ABOVE: ‘London after the Rain’, by Ben Olszyna-Marzys. A film produced for Nic Clear’s Unit 15 course, ‘Crash: Architectures of the Near Future’.

In recognition of the sophistication of Ballard’s architectural analysis, a raft of discourse has been produced in recent times from within both academic and pop-cultural realms. This takes the form of tributes, analyses, ‘reimaginings’ and course syllabuses. In the influential architecture blog BLDGBLOG, for example, Geoff Manaugh sounds the note:

We have more to learn from the fiction of J.G. Ballard … than we do from Le Corbusier. The good city form of tomorrow is a refugee camp built by Brown & Root; the world’s largest architectural client is the U.S. Department of Defense. More people now live in overseas military camps than in houses designed by Mies van der Rohe — yet we study Mies van der Rohe.

While Le Corbusier appears to be (mis)remembered by history for supposedly self-important, grandiose plans to realise an architectural utopia that ignored the basic requirements of its inhabitants, Ballard, according to Manaugh, assumes increasing importance for the manner in which his work acutely analyses the ways in which the built environment can impact psychologically on its users and inhabitants. This includes, he elaborates, an identification of a ‘constant dissatisfaction with … architectural surroundings [that] becomes a kind of quiet aggression, an unarticulated suburban angst’. For Manaugh, the ‘psycho spatial’ nature of ‘Ballardian space’ is best articulated by Concrete Island, High-Rise and Super-Cannes, which he has utilised to varying degrees as the cornerstones of several BDLGBLOG posts.

Within the creative arts, the Birmingham-based artist Michelle Lord exhibited a series of images that used imagery from Concrete Island and Ballard’s novella ‘The Ultimate City’ (1976) to examine the legacy of Brutalist architecture in Britain. Lord’s work explicitly critiques the utopian ‘social idealism’ of Brutalism, itself a descendant of the Le Corbusier school of architecture, and the fashion in which it disregarded ‘the communal, historic and surrounding built environment’. Yet Lord also successfully captures the sense of ambivalence that powers ‘The Ultimate City’, with its depiction of a far-future, ‘post technological’ world in which the harshness of the urban environment is rejected in favour of a ‘green’, sterile ecotopia, only to be fatally underscored by a lingering lament for the decline of industrial landscapes.

Academically, Ballardian Studies is an emerging discipline in architectural schools. Here, the website of the London-based firm, Azhar Architecture, is instructive, featuring a list entitled ‘What’s being recommended in Architecture Schools: A Sample’. High-Rise, tracking the breakdown of social order in a Corbusian apartment block, is included alongside works from Rem Koolhaas, Mike Davis, Deleuze & Guattari and Guy Debord. At Columbia University’s Department of English & Comparative Literature, Professor Ursula Heise taught a subject entitled ‘Modern and Postmodern Cities’, in which depictions of ‘the metropolis and urban life’ were considered in 20th-century literature. One session was given over to two Ballard short stories, ‘The Concentration City’ (1957) and ‘Billennium’ (1962), which rank among the author’s most effective portrayals of the sensory overload of big-city life. Conceptually, the stories are at polar opposites, thematically they are of a piece: the absolute alliance of architecture with late capitalism. ‘Billennium’ is concerned with the complete contraction of public and private space by an overbearing architecture, while ‘Concentration City’ is based on the premise that the city is ever-expanding, without limits, its boundaries unable to be located by the central protagonist, who, no matter how far he travels, ends up where he started.

But the most ambitious academic program to date is almost certainly ‘Crash: Architectures of the Near Future’, which was taught by Nic Clear and Simon Kennedy at the Bartlett School of Architecture in London in 2007-08. For Clear and Kennedy, the ‘speculative’ nature of Ballardian architectural space is all-important. The course, which utilised film and animation, video and motion-graphic techniques to devise representations of ‘synthetic space’, challenged students to examine architectural themes across the broad span of Ballard’s writing. The aim was to process the manner by which he deploys ‘actual’ and ‘virtual’ environments to form a coherent analysis of the challenges inherent in a supersaturated technological world. Clear and Kennedy, like Manaugh, also point to the psychological effects of architecture, which leads on to their consideration of Iain Sinclair and Chris Petit’s film, London Orbital, as a text not only influenced by Ballard but also by the psychogeographical revival that Sinclair is closely associated with.

I recall in my interview with Manaugh, where I mentioned how I’d love to see Ballard taught in architectural schools. Geoff enthusiastically replied, ‘I would love to do this — it’s actually a conscious fantasy of mine…’ You can understand my excitement upon learning of Unit 15! I decided therefore to contact Nic Clear, and pin him down about Ballard, architecture and the fabulous work created by Unit 15, as well as the new U15 program for 2008-09, ‘The Near Future Part II’, which questions whether the utopianism of the ‘corporate architectural complex’ is viable in a world riven by conflict.

Simon Sellars

ABOVE: ‘The Sound-Sweep’, by George Thomson, based on the story by J.G. Ballard. A film produced for Nic Clear’s Unit 15 course, ‘Crash: Architectures of the Near Future’.

J G Ballard is one of the most original and distinctive authors of the last part of the C20th, and beginning of the C21st. His writing has encompassed topics as diverse as ecological crisis to technological fetishism and augmentation, and from urban ruination to suburban mob culture, and he has pursued these topics with a wit and inventiveness that is without comparison.

His understanding of architecture, and architects, and his prophetic visions make Ballard 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. Rather than examining specific texts, Unit 15 will be following themes implicit in Ballard’s writing.

Unit 15 will also be examining filmic interpretations of his writing, particularly David Cronenberg’s Crash and Jonathan Weiss’s The Atrocity Exhibition, and to a lesser extent Steven Spielberg’s Empire Of The Sun. We shall also be looking at films inspired by Ballard’s work especially Iain Sinclair’s London Orbital. In short, we shall be examining all aspects of culture that can be considered BALLARDIAN.

Nic Clear & Simon Kennedy, ‘Crash: Architectures of the Near Future’, Unit 15, Bartlett School of Architecture, 2007-08.

SIMON SELLARS: Nic, how did the idea for ‘Crash: Architectures Of The Near Future’ come about?

NIC CLEAR: I’ve been interested in Ballard’s writing for many years; I was a big Joy Division fan and read The Atrocity Exhibition simply because they wrote a song with the same name. More recently, it struck me that the themes in Ballard’s work seem to address the issues about the built environment that architectural discourse seems to avoid: namely, how people actually operate within a social context where things are either falling, or have fallen apart. Architecture always seems to present this impossibly rosy view of the future and seems unable to deal with the possibility of failure, even though all architecture in some way fails.

SS: How have your students responded to Ballard’s work?

NC: The projects have been very successful, and the use of a literary point of departure has been quite liberating. The Ballardian theme has allowed students to really speculate on what they are doing, but also, more importantly, why they are doing it.

SS: Besides Unit 15, it seems there are a few architects, architectural critics, architecturally-minded artists and architecture schools that are starting to take notice of Ballard’s work.

NC: I’m not sure how many architects are being influenced by Ballard in their work, especially within ‘commercial’ architecture — maybe the forthcoming recession will make architects aware of the Ballardian possibilities of architecture. Within academia and architectural criticism, if such a thing still exists, there is a general disdain for ‘popular’ fiction — writing on, and about, architecture is still very elitist — and I have met quite a bit of resistance when discussing Ballard as a serious subject. However, I think that there is a desire to face up to a future that deals with a system in crisis, which Ballard articulates so brilliantly. I was recently reading Mike Davis’s breathtaking collection of essays, Dead Cities, and was constantly thinking ‘this is so Ballardian’. Also, writers like Frederic Jameson and Jean Baudrillard, who have been influenced by Ballard, are still incredibly important and influential. Obviously Ballard’s early identification of global environmental issues also makes him incredibly pertinent to many people. However Ballard does not give easy, or even any answers and this puts off many people. Given the current economic and environmental conditions, he seems more prescient than ever, not simply because of the situations he describes, but because he offers a mindset for dealing with these issues.

Many people may think that Ballard’s characters face the scenarios he creates with an unbelievable stoicism, although Ballard has an advantage over us, as most of us have never had to face any kind of catastrophe. I think the experiences of life in Shanghai during WWII made Jim believe that the human race is able to endure — and inflict — almost any horror imaginable.

ABOVE: A film by Michael Aling, produced for Nic Clear’s Unit 15 course, ‘Crash: Architectures of the Near Future’.

SS: A wider, and resurgent, trend in film and literature, which Ballard seems to have anticipated, is the idea that on some level we secretly desire the apocalypse, that we welcome the chance to explore the farthest limits of alienation. This is something that Chris Nakashima-Brown articulates very well: ‘The persistence of post-apocalyptic scenarios (as well as many disaster movies) expresses a latent yearning for the destruction of the state apparatus and the abolition of private property. At a deeper psychological level … the idea of roaming a depopulated earth rummaging for useful artifacts articulates the extent of our individual alienation in a thoroughly commodified society.’

NC: Many people may fantasise about these scenarios, but when it comes to losing their own luxuries, people will vote for whoever offers the easiest way out — which most often involves blaming someone else. The most depressing part of how current economic and social structures start falling apart is that, instead of embracing the liberating potential of re-structuring and re-organising, politically things could start getting much more conservative. This is obviously another common theme in Ballard. I grew up in the 70s with the three-day week and the winter of discontent, with the parks of London used as rubbish dumps, but for me it was great power cuts and no school, and out of it came punk … yet the down side was Thatcherism. Obviously the next few years will be catastrophic for ‘big business’ (is that so bad?), and the fall out will be difficult for many, but we will adjust to yet another ‘new normal’. We may even in the long run be better off as a society for it.

Personally, this will be my third major recession, and they are always the most productive times: when no one has money, money stops mattering.

SS: High-Rise is the obvious book to cite when discussing Ballard and architecture. Which of his other works is relevant?

NC: It’s easier to say which one’s aren’t relevant, and the answer to that is probably none! Crash is a personal favourite, I like the perversity of it; it takes the whole modernist fetishisation of technology and mixes it with contemporary obsessions like celebrity cults. The problem with the film was that it was soft-core pornography — all those shots of Debra Unger’s stockings — when really the book is quite hardcore: the leaky orifices, the polysexuality and the car as augmented bodily technology. It’s a surrealist masterpiece up there with Bataille’s The Story of the Eye and Duchamp’s ‘The Large Glass’.

SS: When I interviewed Geoff Manaugh, he defined ‘Ballardian space’ as ‘psycho spatial’. I’d be interested in your take.

NC: If you take Jameson’s postmodern hyperspace, remove the post-structuralist jargon, add some dark humour and set it on the periphery of any declining western industrialised city — especially London — then you are pretty close.

SS: Does this relate to Unit 15′s research into ‘synthetic space’?

NC: Synthetic space is the merging of the actual and virtual; writers like Ballard and Burroughs have been describing synthetic space for years. Within architectural terms, I see it as the inability to differentiate between spaces and their representations — where spatial representations are increasingly becoming spatial propositions.

SS: Ballard is famously obsessive about multi-storey car parks. What do they mean to him, do you think?

NC: The defining symbol of the 20th century is the motor car, and car parks are part palace and part mausoleum. They also tend to be quite ugly and boring, though often in a strangely beautiful and interesting way, and that sort of perversity defines Ballard’s aesthetic.

SS: For my PhD, I was researching contemporary attitudes towards modernist architecture and came across the critical reaction to the 2006 exhibition on modernist art at the V&A. I was completely shocked by Simon Jenkins’ response, which verged on demonic possession. He took particular exception to modernist architects, who he said were ‘the worst offenders because they became the most powerful’, and equates them with Hitler. (But as Deyan Sudjic riposted, such a caricature misrepresents ‘the full and often contradictory range of Modernist expression… none of which seemed to be inspiring much actual terror on the day I went’.) Why does Brutalist architecture in Britain continue to provoke such rage?

NC: The British establishment, and the English in particular, still have a real suspicion of architectural modernism, seeing it as ‘elitist’, ‘European’ and ‘socialist’. Brutalism especially has become a scapegoat for the failure of that post-war welfare state optimism. Of course, this is rubbish: the real failure lies in the political and cultural failure to actually bring about a more egalitarian and democratic society.

SS: On the other hand, as the antithesis to Jenkins, Ballard said: ‘I have always admired modernism and wish the whole of London could be rebuilt in the style of Michael Manser’s brilliant Heathrow Hilton’.

NC: I always imagine that Eden-Olympia in Super-Cannes was designed by someone like Manser. But lets face it, we can’t always trust such pronouncements by Jim, especially if it was for the benefit of the Guardian — imagine all that liberal angst and hand wringing.

ABOVE: A film by Peter Kidger, produced for Nic Clear’s Unit 15 course, ‘Crash: Architectures of the Near Future’.

SS: In his review of Davis’s City of Quartz, Ballard welcomes ‘unrestricted urban sprawl, the decentred metropolis, a transient airport culture, gated communities and an absence of traditional civic pride’. He suggests that architects and urban planners need to ‘make the most of this’, letting the environment guide them almost as if it is sentient, rather than conforming to the reverse, ie, the old ideal of the arrogant architect imposing his grand vision on the environment (in High-Rise, this was the downfall of the architect Royal). Do you agree with Ballard?

NC: ‘Unrestricted’ would be the key term; the brilliance of Davis’s analysis is to show how clearly urban planning follows such a narrow set of vested interests. Less planning, less controls, less regulation would only work if it also meant less greed, and what are the chances of that? It reminds me of that Noam Chomsky quote on the free market: ‘it sounds like a great idea, maybe we should try it sometime’.

SS: Rem Koolhaas seems to bear more than a passing resemblance to some of the architects in Ballard’s stories: the ego, the vainglory, the architect as self-styled eccentric…

NC: He probably likes to think he does. I like Ballard’s architects: they seem genuinely optimistic and have a faith, albeit misguided, in the power of architecture to change society for the good. They are of a much older generation — Ballard’s. I bet Robert Maitland would send angry letters into Building Design, the weekly British architectural newspaper, complaining about these new-fangled projects.

Rem’s recent work, especially in China, strikes me as cynical. His obsession with celebrity, especially his own, seems to be his main driving force, and like many ‘good’ Marxists of his generation, he has become a consummate capitalist. He is much more like Wilder Penrose from Super-Cannes — without the humour.

SS: Does architecture still have an image problem, then, in terms of this archetype of the arrogant, narcissistic architect imposing his vision on the people?

NC: Yes, because most of us are arrogant and narcissistic.

SS: In books such as Concrete Island and stories like ‘The Ultimate City’, Ballard depicts architecture as an instrument of oppressive capitalism, and architects as contributing to that oppression. For Ballard, it seems to me, no architect can be truly radical, or can truly think of architecture as ‘art’ when they are either carrying out the wishes of the State, mobilising state funds to realise their designs, or carrying out the desires of big business. Is this an accurate summation of architectural practice today? How would you reconcile that frustration with a pure creative spirit?

NC: I started my postgraduate dissertation in 1989 with a quote from Frederic Jameson: ‘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.’

Little has changed since; in fact, things have got worse. Architecture is now synonymous with the architectural profession (or Corporate Architectural Complex), speculation is financial rather than intellectual, and architects have been complicit with the kind of greedy thinking and acting that has got us into the current global financial crisis. We have to stop thinking about architecture simply in terms of building buildings — that’s why I am so interested in looking at other models and disciplines to draw inspiration from.

SS: Ballard says that ‘Novelty architecture dominates throughout the world, pitched like the movies at the bored teenager inside all of us.’ Any thoughts on that?

NC: For novelty architecture, see my answer on Rem. A couple of years ago I used the phrase ‘Shapist Architecture’, taken from Tony Hancock’s 1961 film The Rebel, a satire on the art world. At one point he says, ‘I don’t paint the object, I paint the shape around the object’. Developments in the use of computer software have allowed architects to come up with a variety of three-dimensional forms, which has led to a whole raft of ‘blobby’ buildings, a lot of which appear to be self-indulgent and that confuse ‘looking interesting’ with ‘being interesting’ and ‘looking complex’ with ‘complexity’. We have an architecture of the image.

SS: In Ballard, architecture is often used as a form of social control. Did you perceive any similarities between the nature and cause of the banlieue riots in France in 2005, and the breakdown of society depicted in High-Rise?

NC: Not really. High Rise is about a rejection of convivial social structures and returning to a more ‘primitive’ social model. There is a brilliant French film from 1973 called Themroc
directed by Claude Faraldo, which seems to have a greater affinity with High-Rise, published two years later. In it, a blue-collar worker rejects his mundane life, knocks the front wall out of his apartment and starts living like a caveman. However, Kingdom Come, in many ways, does describes the type of anomie and alienation that dominates the urban periphery. Boredom and disenfranchisement brought about by simply being defined by what we consume are the most incendiary factors in the contemporary city.

ABOVE: A film by Dan Farmer, produced for Nic Clear’s Unit 15 course, ‘Crash: Architectures of the Near Future’.

SS: Do you think Ballard has much at all to do with psychogeographical conceptions of urban space? He appears to have been co-opted into the ‘movement’, such as it is.

NC: It seems everyone’s a psychogeographer nowadays. Psychogeography was originally articulated by the Situationists as an experimental form of urbanism that attempted a critique of the hegemonic values of urban planning and zoning by emphasising the ‘transience’ of the urban experience. The political aspect of psychogeography has been diminished in favour of a ‘poetics’ of the city. I think Ballard in some of his writing retains a lot more of that political conception of psychogeography than many who have fashionably co-opted that term.

SS: What role does film, video, animation and motion graphics play in your course? How can film methodology help to illuminate architectural design?

NC: My main interest in time-based techniques is the ability to tell stories. However, at a pedagogic level, working with film, video and animation does teach a whole number of organisational and aesthetic skills, so despite my anti-profession rhetoric, I seem to be doing a very good job in equipping students to operate very successfully within the profession.

SS: In The Atrocity Exhibition, there are many scenarios in which mental patients are encouraged to make their own films as therapy. Without wishing to casting aspersions on the mental health of your students(!), were the many references to DIY film aesthetics in the book an inspiration for your decision to use Ballard and film as a way into thinking about architecture? (Recall that in Atrocity, these amateur films recast the media landscape and the built environment in ‘ways that make sense’.)

NC: The way I teach is very much geared toward helping students find a voice, whether that is therapeutic is unimportant (to me) — besides, I hate that psychoanalytic model of teaching, just as much as I hate the paternalistic model.

SS: Sure, but I wasn’t really referring to the thereaputic aspects, though, more the DIY angle and the mediation of the built environment.

NC: The main decision to start using film in the way I teach architecture, which I have been doing since 1999, was simply because it was what I was doing myself. The rise of CGI, animation and the availability of digital video made it a much more accessible and viable way of generating, developing and communicating architectural and spatial ideas and narratives. The influence of lo-fi (as opposed to DIY) artists and filmmakers such as Bruce Nauman or Burroughs was an attraction, but it was the availability of the technology that got me going.

SS: Do you think Ballard is an especially ‘filmic’ or ‘cinematic’ writer?

NC: Yes, which is why the English literary establishment still treats him with suspicion since he is not a ‘literary’ writer. Ballard wants to create images and tell stories rather than impress with literary form.

SS: I think the films your students have turned out are simply stunning, especially considering they don’t have a ‘studio budget’ to work with — the filmmakers, as well as you and everyone involved, should be applauded. But besides making films, you also looked at feature-film versions of Ballard’s work. How can an analysis of these adaptations help in understanding ‘speculative, narrative architectures’ in Ballard’s writing?

NC: I have taken this particular position for two reasons: to engage with a critique of contemporary architecture, and because it’ s fun. The filmic analysis was just a starting point; out of all the films we watched, Jonathan Weiss’s Atrocity Exhibition and Sinclair and Petit’s London Orbital were the most influential.

Architecture should not be left to architects — the whole discourse needs opening up. The reason why I earlier questioned whether architectural criticism exists is simply because architecture is an incredibly insular and hermetic discipline — no one dares criticise the Rems, the Dannys or the Zahas for fear of being locked out. Magazines need content and they publish pretty much anything and everything without questioning it; if they did question it, then the content would dry up.

SS: It’s good to see Jonathan Weiss’s film gaining recognition. What do you appreciate about it?

NC: The fact that he had the guts to take it on with virtually no budget. The Atrocity Exhibition is the most ‘Burroughsian’ of all Ballard’s writing and I think Weiss has captured that. The use of found footage and the dislocated time line have echoes in the literary character of the book, and bits of the film are extremely beautiful to look at. I can’t stand the criticism that it doesn’t make sense or is difficult: these criticisms seem to ignore the difficulties of the original text.

ABOVE: ‘The Knife’ by Mario Balducci, produced for Nic Clear’s Unit 15 course, ‘Crash: Architectures of the Near Future’.

SS: Who else do you think would make a good fist of adapting Ballard?

NC: Taakishi Miike to direct High Rise as a total gore-fest, Michael Mann to direct Super-Cannes — and I’m working on an adaptation of ‘Motel Architecture’.

SS: Taakishi Miike? Good call! But tell me about your own adaptation.

NC: I’m going through the shower scene from Pyscho frame by frame to develop the analysis that JG alludes to in ‘Motel Architecture’. I’ve mapped out a rough script and hope to shoot something in the new year. Part of what I am doing for ‘The Near Future’, the issue of Architectural Design I’m guest editing, will be based on this project (some sort of ‘House Of The Future’) — the other part is an essay/rant against the architectural profession.

At the time he had been sitting in his chair in the centre of the solarium, bathing in the warm artificial light that flowed through the ceiling vents and watching the shower sequence from Psycho on the master screen. The brilliance of this tour de force never ceased to astonish Pangborn. He had played the sequence to himself hundreds of times, frozen every frame and explored it in close-up, separately recorded sections of the action and displayed them on the dozen smaller screens around the master display. The extraordinary relationship between the geometry of the shower stall and the anatomy of the murdered woman’s body seemed to hold the clue to the real meaning of everything in Pangborn’s world, to the unstated connections between his own musculature and the immaculate glass and chromium universe of the solarium. In his headier moments Pangborn was convinced that the secret formulas of his tenancy of time and space were contained somewhere within this endlessly repeated clip of film.

J.G. Ballard, ‘Motel Architecture’ (1978).

SS: The guest issue of AD was originally going to be explicitly ‘Ballardian, wasn’t it?

NC: The publication, in its current form, has changed from being explicitly about Ballard and Ballard’s writings to something more general: an antidote to the shiny ‘bigness’, ‘everything’s great’ vision of contemporary architecture presented by the mainstream architectural press. The guiding principles are still thoroughly ‘Ballardian’, even though I have opened the discussion up. I would still like to do a purely Ballardian book and will use The Near Future as a first step.

This is the blurb for the issue, which I think neatly sums up my aims for the whole Near Future project:

For the last 20 years, the architectural profession has been complicit with the laissez-faire ideology of late capitalism, assuming that the economic forces of growth and expansion are the only means by which society can develop and prosper.

The current economic crisis makes us question whether a future of unlimited growth is not only possible, but taking into account environmental factors, actually advisable. We have reached a moment of crisis — economic, environmental and technological — where we have to make choices about the type of future that we want, but also the type of future we can actually achieve.

It would appear that the Architectural Profession has nothing to say except ‘business as usual’, as it continues to produce bright, shiny renders of schemes that will sit empty for years. This proposed issue of Architectural Design offers a series of alternate voices, developing some of the neglected areas of contemporary urban life and trying to find visions of the future, not simply images of the future.

The proposed issue offers a diverse set of ideas that explore a number of possible ‘Near Futures’ — futures that may be influenced the resurgence of gout in Swindon, or take precedent from an analysis of the political landscape of Southern Italy where in some areas a state of effective lawlessness exists.

The issue combines critical analysis with gorgeous graphics, and features work produced at the margins of contemporary architectural practice. Drawing on topics as diverse as synthetic space, psychoanalysis, post-modern geography, post-economics, cybernetics, developments in neurology as well as the fictional writings of authors such as J G Ballard and William Gibson, ‘The Near Future’ will present a series of polemical blasts that are intended to rock the cosy world of architectural discourse.

Thank you, Nic Clear and Unit 15. ‘The Near Future’, the issue of Architectural Design guest-edited by Nic, will be published in September 2009.

ABOVE: ‘Nic’s right-hand talking to Evis, starring Nic Clear’. Video via archimaxx.

This is a bizarre match up: Mike Skinner of the Streets in conversation with the philosopher John Gray:

It seemed a good idea to put the pop star and the professor together, and so they met for a wide-ranging conversation — covering the art of storytelling and the imminent collapse of Western capitalism — in a north London pub hours before Skinner’s performance at the BBC Electric Proms.
…
MS: Isn’t it dangerous to say evil is natural?

JG: It’s the opposite. I’m a big fan of JG Ballard…

MS: I’m halfway through High-rise

JG: The very book I was going to mention! Ballard says that people from Catholic countries are less shocked by his books than people from Protestant countries, because they still believe in original sin – there are murderers and psychopaths inside us. It doesn’t mean you accept that state of affairs, it means you have rules and conventions which stand in the way. That’s what used to be called civilisation – though, of course, there’s nowhere that’s more than half-civilised. In general, I’m interested in looking at what’s happening now and trying to deal with it. For instance, climate change is not fully solvable…

MS: Because it’s natural or… because we’re fucked?

JG: [Laughs] Well, my best understanding is that the planet is not like a clock that we can wind back. Once the carbon is in the system, there are inexorable results. Also, there’s global dimming – the darkening of the skies by pollution, which also makes the world cooler than it would otherwise be. Getting rid of pollution too quickly could accelerate global warming.

Most greens are horrified by the thought that we can’t stop climate change, but that’s childish. Am I telling people to give up? No. In Holland, for instance, they’re giving back land to the sea and building more on stilts because they expect sea levels to rise… and I find that uplifting, even though it’s a very sober approach.

I don’t know about Skinner, but Gray’s had a lot of interesting things to say about Ballard in the past, often when he’s applying this particular world view that he’s explaining here to Skinner: that is, an acceptance of a certain level of chaos is necessary in order to survive. It’s therefore not hard to see why Gray admires Ballard. In the New Statesman in 1999, for example, he summed up JGB’s career somewhat more perceptively than most recent commentators: ‘Ballard’s achievement is not to have staked out any kind of political position. Rather it is to have communicated a vision of what individual fulfilment might mean in a time of nihilism’.

In 2000, on BBC Radio Four, he interviewed Ballard to promote Super-Cannes and again managed to diagnose the dark heart powering JGB’s work:

Super-Cannes seems to be … about the way that this individual need to … descend into the parts of ourselves that are not fully sane, that even contain a certain element of real madness, that this kind of … individual self-exploration can be co-opted by business, by government, so that types of behaviour and fantasy that in the past were forbidden become almost light entertainment, part of a new industry where we’re fed with brilliant, violent, strange, surreal imagery, but with the goal not of emancipating us, but of keeping us at the job, keeping us working… the liberation that comes with wealth, affluence, freedom of choice can be used as a tool of social control.

More recently, in his book, Black Mass, while not specifically referencing Ballard, Gray formulated a position that could equally apply to the peculiar character of Ballard’s dystopias, in which the characters create meaning from chaos, forging an alliance with the forces of darkness. Black Mass notes how utopian values specifically fuelled by religion and government have created human misery on a massive scale, up to and including the War on Terror. For Gray, what is needed instead is a realist perspective that rejects utopianism and instead accepts the fact that politics is meaningless and that conflict is inherent in human relationships:

A private realm protected from intrusion is part of civilized life, but some incursion into privacy may be unavoidable if other freedoms are to be secure. It is better to accept these conflicts and deal with them than deny them, as liberals do when they look to theories of human rights to resolve dilemmas of war and security.

Sound familiar?

Over at Fantastic Journal, Charles Holland has a fabulous post that begins with a rumination on the 1:43 scale model of JFK’s presidential limo sitting on his mantelpiece, and makes its way to a very perceptive analysis of the nature of conspiracy theory as it applies to Ballard’s Atrocity short, ‘The Assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy Considered as a Downhill Motor Race’:

Ballard’s story differs from conspiracy theory in an important respect. Although, like them, it uses collage and displacement – the sliding in one of one scenario for another, storylines and characters cut and pasted from alternative worlds* – it works through absurdity, highlighting the seam between the accepted reality and the absurd version he posits in its place. Ballard’s story uses collage as an avant garde device of radical disjunction and violent displacement… Conspiracy theory strives for truth, but one that always slips away. By casting doubt on truth in the first place it inherently unbalances itself. Despite its controversy at the time of writing, Ballard’s story is as much a satire on conspiracy theory as it is a tasteless deflation of the importance of the event itself.

More at Fantastic Journal.

Here’s the info (via the JGB Yahoo list):

Contemporary Critical Perspectives: J.G. Ballard

Series Editors: Jeannette Baxter, Sebastian Groes, Sean Matthews

Editor: Jeannette Baxter

J.G. Ballard is one of the most significant British writers of the contemporary period. His award-winning novels are stock features of school and university reading lists, yet the appeal of Ballard’s idiosyncratic imagination is such that his work also enjoys something of a cult status with the reading public. The hugely successful cinematic adaptations of Empire of the Sun (Spielberg, 1987) and Crash (Cronenberg, 1996) further confirm Ballard’s unique place within the literary, cultural and popular imaginations.

Although J. G. Ballard is known primarily as a novelist, he is also the author of over one hundred short stories, a number of which have been adapted for television and theatre. For the first time, Contemporary Critical Perspectives: J. G. Ballard places a discussion of Ballard’s short stories alongside readings of the major novels in order to explore issues of form, narrative and experimentation.

Another defining element of this volume is its coverage of Ballard’s extensive catalogue of cultural journalism. Over the course of five decades, Ballard has written for publications as various as The Daily Telegraph, Playboy, the Guardian, Time Out, New Worlds, The Times and Vogue. Contemporary Critical Perspectives: J. G. Ballard is the first study of its kind to explore Ballard’s significance as a cultural commentator, and to investigate the relationship between his creative and critical writings.

Whilst offering fresh readings of dominant and recurring themes in Ballard’s writing, including history, sexuality, violence, consumer capitalism, and urban space, this edition of Contemporary Critical Perspectives engages with hitherto unexplored questions of post 9/11 politics, terrorism, neo-imperialism, science, morality and ethics.

Contents:

General Introduction: Jeannette Baxter (UEA)

Biography/Chronology: Jeannette Baxter

Chapter 1: Brian Baker(Lancaster) ‘The Geometry of the Space Age: J. G. Ballard’s short fiction and science fiction of the 1960s’: a reassessment of J. G. Ballard’s early work.’

Chapter 2: Jake Huntley (UEA) ‘Re-reading The Atrocity Exhibition.’

Chapter 3: Sebastian Groes (Liverpool Hope), ‘From Shanghai to Shepperton: Place and Space in the Work of J. G. Ballard.’

Chapter 4: Corin Depper (Kingston), ‘Death at Work: The Cinematic Imagination of J. G. Ballard.’

Chapter 5: Umberto Rossi Mind is the Battlefield: Reading Ballard’s ‘Life Trilogy’ as War Literature

Chapter 6: David Pringle, ‘The genres of J. G. Ballard’s non-fiction.’

Chapter 7: Jeannette Baxter (UEA), ‘Visions of Europe in Cocaine Nights and Super-Cannes’

Chapter 8: Philip Tew (Brunel), ‘The possibilities of sacrifice, the certainties of trauma: J. G. Ballard’s Postmillennial Fiction.’

An interview with J.G. Ballard by Jeannette Baxter

ABOVE: JGB in 2006 (photo courtesy The Terminal Collection).

Translation by Dan O’Hara.

The interview below was published in a vast tome, an annual German review of the year in science fiction which came out in July last year. The interview itself was presumably conducted sometime in Spring 2007, after the publication of Kingdom Come and the re-issue two-volume set of The Complete Short Stories.

One suspects, in the end, that Ballard’s playful teasing of his interviewers results from a certain sanguinity about the state of his health; it’s less a callous dissimulation at the expense of his interlocutors than the resolution of the old Lunghua survivor. Evidently by the time of the interview he had already been visiting hospitals, as he notes their science fiction-like hypermodernity, and even advises his interviewers to visit one. I’d rather remember the Ballard of this interview, his sense of mischief intact even in the face of his physical atrophy, than the Ballard who has appeared in recent TV interviews, in which he seems oppressed by less considerate and more parasitical personalities.

Dan O’Hara

Many thanks to Michaela Pape for proofing these interviews.

WERNER FUCHS & SASCHA MAMCZAK: Mr Ballard, last year marked a very special anniversary for you: fifty years ago, in 1956, with the publication of your first story, your career as a science fiction author began.

J.G. BALLARD: Yes, that’s true. But don’t remind me of it! I’m an old man.

Well, your publishers have effectively reminded you of it by newly publishing a thousand-page-plus collection of all your stories from the last fifty years.

Naturally, I was very impressed. After all, that’s half a century of hard work, half my life, if you like. You know, short stories were always very important for me. Like many science fiction authors, I began by writing short stories, which isn’t the norm any more, at least not among British authors today. Today young authors would rather write novels straight off – and that’s precisely why these novels are mostly so poor. In every job you need a certain amount of practice, whether you’re a violinist or a joiner, and short stories offer writers a wonderful chance to acquire the necessary tools. The Mona Lisa, was, after all, not exactly Leonardo da Vinci’s first painting. In any case I learned what it meant to be a writer by writing short stories; what my weaknesses and strengths are.

Today, short stories – even SF short stories – have fallen out of style somewhat.

Yes, one’s become used to these overlong novels in which everything is explained and tidied up. At the heart of every good short story lies a certain ambiguity, a sort of “Yes, but.” That’s very seldom found in novels. And yet this ambiguity is the very stuff of life. Many people tell me I should write more short stories – and I reply that I don’t know where I’d publish them. When I began writing them fifty years ago, it was completely different: nearly every paper and magazine in those days published short stories, some of them even every day. And then there were of course the science fiction magazines, which had an almost insatiable appetite for short stories. The SF magazines in those days were an entirely wonderful training space for budding authors – one could pursue one’s obsessions, one’s fantasies; one could discover what kind of writer one wanted to be. It’s a little like the way that, in one’s youth, one has a lot of affairs: one learns how to make love. It’s different now: most young authors don’t know how to make love, and they don’t know how to write. Oh, well, that’s only the grumbling of an old man.

ABOVE: JGB in 2006. Photograph by Adam Bloomberg & Oliver Chanarin.

How, back then, did you come to write science fiction?

Now, most authors in those days were fans before they began to write professionally. Which means that they’d already written something or other in their youth, mostly for fanzines. With me it was different, I only came to science fiction later. I was twenty-six when I published my first story. Before then I’d scarcely read any science fiction. It was when I went to Canada with the Royal Air Force that I first became aware of SF. We were based somewhere in the Canadian provinces, it snowed incessantly, and there was nothing to do and nothing to read, not a single daily paper. So I started to read science fiction magazines – and I was extraordinarily surprised. It gave me a glimpse of a hitherto unexplored terrain. The then literary mainstream – the stories which the New Yorker or other magazines published – was purely oriented towards the past, both thematically and stylistically. That didn’t interest me. I was interested in the changes around us – the consumer society, the first computers, TV, the fear of nuclear war, gigantic motorway and airport complexes – all of that created a new landscape, an external landscape like the mental one. I wanted to write about that. So I thought, why not science fiction? One could investigate this landscape there.

And of course the nascent space age.

Of course. I remember very well how in 1956 – as I said, the year in which I published my first short story – I heard for the first time on the radio the Sputnik 1 signal: beep, beep, beep. The sound of a new world. So long, past! Hello, future! They were really very exciting years. Years in which, in practice, I wrote exclusively short stories.

Which authors – both within science fiction and outside it – influenced you the most back then?

Within SF, very few – I simply learned too little from them. I was weaned, if you will, on the classical European and American menu, and the one to make the most impression on me was Franz Kafka. He was the most significant writer of the 20th century, far more significant than James Joyce. Edgar Allan Poe and Dino Buzzati also fascinated me. Of the SF authors in those days I had the most respect for Ray Bradbury, but I’ve never written like him. He was too romantic, too naive for me at times.

What about Philip K. Dick? And Theodore Sturgeon?

I did like Sturgeon. Dick, less so – he was too American for me. Many British authors imitated the Americans in those days, so as to get published in the US magazines. And that’s exactly what I didn’t want. I’d prefer the neutral tone of a Robert Sheckley or a Cyril Kornbluth. But if you ask me who really influenced me – it was less writers than painters like Max Ernst, Salvador Dalí, Giorgio di Chirico, René Magritte. The surrealists. I wanted to create in words what they created on canvas. These dreamlike landscapes, this fascinating way of artistically realizing psychological states. You know, as a teenager I lived through the greatest surrealistic situation on the planet: the war. You go into the street, and half the houses are in ruins. A car sitting on top of one of the houses. And so on… War is full of surreal surprises, full of surrealist images. Back then it became clear to me that something in human culture was taking a dreadfully warped turn – and as an artist, a writer, I wanted to understand it.

LEFT: The Drowned World, German edition (Phantasia, 2008).

When your first stories were published in British SF magazines, what was the reaction in the USA? Were many of the stories accepted?

No, the Americans were very hesitant to publish my stories. They just didn’t understand what I was driving at. The American SF magazines of the late 50s and early 60s wanted conventional SF stories, stories set in the future or in space. An SF story set in the present irritated them terribly, and many of my stories were set in the present then. In time it got better, naturally, and many of my stories could then appear over there, but the experimental pieces were really published almost exclusively in Britain. So up to 1963 – when the success of my first really serious novel The Drowned World brought me a certain independence – I wrote almost entirely experimental short stories.

Can it be that your 1964 short story ‘The Terminal Beach’ marked a turning point in your work? With respect to what one generally designates ‘inner space’?

Absolutely. ‘The Terminal Beach’ is certainly one of my most important stories. Even though it was published in New Worlds, it wasn’t a science fiction story at all, but rather conveyed merely a certain science fiction atmosphere. It described a landscape that was the expression of a particular psychological state – our fear of nuclear war. Yes, I think ‘The Terminal Beach’ is the first real ‘inner space’ story and it leads directly to The Atrocity Exhibition, but also to novels like Crash, High Rise and Concrete Island. There, there are particular mental landscapes described throughout, like those made by the surrealists in their paintings.

‘Inner space’ was also the thematic centre of the start of the New Wave back then. When you look back today, how do you see your rôle in that literary movement?

I was the New Wave! (Laughs.) Well, in some ways there was something inevitable about the New Wave. Back then in the early 60s American science fiction had exhausted itself in repeating its themes, and people were looking for something new and exciting. You know, as soon as I began to write, I constantly saw in SF authors and especially in the American ones a collection of truly naive and, if you like, innocent men – people who truly didn’t know what they were doing. Ray Bradbury is a prominent example. A few years ago someone sent me a book about him, with many photographs. One of these showed Bradbury in his work room, which is about as large as a tennis court – and every millimetre of this huge workroom is stuffed full of toys: rockets, spaceships, dinosaur models, every kind of monster. A child’s room. A wonderful image for the American science fiction of these times, even for the whole of American culture.

You said that you wouldn’t describe ‘The Terminal Beach’ as a science fiction story at all. Would that go for everything you’ve written since?

Absolutely. I don’t see novels like Crash, High Rise or Concrete Island as science fiction. And I think that many people only describe it as science fiction because in that way they can neutralize the uncomfortable feeling it radiates.

Then what are these novels and tales?

Good question. They’re certainly not part of Realism, which dominates modern fiction – I’ve only really written one ‘realistic’ novel: Empire of the Sun. No, I think they belong to another literary tradition, one which goes back to Sade and which was carried on by writers like Genet or Celine. The bad boys of literature, if you like. An extraordinarily powerful tradition that deals with truths people don’t want to hear. I’ve always seen myself as a kind of moralist, one who stands on the roadside holding up a sign with the legend: Look out, dangerous bends, drive slowly!

ABOVE: JGB in 2006 (photo courtesy The Terminal Collection).

So, stories that read like science fiction, but aren’t?

Something like that. It’s simply that the themes of science fiction were eagerly ingested by the mainstream, and readers got on with them better and better. Just take William Burroughs, who I admire greatly: he demonstrated very early on, with his paranoid fantasies which naturally go back to Kafka, that one doesn’t have to be a science fiction author to write science fiction. No, I think that with The Atrocity Exhibition at the latest, I abandoned the genre for good. And I’ve not gone back to it since. But that’s not at all uncommon: even H. G. Wells began as a science fiction author, and at some point left off with it and wrote mainstream novels.

In the 80s with cyberpunk there arose a literary movement about which, in retrospect, one asks oneself if it was still science fiction.

Yes, I greatly admired the cyberpunk authors, William Gibson, Bruce Sterling, many others. Whether they wrote science fiction or something else is hard to say. The fact is that new forms of communications have a great influence on literature, particularly the internet – and cyberpunk was the first expression of it. But it came too late for me. I’ve never owned a computer, and I still don’t have one even today.

But you surf on the internet now and then, don’t you?

Naturally. One cannot avoid it anymore. The internet’s a fascinating thing – it really has made the world into a global village.

Let’s come back to your short stories. Or rather to the fact that in the 90s you hardly wrote them any more…

I think that short stories are basically a playing field for young authors, a bit like the lyric. Moreover there are, as I said, scarcely any more opportunities to publish short stories. Of course now and then a magazine rings me and asks for a story, which is quite wonderful. But when I then ask how long it should be, they answer: 2000 words. 2000 words! That’s not a story, it’s a vignette. Yes, I stopped writing short stories in the 90s. But in some ways all my most recently published novels are extended short stories. But please don’t tell anyone.

And all these novels seem to have a common theme: the failure of every form of middle-class utopia.

Yes, in some ways. I’m very interested in social pathology, in what really drives us on in our everyday lives. My newest novel Kingdom Come raises the question of whether the consumer thinking of the present day might not at some point suddenly turn into fascism.

A very trenchant thesis.

Yes, but just take a look at what’s going on in these huge shopping malls. Evidently not much more than shopping is left for us. That and sport. That’s where we get our kicks, those are the new religions. I already believe that one of these days we could end up in a kind of leisure-time dictatorship.

But don’t events like the attacks of the 11th of September or the catastrophe in New Orleans remind people of the hard facts of reality?

I’m not so sure about that. I think it was difficult for many people to distinguish the picture of the collapsed World Trade Center from all the other images they know from Hollywood. It’s such a binary matter: real, unreal, real, unreal… And as for whether the current American administration finds itself brought down to reality or not, I very much doubt it. No, I think we live in dangerous times.

Do at least modern SF authors react appropriately to what’s going on around us?

I can’t say, I read practically no science fiction any more. You know, it’s like an old affair: if it ends, it’s gone forever. It doesn’t come back. What fascinated me about science fiction fifty years ago has long become a part of our everyday life, it’s permeated the whole of society. Just go to a modern hospital sometime – it’s pure science fiction. I only very seldom read novels at all. I read far more non-fiction, political analyses, biographies. The older one gets, the more one clings to facts.

And to come back to the aforementioned tome of fiction, your collected short stories: could you tell us what your favourite short story is?

Hm… My favourite story is probably ‘Why I Want To Fuck Ronald Reagan’. That story changed everything for me.

And will there one day be a sequel? ‘Why I Want To Fuck George W. Bush’?

No, I really would not want to fuck George W. Bush! Hillary Clinton, maybe. If you know what I mean.

Many thanks for the chat, Mr. Ballard.

Originally published in German as Werner Fuchs and Sascha Mamczak, ‘George W. Bush möchte ich nun wirklich nicht ficken!’ in Das Science Fiction Jahr 2007, eds. Sascha Mamczak and Wolfgang Jeschke (Heyne, 2007).

Ben Noys has recently published two academic articles on Ballard’s work, both of which can be found online in some form. Included is an update of a specific piece of his that I posted here on Ballardian last year, entitled ‘Crimes of the Near Future: Baudrillard/Ballard’. It’s been reworked to consider Kingdom Come in the scope of the argument, and the new version is available at the International Journal of Baudrillard Studies. The other article, ‘La libido reactionnaire? The recent fiction of J.G. Ballard’, is an update — again to include Kingdom Come — of a paper Noys gave at the Sixth European Social Science History Conference in 2006. Although the new version is only available via subscription at the Journal of European Studies website, I recommend seeking out the newer piece (contact me if you want a copy).

I’ve always found the Baudrillard/Ballard symbiosis intriguing, and it’s good to see someone update it with regards to Ballard’s more recent work, rather than referring solely, as so often happens, to 16-year old arguments surrounding Baudrillard’s ‘controversial’ reading of Crash. Noys is insightful for the way he examines how each element of this ‘Beckettian “pseudo-couple” ‘ — Ballard-Baudrillard — explores the need for ‘hyper-trangression’ in a society in which cultural capital routinely produces its own drip-fed doses of ‘regulated violence’. He makes the salient point, however, that such an invocation of the ultimate crime (so memorably and shockingly revealed in Super-Cannes) risks sustaining the ‘system of simulation’, producing a simulated ‘alterity’ (defined by Baudrillard, according to Noys, as ‘Otherness, difference, and negativity in their radical forms’) that can be controlled and measured — “the melodrama of difference” in Baudrillard’s words.

Noys writes that

[s]uch melodramas include, in Britain, the continuing “debate” on the integration of asylum seekers, British Muslims, and the “underclass”. In this way alterity is given an identitarian form, at once threatening and open to neutralisation within the body politic.

However, rather than taking the usual line of critics of Baudrillard, who only see ‘absolute pessimism in the face of inescapable systems’, Noys ends by developing a different strand in Baudrillard’s work: its earlier, provocative suggestion that ‘becoming banal’ may just break this feedback loop. Noys uses Kingdom Come to effectively illustrate the point, highlighting its ‘self-criticism’ of Ballard’s most recent novels and their fascination with trangression, and the novel’s subsequent descent into a kind of entropic inertia that recalls his earliest fiction. In this sense, an indifference to the all-encompassing gaze of the spectacle might just break the ‘vicious circle of incitement’. I tend to agree: in an age of instant celebrity in which anyone at all can become a star — a process unconnected with outmoded notions of ‘talent’ or ‘skill’ — the end result is, as we so often see, a total trade-off in terms of psychological health, security and well-being. ‘Becoming banal’ is therefore not a bad strategy to undertake. Remaining anonymous, withdrawing, embracing obscurity — it may just be the most radical strategy anyone could hope to deploy.

Regarding the ‘La libido reactionnaire?’ article, note that my comments below refer to the updated version, in which Noys considers the vexed question of Ballard’s politics.

‘Is J.G. Ballard a reactionary?’ Noys asks, in light of France’s ‘New Reactionaries controversy’, in which the ‘subversive gestures’ of writers including Michel Houellebecq were accused of actually serving ‘the agenda of the right’ rather than the automatic assumption that they were left-leaning. Noys looks at ways in which Ballard’s work seems to be endorsing the ‘reactionary libido’, via Zizek’s formualtion of the ‘obscene underside of the law’, and the sense that Ballard’s recent work apparently upholds the ‘”rightist” admiration for those willing to do the dirty work’. That’s an interesting equation, and in this light I couldn’t help but think of Ballard’s ‘psychopaths-as-saints’ as having more than a little in common with film vigilantes such as Dirty Harry and the Charles Bronson character in Death Wish. However, Noys suggests that Ballard’s turn towards the crime and thriller genres in his later work suggests ‘that his interrogation of what passes for politics is also an interrogation of what passes for fiction… As he did with science fiction, Ballard reworks existing elements of a genre to produce a new form of work’.

Noys makes the excellent point, echoed here on ballardian.com on a number of occasions, that ‘while [Ballard's] work is recognized as provocative and controversial, this is neutralized through the construction of an ‘eccentric’ authorial persona’. Noys sees this reductive process as deriving from the success of Empire of the Sun and the way in which that book’s ‘biographical keys’ have nullified some of the more extreme conclusions reached in his other fiction, especially the disturbing — and unanswered questions — Ballard raises about ‘regression, sexual deviance and the role of violence and radicalism in the arts’ (to quote, as Noys does, Michel Delville on Ballard).

In the end Noys sees this nullification as a result of the stifling ‘constriction of the terms of literary and cultural debate in Britain’, and ends by calling for critical re-engagement with Ballard’s most urgent concerns. Although I’m not sure he ever satisfactorily answers the question, ‘Is J.G. Ballard a reactionary?’, ultimately I’m not sure he has to. His article opens up many productive lines of enquiry that hopefully will be picked up by future analysts of Ballard’s work (as he writes, critical engagement is the key), although, I fear, not by the lazy journalism that distils the Ballardian essence to the British public, neutering Crash, puffing up Empire of the Sun, and completely ignoring the vast body of work Ballard has produced in and around these two iconic tomes.

One final point: as much as I enjoyed these two articles, I am still waiting for someone to take up Roger Luckhurst’s speculation, that the academic tendency to produce ‘theorized versions’ of Ballard (especially Crash), by reading the work through Bataille, Lacan, Baudrillard and so on, is because

these theoretical interventions are in exactly the same avant-garde tradition as the text they ostensibly strive to “explain.”…[for example] Lacan and Ballard seem to me to make the most sense if they are understood as writing in the wake of Surrealism. Similarly, I think we might understand the affinity of Crash with many French poststructuralist thinkers by seeing them as the product of the same extraordinary era. Baudrillard turned savagely against his own commitment to Marxist critique in the mid-1970s, as did other radical philosophers like Jean-Francois Lyotard. (Luckhurst, ‘J. G. Ballard’s Crash’, Companion to Science Fiction, ed. David Seed, Blackwell, 2005)

One for the future, perhaps.

Noys also edited the latest edition of Film-Philosophy, which has as its theme ‘Lacan and Film’; all articles are available online. I know just a little about Lacan, but I respond to Noy’s introduction best when he states, ‘All the essays take film seriously as a place in which change can be thought, while also engaging with the aesthetic and political choices of the films and filmmakers they analyse, as well as the constraints of contemporary image production — what Mark Fisher calls “cyber-capital” in his contribution’.

And it’s Fisher’s essay that I’m interested in for the purposes of this site. It’s an update of a post he wrote for his k-punk blog a while back, and it positions the film Basic Instinct 2 as an exercise in ‘preposterous excess…not immediately [suggesting] Lacan so much as a delirial commodity porn confection of James Bond, Ballard and Bataille … auto-erotic in the double, Ballardian sense’. Now, who can resist a come on like that? Not me.

Fisher goes on to explore how Basic Instinct 2 feels more like a sequel to Cronenberg’s Crash rather than the original Basic Instinct, providing the surprising detail that Cronenberg actually worked on the film in pre-production. None other than Sharon Stone, that ‘elegant bitch’, says that some of his traces remained, and Fisher uses that detail to ruminate on the film’s Ballardian appeal:

+ The name of the femme fatale, Catherine: ‘Even Tramell’s first name seems to be transformed into a reference to Ballard’s 60s and 70s work, in which ‘Catherine’ was a frequently recurring name.’
+ The film’s setting, a ‘phantasmatic, cybergothic London’, which, for Fisher, recalls elements in Ballard’s book that obviously were not to be found in the Toronto setting of Cronenberg’s film. As Fisher says, ‘Ballard’s principal area of interest has always been environment and architecture rather than technology: even the car in Crash functions not as a machine but as a screen on which fantasies can be projected and a scene in which they can be acted out.’
+ The film’s ‘erotics of the superficial’ with its emphasis on objects, on environmental elements, on clothing. Ultimately for Fisher, the ‘very Ballardian’ in this film is also the ‘very Lacanian’, in that the characters ‘such as they are, have no more depth than the buildings they move through or the clothes they wear.’

The rest of the essay detours via Baudrillard’s Seduction, ‘one of his most Lacanian works’, and takes in an analysis of the ‘ontological haemorrhage’ of the recent ‘news’ hysteria surrounding the missing McCann child, including the manner in which the story has been framed and reframed as if it was a live drama improvised on the spot for the TV cameras. This analysis is all very skilfully done (although perhaps Lacan is missing in action a little towards the end; I don’t have Lacanian chops so I would have liked a bit more detail on how the film relates to his work), and Fisher relates and returns it all back to Basic Instinct 2, the film, with its refusal to resolve its world, with its vision of ‘ultra-precarious cybercapital, whose endlessly weaving digital labyrinths resemble the dream work itself.’

Also of note is Fisher’s review of The Killing of John Lennon in the latest Sight & Sound, which includes the following observation:

The film works best as an analysis of assassination as plagiarism. Chapman appears as a kind of bad but spectacularly successful postmodern author, synthesizing his influences not into an act of artistic production, but of a murder, acting out in the (hyper)real what had previously only happened on the page and the screen. Chapman becomes Travis (whose name was itself a cinematic reference, to Mick Travis in If), stalking a New York transformed by Bickle’s misanthropy and misguided sense of mission into a sin city that can only be redeemed by a symbolic act of murder. Chapman declares that he didn’t only kill Lennon; he ended an era, the Sixties. Yet Chapman’s killing of the star can be seen as in many ways an attempt to revive the perverse montage of murder and megastardom that defined the Sixties. In J G Ballard’s definitive examination of the Sixties’ mediatized violence, The Atrocity Exhibition, the lead character (saturated in cinema and TV, and sometimes referred to as ‘Travis’) ‘wants to kill Kennedy again, but this time in a way that makes sense’. Chapman’s would-be redemptive act belongs to the same (patho) logic of ritualised violence inspired by, and taking place in, the media landscape. (Even the Dakota building is another cinema reference: Rosemary’s Baby was filmed there.)

Very effectively, both Fisher and Noys answer at least one of Luckhurst’s challenges (if not the one mentioned earlier), namely the call he sent out at the Ballard conference in May last year for Ballard to be ‘rescued from the novel’, a form with which, as Fisher has said on his blog, ‘Ballard is clearly bored’, suggesting that we need to locate new, non-literary ways in which his work might be interpreted and adapted.

Interestingly, I recently came across a review of Kingdom Come in the London Book Review that got me thinking about precisely that. This anonymous review analysis states that:

As Ballard’s reputation has risen, so too have the number of critics who look to his work for a critique of where we are going. Still worse there are those who seek to discern hidden themes and patterns in the real world, who look to Ballard to find the pulse of what’s going on in the world around us.

Ouch! I have a sneaky feeling this reviewer won’t like ballardian.com, then, for I’ve never made any secret that this site has two main themes: firstly, to celebrate and critique Ballard’s work, and then to also uncover the ‘Ballardian’ out there in the real world. I feel it’s a mistake to dismiss Ballard’s relevance as a cultural critic, and to engage in purely textual, psychological readings of his work. This again is in opposition to the review, which states:

Ballard’s best work provides an oblique view of the world that is informed by his own obsessive visions and neuroses. That this can sometimes illuminate aspects of the world is almost incidental – it is certainly not the point of his work. Perhaps [in Kingdom Come] he’s simply trying to hard to be the JG Ballard that the critics are looking for. Maybe it’s time to become the JG Ballard that his fans adore instead.

To me, Ballard’s many interviews, especially the ones from his glory years — the early 70s to the early 80s — demonstrate the eye of an exceedingly sharp cultural critic and the mind of a deeply engaged philosopher. At one stage, a long time ago, I convinced myself that I preferred his interviews to his fiction. The RE/Search collection is exemplary in this regard: probed by people with a serious interest in cultural production and the media landscape, Ballard responds with a never-ending stream of insight and observation that still amazes to this day. Also run your eye over the archival interviews with Ballard I’ve posted here on the site and also the examples collected by Rick McGrath.

It’s quite clear from these that Ballard draws inspiration from popular culture, from the mass effects of consumerism and capitalism. In interviews he test these concepts, extrapolating them to their logical (and sometimes illogical) conclusions, engaging in wildly speculative flights of fancy. As a final step he plugs the results of these road tests into the hull of his fiction, providing a streamlined, supercharged iteration. Finally, more often than not, these turbocharged vehicles prove to be extraordinarily prescient, and this, to my mind, is because Ballard is so throughly grounded in the nitty-gritty mechanics of the machinery of post-late capitalism — or ‘cybercapital’, as Fisher would have it.

Yes, there’s Freud, surrealism, the shock and awe of Ballard’s life and biography as determinate causes for the power of his work, but for me — and for many others — it’s that precise evocation of post-post-modernity that really sticks to the skin and that especially powers the throbbing engine driving his career. It’s not for nothing that the Collins definition of ‘Ballardian’ refers to the worlds depicted inside Ballard’s work, as well as the world outside, ie: ‘the conditions described in Ballard’s novels & stories, esp. dystopian modernity, bleak man-made landscapes & the psychological effects of technological, social or environmental developments’.

Sometimes the fiction and non-fiction blurs, loses its boundaries. Many bemoan the fact that Ballard no longer writes short stories, but I would suggest reading the many reviews and opinion pieces that have taken their place. Ostensibly rooted in real-world events, reality in fact provides a launching place for Ballard’s journalism to display as much imaginative insight as the best of his fiction: dreamy, evocative voyages into the realm of fantasy, sex and power. Reading Ballard’s recent piece on the Bilbao Guggenheim, for example, it’s impossible not to think of Cocaine Nights, perhaps Ballard’s most ‘architectural’ work, in which the built landscape guides the protagonist like some kind of artificial intelligence:

Novelty architecture dominates throughout the world, pitched like the movies at the bored teenager inside all of us. Universities need to look like airports, with an up-and-away holiday ethos. Office buildings disguise themselves as hi-tech apartment houses, everything has the chunky look of a child’s building blocks, stirring dreams of the nursery. But perhaps Gehry’s Guggenheim transcends all this. From the far side of the Styx I’ll look back on it with awe. (J.G. Ballard. ‘The larval stage of a new kind of architecture’, The Guardian, 8/10/07)

What I am trying to tell you, ultimately, is that Ben Noys and Mark Fisher are generating some of the most substantial and relevant commentaries around on Ballard’s work, bringing into sharper focus the insights of one of the most penetrating cultural critics around: J.G. Ballard. And they are doing this by breaking the frame, shattering the generic, policed boundaries surrounding Ballard’s fiction-theory.

I look forward to more.

..:: Previously on Ballardian: John Howard: The Conspiracy of Grey Men (which is the only post on this site I’ve left with a comments box completely unmoderated, as the comments are completely priceless and apparently fairly sum up the level of political debate in this country).

Or Bono, a proud and rebellious Irishman, who recently accepted an honourary knighthood from the country that oppressed his people for centuries, awarded by a Prime Minister who looked suspiciously like he was trying very hard to curry favour with a thickened stem of popular culture far more influential than his own sphere of influence.

Well, as always, Ballard sums up the process far more eloquently than this blog ever could. Here’s JGB on the reasons why he rejected a Commander of the British Empire award in 2003:

I am opposed to the honors system. The whole thing is a preposterous charade. Thousands of medals are given out in the name of a non-existent empire. It makes us look a laughing stock and encourages deference to the crown. I think it is exploited by politicians and always has been…”

————————————————————————————-
J.G. Ballard, quoted in the Sunday Times, 2003.
————————————————————————————-

The dreams of empire were only swept away relatively recently, in the ’60s. Suddenly, we seem to have a prime minister who has delusions of a similar kind… It uses snobbery and self-consciousness to guarantee the loyalty of large numbers of citizens who should feel their loyalty is to fellow citizens and the nation as a whole…

I think it’s deplorable when leftwing playwrights like David Hare, who have worn their socialist colors on both sleeves for so many years, should accept a knighthood. Godalmighty, this man actually knelt down in front of the Queen.”

————————————————————
Ballard, quoted in the Guardian, 2003.
————————————————————

And finally, a mini-interview from the Independent in 2003:

Independent: Why did you refuse your honor?
Ballard: As a republican, I can’t accept an honor awarded by a monarch — all that bowing and scraping. The whole system of hereditary rank and privilege should be swept away.
Independent: How would you change the present system?
Ballard: Demolish it altogether.
Independent: Who would you give an honor to?
Ballard: No one.

Many thanks to RE/Search for collecting these quotes, and much more, in their indispensable J.G. Ballard: Quotes volume.

John writes: ‘It might just be because I’ve been getting ready for a conference on J. G. Ballard, but this article on the Ministry of Defence’s vision of the future certainly caught my eye’.

He goes on to highlight the most Ballardian passage, concluding ‘Shades of Millennium People, perhaps…’

Marxism

“The middle classes could become a revolutionary class, taking the role envisaged for the proletariat by Marx,” says the report. The thesis is based on a growing gap between the middle classes and the super-rich on one hand and an urban under-class threatening social order: “The world’s middle classes might unite, using access to knowledge, resources and skills to shape transnational processes in their own class interest”. Marxism could also be revived, it says, because of global inequality. An increased trend towards moral relativism and pragmatic values will encourage people to seek the “sanctuary provided by more rigid belief systems, including religious orthodoxy and doctrinaire political ideologies, such as popularism and Marxism”.

———————————————————————————————————-
‘Revolution, flashmobs, and brain chips. A grim vision of the future.’
Richard Norton-Taylor. 9/4/07.
———————————————————————————————————-

J. Carter Wood, over at Obscene Desserts, has posted a long and thoughtful rebuttal of Rob Liddle’s recent dismissal of Kingdom Come. I posted about Liddle’s piece earlier, but J. Carter’s articulate response cuts far quicker and deeper to the heart of the matter:

First and foremost, anyone who thinks Ballard’s fiction fits comfortably with a New Labour mindset has either absolutely no idea about literature or has to provide proof that Blairism is a far more kinky and interesting ideology than is generally acknowledged.

More to the point though, in Kingdom Come, many of the ‘plebs’ who run riot in the book are of the ‘professional classes’ themselves, and the dividing lines between good and bad are hardly drawn by income alone. Moreover, in books such as High-Rise, Super-Cannes and Millennium People (and others) Ballard has long made clear that the darker aspects of humanity (i.e., those upon which he tends to dwell) are something to which the cappuccino swilling middle-classes have at least as much access to as anyone else.

Indeed, if I had to name any single class which comes off badly in Ballard’s books, it would be the pretentious middle classes. The silly, Guardian-reading, Habitat-shopping revolutionists of the ‘upholstered apocalypse’ depicted in Millennium People are a prime example.
…
A closer reading … might have pointed out to [Liddle] that what binds the members of the riotous mob in Kingdom Come more than anything else is not that they are working class but rather that they are largely a consuming class to whom few of the traditional social ties which used to bind people together are available.”

It’s an excellent point. Football is pure commodity. Ballard reports this fairly and accurately, including cataloguing his own weaknesses as a so-called “middle-class” writer observing Liddle’s so-called “working-class pleasures”. Maybe there’s more invested in supporting a club (or nation) by, say, someone who grew up during the Depression era where sport was something to really believe in, but to many present-day observers, it looks far more ominous.

Liddle takes exception with KC’s depiction of sporting mobs “dressed in identical St George’s shirts and interested only in consumerism and sport.” But football is a supply line that leads directly to the Bentall Centre (or Kingdom Come’s sinister equivalent — the Metro-Centre), if a club (or nation) can sell enough strips by conning supporters that they are part of a Liddle-style “noble tribe” rather than supporters of a corporate brand.

It’s not just an English thing, either, and it’s not confined to sport — the “religion of consumerism” does not discriminate. At the recent Big Day Out music fest, the organisers called on attendees to leave Australian flags at home for fear of riots and racial tension, after various mass-flag-waving violent incidents over the past year or so.

This from the ABC website:

The Australian Democrats say political leaders should face up to the fact that the Australian flag has been misused by racists and ultra-nationalists. … Prime Minister John Howard has called the move stupid and offensive… But Democrats Senator Andrew Bartlett says the Big Day Out organisers have made a sensible decision because some people misuse the flag in a racist way.
….
Jeremy Smith says he was the victim of an attack by a man carrying an Australian flag at last year’s Big Day Out… “Looking back, it was definitely prevalent during the day and from the other Big Day Outs I’d gone to,” he said. “It … turned into more of a sporting hooligan event more than anything.”

Music as sport; violence as patriotism — on the face of it, is it really drawing that long a bow to suggest that consumerism can lead to fascism? I’m taking Ballard’s stripped-down perception over Liddle’s reactionary romanticism any day.

Final words… On the matter of Ballard’s politics, Iain Sinclair, in Tim’s interview for Ballardian, manages to hit the nail right on the head:

Ballard’s politics are quite curious. I don’t know whether you could call him conservative, with a small ‘c’, because he celebrates the nature of the bourgeois in its exile: the people that … are anonymous and separated from the mob. Whereas his early partner, Michael Moorcock, said he was a man of the urban mob, who celebrates the crowds and smells of cafes and markets and all of that stuff, which is totally alien to Ballard. He’d like to chuck away all the old buildings, pull them down, get rid of all that heavy 19th-century furniture and have everything straight out of an Ikea catalogue.

In that sense, I think there’s something conservative, but in other senses there’s something incredibly anarchic and furious about what he does, which doesn’t fit with any contemporary sense of politics. He doesn’t belong, he’s completely an outsider, although when you meet him he appears to be quite an Establishment person. He’s got a very fruity voice and genial persona, and would fit into the colonial society in which he grew up.”

Mike Holliday has uploaded J.G. Ballard — A Collector’s Guide, an in-depth information resource designed “as a ‘helping hand’ to anyone interested in collecting books, stories, and other material by the British author J. G. Ballard”. There’s a lot of detail here for those interested in tracking every filament of Ballard’s work, including what I consider to be one of the most fascinating periods of JGB’s career: the “miscellaneous media” he produced during the late 1960s, including a series of collages (termed “advertiser’s announcements”) for Ambit magazine that continue to exert a strange power over me. (This blend of experimental prose poetry and conceptual art is true slipstream “fiction” and there’s nowhere near enough discourse on it; with that in mind, I’ll be posting more on Ballard’s miscellaneous media at some vague point in the future.)

Mike also notes that Ballard’s first published story, “The Violent Noon” (1951) has been onlined by Rick McGrath, just about the only place you’ll find this ultra-rare twig of the tree. The piece, written by the 20-year-old medical student “J. Graham Ballard”, was the winner in a crime-story competition run by Cambridge University’s student newspaper, Varsity, where it was published. It’s a “Hemingwayesque pastiche written to please the jury” (according to Wikipedia), and takes place during the Malayan Emergency, when the guerrilla forces of the Malayan National Liberation Army battled British, Malayan and Commonwealth forces from 1948 to 1960. It’s worth reviewing, considering that JGB has said that winning this competition was just the impetus he needed to give full-time writing a proper go.

“The Violent Noon” describes a sneak “terrorist attack” on a British officer, Michael Allison, and his wife and child. The attack is described in gory detail, with Allison dying “in a foam of blood that bubbled out of his mouth and the wound in his face”, while Mrs Allison looks up “blankly from the pulped face of her baby”. It’s interesting to note that even then Ballard had an eye for surrealistic imagery embedded in violent death, a type of suspended animation that he has continued to refine in story after story, novel after novel. After the insurgents take off, Mrs Allison, her front teeth knocked out, kneels on the seat of the car alongside another officer, Hargreaves, with her dead husband beside them:

Mrs Allison was … calmly peering out through the rear window … quiet and composed. Neither of them made any attempt to move the bodies in the front seat. They just sat there, in the shambles of the chaos that had exploded about them … Mrs Allison watching out of the window, until a lorry passed by half an hour later.”

————————————————————
J.G. Ballard. “The Violent Noon” (1951).
————————————————————

Reading this passage, I was struck by the similarities with the scene in Crash where Helen Remington loses her husband in a car crash with the narrator, “James Ballard”:

Apart from a bruised upper jawbone and several loosened teeth, she was unharmed. … We looked at each other through the fractured windshields, neither of us able to move. [She] sat behind her steering wheel, staring at me in a curiously formal way, as if unsure what had brought us together.”

———————————————–
J.G. Ballard. Crash (1973).
———————————————–

This “curious formality” of violence and death — this dispassionate narrative effect that’s a feature of Ballard’s airless worlds, and the media landscape that “factors death out of our lives” — of course derives from Ballard’s childhood in Shanghai, as has been well documented, where he witnessed the horrors of war first hand. “The Violent Noon” adds more fuel to that fire, with its bitter description of “Chinese gangsters and gun-happy roughnecks, no-goods from the villages, hopped up by agitators from the slums of Canton and Shanghai, promising prosperity to the people and then threatening them and pillaging their homes, slashing the rubber trees, madly shooting harmless women and children, filling the streets with frantic gunflame and death.”

As Ballard has said of his time at medical school:

The experience of war is deeply corrupting. Anybody who witnesses years of brutality can’t help but lose a sense of the tragedy and mystery of death. I’m sure that happened to me. The 16-year-old who came to England after the war carried this freight of ‘matter-of-factness about death’. So spending two years dissecting cadavers was a way of reminding me of the reality of death itself, and gave me back a respect for life.”

———————————————————————————————–
J.G. Ballard, “Raising the Dead”, excerpted in J.G. Ballard: Quotes
(RE/Search Publications, 2006).
———————————————————————————————–

“The Violent Noon”, written just four years after “the 16-year-old came to England” is a fascinating Polaroid of the young JGB’s mindset, before the cadavers had reset his emotional circuitry.

—————————————————————————————————————-
NOTES:

1) Here’s Varsity’s blurb, worth regurgitating for the fact that it effectively contains Ballard’s first published interview as an author…

“J. Graham Ballard who shares the first prize of ten pounds with D. S. Birley in the “Varsity” Crime Story Competition is now in his second year at King’s and immersed in the less literary process of reading medicine.

He had, in addition to writing short stories, also planned “mammoth novels” which “never get beyond the first page.”

2) The publication of “The Violent Noon” also led to (effectively) Ballard’s first review. Varsity promised that “the summing up by the judges…will…be available next week on this page”. And so in the June 2, 1951 edition, we find, as David Pringle informs me:

“an unsigned summary of the judges’ reasons for picking the two winners, ‘The Violent Noon’ by J. G. Ballard and ‘Seance’ by D. S. Birley. Of Ballard’s tale, they say: ‘… ‘Violent Noon’ was the most mature story; it contains patches of high tension, the characters come to life, and the ending is brilliant in its cynicism. The author should, however, avoid a tendency to preach.”

Considering what came after — a body of work with politics that could perhaps best be described as “ambivalent” — we can only surmise that JGB heeded the advice to cut the preaching. I do wonder what became of D.S. Birley, though…
—————————————————————————————————————-

OPENING LINE:
“In his prime the Hollywood screenwriter was one of the tragic figures of our age, evoking the special anguish that arises from feeling sorry for oneself while making large amounts of money”. (from ‘The Sweet Smell of Excess’).

From the 1996 Harper Collins edition:

The first-ever collection of J.G. Ballard’s articles and reviews, published over the last thirty years. In a long and highly-acclaimed career, J.G. Ballard has established himself as one of Britian’s most distinctive and admired writers, the author of such influential novels as Crash, The Drowned World, High-Rise, Empire of the Sun and, most recently, Rushing to Paradise. Throughout his career he has also been a regular contributor to magazines and newspapers. Now, for the first time, he has gathered together the finest of these pieces and grouped them under themes such as film, lives, the visual world, writers, science, autobiography and science fiction.

Marlon Brando, Nancy Reagan, Elvis Presley, Deng Xiaoping, Andy Warhol, Salvador Dali, Max Ernst, William Burroughs and Graham Greene are just some of the people who feature in the ninety articles, together with many of the themes familiar to readers of Ballard’s fiction, includign Shanghai, television, surrealism, cars, motorways and the atom bomb.

The result is an astonishingly varied and fascinating collection — a provocative and entertaining review of the modern world, as seen through the eyes of one of this country’s most original writers.”

I happen to think that some of Ballard’s best writing can be found in the non-fiction realm; in fact, there was a time, when I first chanced upon his work, that I was convinced he was a superior journalist than a novelist. Although it’s not in this collection, I especially savour Ballard’s phrasing in his lovely meditation on Helmut Newton:

A company of beautiful women moves through the palatial corridors or gazes into the opaque depths of ornate mirrors, waiting for a last act that will never unfold. Even those women who are naked seem scarcely aware of themselves, as if their sexuality is defused by the strange bedrooms where they wait for the rich and powerful men stepping from their limousines in the courtyards below.”

J.G. Ballard. ‘The Lucid Dreamer’.

The Edge features a typically acerbic review of User’s Guide, by Gerald Houghton:

In 1977 Ballard wrote one of his most experimental and most brilliant short stories, ‘The Index’. Did the attached book ever actually exist? Was it all a figment of some deranged imagination? All that remains of this autobiography is a collection of names and page numbers; tantalising nudges and winks, like a road-map with the motorways rubbed out. It’s a game we can play with A User’s Guide To The Millenium: Hitler nuzzles up to Mae West, Dali to Nancy Reagan, Derek Jarman with Walt Disney, Lee Harvey Oswald and the young Jim interred in the Japanese camp. What, if anything, do all these and the rest have to do with this rather unpresupposing British author?

Ballard is never less than urbane, but his best dinner party manners mask real teeth. Thus he adores the Surrealists, Henry Miller, Joyce and Genet, but is dismissive towards others (Warhol), occasionally outright scathing (Nancy Reagan). The Ballard in these pages is clearly in awe of Burroughs’ reupholstering of narrative form, while describing himself as an old-fashioned storyteller. (It’s fulsome praise that should be tempered with a reading of his superb interview with Will Self in Self’s recent Junk Mail.) He is mystifyingly rhapsodic over Dali, surely the most overrated artist of the century. (What, one wonders, would Ballard make of the comment that Dali is the ‘kind of artist you think is brilliant when you’re 15′? Are you listening Damien Hirst?).”

..:: CONTENTS

1. FILM
Casablanca, Brando and Mae West, Star Wars and Blue Velvet…

• ‘The Sweet Smell of Excess’ (1990)
• ‘Magical Days at Rick’s’ (1993)
• ‘Hollywood Sex Idols’ (1991)
• ‘Push-button Death’ (1991)
• ‘Hobbits in Space?’ (1977)
• ‘A User’s Guide to the Millennium’ (1987)
• ‘Courting the Cobra’ (1993)
• ‘The Samurai of the Epic’ (1991)
• ‘La Jetee’ (1996)
• ‘Blue Velvet’ (1993)

2. LIVES
Nancy Reagan, Elvis, Howard Hughes and Hirohito…

• ‘The Chain-saw Biographer’ (1991)
• ‘Survival Instincts’ (1992)
• ‘Fallen Idol’ (1991)
• ‘The Killing Time’ (1979)
• ‘Mob Psychology’ (1991)
• ‘Closed Doors’ (1977)
• ‘Last of the Great Royals’ (1989)
• ‘Sinister Spider’ (1992)
• ‘Lipstick and High Heels’ (1993)

More contents to come.

..:: J.G. BALLARD
• Bibliography
• Filmography (coming soon)
• Artography (coming soon)

..:: BUY THE BOOK

OPENING LINE:
“I first met Jane Ciracylides during the Recess, that world slump of boredom, lethargy and high summer which carried us all so blissfully through ten unforgettable years, and I suppose that may have had a lot to do with what went on between us.” (from ‘Prima Belladonna’).

From the 2001 Flamingo edition (originally one volume; reprinted in two volumes in 2006):

For the first time in one volume, the complete collected short stories by the author of Empire of the Sun and Super-Cannes — regarded by many as Britain’s No.1 living fiction writer.

J.G. Ballard is firmly established as one of Britain’s most highly regarded and most influential novelists. Throughout his remarkable career, he has won equal praise for his ground-breaking short stories, which he first started writing during his days as a medical student at Cambridge. In fact, it was winning a short-story competition that gave him the impetus to become a full-time writer.

His first published works, ‘Prima Belladonna’ and ‘Escapement’ appeared in Science Fantasy and New Worlds in 1956. Ever since, he has been a prolific producer of stories, which have been published in numerous magazines and several separate collections, including The Voices of Time, The Terminal Beach, The Disaster Area, The Day of Forever, Vermilion Sands, Low-Flying Aircraft, The Venus Hunters, Myths of the Near Future and War Fever.

Now, for the first time, all of J.G. Ballard’s published stories — including four that have not previously appeared in a collection — have been gathered together and arranged in the order of original publication, providing an unprecedented opportunity tp review the career of one of Britain’s greatest writers”.

Plus the obligatory endorsement:

Ballard is one of the few genuine surrealists this country has produced, the possessor of a terrifying and exhilirating imagination — and a national treasure.”

Nicholas Royle, Guardian.

A large body of opinion says that Ballard’s a better short-form stylist than novelist. On some days, I agree. My first exposure to Ballard, aside from Crash, was his short story ‘The Subliminal Man’. It hung in my imagination like a sharp blade over a heifer’s neck. Absolutely incredible, the imagery of it:

The old cities were surrounded by the vast motion sculptures of the clover-leaves and flyovers, but even so the congestion was unremitting.
…
Then the flicker of lights cleared and steadied, blazing out continuously, and together the crowd looked up at the decks of brilliant letters. 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 NEW CAR NOW
YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES YES
…
They walked out into the trim drive, the shadows of the signs swinging across the quiet neighbourhood as the day progressed, sweeping over the heads of the people on their way to the supermarket like the blades of enormous scythes.”

J.G. Ballard. ‘The Subliminal Man’ (1963).

All the criticisms that are usually applied to Ballard’s novels — style over substance; lack of characterisation; thin plot — simply don’t apply in this format. In fact, in this realm they become virtues, as the sheer weight of Ballard’s imagination is compressed, and then unpacked, with full force. He didn’t dub the short pieces that make up The Atrocity Exhibition ‘condensed novels’ for nothing. Ballard’s a radical, a man who saw that the 20th-century novel was stifled by 19th-century function and set about stripping it to its very essence. That aesthetic became his body of short stories: quite simply, the man’s a master of the form and it’s a damn shame he doesn’t write them anymore.

I have the hardback, single-volume, supposedly complete version — a fallacy, for it only includes three pieces from The Atrocity Exhibition. I’m not sure if the new two-volume set rectifies that — probably not, considering it would take away sales from Atrocity itself.

It’s a bit of a cheat. If the publisher considers Atrocity to be a novel (as Ballard does), rather than a collection of short stories, then the Complete Short Stories shouldn’t contain any Atrocity pieces at all. According to Ballard expert David Pringle, there are three Ballard shorts that weren’t included, seemingly at the expense of the three Atrocities: ‘Journey Across a Crater’ (1970), ‘The Secret Autobiography of J. G. B——” (1984) and ‘The Dying Fall’ (1994).

I call that a missed opportunity.

Update: reader Mike Holliday contacted me with some further comments on this collection:

Despite its title, the book does not include all of Ballard’s short stories. If we discount those that are shortened versions of Ballard’s novels (Storm-Wind, The Drowned World, Equinox), then the following are missing:

(i) The Violet Noon, an early non-professional story published while Ballard was at university

(ii) most of the stories included in the original edition of The Atrocity Exhibition, namely You and Me and the Continuum, The Assassination Weapon, You: Coma: Marilyn Monroe, The Atrocity Exhibition, Plan for the Assassination of Jacqueline Kennedy, The Death Module, Love and Napalm: Export USA, The Great American Nude, The University of Death, The Generations of America, The Summer Cannibals, Tolerances of the Human Face, Crash!

(iii) the so-called ‘surgical fictions’, Coitus 80, Princess Margaret’s Facelift, Mae West’s Reduction Mamoplasty, Queen Elizabeth’s
Rhinoplasty, Jane Fonda’s Augmentation Mammoplasty

(iv) a few other pieces, namely Journey Across a Crater, The Secret Autobiography of J. G. B******, Neil Armstrong Remembers His Journey to the Moon, and The Dying Fall. It also excludes those items classified as Miscellaneous Media [including Ballard's collages for Ambit magazine].

In 2006, The Complete Short Stories was republished in two paperback volumes, but this edition omits the novella The Ultimate City.”

Disappointingly, there’s not a lot of decent criticism surrounding Ballard’s short-form work. Over at Rick McGrath’s site, however, John Boston has posted a thorough and interesting account of “the four short stories that got [Ballard] back into writing science fiction: Now: Zero (1959), The Waiting Grounds (1959), The Sound-Sweep (1960), and Zone of Terror (1960).”

..:: LINKS
+ J.G. Ballard’s Introduction to the Complete Short Stories

..:: CONTENTS

+ ‘Prima Belladonna’ (1956)
+ ‘Escapement’ (1956)
+ ‘The Concentration City’ (1957)
+ ‘Venus Smiles’ (1957)
+ ‘Manhole 69′ (1957)
+ ‘Track 12′ (1958)
+ ‘The Waiting Grounds’ (1959)
+ ‘Now: Zero’ (1959)
+ ‘The Sound-Sweep’ (1960)
+ ‘Zone of Terror’ (1960)
+ ‘Chronopolis’ (1960)
+ ‘The Voices of Time’ (1960)
+ ‘The Last World of Mr Goddard’ (1960)
+ ‘Studio 5, The Stars’ (1961)
+ ‘Deep End’ (1961)
+ ‘The Overloaded Man’ (1961)
+ ‘Mr F. is Mr F. (1961)
+ ‘Billennium’ (1961)
+ ‘The Gentle Assassin’ (1961)
+ ‘The Insane Ones’ (1962)
+ ‘The Garden of Time’ (1962)
+ ‘The Thousand Dreams of Stellavista’ (1962)
+ ‘Thirteen to Centaurus’ (1962)
+ ‘Passport to Eternity’ (1962)
+ ‘The Cage of Sand’ (1962)
+ ‘The Watch-Towers’ (1962)
+ ‘The Singing Statues’ (1962)
+ ‘The Man on the 99th Floor’ (1962)
+ ‘The Subliminal Man’ 63 (1962)
+ ‘The Reptile Enclosure’ (1962)
+ ‘A Question of Re-Entry’ (1962)
+ ‘The Time-Tombs’ (1962)
+ ‘Now Wakes the Sea’ (1962)
+ ‘The Venus Hunters’ (1962)
+ ‘End-Game’ (1962)
+ ‘Minus One’ (1962)
+ ‘The Sudden Afternoon’ (1962)
+ ‘The Screen Game’ (1962)
+ ‘Time of Passage’ (1964)
+ ‘Prisoner of the Coral Deep’ (1964)
+ ‘The Lost Leonardo’ (1964)
+ ‘The Terminal Beach’ (1964)
+ ‘The Illuminated Man’ (1964)
+ ‘The Delta at Sunset’ (1964)
+ ‘The Drowned Giant’ (1964)
+ ‘The Gioconda of the Twilight Noon’ (1964)
+ ‘The Volcano Dances’ (1964)
+ ‘The Beach Murders’ (1966)
+ ‘The Day of Forever’ (1966)
+ ‘The Impossible Man’ (1966)
+ ‘Storm-Bird, Storm-Dreamer’ (1966)
+ ‘Tomorrow is a Million Years’ (1966)
+ ‘The Assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy Considered as a Downhill Motor Race’ (1966)
+ ‘Cry Hope, Cry Fury!’ (1967)
+ ‘The Recognition’ (1967)
+ ‘The Cloud-Sculptors of Coral D’ (1967)
+ ‘Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan’ (1968)
+ ‘The Dead Astronaut’ (1968)
+ ‘The Comsat Angels’ (1968)
+ ‘The Killing Ground’ (1969)
+ ‘A Place and a Time to Die’ (1969)
+ ‘Say Goodbye to the Wind’ (1970)
+ ‘The Greatest Television Show on Earth’ (1972)
+ ‘My Dream of Flying to Wake Island’ (1974)
+ ‘The Air Disaster’ (1975)
+ ‘Low-Flying Aircraft’ (1975)
+ ‘The Life and Death of God’ (1976)
+ ‘Notes Towards a Mental Breakdown’ (1976)
+ ‘The 60 Minute Zoom’ (1976)
+ ‘The Smile’ (1976)
+ ‘The Ultimate City’ (1976)
+ ‘The Dead Time’ (1977)
+ ‘The Index’ (1977)
+ ‘The Intensive Care Unit’ (1977)
+ ‘Theatre of War’ (1977)
+ ‘Having A Wonderful Time’ (1978)
+ ‘One Afternoon at Utah Beach’ (1978)
+ ‘Zodiac 2000′ (1978)
+ ‘Motel Architecture’ (1978)
+ ‘A Host of Furious Fancies’ (1980)
+ ‘News from the Sun’ (1981)
+ ‘Memories of the Space Age’ (1982)
+ ‘Myths of the Near Future’ (1982)
+ ‘Report on An Unidentified Space Station’ (1982)
+ ‘The Object of the Attack’ (1984)
+ ‘Answers to a Questionnaire’ (1985)
+ ‘The Man Who Walked on the Moon’ (1985)
+ ‘The Secret History of World War 3′ (1988)
+ ‘Love in a Colder Climate’ (1989)
+ ‘The Enormous Space’ (1989)
+ ‘The Largest Theme Park in the World’ (1989)
+ ‘War Fever’ (1989)
+ ‘Dream Cargoes’ (1990)
+ ‘A Guide to Virtual Death’ (1992)
+ ‘The Message from Mars’ (1992)
+ ‘Report from an Obscure Planet’ (1992)

..:: J.G. BALLARD
• Bibliography
• Filmography (coming soon)
• Artography (coming soon)

..:: BUY VOLUME 1

..:: BUY VOLUME 2

Iain Sinclair at the Barbican. Photo: Tim Chapman, © 2006.

Iain Sinclair has been acclaimed as one of Britain’s most visionary writers and as an incomparable prose stylist. His early writing, notably Lud Heat (1975) and White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings (1987), was rooted in his adopted home of East London. It did much to popularise ideas of psychogeography in Britain, and inspired such works as Peter Ackroyd’s Hawksmoor and Alan Moore’s From Hell. His non-fiction Lights Out for the Territories (1997), based around a series of walks through some darker corners of London life and history, brought his vision to a wider audience.

I met Sinclair in the Barbican, the City of London Corporation’s modernist complex of high-class municipal housing and cultural facilities, which hosted the London Orbital theatrical event in October 2002. On the empty, third-floor Sculpture Court, we discussed JG Ballard and more, surrounded by high rises and interrupted only by the sounds of aircraft flying to and from London’s terrorised airports.

– Tim Chapman

NOTE: Video stills of Ballard are taken from the short film Crash! (1971), directed by Harley Cokliss, filmed among the multistorey carparks of Watford and referenced by Sinclair in the BFI book.

Tim Chapman is a writer and journalist based in Halifax, Yorkshire. See www.2ubh.com for more.

When did you first start reading Ballard?

In the 1960s. I think the first book I read was The Terminal Beach, and I kept picking up on him through things like New Worlds magazine. I was a bit at arm’s length at that time — I was very involved with the American Beat writers, and I saw Ballard in the lineage of William Burroughs. The whole notion of English suburbia, Shepperton, was so strange to my experience that I didn’t really engage that closely with it but I admired him very much as a pared-down stylist.

It was probably with The Atrocity Exhibition that I really recognised him as an English master. I think that’s still the book that affects me most — its use of this American material that I was interested in, and the way it puts it under such incredible pressure to achieve this astonishing paranoiac poetic, is still an example to us all.

Would you say he’s been an influence on your own writing?

Not really. I think my own writing is at absolutely the opposite extreme from Ballard’s. It’s singularly failed to be pared down and accurate and precise in physical details as his is, where you always know exactly what’s going on. My writing tends to be much baggier with more clauses tacked on. It’s more related to the kind of writing that his early partner Michael Moorcock was doing.

I started out as a film-maker in the 60s and came back to it much later on in the late 80s and 90s, getting together to make films with Chris Petit. At that time, I really came back strongly to Ballard and I think he was an influence more on the film-making than the writing. Chris himself was clearly and directly influenced by Ballard. His book Robinson is like an aftershock based on Crash. He made a film with Ballard for The Moving Picture Show at that time. By the time we were making films together, Ballard was one of the people we looked to.

I think then when I got to do a short book for the BFI on Crash, my interest was more in Ballard than in Cronenberg. Having met him, we became friendly. My book London Orbital was one that interested him because it was dealing with borderlands, liminal spaces, the motorway corridor, and all the things he’s written about for years. At that point, he really was a direct influence — not in the style of how I write, but more in the way that his vision of England was something that I was extremely drawn to.

You said in the acknowledgements to the BFI book that it was proposed at the strategic moment when you wanted an excuse to meet Ballard.

Exactly. I thought he’d really got it right. It never was science fiction, it was hyper-sharp reportage. His reality of the 60s had now come into place in the English landscape. That kind of world he’s endlessly talked about — retail parks and marinas and executive homes, and this list that pours out of him on ticker tape — all of that was now the landscape of England. I think we are a motorway culture, and he was the prophet of that. I really did want an excuse, if that was the word, to meet him and talk to him. Of course, when you do talk to him, what you get is almost exactly what you know from having read the books and the previous interviews. He’s quite a guarded person, quite contained and very much a solitary voyager. He’s lived in this time capsule and seen everything, and is now in his later career becoming a kind of stoic comedian. I think he’s getting quite funny in the last books — the satire is beginning to bite.

Photo: Tim Chapman.

I’d been reading your books for a while when the BFI book came out, and thought it wasn’t an obvious combination.

Funnily enough, the first actual physical connection was in a film from Mary Harron, who’s now a well-known Hollywood film-maker. She was working for the BBC Late Show and she was commissioned to make a film about Docklands and Canary Wharf as it was being built. I was invited to be one of the voices with Ballard. As the author of High-Rise, he was seen to be prophetic of this landscape, and he was saying that this is a future that he quite looks forward to. He liked the idea of Docklands. I was being quite apocalyptic and gloomy about it, looking at it from a more social and political perspective, and so curiously we were placed side by side in this now obscure and lost film. As the years went on, probably I’ve shifted more to his position.

Harron filmed American Psycho with Christian Bale, who was young Jim in Spielberg’s Empire of the Sun.

Yes, she’s an interesting woman. The interesting thing about it was most of these films for the Late Show were made in about two days. But she was tough enough that she had a proper length of time to do this. She was out in this landscape filming for weeks at a time, and persuading Ballard to appear, which is not necessarily always easy either.

I dug out a review of the BFI book by John Gray at the London School of Economics, where he said “the juxtaposition of JG Ballard and Iain Sinclair is far from obvious. Their views on the political and cultural scene from which they are equally estranged are quite different, even opposed”.

I don’t know that they are opposed. Maybe it would have seemed like that at that time, but I think now they would be seen to be quite similar in some ways. I think they’re quite interesting to juxtapose because he’s stayed out in Shepperton since the 1960s and he’s written essentially the same coded arrangements — every single book is a repetition, an extension of the same riff — in the same way that I’ve been in Hackney in the inner city since the 1960s and have also essentially written the same paradigms over and over. Except I kind of felt I’d reached a dead end — the city centre was becoming so heritaged and corrupted, I thought the interesting move was out to the margin, to the motorway, to the M25. As soon as that happened, it’s invading his territory. I certainly felt homage had to be paid. I was walking around the M25 and it was very necessary to stop off at Shepperton and see him, to visit this place of reservoirs and aircraft and future terror.

What was the genesis of the London Orbital project?

I felt quite strongly that with the kind of complicated dense fictions that I’d been writing, there was no place for them in the market. Lights Out for the Territory, which was centred on walks and explorations within London, had been much more successful. I needed to do another book which appeared to be a documentary but went off in other directions. One day when I was out walking up the River Lea to the point where it hit the M25 at Waltham Abbey, I thought this is it. This is the future England. London itself, by being completely enclosed in a motorway, has become a kind of concrete island. The obvious space to explore is this, with this pilgrim journey. It’s a book you can describe in a single sentence — a walk around the M25 — so everything clicked into place. Once I’d taken that decision, the book was there waiting to be written.

The Seer of Shepperton: “I was interested in the gauge of psychoarchitectonics” (still from Crash!, 1971; dir. Harley Cokliss).

Was Ballard always part of that plan?

Yeah. I thought the main figures I could see emerging from this landscape were Bram Stoker to the east, because of Carfax Abbey and Purfleet which is the point where the M25 crosses the Thames with the QEII bridge; HG Wells’ War of the Worlds out on the other side in Woking in Surrey, where the Martian invasion takes place; and Ballard himself at Shepperton. That was always my triangulation of the three energy points, the three great metaphors that described that topography. Ballard in a sense is reprising and working over Wells, in this sense of terrorism and viral invasion. In War of the Worlds, the invaders come in through Shepperton — they actually cross the river at that point — and the river turns into this red weed which is very much like the atmosphere of The Drought.

Wells is often seen as primarily a science fiction writer, but he did a lot of political and social comment which is often overlooked.

Ballard’s politics are quite curious. I don’t know whether you could call him conservative, with a small ‘c’, because he celebrates the nature of the bourgeois in its exile: the people that live in these kinds of flats that surround us now, who are anonymous and separated from the mob. Whereas his early partner, Michael Moorcock, said he was a man of the urban mob, who celebrates the crowds and smells of cafes and markets and all of that stuff, which is totally alien to Ballard. He’d like to chuck away all the old buildings, pull them down, get rid of all that heavy 19th-century furniture and have everything straight out of an Ikea catalogue. In that sense, I think there’s something conservative, but in other senses there’s something incredibly anarchic and furious about what he does, which doesn’t fit with any contemporary sense of politics. He doesn’t belong, he’s completely an outsider, although when you meet him he appears to be quite an Establishment person. He’s got a very fruity voice and genial persona, and would fit into the colonial society in which he grew up.

He did declare in the late 70s and 80s that he was a great admirer of Mrs Thatcher, but whether that was the politics or the charisma of it…

I think maybe the sort of psychosexual politics of Thatcher, in the same way that John Gray was a member of the Thatcher thinktanks. He was a significant Thatcher admirer and advocate at that period, but had a complete change of heart and is now violently opposed to American policy and all these things she was supportive of in the ’80s. He’s rather embarrassed about it. There’s interesting things happening there politically.

Ballard said a few years ago that he’s getting more left-wing as he gets older.

It’s quite interesting, because usually it’s the other way around. Someone like Kingsley Amis, who was an early supporter of Ballard, supposedly started off as quite socialist but gradually moved to extreme right to become this kind of Blimpish drunk at the end of his career. His feeling about Ballard’s writing also shifts with the years to become much more uncomfortable about where it’s going, as he’s obviously not the science fiction writer that Amis thought he was at the beginning.

Photo: Tim Chapman.

Could you talk about the London Orbital event here at the Barbican?

London Orbital was never just a book. It was also a TV film made with Chris Petit. The fact of it being a film meant that it couldn’t follow the procedures of walking, which is what I’d done in the book. The whole point was to walk the motorway spaces, and thereby to suck out information slowly and gradually from the ground. Chris is famous as a maker of road movies, and he couldn’t cope with filming the walking aspect because by the time he’d set up his camera the walkers had gone over the horizon. He shifted it all into the car. Once you were in the car, you were much closer to entering a Ballardian space. We accumulated all this road footage. Chris, in the end, discovered the only way to do it was never to switch the camera off. The only way to make sense of the road was to keep the camera running right the way round the whole thing.

It became obvious that maybe the meeting place between the book and the film would be to do a theatre event here at the Barbican, at which a number of people who appeared in the book would appear as themselves. There would be music, there would be three screens for which Chris went out and shot new footage of continual M25 progression. Ballard was supposed to appear here as the star of the show. He agreed to do that, which was surprising. We were just going to have a little discussion, a conversation, he wouldn’t have to read or do anything else. But on the day the phone rang and he said he wasn’t feeling well and wasn’t going to come. I wasn’t altogether surprised because he really doesn’t like doing these things very much.

I believe in the power of the imagination to remake the world, to release the truth within us, to hold back the night, to transcend death, to charm motorways, to ingratiate ourselves with birds, to enlist the confidences of madmen.

I believe in my own obsessions, in the beauty of the car crash, in the peace of the submerged forest, in the excitements of the deserted holiday beach, in the elegance of automobile graveyards, in the mystery of multi-storey car parks, in the poetry of abandoned hotels.

Excerpted from ‘What I Believe’ by J.G. Ballard, first published in Interzone #8, 1984

What happened was we made a photographic life-size cut-out of Ballard — there’d been a piece in one of the Sunday newspapers about us and we just blew up that photograph. Chris and I recited alternately this Ballardian screed, ‘What I Believe’, which I think is a terrific take on Ballard. In a sense, his presence was there perfectly. It was not actually necessary to have him physically, and of course he appeared in the London Orbital film as well. At the end of the film there’s this nice moment where he’s saying “Iain, I want you to go out and blow up the Bentall Centre, I want you to destroy Bluewater“, which has now become the subject of his new book Kingdom Come. It’s also been invoked by the present terror alerts at Heathrow Airport which seem to stem in part from places like High Wycombe which is exactly in this Ballardian Thames corridor.

How was the event received?

It wasn’t really received at all — it was an invisible event. As far as I know, practically no one wrote about it. Those that did were kind of uncomfortable because they liked the music, or certain aspects of the music, but didn’t like other stuff, so it was one of those invisible events. The interesting thing was the Barbican was expecting to sell 400 or 500 seats, which is what they’d allowed for, and it completely sold out. It took 2000 seats.

One of the stranger things was within it: there was a whole thing about Essex criminals who were involved in ecstasy and drug wars and Range Rover murders. Some of these figures were in the audience and took a deep objection to the stuff I was reading out about them, and tried to get round the back to kill me. There was a kind of interesting subtext of drama going on. It was almost a Ballardian event in which he was pulling the strings without being there at all. It was actually quite funny.

There’s going to be a repeat of this event here for a book called London: City of Disappearances, for which Ballard has contributed a piece about the Westway. I’ll certainly try and go out and interview him on film, and have a film to show rather than expect him to turn up this time.

The Barbican. Photo: Tim Chapman.

It was said at the time that Ballard had never actually been to the Barbican before.

He said that, which was very surprising, but in a sense he doesn’t need to because it’s almost like his mental landscape. He did say to me he’d never really been to the East End of London — he had no real interest or desire in seeing it. He’d done a car trip once to go and have a look at the Millennium Dome but he never got out of the car — just drove past it and went back again to Shepperton.

It’s probably the best way to see it.

It probably is, but this is the absolute opposite of what I feel. Always, the way is that you walk. You start from wherever you are and you walk slowly through the city, and your narrative is revealed. He just doesn’t feel the need to work in that way at all. He fillets from magazines, watches random TV, and looks at technical reports, scientific journals, and just cuts up and accumulates this material. In the 60s, he was using it fairly straight in a fragmented way, and now it’s become finessed into something that’s almost like a standard literary novel, but once you look below the surface it’s something else.

Photo: Tim Chapman.

Walking and driving is something you riff on in Dining on Stones: pods versus peds.

I had this insight when I was walking down the A13 when I walked into this Travelodge. I was amazed to see that what I thought was this food dispenser giving you pies was actually filled with books. I looked at this and thought god, all of these writers are either walking writers or driving writers. Most people fit into one or the other of these categories. Moorcock I think would be very much a walking writer, even though his foot has gone now and he’s in a wheelchair. His novels are walking novels, and he never did learn to drive. Whereas Ballard, you can’t really see him getting out of the car. Everything is there in this car journey between Shepperton and West London, where he comes in on a regular basis. I thought most people could be put one way or the other.

With Ballard, it’s not so much driving I’d associate with him as flying — aeroplanes, low-flying aircraft.

There’s a lot of flying — he was a pilot. I think he does have a god’s-eye view of things, he’s able to be right up there. You can see him in this building here, the man on the balcony. He’s very much that, sometimes with a camera. There’s a photograph I used in the BFI book with the woman on the balcony, by Helmut Newton who he admires. It’s looking from inside a flat out to the woman who’s maybe naked from behind on the balcony, and looking down into the street. I thought that foreground-middleground-distance is exactly the Ballardian perspective, which is reprised in the Cronenberg film of Crash, quite near the beginning. That’s why I think he was very happy to see the film move to Canada, to Toronto. That was fine, because to him it doesn’t have to be specific to London, whereas the way that Chris Petit and I think about it is: it’s very much a London book, about the Heathrow gas stations and the backroads between Shepperton and Heathrow. He doesn’t need that.

Since the BFI book, most of your work seems to have been stuffed full of Ballard references. As you say in Dining on Stones: “When in doubt, quote Ballard.”

Yeah — he’s so sharp. I’ve been reading back through the interviews in the Re/Search book, and every little aphorism that was very savage and strange at that moment seems incredibly pertinent to this one. Once I was writing about the edges of London, the A13 corridor, down there his voice is playing in your ear the whole time as you have the queues of low-flying aircraft and the reservoirs, and the idea that you could be blown out of the sky or fly straight into a towerblock at any moment. All of that is his world. And the death of Diana — all the journalists rung him up because it was exactly the kind of thing he’d always been describing or thinking about in terms of James Dean or Jayne Mansfield.

You said in the film of London Orbital that he is an icon now, with his own credo. Is it just the fact that he’s been around so long?

I think it’s partly that. It’s quite interesting that in the 60s he’s very much a marginal figure. He’s got a cult following but he doesn’t really register in the mainstream apart from with one or two writers who support him very strongly. In the ’70s, he’s actually become a kind of pariah — Cape, who were publishing Crash, were wearing gloves to do it. Then everything changes with Empire of the Sun — it’s the moment he becomes supremely visible. There’s a Spielberg version of Ballard, which would have been unthinkable.

Then the general middlebrow consensus swerves round and thinks of him as a different kind of writer to what he actually is. He’s seen as a great guru of the West, but the people who are doing that very rarely refer back to the earlier books. They go back maybe to Crash, because they know it’s a film, and they think that’s shocking, but Crash is only a version of what’s in The Atrocity Exhibition which is very rarely referred to, or any of those earlier pieces.

I think he’s been reinvented — not by himself, because he’s carried on doing what he’s always done — but by the literary consensus who have reinvented him and think of him as being something really that he isn’t: this sort of genial but provocative figure sitting out there writing about the Metro Centre and shopping malls and stuff. I can see the reviews even now. But the real early energy and madness is still not appreciated.

James Graham Ballard: “…transcending death, charming motorways, integrating
with birds, enlisting the confidences of madmen” (still from Crash!, 1971; dir. Harley Cokliss)

I think the problem is it’s almost too easy to reduce him to a set of icons — the car crash, the concrete flyover.

That is obviously what’s happened. You see him constantly quoted or brought into catalogues at the Tate Modern and glossy magazines. He’s the first name you think of to underwrite these sorts of things. There was an event at the Serpentine a couple of weeks back with Rem Koolhaas, the architect, doing a 24-hour interview with different people. I was one of the people there. I said I assume you’ve got JG Ballard. He said well, he wouldn’t come here, but he was there as a presence on tape. And yet he’s not really interested in the city, there’s this polemic on the city but the city doesn’t mean anything to him. I don’t think he could describe it, he hardly knows the city. Maybe he comes in to see his publishers or have a meal or go to the Tate, but really it’s of no importance to him and his mental universe.

It’s interesting you mention Koolhaas. At the architecture exhibition here at the Barbican, Future City: Experiment and Utopia in Architecture [1956-2006], there’s an installation of a theoretical work by Koolhaas, Exodus [1972], which is about placing a great strip of ultra-luxury accommodation across London so it divides it in two, and seeing what’ll happen. I thought that’s an unwritten Ballard story.

Absolutely. While other writers were just not thinking about those kinds of things, he was. He didn’t discriminate, he didn’t have this snobbery of being a literary writer. He felt that there were things he could take from the most debased forms of public culture. He would come out and say I think everyone should watch television for eight hours a day in random fashion — there’s no good or bad, you just jump about and let it flow over you, with your glass of whisky. It just meshes together and creates its own strange poetic. Nobody else was saying that at that time. Nobody else liked roads, nobody else liked petrol stations, apart from a few nouveau-pop artists in America. So he’s gone from a position of being right out there and advocating hateful stuff and disliking Ralph Nader and not being politically correct and not being green or ecologically sound, and suddenly here he is as a nice old man.

It’s rather like what happened with Kafka, who was very much a fringe character in his lifetime but later became this iconic figure with his own adjective.

Obviously Ballard has his own adjective in the same way, so he’s very similar to Kafka. Except Kafka was probably even more extreme and much more invisible than Ballard. I mean, Ballard has been there for a very long time in various ways. The interesting thing is that by doing exactly the same things all the time, his status and position have shifted significantly. He’s gone from one extreme to the other. Whereas — and I keep coming back to Moorcock — I think Moorcock was a lot more populist in the 60s, but because his books now are large and unwieldy and complex they’re much less read now than Ballard. They’ve drifted off somewhere where the fans are following him but the general readership just don’t acknowledge him any more. That’s quite a curious thing.

As you say, Ballard’s been doing the same thing all along. Maybe it’s just taken this long for the rest of the world to catch up?

He has done the same thing, but the mode in which it’s done has shifted from something that’s manufactured or tooled to fit in magazines where there was a market for these short sharp pieces, to something that now sits and pretends to be a mainstream literary novel. It comes out looking like a literary novel — Cocaine Nights has almost the form of an Agatha Christie novel, it’s comfortable — except that they’re doing stranger things. There’s a much darker kick in it.

Cocaine Nights was promoted as summer beach reading.

Exactly, which is good too. And things like Alex Garland’s The Beach clearly derive from Ballard. There is a line now from Ballard through Martin Amis and Will Self and Alex Garland – young, hip writers who have taken their tricks from Ballard. And yet I don’t think any of them have what he had to start with.

Garland also scripted the British zombie movie 28 Days Later — he said that large parts of that were a deliberate homage to Ballard. Alan Warner’s another one.

Sure. He’s one of the generators of this new kind of literature.

Ballard’s also doing a lot of work with newspaper columns and book reviews. In Landor’s Tower, you have a mock book review for one of your characters which you attribute to Ballard.

Right! I’d forgotten that.

Photo: Tim Chapman.

“In the canted floors of these multistorey carparks, rephotographed from surveillance tapes…”

Ah yes. That was written in parallel with making a film called Asylum. In the same way the London Orbital book and film were going on together, this film of Asylum had a very strongly Ballardian presence without Ballard being in it, although Moorcock was in it. It finishes up in the Heathrow motorway corridor with planes flying low with a desperate sense of threat — also the shimmering landscapes of those reservoirs and all of that. So, in a sense, by physically invading this territory to make this film my mind was totally set on Ballard. When I was writing the book at the same time, which criss-crosses its inspiration from the film, obviously Ballard was in mind and I came up with this riff in homage to him.

Did you find he was an easy writer to pastiche?

He’s a very easy writer to pastiche badly. I think he’s there with someone like Graham Greene as a stylist. There used to be a New Statesman competition to parody Greene’s style, and Greene came second when he entered.

You mentioned The Atrocity Exhibition as one of the most important books for you. In the BFI book you mention the film of that which was then a work in progress.

Has that finished now?

It has. It’s out on DVD.

I look forward to seeing that. I saw it at the ICA or somewhere as a work in progress. It struck me as probably the most Ballardian of the various films. It worked on his own terms and is therefore likely to be the least popular. I saw Empire of the Sun again the other day, and it’s sort of Spielberg more than Ballard though it’s reasonably close to the book. The Cronenberg is interesting but it’s not remotely in the spirit or the time of the book. But The Atrocity Exhibition I thought was pretty fair.

Simon interviewed the director, Jonathan Weiss. He seems quite an angry man — angry about the film’s mention in the BFI book, and about various things you’d written.

Well, I don’t know. When I saw it, it was certainly a work in progress. It wasn’t finished, and it was announced as such.

You did say in the BFI book that from what you’d seen you thought it was almost too faithful to the book.

I think there was a sense of that. It’s a bit inverted commas, a bit in aspic. They’re treating these literary classics from another era as if they were heritage Dickens. Probably that’s a mistake — you’ve got to really get down and hack it to pieces and find something that really works in film terms, something that honours the spirit of the original book. You can’t just make the film of the book — it doesn’t work.

One thing I find interesting about how you write and how Ballard writes is the way identity is used in a fictional context: particularly in your earlier novels, and with Ballard in Empire of the Sun, The Kindness of Women and, in a very different way, Crash.

None of them are him, and none of them are me. Crash is interesting because there’s this extreme character and he gives him his own name. It’s not him but it represents some avatar of him. When I met Claire Walsh, who he calls his girlfriend, he said here’s Claire, she’s the woman in Crash. It’s quite hard to move beyond that, it’s just a shocking idea. And yet it doesn’t actually mean this is the woman in Crash or this is JG Ballard. It’s just a device, a kind of honest device in a way, and also a convenience. That’s really what I’ve done. When you’re writing fiction, you’re creating a kind of theatre of the world and you push some element of yourself that’s convenient into it.

How much do you distinguish between your books which are sold as fiction and the ones that are sold as documentary or travel?

I don’t at all in terms of writing them, but in terms of presenting or marketing them. The ones that are called travel or whatever now have a kind of market. They can be sold, but the ones that are supposedly just straight fiction really don’t have much of a market any more. I would tend to shape anything I do to pretend to be document or travel even though it probably won’t be. Whereas I suppose most of what Jim has done appears to be fiction, but you could make a pretty good case for it being travel or art criticism or social criticism or polemic — all of these things can be absorbed within what seems to be a fiction. Kingdom Come could have been stripped down to be a series of savage essays or presentations about the motorway corridor with dramatised events happening in the middle.

“Crushed breasts on door handles”: Fiction as a branch of neurology (still from Crash!, 1971; dir. Harley Cokliss).

Ballard has said in the past that if he had his time again he’d be a painter. It seems now that he almost wants to be a sociologist.

Maybe not so much a painter as a very good art critic — not in an academic sense, but as someone with the language and the eye to break an image down. That takes in being a form of social critic or geographer, an essayist in the sense that someone like Paul Virilio is. There is an interface between the world of the catalogue and copywriting for Mercedes cars and the film script for a porn movie — all of these things intersect in something that he’s not embarrassed to cut together.

Talking about geography, you’re very much associated with the psychogeography movement…

Have you seen this book that’s just come out on psychogeography that tries to incorporate Ballard into that group? You make of him what you will, but I don’t think he’s in any way a psychogeographer, and I don’t think he’d use those terms himself at all. I think the aspect of him they’ve drawn on is the notion of a spatial geography, of particular lines and movements that you make in describing a city’s geometry, which he does with the multistorey carparks and bridges and motorways and all of that.

Which is maybe closer to Debord’s original ideas.

Much closer than to the London occult versions that have appeared.

There’s another quote from Ballard in the BFI book, on the Watford car parks: “I was quite interested in the gauge of psychoarchitectonics.”

Wonderful. He must have been one of the very first people to get interested in Watford.

The more recent books — Millennium People and Kingdom Come — are more explicitly concerned with London and its environs.

A kind of London. The London that Millennium People is concerned with, and the bits of the centre that appear in Kingdom Come, are so very strange, they’re completely surreal and unlike actual London. He talks about a character in Kingdom Come living in Chelsea and his address is given as Chelsea Harbour, which isn’t even in Chelsea — it’s not a harbour either. It’s an unplaced London, a generic catalogue London that he uses as a shorthand, but it’s not an inhabited city. It’s got no landmarks, nothing fixed, and I don’t think he wants it to be fixed. I think he wants it to be fluid, and he wants a sense of alienation, almost like being in this estranged movie at the edge of things.

Whereas your work is very site specific.

It starts with that, and then it pushes through into whatever’s on the other side of it. But it usually starts with something very very specific and concrete.

Millennium People, and the basic idea behind all this middle-class anomie, seems quite specifically London. I think he said he got the idea from his own daughters’ problems in finding affordable living and maintaining that lifestyle.

Funnily enough, after this I’m seeing someone who lives in the Barbican who’s writing a strange thesis. In it I saw something he quoted from Siegfried Kracauer, who was part of the Frankfurt School in the 1930s, talking about how the revolt will come from the middle classes, from the anomie of the middle classes. In a way, that idea is exactly what Ballard’s talking about in Millennium People.

In the context of early 1930s Germany, it seems quite different.

It’s a very different thing, but now Ballard sees fascism arising out of the shopping mall and the airport satellite cities — a fascism based on an advocacy of sport; football hooligans — and blending into that, a very strange picture.

It’s interesting he’s writing that at a time when there’s been a resurgence of BNP support in the eastern fringes of London.

Geographically, in the 70s and early 80s, all of it was based in places like Brick Lane and Bethnal Green at the centre. Those people have now moved out into Essex, and it’s an Essex phenomenon. I don’t think in actuality you’d find any trace of it in those Heathrow satellite towns, but there’s no reason you can’t have it as a literary conceit.

Drowned Barbican. Photo by Tim Chapman.

Do you see Ballard as a London writer? Some of the early novels like The Drowned World were very specifically about the parts of west London where he used to work.

I don’t, no. Obviously London has been one of the locations of his imaginative world, but it just seems like it’s a convenient set. He could just as well have been writing about Lisbon or anywhere else he happened to find himself. He doesn’t thirst for the particulars of the city — he’s not interested in the dust and the detail. It is just a manipulated set, and I think it’s not to do with London but very much to do with being an observer on the edge of things, with the motorways that take you away somewhere else, and the anonymous tower blocks which are a kind of nowhere. He’s a great writer of these nowheres — he’s a defender of them.

With Kingdom Come, as you say, you were given this assignment to destroy Bluewater. Did you fail him? Does he have to do it himself?

I did my best — I gave it a good kicking in the book. Bluewater I thought was one of the most de-energising places on the face of the earth. It’s down in this chalk quarry, which makes it different from any other huge mall. Essentially it’s just a car park — the convenience is that it’s somewhere you can put your car. Shopping is completely separate from it. In fact I’ve never met anyone who could shop there at all — all they can do is walk round the galleries and use one of the many many coffee shops.

He’s never visited, obviously. The Bentall Centre has got these dancing bears which appear in Kingdom Come — I think that’s one of the few places he does go to on a regular basis. In a sense, the specifics of that do re-emerge in this fictional universe he’s created.

Is London: City of Disappearances an edited anthology?

No, it’s a bit more than that. What I did was to feel — in a very opposite way to Ballard, who couldn’t get this idea at all — that London at the moment is somewhere with endless erasures and reinventions and disappearances and amnesia. A lot of important cultural stories and figures were wiped out, buildings would disappear and something else is put up in their places. There’s a constantly shifting landscape, but it’s still very solid and tangible.

I wanted to do a book about that and, rather than me writing a novel or a document from A to Z, it would be much more interesting to invite a whole bunch of quite disparate people to send in their reports. They might take the form of fiction or a document. I had this wad of material and I divided it up partly topographically by zone and partly by theme, and at the end of each section there were gazetteer entries so it’s like a sort of mock guidebook. I tried to shape it like a novel so you could read it right the way through. Where I felt I needed to shift things I’d write a piece myself. I do feel at the end that it makes a new kind of novel, a sort of communal novel which I was editing more in the sense of editing a film rather than editing a book. The result isn’t something I could have prophesied, but it is a new form I think.

“Iain, I want you to blow up Bluewater.” (still from Crash!, 1971; dir. Harley Cokliss).

Ballard is in there more as a presence rather than with the piece he wrote himself, which is very short; it has actually appeared somewhere obscure once before, anyway. He describes the Westway so that in a sense the landscape around the Westway is what disappears. He’s just interested in this fragment that could have been the beginning of a new city but which was never followed up. It was just left, like the ruins of an Inca monument.

I think I know what you mean about disappearances — I lived down here, close to the old Gainsborough Studios in Hoxton. I went by this morning and didn’t recognise it.

It’s very smart and modernist flats. The whole of the canal has now undergone this Ballardian process whereby all the warehouses have been turned into loft living for city folk. It is actually a city, a water city, even though the canal is decaying into a drought-like condition, undergoing hideous transformation and being choked with weed, but along it is somewhere that is nowhere. People who live there don’t really know where they are, they just get on the canal bank on their bicycles and commute between the City and Docklands. It actually is a new city — I think it should be called Ballard eventually, or Neo-Shepperton.

“Bring Me the Head of Alfred Hitchcock”. Photo: Tim Chapman.

The flats themselves at the Gainsborough are fairly generic — you could see them in Manchester or Leeds — but at the middle of it there’s this huge semi-submerged head of Alfred Hitchcock.

Fantastic. Of course, he made his early silent films in those studios and grew up not far away. Maybe we should have a submerged head of Ballard out in the middle of this, to go with John Milton in the church down there.

Psychogeography is quite a buzzword now; Will Self’s got his column in the Independent…

Which to me has absolutely no connection whatsoever to whatever psychogeography was originally, or in its second incarnation. It was something very specific in Paris in the 50s and 60s — the Lettrists and Situationists had this politicised conceptual movement called Psychogeography. Then it was reinvented into London with people like Stewart Home and the London Psychogeographical Association, who mixed those ideas with ideas of ley lines and Earth mysteries and cobbled it together as a provocation, and I took it on from that point. Now it’s just become this brand name for more or less anything that’s vaguely to do with walking or vaguely to do with the city. It’s a new form of tourism.

Is there any mileage left in it?

No, I don’t think so, other than if someone can brand it and promote it, which they are doing. Once these little pocket books appear with an easy readers’ guide which can take you back to Ballard or de Quincey or Debord or wherever you want to go, it’s a route map where everything’s laid out for you. It’s very strange. I’m not quite sure why that happened.

What other writers at the moment do you think are worth reading?

Unfortunately I tend to be reading older material that’s related to whatever projects I’m working on. As I’m working on a book about Hackney, where I’ve lived for so long without ever really thinking about it, I’m reading books by forgotten or half-forgotten Hackney writers like Alexander Baron and Roland Camberton, and Harold Pinter’s book The Dwarfs.

Are you working on anything else?

No, that’s all consuming. In the light of having done the Disappearances book, I’m working in a new way, which is going out and carrying out huge numbers of interview. I’m leading the people I’m interviewing to some extent into particular locations and particular figures who I think represent whatever Hackney was in this period before it started to disappear, which I think it will on the back of the Olympic thing. I’m not sure how that’s going to work. It’s going to be partly memoir, partly a series of edited transcripts, partly in essay form — it’ll take its own form as it goes on. After that, for the first time ever, I’ll have reached the end of a contract. I’ll have to stop and think what I can do next, if not back to bookdealing.

Photo: Tim Chapman.

Are you planning anything more on the film side?

There’s one thing on the distant horizon. It’s called Beijing Orbital. When I was in Stavangar in Norway at one of these strange conferences, I saw a presentation by an assistant of Rem Koolhaas which was about the China TV building he’d built. He showed this virtual version of a city with seven orbital motorways just spreading out from the centre of this very traditional city into the desert, and the incredible pieces that were going up. I thought my god, it will be amazing to travel around these seven orbital motorways. Of course, that is relatively attractive to be made into a film. I think it will be reasonably possible to get a commission for that, which may also become a book. It will also involve me doing a lot of other things — circling round China as to what China means to different places in Europe, in the sense of Fu Manchu or people being drowned in Morecombe, all these stories, before I even embark on a journey to the place itself.

Have you thought of doing more comics? You worked with Dave McKean on Slow Chocolate Autopsy.

I’d like to. With Dave McKean it was just starting to get interesting. I was just beginning to understand what the form can do. Apart from the comic itself, he’s a terrific designer of a whole book — you’ve got his typography and the way he plays with images. It’d be great to do another one, but I don’t know if the opportunity will ever come up.

Any final thoughts?

I think we’ve covered the ground pretty thoroughly.

..:: LINKS
+ Iain Sinclair at Granta
+ Michael Moorcock
+ The Barbican
+ Bluewater
+ Bentall Centre
+ Chris Petit
+ Stewart Home
+ London Psychogeographical Association
+ RE/Search Publications

Previously in this series:
+ Child of the Diaspora: Bruce Sterling on JG Ballard
+ Seductive Whirlpools: The John Foxx Interview
+ No One Dances in Ballard: An Interview with Mike Ryan (RE/Search Publications)

In that sense, there is a strong link between 9/11 events and the fiction of J. G. Ballard, inasmuch as they both concern a ‘staged’ reality, a manufactured space-time (particularly in Ballard’s ‘mid-period’ novels, Atrocity Exhibition onwards). In early Ballard this sense of deep, geological, ancient time is usually more of a natural fact (as opposed to technological), a deeper ‘voice’ of reality that comes to claim the characters, undoing the more superficial cortex structure of the ego. Ballard’s characters are upper middle-class individuals, absorbed in a state of emotional alienation that can only be broken by the most spectacular transgressions.

In Ballard, however, we only get the point of view of the ubiquitous disaffected individual, but never from the point of view of the engineers of this staged reality. I can think of the architect in High-Rise, perhaps. But he himself is only unlocking a deeper layer of the unconscious through the language of architecture.

This is what annoys me a bit about Ballard: his POLITICS. What are the politics of Ballard?

Ballard, it seems to me, subscribes to a kind of naïve Freudianism. The technological landscape can only unlock what already pre-exists in the human mind. Or the key can be a liberating violence, an absurd violence beyond rationality. There is always a death-drive powering the characters and events. New ‘psychopathologies’ and configurations can, of course, be created (so, it is not a simple regression, or return to the primal scene, or whatever). But there is no sense of real human interests or other historical, social factors driving the manufacturing of these realities (for example, the enclave-resorts ubiquitous in the latest Ballard novels). There is always a sense of withdrawal, of entropic regress, which perhaps is (as R. D. Laing might have put it) a sane reaction to an insane society. Yet, there is no way out of this lock, except a resort to some transcendental mental structure; a natural, essential, pre-social drive. Ballard espouses a certain fatalism born out of a psychological reductionism. Can we ever escape this programming, this death-drive?

By MICHAEL R. BLOOD
Associated Press Writer

SAN DIEGO

Actors Warren Beatty and wife Annette Bening tried to crash a campaign appearance Saturday by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger as the governor sought to drum up last-minute support for a group of statewide ballot measures.

The Hollywood couple strode side-by-side to the entrance of an airport hangar where several hundred of the governor’s supporters had gathered.

A Schwarzenegger aide told the “Bulworth” star he was not on the guest list and did not have the appropriate wristband to get inside.

“You have to have a wristband to listen to the governor?” Bening asked. “He represents all of us, right?”

The couple’s appearance caused momentary confusion. Just before the governor took the stage, the hangar door was closed _ literally in their faces. It was later reopened as Schwarzenegger spoke.

Inside, Schwarzenegger told cheering supporters that his slate of four ballot proposals on Tuesday’s ballot would “reform the broken system.”

Beatty planned to shadow Schwarzenegger throughout the day as the governor campaigned. He has been repeatedly mentioned as a possible challenger to Schwarzenegger, but he said Saturday that he would not be a candidate in next year’s gubernatorial race.

“To me, this is an abuse of the initiative process,” Beatty said of Schwarzenegger’s campaigning for the ballot measures.

In a later interview, the governor alluded to Beatty only indirectly.

“There’s the main event, then there is the sideshow,” Schwarzenegger said. “I don’t care about the sideshow.”

Earlier, Beatty boarded a bus draped with a banner reading “Truth Squad” and urged people to vote against the ballot measures supported by Schwarzenegger.

The Democrat and longtime political activist, told reporters he had no plans to run for public office in the future, but he didn’t rule it out entirely.

“I don’t want to run for governor,” he told reporters. “I want to say what I think.”

Schwarzenegger, who later appeared with Arizona Sen. John McCain, is pushing several measures that would curb the power of the Democrat- controlled Legislature and the state’s public employee unions. Another measure he backs would extend the trial period for teaches to get tenure.

Review of JG Ballard: Conversations (ed. V Vale, 2005) and JG Ballard: Quotes (selected and edited by V Vale & Mike Ryan, 2004).
Published by RE/Search Publications

V Vale has been an underground publishing icon in San Francisco for quite some time, kicking off with late-70s ‘punk tabloid’ Search and Destroy (America’s equivalent of Sniffin’ Glue, the legendary British punkzine) and founding RE/Search Publications from there. RE/Search is quite the exotic beast, with a backlist of large-format books covering William Burroughs, Brazilian psychedelic lounge music, piercing and scarification, ‘angry’ female performance artists, ‘industrial culture’, and reprints of memoirs of sideshow freaks and sado-masochistic rituals.

In the 1980s RE/Search was also responsible for two lovingly detailed volumes on JG Ballard; for many admirers of Ballard’s work, the RE/Search editions have long been the ultimate reference. The first volume, simply entitled JG Ballard, was refreshingly free of the academic jargon that renders inscrutable most other works on the writer; instead, Vale and his RE/Search team compiled a portrait of Ballard that located him within a steaming cauldron of pop-culture references and real-world applications, detecting the Ballardian effect in music, film, politics and mythology. But the real goldmine was the 40-odd pages of interviews, in which Vale and people like industrial musician Graeme Revell quizzed Ballard on all this and more.

All parties clearly enjoyed each other’s company; there was a palpable sense of Ballard letting his hair down and relaxing before the critical gaze of a new and unknown source – an American audience – for Ballard was considered pretty much a cult author in the US before RE/Search came along. Vale upped the ante with RE/Search’s subsequent publication of The Atrocity Exhibition, Ballard’s then-out-of-print classic collection of experimental short stories, first assembled in the 1960s. The RE/Search reprint added a few new ‘Atrocity’ pieces, enlisted Phoebe Gloeckner to provide some surreal, provocative illustrations of internal organs and medical processes, and topped it off with annotations by Ballard himself…it still holds up as a beautiful piece of independent publishing, 15 years on.

Left: photography by Tim Chapman, from JG Ballard: Conversations

In 2005 things are very different. The world has cottoned on to Ballard: he’s critically accepted; films have been made of his books; he’s won awards; he’s quoted in major newspapers; he’s about as ‘cult’ and as ‘underground’ as Sir Michael Phillip Jagger. But unlike Jagger, Ballard’s worldview is still sublime, still relevant, and still has the capacity to jiggle the old grey matter. Back in the 1960s, if you’d asked most science fiction ‘heads’ which writer’s vision would reign supreme in the early 21st century – Ballard’s or Arthur C Clarke’s – it’s unlikely the majority would have picked the ‘difficult’ and ‘experimental’ Jimmy Ballard. But think of the death of Princess Di; September 11; reality TV; the London bombings; the breakdown of civilisation after Hurricane Katrina…if you know Ballard then you understand this is his world.

And that’s probably why Vale has decided to revive the seemingly dormant RE/Search empire with the publication of two new Ballard books: JG Ballard: Quotes and JG Ballard: Conversations. It’s a great opportunity to evaluate how this maverick futurist has stood the test of time. JG Ballard: Conversations consists of lengthy interviews with Ballard, conducted by the RE/Search crew and derived from all the untranscribed recordings RE/Search made with Ballard from 1983 to the present. Now, when writers begin to pontificate and interpret their own work, there is a risk that they will ruin everything. Samuel Beckett, for example, was wise enough to keep his mouth shut. Thomas Pynchon just refuses to even come out, wherever he’s hiding. Their work has benefited from this, retaining a certain aura of mystery that opens it to various readings and reinterpretations. But Ballard’s interviews and occasional essays are often as devious and slippery as his fiction. They have offered a fascinating complement to his work, and a glimpse into his creative process.

With Conversations, though, you need to bear in mind that these really are ‘conversations’, rather than interviews. They read like straight transcripts, with all the meanderings of real conversations, and that is both a strength and a weakness: it’s a lovely indicator of the character, warmth and empathy of the man, but it doesn’t really throw any new light on Ballard’s previous utterances. Although the future (our present, that is) has become Ballardian in many ways, it would be unfair to judge Ballard’s work in terms of how accurately he predicted things; that was never the point. Nonetheless, some of the man’s judgments are a little naive. For example, he states that George Bush is not a media manipulator, that there’s no media image of Bush, and that he doesn’t engage our emotions (p. 204-5); the most sophisticated thing Ballard has to say about the War on Terror is that the media is manipulating you. Elsewhere, the writer admits he doesn’t follow politics, saying that when the papers called him wanting to know his thoughts on 9/11, he didn’t have any thoughts (p. 53). These are quibbles, though; Ballard is always immensely readable, whether in conversation or in his writing, and at all times he comes across as the ideal quirky, weird uncle we would all love to have (in the dark hidden folds of our reptilian sub-cortex, of course).

Although it’s fair enough that RE/Search wouldn’t want to commission new interviews, a slightly frustrating aspect of Conversations is the fact that the questions are coming from the usual suspects: Vale, Revell, Mark Pauline – the same voices heard in RE/Search’s original Ballard volume. It would have been interesting to read the fruits of contemporary writers and artists grappling with Ballard, although a bonus is the conversation with David Pringle, the writer’s longtime ‘archivist’ and Number One Fan.

For the ultimate Ballardian experience, the Quotes volume is the pick, being a concentrated compendium of Ballard’s observations and admonishments, mixing quotes from interviews and excerpts from his fiction: dense, poetic, and oblique aphorisms that don’t stray too far from familiar Ballardian territory: flight, art, the Space Age, gated communities, car crashes, airports, photography. These are the subjects Ballard feels most comfortable with, and his observations are truly insightful. ‘One wonders,’ Ballard muses, ‘if photography is the Cyclops eye of the late 20th century, recording everything but seeing nothing’. Quotes is fantastic for dipping into: on the toilet, on the bus, at the office, in bed, on a plane – anytime you need a fix – and both Quotes and Conversations are in a handy, slightly-less-than-A5 format, perfect for slipping into your handbag and whipping out as required. Vale calls Quotes a ‘handbook for deciphering the future’, and that’s pretty accurate. JG Ballard’s imagination can still kick you in the guts and is perhaps best read in compressed chunks like these; Atrocity Exhibition, after all, was the ultimate example of packing dense meaning into tiny frames.

All up, Vale and RE/Search have done a fine job with these publications. They’re shot through with striking urban and industrial-landscape photography and some interesting cover choices: garish and colourful, evoking old-skool 50s sci fi (for such a forward-thinking, prescient writer, these covers are perhaps a little odd). But all you really need to know is that both books are infused with that unmistakable Vale touch: unpretentious, eclectic, smart. Over the years, Ballard has had a fine shadow in Vale; let’s hope it’s not so long before RE/Search is activated again.

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>< <<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<

JG Ballard: Conversations (ed. V Vale, 2005)
JG Ballard: Quotes (selected and edited by V Vale & Mike Ryan, 2004)
Available from RE/Search Publications

>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>< <<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<

The following is an excerpt from an official report prepared by Andrés Vaccari, on behalf of the JG Ballard Institute for the Study of Eroto-Responsive Kinetics, Canberra.

DISCLAIMER: The following photos have been modified by the patients referenced by this report. The JG Ballard Institute for the Study of Eroto-Responsive Kinetics, Canberra implies no endorsement of any kind whatsoever by their publication.

The Conspiracy of Grey Men

“The Grey Men,” Dr Travis explained, “play a pivotal role in these kinds of fantasies. The appearance of this archetype is contemporary with the dawn of large bureaucracies and the rise of pseudo-rational economic ideologies. The Grey Men share the ideal traits of bureaucrats, accountants, lawyers, businessmen and other exemplars of the human fauna spawned by industrial capitalism. They are emblems of efficiency and procedure, to whom people are abstract quantities, and society a series of equations of greed and demand. Their code words are ‘inevitability’, ‘invisibility’ and ‘profit’. Their language is a mixture of esoteric jargon and mathematical ephemera, with constant references to quasi-alchemical concepts like ‘The Invisible Hand’, the ‘Balance of Trade’ and ‘The Trickle-Down Effect’. It is not surprising, therefore, that we are witnessing a marked increase in these paranoid fantasies after the Liberal Party’s rise to power in 1996. It is not a coincidence either that patients are becoming fixated sexually on the figure of John Howard, the Australian Prime Minister – the living embodiment of Grey Man.”

The Mechanics of Inhumanity

During one of the studies, a series of photographs was presented to a group of schizophrenic patients, who were instructed to group them in a meaningful schema. This series included: 1) a diagram of a Watt steam engine; 2) Liberal Party figureheads; 3) the disfigured genitalia of anonymous car crash victims; 4) well-known environmental disasters; 5) Jeanette Howard, the Prime Ministers’ wife, eating at a corporate dinner; 6) queues at banks and Centrelink offices; 7) victims of police brutality; Victorian ex-Premier Jeff Kennett’s hairstyle; 9) Iraqi refugees at Port Hedland Detention Centre.

Sixty-five per cent of patients strongly associated the disfigured genitalia with various powerful figures in the Howard Government, a phenomenon doctors interpreted as expressing powerlessness – projected as psycho-sexual impairment – before a divisive and hermetic political regime. The Liberal Party figures were the objects of mutilation scenarios, and often the photos themselves were torn or cut. Also, forty-nine per cent of patients reported various elaborate, Sadean erotic fantasies. In these, they took submissive roles, often involving binding and genital disfigurement.

The Sleep of Reason

Dr Travis explained that the advent of discourses like “Scientific Management”, “Human Resource Management” and “Economic Rationalisation” had introduced a novel figure into the pantheon of modern psychosis. These prophets of efficiency and mechanism had become insistent iconic presences in the cosmologies of the deranged. Dr Travis said that the new millenium would bring nightmarish variations on these archetypes. He cited a recent US study, where patients in various states of terminal psychosis described terrifying meetings with cold female inquisitors, who would read out long strings of numbers, soliciting detailed information such as physical characteristics and financial assets.

These visitors, clad in neat, spotless grey suits, dictated intricate megalomanical theories that explained society through the workings of a cryptic “Economic Realm”, which they described as a land of milk and honey where the souls of workers and managers travelled after death, and which was ruled by a benevolent, all-seeing entity.

Assassination Fantasies

During one of the studies, long-term inmates were provided with Conceptual Assassination Kits, and the ensuing fantasy-elaboration process was monitored closely.

In 87 per cent of cases, the figure of Prime Minister John Howard emerged as a favourite target of assassination. Elaborate death schemes were put forth, many of which involved multiple automobile disasters and byzantine torture machinery. Twenty-one per cent of patients singled out Minister for the Environment Robert Hill as a preferred object of death, with the proposed methods of execution clearly echoing the present global devastation: death by toxic waste poisoning, melanoma and famine.

Psychotherapists concluded that the Prime Minister’s lack of any vital human traits – such as compassion, imagination or sexuality – made him a favourite vessel for various paranoid projections and erotic decontextualisations. In a minority of cases, this perceived emptiness facilitated reconceptualisation of Howard as a robot or a computer-generated image.

John Howard’s Conceptual Pudenda

Shortly before his unexplained disappearance, Dr Travis outlined the results of his research in a manuscript presently in the possession of a Federal Police Task Force.

Then Beatty got serious and ripped the governor, who once had a road crew create a huge pothole so he could be photographed filling it with a shovel of tar.

“Governing by show, by stunts, by cosmetics, by photo ops and fake events and fake issues and fake crowds and backdrops – that’s a mistake. … That concept of reality should be saved for action movies and show business.”

“We only just got around to seeing Peter Watkins’ Punishment Park – we figured we’ve waited for 35 years… what’s another week or so matter. Now we’re kicking ourselves for not getting along to the ICA sooner so we could recommend this to you guys earlier. We caught the very last screening yesterday afternoon, but we still want to mention the film as it’s due for a DVD release in the Autumn.

It’s what Watkins describes as a psychodrama as the cast are mostly not actors and the script tended to be improvised and mirrored the beliefs of those voicing them. The exception to that were some of the right-wing authority figures who were played by ex-policeman and on the whole believed that the characters portrayed in the film were a danger to society.

Society was scared enough to not watch the film again for almost four decades.

The set up is reminiscent of a couple of JG Ballard short stories in which BBC crews follow both sides of an American anti communist war that has spilled over into Britain. Where Ballard envisaged an escalation of the Vietnam war forcing a civil war over here Watkins took what was happening in the States and turned everything up a notch or two. What he came up with was the idea of Punishment Parks – vast tracks of desert where the police and national guard could practice their law enforcement techniques on political dissidents as a way to alleviate prison overcrowding. The idea is that those convicted of crimes against their country are offered the choice between lengthy jail time and a few days in the Park. Naturally most people choose the Park.”

More here.