by Mike Holliday

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

NOTES

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

ABOVE: The Terminal Beach. Photo courtesy Brookings: “Beneath this concrete dome on Runit Island (part of Enewetak Atoll), built between 1977 and 1980 at a cost of about $239 million, lie 111,000 cubic yards (84,927 cubic meters) or radioactive soil and debris from Bikini and Rongelap atolls. The dome covers the 30-foot (9 meter) deep, 350-foot (107 meter) wide crated created by the May 5, 1958, Cactus test. Note the people atop the dome”.

This essay was first published in Colloquy no. 17, August 2009, pp. 44-61. Reprinted with permission.

One of the more enduring misconceptions surrounding the work of J.G. Ballard is that it operates in the classical dystopian narrative mode, [1] supposedly mining pessimism, repression and the negativity of a post-industrial age. Robert Collins’s commentary is typical, placing Ballard’s Crash (1973) at number three in a list of “the top 10 dystopian novels”:

Fictional dystopias are almost always cautionary tales – warnings of where our political, cultural and social surroundings are taking us. The novels [on this list] share common motifs: designer drugs, mass entertainment, brutality, technology, the suppression of the individual by an all-powerful state – classic preoccupations of dystopian fiction. These novels picture the worst because, as Swift demonstrated in his original cautionary tale, Gulliver’s Travels, re-inventing the present is sometimes the only way to see how bad things already are. [2]

However, to locate Ballard within this literary tradition is a fundamental misreading. The “state,” for example, barely features in his writing, and politicians or any kind of external authority are almost wholly absent. This is amplified to comical proportions when the police make a token appearance in High-Rise (1975), which depicts the breakdown of the social order in a high-tech apartment block. At first suspicious about the building’s car park, with its damaged vehicles and debris thrown from balconies, they are quickly turned away by a group of residents, who set about “pacifying the policemen, reassuring them that everything was in order, despite the garbage and broken bottles scattered around the building”; [3] the police duly leave and are never seen again, even as the high-rise descends further into anarchy. The residents prefer to remain within their “dystopia,” rather than reacting against it, embracing the “brutality and technology” that Collins suggests they should be reacting against – there is no external “Big Brother” forcing their hand. For the residents:

even the run-down nature of the high-rise was a model of the world into which the future was carrying them, a landscape beyond technology where everything was either derelict or, more ambiguously, recombined in unexpected but more meaningful ways. [4]

This dynamic is even more apparent in the subset of “Pacific fictions” in Ballard’s oeuvre, stories set on abandoned Pacific islands where there is no need to even allude to the presence of the State, for these are stateless worlds – “between owners.” They are neither straight utopia nor classical dystopia, but an occupant of the imaginative space between: what might be termed “affirmative dystopias,” which reach similar conclusions as to the question of how to “revive the spirit of utopia” that Fredric Jameson does in his exhaustive study, Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions. As such, they provide an enduring template for Ballard’s more well-known urban works, of which Crash is the exemplar.

Ballard’s fascination with the Pacific stems from his childhood in Shanghai, where he was born and where he lived until he was 16. His semi-autobiographical novel Empire of the Sun (1984) draws on his experiences as an internee in the Lunghua civilian camp, and it ends with Jim (the character based on the young Ballard) witnessing the atomic flash over Nagasaki, enabling a potent metaphor for the post-war era that Ballard would consistently return to throughout his career:

The B-29s which bombed the airfield beside Lunghua Camp, near Shanghai, where I was interned during the Second World War, had reportedly flown from Guam. Pacific Islands, with their silent airstrips among the palm trees, Wake Island above all, have a potent magic for me. The runways that cross these little atolls, now mostly abandoned, seem to represent extreme states of nostalgia and possibility, doorways into another continuum. [5]

ABOVE: Wake Island. Photo courtesy USMCFLYR: “A boom from a KC-135 Stratotanker over Wake Island”.

In Ballard’s short story “My Dream of Flying to Wake Island” (1974), he returns to these “extreme states of possibility,” which overwhelm the account. The story remains in perpetual fugue – a concrete narrative arc never coalesces, and there is perpetual yearning enveloping the central character, Melville, a former astronaut who flew a solitary mission in space, during which he suffered a mental breakdown broadcast live to millions of viewers on Earth. Humiliated, he resolves to fly to remote Wake, fascinated by the island’s geographical isolation and “psychological reduction” (deriving from its real-world role as a former World War Two military base; Wake has never had a permanent indigenous population), which mirrors his own. For Melville, Wake Island is a portal. Referring to photographs of the military airstrip, he enthuses: “‘Look at those runways, everything is there. A big airport like the Wake field is a zone of tremendous possibility – a place of beginnings, by the way, not ends’.” [6] The story is indicative of Ballard’s deployment of the rich seam of metaphor provided by the region, and the manner in which he uses abandoned Pacific islands as sites of radical reinvention, imagistic buffer zones representing the sovereignty of the imagination.

According to the anarchist author Hakim Bey, classical utopias – “from Plato’s republic to Brook Farm” – depend on abstraction, which renders them susceptible to “a correspondingly high level of authoritarian control. As a result, most Utopias in practice have proven oppressive and deadening – ‘social planning’ would seem to be an offense by definition against the ‘human spirit’.” [7] In the novel Rushing to Paradise (1994), Ballard is also concerned with social planning, which, similarly, is seen as eventually numbing and destroying the human spirit. In fact, the novel indicts the very idea of utopia.

Rushing to Paradise is set on the remote (and fictional) Pacific atoll of Saint-Esprit, claimed by France as a site for possible nuclear testing, where the renegade Dr Barbara has gathered a ragtag crew on the premise of saving the island’s endangered albatross (the French have relocated the original inhabitants and set up their nuclear equipment, but abandoned the island for Muroroa). Although the mission is initially pitched as environmentalist, each crewmember has wildly differing, concealed motives for making the journey, thus rendering impossible the idea of a genuinely shared utopia. The Hawaiian, Kimo, dreams of establishing an independent Hawaiian kingdom, “rid forever of the French and American colonists,” [8] while the boy Neil is obsessed with the relics of a bygone nuclear age, and excited by the news that the French might be returning to the island for testing:

For all Dr Barbara’s passion for the albatross, the nuclear testing-ground had a stronger claim on his imagination. No bomb had ever exploded on Saint-Esprit, but the atoll, like Eniwetok, Muroroa and Bikini, was a demonstration model of Armageddon, a dream of war and death that lay beyond the reach of any moratorium. [9]

Dr Barbara has her own, highly secretive, and ultimately destructive, reasons – not to save the albatross, but to establish Saint-Esprit as a radical feminist enclave. She is determined to achieve this by any means: “If Saint-Esprit, this nondescript atoll six hundred miles south-east of Tahiti, failed to match her expectations, it would have to reshape itself into the threatened paradise for which she had campaigned so tirelessly.” [10] Superficially, this echoes Ballard’s Concrete Island (1974), in which the architect Robert Maitland, after a car accident, is stranded on a triangle of wasteland underneath a busy motorway. Feverish from his injuries, he imagines the physical environment as an outcrop of his psyche: “More and more, the island was becoming an exact model of his head.” [11] Yet the fundamental difference is that Dr Barbara wants the island of her mind to reshape everyone else’s reality, too. This makes Rushing to Paradise, at one level, an allusion to utopian gurus such as David Koresh and Jim Jones, similarly charismatic leaders who built isolated, essentially micronational, communities and coerced others into joining them, before destroying everything as the authorities closed in. As one character says to Neil, after the boy asks whether Dr Barbara’s mission is how new religions start: “there’s nothing new here. It’s the oldest religion there ever was – sheer magnetic egoism.” [12]

In Archaeologies of the Future, Jameson devotes considerable space to analysing failures in the wider utopian imagination. In his attempt to re-map the potential of utopian desire, he concludes:

What is Utopian becomes … not the commitment to a specific machinery or blueprint, but rather the commitment to imagining possible Utopias as such, in their greatest variety of forms. Utopia is no longer the invention and defense of a specific floorplan, but rather the story of all the arguments about how Utopia should be constructed in the first place. It is no longer the exhibit of an achieved Utopian construct, but rather the story of its production and of the very process of construction as such. [13]

Re-placing Rushing to Paradise within Jameson’s framework, it becomes possible to read the story of Saint-Esprit as “the story of all the arguments” about how the Pacific should be constructed.

The region has always had an unstable identity and an especially volatile sense of nationalism, from perpetually coup-ridden Fiji in the South Seas to the perpetually colonised islands north of the equator. The Republic of Palau in Micronesia is sometimes cited as an archetypal tropical utopia, but could in fact embody the root definition of “utopia,” as “no place.” It has been used as a pawn by various colonial powers almost continuously since the late 17th century, rapidly lost its traditional culture and become a melange of other cultures. It has changed hands between Spain, which enforced Christianity on the Palauans; Germany, which commanded them to work as plantation slaves; Japan, which forced them to speak a subservient form of Japanese and turned the main island into a closed-off, heavily fortified military base; and the US, which bombed the islands to get at the Japanese in a series of bloody World War Two battles and then claimed them as American territory until 1994.

Mimicking the Pacific’s jagged history, Ballard populates Saint-Esprit with idealistic Germans, scientifically-minded Japanese and single-minded Americans, as well as Kimo, symbol of an oppressed indigenous people, Dr Barbara, an archetypal British colonialist, and, crucially, Neil, an echo of young Jim himself, both teenagers obsessed with dreams of nuclear war and of holding their own among deluded and dangerous adults in an artificial community. After the death of the character Mark Bracewell, the American, Carline, verbalises a metaphor that neatly sums up these duelling versions of utopia:

Contrary to the general belief, no-one’s death diminishes us. Nature in its wisdom created death to give each of us our unique sense of life. We’re not part of the main. Each of us is an island, every bit as real as Saint-Esprit, and death is the price we pay to keep ourselves from drowning in the larger sea. Like Kimo here, we’re all island people … especially young Neil, dreaming about another kind of island. Mark Bracewell lived for twenty-seven years, and his island still floats in the sea of time and space. [14]

This seems to correspond with Jameson, who proposes to “think of our autonomous and non-communicating Utopias … as so many islands: a Utopian archipelago, islands in the net, a constellation of discontinuous centers, themselves internally decentred.” [15] This discontinuity suggests the ideal resting state for Ballard’s ideal of a neural, free zone of the imagination – a “morally free psychopathology of metaphor, as an element in one’s dreams,” [16] which, although powerful and liberatory, has a dark underside. If one tries to apply it to other people, then Micronationalism [17] – the utopian imagination, no less – turns into dangerous cultism through which lives can be destroyed, a very real danger that arises when the metaphor is literalised into “the domain where it has no place, an id-driven psychopathology that lays waste to human life.” [18] Neil’s surreal, internalised visions of nuclear war therefore contrast markedly with Dr Barbara’s hard, external authoritarianism, further corresponding to Jameson’s conception of utopian desire, which “must be marked as Utopian and thereby as partaking in a specific and very special kind of aesthetic unreality: otherwise it falls into the world and, particularly if realized, spells the end of Utopias in the way wryly distinct from the usual prognoses of their current disappearance.” [19] Subsequently, the novel sours traditional utopian thought by highlighting the oppressive hypocrisy of its “abstracted authoritarianism,” to appropriate Bey’s term. Once Kimo has used his muscle to build the community and Neil his youth to impregnate the idealistic women who flock to the island, they become expendable, with no place in a feminist paradise.

Indeed, Dr Barbara manages to kill off almost all the men (although Neil survives) when they contract fever and she administers fake medicine. By the novel’s end, she is feverish and hiding out in the forest, burrowing deeper and further away from the French authorities that have come to retake the island. This seems a deliberate reference to the legendary stories of Japanese soldiers hiding out in the Pacific jungles of Guam long after the war had ended, terrified, as is Dr Barbara, at the prospect of an imperialism perishing with the onslaught of newer, more localised and “internally decentred” voices, American-led globalism, no less – overrun by an “anti-anti-utopian” imagination (again, after Jameson, in opposition not to straight dystopia, but to unworkable utopia) that has evolved organically from the discontinuities and disjunctions of the modern world, and that is centrally represented by Neil. As Jameson writes of the wider dynamic:

Multiplicity becomes the central theme of this imaginary resolution, whose conceptual dilemma remains that of closure. Yet we may well suppose that this new development will have had some impact on the Utopian form itself, accounting for the seeming extinction of the traditional kinds and the emergence of newer more reflexive forms. [20]

ABOVE: Observers at Operation Hardtack nuclear test (1958) on Enewetak.

Neil, with his dreams of nuclear war, symbolises this “more reflexive form” and the perverse and paradoxical “absolute freedom” it brings. He comes to embody the “anti-anti-utopian” spirit of the book, or, more accurately, he embodies the Ballardian sense of “affirmative dystopia,” a sense of which is given by Gregory Stephenson’s overview:

The themes of transcendence and illusion inform nearly all of Ballard’s work, and have often been misconstrued by critics as representing a nihilistic or fatalistic preoccupation on the part of the author with devolution, decay, dissolution and entropy … these themes represent neither an expression of universal pessimism nor a negation of human values and goals, but, rather, an affirmation of the highest humanistic and metaphysical ideal: the repossession for humankind of authentic and absolute being. [21]

Rushing to Paradise is not a disaster novel per se, but in his reimagining of the apocalypse, Neil virtually wills the disaster to happen. In so doing, he does not “colonize the future with Utopian blueprints,” as the Pacific’s invading powers have so wilfully done (indeed, as Dr Barbara has done), but rather, embodies what Jameson defines as:

Disruption … the name for a new discursive strategy … which insists that its radical difference is possible and that a break is necessary. The Utopian form itself is the answer to the universal ideological conviction that no alternative is possible, that there is no alternative to the system. But it asserts this by forcing us to think the break itself, and not by offering a more traditional picture of what things would be like after the break. [22]

Jameson briefly touches upon this strain of disruption in Ballard, without referring directly to the stories under discussion here: “Ballard’s work – so rich and corrupt – testifies powerfully to the contradictions of a properly representational attempt to grasp the future directly.” [23]

Extrapolating from there, my contention is that, in his Pacific fictions, Ballard “forces us to think the break” by repeatedly drawing on the spectre of nuclear testing, of which there are numerous real-world examples in the region. French Polynesia, for instance, was employed as a testing site for almost 10 years, with the result that high radiation levels were detected 4,500km away in Fiji. Bikini Atoll was rendered uninhabitable by American nuclear tests, its inhabitants forcibly relocated, like those of Saint-Esprit, never to return. The inhabitants of Eniwetok were also forcibly relocated in 1948 to make way for American atomic bomb tests; only comparatively recently has the US government, under overwhelming global pressure, cleared the island of active waste, allowing the islanders to resettle the southern part of the atoll after 33 years in exile. In Ballard, the thermonuclear age brings with it an advanced technology that renders objective perception meaningless, thus beginning the era of simulation, an increasingly abstracted, stylised and mediated realm, riding on the decline of Japanese imperialism and the rise of American-led globalisation.

ABOVE: Nuclear testing on Bikini Atoll. Music by Cousin Silas.

To examine this motif, it is interesting to contrast Ballard’s reworking, and remapping, of the region to that of the travel writer Simon Winchester, whose The Pacific provides a thorough history of changes since the war. Ballard has written: “I used to dream of the runways of Wake Island and Midway, stepping stones that would carry me back across the Pacific to the China of my childhood.” [24] Compare with Winchester’s account of American mariners at the start of the 19th century, seizing and settling “Midway, Wake, Guam … thus creating a series of stepping-stones, a lifeline of tropical islands that led all the way to that greatest and most elusive prize, the Middle Kingdom, China” [25] – a process that leads eventually to the bombing of Japan and subsequent irradiation of Pacific islands like Eniwetok. The similarities (references to Wake Island, Midway, China, especially “stepping stones”) are startling, yet these positions are opposed nonetheless. Ballard wants to resettle, and bulwark, the imagination, where the American forces wanted to colonise and wipe clean whole territories. One wishes to explore hidden folds within the map, the other to claim every available point on the map; both coexist in paradoxical dreams of the Pacific. The paradox is even rooted in temporal reality, as Winchester notes, when he visits the island of Tonga. There, he ponders the arbitrary division of the dateline, which ensures that Tonga sees the world’s first dawn each day:

I had imagined … that I would be able to catch a glimpse of Mount Silisili [in Samoa] … just a few miles away across the water. [It] would be enjoying precisely the same clock time as here in Tonga, but exactly one day before. The simultaneous sighting of two periods of time separated by an entire 24 hours seemed a paradox well worth experiencing. [26]

In Ballard, these paradoxical time tracks form a lasting metaphor for a certain nexus of confusion in the post-war world, a notion made explicit in the note that begins Empire of the Sun: “The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour took place on Sunday morning, 7 December 1941, but as a result of time differences across the Pacific Date Line it was then already the morning of Monday, 8 December in Shanghai.” [27] For Ballard, the bomb signifies the end of history and the coming of an age of surfaces, a recombinant age of planing identities, as he makes clear in the introduction to Crash, which applies the metaphor of chronological confusion to the mediated reality of the Western world:

Increasingly, our concepts of past, present and future are being forced to revise themselves. Just as the past, in social and psychological terms, became a casualty of Hiroshima and the nuclear age, so in its turn the future is ceasing to exist, devoured by the all-voracious present … Options multiply around us, and we live in an almost infantile world where any demand, any possibility, whether for life-styles, travel, sexual roles and identities, can be satisfied instantly. [28]

The past “as a casualty of the nuclear age” would be reframed 11 years after Crash, in Empire of the Sun, the latter part of which is set in a destroyed stadium filled with prisoners and the detritus of war. Suddenly, the stadium is illuminated by light from the atom bomb exploding on Nagasaki – a blinding, overwhelming orb. Andrés Vaccari correctly identifies the world “presided over by this nuclear sun” as the “real Empire of the Sun. It is the metaphoric birth of the post-war world, the omnipresent subject of Ballard’s fiction” [29] – the coming of a nihilistic world with no boundaries, no spatial coordinates except those of inner space, the cognitive remapping of a world that has lost its bearings in time and space. [30]

ABOVE: The Cactus Dome on Runit Island, part of Enewetak Atoll. Photo courtesy Artificial Owl.

This notion of planing identities (planing time tracks) is also embodied in Ballard’s short story “The Terminal Beach” (1964), set on Eniwetok (also known as ‘Enewetak’), in which the character Traven, an ex-air force pilot, finds himself similarly searching for identity among the island’s abandoned concrete bunkers and blockhouses, which have been used for thermonuclear trials. He comes across plastic, human mannequins used in the weapons testing, with their “half-melted faces, contorted into bleary grimaces [gazing] up at him from the jumble of legs and torsos.” [31] Attempting to escape from US servicemen who appear on the island, he hides “in one of the target basins, lying among the broken bodies of the plastic models. In the hot sunlight their deformed faces gaped at him sightlessly from the tangle of limbs, their blurred smiles like those of the soundlessly laughing dead.” [32] When he scavenges among “the litter of smashed bottles and cans in the isthmus of sand separating the testing ground from the air-strip,” [33] we find layers of recent cultural history, buried and then recovered as if in an archaeological find. Confronted with this effacement of geographical and human boundaries (the latter effectively represented by the undifferentiated slagheap of molten mannequins), Traven is, in a sense, reborn, scrambling for meaning among the detritus of the old world.

The effect is replicated in Concrete Island, in which the patch of underpass comes to symbolise the archetypal liminal space of Ballardian fiction. It is a zone of buried layers of urban cartography comprising “the unintended, forgotten, abjected corners of town planning.” [34] In the fragmented post-war world, with its shifting national boundaries and national identities, Ballard seems to suggest the only effective strategy is to remake the world through bricolage, or what Andrzej Gasiorek terms “a kind of fugitive reappropriation of an otherwise seemingly monolithic set of structures and relations.” [35] In Concrete Island, Maitland, the architect, was all too willing to submit to the conformity of capitalism, favouring the demands of finance and big business over any sense of public obligation or civic duty. Gasiorek observes that he had “a predilection for modernism,” specifically “hard, affectless architecture” and “stylised concrete surfaces,” marked as “hostile to the forging of human relations … a kind of dead end for life.” [36] Before his crash, Maitland seemed a ruthless autocrat forcing people into inhumane living conditions to justify his ego, but he is confronted with the underside of this “dead end for life” when, marooned on the concrete island, he is required to come to terms with the tradition he wilfully discarded in his work. Like Traven, he uncovers historical layers paved over by the demands of the motorway system – the strictures of advanced technology:

Parts of the island dated from well before World War II. The eastern end, below the overpass, was its oldest section, with the churchyard and the ground-courses of Edwardian terraced houses. The breaker’s yard and its wrecked cars had been superimposed on the still identifiable streets and alleyways.

In the centre of the island were the air-raid shelters among which he was sitting. Attached to these was a later addition, the remains of a Civil Defence post little more than fifteen years old. [37]

Maitland meets the human equivalents of this discarded landscape in the form of Proctor and Jane, two homeless dwellers who have made the island their own, both on the run from oppressive systems of control. Jane is a victim of patriarchy, hiding from an apparently abusive husband and bitter memories of her father, and now working as a motorway prostitute. Proctor is an old tramp who has suffered ritual humiliation at the hands of the local police. The island, reconfigured by Ballard as a container of social debris (both geographical and human, as in “The Terminal Beach”) becomes a space where social relations can begin again, where the social order is decommissioned, recombined, reconstructed and reshaped in ways that subvert dominant systems of thought. Maitland comes to see the island much as Proctor and Jane do, as a psychic “go-zone” where he can escape the pressures of his relationships with his wife and mistress and of his job – free “to rove forever within the empty city of his mind.” [38]

In his later career, immediately after Rushing to Paradise, Ballard embarked on a cycle of novels in which he would explore a much harder version of micronationalism, manifest in the savage gated communities of Cocaine Nights (1996) through to Kingdom Come (2006). It would no longer be necessary to look to mythical lands to remake and remodel maps of alienation – instead he began to focus on a parallel examination of the type of urban “non-place” that has come to be associated with the anthropologist Marc Augé. For Augé, our world is so saturated by superabundant fictions that it produces a conception of simultaneous time, representative of a homogenous, mediated society. The physical result is non-place, transitional zones detached from history and culture, inorganic, in-between zones where individuals are linked by this superabundance of information and technology rather than community or historical awareness, which paradoxically creates a pervasive sense of inwardness and isolation. Examples of non-place include motorways, hospitals, airports (especially duty-free zones), gated communities, business parks and housing estates – rich Ballardian territory, as the “urban disaster trilogy” of Crash, Concrete Island and High-Rise makes abundantly clear.

Ballard anticipates Augé, whose anthropological studies turned away from the “foreign field [towards] more familiar terrain,” due to the fact that “the contemporary world itself, with its accelerated transformations, is attracting anthropological scrutiny: in other words, a renewed methodical reflection on the category of otherness.” [39] In “The Terminal Beach,” Ballard describes Eniwetok as “synthetic, a man-made artefact with all the associations of a vast system of derelict concrete motorways.” [40] This is a description that foreshadows Concrete Island, and in the introduction to the latter, Ballard makes the link explicit: “The Pacific atoll may not be available, but there are other islands far nearer to home, some of them only a few steps from the pavements we tread every day. They are surrounded, not by sea, but by concrete, ringed by chain-mail fences and walled off by bomb-proof glass.” [41]

ABOVE: “A clip of the Hydrogen Bomb test at Enewetak Atoll on November 1, 1952, and the first time one was exploded. The fireball was big enough to cover most of Manhattan Island. This clip shows more of the aftermath of the nuclear cloud than most films.”

Just as Traven declares Eniwetok a “state of mind,” [42] so, too, does Maitland, indirectly, in Concrete Island when he insists: “I am the island.” [43] Here, “state” has a double meaning, as a condition of being, but also as a sovereign, independent territory. Both locations are potent symbols of the post-war era: Eniwetok, a tabula rasa of nationalism and patriotism; the motorway underpass, the archetypal non-place of supermodernity. As Traven’s existence in Eniwetok’s “thermonuclear noon” becomes increasingly hallucinatory (it is not clear whether he is dead, dying or feverish from irradiation), he finds that by saying goodbye in his mind to the disasters of the external world, he can come to terms with it. Standing among the abstract concrete blocks of the testing bunkers, he produces a strange incantation:

“Goodbye Eniwetok” … Somewhere there was a flicker of light, as if one of the blocks, like a counter on an abacus, had been plucked away.
Goodbye Los Alamos. Again, a block seemed to vanish. The corridors around him remained intact, but somewhere in his mind had appeared a small interval of neutral space.
Goodbye, Hiroshima.
Goodbye, Alamogordo.
Goodbye, Moscow, London, Paris, New York … [44]

The opening up of this “small interval” of neu(t)ral space represents a kind of psychological DMZ, an imaginative form of resistance that, along with Neil’s apocalyptic dreams, symbolises an intent that is the polar opposite to that of Dr Barbara (who, we recall, literalised a megalomania that proved unstoppable, and fatal). Traven surmises that time on Eniwetok has become “quantal,” an eternal present obliterating past and future. But is Ballard’s sense pejorative? [45] As Traven declares: “For me the hydrogen bomb was a symbol of absolute freedom. I feel it’s given me the right – the obligation, even – to do anything I want.” [46] This may well be the defining statement of the author’s career, brought into sharp relief by John Gray’s perceptive appraisal that Ballard’s “achievement is not to have staked out any kind of political position. Rather it is to have communicated a vision of what individual fulfilment might mean in a time of nihilism.” [47] It is a concept Ballard has alluded to in interview, when asked if his writing is interested in decadence:

Decadence? I can’t remember if I ever said I enjoyed the notion, except in the sense of drained swimming pools and abandoned hotels, which I don’t really see as places of decadence, but rather … as psychic zero stations, or as “Go,” in Monopoly terms. [48]

Here, Ballard appears to inform the concept of the “Temporary Autonomous Zone” (TAZ), codified by Bey in 1985 and enormously influential on anarchists, musicians and a myriad of underground artists. The TAZ calls for a mode of radical intervention in the form of creation of temporary spaces – whether “geographic, social, cultural, imaginal” [49] – that will serve to confound formalised control systems. Bey’s main focus was on the liberation of mind states, what he terms “psychotopology (and -topography)” as an antidote to the State’s “psychic imperialism”:

Only psychotopography can draw 1:1 maps of reality because only the human mind provides sufficient complexity to model the real. But a 1:1 map cannot “control” its territory because it is virtually identical with its territory. It can only be used to suggest, in a sense gesture towards, certain features. [50]

This particular strategy within the TAZ can be traced to Alfred Korzybski’s oft-repeated remark that “the map is not the territory,” since duplication is simply simulation, and able to be recouped as such. In opposition, Bey suggests that these sovereign mindscapes are enfolded within the folds of the cartographical matrix: “We are looking for ‘spaces’ with potential to flower as autonomous zones – and we are looking for times in which these spaces are relatively open, either through neglect on the part of the State or because they have somehow escaped notice by the mapmakers, or for whatever reason.”[51]

Ballard actually paraphrases Korzybski in Empire of the Sun: “Never confuse the map with the territory,” [52] while the patch of underpass in Concrete Island, built over the leavings of industrial culture, has been neglected by the State, and is so far off the map as to be invisible. Moreover, Maitland liberates an area of land or imagination (depending how we read the novel), without ever engaging directly with systems of control, with the State. As Ballard makes clear in the introduction: “What would happen if, by some freak mischance, we suffered a blow-out and plunged over the guard-rail onto a forgotten island of rubble and weeds, out of sight of the surveillance cameras?” [53] For Bey, confrontation with the State occurs through “the Spectacle,” in Guy Debord’s sense, where images rule by virtue of their monopoly of social space. Because society defines itself through the dissemination and experiencing of this space, the process appears natural, a self-contained feedback loop: “What appears is good; what is good appears.” [54] Such confrontation is doomed to failure since the machinery of simulation will merely absorb any display of “spectacular violence”. For Bey, as for Ballard, radical action therefore lies not in the deployment of spectacular violence, but in withdrawal, in becoming invisible, in merging with, and therefore rehabilitating, the by-products of supermodernity.

ABOVE: Sonsorol. Photo by Hisayuki Kubota.

Elsewhere, Ballard’s prototypical Pacific fictions seem an obvious influence on Bey’s “Visit Port Watson!,” [55] which uses their cue to forecast similar micronational and imaginative possibilities in the region. Written as a faux travel guide, it describes the micronation of Port Watson on the Pacific island of Sonsorol (the island actually exists – it is part of Palau – but Port Watson does not). Bey charts the history of Sonsorol and its colonisation by Spanish, Dutch, Japanese, New Zealand and Australian forces. He writes that when the island finally gained independence, the Port Watson enclave was set up by the island’s “Sultan” (a legacy of Sonsorol’s fictional 17th-century invasion by Moorish pirates), who had been influenced by libertarian-anarchist philosophy while studying in America. Offshore banking funded the enclave: “the creation of wealth out of nothing, out of pure imagination.” [56] Port Watson therefore develops as a libertarian-anarchist micronation with no laws or currency save for a “computerised” barter system, where a hamburger stand is called “McBakunins,” most people refuse to work since everyone has stakes in the banking system, and “public fucking” is encouraged.

This notion of a libertarian-anarchist enclave powered by “pure imagination” has clear Ballardian overtones, [57] especially in light of Ballard’s career-long “libertarian and anarchic stance … [a] scepticism about all communal laws.” [58] As Ballard himself wrote in Empire of the Sun: “After three years in the camp the notion of patriotism meant nothing.” [59] And, like Ballard, Bey’s external mapping of utopian space can in fact be read as a travel guide to inner space, unlocking the potential of the imagination to transcend laws, authority and corporate structure, all built upon the metaphorical/micronational possibilities of the Pacific. In “Visit Port Watson!,” this is consummated in the final paragraph, where Bey “quotes” an editorial from the local gazette, written by the Sultan, in answer to whether such a utopia can exist only on a tropical island: “Sonsorol could be created anywhere – nothing stands in the way but false consciousness and the grim power of those rulers who feast on false consciousness like vampires … ‘Don’t despair: Port Watson exists within you, and you can make it real’.” [60]

This internal collapse – this conflation of inner and outer space – reminds us of the power of Ballard’s original Pacific fictions, which reinhabit the frame to present a clearinghouse in which corporate and national governance is overthrown and regoverned as a “state of mind” – dystopia becomes the real utopia, and utopian ideals, typically represented as a stifling of the imagination, the true dystopia. But Ballard’s insistence that the imagination must remain sovereign territory – the “last nature reserve,” as he has termed it [61] – also aligns him once more with Jameson, who describes “anti-anti-utopian” thought as:

a new form of thinking … a new dimension of the exercise of the imagination. It’s only when people come to realize that there is no alternative that they react against it, at least in their imaginations, and try to think of alternatives … [affording] a process where the imagination begins to question itself, to move back and forth among the possibilities. [62]

Ballard’s reimagining of the Pacific archipelago – as a vast, disjunctive region of abandonment and reinvention, with multiple islands floating in the “sea of time and space” – and its subsequent superimposition onto urban landscapes, provides an excellent example of a pluralism of utopias (multiple subjectivities) steeped in an “aesthetic unreality”: affirmative dystopias that are finally, unmistakably, Ballardian.

ABOVE: Enewetak today. Photo by Brad Templeton.

..:: Previously on Ballardian:
+ My Dream of Flying to Tinian Island
+ How to Build a Utopia in your Spare Time

NOTES

[1] According to Tom Moylan: “The critical logic of the classical dystopia is … a simplifying one. It doesn’t matter that an economic regime drives the society; it doesn’t matter that a cultural regime of interpellation shapes and directs the people; for the social evil to be named, and resisted, is nothing but the modern state in and of itself.” Tom Moylan, “‘The moment is here … and it’s important’: State, Agency, and Dystopia in Kim Stanley Robinson’s Antarctica and Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Telling’ in Dark Horizons: Science Fiction and the Dystopian Imagination, eds Raffaella Baccolini and Tom Moylan (New York and London: Routledge, 2003) 136.
[2] Robert Collins, “Robert Collins’s top 10 dystopian novels,” The Guardian, 24 August 2008, date of access: 29 November 2008, < http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2005/aug/24/top10s.dystopian.novels >.
[3] J.G. Ballard, High-Rise [1975] (London: Flamingo, 1993) 131.
[4] Ballard, High-Rise 47. David Cronenberg, discussing his film version of Crash, identified this dynamic as a cornerstone of the Ballardian technique: “The police are a very minor presence in the book and in the film, because the exercise is not to see what would happen realistically now if people did this, it’s to allow them to do it unhindered, to see where it takes them psychologically … it’s still legitimate to say that the movie is not to be taken literally or realistically but as more metaphorically.” Chris Rodley, “Crash Talk: David Cronenberg and J.G. Ballard in conversation with Chris Rodley,” Guardian Lecture [transcript], British Film Institute, 10 November 1996, date of access: 29 November 2008, .
[5] J.G. Ballard, The Atrocity Exhibition [1970] (London: Flamingo, 2001), annotations 52.
[6] J.G. Ballard, “My Dream of Flying to Wake Island” [1974], The Complete Short Stories: Volume 2 (London: Flamingo, 2001) 337.
[7] Anonymous, “Visit Port Watson!” in Semiotext(e) SF, eds Rudy Rucker, Peter Lamborn Wilson and Robert Anton Wilson (New York: Autonomedia, 1989) 317.
[8] J.G. Ballard, Rushing to Paradise [1994] (New York: Picador, 1996) 12.
[9] Ballard, Rushing to Paradise 15-16.
[10] Ballard, Rushing to Paradise 10.
[11] J.G. Ballard, Concrete Island 1974] (London: Vintage, 1994) 69.
[12] Ballard, Rushing to Paradise 94.
[13] Fredric Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions [2005] (London and New York: Verso, 2007) 217.
[14] Ballard, Rushing to Paradise 74.
[15] Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future 221.
[16] Graeme Revell, “Interview with JGB by Graeme Revell” in RE/Search #8/9: J.G. Ballard, eds V. Vale and Andrea Juno (San Francisco: Re/Search Publications, 1984) 47.
[17] In a forthcoming essay, I examine in detail Ballard’s mapping of micronational space, which I describe as “predicated on a vocabulary of secession, and … filled with depictions of colonies, anomalous enclaves, virtual city-states, ‘zones of transition.’” To quote further from that piece: “The political (or, rather, anti-political) potential of these spaces is interesting, since their structure and interaction with the outside world strongly parallels the successes and failures of the real-world phenomenon of micronations. The term ‘micronation’ refers to an attempt, usually by small groups of individuals, to found small, often ephemeral ‘nations’, often without land, but sometimes claiming the types of ‘non-space’ Ballard describes. Micronational enterprises can be satirical, or a component of an art project, but occasionally they can have serious political intent. Micronations are sometimes called ‘model nations’, since they mimic the structure of independent nations and states, but are not recognised as such by established states.” Simon Sellars, “‘Zones of Transit’: Micronationalism in the work of J.G. Ballard” in J.G. Ballard: “From Shanghai to Shepperton,” eds Jeannette Baxter, Mark Currie and Rowland Wymer (Palgrave, projected date of publication: 2009).
[18] Andrzej Gasiorek, J.G. Ballard (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2005) 212.
[19] Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future 234.
[20] Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future 216.
[21] Gregory Stephenson, Out of the Night and Into the Dream: A Thematic Study of the Fiction of J.G. Ballard (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1991) 2-3.
[22] Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future 231-2.
[23] Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future 288.
[24] J.G. Ballard, “Airports,” The Observer, 14 September 1997.
[25] Simon Winchester, The Pacific (London: Arrow Books Limited, 1991) 17.
[26] Winchester, The Pacific 12.
[27] Ballard, Empire of the Sun [1984] (London: Grafton Books, 1988) 5.
[28] J.G. Ballard, “Some words about Crash!: 1. Introduction to the French edition of Crash! [sic],” Foundation, The Review of Science Fiction 9 (November 1975) 47-8.
[29] Andrés Vaccari, Awakening the Entropy Within: The Novels of J.G. Ballard, unpublished monograph, 1996.
[30] This is core subject matter that would endure right across Ballard’s career, beginning with his 1962 short story, “Thirteen to Centaurus,” and his novel from the same year, The Drowned World. While treating very different subject matters, both feature central characters haunted by dreams of a beating, burning, amniotic sun, a super-enhanced inner landscape of the mind that begins to merge with the burning sun of the external, overheated world.
[31] J.G. Ballard, “The Terminal Beach” [1964] The Complete Short Stories: Volume 2 33.
[32] Ballard, “The Terminal Beach” 44.
[33] Ballard, “The Terminal Beach” 30.
[34] Gasiorek, J.G. Ballard 110.
[35] Gasiorek, J.G. Ballard 212.
[36] Gasiorek, J.G. Ballard 120.
[37] Ballard, Concrete Island 69.
[38] Ballard, Concrete Island 142.
[39] Marc Augé, Non-places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity, trans John Howe (London and New York: Verso, 1995) 23-4.
[40] Ballard, “The Terminal Beach” 30.
[41] Ballard, Concrete Island 4.
[42] Ballard, “The Terminal Beach” 30.
[43] Ballard, Concrete Island 71.
[44] Ballard, “The Terminal Beach” 45-6.
[45] Augé argues that non-space is a negative aspect of supermodernity, as Gasiorek indicates in his overview of Augé’s links to Ballard’s work: “[In] Ballard [the] future is a dead zone already destroyed by the relentless drive to reduce everything to the present moment and thus to collapse all the time that has passed and is still to come into the tyrannic embrace of the ever-same now, hence his claim that “the future is ceasing to exist, devoured by the all-voracious present” … Augé’s contention that the question of space has come to the fore because it is ‘difficult to make time into a principle of intelligibility, let alone a principle of identity’ fits well with Ballard’s concerns.” Gasiorek, J.G. Ballard 110.
[46] Ballard, “The Terminal Beach” 43.
[47] John Gray, “Modernity and its discontents,” New Statesman (10 May 1999) 42.
[48] Thomas Frick, “The Art of Fiction: J.G. Ballard,” Paris Review, 94 (1984) 138.
[49] Hakim Bey, “The Psychotopology of Everyday Life” in The Temporary Autonomous Zone (New York: Autonomedia, 1985), date of access: 29 November 2008 .
[50] Bey, “The Psychotopology of Everyday Life.”
[51] Bey, “The Psychotopology of Everyday Life.”
[52] Ballard, Empire of the Sun 129.
[53] Ballard, Concrete Island 5.
[54] Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle [1967], trans Ken Knabb (London: Rebel Press, 2006) 9-10.
[55] Although this piece was published anonymously, it is generally agreed that Hakim Bey wrote it, given the identical stylistic and thematic consistencies to his work (“Hakim Bey” is the pseudonym of the Semiotext(e) SF co-editor, Peter Lamborn Wilson).
[56] Anonymous, “Visit Port Watson!” 317.
[57] The fact that “Visit Port Watson!” was published in an anthology along with two Ballard stories, along with an editorial acknowledgement of Ballard’s influence on the writers within, also seems to affirm, as with the links with the TAZ, Ballard’s shaping of Bey’s worldview.
[58] Gasiorek, J.G. Ballard 1, 2.
[59] Ballard, Empire of the Sun 169.
[60] Anonymous, “Visit Port Watson!” 330.
[61] J.G. Ballard, Super-Cannes [2000] (New York: Picador, 2002) 264.
[62] Quoted in Joshua Glenn, “Back to utopia: Can the antidote to today’s neoliberal triumphalism be found in the pages of far-out science fiction?,” The Boston Globe (20 November 2005).,” The Boston Globe (20 November 2005).

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Simon Sellars

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

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

His understanding of architecture, and architects, and his prophetic visions make Ballard one of the most important figures in the literary articulation of architectural issues and concerns. From the description of futuristic houses that empathise with their inhabitants, to the bleak characterisation of gated communities consumed by sex, drugs and violence, Ballard’s world is highly prescient and ruthlessly unsentimental. Rather than examining specific texts, Unit 15 will be following themes implicit in Ballard’s writing.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

NC: I started my postgraduate dissertation in 1989 with a quote from Frederic Jameson: ‘Of all the arts, architecture is the closest constitutively to the economic, with which, in the form of commissions and land values, it has a virtually unmediated relationship.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

LEFT: Burroughs in 1963: ‘particularly spectral and menacing: a fitting mug shot for a literary outlaw’ (image via Reality Studio). RIGHT: Moorcock, from around the same era (image via Moorcock’s Miscellany).

Over at Reality Studio, there’s an excellent interview with Michael Moorcock, conducted by Mark P. Williams. Naturally, Moorcock is as insightful discussing Burroughs and the Beats as he has been analysing the New Wave and Ballard, and I think he sums up Kerouac for me, too:

I read two books while hitchhiking from Sweden to France and was starving by the time I got to Paris — On the Road by Kerouac and Brideshead Revisited by Waugh. I thought On the Road a bit of a wank and the Waugh a bit frozen in a time which meant almost nothing to me.

And then came Burroughs…

Read the interview for more on the intersection of three great writers (there’s quite a bit of detail on Ballard, also). And kudos to MPW for the weighty questions — to which Moorcock responds in kind.

MPW: Both your writing and Burroughs at this time would fall under what Jeff Nuttall described as “Bomb culture” (Nuttall, Bomb Culture, 1968), a peculiar reaction to the uncertainties and contradictions revealed in the post-1945 era, which he identifies particularly with the atom bomb. How much do you feel that the specific cultural circumstances of the mid-to-late-1960s, particularly in the Ladbroke Grove area, are reflected in the appeal of what Mary McCarthy calls Burroughs’ novel of “statelessness?”

Moorcock: Jeff was a bit older than me. I didn’t react much to the bomb. I wasn’t scared of it, maybe saw it as a useful symbol… and though I sort of went along with friends in the Ban the Bomb movement, I knew it wouldn’t be banned and rather relished the idea of it. I did see it as a way of keeping the peace. I shared this view with Ballard and Barry [Barrington] Bayley, the two writer friends I saw regularly and with whom I had most in common. Ballard had been liberated by the Bomb, as had [Brian W.] Aldiss, another friend. Ballard from the Japanese civilian camp and Aldiss from having to begin the invasion of Japan. I think I was born a little too late to worry. I had enjoyed the excitement of the V-bombs, the majority of which fell in SW London, where I lived, and had always felt slightly let down by peacetime. Few of my close friends gave much of a crap about the bomb. We understood sensibilities had changed and that we needed a new kind of fiction to deal with it, but we didn’t lose much sleep except, maybe, during the Cuban crisis. But even there our attitude was sort of elevated. I was more focussed on discovering a new kind of urban fiction.

I like the notion of the “stateless” novel and indeed you could argue I was looking for a form like that. Cornelius certainly reflects that. A novel which looked for a new form of identity? McCarthy was arguing from a more academic, conventional point of view. I was more practical, I think, in that I was trying to reclaim the “literary” novel for a general public, through sf. Burroughs, Bayley and Ballard all had an interest in taking certain ideas from sf for their own uses, as I did. So we were trying to marry popular and, if you like, elitist art, in much the way Michael Chabon and his Bay Area friends are trying to do today. I did assume Burroughs to be a writer with an audience amongst sf readers, for instance. It turned out that the sf audience, like the audiences for any genre fiction (including the middle-brow “modern” or even “modernist” novel) is deeply conservative and pretty much addicted to generic conventions. Repetition is what it needs, not innovation.

..:: MORE
+ ‘To Write For the Space Age’: Interview with Michael Moorcock by Mark P. Williams
+ A New Literature for the Space Age: Moorcock’s Editorial on Burroughs for New Worlds
+ The Cosmic Satirist: Moorcock’s review of Naked Lunch for New Worlds

BALLARDOSCOPE: SOME ATTEMPTS AT APPROACHING THE WRITER AS A VISIONARY

by Jordi Costa

The exhibition JG Ballard, Autopsy of the New Millennium, celebrating the work and enduring influence of J.G. Ballard, opens tomorrow at the Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona.

Please enjoy the CCCB’s wonderful promotional film for the exhibition, a Lynchian, impressionistic cut up with main ingredients: Marilyn Monroe’s ghost, Ballard’s mellifluous tones, snatched Aphex Twin, what looks like James Dean’s car and a severe case of the night terrors.

And below is the prologue to the exhibition catalogue, a deep tribute to JGB composed by Josep Ramoneda, Director of the CCCB.

‘The Metro-Centre is secure … Withdraw all army units … Repeat, the Metro-Centre is secure … We have hostages … Repeat, we have hostages …’
…
I stared at the heavy shield, and helped the elderly man to the chair by the enquiry desk. He thanked me and said: ‘Your foot’s bleeding.’

‘I know. Tell me — are we sealed in?’

‘It looks like it.’

‘The North Gate entrance?’

‘I imagine that’s also closed.’

‘And the side exits?’

‘Everything. The car parks and freight entrance.’…

‘…these shopping malls haven’t learned how to cope with violence. When they do…’

‘War will move into the world’s consumer spaces? That’s quite a thought. Up till now, buying a washing machine has been a safe option…’

J.G. Ballard, Kingdom Come, 2006.

In the latest attack in Gauteng, a policeman was critically injured in a shoot-out with a gang of 12 bombers armed with AK47 and R5 assault rifles. In the early hours of Friday morning the gang took control of a parking lot at Bracken City shopping centre, in Brackenhurst, south of Johannesburg. They took about 20 people hostage before blowing up a First National Bank ATM.

“They were like a mini army. The shoot-out ensued when the police heard the explosion and came to investigate,” police spokesman Steady Nawa said.

News report, the Times (South Africa), 2008.

by the Crashman.

ABOVE: ‘White Bird’ by the Crashman. ‘XB-70, Tu-144: White Bird Must Fly, or she will crash’.

From the moment Blake crashes his stolen aircraft into the Thames, the unlimited dream company takes over and the town of Shepperton is transformed into an apocalyptic kingdom of desire and stunning imagination ruled over by Blake’s messianic figure. Tropical flora and fauna appear; pan-sexual celebrations occur regularly; and in a final climax of liberation, the townspeople learn to fly.

From the cover blurb to The Unlimited Dream Company, J.G. Ballard, 1979 (Triad/Panther edition, 1985).

Perreau: You once said “Nothing has any sense except in terms of ephemeral airplane culture”. Motorways, airplanes, shopping centres… What is the link between these things? What do humans do?

Ballard: They take planes and fly around, like the great soaring birds who endlessly cross and recross the ocean. Like the albatross, we are looking for our soul. Tourism is a rehearsal for death.

From Yann Perreau’s interview with J.G. Ballard.

As a stripling, I had the immense good fortune to stumble across the short stories of J.G. Ballard in the pulp science fiction magazines of the day: IF, F&SF, Analog. These prompted me to get hold of his early novels: The Wind From Nowhere, The Drowned World, The Crystal World. I was seduced by the subtle brilliance of Ballard’s work, by the total absence of worked-to-death SF themes, by the air of detached sophistication, overwhelming to a callow adolescent like me.

When Mr Ballard turned his back on “conventional SF” and pioneered the British New Wave with Michael Moorcock, I was as excited as anyone. His work opened up a relentless, terrifyingly limitless voyage into the libido, the id, the savage psychopathology that lies hidden in every ordinary man and woman, the possibility of any strange thing. Reading Ballard as an adolescent changed my entire view of the world, certainly of what was called “Science Fiction”.

In the early 70s a fellow fan handed me a copy of Crash. It was an utterly stunning experience. Crash ruined my taste for anything but the finest SF, and I was haunted for years by visions of Vaughan’s peculiar hobbies, those bizarrely twisted, almost unheard-of modes of human sexuality spelled out inexorably by the book. Now nothing could satisfy me as fully as Mr Ballard’s experiments with what the human psyche was really capable of, laying out unthinkable sexual and psychological grotesqueries in his trademark elegant, gentlemanly, spare and penetrating prose. His writing remade my intellectual world.

I gulped down his later novels, each more thought-provoking than the last, reveling in the astounding but visibly true events reported in the daily news as much as in his work. I found little to criticize, least of all his unflinching view of the profound yet subtle changes imposed by modern civilization on a thinking organism many millions of years old, an organism evolved under very different conditions than prevail today.

I searched for similar oracles, those who could further light the shattered-glass-strewn, arc-lit motorways we would soon be endlessly traveling. The Cronenberg movie was devastatingly, beautifully faithful to Ballard and after I saw it I realized that all of Ballard’s work could be read as a screenplay, a script for a movie about the storms of change enveloping the world.

ABOVE: ‘Helicopter Opera’ by the Crashman. ‘Helicopters crash to soaring opera by Kimera’.

I developed a desire to put forth my own tribute to Ballard’s work and somehow to carry forward the concepts that had so fascinated and changed me. I am no writer of any skill, and the idea of writing something “derivative of” or “inspired by” the genius of the Oracle of Shepperton was repellent to me. It could not fail to be anything but the crudest of imitations. So, to contribute to the Ballardian universe and its inhabitants, I latched onto the themes expressed in Crash, and since Mr Ballard’s novels acknowledged little or no boundaries, neither would I. I felt I could somehow take the themes of Crash even further, in different media if necessary. I thought about the event that had more or less inspired Crash: Mr Ballard’s exhibition of crashed cars as art, with the death and destruction latent in these twisted, crashed vehicles unleashing something that had always been hidden in the minds of their viewers. I wanted to do that.

In my teens I acquired a pilot’s licence, for sport and for the opportunity to master dangerous technology. But I was also drawn to plane crashes, to air crashes of any type, crashes at air exhibitions, transport accidents, airliners, sport planes, military fighters. They attracted me in the same way as Vaughan, who could not pass a motor accident without slowing to view and, if possible, photograph the result. From childhood I collected every book, press clipping and photograph I could find that dealt with aviation accidents and their strange and often grotesque aftermaths. To this day I have valises bulging with old magazine and newspaper clippings of long-forgotten air crashes.

Famous air tragedies have become iconic for me: so much human anguish dealt out by a crack in a pressurized Comet window joint, by the decision of the KLM captain at Tenerife to advance the throttles of his huge 747 while another loaded 747 on the same runway ahead of him lay hidden in the fog. By the peculiarly unforgiving nature of mechanical flight, midair collisions against all odds, the inexplicable crash deaths of highly experienced pilots from unexpected causes, of men and women who had spent thousands of hours at the controls. As Ballard’s work implies, we are at the mercy of our own technology.

I began to understand what it was that never fails to fascinate the public about aviation: the CRASH. A massive, newsworthy and completely public display of flying vehicular violence always raises the psychological stakes on the table, and is faithful to the essential Ballardian spirit. In the film The Great Waldo Pepper the barnstorming protagonist asks, “Why do people come to airshows?” The answer he is given is: “People don’t come to airshows to watch planes fly. They come to watch a man die.” Few psychoanalysts would disagree.

But I have also never met a pilot who can resist reading a crash report or viewing a film of one. We learn from them, “there but for the grace of God go I” — but like a car accident on the motorways that now define our civilization, no one can look away. We are all spectators at this destructive end-stage of our grotesquely dehumanizing civilization. Eventually it will become boring, as Mr Ballard has predicted our future as a civilization to be.

ABOVE: ‘Kraftwerk Crashes’ by the Crashman. ‘Topnotch crashing, all technical styles’.

Added to that, I was also fascinated by Ballard’s stint in the RAF and the flying symbolism in his books. Again and again he has teased us with aviation and its dangers, so akin to the dangers of the motorway. There’s the protagonist aviator in Super-Cannes with his crash-injured knee and his banner-towing girlfriend. There are the accounts in The Kindness of Women of military training in powerful RAF Harvards in Saskatchewan; of the ceaseless activity at the huge airports that always seem to be at the nexus of those fascinating and deadly motorways; of the forever-lost Turkish aviator trainee and his crashed Harvard, inverted for eternity in an unnamed Canadian lake, its form just visible, slowly disappearing under green algae as Ballard flew over it. And of the bold and virile American Mustang over Shanghai, herald of liberation and of a change in Ballard’s life as profound as that triggered by the Japanese occupation, itself announced by graceful formations of Zeros and Mitsubishi bombers over the soon-to-be-destroyed Shanghai of the 1930s.

So here was my chance to sit at the Ballardian table and place my own dish on its menu. Given my aviation background, and my desire to evoke the spirit of Crash, what could be more appropriate than the sight of a sudden and unexpected crash, preferably of a large airliner, its great silver phallus shattering in an ultra-high-speed orgasm of violent, spasmodic disintegration, uncontrollably spewing the shocked, wandering gametes of its ambulatory survivors and the ragged chunks of human flesh still full of their own unique DNA? This is epistemology, the very question of identity itself: “Who are we?” “Who were you?”. And what could be more Ballardian? No one ever emerges from an air crash unchanged at the deepest levels, even if they do survive.

ABOVE: ‘Crash Right In’ by the Crashman. ‘Baby let your hair hang down…’

The raw materials for the experiment were already available. I found numerous websites devoted solely to air accidents, those rare films where a motion-picture camera has recorded the unfolding of the crash, the cries and shouts of the survivors and onlookers, the stunned silence of the injured and the unending silent rage of the dead, lives with a whole trajectory changed forever in the intersection with violent arcs of shatteringly powerful, aluminium turbine-powered technology. Right away these suggested TV commercials of traveling death and terrifying impacts rather than beaches and sun, films of agonizingly public yet intensely personal disasters of which the Zapruder Kennedy motorcade film was an early harbinger.

I collected these films, poring over dread experiences frozen forever in time. Again, I recalled Ballard’s exhibition, where the mere presence of the crashed vehicles in a public art-space had touched and unleashed the id of the viewers, to the point where the audience began to interact unpredictably and destructively with these static displays of demolished technology. Somehow, Ballard’s work had touched something that was always there, but rarely expressed in public.

I began to edit the films to music, making my own choices and juxtapositions, the goal being to emerge with a collection of short videos that had been extracted from reality, yet would evoke in the viewer the same types of emotions and insights unleashed in Mr Ballard’s work. I used a neo-Ballardian pastiche technique to edit them: no plot, no dialogue with the viewer, nothing but crash after crash, and the result emerged as a video collage of horror, dismay, and death, Ballardianism expressed in an entirely new set of technological media.

ABOVE: ‘Turning Japanese’ by the Crashman. ‘I think I’m turning Japanese…’

The films in their original state were often silent, sometimes monochromatic and flickering with age, and sometimes modern color video, the soundtrack replete with the noise of impact and the cries of onlookers. But music dictated an important “feel” to the videos, echoing and amplifying the visual crash itself, lending it layers of additional meaning (although I often left in the cries of spectators and survivors, the better to immerse the viewer in the event). I found that the visual material of crashing aircraft lent itself readily to many kinds of musical background. Repeated slow-motion test crashes of old airliners called for music evoking the eventual futility of life. Exciting airshow passes and flaming collisions called for equally exciting, pounding rock ‘n’ roll. Surviving, parachuting pilots had their luck accompanied with notes of musical grace. Antique crashes evoked songs from their own black-and-white era. Uniquely elegant aircraft crashes called for matching beauty in the music.

At first I kept these short videos to myself. I felt the general public would see them as merely morbid, while the aviation community, of which I remained a part, would probably react even more negatively. Then I began to post them on websites devoted to bizarre and unpleasant events. After I had made a few of the videos public, a collective audience began to slowly emerge. I began to receive feedback and criticism, sometimes constructive, often laudatory, and sometimes merely abusive. But these people were accustomed to horrible sights and events already, like a doctor or air crash investigator. How would a random, general audience feel and what would they say? I took the next step: in 2006 I uploaded most of the videos to YouTube.

I expected to be excoriated by this wider, larger general public as a ghoul, an exploiter of the suffering of others, and as it happened the word ‘sick’ was freely applied to the videos as well as to myself. I considered this a compliment, as it mirrored the initial response to Crash (‘This author is beyond psychiatric help: do not publish’, according to the publisher’s reader). But, and I had expected this too, neo-Ballardians began to show themselves, finding subtle excitements and even strange beauty in the videos, that uneasy, disquieting splendour inherent in the slow-motion breakup of a speeding aircraft. Negative commenters, meanwhile, would often complain that the music was not to their taste, ignorant of the maxim “de gustibus non est disputandum”.

While I got my share of abuse as a psychopathic air crash ghoul and poor chooser of soundtrack music, I noticed an interesting phenomenon: not one of the persons commenting who had an authentic aviation background found them less than fascinating, and the vast majority of them found the videos praiseworthy. They admitted they were fascinated and horrified at the same time, feelings made familiar by the very real possibility of such crashes happening to them. They had been fatally intrigued. As one of my sharpest critics admitted, even he couldn’t look away from the screen. The material was simply too visually powerful. I had touched something, and I hoped it was close to what Mr Ballard had touched in the readers of his novels and in the viewers of his crashed-car art installation.

I continued to expose my unpromoted, unadvertised work, with all its unfettered techno-pornography of aviation violence. Within a little more than a year my videos had been seen by well over a million people on YouTube alone. The experiment was working on a large stage now.

ABOVE: ‘Proud and Glorious’ by the Crashman. ‘Death and glory in the air…’

The viewers seemed to get the intended spirit of these odd video creations right away. Others had already begun making fascinating crash-collage videos of auto accidents, and my work was seen as kicking the violence stakes up a notch, because, I suppose, of the relative rarity of plane crash films and the indisputably brutal violence inherent in their nature. Famous airliner crashes, the air conflicts of WWII, the pathetic mishaps of general aviation and the unintended accidents at public airshows and aerial exhibitions interested the vast majority of viewers.

I found that nationalism played a large part in most of the negative reactions. Russians, for example, would complain about videos devoted to their own airshow crashes. My video of the incomparably horrible Lviv airshow accident in 2002 showed shredded bodies on the runways, yet how could a video faithfully recording the original event ever be justifiably censored? No one can even see these videos unless they seek them out…

Once a contingent of Britons forced YouTube to take my collage of helicopter crash films offline, by bombarding them with complaints that it showed a completely non-explicit but fatal crash of one of their own country’s helicopters. Again I adopted a Ballardian stance: here it is, make of it what you will. View the videos or not, as you choose. To the extent I needed one, I pleaded the aesthetic defense of reality, of psychological and factual truth-telling — and a strong one it is.

It’s interesting to note that since I began posting in 2005, quite a few others have begun to do the same, editing various aviation-accident and plane crash videos to music and posting the result. The experiment has gone “viral” — a novel subgenre is emerging on YouTube and many other sites devoted to odd videos.

On a personal level, I consider this experiment an enormous success, comparable to the feelings of an author or filmmaker who knows that literally millions of people have chosen to view their work. On the Ballardian level, as a public psychological experiment in Applied Ballardianism, it merely proves what we already knew: that Mr Ballard’s unique visions are as powerful when translated into other media as they are in his work itself.

We know that Mr Ballard does not use the internet, but his partner, Claire, does. If by chance she runs across this project someday and shows it to him, I can only hope he will accept this experiment as it was intended: as a sincere tribute to the man and his work.

I feel that the balance between fiction and reality has changed significantly in the past decades. Increasingly their roles are reversed. We live in a world ruled by fictions of every kind – mass-merchandizing, advertising, politics conducted as a branch of advertising, the pre-empting of any original response to experience by the television screen. We live inside an enormous novel. It is now less and less necessary for the writer to invent the fictional content of his novel. The fiction is already there. The writer’s task is to invent the reality.

J.G. Ballard, introduction to Crash, 1973.

The Crashman. Copyright 2008, Crashman Productions.

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Steven Meisel’s latest ‘atrocity porn’ is now online.

[ via TimC ]

Previously on Ballardian: k-punk on Steven Meisel.