* “The ’state,’ for example, barely features in his writing, and politicians or any kind of external authority are almost wholly absent” – ala Wild Palms: “There’s no police. Maybe it’s the other way around. Maybe there’s nothing but police.”
* “Affirmative dystopia”: immediately reminds me of Zizek’s dialectical ‘reversal’ – one of his fave intellectual strategies – the psychoanalytical equivalent of a slippery klein bottle wielded by an ironically angry deconstructionist
* “[..] imagistic buffer zones representing the sovereignty of the imagination” – total boundary dissolution; searingly hyperreal psychotopological intensity; a world “[..] now so interlaced with fiction as to be an independent psychical entity: not so much a place in which we think as a place that seems to think for us” (http://www.mapmagazine.co.uk/index.cfm?page=984F1E34-BDF5-2379-71075D0184E53D92&articleid=358)
* “Melange”: ’spice’: “A space deformation technique that folds 2D space into 3D in order to bring several focus regions of interest into view at the same time..” (http://www2.computer.org/portal/web/csdl/doi/10.1109/TVCG.2009.86)
* “[..] dark underside”: doesn’t the use of this cliche ironically contradicts Ballard’s affirmative dystopia.. or is Jameson with his ‘anti-anti-utopianism’ trying to muddy already muddy psychological backwaters? (Is that you John Wayne?) Er..
* “[..] the contradictions of a properly representational attempt to grasp the future directly” – Ballard as child, unable to fully grasp the import (of the horror of the warring) Present, automatically creates in his mind a void, a gap – the zizekian notion of the (unspeakable) ’surplus’.. “[..] a surplus of the Real always eludes the symbolic grasp” (http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=1vp_flyTrrMC&pg=PA239&lpg=PA239&dq=zizek+surplus&source=bl&ots=OgY5DgoBSy&sig=0mlOz9pnSla3SXAuBOdW42bUMj8&hl=en&ei=68ysSt2sBprSjAeT3Nz7Bw&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=4#v=onepage&q=&f=false) and can / must only be expressed as Science Fiction, which cleverly prevents people from totally loosing their ontological shit by telling them it deals only with something safe and far off called ‘The Future’..
* “[..] an almost infantile world where any demand, any possibility, whether for life-styles, travel, sexual roles and identities, can be satisfied instantly” – seen that “Gamer” film recently? (Don’t bother its a p.o.s) but you know what I mean..
* “[..] multiple subjectivities steeped in an aesthetic unreality”: Welcome to Indra’s tubular internets
*RE: the top pic – a ufo is an inverted swimming pool..

Chasing that brilliant Pacific Blue

Henry Swanson

the adoption of jgb novels in the list of dystopias, doesn’t seem like a misreading to me. i even think that it is a good thing to do so, because as i understand the literary cathegory of distopia as a political one, therefore a very subjective one, depending on the political/social/aesthetical goals of the reader or the writer. i think the problem with this topic is to be found in the fact, that the term “dystopia” as we know it, is based on the idea of humanism. and since it seems like “western civilisation” has been set equal to humanism by a huge campaign of brainwashing, terms like humanism have to be discussed again. the fact that ballard does not specificly describes the apparatus of “the state” is based on the simple fact that mordern societies (made of human flesh) rule themselve. like hannah arendt describes in the concept of the “domination of nobody”, in which the authority is like the rizom or grid that is part of every person. authority structures are inherent in the public mind and bodys, and of course in the architecture of our enviroment. “the state” as a symbol for an authority system is part of everyones “inner space”. because there hasn’t been any outside nor inside since quite a long time now. and at least i am not sure if there ever was a difference.

grm/nhl

It’s good to see a perceptive reading of “Rushing to Paradise”, a novel that’s been all too easy to ignore or mis-read. Although I’m not that familar with Jameson’s writings, the use of his questioning of the notion of Utopia seems to have been really productive.

And I love those photos of Eniwetok and Wake Island …