ABOVE: Image via Hard Mag.

The following written interview with J.G. Ballard was first published in issue 1 of Hard Mag in 2005. It was conducted by Dan Mitchell and Simon Ford, the publisher and editor respectively of the magazine, and was intended to follow up some of the questions raised in Ford’s article about Ballard’s ‘Crashed Cars’ exhibition of 1970, published in the same edition. The article has since been revised and republished over at /seconds and if you’re unfamiliar with the exhibition, it makes for a great introduction. Meanwhile, the interview makes its first reappearance beyond the confines of Hard Mag here at ballardian.com.

Many thanks to Dan, Simon and Hard Mag for sanctioning this second wind.

Interview Date: March 2004 (1756 words)
Original font: Lucida Sans Typewriter Oblique (9-point)

Copyright Hard Mag 2005.

QUESTION 1
We’re interested in the reaction of the visitors to ‘Crashed Cars’. Do you think the work and a similar presentation today would elicit a similar response? Would an audience today be more detached and more self-conscious about their reactions? Are the reasons for going to such events different today from then? Was the audience likely to be more critical then? How did the audience see themselves then (today’s art world audience can be accused of looking to be seen looking good), were the visitors part of an elite, did you see them as sophisticated? Or perhaps as mere extras in a visual field dominated by your work (the grass to the cows)?

ANSWER 1
At the opening party there was wildly drunken reaction, and what seemed to be barely repressed hostility came bursting out. During the month on show the cars were attacked, daubed with paint and so on. Many visitors stared at them numbly. I don’t think there would be the same reaction today, 35 years later. Since then there have been so many provocations that the audience response to three crashed cars would be much more calm. People are still shockable today — as with the Myra Hindley handprints portrait — but nothing defuses a sense of shock more than the sense that it’s all been done before. Duchamp’s urinal would produce no gasps, in fact I think a [sic] saw it, or a replica, at the Hayward gallery some ago. No-one was looking at it. I said to my girl-friend that the only way to startle the audience would have been to urinate into the thing, which I think someone has now done. I don’t think today’s audiences are all that different. Apart from the Arts Lab regulars, the audience in 1969 were readers of International Times, rather than today’s Time Out, and people interested in any new ideas that might be floating about. They certainly weren’t extras — I was very keen to see their reactions to the cars. The whole thing was a psychological test, to see whether my hunches were sufficiently confirmed for me to go on and write Crash. They were. The show’s object was not to shock, but to prompt a response.

QUESTION 2
What would have to be done to create a similar response today, given the increased number of international artists, the larger scale of the art world, the many crossovers with global finance through sponsorship deals and the post-young British artist Tate Modern era/culture?

ANSWER 2
To shock people today is as easy as it ever was. Set up a situation that elicits pity sympathy and concern and then deride the sentiments — the Hindley portrait did that. But that kind of outrage has been devalued, and the artists with it. Besides, there are far more subtle ways of unsettling people. Think of the outrage that greeted the impressionists. Dali’s melting watches, Ernst’s eroded rocks are far more disturbing than anything dreamed up by the Turner Prize.

ABOVE: Ballard’s crashed Pontiac. Photo via The Terminal Collection.

QUESTION 3
Were the cars for sale as artworks? Did you see them as artworks, then and now? Were you asked or did you ever plan to do any more shows? What is your general attitude to the art world, did you ever want to be an artist?

ANSWER 3
They weren’t for sale, though there is a photograph of the Pontiac with a ‘£3500′ [sic] price tag in the windscreen, which I think was published in the Daily Mirror and was probably put there by the cameraman. The cars were certainly sculptures of a kind. I wasn’t asked to do any more shows. The Arts Lab closed for good soon after, and the 1970s began, a dreary decade. I saw the cars as a one off. I’ve always been very interested in painting and sculpture, which are a better key to the public’s imagination than the novel, a form that tends to resist innovation. In many ways the art world is ferociously competitive, far more than the literary world, whre [sic] writers are protected by their agents and can work in total isolation if they want to (like myself).

QUESTION 4
Was Euphoria Bliss the stripper/interviewer at the opening party? Do you have a copy or can you summarize what you described as the stripper’s ‘damning review’ she wrote for the underground paper Friendz?

ANSWER 4
No, the interviewer was not Euphoria Bliss, who was highly intelligent (and I hope still is) and completely tuned into the various projects I experimented with — stripping to a recital of a scientific paper at the ICA and so on. These were part of my then association with the magazine Ambit, for which I was trying to drum up publicity. Euphoria, who worked as a professional stripper, was extremely beautiful, and easy-going. The interviewer/stripper at the Arts Lab was recruited by someone at the gallery. She disapproved strongly of the cars, deciding that she would only appear topless (a fascinating response, it seemed to me at the time). A couple of drunken guests manhandled her in the back seat of the crashed Pontiac, and she claimed that they had tried to rape her. I can’t remember the review in detail or her name, but she was damning.

ABOVE: Euphoria Bliss holds court. Front row left to right: Euphoria, Eduardo Paolozzi, Ballard, Michael Foreman (art editor of Ambit) and Dr Martin Bax, editor of Ambit. We don’t know who the chaps at the back are. This photo was taken in 1972, at the Royal Academy of Art in front of a Paolozzi sculpture that was being exhibited.

QUESTION 5
Would you produce something similar to ‘Crashed Cars’ today? Has the car, at the same time as maintaining its position as the engine of capitalism, lost something of it’s power to signify by its very dominance and accessibility (for example, cars are smashed up for fun on quiz shows to aid the spectacle). Has the ‘crashed car’ taboo shifted, and if so to where?

ANSWER 5
I would if I wanted to test some idea, though I think those days are past for me. I think the car has retained its hold on us, partly by the way in which it elicits aggression and an illusion of freedom and partly because while driving we control the possibility of our own deaths. The Princess Di death took on extra resonance that would have been absent if she had died in a hotel fire.

QUESTION 6
Are you still interested in creating ‘posters’ that can be read as novels, or has the poster lost some of its power? If so what has it been replaced by?

ANSWER 6
Sadly, the economies of publishing are against the idea.

QUESTION 7
Was Millennium People intended as an attack on the middle classes? Compare to the 1959 short story ‘Now: Zero’, a text that kills its reader.

ANSWER 7
Not an attack, no. As one of the middle classes. I feel for their plight. Their rebellion in MP turns out to be pointless, since they are the last group who could hope to rebel — docility is in their bones. The book is about pointless violence, and pointless protest, which are increasingly around us today. It’s a waste of time looking for a motive, when the absence of a motive is the only point. This makes Hungerford, Columbine and so on impossible to predict. The Islamist attacks on New York and Madrid are another matter entirely.

ABOVE: JGB photo via Hard Mag.

QUESTION 8
Why blow up Tate Modern? Is it because it is now the representative site of contemporary high culture, an instrument of the massification of that high culture, and the ‘spiritual’ heart of new religion, a cathedral to the art of spectacle? Or is it a cultural Auschwitz? Would it be better to disseminate this culture far and wide, so there was a mini Tate in every shopping centre, or really dissolve the barrier between culture and life Helmut Newton photos used to sell Sainsbury’s economy baked beans?

ANSWER 8
My revolutionaries see Tate Modern as one of the ways in which the middle classes are brain-washed, along with education generally. (Not a view I share). The process of popularising doesn’t necessarily entail dilution or dumbing down — the Hollywood film was popular but highly original in its heyday. But the modern movement set out to be provocative and revolutionary from the start (Manet?), and popularising the avant-garde is bound to blunt the blade. The entertainment conglomerates that now rule our world can neutralise and absorb almost anything, and one needs educated feet to dance just out of reach of their embrace. People have done it — Dalí, Helmut Newton, Francis Bacon and others.

QUESTION 9
Are the middle classes really at fault here, squeezed as they are between the workers (soldiers, policemen, builders etc.) and the ruling elite who use the workers to maintain and build order? What else are they supposed to do? This comes close to a very important theme for Hard Mag, just what is the role of the middle class intellectual/artist/writer/thinker? What is the responsibility now? Have things changed much in the last 50-60 years? What would you be interested in seeing happen in the next 5-10 years? How far can you see things (such as the art spectacle, middle class attitudes of unfairness and intolerance) continuing to accelerate?

ANSWER 9
The middle classes aren’t at fault. They are the yeomen class, who have given loyal service to the feudal lord, refining their archery and swordsmanship, and now find that they are no longer needed, since the feudal lord has hired foreign mercenaries equipped with the new wonder-weapon, the flintlock. As for the special problems facing the middle-class artist — it looks as if alienation is going to be imposed on him whether he likes it or nor. Most artists and writers in the past have been middle-class, the surrealists to a man, with backgrounds similar to those of the Baader-Meinhof gang. However, the middle-class world against which they rebelled was vast and self-confident. Who today would bother to rebel against the Guardian or Observer-reading, sushi-nibbling, liberal, tolerant middle-class? I think the main target the young writer/artist should rebel against is himself or herself. Treat oneself as the enemy who needs to be provoked and subverted.

QUESTION 10
Is there a role today for an avant-garde? And if so what fields of operation are open to such an avant-garde? Is there the possibility for such an avant-garde within the art world and the world of publishing today?

ANSWER 10
Yes, though it won’t necessarily appear in the places we expect. Follow your own obsessions, use them like stepping stones. and with luck you’ll find your way into your mysterious inner self.

All the best,
J.G. Ballard

..:: MORE INFO:
+ Hard Mag

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

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

Sholto Byrnes, The Independent, 29 October, 2002.

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

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

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

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

Jonathan Brown, The Independent, 24 May, 2008.

Teacher admits threatening to blow up Bluewater shopping centre.

I wonder if they’ll arrest Ballard next.

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

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

Infinite Thought, 24 May, 2008.

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

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

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

The Menzies Building, Monash University: Conference HQ. Photo: Simon Sellars.

I recently gave a paper on Ballard at Demanding the Impossible: the Third Australian Conference on Utopia, Dystopia and Science Fiction at Monash University. The conference, spread over three days, was intensive and impossible to digest in its entirety (of the 76 papers, I attended just 15 including my own), but various themes emerged. Terry Eagleton was a keynote speaker, meaning that, as another attendee (who goes by the very academic name of ‘Superdave’) has noted, ‘A lot of the people at the conference were Marxist theorists, which is natural considering the theme. Marx may have condemned utopianism, but Marxism is essentially utopian nonetheless–as its repeated failure attests.’

DAY 1: Welcome, Catastrophe

The work of Kim Stanley Robinson seemed to be a focal point, from what I gathered from some of the papers and from many of the conversations I engaged in. On the first day, keynote speaker Tom Moylan, in his talk entitled ‘Making the Present Impossible: On the Vocation of Utopian Science Fiction’, took up Fredric Jameson’s assertion that Robinson’s Mars trilogy is the ideal expression of utopian literature, in that it presents multiple possibilities for utopian expression and moves between them in a state of flux. As Moylan said, this type of work ‘nominates and explores new alternatives, not to find immediate answers, but to alleviate and enlighten political strategy.’ As I tried to tease out in my own paper, I see Ballard’s Rushing to Paradise as fulfilling a not-too-dissimilar function, my conclusion being that this book (and, to a lesser extent, the rest of what I term Ballard’s ‘Pacific fictions’) is both uniquely Ballardian and exquisitely Jamesonian.

Moylan’s presentation basically served as an introduction to current utopian thought in literature. Again echoing Jameson, it concluded that the form, rather than being associated with the nasty stench of various dictatorships that have co-opted utopianism in the name of genocide, should be reclaimed and thought of as ‘a device to cut through quotidian reality and open up a gap through which we can see a better world.’ There was an interesting question from the audience, in which Moylan was asked, ‘If utopian writing should be conceived as a disruption, an alternative, should it therefore embody disruptive, ie, experimental, form?’ Moylan’s answer was, ‘Perhaps, but the virtue of SF is that it’s both immediate and accessible’, and this exchange immediately made me think of recent conversations in which people have wondered why Ballard abandoned the experimental form of The Atrocity Exhibition for more conventional structures and narratives. My feeling is along similar lines to Moylan, that the subversive value of Ballard’s later work lies precisely in the fact that it is ‘immediate and accessible’.

As Iain Sinclair has said, Ballard ‘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.’

My paper, ‘Zones of Transit: J.G. Ballard’s Pacific Fictions’, was in the early afternoon and I was pleased that it was well received. Thinking back I wish I’d included footage or slides of A-bomb tests and perhaps some photos of the WWII aircraft I found abandoned in the North Pacific jungles. Still, my paper seemed accessible enough, even though, disappointingly, I was asked just half a question (directed to me and the other speaker on my panel, who also referenced Ballard). That paucity would normally be a sign of audience incomprehension, but to my relief a few people told me in the break that they enjoyed my presentation. And to also tell me that they love Ballard but can’t stand Rushing to Paradise. Well, I don’t think it’s Ballard’s best work at all but the ideas are most intriguing and underexplored compared to the rest of his canon. I’ll refrain from further comment as I think I’ll post my paper here in the New Year.

The question asked of myself and the other speaker was, ‘If Ballard is essentially writing the same story over and over again, does that therefore spell the end of the concept of utopia as a historical concern?’ The audience member used Ballard’s ‘Ronald Reagan’ piece from Atrocity (as prefiguring anti-celebrity culture) and Crash (as prefiguring cyber- and virtual sex) and their temporal location in the late 60s and early 70s as examples of the writer mining a prophetic wave of inspiration and then revising and refining that template to the present day. I wasn’t entirely sure of the point of this question, so my rambled and thoroughly non-academic answer was that Ballard, of course, is out of time (or ahead of his time, if anything), and if he has been writing the same thing since the 1960s, that simply means to me that the rest of us are still yet to catch up. As to the utopian angle, to my understanding Ballard has never been especially concerned with the past or the future, or any sense of historicity, focusing instead on a collapsed present, and that in any case it’s arguable as to whether his work is utopian (or rather, dystopian) at all. Instead, as I tried to make clear in the paper, the notion of an ‘affirmative dystopia’ is the key to his work, an oscillation between the poles that is neither one nor the other, but that plays on the elements of both. Actually I was a little surprised that Ballard was so under-represented in the rest of the conference: like I say I don’t classify him as a straight utopian or dystopian writer, but his work very definitely plays with the conventions in an innovative and provocative fashion.

With my paper out of the way, I made it to an afternoon panel featuring Kate Rigby, whose paper, ‘Apocalypse Now: Whither Utopianism in the Midst of Catastrophe?’, was rooted in reality, in an acceptance of the parlous state of climate change and the notion that things are only going to get worse. What role, asked Kate, can utopianism serve in the face of such a dire state of affairs? Looking to the biblical narrative of Noah’s Ark, she examined ‘non-human’ life and called for a ‘radical extension of hospitality towards more than only human others’ as a means to mobilise action in a world in which the utopian impulse seems to be well and truly exhausted as we slide downwards into eco-disaster.

Now this was a very stimulating presentation, with issues you could really sink your teeth into. Of course, what I wanted to ask Kate was, informed by Ballard’s early eco-disaster novels, how does one account for the fact that there actually might be a certain strata of the populace that would welcome the catastrophe for whatever reasons: psychological, psychopathological, aesthetic, evolutionary, etc. But I was beaten to the punch by another attendee. In response to Kate’s assertion that ‘If we see the apocalypse as a purifying event, that almost legitimises inaction’, he said (and I’m paraphrasing from memory), ‘There’s an unwarranted belief that eco-disaster can be averted. The world will run down of its own accord anyway, so why bother prolonging the inevitable for our children and grandchildren, who may only grasp a habitable world for just a few generations’.

Kate’s response was that for her it’s an ethical question, it’s ‘about allowing life to flourish, for however long that may be’. I wish I’d had the insight to follow this up along Ballardian lines, but I was still mulling all of this over as this exchange was talking place. Unfortunately I’m a bit slow like that. Interestingly, Geoff Manaugh asked something similar of Kim Stanley Robinson in their recent BLDGBLOG interview, and Robinson’s answer is perhaps similar to how Kate may have responded:

Robinson: The crash scenario that people think of … as an escape to freedom would actually be so damaging that it wouldn’t be fun. It wouldn’t be an adventure. It would merely be a struggle for food and security, and a permanent high risk of being robbed, beaten, or killed; your ability to feel confident about your own – and your family’s and your children’s – safety would be gone. People who fail to realize that… I’d say their imaginations haven’t fully gotten into this scenario.

After Kate’s presentation I sat in on the Comparative Utopias workshop (overheard before I went in: ‘What on earth is a utopias workshop? Lessons in how to build a utopia?’). This was useful in that it extrapolated the utopian impulse beyond Western culture, although, as Jacqueline Dutton asserted, ‘There’s no real tradition of utopias outside the West’. But for me, Roberto Gonzalez-Casanovas‘s paper, ‘Utopian and Dystopian Typologies of Arawaks vs. Caribs: Relativising Cannibals in Colonial Myth and Postcolonial Critique’ was the standout, with its fascinating account of the role cannibal cultures have played in the Western mythos, as a composite cut-out, symbolising and embodying the insecurities and ambitions of the West.

And that was it for me for the first day. On the train home, I sat next to a retired chap who’d been at the conference. Funnily enough, he wasn’t even remotely involved in academia — instead, he was your archetypal sci fi ‘fanboy’ who told me he has worn Star Trek outfits at conventions. He’s a smart and engaged chap who came along to gain a different perspective on science fiction, and this to me was a sign of the conference’s success.

DAY 2: The Eagle(ton) Has Landed

The Menzies Building, Monash University: Conference HQ. Photo: Simon Sellars.

I missed Day 2 as I had to work, but I was informed that Eagleton’s presentation, ‘Utopia and the New Testament’, was like stand-up comedy. See Superdave’s blog for info on Day 2 and for some Eagleton hot gossip… (he calls it ‘Day 3′ on his blog but he’s actually talking about Day 2).

DAY 3: This Argument Did Not Take Place

The Menzies Building, Monash University: Conference HQ. Photo: Simon Sellars.

Australian SF and fantasy author Lucy Sussex was the keynote speaker for the third day. As Andrew Milner noted when introducing her, ‘Lucy, unlike those of us in academia with our tenure, actually lives off her writing’. And she’s very good at it, too. Lucy’s presentation, ‘A Tour Guide in Utopia’, for me was the highlight of the conference. Her style was witty and imaginative, taking the time to explore the absurdities of her subject matter.

Lucy took us through the history of utopian literature in Australia, from 100 years ago to now. The early account was fascinating as I had no idea there was such a strong utopian tradition in Australian writing — it’s something ‘official’ histories never discuss. Early Australian utopias, as Lucy explained, were propelled by a stew of influences, including the threat of Western Australia seceding, the advent of Federation, the prospect of New Zealand becoming a state of Australia, and from elsewhere, the advent of Freud, electricity, Einstein, Marconi, Wells, suffragettes, you name it.

For Lucy, Australian politics today cries out for the form to be revived and she pointed to some examples that take up the call, with the caveat that dystopian literature has replaced the utopian mode in Australian writing, fuelled by the Howard government and Australia’s involvement in the ‘War on Terror’. She referred to an Australian novel that sounded most intriguing (unfortunately I’ve lost the author’s name), with its vision of terrorists beheading their victims, and via some weird technology, forcing them to live on in a kind of half-life as headless slaves. I can’t quite get that image out of my head and I must seek out that book. If anyone knows of it, let me know. Lucy also mentioned Andrew McGahan’s novel Underground, which depicts Canberra wiped out in a jihad attack. Imprisoned in Parliament House, the protagonist has nothing to read but Hansard — a vision of hell if ever there was one.

Lucy finished up by relating the answers she was given when she asked some prominent writers about the need for utopian writing today. Ursula Le Guin said (and, again, excuse my paraphrasing from memory), ‘How can anyone draw up a blueprint for utopia when science and technology today are changing so rapidly?’ While for Dorothy Porter, ‘The Howard Government’s years were a literal dystopia. I didn’t need to write about it.’

That was a wonderful note to end on.

At lunchtime I got chatting to a chap who informed me that he identified as a Marxist but that his university department was all Derridean; the way he told it, it was like he was a black man who had wandered into a Klu Klux Klan meeting. When he asked what I identified as, I was stumped and eventually answered, ‘a Ballardian?’, which was very lame, I know. Then he was stumped too. And then we had some more wine and talked about something else.

In the afternoon I chaired a panel on utopian themes in film. Both papers were uniformly excellent. Julia Vassileva’s paper, ‘On Imagination, Energy and Excess: the Lasting Legacy of Eisenstein’s Utopias’, was a deep examination of the manner in which Eisenstein, like Freud, sought to ‘represent the non-representational’. Julia made the excellent point that for Eisenstein, the use of montage generates a parallel narrative that makes ambiguous comment on the main narrative, a stimulating concept with vast utopian potential. As Julia explained, for Eisenstein who ‘dreamed of a classless society’, utopian ideals were simply not able to be realised in the time in which he lived. However ‘it is the very insistence on utopian ideals despite a knowledge of their impossibility that creates the inner spring’ — or an energy that can be realised — a similar conclusion reached by other speakers examining other writers and artists at the conference.

Rachel Torbett’s paper, ‘The Silence Afterwards: Lyotard with Haneke’s “Le Temps du Loup”‘ focused on Haneke’s film “Le Temps du Loup”, with its post-apocalyptic world in which the catastrophe is never explained and which is alluded to only in the most oblique of terms. Rachel played an edited copy of the film behind her, timed to finish when her paper finished, a fabulous touch that really enhanced her presentation. For Rachel, ‘Speculating on the human opens up a space of indeterminacy’ and she noted that this film accomplishes that, with its vision of ‘gross inhumanity’ and the barbarism that people descend into when their technological safety nets are stripped away (a Ballardian theme too, as it happens; earlier Rachel had told me she had originally considered a paper on Ballard’s High-Rise). Weaving Lyotard into this argument, she explored the concept of the ‘sublime’ and how the film presents ‘the threat that something will happen in this void; that it’s not over’. I hadn’t seen the film, but with the video behind her I clearly saw how Haneke, with his use of darkness and snatched, whispered dialogue fully explores this idea, as characters lose themselves in the landscape which is shot in fading, natural light.

For Rachel, the problems raised in the film ‘linger because they go unresolved’. Withholding vital information from the audience, then presenting a final scene in which a train passes through a countryside that is beautiful once again, Haneke promises pleasure emerging from the terror only for it to be deferred as we realise that we don’t know who is on the train, where they are going or what they intend to do. The endpoint, I believe, was that we ultimately come to question the notion of ‘humanity’ itself and whether it is to be desired at all. This paper made me want to explore Haneke’s work in more detail, and watching the extracts from the film, I couldn’t help but compare that ending with Children of Men’s, in which the humanity is virtually rammed down your throat.

After this I caught Andrew Milner‘s paper, which he co-wrote with Robert Savage. The paper derived from a great central conceit: what would happen if the German philosopher Ernst Bloch had included the Golden Age of science fiction in his ‘magnum opus’ The Principle of Hope? (Originally Milner and Savage had planned to write a short story exploring this idea; that would have made a great paper.) Bloch wrote of ‘the colportage novel, the circus and the fairy tale’, but ignored the SF pulps, which were being produced at the same time he was working. Milner then took us through an examination of utopian themes in the pulps. All in all an engaging paper. Andrew is a hyperactive speaker, almost tripping over his own words in his enthusiasm for his subject matter, an infectiousness transmitted to the audience.

And then the conference, for me, was over (there was another workshop but I had to leave).

That night I was having drinks with some friends when someone I didn’t know wandered into the group and heard me talking about Ballard, Baudrillard and the conference. Immediately he began attacking me, saying that Baudrillard (and Ballard) believe that nothing is real, and that they are wrong and irresponsible. He kept saying that the body is real, that if someone attacks you on the street then you will bleed, you may even die, and you will then know that your corporeal self is very very real, and not part of some fantasy virtual reality theory. None of which I’ve ever argued against. Weary from too many beers and suddenly being put on the spot and forced to defend theory in the middle of a packed and noisy pub filled with steroid heads and Paris Hilton clones, I tried to explain that my interest in media landscapes, informed by Ba(udri)llard, lies in the way advertising and media has changed to become nomadic, fluid and omnidirectional, rather than top-down, hierarchical and sticky, and that because the so-called spectacle is so complete and so enveloping, this renders traditional notions of ‘authentic’ behaviour obsolete. (Behind me, as if to emphasise my point, one of the Paris clones threw up on the pavement). But this doesn’t mean I believe that nothing is real, even though I may feel overwhelming ennui and deflation, even something approximating fear, from time to time because of it. It’s purely a mode of enquiry into something that’s basically unanswerable, but still worth questioning for anyone remotely interested in the forces of cultural production in the early 21st century. In fact, the idea of the mediated ‘spectacle’ is so ingrained now in popular culture that it — in and of itself — has become a tedious marketing cliche in films and advertising (cf. the Matrix, with its pop-cult take on Baudrillard, and hyperware and self-reflexive ads that consistently ‘break’ the frame), so it was somewhat surprising to hear someone argue that there was no such thing.

Even more shocking, I couldn’t believe this guy was dredging up a stock argument against Baudrillard, an argument over 10 years old in fact, regurgitating the whole ‘Gulf War Did Not Happen’ gambit and using that to discredit him. I mean, honestly, this is such an old and tired argument. After all these years I don’t think you need me to explain that Baudrillard was not claiming that the physical event of war didn’t happen, but that the war was the first to be almost entirely mediated by technology and therefore was not ‘real’ according to traditional theatres of warfare. And that that notion is very applicable to today, in the midst of our pervasive and all-invasive FaceSpace culture. But this just didn’t wash with this fellow, and he kept pushing and pushing until I finally asked him what he studied at university. Surely nothing French?

And he said: ‘Derrida. I’m a Derridean, of course. A realist’.

Derrida? A realist? That’s a new one on me.

(By the way, see the blog Obscene Desserts, in which Anja relates a similar scenario — only in reverse, and in Germany).

..:: Previously on Ballardian
+ ‘If I had a pound for every time someone mentioned psychopathology’: A Review of the First International Conference on the Work of J.G. Ballard

Dom passes on news of yet another Ballard mini-interview, this time in the December 2007 edition of SFX Magazine. It’s just a series of quotes pasted onto the above photo, with the terrible title, ‘Never Mind the Ballards’.

Here’s the full text:

NEVER MIND THE BALLARDS
J.G. Ballard is still fascinated by the future, even though he doesn’t write SF anymore.

“I haven’t written any science fiction for a long time, probably not since the end of the ’60s. Novels like Crash and my recent novel Kingdom Come are not science fiction. So I’ve moved away from science fiction but I’m still very much interested in the next five minutes.”

“You don’t know what’s going to happen in the world because we’re going through a time of huge and dangerous change. The century practically started with the 9/11 tragedy at the World Trade Center and it looks as if it’s going to go on the way it started. There’s an ever-present threat of terrorist violence.”

“I’m interested in the future because I like to know what’s going to happen. Whether my own novels have stood the test of time, I can’t really say but the thing about the future is that it has arrived. If you’re writing about the present day, it’s impossible not to write about the future as well. It’s sort of pressing on the door, the social and political change.”

“The dominant fear now is the fear of Islamic terrorism. That is the future and it’s not likely to go away for a while. It’s difficult not to write about the future.”

“None of my books are being made into films at the moment, all is quiet. A lot of Philip K Dick’s books have been filmed; they fit the American mood. His novels are very paranoid and I think that touches a nerve in America.”

Firstly, John emailed to inform me of a new Washington Times interview with David Cronenberg, in which the Baron of Blood makes this rather curious remark:

There’s an eroticism involved, certainly in ‘Crash,’ and I really saw that in the beheading videos. They looked like homosexual gang rapes with all the chanting and so on. It was pretty obvious to me, though [the terrorists] would be in total denial about that. There are strange, perverse elements to violence.

Meanwhile, Amplification, a dance performance based on stories of victims of automobile accidents, was choreographed by Phillip Adams (a Melbourne fellow like me, I note) and recently performed in Albany in the US:

“Amplification,” inspired in part by J.G. Ballard’s 1973 novel “Crash” and David Cronenberg’s 1996 film adaptation, takes the harrowing elements of a head-on collision and injects them, surprisingly, with grace and humor. The movements of a body in a crash ricocheting against the steering wheel, flipping upside down, being ejected out a window are translated into extended dance sequences. In another section, dancers are folded and rolled on the floor inside white sheets that resemble shrouds.

[ via TimC ]

Finally, the ‘philosophical prankster’ Tom McCarthy was interviewed recently in the Independent, and Ballard was invoked as an influence. On top of this, it’s worth going back to an interview with McCarthy from late last year, where he has some pertinent things to say about Crash:

Ballard says we’ve collapsed the future into the present and we’re surrounded by fictions and fantasies from which we can pick at will. He says that the writer’s job is to invent the reality. I like that, that’s very good.
…
Crash was a big influence. It’s more the repetition side of things than the technology. Ballard’s hero Vaughan re-enacts car crashes of the rich and famous. He’s also obsessed with becoming authentic, as is Ballard-the-character-in-the-book. He keeps saying things like ‘the car crash was the first real thing that had happened to me’. The heroes of both Crash and Remainder use re-enactment and stylised violence as a portal towards the real – and fail spectacularly, excessively, luxuriously.
…
Ballard is fascinating because he’s a great writer without even being a good one. I don’t mean this negatively: I’m a huge fan. But he doesn’t care about polished prose (compare his sentences to Nabokov or Updike and they look like pulp) or depth of character. Having said that, Crash has an intense lyricism that comes from its almost incantatory, modulated repetition of technological and sociological terms, and Vaughan is a much truer presence for me than, say, some boring ‘rounded’ figure out of Jane Austen. That’s the great thing about Ballard: he’s got a vision, he’s a visionary, that makes him great, and the niceties he doesn’t bother with. He knows exactly where he stands in this respect. I talked to him once and told him my theory that Crash was a re-write of Don Quixote, whose hero also re-enacts stylised violent moments on the public highways in a bid for ‘authenticity’, and also fails fabulously – and he answered: ‘Your theory is great, but I’ve never read Don Quixote. I don’t really read proper books, I’m very low-brow.’ Genius.

‘Obscene mannequins’. ‘Conceptual deaths’. The eroticisation of violence in the media landscape… the stunning ‘State of Emergency’ spread in the current Vogue Italia seems to come straight out of JG Ballard’s Atrocity Exhibition…

A few weeks ago, I asked whether it would be possible ‘for there to be a pornography, sponsored by Dior or Chanel, scripted by a latter-day Masoch or Ballard, whose fantasies were as artfully staged as the most glamorous fashion photo shoot?’ Steven Meisel’s Vogue photo-shoot, much more than Mike Figgis’s drearily vanilla promotional films for Agent Provocateur, suggests that such a pornography is conceivable.

‘State of Emergency’ shows, once again, that it is left to high fashion to take up the role that fine art has all but abandoned. While much of fine art has succumbed to the ‘passion for the real’, high fashion remains the last redoubt of Appearance and Fantasy.

The used tampons and pickled animals of Reality Art offer, at best, tracings of the empirical. Their quaint biographism reveals nothing of the unconscious. Meisel’s elegantly-staged photographs, meanwhile, drip with an ambivalence worthy of the best Surrealist paintings. They are uncomfortable and arousing in equal measure because they reflect back to us our conflicted attitudes and unacknowledged libidinal complicities. (In this respect, they form a sharp contrast with the infinitely more exploitative image being used to front the American Express Red campaign, whose meaning is easily anchored to the co-ordinates of the currently dominant ideological constellation.)

Reframed as Art, the Vogue photographs would no doubt be described — in the all-too familiar terms of art-critical muzak — as ‘negotiating with ideas of violence/ terror/ etc.’ As high fashion, they meet instead with a type of liberal denunciation that is no less familiar. In the Guardian, Joanna Bourke complained that, ‘It is no coincidence that the security forces are shown to be protecting us from a person who is neither male nor obviously Muslim’. Would Bourke have preferred it, then, if the images did feature a Muslim man?

Bourke continues:

Instead, the terrorist threat is an unreal woman. In contrast to the security personnel depicted, she is placed beyond the realm of the human. Her skin is as plastic as a mannequin’s; her body is too perfect, even when grimacing in pain. When the model is depicted as the aggressor, she remains nothing more than the phallic dominatrix of many adolescent boys’ wet dreams. In both instances, the beauty of the photographs transforms acts of violence and humiliation into erotic possibilities.

Again, what would Bourke have preferred: simulated snuff in which ‘real-looking’ women were roughed up by security staff? Bourke’s hostility to the fantasmatic is oddly doubled by the aggression of the security personnel towards the ‘unreal’ women. And what does it mean to substitute an ‘unreal woman’ for an all-too-real Muslim male, in any case? What does the confusion of ontological levels — agents of reality conjoined with the waxy artificiality of Bellmer-doll fashion models — tell us? The photographs are fascinating and unsettling because there are no straightforward answers to these questions.

Needless to say, Meisel’s photographs do find erotic possibilities in violence and humiliation, but this is not so much a ‘transformation’ as a rediscovery. Two hundred years after Sade, a century after Bataille and Masoch, it appears that anything which publicly acknowledges that eroticism is inseparable from violence and humiliation is more unacceptable than ever. The issue is not how ‘healthy’ sexuality can be purged of violence, but how the violence inherent to sexuality can be sublimated. Meisel’s photographs — which, we should remember, appear in a magazine the vast majority of whose readership is not ‘adolescent males’ but women — are ‘fantasy kits’ which offer just such sublimations, providing scenarios, role-play cues and potential fantasmatic identifications.

‘State of Emergency’ demonstrates that, rather than simply retaining its capacity to shock, The Atrocity Exhibition is more disturbing than ever. The overt sexualisation and compulsory carnality of postmodern image culture distracts us from the essential staidness of its rendition of the erotic. As Baudrillard argues in Seduction, biologised sex functions as the reality principle of contemporary culture: everything is reducible to sex, and sex is just a matter of meat mechanics. Ours is an age of cynicism and piety, which, as Simon suggested in his initial post on ‘State of Emergency’, primly and pruriently resists the equivalences between eroticism, violence and celebrity that Ballard explored.

Entering the exhibition, Travis sees the atrocities of Vietnam and the Congo mimetised in the ‘alternate’ death of Elizabeth Taylor; he tends the dying film star, eroticising her punctured bronchus in the over-ventilated verandas of the London Hilton; he dreams of Max Ernst, superior of the birds’.

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JG Ballard, The Atrocity Exhibition
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To imagine the atrocities of September 11th and Abu Ghraib mimetised in the alternate death of Paris Hilton feels far more unacceptable, because contemporary piety has sacralised its atrocities in a way that the 60s could not. In Atrocity, Dr Nathan’s reminder that, at the level of the unconscious, ‘the tragedies of Cape Kennedy and Vietnam…may in fact play very different parts from the ones we assign them’ is extremely timely. (As Burroughs tells us in his preface to The Atrocity Exhibition, ‘Surveys indicate that wet dreams in many cases have no overt sexual content, whereas dreams with an overt sexual content in many cases do not result in orgasm’.) It is clear that the appalling Abu Ghraib photographs were already intensely eroticised stagings whose scenarios were derived from cheap American pornography. Love and Napalm: Export USA, indeed*. Part of the reason that the Abu Ghraib images were so traumatic for a deeply conflicted American culture which combines religious moralism with hyper-sexualised commerce, and which is united only by a taste for megaviolence, is that they exposed the equation between military intervention and sexual humiliation that the official culture both depends upon and must suppress.

It’s interesting to compare both The Atrocity Exhibition and ‘State of Emergency’ to Martha Rosler’s series of collages, Bringing the War Home. ‘Sixties iconography: the nasal prepuce of LBJ, crashed helicopters, the pudenda of Ralph Nader, Eichmann in drag, the climax of a New York happening: a dead child’: this typical section from The Atrocity Exhibition could almost be a gloss on Rosler’s images, with their irruptions of war and atrocity amidst domestic scenes. But in Rosler’s case, unlike in Ballard’s, surrealist juxtaposition has a clear polemical purpose. The Atrocity Exhibition, like ‘State of Emergency’, is devoid of any decipherable intent; the oneiric juxtapositions in Ballard’s and Meisel’s work seemed to be conceived of as neutral re-presentations of the substitutions and elisions made by the mediatised unconscious.

Meisel’s fantasy kits, their narratives left implicit and mysterious, suggest ways in which Ballard might be adapted in future. Part of the problem with Weiss’s film adaptation of The Atrocity Exhibition is that it subordinated the fragmentary mode of the novel to the duree — the lived time — of the feature film. The most successful part of the film was perhaps the first few moments, where Ballard’s text was intoned over still images in a style reminiscent of Marker’s La Jetee (a film which Ballard adores, of course). That is partly because it is the profound stillness of the Surrealist paintings which The Atrocity Exhibition describes and appropriates — their beaches drained of time — which sets the rhythm of the novel. The most successful adaptation of The Atrocity Exhibition would, precisely, be an exhibition — not only of photographs, but also of newsreel footage, mandalas, diagrams, paintings and notebooks. It would be left for the viewer-participant to assemble their own narratives from these fantasy kits.

k-punk

————————————————————————————————
*Love and Napalm: Export USA — title of The Atrocity Exhibition’s original American edition
————————————————————————————————

..:: LINKS
+ Buy The Atrocity Exhibition from Amazon
+ State of Emergency: scans from the mag
+ k-punk

On 14 September 2006 JG Ballard gave a reading from his new novel, Kingdom Come, and talked to Robert McCrum of the Observer at the Institute of Education, London — the evening was presented by Blackwell. Looking rather dapper and displaying a sharpness and wit that puts people half his age to shame, Ballard talked about his childhood and influences before touching on some of the big questions of our age: consumerism, Islamic terrorism and the communications revolution.

Ben Austwick

——————————————————————————————–
STOP PRESS: Rattling Other People’s Cages, Ballardian’s new interview with J.G. Ballard, is now online.
——————————————————————————————–

ROBERT McCRUM: Your books are very funny.

JG BALLARD: I tend to be a bit on the deadpan side I think, to put it mildly. The surrealists use a sort of serious humour, and I flatter myself to think I’m in that area too. But it’s a dangerous area to be in. Americans in particular find my stuff very confusing: “What, is he serious?”

There’s one passage in Kingdom Come about a hostage siege in the Metro Centre. This must have been informed in part by your experiences of the war. Do your experiences of China and Shanghai in the Second World War still resonate in your work?

Well, they probably do, even though it was a long time ago. People do get over unhappy experiences in their childhood. War is a terrific revelation, there’s no doubt about it, whether you’re a civilian or a combatant. In many ways I think it’s more of a revelation if you’re a civilian because you’re so powerless.

I had the most comfortable, ex-pat life in the Far East then abruptly woke up one morning — the morning of Pearl Harbour — and everything had changed. Seeing my parents frightened was an education in its own right, and being interned in the camps made such an impression. It’s something very few children know in the West. It separated those who could cope from those who couldn’t. People were sort of boiled down to their reduced essence: meanness, courage, generosity, eccentricity. I think the whole idea of life as a sort of stage set, which it is, registered itself forever in my brain.

‘I feel like I’ve stepped into a time capsule…’
JG Ballard, on his return to Shanghai (still from the BBC documentary ‘Shanghai Jim’, 1991)

At that point, at the age of eleven or twelve, did you know you wanted to be a writer?

Yes, I did. But I was writing even before the war, in the late 1930s.

My mother based her whole life as far as I know on playing bridge and drinking large martinis. She died at the age of 93, a wonderful advertisement for the misspent life. I mentioned the two-martini lunch to her and she said, “Two martinis? Five martinis”. She never worked, of course — I don’t think the idea ever entered her mind. Her job was to run the home and arrange dinner parties.

She spent an enormous amount of time playing bridge and gossiping, real character assassinations, whilst passing this small child around. I didn’t know who the heck they were talking about, but was fascinated by the game and its bidding system — two hearts, three no-trumps and so on — and I thought, ‘what on earth does all this mean?’ It was a sort of code and I wanted to figure it out. So I asked my mother to explain the conventions. She did and I thought ‘my God!’ I was so inspired that I actually wrote a little book on how to play contract bridge. I think the gigantic moralistic strain in my fiction that everyone comments on probably stems from that first effort to set the world to rights.

And when you were that age, what was the young JG Ballard reading?

I was reading everything.

To come back to Kingdom Come, for those of you haven’t read it yet, in a way it’s in the genre of the detective story.

Detective novels are a genre I’ve never really read. I’ve read Raymond Chandler, but I never read all the classic Agatha Christie novels that were published at the time I was growing up.

What did you read at the time?

I read children’s versions of Robinson Crusoe, Alice in Wonderland and so on. I read boy’s annuals and Boy’s Own paperbacks. I read American best sellers: extraordinary books like All this and Heaven Too, which most of this audience will be too young to have read, but is an amazing, emotional novel. Even at the age of nine I could see that. I read American comics. I devoured magazines: Time, Life, the Saturday Evening Post. I was a real magpie.

Some writers have said — I’m thinking of VS Naipul here, and there are a number of others — that when one has grown up in the British Empire, one knows England through pictures, through books, and the extraordinary shock of coming to London and seeing the city which they’d read about, which they’ve seen through the eyes of Dickens or whoever it may be. When you came to England, was it a shock?

Yes, it was. It was a huge shock. From reading the Just William books and Winnie the Pooh I thought everybody lived in Kensington. But there was something wrong: not only had three quarters of the population never even been referred to, but large parts of the place had been bombed to the ground. I found it extremely difficult to cope, frankly.

I’m going to quote back to you something you wrote in Kingdom Come: “Like English life as a whole, nothing in Brooklands can be taken at face value”.

Oh, that’s true. Everything — when I arrived, and to some extent now — was coded. It was all a matter of private languages and house rules. It didn’t matter where you were, there was a way of paying a bill, a way of ordering a meal in a restaurant, a way of buying tickets at a ticket office. Everything was calculated to convey a message of some sort — social status, generally speaking.

You were figuring out how to live here.

Still am, still am.

Let me just say at this point, it’s the 50th anniversary today of the publishing of Jim’s first story, ‘Prima Belladonna’, in 1956 in a magazine called Science Fantasy.

I didn’t know!

How did you get to the point where you writing stories like ‘Prima Belladonna’?

I read medicine at Cambridge University, working with cadavers and so on, which was a very important experience. It gave my imagination a huge repertoire of images that have sustained my fiction.

But I knew I was going to become a writer. The problem was in those days it was very difficult to make a start. I wasn’t anywhere near ready to write a novel. I had all this extraordinary experience from the war, but I wasn’t anywhere near making sense of it all.

I read Horizon, which was a very serious literary journal. I read New Statesman, the Observer, and I thought this was what writing was about. You doffed your cap to the grand practitioners of modernism: James Joyce, Kafka. I thought a writer, a serious writer, was someone who wrote within that sort of context. The problem was, when I wrote in that sort of way it wasn’t very good, or original, and I couldn’t get it published.

When I was in the RAF, based in Canada, at about 24 years old, I came across a science fiction magazine — lurid cover, a space monster grappling with a half-naked blonde — and when I turned the pages, inside I found the stories were far more serious than you might think. These were the sort of stories that Kingsley Amis, to his credit, realised constituted a kind of invisible literature. I felt a sort of jolt of recognition. Here’s a fiction about the present day that owed nothing to aping past models. It had vitality, endless vitality, which was absent from the then British literary scene. The serious writers I admired, Lawrence Durrell, Graham Greene, later Anthony Burgess, all lived abroad, and I sort of understood why.

Here was a fiction about advertising, the media landscape, television, the threat of nuclear war, and I thought, ‘this is something I’ll have a go at’. I thought there’s endless possibilities with this fiction — something can be done with it, and this is my job. For the first ten to fifteen years of my career I couldn’t believe I was seen as being a science-fiction writer, because in the science-fiction field I wasn’t that at all –they loathed me. I was a virus that had entered their immaculate cell, infiltrating their cellular machinery to create this cancerous monster. I was Public Enemy Number One. I went to one or two science fiction conventions and was almost physically assaulted.

In one of the editions of Crash, you write, “The fiction is already there. It is up to us to invent the reality”.

I think that is pretty true on one level. We live in a world of entertainment culture that’s informed by relentless television, hundreds of channels, by advertising, by politics conducted as a branch of advertising, by consumerism as a whole. It’s seen as a reality because people are quite serious about it, but it’s completely devoid of real elements.

My father as a young man, or my grandfather as a young man, or my grandmother, would have recognised reality. They had a clear understanding that reality was work. That isn’t true any more. The whole thing is a huge fiction. This is why we’ve sort of lost our direction as a nation. We assume that everyday reality is as real as in our grandparents’ time. I think even our present Prime Minister is to some extent a prisoner of his own fantasy world, who doesn’t realise it and has started to believe his own fictions.

I don’t think it can be reversed — the other world, the reality, has become so fictionalised. Any points of reality we have are in our own heads. Our obsessions. Nodes of anger, greed, hope, the need to remythologise our lives — these are the only realities we have. To my father’s and grandfather’s generation all that was just nonsense. ‘You’re dreaming boy. Go to work. Wake up’. There’s been a sort of switch of polarities.

I want to ask how important your writing style is. Is it something you’re aware of?

I don’t give much thought to style, which is probably a fault.

The message seems to be much more important than character.

Yes. I’m not really interested in characterisation, I’m much more interested in psychological roles.

It’s something you’ve been criticised for.

Yes, and it’s probably too late to change. I’ve always loved case histories. The sort of things you get in textbooks, you know: ‘Mrs Ash was sitting on a train from Potter’s Bar to Paddington, when she noticed that God was sitting opposite her’. The textbook takes this very seriously. It’s governed by the situation. Her basic situation, the psychological role this woman finds herself in, is very interesting. There’s nothing about her mother in law, or her role in the Women’s Institute, because she’s seen God! That’s what’s interesting about this woman: a psychological revelation. That’s much more interesting than any trivia about where she buys her shoes.

We actually know very little about the characters in our lives, the people we deal with. Every husband in the land I’m sure has woken up next to his wife after five years and thought, ‘I hardly know her and I share a bed with her’. But they’re very happily married. We can be very close to people and know next to nothing about them. Character doesn’t reveal itself that obviously. To create a fully rounded character takes an enormous amount of time. It’s not a matter of just a few little flicks of the wrist.

You’re always described as the Seer of Shepperton.

Well, that’s a joke.

In 1967 you wrote a story called “Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan”, in which you predicted the Reagan presidency. And of course there’s Crash which predicts all kinds of things, so you have foreseen a few things.

I don’t know. I haven’t done a count. I see myself as a weatherman. I look at the sky, read the weather — that’s all I think I’m doing actually. I can see a storm coming. I think we live in frightening times.

Going back to your last book, Millennium People, which deals with a kind of terrorism, when you were writing it were you tempted at all to write about the War on Terror, or even allude to it?

The thing about the War on Terror and Islamic terrorism is that so far — thank God — it’s had a very limited scope. Whereas there’s a strange, cultural shift that I’ve been watching over the last 45 years since I came to England: the airport culture, the motorway culture, CCTV cameras, all the rest of it. People like alienation, curiously enough. They like disposability. Friendships that last half an hour. Things have changed, and one can’t help but notice.

Here and there in the novel I talk about inner London, what I call heritage London, by which I don’t just mean Bloomsbury, the Tower of London, Westminster Abbey — I mean Muswell Hill, Holland Park. A middle-class London held together by dinner-party culture. I admit I’ve been part of it. It sustains a view of England as a place of Georgian rectories and so on. It is not. If you want to see the real England, go out to the M25 motorway towns, where it’s almost impossible to buy a book, say a prayer. The old civic virtues have gone and we have a throwaway, disposable culture — which is prone to takeover, frankly. There’s been a sort of shift.

‘Every car had a St George’s flag’. Photo by Simon Crubellier.

The takeover would be what you call soft fascism?

Yes. It could happen. I live in Shepperton, a small town. There’s about forty or fifty shops on the high street. During the World Cup every one of them had a large St George’s flag in the window; every car had a St George’s flag flowing from it. One of my neighbours erected a flagpole. I looked out of my bedroom window and I saw a flagpole! Where do you get a flagpole? I wouldn’t know where to start.

I thought, ‘something’s happening here’. I’ve speculated that the white working class is tribalising itself. Waves of immigration have been coming here for the last forty or fifty years — black, Asian, Kosovan, Polish — and the white working class are saying, ‘remember us’. I don’t think it’s racist — not yet. But there’s something going on, and sport could be a catalyst.

There are references in Kingdom Come to Goebbels, the Fuhrer, etc. It seems that the message in Kingdom Come has been conditioned by your childhood.

I’ve never taken the view that the two huge totalitarian systems that dominated the twentieth century, Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia, just arrived out of the sky and after leaving tens of millions of people dead just vanished. I think there’s something uniquely dangerous about human beings. We’re the only animal species that in its ordinary, everyday condition is mad. We aren’t overrun by mad alligators or mad squirrels. I think we’re a very dangerous species.

We should take some questions from the audience now.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Could you expand on what you said about Tony Blair not living in the real world?

I wasn’t making a political point. I just think that he is a rather sad and deeply unhappy man. Something’s gone seriously wrong. He’s a person who needs to be liked, and that’s part of his strength. I go along with the general view that his big mistake was to get too close to the American president and enter the Iraq war. The problem is we don’t trust him any more. We see him as a bit of a fantasist. Whether we’re going to be happy with his successor is a different matter.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: What happens next for a consumerist society? Will there be a post-consumerist phase that you anticipate?

Well, I wouldn’t know. There are some very strange movements afoot. Religious revivalism for one, in the States in particular. There was a graph in the Times a couple of days ago that showed that something like 98% of Americans believe in God. One shouldn’t interpret that too literally — at least I hope not — but there are some very strange currents in society. The problem is, modern technology allows change to take place at an enormously fast pace. A suspicious substance is found in a bungalow in Bishop Stortford, and the next day the entire airline system of the West is more or less shut down. Everything’s so volatile. I hope my wildest dreams don’t come true.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: I’d like to ask what inspired The Drowned World.

I think there’s no doubt that The Drowned World, my first novel, was unconsciously inspired — though it took me a long time to realise it — by Shanghai during the annual spring floods, when the Yangtze overflowed and the streets of Shanghai were a foot deep in water. As a boy I thought, ‘this is a bit weird’.

English novelists over the past two or three hundred years have made a specialty of stories of world destruction — cataclysmic novels. It’s never been that popular in America but it’s intensely popular here. English novelists have destroyed London by every conceivable means. It’s an interesting strain in our character. If you put too many rats in what they call a rat universe, the rats after a while separate off into little clubs, then they start attacking each other — then they start attacking themselves. Maybe there’s something about overcrowding here.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: In some of your novels you talk about random acts of meaningless violence making us feel more I alive. I was wondering how you’d apply this to the July 7 attacks in London?

In many ways that wasn’t an act of meaningless violence. The people who perpetrated it knew what they were doing. Suicide bombing is a sign of despair. The men who crashed planes into the World Trade Centre knew they’d never defeat America. The Chechnyan terrorists know they’ll never beat Russia. I’ve got a feeling that many of these young Islamic terrorists know that Islam is too deeply rooted in the past to defeat the West, and it’s a tragedy of gigantic proportions. I fear huge numbers of people are going to die before there’s any resolution because these people are absolutely desperate — they don’t see any way in which Islam is going to be reconciled, so they retreat into fantasies of violence that tragically kill large numbers of people. It’s something we have to live with.

At the end of the last century, people would ring me up and ask me my views about the future. I said I can sum up the future in one word — it’s going to be boring. Vast suburbs that extend around the planet: utter boredom, broken by acts of unpredictable violence. The man in the supermarket who opens fire with a machine gun. And the suicide bomber, a man who has nothing, setting off a bomb in a desperate way to prove himself. The idea of meaningless violence, which I looked at in my previous novel Millennium People, has a huge appeal. I can understand that. It’s in the roots of one’s childhood — all children smash their toys. The trouble, of course, is that people get killed.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: Is your work a critique of modernism?

I think modernism shot its bolt. There’s something about modernism that’s too self-immersed and neurotic. I think people prefer confusion.

AUDIENCE MEMBER: You talked about 50s science fiction as having great vitality. Where do you see that same vitality now? Is it in internet culture, or is it still fiction?

I think internet culture does have that vitality, from what I see over my partner’s shoulder 18 hours a day. She retrieves the most extraordinary things from the internet. I think internet culture is the most vital culture today. I don’t think there’s anything remotely rivalling it. It’s so democratic. Where it’ll go I don’t know. I’ve got a terrible fear that big corporations will start blocking off larger and larger areas of it. But that hasn’t happened yet as far as I know. I think it’s a wonderful force.

——————————————————————————–
..:: LINKS
+ Rattling Other People’s Cages Ballardian’s newest interview with J.G. Ballard

Here’s a Vogue Italia photo shoot by Steven Meisel that posits supermodels as new-age terrorists (thanks for the link, FJ Torres). As Tim has already commented, “If you want to imagine the future, imagine a boot stamping on a supermodel’s throat forever.”

Yes, it’s Ballardian. Yes, it’s JGB’s imagined “sinister marriage between sex and technology”, the final realisation of “violence as consumer spectator sport”. Yes, its disturbing — living in Australia, as I do, and reading about the horrific details of the Dianne Brimble case, it’s difficult to adjudicate otherwise. And yet…and yet…it operates on so many levels I wouldn’t even begin to know where to start in beginning to even imagine formulating an analysis.

Is it a comment on the war on terror? On the place of women in society? On the predominance of anorexic models in the fashion industry, which the industry is attempting to self-regulate? Or is it, as Tim again astutely summarises, merely a point “for academic and media handbags to be flapped”? Certainly Joanna Burke, writing in the Guardian, is under no illusions. For her, “the most disturbing thing about these photographs … is that they have taken their inspiration from the torture photographs taken in Abu Ghraib prison and elsewhere in Iraq … we see how those images of torture have been translated into consumer products”.

Despite Jonathan Weiss’s claims to the contrary, that’s what Andres’s review, for whatever faults Jonathan thinks it may embody, was trying to get at: how much more shocking is the type of ‘libidinization of violence’ (thanks to k-punk for the clarity of terms) defined by Ballard’s Atrocity Exhibition when spliced with today’s terror porn: September 11…Iraq, etc — a complete fetishisation of mediated violence. That’s at least one level on which Meisel’s shoot operates. And that’s the point Andres was at least attempting to make in his review and which Mr Weiss ripped us to shreds over.

I’m all for updating, expanding, modifying and recasting the Ballardian template…and I now know, after reading Kingdom Come, that JGB is, too. Is Steven Meisel? Perhaps Kingdom Come could form the basis of his first feature film…

Then again, perhaps Pippa, on the same chat group as Tim, is closer to the mark, when she says, “Hmmm. Pretty anodyne really. It just looks like a fashion shoot. Which makes one ask whether fashion shoots are looking more like atrocity images, or the other way around. Isn’t this the real death of affect, when it’s all pretty damn boring?”.

There’s no doubt about it — this is definitely a job for k-punk…I’m sending out the Bat Signal…

OPENING LINE:
“A small revolution was taking place, so modest and well behaved that almost no one had noticed.”

From the 2003 Flamingo edition:

Violent rebellion comes to London’s middle classes in the extraordinary new novel from the author of Cocaine Nights and Super-Cannes.

When a bomb goes off at Heathrow it looks like another random act of violence to psychologist David Markham. But then he discovers that his ex-wife Laura is among the victims. Acting on police suspicions, he starts to investigate London’s fringe protest movements, falling in with a shadowy group based in the comfortable Thames-side estate of Chelsea Marina. Led by a charismatic doctor, the group aims to rouse the docile middle classes to anger and violence, to freem them from both the self-imposed burdens of civic responsibility and the trappings of a consumer society — private schools, foreign nannies, health insurance and overpriced housing. Markham, seeking the truth behind Laura’s death, is swept up in a campaign that spirals rapidly out of control. Every certainty in his life is questioned as the cornerstones of middle England become targets and growing panic grips the capital…

Compelling, disturbing and typically acute, Millennium People is J.G. Ballard’s most remarkable novel yet. Its shockingly plausible vision of a society in collapse is proof that this most original and influential of authors is at the peak of his powers.”

Millennium People is witty, life-affirming, sharp as a blade — and highly topical, continuing to resonate into the 21st century. K-punk captured the tenor precisely:

Gould is an elegant and eloquent salesman of the Deleuze-Guattari ‘line of abolition’, the Fascist drive to destruction which is ultimately a drive towards self-destruction. Ballard, who, to his credit has always refused to endorse facile moralizing, would no doubt object to that characterization, since to in any way condemn or censure Gould would be to confirm the very securocratic values he seeks to undermine.

However, the most compelling aspect of Millennium People, politically speaking, is not the in many ways familiar asignifying violence, but its PUNK THEORY OF CLASS REVOLT.”

k-punk. ‘What are the politics of boredom?’

This is hard-core. From now on ordering an olive ciabatta is a political act.”

J.G. Ballard. Millennium People.

..:: 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

OPENING LINE:
“The suburbs dream of violence.”

From the 2006 Fourth Estate edition:

Richard Pearson, unemployed advertising executive and life-long rebel, is driving out to Brooklands, a motorway town on the A25. A few weeks earlier his father was fatally wounded at the Metro-Centre, a vast shopping mall in the middle of this apparently peaceful town, when a deranged mental patient opened fire on a crowd of shoppers. When the main suspect is released without charge thanks to the dubious testimony of self-styled pillars of the community — including Julia Goodwin, the doctor who treated his father on his deathbed — Richard suspects that there is more to his father’s death than meets the eye, a more sinister element lurking behind the pristine facades of the labyrinthine mall.

Determined to unravel the mystery, Richard soon realises that the Metro-Centre, with its round-the-clock cable channel and sports clubs, lies at the very heart of his father’s death. Consumerism rules the lives of everyone in the motorway towns and feeds the cravings of this bored community with its desperate need for something new, whatever the costs. Riots frequently terrorise the streets, immigrant communities are set upon by roving bands of hooligans and sports events mushroom into jingoistic political rallies. Gradually, Richard finds himself drawn into this world, caught up in the workings of the mall, exposed to the insides of the consumer dream, and starts upon dismantling this wayward vision his advertising career helped to found…

In this gripping, dystopian tour de force, J.G. Ballard holds up a mirror to middle England, reflecting an unsettling image of suburbia and revealing the darker forces at work beneath the gloss of consumerism and flag-waving patriotism.”

The negative notices this remarkable vision have received don’t make a whole lot of sense to me. Ballard’s a man who admits he doesn’t read novels, instead devouring ‘invisible literature’: marginalia, copywriting, medical journals, psychiatric reports, Ikea catalogues, cereal boxes. He’s influenced by Freud, film noir, science fiction and Surrealist paintings; film, more than anything. To compare him with some literary type who practices the art of ‘tight plotting’ and ‘well-rounded protagonists’ is woefully inadequate. Reviewing KC in the Telegraph, David Robson wrote: ‘The plotting is clumsy … and the violence, integral to the whole design, belongs to the world of comic-strips’. Well, yes. Precisely. Honestly, do we still live in an age where popular culture is considered second-rate to the almighty ‘novel’? Funnily enough, I’m put in mind of my 78-year-old father, who refuses to watch The Simpsons because ‘cartoons are for kids’.

At least we have theorist Steven Shaviro, who has written the most insightful review of Kingdom Come to date, refreshingly free of the restraints of commercial media:

Kingdom Come has so far only been published in the UK, not the US. And it has gotten mostly negative reviews — even from speculative writers like Ursula LeGuin and M. John Harrison, who ought to know better. The book has been criticized for the fact that its plot and characters aren’t slick, catchy, and ‘well-constructed’ enough. But of course these are the wrong standards by which to judge Ballard. He writes genre fiction as social theory — and he remains, at age 76, one of the most acute social theorists that we have. His insights could not be communicated in the form of the artfully structured literary novel. His seeming repetitiveness, his clumsy prosaicness, and his insistence on a kind of pop-culture (so-called) ‘kitsch’ are necessary tools of insight. In a thoroughly Modernist way, his form coincides with his themes; though, as an anatomist of our “postmodern” condition, his forms/themes are such as the classic Modernists could never have imagined.”

Steven Shaviro. ‘Kingdom Come’.

Rick McGrath has also written a provocative review, from his own perspective as an ex-ad-man:

But what form does a non-message take? For Pearson, that’s easy: “Madness is the key to everything. Small doses, applied when no-one is really looking.”

Regardless of all the novel’s ranting about consumerism and violence and fascism, I find this marketing insight perhaps the most chilling prediction of Kingdom Come. Instinctive advertising – a direct message to the irrational, the purely emotional. It’s about using psychopathology, after all. It’s a chilling thought not because it could be a campaign as Ballard imagines it, but because it is a campaign which is currently being successfully employed by, oh, advertising for the fashion industry, Hollywood, political parties.

Rick McGrath. ‘Thy Kingdom Come, Thy Ads Be Run…’

And Ballardian contributor Pippa Tandy offers the following thoughts:

JGB is not Alan Sillitoe. There is little point in reading KC for direct equivalences to social conditions. Although he writes of the effects of consumerism, shopping malls and the obsession with sport, Ballard is not a realist writer. Although he makes reference to the notorious DuPont as the benefactor of a research wing of a mental asylum, (97) and uses as a chapter heading the expression ‘Exit Strategies’, has his protagonist speak of himself as only being good at ‘warming the slippers of late capitalism’, (9) and make other references to political and social realities of the past and present, this is not a direct socially realistic account of society. KC reiterates images that appear from his earliest work, images that are coded references to his earlier writing but which have another function. As in his other writing, they are a register of the psychic state of his society. It is not a question of whether his characters behave as ‘real’ people behave; KC is rather another myth of the near future, except that the near future is now on top of us. (And has been for a while, hardly Ballard’s fault!) Remember Ballard never felt like he needed to check the realist accuracy of his descriptions. You will recall that The Rockford Files and Kojak informed his understanding of America, a Thames Valley gravel pit supplies the lineaments of Cape Canaveral, and so on.

KC begins in the typical liminal setting of the Heathrow motorways, with a protagonist narrator who finds himself drawn into a maze of concrete and paranoia, who backs away from the reflected attenuation in his own mirrored face, who limps through the broken mallscape on a bandaged foot, a black comedy in which motorways and runways intersect, fugitives hide themselves as shop mannequins, the beach of a shopping mall echoes the beach of a nuclear test site, and a deracinated psychiatrist and mock Lemmy Caution move among the crowd. Ballard would probably not like to admit it, but he is doing something similar to Godard in Alphaville. He is using the materials of his time (shopping malls, sporting crowds, consumerism) as latent conditions. That is why it all seems a bit wrong when we try to match it all up. Like his other writing, this novel is Ballard’s attempt to bring vision to the present, to create, like the detonation in the Metro-Centre, a space in which a section of space-time had been erased, exposing a deep flaw in our collective dream.� (113-4)

And, just another point, for fun. Is not the description of the dead Cruise being wheeled around as a kind of totem figure, surrounded by grieving worshippers, very reminiscent of Mr Kurtz on his stretcher in Heart of Darkness?”

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

..:: BUY THE BOOK

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?

“ZTT release Propaganda’s new five-track EP in early November [1985], called Wishful Thinking, and comprising remixes and some previously unissued material. It remains to be seen whether Propaganda can elude ZTT’s tiresome penchant for cerebral games-playing.

They’ve already run into a spot of trouble over a quote from novelist J.G. Ballard which appeared on the sleeve of their single P-Machinery, referring to the origins of the Baader-Meinhof terrorist group. Ariola, who distribute their records in Germany, insisted on the quote being removed”.

“In this instalment, Davis discusses the rise of Pentecostalism in global mega-slums; the threat of avian flu; the disease vectors of urban poverty; criminal and terrorist mini-states; the future of sovereignty; environmental footprints; William Gibson; the allure of Hollywood; and Viggo Mortensen’s publishing imprint, Perceval Press.”

“Peep “TV” Show
PRO: Watching Yutaka Tsuchiya’s Peep “TV” Show is a lot like reading J.G. Ballard’s The Atrocity Exhibition—both are not easy to get through but are vital works of art. Peep “TV” Show is about a society (contemporary Tokyo) that is mediated to the last degree. Public, private, and commercial spaces are crammed with cameras that look into them, and (TV, video, computer) screens that look out at other public, private, and commercial spaces. Every level of life is a spectacle that aspires to become the total spectacle of the new century-9/11. The main characters in Peep “TV” Show are morbidly, erotically obsessed with the destruction of the Twin Towers, one even admitting that he wished it had happened to Tokyo. 9/11 is to Peep “TV” Show what the assassination of JFK was to Crash (1973), another J.G. Ballard novel. Crash, however, is a work of science fiction, whereas Peep “TV” Show is about the present and the real proliferation of electronic consumer products, specifically the digital and micro-cameras with which the entire movie is shot. Peep “TV” Show is relentlessly repetitive, but it does have several unexpected moments that break the surface of the vicious pattern and peer into the dizzying depths of what all underdeveloped economies are striving to become: overdeveloped, paperless, capitalist societies. (CHARLES MUDEDE)

CON: Peep “TV” Show is a deliberately abrasive DV feature whose main appeal, if it can be said to possess any, is the opportunity to gawk at Japanese youth subcultures. Want to see a young woman dress up as a “Gothic Lolita,” a sort of cross between Little Bo Peep and a riot grrrl (as featured in the Phaidon book Fresh Fruits)? Want to get a gander at the hikkikomori, the “socially withdrawn” men in their late teens and twenties who venture out of their rooms only to buy food in the middle of the night (as featured in the New York Times)? Want to see a live cat being placed inside a plastic bag and… never mind. If the movie were smart, it would indict you for the voyeurism of the main character, Hasegawa, who likes to tote around a tiny camera and film from the ground up on busy Tokyo streets. Instead, the characters offer the tepid excuse, “It’s not us, it’s reality that’s messed up,” and the movie gets lost in junk analysis of the appeal of 9/11 footage.
(ANNIE WAGNER)

Grand Illusion, Fri 7, 9 pm, Sat-Sun 3, 5, 7, 9 pm, Mon-Thurs
7, 9 pm.”

A 76-year-old performance artist was arrested after attacking Marcel Duchamp’s “Fountain” _ a porcelain urinal _ with a hammer, police said.

Duchamp’s 1917 piece _ an ordinary white, porcelain urinal that’s been called one of the most influential works of modern art _ was slightly chipped in the attack at the Pompidou Center in Paris, the museum said Thursday. It was removed from the exhibit for repair.

The suspect, a Provence resident whose identity was not released, already vandalized the work in 1993 _ urinating into the piece when it was on display in Nimes, in southern France, police said.

During questioning, the man claimed his hammer attack on Wednesday was a work of performance art that might have pleased Dada artists. The early 20th-century avant-garde movement was the focus of the exhibit that ends Monday, police said.

A 2004 poll of 500 arts figures ranked “Fountain” as the most influential work of modern art _ ahead of Pablo Picasso’s “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon,” Andy Warhol’s screen prints of Marilyn Monroe and “Guernica,” Picasso’s depiction of war’s devastation.

“Fountain” is estimated at $3.6 million.

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.

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

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Recently I’ve come across a piece by one of my favorite authors, J. G. Ballard, on a show I’ve become addicted to against my better judgement: Crime Scene Investigation (you can access Ballard’s article here). I was pleased and disappointed by Ballard’s analysis. Although a lot of his comments are perceptive, I think he missed some of the fundamental reasons for the appeal and popularity of this series.

I approach television nowadays with heavy doses of cynicism and trepidation. It’s hard to get me hooked. But after two episodes of CSI, I’m addicted. I cannot stop watching it, regardless of what my critical faculties say. I love it and hate it in equal measures.

I think the allure of the show derives mostly from what it borrows from the crime genre. Crime is the purest and most efficient form of narrative, one that allows endless permutations, but which adheres to a strong, logically seamless structure. I speak here of an archetypal, perfect crime narrative; one that perhaps does not exist, but which perhaps subsists in many remarkable examples of the genre. Every element in the story moves towards a final goal, an anticipated revelation, and every bit of plot must contribute to this final denouement. Hence the suspense, the narrative drive that compels reading, watching, discovering.

The characters are clearly defined by their relative position in a network of relationships: Detectives, suspects, perpetrators, innocent bystanders, etc. The detective acts as a kind of master storyteller, a demiurge enclosed in the world of the story, anticipating different twists and the possibilities that lurk behind the manifest events. The detective must weigh probabilities, hypotheses, plot scenarios, what-ifs? Form and content, plot and structure merge together perfectly in this genre, for each piece of text is (ideally) structurally necessary. The reader may even be allowed to know the identity of the killer from the beginning; and even then the crime story would obey this tight teleological structure. The story doesn’t even exist, it’s not a story, until we reach the end—and the whole edifice is glimpsed, and the swarm of possibilities collapse into a single reality.

The genre also permits a myriad interesting variations and detours. The crime narrative can be used to comment and digress on the society of the time. (Ballard himself has done this, in his remarkable foray into the crime genre, Cocaine Nights). A crime reveals skeletons in the closet, allows intrusion into intimate places. “What were you doing at 9:15 on Wednesday night?” The genre effortlessly opens the space for a piercing psychological intimacy.

A second dimension of the genre, always identified by theorists and critics, is the fact that it is concerned with morality. (This has, in part, to do with the historical beginnings of the genre in the urban, industrial environments of the nineteenth century.) The very fact of a crime—the act at the core of the narrative, the impetus—obviously implies a wrong, a morally reprehensible act. The stakes are high; the genre absorbs some of the functions of ancient myth, dealing with moral infractions, violence, monstrosity, the forbidden. In other words, the moral order.

Crime narratives are concerned with the social and institutional apparatus that comes to bear on such a transgression—as well as the human, psychological universe that surrounds the act. We may even be allowed to identify with the killer or criminal, forgive him or her, share his/her perspective. The narrative can also turn against this apparatus, exposing its flaws. The detective, as the human incarnation or focus of this apparatus, usually must be a sharp judge of character, a connoisseur of human nature. Again he/she is a surrogate of the writer.

Crime stories may not always have a ‘moral’, but they explore a moral universe. Even in its most jaded, disillusioned noir incarnations, the crime story still portrays a moral universe—or anti-universe where the good don’t always win, and where things are not black-and-white. Witness one of the great crime novels of all time, Dostoyevski’s The Brothers Karamazov, which realizes the philosophical potential in the old genre trick of having multiple characters, each with his/her own story. Each ‘suspect’ in Dostoyevski’s novel incarnates a perspective on life, a system of ideas.

CSI, of course, is nowhere as interesting as Dostoyevsky, yet it presents its own moral universe. The series boils down the structure of the archetypal crime story to its bare schematic skeleton, with some postmodern twists.

Firstly, the fiction of detection has undergone an interesting mutation in the age of forensic science. In this regard, CSI is part of a larger phenomenon, largely spearheaded by the novels of Patricia Cornwell, and the subgenre of ‘forensic detection’.

Nowadays every time you switch the TV on at prime time, you’re bound to see a corpse lying on a table, or some ghastly forensic procedure take place. The voyeuristic spirit of TV has now taken a worryingly morbid turn. What is the root of this obsession? Given the immense popularity of these shows, they definitely seem to touch a paranoid nerve. In fact, you need to watch the news to find their ‘real-life’ counterpart. Terror, fear, catastrophe.

But first, let’s look at the narrative side. In the subgenre of forensic detection (or whatever you want to call it) the whole process of reconstructing the events takes place in the laboratory, by following chains of deduction based on laws of physics, biology and chemistry. Whereas in, say, Agatha Christie’s novels, the detective must piece together the events from people’s testimonies and their inadvertent bodily or facial clues, here it is the objects that speak. Chemical substances, pieces of glass, blood splatters, footprints and, of course, cadavers. The only people the investigators are interested in are dead. Yet, the narrative thrust of the archetypal crime story is intact. CSI follows a very classic structure. Despite its flashy hi-tech gimmicks, we could call it conservative. All we get, in fact, is plot.

Grissom (the head of the crime forensics unit in CSI) is like a postmodern Sherlock Holmes. One of the things that makes Conan Doyle’s stories so delightful is that moment of revelation, when we find out what Holmes has been thinking, how he has logically pieced it all together out of clues that have completely passed us by. Grissom surprises us with similar inferences and logical gymnastics. But his reasoning is firmly techno-scientific. Grissom knows where to look because he knows his science. This is not to say that he’s stupid. He has hunches; but these are nothing without evidence. At the end of the day, what matters is the evidence, the scientifically incontrovertible facts. A CSI investigator might conclude from the impact lines in a piece of glass that a window was shattered from the inside. Grissom might deduce from the presence of a particular insect that a human corpse has been hidden nearby. To function properly, reason now needs a huge apparatus around it—a laboratory, lots of machines, a vast corpus of knowledge. Chains of deduction must be anchored on an institutionalized body of observation, on complex apparatuses of imaging and measurement, and on the strict following of police procedure. We have come a long way from the quasi-solipsistic, opium-fuelled rationality of Holmes.

That’s why we get no character interaction, no emotions, hardly any narrative ‘fat’. The suspects, once faced with the truth, hardly struggle. In the face of the unassailable evidence, they surrender feebly, blurting out their confession in time for the credits to roll. In the last couple of seasons, the creators of the show have been trying to give us more rounded characters, creating affairs and rivalries, and trying to generate more tension between the members of the team. The results are uninteresting, and add nothing to the show—in fact, we feel vaguely uncomfortable with their ‘human’ side. Ballard perceptively notes this austerity, and identifies the qualities of the setting, its strange claustrophobic ‘ecology’. Most of the action takes place indoors, and we rarely see the characters travelling anywhere. There are also a lot of close-ups. We inhabit the gaze of techno-scientific procedure: intimate yet inhuman.

Grissom is self-absorbed, literate, and quirky—yet somewhat infantile, emotionally stunted. Grissom’s obsessive quest for the ‘objective truth’ sits incongruously in the midst this technological paraphernalia. We get the feeling that his quaint idealism (‘science is about finding the truth’) has no place in the modern crime-fighting machine. And this is Grissom’s tragedy (and largely why we sympathize with him). His team-mates are happy to tag along, and don’t need this kind of grand justifications; most of the time they just look happy to have a job. I think we also sympathize with Grissom also because of William Petersen’s great performance in the role. Petersen plays the oddball Grissom with affection and humor, and the show becomes more interesting as soon as he walks into the frame. Despite his limitations, Grissom is somehow unpredictable; we just never know what he’ll come up with.

Needless to say, the purported ‘gritty realism’ of the series is curiously at odds with the fantastic, preposterous nature of the action. The dialogue is ludicrous, the attempts at humor fall flat on the face (when they are not in very bad taste), and not for a minute can we reasonably believe that we’re watching a faithful rendition of police procedure. For a start, forensic scientists are not detectives, and do not interrogate suspects or conduct investigations.

Yet this trashiness, this awkwardness almost, is central to the appeal of CSI. The patent artificiality acts as a buffer against the most unpleasant aspects of the reality that the show is documenting. Yes, because CSI does have a basis in reality, however dim; it hooks into powerful social and psychological forces. American film and TV (even US culture in general) can’t stomach realism. (Remember that realism is not about a faithful portrayal of reality but about verisimilitude: fooling the audience into thinking that what they are watching could easily happen). The only way Americans can recognize reality is when it mimics film (witness the attack on the World Trade Centre). A ‘realist’ crime show would simply be unwatchable. In fact, Australians make the best realist crime TV: Wildside and Blue Murder, for example. These shows are so stark and uncompromising they’re almost unpleasant to watch.

Even the celebrated, flashy computer simulations of CSI (in which we follow in clinical detail how a bullet enters the lungs, or the effects of a certain poison on the internal organs) are distancing devices, abstract and synthetic images that provoke a strange mixture of physical revulsion and intellectual remoteness.

Ballard misses the point completely. I think the massive popularity of CSI does not stem from the obscure echoes it strikes in the ‘collective unconscious’. Ballard likes this kind of explanation, and most of the time he’s quite persuasive. The reasons are partly psychological, yes; but they float much closer to the surface. CSI is, in fact, a parable about the War on Terror. It is full of paranoid warnings, admonitions, explorations of fear. The space the forensic investigators tread on every day is a landscape of death and remains, of accidents and rotten intentions. This is the modern traumascape, an unsafe and paranoid place, a netherworld of catastrophe and loss. No, there’s no heaven; just decomposing bodies, flesh cracked open on the stainless-steel table, organic fluids and chunks of tissue under the microscope. CSI portrays a world in which we have come to accept these things as necessary and inevitable—and, surprise surprise, it is our world. Perhaps the source of the fear is not limited to the War on Terror, but also to the war crimes that have ravaged the closing decades of the twentieth century, and which seemingly will also be a staple feature of the twenty-first. The terror arises from the collapse of the myth of globalisation with its happy vanishing of frontiers and cultural barriers. It is the dark awakening to the horrors of genocide and rabid nationalism. Maybe Grissom and his crew are symbolic stand-ins for the anonymous crews of forensic anthropologists that have to catalogue the mass graves in Bosnia, Sarajevo, Rwanda, South America, and countless other places.

But there’s a right-wing edge to CSI, a morally conservative paranoia that urges us to lock the doors and find refuge in—where? Where does Grissom find refuge? How do the characters gather the moral fortitude to deal with this horror on a daily basis? CSI doesn’t tell us. This is where right-wing moralism comes face to face with its own emptiness. Or alternatively (as a couple of shows have suggested) we must look somewhere else, outside this fallen universe. Shall we look to the church, to God for guidance? “You might not believe in God,” an unmasked murderer tells Grissom at the end of one of the episodes, “but you are doing His work.”

So, remember kids: In the immortal words of Robocop: STAY OUT OF TROUBLE.

– Andrés Vaccari