Ballardian

by William Viney

Future Ruins: Michelle Lord © 2007. Used with permission.

NOTE: This feature was published in two installments: Parts I & II here, Part III there.

William Viney, © 2007.

I. Waste and Value.

Waste undeniably concerns notions of value and meaning: what is retained and preserved is valued; what is discarded, banished, and abjected is devalued [1]. Waste therefore marks implicit boundaries, articulates dynamic categories, and stratifies objects into orders of value. Yet these orders of meaning and significance are by no means static. Rubbish, refuse and litter are expressions of complex systems in perpetual motion: representing different things, to different people, at different times. This semantic contingency is the product of an aesthetic, economic, biological, and socio-political “discursive constellation” [2] that is forever in flux. The subject of waste requires therefore an interdisciplinary approach. We must adopt a critical apparatus flexible enough to trace the intricately intersecting discursive nodes that generate and maintain value.

Though cultural order and taste might at first appear to be rigid and long established, it in fact requires endless renewal and recreation, re-enacted through individual and collective forces. From a structural anthropologist’s point of view, rubbish is a dynamic social force. For Mary Douglas, it is the clean and orderly that represents the static and immobile, whilst dirt, rubbish, and refuse contain a covert revolutionary potential, harbouring a power to contest the static stability upon which order depends. As Douglas has noted, “[d]irt offends against order. Eliminating it is not a negative moment, but a positive effort to organise the environment” [3]. Waste or rubbish (synonyms of dirt for Douglas) maintain order, through the binary logic of the devalued Other. Simultaneously, waste contests that order, as it threatens to become a valued object. As this brief theoretical excursion illustrates, the value of waste is far from absolute. The changing values given to objects lend them tumultuous life, making possible a “cultural biography of things” [4]. If we begin to think about J. G. Ballard’s cultural biography of objects, we are immediately struck by his unerring focus on the final chapters, the closing pages that mark the transition into, and out of, the category of ‘waste.’ Even more peculiar, Ballard’s ‘biography’ of things never fully ends, his waste frequently returns as want, merging end and beginning, creation and destruction.

Michael Thompson, one of the earliest theorists of waste, has divided objects into two categories: ‘transient’ objects (e.g. a car) with a finite life span which decrease in value as time progresses; whilst ‘durable’ objects (e.g. antique furniture) have prolonged life spans, and their value increases as time progresses. Our attitude towards an object greatly depends on our ability to place it into one of these categories; our financial energies will be thrown into the conservation (through insurance, maintenance, presentation etc.) of the durable object, whilst we will happily destroy or discard the transient object. Thompson goes on to argue that there is a shadowy and covert third term: ‘rubbish.’ Although a transient object may fall into the ‘rubbish’ (or waste) category it may, by good fortune, fortitude, or human intervention, re-emerge with durable credentials. Waste as a social category of value is therefore intimately bound to fluid transfers of value, a category of flexibility and mutability [5]. Most notable in Ballard’s fiction is the absence of Thompsonian durability, to borrow another phrase from Thompson; Ballard’s world is a “world of transience.” For Ballard, waste registers a process, a cycle, a movement, and system in transition: durability and permanence have no place in a fictional world that revels in the power of waste to negotiate and renegotiate value.

II. Architectures of Waste: High-Rise, Concrete Island, and “The Ultimate City”

The changing character of the city, and the casual effects these changes have upon the individual and collective psyches of its populace, are powerfully rendered in High-Rise, Concrete Island, and “The Ultimate City”. All three contain familiar visual landscapes: the high-rise apartment building, the roadside waste ground, the empty Central Business District. However, each of these recognisable aspects of urban experience is rendered unfamiliar through the pervasive renegotiation of waste categories. Unexpected reversals propel each narrative on unknown trajectories: the brand new high-rise becomes derelict, the waste ground becomes habitable, the abandoned city centre thrives once more. In each case, values and priorities transform themselves, giving way to new orders of social organisation and new systems of commerce. What is considered rubbish finds itself similarly reconfigured, as radical new ecologies of consumption and rejection are tried and tested. Waste hovers at the fringes in a ubiquitous and deeply ambivalent manner, at all times it threatens to upset traditional categories of value. As waste becomes accepted, even loved, Ballard shows how our environment conditions notions of waste, want, and value.

In High-Rise, Ballard questions the bold ambition of high modernist architecture. These building projects implicitly communicate concepts of cleanliness and waste management, furthering a techno-modernist form of social engineering [6]. At the core of post-war redevelopment were notions of reclamation and redevelopment. Progressive ultramodern housing rose from the derelict slums and industrial wastelands. This is a context with which Ballard’s fiction patently interacts:

Together [the apartment blocks] were set in a mile-square area of abandoned dockland and warehousing along the north bank of the river [...] The massive scale of the glass and concrete architecture, and its striking situation in the bend of the river, sharply separated the development project from the rundown areas around it, decaying nineteenth-century terraced houses and empty factories already zoned for reclamation [7].

Dominating the architectural scene of 1960s and 1970s Britain, the Brutalist school confronted inner city decline, bombed-out post-war dereliction, and industrial decline, with a clinical rationalism. As Jürgen Joedike has made clear, the Smithsonian-Brutalist movement privileged ethical and social architectural principles over the aesthetic. Precise geometry, ‘honest’ (i.e. visible) use of materials, and a dedication to the striking ‘image,’ were seen to create buildings both progressive and pure, in function and form [8]. The ultra-rationalist/behaviourist ideals that the Brutalists inherited from architects such as Le Corbusier and Mies Van Der Rohe meant that the high-rise was intended as a means to cleanse post-war Britain of its social ills, literally cleaning up the neighbourhood through a minimalist economy of space. A utopian relationship with technology fostered a correspondingly technocratic architecture:

for the machine supported present-day cities, only a live, cool, highly controlled, rather impersonal architectural language can deepen that base-connection, make it resonate with culture as a whole [9].

Peter Smithson’s Futurist aesthetic becomes playfully inverted in Ballard’s high-rise. Whilst the building begins as “a huge machine designed to serve [...] a never-failing supply of care and attention” (HR, 10), the ‘machine’ comes to a shuddering collapse, taking with it the moral stability of its residents. The absolute failure of the high-rise permits the exploration of previously repressed psychological phenomenon: tribal violence, sexual promiscuity, and open vandalism.

The high-rise’s aggressive environment encourages a competitive decadence that allows valuable objects to become transformed into waste - shows of wealth, irresponsibility, and indifference gather around acts of disposal. Drinking “a brand of expensive imitation champagne” in the morning, and throwing a full bottle, “still with its wired cork and foil in place,” off the balcony, powerfully demonstrates the violent waste-making of the affluent classes (HR, 11, 12). It is this self-conscious creation of waste that is endlessly paraded throughout the novel. Laing’s mild annoyance towards his inconsiderate neighbours is far less interesting than his decision to dispose of the remnants of the champagne bottle in an identical manner as the revellers above, by throwing it over his balcony’s balustrade. Individual waste becomes socialised, the category of waste is contagious.

Fittingly, Laing’s first altercation with a fellow resident is over a blocked rubbish-disposal chute. He and Steele soon unite however, as they unblock the chute and discuss the peculiar waste disposal habits of the upper floor residents. At this early stage in the novel, the presence of waste is already expressing the transient relations people hold with their refuse:

Steele stood back as the column of garbage sank below in a greasy avalanche. He held Laing’s arm, steering him around a beer can lying on the corridor floor. ‘Still no doubt we’re all equally guilty — I hear that the lower floors people are leaving small parcels of garbage outside their apartment door’ (HR, 39).

The telling manipulation of language here suggests a deliberate, perhaps ritualistic, negotiation and renegotiation of waste values, and this merely marks the beginning of what becomes an obsession. Ballard’s incessant cataloguing of rubbish becomes a towering feature of his narrative. A careful balance is struck between waste avoidance (clearing the chute and steering round the beer can) and waste acceptance (parcels of rubbish left in communal spaces), a balance that will steadily break down through the course of the novel. Any quaint delicacy that “small parcels” might suggest becomes obliterated as the rubbish heaps up, inside and outside the building. Anthony Royal, the building’s architect, observes from his top-floor apartment a “sea of rubbish that spread[s] around the building like an enlarging stain” (HR, 76). This spreading sea, for Royal and the reader, is a “visible index of the block’s decline,” a physical measure of “the extent to which its tenants accepted this process of erosion” (HR, 76). At first tolerated, then accepted without acknowledgment, and finally embraced as a truer state of being, the residents’ changing relations with rubbish is an important barometer of social change; a mirror that reflects the collective mental health of the high-rise.

The steady accumulation of rubbish is symptomatic of an eroded boundary between ‘inside’ and ‘outside.’ The high-rise retains an inexplicable hold upon the psyches of the residents, they reject the outside world entirely. For example, despite growing hardships, Royal observes: “they would not be leaving either the following morning or any other” (HR, 78). He dreams of an architecture with “no possibility of escape” (HR, 81). In their rejection of the outside world, Royal and his fellow residents testify to the success of self-containment. The waste and dirt of the high-rise insulate the residents against an outside that has become increasingly unattractive, detached, unreal. After attempting to go to work and getting only as far as the car park before turning back, Laing realises he will never again try to leave (HR, 104). Coupled with the bizarre psychological control the high-rise holds over its residents, the physical properties of the high-rise means that waste cannot escape either. An architecture that prioritises the vertical over the horizontal means that spatial boundaries are reordered. The high-rise has no discernable centre, or rather, the whole building is a giant centre. Similarly, each apartment has no discernable periphery, the front door simply leads further into the main building. The “small parcels of garbage” left outside the apartment door speak of the contested nature of private space in a high-rise apartment block. With this space contested, the sense of ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ become similarly obscured. With a clearly identifiable ‘outside’ lost, the boundary between ‘core’ and ‘periphery’ is blurred, complicating the spatial distinctions implicit in ‘throwing things out.’ Even though the residents might try to throw their rubbish off their balconies, Royal still observes waste that appears as a “sea” and a “stain.” Both words express the impossibility of disconnecting the building from its waste: “[a] greasy spray hung across the face of the building, the residue of the cascade of debris now heaved over the side without a care whether the wind would carry it into the apartments below” (HR, 97). Laing tries to clean his flat only to discover that “all he was doing was rearranging the dirt” (HR, 100). With its complication of spatial divides, the high-rise renders waste uncanny - in perpetual circulation, forever threatening to return to sender.

Future Ruins: Michelle Lord © 2007. Used with permission.

If waste defines space (and vice versa) through the generation of physical and conceptual boundaries then the sense that refuse has lost its ‘correct’ place registers the renegotiation of these boundaries, and perhaps the renegotiation of waste categories in general. The most intimate and domestic spaces, such as the kitchen and bed, become unexpected rubbish tips. In fact, Laing finds himself in his kitchen bedding down on bags of rubbish:

[H]e realised how derelict it had become. The floor was strewn with debris, scraps of food and empty cans. To his surprise, Laing counted six garbage-sacks — for some reason he had assumed there was only one [...] Reclining against this soft bed of his own waste he felt like going to sleep (HR, 100).

Laing’s indifference to these heaps of rubbish are neither the signs of laziness or the failure of the buildings’ technology, but rather, proof that his values are at a considerable remove from those that prompted him to throw the broken wine bottle off his balcony. His dramatic change in attitude towards waste is “to be welcomed [it] helped to expose a more real vision of himself” (HR, 100). Similarly, Royal observes the unwillingness of his residents to dispose of their sacks of rubbish:

Presumably they held this rubbish to themselves less from fear of attracting the attentions of the outside world than from the need to cling to their own, surround themselves with the mucilage of unfinished meals, bloody bandage scraps, broken bottles that once held the wine that made them drunk, all faintly visible through the semi-opaque plastic (HR, 137).

It is difficult to say when exactly our waste ceases to belong to us. The residents believe that by throwing their rubbish over the rails they lose an aspect of themselves. In this sense, when we discard an object we in fact give birth to, or create something, that we can cherish, creatively expressing an aspect of ourselves. Put simply: a truer connection with one’s waste offers a truer sense of the self, a reversal of the unreal disposable society that dominates the metropolis beyond the buildings’ limits. The logical conclusion of this attitude is a richer relationship with one’s own bodily wastes: “the stench gave him confidence, the feeling that he had dominated the terrain with the products of his own body” (HR, 107). As will become clear in Concrete Island, Crash, and Empire of the Sun, Ballard uses the body as a site and object of ‘ultimate’ waste — the Alpha and Omega of the discarded. High-Rise has its own peculiar twist on this theme, a twist only fully appreciated if, bizarrely, we go via the swimming pool.

Perhaps the most Ballardian of images, the declining status of the swimming pool is a dependable measure of narrative progress: it provides a flexible and mobile metaphor that leaps from narrative to narrative. Almost all of Ballard’s novels contain a swimming pool in one form or another. In Cocaine Nights the crowded swimming pool is symbol of violent regeneration. The empty pools of Hello America powerfully represent the shortage of water that has left the twentieth century empty and derelict, making Western civilisation seem laughably futile. In Empire of the Sun Jim’s crystal clear pool empties itself at the same rate that the expatriate community are evacuated: ” [t]he water was covered with leaves and dead insects, and the level had fallen by almost three feet, draping a scummy curtain on the sides. Cigarettes ends lay crushed on the white tiles, and a Chinese packet lay under the diving board” [10]. In a subtle way, the refuse that the Chinese soldiers have left suggests a form of colonisation, a politicised reclamation of space through rubbish.

In a more startling correspondence, the changing fortunes of the high-rise and the relative cleanliness of the building’s swimming pools are directly correlated. Apart from the waste disposal-chute incident analysed above, the swimming pool is the original place of conflict in the high-rise, where the separate levels begin to divide themselves into a series of primitive castes. The first incident involves an argument between a cost-accountant from the 17th floor and Mrs Wilder. The cost-accountant accuses Mrs Wilder’s children of repeatedly urinating in the pool. Aside from the comic images this evokes, it sets in motion a spiralling series of additional incidents, culminating in the death of the jeweller. As the children are banished from the sullied swimming pool the lower-levels retaliate by drowning an Afghan hound owned by an upper floor resident. What Ballard terms the “contamina[tion]” and “profanation” of the pool again announces a more specific objective correlative for the psychological health of the high-rise. The pool, like the building as a whole, is already progressing from a space of decadent leisure to one of violent contamination and waste.

The decline of the swimming pool is gradual yet entropic; “a half-empty pit of yellowing water and floating debris” (HR, 75) soon becomes “yellowing water [...] filled with debris, the floor of the shallow end emerging like a beach in a garbage lagoon. A mattress floated among the bottles, surrounded by a swill of cardboard cartons and newspapers” (HR, 88). After this, the 35th floor pool has a lengthy absence until it reappears: “[t]wo bodies, he noted, floated in the pool, barely distinguishable from the other debris, the kitchen garbage and pieces of furniture” (HR, 159). Both pools have become established unofficial dumps, places where both kitchen waste and human bodies can be discarded with equal ease. This disturbing image acts as a mere prelude to the climactic description of the 10th floor swimming pool:

In the yellow light reflected off the greasy tiles, the long tank of the bone-pit stretched in front of them. The water had long since drained away, but the sloping floor was covered with the skulls, bones and dismembered limbs of dozens of corpses. Tangled together where they had been flung, they lay about like tenants of a crowded beach visited by a sudden holocaust (HR, 170).

This is perhaps the ‘ultimate waste’ generated by the high-rise’s harsh environment. With the Jewish Holocaust as a historical intertext, we are reminded how easily humans can discard one another on an unthinkable scale. True to the earlier observation that, “for all their descent into barbarism, the residents remained faithful to their origins and continued to generate a vast amount of refuse” (HR, 134), the numerous bodies that fill the pool are the systemic waste products of a building, a community, and the individual, in a state of absolute collapse. In a more sinister way, the body pit presents an extension of the unshakeable late-capitalist tendency towards disposability. Ballard’s dystopian vision of architectural modernity suggests a salient and unrelenting feature that transcends seismic social change: the generation of waste.

With the precise details of an autobiography, Concrete Island situates itself very specifically within time (at exactly 3 o’clock April 22nd 1973) and place (six hundred yards from the junction of the Westway and the M4). Richard Maitland’s car tyres explode and send him careering into a forgotten wasteland, setting forth a narrative imbued with the indisputable force of possibility. This piece of derelict land has been created and disremembered, hidden and neglected. Its true origins are made deliberately ambiguous, an ambiguity provoked by Ballard’s enigmatic and exacting style: “a small traffic island, some two hundred yards long and triangular in shape, that lay in the waste ground between three converging motorway routes” [11]. Whilst the familiar term “traffic island” suggests the immediate designs of motorway planners and municipal bureaucrats, “waste ground” creates a contrary and implicit opposition, a sense of chance and contingency: an incidental systemic by-product of humanity’s need for transportation. This concrete island is not only “sealed off from the world around it by the high embankments on two sides and the wire-mesh fence on its third” (CI, 13), but is also “a forgotten island of rubble and weeds” (CI, 5). With “the world around it,” the waste ground is a non-space, deliberately sealed and excluded from the social and economic norms of the everyday. Yet Ballard’s insistence on the term “island” presents a powerful force of naturalisation, with all the associated notions of colonisation and empire, primitivism and pioneer living. As these brief extracts already suggest, Concrete Island is a novel obsessed with the junctures between the created and the artificial, natural and unnatural, the familiar and unfamiliar, the valued and the discarded.

Compounding an endless flux between binaries is the lingering remnants of the island’s archaeology, which has been described by Andrzej Gasiorek as a “physical palimpsest” [12]. Maitland traces the outline of what was once a Victorian terraced street, discovering the ruins of an abandoned church, graveyard, and print shop, with the littered type of an old letterpress still scattered on the ground (CI, 41, 65). We glimpse traces of the island’s hidden history, a history made archaeology by post-war demolition squads and an emerging desire for high-speed travel. All this Victorian certainty has become waste, both by design and neglect. The durable old world has been replaced by a transient new world. The shifting fortunes of what was once a habitable and thriving environment, stable enough to support a church, print shop, and cinema, gives emphasis to the ephemeral nature of land use and value. An uncertain duality between the created and the forgotten is tirelessly reinstated, Maitland’s environment becomes loaded with both a benevolent domestic potential and a desolate wasted malevolence, and it is between these binaries our traditional valuations of wastelands are wilfully disrupted.

What is so remarkable about the island on which Maitland finds himself is its resistance to straightforward categorisation. By successfully existing as island, waste ground, Victorian ruin, “unofficial municipal dump” (CI, 13), and the home of Jane and Proctor, this space retains a robust semantic multiplicity. If we choose to agree with Ballard’s speculative observation that “this triangular patch of waste ground had survived by exercise of guile and persistence, and would continue to survive, unknown and disregarded, long after the motorways had collapsed into dust” (CI, 69), then we must also acknowledge its semantic undecidability as an important contributing factor to this persistence [13]. Maitland’s grim assessment of his island as an “abandoned ground,” no more than “meaningless soil” (CI, 32), does not merely express his frustration with being marooned, rather, it communicates his thwarted desire to give his environment meaning; to give this space a proper language, and a proper name.

If Maitland’s island represents a sort of non-space, without unequivocal value, then we should be unsurprised by the catalogues of seemingly formless refuse piled at the island’s boundaries. With these, Ballard gives his 1970s wasteland a sense of impossible borderlands, populated by the miscellaneous and discarded. The following passages are typical:

[a] wire-mesh fence sealed off the triangle of waste ground from the area beyond, which had become an unofficial municipal dump. In the shadows below the concrete span were several derelict furniture vans, a stack of stripped-down billboards, mounds of tyres and untreated metal refuse. (CI, 12-13).

No grass grew under the overpass. The damp earth was dark with waste oil leaking from the piles of refuse and broken metal drums on the far side of the fence. The hundred-yard-long wire wall held back mounds of truck tyres and empty cans, broken office furniture, sacks of hardened cement. Builder’s forms, bales of rusty wire and scrapped engine parts were heaped so high that Maitland doubted whether he would be able to penetrate this jungle of refuse even if he could cut through the fence (CI, 39).

Future Ruins: Michelle Lord © 2007. Used with permission.

Although both extracts technically describe an area beyond the small triangle ground that Maitland inhabits, this is no less instructive. As the eastern end of the triangle is the only side not lined with a solid, insurmountable motorway embankment, it presents the only viable means to escape, yet Maitland observes a “jungle of refuse” that forms a third embankment, a wall of waste that effectively completes his isolation. Paradoxically, the waste ground is given boundaries through heaps of refuse, but the inherent chaos of these heaps serves only to obscure the islands’ beginning and end. The wire fence can only form a tenuous and explicitly porous screen between the ‘wanted’ and the ‘wasted’; the leaking oil signifies their fragile, if not impossible, division.

Just as discarded objects pile up in Concrete Island, so too does socially discarded people. Richard Maitland, a successful architect, is thrown into a wasteland, perhaps never to escape. Proctor, after injuring himself in the circus, has been made mercilessly unemployed: ” ‘They just threw him out’ ” (CI, 98), whilst Jane, once wealthy, married, and pregnant, has become a drug-using prostitute [14]. It is through the island’s three inhabitants that we are made aware of the fluid movement between success and failure, the harsh downside to a socially mobile population. Ballard describes them as “[t]hree derelicts” (CI, 109), and “outcasts” (CI, 114). Their social identities become fused with the status of the island:

Identifying the island with himself, he gazed at the cars in the breaker’s yard, at the wire-mesh fence, and the concrete caisson behind him. These places of pain and ordeal were now confused with pieces of his body. He gestured towards them, trying to make a circuit of the island so that he could leave these sections of himself where they belonged (CI, 70).

The island harnesses a powerful ability to fragment, making Maitland wish he could discard the aspects of himself that have become useless: in a similar passage, frustrated with his damaged leg Maitland wishes “he could disconnect” and “throw it away” (CI, 127). In Ballard’s deeply critical manner, Maitland has become fully absorbed into disposable culture; a culture that has made and populated the island, a culture that is predicated on throwing away anything that is inconvenient or uncomfortable. Along with the haunting reminders of Jane’s aborted child, Ballard strikes deep into a society that complacently accepts the human body as a form of waste, as something to be discarded along with the cigarette packets and empty bottles.

Although the pervasive culture of the disposable may shape and populate the island, this should not detract from the fluctuating categories of value that prevents rubbish from becoming an entirely static order of meaning. Instances of scavenging and recycling galvanise Concrete Island’s Crusoe-like ’survival-narrative,’ connecting the novel to a long history of travel fiction. But unlike the great majority of canonical shipwrecked heroes, Maitland must rely on an artificial and redundant landscape for sustenance. His need to recycle gives great testimony to the dynamic aspects of Thompsonian rubbish theory, a subtle implosion of categories that suggests a continuous renegotiation of value.

The novel’s first instance of recycling occurs where he wrenches off a piece of exhaust piping from his wrecked car to fashion a crude six-foot long crutch. In a peculiar way, his car continues to give him mobility, or rather, it is recycled waste that makes his hobbling exploration of the island possible (CI, 32). No less remarkable are Maitland’s desperate attempts to catch the attention of passing drivers, firstly by setting the car alight to make a beacon, and secondly by using the car’s blackened wiring as writing material (CI, 51, 61). Although he fails to attract anyone’s attention his recycling is nonetheless successful, transforming the wreck into a crutch, a torch, and a pen.

As Maitland establishes himself on the island, the opportunities to utilise its rich resources multiply. Proctor shows him the island’s main food-source, the fly-tipped kitchen waste of a local restaurant:

[A]n amorphous mass of gleaming mucilage which lay in a three-feet-high heap across a stack of tyres. The nearest edge of this sludge-pile was already oozing through the mesh [...] Proctor picked at the slices of wet bread, lumps of fatty meat and vegetable scraps embedded in the greasy avalanche (CI, 128).

This complex (and comparatively rare) use of consonance and assonance indicates a clear intention to shock. Phrases such as “gleaming mucilage,” “sludge-pile,” and “greasy avalanche,” emphasises the decaying viscosity of this “illicit garbage dump” (CI, 128). Yet this fetid feast leaves Maitland profoundly unaffected: “he felt no sense of revulsion” (CI, 128). The episode is remarkable for a number of reasons. Firstly, it allows the island a habitable benevolence, with a moderately reliable source of food Maitland’s colonisation becomes possible. Secondly, it illustrates an important revolution in value. The fatty lumps and sodden dregs register the excesses of Western consumerism, at first considered waste, once again finds value in the mess tins of Maitland and Proctor. Finally, it provides a significant example of how powerful emotions of disgust can act as organising principles behind categories of value. William Miller has argued that disgust is an emotion that “ranks people and things in a kind of cosmic ordering” [15]. Therefore, Maitland’s loss of disgust announces a cosmic, or rather, a holistic reordering of value. His rotten heap of food scraps corresponds to what the German phenomenologist Aurel Kolnai has called the “prototype of all disgusting objects”; the sight, smell, or taste of putrification; “the tactile impression of flabbiness, sliminess, pastiness, and indeed anything soft…” [16]. Similarly, Julia Kristeva argues that food loathing is “the most elementary and most archaic form of abjection” [17]. But, if we accept that the abjection of objects in part constitutes the Lacanian “I”, where the expelled object affirms and consolidates the formation of the self-becoming subject, then Maitland’s acceptance of waste suggests the reversal of this process, signifying both an unravelling and restructuring of the self. Via the consumption of waste, an emerging identity is therefore articulated. Through the assimilation of previously abject(ed) material Maitland becomes waste, and waste becomes him.

The novel’s powerful depiction of ‘wasted living’ — the domestication of and through waste — finds climactic resolution when Proctor creates Maitland a “pavilion of rust” (CI, 162); a crude house made of the discarded sections of cars. In a deeply ambivalent way, Jane observes: “I can see that you’re a real architect” (CI, 163). Has Maitland achieved a truer sense of ‘reality’? Does a recycled eco-architecture present a viable antidote to the unreal high-rises that dominate the urban skyline? Are Jane’s words a sarcastic commentary on Maitland’s dramatic fall from grace? The presence of waste makes these questions both possible and irresolvable. The fluid transactions between categories of value obscure a critical overview. Critics have often preferred to stress the dystopian aspects of the novel. Gasiorek writes that the island is a “symbol of the waste and destruction modernity leaves in its wake,” Peter Brigg calls the work a “disaster novel,” and Roger Luckhurst writes of the “uncanny wasted margins or ruins of a forgotten twentieth century history” [18]. Ballard’s Concrete Island typically engenders thematically negative readings; nowhere is the novel’s latent utopian content, seen in the regenerative treatment of waste, given an opportunity to redress this imbalance. The tragi-comic ambiguity of Maitland’s fate depends on our acceptance of the island as a viable space in which to live. Should we accept this, as Maitland certainly does, then we must radically reappraise our hierarchies of value and acknowledge the hidden potential to be found in the discarded.

If High-Rise and Concrete Island generate and explore myths of the present, “The Ultimate City” tells a myth of the near future, an exploration of how the future will look upon our present. Raised in the post-industrial ‘Garden City,’ Halloway becomes captivated by the world his parents left behind. Using the flying competition as a thinly veiled excuse, he builds a sailplane and reaches the other side of the sound to explore the metropolis: “an abandoned dream ready to be re-occupied” [19]. He discovers systems of waste built upon an aggressive use of power and materials, an economic unsustainability predicated upon massive overproduction and consumption, only to be abandoned on an equivalent scale. Not only does Halloway reoccupy a wasteland and a derelict high-rise, but an entire metropolis. He re-inhabits a discarded twentieth-century.

The defining contrast of the novella opposes the docile pastoralism of the Garden City on the one hand, and the aggressive petroleum-driven industrialism of the abandoned metropolis on the other. The Garden City’s manufacturers are so exact that “everything [is] so well made that it last[s] for ever” (CSS, 879), what refuse is produced is efficiently recycled. The metropolis is an enormous monument to the culture of the discard, a wasteland strewn with abandoned cars, televisions, washing machines, and other commodities. Through Halloway’s regeneration of the long abandoned city, the narrative asks crucial questions about the material legacies of technologically advanced societies, the transient nature of material culture, and the futile ambitions of Western industrialism. His ability to playfully master the systems of a distant twentieth-century tie into processes of reconciliation and self-exploration, allowing him to come to terms with his insatiable desire for power and waste.

The aptly named Buckmaster, the ageing industrialist Halloway meets in the metropolis, represents the industrial glut of Fordist production. With an emphasis upon disproportionate material accumulation, surplus and excess, Buckmaster describes his golden age:

During the war I built thirty thousand fighters for the government, we were turning them out so fast the Air Force kept the war going just to get rid of them… [and] … enough spare parts to give every man on this planet his own robot-assembly kit (CSS, 896).

Ballard gives us a clear sense of the motive and morals of the old world, constantly reflected in the enormous volume of discarded goods: “[i]n the open fields a local manufacturer had dumped what appeared to be a lifetime’s output of washing machines” (CSS, 879); “[t]housands of cars lined the streets, their flamboyant bodywork covered with moss” (CSS, 882). The size of production and consequent abandonment is enigmatically captured in Miranda and Buckmaster’s waste sculptures:

As he stepped down from the pedestrian exit, he noticed that a nearby parking lot had been used as a municipal dump. Old tyres, industrial waste and abandoned appliances lay about in a rusty moraine. Rising from its centre was a pyramid of television sets some sixty feet high, constructed with considerable care and an advanced geometry (CSS, 883-884).

With their direct association with the monuments of ancient civilisations, these heaps of consumer durables hold an arresting power [20]. Although they represent objects drained of use and exchange values and made useless through abandonment, they demonstrate a nostalgically aestheticised form of memorialisation. This is most powerfully demonstrated in Buckmaster’s “cathedral of cars” (CSS, 897), a four hundred foot monument made entirely of cars, and the largest of the city’s pyramids of waste. Halloway observes that this pyramid “resembled a gothic cathedral” (CSS, 895). These physical epitaphs to Western civilisation hold an implicit relationship with Dada, and to Marcel Duchamp’s ‘readymades.’ Like Dada, these towering monuments of rust express a clear rejection of rationalist humanist principles, elevating mundane objects as works of art and debasing works of art to the level of mundane objects [21]. Duchamp argued that his readymades were created to inspire “a reaction of visual indifference [...] a total absence of good or bad taste, in fact, a complete anesthesia” [22]. Of course, the last thing Duchamp’s shock-tactics inspire is critical affectlessness, his Bicycle Wheel (1913) and Fountain (1917) still attract debate. More accurately, Duchamp’s readymades challenge our traditional tools of analysis, obscuring the distinctions between art and the everyday, the aesthetised and the ordinary [23]. Buckmaster’s ‘cathedral’ represents an extension of Duchamp’s Dadaist ideals, generating something far more elaborate than an ‘architecture of waste.’ The pyramid allows a complex network of competing uses and meanings to collide, a nuanced mixture of object d’art, monument, memorial, and deification of waste. Rubbish, rather than the simple by-product of a forgotten economic system, is figured as the very symbolic locus of that system. All this is achieved through the very materials that the monument seeks to celebrate, waste is used to glorify waste. A very specific brand of mise en abime is created, collapsing important interpretative binaries such as the relationship between part and whole, end and beginning, subject and object: the physical and semantic centre of the edifice is therefore rendered disturbingly ambivalent.

The pyramids trigger in Halloway an appreciation for waste that goes far beyond nostalgic mourning, he begins to see the aesthetic desirability of waste. The following extract is arguably one of the novella’s most powerful:

Far from disfiguring the landscape, these discarded products of Twentieth-Century industry had a fierce and wayward beauty. Halloway was fascinated by the glimmering sheen of the metal-scummed canals, by the strange submarine melancholy of drowned cars looming up at him from the abandoned lakes, by the brilliant colours of the garbage hills, by the glitter of a million cans embedded in a matrix of detergent packs and tinfoil, a kaleidoscope of everything they could wear, eat and drink. He was fascinated by the cobalt clouds that drifted below the surface of the water, free at last of all the plants and fish, the soft chemical billows interacting as they seeped into the sodden soil. He explored the whorls of steel shavings, foliage culled from a metallic Christmas tree, rusting wire whose dense copper hues formed a burnished forest in the sunlight. He gazed raptly at the chalky whiteness of old china-clay tips, vivid as powdered ice, abandoned railyards with their moss-covered locomotives, the undimmed beauty of industrial wastes produced by skills and imaginations far richer than nature’s, more splendid than any Arcadian meadow. Unlike nature, here was no death. (CSS, 915)

Ballard steers us towards a peculiar version of the Kantian sublime: the common flower can no longer hold Halloway’s attention, only a “fierce and wayward” bricolage of waste can provoke his ‘fascination’ and ‘rapture’ [24]. Whereas in High-Rise and Concrete Island rubbish was embraced for typically utilitarian ends (for food, shelter, domination), Halloway’s appreciation of waste operates on primarily aesthetic terms, abstracted beyond a crass division between ‘good’ and ‘bad,’ ‘right’ and ‘wrong.’ It might be tempting to dismiss the final line of this extract as mere Ballardian hyperbole. To do so would be to miss the source of wastes unique aesthetic properties. If a bomb were dropped on La Gioconda it would become worthless, if a bomb were dropped on a rubbish tip its visual nature would be altered, but its value would remain unchanged. The visual attractiveness of industrial waste is one that can never be tarnished — its steady decline is the very source of its arresting beauty.

NOTE: This feature was published in two installments: Parts I & II here, Part III there.

ENDNOTES

[1] I believe Ballard’s treatment of waste runs contrary to John Scanlan’s between garbage and the complete absence of meaning and value; see John Scanlan, Garbage, (London: Reaktion, 2005), 97-98, 112. For Ballard, waste lies on a flexible spectrum of value, ever fluid, mutable, and capricious.

[2] Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. A.M. Sheridan Smith (1969; London: Tavistock, 1972), 66.

[3] Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concept of Pollution and Taboo, (1966; London: Routledge, 2002), 2

[4] Igor Kopytoff, “The Cultural Biography of Things: Commoditization as Process,” The Social Life of Things: Commodities in a Cultural Perspective, ed. Arjun Appaduri (1986; Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999), 64-91.

[5] Michael Thompson, Rubbish Theory: The Creation and Destruction of Value (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1979), 9-10.

[6] Ballard’s High-Rise is set in 1970s London Docklands, at the very cusp of gentrification which only gathers its full pace in the 1980s. It is commonly believed that the West End grew to be a desirable and exclusive district because it lay up wind of the slums in the east, the colonisation of the East End by the affluent professional classes in High-Rise supposes a solution to this problem; a solution the novel wilfully destroys.

[7] J. G. Ballard, High-Rise, (1975; London: Flamingo, 2000), 8. Hereafter, cited in the text as HR.

[8] Jürgen Joedike, Architecture Since 1945: Sources and Directions, trans. J. C. Plames, (London: Pall Mall Press, 1969), 110-23.

[9] Peter Smithson, quoted in Charles Jencks, The Language of Post-Modern Architecture, (1977; London: Academy, 1989), 23.

[10] J. G. Ballard, Empire of the Sun, (1984; London: Panther, 1985), 62. Hereafter, cited in the text as ES.

[11] J. G. Ballard, “Introduction,” Concrete Island, (1973; London: Vintage, 1994), 11. Hereafter, cited in the text as CI.

[12] Andrzej Gasiorek, J. G. Ballard, (Manchester; Manchester UP, 2005), 113.

[13] Scanlan argues that symbolic and linguistic undecideability is an inevitable characteristic of waste. See On Garbage, 11-53.

[14] The fallen fortunes of the islanders are reflected in Ballard’s appropriation of establishment names. ‘Maitland’ may well be a reference to jurist and historian Frederic William Maitland (1850 - 1906), whilst ‘Proctor’ might refer to astronomer and philosopher Richard Anthony Proctor (1837 - 1888). If this is so, then Ballard takes two eminent Victorians, who worked to uphold legal and natural law, and places them at the mercy of the twentieth century.

[15] William Ian Miller, The Anatomy of Disgust, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1997), 2.

[16] Aurel Kolnai, “Disgust,” On Disgust, ed. and trans. Barry Smith, Carolyn Korsmeyer (1929; Chicago; Open Court, 2004), 51, 52.

[17] Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay in Abjection, trans. Leon S. Roudiez, (1980; New York; Columbia UP, 1982), 2.

[18] Andrzej Gasiorek, J. G. Ballard, 108, Peter Brigg, J. G. Ballard, (Mercer Island, WA; Starmont House, 1985), 68, Roger Luckhurst. ‘The Angle Between Two Walls’: The Fiction of J. G. Ballard, (Liverpool; Liverpool UP, 1997), 132.

[19] J. G. Ballard, “The Ultimate City,” The Complete Short Stories, (London: Flamingo, 2001), 876. Hereafter, cited in the text as CSS.

[20] New York’s ‘Fresh Kill’ landfill site towers at 505ft tall and 2.8 by 3.8 miles diameter; twenty-five times the size of the Great Pyramid of Khufu at Giza. Ballard’s pyramids of waste are therefore closer to reality than they at first appear. For more on Fresh Kill see William Rathje and Cullen Murphy, Rubbish! The Archaeology of Garbage (1992; Tucson: U of Arizona P, 2001), 3-9.

[21] For an overview of the many different varieties of Dadaism, see Robert Short, Dada and Surrealism (London: Octopus, 1980), 7-52.

[22] Marcel Duchamp, quoted in William S. Rubin, Dada and Surrealist Art(New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1980), 37.

[23] See Scanlan, On Garbage, 89-115. Although Scanlan ignores the excess of meaning Duchamp’s aesthetics of waste inspires, he nevertheless is right in noting that the use of rubbish by Duchamp is fundamental to an art that “has no objective meaning” 96.

[24] Dylan Trigg has written that an encounter with decaying modern buildings prompts an experience of the “post-industrial sublime,” proving “reason to be fictitious.” See The Aesthetics of Decay: Nothingness, Nostalgia, and the Absence of Reason, New Studies in Aesthetics 37 (New York: Peter Lang, 2006), 141-153.