The Unicorn Bookshop edition of Ballard’s Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan.

Ronald Reagan and the conceptual auto-disaster. Numerous studies have been conducted upon patients in terminal paresis (G. P. I.), placing Reagan in a series of simulated auto-crashes, e.g. multiple pile-ups, head-on collisions, motorcade attacks (fantasies of Presidential assassinations remained a continuing preoccupation, subjects showing a marked polymorphic fixation on windshields and rear trunk assemblies). Powerful erotic fantasies of an anal-sadistic character surrounded the image of the Presidential contender. Subjects were required to construct the optimum auto-disaster victim by placing a replica of Reagan’s head on the unretouched photographs of crash fatalities. In 82 percent of cases massive rear-end collisions were selected with a preference for expressed faecal matter and rectal haemorrhages.

J.G. Ballard, ‘Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan’ (1968), later published in The Atrocity Exhibition.

“Is this not the meanderings of a dirty and diseased mind?” — that was the question which prosecuting counsel Michael Worsley posed in Court for BBC Radio producer George MacBeth in 1968. The subject of their discussion was a booklet written by J.G. Ballard and published by the Unicorn Bookshop, Brighton, titled Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan. MacBeth’s view was almost as surprising as Worsley’s — he told the Court that if the work became available for broadcasting, he would like to use it.

This surreal discussion took place at the trial of Bill Butler, proprietor of the Unicorn Bookshop, on charges of possessing obscene articles for commercial publication. However bizarre or absurd the proceedings in Brighton Magistrates Court might appear some 40 years later, they had an only too serious effect on Butler, who found himself having to pay fines plus legal costs in the order of £50,000 in today’s money. In a letter written two years later, he asked a correspondent to forgive his temper, explaining that his memory had, to all useful purposes, stopped at the date of the police raid on his bookshop, and that “I am, after all this, paranoid”.

As I looked through the records of the trial, a sense of depression settled on me … Butler seemed like a fly in a spider’s web, fighting the prosecution because he felt he could not do otherwise, yet fearing that at bottom the cause was a hopeless one. Having started out with the intention of investigating Ballard’s involvement with an obscenity trial, I became more interested in how it was that Bill Butler, a 33 year-old American poet, bookshop owner, and sometime publisher, became involved in this drama.

A relaxed-looking Bill Butler (from New Worlds #185).

The law on obscenity in the UK centered on the notion that an article — a book, magazine, or photograph — had to have a tendency to deprave and corrupt those who were likely to view it. The 1959 Obscene Publications Act had provided a defence if it could be shown that publication was in the public interest — for example, because of the article’s literary value. There followed a series of Court cases — sometimes great theatre, sometimes personal tragedy, and sometimes unpleasant listening — as the implications of the law were fought over in a society whose beliefs and tastes were rapidly changing.

The first test was theatre — sufficiently so for BBC television to commission and broadcast a drama about the trial of Lady Chatterley’s Lover some 45 years later. Prosecuting Counsel shot himself in the foot at the outset when he told the jurors: “Ask yourselves the question, would you approve of your young sons, young daughters — because girls can read as well as boys — reading this book? Is it a book you would have lying around in your own house? Is it even a book that you would wish your wife or your servants to read?” — the jurors reportedly smiled at such a bizarrely out-of-touch view of the world. Numerous defence witnesses were wheeled in to testify to the virtues of one of Lawrence’s lesser novels and its four-letter descriptions of adultery, although they all ignored the passage where the Lady is sodomised … the prosecution had either not read or not understood that scene, since they ignored it also. At the end of the trial, the jury found the publishers, Penguin Books, not guilty.

Mervyn Griffith Jones, QC, Prosecuting Counsel in the Lady Chatterley trial, as portrayed in a Private Eye spoof.

A series of other cases followed, less amusing, and often more discouraging for those who wanted to see a more open society. One of the lesser-known cases indicated the way things might go: Cain’s Book, a novel by the Glaswegian writer Alexander Trocchi, was prosecuted in Sheffield in 1964, and the police justified seizing the book on the grounds that it “seems to advocate the use of drugs in schools so that children should have a clearer conception of art. That in our submission is corrupting.” This extension of the notion of obscenity beyond the sexual was confirmed during an unsuccessful appeal by the publishers, when Lord Chief Justice Parker ruled that “there was no reason whatever to confine depravity and obscenity to sex”. John Sutherland later commented that:

[this decision] marked a new phase of obscenity-hunting in which the primary target would not be the work’s text (for instance its incidence of four-letter words) but the lifestyle it advocated, or that was associated with its author or even its readership. If it was risking ‘obscenity’ to be a junkie and a beat, it was also soon going to be similarly risky to be a hippy.

The truth of this judgment is only too apparent in the Unicorn Bookshop prosecution.

LEFT: The Calder 1963 edition of Alexander Trocchi’s Cain’s Book, the subject of an obscenity trial the following year.

Bill Butler had managed Better Books on the Charing Cross Road in London, before moving to Brighton and then opening the Unicorn Bookshop during 1967. The shop specialized in poetry and American authors; in fact, many of its ongoing sales were by mail order to American universities. In late-1967, Butler returned to the U.S. for a short visit, leaving the shop in the hands of a young man who was then arrested for possession of drugs, convicted, and sent to a young offenders detention centre. According to Butler, “apparently he had had a container for the hashish and some scissors for the cutting of the hashish in the shop. Subsequently my shop was broken into and the meters pilfered. When the police came to enquire about this they seemed more interested in the sales of hashish than in the meters.”

Motion picture studies of Ronald Reagan reveal characteristic patterns of facial tonus and musculature associated with homo-erotic behaviour. The continuing tension of buccal sphincters and the recessive tongue role tally with earlier studies of facial rigidity (cf., Adolf Hitler, Nixon). Slow-motion cine-films of campaign speeches exercised a marked erotic effect upon an audience of spastic children. Even with mature adults the verbal material was found to have minimal effect, as demonstrated by substitution of an edited tape giving diametrically opposed opinions. Parallel films of rectal images revealed a sharp upsurge in anti-Semitic and concentration camp fantasies.

J.G. Ballard, ‘Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan’ (1968), later published in The Atrocity Exhibition.

The Unicorn Bookshop, circa 1972 (photo from Frendz #28).

According to the police, someone then complained to them about a publication they had seen in Butler’s shop, Cuddon’s Cosmopolitan Review, an anarchist magazine containing a play by Tuli Kupferberg entitled “Fucknam”. A plain-clothes officer visited the shop on 15th January 1968, and purchased copies of Cuddon’s and the underground magazine Oz. The following day, a full raid was mounted and the police took away over 3,000 items (mostly copies of Oz), representing more than 70 different titles. The items seized included several issues of the U.S. literary magazine Evergreen Review, as well as books by Burroughs and Ginsberg. Also taken were three copies of Ballard’s Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan, which had been found inside an addressed and sealed envelope.

LEFT: Oz #4, poster and front cover. Three thousand copies of the underground magazine were seized by the police from Unicorn Bookshop, but the charges were dropped.

Charges of possessing obscene articles “for publication for gain” were brought, but eventually the Director of Public Prosecutions dropped charges against half the items. Butler speculated that the DPP could not afford to drop the charges against all of the original 76 publications, since “he might have faced a suit from me for malicious prosecution. Thorny problem.” The remaining items that featured in the subsequent trial included issues of Evergreen Review and Kulchur, Cuddon’s Cosmopolitan Review, books of poetry by Herbert Huncke and John Giorno, and Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan.

Butler decided to plead “not guilty” to the charges, regardless of having been three times refused legal aid by the magistrates even though he appeared to qualify on financial grounds. Between the raid and the trial, the drugs connection continued to rear its head:

A member of Brighton’s police force has visited the shop since the raid and among other things discussed the problem of drugs in the shop and users of narcotics frequenting the shop. It was suggested that I cooperate with the police by revealing names of people I suspected of using narcotics. … A barrister has advised me that in his view the police probably have it in for me. It has been suggested that the shop might be better off in London.

The trial took place in August, 1968. Since the raid, the entire world seemed to have been in turmoil … the Tet offensive had taken place in Vietnam; agitation and strikes had almost brought down the French government; an anti-War demonstration in London’s Grosvenor Square ended in violence; President Lyndon Johnson had announced he would not seek re-election; Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy were both assassinated; and the British politician Enoch Powell made his infamous “rivers of blood” speech. The day after the trial opened, the U.S.S.R. invaded Czechoslovakia; before it had finished, a week later, police had clashed with anti-war demonstrators outside the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, and France had exploded its first Hydrogen bomb.

The Summer of ‘68 … Revolution! … Smash the System! … Situationists! … J.G. Ballard!
(publication of Love and Napalm: Export USA in the student magazine Circuit, June 1968).

Rather more prosaically, the charges against Butler were being considered by the three magistrates — a retired Labour Exchange manager, an auctioneer’s wife, and a car salesman and garage proprietor. The defense called a number of “expert witnesses” to provide evidence as the literary value of the condemned items, among them George MacBeth, a poet who also worked as a producer for the BBC and had conducted a radio interview with Ballard the previous year. MacBeth cogently described Ballard’s concerns in Why I Want To Fuck Ronald Reagan:

… here he is concerned with American politics and society and the ways in which, as he sees it, the feelings of sexual desire and love can only be aroused by violence and violent stimuli. He believes American society is sick and he is criticising the sickness in this work. … America is a most highly developed society where advertising is crucial and so is the projection of images. … This [piece] shows how human feelings of sex and love can be manipulated by violence. [It] shows the connection between the different kinds of violence, for example car crashes, Vietnam and racial violence.

At this point prosecuting counsel asked “Is this not the meanderings of a dirty and diseased mind?” “Certainly not,” replied MacBeth, “and it’s obvious to any man of goodwill who reads it.”

But the value to Bill Butler’s defence of two days of deliberation about contemporary culture and literary merit was debatable. Even defending counsel appeared baffled by some of the discussion, commenting at the start of his concluding speech that “it may be that some of us did not fully understand all that the expert witnesses were talking about, indeed I myself occasionally found it very difficult to understand.” In contrast, the prosecution’s approach was simple and direct — they called no witnesses beyond the police who carried out the raid, and relied on the magistrates’ judgement as to whether the books and magazines were obscene:

I rely on your examination of the works themselves to rebut the defence of public good. It is obvious that these books are obscene and it would not be in the public good for them to be published. I rely on this Court knowing a dirty book when they see one …

The prosecution’s strategy played on the problem at the heart of the 1959 Act. Expert witnesses could testify in Court as to a publication’s literary merit, but not as to whether it was obscene or tended to corrupt — that was the essence of the case and therefore a matter for magistrates or jurors. But how can publication be “in the public interest” if what is published tends to deprave and corrupt? The two major prosecution failures in obscenity trials following the 1959 Act were Lady Chatterley’s Lover and Inside Linda Lovelace: both were acquitals by a jury, and both were of books where the jurors stood some chance of understanding what they read, allowing them to conclude that the books were not likely to corrupt and deprave. (Even that may be overstating matters, since five of the jurors in the Lady Chatterley trial apparently had difficulty in reading the oath, let alone the book.)

In other cases, jurors and magistrates tended to react badly to being lectured at by expert witnesses about books they found difficult to understand. A remarkable case was that of the Yorkshire bookseller and publisher, Arthur Dobson, who intended to publish My Secret Life, a pseudonymous autobiographical account of a Victorian middle-class gentleman’s prodigious sexual career (1,200 women, described in 4,200 pages), which was first published for the author’s own amusement in an edition of six copies in 1888. Eighty years later, Arthur Dobson had got as far as typesetting the first two volumes before the police intervened. His subsequent trial at Leeds Assizes in 1969 appeared to be going well for the defence: the judge seemed not ill-disposed, cogent expert witnesses argued for the book’s value as a rare first-hand account of life in the Victorian underworld, and the witnesses dealt well with the prosecution’s attempt to display them as unworldly or inconsistent — on one occasion prosecuting counsel asked of a quiet-mannered academic: “Is this not the vilest thing you have ever read?”, only to receive the reply “You don’t mean that question literally, do you?”, followed by “Have you never heard of the concentration camps of the Third Reich?”

But all this was to no avail. When the jurors were sent to read the two printed volumes of My Secret Life, most looked only at the first few pages. It was subsequently reported that only two of the jurors were in the habit of reading books, and they had given up very quickly on the 19th century language in front of them. The expert witnesses who had impressed everybody else seemed to have little effect on the jury: Arthur Dobson was convicted and sentenced to a heavy fine, plus two years in prison (reduced to one year on appeal).

Banned in ‘69: My Secret Life by ‘Walter’.

At Bill Butler’s trial in August 1968, counsel had little difficulty in turning the expert witnesses to the prosecution’s advantage. He extracted from one witness, Mrs Anne Graham-Bell, the opinion that adults are not likely to be corrupted, thereby enabling him to portray her as an innocent who “is not to know the evil to which these sort of things lead”, unlike the magistrates, who, he suggested, had rather more experience of the corruptibility of adults than did the defence witnesses. Not unexpectedly, the magistrates found all charges proven.

Incidence of orgasms in fantasies of sexual intercourse with Ronald Reagan. Patients were provided with assembly kit photographs of sexual partners during intercourse. In each case Reagan’s face was superimposed upon the original partner. Vaginal intercourse with ‘Reagan’ proved uniformly disappointing, producing orgasm in 2 percent of subjects. Axillary, buccal, navel, aural and orbital modes produced proximal erections. The preferred mode of entry overwhelmingly proved to be the rectal. After a preliminary course in anatomy it was found that caecum and transverse colon also provided excellent sites for excitation. In an extreme 12 percent of cases, the simulated anus of post-colostomy surgery generated spontaneous orgasm in 98 percent of penetrations. Multiple-track cine-films were constructed of ‘Reagan’ in intercourse during (a) campaign speeches, (b) rear-end auto-collisions with one- and three-year-old model changes, (c) with rear-exhaust assemblies, (d) with Vietnamese child-atrocity victims.

J.G. Ballard, ‘Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan’ (1968), later published in The Atrocity Exhibition.

But what about Why I Want To Fuck Ronald Reagan? The three copies seized by the police had been taken from an envelope addressed to Mrs Graham-Bell, who at the time had been head of public relations for Penguin Books. In her evidence she explained that Bill Butler had told her about this new work by Ballard, and that she had agreed to forward copies to possible interested parties including the editor of the Times Literary Supplement. As was normal practice, she did not expect to be charged for these copies. This gave the prosecution a problem, since the charge involved publication “for gain”. It was obvious to everyone that Unicorn would not have given all the remaining copies away for free, and they were even noted as publisher inside the pamphlet, but the only evidence the prosecution could present to the Court were the copies that were supplied free of charge to Mrs Graham-Bell. After all his discussion of this supposedly “evil” publication, prosecuting counsel had to concede at the start of his closing speech that he couldn’t prove the offence, and asked that the charges relating to Ballard’s work be dropped.

However, in other ways the rules of evidence worked against the defence. They were not allowed to demonstrate that some of the works were widely available throughout the U.K., since the mere fact that a book is available to be bought somewhere is not evidence as to whether or not it is obscene. After Butler had been found guilty, his Counsel was finally able to quote the availability of the works in mitigation before sentencing. One of the issues of Evergreen Review had been included in the charges because it contained an extract from Justine, and defence counsel waved a copy of de Sade’s novel around the Court pointing out that it was an unexpurgated edition published in the U.K. which had sold 100,000 copies.

Not that this seemed to have any effect on the magistrates. Butler was ordered to pay fines plus costs of £419, and his own defence costs would come to much more than this. The Chairman of the Magistrates, the delightfully-named Mr Ripper, commented that John Giorno’s Poems — whose contents included Pornographic Poem — was “the most filthy book I have ever had to read”.

There was a bizarre ending as Mr Ripper went on to attack the expert witnesses:

May I say how appalled my colleagues and I have been at the filth that has been produced at this Court, and at the fact that responsible people including members of the university faculty have come here to defend it. It is something which is completely indefensible from our point of view. We hope that these remarks will be conveyed to the university authorities.

The end of the trial, reported in Brighton’s Evening Argus.

This attack later earned Mr Ripper a public rebuke from the journal Justice of the Peace, for criticizing witnesses “not because they have in any way misbehaved, but merely because they have exercised their legal right of expressing opinions which do not coincide with those held by the bench.” Ripper was quoted as saying that he had made his comments because he objected as a taxpayer to universities spending their money on trashy publications.

Advised by his solicitors that there seemed no realistic grounds for appealing the Magistrates’ decision, Butler was uncertain how to proceed. Eventually, on 21 November, his solicitors asked the Queens Bench for an order of Mandamus instructing the Magistrates in Brighton to state a case for the consideration of the higher court. This request was refused and Butler was left with a final bill in the order of £3,000. A year later, he wrote to a correspondent that, although he had received numerous offers of help, many remained unfulfilled and he still owed £2,500 to his solicitors, “who are beginning to moan ever so gently off in the distance. Like wolves.”

Bill Butler, circa 1972 (photo from Frendz #28).

The Unicorn Bookshop stayed open until 1973, when Butler moved to a remote cottage at Nant Gwilw, Wales, intending to concentrate on publishing. He died a few years later, whilst only in his forties, apparently of an accidental drug overdose. It seems fitting to leave the last words to the late William Huxford Butler, speaking during his trial in August 1968:

You regard it as important that we tell the truth in your court, and you put us under oath to do so. When any poet writes or an artist paints, he is under oath to something inside himself to tell the truth and the whole truth. Not to tell just those parts of the truth which are palatable and pleasing but all that is true – the good and the bad parts. Until he does that, he is incomplete as an artist and a poet.

Acknowledgements:

In researching this article I made considerable use of the records of the Unicorn Bookshop kept by the Archives department of the London School of Economics and Political Science. Background on the U.K.’s Obscene Publications Acts came from Offensive Literature: Decensorship in Britain, 1960-1982 by John Sutherland (Junction Books, 1982), and Freedom’s Frontier: Censorship in Modern Britain by Donald Thomas (John Murray, 2007).

Mike Holliday, April 2009.

J.G. Ballard, photographed at his home in Shepperton for Liberation Newspaper, Paris. Photo courtesy burningrolls.

In Part 1, I asked whether Ballard’s three levels of perception could apply to Ballard’s five advertiser announcements. Look more closely. The first and fifth ads of this series are specifically about and feature Ms Churchill – first just her face, and then just her naked, natural, seaweed-covered body. This bifurcation suggests a natural split between head and body, between mental and physical, between latent and manifest. It also suggests that the three middle ads form some kind of bridge between the eye-dominated conceptual purity of the first ad, and the genital-dominated natural purity of the last. How can this fit within Ballard’s three levels? Here’s a possible answer: ‘Homage’, with its glamorous pose and languid look could represent the world of public events, with its sexuality mimetized on giant billboards across the land.

ABOVE: Detail: ‘Homage to Claire Churchill’ (left) and ‘Venus Smiles’ (right).

On another level, ‘Venus Smiles’ could represent the world of the immediate personal environment, the geometry of postures, the angles of desire, that which has been captured within the immediate and present. This leaves the three middle ads – those without Ms Churchill— as a sort of Coma, Kline and Xero of the inner world; three versions of woman as an imaginary construct, each representing a specific psychopathology of desire. Seen this way the set becomes a kind of psychological study of a love, a public declaration of how, on each level, Ballard can dissect the elements of love into their specific components and conceptualize them as eroticized images, born from his idiosyncratic perception and expressing the validity of his feelings.

This appears to be the manifest… what of the latent? Obviously, given their textual basis in The Atrocity Exhibition, they are also ads for ideas apparently buried within the story/chapters. This additional layer of meaning gives us a new kind of condensation in already compressed text.

If we look at these ads this way, then ‘Homage’ becomes an ad for ‘Notes Towards A Mental Breakdown’, and in this story Catherine Austin and Dr Nathan actually discuss Ballard’s series of ads. In a chapter called ‘Operating Formulae’, Nathan shows Austin the ‘elegant and mysterious advertisements which had appeared that afternoon in copies of Vogue and Paris Match’. Her response will be discussed when ‘Venus Smiles’ is analyzed.

ABOVE: Detail: ‘The Angle Between Two Walls’ (left), ‘A Neural Interval’ (middle) and ‘Placental Insufficiency’ (right).

The three other ads segue neatly into the stories and ideas they promote: ‘Angle’ is from ‘You: Coma: Marilyn Monroe’ a chapter in which Tallis attempts to solve the riddle of Marilyn’s suicide. In the story, the angle between two walls results in the death of Karen Novotny, and a happy ending is problematic as we’re not told if Tallis was able to “solve her suicide” in Novotny’s alternate death.

‘Neural Interval’ promotes ‘The Great American Nude’, and again features the death of Karen Novotny, who dies while trying to “break the code” of an immense plastic representation of Elizabeth Taylor’s body. Pleading for the “positive effects of sexual perversions”, ‘Neural’ supplies a variation on the Novotny “sex kit” with art of a woman encased in sado-masochistic fetish gear. As Ballard says in his later Atrocity Exhibition annotations: “the mass media publicly offer a range of options which previously have been available only in private.” This ad, apparently, reveals yet another of those “options”.

‘Placental Insufficiency’ is associated with ‘You and Me and the Continuum’, a story about a “botched second coming” and a time-man pilot who inhabits the story like an alien in Minkowski space-time, a virgin child outside of an oedipal world. This ad inverts the story, however, as the “insufficiency” of the model’s placenta guarantees no savior, and the freezing of time and space in a daily afternoon ritual. Whatever – the incredible choice of art, a sort of female William Burroughs, is guaranteed to attract your attention – as does all the art in this set.

Like ‘Homage’, ‘Venus’ advertises ‘Notes Towards a Mental Breakdown’, a recapitulation of the Apollo disaster by a staging of the Dealey Plaza death of John Kennedy and the car crashes of Ralph Nader. The story includes one telling chapter which Ballard may using as the basis of this ad. Entitled “What exactly is he trying to sell?”, the copy block features an exchange between Dr Nathan and Catherine Austin, who asks the question in response to these selfsame ads found in popular European publications. Dr Nathan: “’You, Dr Austin. These advertisements constitute an explicit portrait of yourself, a contour map of your own body, an obscene newsreel of yourself during intercourse’”.

Need Ballard be any clearer? Which is why the argument can be made that in this set of ads, Claire Churchill is not only Claire Churchill, but Ballard’s stand-in for Catherine Austin. And further, that each ad represents a conceptualization of not only Claire Churchill, but of the varied, perverse and geometric sexuality of The Atrocity Exhibition.

While Ballard was working on his five ‘Advertiser’s Announcements’, he also found time to create another advertisement for Ambit, entitled ‘J.G. Ballard’s Court Circular’ which appeared in October, 1968.

From an advertising point of view, ‘Court Circular’ appears to have no specific layout at all. Whereas ‘Project for a New Novel’ crammed copy into the rough shape of a billboard, and the ‘Advertiser’s Announcements’ are based on the techniques of real ads, ‘Court Circular’ fills a full-page of a tabloid newspaper and doesn’t resemble an advertisement at all. In fact, given its layout, it appears to be the reverse of an ad, with the headline on the bottom, followed by art, and then the text at the top.

Does this have meaning? One could argue that Ballard knows well how ads should look, so why this inversion? Mike Holliday makes the point that each element of the ad corresponds to Ballard’s three levels of reality, with the photograph of the models representing mediatized reality, Bruce McLean’s stylized drawings the imaginative reality, and Ballard’s concrete poem – a printout – the “everyday” reality.

However, according to a comment Tim Chapman made on ballardian.com, we can also take clues from the ad’s name: “The Court Circular is the daily diary of official engagements of members of the Royal Family, which was carried in ‘newspapers of record’ such as The Times and Daily Telegraph. So the ‘Court Circular’ would have been an expected feature of the newspapers that this special issue of Ambit seems to have been pastiching. ‘JG Ballard’s Court Circular’ could suggest that it’s intended as the record of Ballard’s own official engagements… or, given Ballard’s oft-stated anti-monarchic principles, it may just be satirical.”

The idea of satire makes sense, given the upside-down nature of the ad, which appears to want to be read from the bottom up. In this configuration, the components might be seen to represent Ballard’s conceptual relationship with Ms Churchill, revealing her as the combination of three disparate works of “art” – the photographic, the illustrated, and the described, with the last example ironically given place of honour by being put at the top.

In any case, upside down or not, ‘Court Circular’ is not a triumph of form over content, and as an ad barely lives up to its name. Perhaps that’s the point, as circles have no top or bottom, and you can read this “ad” in a circular manner.

My last example of Ballard’s experiments with advertising is the extended campaigns detailed in Kingdom Come, a novel ostensibly about consumerism, but also about the “message” of advertising and its effects upon an unsuspecting community.

In some ways a variation of the themes in Ballard’s short story ‘The Subliminal Man’, Kingdom Come envisages a society coerced to consume not for economic reasons, but to slake an unconscious thirst for violence hiding under widespread boredom, ennui and ignorance. In actuality, Kingdom Come presents us with two campaigns, both originating in the mind of the protagonist, Richard Pearson – the first for a car designed for driving in London, and the second for the Metro shopping centre in the suburb of Brooklands.

ABOVE: Fictional billboard campaign for HarperCollins’ Kingdom Come promotion.

Pearson’s campaign for a new micro-car is based on the slogan, “Mad is bad. Bad is good.” This upside-down approach, called “strange” by Pearson, is designed to free the consumer from their usual relationships with cars – that is, giving them iconic status – and instead treat these objects as a vehicle for psychopathology – in this case, drive like maniacs and transform yourself into a liberating vehicle of violence and destruction. It’s not boring. And the fact people died as a result of this strange campaign? “Another of the great advertising breakthroughs that got nowhere”, Pearson complains. You can almost hear Ballard chuckling in the background. And while it may be liberating for the populace to buy very small cars with the idea of using them as weapons of psychic liberation, we are, unfortunately, not told anything more about this campaign – except for the fact it got Pearson fired from his job at the ad agency, a situation which then precipitated his divorce.

Once in the suburbs, Pearson irrationally decides to reprise his radical ad campaign: “Brooklands and the motorway towns were the ultimate consumer test panel, and here I could put into practice the subversive ideas that had cost me my career”.

What Ballard is talking about here when he says “subversive” is instinctive advertising – a direct message to the irrational, the purely emotional, the self-serving pleasure principle. The benefits are not product-oriented (new model, spend money, impress your colleagues and neighbours) as they are in ‘The Subliminal Man’, but rather this campaign is social and attempts to appeal to a new kind of consumer who responds not to rational messages about brand personality or product benefits, but to messages designed to appeal to the id, that unorganized, unconscious part of the personality structure that contains the basic drives. In Freud’s formulation: “It is the dark, inaccessible part of our personality… we call it a chaos, a cauldron full of seething excitations… It is filled with energy reaching it from the instincts, but it has no organization, produces no collective will, but only a striving to bring about the satisfaction of the instinctual needs subject to the observance of the pleasure principle.” (12)

The id is also amoral and egocentric, it is without a sense of time, completely illogical, primarily sexual, and infantile in its emotional development. The id can further be divided into two categories – each ruled by the life or death instincts, and in Kingdom Come Ballard focuses his attention on the death instinct, and how it is present in Pearson’s attempts to escape reality through fiction, media, and aggression.

Pearson’s advertising strategies for Brooklands reflect this unorganized outlook: “Message? There is no message. Messages belong to the old politics. No slogans, no messages. New politics. No manifestos, no commitments. No easy answers. They decide what they want”. OK, no message. But what is a non-message? For Pearson, that’s easy: “Madness is the key to everything. Small doses, applied when no-one is really looking.” Overlooking the nitpick that even a non-message is still a message (as we shall see), one could give Pearson the benefit of the doubt and suggest we’ll be seeing something rather different from the usual “50% Off Sale” campaign at the Metro Centre.

ABOVE: Fictional billboard campaign for HarperCollins’ Kingdom Come promotion.

In Kingdom Come we don’t see any actual advertisements, but Ballard does describe the campaign in some detail and outline the media to be used: giant billboards, relentless TV commercials and personal appearances of the campaign’s pitchman, one David Cruise. Pearson’s idea is to reveal him as a “fugitive and haunted hero of a noir film… as a trapped creature of strange and wayward moods – grimacing, frowning, angry, morose, hallucinating and obsessed.” In other words, similar to a four-year-old child… or the pleasure-seeking, pain-averse id.

The novel describes three billboards and six television commercials. As any sophisticated marketer would, Ballard has Pearson design a campaign that builds on itself through evocative scenes, each slightly more fantastic (fictional) than the last. They are indeed mad, although Pearson later calls them “ironic soft-sells”, which is a masterpiece of understatement or self-delusion.

• Billboard #1 shows Cruise, as a “fugitive and haunted hero”, sitting at the wheel of his car, staring ahead at the open road, “and whatever nemesis lay in wait for him.”
• Billboard #2 reveals Cruise in a “nightmare replay of a Strindberg play”, threatening and confused as he stares across a showroom of kitchens.
• TV Spot #1 has Cruise staring “almost ecstatically” at a beat-up garbage can.
• In TV Spot #2 Cruise rings doorbells at random, and when the housewife answers the door, he scowls at her as if to hit her, or beg a place to stay.
• TV Spot #3 shows Cruise “haunting” the Brooklands racing circuit and his mind being “tortured” by squealing tires.
• TV Spot #4 shows Cruise following a group of schoolgirls across a Heathrow concourse “like a would-be child abductor.”
• In TV Spot #5 Cruise is shown howling from the roof of a multi-storey car park.
• TV Spot #6 is just hinted at, but apparently the action takes place in a slaughterhouse. Pearson asks: “The abattoir? Not too gloomy?” And is answered: “Never. Existential choice.” So fraught with death one hardly needs to know the plot.

Pearson himself calls these ads “tense but meaningless psychodramas”, but of course the “meaning” is in the imagery itself – aggressive and violent. It’s what Ballard calls “elective insanity” dressed up in the iconography of the cinema. No longer trapped in their civilized cage of guilty repression and empty minds, the populace of Brooklands quickly responds to Pearson’s siren call of irrational freedom. But then, this is what they’ve been dreaming of: “…people are looking for their own psychopathology. They‘re looking for madness as a way out”. As Pearson notes, his advertisements build on each other in such a way that, “Together they made sense at the deepest levels, scenes from the collective dream forever playing in the back alleys of their mind.”

LEFT: Fictional billboard campaign for HarperCollins’ Kingdom Come promotion.

Pearson’s reconnection with the reality principle comes as he’s driving the streets. Reflecting on the violence his campaign has created, he finally understands the consequences of his actions: “I saw myself as taking part in a merchandising scheme in a suburban shopping mall, using a ‘bad is good’ come-on that was meant to be the ultimate in ironic soft sells. I had recruited a third-rate cable presenter and some-time actor to play the licensed jester, the dwarf at the court of the Spanish kings. But the irony had evaporated, and the slogan had become a political movement… The ad man was faced with the final humiliation of being taken literally.”

There’s the rub, and that’s the danger of advertising Ballard wishes to express in this cautionary tale. Why? Like the unaware populace of ‘The Subliminal Man’, the people of Brooklands also succumb en masse to the message they receive, but not as individuals, as in ‘The Subliminal Man’, but as Philip Tew states in JG Ballard: Contemporary Critical Perspectives, Kingdom Come is “centered upon an underlying malaise not individual or private, but communal”.(13) However, instead of forcing people to do a crazy thing – endlessly buy slightly newer versions of the same product – in Kingdom Come Ballard cuts to the chase and simply encourages people to simply go crazy – with predictable results.

From an advertising point of view, just what is going on in Pearson’s campaign? In structure they appear to be correct: the two billboards offer large, easily-identified images and apparently no copy at all, save perhaps an unmentioned Metro Center logo. Even that may not be necessary, as the pitchman is already a well-known public persona in the community. The six TV commercials are the first of their kind in Ballard’s fiction, and they must be among the oddest commercials ever found in fiction – but then, how many TV spots educate and persuade with glimpses of madness? What is interesting about them is their child-like quality, with their mass of instinctive drives and impulses, their bold representation of fears and aggressions. Technically, the ads are institutional in nature, as they essentially promote a brand – the shopping centre – by equating it with a series of images, usually of an aspirational nature appealing to the mores of the general target group. In that sense, Ballard’s Metro-Centre ads are well-conceived, revealing Pearson’s psychic understanding of the Brooklands population.

ABOVE: Fictional billboard campaign for HarperCollins’ Kingdom Come promotion.

Would such a campaign work in reality? Perhaps in a tightly-controlled dictatorship, where such messages are shown to the exclusion of all others to a population already mad with revenge – Hitler’s Germany, Stalin’s Russia, Bush’s America – but in reality such a conceptual set of ads would have little or no impact upon a lazy, uncaring populace, no matter how much pent-up psychopathology they have buried in their unconscious. They might become a hit on You tube, however. The public consumes ads on a “what’s in it for me” basis, with adults well-trained with experience to gloss over or ignore messages not within their sphere of interest. And Ballard’s noir campaign may be simply too complicated for an average viewer to first comprehend, much less put into action, as there are no direct “commands to action”, an integral part of all advertising messages. No command, no action. This is not to say there are no instances of “crazy ads” on television – it’s an old ploy — especially in the retail sector. The pitch usually involves madness — “we’re crazy to lower our prices this much” – and in rare cases, violence and aggression, such as the American car dealer who took a sledgehammer to new cars and after bashing them in his commercial, reduced the price accordingly. During the late 1960s, when these spots ran, the dealership did Crash-like business. In these instances, however, the psychopathology is directed and focused to a specific sales goal – the point is not to make viewers go out and smash their own cars. In Kingdom Come it’s focused on itself – there’s no “message” to link it to reality. If anything will save us from the horror of Ballard’s marketing nightmare, it’s the simple fact people are too lazy or stupid to do the work of unraveling the madness message and mindlessly adopting it to their own lifestyle. The concept is beautifully executed in Ballard’s psychodrama ads, but it’s a concept that is flawed by its own reliance on the reality principle, which ultimately trumps the pleasure principle upon which the id is based. Well, that and the superego – the state.

So, where does this all leave us? If Ballard did work in a real ad agency, he’d be out on the streets. Real ads cannot withstand the newness and dense conceptualizations of Ballard’s output. Real ads are not as challenging as Ballard’s, in fact, most advertising is nothing more than clichés given a new paint job – old women dressed as tarts. Consumers tend to be frightened by the new, so admen tend to recolonize the familiar by adding a slight twist to it. A perfect example is Saachi & Saachi’s famous punning billboard for Margaret Thatcher’s first UK political campaign – an all-white billboard with a simple, centered headline: “Labour isn’t working.”

Ballard’s ads are artistic, not commercial, although one could imagine them as institutional ads for Ballard’s quiver of concepts. They appear to be dense messages from the subconscious, but are probably highly manipulated concepts of a philosophic nature. Like most of Ballard’s experimental work, they are fascinating more for what they don’t say than what they do. Once again the consumer is expected to complete the process (itself a marketing concept), but even Ballard’s most ad-like ads – the five ‘Advertiser’s Announcements’ – offer up multiple meanings given one’s approach to the set. However, outside the world of harsh reality, and within the world of the unbridled imagination they work hard to reveal those psychological concepts and ideas that Ballard finds interesting enough to separate from his fiction and re-express in a specialized, technical form.

Whether or not it’s Pure Lemon Juice is up to you.

The author wishes to thank Mike Bonsall for his time-saving JG Ballard Concordance, Mike Holliday for his work on ‘Court Circular’, Tim Chapman for his royal insights, and Umberto Rossi for his suggestions and encouragement.

REFERENCES:
(12) Freud, S. (1933) New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis (W.W. Norton & Co, 1965)
(13) Tew, Philip (2008) ‘Situating the Violence of J. G. Ballard’s Postmillennial Fiction: The Possibilities of Sacrifice, the Certainties of Trauma’. JG Ballard: Contemporary Critical Perspectives (Continuum, London 2008) p. 116.

All photography by Simon Sellars.

Bizarrely, it has been almost a year since I posted the first part of this photo essay. There are so many loose ends dangling from this site, frayed and incomplete due to the mad scramble to complete my PhD in the latter half of 2008. Now it’s my mission to clear the backlog as best I can, beginning with this, the conclusion to ‘”Paradigm of Nowhere”: Shepperton, a photo essay’, my attempt to traverse the fantasy-film of Ballard’s Unlimited Dream Company playing in my head. As I wrote in Part 1, I had intended to take photographs of Shepperton, the arena that has supplied so much raw material for Ballard’s writing, but at the same time I had no intention of infringing on his privacy. What I was aiming for instead was the traversal of a distinct psychic terrain (studiously avoiding the dreaded “p*****geography” word): the blanket overlay of Shepperton with a mental template gleaned from so many Ballard novels and short stories, UDC in particular.

In Part 1, we set out from Shepperton train station, making a direct line for the fields and water meadows surrounding the motorway just past Ballard’s street. Crossing this metallized river by bridge, which Blake in The Unlimited Dream Company was unable to do, we made our way to the famous film studios, which feature prominently in the book (doubtless Blake made it by flying). Now in Part 2, we explore the reservoirs near the film studios before crossing back over the motorway and into town, finally alighting in Old Shepperton, where we attempt to locate the exact spot where Blake ditched his plane in the Thames.

I was struck by the fact, when I [first] came [to Shepperton], that I was living in a sort of marine landscape, most unusual. There are these enormous reservoirs, the nearest is only four or five hundred yards away, the Queen Mary Reservoir, which is a gigantic reservoir about a mile in diameter. The whole area in fact is infested with reservoirs and settling beds and conduits and little private canals. When you fly from London airport, when you look down while the plane circles around, you will see what looks like a huge expanse of water, with the Thames of course here too.

J.G. Ballard, interviewed by Alan Burns, 1974.

Above is the entrance to the reservoir that worked its magic on Ballard’s psyche. Although we were disappointed that the reservoir embankment was fenced-off and inaccessible, it must be remembered that for a man of Ballard’s imaginative powers, it would not be necessary to empirically observe a water body to imagine Shepperton — or London — submerged.

Rather, the reservoir is high above us; we are literally ‘under water’.

In fact, [in Shepperton] we’re living … on little causeways. There are huge gravel lakes as well; for a hundred years they’ve been digging sand out, and some of these old pits are damn big, ten times the size of the Serpentine. We’re living in these houses, these little quiet suburban streets, which are little causeways running between these reservoirs. Most of them are invisible because there are high embankments for obvious reasons; the Water Board doesn’t want people peeing in them, throwing cigarette ends in and so on. So they’re well screened off, but one is aware of a sort of invisible marine world, of living below the water line. It works on you imaginatively after a while.

JGB, interviewed by Burns, 1974.

It was plainly not by chance that I had crash-landed my burning aircraft into this riverside town. On all sides Shepperton was surrounded by water — gravel lakes and reservoirs, the settling beds, canals and conduits of the local water authority, the divided arms of the river fed by a maze of creeks and streams. The high embankments of the reservoirs formed a series of raised horizons, and I realized that I was wandering through a marine world. The dappled light below the trees fell upon an ocean floor. Unknown to themselves, these modest suburbanites were exotic marine creatures with the dream-filled minds of aquatic mammals. Around these placid housewives with their tamed appliances everything was suspended in a profound calm. Perhaps the glimmer of threatening light I had seen over Shepperton was a premonitory reflection of this drowned suburban town?

J.G. Ballard, The Unlimited Dream Company.

I am a scholar of Ballard’s interviews, especially the ‘Golden Age’ spanning the late 60s to the mid-70s. I find them endlessly fascinating. Once you have a good knowledge of the many interviews he has given, you begin to unravel themes and motifs that he has discoursed on at length before committing to fiction. These interviews are laboratories in which Ballard unleashes thought experiments upon his unwitting interrogators, who sometimes are unable to keep up (see his 1974 conversation with Carol Orr, where Orr seems quite flustered, taken aback at the brutal clarity of Ballard’s futurology). Having taken his creations for a dry run, we then find them machine-tooled and recalibrated in his writing: compare the previous quotes from the Burns interview (‘I was living in a sort of marine landscape’), with the one above from UDC (‘I realized that I was wandering through a marine world’). It’s a fascinating, holographic process, and in some cases appears to work retrospectively. In the Burns interview, for example, Ballard is talking about when he first settled in Shepperton with his wife and kids in 1960. Now we know where the inspiration for The Drowned World, published in 1962, really came from…

Or is it all an elaborate metaphysical game — another version of Ballard’s maddening, yet emancipatory, version of circular time?

It was now late afternoon, and the bridge approaches were filled with traffic returning from London. Although Walton lay to the south of Shepperton, even further from the airport, at least it would spring me from this zone of danger.

JGB, The Unlimited Dream Company.

…back across the bridge and into town, crossing the always-flowing metal sea that seems to both energise and enervate the citizens in UDC’s version of Shepperton.

I … set off for the pedestrian bridge that spanned the motorway. Poppies and yellow broom brushed my legs, hopefully leaving their pollen on me. They flowered among the debris of worn tyres and abandoned mattresses. To my right was a furniture hypermarket, its open courtyard packed with three-piece suites, dining-tables and wardrobes, through which a few customers moved in an abstracted way, like spectators in a boring museum. Next to the hypermarket was an automobile repair yard, its forecourt filled with used cars. They sat in the sunlight with numerals on their windshields, the advance guard of a digital universe in which everything would be tagged and numbered, a doomsday catalogue listing each stone and grain of sand under my feet, each eager poppy.

JGB, The Unlimited Dream Company.

To my utter amazement, the virtual and the actual continued to merge down to the smallest detail: as we began walking back to Shepperton centre through the parkland just over the bridge, we noticed pollen from poppies and yellow broom dusted on the legs of my jeans. Suitably tagged with Ballardian seed, I dutifully followed the road back into town.

That evening I saw the faces of the three crippled children watching me through the damp light, small moons quietly circling each other. They squatted among the dead flowers and macaws, and played with the pennants of my blood. Rachel fondled them, her blind eyes flickering raptly, trying to read their mysterious codes, cryptic messages from another universe transmitted by the ticker-tape of my heart.

JGB, The Unlimited Dream Company.

When you observe Shepperton through a Ballardian lens, everything seems in code. I imagined Rachel had daubed the back of this sign with the glyphs of her psyche, marked out using the pennants of Blake’s blood.

Already I was convinced that there was no evil, and that even the most plainly evil impulses were merely crude attempts to accept the demands of a higher realm that existed within each of us. By accepting these perversions and obsessions I was opening the gates into the real world, where we would all fly together, transform ourselves at will into the fish and the birds, the flowers and the dust, unite ourselves once more within the great commonwealth of nature.

JGB, The Unlimited Dream Company.

In the book, Blake encourages all to slip the noose of consumerism, to rouse from the waking dream of late capitalism, to throw down whitegoods and gadgets and escape into the unfetettered realm of the imagination, passing through into a micronational realm, ‘the commonwealth of nature’, responsible to no master, least of all bored London admen selling lifestyles to the satellite towns. Pyramids of discarded goods line the streets, expanding upon the consumer bricolage of ‘The Ultimate City’ and presaging the razed shopscapes of Kingdom Come.

Here, the barbaric razor wire surrounding something as banal as the Shepperton Carpet & Flooring Centre triggered something suitably apocalyptic in my mind.

Over my head the sky brightened, bathing the placid roofs in an auroral light, transforming this suburban high street into an avenue of temples. I felt queasy and leaned against the chestnut tree outside the post office. I waited for this retinal illusion to pass, unsure whether to halt the passing traffic and warn these ruminating women that they and their offspring were about to be annihilated.

JGB, The Unlimited Dream Company.

Above: Shepperton’s placid high street, over-ripe for transcendence and transformation…

There is an antiseptic quality about Pangbourne Village, as if these company directors, financiers and television tycoons have succeeded in ridding their private Parnassus of every strain of dirt and untidiness. Here, even the drifting leaves look as if they have too much freedom. Thirteen children once lived in these houses, but it is hard to visualize them at play.

J.G. Ballard, Running Wild.

I recalled the above quote from Running Wild when I came across this leaf that had been embedded in the tarmac. It seemed to be lacquered solid into the road surface, losing any semblance of nature, losing its ability to drift, its colours supervivid and oversaturated; the organic encased in concrete, the fusing of the animate with the inanimate: UDC in a nutshell.

Waiting for release…

Soon after dawn the river had disgorged this antique Pegasus on to the same beach where I had swum ashore. I approached the horse and pulled it on to the bank. The fresh paint silvered my hands, leaving a speckled trail across the sand. As I wiped the paint on to the grass, the pelicans watched me from the flowerbeds. The same vivid light flared from their plumage. The foliage of the willows and ornamental firs seemed to have been retouched by a psychedelic gardener with a taste for garish colours. A magpie swooped across the overlit lawn, feathers brilliant as a macaw’s.

Stimulated by this display of light, I stared into the stained water.

JGB, The Unlimited Dream Company.

The levels in this photograph have been messed with to give it a suitably lysergic feel — as much a cliche as it sounds, UDC feels like an acid trip; but the synaesthetic elements of tripping, rather than any notions of ‘cosmic consciousness’. Ballard’s work, after all, is relentlessly about reordering and recoding the senses to subvert dominant systems of control.

We were soon more than a mile above Shepperton, this jungle town surrounded by its palisade of forest bamboo, an Amazon enclave set down here in the quiet valley of the Thames.

JGB, The Unlimited Dream Company.

Above: the jungle-like gateway to Old Shepperton, the third part of the town’s tripartite structure (high street/reservoir/old town)… and representing our best chance of locating the sunken Cessna.

Pinned to the wall were the X-ray plates of my head, deformed jewels through which a ghostly light still shone, like that corona of destruction I had first seen over Shepperton.

JGB, The Unlimited Dream Company.

In interviews, Ballard has often said that in the suburbs one needs to perform a deviant act almost daily — like kicking the dog — to get a charge out of one’s flaccid existence. This ‘report vandalism’ sign, itself vandalised by a blob of incoherent spray paint, amused me, as I imagined it to be the first bumbling stirrings of Blake’s legions awakening themselves from their perimeter-town stupor.

The sun hid itself behind my naked body, dazzled by the tropical vegetation that had invaded this modest suburban town. Pausing to rest, the crowd began to settle itself. Mothers and their infants sat on the appliances in the shopping mall, children perched on the branches of the banyan tree, elderly couples relaxed in the rear seats of the abandoned cars. There was a sense of intermission.

JGB, The Unlimited Dream Company.

Intermission: lurking in the background, the invading chaotic rhizomes of supernature prepare to engulf the arboreal trap-cars and litter patrols of civic duty.

Father Wingate unlocked the doors of the church. ‘So it was a dream … ? I’m relieved to hear you say so, Blake.’ He stepped through the doors and beckoned me to follow him. ‘Right — we’ll get this over with.’

JGB, The Unlimited Dream Company.

If I had known that only ten minutes after taking off from London Airport the burning machine was to crash into the Thames, would I still have climbed into its cock-pit? Perhaps even then I had a confused premonition of the strange events that would take place in the hours following my rescue.

JGB, The Unlimited Dream Company.

When Blake crashes into the Thames at Shepperton, I can’t help but think of Ballard hitting the town in 1960, wondering what he had got himself in for, but deciding after all, in a strange way, that his perverse talent could be explored to the hilt here. When Blake’s love interest, Miriam St Cloud, dies, I can’t help but think of Ballard’s wife, Mary (known as “Miriam” in The Kindness of Women, of course), and her sudden death in 1964. When Blake teaches the townspeople to not only fly but to explore the farthest reaches of their sexuality, I can’t help but think of the obsessed Ballard, stricken with grief at the death of his wife, hatching The Atrocity Exhibition and Crash on an unsuspecting world; what must the good people of Shepperton have thought of this ‘madman’ lurking in their midst? When Blake is shot down by Stark, I can’t help but think of the storms of outrage that greeted Crash on its publication — and perhaps of Ballard’s later, more cautious narrative approach, when he managed to touch the same veins of psychopathology in his work, but without flying as close to the sun himself.

The final pages of UDC are touching, as Blake yearns to once again merge with Miriam in the afterlife. Ballard has always stared with extraordinarily clear, unmisted eyes at the spectre of death, perhaps never more so than in this book. Ballard’s announcement that he has cancer is very sad, of course, but I can think of no other writer more prepared for whatever may follow.

I decide to visit J.G. Ballard at Shepperton. How does he feel about predicting, and thereby confirming, the psychogeography of Heathrow’s retail/recreation fallout zone? The river was my target… We drove to a riverside pub and, too hot to sit outside, lounged under an overhead fan in a comfortable, clubbish atmosphere. … He’s here, but he doesn’t belong. I think of him as a long-term sleeper, an intelligence operative forgotten by his paymasters.

Iain Sinclair, London Orbital.

The Cessna was almost submerged, its wings tipping below the sweeping tide. As I watched, the fuselage turned and slipped below the coverlet of the water. When the river had carried it away I walked across the beach to the bone-bed of the winged creature whose place I was about to take. I would lie down here, in this seam of ancient shingle, a couch prepared for me millions of years earlier.

There I would rest, certain now that one day Miriam would come for me. Then we would set off, with the inhabitants of all the other towns in the valley of the Thames, and in the world beyond.

JGB, The Unlimited Dream Company.

Here it is: the exact spot where Blake crashed his plane into the river. How did we know? Call it instinct…

Ballard said that The Unlimited Dream Company was yet another preview of his, at the time, still-to-be-written autobiography; thus the book’s transformation of Shepperton is about ‘the writer’s imagination, and in particular my own imagination, transforming the humdrum reality that he occupies and turning it into an unlimited dream company’ (interview with David Pringle, 1996).

The book is a beautifully vivid evocation of Ballard’s love for Shepperton. He may playfully run it down in interviews, but it’s precisely Shepperton’s anonymity that has allowed Ballard to play out his own psychopathology in the pages of his books. He has lived there for almost 50 years now and virtually his entire ouevre has been composed within its boundaries. If, as Ballard has repeatedly claimed, the nature of fiction and reality has reversed in the post-war era, with the imagination the only true node of reality left in a world of endlessly mediated fictions, then The Unlimited Dream Company can be read as more autobiographical than either of Ballard’s so-called ’semi-autobiographical’ works, Empire of the Sun and The Kindness of Women.

In this light, visiting the place is an enriching experience, as Iain Sinclair identifies from his own Shepperton sojourn:

“To be here, in bright sunshine, a small Thames-side town where nobody hurries, is to balance on a hinge. Specifics of the geography that inspired a writer seem, in their turn, to be responding to that ouevre.”

To take a trip to (or even in) Shepperton, ‘the everywhere of suburbia, the paradigm of nowhere’, as Blake declares, is to submit to a form of virtual reality that anyone admiring of Ballard’s work simply must experience.

..:: Previously on Ballardian:
+ ‘Paradigm of nowhere’: Shepperton, a photo essay, part 1
+ JGB: a ‘billionaire’ in Shepperton?
+ J.G. Ballard: The Oracle of Shepperton
+ Sam Scoggins: ‘Unlimited Dream Company’ film
+ A Home and a Grave: Mike Holliday on The Unlimited Dream Company
+ Shepperton under water

L’ile de béton (Concrete Island), French edition, Calman-Lévy (1974). Thanks to Herve for the scan.

Interview by Philippe R. Hupp.

Translation by Dan O’Hara.

Ballard’s novels have always been translated into French with alacrity. His 1974 novel, Concrete Island, was already in translation in time for review in the January 1975 edition of the major Paris literary organ Magazine Littéraire, and Antoine Griset’s review was both penetrating and positive. Griset immediately connected the predicament of Ballard’s protagonist, stranded on an urban desert island between motorway intersections, with the extremes of social inequality within our society.

‘The image or the idea of a man dying of hunger only a step away from a haven of abundance is tragically familiar’, Griset writes, noting how absurd it is that such distress has become a banal commonplace. Whilst admiring the ‘immense talent’ of Ballard in transforming a vague, banal terrain into a hallucinatory hell — a feat also achieved in Crash — Griset observes that although Concrete Island may be a continuation of the earlier novel, this time the automobile is a mere symbolic pretext for an examination of the flip-side of our ordered, automated, aseptic lifestyle.

Griset sees the real focus of Concrete Island as being on the flotsam of urban Man Fridays (or should that be ‘Men Friday’?) living in the interstices of modern cities: the invisible masses we observe daily from behind the safety of the windscreen or the office window. In the novel Maitland, an affluent architect who crosses this invisible barrier, decides to remain on the concrete island, having triumphed over its obstinate vagrants. Yet Griset suggests that, if the Maitland who first arrived on the island dies and is transformed into a new, stronger version of himself, he also remains afraid to recognize his own true nature. In a brilliant insight into Ballard’s metafictional method, Griset implies that this transformation of the protagonist is intended to provoke a similar transformation in the reader. Concrete Island is less concerned with awakening a new moral knowledge than with demonstrating the ways in which the mirror-world of own native brutality is just on the other side of the windscreen.

The following brief interview was printed alongside Griset’s review. Mostly concerned with the novel he was then in the early stages of writing, High-Rise, it does however contain an intriguing reference to Ballard conducting research on the relation between criminal behaviour and the urban environment. Whatever the sources of this research might have been, it seems that it started a line of enquiry which became a central topos of his writing, leading from Concrete Island through High Rise to Running Wild and the loose tetralogy bookended by Cocaine Nights and Kingdom Come.

Dan O’Hara

PHILIPPE R. HUPP: You’re in the process of writing a new novel called The Towers…

JGB: In fact I still haven’t found a title. It’s a book about what in England and the USA are called ‘high-rises’, these residential towers which can have forty or fifty floors or more. I saw a film about Poland last week, in which one complex of apartments had twenty floors and was a kilometre in length! I’ve been interested for several years now in new lifestyles which permit modern technology; skyscrapers have always attracted me. The life led there seems to me very abstract, and that’s an aspect of setting with which I’m concerned when I write — the technological landscape.

Have you read The World Inside by Robert Silverberg? It’s a novel in which people live in groups of 800 thousand in vertical cities. And Silverberg, instead of simply planting the people of today in a futuristic setting, is concerned with showing how their mentality and their social life would be affected.

I haven’t read that book, but what interests me is the present. I don’t want to extrapolate too far – there’s the risk of becoming detached from reality. Although I did write a story a few years ago, ‘Build up’, in which one city occupied the entire universe. It’s a quite fascinating subject.

You’ve already examined housing schemes?

I did research before sitting down to write. For example, in cities, the degree of criminality is affected by liberty of movement; it’s higher in culs-de-sac. And high-rises are culs-de-sac: two thousand people jammed together in the air…

Entirely isolated.

Cut off from the rest of the world. In this kind of situation, all sorts can happen. Above all I’d like to examine the psychological modifications which occur without the knowledge of the inhabitants themselves, to see to what degree the mind of someone who drives a car or lives in a concrete high-rise has been altered. In the course of my investigations, I observed that there now exists a new race of people who are content in their little prisons, who tolerate a very high level of noise, but for whom the apartment is nothing more than a base allowing them to pass the night in comfort, as they’re absent during the day.

Will this new novel be as symbolic as Crash and Concrete Island?

I think it will be in the same vein, although this time I’m no longer concentrating on one single character.

And after that, will you further continue your series on the ‘technological landscape’?

No. I don’t have an idea for a novel, but I’d very much like to write several stories that I haven’t had the time to write these last few years. And it’s been a long time since I’ve written anything in the way of imaginative narratives, romances…

I.G.H. (High-Rise), French edition, Calmann-Levy, Dimensions SF (1976). Thanks to Herve for the scan.

Originally published in French as ‘Entretien avec J. G. Ballard’, Magazine Littéraire 96 (January 1975), 54.

Photo: Simon Sellars.

Sorry for the long absence — I promised ‘daily updates’, well, that didn’t happen. It’s taken me ages to get my thoughts down about Barcelona and Kosmopolis because the experience was so rich, but contributing factors included jet lag, computer problems and a lengthy spell of writer’s block. But mainly it was the richness and how to process it. Kosmopolis was the best literary festival I’ve attended for the intrigue in the program as well as for the organisation — even as one of the lesser participants (in terms of career and achievements), I was made to feel like a king. The Kosmopolis team are a genuinely interesting, creative and dedicated bunch and this transmits into every facet of the show. Thank you Jordi, Miquel, Barbara, Teresa, Juan, Marta and everyone else!

Arriving in Barcelona is a sensory delight. The rhythm of the city is completely different to Melbourne. You get a valid sense of this via traffic flow, the true index of civility. In Barcelona cyclists are treated as road vehicles with equal rights on the tarmac, and traffic signals for both vehicles and pedestrians are adhered to insofar as it facilitates smooth egress for all. This does not mean a nation of automata. When there are no cars, for example, pedestrians cross against the lights, and vice versa it’s the same with vehicles. The police don’t seem to mind. It’s organised chaos (the traffic flow is dense and perpetual, and seemingly balancing on a knife’s edge) and it works. This idea of ensuring harmonious flow by treating rules as guidelines, with the safety of right of way observed above all, seems a simple and obvious point, but in Australia in inner-city areas traffic flow can often be bloody chaos with everyone lockstepping onto their neural GPS to the total exclusion of the rights of others. When I compare the two situations, I think of Barcelona as an organism that knows how to breathe in, and when to breathe out, and that can regulate its breathing for an easier life and stress-free relaxation; I think of urban Australia as a heart-attack victim with fatty arteries and severely constricted breathing.

This can also be indexed by the approach to alcohol. If people were drunk and out of control on the streets of Barcelona, they kept it very well hidden. Is binge drinking popular there? I wouldn’t have thought so. In Melbourne, smashed beer bottles are a common sight on the streets and broken glass is everywhere in the inner city following Friday and Saturday nights. In Australia the government wants to tax alcohol to combat this, to make it so expensive that it will be prohibitive to have more than a few drinks, thereby taking out as collateral damage those who are responsible and who can handle their drink. This is the Nanny State in motion, proffering band-aid solutions that do nothing to get to the heart of the problem, which is cultural and is rooted in Australia’s frontier approach to binge drinking. Try to limit people’s enjoyment of wine in Spain and see how far you get. Alcohol is not the problem in Australia — the problem is social. I felt safe walking around Barcelona at midnight, because there’s none of the paranoia and edginess that is increasingly a feature of Melbourne street life. Instead, there is conviviality — more on that later. I’ll even declare this despite having my wallet stolen on La Rambla just two days into my stay. I was with Mike Bonsall, who was in town for the festival as a punter (along with Tim Chapman and Mike Holliday; great to see you all!). We’d ingested a few drinks and I just didn’t think. Stupidly, I put my wallet in my back pocket, even though I’ve worked as a travel writer and I’ve written on travel scams and dangers — including putting your wallet in your back pocket on La Rambla. So, before we knew it, we were running the gauntlet of a large group of young women who began groping us (!) — ‘Oooh la la, come home with me, baby’. We would have been in their clutches for no longer than a minute before breaking free, but I knew straight away my wallet had gone. The girls had gone, too, melted away into the crowd. But it didn’t ruin my trip because Barcelona’s delights far outweigh its petty crime. Every city has its hazards and I was warned about this one, but I let my guard slip. I don’t think I should blame Barcelona for that idiotic lapse in concentration. Besides, there was an upside. The next day, Teresa from Kosmopolis took me to the police station and gave me a guided tour of the neighbourhoods we passed through, pointing out beautiful historical architecture on the way and filling me in on the unique character of each area. Thank you so much, Teresa — for your wonderful company, it was worth losing my wallet.

Detail from Andrés Hispano’s ‘Autoscan’ installation, at the ‘Autopsia del nou Mil.leni’ exhibition at CCCB, Barcelona. Photo: Tim Chapman.

For the first few days I explored the Ballard exhibition. Unfortunately I had an unfamiliar camera with me so my most of my shots, taken in low light, were unsatisfactory. Of course, Rick McGrath was at the opening of the exhibition back in July and he took many excellent photos, so please refer to his batch in lieu of mine. As for descriptions, I won’t go into too much detail given that McGrath has covered the ground thoroughly in his report, so well in fact that much of it felt very familiar on first visit. What I will say though is that it is an impressive achievement, and one of the most imaginative displays of its type that I’ve seen. I saw the Kubrick exhibition when it came to Melbourne and this matches it, perhaps even surpasses it, because it gives free reign to creative interpretation of Ballard’s metaphors, and all on a budget a fraction of the Kubrick. Jordi and his team have allowed their imaginations to run wild and this has resulted in something quite stunning, in particular the skeletal car body buried in sand. One thing Rick didn’t really comment on was Ann Lislegaard’s black-and-white computer-art rendition of themes from The Crystal World — I spent almost an hour sitting in a darkened room watching this creation, with its looped 3D scenes of interiors and outdoor scenes bathed in an ambience that morphs from light to shade, seemingly crystallising at the meridian into shards of solid, jagged matter. Punctuated with quotes from Crystal, one of Ballard’s most lyrical works, this was a stunning monument to the fashion in which JGB attempts to reorder the senses to provide a deeper, more meaningful existence that cuts against the grain of convention.

Jordi Costa on the left, me on the right. Photo: Tim Chapman.

LEFT: Claire Walsh, circa 1968.

In a very pleasant surprise, Claire Walsh, JGB’s partner, was a last-minute guest of the festival and I was thrilled to meet the face of two of Ballard’s advertiser’s announcements. Jordi Costa and the CCCB’s Miquel Noques took Claire on a guided tour of the exhibition and V. Vale and I were able to tag along. Claire was full of interesting background regarding some of Ballard’s most famous works. For example, discussing Ballard’s crashed-car exhibition, a focus of one of the autopsy rooms, she echoed JGB’s description of the confrontational aspects of the show. Claire was at the event and she emphasised that it was meant to shock, that it was meant to jolt people out of their complacency. According to her, JGB’s oft-repeated descriptions of a drunk, confused and enraged audience were no exaggeration — the public had never butted up against a man of Ballard’s dark intelligence before. Intriguingly, the effect was echoed in the present exhibition, held under similar circumstances — I’m told that in Spain Ballard is virtually unknown, and that many people attending this exhibition were witnessing his work for the first time. Combine this with the fact that Jordi and his team pulled no punches in framing Ballard’s work, presenting often queasy images of medical procedure, wartime horrors and mediated violence, and the effect sometimes approached a similar level of outrage. In the guestbook, there were examples of patrons expressing their anger at the imagery on display — ‘The worst exhibition I’ve ever seen!’ (on the same page as another quote: ‘This is the best exhibition ever’); ‘Scandalous!’; ‘This man is sick!’ — nestling comfortably alongside the words of praise (which far outweighed the negatives, of course). There were also, perhaps predictably, just a few too many examples of mutilated and mutated penises.

‘Frank Ghery [sic] rules’: guestbook hijinks at the Ballard exhibition. Photo: Simon Sellars.

Before we entered the exhibition, I realised I’d forgotten my camera battery so I raced back to the hotel to get it. Downstairs I saw Lou Reed, Kosmopolis’s star guest, sloping laconically through the CCCB lobby followed by a tightly coiled media scrum. He looked very bored in that distinct Lou Reed way, and I was struck by the image of him standing stock still against a Kosmopolis banner while scores of paparazzi took pictures, their flashes firing simultaneously. At one point Reed stretched his palms slightly outwards, while retaining the same rigid face, before puffing his chest out. This image made me recall old interviews where he would talk about channelling feedback from his guitar in the same breath as he would eulogise the mech-human jolt of messing with the nervous system through systematic methamphetamine abuse. Watching him bathed in a hundred flashes, I saw him as a creature raised under electric light, feeding off the popping bulbs, absorbing the photo-synthetic light into his body, allowing it to course through his veins to produce a pure artificial being harnessed to the electric sun and to the raw power of the media. The ever-popping flashes illuminating his body were so rapid and intensive, I expected his bones to start glowing beneath wafer-thin skin.

LEFT: Lou Reed: electro-shock therapy. Photo: courtesy Kosmopolis.

This was on the Thursday, and until his performance with Laurie Anderson on Friday night, I kept seeing him out of the corner of my eye, in and around the CCCB courtyard, heading his entourage, a study in ‘jaded’, causing a commotion with the crowds, at one stage roped off in an enclosure like a zoo exhibit, bored and expressionless, waiting while the fans lined up for his book signings and while rubberneckers like me watched him studying his fingernails. I’m not the biggest fan of his music, save for the Velvets, but his real-life presence was so inorganic, so bloodless in a completely compelling way, it had to be tracked and followed. It was pure celebrity reaction in action (although, funnily enough, I’d never imagined Lou Reed as inhabiting that rarefied level; he always seems ‘cult’ to me… let’s face it, he’s no Jagger) and I noted the delicious juxtaposition of the virtual Ballard on the top floor of the CCCB, a man who has dissected the celebrity process with clinical and unerring precision. I imagined his presence radiating pure waves of insight down on the proceedings below.

On Friday night Lou and Laurie read Catalan poetry and writing, which was utterly bizarre. I’m not sure of the background of this event, or of how and why it happened. Do Lou and Laurie have a connection to Catalonia? I can’t say. All I can tell you is that Lou was on stage at Kosmopolis while Laurie was at the University of California, Berkeley, reading her parts in a live video feed projected on a massive screen behind him. No music, no singing. Lou sounded as if he was reading from the usual tales of heroin, transvestites and Warhol back in NYC — there was that same, familiar raspy drawl that everyone associates with him — whereas Laurie was more engaging and injected multiple personalities into her reading. The whole set up was so strange. When Lou would turn to her, dwarfed by her image, and she would smile benevolently back at him, it seemed like a fairy tale in which Lou, a dark knight, had been shrunk to size by a Queen who wanted to keep him all for herself. But they are in love, I know it’s not like that, I just had a sensory blipvert channel jump induced by the scale distortion and the jumbled spatial dynamic.

Lou and Laurie: telepresent love. Photo: courtesy Kosmopolis.

There was a funny moment when Lou mispronounced a list of Spanish surnames and place names, and the audience erupted into laughter. But the biggest cheer was reserved for the duo’s reading of the Yellow Manifesto (1928), written by Salvador Dali, Lluis Montanyà and Sevastià Gasch. A futurist ode to the extremes of the imagination and to the beauty of machinic art, it occurred to me that it was surely an influence on Ballard’s ‘What I Believe’:

We have eliminated from this MANIFESTO all courtesy in our attitude. It is useless to attempt any discussion with the representatives of present-day Catalan culture, which is artistically negative although efficient in other respects. Compromise and correctness lead to deliquescent and lamentable states of confusion of all values, to the most unbreathable spiritual atmospheres, to the most pernicious of influences… Violent hostility, in contrast, clearly locates values and positions and creates a hygienic state of mind.

After reading through the Manifesto, with its litany of things to be smashed, Lou quipped: ‘I wonder what they’d think of the internet?’ With its call to dismantle bourgeois complacency and the blandness of youth in favour of Catalan independence based around the beauty of enigmatic art, the Yellow Manifesto is a powerful call to arms that clearly still has relevance in today’s political climate. Indeed, I saw anarchist and independence graffiti everywhere in Barcelona, as in the following example, which was stencilled onto a series of mobile-phone advertisements. At first I thought it was actually part of the ad, in a depressingly familiar instance of corporations co-opting revolution, because it was so accurately placed in the exact same spot each time, until I twigged that the stencil artist had actually targeted this particular ad for whatever reason.

‘Anarchy in Catalonia, it’s coming sometime and maybe…’. Photo: Simon Sellars.

When they’d finished their performance, Lou looked up at Laurie and they had a little telepresent moment together, strong love coursing through a hi-def internet link; Laurie gave Lou a radiant smile and made little pincer-like movements with her fingers at him, clearly some kind of secret sign, and he smiled sheepishly at her, this woman who is perhaps the only person in the world that can make Lou Reed self-conscious.

The Ballard segment of the festival kicked off with a panel, ‘Postcards from the Interior Space’, chaired by Jordi and featuring Marcial Souto, Agustin Fernandez Mallo, Marta Peirano and Toby Litt. Unfortunately no one told Mike B and I that the translation of the Spanish/Catalan speakers was being transmitted through portable headsets, so we sat through most of the session in bemusement, perking up when Litt spoke in English. This was a Ballardian experience in itself. Understanding Litt only, we attempted to decode the questions and replies from other speakers that led to Toby’s answers. Sometimes we got it and sometimes the old brain would go into freefall, much the same as it does when it reads Ballard and must submit to the process of unworking the similes and parallel narratives that form the shifting strata of his work. Litt told the audience that the foreword he wrote to a forthcoming volume of academic essays had been rejected on the grounds that it wasn’t likely to entice people to read more Ballard, given his position, which is that it’s impossible to truly understand or truly ‘get’ Ballard’. From there, Toby suggested that all academics have got Ballard wrong. He then read the rejected foreword (which he revealed was finally accepted as the afterword to the book), which built an extended metaphor around the notion of Ballard tunnelling out from the ground under his Shepperton house. Funnily enough, perhaps even appropriately enough, given Toby’s main point about academia, I can’t pretend I fully understood the analogy.

‘Postcards from the Interior Space’: Marcial, Agustin, Marta, Jordi and Toby. Photo: courtesy Kosmopolis.

Litt also referred to psychogeographical interpretations of Ballard, mentioning Will Self, but said he had problems with this angle, with writing about London in this way. I have sympathies with both academic/theoretical and psychogeographic readings of Ballard, but I also agree with Litt when he says that Ballard translates because he maintains a floating parallel world on top of the ‘physical’ world of his novels. It’s a good point, but why then criticise specific readings of Ballard? Surely the indeterminate, open-ended nature of JGB’s writing supports, even encourages, this in its drive to resist categorisation? Well, that’s my position anyway, that this open-endedness generates a program of resistance. Litt also critiqued readings of Ballard that accept Ballard’s version of his life as the truth — I presume Empire of the Sun is the reference — and said he wished that Ballard had never expanded upon his Shanghai childhood in interviews, so that readers would be forced to confront his parade of surrealist war imagery and violent technofutures on their own terms. I do understand what he means — I’d read Atrocity, Crash, High-Rise and Concrete Island before Empire or the bulk of the interviews, and they did seem like the work of mad genius bleeding through into the frame from a parallel dimension. But even now, with the full weight of Ballard’s history informing my study of his work, I see his autobiographical retellings as another fiction to be decoded. His obsessive restaging of the Lunghua theatre is a form of circular time that again resists definition, resists commodification, resists classification — a guerrilla war against the type of ‘eventless present’ that he sees as a by-product of consumer capitalism and its drive to erase history and collapse the future into the present.

There, I’ve just given you the gist of what I spoke about on the panel the next day with Jordi, Vale and Bruce Sterling, where I felt unusual, but happy, appearing as the ‘academic’ among two larger-than-life personalities. Vale showed a 10-minute film of his work with RE/Search and the relationship with Ballard he has forged, and then talked about Ballard’s role as visionary and dreamer. Bruce talked about Ballard’s influence on his own writing and on cyberpunk. But I’ll leave further summaries for now, as I believe Tim C is preparing a transcript of the talk which I hope to post here soon.

‘Myths of the Near Future’: Me, Bruce, Vale, Jordi. Photo: courtesy Kosmopolis.

After the panel, we had a beer in the courtyard. In another welcome surprise, Iraklis from Athens showed up, with his mate Antony! Iraklis is a long-time reader of ballardian.com, from around 2005 onwards, so it was great to meet him. We had an interesting chat about the public perception of Ballard; it seems the situation in Greece is the same in Australia in that he is still regarded as a ‘cult’ author. Perhaps he is. I think Mr Ballard should be proud of getting under people’s skins so thoroughly. It was here that we saw Robyn Hitchcock wandering around with his guitar. He was due on stage that night but was serenading random strangers in the meantime, and we watched him perform a Doors song for a small child, who was clearly delighted and/or bemused by this colourful man. The next night I saw a selection of Catalan poets at the CCCB’s Cafe Europa, and they were doing very interesting things with collage sound and sampled voices. My favourite was the guy who attempted to replicate the way we hear our own voices and the process by which it is filtered through the vibrations of the skull and ear canals, rendering it completely different when heard on a recording. I hate hearing my recorded voice, so this was repellent and fascinating for me. He related all this to the way we cannot trust our own interior voices and memories, which may or may not be creations and constructs of the media — Catalan poet, meet J.G. Ballard. Another poet repeated combinations of words and phrases and looped them through a bank of samplers, creating music from the beauty of the Catalan language. I find it a nice language to listen to, and I chose not to hear the translations on the portable headsets this time. I wanted to free-float and concentrate solely on the musicality of the phrases and intonations, the meaning of which I was clueless, but the poetry of which I immediately and instinctively responded to.

Robyn Hitchcock does his wandering troubadour thing in the CCCB courtyard. Photo: Tim Chapman.

Afterwards, talking to the MC, this poet said something interesting, about how he prefers ‘ignorance’ to ‘knowledge’ because with ignorance, interesting ideas emerge. He gave the example of people who believe that white wine removes blackberry stains or that spirits are good for headaches; in the gap between perception and recognition, ignorance occurs and new and surreal juxtapositions emerge that inspire radical art and thought processes. These performances again put me in mind of the Yellow Manifesto and how it really sums up the appeal of Kosmopolis, with its focus on grassroots, independent, innovative and creative literary ideas. There were no real superstars at this festival, but instead successful writers and artists who have proved that you don’t need to sell your soul to make it. In this respect Ballard, a true maverick, is the perfect fit.

Lydia Lunch at Cafe Europa. Photo: courtesy Kosmopolis.

Lydia Lunch was also appearing on this night, as she now lives in Barcelona. She performed a spoken-word piece to a fractured jazz-rock soundtrack, typically angry and very ‘fuck you’ and all about the war on terror and global conflict tied in with Spain’s history of conflict. After, she said to the MC that she chooses to live in Barcelona because in the US she would be reminded every day of the hypocrisy of that society and the violence it wreaks on its citizens. In Barcelona, by contrast, she says that every day people wake up and forget about the horrors of the past because each day is seen as a new chance to drink, fuck and forget. To my surprise, I found myself agreeing with this angry and loud American called Lunch: there is indeed a mood of relaxed optimism in this city and it touched me even on my brief stay. It invigorated me in fact, and in the week-and-a-half since my return I’ve been inspired to make a number of important and long-delayed changes to my life and lifestyle, which are already in motion, a direct result of my nine days in Barcelona and the deep impact it and Kosmopolis had on me and the possibilities I can now envisage for creative work that is symbiotic with a healthy inner life.

ABOVE: Kafkaesque. Photo: Simon Sellars.

ABOVE: Brechtian. Photo: Simon Sellars.

If you are a writer, or literary minded, how could you fail to love this city? I came across stencils of Kafka, and graffiti that quoted large chunks of Brecht. It’s a city made for walking, for inspiring thought. The back alleys and side streets are immersive and the architecture across all styles is superb. I walked many kilometres each day, directionless but always finding something to inspire. I did so much walking and uncovering of back streets that I didn’t make it to any of the Gaudi attractions (I’ve been to Barcelona before, and did the whole Gaudi thing, so I’d subconsciously made the decision this time around to see the more of the quotidian fabric of the city instead).

Gala, is that you? Photo: Simon Sellars.

It was during one foray into a back street that the lady in this shot came into view. She saw me taking photos of buildings and stopped right in front of me, extending her walking stick out towards me, smiling radiantly all the while but not saying a single word. Look at the amazing way she is dressed and that face that knows all: she looks like a female Dali. She struck this pose as soon as she saw me, as if to say: ‘Hey! What about me? I’m the finest architecture here’. For a moment I wasn’t sure what she was doing and then I realised she was offering herself as a model to be photographed. As soon as the shutter clicked, she turned on her heel and walked briskly away, still smiling that same brilliant smile, still uttering not one word. And that is what I love about Barcelona, the casual surrealism that is woven into the fabric of the place. Included with the pack given to Kosmopolis participants was a series of monographs published by the CCCB that explored urban space and the need for a vital public space in order to maintain a healthy society. One, ‘Collective Culture and Urban Public Space’ by Ash Amin, is especially relevant. Amin writes about the need for a ‘post-human perspective’ on urban space that brings together ‘the most promising examples of surplus made to work as such’:

These would include bazaars and shopping malls in which difference is treated as a virtue, streets and squares of free and safe mingling, parks and other recreation spaces resonating with vitality and mixed use, libraries and schools that sustain public interest and reach out to the reluctant, bus shelters and car parks that are not the dumping ground for the dregs of society, buses and trains that work and offer a pleasant experience to the travelling public. Here, the qualities of multiplicity, conviviality, solidarity and maintenance can be expected to crowd out malfeasance, reinforcing a sense of shared space.

It is no accident that Amin had been commissioned by the CCCB to write about public space. He repeatedly emphasises conviviality as the key to a healthy and dynamic urban fabric, and as I was reading this, I thought, ‘That is Barcelona’. Whatever problems there may be with the Spanish government or economy, what Barcelona in particular has is convivial public space, and I, like Lydia Lunch, would be willing to give up many other things to experience that on a daily basis.

I have a final observation about Barcelona: I have never seen so many young men on crutches in any city I’ve visited. Are Catalan males very sporty, are they just really clumsy, or do they have very brittle joints?

The Dali Museum. Photo: Simon Sellars.

On my last full day in Spain, I travelled to Figueres to see the Dali museum. I am staggered by how popular his work continues to be. The queues and crowds were massive and the whole complex was like a warped theme park, Disneyland nightmares for the masses. There were plenty of school groups there and I could only think that being introduced to Dali at a very young age must be a very good education indeed, exposed to images of young virgins being auto-sodomized by their own chastity and labia-faces. This is what I mean by casual surrealism, which appears to be threaded into the Catalonian DNA.

And now it’s encoded into mine. On the way home, I picked up some British newspapers at Heathrow to find that the UK was in the midst of the Jonathan Ross/Russell Brand/Andrew Sachs scandal.

And every time I read the name ‘Georgina Baillie’, I was convinced they were referring to ‘Georges Bataille’.

ABOVE: Barcelona street scene. Photo: Simon Sellars.

ABOVE: The thrill of it all: nu-architecture at Port Olympic, Barcelona. Photo: Simon Sellars.

..:: Soundtracks to inner space: Future Engineers, ‘Studio Mix 2007′; Underground Resistance, ‘First Galactic Baptist Church’; The Martian, ‘The Stardancer’; Simple Minds, ‘Themes for Great Cities’; PiL, ‘Radio Four’; Lalo Schifrin, ‘Jaws Theme’; Ennio Morricone, ‘Come Maddalena’.

One of the country’s most acclaimed novelists has called for the Bluewater Centre, in Kent, to be obliterated. In London Orbital, a film inspired by Iain Sinclair’s book of the same title to be broadcast tonight on Channel 4, JG Ballard declares in conversation with Sinclair: “Iain, I want you to blow up Bluewater.” Sinclair then verbally batters the hapless shopping centre, a pimple just south of the M25. It is, he says, “a zone where only the fake is truly authentic, the retail swamp on the borders of everything, grandiloquent and meaningless as one of Saddam Hussein’s arches”. Staff at the centre seem surprised by the vitriol. “I don’t know if in the current climate inciting people to blow things up is such a good idea,” says a spokesman. “Anyhow, what’s all this about swamps? I thought we had some quite nice lakes.”

Sholto Byrnes, The Independent, 29 October, 2002.

Ralph Rugoff, writing in Frieze, called Bluewater a “diuretic slurry of pumped-up historical and decorative emblems”. “Citizens of England!” cried Hugh Pearman in the Sunday Times, “We do not need these places!” Contemplating the 20,000-person village, also designed by CivicArts, that will eventually adjoin the mall, Jonathan Glancey of The Guardian envisioned “a city with no gods other than Prada, Gucci and Starbucks, with no cathedral and temple beyond the naves and domes of the mall itself, and with no ultimate purpose beyond stupefying consumption.”

It is easy to adopt this sort of anti-materialist scorn towards Kuhne’s shopping centres. And since Kuhne himself described Bluewater as “a city rather than a retail destination,” it is safe to assume that his cities may resemble his malls. This possibility excites Kuhne; he has faith in retail. “Retail,” he tells the audience in Dubai, “is the only industry that can manage our city centres… We are the only ones who deal with experience. We are the only ones that understand how to customise and modify and release and replan and reorganise and administer a luscious experience for a group.”

Peter C. Baker quoting Bluewater’s architect, Eric Kuhne, The National, 1 May, 2008.

A former English teacher pleaded guilty yesterday to threatening criminal damage, having talked of a plan to blow up Europe’s largest shopping complex. Saeed Ghafoor made his threat to prison officers while serving a jail term in February this year. He claimed he would target the Bluewater centre using three limousines loaded with gas canister explosives.
…
When officers told him that the centre, the target of a previous fertiliser bomb plot by Islamic terrorists last year, was in fact in Kent, he said he had not yet fully “finalised” his scheme. Pierce Arnold, for the prosecution, told the Old Bailey: “Mr Ghafoor made the threat. We do not know if he could have carried it out. It was not a bomb hoax. It appeared on the face of it to be a serious threat by someone who was not happy.”
…
The first officer to hear his claim believed him a fantasist but took his remarks seriously. Ghafoor said he was protesting at the involvement of British and American troops in Afghanistan. He was also seen by the prison imam, who formed the impression that the prisoner was susceptible to brainwashing.

Jonathan Brown, The Independent, 24 May, 2008.

Teacher admits threatening to blow up Bluewater shopping centre.

I wonder if they’ll arrest Ballard next.

‘But when questioned about his plot, Ghafoor, 33, of Southampton, did not appear to know where the shopping centre was, the Old Bailey heard.’

Ah, but he was right, because Bluewater is everywhere, Bluewater is us. We must blow ourselves up. It’s the only solution.

Infinite Thought, 24 May, 2008.

J.G Ballard and Iain Sinclair’s threat to blow up Bluewater … taken rather more seriously when delivered by a (shock-horror) Muslim — who nonetheless had the impression that Bluewater was in Exeter, but that’s being let pass. Two quick points here: one, I was faintly intrigued to find that the threatener in question was not only from Southampton, but from the Flower Estate (so why he didn’t want to blow up West Quay is beyond me); and two, it makes this interview with the designer of Bluewater and its ilk (via) even more grimly compelling. The gist: Bluewater is what people want, when an industrial site is cleared – shops, lots of them, ‘contextual’ architecture, and many many parking spaces. If there’s a despot locally who can help the process along then that’s good too. In fact, Bluewater seen like this is reminiscent of ‘Most Wanted Paintings’ the Sots Art prank where the votes of a given area for what they most wanted to see in a painting get totted up, with the results appropriately ridiculous.

Owen Hatherley, Sit Down Man, You’re a Bloody Tragedy, 25 May, 2008.

..:: Previously on Ballardian…
+ When in Doubt, Quote Ballard: An Interview with Iain Sinclair

Michael Z. recently wrote to me. Michael is the developer of SurveillanceSaver, the uber-Ballardian screensaver that displays live feeds from over 600 Axis surveillance-camera networks, which I wrote about here.

Michael tells me he has now released a new version for MS Windows with much more cameras, and while I would have been happy to see SurveillanceSaver remain Mac only (because I’m a snob for no good reason save habit and cliche), more cameras can only increase the potential for high weirdness, and that is good.

To celebrate this new release, here is the The Ballardian Primer to CCTV & Surveillance Technology, with all quotes lifted from J.G. Ballard’s novels. As with the Car Park Primer, I’ll have to leave the short stories until a later, less chaotic and less disorganised juncture in my life.

CCTV as a form of social control, as a fully integrated technological system, was implemented in the UK in the late 80s/early 90s, but Ballard was always aware of the power of the lens to flatten time and space and erase identity well before then. Therefore any quotes here that date from before the late 80s should be considered as CCTV’s very own becoming: an AI marshalling its forces, scanning its terrain, scouting for passive, unknowing victims. Indeterminate, invisible. Vapourous. Never quite coalescing.

Until it was defined.

All pics are screengrabs from Axis cameras.

“He moved across to the bank of TV receivers. There were six of them, relaying pictures transmitted from automatic cameras mounted in sealed concrete towers that Marshall had had built at points all over London. The sets were labelled: Campden Hill, Westminster, Hampstead, Mile End Road, Battersea, Waterloo. The pictures flickered and were lashed with interference patterns, but the scenes they revealed were plain enough.”

JGB, The Wind from Nowhere (1961).

“Sequence in slow motion: a landscape of highways and embankments, evening light on fading concrete, intercut with images of a young woman’s body. She lay on her back, her wounded face stressed like fractured ice. With almost dream-like calm, the camera explored her bruised mouth, the thighs dressed in a dark lace-work of blood.”

JGB, The Atrocity Exhibition (1970).

“Vaughan followed them everywhere with his camera, zoom lens watching from the observation platform of the Oceanic Terminal at the airport, from hotel mezzanine balconies and studio car-parks. For each of them Vaughan devised an optimum auto-death.”

JGB, Crash (1973).

“Watching him from my car, parked alongside his own, I could see that even now Vaughan was dramatizing himself for the benefit of these anonymous passers-by, holding his position in the spotlight as if waiting for invisible television cameras to frame him.”

JGB, Crash (1973).

“Without Vaughan watching us, recording our postures and skin areas with his camera, my orgasm had seemed empty and sterile, a jerking away of waste tissue.”

JGB, Crash (1973).

“Many of the women had portable radios slung from their shoulders, which they switched from station to station as if tuning up for an acoustic war. Others carried cameras and flash equipment, ready to record any acts of hostility, any incursions into their territory.”

JGB, High-Rise (1975).

“My skin prickled like over-sensitive camera film, already recording the hints of light that touched the pewter sky above London.”

JGB, The Unlimited Dream Company (1979).

“‘Take it easy…’ Paco eyed Wayne defensively, unsure about the wisdom of admitting this volatile newcomer to their private teenage domain. ‘I only saw you on film — we have a few robot cameras on the other side of the Rockies, with trip-zooms that focus on anything that moves. It’s bad about your two friends, though.’”

JGB, Hello America (1981).

“He was still wearing the safari suit, and sat in front of his TV consoles — vivid colour pictures of Las Vegas at night taken by a camera on the roof of the Desert Inn. He looked pale but alert, as if he had decided long ago to dispense with sleep by a simple executive decree.”

JGB, Hello America (1981).

“Behind him he heard the sinister clatter of the two robot gunships, these blank angels which Manson moved around the sky. They came down from the night and hung fifty feet above him as he strode along the centre of the Strip, gatlings pointed at his back, camera zooms in their empty cockpits straining to catch Wayne’s profile.”

JGB, Hello America (1981).

“Manson glared at Wayne as if he were a malfunctioning robot. He fumbled with a set of buttons inlaid into the table top, his fingers scrabbling for the familiar contours like a blind man comforting himself with a rosary. ‘Look, Wayne, you can see it! There’s your virus!’
The television screens loomed into close-up. The pictures were transmitted from a series of cameras somewhere off Interstate 15.”

JGB, Hello America (1981).

“Carter ran head on through a plate-glass window. Picked up by a lobby camera, his startled face was frozen for ever in an immense, dazed smile.”

JGB, Hello America (1981).

“They clattered down the stairs and ran along the quay, following the remote-control camera mounted between the landing rails of this chimeric machine, like the devotees of a new televised religion.”

JGB, The Day of Creation (1987).

“We had rested through the night under the roof of the hangar, where the wounds to my head and ear had dried again. But the torn muscles of my scalp set it askew on my skull, and in turn seemed to tilt my mind, so that it perceived the world at an odd angle, like a misaligned camera.”

JGB, The Day of Creation (1987).

“The pearly rectangle, scarcely larger than a light-bulb, shrank me down to size, like everything else on which the camera turned its eye, and stripped away the irrelevancies of emotion, pain, and motive. Only my obsession endured, a great dream made small by failures of nerve, but a great dream nevertheless.”

JGB, The Day of Creation (1987).

“A security guard is lying on the floor below the row of television monitors, their screens a blizzard of snow. Someone has cut the cable running from the surveillance cameras mounted all over the estate, but clearly Officer Turner had no time to reach for the telephone whose scissored cord hangs from the desk above his head.”

JGB, Running Wild (1988).

“Secure behind their high walls and surveillance cameras, these estates in effect constitute a chain of closed communities whose lifelines run directly along the M4 to the offices and consulting rooms, restaurants and private clinics of central London.”

JGB, Running Wild (1988).

“The surveillance camera, as if bored with nothing to do, began to scan the house in close-up. The superb lenses, representing the most advanced optical technology, showed every detail with unnerving clarity. The camera panned along the plate-glass windows of the lounge and dining room. The undisturbed furniture could be clearly seen, even a clock registering 8:20 on a mantelpiece.”

JGB, Running Wild (1988).

“Already I resented the camera, staring at me like a deformed robot.”

JGB, The Kindness of Women (1991).

“Drained of emotion and value-judgement, the lens of the scientific camera anatomised the world around it like a patient and pensive voyeur.”

JGB, The Kindness of Women (1991).

“Even the empty camera in whose lens we were reflected had helped to shape our sex act. As she smoothed her eyebrows Carmen was measuring her profile against the lens, preparing herself for the even more elaborate sex films in which she would appear.”

JGB, The Kindness of Women (1991).

“With its passive and unobtrusive despotism, the camera governed the smallest spaces of our lives. Even in the privacy of our own homes we had all been recruited to play our parts in what were little more than real-life commercials.”

JGB, The Kindness of Women (1991).

“The camera lens was our way of disengaging from each other, distancing ourselves from each other’s emotions.”

JGB, The Kindness of Women (1991).

“Here, under the neutral gaze of the rostrum camera, a recruited force of volunteers had explored every legal permutation of lesbian, homosexual and heterosexual intercourse.”

JGB, The Kindness of Women (1991).

“As she lay with her laboratory partner, a remote-controlled camera recorded the involuntary movements of her facial musculature, the flushing of her breasts and abdomen, the skin tremors on the backs of her thighs.”

JGB, The Kindness of Women (1991).

“We were watched by the lenses of a dozen cameras, multiplied and dismantled at the same time.”

JGB, The Kindness of Women (1991).

“When Janet Bracewell called to Neil he turned to face the camera, aware that his chief role was to provide a poignant end-credit to the transmissions.”

JGB, Rushing to Paradise (1994.

“He gestured with a long arm at the villas on the hillside, secure behind their surveillance cameras. ‘I’ve lived here for two years and I’m still not sure if the place is real…’”

JGB, Cocaine Nights (1996).

“Annoyed with myself, I set off along the narrow street, past the surveillance cameras that guarded the lacquered doorways, each lens with its own story to tell.
Hidden perspectives turned Estrella de Mar into a huge riddle. Trompe-l’oeil corridors beckoned but led nowhere.”

JGB, Cocaine Nights (1996).

“I watched him drive away, and repeated his last words to myself. No crime at Estrella de Mar, no drug-dealing, burglaries or car thefts? In fact, the entire resort was wired up to crime like a cable TV network. It fed itself into almost every apartment and villa, every bar and nightclub, as anyone could see from the defensive nervous system of security alarms and surveillance cameras.”

JGB, Cocaine Nights (1996).

“The Sanger villa stood across the road, windows shuttered, the surveillance camera fixed on the litter of cigarette packets and advertisement flyers in the drive. Pushed by the wind, they edged towards the graffiti-covered doors of the garage, as if hoping to be incorporated into this lurid collage.”

JGB, Cocaine Nights (1996).

“Crawford pointed to the crenellated wall. ‘Look at it, Charles … it’s a fortified medieval city. This is Goldfinger’s defensible space raised to an almost planetary intensity — security guards, tele-surveillance, no entrance except through the main gates, the whole complex closed to outsiders. It’s a grim thought, but you’re looking at the future.’”

JGB, Cocaine Nights (1996).

“He fixed his aviator glasses over his eyes and glanced around the car park, counting the surveillance cameras as if calculating the best getaway route.”

JGB, Cocaine Nights (1996).

“‘Town-scapes are changing. The open-plan city belongs to the past — no more ramblas, no more pedestrian precincts, no more left banks and Latin quarters. We’re moving into the age of security grilles and defensible space. As for living, our surveillance cameras can do that for us. People are locking their doors and switching off their nervous systems.”

JGB, Cocaine Nights (1996).

“Civility and polity were designed into Eden-Olympia, in the same way that mathematics, aesthetics and an entire geopolitical world-view were designed into the Parthenon and the Boeing 747. Representative democracy had been replaced by the surveillance camera and the private police force.”

JGB, Super-Cannes (2000).

“Behind the brave and paranoid new world of surveillance cameras and bulletproof Range Rovers there probably existed an old-fashioned realm of pecking orders and racist abuse.”

JGB, Super-Cannes (2000).

“Surveillance cameras hung like gargoyles from the cornices, following me as I approached the barbican and identified myself to the guard at the reception desk.”

JGB, Super-Cannes (2000).

“‘People are so immersed in their work they wouldn’t recognize the end of the world. It explains why no one saw anything unusual about Greenwood. There’s no civic sense here.’

‘There is.’ Halder pointed to a nearby surveillance camera. ‘Think of it as a new kind of togetherness.’”

JGB, Super-Cannes (2000).

“We began to climb the steep road that led towards the billionaire heights of Super-Cannes. Luxury villas as lavish as palaces stood in their groomed parks. On the wrought-iron gates, surveillance cameras crouched like hawks.”

JGB, Super-Cannes (2000).

“‘These security cameras . . . I have to be careful. I’m in Hammersmith, the King Street shopping mall. Consumer hell.’”

JGB, Millennium People (2003).

“Nothing now made sense except in terms of a transient airport culture. Warning displays alerted each other, and the entire landscape was coded for danger. CCTV cameras crouched over warehouse gates, and filter-left signs pulsed tirelessly, pointing to the sanctuaries of high-security science parks.”

JGB, Kingdom Come (2006).

“Everyone’s suffocating — too many barcode readers, too many CCTV cameras and double yellow lines.”

JGB, Kingdom Come (2006).

“Everything about him, from his large feet in a pair of unmatched trainers to the tic that pulled at an infected ear piercing, fixed him firmly as an urban scarecrow designed to frighten away any circling security cameras.”

JGB, Kingdom Come (2006).

“The riot soon began to drink itself into befuddlement, but bands of more determined ice-hockey followers joined forces with track-and-field supporters and marched on an industrial estate in run-down east Brooklands, a night-time wilderness of video cameras and security patrols.”

JGB, Kingdom Come (2006).

“‘This isn’t a suburb of London, it’s a suburb of Heathrow and the M25. People in Hampstead and Holland Park look down from the motorway as they speed home from their West Country cottages. They see faceless inter-urban sprawl, a nightmare terrain of police cameras and security dogs, an uncentred realm devoid of civic tradition and human values.’”

JGB, Kingdom Come (2006).

..:: Previously on Ballardian
+ Car Parks: The Ballardian Primer

One is to provide full RSS feeds for this site rather than partials, which is what was on offer previously. I did this because I read on various forums about so many people getting indignant about partial feeds, saying if a site supplies partials they’ll ‘unsubscribe from the feed straight away, no fooling around, mister!’ Or that ‘life’s too short to click on a partial feed and go to an external site; the RSS reader is my space, how dare you take me out if it’… Or, ’sites that supply partials are like big bastard record companies plastering music with DRM; how dare you place restrictions on my content, I want it delivered the way I choose’, etc etc…

Such venom. It really takes me aback, the way people feel about this topic.

Personally, I don’t have a problem clicking on a partial feed to read a post in its original context, and I’m imagining I’m as ‘time poor’ as many, but if it gets me more readers then full feeds it is. Although, after carefully redesigning the site so that no post is privileged over the other, so that there’s no top-down hierarchy, full feeds of course scupper that ideal — it’s top-down all the way with your good old RSS readers.

The other thing I did, perhaps the most controversial, was to set up a MySpace page for the Ballardian Home Movie competition. The cheek of it, eh? After I had the nerve to unceremoniously slag off that whole insidious gated community.

Heh, heh.

Go on, then — flame away.

Annoyed with myself, I set off along the narrow street, past the surveillance cameras that guarded the lacquered doorways, each lens with its own story to tell. Hidden perspectives turned Estrella de Mar into a huge riddle. Trompe-l’oeil corridors beckoned but led nowhere…

J.G. Ballard. Cocaine Nights (1996).

Every good Ballardian needs this: SurveillanceSaver, a screensaver that displays live feeds from over 600 Axis surveillance-camera networks (found via Boing Boing).

Surveillance cameras by necessity record interzones, the hot spots where crime might breed or deviance might spontaneously generate, in locations beyond the reach of our unenhanced optic nerves, or where everything and everyone has simply shut up shop. Business parks at night, city squares cast in gloomy shadow, empty swimming pools, the hooded entrances of hospitals, the city-like scale of airport perimeters, motorway feeder roads where human interaction is factored out of the landscape and the only transaction occurs between speed and machinery. Ballard’s work precisely records such territory, a rich topography inset with mysterious ley lines, weaving a grid to support shadowy lifestyles enacted far away from mainstream thought.

This screensaver is your privileged window onto Ballardian space.

It cycles through the feeds, lingering for around 3 minutes on each. The action is jerky, frame by frame. At times it takes on the quality of a La Jetee-style photo roman: frozen scenes, no movement, absolutely still, until the glare of a sodium light almost imperceptibly flickers on and off in the foreground. On the occasion that someone walks across the ’set’, their movements are rendered like some stop-motion Harryhausen creature. In a city square somewhere very late at night in Eastern Europe, the scene is empty except for two motionless civic statues; only one isn’t. Within a second, this man’s legs move, then freeze, then move…trapped in the molasses-like gravity of CCTV time sickness. Behind him, there’s actually only one statue and it remains behind, rooted to the spot.

Every time I return to my computer to find the screensaver in action, I’m transfixed. Versed in Ballard’s work, when a grey and forbidding car park appears, I hope for a Lincoln Continental to cruise into view, with a ‘hoodlum scientist’ in a black leather jacket receiving a blow job in the back seat, watched passively by the blank gaze of a man in the driver’s seat, his lack of affect matching the camera lens precisely. Or a porno shoot on a construction site on the far edge of town, the camera watching the cameras. I find myself scanning the feeds, examining every inch of the grainy black and white image, to locate some kind of deviation from the norm: waiting, perhaps, for a casually dressed urban professional to scope the aisles in a video store, a mysterious brown package under his arm; or an office worker staying back late in her cubicle, injecting some unknown substance into her arm, unable to bear the thought of returning home to whatever it is that awaits her there. I watch mannequins in store windows, wondering if they’ll ever break the window and go into a club, where they’ll start to dance. I stare at what looks like frozen tundra, hoping for a Tunguska-like object to explode… And then I am jerked from my reverie: the next feed is a pig pen on a remote farm. A huge snout fills the screen, and then the software cuts to a new feed, a dolphin swimming in a zoo, then yet another feed, the underwater underside of a woman’s body doing laps in a pool.

But most of all, I am alert for the offices and the university computer labs and the library reading rooms that randomly cycle through, waiting for the uncanny shock of catching someone I know watching a screen, wondering if they are watching this screensaver, too, watching for me, under the passive gaze of this camera behind me, above and to my right, somewhere out in space.

Far from installing SETI software on our computers to assist in the search for life in outer space, we should be installing this wonderful screensaver, scanning the farthest reaches of inner space, where it is even less certain than in the cosmos that intelligent life exists.

I phoned J.G. Ballard at his home early in September 1996, shortly before the publication of his novel, Cocaine Nights, the murder mystery set in the Costa Del Sol, whose ‘detective story’ format bears much the same relation to the book’s real themes as the skull does to the subconscious.

The interview was conducted for a short feature on the novel that ran in The List magazine (issue dated 20 September 1996), the Glasgow-Edinburgh events guide that is pretty much Scotland’s Time Out. This is the first time the full transcript of the conversation has been published anywhere.

Damien Love, 2007

Damien Love is a writer, journalist and independent publisher, based in Glasgow, UK.

LEFT: Cocaine Nights: French edition, with a different title, ‘The Hidden Side of the Sun’.

DL: You still live in Shepperton. How long have you been based there now?

JGB: Oh god. Since… 1960. A long time.

And I take it you have no immediate desire to resign to the Costa Del Sol?

Oh, no. I have every desire to. I intend to go fairly soon. I think it’s time I warmed my old bones in the sun.

And settle into the lifestyle you’ve described?

Well… umm… yes. I wrote the book and then thought, well, it sounds rather fun. I must go and live there. I have been there, of course.

What was the genesis of Cocaine Nights?

Well, I think watching the growth of the Costa Del Sol and similar places along the Mediterranean over the last 40 years that I’ve been going there, and seeing a microcosm of a future that’s waiting for us all. You know, these security obsessed enclaves with tele-surveillance and armed guards and smart cards and all, the whole paraphernalia, like a kind of maximum security state, reduced to the size of a village. If you know the States at all, you’ll know there are masses of similar security compounds. And there have been for many, many years. But they’re coming, they’re all over Europe now. You can see them out in the Home Counties where I live, to the west of London. People are obsessed with security, at all costs. And you pay a price for it. And I can see this development beginning to isolate people, more and more, behind their triple-security locks, and they’ll pay an enormous price, in terms of social cohesion, civic life, you know, just to feel ‘safe.’

So, do you see any merits in the radical prescription to the problem prescribed by Crawford?

Well, I the author am not suggesting that we all go out and… burgle our neighbour’s houses, or take up drug trafficking, and the very next day we’ll all be practising our violins and forming chess clubs. But I’m saying that it’s possible that we’re too obsessed with security. Although, anyone who has just been burgled is going to think me an idiot. Quite rightly. But, it’s a matter of realising that, you know, certain things have to be bought at a price, and maybe the price is too high. Maybe, to make a pearl, you need a bit of grit in the oyster shell. I think, probably, that the proposition I’ve put forward in the novel is probably correct.

The novel reminded me of the conversation you had with Will Self, about a future of boredom springing up as consumer culture envelops the globe, and these Kafkaesque communities spring up into… living death…

Yes. Kafka with unlimited Chicken Kiev.

LEFT: Cocaine Nights: Russian edition. RIGHT: Cocaine Nights: Italian edition.

The protagonist of the novel, Charles Prentice, is a travel writer, and, as is mentioned, an observer rather than a participant. Why make him so consciously someone who, initially at any rate, observes rather than interacts?

Well, he is an observer. I mean he’s a visitor to this strange place. And as a travel writer, he’s got a trained eye so that he is, as it were, more aware. More aware of the strangeness of this coast where the Brits have settled over the last thirty years, than the average person would be. As you drive along that coast, from Marbella to Malaga, or from Gibraltar to Malaga, you pass all these condominiums and pueblo-style housing estates, and you think ‘Well, they’re a bit odd, I wouldn’t want to live in one myself’. But you don’t realise how odd they are until you go into one, and then you realise that tens of thousands of Brits, along with Dutch and French and Germans and so on — many of them retired there permanently, are all living these very strange lives. I’m not just concerned with the Costa del Sol. What I’m interested in is an emerging psychology where people, for the sake of security or some other social end, are willing to sacrifice a large number of the stresses and strains that are a part of the price one pays for an active and lively and rich cultural mix. I don’t say that crime is necessary to kickstart a culture, I’m just saying that one must beware of extreme solutions.

LEFT: Cocaine Nights: Latvian edition.

Are you — as a person and not a writer, as it were — consciously frightened of a future where people are so obsessed with themselves and their own security, that in a way they cease to be aware of themselves any more?

I think that we’re moving in that direction. As living standards continue to rise, as they have done since the war — and, I’m sure living standards will, on the whole, continue to rise — people have got more to lose. You know, they’ve packed their homes with high-tech electronic gear. It’s worth burgling the average suburban house, now. Many of them are equipped like TV studios, not to mention things like jewellery. So, one gets this strangely interiorised style of living, where you switch off the outside world, rather like it was some threatening television programme. You do this by treble locking your front door and switching on the alarm system, and then you retreat and watch videos of the World Cup. And that’s not a good recipe for healthy society. Looked at objectively, one could say that cinema, the visual arts, the ‘entertainment’ culture generally, are in a worse state than they have ever been this century. The cinema is a shadow of what it was in the forties. There’s scarcely a novelist worth reading. There’s scarcely a painter or sculptor worth looking at. I’m too old to know if the music scene has the vitality that it had back in the 60s, but I don’t imagine that it has. And, you know, we’re in a culture of substitutes — Elizabeth Hurley. They had Marilyn Monroe, we’ve got Elizabeth Hurley. Something’s gone wrong. Is it that we’re engineering a new kind of life for ourselves that has echoes of those that I describe in this book?

I take it that, if presented with the choice, you’d have no difficulty in choosing between living somewhere like the retirement pueblos on the coast or somewhere like Estrella de Mar?

Well, yeah. I would opt for somewhere like Estrella de Mar, where it’s lively. I mean, it’s silly to say this, because I’m not inviting anyone to come and steal my car or burgle my house; but one always assumes that totalitarian states will be imposed from the outside on the average citizen, that they’ll be sort of horrific and threatening. But in a way, I’ve often thought that the totalitarian systems of the future will be actually rather kind of subservient and ingratiating, and will be imposed from within. We’ll define the terms of the TV mono-culture which we now inhabit, and it’s a pretty empty place. I can imagine, 50 to 100 years from now, social-historians looking back at the closing years of the 20th century and saying, ‘My God, it opened with the flight of the Wright Brothers; halfway through they went to the moon; they discovered scientific miracle upon miracle. And then they ended with people sitting in their little fortified bungalows while the tele-surveillance cameras sweep the streets outside, and they watch reruns of The Rockford Files.’

It’s a nightmare vision.

ABOVE: Cocaine Nights: two Spanish editions.

You mentioned earlier the state of the cinema.

Well, there are exceptions, don’t get me wrong…

Of course. And there’s Crash. I take it you’ve seen the film, and reacted favourably?

Oh, very. I think it’s a brilliant film, an absolute masterpiece. Cronenberg’s best film, I think.

Do you think that any of the rest of us in the UK will ever get the chance to see it?

Oh well, I don’t know you see. I don’t know whether we’re mature enough to cope with such a film. I think the powers-that-be feel it may give us a rush of blood to the head. I hope that we get a chance to see it. It opened a couple of months ago in France, where it did extremely well. In its first week it was the top-grossing film at the French box office. Pretty remarkable when you bear in mind that it couldn’t be further away from the world of Twister and Mission: Impossible. I mean, it’s a serious film.

We’re at a very strange cultural state now. We’re so panicky, so frightened. So nervous of everything that goes on. Some ghastly tragedy happens, like the Dunblane disaster or Hungerford, and people feel that there must be an explanation, there’s got to be some kind of larger reason. Similar mass murders have taken place in England, like the Hungerford tragedy of some years ago, when this youth shot about fifteen or sixteen people, including his own mother. Something like that happens and people think, ‘My God, there must be something wrong with our society.’ And so they find the obvious culprits. After Hungerford people immediately jumped to the conclusion that Michael Ryan, or whatever his name was, had been watching all the Rambo films. Turned out that he hadn’t in fact; he didn’t even own a VCR. But people look for desperate remedies to make sense of some desperate tragedy, but it’s often the wrong way. I think that the distributors are frightened that there’ll be a huge outcry when Crash is released and hundreds of over-excited drivers will start crashing their cars into each other. It doesn’t seem to have happened in France. As far as I know. I think the film will have exactly the opposite effect, and calm everyone down.

Of course, we weren’t deemed mature enough as a society to see A Clockwork Orange, in that instance by the filmmaker himself.

Yeah, Kubrick himself, as you know, pulled that one. You can rent it anywhere else in the world. You can buy it. I bought one abroad, a copy of Clockwork Orange. But he decided for reasons of his own. I think he had young daughters at the time and they were threatened, so he pulled the plug on the film as far as Britain was concerned.

LEFT: Cocaine Nights: German edition.

It seems strange that, in both cases, the country where the source material of the movie was generated is deemed unable to handle the film.

I know. But I mean, this country, we’re heavily censored. The sort of films that you can catch on your Adult Movie Channel in any hotel on the continent, we’d never see here in a million years. The sort of videos you can rent freely in the States will never be available here. We’re far too nervous. So many of the films we see are heavily cut, particularly on video. We’re very heavily censored here. People are frightened. Of course, it’s all bound up in the whole political system here — you can’t give the plebs too much freedom in one direction, because they might start asking for it in another. Who knows where it will end? You know. I think the film will be shown. It’s going to be shown at the London Film Festival in November, and then I think the company will distribute it themselves. I can’t believe that a Cronenberg film, starring Holly Hunter and James Spader and Rosanna Arquette, which won a prize at Cannes, is never going to see the light of day.

Your work has now been filmed by two very different directors. Do you think this says something about the work itself, or are Spielberg and Cronenberg similar in some way that might not be instantly apparent?

I don’t think there really are any similarities between Spielberg and Cronenberg. There aren’t any similarities between Empire of the Sun and Crash, of course. They are very different books. But Cronenberg, Spielberg and myself do share something in common, in that we all spent a large part of our careers in our own versions of science fiction. None of us were working in the mainstream SF field, but in a sort of marginal zone alongside mainstream SF, which we made our own, in different ways. I, in a sort of Inner Space direction, Spielberg more in the kind of…I don’t know how I would describe it…that sort of poetic SF almost, with something like Close Encounters, and Cronenberg in another kind of Inner Space of his own. So we have that in common. But I’ve been very, very lucky to have two of the greatest talents in present day cinema adapting novels of mine.

Is it a spurious piece of lazy critical shorthand to draw parallels between the character of Bobby Crawford in Cocaine Nights and Vaughan in Crash, these deviant Messiahs?

No, I think they are rather similar types, now that you mention it. I think they are. They’re kind of… they are deviant Messiahs. They’re sort of well intentioned psychopaths. They’re public-spirited psychopaths, a very curious blend. They genuinely want to do good and show people the truth. I know that sounds like Adolf Hitler. But neither Vaughan nor Crawford really want to do harm, to do bad for its own sake. Their idea is to do good. Take the blinkers off, show the truth. They’re both small-scale redeemers.

ABOVE: Cocaine Nights: audio book (detail).

It struck me that there are a lot of female doctors cropping up in your work. Is this a conscious, self-referential thing?

Well, I dunno how many there are. I mean, I’ve written a lot of stuff… Of course, I trained as a medical student, and I met a lot of young women doctors, who I probably will meet again, when my time is up. I think I’ve always been intrigued by the notion of the woman doctor but… that’s another story. But it’s true, there have been a few. There’s one in Crash and there’s one in Cocaine Nights .

And in Rushing to Paradise, too.

That’s true, that’s the sort of Margaret Thatcher figure. Another Messianic do-gooder. Another public-spirited psychopath.

Not quite as attractive, though?

Oh, I found her wonderfully attractive. I always had a thing for Margaret Thatcher. Until I grew too old for her.

Have you started on another project?

No, I haven’t. I’m moving ideas around, having a bit of a rest.

Do you have any notion of what might be your place in the British Literary scene, how you fit in?

None at all. I don’t fit in. I’m definitely outside the castle walls. I gather you have a fairly tight-knit Scottish literary scene. I don’t think the English one is like that, it’s very scattered. I get the impression that the Scots, rightly, are today very conscious of their national identity, whereas the English are losing theirs. They’re a bit lost. It’s very large and dispersed. I don’t know what part I play in it. I don’t think I play any part, actually.

Well, time’s about up.

Great. You’ve got enough for about seven lines. It’s been a pleasure. Best of luck.

Copyright © 1996 & 2007 by Damien Love

..:: MORE INFO
+ J.G. Ballard Live in London: Q&A transcripts from the same era discussing similar themes.

Rich, car-crashing idiot No. 2: Stefan Eriksson.

Over at The Wrong Advices, Dan writes, ‘After watching Eddie Griffin destroy a Ferrari Enzo I was reminded of some of the other times rich idiots have killed beautiful and expensive cars. I’ve put together a list of some of the more memorable crashes.’

My favourite is No. 2:

Car: Ferrari Enzo
Value: US $1.2 million
Idiot at the wheel: Stefan Eriksson – Former Gizmondo Exec
What happened: Crashed into a pole at 199 mph (320.61 km/h). Tried to
blame it on his imaginary friend Dietrich.”

Surely Vaughan’s shaman, Jimmy Dean, should be on this list…

[ via Spinopsys ]

————————————————————————————————————————

+ BUMPER HUMPER

Mechanic Chris DOES have a girlfriend — just one of the Sun’s charming photos.

Speaking of idiots and cars, Keith emailed to remind me of this news story, reported a few weeks back in the UK’s bastion of truth, the Sun newspaper, about a man who has sex with cars. Keith says: ‘Not sure whether it’s a joke or not. The guy sounds so goofy talking about his lust for cars that it makes you understand just how artful Ballard’s descriptions in Crash are.’

It’s *got* to be a joke:

MECHANIC Chris Donald loves his work — he has sex with CARS… “Some men like boobs and bums, but I much prefer curvy bodywork.”

Chris, 38, has a recognised psychological condition that makes him physically attracted to motors. He has had sex with more than 30 different models in 20 years — plus two motorboats and a pal’s JETSKI. Chris, who DOES have a girlfriend, confessed: “A nice car for me is a feast for the senses. It’s about smells, feelings and tastes. If I see a gorgeous Mercedes I know I’d love to jump into bed with it.”

His weird obsession mirrors that of electrician Karl Watkins, who The Sun revealed was jailed for having sex with pavements in Redditch, Worcs, in 1993.”

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+ PLEASURE SHOPPING

LEFT: Where pleasure is a way of life…

Look what’s just opened for business! The Metro-Centre, no less, billed as ‘the largest shopping mall in the south of the UK. Located at Brooklands, off the M25 near to Heathrow… This is the Metro-Centre where shopping is a pleasure and pleasure is a way of life.’

According to the Centre’s blog:

Want to try alternative types of medicine? Want to see what the healing power of crystal can do to your life? Then get over to the east wing on the second floor to The Crystal World. Featuring a wide variety of crystals, for both decorative and practical uses, The Crystal World could be your gateway to a new existence!”

The Metro-Centre’s only been open for a few weeks, but I’m predicting that pretty soon the blog is going to be reporting a secession that turns the Centre into an anomalous enclave, following a dark and mysterious ‘ad-noir’ campaign featuring a charismatic cable-TV host and a subsequent takeover by paramilitary goons…

The signs are already there: when you click on ‘map’, it says: ‘AT THE REQUEST OF THAMES VALLEY CID, THIS PAGE HAS BEEN REMOVED.’

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+ PUBLIC DISORDER AS ENTERTAINMENT

A Ballardian community?

For a taste of what you can expect when the Metro-Centre does kick off, Mountain*7 informs us that a ‘remarkable set of images, taken from a mini-riot that took place at the Gare du Nord in Paris on the 26th March’ has been uploaded to Flickr:

Apparently the whole thing kicked off after a passenger caught travelling without a ticket was arrested with ‘excessive force’ – there were 9 arrests made and some mild injuries (although the vending machine appears to have borne the brunt of the damage).

There’s a banality to the images somehow, as if the whole thing were a media set; and the sheer presence of so many cameras almost doubles the unreality of the event. We’re so inured to the idea of simulation now that the very mention of it seems superfluous, but this seems to have tipped over into something else, a Ballardian sense of community-through-violence, public disorder as entertainment.”

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+ SERRENIA NIGHTS

Serrenia: layer upon layer of invisible security.

Matteo emailed to direct me to Dan Hill’s mashup of Cocaine Nights and promotional material for the Serrenia project, the waterside development that ’sits where the Red Sea meets the Eastern Sahara, mountain ranges to the west silhouetting the horizon, and beyond them the ancient city of Luxor and the timeless Nile.’

Dan goes on to say:

…can anything in literature be as bizarrely late-period Ballard as the actual Serrenia promo video and website? Is it even for real? Perhaps most of all, this section from the ‘PEACE OF MIND’ section of the website:

“Discreet, effective and efficient security is all part of the Serrenia experience. The security is there, all but invisible, building layer upon subtle layer. The very latest in high-technology protection, ‘laser’ fences, detect movement and 24-hour CCTV monitors constantly. Even after having been granted access to Serrenia through the main Sahl Hasheesh gate, visitors will still have to pass through one of the three main entry gates. The Hotel and ‘exclusive zone’ will be controlled by another security layer each with extra gates. Finally access to Palace Island is regulated by an additional layer of security and another gate. Experienced professionals, recruited from across the world, have given their expertise to create a secure haven, and to supply the most unobtrusive of safeguards, while all staff are rigorously vetted. Highly trained personnel are available at all times to offer support, though chances are you’ll never even know they are there, to guarantee your safety and freedom, so that you can enjoy the luxury of protection without feeling confined.”

One’s tempted to say “you couldn’t make it up” except that, essentially, Ballard already had.”

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+ THE CAR CRASH AS SEDUCTION TECHNIQUE

LEFT: Robert Maitland, eat your heart out.

And finally, via Rodcorp, we learn that Paul Thorp — a real-life Maitland from Ballard’s Concrete Island — is in the news again:

“Anyone who’s driven on the M62 between Manchester and Leeds will have seen the farm in the middle of the motorway and wondered: what’s it doing there? And is it, as most people believe, a monument to stubbornness?
…
Its sole occupant is Paul Thorp, a sheep farmer with just his dogs for company and 2,000 acres of land. Living 20 yards from the fast lane has its ups, downs – and near misses – as Paul reveals.

“It has its moments. We’ve had a few visitors over the fence. They’ve put a crash barrier up to stop ‘em, but before my time a wagon came through knocked the wall down landed on its side touching the garden wall. We’ve had plenty of accidents wagons and cars stuff coming through fence not that often but enough.”

…making Stott Hall Farm attractive to the opposite sex has proved difficult… Paul admits it can be a lonely place: “I guess you don’t want to be on your own all the time. It’s just a bit of a bleak place to bring somebody out in the wilds, all that traffic round you, and you’re a long way from anywhere – two miles from the nearest village. The postman only comes to the bottom of the hill and some days you won’t see anybody except those zipping past on the motorway – apart from people ringing you might not see anyone else to talk to.

“I just need someone who likes the outdoor life to have a breakdown outside and then come round!”

Paul, we have just the lady for you…

by Benjamin Noys

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In the wake of Jean Baudrillard’s death, Ballardian presents Benjamin Noys’s essay exploring the ‘point of convergence between the writing of Jean Baudrillard and J.G. Ballard’. This is a slightly modified version of the article that appeared as ‘Crimes of the Near Future: Baudrillard / Ballard’, Ícone 9 (2006): 29-38, reproduced with Dr Noys’s permission.

Benjamin Noys is Lecturer in English at The University of Chichester. He is the author of Georges Bataille: A Critical Introduction (2000) and The Culture of Death (2005).
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In his key work Simulacra and Simulations (1981) Jean Baudrillard lauded the British science-fiction writer J.G. Ballard’s novel Crash (1973) as ‘the first great novel of the universe of simulation’ (1994: 119). For Baudrillard it took science-fiction beyond its usual coordinates of imaginary future universes and towards our world as hyperreal (1994: 125). In this situation of the ‘precession of simulacra‘ (1991: 1, Baudrillard’s italics) theory becomes science-fiction and science-fiction becomes theory. Therefore we see a point of convergence between the writing of Jean Baudrillard and J. G. Ballard, which has developed as both try to ascertain the precise mutations of this new universe of simulation. Together they form a strange kind of Beckettian ‘pseudo-couple’: locked together as ‘Baudrillard-Ballard’ or ‘Ballard-Baudrillard’. Despite the fact that, unlike the most famous theoretical ‘pseudo-couple’ of Deleuze and Guattari, they have not collaborated together numerous points of exchange exist between them. This is not a neutral cooperation but often takes an antagonistic form; what Baudrillard calls the mode of alterity or ‘the duel’ (2005: 72). However, in this mode we find an increasingly shared diagnosis of the present and a ‘hypercriticism’ that tracks the fate of alterity (synonymous for Baudrillard with Otherness, difference, and negativity in their radical forms). If the universe of simulation aims at ‘a virtual universe from which everything dangerous and negative has been expelled’ (2005: 202) then alterity will be its victim.

This problem can be seen in what might seem an appropriately mediated reference to Baudrillard in Ballard’s recent novel Super-Cannes (2000): ‘I sat down and ordered a vin blanc from the young French waitress, who wore jeans and a white vest printed with a quotation from Baudrillard’ (88). Although this might be dismissed as a typically postmodern ironic ‘in-joke’ it actually speaks to the fate of alterity. The extremity of Baudrillard’s own theory becomes absorbed as a marketing tool by the culture industry, reduced to an unnamed quotation. What we can see here is a further mutation of the ‘perfect crime’ of the murder of alterity. This is a crime which also ‘erases its own tracks’ (Baudrillard, 2005: 197) by the production of new forms of simulated alterity. This then is the situation faced by the hypercritic; not only the extermination of any principle of alterity from which to make a critique but also the simulation of critique itself. It is precisely this mutation that both Baudrillard and Ballard engage with in their recent work.

Baudrillard’s example is that of auto-immune disorders (1993: 60-70). The more medicine eliminates disease the more it becomes haunted by disorders in which the body’s own immune system turns on itself. To avoid the disastrous consequences of this elimination of alterity the system of simulation introduces doses of homeopathic alterity (small amounts of alterity that keep the system in ‘health’ rather than leading it to turn on itself). In this way simulation goes so far as to simulate alterity, after it has ‘murdered’ its truly threatening forms. The result is a new form of what Baudrillard calls ‘trompe-l’oeil negativity’ (2005: 203), the simulated mirror-image of ‘real’ alterity. Although Baudrillard has laid a great deal of stress on this analysis recently, such as in Part II of The Transparency of Evil (1993: 113-174), it was present in his earlier work. In Simulacra and Simulation he remarks about the capacity of simulation ‘to regenerate a moribund principle through simulated scandal, phantasm, and murder – a sort of hormonal treatment through negativity and crisis’ (1994: 18-19). In fact it also bears close resemblance to the ‘artificial negativity’ thesis of Paul Piccone (1978) and the Telos group who, inspired by the work of the Frankfurt school, argued that the system required protest to buoy its functioning. Piccone argued the new left and other social movements of the 1960s were not real threats to the social system, but encouraged by the system to correct its own functioning. However, while he still sought an ‘organic negativity’ that could resist this process Baudrillard (and Ballard) instead trace the potential exacerbation of simulated alterity.

The murder of Otherness, of alterity, produces a new obsession with it and its return in what Baudrillard describes as ‘the melodrama of difference’ (1993: 124-138). For Baudrillard this is particularly true of forms of identity politics and other proclamations of the ‘right to difference’. In fact this always reduces alterity to something negotiable and actually refuses radical alterity. We can see further evidence for this ‘melodrama of difference’ in the toleration and funding of so-called ‘transgressive’ art – for example, in the symptomatic fact that Charles Saatchi, who made his fortune in advertising (including for the British Conservative party), was the chief patron of the ‘Sensation’ exhibition of New British Art. In this case the ‘melodrama’ generates the requisite shock while also being used to market the singular ‘new’ achievements of British culture. Outside of the still relatively ‘high’ domain of art we could also consider the fashion for ‘extreme’ works in popular film. Since Se7en (1995), which explores the baroque tortures inflicted by a serial killer, a whole range of contemporary films have exploited the horror of torture: Ôdishon [Audition] (1999), Saw (2004), Saw II (2005), Creep (2004), Wolf Creek (2005), and Hostel (2006) (to mention only the most well-known). Often they are seen as a reaction against the postmodern irony that has been prevalent in horror film since Scream (1996). In a sense, though, they offer a meta-irony; to make a ‘true’ horror film rather than a pastiche is simply to pastiche the ‘true’ horror film. This is evident in the way in which recent explicit remakes of 1970s horror films, such as Texas Chainsaw Massacre (2003; original 1974) and The Hills Have Eyes (2006; original 1977), have returned to negativity of the ‘original’ film only all the more effectively to simulate it. Any political negativity present in the original is lost through a focus on more and more precise representations of bodily suffering.

Still from Wolf Creek (dir. Greg McLean, 2005).

This then is a situation of administered alterity and the hypercritic responds not by withdrawing into a position of disgust, ressentiment, or resignation, as does Paul Virilio (2003). Neither do they simply celebrate this new body-shock art as revealing the obverse ‘truth’ of our mediatised culture. Instead they try to exceed both the new forms of simulated alterity and those forms of critique which rely on an alterity that has now disappeared. In fact despite the seeming pessimism of this analysis, in which every instance of alterity is ‘always-already’ simulated, Baudrillard insists on the ‘Other’s indestructibility’ (1993: 146) and the need to reconstitute the radical Other ’starting with the fragments and tracing its broken lines, its lines of fracture’ (1993: 155). The very capacity of simulation to simulate alterity actually threatens to overwhelm it, with radical alterity now taking a viral or catastrophic form that permeates simulation. Of course what remains contentious is not only the extent to which we accept this analysis, presented quite explicitly as a fiction, but also the mechanism or mechanisms by which this reversal, implosion or catastrophe is supposed to, or is, taking place. Here we re-encounter the notion of crime, but this time a crime directed against the original crime and its cover-up. This is the exacerbative approach, not returning to ‘organic negativity’ or celebrating the ‘truth’ of negativity, but committing a new crime, which will exceed the original.

In Ballard’s fiction this articulation of excess literalises Baudrillard’s metaphor of crime. This is particularly true of the novel Super-Cannes, which begins with Paul Sinclair, an aviation journalist, and his young wife Jane, a doctor, travelling to the business park of Eden-Olympia on the Côte d’Azur. While Paul is recovering from the effects of a flying accident Jane’s role is to replace the previous doctor David Greenwood, who went on a killing spree before killing himself. Almost immediately they arrive they encounter the threatening psychiatrist Wilder Penrose and take up residence in Greenwood’s old villa. With time on his hands, and increasingly obsessed with the fate of Greenwood, Paul Sinclair begins to investigate the circumstances of the killings. He slowly uncovers evidence that suggests both a network of criminality in the business park and that Greenwood was deliberately executed. Although it comes as no surprise to the reader, there is deliberately little mystery in this novel, the psychiatrist Wilder Penrose is the orchestrating figure. Suffocated by the banality and conformity of the park, which is totally regulated and simulated, the executives who lived there had begun to fall ill with minor and persistent ailments. Penrose’s solution was ‘a controlled and supervised madness’ (2001: 251) through a secret therapy programme of crime.

The novel ’stages’ both the danger of simulation leading to the internal collapse of a social system and the way in which those who manage the system recognise this risk and ‘re-inject’ alterity. Penrose’s crime programme is directed outside the park in the form of violent raids (ratissages) against the local Arabs and blacks, robberies, and also child prostitution. It was Greenwood’s role in administering this programme, and especially his recognition of his own paedophilic desires, which led to his attack on the park. As Paul discovers it was not actually a wild striking out but a deliberate attempt to both punish those responsible and to uncover the ‘therapy’ programme. The novel ends with Paul setting out to complete the task at which Greenwood fails – another crime to expose this surreptitious criminality. Certainly Ballard’s novel is a fiction and, despite the seriousness of its subject matter, not without humour. However, Ballard’s recent work also puts into play the necessity for an apocalyptic or catastrophic violence to exceed the regulated violence of contemporary culture (see Gasiorek, 2005: 202-214) – to literally blow apart the limits of the existing order. Again the only way to exceed licensed transgression is through an out-bidding by another hypertransgression.

This process recalls Baudrillard’s analysis of potlatch, the gift exchange of so-called ‘primitive’ societies, as a process of ‘continual higher bidding in exchange’ (1998: 194). The excess emerges out of the acceleration of this bidding beyond any hope of containment or return. In the same way Paul Sinclair’s crime answers, and out-bids, both the failed crime of David Greenwood and the organised criminality of Wilder Penrose. It also conforms to Baudrillard’s description of the terrorist act as ‘at the same time a model of simulation, a micro-model flashing with a minimally real event and a maximal echo chamber’ (1983: 114). It belongs to the order of simulation, as it will be spectacular and an object of media interest, as was Greenwood’s original crime. Also, it functions as a micro-model of dissident resistance against the organisation of alterity: the ‘real event’ here being the eruption of a ‘real’ alterity. Finally, as an echo chamber, it expands beyond the immediate context of the novel as fiction, resonating in the mediascape of contemporary culture. What is also crucial is that Ballard does not actually describe this act; it remains a virtual future left in all its potential ambiguity. Rather than provide another representation of radical alterity, bringing the crime back into simulation, Ballard’s novel marks its ‘presence’ in the form of an absence. The perfect crime of the murder of alterity and its simulation is ‘matched’ or out-bid by another crime that never occurs, and may not actually occur, in the fictional universe.

Still from 71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance (dir. Michael Haneke, 1994).

This is very similar to the recent work of Baudrillard. Although he does not have the license of fiction for him the out-bidding of the perfect crime takes place in thought: ‘[o]ur only hope lies in a criminal and inhumane kind of thought’ (2001: 61). The substance of Baudrillard’s thought has, as we have seen, remained quite constant. Therefore I want to suggest that this ‘criminal and inhumane kind of thought’ for which he strives is rather more a question of form. Since what we might call Baudrillard’s ’simulated sociology’ (the last great work being Symbolic Exchange and Death (1976)), which at least mimicked existing academic forms, his work has increasingly been articulated through disruptive formal strategies. His use of aphorism, impressionistic or journalistic writing (the bête noir of academic writing), fragments, diaries, and so on, work towards a hypercritical writing, which is itself implosive or catastrophic. The reason for these strategies is, again, the refusal to simply stage or represent the ‘indestructible Other’. Instead the fragmentary form of his work circulates around it, registering its destabilising and implosive effects through writing. This is Baudrillard game of seduction: seducing simulated alterity into contact with the distortive ‘black hole’ of radical alterity.

Of course it is worth noting that there is nothing particularly original in these strategies per se, which can be found in thinkers like Pascal, Lichtenberg, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein and Lyotard. Each, in their own way, also chose these forms to explore the effects of a radical alterity which cannot be spoken of directly. However, unlike the tendency of these thinkers to put everything on the side of subjectivity Baudrillard insists on the ‘Object’ as the final figure of otherness (1993: 172). The Object is not present as such but functions as a ‘vanishing point’, and the role of theory is to mimic the challenge of the Object (1993: 173). Despite this difference the manoeuvre is fundamentally similar, and perhaps even closer to his contemporaries like Lévinas and Derrida. A radically fragmentary writing attests, through its fragmentation, gaps, and absences, to the ’strange attractor’ that is the Object. The risk in this invocation of absolute alterity is that something will be lost: Baudrillard’s concrete tracing of the effects of simulation and alterity in the mediascape. For all its fictionality and Baudrillard’s studious avoidance of the scholarship of media studies his extreme thinking always anchored itself in the actuality of the present. In his choice of conventionally unconventional writing strategies and a conventionally unconventional thought of the Other this threatens to disappear in an unspecific and generalised invocation of absolute alterity.

In the terminology of Alain Badiou, we might locate Baudrillard as part of the dissident tradition of ‘anti-philosophy’ (see Hallward, 2003: 20-23). According to Badiou this ‘tradition’ poses an ineffable transcendent meaning against philosophy, and often does so in fragmentary anti-systematic forms. Although he does not deign to mention Baudrillard his list of anti-philosophers includes most of the figures mentioned above. Identifying unequivocally with philosophy, in a new rationalist form, Badiou argues that the fundamental orientation of anti-philosophy is theological. Lurking behind the transcendent meaning or figure of radical alterity is God. From this point of view Baudrillard’s ‘criminal thought’ would be another attenuated religiosity, searching for an ever-receding mystical intuition of the ‘Object’. Now Baudrillard himself, in Simulacra and Simulation, realised the danger of the ‘anti-’position of simply being opposed to an existing form or discourse (1994: 19). In precisely the terms I have been discussing the ‘anti-’ position is one of simulated alterity, by means of which dead forms sustain themselves. Instead of destroying what it opposes, the pose of opposition supports and sustains it. The irony is that Baudrillard and Ballard’s invocation of the extreme crime might all too easily sustain the system of simulation they are subjecting to hypercriticism. Rather than out-bidding and accelerating simulated alterity the danger is providing a new form of simulated alterity. They are both transfixed by the possibility of a truly authentic criminal act always just out of reach. This is made even more ironic by the media fascination with ‘true crime’ – from CCTV footage of criminal acts to the fascinated horror of accounts of the activities of serial killers. Therefore I am suggesting that Baudrillard’s ‘criminal and inhumane kind of thought’ is not criminal and inhumane enough.

Passivity and inertia — the way forward? Photo by Emiliano Granado.

Isn’t the problem that this criticism simply leaves us in the position, so often made by critics of Baudrillard, of an absolute pessimism in the face of inescapable systems? ‘Criminal thought’ is a failure and so we have no escape from the reign of simulated alterity, other than a quite literal faith in the Other. I want to take another line of thought developed by Baudrillard as a line of flight out of this impasse of obsession with the radical crime. His earlier text In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities (1983) avoids the language of radical alterity and the Other. Instead Baudrillard explores how the masses, the ’silent majorities’, offer ‘the strength of inertia, the strength of the neutral’ (1983: 2). Rather than the masses incarnating any sort of excessive energy or reservoir of transgressive alterity it is their very muteness which threatens. The text makes an explicit break with sociology, including media sociology, by refusing the operation of the ascription of meaning. This refusal is undertaken in the name of the masses, which, like the new theorist (or post-theorist) are indifferent to meaning. Here we can see a strange connection traced between the indifference of the masses and the indifference of the theorist. Not that Baudrillard simply falls into the trap of being the spokesperson for this indifference, which would immediately nullify it. Instead the masses indicate the way forward for theory through passivity and inertia that refuses to respond to the relentless incitement of the media: ‘Bombarded with stimuli, messages and tests, the masses are simply an opaque, blind stratum’ (1983: 21). What is also different is the mode of challenge they offer. They do not exacerbate alterity through a further crime, or excessive violence, instead they follow the fatal strategy of hyperconformity.

As Baudrillard puts it ‘You want us to consume – O.K., let’s consume always more, and anything whatsoever; for any useless and absurd purpose’ (1983: 46). Let’s take the previous example I used of new extreme horror films. They seem to incarnate a logic of simulated alterity and invite either horrified disgust or perverse celebration, both operations of giving meaning to them. What about those spectators who take the films precisely as it often seem they are intended, as a game? The game is ‘what have you got to show me?’, ‘how far will you go?’, but rather than a perverse logic of escalation or desensitisation, it is a matter of indifference. Instead of searching for an alterity that would push beyond the screen, or even the viral return of the alterity, say in forms of mimicking of the violence shown, we simply have a passive response to it as a game. There is no alterity here, but only play.

One of the so-called ‘video nasties’ of the 1970s, Wes Craven’s Last House on the Left (1972), had the tagline ‘To avoid fainting, keep repeating “It’s only a movie … It’s only a movie…”‘. The playful assumption of the tagline is that the audience will identify so much with what they are watching that they will be overcome unless they remind themselves that they are only watching a film. This sense of identification with the film has also been a common assumption in film theory, especially in its psychoanalytic forms [1]. However, what if the audience does not have to keep repeating ‘it’s only a movie’ to avoid fainting? What if they recognise this simulated alterity as what it is and hyperconform to it? They play a game with the film by not treating it as real, but at the same time conforming to its effects of horror. This does not involve a simple fascination with finding an authentic transgressive excess but rather a blank passivity. In some senses it might be suggested that the increasingly extremity of recent horror films responds to this audience inertia; as this over-involvement absorbs simulated alterity the filmmakers must ‘up the stakes’, only to encounter another level of inertia. Certainly these are my own highly speculative suggestions, but I think they indicate something that Baudrillard’s own recent invocations of criminal thought and radical alterity step-back from in his own work. What is being avoided is banality in favour of the transgressive crime.

This argument for the banality of the media and the hyperconformity of the masses to this banality has implications for our strategies of response that have not fully been exhausted. Within academia it is a familiar accusation that media studies is banal. In that most directly Baudrillardian of novels White Noise (1984) the character Murray, a lecturer on ‘living icons’, remarks ‘I understand music, I understand the movies, I even see how comic books can tell us things. But there are full professors in the place who read nothing but cereal boxes’; his friend replies ‘It’s the only avant-garde we’ve got’ (1999: 10). This exchange indicates something interesting, with a remark about the banality of the object being answered with the suggestion that this is our avant-garde. It identifies one of the key modes by which media studies has often justified itself: as an avant-garde political gesture. Therefore against the supposed banality of the object the media studies scholar replies by finding within that object, or more exactly in its use by the consumer, strategies of transgression or its synonyms (subversion, resistance, alterity, etc.). In this way the banality of the object is redeemed through its association with political or cultural transgression. At the same time the activity of the scholar is also redeemed from banality due to its political import, which is revealed by the superior insight of the critic. On the other side, that of cultural producers, the game of transgression is also played to elevate their own products to the status of transgressive objects. In this way academia and cultural producers position themselves with a self-confirming loop of transgression.

The ‘criminal’ gesture of Baudrillard and Ballard could easily be regarded as simply a hyperbolic extension of this line of argument. They claim that although the kind of everyday transgressions identified by media scholars or practiced by cultural producers are part of the society of simulated alterity there is still a radical alterity beyond representation. This might appear to be a radical ‘out-bidding’ but it falls within the same ‘avant-garde’ logic, as well as drawing radical alterity back into representation. In a sense it retains a faith in a pure product of transgression in relation to which every actual gesture of transgression, whether critical or artistic, must necessarily fall short. The alternative I am suggesting is to reply to the critic of the banality of the media in the mode of hyperconformity: ‘You accuse the media of being banal? O.K. what I do as a critic or producer is banal, more banal and useless than you could ever know!’. The advantage of this hyperconformist response lies not simply in disarming the critic. It refuses to justify the media object in other terms (political or artistic, for example) and it refuses the frantic invocation of transgression. The account that Baudrillard and Ballard give of simulated alterity suggests that transgression is not actually transgressive; it is rather that transgression is boring. Although de Sade is often regarded as the original thinker of transgression he already came to this insight in his account of the final apathy of the libertine (see Klossowski, 1992: 28-34).

To play the game of transgression is to fall within an unacknowledged banality, as well as to continue to sustain the dead forms of contemporary culture. Therefore it is a matter of pushing through and completing the banality of transgression. Of course this hyper-conformity can easily fall back into plain conformity, such as with the American artist Jeff Koons in his ‘Banality’ show of 1988. As he put it ‘[m]y work tries to present itself as the underdog. It takes a position that people must embrace everything’ (in Muthesius (ed.), 1992: 107). However, the withdrawal that I am tracing is not quiescent, but the refusal of the immediate equation of certain content with transgression and the refusal of the conformity of transgression itself. It is an attention to the politics of form. In particular it is an attention to that banality that Ballard accessed through science-fiction. As he stated in 1971:

The subject matter of SF is the subject matter of everyday life: the gleam on refrigerator cabinets, the contours of a wife’s or husband’s thighs passing the newsreel images on a color TV set, the conjuncture of musculature and chromium artifact within an automobile interior, the unique postures of passengers on an airport escalator (1984: 100).

Even, we might add, a cereal box.

Ushering in Banality (Jeff Koons, 1988). Photo by Henrike Schulte.

What is produced in Ballard’s work on the 1970s, and partly what attracted Baudrillard to it, is the refusal of the ascription of meaning and a free-floating attention to the ‘invisible literature’ that shapes our cultural landscapes. In Baudrillard’s reading of Crash precisely what he refused was Ballard’s positioning of the novel as traditional criticism, or his enclosing it within the logic of perversion (Baudrillard, 1994: 113). Instead of a world of transgression we have world ‘without desire’ (Baudrillard, 1994: 118). I want to suggest then that their more recent work functions still as a diagnostic but risks regression to a fascination with transgression rather than what Baudrillard calls the ‘dull splendor of banality or of violence’ (1994: 119). The return to those previous positions is then a matter of rethinking the exacerbative possibilities of form without conceding to a fixing of the form of alterity in the absolute crime or the totally Other. Contrary to the desire to find a real future crime we might follow Baudrillard’s previous suggestion for a fatal strategy: becoming-banal.

[1] For a convincing critique of this assumption see Smith (1995).

Benjamin Noys

..:: BIBLIOGRAPHY

Ballard, J. G. (1984) ‘Fictions of Every Kind’ (1971), Re/Search 8/9: JG Ballard, eds. V. Vale and Andrea Juno: 98-100.
___. (2000) Super-Cannes. London: Flamingo.

Baudrillard, J. (1983) In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities. Trans. P. Foss, J. Johnston and P. Patton. New York: Semiotext(e).
___. (1993) The Transparency of Evil: Essays on Extreme Phenomena. Trans. J. Benedict. London and New York: Verso.
___. (1994) Simulacra and Simulation. Trans. S. F. Glaser. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press.
___. (1996) The Perfect Crime. Trans. C. Turner. London and New York: Verso.
___. (1998) ‘When Bataille Attacked the Metaphysical Principle of Economy,’ in F. Botting and S. Wilson (eds) Bataille: A Critical Reader. Oxford and Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 191-195.
___. (2001) ‘From Radical Incertitude, or Thought as Impostor,’ in: S. Lotringer and S. Cohen (eds) French Theory in America. London and New York: Routledge, 59-69.
___. (2005) The Conspiracy of Art. Ed. S. Lotringer. New York: Semiotext(e).

DeLillo, D. (1999) White Noise. London: Picador.

Gasiorek, A. (2005) J. G. Ballard. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press.

Hallward, P. (2003) Badiou: A Subject to Truth. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press.

Klossowski, P. (1992) Sade My Neighbour. Trans. Alphonso Lingis. London: Quartet Books.

Muthesius, A. (ed.) (1992) Jeff Koons. Cologne: Taschen.

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