Can We Ever Escape This Death Drive?
Author: Andrés Vaccari • Jun 28th, 2006 •Category: architecture, death of affect, entropy, features, media landscape, politics, terrorism
One of the sources for the death of affect is the distancing from community and a sense of shared existence brought about by the technological management of reality. There is a central paradox here: while the technical construction of collective time (through the engineered events in the media) tends to produce an instant ‘real-time’ that narrows the gap between perception and reaction (creating a kind of permanent present, and a social condition of amnesia and of the irrelevance of history and the past), this instant, intense mediation (which has more to do with the time of machines than with phenomenological time) produces a distancing rather than a being in the moment, or a ‘full’ experience. There is a critical disjunction between what we see, and what we feel and think. The global village is not a place of shared experience, but on the contrary, a surface effect further distancing us emotionally from this mythical, instantaneous present we are all supposed to be connected with. So we have two complementary directions: an entropy and withdrawal, and an acceleration, a hyperconnectedness that doesn’t really ‘connect’ anything.
In that sense, there is a strong link between 9/11 events and the fiction of J. G. Ballard, inasmuch as they both concern a ’staged’ reality, a manufactured space-time (particularly in Ballard’s ‘mid-period’ novels, Atrocity Exhibition onwards). In early Ballard this sense of deep, geological, ancient time is usually more of a natural fact (as opposed to technological), a deeper ‘voice’ of reality that comes to claim the characters, undoing the more superficial cortex structure of the ego. Ballard’s characters are upper middle-class individuals, absorbed in a state of emotional alienation that can only be broken by the most spectacular transgressions.
In Ballard, however, we only get the point of view of the ubiquitous disaffected individual, but never from the point of view of the engineers of this staged reality. I can think of the architect in High-Rise, perhaps. But he himself is only unlocking a deeper layer of the unconscious through the language of architecture.
This is what annoys me a bit about Ballard: his POLITICS. What are the politics of Ballard?
Ballard, it seems to me, subscribes to a kind of naïve Freudianism. The technological landscape can only unlock what already pre-exists in the human mind. Or the key can be a liberating violence, an absurd violence beyond rationality. There is always a death-drive powering the characters and events. New ‘psychopathologies’ and configurations can, of course, be created (so, it is not a simple regression, or return to the primal scene, or whatever). But there is no sense of real human interests or other historical, social factors driving the manufacturing of these realities (for example, the enclave-resorts ubiquitous in the latest Ballard novels). There is always a sense of withdrawal, of entropic regress, which perhaps is (as R. D. Laing might have put it) a sane reaction to an insane society. Yet, there is no way out of this lock, except a resort to some transcendental mental structure; a natural, essential, pre-social drive. Ballard espouses a certain fatalism born out of a psychological reductionism. Can we ever escape this programming, this death-drive?
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Hello!
I’ve been thinking about this a lot recently, and discussing it a bit on the Ballard mailing group.
Is it okay if I add some of my thoughts culled from my posts to this?
I’ve finally got round to reading ‘Millennium People’, finishing it last night sat in Greenwich Park, SE London, which in some ways I read with this debate in mind.
Ballard’s characters are often one step ahead of the rest of us, finding ways to take advantage of the media situation that you mention, finding new ways of staging ‘reality’ events themselves as a kind of involvement or way of healing the lack they experience.
I’m not sure that Ballard characters are tied to the death drive in that they want to die, but this does seem to be a form of expression in trying to bring about meaning. Ballard’s characters often find themselves wanting to be transformed or transcendent, finding their own techniques of escape.
I think that’s what so refreshing about Ballard is his sensitivity to, and channelling of, certain ideas in the form of the pulp thriller that are more commonly operated in non text based forms. In some ways this makes him slippery in terms of nailing his ideological position, because he often seems to me to be undertaking his writing as a way of bringing to light things that he himself hasn’t nailed in terms of historical or dialectical meaning himself.
That’s true, actually. I think you illuminate a possible direction here: Ballard’s characters trying to come up with new ways of dealing with the oppressive environment they’ve been thrown in (or chosen by reasons obscure to themselves).
Which opens the question of how the different novels approach this. Millenium People is unusual, in that Ballard is having a laugh at the impotence of the middle classes (I thought), the fact that they can’t get their shit together. There’s something laughable about their revolution. What is disturbing is (and this is a running theme in Ballard) the meaninglessness of these acts of violence that they unleash, the fact that the very meaninglessness is what is liberated in a world overdetermined with meaning.
In all of Ballard’s novels there’s a messianic figure (the double of the narrator) who comes to explicitly articulate the desires of the narrator, offering them a line of flight. In both The Unlimited Dream Company and The Day of Creation (two quite similar books) the figure of the narrator and the messianic figure are merged into one.
From Cocaine Night onwards, this messianic figure begins to grow less terrifying, more pathetic (although there’s something pathetic about Vaughan in Crash, he’s a more sinister and powerful figure). I guess, if we take this as a kind of political statement or symbol, we uncover another dystopian side to Ballard: the fact that we want to be led, to follow powerful figures that infantilize us (or perhaps we are already all infantilized).
Anyway, I’m rambling. I still feel that Ballard’s characters only have to follow the drift, as it were. They are not active, engaged (not that they should be!). All the Vaughans and Crawfords of this world have to do is flick the switch, articulate or externalize our desires for us. What emerges is something new, a new psycopathology; but a psychopathology that gathers its forces from presocial, preindividual forces.
Millennium People is interesting in that, in many places, it reads like a summary of Ballard’s thinking on some of his various themes. (If I get a chance over the next couple of weeks I’ll cobble together some quotes and the like to show what I mean).
For example, the the industrial psychology institute that the protagonist works for is what he has chosen over the opportunities he had as the son of radical who drank with Ronnie Laing etc. He only realises that he betrayed something of himself when presented with the random act of violence that the airport bomb represents, with Dr Gould as his shadow self.
While in some ways ‘Millennium People’ feels more frivolous, I think it has a great weight as Ballard considering his own themes.
In the Harper Perenial edition of the book, there’s a bit of an interview with Ballard where he talks about the fact that terrifying fact that people are so bored that the only thing they think will wake them up is terrible violence. He also lists ‘terrorist attacks’ as his greatest fear.
I wonder whether Ballard saw or sees some parallels between his dissatisfied heroes being introduced into shadowy, marginal groups with their own devotional/deviant world view and the way in which the real world terrorist attacks and activities that seem to have preoccupied him?
Maybe he felt the real world forcing him to clarify certain things?
This is a very interesting discussion…in light of it, i wonder what both andres and mark make of this comment from Ballard (from the RE/Search book, and found here: http://bagrec.livejournal.com/198196.html)
JG BALLARD: “The 9/11 attack was really meaningless — it didn’t achieve anything, apart from killing a huge number of people. It was almost a meaningless act; the logic was difficult to follow. If you hated the U.S. so much, there were other and better targets, in a way: the Capitol in Washington, the White House, the Pentagon itself — one plane obviously wasn’t going to do enough damage; all four planes could have gone into the Pentagon. The symbolic value of an attack, say, on the White House or the Capitol would have been far, far greater. By comparison, the attack on the World Trade Center in New York was really… It almost comes into the category of a meaningless act… and it’s this that people find so unsettling. I think that when you’re faced with a meaningless act of that kind, the brain rushes around trying to find some sort of conceivable reason at work in the perpetrators’ mind”.
Again, I think that ‘Millennium People’ discusses this rather well. The book talks about meaningless violence opening a great gaping void, an absence, where then meaning flows in.
This is why the discussion about 9/11 and whether it was a Ballardian event interested me so much. ‘The Atrocity Exhibition’ has a character that explicitely explains that, in an attept to bring about inner changes, people alter their environment, both mapping the inner landscape onto the outer one, but also trying to alter the inner one by altering the outside world.
I think that the meaningless aspect was the meaning. Symbolically, it was suppose to be an event that undermined notions of proper cause and effect.
The mantra, so prevelent in sixties and seventies radical thinking, that ‘no-one is innocent’ came home to roost. All are complicite in what you are against if they have no expressed their commitment to your individual cause.
It interests me that ‘Islamic Terrorism’ is seen as being the latest in a line of radical terrorist actions but seen as something that is completely new. I think that Ballard recognises that the terrorism of late capitalism is, in some ways, a byproduct of it, hence his link between boredom or alienation and violence.
Dr Gould in ‘Millennium People’ says that terrorism directed at sensible logical targets with a particular end is too neat, too easy to compartmentalise, and thus put neatly away.
I think the World Trade Centre event was supposed to open a big sucking wound where the possibility of healing would be minimal.
I imagine the parallels with his own conception of redemption, or self-perceived redemption, through devience must have given Ballard some cause for concern. In his books, devient ideas in response to ‘modern life’ arise and are nurtured not be well drilled armies or tight organisations, but by small groups of interest.
There’s a really interesting bit of Jonathon Raban’s ‘Soft City’, written in 1972, that talks about the capacity within a city for everyone to act a role. Due to lack of real, organic linking between people, little groups, sub-cultures and grouplets form, coming together based upon a concensual idea of the meaning of the world around them.
On their own, in the modern world where experience of ‘reality’ is fragmented and to a great extent assembled by the individual, these groups filter out everything that is not condusive to their world view, over time becoming further and further divorced from ‘actual’ reality. The experience of this is the world reconfiguring itself around you to fit your prejudices.
Raban talks about the Angry Brigade and the urban revolutionary in this context, but it always makes me think of Ballard’s grouplets, waiting to be found by the his protagonists, who want to have a certain aspect of themselves and their view of the world confirmed, nurtured or brought to the surface.
I don’t think the similarity between this and the terrorists of 9/11 was lost on Ballard.
Thanks guys for your thoughtful and interesting replies.
I think, however, that 9/11 was too ‘meaningful’, in a way. On one hand, it unleashed a certain psychic violence, an excessive force, a horror and shock that struck at a number of unconscious, collective levels. On the other, it was overtedetermined from the start, analalysed, mediated to death, and of course taken as an excuse for the War on Terror, invading Iraq, etc. (thereby playing right into certain agendas, and having already a kind of pre-determined sense). The guilty parties were already waiting in the wings for their appointed role, the media machinery already had its predetermined structures to represent the courage, horror, pain, feed it, make it a political instrument of some other ends. As an imaginary event, it had also already been staged before, it looked too much like a million Hollywood movies, and there was already an alloted space in the collective unconscious for it. Historically speaking, it had to happen, almost, if you look at the dark history of the US-Arab alliances, etc. As such, 9/11 lacks that liberating meaninglessness that Ballard talks about, and which his characters pursue as the Holy Grail at the center of their entropic universes. But no doubt, there are point of contact. It is interesting that Millennium People follows the same pattern of all Ballard novels (essentielly, Ballard has been rewriting the same novel since The Drowned World). But MP is obviously marked by 9/11 and the geopolitical climate, so that he finds a way to incorporate it into the structure of his narrative. What strikes me is the fatalism (from Cocaine Nights onwards), the fact that these acts of rebellion or liberation are absurd and doomed to fail (whereas previously we are supposed to be sympathetic with the messianic message, to understand its rationality).
I’ll post some more ideas as they occur. But this stuff is making me want to re-read MP more closely. (And I think also the recent post on Super-Cannes, to do with architecture, civic duty, etc., can play into this debate as well).
Another 9/11 — Ballard meme…from http://www.coudal.com/ftb/pierce.php
“…my flight is delayed, so I pass the time by enjoying a novel I picked up at Chicago’s O’Hare airport before I came out to Washington — J.G. Ballard’s visionary novel of our complex, often-eroticized relationship with technology, Crash. Though, really, ‘enjoying’ isn’t the right word; it’s not really a novel one ‘enjoys’ in the breezy, entertaining way you might expect from an airport fiction purpose - and especially if you read it, as I did, in a waiting area of an Arctic-empty airport only a month after the worst terror attacks in American history. The cold snake of sensation that wrapped itself around my spine as I read Ballard’s narrative of sexual obsession played out in an airport hospital meant for the treatment of the horribly burned and mutilated bodies of plane crash victims was about as clear an illustration of the difference between the erotic and the pornographic as one could ask for, and despite having friends who lived in Manhattan on September 11th and having watched the entire thing on television myself, the full reality of the attacks didn’t quite catch up to me until that afternoon, sitting in a comfortable chair across from an abandoned Chinese buffet.
Sometimes it’s better to stick with John Grisham”.
From an interview with Travis Elborough: “the experience of spending nearly three years in a camp, especially as an early teenage boy, taking a keen interest in the behaviour of adults around him, including his own parents, and seeing them stripped of all the garments of authority that protect adults generally in their dealings with children, to see them stripped of any kind of defense, often losing heart a bit, being humiliated and frightened… all of that was a remarkable education.”
Does it seem that a lot of JGB’s novels are a rewrite of those three years of incarcerated social inversion and ultimate loss of the “father” (personal and group) as a civilizing force? Is the Death of Affect another term for the death of conscience?
What strategy would you create to survive — given that, as far as you knew, the new social order would never go away… acquiescence from the norm into a private reality seemed to be popular… sound familiar?
I don’t agree with you, Andrés, when you say,”There is always a death-drive powering the characters and events.” There is always an inversion of “reality” (itself a fiction)… and while events may be death-driven, the characters seem motivated by a life force, stunningly indivdualized as is JG’a imaginative wont.