APOLLO ROULETTE, PART 1

by Brian Baker

In this sequel to ‘Iterative Architecture: a Ballardian Text’, an ‘auto-displacement’ Ian Fleming/J.G. Ballard mashup, Brian Baker applies the method to desert imagery in Ballard’s work.

Finally, Baker uncovers the hidden logic at play in the American ‘nuclear state’ – a deadly game of APOLLO ROULETTE!

Tune into Ballardian.com for Part 2: the final thrilling instalment of Brian Baker’s Apollo Roulette!

Double Zero Wheel. He clicked the cartridge into the chamber of the service revolver, carefully closed the cylinder, and placed the mouth of the barrel against his temple. What was it he had said to Markham? ‘I understand that double-O’s have a very short life expectancy.’ He wondered now how many of those deaths were suicides. Somehow the service revolver seemed right, for doing the decent thing. He had killed too many men with the Walther, and didn’t want to be a notch on his own gun.

The Gernsback Continuum. At the beginning of Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1971), the narrator and his attorney are on the way to cover the ‘fabulous Mint 400’ in Las Vegas. The text famously begins: ‘We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold. I remember saying something like “I feel a bit lightheaded; maybe you should drive…” And suddenly there was a terrible roar all around us and the sky was full of what looked like huge bats, all swooping and screeching and diving around the car, which was going about a hundred miles an hour with the top down to Las Vegas’ (3). Thompson is driving along the former Route 66, now known as Interstate 15. To the west of Barstow is Edwards Air Force Base. Edwards was the site of the X-plane testing program in the 1950s, which eventually gave way to the ‘spam in a can’ astronautics of the Friendship, Mercury and Apollo programs. The men of Edwards Air Force Base, ‘folk heroes of our time’ according to Lyndon Johnson,[1] inhabited a variant of frontier masculinity appropriate to Edwards’s desert setting, and was exploited in Tom Wolfe’s The Right Stuff and its screen adaptation.

Thompson, driving east of Edwards towards Barstow, experiences an hallucination, a fata morgana, a common desert phenomenon. Brought on by the desert light and psychotropic drugs, Thompson hallucinates what William Gibson, in ‘The Gernsback Continuum’, would call ‘semiotic ghosts’, ‘semiotic phantoms, bits of deep cultural imagery that have split off and taken on a life of their own’.[2] In this story, the narrator encounters a vision of ‘the air thick with ships: giant wing-liners, little darting silver things [...], mile-long blimps, hovering dragonfly things that were gyrocopters [and] smooth silver shapes like beads of running mercury’ (8-9). He sees Tucson as ‘a dream Tucson thrown up out of the collective yearning of an era’ (9), ‘an idealized city that drew on Metropolis and Things to Come’ (8). Thompson sees not a fascist utopia, but bats; and not bats, but UFOs; and these UFOs are the semiotic phantoms of the American Space Program made manifest by a cocktail of narcotics and desert speed.

One, Two, Three. No, not yet. He lowered the gun and placed it gently on the glass-topped table by his right hand, where it settled with a hard double click. His hand went automatically to the shaker and poured the last of the vodka martini, but he already felt nauseated by the two glasses he had downed before. Dutch courage? He shuddered. He really was finished if he needed help to pull the trigger. Some of his fellow agents, he knew, had descended into a whiskey-sodden fugue before the inevitable end had come, a danger to themselves and to others and their deaths ultimately something of a mercy. When the instrument begins to feel, he thought, it’s past time for the Service to hone the edge of a new blade.

Algebras of chance. In Hello America, the roulette wheel becomes the means by which the deranged President Manson decides which of the ruined cities of America to target with the remaining stockpile of cruise missiles and ICBMs. In the words of President Manson, Ballard diagnoses the ‘American dream’ of migration and aspiration as a gamble, with Las Vegas the latter-day cradle of the modern USA. ‘Europe doesn’t exist for me any more, Wayne – except that I see that it is waking now like an old dog, smelling us here and trying to get its snout into this new America I’ve built. It was a gamble, Wayne, a gamble with my own life. I put everything on the one spin of the wheel each of us is given, a small stack of dreams and hopes’ (153). Manson’s is a materialist vision, lacking the transcendent: even hopes and dreams are but small chips in an unwinnable game.

Clouds. Doctor Bluffield stood at his office window and gazed across the piazza of the clinic, which opened towards the saucer-shaped water tower that blazed white in the southwestern sun. The clinic was a plate-glass spacecraft fallen among the green knolls of the science park. The sculpted gardens reflected the serenity of purpose of the bio-medical corporation under whose aegis the clinic operated. The clinic’s main building incorporated a heat-reflective skin which maintained a carefully-controlled temperate environment within. Outside, the heat was well over a hundred degrees, according to the monitor on Bluffield’s desk. In the piazza, by the fountain – an indulgence in this climate, as were the lawns – a man in a loose-fitting, white tracksuit was calmly proceeding though a T’ai Chi warm-down sequence,  like some kind of swaddled and articulated mannequin.

Fata Morgana. Vermillion Sands is a desert resort that is the location of a sequence of short stories that were collected in the 1971 volume Vermillion Sands.[3] In the fantastical desert space of the resort and its outlying desert villas, Lagoon West and Lizard Key, glider pilots carve cloud formations into mobile sculpture, flying ‘sand rays’ are hunted akin to the Albatross in Coleridge’s ‘The Ancient Mariner’, and the pathologies of the resort’s inhabitants – movie stars, poets, glitterati – are made manifest. In ‘The Thousand Dreams of Stellavista’, a psychotropic house, in which a film star murdered her husband, ‘recalls’ these emotions and causes the relationship of the new inhabitants to disintegrate. In a sense, ‘Stellavista’ is a ghost story, a haunted-house narrative. The emotional ‘ghosts’ are technological revenants; the house itself takes on the psychosis of its owner as a kind of pathological prosthesis, and itself becomes murderous. The pathology of the male narrator also becomes aligned with the trauma encoded in the house’s psychoactive circuits and the phantasmal ‘presence’ of the femme fatale/ murderess, Gloria Tremayne. 99 Stellavista is a classic Ballardian pathologised technology that threatens but ‘beckons more and more persuasively from the margins of the technological landscape’.[4]

Two Tribes. In the morning B hired an open-topped Corvette Sting Ray and put the hiking gear in the trunk, using the Swiss passport and a sheaf of soft dollar bills he had won at blackjack two nights before. It certainly wasn’t baccarat at the Royale, but the sharp spike of adrenalin, even dressed in casual clothes among these holidaying Midwesterners, so anxious to lose their roll, as they called it, was gratifying. It was even something of a relief. If it wasn’t the pleasures of the roulette wheel in the warmth of a Mediterranean evening, at least it wasn’t sitting alone with a loaded revolver at his right hand. The heat was oppressive on Highway 15 as it spooled north from the city limits. The resort shrank like a discarded postcard in the rear-view mirror, and like those other desert cities, Phoenix and Reno, seemed as unreal as a fata morgana once left behind. Runnels of sweat slicked his white linen shirt to his back, and he had to blink away salty droplets behind the incognito of his glasses. The desert called to him, but the still-rational remainder of his mind worried that the Corvette might not prove reliable. He didn’t like the idea of buzzards and coyotes picking at his bones. It reminded him too much of what he did for the Service.

Image: ‘Las Vegas Club’ by Troy Paiva.

Synchronoclasmique. ‘The secret affinity between gambling and the desert: the intensity of gambling reinforced by the presence of the desert all around the town. The air-conditioned freshness of the gaming rooms, as against the radiant heat outside. The challenge of all the artificial lights to the violence of the sun’s rays. Nights of gambling sunlit on all sides; the glittering darkness of these rooms in the middle of the desert. Gambling itself is a desert form, inhuman, uncultured, initiatory, a challenge to the natural order of value, a crazed activity on the fringes of exchange. But it too has a strict limit and stops abruptly; its boundaries are exact, its passion knows no confusion. Neither the desert nor gambling are open areas; their spaces are finite and concentric, increasing in intensity toward the interior, toward a central point, be it the spirit of gambling or the heat of the desert – a privileged, immemorial space, where things lose their shadow, where money loses its value, and where the extreme rarity of the traces of what signals to us there leads men to seek the instantaneity of wealth.’[5]

Three Days of the Condor. He awoke in the passenger seat of the Corvette, parked under some scrub out of sight of the highway. He had tried to limit his water intake in order to preserve his supplies for his hike to Groom Lake, and had taken the salt tablets, but still he felt drained by the sun. The relative coolness of the evening revived him slightly as he climbed out of the automobile and retrieved his gear from the trunk. Night was falling over the Range like a soft rain. A bar of gold light at the horizon faded as he looked up at the enormous sky, the constellations seemingly close enough to touch. He had heard that other lights, other shooting stars, had been seen in the Tikaboo valley and by motorists on Route 375, but he dismissed these reports as black propaganda. Since the demise of the Sky Flash program, British involvement in advanced aeronautics had been limited to client status, and the Service would dearly have liked to obtain hard information about what research was being pursued at NAFR. His trespass would not be the first by a British agent, and he often wondered what side he was meant to be on. This intrusion, however, had its own agenda.

Survival Kits. Throughout The Atrocity Exhibition (1969), a collection of experimental short-story ‘condensed novels’, there are references to a group of items (photographs, documents, physical objects) called a ‘kit’: there are eleven in total.[6] Kits are also found in ‘News from the Sun’ and ‘Myths of the Near Future’. In ‘News from the Sun’, the kit is a ‘shrine’ left for the doctor Franklin by Slade, the would-be astronaut whom Franklin refused to allow on the space program on psychological grounds.  The kit consists of: a fragment of lunar rock; a photograph of Marion Franklin in the shower; a faded reproduction of Dali’s Persistence of Memory; a set of leucotomes; an emergency brain donor card (1016). The function of such a kit is made much more explicit in ‘Myths of the Near Future’, where Sheppard suggests that the kit is a ‘machine, of a kind. A time-machine’ (1077). It consists of: ‘a framed reproduction of Magritte’s The March of Summer, a portable video-cassette projector, two tins of soup, a well-thumbed set of six Kamera Klassic magazines, a clutch of cassettes labelled Elaine/Shower Stall I-XXV, and a paperback selection of Marey’s Chronograms’ (1068).This ‘survival kit’ (‘of a special kind’) is quite typical in its references to Marey, Surrealist art, sexual experimentation or transgression, and visual technology. These are themselves condensed representations of key Ballardian icons and concerns: time, sex, vision.

The Four Horsemen. It had been simple enough to evade the guards in their pick-up, though the warnings about the use of deadly force on the ‘Restricted Area’ signs had given him some pause. Trespass was one thing, but shooting dead an American serviceman, even an armed one, was something else entirely. He kept tramping in the cool desert air, his body responding as of old to exertion and deprivation. He felt the straps of the backpack on his shoulders, but the discomfort was familiar and welcome. The first fingers of dawn light were haloing the horizon off to his left, and so he had perhaps an hour until he needed to find a hide, from the sun and from surveillance. He wasn’t far from Groom Lake now, but would wait until tonight to try to penetrate the area proper. Until then, he would manage his body’s needs, and his thoughts.

Signs of the mineral. ‘Why [...] are the deserts so fascinating? It is because you are delivered from all depth there – a brilliant, mobile, superficial neutrality, a challenge to meaning and profundity, a challenge to nature and culture, an outer hyperspace, with no origin, no reference points.’[7]

Space/Time Crisis. As he walked down the main staircase, Bluffield could see the man in white framed in the large windows that let polarised light into the atrium of the clinic. The man was a rather troubling patient, but there was little enough to distinguish him from either his fellow patients or the clinicians. Bluffield left the building by the large plate-glass doors and immediately began to perspire. He stepped across the paving to where the man went through his warm-down exercises.

‘How are you with muscle strains, Professor?’ asked the man. ‘Do they come under your area of expertise?’

‘I’m afraid not,’ said Bluffield.

‘So you can mend complicated machines,’ said the man, indicating his forehead suggestively, ’but not simple ones?’

‘I don’t really consider myself an engineer,’ said Bluffield.

‘The metaphysical rather than the material?’ asked the man. ‘Well, never mind, I’ll persevere.’ He continued with his slow, graceful articulations.

‘Two o’clock,’ said Bluffield brusquely, somewhat nettled by the man’s self-possession. He resumed his walk across to the car park. The water tower cast a dark shadow in the morning light. The fronds of the palms, moving in the slight breeze, whispered some secret arboreal language to the desert air.

Image: Atomic fireball, Trinity test, White Sands, 1945.

Alamagordo. ‘The first atomic-bomb test against the backdrop of White Sands, the pale blue backcloth of the mountains and hundreds of miles of white sand – the blinding artificial light of the bomb against the blinding light of the ground.’[8]

Saturn V. His chest screamed as he ran in ballooning strides down the scree slope, a tiny avalanche of dust and gravel ploughing ahead of him. The hammering blades of the helicopter broke waves of pulverizing sound upon his head as he dashed sideways out of the searchlight beam, a jack-rabbit fleeing the hunter’s gun. He felt he was being flushed towards a trap, but exhaustion and terror dulled his reactions. Time became a chain of moments as he hopped from rock to rock, scuttled from brush to brush in a vain attempt to deceive his pursuers. He ran up a cleft in the rocks, a small island on the desert floor, hoping for some crevice into which he could push himself, some tunnel into which he could bolt. As he jumped down the other side, he saw several guards standing in the beams of their pick-ups, and he knew the chase was over. He stumbled towards them, heaving for air, and then fell to his knees. After a few seconds, he found a small, scratchy voice. ‘Where are you going to take me?’ he asked. A man in a dark suit came forward through the blinding beams of light, offering a hand to help him onto his feet. ‘We’re going to take you to our leader,’ he said, smiling.

A simultaneous structure. In the 1971 film The Andromeda Strain, directed by Robert Wise, a ‘crystalline’ alien virus lands in the American desert attached to a meteorite, and causes catastrophic effects on the human circulatory system, The focus of the narrative is to find a solution for this virus through scientific means: by understanding why a very young baby and an alcoholic old man did not fall victim to the virus that devastated a small desert town. A group of scientists descend 5 ‘biologically cleaner’ underground levels of a top-secret base until they arrive at a secure and sterile environment in which to study the alien life form. This base is located at Lake Mead, Nevada, south-east of Las Vegas and on the opposite point of the compass to the Groom Lake testing grounds. Its location places the base in a clear relation to both underground nuclear missile silos and secure Cold War ‘bunkers’ used to protect military chains of command in the event of a nuclear war.

Still from The Andromeda Strain (dir: Robert Wise, 1971).

The security of biological hygiene is short lived in The Andromeda Strain, however: the virus also corrodes the flexible seals that close off ‘secure’ spaces. It is not by human agency that the virus is rendered harmless: it mutates into a non-lethal form, and it is the failure to ‘destroy’ the virus by a nuclear detonation (that would have caused exponential mutation and growth and widespread dissemination of the virus) that is the major human achievement therein. The Andromeda Strain is a diagnostic text for Cold War science fiction in its discourses of hygiene and security, and its near-phobic coding of the alien as biological other. In Kubrick’s Dr Strangelove (1964), the insane SAC General Jack D. Ripper’s paranoia migrates from Reds-under-the-bed rhetoric to phobias about his own body: he avoids fluoridated water (and sexual orgasm) as he is concerned to protect the integrity of his own ‘precious bodily fluids’ from contamination. This discourse informs The Andromeda Strain, as it does Ballard’s Hello America (1981), where the (again, insane) ‘President’ Charles Manson reveals to the protagonist Wayne his use of the remaining American nuclear stockpile after an environmental catastrophe has rendered the USA half desert, half jungle:

‘I had to take them out, Wayne, there was a threat of plague in the east. I used the old cruise missiles. Before his breakdown my partner renovated the warheads and guidance systems. They’re slow but reliable, like homing pigeons going back to a hot supper. Think of it as a necessary prophylactic measure.’[9]

The ‘plague’ is the threat of the eastern seaboard of North America being re-colonised from Europe: the discourses of infection and ‘cure’ are deployed to rationalise the destruction of a threat of invasion.

Six of One. The dark-suited man offered little in the way of conversation as they sped along Groom Lake Road in the pick-up, but his body language was unthreatening, even friendly. The other guards had gone about their business, leaving him alone with the suited man, although he had been asked, politely, to hand over the Walther. The police-band radio squawked occasionally on the dash, but there seemed little else going on in the Range. The sun was coming up behind and to the left of them, and the desert was emerging from the night in grey and blue and ochre. The pick-up slowed as it approached what seemed to be an abandoned desert diner, a dusty roadside shack with wooden porch and lettering on the roof, an old Burma-Shave sign out front, and long dark shadows painted across the blacktop. Parked at an angle to the porch was a clean, black government-issue Cadillac, the kind of car that Agency officers drove, not without a sense of irony, around Langley. As they pulled up in a volume of dust, he wondered who the driver could be.

Ballard’s short-story collection ‘Memories of the Space Age’ (1988), with Ernst’s ‘Europe After the Rain’ on the cover.

L’Amerique sidereal. The military-industrial complex, a phrase coined by President Eisenhower in a jeremiad delivered on his leaving office, is crucial to the post-war economy of Southern California. According to Dale Carter:

Simultaneously, by transferring over $17.5 billion to the southern and western United States between Fiscal years 1962 and 1969, the space agency’s budget made a proportionally greater contribution to what was ultimately the more painful mechanism, not only of the Rocket State’s growth but also of its eventual succession. The contribution itself had two distinct yet related dimensions. On the one hand, the more than $13 billion worth of prime contracts and subcontracts which initiated the rapid growth of the Cape Canaveral region and secured the prosperity of the Houston and Los Angeles industry and commerce during the 1960s indirectly helped elevate new generations of Florida real estate speculators, California construction firms, and other Sunbelt entrepreneurs and financiers: a new community  of interest born of the Vietnam war boom whose relative independence from the power elite’s east coast operational core would allow them to ride out the recessions of the early 1970s and underwrite the rise of the New Right during the rest of the decade.

On the other hand, vast prime contracts awarded to companies like Boeing and North American Rockwell by NASA during the 1960s directly fuelled corporate giants which, while more closely aligned with the Republican establishment or pro-military Democrats than with the New Right’s highest circles, were nevertheless integral to Ronald Reagan’s election in 1980 (234-5)

The American ‘rocket state’, in which the space program (and especially Apollo) acts as the spectacle element in the economic system of the Cold War, is most in evidence in the prosperity of Southern California and Florida, both critical sites for Ballard’s short fictions.

***

Now: Zero. On an American roulette wheel, there are 36 numbers, 18 red and 18 black, from 1 to 36. There are also two green sections of the wheel: Zero (0) and Double Zero (00). Both pay the house.

***

Seven Days to Noon. Strangely, the dark-suited man used some kind of electronic card-reader and keypad to open the door of the diner, which led directly down a short flight of steps. He blinked in the bright overheads as he took in a modern institutional canteen, in brushed steel, white melamine and glass. Several men, Special Agents by the cut of their jackets, were collecting food at a self-service counter, while others sipped coffee, chatted or scanned documents at an archipelago of small tables. At one, a tall chestnut-haired woman in a midnight-blue trouser suit stood up and faced them, as the dark-suited man guided him by the elbow to her table. Now he knew he the driver was. ‘Felicity Vespertine,’ he said, smiling. ‘Why are you here?’ ‘B,’ she said warmly, clasping his hand firmly and pulling him toward her, kissing him on both cheeks. ‘Howard,’ she said to his companion, could you grab a couple of coffees for us before you go, and a sandwich? B here looks famished.’ ‘I think the word you’re looking for, Felicity,’ said B, ‘is finished.’

Macrocosmic Null-X. In Hello America, the young protagonist Wayne finds himself, towards the end of the narrative, in a mocked-up ‘War Room’ at Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas, in which the deranged President Manson spins a roulette wheel to determine which ‘infected’ North American city will be targeted by what remains of the Cold War nuclear arsenal. Reluctantly, Wayne throws:

Zero.

Wayne watched the ball circle the illuminated bowl, safe and defused in its empty niche. No city was marked against it!

With relief he blurted: ‘Mr President, there’s nothing there, no city – ’

Manson laughed affably, the chuckle of a conjuror who has just deceived a small child.

‘Zero pays the house, Wayne.’ (215-6)

In his article ‘”Zero Pays the House”: The Las Vegas Novel and Atomic Roulette’, Ken Cooper suggests that Las Vegas and ‘the bomb’ are inextricably intertwined, not only by the city’s proximity to the Nevada testing grounds, but through metaphor: ‘everyone is a subject of the nuclear state; we are all in the same casino. So, to extend the metaphor, How do we get out of the casino when we’re tired of playing atomic roulette?’[10] The ‘game’ of MAD is a game of chance, but all outcomes are ultimately that of defeat. Wayne in Hello America, however, flees the city by ‘Sunlight Flier’, a fleet of crystalline human-powered aircraft that provide an irresistibly surrealist gloss on Ballard’s motif of flight as transcendence. The dream of Las Vegas inhabited by Wayne, that of a ‘past America [and] city of antique gamblers’ (236), is itself the final victim of the logic of the Cold War.

Vapours. Patient B had arrived at the clinic in Vermillion Sands some three months ago, after a long convalescence in Geneva. The Swiss clinicians had performed exemplary work on B’s physical injuries – on cursory examination, one would hardly notice the fractured tibia, cracked hip, two broken patellas and contusions around sternum and ribcage – but B’s physical condition was of less concern to Bluffield than the psychological. B was clearly a highly intelligent individual, but his strongly practical cast of mind caused him to disengage from Bluffield’s approaches, or even reject them outright. B had no interest in the problem, it seemed, no insight into his own psychological processes, and Bluffield had failed to interest his patient intellectually in the clinical models at work. B seemed content to live in a quotidian world of regular exercise and small-scale concerns. To explain that, Bluffield knew, there was no need for recourse to deep theoretical structures.

Helios. Apollo, the Greek and Roman god of the arts, but also of rationality and architecture, became increasingly identified with Helios, the sun god, in Hellenic times. Why is Apollo, the sun-deity, named for the NASA moon programme? Perhaps the reason is that Apollo is patron of the arts and of philosophy, of music (of the spheres) and science. Apollo is also an oracular god, implicitly a deity of what is to come. More troublingly, perhaps, Apollo was the centre of a cult of masculine youth. With goddesses Artemis/ Selene more properly identified with the moon, is the NASA Apollo program a conquering, or erasure, of the cosmologically feminine?

Tune into Ballardian.com for Part 2: the final thrilling instalment of Brian Baker’s APOLLO ROULETTE!

[1] Dale Carter, The Final Frontier: The Rise and Fall of the American rocket State (London: Verso, 1988), p. 153
[2] William Gibson, ‘The Gernsback Continuum’, Mirrorshades: The Cyberpunk Anthology, ed. Bruce Sterling (London: Paladin, 1988), pp.1-11 (p.7).
[3] J.G. Ballard, Vermillion Sands (1971) (London: Phoenix, 1992).
[4] J.G. Ballard, ‘Introduction’ to Crash (1973) (London: Vintage, 1995), unpaginated.
[5] Jean Baudrillard, America, (1986) (London: Verso, 2010), pp.137-8.
[6] J.G. Ballard, The Atrocity Exhibition (1969) (London: Harper Perennial, 2006).
[7] Baudrillard, America, p.133.
[8] Baudrillard, America, p.4.
[9] JG Ballard, Hello America (1981) (London: Flamingo, 1993), ch.20, p.154.
[10] Ken Cooper, ‘”Zero Pays the House”: The Las Vegas Novel and Atomic Roulette’, Contemporary Literature 33:3, Fall 1992, 528-544(p.534)

The following is excerpted from Matteo Pasquinelli’s book Animal Spirits: A Bestiary of the Commons (Rotterdam: NAi Publishers / Institute of Network Cultures, December 2008). Reproduced with permission.

Fiction is a branch of neurology: the scenarios of nerve and blood vessel are the written mythologies of memory and desire.

— J.G. Ballard, Ambit magazine, 1967[1]

“Fiction is a Branch of Neurology”

The novels of J.G. Ballard can describe the nature of technology and the contemporary mediascape better than any philosopher, media theorist or cultural studies academic. During the mass media revolution, while spectres of the collective imaginary were flourishing on everybody’s television screens in a genuine “atrocity exhibition”, both academic and radical theorists were imploding in the semiotics of the image: postmodernism indeed reduced the image to a linguistic sign. Ballard and other science fiction writers, meanwhile, were left alone to map the new becoming of the media unconscious. In retrospect, it is increasingly apparent how the postmodern agenda and the church of simulacra functioned as an immunisation strategy of an armchair intelligentsia against the monsters emerging from the collective Id.

Ironically, the notion of ‘collective unconscious’ can itself be interpreted as a high culture sanitisation attempt to what was visibly and consciously intensifying at the core of mass media society: libido. As much as Deleuze and Guattari recognised that delirium is always social, political and historical (something not simply isolated to the morbid intimacy of a psychoanalyst’s couch), Ballard understood that “after Freud’s exploration within the psyche it is now the outer world of reality which must be quantified and eroticised”.[2] Significantly, he began his cartography of the machinic unconscious of the West outside the mediated discourses of philosophy and psychoanalysis. His context was the American cultural imaginary of the ’50s and ’60s that colonised the European psyche by broadcasting morbid televisual images of John F. Kennedy’s assassination, Marilyn Monroe’s second lives, the Vietnam war and so on. At the time of May ’68, Ballard’s own personal “counterculture” was on the other side of the barricades, on the side of power and mass media, where he discovered far stronger and more lysergic forces than in any leftist movement. From this science-fiction perspective on the mainstream, Ballard effectively anticipated the Guattarian schizoanalysis of the collective machinic unconscious.

For an accurate introduction to the Ballardian universe, however, it may be useful to make a comparison with a sparring partner from the postmodern school. Baudrillard, once more, is worth considering for his review of Crash, where Ballard’s uncanny worlds are sanitised through the theoretical frame of Simulation.[3] His review twisted the novel’s carnal tangle into a “semiurgy of the body” (semiurgy being the trendy neologism introduced by postmodern for ‘the art of creating new signs’). Amusingly, Ballard would dismiss this postmodern critique of his writing as “the apotheosis of the hamburger”.[4] In a society increasingly exposed to mass media, Baudrillard is an obvious symptom of iconophilia turned to iconophobia.

‘You: Coma: Marilyn Monroe’. One of Mike Foreman’s illustrations for the abandoned illustrated version of The Atrocity Exhibition.

From the classical (and even the cybernetic) viewpoint, technology is an extension of the body. […] From Marx to McLuhan, one sees the same instrumentalist vision of machines and of language: relays, extensions, media-mediators of a Nature destined ideally to become the organic body. In this “rational” view, the body itself is only a medium. Inversely, in its baroque and apocalyptic treatment in Crash, technology is the deadly deconstruction of the body — no longer a functional medium, but an extension of death: […] all the metallurgy of accidents is inscribed in a semiurgy of the body — not in anatomy or physiology, but in a semiurgy of contusions, scars, mutilations, and wounds which are like new sexual organs opened in the body.[5]

Baudrillard interprets Ballard’s death of affect as the postmodern haze through which everything is grey and desire is lacking. On the contrary, the death of affect actually marks an intensified longing or love for the inorganic; otherwise Ballard’s “erotisation” of the “outer world” would not be intelligible. In particular, the sophisticated relation between violence, libido and machine signals a notion of desire that is not unfamiliar within the intellectual account of masochism and the BDSM subcultures of the last decades.

In Crash, there is neither fiction nor reality — a kind of hyper-reality has abolished both. Even critical regression is no longer possible. This mutating and commutating world of simulation and death, this violently sexualized world totally lacking in desire, full of violent and violated bodies but curiously neutered, this chromatic and intensely metallic world empty of the sensorial, a world of hyper-technology without finality.[6]

Baudrillard’s hyper(flat)-reality clearly disappointed Ballard. While for Ballard, “fiction is a branch of neurology”, Baudrillard annexed his novel to the realm of simulacra, unequivocally stating that “Crash is the first great novel of the universe of simulation, the world that we will be dealing with from now on”. In a completely opposite reading, William Burroughs wrote in the introduction to The Atrocity Exhibition: “The line between inner and outer landscapes is breaking down. Earthquakes can result from seismic upheavals within the human mind”. By illuminating the “death of affect”, Burroughs effectively underlines how “sexual arousal results from the repetition and impact of image”. Ballard’s novel The Atrocity Exhibition is indeed a sincere anti-postmodern manifesto.

“Neuronic Icons on the Spinal Highway”

Ballard’s iconology is not concerned with a flat image framed according to academic coordinates, but it is a journey into the subterranean world beyond that surface. Rather than being purely a linguistic sign, Ballard’s image is part of the collapse between “inner and outer landscapes”. A recurring codeword in The Atrocity Exhibition is “spinal”: images have nerves, they become part of the nervous system. Like Leroi-Gourhan’s anthropology, the medium of technology is an extension of the human skeleton, not a self-indulgent eye.[7] The aesthetics of the contemporary image cannot be found through its metaphysical fabric, in the claustrophobic white cube of the art world or the minimal semiotics of the digital screen, but precisely in the externalisation of the nervous system.

[In] The Atrocity Exhibition, the nervous systems of the characters have been externalized, as part of the reversal of the interior and exterior worlds. Highways, office blocks, faces and street signs are perceived as if they were elements in a malfunctioning central nervous system.[8]

Images are “neuronic icons on the spinal highway”, signs of a biomorphic unconscious lurking beneath the urban landscape. The diagram of these icons is a “neural interval” in the physiology of the body. In other words, the neural space we enter with Ballard is not the re-assuring social-democracy of psychoanalysis, but the “spinal battlefield” of contemporary warfare, the space of World War III and of Foucauldian “biopolitical conflicts”. Ballard has in effect inaugurated a neurospace — a carnal and physical understanding of the mediascape that only many decades later will surface from the underworld of cyberspace. Ballard’s neurospace, however, should not be considered an autonomous media sphere, but a continuum between inner and outer landscapes, between the psychological and libidinal life of any physical form and object.

The blitzkriegs will be fought out on the spinal battlefields, in terms of the postures we assume, of our traumas mimetized in the angle of a wall or balcony.[9]

To consider The Atrocity Exhibition as a manual for the contemporary collective imaginary, another lesson is worth remembering: the image is always social and collective, and the figures of the collective imaginary are always “giants”. The image by nature is socially expansive, “commercial cosmologies” covering the unconscious of the nation. Even as early as the 1920s, Benjamin took note of the “huge images across the walls of the houses, where toothpaste and cosmetics lie handy for giants”.[10] The conceptual origin of the ‘mediascape’ can be traced back to this particular skyline of huge advertisements, a commercial landscape of billboards associated with the American horizon of the 1950s. In two famous cryptic fragments, Ballard spreads a giant pornographic picture of Elizabeth Taylor across hundreds of such billboards.

A group of workmen on a scaffolding truck were pasting up the last of the displays, a hundred-foot-long panel that appeared to represent a section of a sand-dune. Looking at it more closely, Dr Nathan realized that in fact it was an immensely magnified portion of the skin over the iliac crest. Glancing at the billboards, Dr Nathan recognized other magnified fragments: a segment of lower lip, a right nostril, a portion of female perineum. Only an anatomist would have identified these fragments, each represented as a formal geometric pattern. At least five hundred of the signs would be needed to contain the whole of this gargantuan woman, terraced here into a quantified sand-sea.[11]

Dr Nathan limped along the drainage culvert, peering at the huge figure of a dark-haired woman painted on the sloping walls of the blockhouse. The magnification was enormous. The wall on his right, the size of a tennis court, contained little more than the right eye and cheekbone. He recognized the woman from the billboards he had seen near the hospital — the screen actress, Elizabeth Taylor. Yet these designs were more than enormous replicas. They were equations that embodied the relationship between the identity of the film actress and the audiences who were distant reflections of her. The planes of their lives interlocked at oblique angles, fragments of personal myths fusing with the commercial cosmologies. The presiding deity of their lives the film actress provided a set of operating formulae for their passage through consciousness.[12]

Elizabeth Taylor, as she appears on the cover of Crash.

In these two passages, Ballard deconstructs a sample of the collective imaginary (the archetypical 1950s movie star), stripping the image back to its fundamental components. First, its infrastructural medium: the skeleton of scaffoldings and billboards that turns a pop star to architecture. Second, its picture as replica: a sensuous module of a benevolent propaganda machine. Third, its pornographic focus: intimate details of the body that fall under the public eye and become part of public constructions. Fourth, the sexual nature of such an apparently neutral magnification: perineum and ilium are the scientific names for the anatomic zones where the male gaze is usually drawn. Fifth, its sexualised body is exploded into different fragments and patterns. Sixth, those replicated fragments function together as a collective image over the unconscious domain, as “a set of operating formulae for their passage through consciousness”, “equations that embodied the relationship between the identity of the film actress and the audiences who were distant reflections of her”. No other description could provide a better diagram of the basic elements of the mediascape.

Ballard is not the first writer to investigate the intoxicating effect of mass media society, but he is exceptional for offering a detailed mapping of its unconscious parallel dimension. Ballard attempts to reveal the existence of a “second narrative” behind the official version of events, and how the collective consciousness produces “emergency scenarios”, as in dreams, to face the violent stimuli emanating from the mediascape. For Ballard, the collective imaginary is a bicephalous entity that simultaneously maintains contradictory meanings and dimensions.

The media landscape of the present day is a map in search of a territory. A huge volume of sensational and often toxic imagery inundates our minds, much of it fictional in content. How do we make sense of this ceaseless flow of advertising and publicity, news and entertainment, where presidential campaigns and moon voyages are presented in terms indistinguishable from the launch of a new candy bar or deodorant? What actually happens on the level of our unconscious minds when, within minutes on the same TV screen, a prime minister is assassinated, an actress makes love, an injured child is carried from a car crash? Faced with these charged events, prepackaged emotions already in place, we can only stitch together a set of emergency scenarios, just as our sleeping minds extemporize a narrative from the unrelated memories that veer through the cortical night. In the waking dream that now constitutes everyday reality, images of a blood-spattered widow, the chromium trim of a limousine windshield, the stylized glamour of a motorcade, fuse together to provide a secondary narrative with very different meanings.[13]

Against the contemporary dismissal of the notion of unconscious (but actually of its metaphysical and linguistic interpretations), Ballard identifies a clear energetic undercurrent behind the mediascape and the surrounding biosphere of machines. To confront this new environment, he appropriates the notion of latent and manifest content from Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams and applies it to external reality. According to Ballard, beneath the “benign or passive posture” of machinic civilisation and consumerist society resides a latent energy, “ambiguous even to the skilled investigator”.

From this and similar work it is clear that Freud’s classic distinction between the manifest and latent content of the inner world of the psyche now has to be applied to the outer world of reality. A dominant element in this reality is technology and its instrument, the machine. In most roles the machine assumes a benign or passive posture — telephone exchanges, engineering hardware, etc. The twentieth century has also given birth to a vast range of machines — computers, pilotless planes, thermonuclear weapons — where the latent identity of the machine is ambiguous even to the skilled investigator. An understanding of this identity can be found in a study of the automobile, which dominates the vectors of speed, aggression, violence and desire. In particular the automobile crash contains a crucial image of the machine as conceptualized psychopathology.[14]

What is the nature of this dark side of the machinic landscape? Irrational violence, animal instincts, sexual impulses and natural aggressiveness emerge as constitutive of the “biomorphic horror” pulsating through the collective technological imaginary. Rather than Baudrillard’s imagined society of simulacra, the “death of affect” is actually a consequence of the molecular dissemination of a conceptual violence that makes any object, even the most aseptic one, a vector of conflict. In this sense, the “abstraction” of violence causes psychopathologies to become everyday playthings. The violence of The Atrocity Exhibition is not comparable to, for instance, the aesthetisation of sadism in Burgess’ A Clockwork Orange, since the former emerges through the force of inorganic structures.[15] Just like a sophisticated philosophy of sadomasochism, Ballard considers the abstract psychopathologies of the mediascape “as a game”, as an intrinsic means of human communication. This intuition will be useful later when introducing the notion of masochism of image.

Travers’s problem is how to come to terms with the violence that has pursued his life – not merely the violence of accident and bereavement, or the horrors of war, but the biomorphic horror of our own bodies. Travers has at last realized that the real significance of these acts of violence lies elsewhere, in what we might term “the death of affect”. Consider our most real and tender pleasures — in the excitements of pain and mutilation; in sex as the perfect arena, like a culture-bed of sterile pus, for all the veronicas of our own perversions, in voyeurism and self-disgust, in our moral freedom to pursue our own psychopathologies as a game, and in our ever greater powers of abstraction. […] The only way we can make contact with each other is in terms of conceptualizations. Violence is the conceptualization of pain. By the same token psychopathology is the conceptual system of sex.[16]

Surprisingly, Ballard suggests his own counter-strategies for confronting the psychopathologies of the imaginary — a sort of political agenda born from the perspective of science fiction. Against both conservative puritanism and radical pessimism, against the politically correct ethos of the peace movements, Ballard professes a joyful and “just psychopathology” as the “final destination of the 20th century”. The only way to deal with the abyss, Ballard suggests, is to stare directly into it, immerse ourselves in the dark waters of the unconscious and “swim”.

..:: NOTES:

[1] J.G. Ballard, “Does the angle between two walls have a happy ending?”, Advertiser’s Announcement, Sex: Inner Space, Ambit magazine, no. 33, 1967.
[2] J.G. Ballard, A Neural Interval’. Advertiser’s Announcement: A J.G. Ballard Production. Ambit magazine, no. 36, 1968.
[3] Jean Baudrillard, “Ballard’s Crash”, 1976. Trans. Arthur B. Evans. Science Fiction Studies 18: 313-20, #55, Nov 1991.
[4] J.G. Ballard, “A Response to the Invitation to Respond”, Science Fiction Studies, 18: 329, #55 (Nov. 1991): “I thought the whole problem SF faced was that its consciousness, critically speaking, had been raised to wholly inappropriate heights —the apotheosis of the hamburger. An exhilarating and challenging entertainment fiction which Edgar Allan Poe and Mark Twain would have relished has become a “discipline” — God help us — beloved of those like the Delany who will no doubt pour scorn on my novel of the early ’70s. The “theory and criticism of s-f”!! Vast theories and pseudo-theories are elaborated by people with not an idea in their bones. Needless to say, I totally exclude Baudrillard (whose essay on Crash I have not really wanted to understand) — I read it for the first time some years ago. Of course, his Amerique is an absolutely brilliant piece of writing, probably the most sharply clever piece of writing since Swift — brilliancies and jewels of insight in every paragraph — an intellectual Alladin’s cave. But your whole “postmodernism” view of SF strikes me as doubly sinister. SF was ALWAYS modern, but now it is “postmodern” — bourgeoisification in the form of an over-professionalized academia with nowhere to take its girlfriend for a bottle of wine and a dance is now rolling its jaws over an innocent and naive fiction that desperately needs to be left alone. You are killing us! Stay your hand! Leave us be! Turn your “intelligence” to the iconography of filling stations, cash machines, or whatever nonsense your entertainment culture deems to be the flavor of the day. We have enough intellectuals in Europe as it is; let the great USA devote itself to the spirit of the Wrights — bicycle mechanics and the sons of a bishop. The latter’s modesty and exquisitely plain prose style would be an example to you — especially his restrained but heartfelt reflections on the death of one of his sons, a model of the spirit animating SF at its best. But I fear you are trapped inside your dismal jargon.”
[5] Jean Baudrillard, “Ballard’s Crash”, cit.
[6] Ibid.
[7] See: André Leroi-Gourhan, L’Homme et la matière, Paris: Albin Michel, 1943; and:
Milieu et techniques, Paris: Albin Michel, 1945.
[8] J.G. Ballard, The Atrocity Exhibition, London: Jonathan Cape, 1970. Notes by the author added in a reissue by RE/Search Publications, San Francisco, 1990. Page numbers refer to the edition by Harper Perennial, London, 2006, p. 76.
[9] Ibid, p. 7.
[10] Walter Benjamin, “One Way Street”, in Reflections, cit., p. 86.
[11] J.G. Ballard, The Atrocity Exhibition, cit., p. 11.
[12] Ibid., p. 13.
[13] Ibid., p. 145.
[14] Ibid., p. 156.
[15] Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange, London: William Heinemann, 1962.
[16] J.G. Ballard, The Atrocity Exhibition, cit., p. 116

..:: ELSEWHERE ON BALLARDIAN:
+ Crimes of the Near Future: Baudrillard/Ballard
+ RIP Elizabeth Taylor: A Ballardian Primer

Outpost 13: The Atrocity Exhibition from Ballardian on Vimeo.

Eurydice in a Used Car Lot. Margaret Travis paused in the empty foyer of the cinema, looking at the photographs in the display frames. In the dim light beyond the curtains she saw the dark-suited figure of Captain Webster, the muffled velvet veiling his handsome eyes. The last few weeks had been a nightmare – Webster with his long-range camera and obscene questions. He seemed to take a certain sardonic pleasure in compiling this one-man Kinsey Report on her . . . positions, planes, where and when Travis placed his hands on her body – why didn’t he ask Catherine Austin? As for wanting to magnify the photographs and paste them up on enormous billboards, ostensibly to save her from Travis . . . She glanced at the stills in the display frames, of this elegant and poetic film in which Cocteau had brought together all the myths of his own journey of return. On an impulse, to annoy Webster, she stepped through the side exit and walked past a small yard of cars with numbered windshields. Perhaps she would make her descent here. Eurydice in a used car lot?

The Concentration City. In the night air they passed the shells of concrete towers, blockhouses half buried in rubble, giant conduits filled with tyres, overhead causeways crossing broken roads. Travis followed the bomber pilot and the young woman along the faded gravel. They walked across the foundation of a guard-house into the weapons range. The concrete aisles stretched into the darkness across the airfield. In the suburbs of Hell Travis walked in the flaring light of the petrochemical plants. The ruins of abandoned cinemas stood at the street corners, faded billboards facing them across the empty streets. In a waste lot of wrecked cars he found the burnt body of the white Pontiac. He wandered through the deserted suburbs. The crashed bombers lay under the trees, grass growing through their wings. The bomber pilot helped the young woman into one of the cockpits. Travis began to mark out a circle on the concrete target area.

J.G. Ballard, Chapter One: ‘The Atrocity Exhibition’, The Atrocity Exhibition.

Presenting ‘Outpost 13: The Atrocity Exhibition’, a video directed by Mark C and produced by Outpost 13: Stuart Argabright, Mark C and Kent Heine. The full 35-minute film is based on J.G. Ballard’s The Atrocity Exhibition, and is part of a performance piece that debuted in Porto, Portugal at the Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art, with o13 performing the soundtrack live.

The excerpt here features narration from Ballard’s text by David Silver with Jen Jaffe and Esther Ahn, and images by Robert Longo, Adrienne Altenhaus and others. o13 have also completed a 10-minute video, soundtrack and narration for ‘Time, Memory And Inner Space’, Ballard’s 1967 essay, with narration by Judy Nylon, once of the group Snatch and a former collaborator of Brian Eno’s, plus a CG video by Austrian artist Patrick Quick.

Recently, 013 have been performing The Atrocity Exhibition and ‘Time, Memory And Inner Space’ in New York with a live soundtrack and sound design.

Outpost 13:
Mark C: guitar, synthesizers, vocals
Stuart Argabright: synthesizers, laptop, vocals
Kent Heine: bass

With the sad news of Elizabeth Taylor’s passing, the time seems right to review the appearance of this enigmatic actress across a significant chapter in Ballard’s work, spanning the publication of the experimental story ‘The Atrocity Exhibition’ (1966) through to the notorious Crash (1973). What did Taylor represent to Ballard? Less a sex symbol and more an emblem of the parallel landscape that celebrity culture in the 1960s and 70s inhabited, a virtual reality colonising the private lives of ‘ordinary’ people exposed, through mass communications and on a hitherto unprecedented scale, to a world as strange as an alien planet yet paradoxically erotic and near – a synthetic substitute for reality itself.

Apocalypse. A disquieting feature of this annual exhibition – to which the patients themselves were not invited – was the marked preoccupation of the paintings with the theme of world cataclysm, as if these long-incarcerated patients had sensed some seismic upheaval within the minds of their doctors and nurses. As Catherine Austin walked around the converted gymnasium these bizarre images, with their fusion of Eniwetok and Luna Park, Freud and Elizabeth Taylor, reminded her of the slides of exposed spinal levels in Travis’s office. They hung on the enamelled walls like the codes of insoluble dreams, the keys to a nightmare in which she had begun to play a more willing and calculated role. Primly she buttoned her white coat as Dr Nathan approached, holding his gold-tipped cigarette to one nostril. ‘Ah, Dr Austin . . . What do you think of them? I see there’s War in Hell.’

J.G. Ballard, ‘The Atrocity Exhibition’, first published in New Worlds, September 1966, collected in The Atrocity Exhibition, 1970.

‘Eniwetok and Luna Park’ may seem a strange pairing, the H-bomb test site in the Marshall Islands with the Paris fun-fair loved by the surrealists. But the endless newsreel clips of nuclear explosions that we saw on TV in the 1960s (a powerful incitement to the psychotic imagination, sanctioning everything) did have a carnival air, a media phenomenon which Stanley Kubrick caught perfectly at the end of Dr Strangelove. I imagine my mental patients conflating Freud and Liz Taylor in their Warhol-like efforts, unerringly homing in on the first signs of their doctor’s nervous breakdown. The Atrocity Exhibition’s original dedication should have been ‘To the Insane’. I owe them everything.

Ballard, annotations, The Atrocity Exhibition, 1990.

‘This reluctance to accept the fact of his own consciousness,’ Dr Nathan wrote, ‘may reflect certain positional difficulties in the immediate context of time and space. The right-angle spiral of a stairwell may remind him of similar biases within the chemistry of the biological kingdom. This can be carried to remarkable lengths – for example, the jutting balconies of the Hilton Hotel have become identified with the lost gill-slits of the dying film actress, Elizabeth Taylor. Much of Travis’s thought concerns what he terms “the lost symmetry of the blastosphere” – the primitive precursor of the embryo that is the last structure to preserve perfect symmetry in all planes. It occurred to Travis that our own bodies may conceal the rudiments of a symmetry not only about the vertical axis but also the horizontal.’

Ballard, ‘The Atrocity Exhibition’, 1966.

Elizabeth Taylor was staying at the Hilton during the shooting of Cleopatra, when she contracted pneumonia and was given a tracheotomy. The Hilton’s balconies remind Travis of the actress’s lost gill-slits (which we all develop embryonically as we briefly recapitulate our biological past).

Ballard, annotations, The Atrocity Exhibition, 1990.

[Traven in The Atrocity Exhibition] is offering a substitute for emotions, which are difficult to describe in words because they’re so powerfully visual. He’s offering a kind of ongoing drama; dramatic tension takes the place of emotions, spatial awareness takes the place of emotions, the unity of apparently disparate things – balconies on a Hilton Hotel, and the operation scars on Elizabeth Taylor’s throat after her tracheotomy – these have a clear relationship, and Traven is offering these relationships to take the place of emotions. So that we are no longer constrained by our appetites and fears, but have a much more expansive and open sense of a world where everything is connected to everything else by a new kind of algebra, a new kind of geometry. And that’s very evident I think in the film.

Ballard, from a conversation between Jonathan Weiss and Ballard on the commentary track for Weiss’s film of The Atrocity Exhibition, 2006.

Dr Nathan limped along the drainage culvert, peering at the huge figure of a dark-haired woman painted on the sloping walls of the blockhouse. The magnification was enormous. The wall on his right, the size of a tennis court, contained little more than the right eye and cheekbone. He recognized the woman from the billboards he had seen near the hospital – the screen actress, Elizabeth Taylor. Yet these designs were more than enormous replicas. They were equations that embodied the relationship between the identity of the film actress and the audiences who were distant reflections of her. The planes of their lives interlocked at oblique angles, fragments of personal myths fusing with the commercial cosmologies. The presiding deity of their lives, the film actress provided a set of operating formulae for their passage through consciousness. Yet Margaret Travis’s role was ambiguous. In some way Travis would attempt to relate his wife’s body, with its familiar geometry, to that of the film actress, quantifying their identities to the point where they became fused with the elements of time and landscape.

Ballard, ‘The Atrocity Exhibition’, 1966.

Elizabeth Taylor, the last of the old-style Hollywood actresses, has retained her hold on the popular imagination in the two decades since this piece was written, a quality she shares (no thanks to myself ) with almost all the public figures in this book – Marilyn Monroe, Reagan, Jackie Kennedy among others. A unique collision of private and public fantasy took place in the 1960s, and may have to wait some years to be repeated, if ever. The public dream of Hollywood for the first time merged with the private imagination of the hyper-stimulated 60s TV viewer. People have sometimes asked me to do a follow-up to The Atrocity Exhibition, but our perception of the famous has changed – I can’t imagine writing about Meryl Streep or Princess Di, and Margaret Thatcher’s undoubted mystery seems to reflect design faults in her own self-constructed persona. One can mechanically spin sexual fantasies around all three, but the imagination soon flags. Unlike Taylor, they radiate no light.

A kind of banalisation of celebrity has occurred: we are now offered an instant, ready-to-mix fame as nutritious as packet soup. Warhol’s screen-prints show the process at work. His portraits of Marilyn Monroe and Jackie Kennedy drain the tragedy from the lives of these desperate women, while his day-glo palette returns them to the innocent world of the child’s colouring book.

Ballard, annotations, The Atrocity Exhibition, 1990.

13. Dali: “After Freud’s explorations within the psyche it is now the outer world of reality which will have to be quantified and eroticised.” Query: at what point does the plane of intersection of two cones become sexually more stimulating than Elizabeth Taylor’s cleavage?

15. Query: does the plane of intersection of the body of this woman in my room with the cleavage of Elizabeth Taylor generate a valid image of the glazed eyes of Chiang Kai Shek, an invasion plan of the offshore islands?

Ballard, ‘Notes From Nowhere: Comments On Work In Progress’, New Worlds, October, 1966.

As I said in one of my stories, the body of a screen actress like Elizabeth Taylor, which one sees on thousands of cinema hoardings, thousands of advertisements every day, and on the movie screen itself, her body is a real landscape. It is as much a real landscape of our lives as any system of mountains or lakes or hills or anything else. So therefore I sought to use this material, this is the fictional material of the 1960s.

Ballard, quoted in Jannick Storm, ‘An Interview with JG Ballard’, Speculation no. 21, February 1969.

At the gates of the film studio Dr Nathan handed his pass to the guard. ‘Stage H,’ he said to Koester. ‘Apparently it was rented by someone at the Institute three months ago. At a nominal charge, fortunately – most of the studio is disused now.’ Koester parked the car outside the empty production offices. They walked through into the stage. An enormous geometric construction filled the hangar-like building, a maze of white plastic convolutions. Two painters were spraying pink lacquer over the bulbous curves. ‘What is this?’ Koester asked with irritation. ‘A model of SQRT(-1)?’ Dr Nathan hummed to himself. ‘Almost,’ he replied coolly. ‘In fact, you’re looking at a famous face and body, an extension of Miss Taylor into a private dimension. The most tender act of love will take place in this bridal suite, the celebration of a unique nuptial occasion. And why not? Duchamp’s nude shivered her way downstairs, far more desirable to us than the Rokeby Venus, and for good reason.’

Dr Nathan edged unsteadily along the catwalk, waiting until Webster had reached the next section. He looked down at the huge geometric structure that occupied the central lot of the studio, now serving as the labyrinth in an elegant film version of The Minotaur. In a sequel to Faustus and The Shrew , the film actress and her husband would play Ariadne and Theseus. In a remarkable way the structure resembled her body, an exact formalization of each curve and cleavage. Indeed, the technicians had already christened it ‘Elizabeth’. He steadied himself on the wooden rail as the helicopter appeared above the pines and sped towards them. So the Daedalus in this neural drama had at last arrived.

Ballard, ‘The Great American Nude’, first published in Ambit 36, Summer 1968, collected in The Atrocity Exhibition, 1970.

Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton had appeared in stage versions of Faustus and The Taming of the Shrew , typecasting for both, especially Burton, who had the look in his last years of a man who had made the devil’s bargain and knew he had lost – but drunk or sober, he was always interesting and sympathetic.

Ballard, annotations, The Atrocity Exhibition, 1990.

In the first study, portions were removed from photographs of three well-known figures: Madame Chiang, Elizabeth Taylor, Jacqueline Kennedy. Patients were asked to fill in the missing areas. Mouth-parts provided a particular focus for aggression, sexual fantasies and retributive fears. In a subsequent test the original portion containing the mouth was replaced and the remainder of the face removed. Again particular attention was focused on the mouth-parts. Images of the mouth-parts of Madame Chiang and Jacqueline Kennedy had a notable hypotensive role. An optimum mouth-image of Madame Chiang and Mrs Kennedy was constructed.

Ballard, ‘Plan for the Assassination of Jacqueline Kennedy’, first published in Ambit no. 31, Spring 1967.

Vaughan died yesterday in his last car-crash. During our friendship he had rehearsed his death in many crashes, but this was his only true accident. Driven on a collision course towards the limousine of the film actress, his car jumped the rails of the London Airport flyover and plunged through the roof of a bus filled with airline passengers. The crushed bodies of package tourists, like a haemorrhage of the sun, still lay across the vinyl seats when I pushed my way through the police engineers an hour later. Holding the arm of her chauffeur, the film actress Elizabeth Taylor, with whom Vaughan had dreamed of dying for so many months, stood alone under the revolving ambulance lights. As I knelt over Vaughan’s body she placed a gloved hand to her throat.

Could she see, in Vaughan’s posture, the formula of the death which he had devised for her? During the last weeks of his life Vaughan thought of nothing else but her death, a coronation of wounds he had staged with the devotion of an Earl Marshal. The walls of his apartment near the film studios at Shepperton were covered with the photographs he had taken through his zoom lens each morning as she left her hotel in London, from the pedestrian bridges above the westbound motorways, and from the roof of the multi-storey car-park at the studios. The magnified details of her knees and hands, of the inner surface of her thighs and the left apex of her mouth, I uneasily prepared for Vaughan on the copying machine in my office, handing him the packages of prints as if they were the instalments of a death warrant. At his apartment I watched him matching the details of her body with the photographs of grotesque wounds in a textbook of plastic surgery.

In his vision of a car-crash with the actress, Vaughan was obsessed by many wounds and impacts – by the dying chromium and collapsing bulkheads of their two cars meeting head-on in complex collisions endlessly repeated in slow-motion films, by the identical wounds inflicted on their bodies, by the image of windshield glass frosting around her face as she broke its tinted surface like a death-born Aphrodite, by the compound fractures of their thighs impacted against their handbrake mountings, and above all by the wounds to their genitalia, her uterus pierced by the heraldic beak of the manufacturer’s medallion, his semen emptying across the luminescent dials that registered for ever the last temperature and fuel levels of the engine.

At the conclusion of the questionnaire the last of Vaughan’s victims appeared. Elizabeth Taylor stepped from her chauffeured limousine outside a London hotel, smiled across her husband’s shoulder from the depths of a rear seat.

Thinking of this new algebra of leg-stance and wound area which Vaughan was calculating, I searched her thighs and kneecaps, the chromium door frames and cocktail cabinet lids. I assumed that either Vaughan or his volunteer subjects would have mounted her body in any number of bizarre postures, like a demented stunt driver, and that the cars in which she moved would become devices for exploiting every pornographic and erotic possibility, every conceivable sex-death and mutilation.

The clear equation he had made between sex and the kinaesthetics of the highway was in some way related to his obsessions with Elizabeth Taylor. Did he visualize himself in a sexual act with her, dying together in some complex car-crash? During the mornings and early afternoons he followed her from her hotel to the film studios. I did not tell him that our negotiations to feature the actress in our projected automobile commercial had fallen through. Vaughan’s hands moved through small contortions as he waited for her to appear, fretting around the rear seat, almost as if his body was unconsciously miming in fast motion hundreds of acts of intercourse with her. I realized that he was assembling in disjointed form the elements of a conceptual sexual act involving the actress and the route she would take from the studios at Shepperton. His self-conscious gestures, the grotesque way in which he hung his arm out of the car, as if about to unscrew it and toss the bloody limb under the wheels of the car following us, the rictus of his mouth as he framed his lips around a nipple, seemed to be private rehearsals for a terrifying drama unfolding in his mind, the sex act he saw as the climax of his own death-collision.

Ballard, Crash, 1973.

To be quite honest, I myself have no desire to die in a head-on collision with Elizabeth Taylor [laughs]. I once nearly bumped into her in a revolving door in a London hotel and that was close enough. [Laughs.]

Ballard, quoted in James Verniere, ‘A Conversation With J.G. Ballard’, The Twilight Zone, June 1988.

[Elizabeth Taylor] wasn’t my type. A pity. But she is the last of the oldstyle Hollywood stars.

Ballard, quoted in Paul Di Filippo, ‘Ballard’s Anatomy’, Science Fiction Eye, 1991.

In [Crash], Elizabeth Taylor had an emblematic role. I wasn’t that interested in the actual actress, but she stood for the last of the great Hollywood stars.

Ballard, quoted in Andrew Hultkrans, ‘Body Work: Andrew Hultkrans talks with J.G. Ballard’, Artforum Magazine, vol. XXXV, no. 7, March 1997.

Most of the film stars and political figures who appear in The Atrocity Exhibition are still with us, in memory if not in person – John F. Kennedy, Ronald Reagan, Marilyn Monroe and Elizabeth Taylor. Together they helped to form the culture of celebrity that played such a large role in the 1960s, when I wrote The Atrocity Exhibition.

Ballard, Author’s Note, The Atrocity Exhibition, 2001.

by Simon Sellars

This is an earlier version of an article published in Continuum, Volume 24, Issue 5 October 2010, pages 721-33. Both versions were based on a paper given by Simon Sellars at the Monash University conference, B for bad cinema: aesthetics, politics and cultural value.

Recent academic discussions of ‘badfilm’ and ‘paracinema’ have highlighted the re-appraisal of ‘all forms of “cinematic trash”’ (Sconce 1995, 372). This article addresses the theme by contrasting films from two of the most well-known purveyors of ‘cinematic trash’: X: The Man with the X-Ray Eyes (1963), directed by Roger Corman, and They Live (1988), directed by John Carpenter. In X, a scientist develops X-ray vision, seeing into the fourth dimension and something so shocking he rips his eyes out. This act is analogous with Corman’s career as purveyor of trash cinema: refraining from pushing badfilm’s power to the absolute limit; foregoing the gift of ‘second sight’; content to exist on a marginalised, second-tier, parallel reality to the Hollywood mainstream. In They Live, Carpenter re-empowers the thesis: the hero stumbles on a secret society that has developed sunglasses to see through the real to the alien-generated subliminal messages in advertising and politics. Rather than withdrawal, Carpenter’s hero declares: ‘I have come here to chew bubblegum and kick ass – and I’m all out of bubblegum’. Unabashed, glorying in his outsider status, Carpenter reappropriates Hollywood values in a cheap ‘bubblegum’ universe, deploying trash culture as a smart bomb that aims to prise apart not only cinematic convention but also reality itself.

Ultimately, both films, in very different historical specificities, and linked by the work of J.G. Ballard, offer up the B-movie as a response to the gathering global and economic forces of late capitalism, signified by what Slavoj Žižek identifies as the ‘ideological state apparatus’ of the Hollywood movie-making machine (2002).

ROGER CORMAN: THE ‘X EFFECT’

Still from X.

Roger Corman, known as the ‘King of the Bs’, was a force of nature. An undeniably intelligent and daring filmmaker, more often than not he seemed a hyper-manic combination of accountant, adrenalin junky and huckster than a maverick artist with a vision. Reminiscing about an early script, he said: ‘I told [the production company] I would give them the film if they would give me all of my money back immediately as an advance against distribution and I would do the same thing on three more films, so I could set myself up as producer’ (Emery 2003, 120). He even seemed in competition with himself: ‘I did Bucket of Blood in five days and … Little Shop of Horrors in two days and a night, but that was really an experiment and a joke to see if I could do it’ (Emery 2003, 121). In 1963, Corman completed The Terror in three days on sets leftover from The Raven, also from 1963. That year, too, he somehow found the energy to direct X: The Man with the X-Ray Eyes, with its portrayal of Dr James Xavier, who experiments on his own eyes with a super-powerful X-ray serum. The ‘X-effect’ is exponential as Xavier begins to see through more and more layers of reality: right through his eyelids and beyond, then through walls and buildings. When he sees through a sick girl’s skin to discover a malignancy her operating doctor has missed, Xavier disables the doctor by cutting his hand and performing the operation himself, saving the girl’s life. Facing a subsequent malpractice suit, the funding for his experiments is cut. Feverish from the X-effect and sleeplessness, his grip on sanity worsens and he lashes out at a colleague, inadvertently pushing him out of an upper-floor window to his death.

Xavier hides out in a backwaters town. Under thrall to a manipulative carnival hustler, he performs circus tricks as a sideshow ‘mind reader’ (in actuality, he reads people’s ID cards through their clothing). Needing money to progress his experiments, he follows the hustler to another anonymous, small town, where, in a distortion of his former life, he looks through sick people’s skin to identify diseased internal organs. He then provides a diagnosis to the victim, who, having abandoned hope, is grateful and willing to reward him. Of course, he must hand over a cut to the hustler, becoming ever more embittered as a result.

Another colleague finds him and Xavier escapes with her. His observations become increasingly deranged: ‘I see the city as if it were unborn … Limbs without flesh, girders without stone, signs hanging without supports, wires dipping and swaying without poles … flesh dissolved in an acid of light: a city of the dead’. Wearing modified sunglasses, with a thickness that retards the X effect to some extent, he works a Las Vegas casino, winning money by seeing through card decks and slot machines. However, when his sunglasses fall off, his horribly blackened eyes are revealed to the crowd and he flees to the desert, stumbling across a religious revival tent complete with blood-and-thunder preacher. Now he has begun to see through the final layers of reality and into the heart of the universe. Recoiling in horror, Xavier addresses the preacher: ‘I’ve come to tell you what I see. There are great darknesses, and beyond the darkness, a light that glows. And in the centre of the universe: the eye that sees us all.’ The preacher exhorts: ‘You see sin and the devil! But the bible tells us what to do: if thine eye offends thee, pluck it out!’ Xavier, unable to bear the burden of seeing what no one has seen before, takes the advice and gouges out his own eyeballs.

Still from X.

There have been many interpretations of the film. Ann Reynolds sees Xavier’s condition as a cinematic corollary of Robert Smithson’s ‘ruins in reverse’, symbolising the illusory hopes of future utopias (Reynolds 2003, 116). For Akira Mizuta Lippit, Xavier’s experiments invoke ‘the nuclear age, a premonition of total catastrophe destined to follow’ (Lippit 2005, 145). But in this act of self-immolation – Xavier putting out his eyes rather than trusting the perceptual logic he has set in train[1] – there seems an even clearer analogy: namely, with Corman’s directing career. In 1961, Corman made The Intruder, which dealt with small-town racism. This raw, uncompromising film garnered excellent reviews yet failed to make money. Subsequently, ‘after [this] financial disaster … Corman never again forgot the importance of the bottom line’ (Dixon 2005). His films from then on would be designed to make money first and foremost, with ‘art’ and ‘worthiness’ as secondary commodities. In his autobiography, he even devotes an entire chapter to the ‘disaster’ that in his mind was The Intruder, an act of pathos according to William D. Routt: ‘What was the big artistic “risk” here? Apparently, as it turns out, it was Corman’s sense of personal self-worth. Yet here, as the details of financial risk are spelled out, what seems significant is risk itself, a nameless danger that posits the film maker as One against the Rest: art as a specific, fraught enterprise’ (Routt 1994, 57).

This moment of realisation reached its apex when Corman founded his production company, New World Pictures, in 1970. He would not direct another film for 20 years, [2] an absence clarified by this 1974 announcement: ‘my earlier theories of the director as auteur are undergoing some revision and I’m beginning to think the producer is more important than the director’ (Morris 2000). For Charles Griffith, screenwriter on Little Shop of Horrors (1960), such an outcome was assured insofar as Corman ‘uses half his genius to degrade his own work, and the rest to degrade the artists who work for him’ (Griffith in Gray 2000). Although Corman had given up directing himself, he still wielded power over New World’s staff directors. According to Paul Bartel, once filming had started on Bartel’s Death Race 2000 (1975), Corman excised much of the black humour in the original cut, replacing it with excessive gore and positioning it as a knock-off of Norman Jewison’s blockbuster, Rollerball, from the same year. As Bartel observed: ‘It was very important to him to be the David against the studio Goliath, and to come up with a cheap version that could be marketed along the same lines as some megaproduction’ (Gray 2000, 121). For Joe Dante, another Corman protégé, Death Race 2000 was ‘a real pop-art masterpiece before Roger got to it’ (Gray 2004, 121). Inadvertently, Corman’s autobiography confirms this angle. His account of the creative process surrounding Death Race 2000 is told entirely from his own perspective; Bartel and the screenwriters are barely mentioned: ‘When I read the story,’ Corman writes, ‘I thought: You can’t do this as a straight and serious film’ (Corman and Jerome 1990, 205).[3]

Still from X.

There is no small irony at this fate befalling Corman, whose forsaking of edgy, independent drama (typified by The Intruder) for cheap, moneymaking thrills, while running roughshod over colleagues, echoes that of Xavier. After all, the scientist was finally on the verge of a major metaphysical breakthrough only to succumb to fatal hubris. Destroying his talent, he subsists by performing cheap carnival tricks solely to raise cash before eventually rendering himself blind – literally, but also metaphorically blind to those around him.[4] Again, Corman’s autobiography hints at a literal act of self-sabotage. Reflecting on his enforced layoff from directing, Corman asks himself:

‘Did I quit out of fear? Did I let myself get wrapped up in the business of New World so I wouldn’t have to confront any insecurities I may have had about my worth as an artist, as an auteur? … Was New World a way for me to remain master of my own limited universe and reject a mainstream system that would only compromise my creative freedom and financial autonomy?’ (Corman and Jerome 1990, 231)

Today, he has pushed this logic to its bitter end: Corman’s latest productions are virtually unwatchable, a view held by detractors and admirers alike. Winston Wheeler Dixon, an avowed fan, voices the consensus:

‘These later films are extremely problematic … they are all but invisible to the public, being released solely through US cable networks, or on straight-to-home-video deals… [Their] excessive … sex and violence … makes many … uncomfortable …. [They] seem devoid of any artistic impulse whatsoever, designed solely to make money.’ (Dixon 2005)

In fighting such a longstanding resistance war against Hollywood, indeed against his own talent, Corman has marginalised himself out of existence, victim of a system that today fights back in very different ways – with absorption. As the novelist J.G. Ballard cogently observes: ‘the time span between the Rebel – the Revolution – and Total Social Acceptance is getting shorter and shorter …. In the future (this is part of the problem in the arts as well) you’ll get some radical new idea, but within 3 minutes it’s totally accepted, and it’s coming out in … your local supermarket.’ (Ballard in Savage 1978, 107).

Thus, Corman’s later work, defiantly yet ineffectually schlocky, is decidedly out of step when appropriated by a Hollywood simulacrum that has not only successfully mimicked exploitation values, but also, as Greg Villepique notes, Corman himself:

‘[Before] Jaws and Star Wars … studios allotted big budgets to historical epics and character-driven dramas while tossing off exploitation films on the cheap, so Corman was at least competing in the same ballpark as the majors (albeit from left field). Since the mid-70s, the studios’ priorities have flipped and they’ve poured all their resources into aping, with far more polish, Corman’s audience-pleasing strategies – tongue-in-cheek, $100 million Arnold Schwarzenegger and Will Smith blow ’em-ups that simply out-Corman Corman.’ (Villepique 2000)

In a world of commodity fetishism, where the lag between radicalism and flaccid cliché becomes negligible, what space can the ‘rebel’ hope to occupy?

JOHN CARPENTER: THE ‘X Continuum’

Still from They Live.

They Live begins as a sombre affair. John Nada, a humble working-class drifter, needs a job and a place to sleep. Finding work on a construction site, he is offered a bed in a shantytown. He becomes intrigued by a nearby church and sneaks inside, overhearing a resistance group bent on bringing down the government. Later, the police discover the shantytown, bulldozing it and arresting the freedom fighters. Nada returns to the now-empty church, finding a box of sunglasses left behind.

LEFT: An alien, as seen by Nada sans shades…

Putting on a pair, he is stunned to discover that they reveal hidden messages in billboards and signs: ‘OBEY’, ‘MARRY AND REPRODUCE’, ‘SLEEP’, ‘CONFORM’. Dollar bills now read: ‘THIS IS YOUR GOD’. When he takes them off, everything is normal again. But there is an even bigger shock when the sunglasses reveal that certain people are in fact shapeshifting aliens with skeletal faces and metallic eyes. Nada flees and takes refuge in a bank, where with his enhanced vision he sees that most of the customers are aliens. At this point, the film shifts gears without warning, becoming unabashedly ‘cartoonish’. At the sight of the enemy, Nada instantly slips into cocky, wisecracking mode, a jarring transition from his previously low-key demeanour, as he blows apart the aliens while spitting out corny one-liners almost as much as bullets, like a B-film version of Arnold Schwarzenegger (he is muscle-bound, too, enhancing the comparison).

LEFT: …and as seen by Nada, with shades on.

This dramatic shift in tone has been criticised widely, with many commentators lamenting its supposed undermining of the Althusserian account of false consciousness inherent in the film’s first half. Barry Keith Grant is typical: ‘They Live … abandons its cultural critique halfway through to concentrate on [Nada’s] improbable heroics … Ironically, the film becomes exactly the kind of formulaic escapist entertainment it begins by critiquing as the opiate of the people’ (Grant 2004, 18). But what if the film is suggesting there is no way to step outside of ideology, no way to unwork false consciousness, but that the best one can do is to rework it to satisfy personal need? This then speaks of the difference between Corman and Carpenter, and ultimately of the difference in cultural value of the B-film in the 1960s (loitering in some kind of rebellious ‘outside’) and the B-film today (as fully absorbed, hyperreal selling point). Nada is like a badfilm version of Schwarzenegger’s character Doug Quaid in Total Recall (1990), who does not realise he is an undercover secret agent, but is instead brainwashed to think he is an ordinary labourer – just like Nada. But when danger comes, Quaid’s training kicks in automatically and he transforms into the lethal agent he was all along, as seamlessly as Nada does when the bullets begin to fly. Nada, then – indoctrinated, brainwashed, but subliminally aware – is the secret agent of badfilm. When he assumes his wisecracking, B-movie action stance, he is turning the autonomous, controlling intelligence the film rails against back against itself.

They Live sits within a continuum of SF works that challenge the consensus reality of consumer and mass-mediated culture. Examples include: Ray Nelson’s short story ‘Eight O’Clock in the Morning’ (1963), the basis for Carpenter’s screenplay alongside the ‘Nada’ comic strip (1985) that Nelson adapted from his story;[5] Ballard’s ‘The Subliminal Man’ (1963); Philip K. Dick’s Ubik (1969); and the films Invasion of the Bodysnatchers (1956), The Truman Show (1998) and The Matrix (1999). In terms of They Live, ‘The Subliminal Man’ is most revealing. In fact, it seems to have inspired ‘Eight O’Clock in the Morning’ (and therefore could be said to be the real inspiration for They Live),[6] although Nelson’s story comes off as little more than a heavy-handed rewrite with freaky aliens added for shock value. ‘The Subliminal Man’ features a world (minus aliens) in which subliminal messages control the populace through advertising and billboards, part of a society structured around conformity and planned obsolescence. There is only one make of car (only one make of everything: cigarettes, household goods, foodstuffs), produced in the same colour and specifications each year and designed to wear out at six-monthly intervals, and consumers become trapped in unbreakable shopping contracts, locked into the pursuit of false fulfilment.

Panels from Ray Nelson’s ‘Nada’, first published in Alien Encounters #6, 1985.

A man, Hathaway, becomes agitated about a series of giant signs erected on city outskirts and shopping centre perimeters. They don’t advertise anything – their facades are blank, shuttered grilles – so their true purpose is a mystery. But Hathaway believes they carry subliminal messages designed to control the populace. As he tells his doctor, Franklin, in a scene reminiscent of Nada’s futile pleas to others to understand the truth: ‘If you can’t believe your own senses what chance have you left? They’re invading your brain, if you don’t defend yourself they’ll take it over completely! We’ve got to act now before we’re all paralysed’ (Ballard 2006, 569–70). Franklin watches Hathaway climb one of the billboards, where he attacks a switch-box and destroys the sign’s grille, revealing, in another clear parallel with Carpenter’s film, a cycling and repeating display underneath:

‘The phrases, and every combination of them possible, were entirely familiar, and Franklin knew that he had been reading them for weeks as he passed up and down the expressway.

BUY NOW BUY NOW BUY NOW BUY NOW BUY
NEW CAR NOW NEW CAR NOW NEW CAR NOW
YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES’ (Ballard 2006, 576)

‘The Subliminal Man’, while not specifically referring to the concept of X-rays as a hard scientific process, does reveal a sense of ‘seeing beyond’ consumerism, and the fake reality consumerism begets, thereby aligning itself with both X and They Live. As Steven Connor notes in his overview of the history of X-ray vision in art, literature and myth:

‘X-rays promise a utopia of pure spiritual essences, in which it would be possible to see through the obscuring veil of materiality, and in the process leave it behind, moving to a higher plane, or to a more refined condition. [Yet] they involve an irreducible necessity for some form of material meditation, a screening, detaining, or fixing, which seems to compromise, or indefinitely to defer the immaterialist dream of a world in which all that is solid may be melted into air.’ (Connor 2008)

This dream of ‘seeing through the obscuring veil of materiality’, and the necessity for ‘material mediation’, fits well with the kind of critical terrain in the 60s and 70s that would come to position advertising as an ideological system that denies consumers ‘true’ identity by virtue of a supersaturation of all modes of informational output. For Judith Williamson, the false image of ourselves bestowed by buying into the referent system of advertising is a system which devalues and erodes our nature and obscures ‘social realities’, resulting in a situation where ‘ideology and symbolic or signifying structures combine to form a Platonic system where everything means something else, and nothing is what it is’ (Williamson 1978, 170). In fact, ‘The Subliminal Man’ fictionalises the devolutionary effects of advertising and the forbidding sense that ‘nothing is what it is’. While the story’s narrative device seems an obvious influence on Nelson, its denouement recalls both Corman and Carpenter. As Hathaway is shot by the police and falls to his death – punished, like Xavier, for the sin of knowing reality as no one else can – Franklin orders yet another new car, as if nothing has ever happened, as ‘blind’ as everyone in They Live. But while the texture of the story is undeniably prescient in its central message, that the media landscape has redefined the world as itself, it, like Corman’s film, is essentially old-style message SF: socially aware science fiction depicting one man against the system, where the hero’s rebellion is brutally crushed and his broken body used as a totem to warn the rest of society.

Panels from ‘Nada’.

What exactly was in the air in 1963? As all three texts were formulated that year, it is fruitful to analyse Ballard’s story as a hinge text that embodies elements of both Corman’s and Carpenter’s films, yet one that points the way forward to a ‘Ballardian’ solution to the problem of futile rebellion – a solution Carpenter would also arrive at. Ballard refined the thesis of ‘The Subliminal Man’ in his experimental novel The Atrocity Exhibition (1970), which depicts the struggle of a schizophrenic man, ‘T-’, to formulate new sensory responses to the emergent dynamics of the burgeoning media and communications landscape in the 1960s. The Atrocity Exhibition mirrors Marshall McLuhan’s observation that the ‘medium, or process of our time – electric technology – is reshaping and restructuring patterns of social interdependence and every aspect of our personal life’ (McLuhan and Fiore 1967, 8). It is a work that places its protagonist ‘inside’ the image, absorbed within the Spectacle, with no ‘outside’ of which to speak or to safely retreat to. There is no limit to the multiple fantasies the media landscape feeds to ‘T-’, and which nourish his psychopathic tendencies, which then take on a life of their own: an invasion of the actual by the virtual. As Ballard puts it: ‘the nervous systems of the characters have been externalized, as part of the reversal of the interior and exterior worlds. Highways, office blocks, faces and street signs are perceived as if they were elements in a malfunctioning nervous system’ (Ballard 2001, annotations 76).

Mirroring the text’s Burroughsian cut-up narrative technique, ‘T-’ cuts and pastes the major cultural and political events of the 1960s into a bricolaged, reordered version of reality playing inside the cinema of his mind, with himself in the lead role. This is a process summarised usefully by Dominika Oramus:

‘[Ballard’s characters] live surrounded by texts which invade their minds, but they cannot focus long enough to appreciate any complex messages. The characters dream about violence and excitement in their own lives, and the mediascape (ever full of aggressive imagery) makes them long for the re-enactment of atrocities: ‘all those scenes of pain and violence that illuminated the margins of our lives’.’ (Oramus 2007, 161)

It is precisely this sense of ‘re-enactment’ that They Live inhabits, placing it further along a historical and cultural specificity that bears no relation to X, indeed to Corman’s career. In the early part of the film, Nada is as indoctrinated as everyone else, with no agency over the external conditions he finds himself in. As Carpenter intercuts banal television shows with inane conversations on the street, suggesting they are symbiotic, Nada, when asked how he plans to make ends meet, blithely parrots Reaganomics: ‘I believe in America. The opportunity will come’. Yet he does get smart, reworking those external conditions in a performative manner that evokes not only Ballard but also Simon Cottle’s sense of media consumers who, in ‘late-modern societies and, in their mediatized expression, periodically summon and galvanize collective beliefs, myths and solidarities – collective sentiments and appeals increasingly performed on a global media stage’ (Cottle 2006, 428).

Still from They Live.

Rather than Xavier’s fatal withdrawal, Nada declares, in the film’s most quoted line: ‘I have come here to chew bubblegum and kick ass – and I’m all out of bubblegum’. Unabashed, glorying in his outsider status, Carpenter reappropriates Hollywood values in a cheap ‘bubblegum’ universe that invades, reinvigorates and repopulates what Žižek (himself borrowing from Jean Baudrillard) calls the ‘desert of the real’ – the ideology of late capitalism (2002, 15). This intent is made blatantly clear from the opening titles, which display the words ‘They Live’ fading into graffiti on a desolate railway overpass. This simple dissolve is indicative: in Carpenter’s world, badfilm is the reality; there is no place left to stand outside of mass mediation. Perfomativity, the audience reacting within the dynamic system of media ritual enacted on the global media stage, with ‘spectators’ mirroring content back to ‘producers’, becomes, if enabled correctly, the last – the only – line of resistance.

Still from They Live.

Studying the ‘role of media in processes of manufacturing consent’, Cottle suggests that it is inadequate to conclude that mass media has an unquestioned role in enacting ironclad attitudes and frameworks through which processes such as ‘moral panics’ are channelled. Instead, he speaks to the issue of perfomativity in audience reception:

‘[Media] ritual only comes alive experientially, emotionally, subjunctively, when actively read by audiences/readerships who are prepared to ‘participate’ within it as symbolically meaningful to them, and who are prepared to accept the imagined solidarities on offer. Performativity, then, is not confined to the performative ‘doing’ of media producers but includes the ‘doing’ of ‘spectators’ as well, who actively enter into (‘commit themselves to’) the proceedings and who can identify themselves and their sentiments within them.’ (Cottle 2006, 428-9)

For Cottle, if this process can be used to enable moral panics (which are dependent on being actively ‘read’ by audiences, before being reflected back onto the global sphere), then it can also be used to re-project more intimate details of the audience’s experience and social lives, all the while remaining inside the technology of media ritual, a dynamic, interlocking system with constituent parts ‘producers, performers and participating audiences’ (Cottle 2006, 429). To return to the narrative conceit of X-ray vision, of seeing beyond, the notion of perfomativity in mediatised landscapes (mediascapes) can be seen as analogous to a form of brake or control – Connor’s ‘material mediation’ – on the capacity to see beyond. But why would we need it?

Connor describes how the very idea of X-ray vision has historically induced anxiety and terror because ‘the problem with X-rays is that, for the most part, what they like best is to go through things, and to go on going through things unless or until they meet something, like lead, that absorbs or scatters them’ (Connor 2008). To demonstrate, he identifies X as a ‘dystopia’ in which ‘every last pocket of opacity has been seared away, leaving a vitreous desert of universal transparency’, and he aligns the film with Baudrillard’s theory of hyperreality, with its preoccupation with depthlessness and the fatal blurring of private and public realms: ‘In a world in which everything must be made visible, and in which “value radiates in all directions”, the transparency of evil is indistinguishable from the evil of transparency’ (Connor 2008).

In this account, seeing everything, a process to which we willingly succumb via commodity fetishism, is the tool of an oppressive, autonomous system that exposes us to its inner workings: the truth that is revealed may not be a truth we are ontologically equipped to handle, with its inescapable highlighting of the fact that our free will has been stripped to the bone, and that this outcome has been smuggled in via our own collusion. The prediction of Baudrillard’s contemporary, Paul Virilio, is also apposite. Probed about our heavily surveilled and intrusive Western society, Virilio was asked: ‘But what shall we dream of when everything becomes visible?’ To which he replied: ‘We’ll dream of being blind’ (Wilson 1994). The disturbing parallel with Xavier’s fate need hardly be stated. Thus, for Connor, ‘the problem of how to see X-rays, or to employ them indirectly as a form of visual perception is similar to the problem … with the schoolboy fantasy of a universal acid, capable of burning through any substance: so what do you keep it in?’ (Connor 2008). Appropriate to this analysis of trash culture, Connor approaches the conundrum as Superman might. After all, ‘In order to exercise his X-ray vision, Superman would need some arrangement whereby the rays could be bounced back to him, as though he were able to exude some kind of screen which could be sent out in advance of the X-rays in order to reflect them’ (Connor 2008).

Let us return to the two films, then, with this framing question in mind: ‘If you have a narrative device that can see everything: what do you keep it in?’

‘HOW TO RECONSTITUTE YOURSELF’

LEFT: The preacher from X.

They Live subverts the thesis of X in a number of ways. Both feature apocalyptic preachers, that old B-movie staple. In X, the preacher exhorts Xavier to destroy himself and he is all too willing to comply. They Live’s preacher, however, implants the idea in Nada’s mind that there is another layer of reality of consumerism to be unpeeled, thereby leading him to the church, the sunglasses and the jouissance of self-realisation.

In one scenario, trash culture destroys the protagonist; in the other, it enables him to become complete. In both films, the sunglasses themselves, a heavily iconic popcult signifier, reinforce the division. In X, Xavier’s pair hinders his ability to see through reality, but Nada’s sunglasses allow him to see beyond, with the fullest sense of liberation – ‘like a drug’, he says.

LEFT: The preacher from They Live.

Crucially, Nada is in control of the process. He can turn the ‘high’ of popular culture on and off by taking the sunglasses on and off, whereas Xavier is helplessly trapped inside a spiralling nightmare – there is no permanent way to halt his worsening condition.[7]

Further, when Xavier is on the run, the subculture he is drawn to, filled with sideshow freaks and circus workers, is unequivocally depicted as degrading, lowlife, exploitative, even as it provides him with a living. In They Live, when Nada hides out, his subcult of freedom fighters is nourishing, welcoming, each warrior dedicated to one other: ‘There’s no need to wear your sunglasses,’ he is told. ‘We’re all human in here’.

ABOVE: X’s subcult. BELOW: They Live’s subcult.

Even the character’s names are overripe with signification. ‘X’, which refers to Xavier himself (as the film’s subtitle makes clear), is the classic signifier of negation, but also a generic marker, as in ‘Brand X’. Xavier, then, is everyman, but one who thinks he can rise above it, thus negating himself, cancelling himself out in the process. ‘Nada’, too, signifies generic values, literally nothingness (in Spanish and Portuguese, ‘nada’ means nothing) but in Carpenter, the name signifies the obvious blank slate that his character has become – the bland everyman ripe for reinscription. Inevitably, Corman’s real-world circumstances yet again mirror his film world’s inherent bias. Like Xavier, he became repulsed by what he had become, and the world towards which he was drawn: ‘Fairly early on, I began to worry that New World Pictures might become too closely associated with exploitation films … I did not want to personally be identified, even stigmatized, by exploitation filmmaking’ (Corman and Jerome 1990, 188, 189).

Between the two filmmakers, there is another critical parallel/division: as Corman did before him, Carpenter, in recent times, has forsaken directing indefinitely. Yet this too effects a very different outcome. Carpenter has embraced the world of computer games, as a consultant on the first-person shooter computer game F.E.A.R. (2005). Tellingly, he describes the game in terms of ‘cinematics’, pointing out that ‘you,’ as the user, ‘are the character’ and that there is no difference between creating a suspense scene for film or game.[8] This merger between Carpenter, films and gaming was predicted 17 years earlier in They Live. When Nada and his sidekick Frank make their way up through the floors of the alien-controlled television studio, their goal is to destroy the antenna that beams the signals masking the subliminal messages and the aliens’ real faces. In the smoking hallways, strewn with debris from their shootouts with alien guards, Nada and Frank hear voices and must decide in a split second whether to fire automatically and risk killing humans. The entire sequence, with its rapid-fire decision making seen from Nada’s perspective and its ultimate goal of blowing up a vital installation in an alien base, is nothing less than a first-person shoot ’em up computer game – in live action.

ABOVE: still from They Live. BELOW: screenshot from F.E.A.R.

Here, Carpenter seems to anticipate the badfilm zeitgeist as outlined by Brendan Murphy and Jane Mills. Murphy points to the emergence of a new mode of filmic production that not only ‘blurs production and consumption’ as a result of our Web 2.0 society, encompassing social media, the aesthetics of appropriation and the cutting-edge interactivity of computer games, but that also looks to the B-movie world as a kind of shared repository of generic, iconic signifiers that create meaning across cultural, aesthetic and even political boundaries (Murphy 2009).[9] This corresponds with what Mills highlights as the breaking down of the traditional binary opposition between Hollywood and ‘not Hollywood’ (that is, most alternative/independent cinema movements) by a globalising, hybridising process that provides a ‘fluid screenscape in which cultural phenomena flow in and out of the frame’ (Mills 2009).

How does They Live resolve these strands of cultural data? According to Janet Maslin, Carpenter directs the film ‘with B-movie bluntness, but with none of the requisite snap’, while the ‘B-movie casting is another problem’ (Maslin 1988). But there are two ways to take the badfilm tropes she criticises: as a universal sign of narrative/aesthetic weakness, or, with Murphy and Mills in mind, as a liberating mesh of codes and signifiers that actually support the film’s critique. In fact, They Live draws more from Nelson’s comic strip ‘Nada’ than from the original short story upon which both comic and film are based.[10] The comic features the same sudden shift in tone from conspiracy theory to all-out ‘superhero’ action, a narrative device de rigueur for the pulpy comic-book world but apparently not for the serious world of film that Maslin wants They Live to inhabit.

Rather than lacking ‘requisite snap’, Carpenter is in fact completely true to his source material (moreover, more faithful to pulp fiction as revealing of reality than ‘serious’ literature), even if he does make one vital modification (although this in no way devalues his respect for pulp). In They Live, when Nada finally destroys the antenna, the film ends abruptly with a groan-inducing punchline. As a woman makes love to her partner, Nada destroys the antenna and the signal is switched off. The partner’s alien face, no longer electronically masked, is suddenly revealed to the woman. As she looks on in horror, he asks, ignorant of his outward appearance and only concerned with his sexual performance: ‘What’s wrong, baby?’ This awful joke is also present in ‘Nada’, but whereas Nelson hints at a subsequent war against the aliens brought on by their unmasking, Carpenter does no such thing. Instead, he immediately cuts to the credits with absolutely no hint of a new revolution sweeping out the old, no realistic, tangible sense of political upheaval: just that final, terrible gag as the film’s exclamation point.

The same joke twice. ABOVE: Panel from ‘Nada’. BELOW: Still from They Live.

Typically, Carpenter has been criticised for not being able to deliver a sense of the world after the alien signal has been destroyed. However, to return to Žižek, not even a provocateur of his experience has been quite able to imagine what exactly comes after capitalism.[11] Far more compelling in Žižek’s discourse is the methodology by which he uses examples from popular cinema as metaphoric circuit breakers in political discussion. For Žižek, Hollywood itself is the ultimate ‘ideological state apparatus’ (Žižek 2002, 16), inherently political in that it produces a cultural product – popular film – that belongs to a wider system of ideology that invents reality and supports cultural myths and institutional structures. According to Žižek, revolutionary cinema is therefore ‘cinema as the art of appearances telling us something about reality itself, about how reality constitutes itself’. When ‘the coordinates of your reality disintegrate’, the problem becomes ‘how to reconstitute yourself’ (Žižek in Fiennes 2006). In contrast to commentators who protest that They Live sells out the leftist critique it sets up, Žižek uses the film’s sunglasses premise as a crucial metaphor for the need to unwork the ‘real message’ lying beneath Republican ideology:

‘The glasses … function as a device for the critique of ideology. In other words, they enable [Nada] to see the real message lying beneath the glossy, colorful surface. What would we see if we were to observe the Republican presidential campaign through such glasses? The first thing would be a long series of contradictions and inconsistencies.’ (Žižek 2008)

Extrapolating to the aftermath of 9/11, Žižek demonstrates how the demonisation of the Islamic enemy is seen as an insidious by-product of American global expansion. For Žižek, we must reject the binary opposition that supports a war on terror, instead adopting ‘both positions simultaneously; this can be done only if we resort to the dialectical category of totality: there is no choice between these two positions; each one is one-sided and false …. The two sides are not really opposed …. They belong to the same field … The choice between Bush and Bin Laden is not our choice; they are both “Them” against Us’ (Žižek 2002, 50-1). This instantly recalls They Live, in which Carpenter ensures there is no distinction ‘between them and us’ (aligning the film with Mills’ Hollywood/not Hollywood hybridity): the aliens in their human guise are seamlessly integrated into our world, and it is only by a trick of the light that we are able to see them differently.

In the face of this ‘dialectical category of totality’, Žižek suggests that: ‘Instead of imposing our version of universality (universal human rights etc), universality – the shared space of understanding between different cultures – should be conceived of as an infinite task of translation, a constant reworking of one’s own particular position’ (Žižek 2002, 66). This returns us to Cottle’s media performativity and to Carpenter’s latter-day career as remaker/remodeler of his own B-movie legacy. Like Corman, Carpenter has his own empire – not producing other people’s work, but recycling and remixing his own, on (at the time of writing) no fewer than five big-budget remakes of his films. Undoubtedly, he is adept at ‘constantly reworking his own position’.[12] This is in stark contrast to Corman, eternally casting himself as David against the Goliath of Hollywood, yet slaying only himself (as Žižek might argue, ‘resistance is surrender’).[13] Indeed, Routt specifically examines how Corman’s adherence to the ‘outside’, and his blindness to fluidity of hypercapitalism, constantly undercuts his position: ‘Corman’s case, particularly in the “enigma” of the way in which his taste is transformed into that of the public, seems exemplary to me partly because what he … clearly thinks of as dichotomies keep melting into one another’ (Rout 1994, 60).

Meanwhile, the default critical position is that Carpenter, the filmmaker, is in decline. As Philip Kerr caustically observes: ‘the modestly titled John Carpenter’s Ghosts of Mars … is no exception to this decline, in that it finds the director now feeding off his own corpse … I myself was sad to see a once inventive talent eating his own excrement’ (Kerr 2001, 44). But Carpenter has always ‘fed off his own corpse’, fully aware of dichotomies that melt into one another: his entire oeuvre features repeated motifs, aesthetics and concepts, extending down to his self-composed soundtracks, with their minimal and repetitive refrains. Further, his films borrow just as freely from the films he admires as they do from his own work. As he said in response to an interviewer who detected elements from his films in other directors’ work: ‘I’ve made money off the creativity of Howard Hawks, Sergio Leone, Alfred Hitchcock, John Ford, John Sturges, Orson Welles, and many many others for my entire career – how can I complain when it happens to me?’ (Bright 1999).

With this statement, Carpenter situates himself as a nodal point in Mills’ ‘fluid screenscape of cultural phenomena’. If Xavier/Corman is the hubristic, overreaching modernist, then Nada/Carpenter is the exuberant postmodernist: ‘eating his own excrement’ is perhaps the Faustian pact Carpenter pays for delivering such astonishing work, a golden period stretching from his first feature Dark Star (1974) to They Live 14 years later. Accordingly, the jamming of the signal at the end of They Live is badfilm producing its own transmission, performing its own means of production, reconstituting itself from signals beamed out, mirrored back and reworked in the endless play inherent within Murphy’s proscribed repository of generic signifiers.

In They Live, that last scene – that note of purest trash reflected back to the horrified woman, back to the viewer of the film, a mirror halting the progress of the X-ray vision that demands to see beyond into the world to come – is the product of this new, reordered transmission. As ‘material mediation’, it is the ultimate solution to the problem of reconstitution, to the metaphoric problem of unstoppable X-ray vision, which, in Žižekian terms, is very much ‘your reality disintegrating’.

It is a solution that Xavier/Corman, forever scrabbling to find an outside from which to fire bullets, was never destined to achieve.

Image found on the internet. Creator unknown.

Notes

[1] Earlier, the cocky scientist had proudly announced about his experiments: ‘I’m closing in on the gods’.
[2] According to Greg Villepique: ‘As if to formally declare himself all washed up as an artist, Corman made a surprise return to directing for the 1990 time-travel stinker Frankenstein Unbound, a film sunk by his refusal to spend a little more money on effects; nobody much noticed its brief theatrical run’ (Villepique 2000).
[3] Elsewhere, he reflects: ‘We are a violent … species. If we weren’t … the sabre-toothed tiger would be … the dominant species. But the humans killed them. I touched on this in Death Race 2000’ (Corman and Jerome 1990, 162).
[4] Xavier, of course, kills one colleague and fails to heed another’s warnings about the serum’s side effects.
[5] Both Nelson’s story and comic strip are standard alien-invasion fare. Carpenter’s reworking is markedly more political, ironic, anti-consumerist and popcult-savvy.
[6] This is further borne out by publication dates: ‘The Subliminal Man’ was published in New Worlds in January 1963, while Nelson’s story appeared in Fantasy & Science Fiction in November that year.
[7] Carpenter’s masterstroke, not present in Nelson’s short story or comic strip, was to use the sunglasses as the device that reveals reality. In Nelson’s original story and comic, Nada ‘wakes up’ through hypnosis and is unable to turn the effect off.
[8] In an interview, Carpenter explains: ‘There’s a quality to [F.E.A.R.’s] visual cinematics …. I’m a video game fan from the old days, and I love first person shooter games. I’m a big fan of DOOM, but this is … a leap forward in terms of graphics which is the first thing you look at as a director. How does it look and how does it play and how does it feel? … The audience, whether it’s for a game or for a movie, invests in the characters on screen and psychologically bonds with them. What happens to them is what emotionally happens to you. In F.E.A.R., you are the character, so you already step into it, assuming that things will jump out and they will be frightening”’ (Ferrante 2005).
[9] Recall Nada’s appropriation of the Quaid character in Total Recall, the latter film itself a kind of glorified, unabashed B-movie made with Hollywood money.
[10] Amusingly, Nelson’s son Walter wrote on his father’s Facebook fan page: ‘Dad’s short story “Eight O’Clock in the Morning” had been pretty much continuously in print in multiple languages since the late ’60s. In the early ’80s, a friend convinced Ray to turn it into a graphic novel called ‘Nada’. The Nada comic hadn’t been on the shelves for a week before John Carpenter was on the line. The moral of this story is that Hollywood doesn’t read books, but does read comic books (er, graphic novels)’ (Nelson 2008).
[11] As he writes: ‘One of the clearest lessons of the last few decades is that capitalism is indestructible. Marx compared it to a vampire, and one of the salient points of comparison now appears to be that vampires always rise up again after being stabbed to death. Even Mao’s attempt, in the Cultural Revolution, to wipe out the traces of capitalism, ended up in its triumphant return’ (Žižek 2007, 4).
[12] And philosophical about it, too: ‘It’s a brand new world out there in terms of trying to get advertising. There’s so much going on that if you come up with a movie that people have never heard of they don’t pay attention to it – no matter how good it is. So it becomes, “Let’s remake something that maybe rings a bell and that you’ve heard of before”. That way, you’re already ahead. I’m flattered, but I understand what’s going on. They’re picking everything to remake. I think they’ve just run down the list of other titles and have finally got to mine (laughs)’ (Matloff 2007).
[13] This phrase refers to the title of Žižek’s 2007 article, in which he outlines the ‘defeat of the Left’: ‘The response of some critics on the postmodern Left to this predicament is to call for a new politics of resistance. Those who still insist on fighting state power, let alone seizing it, are accused of remaining stuck within the ‘old paradigm’: the task today, their critics say, is to resist state power by withdrawing from its terrain and creating new spaces outside its control. This is, of course, the obverse of accepting the triumph of capitalism. The politics of resistance is nothing but the moralising supplement to a Third Way Left’ (Žižek 2007, 4).

References

+ Ballard, J.G. 2001. The Atrocity Exhibition [1970]. London: Flamingo.
–––––– 2006. ‘The Subliminal Man’ [1963]. In The Complete Short Stories: Volume 1, 559–77. London: Harper Perennial.
+ Bright, Marc. 1999. ‘John Carpenter Speaks to the “John Carpenter Website”.’ http://www.geocities.com/j_nada/carp/interview/jcspeakstojcpage.html.
+ Connor, Steven. 2008. Pregnable of Eye: X-Rays, Vision and Magic. http://www.stevenconnor.com/xray.
+ Corman, Roger, with Jim Jerome. 1990. How I Made a Hundred Movies in Hollywood and Never Lost a Dime. New York and Toronto: Random House.
+ Cottle, Simon. 2006. Mediatized rituals: beyond manufacturing consent. Media, Culture & Society, 28, no. 3: 411-32.
+ Emery, Robert J. 2003. The Directors: Take Three. New York: Allworth Press.
+ Dixon, Winston Wheeler. 2005. Roger Corman. Senses of Cinema, August. http://archive.sensesofcinema.com/contents/directors/06/corman.html.
+ Ferrante, Anthony C. 2005. John Carpenter and game producer Rob Loftus uncover the nature of F.E.A.R. mania.com, 31 October. http://www.mania.com/john-carpenter-game-producer-rob-loftus-uncover-nature-fear_article_49967.html.
+ Grant, Barry Keith. 2004. Disorder in the Universe: John Carpenter and the Question of Genre. In The Cinema of John Carpenter: the Technique of Terror, ed. Ian Conrich and David Woods, 10-20. London and New York: Wallflower Press.
+ Gray, Beverly. 2000. Roger Corman: An Unauthorized Biography of the Godfather of Indie Filmmaking. Los Angeles: Renaissance Books.
+ Kerr, Philip. 2001. Mars bores. New Statesman, 10 December.
+ Lippit, Akira Mizuta. 2005. Atomic Light (Shadow Optics). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
+ McLuhan, Marshall and Quentin Fiore. 1967. The Medium is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects. New York: Bantam Books.
+ Matloff, Jason. 2007. John Carpenter’s Business of Insanity. MovieMaker, 31 July. http://www.moviemaker.com/directing/article/john_carpenters_business_of_insanity.
+ Maude, Collette. 2008. They Live. Time Out. http://www.timeout.com/film/reviews/79208/they-live.html.
+ Mills, Jane. 2009. Hollywood’s ‘bad’ other. Conference paper given at B for BAD Cinema, Monash University, 15 April.
+ Morris, Gary. 2000. Roger Corman on New World Pictures: An Interview from 1974. Bright Lights Film Journal, no. 27, January. http://www.brightlightsfilm.com/27/cormaninterview1.html.
+ Murphy, Brendan. B Grade 2.0: Gondry, ‘Sweding’ and B-movie tropes in emerging social media culture. Conference paper given at B for BAD Cinema, Monash University, 15 April.
+ Nelson, Ray. 1963. ‘Eight O’Clock in the Morning’. Fantasy and Science Fiction, November.
–––––– 1985. ‘Nada’. Alien Encounters, no. 6.
+ Nelson, Walter. 2008. The Story Behind They Live. http://www.facebook.com/pages/Ray-Faraday-Nelson/44349104571?v=feed&story_fbid=91694579571.
+ Oramus, Dominika. 2007. Grave New World: The Decline of the West in the Fiction of J.G. Ballard. Warsaw: University of Warsaw.
+ Reynolds, Ann. 2003. Robert Smithson: Learning from New Jersey and Elsewhere. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press.
+ Routt, William D. 1994. Art, popular art. Continuum: the Australian Journal of Media and Culture, 7, no. 2.
+ Savage, Jon. 1978. J.G. Ballard, in V. Vale (ed.), Search & Destroy #7-11: The Complete Reprint, San Francisco, V/Search Publications [date not given].
+ Sconce, Jeffrey. 1995. Trashing the academy: Taste, excess, and an emerging politics of cinematic style. Screen 36: 371-93.
+ Villepique, Greg. 2000. Roger Corman. Salon, 13 June. http://www.salon.com/people/bc/2000/06/13/corman/index1.html.
+ Williamson, Judith. 1978. Decoding Advertisements. London: Marion Boyars Publishers Ltd.
+ Wilson, Louise. 1994. Cyberwar, God And Television: Interview with Paul Virilio. Ctheory.net, 1 December.
+ Woods, David. 2004. Us and Them: Authority and Identity in Carpenter’s Films. In The Cinema of John Carpenter: the Technique of Terror, ed. Ian Conrich and David Woods, 21-34. London and New York: Wallflower Press.
+ Žižek, Slavoj. 2002. Welcome to the Desert of the Real!: Five Essays on 11 September and Related Dates. London and New York: Verso.
–––––– 2007. Resistance Is Surrender. London Review of Books, 29, no. 22.
–––––– 2008. Through the Glasses Darkly. In These Times, 29 October. http://www.inthesetimes.com/article/3976/through_the_glasses_darkly.

Films

+ Carpenter, John. 1988. They Live. Alive Films.
+ Corman, Roger. 1963. X: the Man with the X-Ray Eyes. Alta Vista Productions.
+ Fiennes, Sophie. 2006. The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema (written and presented by Slavoj Žižek). Amoeba Film.

by Mike Holliday

JOHN GRAY is Emeritus Professor of European Thought at the London School of Economics. His numerous books include ‘Hayek on Liberty’ (1984) and Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals (2002); his most recent work is The Immortalization Commission: Science and the Strange Quest to Cheat Death (2011). Gray has been described as ‘one of the most challenging and controversial political theorists in the English-speaking world’, and as ‘the most prescient of British public intellectuals’.[1] He is also an enthusiastic admirer of J.G. Ballard, providing an appreciation for the New Statesman following Ballard’s death in April 2009 in which he wrote:

After each meeting with him my view of the world around me was more Ballardian – a tribute not only to the force of his personality, but even more to the exactitude of his vision.[2]

However, there is little in the way of appraisal or commentary on the relationship between Ballard’s fiction and Gray’s philosophy, which may be considered surprising given the prominence of Gray’s writings over the last several years. This is a deficiency that I shall be attempting to rectify in what follows …

During the last 10 years of Ballard’s life, it seemed at times as if the author had formed a two-man mutual admiration society with Gray. It was Gray who had started the ball rolling in 1999 with a review in which he argued that Ballard was Britain’s ‘most gifted and original living writer’, comparing him favourably with Wells, Conrad, Greene, and William Burroughs.[3] Three year later, Straw Dogs, which was to become Gray’s best known book, appeared with an endorsement from Ballard: ‘powerful and brilliant … an essential guide to the new millennium.’ Straw Dogs was duly selected by Ballard as one of his books of the year, as were two of its successors, Heresies (2004) and Black Mass (2007).

It was obvious that the two writers shared common concerns. They both viewed our lives as characterised by chance, fragmentation, and what Ballard termed ‘hidden assignments,’ rather than by conscious choices and intentions.[4] What we think of as reality, they saw as a ‘ramshackle construct’ heavily influenced by our need for day-to-day survival and by the mediatised fictions around us.[5] Both emphasized that, as primates, we bear the traces of our evolutionary heritage, and that violence and psychopathy lie latent within the human psyche.[6] Gray and Ballard therefore saw themselves as opposed to that strand of the Enlightenment tradition which believes humans to be essentially sane and rational.[7] There were resemblances in political outlook as well: both combined criticism of ‘big business’ capitalism with strong anti-socialist sentiments and an admiration for Margaret Thatcher.[8]

Nevertheless, some of Ballard’s readers may have been perplexed by the mutual enthusiasm. Gray’s emphasis on social stability and his support for inherited institutions such as the monarchy[9] appeared at odds with Ballard’s intense dislike of British traditionalism and conformity, and with the passionate welcome which he gave to social and cultural change. It seemed difficult to understand Ballard’s admiration for a political philosopher whose key influences included Friedrich Hayek and Michael Oakeshott[10] and who could write that:

[human beings'] deepest need is a home, a network of common practices and inherited traditions that confers on them the blessing of a settled identity. … their freedom is worth while and meaningful to them only against a background of common cultural forms. Such forms cannot be created anew for each generation. … Where change is incessant or pluralism too insistent, where the links between the generations are broken or the shared raiment of the common culture is in tatters, human beings will not flourish.[11]

Moreover, Ballard’s fiction of ‘psychic fulfillment’[12] contrasted with what many perceived to be the gloomy pessimism and quietism of Straw Dogs and Heresies, epitomised by the Introduction to the latter, which concluded with the words:

Fortunately, the Earth is larger and more enduring than anything produced by the human mind. For humans, the growth of knowledge means only history as usual – if on a rather larger scale of destruction. For the Earth, it is only a dream, soon to end in peace.[13]

This is the type of comment which led fellow-philosopher Simon Blackburn to write that ‘Gray could be comfortable only in a religion with no faith, no hope, and no charity.’[14]

In fact, of the concerns that he shares with Ballard, only Gray’s antipathy towards socialism features strongly in his writings prior to the late-1990s. His initial political philosophy appears to have been based around a rejection of Marxism as a form of utopian messianism,[15] together with a conviction that the post-war consensus in British politics had broken down:

Unlike corporatist institutions in Germany and Austria, which acted as pace-makers for wealth-creation and guarantors of social peace, British corporatism in the 1960s and 1970s had produced economic stagnation, industrial and social conflict and a fiscal crisis of the state which triggered the intervention of the IMF.[16]

In light of this, it is not surprising that Gray was an enthusiast for the economic policies of Margaret Thatcher and the writings of Friedrich Hayek, before coming to realise that the views of the neo-liberal ‘New Right’ were just as utopian as those of the Marxist left – another variant on ‘the Enlightenment project of supplanting the historic diversity of human cultures with a single, universal civilization.’[17] There followed a flirtation with Oakeshottian conservatism, with its emphasis on civic association, localism, and inherited social practices, but Gray eventually saw this as inconsistent with the pluralism and social and economic changes engendered by market forces and the power of capital. Conservatism – of almost any type – had become an ‘atavistic reaction against modern life’;[18] it now rested on credulity towards tradition and had hence become another totalising political narrative. In the 1990s Gray was briefly enthused by Tony Blair and ‘New Labour’, initially seeing the latter as a liberal communitarian project but soon recognising its Thatcherite and neo-conservative roots.[19] The result of this rejection of a series of universal political theories – socialist, neo-liberal, Oakeshottian-conservative, and liberal-communitarian – was two-fold. First came Gray’s attempt to characterize a more restricted form of political agreement in terms of a modus vivendi between differing and incompatible ways of life;[20] and this was followed by what many perceived to be the anti-humanism and nihilism of Straw Dogs, with its rejection of the twin Enlightenment conceits: that we can transcend our animals natures, and that we can attain permanent political and moral progress.[21]

In a sense, therefore, the effect of Gray’s course as a political philosopher has been to bring home the lesson that Ballard understood intuitively from his upbringing in Shanghai and his experiences in Lunghua camp: that the stage-set which we perceive as reality can come crashing to the ground in short order, and that violent and psychopathic behaviour can re-emerge no matter how civilised we view ourselves.[22] Given this, all attempts at an overarching political theory must fail to do justice to the facts of human existence. The implication for Gray is that politics must concern itself with pragmatic activity, with ways of somehow reconciling or negotiating between different interests and values, rather than with prescriptive theorizing. For Ballard, the lesson is that we can no longer look to politics as the source of fundamental change, but must rely on the transcending and transforming powers of the human imagination: ‘radical change [cannot] come from political means any longer. I think it can only come from the confines of the skull – by imaginative means, whatever the route may be …’.[23] But if redemption lies outside politics, then it is not the political philosopher but the writer of the imagination who can indicate a way forward, as Gray himself appears to recognise when he discusses Ballard’s writings:

The casual cruelty he witnessed in Shanghai, and the tragic early death of his wife Mary in 1964, revealed a world devoid of human meaning. The challenge Ballard faced was to show how fulfillment could be found in such conditions. His writings were the result, a lifelong experiment in imaginative alchemy, the transmutation of senseless dross into visions of beauty.[24]

… to view Ballard as a political moralist would be a complete misreading. He is not a Ralph Nader or Herbert Marcuse, railing against the emptiness of a society based on consumption. … Ballard’s achievement is not to have staked out any kind of political position. Rather it is to have communicated a vision of what individual fulfillment might mean in a time of nihilism.[25]

How might we understand Gray’s comment about fulfillment in a time of nihilism? Perhaps the best place to start is by looking more closely at the reasons why Gray rejects all political ideologies. Central to this dismissal of political theorizing is his critique of the idea of progress. Political theories which apply supposedly universal principles or techniques to the vicissitudes of the real world gain their traction from an implied end-point, towards which a society, or humanity as a whole, is travelling. But, claims Gray, improvements in society and ethics are not like gains in scientific knowledge. The latter are cumulative, but the former depend on practices – on skill and practical art – and can be easily lost if conditions change. One of the reasons we do not understand this is that we are blind to the roots of our long-standing assumption that progress is ubiquitous:

Like much else in secular thought the idea of progress is a legacy of Christianity. … The belief that salvation is a type of historical event is an innovation, most likely originating around three thousand years ago with the Persian prophet Zoroaster. … In modern times the belief that God could defeat evil was translated into secular terms, and became a strand in the Enlightenment. Substitute for God a divinized humanity, and you have the myth that lies behind radical secular politics from the Jacobins onwards. The impact of this vision went far beyond revolutionary movements. It also produced meliorism – the faith in gradual improvement of liberal humanists, who although they deny any belief in a single, world-transforming event still believe that the world can be remade by human action.[26]

On this view, the idea of progress constitutes an idolatry of time in which the particulars of the world are perceived and accorded value according to what they might lead to, emptying the present of value and eliminating the perspective of the timeless.[27] It assumes a linear time which flows into the future, rather than, say, a circular time determined by the seasons, which is what agriculturalists would be inclined to suppose. This is reminiscent of Ballard’s long-standing interest in different forms of time: as early as 1962 he was criticizing science fiction writers for ‘treating time like a sort of glorified scenic railway’,[28] which might serve as a graphic metaphor for the faith in unilinear progress which Gray sees as underlying Western political thought. In his early novels Ballard explored a variety of temporal possibilities: the archaeopsychic time of evolutionary history (The Drowned World), the erasure of memory in the ‘lunar landscapes’ of the future (The Drought),[29] and the surrender of temporal identity and erasure of time itself (The Crytsal World). The non-linear structure of The Atrocity Exhibition (1970), was intended as a counterpart to the fragmented nature of modern lives, as Ballard would later explain:

We live in a kind of enormously expanded present, which is just packed like a tenement city with images from the past, and to some extent the future, which have been commandeered, ransacked out of the years past and the years to come, and The Atrocity Exhibition really describes just that world. Traven is making a desperate bid to understand what all these elements that are no longer linked by time mean – if they are not linked by time, what are they linked by?[30]

The notion of a liberation from time re-emerged in a number of Ballard’s short stories from the early 1980s, and much of his subsequent work (Running Wild, Cocaine Nights, Super-Cannes, Millennium People, Kingdome Come) can be seen an extended exploration as to how we might live in what he terms an ‘endless present’ dominated by the media and consumption.

Especially problematical is the notion that our own lives are to be understood in terms of an ongoing narrative. For Gray, this is a modern, Western conceit that derives from Christian eschatology and its secularization in terms of the notions of linear progress and utopic societies:

The dominant western myths have been historical narratives, and it has become fashionable to view narrative as a basic human need. … [But] seeing one’s life as an episode in a universal narrative is a fantasy, and … has not always been regarded as a good thing. Many of the world’s mystics have aimed to achieve a state of contemplation in which the succession of happenings from which we construct the story of our lives is absent. … Poets and epicureans have cultivated a condition of spontaneity in which they could enjoy each moment for its own sake.[31]

According to this modern-day myth, our personal lives are a story in which the moment-by-moment present develops out of what happened to us in the past and derives its meaning from what it points to in the future. Ballard agrees with Gray in finding this unrealistic:

I mean there’s no sort of central ordering principle which each of us feels – we don’t sort of say half way through the day ‘Right! I am a character in, as it were, chapter three’ who has a narrative assignment determined by some sort of larger, evolving process, like a character in Hamlet.[32]

For Ballard, if our lives do actually resemble some form of narrative, then it must be one that has been written by William Burroughs, composed of chance or random events: ‘we switch on television sets, switch them off half an hour later, speak on the telephone, read magazines, dream, and so forth. We don’t live our lives in linear terms in the sense that the Victorians did.’[33]

In the absence of a linear narrative – whether it be eschatological, ideological, or personal – that provides meaning to our lives, salvation or fulfillment has to be an individual achievement and is to be sought not in the future but rather in a release from the grip of time. When Gray interviewed Ballard in 2000, he commented on how the author’s characters frequently seek to escape from memory, from the ‘shallow time that passes in their personal lives’: sometimes they find themselves free to explore a deeper notion of time that lies within the human nervous system, but on other occasions they ‘put the past aside in order to inhabit the present better’.[34] As Gray later noted in Straw Dogs and Black Mass, this surrender to the present as a way of finding release from time is a common theme in mysticism, religion and poetry.[35] In Ballard’s fiction, it is perhaps most evident in the three stories published in the early 1980′s: ‘News from the Sun’, ‘Memories of the Space Age’ and ‘Myths of the Near Future’, each of which features a widespread psychic disorder which distorts its victims’ perception of time. The stories’ protagonists come to understand that this makes available to them a world where all events – past and future – can be simultaneously present. This is not the obliteration of memory and hopes, but their displacement and incorporation into an everlasting present. Another – more modest and personal – version of this transformation appears in Ballard’s semi-autobiographical novel The Kindness of Women, where Jim describes the effect that family life has had on him: ‘The children Miriam had borne and the others who played by the stream had taken the place of the dead Chinese lying in the Lunghua creeks and canals. For the first time I was living in an endless present that owed nothing to the past.’[36]

For Gray, this assimilation of past and future into the present is more meaningful than our preoccupation with work and action, which – he supposes – serves the same aim. Activity and enterprise involve a form of ‘time worship’ whereby meaning is imparted to our lives by what we might achieve or become in the future, rather than by what we are now:

The world has come to be seen as something to be remade in our own image. … Action preserves a sense of self-identity that reflection dispels. When we are at work in the world we have a seeming solidity. Action gives us consolation for our inexistence. It is not the idle dreamer who escapes from reality. It is practical men and women, who turn to a life of action as a refuge from insignificance.[37]

This scepticism towards the value of work and action manifests itself in a number of Ballard’s novels – most noticeably in Super-Cannes, but also in the much earlier book The Drowned World. As Ballard explained in a 1975 interview,[38] Kerans’ decision to stay at the flooded lagoon in an attempt to understand and come to terms with the way he has been affected by the changes in landscape – which culminates in his suicidal journey South towards the sun – is the only meaningful course of action in the book. Compared to this, the behaviour of those who flee North, or those who drain the lagoon, is empty of meaning. In the book, Kerans reflects on the activity of Colonel Riggs, who ‘had not seen the dream, not felt its immense hallucinatory power. He was still obeying reason and logic, buzzing around his diminished, unimportant world with his little parcels of instructions like a worker bee about to return to the home nest.’[39] Sanders in The Crystal World learns the same lesson: ‘we have always associated movement with life and the passage of time, but from my experience within the forest near Mont Royal I know that all motion leads inevitably to death, and that time is its servant.’[40]

This rejection of the Western cult of enterprise and action-for-the-sake-of-action is similar to the Taoist concept of wu wei which, although frequently translated as ‘doing nothing’, is not an injunction to quietism but a recognition that, instead of formulating goals and deliberately aiming one’s actions at them, one may be better served by spontaneous behaviour that comes from a clear view of the world.[41] Taoism is just about the only philosophy that Gray has good words for in Straw Dogs,[42] admiring the way in which ‘spontaneous action’ does not mean giving oneself up to subjectivity and intensity of emotion – a legacy of Western romanticism – but reflecting on one’s situation with utmost clarity and discovering that there is actually just the one way in which one can act. In A.C. Graham’s words, ‘contemplating with … the senses perfectly clear one grasps everything in its unity, in a knowing which … we may think of as an instantaneous synthesising of all information as it comes.’[43]

This type of spontaneous action is similar to the behaviour of many of Ballard’s protagonists, particularly those in his early fiction – the novels and stories of ‘psychic fulfillment’ – such as Powers (‘The Voices of Time’), Kerans (The Drowned World), Sanders (The Crystal World), and Traven in The Atrocity Exhibition. Their actions can hardly be described as driven by the emotions, yet they lack the rationality which we normally associate with purposive behaviour. These characters wait, they assimilate the information available in their environments, and they take counsel from their unconscious and imagination – only then do they respond with what seems to them to be the appropriate response, and in doing so they follow ‘that single course which fits no rules but is the inevitable one.’[44] So in The Atrocity Exhibition, Traven listens to the time-music of the quasars, retreats to his terminal beach, and consults with Kline, Coma and Xero – the avatars of his unconscious; then he re-emerges to set out his ‘psychodramas’ and try to wrest meaning from a world made meaningless. These heroes of Ballard’s fiction understand that the relationship between self and world is such that taking a rationalised approach gets us nowhere; there are always reasons for and against several different plans of action, so it is best to ‘listen to Heaven which breathes through us’[45] and let the subterranean areas of our minds do the work:[46]

We are bombarded by this absolute deluge of fictional material of every conceivable kind and all this has the affect of … preempting our own original response to anything. … One has to foster one’s own imagination to a very intense degree, far more than most people realize. Most people have a huge capacity for imaginative response to the world that is scarcely tapped. … One will not be able to trust the external environment to provide all the necessary cues for a rich and fulfilling life.[47]

Gray believes that, once we forsake a rationalist philosophy and accept the power of the unconscious and the human imagination, we are better able to appreciate the significant role that religion and myth play in people’s lives: ‘If humans are different from other animals it is chiefly in being governed by myths, which are not creations of the will but creatures of the imagination. Emerging unbidden from subterranean regions, they rule the lives of those they possess.’[48] Religions constitute ways of living with mystery, with what we simply cannot know – and Gray believes that most of humanity will continue to have need of them. His enthusiasm for religion and his criticism of what he terms ‘proselytizing atheism’[49] would seem at odds with Ballard, who once claimed: ‘I assume there’s no after-life on the same basis that I assume the world is not balanced on the back of a giant tortoise.’ Yet later in the same interview, Ballard explained that he was nevertheless extremely interested in religion as a means by which people cope with the enigmas of the universe and of human consciousness, and compared it to the way that he himself, as a writer, tried to deal with the same subjects in an imaginative manner.[50] In fact a close reading of Ballard’s fiction discloses numerous examples of religious imagery, sometimes in surprising places such as The Atrocity Exhibition, one chapter of which is concerned with an abortive Second Coming of Christ in the 1960s (‘In the eucharist of the simulated auto-disaster we see the transliterated pudenda of Ralph Nader, our nearest image of the blood and body of Christ’), and Crash, which Ballard himself once described as a ‘psychopathic hymn’ (‘She sat in the damaged car like a deity occupying a shrine readied for her in the blood of a minor member of her congregation’).[51]

It seems that for both Gray and Ballard, religion is – in its essentials – about how we deal with what we cannot understand rationally, so it is not surprising to find that Gray attaches little importance to the role that belief plays in most religions. It is only, he thinks, certain types of Christianity and Islam where belief has a central place, where claims to knowledge replace imagination, symbolism and metaphor: ‘For polytheists, religion is a matter of practice, not belief; and there are many kinds of practice. For Christians, religion is a matter of true belief. If only one belief can be true, every way of life in which it is not accepted must be in error.’[52] Hence we can understand how this strong opponent of secular rationalism can tell Will Self: ‘beliefs – especially spiritual beliefs – are just an encumbrance. Best to have none, if you can manage it.’[53]

Yet despite the congruence of views between Ballard and Gray an impression persists that there is a substantive difference between them. For Ballard, there seems to be an urgency, a desire to wake people out of a stupor imposed by unthinking adherence to existing patterns of behaviour. At times, he suggests that almost any action is useful if it can crack ‘the conventional enamel that encases everything’.[54] This imperative is so strong that Ballard sometimes reads more like a proponent of the power of positive thinking than of the efficacy of the Taoist wu wei:

The challenge is for each of us to respond, to remake as much as we can of the world around us, because no one else will do it for us. We have to find a core within us and get to work. … Just get on with it![55]

Although Ballard cannot be said to value choice per se, he is convinced that for us, today, freedom of the individual to choose their own path has to trump the acceptance of established paradigms. The imperative is to exert oneself against ‘smothering conventionalized reality’[56] by using our imaginative resources, perhaps even our psychopathic urges, and this implies that there has to be value in the freedom to be able to act in this way. The individual must recognise that ‘he or she is all he or she has got.’[57]

Gray appears much more ambivalent. He argues that most people throughout history have never been the authors of their own lives, nor would they have even valued this type of life.[58] But, he goes on, ‘we have been thrown into a time in which everything is provisional. … We are forced to live as if we were free. The cult of choice reflects the fact that we must improvise our lives. That we cannot do otherwise is a mark of our unfreedom.’[59] Yet Gray seems to fear that emphasizing individual choice risks delivering us back into the clutches of a liberal individualism that is empty of substance:

… individual well-being presupposes an array of choiceworthy options which can only be supplied by worthwhile forms of common life. It is from the options provided by such forms of life that choices, however autonomous, derive all of their value. The ultimate locus of value in the human world is not, therefore, in individual choices.[60]

For Ballard, one suspects, resorting to values which lie in ‘worthwhile forms of common life’ is at bottom just another failure of the imagination, a refusal to confront the power of social conformity – no matter how much he might share Gray’s skepticism concerning the sovereign individual selves of Enlightenment rationalism and neo-liberalism.

This is maybe why, as he neared the end of his life, Ballard retained his sense of optimism. V. Vale of RE/Search Publications tells of discussing the impending global financial crisis with Ballard in late-2008, a few months before he died: ‘he said, “I remain optimistic”. I was really happy about that [because getting depressed] takes away your power, especially the power of your imagination which Ballard himself has demonstrated and incarnated in his life.’[61]

Vale and Ballard, towards the end of Ballard’s life.

Yet perhaps Gray is not quite the pessimist that one might guess from reading Straw Dogs. As Glen Newey points out,[62] Gray’s activity over the last 10 years or more – his regular public appearances and his journalistic pieces, many of which have confronted current issues such as the nature of globalization, Islamic fundamentalism, and changes in the old Soviet-bloc countries – contrasts sharply with the more theoretical writings of most political philosophers, and indicates that Gray has not given up but is offering us ‘a counsel of modesty rather than of impossibility.’ I suggest that Gray’s apparent pessimism reflects the fact that he has been primarily concerned with counteracting ideologies and puncturing their attendant illusions; conversely, Ballard’s optimism was a necessity for a writer searching for a sense of meaning and purpose which might be available in our everyday lives.[63]

This difference between the two writers points to a critical tension within Gray’s thought. Despite his strictures against liberal individualism, the effect of Gray’s attempts to undermine any and all universalist ‘solutions’ that derive from political theorizing (whether they be socialist, neo-liberal, return-to-basics conservative, or whatever) must be to place the emphasis back on the individual – who, after all, still has to come to terms with the society in which they find themselves.

One way of resolving this tension can be found in Ballard’s contention that (notwithstanding his sense of urgency and desire for change) we can only really become what we already are:

The whole purpose of imaginative enterprise – surrealist paintings or the sort of fiction I try to write – is to find one’s real nature. … I think that all of my fiction is optimistic because it’s a fiction of psychic fulfillment. The characters are finding themselves, which is after all the only definition of real happiness there is: to find yourself and be who you are.[64]

This is a conception of individualism that is no longer dependent on a free-standing, sovereign self or on the privileging of choice. Neither does it generate a temporal dimension whereby the present is a pale reflection of one’s shining future. Instead, by becoming what we already are, we mediate past and future and discover that long-standing Ballardian preoccupation – an everlasting present. Here, suggests Ballard, we can find the immanent counterparts of those aspects of human life – fulfillment, individuality, even community – which appeared to have receded out of reach and been replaced by empty concepts.

We can now see the full import of Gray’s comment that Ballard has tried to describe ‘what individual fulfillment might mean in a time of nihilism’. For Gray, nihilism is constituted by the belief that ‘human life must be redeemed from meaninglessness’.[65] Only a nihilist, after all, would assume that human life is of itself meaningless, and hence in need of rescue – a view which Gray sees as being shared by all political ideologies. What life actually needs is not another rescue attempt but Ballard’s passionate engagement. The alternative of pessimism and quietism represents just another version of the belief that we have reached the truth – a temptation which Gray rejects like all the rest:

The point of showing the flimsiness of all that is seemingly solid is not to come up with an immovable truth, and persuade the reader to accept it. Persuasion is a missionary enterprise, the goal of which is conversion. Instead the aim is to present a record of what one observer has seen, which readers can use as they will.[66]

NOTES

[1] John Horton & Glen Newey, ‘John Gray: A Political Theorist Of and Against Our Times’, in The Political Theory of John Gray, John Horton & Glen Newey (eds.), Routledge (New York & London), 2007; Pankaj Mishra, ‘The War of the Worlds’, Financial Times, 6 June 2009.

[2] John Gray, ‘Appreciation: J G Ballard‘, New Statesman, 23 April 2009.

[3] John Gray, ‘Modernity and Its Discontents‘, a review of Iain Sinclair’s book Crash: David Cronenberg’s Post-Mortem on J G Ballard’s ‘Trajectory of Fate’, New Statesman, 10 May 1999.

[4] The significance of chance and hidden assignments was one of the topics discussed when Gray interviewed Ballard on BBC Radio 4, 21 September 2000. See also Gray’s Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals, Granta Books (London), [2002]/2003, p. 38.

[5] For Ballard on ‘a ramshackle construct’, see ‘J G Ballard: Myths of the Near Future‘, an interview in ZG Magazine: Altered States (1988). For similar ideas in Gray, see Straw Dogs, op cit, pp. 26-28. The mediatization of reality is a familiar Ballardian trope, and forms a large part of the subject matter of The Atrocity Exhibition; see also Ballard’s early interviews, such as those in Speculation #21 (1969) and Friends #17 (1970). Gray discusses how the development of a media-dominated society was perceived at an early stage by both Ballard and Guy Debord in ‘Ulrika is a sign that we’ve got it all‘, New Statesman, 28 October 2002, and in his talk at ‘Ballardian Architecture: Inner and Outer Space‘, Royal Academy of Arts, London, 15 May 2010.

[6] The importance of our evolutionary heritage is a motif of The Drowned World and one of Ballard’s perennial themes. For Gray on the same topic, see Straw Dogs, op cit, p. 79, as well as the BBC Radio 4 interview with Ballard on 21 September 2000 where they also discuss the latent nature of violence and psychopathy.

[7] Gray’s Straw Dogs, op cit, is an extended attack on Enlightenment ideas. For Ballard on the Enlightenment, see ‘Ballard of an indignant man‘, an interview in the Australian newspaper The Age, 1 November 2003.

[8] Ballard’s concerns about multinationals, consumerism, and the like are best expressed in his later novels Super-Cannes (2000) and Kingdom Come (2006); for his views on socialism, see his conversation with Zinovy Zinik in The London Magazine: A Review of Literature and the Arts, February/March 2003; and for his opinions on Thatcher, see the interview with Lynn Fox (1991) in J G Ballard: Conversations, RE/Search Publications (San Francisco), 2005.

Gray’s rejection of socialism has been evident from the outset, for example in Hayek on Liberty, Blackwell (Oxford), 1984, and ‘The System of Ruins’ (1983) in Gray’s Anatomy: Selected Writings, Allen Lane (London), 2009. For Gray’s post-mortem on Thatcherism and his criticism of neo-liberalism, see Chapter 3 of Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia, Allen Lane (London), 2007; also ‘A Conservative Disposition’ (1991), ‘The Strange Death of Tory England’ (1995), ‘What Globalization is Not’ (1998) and ‘The World is Round’ (2005), all in Gray’s Anatomy: Selected Writings, op cit.

Both Gray and Ballard perceive that one result of neo-liberal capitalism is the destruction of the certainties of the middle-class way of life – which is turning out to have been a temporary phenomenon; see Gray’s Straw Dogs, op cit, pp. 159-166, and Ballard’s novel Millennium People (2003), which was reviewed by Gray in the New Statesman, 8 September 2003.

[9] For Gray on the monarchy, see ‘Monarchy is the key to our liberty‘, The Observer, 29 July 2007.

[10] For Gray on Hayek, see ‘Hayek as a Conservative’ (1983) in Gray’s Anatomy: Selected Writings, op cit; and on Oakeshott, see ‘Michael Oakeshott and the Political Economy of Freedom’, The World and I, September 1988.

[11] John Gray, ‘An Agenda for Green Conservatism’ (1993) in Gray’s Anatomy: Selected Writings, op cit.

[12] Ballard discusses his writings as stories of psychic fulfillment in ‘An Interview with J. G. Ballard: By James Goddard and David Pringle 4th January 1975′, published in J G Ballard: The First Twenty Years, J Goddard & D Pringle (eds.), Bran’s Head Books, 1976.

[13] John Gray, Heresies: Against Progress and Other Illusions, Granta Books (London), 2004.

[14] Simon Blackburn, in a review of Gray’s Anatomy: Selected Writings in The Sunday Times, 12 April 2009.

[15] The early basis for Gray’s view of Marxism as a millenarian philosophy is evident in his choice of Norman Cohn’s The Pursuit of the Millennium as ‘The book that changed my life‘, in New Statesman, 5 February 2009: ‘It is more than 40 years since I first read Norman Cohn’s The Pursuit of the Millennium. Published in 1957, the book deals with millenarian religious movements in late medieval and early modern Europe, but as Cohn makes clear, the millenarian mentality did not end with the waning of religion – 20th-century secular totalitarian movements exhibited similar patterns of thinking. … Reading Cohn’s masterpiece left me with a suspicion of world-transforming political projects that has remained with me ever since.’

[16] John Gray, ‘The Strange Death of Tory England’ (1995) in Gray’s Anatomy: Selected Writings, op cit.

[17] John Gray, False Dawn: The Delusions of Global Capitalism, Granta Books (London), 1998.

[18] The phrase is Glen Newey’s, from ‘Gray’s Blues: Pessimism as a Political Project’ in John Horton & Glen Newey (eds.), The Political Theory of John Gray, op cit.

[19] For Gray’s post-mortem on New Labour, see ‘Tony Blair, Neo-Con’ (2007) in Gray’s Anatomy: Selected Writings, op cit.

[20] Gray summarises modus vivendi as follows: ‘The aim of modus vivendi cannot be to still the conflict of values. It is to reconcile individuals and ways of life honouring conflicting values to a life in common. We do not need common values in order to live together in peace. We need common institutions in which many forms of life can coexist. … A theory of modus vivendi is not the search for an ideal regime, liberal or otherwise. It has no truck with the notion of an ideal regime. It aims to find terms on which different ways of life can live well together.’ ‘Modus Vivendi’ (2000) in Gray’s Anatomy: Selected Writings, op cit.

[21] Among those who interpret Straw Dogs as a retreat into nihilistic anti-humanism are George Kateb (‘Is John Gray a Nihilist?’, in John Horton & Glen Newey (eds.), The Political Theory of John Gray, op cit) and Glen Newey (‘Gray’s Blues: Pessimism as a Political Project’, also in The Political Theory of John Gray, op cit). My summary of Gray’s political theorizing owes a debt to that in Glen Newey’s ‘Gray’s Blues: Pessimism as a Political Project’, op cit.

[22] See J.G. Ballard, Miracles of Life, Fourth Estate (London), 2008, Chapter 5.

[23] J.G. Ballard, ‘Interview by Graeme Revell’ Re/Search 8/9: J G Ballard, Re/Search Publishing (San Francisco), 1984.

[24] John Gray, ‘Appreciation: J.G. Ballard’, op cit.

[25] John Gray, ‘Modernity and Its Discontents’, op cit.

[26] From the Introduction to Gray’s Anatomy: Selected Writings, op cit, pp. 12-13. See also ‘The Original Modernisers’ (2003) in Gray’s Anatomy: Selected Writings, op cit, and the Introduction to Heresies: Against Progress and Other Illusions, op cit.

[27] John Gray, ‘Santayana’s Alternative’ (1989) in Gray’s Anatomy: Selected Writings, op cit.

[28] J.G. Ballard, ‘Which Way to Inner Space?’, guest editorial in New Worlds #118, May 1962.

[29] In The Drought, Ransom seems to positively desire the erasure of memory and feeling that the burning world will provide: ‘At first Ransom had assumed that he himself, like Philip Jordan and Mrs Quilter, was returning to the past, to pick up the frayed ends of his previous life, but he now felt that the white deck of the river was carrying them all in the opposite direction, forward into zones of time future where the unresolved residues of the past would appear smoothed and rounded, muffled by the detritus of time, like images in a clouded mirror. Perhaps these residues were the sole elements contained in the future, and would have the bizarre and fragmented quality of the debris through which he was now walking. None the less they would all be merged and resolved in the soft dust of the drained bed.’ The Drought, Cape (London), 1965, pp. 202-203.

[30] Ballard’s audio-commentary for Jonathan Weiss’s film of The Atrocity Exhibition, Reel23 DVD #1, 2001.

[31] John Gray, Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia, Allen Lane (London), 2007, pp. 204-206.

[32] Ballard’s audio-commentary for Jonathan Weiss’s film of The Atrocity Exhibition, op cit.

[33] ‘The New Science Fiction: A conversation between J G Ballard and George MacBeth‘ in Langdon Jones (ed), The New SF, Hutchinson (London), 1969, pp. 51-52.

[34] Interview on BBC Radio 4 on 21 September 2000; the words quoted are Gray’s.

[35] John Gray, Straw Dogs, op cit, pp. 198-199; Black Mass, op cit, pp. 206-207.

[36] J.G. Ballard, The Kindness of Women, Harper Collins (London), 1991, p. 106.

[37] John Gray, Straw Dogs, op cit, pp. 193-194.

[38] ‘An Interview with J. G. Ballard: By James Goddard and David Pringle 4th January 1975′, op cit.

[39] J.G. Ballard, The Drowned World, Gollancz (London), 1962.

[40] J.G. Ballard, The Crystal World, Cape (London), 1966, p. 102, my emphasis.

[41] A.C. Graham, Disputers of the Tao: Philosophical Argument in Ancient China, Open Court (Illinois), 1989, pp. 232-234.

[42] John Gray, Straw Dogs, op cit, pp. 112-115.

[43] A.C. Graham, Disputers of the Tao: Philosophical Argument in Ancient China, op cit, pp. 102-103.

[44] A.C. Graham, Chuang-Tzu: The Inner Chapters, Mandala/Unwin Paperbacks, [1981]/1989, p. 7.

[45] An adaptation of A.C. Graham’s phrase in Chuang-Tzu: The Inner Chapters, op cit, p. 49.

[46] The most explicit example of Ballard’s affinity with the Taoist concept of wu wei – ‘doing nothing’ – occurs in his introductory comments to the short story ‘The Waiting Grounds’, where he refers to ‘the old conundrum of the ant searching hopelessly for the end of the infinite pathway around the surface of a sphere. “The Waiting Grounds” offers it a solution, implies that instead of crawling on and on it will find the pathway’s end if it just sits still’ (New Worlds #88, November 1959).

[47] ‘An interview with J.G. Ballard‘, Mississippi Review Vol. 20 #1-2, 1991.

[48] From the Introduction to Gray’s Anatomy: Selected Writings, op cit, p. 16.

[49] See, in particular, John Gray, Black Mass, op cit, Chapter 6, and ‘Evangelical Atheism, Secular Christianity’ (2008) in Gray’s Anatomy: Selected Writings, op cit.

[50] J.G. Ballard, ‘All praise and glory to the mind of man‘, The Sunday Telegraph, 20 March 1994.

[51] J.G. Ballard, The Atrocity Exhibition, Cape (London), 1970, p. 29, and Crash, Cape (London), 1973, p. 109. Both these books contain numerous examples of religious imagery, as do The Drought and The Crystal World. For Ballard on Crash as a psychopathic hymn, see his discussion with Will Self in the latter’s Junk Mail, Bloomsbury (London), 1995; and for Ballard on the use of religious imagery in the work of Salvador Dali, see ‘Goodbye Dali’, Science Fiction Eye #5, July 1989.

[52] John Gray, Straw Dogs, op cit, p. 126.

[53] ‘John Gray: Forget everything you know‘, an interview by Will Self in The Independent, 3 September 2002.

[54] J.G. Ballard, ‘Interview by Graeme Revell’, op cit.

[55] ‘The Strange Visions of J.G. Ballard‘, an interview in Rolling Stone, 19 November 1987.

[56] J.G. Ballard, ‘Interview by Graeme Revell’, op cit.

[57] ‘The Strange Visions of J.G. Ballard’, op cit.

[58] John Gray, Straw Dogs, op cit, pp. 58-59.

[59] John Gray, Straw Dogs, op cit, p. 110, my emphasis.

[60] John Gray, ‘An Agenda for a Green Conservatism’ (1993) in Gray’s Anatomy: Selected Writings, op cit.

[61] Panel discussion at the Kosmopolis 08 international literature festival, based at the Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona, 25 October 2008; quoted at http://www.ballardian.com/myths-of-a-near-future-sellars-sterling-vale.

[62] Glen Newey, ‘Gray’s Blues: Pessimism as a Political Project’, in The Political Theory of John Gray, John Horton & Glen Newey (eds.), op cit.

[63] It is interesting to compare Gray – who has had to reject the epithets of pessimist and nihilist – with Ballard, who was frequently seen as a cold, analytic writer of dystopian fictions, despite his protestations to the contrary. For Gray’s rejection of the notion that he is a pessimist or a nihilist, see the profile by Will Self in The Independent, 3 September 2002, and ‘Reply to Critics’ in The Political Theory of John Gray, John Horton & Glen Newey (eds.), op cit. Gray himself is well aware of the misinterpretation of Ballard as a pessimistic writer – see his review of Super-Cannes in the New Statesman, 11 September 2000. For a recent view of Ballard as a dystopian writer, see Dominika Oramus, Grave New World: The Decline of the West in the Fiction of J.G. Ballard, University of Warsaw, 2007.

[64] ‘J.G. Ballard at Home’, an interview in Métaphores [University of Nice] #7, 1983.

[65] John Gray, Straw Dogs, op cit, p. 128.

[66] From the Introduction to Gray’s Anatomy: Selected Writings, op cit, p. 17. Those familiar with Ballard will note the similarity between Gray’s position and Ballard’s refusal to set out a moral framework for his own writings, particularly the more extreme ones such as Crash. It is up to the reader, Ballard suggests, to decide what conclusions, moral or psychological, might be drawn from his ‘extreme hypotheses’; see ‘Interview by Graeme Revell’, op cit, and Ballard’s comments on David Cronenberg’s film of Crash in Index on Censorship, Vol.26 #3 (1997).

Poster from the IG exhibition, Parallel of Art and Life, co-designed by Paolozzi in 1953.

On Friday 18th February, from 10am-5.30pm, the one-day conference ‘Eduardo Paolozzi Re-readings’ will be held at the Visual Culture Research Centre at Manchester Metropolitan University. The conference will coincide with a Paolozzi exhibition at the MMU’s Holden Gallery.

According to the press release:

“The conference will shed new light on the graphic works of Eduardo Paolozzi (1924-2005). The conference seeks to make a significant contribution to the reappraisal of this seminal artist/co-founder of the Independent Group. His work was included in two recent major exhibitions, “Eduardo Paolozzi: The Jet Age Compendium” at Raven Row, London (2009) and “CRASH: Homage to JG Ballard” at the Gagosian, London (2010).

The conference findings will supplement an exhibition by Paolozzi at the Holden Gallery at MMU (Feb 13-March 13). Paolozzi’s edition, GENERAL DYMANIC F.U.N. (1970), comprises 50 screen prints and photolithographs and is introduced by his friend and collaborator, J.G. Ballard. On publication, this work was welcomed as Pop Art, but through Ballard’s eyes it was closely related to his own literary project that sought to analyze the media landscape for its libidinous content. Taking the metaphor of re-reading, speakers will reconsider Paolozzi’s work from a variety of points of view, including the significance of his collaboration with Ballard.

The list of provisional speakers is:
* Professor Jim Aulich; David Brittain; Professor Allen Fisher; Dr Crista-Maria Lerm Hayes; Carol Huston; Joanne Murray; Jon Oberlander; Dr John Sears

The one-day conference concludes with a personal tour of the exhibition, GENERAL DYNAMIC F.U.N. by the eminent art historian Robin Spencer. He is editor of “Eduardo Paolozzi: Writings and Interviews”, and worked very closely with the artist on the creation of the Krazy Kat Arkive, currently situated at the Victoria & Albert Museum.”

More information here.

To promote the event, conference organiser David Brittain has kindly allowed us to publish excerpts from his excellent essay on Paolozzi, Ballard and Ambit, included in The Jet Age Compendium: Paolozzi at Ambit.

Extracts from ‘Eduardo Paolozzi at Ambit’ by David Brittain from The Jet Age Compendium: Paolozzi at Ambit (Four Corners Books, 2009)

It would seem that Ballard and Martin Bax recruited Paolozzi into the editorial team of AMBIT as a fellow traveller and surrealist. Ballard had been an admirer of Paolozzi’s work since the early 50s and they had long shared many of the same interests, obsessions and themes. Both were interested in science and were proud to identify with the new generation of producer/consumers that Susan Sontag described as “against interpretation”. Like Paolozzi’s art works, Ballard’s writing style (an intoxicating goulash of literary prose and scientific jargon) was indebted to surrealist collage. Each was attracted to the apocalyptic: Ballard’s early “catastrophe” novels foretold the end of civilisation by unstoppable natural or man-made forces, while the hulking half-man, half-machine sculptures of Paolozzi reminded Ballard of “survivors of a nuclear war.” As a novice writer Ballard had visited Independent Group (IG) shows including This is Tomorrow, the famous 1956 group exhibition at the Whitechapel in London. Now recognised as a milestone in the emergence of Pop art, this event became the most popular and critically acclaimed manifestation of the work and ideas of the various members of the IG.

Cover of Ambit #50, 1972 – Bax standing with Ballard and Paolozzi (third and fourth from right).

Paolozzi and Ballard in the Imperial War Museum, 1971.

Richard Hamilton contributed his collage Just What Makes Today’s Home So Different, So Good. Paolozzi teamed up with Nigel Henderson and Peter and Alison Smithson to construct “The Patio and Pavilion” that was described in the catalogue as “a habitat for symbolic of human needs – space, shelter, and privacy…”, a description which suggests analogies between Paolozzi’s art and the post-catastrophe landscapes from Ballard’s early fiction. Ballard recalls: “a terminal hut stood on a patch of sand, on which were laid out the basic implements that modern man would need to survive: a power tool, a bicycle wheel and a pistol.” It was this exhibition that convinced Ballard that writers were falling behind artists in their recognition of the impact of science on everyday life and he resolved to write fiction along the same lines. Paolozzi, whom Ballard respected for adapting early avant-garde insights to the contemporary scene, was the only “visual writer” in this inner space clique. Ballard placed him within “a tradition of imaginative response to science and technology” that included H.G. Wells, Aldous Huxley, Salvador Dali and William Burroughs.

By the mid 70s, Ballard’s influence on AMBIT was at its height; the tone of AMBIT no 63 is set by descriptions of bizarre scenes of violence taken from the forthcoming novel, High Rise. The novelist’s “apocalyptic vision” and his determination to entangle AMBIT in controversy informs the collaboration between Bax and Paolozzi. Published in 1975, and timed to coincide with the ending of the war, “The Vietnam Symphony” comprised text by Martin Bax; grids of images, many sourced from Moonstrips Empire News, were supplied by Paolozzi. Paolozzi’s decision to juxtapose jingoistic images of smiling politicians with suffering war victims is a visual analogue of Ballard’s grand theme of the real as a perverse fiction.

Print from Paolozzi’s Moonstrips Empire News, 1963.

Paolozzi’s contributions to AMBIT were consistent with its anti-war spirit, yet his attitude to America was ambivalent. At the time he was visiting regularly in the role of lecturer at the University of California (1968), and in his youthful advocacy of popular culture, had seemed to be pro-American but now Paolozzi began to express doubts to friends. Ballard recalls that: “His early fascination with all things American rather faded after his teaching trip to Berkeley in the late 60s.”

For Paolozzi, AMBIT stood for values and principles he held in common with his peers and supporters that were political and ethical as well as artistic. His closest collaborators were Ballard and Bax with whom he occupied the inner circle of AMBIT’s decision-making alongside art director Michael Foreman. Back issues of AMBIT offer ample evidence that the magazine was the setting for a shared vision that united these three friends and collaborators, and that enabled them to complete each other in some ways. Just as Paolozzi’s collages elaborated themes of inner space, so Ballard’s polemical texts, about science and art, gave the artist’s work a contemporary theoretical underpinning. Meanwhile, Paolozzi’s “language games” gave meaning and purpose to Bax’s flaunting of literary conventions.

Two prints from Paolozzi’s General Dynamic F.U.N. series (1970).

Paolozzi’s cover for Ambit #40, 1969.

..:: Previously on Ballardian:
+ “Ambiguous aims”: a review of Crash: Homage to J.G. Ballard [NSFW]

The panel. From left to right: Sellars, Sterling, Vale, Costa. Photo by Martí Pons, courtesy CCCB 2008.

“Hello Barcelona. I hope everyone there is enjoying the show, if I’m allowed to call it that. Vale is taking charge of everything, and I leave him to represent me.”

J.G. Ballard, from Vale’s opening video.

Two years ago, I appeared on a panel, ‘Myths of a Near Future’, with writer Bruce Sterling and V. Vale of RE/Search Publications to discuss the work of J.G. Ballard. Held at the Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona (CCCB) as part of the Kosmopolis 08 literary festival, the panel was chaired by the Spanish critic Jordi Costa, the driving force behind the CCCB’s magnificent ‘JG Ballard – Autopsy of the new millennium‘ exhibition.

Jordi began with a Spanish-language introduction, and then Vale followed with a 15-minute video detailing his relationship and collaborations with Ballard. Jordi’s questions were in Spanish, and they were translated for us and the audience via earpiece. Our friend Tim Chapman was in the audience and he has kindly transcribed the discussion from his recording, although his Spanish was not sufficient to recall Jordi’s questions in English.

So here it is, two years late, but hopefully still of interest: ‘Myths of a Near Future’.

Jordi Costa: [a question about the definition of 'Ballardian']

Bruce Sterling: I’m of the school who believes JG Ballard really is a science fiction writer, and I think he made very wise choices in the sciences he was interested in. He did in fact work on this engineering and technology publication for quite a while. He was famous for saying that the rubbish can of science was the gold mine of science fiction. That’s certainly something I learned a lot from. But while a lot of science fiction writers were interested in topics like space flight and robots and atomic power and nuclear physics, Ballard was always interested in medicine, and psychotherapy, and extremes of human behaviour, and hysteria, and panic, and weapons.

I think his chosen scientific topics had more literary value than the ones that were chosen by his colleagues in science fiction. That’s why his work has lasted, and that’s why he was able to capture something about the nature of society that lets us use terms like ‘Ballardian’. He just had a better literary understanding than most of his colleagues, a better set of tools, deeper insights that were better expressed, and that’s why he’s a major cultural figure while most science fiction writers are genre writers.

Sellars, Sterling, Vale, Costa. Photo by Martí Pons, courtesy CCCB 2008.

Costa: [another question about the definition of 'Ballardian']

Simon Sellars: I think the adjective ‘Ballardian’ will become immortal, because I think that, to take what Bruce has said about the way Ballard turned from the traditional notion of science fiction from outer space to inner space, I think that was a very prophetic move. He saw the way technology was heading. There’s a famous phrase of his that he wanted to explore the next five minutes rather than the next 500 years. To me, that says that he saw that technology was creating a turning inward in a psychological sense. He saw the democratisation of technology, in terms of technology that – in a phrase of Bruce’s from the cyberpunk era – would stick to the skin rather than being something else. He would write about this stuff rather than the modernist aesthetic of rockets and outer space. I think that was a very prophetic move.

Also, he saw the way that we’re entering this globally homogeneous space, a sort of eventless present as he likes to call it, where you virtually can go to any country in the world. He talks about the areas around motorways and airports as a metaphor for this homogeneous space, and I think he saw the implications of where this is all heading. He also reacted against it, so I see his work as a resistance against this sort of corporate culture, and against the drive of, I guess, late capitalism to classify and categorise everything.

To me, the most important thing about Ballard is providing this space that he evokes, that preservation of inner spaces and autonomous zones. I’ve been reading a lot of mainstream newspaper articles recently, talking about the colonisation of inner space and the way we’re really crowded with information. The terms that were used and the arguments they were making were the things that Ballard was talking about in the ’60s. In that sense, I’d say there was this philosophy of resistance to a political culture. To me, that’s a sort of ideal for living.

Costa: [a question about future perceptions of Ballard]

Sterling: I think what you’re asking there is, like, is his work due to date because he’s a period figure. No, I don’t think so. Like the work of William Burroughs, there are aspects of Ballard’s work which will be very frightening and even astonishing to people in a hundred years. It’s true that some things that he foresaw have become everyday things among us, but there are aspects of Ballard’s work which are really intensely visionary and are never going to be seen in everyday experience, like say The Crystal World disaster novel, or something goes wrong with the structure of time and people are overwhelmed by this cosmic disaster. As a young man, that was one of the touchstones of my literary experience – it’s by no means a realist novel, but it had a really powerful, emotional, liberating effect on me as a teenager, just because it was showing me the scope of things that it’s possible to imagine.

Ballard has a tremendous power of imagination which the passage of time is not going to be able to dim. There are topics of his which will become out-dated, like Marilyn Monroe or John F Kennedy that are going to be period figures. In a way he’s a lot like Kafka – even though Kafka writes about the experience of the 1930s, when we say ‘Kafkaesque’, we know what that means, that no real bureaucracy will be as ideally horrible as a Kafka bureaucracy, no disaster (although we have plenty) can ever be as ecstatic and total as a Ballard disaster.

Costa: [a question about the Ballardian implications of the global financial crisis]

V. Vale: You know, Ballard is a very wise man in his judgement, and I’m thinking that of course when he starts taking in the input of information about the financial crisis, what is he thinking about. He’s not really thinking about himself, he’s thinking about the welfare of his children and grandchildren, I think. Also, he knows who his audience is. I’m also a parent. This may sound strange, but he actually heartened me with his response. He more or less said to me, regarding the current state of financial chaos, downturn, whatever you call it – he said you know, I remain optimistic. I was really happy about that, regardless of whether there’s any foundation or not.

I think it is important to preserve a sense of optimism and hope. In many situations, I think, one can only hope. There certainly isn’t any point in just becoming very depressed, because that takes away your power, especially the power of your imagination which Ballard himself has demonstrated and incarnated in his life. He walks down the street and every time he does, it might be the same street but the street is transformed in his imagination. This is something we can all do – we don’t have to take reality at face value. There has to be another dimension of inner space and inner strength we can tap, and that’s got to be built up in each one of us by a sustained exercise – daily, hourly, minutely – of the imagination. Please, never take anything at face value, you never accept any of these mass media notions of reality.

Sellars: I think that’s true, and that’s why Ballard’s books are optimistic. It’s a misreading when people say they’re a negative vision of the world – you hear that so often about Ballard’s work. But for the reasons you say, the characters are trying to make sense of chaos, and that transforms the world.

Sterling: I completely agree. He is a fantasist, he’s not a realist writer. I find his work attractive because of the sense of liberation and inspiration and release that he gives me. Really, as a young man of imaginative bent, when I was reading these early books of Ballard in the 1960s, I was never depressed or upset by them for a moment. To me, they were one torrent of good news. They were like sunlight through a [brick?] wall in the existence I had as a young teen in a small Texan industrial town.

This is someone who really is a grand master of the imagination. Yes, he does have black humour, and yes he very much enjoys pulling the legs of the bourgeoisie, he likes to make harsh jokes at the expense of power figures, and he’s really a clinician of the psychopathology of everyday life. There are a lot of things that people do in our society which are irrational and bad for us. He had a great deal of personal experience of that, and there are aspects of his own experience which are universal.

Sellars, Sterling, Vale, Costa. Photo by Martí Pons, courtesy CCCB 2008.

He’s not a tremendously popular figure, he’s not the author of Harry Potter, but he’s by no means a minor figure. Certainly, in the circle of American science fiction writers of my generation – cyberpunks and humanists and so forth – this was a towering figure. We used to have bitter struggles over who was more Ballardian than whom. We knew we were not fit to polish the man’s boots, and we were scarcely able to understand how we could get to a position to do work which he might respect or stand, but at least we were able to see that the peak of achievement that he had reached. It was not like the slough of despond, that’s just a rhetorical tactic.

To call Ballard depressing, it’s like a Christian fundamentalist who says ‘If I didn’t believe Jesus was watching me, I’d kill myself’ who then argues that therefore you must be suicidal because you don’t have Jesus to help you make breakfast. You’re not suicidal if you understand JG Ballard. On the contrary, this guy’s a consummate survivor. Burroughs and his friends and the beatnik movement had a tremendous casualty list, whereas Ballard and his friends in the British New Wave movement and the Pop Art scene were actually fairly solid, well-balanced if unconventional individuals – people with jobs and children, they were not reedy figures. This is a towering oak tree of a writer, who wrote many volumes of consistently good, accomplished work.

Many science fiction writers have – even [Homer?] nods, it’s common for a writer to do something unworthy of himself and you have to overlook that. In Ballard’s case, I can’t think of a single work. Even his minor work is very polished, very assured – he’s never hasty, he’s a consummate professional, he’s really in charge of every sentence on the page. It’s really no accident that he’s being honoured at this event. I must say that I am enjoying the show, as he urged me to do, it’s a lot of fun to see this happen.

Vale: I think another thing about Ballard is, during my 32 years in publishing I’ve pretty much concentrated on the interview or the conversation format for a very simple reason. You don’t give the questions in advance, and you just use your intuition to listen carefully and observe how the author responds in real-time to something completely unexpected and how they improvise answer. You’re not even improvising if you’re JG Ballard, this is just coming out of you without pause.

Really, the amount of editing I’ve had to do on all the people I’ve recorded and transcribed, the amount of editing was absolutely the least I’ve ever had to do with JG Ballard and, of course, William S Burroughs. Their conversations are practically extensions of their writing. I wish we could all be like that.

Sellars: Vale, can I ask did you get the sense through the interviews that Ballard was testing ideas that he would later come back to in his writing?

Vale: I don’t think he tests, I really think there’s almost a perfect marriage in his soul between – as soon as he starts talking and thinking and expressing himself, it’s beyond some rational process level. It’s just coming out, he has such an incredibly detailed and complete philosophy, such an evolved vision of the universe, unlike most of us he doesn’t have to censor himself or choose his words carefully or any of that, it just comes out. One reason I like him so much is because you really think that he’s considering your feelings, you really think that unlike 99 per cent of writers out there, he just tells the truth. I can’t explain it any other way. I mean, how rare is that?

Costa: [unknown question]

Sterling: Well, I wouldn’t call Crash a jolly book by any means. It’s a very sinister work which is well informed by a deep understanding of human psychopathology. In some ways, it’s like expecting a medical textbook to be optimistic. If you read a medical textbook, it’s usually a long list of terrible things that can go wrong with people. By the time you reach the end of a medical textbook, you’re looking at yourself for symptoms – is it my liver, could it be my eyeballs?

I don’t think that work in itself is a happy work, but when you put it down the sense of escaping that world gives you a strange uplifted feeling. It’s like being subjected to a really violent massage, something on the edge of pain, and when it stops you have this sense of achievement and joy. It’s like, what’s the worst thing that can happen to me during the rest of my life? Will I be involved in a sexual cult involving crashed automobiles? Probably not, you know, and that’s another reason to go on.

Vale: A writer often takes you – if you have an idea or a fantasy, I think you ought to take it to the utmost limit. It’s only writing, it’s not real life. In writing, you can kill people, you can do sexual things that you might not do in real life, but it’s just writing, it’s just words on paper. I think you have a duty to yourself to carry an obsession, any obsession is valid, to its utmost extension in writing, on paper, in the realm of the imagination – I’m not saying to do any of that in real life.

Ballard and Vale, in a still from Vale’s opening video. Photo by Martí Pons, courtesy CCCB 2008.

Sterling: I really don’t think that’s the ultimate extension of this particular problem. There are probably people in Nascar who are worse off than the characters in that. There are probably fans of monster racers in the United States who are more psychopathological than the characters in Crash.

To me, the thing that I find really useful about that book is that most science fiction writers, if you asked them to write science fiction about cars, would write about, say, a flying car or a car that’s also a submarine. They would not write about an intense psychosexual fixation with cars, or the car as another method of being, or people who are so dependent on cars they can’t get through a day without cars. They certainly would not illuminate the truth about cars, which is they kill more of us than wars.

There’s probably not a person in this audience who hasn’t had a loved one injured or maimed or killed in a car. That’s just the truth about cars, but we are very rarely shown that truth. Certainly not by the car industry. Sometimes there will be a mention of car safety in a car commercial, like your child is safe in the back seat, but you will never see a major car company of any description, from Fiat to Toyota or General Motors, apologising to the people who die in their vehicles, any more than you would see an armaments manufacturer saying, you know, I’m sorry people were killed by handguns. But it’s true. It’s not even like sort of true, it’s kind of like a vast open scandal in our society that so many of us are murdered, I mean just slaughtered, by cars.

Sellars: But it’s very ambiguous with Ballard, isn’t it, because he’s also aware of the seductive nature of cars and technology and speed.

Sterling: Well, we love our cars. But there’s something wrong with a society that is so in love with something so destructive. I don’t even know if it is wrong, it’s a statement about the nature of mankind that we love that which destroys us. We’re more interested in poisonous snakes than we are in rabbits, we’re fascinated by things with the potential for menace, we find them arousing and exciting. The same goes for political leaders. Really, someone who promises to simply pave our streets and look after our children will be immediately thrown aside for a person who promises us blood and sweat and tears and toil and death and a sense of exultation. Ballard talks about this openly many times, about the attractive psychopathology of cult leaders. They have command over us because they can tap into our urge to harm ourselves, and we do.

Costa: [a question about Ballard's methods]

Vale: Well, there’s a huge component of theatre in everyone’s life. Ballard was the first that I read to point out how the invention and widespread adoption of the cellphone has led to almost everyone becoming a sort of actor. As they talk on their cellphones in public, they’re acting a lot of the time, with their gestures, and it is kind of shocking to me how cellphone users will talk about the most intimate details of their lives while other people can overhear them.

The thing is, what a book can do, it can, like, let you know in a pretty universalising way that you’re not alone in any of your sexual fantasies or whatever, no matter how extreme you might have thought them. Your participation, even if just in your imagination, with these theatrical fantasies, you’re just not alone. I suppose it’s a form of justification to make your life easier for you. We do look to writers, I think, for help in navigating very perplexing times such as now when we have so many options for everything in our lives. What are some core values which can last when we’re assaulted with so many contradictory media images, and they’re usually either sexual or violent in nature, how do you sustain some kind of inner compass or barometer so we can survive all this?

Left: Bruce Sterling. Photo by Martí Pons, courtesy CCCB 2008.

Sterling: Some of Ballard’s greatest inspirations were surrealists in the 30s and pop artists in the 60s, and they were both very big on the power of the unconscious and the libido and urges which did not surface within consciousness. There was an ideal there that if you could speak to these urges directly and break the code of bourgeois behaviour and liberate something deep.

Ballard is not a sex writer in the way that say Henry Miller was a sex writer, I don’t really think that’s one of his major interests. He mentions it, he’s kind of deploying it in the way that Max Ernst might put a nude in a collage, but there aren’t really long intimate sex scenes in Ballard novels, he’s not really that interested in what happens between individuals. It’s more like his lasting interest in celebrity worship, which is something that shows up in his work all the time. It’s like some kind of very intense social, emotional, sticky and vaguely unhealthy allegiance between people’s unmet emotional needs and a figure like Jackie Kennedy or Marilyn Monroe or Princess Di. It’s somebody you’re never going to actually have sex with, but it’s somebody who’s going to come up in your erotic imaginations sort of like the Loch Ness Monster.
That’s the kind of thing that Ballard finds as a totem and a touchstone. He’s kind of deploying these things against us – he wants us to disrupt our sleep with these images, he’s not trying like Miller to get to the core of the erotic impulse, that’s not really his major line of work.

Sellars: He also foresaw that whole anti-celebrity thing, that celebrities now don’t have the lustre or starpower they used to. Those surgical fictions with Princess Margaret and Mae West where it’s cutting up these celebrities in a very clinical medical way, it’s very prophetic of the end of that particular paradigm.

Sterling: I’ve been saying Paris Hilton is a very Ballardian figure. Here you have somebody whose major reason for being a celebrity is this kind of unsought sexual transgression which was blown up through the media. It’s not really like that fantastic an act of sex that Paris Hilton has, it’s not like she’s a sexual athlete of some kind, it’s merely that she’s a minor celebrity who became a major celebrity and was able to work it, to industrialise that and build upon it with the perfume and the record and clothing line and the Los Angeles celebrity life, really just construct a life out of elements of 1960s transgression.

Costa: [unknown question]

Sellars: It’s a kind of system of circular time that Ballard uses, that sort of eventless present that’s always a symbol of oppression in Ballard’s work. He reuses events from history and his own personal history and re-inhabits them and re-interprets them throughout his whole career, and I think that’s a very liberating force as well. It becomes a sort of parallel history in a sense, something that runs counter to the main narrative.

Sterling: I think Ballard knows a great deal about the work of the surrealists in the 20s and 30s. So much so, that he is almost a surrealist writer. He quite frequently chose surrealist canvases for his own work, and they make a lot of sense. I think he also has a deep knowledge of modernist design and urbanism and architecture. He’s very aware of the roots of that in the 20s and 30s and how it developed, and the successes of the modernist programme and the failures of modernism, and the oncoming and rush of postmodernism. To be a good futurist, you need some kind of roots in the past. I think those are his roots, and those are the things he was looking at when he was quite young and he really is a scholar in those fields, and I think that has helped him a lot in his prognostications.

Left: Simon Sellars. Photo by Martí Pons, courtesy CCCB 2008.

Costa: [a question about Ballard's influence on visual art]

Sellars: I think it’s like Bruce and Vale have said, that Ballard has a surrealist background, has a very visual mindset. I think that aside from using that to explore his ideas of the subconscious and inner space, I think that in the 60s he saw how advertising was becoming basic in how we were shifting towards a visual culture. He has sort of encoded this into his writing. As we’re starting to see this happen, I think that aspect of his work is becoming more and more influential and people are really picking up on that.

He is a visual person to the extent that he’s created his own collages, he’s starred in his own film, and I think he was working on a theatre play in the 60s, so he was really interested in breaking the frame of his fiction to create something that was in a sense a prototype for a multi-media society, and he was doing that a long time ago. If you look at that visual work that Ballard did today, the collages, they’re still very strong graphic works that really re-use the tricks of advertising against itself. When I started up the website, that’s an aspect that really interested me a lot, and we started to find a lot of examples of people who were really quite influenced by that. We’re still continuing to find a lot of people who are really influenced by that aspect.

Sterling: I think he has a great friendliness for the artist. Like his short story collection Vermilion Sands is set in a future art colony and he takes artistic work seriously. I think artists and musicians respond to that. When they find a novelist who thinks that painters are important, they think well of him. Whereas most science fiction writers are much more in love with scientists than they are with artists, Ballard is the kind of guy who would actually go hang out with pop artists and go to their openings and befriend them and be kind to them and chat things over with them and learn with them and trade things with them. He was never a philistine, he’s actually quite sophisticated in that way, and still has the dapper look of a ’60s pop artist gentleman in his neat little kitted-out white suit and snappy white fedora. He’s won the friendship of people in other lines of work.

Vale: He has constructed a whole universe and whole world, and the world always needs a soundtrack. What would this be – it would not be something mainstream so much as something unusual. Grace Jones at one end and you could have Joy Division at the other, and in the middle there’s the Teddy Bears Picnic. The thing is, the spectrum of music is – I have to confess I’m going to reveal a small secret, I hope she doesn’t mind, but Claire Walsh [Ballard's partner] did tell me that she suggested one of the numbers on the [Desert Island Discs] list, one of the 10 pieces on the list was actually suggested by Claire Walsh as a sort of prank. They certainly puzzled me, those two classical pieces, which is where it’s at to me. You always want to have an aspect of mystery about everything you do, even if it’s by chance that something happens. I think Ballard, again as a surrealist, is very open to the miracle of a chance encounter or a chance suggestion. He is open to that, in the same way the surrealists were.

Sterling: He’s someone who doesn’t just facilely admire Dali or Ernst, he’s actually read Dali and frequently quotes Dali. I think he probably learned quite a lot from Andre Breton. Similarly, I read Andre Breton because I thought Ballard took him seriously. Many people say Breton was a rather downbeat figure as well, but that was certainly not what occurred to people in Breton’s immediate circle. They all called him the torch who lights our steps, they considered him an organising and enlightening figure, not someone who was on the fringe of society but someone who was leading them into sunlit uplands.

I think that comes across very strongly in his work, he’s not really interested in the arts, he’s interested in how artists think and how they approach reality, and that’s what gives him a well-rounded sensibility. There are a lot of pop writers and comicbook writers and so forth who are very into pop music, and heaven knows cyberpunks love rock and roll, but to have a whole wider sensibility that really appeals to a great many people in many different lines of creative work, it’s more like surrealism which is almost a philosophy, a way of life, rather than a painting, a poetry, a form of sculpture, a form of music, that’s a way of being.

Left: V. Vale. Photo by Martí Pons, courtesy CCCB 2008.

Vale: I agree with that. Surrealism is definitely a way of life, a philosophy, a consciousness with historical art roots that’s something living, the potential is far from extinguished. You just have to read the hundreds of books, that’s a start. Most people – they didn’t get taught surrealism in my art history class. I hope things have advanced since then.

Costa: [unknown question]

Sterling: Stunned, the audience stares at one another…

Audience question: [about preventing horrible futures]

Sellars: Only if we read more Ballard books, it’s the only way…

Sterling: I really think probably the critical moment in Ballard’s literary life was the two years he spent in Canada, when he was in the Royal Air Force in Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan. He described his period at this air force base as being paralysingly boring, and the only outlet he found there were copies of these American pulp science fiction magazines which by some strange accident had ended up on this military base. You have to imagine this young very asocial man who’s basically flunked out of medical school and joined the military, and having lived in China is now in an icy camp somewhere in Canada reading American science fiction for a lack of any other alternative. From that experience which is frankly rooted in boredom we get the greatest literary artist of the science fiction genre, and probably the most visionary science fiction writer of the 20th century. Boredom can be the seed of great things.

Vale: Well, the imagination is obviously the antidote to any boredom, and it’s always there ready to be deployed. Imagination and brains are our secret resource which makes everyone in the audience an artist, because in your dreams you’re a complete film director, you’re the scriptwriter, you’re the set designer, you’re the make-up person, you create everything and it’s all happening when you dream every night. It’s really kind of a miracle.

Audience question: [about film adaptations]

Sterling: I know he enjoyed appearing as an extra in his own film. In Empire of the Sun, there’s a period where Ballard appears in the movie as an older figure. He’s always lived in Shepperton which is quite close to the Shepperton film studios which in Britain are famous for the films that are made and the sets that are made. But I don’t think he’s either disturbed or enthusiastic about it, I think he’s had a very mature response to his unsought cinematic success. I don’t think he was either disappointed or shocked or chagrined. He did the wise thing by letting Hollywood do what it wanted.

Costa: [closing comments]

[applause]

…:: Previously on Ballardian:

+ ‘Unblinking, clinical’: From Ballard to cyberpunk
+ Kosmopolis 08: Landing Gear
+ Kosmopolis 08: Switching stations
+ Negative acoustic space: Ballardian sound art
+ Rick McGrath’s Letter from Barcelona: The Exquisite Corpse, An Autopsy of the New Millennium
+ Ballardoscope: some attempts at approaching the writer as a visionary
+ J.G. Ballard: In the Raw
+ J.G. Ballard, Autopsy of the New Millennium: Press Release
+ Autopsy of the New Millennium: JGB exhibition opens tomorrow in Barcelona
+ ‘Child of the diaspora’: Sterling on Ballard

Abu Dhabi. Image from ‘Pillars of Wisdom’ (2009) by Paul Williams.

Paul Williams is stationed in Abu Dhabi doing contract work on computer systems. He has made a series of short films during his time there, which I find remarkable for their attempt to, in his words, ‘mix Ballardian landscapes with elements of Islamic mythology to arrive at something new and unfamiliar’. This film work is attuned to the subtle details and emergent urbanism at play in Abu Dhabi, which, like Dubai before it, is fast becoming the epitome of Ballardian spatial logic: an almost sentient, self-replicating landscape powered by the inexorable logic of capitalist realism. In such a place, tricks of perception are commonplace, enhanced not only by the preternatural, blasted desert light but also the strange stirrings of a future urban sensibility.

Below, find Paul’s latest two films, ‘Majlis al Jinn’ and the incredible ‘Vermilion Sands’, as well as another favourite of mine, ‘Solaris’, with its Lem/Tarkovsky references. I highly recommend exploring the rest of Paul’s output (often soundtracked by artists from the Touch soundscape label), which continue to mine this unique nexus of Ballard, Islam, rampant development, industrial isolation and subsonic hums. These filmic miniatures form a unique, ongoing travelogue, often shot from the upper-level hotel room high above the clouds that has served as Paul’s home for the past year, recording his nostalgia and emotion at the absence of his family in the UK, as he captures the evolution of the cityscape warping the desert below.

Note: these films are not viewable in Google Reader and other RSS devices due to embedding restrictions requested by the filmmaker.

Solaris from Paul H Williams on Vimeo.

Video and Music by Paul H Williams – Best experienced with headphones.

Successive bursts of static came through the headphones, against a background of deep, low-pitched murmuring, which seemed to me the very voice of the planet itself.

Stanisław Lem (Solaris)

Abstracted, Mason invented some tale to satisfy her, then carried his coffee into the study and stared at the morning haze which lay across the rooftops, a soft lake of opacity that followed the same contours as the midnight sea. The mist dissolved in the sunlight, and for a moment the diminishing reality of the normal world reasserted itself, filling him with a poignant nostalgia.

JG Ballard, ‘Now Wakes the Sea’.

One morning I awoke to find everything obscured by a thick roiling mist. It seemed to have a life of its own; sometimes moving slowly sometimes quickly. I could smell the sea and I realised that that was where it had come from. I stood on the balcony with the clouds drifting about me. I thought of home and, for a while, it was as if I was floating between two worlds…

- Paul H Williams, 2010.

Majlis al Jinn (Meeting Place of the Jinn) from Paul H Williams on Vimeo.

Video and music by Paul H Williams
Filmed on location in Abu Dhabi
Best experienced with headphones

Genie (Arabic: جني jinnī, or djinni) is a supernatural creature in Pre-islamic and Islamic mythology which (according to both mythology) occupies a parallel world to that of mankind, and together with humans and angels makes up the three sentient creations of Allah. (1)

The Holy Qur’aan reveals that Jinn are created from fire whereas the human beings are created from clay. Although they are invisible to human eyes, the jinn can see us… (2)

I have always felt that the empty swimming pools and abandoned hotels featured in JG Ballard’s stories are symbols of loss and can be seen as “ghosts”. The empty structures shown here are in the process of being made and therefore have a very different relationship with time.

In this video I wanted to mix Ballardian landscapes with elements of Islamic mythology to arrive at something new and unfamiliar.

This is the reality of this part of the middle east: 21st century technologies combined with religious beliefs forged in the 7th century.

Majlis al Jinn takes place on a site that is between dream and waking; between conception and realisation. As it pushes its way into our reality perhaps we can already feel the presence of those beings who may eventually live there… human or other… it will depend upon who comes…

(1) en.wikipedia.org/​wiki/​Genie
(2) http://inter-islam.org/​faith/​jinn.html

- Paul H Williams, 2010.

Vermilion Sands from Paul H Williams on Vimeo.

Video and music by Paul H Williams
Filmed on location in Abu Dhabi
Best experienced with headphones

“Sometimes in the late afternoons we’d drive out along the beach to the Scented Desert and sit alone by one of the pools, watching the sun fall away behind the reefs and hills, lulling ourselves on the rose-sick air. When the wind began to blow cool across the sand we’d slip down into the water, bathe ourselves and drive back to town, filling the streets and café terraces with jasmine and musk-rose and helianthemum.”

J.G. Ballard, ‘Prima Belladona’.

“At sunset, when the vermilion glow reflected from the dunes along the horizon fitfully illuminated the white faces of the abandoned hotels, Bridgman stepped on to his balcony and looked out over the long stretches of cooling sand as the tides of purple shadow seeped across them. Slowly, extending their slender fingers through the shallow saddles and depressions, the shadows massed together like gigantic combs, a few phosphorescing spurs of obsidian isolated for a moment between the tines, and then finally coalesced and flooded in a solid wave across the half-submerged hotels. Behind the silent facades, in the tilting sand-filled streets which had once glittered with cocktail bars and restaurants, it was already night. Haloes of moonlight beaded the lamp-standards with silver dew, and draped the shuttered windows and slipping cornices like a frost of frozen gas.”

J.G. Ballard, ‘The Cage of Sand’.

“May I have some water?”

I opened my eyes to find myself looking up at a tall figure standing over me. The voice was female but the silhouette, burned out by the intense, afternoon sunlight, was strangely androgynous. I was still drowsy. I’d come for a swim at the hotel’s small, artificial beach and, after half an hour of floating under the gaze of the semi-constructed skyscrapers on the neighbouring island, I’d returned to the shore for some food and a nap. The heat was relentless and I was sheltering beneath one of the thatched wooden sun shades planted deep in the soft white sand.

“Yes… yes… I must have drifted off,” I said to fill the vacuum while I located the bottle by the side of my sunlounger momentarily distracted by the lines of ants marching across the microscopic dunes.

When I looked back I realised I was in the company of a young woman. She seemed to be all arms and legs, very thin and angular. Her skin was deeply tanned and still dripping with water. Mirrored sunglasses obscured much of her small sharp face. As she raised the bottle to her lips a multitude of bangles slipped down her arm with a metallic rattle. I watched her drink for some time never having seen her amongst the regular group of hotel guests that I maintained my distance from with casual nods.

“That’s much better,” she said wiping her mouth with a satisfied gasp. “You like Ballard?” she nodded at the blanched copy of Vermilion Sands I had on the small, white plastic table next to me.

“Yes, I’m definitely a Ballardian,” I said smiling. I couldn’t place her accent. It seemed to veer from Russian into something much more eastern.

“Of course you know that Vermilion Sands actually exists,” she murmured.

There was a pause. Even the clanging of the workmen across the water constructing the new high-rise apartments seemed to fade for a few seconds.

“In our minds,” I said.

“A few hours drive from here,” she said ignoring my response. She let the idea slowly form inside my head. “Pen?” she demanded holding out her hand.

I fumbled in my rucksack wondering why I seemed to do whatever she said.

She started to sketch out a map on the pure white napkin that came with my lunch stopping occasionally to toss back her long black wet hair.

“That should get you there,” she said leaning back satisfied with her handiwork.

“Oh yes,” I looked at the map. “There it is Vermilion Sands…”

“You don’t believe me!” she laughed.

“I’m afraid not,” I laughed back. “Not even a little bit.”

She curled a forefinger at me to come closer. I leaned forward and so did she until our faces were just inches apart and I could smell the brine on her skin. She reached up to slowly move her mirrored shades down below the bridge of her nose. I looked into what should have been her eyes. Pale blue sea-anemones waved their delicate tendrils at me as if wafted by warm ocean currents from beneath a different sun.

I nodded my head.

She restored her sunglasses and stood up once more towering above me.

“Go and see,” she said over her shoulder as she returned to the gently lapping waves.

- Paul H Williams, 2010.

..:: Previously on Ballardian:
+ Dubai Ballard World

Modelling and photography by Nicholas Cobb.

This was the first office building to be constructed at the business park, but after a bombastic overture the architecture that followed was late modernist in the most minimal and self-effacing way, a machine above all for thinking in.

J.G. Ballard, Super-Cannes.

Recently, London’s Royal Academy of Arts hosted the symposium Ballardian Architecture: Inner and Outer Space:

Acclaimed writer JG Ballard derived inspiration from aspects of the built environment that architectural convention and critics tend to overlook. His novels offer many insights into the flaws and consequences of the shopping centres, car parks, hotels, office towers and housing projects that make up so much of contemporary architectural endeavour. This forum traces several themes in Ballard’s literary analysis of the contemporary built environment, including the concept of spectacle and role of the media in contemporary society, and how “invisible literatures” such as scientific journals, technical manuals, pornography, advertising copy can be seen as a literary counterpart to pop art and the “brutalist” aesthetic of modernity.

Three longer papers are followed by a series of brief but powerful commentaries which each open up particular insights into Ballard’s work, and together explore how Ballard’s perceptions may challenge and inform contemporary architecture.

Film has now been posted online of each discussion, and we have reproduced the presentations below. You can also download mp3s of the talks.

The event was chaired by Jeremy Melvin. Speakers included John Gray, Nic Clear, David Cunningham, Nigel Coates, Matthew Taunton, Chris Hall, Joanne Murray, Dan Holdsworth, Tim Abrahams and Claire Walsh. Thank you to Static TV for supplying the footage.

..::: Previously on ballardian.com:

+ Re-Placing the Novel: Sinclair, Ballard and the Spaces of Literature, by David Cunningham
+ A Near Future: Nic Clear’s Tribute to JG Ballard
+ Stereoscopic Urbanism: JG Ballard and the Built Environment
+ ‘Architectures of the Near Future’: An Interview with Nic Clear
+ ‘Because we’re fucked’: Skinner vs Gray

Ballardian Architecture 1: John Gray

Ballardian Architecture 1 – John Gray from static tv on Vimeo.

John Gray, author and philosopher, identifies correspondences between Ballard’s work and Guy Debord’s notion of the spectacle, discussing certain ramifications for contemporary economic and social phenomena.

Ballardian Architecture 2: Nic Clear

Ballardian Architecture 2 – Nic Clear from static tv on Vimeo.

Nic Clear, architect and lecturer at the Bartlett School of Architecture, delivers a paper entitled ‘J.G. Ballard is an Enemy of the Architectural Profession’.

Ballardian Architecture 3: David Cunningham

Ballardian Architecture 3 – David Cunningham from static tv on Vimeo.

David Cunningham, University of Westminster, examines architectural aspects of Ballard’s prose, exploring corresponding tendencies in the writings of Iain Sinclair and W.G. Sebald.

Ballardian Architecture 4: Session 1 Discussion

Ballardian Architecture 4 – Session 1 Discussion from static tv on Vimeo.

Session 1 concludes with a discussion featuring speakers John Gray, David Cunningham and Nic Clear. The discussion is chaired by Jeremy Melvin, and features contributions from members of the audience.

Ballardian Architecture 5: Nigel Coates

Ballardian Architecture 5 – Nigel Coates from static tv on Vimeo.

Nigel Coates, architect and lecturer, discusses the influence of Ballard’s writings upon a number of his architectural projects, as well as reviewing work by some of his students at the Royal College of Art.

Ballardian Architecture 6: Matthew Taunton

Ballardian Architecture 6 – Matthew Taunton from static tv on Vimeo.

Matthew Taunton, author and academic, investigates Ballard’s 1960 short story ‘Chronopolis’, highlighting Ballard’s engagement with modernist urbanism and his response to Taylorism and Fordism.

Ballardian Architecture 7: Chris Hall

Ballardian Architecture 7 – Chris Hall from static tv on Vimeo.

Chris Hall, journalist and writer, analyses architectural aspects of Ballard’s short story ‘The Terminal Beach’.

Ballardian Architecture 8: Joanne Murray

Ballardian Architecture 8 – Joanne Murray from static tv on Vimeo.

Joanne Murray, lecturer and Birkbeck PhD candidate, discusses formal characteristics of Ballard’s art and writing in relation to New Brutalist architecture.

Ballardian Architecture 9: Dan Holdsworth

Ballardian Architecture 9 – Dan Holdsworth from static tv on Vimeo.

Dan Holdsworth, artist, discusses his photographs, highlighting architectural motifs and visual tendencies that reflect aspects in Ballard’s prose.

Ballardian Architecture 10: Tim Abrahams

Ballardian Architecture 10 – Tim Abrahams from static tv on Vimeo.

Tim Abrahams, journalist and Associate Editor of ‘Blueprint’ magazine, discusses Ballard’s Shanghai-set, semi-autobiographical novel ‘Empire of the Sun’ in relation to the Shanghai Expo 2010.

Ballardian Architecture 11: Session 2 Discussion

Ballardian Architecture 11 – Session 2 Discussion from static tv on Vimeo.

Session 2 concludes with a discussion featuring speakers Dan Holdsworth, Nigel Coates, Tim Abrahams, Chris Hall, Joanne Murray and Matthew Taunton. The discussion is chaired by Gavin Parkinson, and features contributions from members of the audience.

Ballardian Architecture 12: Claire Walsh

Ballardian Architecture 12 – Claire Walsh from static tv on Vimeo.

Claire Walsh, editor, researcher and J.G. Ballard’s partner, discusses Ballard’s life and interests in a presentation that closes the proceedings of the forum.

The Bentall Centre. Photo by Fr3d.org. Reproduced under Creative Commons.

by Mike Holliday

Why do I dislike the Bentall Centre so much? Because it’s so… cretinous. [The consumers] seem to be moving though a kind of commercial dream space and vague signals float through their brains.

J.G. Ballard in interview, 2006.[1]

Ballard’s final novel, Kingdom Come, a dystopian account of consumerism as a type of ‘soft fascism’, [2] received lukewarm reviews and suggestions that the author was, perhaps, finally losing his touch – that the metaphors seemed strained, the text confusing and ambiguous.[3] M John Harrison, one of Ballard’s fellow authors in New Worlds back in the 1960s, commented that ‘Perhaps, after all, it is not the consumers who have fallen for the dream of the Metro-Centre; it is the alienated intellectual of the London suburbs … For the old metaphorista, perhaps, the hidden terror of the shopping centre is that it is just somewhere people go to shop’.[4] Other commentators were eager to point to parallels between Kingdom Come and events in the world around us – aggressive car commercials, racist behaviour by sports fanatics – but appeared reluctant to delve into the novel’s theses in any depth. In this article, I re-examine Kingdom Come and ask: can we really equate consumerism with fascism?

How you convert a metaphor into the arming device of a political conspiracy, or how the consumerist dream might be co-opted to produce the kinds of hard results associated with the nationalist dream of the 1920s and 30s, Ballard seems less sure. In reality, there are only a lot of people buying American sports utility vehicles, Tanzanian fish, Chinese teddy bears, French five-hob stoves … Do unconscious dreams of mass violence need to figure?

M John Harrison, ‘Narratives of the mall’.[5]

The elements of Kingdom Come are taken straight from the world that the author would have seen around him … a giant shopping mall (loosely based on the Bentall Centre in Kingston) which is not just a place to buy things but somewhere to take the family for a day out; low-level racist behaviour against ethnic minorities in the suburbs of West London; an upsurge in interest in sporting events such as the World Cup that enable displays of national or tribal identity. These realistic components can prompt a straightforward reading of the novel: Kingdom Come is rendered as the idea that consumerism in 21st century England can be seen – with the help of a modest dosage of imagination and metaphor – to be a type of fascism. Such realist readings appear to lie behind M John Harrison’s complaints, as well as Rod Liddle’s attack on the book as ‘deeply silly and patronising’.[6]

The Bentall Centre. Photo by Joanne Murray. Reproduced with permission.

‘I remember four or five years ago going into the Bentall Centre, a huge shopping mall in Kingston, a town I hate. It was before Christmas, and there were these three gigantic bears on a plinth in the centre of this huge atrium … automatons, moving to Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer. The place was packed; crowds looking up at them. And I thought, God, these people have left their brains somewhere. What’s going on here? And then I noticed that my head was moving, too. I thought, Jesus, get out fast.’

Ballard in interview, 2006.[7]

If Kingdom Come is a realistic reading of the English suburbs, then various of its details fail to convince. It seems odd to emphasize the violence of spectator sports when the most popular, soccer, has become far less brutal, among both participants and spectators, than was the case 25 or more years ago. And the portrayal of ethnic minorities as antipathetic to consumerism seems equally unrealistic, and risks an accusation of the very racism that the author wants to attack – for implying that they aren’t interested in consumer goods or sport because their culture is different from ours.[8]

Beyond the details, there seems to be a conspicuous problem with the novel’s underlying theme, since fascism was always anti-consumerist in its temperament. As Peter N Stearns puts it in his review of Consumerism in World History: ‘For fascist leaders, modern society had become too disunited and individualistic. Consumerism was a fundamental part of modern degeneracy’.[9]

But any such straightforward reading of Kingdom Come surely founders on the fact that Ballard is simply not, and never has been, a realist writer. Deeply influenced by the surrealist artists, and by Freud’s distinction between manifest and latent content, Ballard’s descriptions are no more ‘realist’ than Dali’s clock-faces or Delvaux’s mysterious women. He described his semi-autobiographical novel, Empire of the Sun, as an effort to reach some sort of psychological truth, as opposed to a depiction of actual events in the camp at Lunghua in which he was interned, and Kingdom Come is perhaps best viewed in like manner, as a surrealistic attempt to discover the latent psychological meaning behind consumerist society, rather than as a portrayal, however exaggerated, of the behaviour of sports fans and visitors to shopping malls.

Dali’s ‘The Persistence of Memory’.

Ballard in front of his commissioned reproduction of a lost painting by Delvaux. Photo: David Levenson.

This still leaves us with the underlying concept, reiterated by Ballard in contemporaneous interviews, of consumerism as a soft fascism. An obvious temptation is to interpret Ballard as agreeing with the frequently articulated view that modern consumerist societies are totalizing – enclosing individuals in a perpetual obligation to choose, but allowing no alternative ways of living outside of the marketplace and the media – and concluding that therefore such societies can be regarded as fascist.

If there is no principle restricting who can consume what, there is also no principled constraint on what can be consumed: all social relations, activities and objects can in principle be exchanged as commodities. This is one of the most profound secularizations enacted by the modern world … [and] places the intimate world of the everyday into the impersonal world of the market and its values. Moreover, while consumer culture appears universal because it is depicted as a land of freedom in which everyone can be a consumer, it is also felt to be universal because everyone must be a consumer: this particular freedom is compulsory.

Don Slater, ‘Consumer Culture & Modernity’.[10]

But seen as an interpretation of Kingdom Come, this makes little sense. Ignoring Ballard the surrealist, it instead concentrates on an all-too-easy transition from ‘totalizing’ to ‘fascist’, a transition which effectively empties the term ‘fascist’ of meaningful content and historical context. Yet Ballard’s novel is full of such context – from the explicit references to the Third Reich in the set-speeches, to the marching groups of supporters and over-lit sports stadia, and even to small details such as the cable-TV presenter naming his new Mercedes limousine ‘Heinrich’. On the proposed interpretation all this detail becomes mere window-dressing, and the novel adds little or nothing to the political critique on which its main thesis supposedly rests. I therefore suggest that Ballard really does intend arguing for the more substantive, if less obvious, notion that modern consumer societies can mutate into something best understood in terms of 1930s Nazi Germany.

To see how this might be the case, I think we should start by recognizing that Ballard’s understanding of society is principally in terms of psychology, and that Kingdom Come re-emphasizes, and links together, two of his long-standing motifs – that the future will be boring, and that humans are dangerous and violent animals.

Consumerism rules, but people are bored. They’re out on the edge, waiting for something big and strange to come along. … They want to be frightened. They want to know fear. And maybe they want to go a little mad.

Ballard, Kingdom Come.[11]

Lying behind Ballard’s expectations of a boring and empty suburban world is the notion of human reality as a constructed reality, the roots of which seem to lie with his early grasp, as a child in Shanghai, of the everyday world as a stage-set.[12] For Ballard, the human brain has presented us with ‘a kind of ramshackle construct’ suitable to the lives of all those countless ancestors who were engaged in the struggle for food, shelter, and safety. But we no longer live in an age of day-to-day scarcity and insecurity, and as a result the external world no longer forces its interpretation upon us. Therefore the conventional ways in which we viewed the world, which had been buttressed by traditional social structures and conforming behaviours, have weakened their hold over us. The external environment has become fictionalized, and ‘reality’ – that which is of most significance in our lives – has retreated inside our minds, to be represented by our hopes, desires and obsessions.[13] One way in which we establish meaningful relationships between events and objects is via our our notion of time, by working out causal relationships and by connecting the present to the past through memories, either individual or social, or to the future through our intentions and expectations. However, as Ballard has emphasized, the past as a guide and the future as a destination no longer have much meaning for us.[14] Nowadays, an understanding of events and objects cannot simply be read off from the external world, nor can we link them in a straightforward temporal manner.

The Bentall Centre. Photo by elyob. Reproduced under Creative Commons.

The retreat of past and future and the internalization of reality – both of which are ultimately grounded in increased prosperity – are viewed by Ballard in two very different ways. On the positive side, our freedom and possibilities for fulfillment are enhanced. But, because we lack the sense of meaning provided by a stable external reality and by an awareness of time, we can experience emptiness and boredom. In the 1960s and 1970s, Ballard chose to emphasize the use of our imaginative powers as a way of providing us with different perspectives and of transcending our conventional outlook on the world. But the way Ballard told it to Carol Orr in 1974, this seemed a demanding and daunting task: ‘people will behave in a very lunar way, very isolated from each other. Does that appeal to me? Yes, it does, because I think people will have more freedom there. I mean, the freedom of isolation, the freedom of complete choice in one’s behaviour.’[15] Fifteen years later, there was more urgency in his comments to Rolling Stone: ‘the suburbanization of the soul [forces] the individual to recognize that he or she is all he or she has got. And this sharpens the eye and the imagination. The challenge is for each of us to respond, to remake as much as we can of the world around us, because no one else will do it for us. We have to find a core within us and get to work. Don’t worry about worldly rewards. Just get on with it!’[16] Using the imagination and following one’s obsessions may, perhaps, be rewarding, but it certainly doesn’t sound easy psychologically, more like hard work. By the early 1990s the warning was starker: ‘If people are going to survive they will need to do this on the plane of the imagination much more than they have done. Otherwise, they’ll simply become a mark on some consumer chart.’[17]

The reasons for concern are clear: if we do not use our imaginations and obsessions, we are at risk of being governed by forces outside ourselves which still operate, such as capitalism or purposeless social conformity. Ballard has drawn attention to the way in which moral structures and decision-making powers have been externalized out into the environment by technology – from traffic lights to CCTV cameras – providing us with a safe passage through our lives,[18] and in like manner we may find it psychologically easier to decline the freedom to utilize the imagination that comes with a safe and prosperous, but individualistic, society. People might instead be content to be governed by forces of social conformity, and to let themselves be directed by their emotions – which Ballard thinks of as tending to reinforce existing social conventions and as restricting, rather than expanding, the possibilities for action.

It may be that we thrive when certain of our relationships are drained of emotion, that we may then be able to explore our lives more fully, because emotions tend to act as a brake. They reinforce the status quo. They set up a kind of tyranny rather like the psychology of a very small child, which may be entirely governed by passionate emotions that are in fact very limiting. It’s only when the child learns to control its emotions that he can begin to explore all sorts of interesting possibilities at the other end of the nursery.

Ballard in interview, 1997.[19]

If this is the bare bones of the psychology that underpins Kingdom Come, we can perhaps add some flesh by considering the social aspects of consumerism. Peter Stearns points out that the growth of consumer behaviour was closely connected with the decline of long-established social structures under the pressures of industrialization and urbanization. In earlier times, social hierarchies were much more rigidly observed, and any crossing of social boundaries or individualistic behaviour tended to be viewed negatively, especially by the upper-classes. The latter had luxury, i.e. their wealth was displayed, rather than consumed, and in standard formats with an absence of individuality or any concern about fashion.[20] However, once this social edifice began to lose its grip, consumer behaviour helped people cope with the resulting uncertainty and insecurity about social status, and with the disruption to established patterns of behaviour, by providing alternative ways of fulfillment and by enabling an individual to demonstrate personal achievement, no matter how limited. This was particularly the case in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when the growth of large firms meant that many in the middle-classes found themselves working for others rather than themselves and in jobs with a high degree of routine: satisfaction and success were no longer an integral element of their occupation, and had to be sought elsewhere.[21]

Utama shopping centre, Malaysia

But there is a malign dialectic at work here. I buy things in order to try and reassert my identity, but as the marketplace grows I am offered an increasing variety of goods and services, and associated ways of living, from which to choose. Now my identity is even more in question, because it is something that I myself have to select and realize. The impact is heightened as the material prosperity of society increases – even something as basic as food becomes no longer a matter of survival and physical well-being, but a decision about life-style.[22]

Yet coherent identity seems to be precisely the main problem of modern existence and is itself something to be chosen and achieved. … Consumerism simultaneously exploits mass identity crisis by proffering its goods as solutions to the problems of identity, and in the process intensifies it by offering ever more plural values and ways of being. … That the self must be a project is dictated to us by a pluralized world and must be pursued within that pluralized world. This entails a high level of anxiety and risk. In terms of consumer culture, there is high anxiety because every choice seems to implicate the self: all acts of purchase or consumption, clothing, eating, tourism, entertainment, ‘are decisions not only about how to act but who to be’.

Slater, ‘Consumer Culture & Modernity’.[23]

To make matters worse, the psychological support that might have been available from kinship ties, the local community, religion, voluntary organizations, and such like, is now much weaker – in fact, involvement in these is as much a life-style choice as everything else. Yet the evidence is that people with a rich variety of social connections are less likely to suffer depression and anxiety than those without.[24] As well as support that I might obtain directly from others, I am better able to cope if I am ‘not just the local lawyer, but also the coach of the cricket team, the friendly neighbour, and the person who always sings at the christmas party’, as a setback in one role is of less significance to my sense of identity and self-esteem.[25]

Without a traditional social fabric around me, I live in a world of endless possibilities but any failure to find fulfillment in my life must somehow reflect my own inadequacies. Hence, as Zygmunt Bauman suggests, we are nowadays more likely to suffer from depression – caused by the fear of inadequacy in the face of endless possibilities – than from neurosis arising from guilt caused by the transgression of prohibitions.[26]

The more we are allowed to be the masters of our fates, the more we expect ourselves to be. We should be able to find education that is stimulating and useful, work that is exciting, socially valuable, and remunerative, spouses who are sexually, emotionally, and intellectually stimulating and also loyal and comforting. Our children are supposed to be beautiful, smart, affectionate, obedient, and independent. And everything we buy is supposed to be the best of its kind. … [Hence,] almost every experience people have nowadays will be perceived as a disappointment, and thus regarded as a failure – a failure that could have been prevented with the right choice.

Barry Schwartz, ‘The Paradox of Choice: Why More is Less’.[27]

In such circumstances, the temptation is to seek comfort and easy pleasures. But experimental psychology suggests that the systems of the brain which control desire are not the same as the systems that control pleasure.[28] Hence, some things – sex, good food – will both activate desire and bring pleasure, but others – such as a bigger, higher-definition TV – may provoke desire but not add much to our happiness. Biologically speaking, happiness is a spur to action, not some end-state that we are programmed to seek out, and this is reflected in the wealth of data indicating a lack of correlation between absolute levels of income and happiness (other than at extremely low levels of income), whether it be between different societies, different individuals in the same society, or individuals over time.[29]

Ballard’s recognition that we ‘construct our own reality’ implies an understanding that happiness is not some ‘default’ or natural state, and that nowadays we have to create the conditions for our own satisfaction and fulfillment; failure to do this in a world that does not impose its meanings on us will lead to emptiness, boredom, and anxiety. What we seem to have, therefore, are the possible conditions for a social crisis rooted in personal reactions to the complexity and uncertainty inherent in a prosperous, individualistic, consumer society, exacerbated by the lack of established social structures that might provide support. And here we can make start to make the connection with fascism …

Given the near unintelligibility of the Nazi regime,[30] any interpretation of its causes needs to explain why it developed in Germany (and not, say, the U.S.A. or France) and in the 1930s (rather than some earlier or later date). Generic explanations based on the ‘German psyche’, or some form of ‘moral crisis’ in modern capitalism, fail to convince precisely because they have no answer to these questions.

Under a leader who talked in apocalyptic tones of world power or destruction and a regime founded on an utterly repulsive ideology of race-hatred, one of the most culturally and economically advanced countries in Europe planned for war, launched a world conflagration which killed around 50 million people, and perpetrated atrocities – culminating in the mechanized mass murder of millions of Jews – of a nature and scale as to defy imagination.

Ian Kershaw, ‘The Nazi Dictatorship: Problems & Perspectives Of Interpretation’.[31]

No explanations I’ve seen are ever convincing of why cultivated and intelligent people like the Germans and Italians should plunge into this insane world-view.

Ballard in interview, 2006.

A promising approach is to start from the idea that inter-war Germany was suffering from a crisis that was simultaneously political, economic, social, and existential. Fascism is then seen to result from a generalized sense of trauma, where stresses in one arena – say the economic or the existential – cannot find an outlet in another, such as the political or social. Such an explanation of fascism owes a debt to Erich Fromm’s prognosis in his 1941 book Escape from Freedom, where he described the fascist regimes, and Nazi Germany in particular, as resulting from the isolation, powerlessness, and anxiety that people felt following modernization and industrialization in countries where traditional structures had lost much of their strength, and which had suffered hyper-inflation and extremely high unemployment.[32]

By the early decades of the 20th century, the German economy was the most developed in Europe and becoming dominated by large organizations: the local boss whom the worker knew on a personal basis was being replaced by distant and amorphous management, and the individual’s sense of their place in the whole was increasingly opaque. In politics, the parties of the new Weimar democracy were concerned with large-scale, intractable issues at the federal level, weakening the significance of local or work-place participation in political or trade union affairs; and the advent of radio was about to kick-start the transformation of politics into a form of advertising and manipulation of the emotions – as the Nazis were quick to realize.

Hitler practices his acting skills. ‘Apocalyptic, visionary, convincing’: three photos by Heinrich Hoffman from 1925.

The individual was no longer compensated for a lack of security and purpose by the strength of those long-standing and powerful elements of German society to which he had been accustomed. The monarchy had been abolished; the military (who had virtually run the country during 1914-1918) had been defeated in a war largely of their own devising; the once all-powerful German state could no longer even honour the commitments on its own bank notes as a result of massive inflation which had destroyed middle-class savings – together with the resulting bourgeois sense of certainty and security; rapid political change, military defeat, and economic problems had left the older generation lost in the world and the young looking elsewhere than to tradition and family. The lack of – or decline in – local social participation and intermediate-level structures, such as voluntary organizations, led to what Gino Germani referred to as ‘street corner society’.[33] And there were all too many whose recourse was to the street – unemployment rose following the 1929 Wall Street Crash until by 1932 an estimated one-third of the workforce were without a job.[34] To many, the world no longer made sense, and in the words of the Marxist historian TW Mason: civil society was no longer able to reproduce itself.[35]

In such circumstances, one psychological recourse for the individual is to seek to give up their independence and to fuse with somebody – or something – else, in an attempt to somehow recreate the lost bonds that had existed at societal level. Hence the attraction to many of an authoritarian party, such as the Nazis, with a clear leader on whom the party member or citizen could project qualities which – especially in the case of Hitler – they clearly lacked, but which were the counterpart of the psychological needs of the adherent. As Ballard once put it: ‘It’s almost as if what [a politician] needs is sort of a reverse charisma now. Not a light that shines outwards, but the ability, like a black hole, to draw light inwards! You’ve got to be able to draw other people’s fantasies to you’.[36] For the disciple, doubt is assuaged by accepting the opinions and directions of others, and uncertainty is conquered by relying on the conviction of the emotions instead of trusting in rational thought and debate – in a world that no longer makes sense, emotions appear a surer guide than reason. As Michael Burleigh puts it in The Third Reich: A New History: ‘Nazism was truly ahead of its time … This was politics as feeling’.[37]

Not a light that shines outwards, but the ability, like a black hole, to draw light inwards! You’ve got to be able to draw other people’s fantasies to you.

Ballard on the requirements for modern politician, interview, 1997.

Hitler himself understood all this perfectly well, as he displayed in Mein Kampf: ‘The mass meeting is necessary if only for the reason that in it the individual, who in becoming an adherent of a new movement feels lonely and is easily seized with the fear of being alone, receives for the first time the pictures of a greater community, something that has a strengthening and encouraging effect on most people. … If he steps for the first time out of his small workshop or out of the big enterprise, in which he feels very small, into the mass meeting and is now surrounded by thousands and thousands of people with the same conviction … he himself succumbs to the magic influence of what we call mass suggestion.’[38]

Fascist ideology was therefore concentrated on a mythic core constituted by the image of the nation reborn, purified, and following its ‘destiny’,[39] and practical politics accordingly relied heavily on symbols, mass spectacles, and a continuously reiterated vocabulary of basic ideas.

A dreadful mass sentimentality, compounded of anger, fear, resentment and self-pity, replaced the customary politics of decency, pragmatism, property and reason … Belief, faith, feeling and obedience to instinct routed debate, scepticism and compromise. People voluntarily surrendered to group or herd emotions … Among committed believers, a mythic world of eternal spring, heroes, demons, fire and sword – in a word, the fantasy world of the nursery – displaced reality. Or rather invaded it, with crude images of Jews, Slavs, capitalists and kulaks populating the imagination. This was children’s politics for grown-ups, bored and frustrated with the prosaic tenor of post war liberal democracy, and hence receptive to heroic gestures and politics as a form of theatrical stunt.

Michael Burleigh, ‘The Third Reich: A New History’.[40]

Fascism therefore offers an irrational escape from apparently intractable difficulties. As Ballard pointed out long ago, in his review of Mein Kampf for New Worlds,[41] Hitler was successful precisely because he dispensed with any rationalization of his prejudices, and was therefore able to tap directly into the unconscious of his followers.

More prosaically, a sense of place and safety could be supplied by hierarchy and control: a 1938 decree introduced general labour conscription by forcing people to work wherever the State decreed, but this effectively gave the well-behaved worker job security, in stark contrast to the early 1930s and to other countries;[42] and the small-holding farmer was tied to the soil just as much as a feudal serf, but was protected against creditors forcing him to sell his property.[43] Independent groups and sources of power which were not destroyed were assimilated into the system: Nazi ideology did not consider a person to have an identity separate from their obligations as a citizen, and it followed that if one was, say, an engineer, a mother, or a writer, one’s own particular concerns could be most effectively met within the context of the Nazi regime. Organizations such as employee associations or trade unions, or women’s and children’s groups, were therefore effectively incorporated into the party or the administration. For example, sports and recreational societies all functioned under the Kraft durch Freude (‘Strength through Joy’) organization, and one of the tasks legally accorded to the Reich Chamber of Commerce was to ‘gather together the creative artists in all spheres into a unified organization under the leadership of the Reich [which] must not only determine the lines of progress, mental and spiritual, but also lead and organize the professions’.[44]

The Nazi’s ‘Metro-Centre’? A detail from an illustration for an article in the propaganda magazine Signal c. 1941, describing the organization of the Nazi Party: ‘Any creative initiative to be introduced in health and hygiene, the training of youth, welfare work on behalf of the working man … whatever revolutionary idea is to be introduced into the crafts, industry, trade or among the peasantry, all flows through the channels of the Party organization’.

The Nazi state was not a completely controlled society, but rather one where existing societal organizations were subject to a form of ‘capture’. Hence, Germany was no longer a pluralist society in the sense of accepting variation in aims, opinions, and interests; variety could exist but it was merely a functional variety – a diversity in unity. As Kevin Passmore puts it: ‘civil society was absorbed into fascism’.[45] The sense of community was now workers and managers marching in the same procession or rally, all shouting Heil Hitler together whilst feeling the same emotions.[46] One advantage of such a non-pluralist society was that it was able to limit the extent to which the functional and social complexity of modern societies impacted on human subjectivity: common activities and emotions, communal gatherings, signs and slogans, all represented psychological simplifications that helped nullify the difficulties of a complex, modern world. The result of this reliance on myth, symbols and emotions was that fascism transformed consciousness rather than society: ‘The idea of the “national community” was not a basis for changing social structures, but a symbol of transformed consciousness. … [Nazism's] intentions were directed towards a transformation of value- and belief systems – a psychological “revolution” rather than one of substance.’[47]

So there are indeed similarities between inter-war Germany and 21st century consumerist societies: in particular, people can feel they live in a world without meaning and have somehow lost control of their lives. Obviously there are also major differences – one could hardly suggest that boredom and ennui were a major factor in 1920s Germany, for example, and the economic backgrounds are dissimilar – but these can obscure the psychological resemblances.[48] In both cases, customary social and political structures are debilitated, providing little tangible or intangible support, and the sense of community is weakened. Traditional politics are viewed as irrelevant or with contempt: there is an absence of debate and we are left with politics as emotion and advertising.

A Nazi mass gathering: the 1937 Reichsparteitag at Nuremberg, including a spectacular performance from the young girls of the ‘Glaube und Schönheit’ (‘Belief and Beauty’) organisation.

The ‘solutions’ in the two cases are analogous. A sense of pseudo-community is created through common activities and attendance at mass spectacles, by the channeling of emotions into a narrow range, and through a strengthening of the sense of commonality by means of an emphasis – vague but insistent – on ‘outsiders’. Community and a shared-culture may still be with us, but no longer based on locality or history: ‘What’s the point of privacy if it’s just a personalized prison? Consumerism is a collective enterprise. People here want to share and celebrate, they want to come together. When we go shopping we take part in a collective ritual of affirmation. … Shared dreams and values, shared hopes and pleasures’, claims Sangster in Kingdom Come.[49]

The concept of ‘us’ implies a ‘not-us’ … an age-old and reliable way of putting strength back into weakening societal bonds: ‘David Cruise casually referred to the ‘enemy’, a term kept deliberately vague that embraced Asians and east Europeans, blacks, Turks, non-consumers and anyone not interested in sport. New enemies were always needed’.[50] To the extent that I am not an individual but part of a commonality, you are not an individual either, but a category; in Nazi Germany, one was ‘no longer a person, but an anti-social, criminal, Gypsy, homosexual, Jehovah’s Witness, Jew or political, in involuntary anticipation of modern identity politics, with their replacement of persons by categories’.[51]

The effect of this growth in pseudo-community is the same in Kingdom Come as in Nazi Germany, as Ballard himself described in a discussion with Jeannette Baxter, when he referred to ‘the positive features of the new regime [of the Metro-Centre] – the self-disciplined and healthily glowing families, the sense of a revived community with a new confidence and purpose in life (in short, that “accommodation” made by so many in the 1930s in England and Germany who should know better)’.[52]

‘I like the music,’ I commented. ‘Though maybe it’s a little too martial. Somewhere in there I can hear the Horst Wessel
song.

‘It’s good for morale,’ Carradine explained. ‘We like to keep people cheerful …’

Ballard, Kingdom Come.[53]

Symbols and myths – reaching almost religious significance – start to predominate. ‘Politics’ mutates into something else, a mixture of emotion, myth, and violence that comes close to madness. In Kingdom Come, Sangster is convinced that ‘some kind of insanity is the last way forward’, and the psychiatrist, Maxted, draws the parallel with Nazi Germany: ‘The Germans were desperate to break out of their prison. Defeat, inflation, grotesque war reparations, the threat of barbarians advancing from the east. Going mad would set them free, and they chose Hitler to lead the hunting party.’[54]

But what of psychopathology and violence, which I referred to earlier as another of Ballard’s long-standing themes that runs through Kingdom Come? He has always held – based in part on his childhood experiences in Shanghai and Lunghua – that the human psyche has dark and dangerous depths, including an attraction to violence. On Ballard’s conception, mankind has natural psychopathic tendencies which, although they may not come to the fore in all societies, cannot be eradicated … a view which has some support from the anthropological and historical evidence, which indicates that hunter-gatherer and primitive agriculturalist societies often had far higher male mortality rates from violence than did Europe and North America in the 20th century, despite our technologies of destruction and two world wars.[55]

When I refer to my own childhood, and how people behaved in the Far East during the Second World War, it seemed that some people simply enjoy killing and tormenting others. … To use a term like ‘sadism’ and to construct an elaborate psychological machinery to explain this behaviour, however, is to miss the point. The fact is, we are violent and dangerous creatures. We needed to be to survive all those hundreds of thousands of years when we were living in small tribal groups, faced with an incredibly hostile world. And we still carry those genes.

Ballard in interview, 1997.[56]

For the majority of the time that people have lived in crowded urban environments, any proclivity for violence was – probably of necessity – contained by social arrangements and by a widely accepted system of morality. However, both of these types of constraints are weakening, something which concerned Ballard as early as this 1974 interview: ‘I myself think that Man, if you like, is a naturally perverse animal, that the elements of psychopathology or perversity or moral deviancy are a very large part of his character. I don’t think that can be changed. I think attempts in the past to provide a very rigid moral framework succeeded to some extent. I think they’re going to break down now, simply because the opportunities for limitless freedom are so great.’[57]

The risk is that the erasure of meaning in modern societies produces boredom and emptiness, a gap which a dormant psychopathology can readily fill, fuelled by a preference for emotion over cognition. Hence Ballard frequently links boredom and psychopathic behaviour in his later books and interviews: ‘My real fear is that boredom and inertia may lead people to follow a deranged leader … that we will put on jackboots and black uniforms and the aspect of the killer simply to relieve the boredom.’[58] The descriptions of brutality in Kingdom Come – racist attacks and violent sports events – are simply taken from Ballard’s perception of the world around him. Their significance lies not, I suggest, in the precise content, but in their latent meaning: within the absences which permeate both society and our own minds, ‘violence and hate, as always, were organizing themselves’.[59]

Aggressive advertising: For Mercedes-Benz, from the Nazi propaganda magazine ‘Signal’, c1943; and, below, for Hummer SUVs in Australia, 2008.

How might we view consumerism – and in particular the totalizing aspects of a consumerist society – as a result of this analysis of Ballard’s vision of a ‘soft fascism’? Consumer behaviour is an exercise in choice, and can therefore infiltrate other aspects of our lives, replacing the traditional but declining forms of morality and politics, both of which are essentially ways of choosing between alternatives. This presents us with an obligation to choose from what is on offer, and thereby effectively closes off the possibility of exiting the system – something that Pearson discovers in Kingdom Come on his first visit to the West London suburbs: ‘I moved through the darkened streets, searching for a signpost to guide me back to London. But here by the M25, in the heartland of the motorway people, all signs pointed inwards, referring the traveller back to his starting point’[60] (my emphasis). The fictionalization of the external world means that Ballard’s ‘exit door’ through the use of our imaginative faculties is gradually closing, as these powers of the imagination become colonized by the fantasies around us and by our own emotions. This enables consumerism to satisfy our needs, not directly via the goods and services that we purchase, but indirectly by meeting our psychological requirements through our involvement in the activities of consumer society – shopping, media, leisure. The disassociation between our desires and pleasures – which might be seen as threatening the consumerist system once we discover that satisfying our desires is unfulfilling – can now be bridged: we desire the goods and buy them, but our rewards come from elsewhere, from our very participation in the system itself … from our attendance at Ballard’s Metro-Centre.

This totalizing effect of consumerism, whereby everything is absorbed into it in much the same way as existing organizations and groupings were subject to ‘capture’ by the Nazis, is perhaps reflected in some of those elements of Kingdom Come which perplexed reviewers: Are the group led by the local solicitor Fairfax really opponents of the Metro-Centre, or are they just trying to use it for their own purposes? How much can we trust what the main protagonist, Pearson, says – or should we regard him as an ‘unreliable narrator’? Why is it not clear, even at the end of the book, whether Pearson really regrets getting involved with the Metro-Centre?[61] The ambiguity of Ballard’s narrative is in keeping with the self-reflexive nature of the society that he is describing, where the transgressive gesture rapidly becomes another media item that can be purchased for cash, and an attempt at escape puts you right back at the centre. Any effort at political action or opposition becomes pointless, because this is not – on Ballard’s view – a conspiracy of false needs and false consciousness: by accepting the emotional lie and the feel-good fairy story, we are ourselves complicit in the consumerist society. But if this is right, then we can see the point of Ballard’s long-held insistence that we must, as he puts it, immerse ourselves in the most dangerous elements and hope that we can swim to the other side[62] – a view that infects both the ‘extreme hypothesis’ of Crash and the studied ambiguity of Kingdom Come.

Finally, what does Ballard’s novel tell us about fascistic activity and what it represents? As I have described it here, fascism arises as a result of a generalized sense of crisis in prosperous, complex societies, whereby tensions in each sphere – the economic, the social, the political, and the personal – cannot find relief, but actually amplify each other. The result is an escape to pseudo-community, and a surrender to the emotions and to psychopathic urges. This suggests a close similarity to Daniel Woodley’s recent discussion of the links between fascism, modernity, and capitalism:

Modern [critical] theorists have abandoned class reductionism for a more sophisticated account of fascism as a political commodity, a form of ideological production in postliberal capitalism based on the aestheticization of politics and the mobilization of emotion. … postliberal capitalism entails new forms of ideological justification based on the bureaucratization and societalization of economic life. These structural tendencies increase the pressure for collective solutions to political integration, resulting in a panoply of new ideologies aimed at addressing atomization. … [Fascism's] timely appearance and reappearance is rooted … in the aestheticization of depoliticized politics and the fetishization of communal identities which conceal the true nature of the commodity as a structured social practice.

Daniel Woodley, ‘Fascism and Political Theory: Critical Perspectives on Fascist Ideology’.[63]

What I have tried to show in this article is that in Kingdom Come Ballard has attempted to unearth this ‘latent content’ of fascism by means of his well-honed forensic tools of imagination and surrealistic description.[64]

NOTES

[1] ‘JG Ballard: The Comforts of Madness’, interview in The Independent, 15 September 2006.
[2] JG Ballard, Kingdom Come, Fourth Estate (London), 2006, pp 167-169.
[3] See, for example, Ursula K Le Guin, ‘Revolution in the aisles’, The Guardian, 9 September 2006.
[4] M John Harrison, ‘Narratives of the mall’, The Times Literary Supplement, 6 September 2006.
[5] M John Harrison, ‘Narratives of the mall’, op cit.
[6] Rod Liddle, ‘Our simple pleasures go up in smoke’, Times Online, http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/sport/columnists/rod_liddle/article1267260.ece, accessed 5 May 2010.
[7] ‘From Here to Dystopia’, interview in the Telegraph Magazine, 2 September 2006.
[8] A similar sentiment is displayed here: ‘A mastery of the discontinuities of metropolitan life has always been essential to the successful urban dweller … A failure to master these discontinuities, whether social or genetic in origin, leaves some ethnic groups at a disadvantage, forced into enclaves that seem to reconstitute mental maps of ancestral villages.’ JG Ballard, ‘Airports: Going somewhere?’, The Observer, 14 September 1997.
[9] Peter N Stearns, Consumerism in World History: The Global Transformation of Desire (2nd edition), Routledge (New York & London), 2006, p 72.
[10] Don Slater, Consumer Culture & Modernity, Polity Press (Cambridge), 1997, p 27.
[11] JG Ballard, Kingdom Come, op cit, p 101.
[12] JG Ballard, Miracles of Life, Fourth Estate (London), 2008, pp 58-59.
[13] Some of Ballard’s clearest comments on the fictionalization of the external world and the interiorization of reality as a consequence of increased prosperity are to be found in an unpublished interview with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, c1974, available at http://www.jgballard.ca/interviews/jgb_cbc_ideas_interview.html, accessed 6 May 2010.
[14] Unpublished interview with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, op cit.
[15] Unpublished interview with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, op cit.
[16] ‘The Strange Visions of J. G. Ballard’, interview in Rolling Stone, 19 November 1987.
[17] ‘An Interview with J. G. Ballard’, Mississippi Review Vol. 20 #1-2, 1991, p 32.
[18] ‘Interview by Graeme Revell’, Re/Search 8/9: J. G. Ballard, Re/Search Publishing (San Francisco), 1984, p. 46.
[19] ‘Dangerous Driving’, interview in ‘Frieze’ magazine #34, May 1997.
[20] Peter N Stearns, Consumerism in World History: The Global Transformation of Desire (2nd edition), op cit, pp 1-14.
[21] Peter N Stearns, Consumerism in World History: The Global Transformation of Desire (2nd edition), op cit, pp 32-34, 60-62.
[22] Anthony Giddens, Beyond Left and Right: The Future of Radical Politics, Polity Press (Cambridge), 1994, p 224.
[23] Don Slater, Consumer Culture & Modernity, op cit, p 84-85.
[24] Michael Marmot, Status Syndrome: How Your Social Standing Directly Affects Your Health, Bloomsbury (London), Chapter 6; Robert H Frank, Luxury Fever: Money and Happiness in an Era of Excess, Princeton University Press, 1999, pp 86-88.
[25] Daniel Nettle, Happiness: The Science Behind Your Smile, Oxford University Press, 2005, p 180.
[26] Zygmunt Bauman, Consuming Life, Polity Press (Cambridge), 2007, p 94.
[27] Barry Schwartz, The Paradox of Choice: Why More is Less, Harper Perennial (New York), 2004, pp 210-211.
[28] For example, when rats have their brains stimulated to eat food, they don’t show the typical ‘liking behavior’ that normally accompanies pleasurable activities – indeed, if anything, they show ‘disliking behavior’. Conversely, the rats can be drugged so that they have no desire to eat, but show liking behavior when a sweet solution is put onto their tongue. See also Daniel Nettle, Happiness: The Science Behind Your Smile, op cit, Chapter 5.
[29] Daniel Nettle, Happiness: The Science Behind Your Smile, op cit, pp 48-52, 70-75; Robert H Frank, Luxury Fever: Money and Happiness in an Era of Excess, op cit, pp 71-74.
[30] Although the reference is to the generic term ‘fascism’, I shall limit my historical discussion to the Nazi Party and the German Third Reich – as does, by and large, Ballard..
[31] Ian Kershaw, The Nazi Dictatorship: Problems & Perspectives Of Interpretation (4th edition), Hodder Arnold (London), 2000, p 4.
[32] Erich Fromm, The Fear of Freedom, Routledge (London), 1960, pp 106-116, 180-188 (originally published as Escape from Freedom, 1941).
[33] See S J Woolf (ed), The Nature of Fascism, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1968, pp 107-108.
[34] Michael Burleigh, The Third Reich: A New History, Pan Books (London), 2001, p 122.
[35] T W Mason, ‘The Primacy of Politics – Politics and Economics in National Socialist Germany’, in S J Woolf (ed), The Nature of Fascism, op cit, p. 171.
[36] In a conversation with Mark Pauline c1987, published in J. G. Ballard: Conversations, RE/Search Publications, San Francisco, 2005, p 136.
[37] Michael Burleigh, The Third Reich: A New History, op cit, pp 210-211.
[38] Quoted in Erich Fromm, The Fear of Freedom, op cit, p 193.
[39] Roger Griffin (ed), Fascism, Oxford University Press, 1995, pp 3-4.
[40] Michael Burleigh, The Third Reich: A New History, op cit, pp 8-9.
[41] JG Ballard, ‘Alphabets of Unreason’ in New Worlds # 196, December 1969, p 26.
[42] William L Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, Arrow Books, [1960]/1998, p 265.
[43] William L Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, op cit, p 258.
[44] For the Nazi assimilation of intermediate-level organizations, see William L Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, op cit, pp 241-267.
[45] Kevin Passmore, Fascism: A Very Short Introduction, Oxford University Press, 2002, p 128.
[46] SL Andreski, ‘Some sociological considerations on fascism and class’, in S J Woolf (ed), The Nature of Fascism, op cit, pp 100-101.
[47] Ian Kershaw, The Nazi Dictatorship: Problems & Perspectives Of Interpretation (4th edition), op cit, pp 174, 179.
[48] It is the psychological similarities that Ballard stressed in an interview with James Campbell: ‘… could consumerism turn into fascism? The underlying psychologies aren’t all that far removed from one another. If you go into a huge shopping mall and you’re looking down the parade, it’s the same theatrical aspect: these disciplined ranks of merchandise, all glittering like fascist uniforms. When you enter a mall, you are taking part in a ceremony of affirmation, which you endorse just by your presence.’ The Guardian, 14 June 2008.
[49] JG Ballard, Kingdom Come, op cit, p 85. It is interesting to note that Fromm uses the term ‘automaton conformity’ to describe the form that the attempt to escape from freedom takes in modern democracies (as opposed to fascist dictatorships); see Erich Fromm, The Fear of Freedom, op cit, pp 159-178.
[50] JG Ballard, Kingdom Come, op cit, p 189.
[51] Michael Burleigh, The Third Reich: A New History, op cit, p 204.
[52] ‘Kingdom Come: An Interview with J. G. Ballard’, in Jeannette Baxter, J. G. Ballard: Contemporary Critical Perspectives, Continuum (London & New York), 2008, p 127.
[53] JG Ballard, Kingdom Come, op cit, p 39.
[54] JG Ballard, Kingdom Come, op cit, pp 102, 168.
[55] See, for example, Azar Gat, War in Civilization, Oxford University Press, 2006, Chapters 2, 6 and 9; also Steven LeBlanc, with Katherine Register, Constant Battles: The myth of the peaceful noble savage, St Martin’s Press (New York), 2003.
[56] ‘Dangerous Driving’, interview in ‘Frieze’ magazine #34, May 1997.
[57] Unpublished interview with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, op cit.
[58] ‘Age of Unreason’, interview published online by the The Guardian, 22 June 2004; available at http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2004/jun/22/sciencefictionfantasyandhorror.jgballard (accessed 13 May 2010).
[59] JG Ballard, Kingdom Come, op cit, p 191.
[60] JG Ballard, Kingdom Come, op cit, p 35.
[61] After all that’s happened, Pearson still has positive feelings for the people of the Metro-Centre: ‘Leaving Sangster and his self-hating motives to one side, I admired Carradine and his mutineers, and the robustly physical world they had based on their consumerist dream. The motorway towns were built on the frontier between a tired past and a future without illusions and snobberies’ (Kingdom Come, op cit, p. 266). And on the penultimate page, there’s the following, rather astonishing, meditation from Pearson: ‘The cable channels had reverted to an anaesthetic diet of household hints and book-group discussions. Once people began to talk earnestly about the novel any hope of freedom had died. The once real possibility of a fascist republic had vanished into the air …’ (Kingdom Come, op cit, p. 279, my italics). This appears to mourn the failure of fascism, but I prefer to think of as reflecting Ballard’s oft-mentioned idea of ‘immersing oneself in the most dangerous elements and swimming’. Just to confuse matters further, on the following (and last) page of the book, Pearson turns pessimistic again and ruminates that ‘In time, unless the sane woke and rallied themselves, an even fiercer republic would open the doors and spin the turnstiles of its beckoning paradise’ (Kingdom Come, op cit, p. 280).
[62] See, for example, ‘An Interview with J. G. Ballard’, Mississippi Review op cit, p 33. And the following brief quote well-illustrates Ballard’s reasoning: ‘I certainly do believe that we should immerse ourselves in the destructive element. Far better to do so consciously than find ourselves tossed into the pool when we’re not looking’, interview in The Paris Review #94, 1984, p 143.
[63] Daniel Woodley, Fascism and Political Theory: Critical Perspectives on Fascist Ideology, Routledge (London & New York), 2010, pp 14-18.
[64] c.f. Ballard on the distinction between manifest and latent content: ‘Freud pointed out that one has to distinguish between the manifest content of the inner world of the psyche and its latent content, and I think in exactly the same way today, when the fictional elements have overwhelmed reality, one has to distinguish between the manifest content of reality and its latent content’, from ‘The New Science Fiction: A conversation between J G Ballard and George MacBeth’ in Langdon Jones (ed), The New SF, Hutchinson (London), 1969, p 50.

Slip-case designed by David Pelham for a Penguin boxed set of four 1974 Ballard reprints.

by James Pardey

The idea that the world and everything in it is made from the four ‘elements’ of earth, air, fire and water endured among philosophers from antiquity to the Renaissance. All things, they said, were a combination of these four building blocks, and whether something was one thing or another – a rock, say, or a leaf – depended only on the relative amounts of each element in it. The idea was not so naïve as it seems, for when wood burned it was seen to release fire, air and water, as steam, until only earth remained as ashes, and in one sense the philosophers were not so very wide of the mark, since nowadays these ‘elements’ are known as solid, liquid, gas and energy.

It has often been said that J G Ballard’s quartet of disaster novels published in 1962–66 draws on these four classical elements for the natural catastrophes that destroy civilization in each of the books. In The Wind From Nowhere a global super-hurricane (air) reaches speeds of several hundred miles an hour, toppling trees, reducing cities to rubble, and darkening the skies with debris and topsoil. In The Drowned World rising sea levels (water) have flooded most of the Earth’s populated areas, and London lies submerged beneath steaming lagoons and primeval swamps that are ringed by jungle and overrun with reptiles. The Drought presents a future where rain is a thing of the past and the Sun (fire) has dried up the lakes and river beds, creating a parched landscape of ghost towns and burning cities. And in The Crystal World a bizarre transmutation of matter (earth) is turning everything into a coruscating mineral realm where plants, animals and people are mutating into sculptures of glass and quartz.

This analogy is almost always noted without further comment, although in fact it may be taken further. For just as Plato and Aristotle had posited the existence of a mysterious and immaterial fifth element, or quintessence, that suffuses all things, so something similar pervades much of Ballard’s early fiction, which, in addition to the four novels, includes two collections of short stories, The Four-Dimensional Nightmare in 1963 and The Terminal Beach in 1964. So what in a Ballardian context is this quintessential element?

Ballard himself pre-empted the question in a guest editorial that he wrote for the British science fiction magazine New Worlds in 1962. In it he argued that it was time for sf to turn its back on outer space and its standard paraphernalia of rockets, ray guns and aliens, and strike out in a new direction that, by analogy with outer space, had become known as inner space. This was not a reference to the hollow earth stories of Edgar Rice Burroughs as Brian Aldiss later quipped[1]. The term had previously been used in 1953 by the English novelist J B Priestley whose essay, They Come From Inner Space[2], presented a critique of sf as he saw it at the time. Priestley argued that the move into outer space was a move ‘in the wrong direction’ and maintained that sf should instead be ‘moving inward’ to explore ‘the hidden life of the psyche’. He singled out the American writer Ray Bradbury as a pioneer of inner space[3] and added that although Bradbury used traditional sf motifs such as spaceships and Martians, he did so in order to ‘show us what is really happening in men’s minds’. Priestley held that men are not as rational as they like to think they are, but are also driven by the desires, urges and irrational instincts of the subconscious mind. For Priestley, the idea that people’s actions are dictated solely by their conscious selves was akin to the equally fallacious assumption that ‘what can be seen of an iceberg is all there is of it’.

April 1974 Penguin reprint with a cover design by David Pelham.

Priestley saw the flying saucer legend and sf’s other trademark tropes as a product of society’s collective unconscious. Rocket ships, he wrote, ‘no longer represent man’s triumphant progress’ but instead have come to symbolize his attempts ‘to escape from himself’. Likewise for aliens, which as metaphors for humanity’s ‘deep feelings of anxiety, fear, and guilt’ can be traced back to the scientific romances of the nineteenth century[4]. So inner space is not a physical space at all but a psychological one. It is the dimensionless world of the subconscious mind or, as Priestley called it, the Unconscious.

Ballard’s editorial, Which Way to Inner Space? [5], did not mention Priestley’s essay but may nonetheless be regarded as a sequel to it, for he took up where Priestley left off, describing Bradbury as ‘a poet’ and reiterating that ‘it is inner space, not outer, that needs to be explored’. But Ballard did more than merely echo Priestley. He also argued that for sf to avoid falling by the wayside it must discover new routes to inner space that draw on more abstract, speculative and experimental techniques like those used in other media such as modern art. As such, he was not just offering a commentary on the state of sf, he was issuing a manifesto that would need to be adopted if the genre was to secure its place as ‘the literature of tomorrow’.

Ballard ended his editorial with an anecdote about Salvador Dalí delivering a lecture in a diving suit. When asked how deep he proposed to descend, the artist had announced, ‘To the Unconscious!’ and Ballard’s editorial was a unilateral declaration of his intent to follow Dalí there[6]. That he was true to his word may be seen in the novels and many of the short stories that followed, though by the time his editorial appeared he had already made a few forays into inner space with stories such as ‘The Waiting Grounds’, ‘The Voices of Time’ and ‘The Overloaded Man’. A notable exception is his first novel, The Wind From Nowhere, which was also written before his New Worlds editorial but was structured as a conventional action adventure. Ballard later disowned it and referred instead to The Drowned World as his first novel, and it is here that inner space comes to the fore as a quintessential force in his fiction.

The Drowned World is a lushly atmospheric novel that takes Conrad’s Heart of Darkness to the lagoons and jungles of post-diluvian London, where half-submerged hotels and office blocks rise out of the water, and cars sit rusting in the streets sixty feet below the water’s surface. Reptiles now dominate the submerged city and the jungle teems with an even greater profusion of wildlife. Alligators patrol the lagoons and iguanas bask three deep in the upper windows of department stores. With humans gone, the flora and fauna are reverting to that of the Triassic period some 250 million years earlier.

Cover painting: The Palace of Windowed Rocks by Yves Tanguy. Penguin Books, 1965 paperback edition.

Amidst this febrile environment, Dr Robert Kerans and several other members of a survey team begin to experience strange dreams, like distant echoes of their surroundings, prompting one of them to ask, ‘Is it only the external landscape which is altering? How often recently most of us have had the feeling of déjà vu, of having seen all this before, in fact of remembering these swamps and lagoons’. From this the realisation follows that the dreams are being triggered by primitive organic memories within their collective unconscious. These ‘neuronic’ memories were encoded in the nervous systems of man’s earliest ancestors during the original Triassic period and have endured at a cellular level through the ensuing epochs of human evolution. But now, in response to the emergence of a new Triassic age, these dormant memories are finally resurfacing, leading the earlier questioner to conclude that ‘we really remember these swamps and lagoons’.

As these dreams and memories take hold so those affected become increasingly introverted, and when the survey team departs these few individuals remain behind. Left alone, they avoid each other and withdraw into their own internal worlds, accepting that ‘their only true meeting-ground would be in their dreams’. Thus they regress through ‘archaeopsychic time’ and ‘a succession of ever stranger landscapes’ towards the prehistoric past of their cellular evolution, until ‘the terrestrial and psychic landscapes were now indistinguishable’.

This exploration of inner space continues in The Drought, a novel that is thematically similar to The Drowned World and may even be seen as a reworking of it with a new catastrophe, a change of location and other nominal differences. For example, Dr Robert Kerans is now Dr Charles Ransom, and the deluge has become a drought that has scorched the earth and turned the landscape into a cracked desert of dead trees, long- gone lakes and empty rivers. Dust chokes the air, as do clouds of ash and smoke from the burning towns and cities whose populations have departed in a mass exodus to the coast. Here they eke out a hand-to-mouth existence in makeshift settlements around the water desalination plants that the government has set up.

But beneath this superficial similarity there is a deeper divergence, for while The Drowned World describes the internal landscapes of Kerans and his colleagues, The Drought takes a more oblique approach as Ballard turns his attention outwards to focus instead on the external landscape and the wreckage that is strewn across it. This change of perspective is echoed by the reader, who switches from an observer of The Drowned World to a participant in The Drought. As an observer, the reader is psychologically detached from Kerans and reads his dispatches from inner space like those of a Reuters correspondent. Ransom, however, has less to say about his state of mind in The Drought and is more like a tour guide, taking the reader with him during his journey to the coast, his ten years of ‘dune limbo’ and his eventual return inland to the ruins of the town in which he once lived. It is a desolate journey, fraught with danger, through an alien environment ravaged by destruction and decay. Abandoned vehicles clutter the highways, boats sit high and dry on the sun-baked river beds, and everything that was once familiar is now being destroyed. This in itself is bad enough but in fact it merely sets the scene, for the novel’s core concern is existential and its theme is the uncertainty of physical and psychological survival. Death lurks everywhere, and prowls the landscape in the form of wild animals that were once caged in zoos, while psychosis threatens in the unpredictability of others – men whose minds are disintegrating like the world around them. As such, The Drought does not present a single, Ballardian version of inner space like the neuronic memories and archaeopsychic time of The Drowned World. Instead it sends its readers there, for it is their responses to this nightmarish world that the novel elicits, their feelings of alienation and vulnerability that it evokes, and their inner spaces that it explores. Like The Drowned World, The Drought is a psychic odyssey, but one that must now be undertaken by the reader.

Having examined inner space in terms of both its internal and external landscapes, Ballard adopted an altogether different approach in his next novel. The Crystal World is an extended version of ‘The Illuminated Man’ which had appeared in his second collection of short stories, The Terminal Beach. In the story a man named James B— travels to the Florida Everglades to investigate reports of a bizarre phenomenon that is turning the region and everything in it to crystal. Similar outbreaks have been reported in the Pripet Marshes of Byelorussia and the Matarre region of Madagascar, and it is the Matarre to which Dr Edward Sanders travels in The Crystal World, although by then Ballard had relocated the Matarre into Cameroon in a move that recalls the story’s famous precedessor, as Sanders journeys upriver through the steaming jungles of West Africa towards a new Heart of Darkness.

Cover painting: The Eye of Silence by Max Ernst. Panther Books paperback edition, 1968.

The crystallization process is similar to a cancer and seemingly unstoppable. As the ground underfoot and the slow-moving waters of the river begin to vitrify, so too do the flora and fauna. Like a game of animal, vegetable or mineral with only one outcome, everything succumbs and nothing is immune. This strange metamorphosis is in some way connected to reports by astronomers that distant galaxies are ‘doubling’ – a phenomenon that is dubbed the Hubble Effect and attributed to the mutual annihilation of matter and anti-matter. These subatomic events are cancelling out the equivalent temporal components of time and anti-time, thereby ‘subtracting from the universe another quantum from its total store of time’ and depleting ‘the time-store available to the materials of our own solar system’. So time is quite literally running out, and as it does the plants, animals and people in each affected area change into scintillating new forms that freeze them in ‘a landscape without time’.

This emphasis on time is a recurring theme in Ballard’s fiction. He had given notice of it in his New Worlds editorial, where he cited time as ‘one of the perspectives of the personality’ and it is this subjective sense of time that shapes The Drowned World, as archaeopsychic time, neuronic time and a ‘descent into deep time’. It is present in The Drought to a lesser extent, but in The Crystal World it again takes centre stage, transforming the external landscape as vividly as it does the dreamscapes of Kerans & Co. in post-apocalyptic London.

The Crystal World is also an intensely visual novel and the inspiration for it is easy to establish. For in 1966, the year that the novel was first published, Ballard wrote an article for New Worlds titled The Coming of the Unconscious[7] in which he equated ‘the images of surrealism’ with ‘the iconography of inner space’. It was a view he reiterated in his 2008 autobiography, Miracles of Life, describing inner space as, among other things, ‘the psychological space apparent in surrealist painting’[8]. But this belief that surrealism offers a window onto inner space was not confined to two statements made more than forty years apart. His writing repeatedly references artists such as Salvador Dalí, Max Ernst, René Magritte, Paul Delvaux, Giorgio de Chirico and Yves Tanguy[9], and their paintings feature frequently in his fiction. Notable examples include a cameo for The Persistence of Memory, Dali’s famous painting of melting clocks, in ‘Studio 5, The Stars’ and an appearance by The Echo, Delvaux’s time-lapse painting of a ‘triplicated nymph walking naked among the classical pavilions of a midnight city’ in ‘The Day Of Forever’[10]. Likewise ‘The Overloaded Man’, which extends the images of inner space to the neo-plastic compositions of Piet Mondrian. These provide a powerful metaphor for the mental breakdown suffered by the story’s protagonist as ‘object by object, he began to switch off the world around him. The houses opposite went first. The white masses of the roofs and balconies he resolved quickly into flat rectangles, the lines of windows into small squares of colour like the grids in a Mondrian abstract’[11].

As in his short stories, so in his novels. The Drowned World features a Delvaux painting ‘in which ashen-faced women danced naked to the waist with dandified skeletons in tuxedos against a spectral bone-like landscape’ while on another wall ‘one of Max Ernst’s self-devouring phantasmagoric jungles screamed silently to itself, like the sump of some insane unconscious’. Later in the novel Kerans reflects on how the jungle around him increasingly resembles the one in Ernst’s painting, while the dreams that he and his colleagues are experiencing are ‘the common zone of twilight where they moved at night like the phantoms in the Delvaux painting’. With Ernst and Delvaux[12] featuring prominently in The Drowned World, the use of a Tanguy painting, The Palace of Windowed Rocks, on the cover of the paperback edition published by Penguin Books in 1965 might have seemed off-key were it not for The Drought which also appeared that year. Two of the novel’s chapters, Multiplication of the Arcs and Jours de Lenteur, take their titles from paintings by Tanguy, and like The Drowned World there is a feeling that the external and painted landscapes are converging, as Ransom sees in his surroundings the ‘drained beaches, eroded of all associations, of all sense of time’ in Jours de Lenteur.

Given these and other references to art and artists, their absence from The Crystal World may at first seem surprising. Readers who have come to expect such references may see in the novel’s two main themes a tacit connection between ‘the petrified forest’ and Ernst’s painting of the same name, or an allusion to Magritte’s Time Transfixed in the depiction of a world without time, but the novel makes no mention of these or any other paintings and the reason for this soon becomes apparent. Ballard excluded the art of others because its presence would have obscured the bigger picture that he was creating, for if a picture paints a thousand words then in The Crystal World it is the other way round and greatly magnified. The novel reads like a journey through a surrealist canvas, and its resemblance to one in particular seems more than coincidental. In The Coming of the Unconscious Ballard had singled out Max Ernst’s painting, The Eye of Silence, as one of ‘the key documents of surrealism’ with ‘a direct bearing on the speculative fiction of the immediate future’. For Ballard, the painting’s ‘frenzied rocks towering into the air above the silent swamp’ have ‘the luminosity of organs freshly exposed to the light. The real landscapes of our world are seen for what they are – the palaces of flesh and bone that are the living façades enclosing our own subliminal consciousness’. With this in mind it is hard to ignore the resemblance of Ernst’s jewelled ceramic structures and bright green biomorphic forms to Ballard’s crystalline forest ‘loaded with deliquescing jewels’ and living statues ‘carved from jade and quartz’. The painting is suffused with a timeless, dream-like quality that is shared by Ballard’s novel as the forest and everything in it slowly solidifies. This convergence of painted and written landscapes recalls those in The Drowned World and The Drought, though unlike these two novels it is not made explicit. As time is removed from The Crystal World it becomes increasingly surreal, until finally all movement ceases and like Ernst’s painting there is silence. If, as Ballard believed, the painting is a window onto inner space then Sanders in the novel climbs through it, pulling aside a curtain of tinkling lianas and shimmering glass foliage to penetrate deep into the heart of the petrified forest. He eventually re-emerges, but at the end of the novel he is seen heading back upriver, and it is tempting to imagine what he might discover on his return. For somewhere, glimpsed perhaps through a gap in the trees, there is surely a remote clearing surrounded by organic rocks and vitrified vegetation. It is the source of the outbreak, and it looks just like The Eye of Silence.

Given this similarity between Ernst’s painting and The Crystal World it was no surprise that when the novel was first published it was The Eye of Silence that filled the dust jacket, as it did the front, back and spine of the paperback edition published by Panther Books two years later in 1968. It was an improvement over the lurid sf imagery used on other covers[13] though it was not without precedent. The idea had first been introduced in 1963 when Penguin Books launched a new sf series. Penguin’s then art director, Germano Facetti, had noticed a similar connection between The Eye of Silence and A Case of Conscience by the American writer James Blish and used a detail from the painting on the book’s front cover. This use of twentieth-century art became a defining feature of the Penguin sf series and, in addition to the pairing of Ballard and Tanguy mentioned earlier, Facetti studiously matched Ray Bradbury’s The Day it Rained Forever with Ernst’s Garden Aeroplane Trap, Hal Clement’s Mission of Gravity with Tanguy’s The Doubter, Fred and Geoffrey Hoyle’s Fifth Planet with Magritte’s The Flavour of Tears and so on, extending the idea to other artists such as Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky, Joan Miró and Picasso[14].

April 1974 Penguin reprint with a cover design by David Pelham.

For Ballard the images of surrealism served a more specific purpose as one of many possible routes to inner space. Such images informed one aspect of his fiction but they were not its raison d’etre. That was inner space in its wider, quintessentially Ballardian form and to capture this required something other than reproductions of surrealist paintings on the covers of his books. This was the challenge facing David Pelham, the art director at Penguin Books from 1968 to 1979, when, in 1974, four of the five Ballard titles in Penguin’s back catalogue came up for reprint. Pelham was responsible for numerous covers at any one time and would often commission other designers and illustrators to produce the artwork, but the Ballard covers he designed himself. The books were sold individually or as a boxed set in a slip-case that Pelham also designed, and it is these iconic images that have become most strongly associated with Ballard’s fiction.

So why is this? The answer is three parts English to one part French. First, Pelham was already familiar with Ballard’s work and a great admirer of it, being drawn to what he later described as its ‘apocalyptic imagery’ and ‘depiction of technological and human breakdown and decay’[15]. Second, it no doubt helped that Ballard and Pelham were friends, having been introduced some years earlier by the artist Eduardo Paolozzi. The three men met regularly at Ballard’s home in Shepperton, a suburban town south-west of London near to Heathrow Airport and the M25 motorway so, third, Pelham was able to discuss his ideas for these new covers with the author himself. Add to this Pelham’s fourth ingredient – a generous amount of je ne sais quoi – and the results were more than merely eye-catching.

Pelham’s covers featured a crepuscular sky above a barren expanse of water, sand or sunbaked earth as the backdrop for an artefact of twentieth-century industrial or military technology. According to the September 1974 issue of Science Fiction Monthly[16], these machines depict ‘the debris of our society’. Pelham, the article explained, ‘finds romance in seeing the future as if it were already the past – in visualizing ruins created from the artifacts we are manufacturing now’. But the paradox of Pelham’s artifacts is that they are not in ruins. His are pristine machines at odds with their apocalyptic settings. Half buried or submerged, they stand as tombstones to ostentation and brutality. They are icons, but only of man’s arrogance.

An American WWII bomber lies abandoned and half-buried by the shifting sands on Pelham’s slip-case[17] while its payload – a sister to the atom bomb that destroyed Nagasaki and the mother of all UXBs – rests nose down in the sand flats of The Terminal Beach. The bomb’s tail-box tilts skywards like the flower of a strange fruit whose hard shell hides an exotic interior. In the belly of the bomb are the seeds of mass destruction, two stones of a ripening plutonium core waiting for the conditions that will trigger them to germinate. But unapproachable and unknowable the bomb is quantum uncertainty writ large; it is Schrödinger’s cat inside Pandora’s box. This atom bomb sitting in the sand is as surreal as Dalí’s melting clocks or Einstein’s theory of relativity, for all are part of the same chain reaction. As mankind cowers with his fingers in his ears and his eyes squeezed shut, so both bomb and slip-cased bomber have their heads buried in the sand, as if in denial of this nightmarish world and the roles they have played in its creation.

April 1974 Penguin reprint with a cover design by David Pelham.

In contrast to this The Drowned World presents a peaceful scene. The surface of the water is flat as a millpond, a sea of tranquillity broken only by the art deco spire of the Chrysler Building which, like the crown of a colossal King Canute, bears silent witness to the deluge that has turned Manhattan into a man-made reef and New York into a new Atlantis. Elsewhere The Wind From Nowhere makes a mockery of a spotless Centurion tank, while The Drought has turned a Cadillac Coupe de Ville into a memorial of chrome and streamlined angularity, its rocketship rear styling and flared tail fins an epitaph to the flamboyance of the American automobile.

The use of such icons to signify apocalyptic ruination is nothing new of course. The Statue of Liberty, in particular, has borne the brunt of numerous cataclysms that have left it in various stages of burial, collapse or decapitation. Ballard himself could not resist the temptation in The Wind From Nowhere, while the Statue’s cameo in the final scene of the 1968 movie, Planet of the Apes, is one of the most memorable denouements in cinematic history, a classic twist in the tail that still cools the blood today. Such images may thrill and perhaps even shock, but the explanation is invariably straightforward because the machine, the artifact, the icon is in ruins. Where Pelham’s images differ is that they defy such explanation. The scene is apocalyptic but the machine is immaculate, and the two are not easily reconciled. Aesthetically these images mesmerise, and on closer inspection they tantalise, but as in Ballard’s fictional worlds, answers are avoided and ambiguity abounds. And this is perhaps the key to Pelham’s images, for they occupy a twilight zone between the landscapes of the outer world and those of inner space. Like the contemplation of a surrealist painting it may take several attempts to ‘get’ Ballard, but Pelham got him to perfection, creating a union of text and image that has never been bettered. With these classic covers the art of J G Ballard reached its apotheosis.

April 1974 Penguin reprint with a cover design by David Pelham.

This article first appeared in the Autumn 2009 issue of Vector magazine. Reproduced with permission.

NOTES

[1] Brian Aldiss. Billion Year Spree. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1973, p.162.
[2] ‘They Come From Inner Space.’ In: J B Priestley. Thoughts in the Wilderness. London: William Heinemann, 1957, pp.20-6.
[3] Ray Bradbury may have been the first sf writer to visit inner space but an earlier pioneer outside the genre was Joseph Conrad in his 1902 novel, Heart of Darkness.
[4] Perhaps the best example is the invasion of Earth by murderous Martians in H G Wells’ 1898 novel, The War of the Worlds, which reputedly caused widespread panic in the USA when a radio adaption narrated by Orson Welles was broadcast in 1938.
[5] ‘Which Way to Inner Space?’ New Worlds, May 1962. Reprinted in: J G Ballard. A User’s Guide to the Millennium. HarperCollins, 1996, pp.195-8.
[6] Ballard playfully alludes to Dalí’s lecture in his novel, The Drowned World. As the central character is putting on a diving suit he is told that he looks ‘like the man from inner space’ and is warned not to ‘try to reach the Unconscious’ as the suit ‘isn’t equipped to go down that far!’.
[7] ‘The Coming of the Unconscious.’ New Worlds, July 1966. Reprinted in: J G Ballard. A User’s Guide to the Millennium. HarperCollins, 1996, pp.84-8.
[8] J G Ballard. Miracles of Life. HarperCollins, 2008, p.215.
[9] Mike Bonsall’s concordance of Ballard’s oeuvre lists 110 references to Dalí , 40 to Ernst, 22 to Magritte, 14 to Delvaux, 11 to Chirico and 9 to Tanguy (http://bonsall.homeserver.com/concordance).
[10] J G Ballard. The Complete Short Stories, Volume 2. HarperCollins, 2006, p.151.
[11] J G Ballard. The Complete Short Stories, Volume 1. HarperCollins, 2006, p.336.
[12] Paul Delvaux was a particular favourite of Ballard’s and in 1986-87 he commissioned the artist Brigid Marlin to reproduce two Delvaux paintings, The Rape and The Mirror. Both were painted in 1936 but were thought to have been destroyed during the Blitz in 1941. In fact The Mirror had survived the war and was auctioned by Christies of London in 1999 for a hammer price of almost £3.2 million. Marlin’s portrait of Ballard, also painted in 1987, is at the National Portrait Gallery in London.
[13] Many of Ballard’s book covers are displayed in Rick McGrath’s Terminal Timeline at www.jgballard.ca/terminal_collection/terminal_timeline.html.
[14] The relationship between text and cover art in Penguin’s sf series is explored in a series of three articles in The Penguin Collector; see ‘Not Quite Nowhere Backwards’ at www.penguinsciencefiction.org.
[15] David Pelham, speaking at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, in June 2005. A transcript of this talk appears in Penguin by Designers. London: The Penguin Collectors Society, 2007, pp.127-53.
[16] Science Fiction Monthly, September 1974, pp.6-7.
[17] In 1974, the year that Penguin published this boxed set, a short story by Ballard appeared in Ambit magazine. ‘My Dream of Flying to Wake Island’ tells of the first astronaut to suffer a mental breakdown in space and his convalescence at an abandoned resort where he becomes obsessed with excavating an American B-17 Flying Fortress that lies buried beneath the sand dunes.

+ More by James Pardey on David Pelham’s cover designs for Penguin’s Ballard reprints.

..:: Previously on Ballardian:
+ Collapsing Bulkheads: the Covers of Crash
+ ‘Woefully Underconceptualised’: Rick McGrath on J.G. Ballard’s Cover Art

Advertiser’s Announcement: ‘Sex: Inner Space: J.G. Ballard’. Ambit no. 33, 1967.

Better Living through Psychopathology
Benjamin Noys (2009)

Presentation at at ‘The Future’, David Roberts Art Foundation, Fitzrovia, London (5 November 2009).

The image of the future which I have selected is one of the series of J. G. Ballard’s pseudo-advertisements that he published in Ambit no. 33 in 1967. Ballard explains that:

Back in the late 60s I produced a series of advertisements which I placed in various publications (Ambit, New Worlds, Ark and various continental alternative magazines), doing the art work myself and arranging for the blockmaking, and then delivering the block to the particular journal just as would a commercial advertiser. Of course I was advertising my own conceptual ideas, but I wanted to do so within the formal circumstances of classic commercial advertising – I wanted ads that would look in place in Vogue, Paris Match, Newsweek, etc. To maintain the integrity of the project I paid the commercial rate for the page, even in the case of Ambit of which I was and still am prose editor. I would have liked to have branched out into Vogue and Newsweek, but cost alone stopped me … (R/S 147).

The actual image is a still from Stephen Dwoskin’s 1963 film Alone (USA 1963 13min), of a woman masturbating. The text is a typically concise and forensic manifesto for Ballard’s own counter-science fiction.

The reason for my fascination with this image as an image of the future, which is in fact over forty years old, is that it represents the deliberate attempt to construct an image of the future that can resist the obsolescence of the future. This might seem an ironic proposition when we consider the fact that this image was created in the mid-60s – a time when, as Ballard retrospectively notes, ‘people … were intensely interested in the future’ (1994). Yet, he also notes that ‘[s]adly, at some point in the 1960s our sense of the future seemed to atrophy and die’ and that, by the 70s, only ‘a few romantics like myself still believe[d] that our sense of the future remain[ed] intact’ (1994). In fact, the atrophy of the future took place because of the impoverishment of our images of the future. The possibility of the future became blocked by those images of the future that seemed to attest to faith in a better tomorrow: the space race, two years away from the moon landing, pop futurism, the consumption-driven Keynesian compact, ‘the dreams that money can buy’, ‘advertising and pseudoevents’ (R/S 96). These images of a promised land of ‘outer space and the far future’ (R/S 97) had been predicted and generated by the science fiction of the 1950s. Locating himself as a science-fiction writer Ballard recognised the exhaustion of this tradition in its realisation: ‘by an ironic paradox, modern science fiction became the first casualty of the changing world it anticipated and helped to create.’ (R/S 97)

Ballard’s image is a counter-image to this atrophy and impoverishment of the future. It is a ‘chromosome of the future’ designed to ‘divide and grow in the reader’s mind’ (Ballard 1994). We can understand it as belonging to that conceptual Third World War Ballard would later invoke in The Atrocity Exhibition: ‘The blitzkriegs will be fought out on the spinal battlefields, in terms of the postures we assume, of our traumas mimetized in the angle of a wall or balcony.’ (AE 11) With the threat that ‘the future is ceasing to exist, devoured by the all-voracious present’ (R/S 97), the counter-image tries to extract a new future; the obsolete science-fiction of outer space has to give way to the new science-fiction of inner space. Reviewing Hitler’s Mein Kampf in 1969 Ballard remarks ‘[t]he psychopath never dates’ and speculates that: ‘perhaps one reason why the American and Russian space programs have failed to catch our imaginations is that this quality of explicit psychopathology is missing.’ (R/S 104) In response conventional science-fiction can only ratify its own transition to archaism, by producing images of the future that are ‘a kind of historical romance in reverse, a sealed world into which the hard light of contemporary reality was never really allowed to penetrate.’ (R/S 97) (Ballard’s reference is 2001, but I also think of Star Wars).

The colonisation of reality by fictions requires a dialectic of involution and externalisation. We turn inward to the body and the psyche – fiction is a branch of neurology – as ‘the one small node of reality left to us is inside our own heads.’ (R/S 98) And yet that inner reality has been turned inside-out, as our innermost desires are always-already realised by science, pornography, and advertising. For Ballard the usual elements of the so-called ‘human condition’ – sex and death – are the first casualties of this war. Instead of de-conceptualising them, to recover their ‘natural’ form, à la Reich or Marcuse, we must take them as manipulable elements ‘of a wholly conceptual character’ (AT 80). The ‘node of reality’ is not even some residual or surplus (Lacanian) capital ‘R’ Real, which could resist the totalising forces of mediatisation. Instead, ‘We’re living in an abstracted world, where there aren’t any values, where rather than fall back, one has to, as Conrad said, immerse oneself in the most destructive element, and swim.’ (R/S 161)

To wage this Third World (Image) War we have to move deeper into our own psychoses (AT 9) – to immerse ourselves in the image-stream to wrest the future from the perpetual present by an ‘elective psychopathy’ (Ballard 2008). The subsumption of the psyche makes it available for further re-conceptualisation, for the invention of new pathologies and new perversions. Ballard’s image is a radicalisation of the fact ‘that sex is becoming more and more a conceptual act, an intellectualization divorced from affect and physiology alike’ (AT 56). We can imagine it as the creation of one of the psychiatric patients in The Atrocity Exhibition, the future image guerrillas of this Third World War: ‘these bizarre images, with their fusion of Eniwetok and Luna Park, Freud and Elizabeth Taylor’ (AT 7). The involution to inner space, to scenarios of nerve and blood vessel, forms an alternative ‘conceptualized psychopathology’ (AT 99) of re-externalisation.

The ‘future’ is now an image concocted from the iconography of the mediatised unconscious, in which Jung’s archetypes and Freud’s drives are re-figured in ‘the nasal prepuce of L.B.J., crashed helicopters, the pudenda of Ralph Nader, Eichmann in drag, the climax of a New York happening: a dead child.’ (AT 20) The result is that these images become reversible; as one character ponders in The Atrocity Exhibition: ‘Are space vehicles merely overgrown V-2s, or are they Jung’s symbols of redemption, ciphers in some futuristic myth?’ (AT 84) Instead of merely being quaint and anachronistic technologies harnessed to an anodyne future, we can re-conceptualise and re-pathologise space vehicles. The science-fiction writer creates a new ‘predictive mytholog[y]’ (R/S 42): myths of the future that are also performative acts to create and construct that future.

From the original Doubleday edition, Michael Foreman’s artwork for an Atrocity Exhibition chapter, ‘You: Coma: Marilyn Monroe’.

Through the choice of psychopathology as a conscious act we can shape new written mythologies of memory and desire. The images of the ‘future’ that previously closed-out the future can now become the material for mythologies of a truly new future. Of course, the problem of such a mythology is that the more successful it is the more it is absorbed by the very mediascape it mimetizes. As Ballard writes ‘A lot of my prophecies about the alienated society are going to come true’ (R/S 155), however, if they come true, then they become superfluous. In The Atrocity Exhibition a ‘Festival of Atrocity Films’ is put on in a venue presumably very much like this one: ‘the results were disappointing; whatever Talbot had hoped for had clearly not materialized. The violence was little more than a sophisticated entertainment. One day he would carry out of Marxist analysis of this lumpen intelligentsia.’ (AT 19) Leaving aside the interesting question of what that analysis might be, and its relevance today, Ballard presciently probes the neuralgic point of his own fiction. The coinage ‘Ballardian’ is the very sign of this ironic success, as Ballard’s own fiction succumbs to the fate he had sketched for the science-fiction of the 1950s: ‘bec[oming] the first casualty of the changing world it anticipated and helped to create’.

It appears that the angle between two walls does not have a happy ending. Ballard’s own creation of himself as a brand or concept becomes another image in the media stream. This, however, is the essential risk of Ballard’s own active nihilism, which accepts that abstraction and conceptualisation operate all the way down: there is no point of immunity or safety from which one might safely create a ‘pure’ image of the future. His images of the future are always, explicitly, transitory, with ‘in-built-obsolescence’. In response we could extrapolate two possible positions from Ballard’s work. The first is that of a quasi-Weberian re-enchantment of a denuded reality through re-conceptualisation. In The Atrocity Exhibition the character Travers ‘has composed a series of new sexual deviations, of a wholly conceptual character, in an attempt to surmount this death of affect’ (AE 80) We could also cite Ballard’s retrospective tendency to position The Atrocity Exhibition as a work of moral commentary. We fall back from the future into a kind of Swiftean satire, at once reactionary and conservative.

The second position is something like what Nietzsche calls ‘completed nihilism’: the traversal and transcendence of the nihilism Ballard anatomises. In this case, Ballard’s dialectic proceeds by the ‘bad side’: the worse the better. He remarked in a 2006 interview that: ‘I’m somebody who stands by the side of the road with a sign saying, Dangerous Bends Ahead – Slow Down.’ He pauses. ‘Although it is true that I sometimes seem to be saying Dangerous Bends Ahead – Speed Up.’ (in Brown, 2006: 20) That speeding up, this accelerationism, of course risks passing from an active nihilism to a mere passive nihilism: the embrace of what is, and the closure of any possibility of the future, or the courting of a deliberate cynicism that re-converges with the position of the moral critic as disgusted and disenchanted observer.

This unease or instability is I want to suggest the reason why Ballard’s image of the future is so resonant. This image, of course, appears as a very 60s image, imbued with the kind of deliberately perverse utopianism that no longer registers with us except in the forms of nostalgia or cynicism. The difference is that this image disjoints itself from that moment by its prescient refusal of the usual models of repression, liberation, and recuperation. In The Atrocity Exhibition Ballard notes that images of elective psychopathy, in which Vietnam combat films are shown with a muzak soundtrack, create an environment ‘in which work-tasks, social relationships and overall motivation reached sustained levels of excellence’ (AT 94). The release of repressed desires can be made to serve the logic of the ‘perpetual present’ of accumulation. This is the mechanism of ‘repressive desublimation’, sketched by Marcuse, in which our desires are ‘liberated’ as the ‘dreams that money can buy’. In response the writer can only immerse themselves and swim, by imagining ‘an optimum torture and execution sequence’ (AE 93). This image fascinates me as an image of the future because it embraces fully the saturation of the future by abstraction and the only remaining possibility being further abstraction. For all its kitsch retro-sixties styling the encrypted moment of resistance figured in this image is the embrace of a future that never really took place, in which the only form of a future we can construct is one that takes place through absolute abstraction.

Bibliography
Ballard, J. G. (1984), Re/Search: J. G. Ballard 8/9. [R/S]
___ (1985) The Atrocity Exhibition [1970], London: Triad Granada. [AE]
___ (1994) ‘Introduction’ in Myths of the Near Future, London: Vintage.
___ (2008) ‘An Exhibition of Atrocities: J. G. Ballard on Mondo Films’, An Interview with Mark Goodall, The Ballardian, http://www.ballardian.com/jg-ballard-on-mondo-films [consulted 16 April 2009].

Brown, M. (2006) ‘From Here to Dystopia: Interview with J. G. Ballard’, Telegraph Magazine 2 September: 16-22.

Nietzsche, F. (1968) The Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufmann, New York: Vintage.

Simon O’Carrigan. Study for “The Drowned World”. 2007. Digital montage. Dimensions variable.

Selections taken from Simon O’Carrigan’s body of work “The Drowned World”, a title taken in reference to a speculative fiction that inspired much of the imagery in this work: J.G. Ballard’s The Drowned World.

ARTIST STATEMENT

[Note: the quotes throughout, from Ballard's The Drowned World, were not included in the artist's original presentation -- SS].

“The Drowned World” is a body of work focussed on the making of images. Coming from a painterly approach to the construction of images, parallels are drawn between the layered nature of the oil paint medium, and the layering prevalent in digital imaging software. The premise of a fragmented nature of vision in a ‘deluge’ of visual culture leads to an image in tension: striving for the unity of traditional modes of painting but simultaneously embracing the fissures and tears embodied in the construction of the image. The flood became the keystone of the work’s subject matter in relation to several concerns: climate change, mythical creation floods, apocalyptic forecasts, inspiration taken from J.G. Ballard’s novel The Drowned World, and a certain atmosphere of unstoppable movement (a parallel with digital and wireless technologies).

Formally, the flood holds a unique form of surface: a surface that can shift and create unexpected combinations (by literally displacing debris, also by the nature of reflection on the surface). This surface that is temporary, mobile, and fragmented translates to the surface of the painted works. Many images in the body of work are sourced from photographs both found and newly made. The flat surface and particular characteristics of different kinds of lenses, cameras, and printing technologies are closely observed in the reworking of each image. Thus, some images sourced from 1970s National Geographic magazines have a slightly less saturated colour and a more grainy image than those taken in 2007 on a digital SLR and printed with advanced digital technologies.

The combination of the image fragments is often firstly a digital process, but always mimicking traditional knife-and-glue collage. In this way, the digital production uses the trompe l’oeil mode of painting. This is extended by the literal use of trompe l’oeil in some of the works, and the addition of neatly ‘cut’ projected video to act as another layer of montage, as if the projected light could be cut and glued into place.

Simon O’Carrigan. Iguana (from The Drowned World). 2008. Mixed media cel animation. 15 sec.

All the way down the creek, perched in the windows of the office blocks and department stores, the iguanas watched them go past, their hard frozen heads jerking stiffly… Without the reptiles, the lagoons and the creeks of office blocks half-submerged in the immense heat would have had a strange dream-like beauty, but the iguanas and basilisks brought the fantasy down to earth. As their seats in the one-time board-rooms indicated, the reptiles had taken over the city. Once again they were the dominant form of life.

J.G. Ballard. The Drowned World (1962).

The body of work depicts the flood both as peaceful, cleansing bodies of water and as destructive, apocalyptic events. The apocalypse figures in the final body of work only as an allusion or a hidden layer of meaning, though the research focussed largely on this apocalypse as a parallel of the ‘Death of Painting’. The ‘Death of Painting’ was prefigured by photography’s invention, and then more directly by the expansion of artistic practice to include found objects, installations and performances. In “The Drowned World”, the aim was to answer the question not of painting’s vitality (a question which is often asked, but to my mind misses the point) but of its ontology. Like any art form, painting can never completely die, but its modality can change and evolve.

Digital imaging and its collusion with marketing and consumer culture have greatly changed the methods and significance of image construction, and image transmission. This shift in visual culture is arguably as significant for painting as the invention of photography was: at a time when fewer artists work with images (choosing rather to focus on conceptual works, performance, or time-based mediums), the creation of visual representations are left to open for commerce to dominate. It is my feeling that those of us who choose still to paint, and to do so in a representational manner, have a responsibility to take the images back, and to investigate the ramifications of the changing modes of image construction and consumption.

Parts of my research focussed on a handful of texts – Rosalind Krauss and subsequent commentary on the ‘expanded field’ of arts practice, and Jacques Lacan on visuality and subjectivity. These lines of inquiry are not central to the finished work, nor need the audience even be aware of them, though they were central in focussing and clarifying what was being achieved in the work. The ‘expanded field’ discourse speaks of a ‘technical support’ as replacing the traditional medium – in this case, all the works may become resolved as oil on canvas, but the production method is a combination of traditional and digital ideas (composition, layering, colour theory, blue-screen and matting effects). The works that combine projection and painting most obviously fit this schema, though all the works shared a focus not on the materiality of one particular medium, but on the crossing points between different ways of working.

Simon O’Carrigan. Burnley Hotel (from The Drowned World). 2008. Mixed Media, stopmotion, & digital. 1 min 37 sec.

…this morning he found himself reluctant to leave the cool, air-curtained haven of the hotel suite. He had spent a couple of hours over breakfast alone, and then completed a six-page entry in his diary, deliberately delaying his departure until Colonel Riggs passed the hotel in his patrol boat, knowing that by then it would be too late to go to the station.

J.G. Ballard. The Drowned World (1962).

Lacan’s notion of visuality and ‘geometral perspective’ clarified for me the reality of fragmented perception and questions the truth of the image. Just as much, it questions the truth of sight and the reliance on light. The projector inverts the usual working of viewing a painting, projecting out and onto rather then looking and ‘taking in’. The layers of imagery and the surface of the flood (or canvas) came for me to symbolise Lacan’s Imaginary, Real and Symbolic; the final painting taking the position of the Lacanian image-screen which shields the subject from reality. In this way, the works function as the tuché (the missed encounter with the Real) – a seemingly obvious parallel to the eking out of lives forever barraged by images which shelter us from objectively or literally experiencing their depicted events.

Finally, the notion of nachtraglichkeit (deferred action) taken from Sigmund Freud engages with a kind of deferred conclusion. Most explicitly referenced in the work Deferred Rapture, I took this notion of deferral to relate to a post- poned Apocalypse. I developed a sense of the ‘punctuational apocalypse’ – meaning that as a period at the end of the sentence, the Apocalypse gives meaning to what has come before. In this way, the end of painting, whether it eventually arrives as a final judgement or just as another deferral along the way, pushes forward the painter to create images of depth and significance as much as possible. The images finally displayed for assessment read quite clearly as images aimed at unity, aimed at a sense of the sublime, but falling short – rendered out of fragments plucked from the deluge, there is an impossibility of ever completing that perfect image, and possibly of ever recovering the sought after depth and significance of the image.

Simon O’Carrigan.

Simon O’Carrigan. Final Days. 2006. Oil on canvas. 120 x 160 cm.

Was the drowned world itself, and the mysterious quest for the south which had possessed Hardman, no more than an impulse to suicide, an unconscious acceptance of the logic of his own devolutionary descent, the ultimate neuronic synthesis of the archaeopsychic zero?

J.G. Ballard. The Drowned World (1962).

Simon O’Carrigan. Louisian Ha Long (3121). 2007. Oil & mixed media on canvas. 80 x 60 cm.

The Mediterranean contracted into a system of inland lakes, the British Isles was linked again with northern France. The Middle West of the United States, filled by the Mississippi as it drained the Rocky Mountains, became an enormous gulf opening into the Hudson Bay, while the Caribbean Sea was transformed into a desert of silt and salt flats. Europe became a system of giant lagoons, centred on the principal low-lying cities, inundated by the silt carried southwards by the expanding rivers.

J.G. Ballard. The Drowned World (1962).

Simon O’Carrigan. Surfacing (Cataract). 2007. Oil on canvas & acetate. 76 x 51 cm.

The bulk of the city had long since vanished, and only the steel-supported buildings of the central commercial and financial areas had survived the encroaching flood waters. The brick houses and single-storey factories of the suburbs had disappeared completely below the drifting tides of silt. Where these broke surface giant forests reared up into the burning dull-green sky, smothering the former wheatfields of temperate Europe and North America.

J.G. Ballard. The Drowned World (1962).

Simon O’Carrigan. Acid Lake (Tidal Fold). 2007. Oil on canvas. 60 x 101 cm (two panels).

Many of the smaller lakes were now filled by the silt, yellow discs of fungus-covered sludge from which a profuse tangle of competing plant forms emerged, walled gardens in an insane Eden.

J.G. Ballard. The Drowned World (1962).

Simon O’Carrigan. After the Deluge (First Light Over Neo Atlantis). 2007. Oil on canvas & foamcore. 91 x 122 cm.

When the first of the storm-belts moved off the visibility cleared, and he could see the southern edge of the sea, a line of tremendous silt banks over a hundred yards in height. In the spasmodic sunlight they glittered along the horizon like fields of gold, the tops of the jungle beyond rising above them.

J.G. Ballard. The Drowned World (1962).

Simon O’Carrigan. Ef(fusion). 2007. Oil on canvas, digital lambda print, foamcore. 66 x 75 cm.

Only fifty miles to the south, the rain-clouds were packed together in tight layers, blotting out the swamps and archipelagos of the horizon. Obscured by the events of the past week, the archaic sun in his mind beat again continuously with its immense power, its identity merging now with that of the real sun visible behind the rain clouds. Relentless and magnetic, it called him southward, to the great heat and submerged lagoons of the Equator.

J.G. Ballard. The Drowned World (1962).

Simon O’Carrigan. Rip/Current (We’ll Burn That Bridge When We Come To It). 2007. Oil on canvas. 61 x 61 cm.

Huge pools of water still lay about everywhere, leaking from the ground floors of the buildings, but they were little more than two or three feet deep. There were clear stretches of pavement over a hundred yards long, and many of the further streets were completely drained. Dying fish and marine plants expired in the centre of the roadways, and huge banks of black sludge were silted up into the gutters and over the sidewalks, but fortunately the escaping waters had cut long pathways through them.

J.G. Ballard. The Drowned World (1962).

Simon O’Carrigan. Please Dump Garbage. 2008. Mixed media, solvent transfer on Arches archival paper. 40 x 60 cm.

As the sun rose over the lagoon, driving clouds of steam into the great golden pall, Kerans felt the terrible stench of the water-line, the sweet compacted smells of dead vegetation and rotting animal carcasses. Huge flies spun by, bouncing off the wire cage of the cutter, and giant bats raced across the heating water towards their eyries in the ruined buildings. Beautiful and serene from his balcony a few minutes earlier, Kerans realized that the lagoon was nothing more than a garbage-filled swamp.

J.G. Ballard. The Drowned World (1962).

Simon O’Carrigan. Rain Dogs. 2008. Mixed media, solvent transfer on Arches archival paper. 60 x 40 cm.

With the reappearance of the submerged streets and buildings his entire manner had changed abruptly. All traces of courtly refinement and laconic humour had vanished; he was now callous and vulpine, the renegade spirit of the hoodlum streets returning to his lost playground. It was almost as if the presence of the water had anaesthetized him, smothering his true character so that only the surface veneer of charm and moodiness remained.

J.G. Ballard. The Drowned World (1962).

Simon O’Carrigan. Alter-Piece (Flow). 2007. Oil on canvas & acetate, projected video. Dimensions variable, 51 x 64 cm.

Down the side-streets they could see the great viscous mass lifting over the rooftops, flowing through the gutted buildings… Here and there the perimeter of the dyke moored itself to a heavier obstruction – a church or government office – and diverged from its circular path around the lagoon.

J.G. Ballard. The Drowned World (1962).

Simon O’Carrigan. Fissure (Under the Weather Projection). 2007. Oil on canvas, projected video. Dimensions variable (120 x 120 cm).

‘Perhaps these sunken lagoons simply remind me of the drowned world of my uterine childhood – if so, the best thing is to leave straight away. Everything Riggs says is true. There’s little hope of standing up to the
rainstorms and the malaria’.

J.G. Ballard. The Drowned World (1962).

Simon O’Carrigan. Lagoon. 2008. Mixed media, solvent transfer on Arches archival paper. 30 x 60 cm.

Soon it would be too hot. Looking out from the hotel balcony shortly after eight o’clock, Kerans watched the sun rise behind the dense groves of giant gymnosperms crowding over the roofs of the abandoned department stores four hundred yards away on the east side of the lagoon. Even through the massive olive-green fronds the relentless power of the sun was plainly tangible.

J.G. Ballard. The Drowned World (1962).

Simon O’Carrigan. Lagoon #2. 2008. Mixed media, solvent transfer on Arches archival paper. 60 x 40 cm.

Many of the lagoons in the centre of the city were surrounded by an intact ring of buildings, and consequently little silt had entered them. Free of vegetation, apart from a few drifting clumps of Sargaso weed, the streets and shops had been preserved almost intact, like a reflection in a lake that has somehow lost its original.

J.G. Ballard. The Drowned World (1962).

Simon O’Carrigan. Study for “Lagoon”. 2008. Mixed media on paper. 15 x 20 cm.

Behind the building was an enormous bank of silt, reaching upwards out of the surrounding swamp to the railings of the terrace, on to which spilled a luxurious outcrop of vegetation. Ducking below the broad fronds of the fern-trees, he raced along to the barrage, fitted between the end of the building and the shoulder of the adjacent office block. Apart from the exit creek on the far side of the lagoon where the pumping scows had been stationed, this was the only major entry point for the water that had passed into the lagoon.

J.G. Ballard. The Drowned World (1962).

Simon O’Carrigan. Study for “Lagoon”. 2008. Mixed media on paper. 15 x 20 cm.

With a dull rumbling roar of collapsing buildings, the sea poured in full flood.

J.G. Ballard. The Drowned World (1962).

Simon O’Carrigan. Study for “Lagoon”. 2008. Mixed media on paper. 20 x 15 cm.

Too many of the other buildings around the lagoon had long since slipped and slid away below the silt, revealing their gimcrack origins, and the Ritz now stood in splendid isolation on the west shore, even the rich blue moulds sprouting from the carpets in the dark corridors adding to its 19th-century dignity.

J.G. Ballard. The Drowned World (1962).

Simon O’Carrigan. Lagoon (from The Drowned World). 2008. Paper cut out & oil on acetate. 12 sec.

Slowly the interval of water widened to a hundred and then two hundred yards, and he reached the first of the small islands that grew out of the swamp on the roofs of isolated buildings. Hidden by them, he sat up and reefed
the sail, then looked back for the last time at the perimeter of the lagoon.

J.G. Ballard. The Drowned World (1962).

+ More info: Simon O’Carrigan

..:: Previously on Ballardian:
+ “Ambiguous aims”: a review of Crash: Homage to J.G. Ballard [NSFW]
+ The Office Park
+ Ann Lislegaard: ‘Crystal World (after J.G. Ballard)’
+ Drowned London
+ Flooded London
+ ‘Paradigm of nowhere’: Shepperton, a photo essay
+ J.G. Ballard: the Visual Tribute
+ Jon Cattapan’s Drowned World
+ Future Ruins

Lord Horror (1997). Image by John Coulthart.

Back in November, we announced our first microfiction competition, to promote our three-part series of interviews with luminaries from Savoy Books. As the second interview, with David Britton, is due online within a couple of weeks, we thought now’s the time to announce the prizewinners.

There were three judges: Michael Butterworth, John Coulthart and myself. We each took what we thought to be the top ten and ranked them. Then, we each assigned points to our top ten: 12 for 1st, 10 for 2nd, 8 for 3rd, then 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1.

And so, in first place with the most points: ‘NW3, wet, dark, cold, two days after Christmas, 1968′ by Rob Keery. In second place: ‘Escapology’ by Craig Hughes. And third: ‘Catchgirl’ by Jim Donnely. Congratulations to Rob, Craig and Jim! We hope you enjoy your booty. And many thanks to all who entered — microfiction’s not the easiest form to master, but there were many great entries.

Following are the stories from the top three, followed by the honourable mentions (the remaining stories that received points from at least one of us).

FIRST PRIZE

‘NW3, wet, dark, cold, two days after Christmas, 1968′
by Rob Keery

As the big blue pig pushed him to the ground JTS reached for the small penknife in his sock, the one they missed, the mordant gift from the Guinness rep he met outside the bankrupt’s court that time. They brayed and snorted high above him, haloed in exaltation of dominance by the cell light glare. He lurched on the floor like a brokeleg cane toad and opened the flat blunt blade. That stopped them, quiet for a second, till he reached for the nearest ankle.

When they opened the door next morning, it was like the lift in ‘The Shining’.

Rob wins:
1) A copy of Lord Horror (yes, the very rare, extremely notorious and long out-of-print novel, currently fetching over US$800 for second-hand copies; Savoy has kindly decided to sacrifice a file copy for Ballardian.com).
2) A really special, rare Lord Horror book, The Truth About Horror (Savoy’s second-rarest gem, published for private circulation only).
3) A Tea Dance at Savoy, by Robert Meadley.

SECOND PRIZE

‘Escapology’
by Craig Hughes

I suppose you could say I’ve found him. We’re always being told we are our ID cards, that we are no one and nothing without them, so here he is, lying in a cold, gritty puddle in an underground car park. All six, square, laminated inches of him. Could they really tell me I’d let him get away? Not by their own rules. Not that they’ll see it that way. Is that blood in the water? Here they come. That engine, Benedict’s car, no mistaking it. He won’t be happy. Safety off. I’m not taking the blame for this.

Craig wins copies of:
1) A Serious Life, by D M Mitchell; and
2) Sieg Heil Iconographers, by Jon Farmer.

THIRD PRIZE

‘Catchgirl’
by Jim Donnelly

Rosie Idolwound, a catchgirl, rainbow hunter. She has spent most of her, so far, short life looking for pots of gold, and credit it or not she has found some. Admittedly they have been small pots, barely enough to make a living from, but then again rainbows are a life not a living.

Today, undercover of driving horizontal rain, which would make most bleed, she crawls, digging deep with broken fingernails toward the necessary end. As the arc of the rainbow emerges she digs deeper, but she is simply too slow this time. Another ray of hope gone.

Jim wins:
1) Savoy Wars CD. Compilation of Savoy’s ‘greatest hits’;
2) The Waste Land CD, TS Eliot read by PJ Proby; and
3) Fuck Off and Die. Another ‘luxury’ item from Savoy – a 160-page hardback comic book in b/w and colour, the follow-up to the notorious Adventures of Meng & Ecker. Written by David Britton and illustrated by Kris Guidio, with an introduction by Alan Moore and an afterword by Dr Benjamin Noyse. Jacket design by John Coulthart.

HONOURABLE MENTIONS

‘Appreciation’
by Ben Soper

Nowhere was hit harder during the great storm than the library. Soon after a committee was formed and by winter enough money had been raised for the library to be rebuilt. The librarian was immensely grateful but being a man of small means he knew that kindness would have to be its own reward. However after the re-opening he noticed a change in his patrons. Books were returned damaged or late, small talk was hurried and gradually people stopped visiting him altogether. The librarian realised the community despised him and decided to leave town that night without saying goodbye.

Untitled
by Matthew Sheret

Mister Murray wondered if, should he drag the mirror over the granite corridor, the occupant of the opposing cubicle would notice the difference. Mister Murray wondered idly if, by hiding himself in the image of another, he may perhaps render himself invisible to the directions of another. Mister Murray wondered if, by reconciling the differences in communication protocol suggested by a mirror and the absence of activity behind it via application of clippers, grit and a hand-axe, he might find himself removed from the burden of interaction entirely. We know Mister Murray wondered this, because we found the yellowing notepaper.

‘Riveting’
by Kevin Clement

Candice awakes to a loud BANG! Then another and another. Thin walls shake to a sinister rhythm. Beside her, an assembly line softly chugs. Pulleys and gears turn; rubber conveyor belts contort around a bulbous, concrete column.

She rolls to the door and pushes it open. The grommet in her neck squeaks as her lens peers into a dim, steamy enclosure. She processes the scene and recoils in disgust.

Amidst a cacophony of smashed vacuum tubes, strewn diodes, and rusted hydraulic rams, two humans embrace. Their hips gyrate in tandem, pumping like a defective riveting machine.

‘Breathe on the window’
by Mark Noonan

Breathe on the window Evelyn, give the glass a bit of life. Squeak your name into it with your finger, make a smiling face. Lick it. For the love of all that’s Holy, I command you to lick that window Evelyn, it’s my last desperate wish to see your tongue touch the sweet drops of your condensed breath on the glass – I can’t even *articulate*. What I have to do is watch, and hope that among this room’s pumping machines and peeling paint you will take it upon yourself. ‘Cause what’s killing me now is the fucking tension.

‘Purlin Obstructs The Passage Of Time’
by James Dibley

A small dragon scales the bedroom wall, unheeded by coupling bodies below.

One of these, Purlin, has the upper hand. His radiant limbs shift through Sadowitz sleights. A high-gain antenna still has to be tuned, and his is the long wavelength. The signal that endures. The auction block shuffle. The girl can’t help it. She prays with her knees upward.

Terrible violence should follow, but compression doesn’t allow for release. It can only sustain. Unbearably. Not one inch of skin is parted. No keloid dares bloom in these jaws.

The dragon falls stupefied to the floor. It dreams of eating clocks.

‘Street Furniture’
by Mat Ranson

Saturday: it had cracked on impact and the car had driven away. But the lamp-post stood, angled, grey and resolute, a soldier in a town that ignored it. Saturday evening: from its wounded, brutalist, concrete core, long forgotten memories began to seep into the air like invisble vapour. Curious dogs approached, barking and snarling. Pedestrians walked close by and were visited by phantom memories of sun-blazed mornings, the rain-soaked windscreens of car crashes and of the tides of dark nights. Sunday morning: it was all over. The lamp-post had split, fallen and shattered across the road.

‘Wrecked and Wasted’
by Tim Maly

He bought the wine at auction. Included, was a certificate of authenticity showing the bottle’s lineage traced backward from auction house to warehouse to boathouse. Before that, the ocean floor. It had lain there for decades, wedged in the doomed ship’s hold.

He opened the wine at home. The bottle had aged gracefully, he decided. He admired the worn label and salt-textured glass. The cork was decisively intact. People had been dancing on deck when the torpedo hit.

He drank the wine alone. Exquisite. The last of his fortune was spent tracking down beer from the Hindenburg.

‘Penumbra’
by Jesse Thrall

Led through the heat shimmer to the dais where the banyan tree shattered the tiles, bound standing with arms outstretched. A necklace of broken silicon thrown over his neck. By sundown, a noticeable grey tinge to his naked calves, a dust flaked off with his sweat when he shifted.

Morning. They came to see his pillared legs, the jagged silicon penumbra of his collar bone, links of chain that merged with the tendons of his wrists. His eyes looked inward.

‘Live-Work’
by Will Wiles

“After the crash, all the money went out of urban renewal,” said the property developer, Maxinalon. “This warehouse conversion was slumming itself anyway, so …”

He had moved in the dealers and the people-traffickers. The live-work units were now meth labs, and the niche coffee outlet was a burned-out husk. The redundant creatives had adapted marvellously, because the hours were flexible.

To the sound of the exhausted police beating down the period-feature, iron-braced doors (wires trailed from the smashed entryphone), Maxinalon smiled a smile that was all percentages. “We’ve exhausted the potential of regeneration; the future is obviously degeneration.”

‘My despair at the demise of Willow Run’
by James Mansfield

I looked towards the soon-to-be-closed factory at Willow Run, Michigan. A great brown rectangle, I couldn’t see how far back it stretched. Throughout the war it had spat out B-24 bombers. I wondered where the metal, plastic, leather of these aircraft now existed? Burnt, shredded, reused? Cologne, Manchester, Dubai? Of course, my grandfather’s plane was now embedded in a skyscraper overlooking the Persian Gulf. At this moment, a British couple were consummating their marriage on the very wings which carried the bombs that killed Hans Naumann, my wife’s great uncle. What would Henry Ford think?

Untitled
by Damien MacIntyre

They met in person at a conference in Tampa. They both worked in teleconferencing. He was from London. She was from Denver. They found this ironic, and joked about it over drinks at the hotel bar the first night. The second night they spent together in his hotel room making more than just jokes. The thrid night they both caught flights back to their separate cities. His flight was still aloft when the terrorist seized control of her plane. Fifty flights over fifty states rained-down that evening. All hijacked with empty soda cans. All cleverly orchestrated using his teleconferencing software.

‘Inhumanly Divine’
by Poppy Varela

He nervously embodied events, his taut body a choreography of micro-spasms in concert with his surroundings. Watching him, I increasingly longed to inhabit this microanatomical dance, to penetrate his jerking trembles. Imagining his body twitch around mine, I felt a wet pool gathering, a tingle swelling into a mass of vibrating balls in my groin, like a gelatinous raft of quivering caviar. The contours of nearby laughter flickered through his gestures. I felt every micro-shudder of this rhythmic transmission vibrate my throbbing mass of balls. Sitting demurely on the couch, I quietly spasmed in orgasm. Inhumanly divine.

‘Summit’
by Greg Marsh

Leonard Krest began to climb the brutalist remains of the hospital, his Colt Diamondback revolver wedged awkwardly within the breast pocket of his dinner jacket. The detritus of the shattered building had now settled, and with each step he levitated upwards with increasing ease, his feet finding footholds without effort. In the higher slopes, beige plastic computer monitors and telephone handsets poked through the steel and concrete avalanche, the dusty pages of medical textbooks flickered silently in the breeze. At the summit, Krest found the slumped body of his wife, a single bullet hole punched through her temple.

‘Eaters of Time’
by Simon Machine-Cooke

England frayed most at the edges: the border towns, the rural pile-ups.

No love. No law.

Diana spun her dansette a final time, pressing her legs into the quilted satin bedspread.

The party’s over now

Bundled clippings grew yellow and mildewed under the staircase cupboard.

Unspeakable crimes in empty rectories. Gothic manses crumbling to dust,

Intermittent gunfire replaced the rattle of commuter trains passing out from the greenbelt.

A murder of crows banded the vegetable patch, eyes the colour of curdled yolk.

‘A New Pornography’
by Martin Gillespie

Hunter considered his recent past as he stood before the Bauhaus building. The failure of his NO/cGMP system, or so-called arousal function, his wife’s obsession with conventional pornography, the makeshift institute where he had rediscovered desire as a by-product of architecture.

Or was architecture the externalisation of male function?

He followed the lines of the building; it rose like the perfect representation of his arousal. He felt himself respond to the structural demands for purpose. He would attempt to embrace this architecture with his own physicality, growth. The ultimate union.

He pressed himself against the grey exterior.

The inspiration behind this body of work came from a growing curiosity about recent corporate developments of private space in London that apparently encourage the public to access them. Typically these environments have beautiful landscaping around a canal or lake. An amphitheatre seems to be a further prerequisite as is CCTV which monitors everything including security guards who amble around these empty places. The hustle and bustle of neighboring streets feels a world away.

In the summer of 2008 I went for a series of walks along arterial routes heading out of London. That summer I had read several of J.G. Ballard’s novels including Super Cannes, which is about disturbing behaviour amongst the inhabitants of a gated community isolated from the world. On one of these ambles I chanced upon a recently completed building development. I felt compelled to enter this beautifully landscaped glass and steel environment. It appeared as if no expense had been spared. What I encountered there helped to crystallize some vague ideas that became the photographs that are presented in this collection. The idyllic setting combined with the ever-present ’security’ got under my skin and left me wondering about a dystopian outcome for this kind of world.

I remember sitting down by the artificial lake. The sun was beating down and people casually wandered about. I gazed up at the office blocks. I thought it must be an idyllic place to work. London felt far away. I imagined that you could lift these acres up and deposit them in any city in the world and they would feel at home. This was an anti-Dickensian space, more an abstract one. It was a statement of how the world of work could be. The management ethos, proclaimed on various signs, was ‘enjoy.work’.

Enjoy.work. Arbeit macht frei. Freedom through work. I rose to the bait. Unease crept into my thoughts.

I found myself searching for the cracks. A variety of methods had been used to try to block the sun reaching the interior spaces. It appeared as if, as each building had been erected, ever more elaborate ways had been devised to keep nature out. What was it really like to work in there?

I noticed that an algae bloom threatened the lake’s plant and animal life. Peering into one building’s reception area, I saw how the appearance of leisure had been carefully arranged. Bicycles, guitars and deckchairs in neat rows. An abandoned chess game and open magazines on the coffee table. A half-finished painting-by-numbers canvas on an easel. No one about. Why had everyone had to leave so suddenly? Or, were they trying to hide something? Soon after, I was asked to leave for taking photographs without permission.

After some months I built an architectural model inspired by this corporate campus, and began photographing. I wanted a dystopian world, centred on a dark lake, that seemed to have the opposite effect on those that gazed into it than that intended by the landscape architect. So, some of the ant-like figures turn up to work, use the facilities and leave. Others seem to be employed in extracurricular activities of a more malevolent nature.

Nicholas Cobb, 2009.

The Office Park book, featuring many more images, is available at blurb as well as a number of other books by Nicholas Cobb.

Lured by tax concessions and a climate like northern California’s, dozens of multinational companies had moved into the business park that now employed over ten thousand people. The senior managements were the most highly paid professional caste in Europe, a new elite of administrators, énarques and scientific entrepreneurs. The lavish brochure enthused over a vision of glass and titanium straight from the drawing boards of Richard Neutra and Frank Gehry, but softened by landscaped parks and artificial lakes, a humane version of Corbusier’s radiant city. Even my sceptical eye was prepared to blink.

J.G. Ballard, Super-Cannes (2000).

The advertising displays in the estate office overlooking the roundabout on the RN7 had the look of museum tableaux, and the artist’s impression of a concourse as crowded as the Champs-Elysées, lined with boutiques and thronged by high-spending customers, seemed to describe a forgotten twentieth-century world. Only the cyber-cafe next door was serving any customers. The computer terminals facing the bar were out of use, but three bikers in metallized boots and Mad Max leathers sat at the outdoor tables. They formed a feral presence in the hyper-modern complex, like carrion-birds on a skyscraper cornice, filling an unplanned niche in the ecology of the future.

Ballard, Super-Cannes.

An almost drugged air floated across the lake, a rogue cloud that had drifted down the hillside, carrying the scent of office-freshener from a factory in Grasse. I walked along the water’s edge, attracting the attention of two security men in a Range Rover parked among the pines. One watched me through his binoculars, no doubt puzzled that anyone in Eden-Olympia should have the leisure to stroll through the midday sun.

Ballard, Super-Cannes.

As if to encourage the fantasies of the stranger sitting nearby, she kicked off her high-heeled shoes and hitched up her skirt to scratch her stockinged insteps, exposing a satisfying glimpse of white thigh. Despite the smart suit, her blonde hair was a little too blown, giving her the look of a nervy and intellectual tart. Was she a call-girl, computerized like everyone else at Eden-Olympia?

Ballard, Super-Cannes.

A black Range Rover clumsily straddled a flowerbed, its tyres flattening the rose bushes. Isolated figures patrolled the lawns, like shadows free to play among themselves for a few hours each night. Behind the shrubbery sounded the low-pitched murmur of radio traffic, a soft anatomy of the night.

Ballard, Super-Cannes.

Halder stood with his back to me, searching the upstairs windows, and I could see his reflection in the glass doors of the sun lounge. He was smiling to himself, a strain of deviousness that was almost likeable. 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.

Ballard, Super-Cannes.

Crowds strolled under the palms, enjoying the warm autumn day, like citizens of another world who had come ashore for a few hours. Wilder Penrose had been right to say that there was something unreal about them.

Ballard, Super-Cannes.

Were assassins aware of the contingent world? I tried to imagine Lee Harvey Oswald on his way to the book depository in Dealey Plaza on the morning he shot Kennedy. Did he notice a line of overnight washing in his neighbour’s yard, a fresh dent in the nextdoor Buick, a newspaper boy with a bandaged knee? The contingent world must have pressed against his temples, clamouring to be let in. But Oswald had kept the shutters bolted against the storm, opening them for a few seconds as the President’s Lincoln moved across the lens of the Zapruder camera and on into history.

Ballard, Super-Cannes.

Prostitutes came out at dusk, usherettes in the theatre of the night, shining their miniature torches at any kerb that threatened their high-heels. Two of them entered the Rialto and sat at the next table, muscular brunettes with the hips and thighs of professional athletes. They ordered drinks they never touched, killing time before they set off to trawl the hotels.

Ballard, Super-Cannes.

‘There’s a remarkable need for punitive violence hidden away in the senior executive mind.’
‘And sex tends to release it?’
‘It’s meant to, for sound biological reasons. Sex is such a quick route to the psychopathic, the shortest of short cuts to the perverse. We aren’t running an adventure playground, but a forcing house designed to expand the psychopathic possibilities of the executive imagination. It needs to be carefully monitored. Sadomasochism, excretory sex-play, body-piercing and wife-pandering can easily veer off into something nasty.

Ballard, Super-Cannes.

The glass and gun-metal office blocks were set well apart from each other, separated by artificial lakes and forested traffic islands where a latter-day Crusoe could have found comfortable refuge. The faint mist over the lakes and the warm sun reflected from the glass curtain-walling seemed to generate an opal haze, as if the entire business park were a mirage, a virtual city conjured into the pine-scented air like a son-et-lumière vision of a new Versailles.

Ballard, Super-Cannes.

‘Homo sapiens is a reformed hunter-killer of depraved appetites, which once helped him to survive. He was partly rehabilitated in an open prison called the first agricultural societies, and now finds himself on parole in the polite suburbs of the city state. The deviant impulses coded into his central nervous system have been switched off. He can no longer harm himself or anyone else. But nature sensibly endowed him with a taste for cruelty and an intense curiosity about pain and death. Without them, he’s trapped in the afternoon shopping malls of a limitless mediocrity. We need to revive him, give him back the killing eye and the dreams of death. Together they helped him to dominate this planet.’

Ballard, Super-Cannes.

I needed to escape from Eden-Olympia, with its ceaseless work and its ethic of corporate responsibility. The business park was the outpost of an advanced kind of puritanism, and a virtually sex-free zone. Jane and I rarely made love. The flair she had shown during my days as a virtual cripple had been smothered by a sleep of eye-masks and sedatives, followed by cold showers and snatched breakfasts.

Ballard, Super-Cannes.

‘Places like Eden-Olympia are fertile ground for any messiah with a grudge. The Adolf Hitlers and Pol Pots of the future won’t walk out of the desert. They’ll emerge from shopping malls and corporate business parks.’

Ballard, Super-Cannes.

‘Who are the tenants? Big international companies?’
‘The biggest. Mitsui, Siemens, Unilever, Sumitomo, plus all the French giants – Elf Aquitaine, Carrefour, Rhone-Poulenc. Along with a host of smaller firms: investment brokers, bioengineering outfits, design consultancies. I sound like a salesman, but when you get to know it you’ll see what a remarkable place Eden-Olympia really is. In its way this is a huge experiment in how to hothouse the future.’

Ballard, Super-Cannes.

Between the security building and the Elf-Maritime research labs was an open-air cafeteria, a facility intended to soften the public face of the business park and give it a passing resemblance to an Alpine resort. Tired after my meeting with Zander, 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.

Ballard, Super-Cannes.

The future was a second Eden-Olympia, almost twice the size of the original, the same mix of multinational companies, research laboratories and financial consultancies. Hyundai, BP Amoco, Motorola and Unilever had secured their plots, investing in long-term leases that virtually financed the whole project. The site-contractors were already at work, clearing the holm oaks and umbrella pines that had endured since Roman times, surviving forest fires and military invasions. Nature, as the new millennium dictated, was giving way for the last time to the tax shelter and the corporate car park.

Ballard, Super-Cannes.

Work and the realities of corporate life anchored Eden-Olympia to the ground. The buildings wore their ventilation shafts and cable conduits on their external walls, an open reminder of Eden-Olympia’s dedication to company profits and the approval of its shareholders. The satellite dishes on the roofs resembled the wimples of an order of computer-literate nuns, committed to the sanctity of the workstation and the pieties of the spreadsheet.

Ballard, Super-Cannes.

High above me, fluted columns carried the pitched roofs, an attempt at a vernacular architecture that failed to disguise this executive-class prison. Taking their cue from Eden-Olympia and Antibes-les-Pins, the totalitarian systems of the future would be subservient and ingratiating, but the locks would be just as strong.

Ballard, Super-Cannes.

I stepped from the car-park lift onto the overheated roof, a cockpit of sun and death. In the mirror curtain-walling of the office building I could see myself reflected like an unwary tourist who had strayed through the wrong door into the danger-filled silences of a bullring.

Ballard, Super-Cannes.

This was the first office building to be constructed at the business park, but after a bombastic overture the architecture that followed was late modernist in the most minimal and self-effacing way, a machine above all for thinking in.

Ballard, Super-Cannes.

‘We ought to move on. Ghosts are walking around Eden-Olympia…’

Ballard, Super-Cannes.

The Office Park book, featuring many more images, is available at blurb as well as a number of other books by Nicholas Cobb.

..:: MORE INFORMATION:
+ Interview with Nicholas Cobb about The Office Park.
+ Nicholas Cobb’s website.

Edward Burtynsky, Oil Fields #22, Cold Lake Production Project, Cold Lake, Alberta, Canada, 2001. Chromogenic color print. Photograph © Edward Burtynsky, courtesy Nicholas Metivier Gallery, Toronto; Hasted Hunt Kraeutler, New York; and Adamson Gallery, Washington, DC.

I recently organized an exhibition of photographs by Edward Burtynsky, bringing together 12 years of his imagery on the subject of oil at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. Burtynsky, a Canadian born of Ukrainian heritage in 1955, is respected internationally for his 25-year focus on industrially-transformed landscapes. His photographs of quarries, factories, mining pits, and railcuts are extraordinary for their depiction of mankind’s organization of the land for resource-extraction and profit. Jennifer Baichwal’s 2006 documentary Manufactured Landscapes is an excellent portrait of Burtynsky, and I highly recommend a viewing of both the DVD and his great books, which include Manufactured Landscapes (2003); Burtynsky – China (2005); and Edward Burtynsky – Quarries (2006).

In organizing the exhibition, it occurred to me that Burtynsky is one of our most Ballardian artists. His intense concentration on the technological sublime; the precisionist geometries of his images; and his evocation of a rationalist (yet mysterious) automatism at the heart of the relationship between man and nature: all seem absolutely the inheritance of Ballard’s insightful understanding of our times.

In writing an essay for the book that accompanies the Corcoran exhibition, I adopted a style in overt homage to Ballard — in hopes that such a literary strategy might help illuminate this great body of work. I also wanted to honor Ballard’s legacy as the foremost imaginative interpreter of the world Burtynsky documents. The editors of Ballardian.com have graciously agreed to reprint the essay here as an extension of that homage. Readers of this site will recognize the tropes, the ideas, and the specific sources I’ve drawn from Ballard’s oeuvre; I hope they will forgive any lapses, or excesses, as my own error.

Paul Roth
Senior Curator of Photography and Media Arts, Corcoran Gallery of Art

To learn more about the Corcoran exhibition Edward Burtynsky: Oil: http://www.corcoran.org/burtynsky/index.php
To learn more about the book: http://www.steidlville.com/books/968-Oil.html
To learn more about the artist: http://www.edwardburtynsky.com

All images can be clicked to enlarge.

Edward Burtynsky, Recycling #2, Chittagong, Bangladesh, 2001. Chromogenic color print. Photograph © Edward Burtynsky, courtesy Nicholas Metivier Gallery, Toronto; Hasted Hunt Kraeutler, New York; and Adamson Gallery, Washington, DC.

The subject is not oil.

In these pictures, Edward Burtynsky shows the man-made world—the human ecosystem—that has risen up around the production, use, and dwindling availability of our paramount energy source. The mechanics and industry of extraction and refinement; the development, products, and activities associated with transportation and motor culture; and the wreckage, obsolescence, and human cost that lies at the End of Oil. These photographs are about man, and what he has made of the earth.

Burtynsky starts at the center of the subject, at oil’s source; then moves outward around the world, showing its use. By their arrangement, the photographs survey a life cycle. Each black drop follows a path; following the pictorial sequence, we can imagine ourselves trailing in its wake.

The journey is an unusual one. We have rarely seen images of these places. Some, we didn’t know existed; others, we never thought we’d see. Has any artist ever documented this manifold subject in such depth?

This is a new form of epic history painting. Turning his camera lens to a fever dream, Burtynsky forges a new mythology for the 21st century from the lexicon of realism. With stunning detail, from improbable perches, in strange and beautiful colors, these pictures show their subjects with clinical accuracy, and with definitive force. But they also tell a parallel and more inchoate tale: a critique of civilization, and a foretelling of human ends.

Extractions

Edward Burtynsky, Oxford Tire Pile #9ab, Westley, California, USA, 1999. Chromogenic color print. Photograph © Edward Burtynsky, courtesy Nicholas Metivier Gallery, Toronto; Hasted Hunt Kraeutler, New York; and Adamson Gallery, Washington, DC.

Some visual experiences test our capacity for explanation—our ability to extract meaning, or convey affect, through existing vocabulary.

In particular, photography can provoke this failure of translation. The old notion—that a picture is worth a thousand words—implies a trade. It suggests that we cannot have both image and meaning at once; possessing a picture, we must barter for its logic. When we are in the thrall of a photograph, we surrender its equivalent in language.

The most powerful photographs, in fact, steal our words. They resist explication or a resolution, refuse our comprehension, render us speechless. Stilling time, preserving the ghost of a moment to be revisited in perpetuity, photography conjures the past, feeds the present, and hints at the future. Mere words can hardly contend with the magic of its revelation.

Again and again, Burtynsky’s images of oil provoke this mute, uncanny exchange. Documentary scenes of crystalline description, of staggering scale and complexity, they nevertheless have a composed, unblinking authority. They resound with a perfect silence.

One might argue that the real force and meaning of these images is not readily apparent in the scenes Burtynsky photographs. Rather, it bubbles from beneath, emerging from an enormous oceanic swell: the remnant energy of a younger sun, compacted by eons of time and pressure into the geologic strata, far below the surface.

The Unseen Reservoir

Edward Burtynsky, Alberta Oil Sands #6, Fort McMurray, Alberta, Canada, 2007. Chromogenic color print. Photograph © Edward Burtynsky, courtesy Nicholas Metivier Gallery, Toronto; Hasted Hunt Kraeutler, New York; and Adamson Gallery, Washington, DC.

These places are curiously familiar, as though inscribed in our synaptic gaps.

You look down from above. Inscribed on the scene below are the shapes and contours of commercial organization. You look past machinery and roads, large tanks and angled pipelines, to see the ground: quickly you sense what lies embedded in the earth, the object of the activity above.

A river system, of black viscous streams and oily tributaries, extending in every direction, not on a single plane but dimensionally up, down, left, right, a surround. A hidden root system leading to a vast reservoir. Veins, spreading through a body. Not contained by borders. Flowing everywhere, touching everything, affecting all.

Among Burtynsky’s images of the oil sands of Alberta, Canada, in scenes of the surface mining that yields bitumen, vast pools of crude oil swirl and eddy: littoral zones of the apocalypse. They offer a strange double mirror, reflecting both the clouds floating above and the reservoir below. Astonishing, beautiful even, they are the discharge of abscesses, man-made sores in the skin of the earth. The ruptures of oil’s forced disclosure.

In this artist’s envisioning, oil derricks near Bakersfield, California become great mechanical mosquitoes. Standing obediently in rows, they suck at the earth, desiccating their surroundings in service of an unlimited thirst. Arresting the metronomic rhythm of these drilling machines, Burtynsky’s lens conveys an impassive threat: a slow-moving industrial vampirism, perhaps, or the glacial decline of a junkie, reaching deeper to hit a vein.

The submerged river of oil has its conscious match in the aboveground structures devised to prepare it for use. In his images of refineries, Burtynsky tracks the labyrinthine pipe systems that guide oil through its many intermediate process streams. Like capillary beds, or the neural pathways that fire our brains, these industrial tangles are oddly biological.

We cannot shake the sense that we have seen these places in our dreams. The details are of course rooted in reality; but they suggest a hidden psychology, a liminal space channeling between the images. A terra incognita—a boundless, technological biome—united by a psychopathology of oil. If these are visions of our shared subconscious, they seem to foretell the future.

Invisible Seer

Edward Burtynsky, Trucker’s Jamboree, Walcott, Iowa, USA, 2003. Chromogenic color print. Photograph © Edward Burtynsky, courtesy Nicholas Metivier Gallery, Toronto; Hasted Hunt Kraeutler, New York; and Adamson Gallery, Washington, DC.

In these photographs, as in dreams, the viewpoint is a disembodied one. We hover out of sight, watching from a remove: our perspective, that of an invisible seer. Sojourning witnesses to extraordinary scenes, we are present at critical moments, in hidden places, from impossible positions. Each is revealed in broad scope, and with abundant detail both familiar and unrecognizable. The tone is bipolar—intense and dispassionate; disoriented, yet strangely taciturn.

Burtynsky’s overhead views of motor culture events reflect this schizophrenia. At Utah’s Bonneville Salt Flats and South Dakota’s Sturgis Motorcycle Rally, spectators mill about blankly: automata, dutifully performing their roles in a big budget film. Pictured at a remove, their reactions to their peculiar surroundings go unseen.

As a trucker’s jamboree in Iowa falls under dusk, visitors navigate a parking lot by the warm light of underbody neon, emanating from the tractor units. On the asphalt, yellow stripes radiate outward from a central line, guiding our eye from one shiny machine to the next. Positioned at angles and spaced for inspection, the semi cabs glow with sterile festivity.

The artist’s outlook assumes a cold authority, a depersonalization. Through the lens, we assume his viewpoint. Absent overt mediation, we are simply present, watching. We sense no filter, no interpretative voice to cloud our knowledge. No camera to bring us the view. Our insight seems total.

This is, in fact, a trope of landscape art. A naturalism of “view” offers the illusion of an unmediated self-presentation. Authoring itself, a place simply rises up before our eyes. (Burtynsky would also recognize this verisimilitude as a characteristic pretense of photographic documentary.) The implication is that our experience is definitive. Our vantage is that of an impassive bird, flying invisibly overhead, surveying the world with stately reserve.

The Overlook

Edward Burtynsky, AMARC #5, Davis-Monthan AFB, Tuscon, Arizona, USA, 2006. Chromogenic color print. Photograph © Edward Burtynsky, courtesy Nicholas Metivier Gallery, Toronto; Hasted Hunt Kraeutler, New York; and Adamson Gallery, Washington, DC.

Or is it a god’s eye view, the perspective of a deity or monarch?

Burtynsky’s photographs are often made from the sky. Lifts, cranes, and helicopters provide the perch; but his vistas have an aura of impossibility. Even when standing on the ground, Burtynsky’s perspective seems one from on high, ordering and immutable. The detachment of his view imparts a seductive, undeniable power.

Gatherings, interstate highways, landscape mutations: all unfold below like prophecy. Despite their physical remoteness, and their ambiguous mood of alienation, we feel we have seen them before; and now, passing overhead, we are revenants, returning to the scene with a glimmer of insight.

For example: homes, cars, and airplanes, parked in rigid alignment by the dozens or hundreds, recede into the distance, an inventory of shelter and transport. A tanker ship, floating by a refinery depot, tells the whole story of oil’s distribution in its massive bulk. In an industrial subdivision, sun-bleached rooftops appear like chips on a computer motherboard, captured from above by satellite imaging.

The photographs have an evidentiary quality, in the manner of crime scenes. Clues are embedded in the details. Looking down from above, we see the indicators of mastery and control. The land divided, the elements negotiated, resources marshaled: nature coexisting with the promise of its own destruction. An invisible grid overlays each locale—a diagram of exploitation, the vectors of progress.

Mapping the Unknown

Edward Burtynsky, Oil Fields #19ab, Belridge, California, 2003. Chromogenic color print. Photograph © Edward Burtynsky, courtesy Nicholas Metivier Gallery, Toronto; Hasted Hunt Kraeutler, New York; and Adamson Gallery, Washington, DC.

Like his progenitors, the great American expeditionary landscape photographers of the 19th century, Burtynsky surveys the territory. His camera is the instrument of a visionary cartography.

While Timothy O’Sullivan, Carleton Watkins, and William Henry Jackson photographed an undeveloped landscape (the “American West”) in the early stages of its colonization, this artist maps a world that has already been radically shaped and ordered, rendered into submission. The place of his geovisualization is a psychological zone, previously uncharted—a vast, discontinuous “Petrolia” of the mind—encompassing events, locations, and people under the sovereignty of oil.

This visionary terrain opposes utopias we’ve seen before in landscape art. The painted vistas of the Hudson River School, for example, imply a permanent future of uncorrupted nature (“virgin spaces,” in the term of art historian Barbara Novak) despite the encroachment of mankind. A harmony prevails, between the transcendent beauty of nature and the civilizing development once thought to honor God’s creation.

Burtynsky’s atlas of dystopia exposes such fantasies. The deceptions of manifest destiny are revealed in the bright light of day.

In one image, we see a pipeline, directing recovery from the oil sands of Alberta, Canada, through a clearing in a forest. Its sinuous channel follows the contours of the woods; only on second glance do we realize the tree line has been re-shaped, altered by the placement of the conduit. Honoring the herculean effort that brings energy to the surface, nature bends to our will.

The place being mapped is really a complex system, and its topography, a connective network. Burtynsky renders his Petrolia as a set of relationships, organized for production: an autopoiesis, the interlocking elements of a cybernetic organism. His images reveal the mechanisms of our world of oil.

The gridlines of this imaginary territory connect at the vanishing points evident in many of the photographs. They become a pivot for our vision, an axis on which our understanding turns. Hidden meanings become evident as we look from one image to the next: places, people, their transport and leisure, all are united by oil as it is taken from the ground, refined, used, and then filters back into the earth, leaving a sediment of scrap and offal.

We navigate Petrolia through the branching passages of a maze; even when our route is circuitous, it unfolds by a fixed logic. We slide into a labyrinth.

Vertigo

Edward Burtynsky, Highway #1, Intersection 105 & 110, Los Angeles, California, USA, 2003. Chromogenic color print. Photograph © Edward Burtynsky, courtesy Nicholas Metivier Gallery, Toronto; Hasted Hunt Kraeutler, New York; and Adamson Gallery, Washington, DC.

In many images, Burtynsky’s mapping evokes both the abstraction of remote sensing and the vividness of ground truth. As our eyes shift from distant elements to the startling clarity of the foreground, an imbalance takes hold. There is a vertiginous quality, a tipping-forward in our view.

The totality of the artist’s scope results in a kind of visual bewilderment, an insistent voiding of perspective. What is nearby, directly below, rushes toward us, as though we were falling into it; by contrast, the horizon recedes into the distance, as though we were backing away. This schism has a powerful effect. At first the eye trips up, abstracting subject elements into a field of patterns. Then, just as quickly, we experience a visual argument between foreground and background that evokes other more consequential debates: between near and distant, center and periphery, present and future, the known and unknown.

This is not unintentional, nor is it mere stylistics. Burtynsky’s technique consistently provokes a crisis of vision. The elevated and the lowly (a dialectic common to landscape art) collide in the warring of perspectives. There is a strange volume to scenes viewed from on high: real places flatten into forms, space recedes in diagonal lines, and ground and horizon oscillate a magnetic field, one that both attracts and repels the eye.

If the word “landscape” implies a remove, the polite framing of a scene, Burtynsky—by contrast—attacks with the vertical imbalance of his view. Leaning forward, falling back, we are in the grip of fate. Our vantage conveys a sense, a submerged realization, that what we see, and where it will lead, has been foreordained.

A Certain Lucidity

Edward Burtynsky, SOCAR Oil Fields #1ab, Baku Azerbaijan, 2006. Chromogenic color print. Photograph © Edward Burtynsky, courtesy Nicholas Metivier Gallery, Toronto; Hasted Hunt Kraeutler, New York; and Adamson Gallery, Washington, DC.

One historic purpose of landscape art is the representation of remote places. The landscapist—our visionary surrogate—ventures into the world, returning with scenes of faraway and inaccessible locales. The outside, if you will, is brought inside. The inhabitants of one realm, curious, experience another: a place of fascination outside their frame of reference.

Burtynsky’s photographs of unknown sites and obscure industrial activities exercise a startling authority. Remarkable scenes—vistas of junk, vast motorways, toxic labor conditions, tribal vehicular gatherings, strange colors loosed from the earth, and the wholesale reordering of nature—so irrationalize our sense of what surrounds us that they can hardly be believed. And yet there they are.

The artist’s images of derelict oil fields at Baku in Azerbaijan exemplify the uncanny means by which he depicts his Petrolia. Here is a place we were never meant to see: a remnant sea of oil, bubbling from the spend depths of a deposit. Ancient derricks cluster like dark herons, stuck in tar.

A whole new terrain emerges from the discards of the oil economy. Bluffs are formed from piles of densified oil filters, crushed fuel barrels, and the stamped cutaways of electrical system parts. In one diptych, Burtynsky confronts a massive wall of tires, rising up to form a new mountain range. Even this panoramic view can’t contain the astonishment of the scene; dark circles pile past the image edges, the strata of an automotive geology.

Burtynsky’s world of oil is beyond comprehension and outside our control. Industrial sites of extraordinary complexity and public works of remarkable scale severely test our suspension of disbelief. A profusion of detail overwhelms. The safe ground we normally stand on is pulled away. How is this possible, we wonder? Our minds strain at the shock of what we see.

The chief landscape tradition Burtynsky assays is that of the sublime. Edmund Burke, in his treatise A Philosophical Enquiry Into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1756), described the sublime as an evocation of anxiety in the face of nature, an exhilarating but fraught recognition of its illimitable power over humankind. When confronted by the sublime in the natural world—a raging flood, a hurricane, a precipitous cliff—man is overcome by an ecstasy of terror; thus awakening to the limits of his own dominion.

Many artists (most famously Caspar David Friedrich) have tried to represent sublime experience in the natural world. But Burtynsky draws his terrifying sublime from the world of order rather than the forces of the wild. The shock of his images derives from unimaginable scale, from crushing power; but not from God’s Nature. Rather: from the organization of resources for profit, from the plumbing of the earth to extract value.

Observing the machine, the electric light, the combustion engine, the dammed river, factory and city, airplane and car, we can imagine that man’s forward motion, from the Industrial Age on, has occasioned a new variation of the sublime. In the rise of modern technology, with its intimations of human mastery over time and space, the natural world has been rendered and contained; its force, dispersed; and our fear of God, tempered. The power of the environmental cosmos surrenders to the monstrous vacuity of science, mechanization, and progress. If, pace Nietzsche, God is dead; then it is man we must fear—and his creations.

In his book The Machine in the Garden (1964), historian Leo Marx describes 19th-century reaction to that era’s emerging marvels of industry and engineering: “The awe and reverence once reserved for the Deity and later bestowed upon the visible landscape is directed toward technology, or rather the technological conquest of matter.” The rise of the machine— and its subjugation of our surrounding environment—has engendered a new “technological sublime.”

This modern form of sublimity is more complex than mere technophobia. It acknowledges our dependence on automation, its betterments and pleasures; our astonishment at its extremes; and finally, our creeping terror at its consequentiality. We see no simplistic villainy in Burtynsky’s pictures—no industrial Golem, no homicidal Frankenstein. Rather, we see the ordering force of man, and the chilling, corrosive, penultimate threat that lies at the black heart of our rationalism.

Precipice

Edward Burtynsky, Shipbreaking #13, Chittagong, Bangladesh, 2000. Chromogenic color print. Photograph © Edward Burtynsky, courtesy Nicholas Metivier Gallery, Toronto; Hasted Hunt Kraeutler, New York; and Adamson Gallery, Washington, DC.

At the edge of the world, where the land falls inward and the sea drags at the sand, Burtynsky discovers an epic scene of industrial demolition: a portent of our coming extinction.

On a Bangladeshi shoreline, we see a netherworld of beached tanker ships, dismantled for scrap. The sky, a blank white, contrasts with the deep black of remnant oil, clinging to storage compartment walls. Workers cluster about their labors, their raiment stained a toxic brown. Looming up from the mud, jagged hulls tower like crumbling monasteries. We envision the dying-out of an old order.

In these scenes of shipbreaking, Burtynsky, with his mixture of awe and dispassion, his combination of wide-field view and dizzying detail— in short, his calm approach to the edge of the cliff—has marshaled all the elements common to representation of the sublime: obscurity, darkness, silence, vacuity, magnitude, vastness, infinity, difficulty, magnificence. We are immersed in a shadowland. Overcome, in the words of J.G. Ballard, by a marriage of reason and nightmare.

We will never visit this place. But we sense that Burtynsky has led us, inexorably, to crossroads of insight. We stand transfixed. Exposed, implicated: haunted by complicity. We are not, as we once may have thought, passive observers. Rather, we are the co-authors of what we see. This is the world of our making.

Inexorable

Edward Burtynsky, Oil Refineries #23, Oakville, Ontario, Canada, 1999. Chromogenic color print. Photograph © Edward Burtynsky, courtesy Nicholas Metivier Gallery, Toronto; Hasted Hunt Kraeutler, New York; and Adamson Gallery, Washington, DC.

A profound fate shapes human ends, and in turn we write that same fate onto nature. Destiny inscribes long scars on the earth. Our own undoing is visible in Burtynsky’s orderly grids of housing and cars, martial arrays of discarded planes, and highways that snake like asphalt rivers: the seeds of our self-destruction. Industry forges a new wilderness, and our civilization, a more efficient—and murderous—state of nature. We are not the fittest; humanity will be transcended over time; and we too, like our evolutionary forebears, will be obviated.

The gravitational pull of Burtynsky’s viewpoint derives from its revelation of consequence. The landscape is shown both as a source of wealth, and as a locus of overreach; oil, as the fuel of progress—and the dark promise of an ultimatum. The safe remove of the camera’s high perspective is mitigated by our near terror of falling. We back away from the edge, even as we realize that it is too late: we’ve already gone over.

The places Burtynsky takes us to are unfamiliar, obscure to our knowledge, but on some level they are no surprise. His images astonish largely because they give shape to our dread, to a suppressed realization of what our lifestyle has wrought. They articulate a secret truth.

These photographs suggest that what lies beneath the surface has far greater value than what lies above: to such an extent that the earth has been devastated to get at the black river below. Shaped not by time, erosion, or the weathering winds, but by the ordering force of the economy, the land has been etched by our avarice and our need. The lines radiate outward, a geometry of revelations, from where we stand at this place and time, to all places, and to our future.

Paul Roth
Senior Curator, Photography and Media Arts
© 2010, Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC

JG BALLARD, 1930–2009

Originally published in Architectures of the Near Future: Architectural Design (ed. Nic Clear), September-October 2009. pp. 5, 6-11. Reproduced with permission.

James Graham Ballard was one of the most original and distinctive authors of the last part of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st century. His writing encompassed topics as diverse as ecological crisis, technological fetishism, urban ruination and suburban mob culture, and he pursued these topics with a wit and inventiveness that is without equal.

Ballard’s understanding of architecture and architects, and his prophetic visions, made him one of the most important figures in the literary articulation of architectural issues and concerns.

From the description of futuristic houses that empathise with their inhabitants, to the bleak characterisation of gated communities consumed by sex, drugs and violence, Ballard’s world is highly prescient and ruthlessly unsentimental. At a time when architectural discourse has become wholly subsumed by the moneymaking pre-occupations of the architectural profession, the writings of JG Ballard serve as reminder that architecture is about people, the things that they do and the places where they do them. Sometimes architecture will involve terrible people doing terrible things in terrible places, but the enduring nature of the human species is that we will always carry on; there is, after all, always the future.

Nic Clear, 2009.

Introduction: ‘A NEAR FUTURE’, by Nic Clear.

Of all the arts, architecture is the closest constitutively to the economic, with which, in the form of commissions and land values, it has a virtually unmediated relationship.

Frederic Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, 1991, p 5.[1]

Later, as he sat on the balcony eating the dog, Dr Robert Laing reflected on the unusual events that had taken place within this huge apartment building during the previous three months.

JG Ballard, High-Rise, 1975, p 7.[2]

Architectural design is always about the future; when architects make a proposition they always assume that it takes place in some imagined future. Architects nearly always assume that this future will be ‘better’ than the present, often as a consequence of what is being proposed. Architecture is, by its very nature, utopian.

Contemporary architecture, unlike earlier models of ‘utopian’ architecture, or perhaps because of the stigma attached to those models, has resisted an explicitly social and political agenda. Instead it has become driven by ‘ideal’ formalist agendas facilitated by the ‘shape-making’ potential of new computer-based design tools and funded by speculative finance.

Indeed, the most important transformations that have occurred in architecture over the last 30 years have not been in the shifts in fashion marking out new typologies, new forms of representation, new materials or new forms of manufacture; the biggest single shift has been in the new economic relations within the building industry and the new forms of contractual relationships that this has brought about. The rise of fast-track construction in the 1980s heralded a major change in the motivations for construction and brought about a homogenisation of building output largely predicated on maximising the economic value of the project, often with little regard for its social value.

And with the introduction of the Private Finance Initiative (PFI) the current UK government has turned even health-care and educational building programmes into a speculative enterprise. PFI has always been presented as a cost-effective way of financing large infrastructural projects; however, like the government’s recent bail out of the banks, it works on the principle of the public financing the risk while the private sector skims off the profit.[3]

For a number of years the single model that has shaped the type of future that the architectural profession has based its assumptions on is one of unfettered consumer expansion. The majority of recent architectural debates have not tried to call into question the economic imperatives of late capitalism that drive financial speculation and generate the context within which private development is presented as the only option. Even the avant-garde architectural firms of the 1980s are now operating as large international commercial practices, and the Deconstructivists have proved to be more than enthusiastic capitalists. The critical and intellectual ambitions inspired by Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze and Guy Debord have been replaced with the monetarist ideologies of Milton Friedman and Alan Greenspan.

The architectural profession has embraced the late capitalist model enthusiastically and uncritically, while all the time pandering to the concepts of social and environmental responsibility. The fact is that this model has been funded through speculative investment, and now that the money has run out the profession is bereft of alternatives.

The promise of an ‘urban renaissance’ has left buildings empty and negative equity is becoming once again the dominant economic value across the property world.

The architectural world has proved completely incapable of suggesting what the future may hold; can one still believe in the shiny renders of the corporate architectural complex when this world has replaced a vision of the future with an image of the future?

But the profession is resourceful and in the same way that all contemporary architects play the ‘sustainability’ game, whether they are designing sustainable airports, sustainable shopping centres, sustainable luxury hotels, sustainable office blocks, sustainable cities in the middle of deserts or sustainable single private dwellings for the ultrarich, we will, no doubt, see a gritty ‘new realism’ starting to appear in architectural discourse that responds to the new economic conditions.[4]

Exactly how these new imperatives will drive the formal shape- making methodologies that have filled so many glossy pages for so long we shall see; and how will the interactive and responsive landscapes interact with, and respond to, bankruptcy, increasing unemployment and a general sense of despair?

Nic Clear, ‘Game with Vestiges: After Ballard Triptych, 2009′. The series of drawings here was set up in the same way as any standard CAD drawing in VectorWorks using layers, classes and libraries of objects. The drawings work as a narrative triptych, bringing together a number of elements — cityscapes, high-rise buildings, surrealist curios, fetish and banal objects — all in keeping with the memory of ‘Jim’, to whom the drawings are dedicated.

Progress
Contemporary culture has put its faith in the ideology of progress; progress will make things better, as well as making things faster and smaller (or bigger depending on the value system). This faith in progress and betterment fails to ring true in the light of economic downturn, environmental catastrophe, increased levels of crime, the threats of terrorism and global pandemics.[5] If the future cannot be guaranteed, where does that leave architecture?

However, a loss of faith is only a problem if that faith exists in the first place.

Within literature there is a major strand that looks at the future in a completely different way; science fiction can also be seen as a ‘utopian’ genre,[6] and in works by writers ranging from Jules Verne and HG Wells, through to Aldous Huxley and George Orwell and more latterly Philip K Dick, JG Ballard, Neal Stephenson and William Gibson, the future is depicted in a variety of different hues, not all of them as rosy as the futures promised by the architectural profession. As a result such speculations are often more believable.

While these writings appear to reflect on the future, more often than not they are actually concerned with issues contemporaneous to their production. To cite two obvious examples, Huxley’s Brave New World (1932) and Orwell’s 1984 (1949) are political reflections on the societies around them, and in Huxley’s case it is not altogether clear whether he is entirely critical of the world that he describes.

However, the writings of JG Ballard are of particular interest here as they filter through a number of the texts contained in this issue, either directly or lingering in the background.[7] Ballard is of special significance largely due to the fact that in so much of his writing architecture and architects play such a pivotal role.

The prescience of Ballard’s writing is obvious; his early works encompass environmental disaster, both drought and flooding; in the 1970s, novels such as Crash[8] and High-Rise[9] dealt with technological fetishisation, urban anomie and alienation, and, long before such issues hit the mainstream, he looked at the links between consumerism and social collapse. In his recent writings, Millennium People[10] and Kingdom Come,[11] Ballard depicts a Britain bereft of social values other than those of daytime TV and the shopping centre, and while his central characters can lack credibility his general description of the cultural landscape is far more accurate than almost anything that has been published in the pages of any recent architectural publication.

The future as presented by Ballard is often stark, bleak and uncompromising. There are few happy endings in his future. However, his faith in our collective ability to endure almost any hardship, drawn almost certainly from his experiences in Shanghai during the Second World War, leads us to believe that despite whatever is thrown at us we will adapt and we will survive.[12]

Like Ballard, let us not despair; though the future may be uncertain, uncertainty is not without its attractions.

The current economic situation offers great potential for developing a new agenda in architecture. The fact that the discipline of architecture has become synonymous with the architectural profession is something that will no doubt become contested as unemployment rises throughout the building industry[13] — those of us who can remember previous recessions can also remember them as highly creative periods. The fact that architects may have to redefine their operations is potentially a wonderful opportunity to recalibrate and reconsider who and what architecture is actually for.

This will bring to life the obvious gulf between expectation and reality that permeates architectural practice. Architecture is a wonderful discourse and training; however, it can be a very tedious job. Of course it does not have to be like this. Freed from the limitations of the profession, architectural projects can offer fantastic opportunities to develop narratives that can help us understand why we are doing the things we do.[14]

The fact that architects may have to redefine their operations is potentially a wonderful opportunity to recalibrate and reconsider who and what architecture is actually for.

In particular these uncertain times may be a blessing for a younger generation of designers; equipped with a vast array of technical skills and understanding they are almost certain to cope with the vagaries of future practice. As the skills demonstrated in many of the projects collected in this issue suggest, future architects may be just as adept at web design, graphics and film-making as they are at producing information for buildings.

The last few years have witnessed a gradual disenchantment within architectural education with the goals espoused by the architectural profession. Increased levels of student debt coupled with a creeping homogenisation of architectural practice have resulted in there being a darker aspect to student projects. Rather than shrinking away from the potential difficulties, the younger generation of architects may use information technologies to create new sites of architectural endeavour and give a whole new meaning to the term ‘architectural design’.

The essays and projects gathered together here cover a wide variety of positions. Many develop the themes suggested by Ballard and others, while some give the current situation a broader historical perspective, suggesting that certain of the scenarios that we face are not without precedent.

Nic Clear, ‘Game with Vestiges: After Ballard Triptych, 2009′. The series of drawings here was set up in the same way as any standard CAD drawing in VectorWorks using layers, classes and libraries of objects. The drawings work as a narrative triptych, bringing together a number of elements — cityscapes, high-rise buildings, surrealist curios, fetish and banal objects — all in keeping with the memory of ‘Jim’, to whom the drawings are dedicated.

Matthew Gandy’s ‘Urban Flux’ gives a historical perspective to our current situation and argues that we need to recover the urban imagination in order to enrich 21st-century public culture. Michael Aling returns to his home town of Swindon, statistically the most average town in Britain, to find people sharing identities, stricken with gout and going to a deserted shopping centre for no real reason other than to fulfil a forgotten collective desire. And John Culmer Bell looks at the nature of electromagnetic radiation as a shaper of 19th- and 20th- century urban form, provocatively questioning whether sacrificing the pleasures of ‘noctambulism’ simply on environmental grounds is actually a good thing.

Bastian Glassner of uber-trendy video directors Lynn Fox presents a series of luxurious images, hybridising the body as meat, a clear homage to Francis Bacon (pun intended) with a bit of Roland Barthes’ A Lover’s Discourse thrown in.

Soki So reimagines Piranesi’s Carceri as a near-future Hong Kong with a series of appropriately spectacular and sumptuous images that also address real concerns over the concept of urban intensity and vertical sprawl. Rubedo send out a provocative declaration concerning the omnipresence of technological systems and the necessity of developing transdisciplinary tactics to negotiate the immersive hybridised spaces of late capitalism.

Richard Bevan constructs a worryingly believable scenario whereby Heathrow airport becomes a carbon casino trading in carbon credits with air-mile-hungry oligarchs gambling to stay aloft, and Geoff Manaugh explores and questions the use of the term ‘feral city’. In ‘London After the Rain’, Ben Marzys presents a beautiful graphic Surrealist landscape, a posthuman picturesque. In ‘L.A.W.u.N Project #21: Cybucolia’ the Invisible University suggest that the near future may carry with it many of the seeds sown with 19th-century Romanticism; and Dan Farmer suggests that the near future may be all in the mind with excerpts from his research on cortical plasticity. Ben Nicholson reflects on his 2004 book The World Who Wants It?, one of the finest pieces of satirical writing of recent years, and presents a series of images that were absent from the original publication.

Simon Sellars and George Thomson explore the most explicitly Ballardian line, with Sellars looking at the aural nature of the urban environment, beautifully illustrated with Michelle Lord’s exquisite assemblages, and Thomson reimagining Ballard’s ‘Sound-Sweep’ as a community occupying a derelict M25.

Finally, Art in Ruins show work from installations that are 20 years old, an important conceptual reminder that none of the ideas in this issue are particularly new.

This issue was first conceived in 2007; the proposal was put forward in early 2008 and most of the text written late 2008/ early 2009. You will be reading this, at the very earliest, in autumn 2009. Like any other architectural project its relevance is shaped by a number of external forces far beyond the control of its authors; the economic events that are taking place as this text is being written (and rewritten) make any allusion to future certainties look foolish. The severity of the current economic situation makes any attempt to try to predict what light, if any, is at the end of this particular tunnel seem absurd. However, what happens if we imagine a number of scenarios, not necessarily the usual convivial scenarios that mainstream architecture usually relies on, but scenarios where the traditional certainties are replaced by something less predictable? Like the heroes of many of Ballard’s stories, the authors of the essays in this issue face the future with a sense of resigned stoicism and the ability to create beauty wherever they find it.

In many ways the near future could be very much like the past, with one obvious exception — it will be completely different.

Notes
[1] Frederic Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, Duke University Press (Durham, NC), 1991, p 5.
[2] JG Ballard, High Rise, Jonathan Cape (London), 1975, p 7.
[3] See George Monbiot, ‘The Biggest Weirdest Rip Off Yet’, Guardian, 7 April 2009. In this article, Monbiot references a paper published in 2002 in the British Medical Journal in which five key criticisms were made of the PFI funding of hospitals: 1) that PFI brings no new capital investments; 2) that the assessments of value for money are skewed in favour of private finance; 3) the higher costs of PFI are due to financing costs which would be incurred under public financing; 4) any PFI schemes only show value for money after ‘risk transfer’, for risks that are not justified; 5) PFI more than doubles the cost of capital as a percentage of annual operating income. From Allyson M Pollock, Jean Shaoul and Neil Vickers, ‘Private finance and “value for money” in NHS hospitals: a policy in search of a rationale?’, BMJ, Vol 324, 18 May 2002, pp 1205–09.
[4] One can imagine that such texts have already begun to emanate from Rotterdam and Boston.
[5] For a critique of ‘progress’, see John Gray, Heresies Against Progress and Other Illusions, Granta Books (London), 2004.
[6] See Frederic Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions, Verso (London and New York), 2005.
[7] Ballard has been a central interest of my diploma unit at the Bartlett School of Architecture where I have been running a programme entitled ‘Architecture of the Near Future’ for several years. The work of Michael Aling, Richard Bevan, Dan Farmer, Ben Marzys, Soki So and George Thomson, all contributors to this issue, came out of this programme.
[8] JG Ballard, Crash, Jonathan Cape (London), 1973.
[9] JG Ballard, High Rise, op cit.
[10] JG Ballard, Millennium People, Flamingo (London), 2003.
[11] JG Ballard, Kingdom Come, Fourth Estate (London), 2006.
[12] Beautifully described in his memoir Miracles of Life: Shanghai to Shepperton, Fourth Estate (London), 2008.
[13] Job losses in architecture between February 2008 and February 2009 were reportedly up by 760%. See Will Hirst, ‘Architect Job Losses up by 760%’, Building Design, 20 March 2009, p 3.
[14] The drawings that accompany this essay come from my sheer enjoyment of producing CAD drawings simply because they are something I like doing.

Text © 2009 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Images © Nic Clear.

Nic Clear, ‘Game with Vestiges: After Ballard Triptych, 2009′. The series of drawings here was set up in the same way as any standard CAD drawing in VectorWorks using layers, classes and libraries of objects. The drawings work as a narrative triptych, bringing together a number of elements — cityscapes, high-rise buildings, surrealist curios, fetish and banal objects — all in keeping with the memory of ‘Jim’, to whom the drawings are dedicated.

…:: Previously on Ballardian:
+ Stereoscopic Urbanism: JG Ballard & the Built Enviroment
+ ‘Architectures of the Near Future’: An Interview with Nic Clear

Information on Architectures of the Near Future: Architectural Design.

In this highly pertinent issue, guest-editor Nic Clear questions received notions of the future. Are the accepted norms of economic growth and expansion the only means by which society can develop and prosper? Should the current economic crisis be making us call into question a future of unlimited growth? Can this moment of crisis – economic, environmental and technological – enable us to make more informed choices about the type of future that we want and can actually achieve? Architectures of the Near Future offers a series of alternative voices, developing some of the neglected areas of contemporary urban life and original visions of what might be to come. Rather than providing simplistic and seductive images of an intangible shiny future, it rocks the cosy world of architecture with polemical blasts.

* Draws on topics as diverse as synthetic space, psychoanalysis, Postmodern geography, post-economics, cybernetics and developments in neurology.
* Includes an exploration of the work of JG Ballard.
* Features the work of Ben Nicholson.

Editorial (Helen Castle ).
Introduction: A Near Future (Nic Clear).
Urban Flux (Matthew Gandy).
Postindividualism: Fata Morgana and the Swindon Gout Clinic (Michael Aling).
Urban Otaku: Electric Lighting and the Noctambulist (John Culmer Bell).
The Groom’s Gospel (Bastian Glassner).
Hong Kong Labyrinths (Soki So).
Distructuring Utopias (Rubedo: Laurent-Paul Robert and Vesna Petresin Robert).
The Carbon Casino (Richard Bevan).
Cities Gone Wild (Geoff Manaugh).
London After the Rain (Nic Clear).
L.A.W.u.N. Project #21: Cybucolia (Samantha Hardingham and David Greene).
Cortical Plasticity (Dan Farmer).
The Ridiculous and the Sublime (Ben Nicholson).
Stereoscopic Urbanism: JG Ballard and the Built Environment (Simon Sellars).
The Sound Stage (George Thomson).
Recent History – Art In Ruins (Hannah Vowles and Glyn Banks/Art in Ruins and Nic Clear)

Practice Profile.
Snøhetta (Jayne Merkel).
Interior Eye.
Biochemistry Department, University of Oxford (Howard Watson).
Building Profile.
St Benedict’s School, West London (David Littlefield).
Unit Factor.
Migration Pattern Process (Simon Beames and Kenneth Fraser).
Spiller’s Bits.
Mathematics of the Ideal Pavilion (Neil Spiller).
Yeang’s Eco-Files.
Computational Building Performance Modelling and Ecodesign (Khee Poh Lam and Ken Yeang).
McLean’s Nuggets (Will McLean).
Userscape
Scaleable Technology for Smart Spaces (Valentina Croci).