Comments on: Ballard/Noys/Fisher

By: mark burgess

mark burgess — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 04:50:05 +0000

Isn’t it amazing how JGB has been riffing on the same themes for over 50 years and people still misunderstand him?! If you are going to comment on an artist and be anywhere close to credible you have to immerse yourself in that person’s entire ouvre over an extended period. That is why someone coming to JGB for the first time through Empire or KC, for example, and then writing a review will completely miss the point. It was after years of reading his fiction, non-fiction, interviews, etc. that I came to truly comprehend what the man was getting at. And it hits you when you least expect it, like the other day I was driving to work and suddenly flashed on that great sentence-”Only the highway showed any signs of activity, the motion sculpture of concrete ribbon unfolding across the landscape.” Suddenly this banal strip of familiar highway turned into something magical and it all made perfect sense.

By: nhuthnance

nhuthnance — Thu, 28 Feb 2008 01:37:28 +0000

Simon, I’ve never thought of you as any kind of heathen, I assure you. I appreciate your receptiveness, but only apologise at how long it may take me to produce anything of sufficient quality to be publishable on your site (study commitments about to kick in of around 50 hours per week, plus paid work on top of that). But I will get it together eventually, and I guess I should get in contact by email throughout the process, as I’d value your feedback before “final submission”.

Cheers

By: Simon Sellars

Simon Sellars — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 23:45:20 +0000

hey, i’m not a complete heathen! as i say, reading ballard through an academic/critical theory lens has given me many fine insights.

and your call for a feminist technotheory analysis of ballard is a grand idea. why don’t you yourself write it? i will publish it. can’t say fairer than that.

By: nhuthnance

nhuthnance — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 02:04:21 +0000

As a long term fan of JGB, I always enjoy visiting Simon’s site. In fact, my brother attended a reading in London in about 1990, and had his copy of The Kindness of Women signed by Ballard. When he asked him if he would ever like to visit Australia, JG politely demurred, saying he found the long plane flight offputting.

Anyhow, this anecdote is really a clumsy segue way for me to ask if anyone knows of any critical work on Ballard’s gender politics, other than the more indirect means of referencing Basic Instinct 2? To this very day, there are passages in Kindness of Women that I find shocking to recall (remember the encounter with the Brazilian prostitute, the comparison of her body in a sex show to a “dummy” etc). I’m sorry to introduce a more literary focus to my question, which Simon was trying to avoid in his piece, but I’m curious about any feminist technotheory writings on Ballard, as a circuit breaker for the usual Lacanian/Baudrillard/Bataille tropes. Here would be Ballard as a materially embodied theoretician, rather than ideological presupposition. I see no reason in principle why this could not therefore also speak to the more expansive sense in which Simon uses “Ballardian”.
I am thinking then of the possible application of Haraway, Judy Wacjman et al. If anyone cares to comment, I’d be most appreciative.

By: Simon Sellars

Simon Sellars — Fri, 22 Feb 2008 02:55:12 +0000

Hi Jase,

Glad you like the site, however I would hardly say that myself or the contributors here over-intellectualise Ballard. I’m not sure that he’s a writer given to idolatory, either. Apart from this site and Rick McGrath’s, there isn’t another dedicated Ballard site or blog, and I’m hardly going to be sifting through his rubbish for clues as to what he eats for dinner or what brand of prophylactic he uses!

But I do know what you mean about Ballard as ‘felt’ experience. I put off for years writing anything about him as I felt I couldn’t articulate what it was that attracted me to his writing, however, reading him through an academic lens did open up some avenues to me, and while I am sometimes wary of hardcore critical theory and jargon, it can’t be denied that Ballard intersects with theory at more than a few levels. In his concerns with technology, media, perception and the resistant, redemptive power of inner space, he’s mining the same rock but using a different brand of power drill.

By: Jase

Jase — Wed, 20 Feb 2008 23:53:09 +0000

Simon, that John Gray quote is awesome.

I will state straight up that I am an avid reader of this site ( and a Melbournite). But I am also wary of over-intellectualising Ballard as well. The Re-Search book (which I picked up in a Tokyo S&M boutique 10 years ago) was a revelation to me and still a treasure. It is clear that Ballard is enormously humble and also embarassed to some extent by being idolised and analysed.

Back to that Gray quote. In the Re-Search interviews Ballard suggested that an ultimate statement would be to consciously choose to live the perfect suburban lifestyle, in the right house, with the right car in the driveway etc. What makes this any less noble pursuit than any other? Is there indeed any nobility in any pursuit?

Ballard for me is felt and I can’t imagine how I might express this feeling in any medium. The architecture of his stories, the lucidity, the impressionistic strokes that have so much substance with some of the most minimal gestures, they never cease to provoke intense feeling at a very base level. I hope to pick up the bio tonight, am I ever looking forward to that!

By: Simon Sellars

Simon Sellars — Mon, 04 Feb 2008 10:03:12 +0000

ben, thanks for clearing that up, the ‘parallel form of investigation’ angle is a nice one, and i think something that luckhurst is trying to tease out, too.

ballard’s politics…always a fascinating subject for debate. i’ve seen people try and co-opt him to the right, extraordinarily vigorously, too, i might add…

ultimately his work resists politics, rather uncannily, and that’s probably why i’m attracted to him the most.

ultimately, i must defer to john gray, who i think sums up jgb’s appeal (for me) in the clearest possible terms:

“Ballard’s achievement is not to have staked out any kind of political position. Rather it is to have communicated a vision of what individual fulfilment might mean in a time of nihilism”.

really lovely, that. wish i could say so much with so few words!

By: Bosse de Nage

Bosse de Nage — Mon, 28 Jan 2008 12:22:43 +0000

“Ballard’s ‘Wae Fever’ provides the counterpoint too ‘La guerre du Golfe n’aura pas lieu’. There, he has the Third World War take place without anyone knowing it. Both are equally true”.
Baudrillard, ‘Fragments’. Verso, 2007, p.71.

By: Ben Noys

Ben Noys — Sun, 27 Jan 2008 13:40:37 +0000

First thanks!
On the Roger Luckhurst point I’d agree and I think both articles (by me) were not arguing for using Baudrillard or Zizek to theorise JGB, but that JGB is engaged in a parallel form of investigation in the form of fiction – hence the pseudo-couple argument. This is a common issue I’d say, and not only with JGB. Many contemporary writers are knowledgeable about theory and build theory into their fictions, hence then ‘applying’ that theory to the fiction is like shooting fish in a barrel. Instead I’m more interested in how theory itself might be altered into theory-fiction and also to analysing / questioning the theoretical elements built-in to texts. There is certainly an article to be written on JGB as a theorist of psychoanalysis for example.
As for the JGB reactionary question I probably did fudge this a little. I’d certainly say there are reactionary elements in his texts and it would be highly unwise to naively identify JGB as (always) ‘on the left’ or ‘critical’ in an unequivocal way. Frederic Jameson rather brutally argued that JBG’s entropic fictions of the 60s were allegories of British imperial decline and Michael Moorcock (in the Sinclair book on Crash) makes some remarks about JGB retaining a colonial mode of thinking. I would think there is more work to be done on JGB as postcolonial – his childhood experiences both creating that effect of estrangement from British/English culture and, at the same time, leaving more disturbing traces of what Fanon called ‘a dying colonialism’. Of course the history of modernism has more than enough examples to prove that artistic radicality is not the preserve of liberal or left politics.

By: Bosse de Nage

Bosse de Nage — Thu, 17 Jan 2008 14:17:12 +0000

Ah yeah, the Ames Room story. Correct, must revise my archeology. There. Thanks!

By: TimC

TimC — Thu, 17 Jan 2008 14:03:48 +0000

‘RW is the seed crystal of the latter works (IMHO).’
Don’t forget ‘The Object of the Attack’, an earlier (1984) story ‘From the Forensic Diaries of Dr Richard Greville’, and in many ways a prototype for RW.

Fisher’s paper on ‘Basic Instinct 2′ does make me want to see the film. This might not be a good thing.

By: Bosse de Nage

Bosse de Nage — Thu, 17 Jan 2008 12:59:36 +0000

I never heard of that; will have to dig it up. The Great Sun Jester… No, just an oblique reference to leaving the building – “dropping the body”, as the Scientologists would say. I.e. JGB is still breathing.

Do you know of any writing on JBG’s Agathie Christie works as deliberate fakes, or decoys? “It looks like a detective novel…but is it really?” Romulan books… There’s a good piece on “Running Wild” as a piece in the Surrealist faits divers tradition here: http://www.surrealismcentre.ac.uk/papersofsurrealism/journal5/acrobat%20files/articles/baxterpdf.pdf

RW is the seed crystal of the latter works (IMHO).

By: Simon Sellars

Simon Sellars — Thu, 17 Jan 2008 10:50:50 +0000

Thanks, Bosse, I look forward to reading that. Hopper’s ‘People in the sun’ was used on a French cover of Cocaine Nights, by the way. As for Elvis…huh? Are you referring to the time Baudrillard, while delivering a speech, wore a gold suit in imitation of the King?

By: Bosse de Nage

Bosse de Nage — Thu, 17 Jan 2008 09:30:31 +0000

Went to browse the IJBS…which has a new number out…and discovered that Edward Hopper is “Baudrillard’s artist”–no surprise since his ‘Beckettian pseudo-partner’ had written about Hopper in “User’s Guide to the Millenium”.

The Baudrillard-Hopper piece: http://www.ubishops.ca/baudrillardstudies/vol5_1/v5-1-coulter.html

But why did Jean’s simulacrum go in search of Elvis first?