my mind drifting, once more, among images of oil. I moved through dark and ponderous swells, black-cresting waves and fleck-spattered shingles, before settling among pools in which oil, spent and inert, lay draped over rocks and animals alike. When it covered whole rocks and whole animals, it looked like PVC, like fetish gear. The rescue and clean-up teams’ protective suits looked both perverse and prophylactic at the same time. Offshore, where the waves were breaking, I could see a sluttish Aphrodite frolicking in blackened foam, her face adorned with the look that readers’ wives and models have in dirty magazines.
6.
6.1 The following week, I organized a meeting with a bunch of civil servants who were working on Koob-Sassen. The idea was that they’d sit in a room and discuss their sense of what the Project entailed, or, more subtly, implied. We had, in the Company’s offices, a room purpose-built for such discussions. It had loungers, sofas, armchairs, even beanbags—all chosen to induce as relaxed and casual an atmosphere as possible, so that the discussion’s participants could just chew the fat while we watched them through a two-way mirror that formed one of the room’s walls. It never worked that way, of course: people always knew that they were being watched, assessed, recorded. It’s a well-known problem for the anthropologist, first noted by a man named Landsberger: the tribe under observation are aware they’re being observed, and alter their behaviour in view of this fact, often acting out versions of themselves which they think conform to the ethnographer’s own conceptions of them. The technical term for this phenomenon is the Hawthorne effect; but in college we always called it the Cat-in-a-Box Paradox. Our nickname owed its title to the famous hypothesisdevised by Erwin Schrödinger, to illustrate the logical consequences of Einstein’s discoveries about the weird behaviour of atoms (we were, in fact, slightly confusing two separate scientific theorems—the Hawthorne effect doesn’t actually have much to do with Schrödinger’s hypothesis; but, not being quantum physicists, we didn’t know or care). Were you (Schrödinger proposed) to seal a cat inside a box in which a vial of gaseous poison—cyanide, say—would either break, thereby killing the cat, or remain intact, thereby leaving it unharmed, depending on which of two apertures an atom chose to jump through—well, the atom would only choose to have jumped through one hole or the other at the moment when the scientist opened up the box to see which it had already jumped through. In other words, the cat would be neither alive nor dead, or rather, both alive and dead, until the scientist, post hoc , peered in to ascertain its live- or deadness.
6.2 Thus it was, after a manner, with the subjects I’d observe through the fake mirror. These civil servants knew without being told what was expected of them—not by me, nor even by their bosses, their immediate superiors to whom they could attribute a name and face and rank, but rather by some larger and much vaguer host of assessors, overviewers, judges, lurking on the far side of some other two-way mirror much, much larger, if less obvious, than this one—and were shaping their contributions accordingly. They kept using the word “excitement”(one hundred and eighty-two occurrences over three hours); also “challenge” (one hundred and four); “opportunity” (eighty-nine); “transformation” (seventy-eight); and, as an upscale variant on this last word, “re-configuration” (sixty-three). They reclined in their loungers, stretched their legs out from their beanbags, tried to exude nonchalance and calm—but to me they transmitted tenseness and unease, like anxious cats.
6.3 The way iodine works, said Petr when we met later that week in the same pub as last time—what it does, is it recognizes thyroid cancer-cells and zaps them. Say each cancer-cell was like a coin—a certain
6.
6.1 The following week, I organized a meeting with a bunch of civil servants who were working on Koob-Sassen. The idea was that they’d sit in a room and discuss their sense of what the Project entailed, or, more subtly, implied. We had, in the Company’s offices, a room purpose-built for such discussions. It had loungers, sofas, armchairs, even beanbags—all chosen to induce as relaxed and casual an atmosphere as possible, so that the discussion’s participants could just chew the fat while we watched them through a two-way mirror that formed one of the room’s walls. It never worked that way, of course: people always knew that they were being watched, assessed, recorded. It’s a well-known problem for the anthropologist, first noted by a man named Landsberger: the tribe under observation are aware they’re being observed, and alter their behaviour in view of this fact, often acting out versions of themselves which they think conform to the ethnographer’s own conceptions of them. The technical term for this phenomenon is the Hawthorne effect; but in college we always called it the Cat-in-a-Box Paradox. Our nickname owed its title to the famous hypothesisdevised by Erwin Schrödinger, to illustrate the logical consequences of Einstein’s discoveries about the weird behaviour of atoms (we were, in fact, slightly confusing two separate scientific theorems—the Hawthorne effect doesn’t actually have much to do with Schrödinger’s hypothesis; but, not being quantum physicists, we didn’t know or care). Were you (Schrödinger proposed) to seal a cat inside a box in which a vial of gaseous poison—cyanide, say—would either break, thereby killing the cat, or remain intact, thereby leaving it unharmed, depending on which of two apertures an atom chose to jump through—well, the atom would only choose to have jumped through one hole or the other at the moment when the scientist opened up the box to see which it had already jumped through. In other words, the cat would be neither alive nor dead, or rather, both alive and dead, until the scientist, post hoc , peered in to ascertain its live- or deadness.
6.2 Thus it was, after a manner, with the subjects I’d observe through the fake mirror. These civil servants knew without being told what was expected of them—not by me, nor even by their bosses, their immediate superiors to whom they could attribute a name and face and rank, but rather by some larger and much vaguer host of assessors, overviewers, judges, lurking on the far side of some other two-way mirror much, much larger, if less obvious, than this one—and were shaping their contributions accordingly. They kept using the word “excitement”(one hundred and eighty-two occurrences over three hours); also “challenge” (one hundred and four); “opportunity” (eighty-nine); “transformation” (seventy-eight); and, as an upscale variant on this last word, “re-configuration” (sixty-three). They reclined in their loungers, stretched their legs out from their beanbags, tried to exude nonchalance and calm—but to me they transmitted tenseness and unease, like anxious cats.
6.3 The way iodine works, said Petr when we met later that week in the same pub as last time—what it does, is it recognizes thyroid cancer-cells and zaps them. Say each cancer-cell was like a coin—a certain
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