terms.

...Setting up fields of association, that’s a way of practicing Necronautism; craft can be psychoanalysis, psychoanalysis can be machinery, it can all be metaphor, although for what? It’s all about mapping fields onto other fields.

It was amazing during this residency at the Austrian Cultural Institute how Momentary Fusion, an aerial dance group, touched on the same reference points (Kristeva, "Moby Dick") as a political philosopher had touched on two days earlier...

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(Ethics)

C: ...sifting memory for blueprints of the future... death demands of us a code of conduct.

T: Levinas says that death is what opens up the field of ethics...

...in each of these fields (moral philosophy, literature, dance, art, photography) death has become a kind of metasynecdoche, standing in for whatever is untranslatable in those fields. I think it’s very important in whatever intellectual or creative endeavour you’re embarking on, whatever craft, to respect that bit of whatever it is you’re engaging with that refuses to be translated.../////{[][}][[][]/.>>><<............

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C:...maybe that’s where we should shut up......

("...1/2 in love w. easeful death..." Keats)              

Cameron Bain (that would be me) is caught between hard rock and a place.

+info www.necronauts.org