Jeremy Reed at the JG Ballard Memorial, 2009. Photo: Rick McGrath.

West End Survival Kit, by Jeremy Reed. Furze Hill, Hove: Waterloo Press, 2009. ISBN: 978-1-906742-07-2.

JEREMY REED IS A HUGELY PROLIFIC poet, novelist, biographer and spoken-word musician, the author of 15 novels, 16 poetry collections and 14 works of non-fiction since 1984. Yet despite that phenomenal output, he remains an exile in British letters. According to Reed, ‘People have reacted so nastily to me and tried to airbrush me out of the picture… The establishment never forgave me, because I used to give readings in heavy make-up’. That’s not a working method that was ever going to appeal to Sir Andrew Motion, the former Poet Laureate, who famously dubbed Reed ‘that effete little pseud’. He also sledged him as the ‘David Bowie of the poetry circuit’, an especially backhanded insult, given Reed’s sartorial style and the fact that among his back catalogue are biographies on Lou Reed, Marc Almond and Brian Jones. In fact, the latter provided one very revealing insight into the mind of Jeremy Reed. Once asked what he thought was the defining moment of the 60s, he replied: ‘I’d say it was the first time Brian Jones wore a girl’s polka-dotted blouse. It had never been done before’. In the same interview, he derided ‘the barbiturate poetry of Andrew Motion and those post-Larkin poets. Very grey, very drab’. And so the stage is set.

Following the pattern of this exile, whenever there is talk about the latter-day British writers who enjoyed the friendship, patronage or thematic repertoire of J.G. Ballard, invariably the same names are mentioned: Will Self and Iain Sinclair. Not Reed. Yet Reed and Ballard enjoy a long and very intriguing relationship. Reed’s science-fiction novel Diamond Nebula (1994), set in the 23rd century, even featured a film-director character obsessed by Bowie, Ballard and Warhol:

Her eye was arrested by an open photograph album … David Bowie at the Rainbow Theatre, 1972; at the LA Forum in 1976; Hiroshima, 1973; LA Amphitheatre, 1974; Wembley, 1976: the images seeming to have been chosen for their visual diversity and metamorphoses. Over the page were weirdly angled shots of Ballard getting into his car at Shepperton after the publication of Crash; and then the publicity photographs of him that had appeared on the jackets of High-Rise and Myths of the Near Future, together with a series of solarized images in the manner of Man Ray, in which the writer’s head was superimposed on Brancusi sculptures. Cindy flicked through the obsessive preoccupations: Warhol screened by black glasses on a couch at the Factory, and then seen filming Edie Sedgwick and Gino Persicho in Beauty 2; and a few pages on, isolated, filming Chelsea Girls.

Jeremy Reed, Diamond Nebula.

These aren’t the ordinary images of Ballard (let alone Bowie) that get bandied about. They are cult snapshots, taken by a writer with a fan’s eye for obscure detail surrounding the object of worship. In the preface to the book, Reed talks of creating an environment in which ‘the external world provides a backdrop to the exploration of inner space, a vanishing-point rather than a structure for continuous reference’. With further reference to the ‘geography of the unconscious’, it’s easy to realise the superficial similarities with Ballard’s own working methods and obsessions. In the preface, Reed describes ‘Ballard as the chief proponent of the futuristic novel … seen as the person most receptive to occupying a colony that looks towards the arrival of mutants from another galaxy’. As an alternative biography of its three avant-garde celebrities, Diamond Nebula is a tantalising work, drawing on Reed’s main obsessions: style, flashy pop, mutation (both psychic and physical), cult celebrities, inner space … and Ballard.

Jeremy Reed speaking to Nicky Singer at the ICA.

In interview, too, Reed always pays his dues, recording his writerly debt to Ballard’s ‘visionary present’ – an especial act of linguistic engagement that ‘transform[s] the universe into its imagined equivalent’ and provides an instruction manual in ‘blowing up the social structure’. He sees Ballard’s work as a hotwire to the pure, uncut imaginative spirit that also powers the work of Stephen Barber and Edmund White:

They all have that very charged language. When I began as a writer, Ballard was the writer who had a new language that I was looking for, the way he crystallised the modern world into images. It’s something that he has never lost. Ballard is not part of literature at any level, he’s got no concern about it at all. He’s a rogue gene which is what attracted me to him from the start. And work is all he is, what he writes is so integral to him. That’s all he does all day, write all day and live in Shepperton.

But the admiration cut both ways. According to Rick McGrath, Ballard provided blurbs for 12 of Reed’s books and wrote forewords to two others, more JGB endorsements than for any other writer. One of the forewords was for Reed’s latest collection of poetry, West End Survival Kit (2009), possibly the last writing Ballard had published, in which he enthuses about Reed’s ‘talent … almost extraterrestrial in its brilliance’. For Ballard, Reed is ‘Rimbaud reconfigured as the Man who fell to Earth, a visitor from deep space whose time machine was designed by Lautréamont and de Sade, and powered by the most exotic fuels the imagination has ever devised’. That’s a very dense sentence, pricking imagistic sensors of recognition in almost every one of its 36 words: Bowie, Roeg, symbolism, science fiction, surrealism, film, sadomasochism, inner space…

And so it is with these poems, which are compacted like diamonds, an intent signalled by this excerpt:

firing ideas at me like big hitters
for work we do
shape-shifting architecture into words,

the way 10 million atoms colonize
an inked full stop.

Jeremy Reed, ‘Liquid Nitrogen Ice Cream’, West End Survival Kit.

The back cover gives no real description of the contents, save for general endorsements from a stellar cast: Ballard, David Gascoyne, David Lodge and Seamus Heaney. We are led to believe that this is a collection of free-standing poems, and reading them is simultaneously exhilarating and exhausting. Reed is obsessed with both surface flash and the hidden layers of meaning inherent in modern urban life, with which we constantly negotiate and are in dialogue with: the meaning of ‘junk DNA’ and the enigma of Michael Jackson, the sigils in corporate signage, the mental cross-chatter engendered by rapid communications technology. His street-level descriptions are often as unfathomable as conspiracy theory, and shot through with a selection of barely glimpsed, constantly rotating characters (including a first-person narrator), invariably described within a mesh of techy jargon:

meditating in front of his mezzanine.
His girlfriend paints her toes
in Howard Hodgkin moods,

reads Holy Anorexia and grooves
at being air
she’s molecules wired to neuronal drive.

He’s into ‘dark matter’, lab neutrinos,
thermonuclear fusion
generating energy in the sun.

Jeremy Reed, ‘Astroparticle Physicist Chills’, West End Survival Kit.

The writing is a rush, a blur. It’s slippery, emphasised by quick-fire, three-line stanzas:

They share headphones on the new R.E.M.:
a shimmering slice of post-modern pop,
impersonal as an airport lounge,

riffy, mid-tempo anomie
for the 21st century.
He wears a Titian red Gucci jacket,

as though it’s cut out of the sun,
and she two dollops of mauve eye shadow
co-ordinating with her top.

Jeremy Reed, ‘Endgames’, West End Survival Kit.

Certain motifs begin to gestate a picture in the mind as you gradually learn through half-remembered, diaphanous glimpses that Mars and the moon have been colonised; dispossessed astronauts wander the Earth; drugs are rampant; and technological virtuality is encoded into the very fabric of everyday life. By the end, you are left with the inkling that the poems are perhaps not free-standing, but part of a continuous (albeit fractured) narrative, illuminated snapshots of a mordant near-future world seen from multiple, cross-linked perspectives. They could be interior hallucinations, or the exterior unspooling vision of CCTV cameras all over the city, but whatever they are, they are engendered by Reed’s very effective trick of repeating a motif, phrase or word from one poem to the next, but never more than two poems in a row. Subliminally, you become aware of a deep, unfolding narrative, even if consciously you assess that you are reading two poems with very different characters:

ten miles above Cape Canaveral.
He journeys back in his neurology
to pink skies over the oxygen plant,

graffiti discovered on a rock face –
RAD51D — the king’s returned —
and gantried higher up a gold statue

Jeremy Reed, ‘Red Planet Blues’, West End Survival Kit.

Someone’s got the dangling hexagonal
molecule RAD51D
under scrutiny for cell death

like a registration number
on a top security Jeep.
She’s paid to disinform. Each day

Jeremy Reed, ‘Drug Giant PA’, West End Survival Kit.

Given all the Ballard associations, it’s tempting to read Ballardian themes into the work (the damaged astronauts fit well) and the densified prose method strives to convey as much meaning as the ‘condensed novels’ in The Atrocity Exhibition. Vaughan from Crash (and Atrocity) even makes an appearance, enmeshed in a shady deal with the clone of Princess Di:

H.R.H. has a contract out
on this blonde afterlife simulacrum:
Di as an endlessly repeatable clone.

Vaughan knows he’s watched. The Jeep outside
has on-board machine guns, a snoop
positioned in it with a cold black eye.

Jeremy Reed, ‘The Reckoning’, West End Survival Kit.

Jeremy Reed – photograph courtesy Waterloo Press.

But in the end, the most obvious reference point seems to be the glistening, cypher-filled, pop-artefact worlds of William Gibson. The characters in West End Survival Kit come on like Case from Neuromancer crashlanding in London (which has merged with Tokyo, as it did in Reed’s 2008 novel The Grid), as if Case was too burnt out to even care about fixing his damaged neurosystem, too jaded to even muster up any more passion for his beloved cyberspace. In her review of The Grid, Bidisha wrote that ‘one wishes Reed would produce a scholarly work about Jacobean theatre instead of an inexpert cyber-romp. His next work should be excellent, but it shouldn’t meddle with the future. Reed’s seriousness and intelligence emerge when he drops his coolness and cleaves to the past’. But this sounds more like the kind of genre snobbery Ballard was forced to endure when he, too, dared to write science fiction. Reed does post-cyberpunk very well: he has a real feel for the imagery, the characters and the worldview, and like both Gibson and Ballard, he is interested in the next 5 minutes rather than the next 500 years. For Reed, too, science fiction is the sociological study of the present. Yet he infuses this with his own ‘extraterrestrial’ brand of theatricality, poetic sensibility and mutant, gender-bending attitude to create a hybrid form. As science-fiction poetry, it recalls the work of Robert Calvert, the late Hawkwind lyricist and lead singer, and another tortured anti-hero whose own life story could easily inhabit the Reed pantheon.

Towards the end of West End Survival Kit, Reed ties it all up with two poems about, of all things, the history of Pink Floyd. And given all of the above, it makes perfect sense. As the poem identifies, the classic-era Floyd, despite being saddled with what people assumed was an intergalactic persona, was always more about inner space than outer (like Ballard’s anomie-infested astronauts), producing a brace of albums that reflected with sensitivity on battered individuals like their founder Syd Barrett, as in Wish You Were Here, and the assorted lunatics in the cast of Dark Side of the Moon. The Floyd poems make a fitting coda to Reed’s painful folio of snapshots from a numb world. They solidify his eulogy to people too disconnected, too exiled in their own minds to ever tread ‘meaningful’ paths through life, but who nonetheless retain a unique sense of self allied to their damaged intelligence:

Barrett’s the rock astronomer
boating the Cam’s lime green spine,
wristing downriver like a water-boatman

listening to voices, his schizophrenia
big in the mix
like invasive radio.
…
Echoing slide. It’s paranoia synthesised –
their moon trip – dark side in reverse.
Barrett’s still running through a corridor

As undertow, a brain damaged psycho.
The music road maps inner space.
It’s like a river knocking at the door.

Jeremy Reed, ‘Brain Damage: a short history of the Pink Floyd’, West End Survival Kit.

It’s out there somewhere, while the London rain

slashes the light-polluted scuzz,
wacks down fried leaves, keeps me inside
this rainy, orange October day,
retrieving the Floyd’s mission to locate
the alien in the psychopath.
Outside my window a wet jay

jabs at a red berry gash.
I go out on their dimension,
beamed by the music’s escalating curve,
back to my youth and Apollo
cargoing human hardware to the moon –

their weighted boots grating on dust,
Pink Floyd the terrestrial soundtrack
to space conquest, a white plateau
opening out to three astronauts
learning by hesitant degrees to trust.

Jeremy Reed, ‘Wish You Were Here’, West End Survival Kit.

West End Survival Kit is not wholly successful (although it’s pretty close). It briefly falls flat, for example, when Reed makes reference to ‘psychogeography’, a loaded concept degraded through cultural overuse that, although undoubtedly inherent within the work, sounds inauthentic when actually named and nudged up against his own dream geographies. Yet mostly, Reed’s innate ability to explore new genres, new forms and new plans of attack in the hope of creating something extreme and unique makes the work well worth reading. As Bidisha implies, it is probably this genre slippage that is the real cause of Reed’s exile, but somehow, given the figures with which he identifies, you get the impression that on some level that’s how he likes it.

‘Video surveillance sights the street. The city leaks pathology…’ We know exactly what Jeremy means, though we may never have thought of our everyday world in these terms. The poet is our extraterrestrial visitor, calmly surveying everything, the highspeed neural networks of his poetic gift assessing the landscape, making only the most important connections, linking the present moment to the most vital possibilities of itself … Use this volume of poems as a guide-book to the present, to the real world of possibility that most of us ignore. It’s the poet’s job to be a seer, to seize us by the shoulders and force us to out-stare the mirage. Reading these poems, I find myself marvelling at their cleverness and brilliance, and saying: ‘…yes, yes, absolutely.’

J.G. Ballard, foreword to West End Survival Kit.

Jeremy Reed performing with Itchy Ear as The Ginger Light, ‘a progressive poetry act’.

Jeremy Reed – photographer(s) unknown.

Thanks to Shane for help with research for this article.

..:: More information:
+ Jeremy Reed
+ Waterloo Press

REFERENCES
Bidisha (2008). ‘The Grid, by Jeremy Reed’. The Independent, 28 September.
Carter, Randolph (2006). ‘Dreaming with his eyes open’. 3am Magazine.
Lachman, Gary (2006). Jeremy Reed: A supernova in orange and purple ink. The Independent, 30 July.
Reed, Jeremy (1994) Diamond Nebula. London: Peter Owen.
———- (2008). West End Survival Kit. Furze Hill, Hove: Waterloo Press.

Lord Horror (1997). Image by John Coulthart.

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

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

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

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

FIRST PRIZE

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

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

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

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

SECOND PRIZE

‘Escapology’
by Craig Hughes

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

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

THIRD PRIZE

‘Catchgirl’
by Jim Donnelly

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

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

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

HONOURABLE MENTIONS

‘Appreciation’
by Ben Soper

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

Untitled
by Matthew Sheret

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

‘Riveting’
by Kevin Clement

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

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

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

‘Breathe on the window’
by Mark Noonan

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

‘Purlin Obstructs The Passage Of Time’
by James Dibley

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

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

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

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

‘Street Furniture’
by Mat Ranson

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

‘Wrecked and Wasted’
by Tim Maly

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

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

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

‘Penumbra’
by Jesse Thrall

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

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

‘Live-Work’
by Will Wiles

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

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

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

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

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

Untitled
by Damien MacIntyre

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

‘Inhumanly Divine’
by Poppy Varela

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

‘Summit’
by Greg Marsh

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

‘Eaters of Time’
by Simon Machine-Cooke

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

No love. No law.

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

The party’s over now

Bundled clippings grew yellow and mildewed under the staircase cupboard.

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

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

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

‘A New Pornography’
by Martin Gillespie

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

Or was architecture the externalisation of male function?

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

He pressed himself against the grey exterior.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nicholas Cobb, 2009.

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

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

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

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

Ballard, Super-Cannes.

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

Ballard, Super-Cannes.

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

Ballard, Super-Cannes.

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

Ballard, Super-Cannes.

Halder stood with his back to me, searching the upstairs windows, and I could see his reflection in the glass doors of the sun lounge. He was smiling to himself, a strain of deviousness that was almost likeable. Behind the brave and paranoid new world of surveillance cameras and bulletproof Range Rovers there probably existed an old-fashioned realm of pecking orders and racist abuse.

Ballard, Super-Cannes.

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

Ballard, Super-Cannes.

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

Ballard, Super-Cannes.

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

Ballard, Super-Cannes.

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

Ballard, Super-Cannes.

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

Ballard, Super-Cannes.

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

Ballard, Super-Cannes.

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

Ballard, Super-Cannes.

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

Ballard, Super-Cannes.

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

Ballard, Super-Cannes.

Between the security building and the Elf-Maritime research labs was an open-air cafeteria, a facility intended to soften the public face of the business park and give it a passing resemblance to an Alpine resort. Tired after my meeting with Zander, I sat down and ordered a vin blanc from the young French waitress, who wore jeans and a white vest printed with a quotation from Baudrillard.

Ballard, Super-Cannes.

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

Ballard, Super-Cannes.

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

Ballard, Super-Cannes.

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

Ballard, Super-Cannes.

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

Ballard, Super-Cannes.

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

Ballard, Super-Cannes.

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

Ballard, Super-Cannes.

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

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

“You’ve still got the paradigms print gave you, and you’re barely print-literate”
- William Gibson, Neuromancer

“Science and technology multiply around us. To an increasing extent they dictate the languages in which we speak and think. Either we use those languages, or we remain mute.”
- J.G. Ballard

“Twitter is like little animated hieroglyphics in the margins of a working manuscript, offering obscurely breaking news”
- William Gibson, Twitter.

LINKS 8/1/10-14/1/10

Links etc harvested from my Twitter account.

2010-01-14 23:20:15
ballardian: I’m in love… Vincent Fournier’s photos of the “retrofuturistic space industry”
http://bit.ly/5oKwcp | http://bit.ly/5nMbWE
via @paleofuture

2010-01-14 23:06:16
ballardian: Finally, some sense. Re: Nitin Garg – “On both sides, a lot of hot air and finger pointing – a dialogue of the deaf”
http://bit.ly/5OAkbv

2010-01-14 22:57:26
ballardian: RT @Glinner: seen the blog devoted to exposing ad agencies who copy ideas from the interweb?
http://bit.ly/1VgNdo /via @cslyons

2010-01-14 21:27:37
ballardian: I miss the future… Geoffrey Hoyle’s 2010: Living in the Future children’s book (‘72), now digitised:
http://bit.ly/5dxd8u | via @bigstanno

2010-01-13 23:47:13
ballardian: Ballard’s Vermilion Sands…. RT @ethel_baraona: Book Review: Interactive Architecture |
http://tinyurl.com/y8ehh2b /we make money not art

2010-01-13 23:39:31
ballardian: RT @marcusod: Superb visual reporting. Big Picture’s heart-rending insight into the horrors of Haiti
http://bit.ly/7jMwZ3

2010-01-13 22:49:03
ballardian: Nick Sowers & the architecture of war: RT @soundscrapers: The End of the Grand Tour |
http://is.gd/6dtCL | my military travels in 2009

2010-01-13 21:53:24
ballardian: The Sweeney & Brutalism: “a hardhatted transition between decaying, smashed-to-fuck factory & modernist housing regen”
http://bit.ly/5HQZ79

2010-01-13 09:02:39
ballardian: @alanbenzie I’ve got this: http://bit.ly/5NW7Tb. Artemiev revising excerpts from Stalker, Solaris, The Mirror.

2010-01-13 09:00:22
ballardian: @paul_h_williams Yes, the Stanislaw Lem school of alien contact is very different from the James Cameron school!

2010-01-13 08:50:46
ballardian: My house, hopefully. RT @VariousArch @bryanboyer: What will be the 2000s gasometer? Ruins beautiful enough to renovate rather than replace?

2010-01-13 08:46:35
ballardian: My friend visited with his 2-year old daughter. I was playing Artemiev’s Stalker s/track. She wouldn’t stop wailing until it was turned off.

2010-01-13 05:16:29
ballardian: “The baggage reclaim hall was a Ballardian experience, when the arcane support systems of modern life stop working” http://bit.ly/6rBlxp

2010-01-13 02:36:23
ballardian: “Brisbane needs Dubai-scale high rise boom” Wow. Brissie must be the only city still looking to Dubai for inspiration:
http://bit.ly/6Q1Swm

2010-01-13 01:57:41
ballardian: RT @Glinner: Wow. I missed the “effective immediately” part RT @kalimkassam Google.cn now shows Tiananmen tank man pics
http://bit.ly/6jyfA0

2010-01-13 01:49:16
ballardian: RT @mrphoenix: Interview w/ 3rd & 7th creator Alex Roman:
http://bit.ly/5HkokQ
—-> film here for those who missed it:
http://bit.ly/8HU05q

2010-01-12 05:50:56
ballardian: Boo! RT @BoingBoing: Facebook blocks “Web 2.0 Suicide Machine,” now a cease-and-desist reported
http://bit.ly/7Kk8Ec

2010-01-12 05:31:54
ballardian: “Has the Internet changed your thinking?” Eno, Coupland, Dawkins, Shirky, Rucker etc
http://bit.ly/7m631w | http://bit.ly/7C6VfL
via @bruces

2010-01-12 04:31:35
ballardian: Zomia, Asia’s “shattered zone”, a region “deliberately constructed to keep the state at arm’s length”
http://bit.ly/4GEsxX | via @harikunzru

2010-01-12 04:28:35
ballardian: Oh dear, that’s a bit wrong… “Movie-goers feel depressed & suicidal at not being able to visit utopian alien planet”:
http://bit.ly/5y8nK2

2010-01-12 04:11:52
ballardian: More on mythogeogaphy from things magazine: “walking as exhibitionism”
http://bit.ly/63E599

2010-01-12 04:10:18
ballardian: Ha ha! On the other hand: the Web Suicide Machine! “Lets you delete all your energy sucking social-networking profiles”
http://bit.ly/5aLtCV

2010-01-12 23:20:50
ballardian: RT: @bengoldacre @iankatz1000: Stop press: Google ends censorship in China
http://bit.ly/7SzeIB

2010-01-12 23:20:00
ballardian: RT @daj42: The Madness of Crowds and an Internet Delusion. Jaron Lanier rethinks “open” information culture {@nytimes}
http://bit.ly/4PYjWs

2010-01-12 22:38:02
ballardian: Must be out of touch: had no idea William Gibson designs bags:
http://bit.ly/kqHas (Check out the comments: who spilt blood in the water?)

2010-01-12 21:51:40
ballardian: “Porn more more valuable than politicians” … porn joins a long list, then…
http://bit.ly/62Pof7

2010-01-12 07:31:45
ballardian: RT @lyndons: Watched Ch9News for 1st time in yrs. Heard the word ‘Aussie’ 20x & only political news seemed to be contents of PM’s winecellar

2010-01-12 07:13:05
ballardian: Albert Speer Jr: “‘The Slums of the 21st Century Are Being Built in Dubai’” [Spiegel] |
http://bit.ly/8B5WkF via @archinect

2010-01-11 05:16:01
ballardian: More on Phil Smith’s mythogeographical process, including ‘mental exercises for sideways walkers’:
http://bit.ly/7a1j41

2010-01-11 05:13:06
ballardian: This is mythogeography, of a sort: Aussie rocker Billy Miller’s guide to old Melbourne footy grounds:
http://bit.ly/6Y6f0z | via @davegraney

2010-01-11 05:09:48
ballardian: Phil Smith’s new book, Mythogeography: Walking Sideways “levels of the city reflected back in the levels of the walker”
http://bit.ly/8rmn47

2010-01-11 05:01:54
ballardian: The Baja coast: “a peaceful getaway or a lawless frontier?”
http://bit.ly/7Keltf | via @centrifugalcity

2010-01-11 04:49:47
ballardian: “Burtynsky has a Ballardian eye for the incongruous, vast machine shapes out of place & time”
http://bit.ly/62wFgZ | http://bit.ly/5rWJL3

2010-01-11 00:22:09
ballardian: I visited Guam & thought there needs to be a film about its 2nd-class US status. And there is:
http://bit.ly/5ahDuy | via @soundscrapers

2010-01-11 00:13:32
ballardian: Man throws 2 bottles of acid from above into crowded Hong Kong tourist spot:
http://bit.ly/4wttpx

2010-01-11 22:49:14
ballardian: Not sure why I am doing this, but here goes: my thoughts on Twitter – “Defending the Indefensible”:
http://bit.ly/7ZzZEp

2010-01-11 22:20:04
ballardian: “Welcome to the age of robot reporters”:
http://bit.ly/6BjX1r

2010-01-11 21:26:32
ballardian: Just what was life like in the UK in ‘08? RT @somebadideas: the ancient ley lines of Woolworths
http://bit.ly/7k02bf | via @Richard_Kadrey

2010-01-11 21:21:16
ballardian: RT @GreatDismal: Twitter is like little animated hieroglyphics in the margins of a working manuscript, offering obscurely breaking news.

2010-01-11 20:37:14
ballardian: RT @lyndons: How Twitter was born: the first 140 users – guardian.co.uk
http://bit.ly/7m7cqe

2010-01-11 18:27:22
ballardian: ‘Journicide’ – the well-written story is becoming extinct:
http://bit.ly/4rgBAU

2010-01-11 17:57:29
ballardian: “Porn studios lead the stampede into 3D TV”:
http://bit.ly/83F8lL

2010-01-11 17:44:00
ballardian: Gothik/erotic. RT @johncoulthart: ‘Crash’, Bethany Shorb’s photo series inspired by JGB & The Normal’s Warm Leatherette
http://bit.ly/6YAexA

2010-01-11 13:03:16
ballardian: Last night, I dreamt I raced James Taylor for pinks.

2010-01-11 12:46:29
ballardian: Weird uplifting timeshifting downbeat phased Carl Sagan/Stephen Hawking lock-loop mashup:
http://bit.ly/L4WZg | via @paleofuture

2010-01-11 12:32:50
ballardian: Die Dubai, die… RT @LittleMonsta: Trailers for video game set in a Dubai reclaimed by the desert
http://j.mp/4ZBuij | http://j.mp/4nn3tW

2010-01-11 10:59:35
ballardian: RT @factmagazine: BBC’s Brian Eno documentary premieres this month:
http://bit.ly/52SYau

2010-01-11 10:09:44
ballardian: RT @bigstanno: Assault on Precinct 13 “I’ve got a plan, it’s called save ass. We jump out that window and run like a bastard” BEST LINE EVER

2010-01-10 23:43:12
ballardian: Radiophonic legends… rare photo of Delia Derbyshire & Daphne Oram, taken by Malcolm Clarke:
http://bit.ly/774QRY

2010-01-10 21:34:44
ballardian: Could you make it with Roxxxy? Sex robot with articulated skeleton, built-in cooling system and five personailities:
http://bit.ly/5e8GU8

2010-01-10 12:16:28
ballardian: “A bridge between imagination and reality must be built” – Raoul Vaneigem

2010-01-10 12:07:39
ballardian: “Piece now!” Watched Weather Underground doco. Fascinating period of history. Will follow up w/ a viewing of Peter Watkins’ Punishment Park.

2010-01-09 06:17:41
ballardian: Dr George Miller: from Mad Max to Babe & Happy Feet…. strangest career trajectory of any director?

2010-01-08 23:21:41
ballardian: Hey, all of you who like abandoned utopias, post-civilisation ruins & Ballardian malls in disrepair, visit Second Life!
http://bit.ly/7I2IAw

2010-01-08 23:08:42
ballardian: RT @theauteursdaily: Viewing (2′27″). RED RIDING trilogy, HD, opens w/blurb from @kpunk99:
http://bit.ly/5DN49J

2010-01-08 22:12:09
ballardian: Finally saw District 9. Wow! It’s not perfect, but it is GREAT. Owns Avatar. Oh, for a parallel universe where D9 rakes in a billion bucks.

2010-01-08 09:31:17
ballardian: Two reverse perspectives on the Nitin Garg murder, from within both countries involved:
http://bit.ly/8lCl6q | http://bit.ly/7eCnEd

..:: PREVIOUSLY ON BALLARDIAN:
+ Twitter: Defending the Indefensible

“You’ve still got the paradigms print gave you, and you’re barely print-literate”
- William Gibson, Neuromancer

“Science and technology multiply around us. To an increasing extent they dictate the languages in which we speak and think. Either we use those languages, or we remain mute.”
- J.G. Ballard

“Twitter is like little animated hieroglyphics in the margins of a working manuscript, offering obscurely breaking news”
- William Gibson, Twitter.

I’m aware that people think this site goes through fallow periods where it seems nothing is happening in terms of research into Ballard and Ballardian themes. But as I’ve mentioned before, I am posting nearly all links on my Twitter account and saving ballardian.com for longer posts and articles. I’m also aware that some readers don’t give two hoots for Twitter, but it works for me as a linksharing hive mind, ready and able to be plugged in for instant feedback. It may well be a “fad”, but as one of my students remarked last year, who cares? Fads serve to focus creativity. And he’s right. The aggregate clusters around a particular medium, breaks up, moves on to something else. What does it really matter if it’s gone in a year, two years, three? For the moment, Twitter works – Twitter is the lightning conductor.

Besides, with the likes of William Gibson and Bruce Sterling using it regularly, do I really need to justify it? Perhaps. Here is my perspective. Updating a blog is hard work; Twitter less so. You do it in down time. At least I do. I recently remarked that I had written around 42,000 words on Twitter in ‘09, less a boast but more an expression of surprise at the amount because it happened so intuitively. And if I can write like that, so quickly and honestly, then I should not be agonising over my forthcoming book — which, too, is supposed to be 40,000 words. I look back over many of those posts and can see clear and direct lines leading to, away and back to the articles, essays and chapters I wrote last year, as well as links, jottings and hurried notes about future projects and ideas. (And there are tools available to archive this stream, which can then be searched for keywords and themes.) When I was updating this site regularly with blog posts, I would agonise over getting a post right, sometimes spending so long that the moment would evaporate. The post would never get written, and the link/person/project I had found would be lost in the temporal backwash. With Twitter, I record the link quickly and go back to it later if need be. I align myself here with Geoff Manaugh, who writes:

Twitter is very obviously not the answer to everything, and it never should have been portrayed that way; but it also very obviously is not the death of humanism. Twitter is just another option for people to use when they want to take notes – and it’s no more exciting than that, either, to be frank. It’s a ball-point pen.

Get over it.

Still, some people will always snigger, that’s just how they’re wired. Today, you can still read articles in newspapers that go out of their way to denigrate the experience, their comments recalling exactly the criticisms levelled against blogs when they first became a popular interface. It’s supremely boring. As for me, I’ve heard it all before. I have one particular interlocutor (a friend, I might add!) who loves to belittle my experience. Here is the latest witticism, posted on another forum:

Simon did note recently that he’d written some 40,000 words on Twitter, which he saw as a very promising portent for the progress of his book. I didn’t think of the analogy in time to reply, but that’s like saying 2,000 quick wanks is good preparation for marriage.

Ho ho. Shut the door on your way out, dude. Oh, and turn out the lights.

In this exchange with one of his followers on Twitter, Gibson sums up the link between Twitter and creativity. He was asked if he was spending too much time on Twitter, when he didn’t spend nearly as much time as on his blog. The interrogator’s fear was that excessive tweeting would negate any potential new book from Gibson. Gibson replied: “I see zero adverse effect. In fact, quite the opposite. The blog was *work*. I do this [Twitter] in the *margins* of work. The other thing about twitter is all the web-browsing time it saves you. People do it *for* you. Twitter: like rattan bones *for your mind*!”

I know from experience that any reasonably popular blog most definitely is work. This site was only updated so much because I was writing my PhD on Ballard at the time, and I was completely saturated in the research material. Now, unfortunately, I have to make a living and sourcing and writing lengthy posts for free every few days doesn’t seem like such an attractive, or healthy, option. On this score, I like what Momus has to say about why he is stopping his own regular blogging. Its an explanation that resonates with my own feelings:

Because there’s a kind of tumbleweed feel to my Friends List these days, as people migrate to Twitter (and “ship” their inconsequential tweets back to the old haunt as if to place a big “Nothing to see here folks!” sign over both locations) or Facebook. Because I don’t feel that blogging either can or should be as big a part of the next decade as it has been of this one. Because I wonder what would happen if I put the energy I pour daily into this blog (and I’ve established a great working routine!) into something like a book, or something else … Because I’ve probably said everything I have to say about my opinions and worldview, on a certain level (which isn’t to say that the positions I’ve adopted have won or been accepted; many will never be). Because switching to another medium (fiction, for example) will be a way for me to put those views and hunches and feelings into new and fresh relationships with each other…

Because I don’t like the chain letter pressure to come up with something interesting every day, or the way that a couple of missed entries lead to a whole week in which nothing happens, and how I care about that and battle to bring the ratings back up. Okay, I’ve cited this before as a plus, calling it the Scheherazade Challenge, but look at poor Scheherazade’s motives for inventing a new tale every day: all the king’s other wives were killed. Is that the kind of pressure I want in my life? Have I considered gardening as a hobby?

But Twitter is like thinking aloud, occasionally to others, often to yourself. A brain stream that is sometimes inspiring, sometimes energising, sometimes dumb and silly, but always for the open-minded person creative in the way that only playful self-reflection and considered world-gazing can be. The other important note to consider is the network effect: a good deal of the links I post/tweet are sent from other Twitter users. I have 1500 followers — I repost that link, and even if it is picked up by a handful of those people, they may have many more followers than me, they retweet it to their followers, and the chain continues. The aggregate effect is the most phenomenally powerful element of Twitter. This is why news often breaks on Twitter before it hits MSM. So, I am indebted to the many kind users who send me interesting news and information, and I hope I’ve been able to add value in the same way. So if you’re intent on hating on Twitter, think of each user as a node or a switching station if that makes the experience any more palatable.

In short: to my mind, Twitter is the best research tool available at this moment in time.

Nonetheless, as a service to my Twitter-challenged friends — and to the loyal readers who visit this site regularly and who expect/want/would like to see new material/research/insights — each week I am going to try to post my previous 7 days’ worth of Twitter links and quotes, plus some observations. I’ll spare you the asides to other users and extended conversations: that’s a realtime conversational/feedback element that can’t necessarily be relayed here, but that must be experienced via Twitter itself, preferably through a client such as TweetDeck. I think this is also good practice for people who visit the site through an RSS reader and therefore can’t see the little Twitter box at the top right of the ballardian.com home page, and who may therefore never even know there’s any action at all over there.

So, my real motivation has never been to preach about Twitter, but simply to share some fairly interesting Ballardian/Ballard-inspired artworks, theory, social upheavals and projects that I have found (or disseminated), and that I hope you will enjoy also. But just to restate: ballardian.com is still alive, and reserved for articles, long posts, essays and photofeatures as they arrive from me and other contributors. There are many exciting features coming up, of which Paul Roth’s recent brilliant essay on Burtynsky is just the beginning.

So, let the link dumping begin. I’ll start from the new year. For the other 42,000 “wanks” from 2009, you’ll need to check the archives.

Jan 1, 2010-Jan 7 2010

2010-01-07 04:57:41
ballardian: “I look forward to the transformation of Britain into the ultimate departure lounge. After all, we have every reason to leave.” – JG Ballard

2010-01-07 02:14:05
ballardian: The Ballardian forum has been offline for months due to hassles with web hosts etc. Now, it has been revived! Enjoy: http://bit.ly/60Jcwy

2010-01-06 22:53:32
ballardian: I’ve been looking forward to SW myself… RT @geetadayal: A review I wrote on “Sonic Warfare,” a new book by @kodenine: http://bit.ly/4qx5uX

2010-01-06 22:49:09
ballardian: A Truffauldian dystopia would not care. RT @SpaceSyntaxGirl: RT @GreatDismal UK pensioners burning books to keep warm http://bit.ly/6GI8Ff

2010-01-06 22:32:17
ballardian: RT @bldgblog: Great photos of the rapidly decaying Biosphere 2 project, referencing “buildings that die,” Ballard & more: http://is.gd/5PlJE

2010-01-06 21:32:55
ballardian: “Like most CGI extravaganzas, it flares on the retina but leaves few traces in the memory” @kpunk99 on Avatar: http://bit.ly/63MNY2

2010-01-06 21:16:07
ballardian: RT @GreatDismal: Ballard would have so brilliantly articulated the nitrous eroticism of our full-body airport security scan imagery.

2010-01-06 12:56:37
ballardian: “Mutation or metamorphosis was taken for granted, indeed welcomed” Christopher Hitchens reviews Ballard’s shorts: http://tinyurl.com/ygjq3dc

2010-01-06 09:04:27
ballardian: Hawkwind, Ballard, Hieronim Neumann… “Flat block / of two dimensions / It’s a human zoo / a suicide machine” http://bit.ly/5d7fZM

2010-01-06 06:43:27
ballardian: “I’m an urban guerilla / I make bombs in my cellar / So watch out Mr. Business Man / Your empire’s about to blow” http://bit.ly/5LDtOi

2010-01-06 05:48:52
ballardian: Understand: the public is not the problem. First the Newark fiasco, now this: explosives smuggled onto plane in ‘test’ http://bit.ly/8q7wec

2010-01-06 03:37:52
ballardian: RT @Richard_Kadrey: Makers, wankers and vampires! RT @martyhalpern: The 10 most pirated digital books of 2009 http://tinyurl.com/yfhoy5r

2010-01-06 01:10:12
ballardian: “A time that no longer occurs” Will Viney, ‘The Romantic Ruin’ http://bit.ly/8AFvAr (also, Viney on Ballardian ruins: http://bit.ly/6Pd1K1)

2010-01-06 00:00:13
ballardian: There are some very strange spam bots patrolling Twitter. One retweets w/out attribution, and then announces it is unfollowing the victim…

2010-01-05 03:28:39
ballardian: Fabulous piece equating Burj’s “vacant stare” w/ the emptiness of the post-recession/post-apocalypse: http://bit.ly/5hymnv | via @bldgblog

2010-01-05 03:22:34
ballardian: RT @bldgblog: Weird new year’s reading: “nfantryman’s Guide to Combat in Built-Up Areas,” U.S. Army urban combat handbook http://is.gd/5IYAD

2010-01-05 02:46:58
ballardian: “Ballard’s stories… well made, full of supposedly contemptible components, yet irreducibly strange” Zadie Smith http://bit.ly/8ZY58Y

2010-01-05 00:37:20
ballardian: RT @johncoulthart: Expect babies or small children to be put to work as bomb mules from now on http://is.gd/5MhZI

2010-01-05 00:18:39
ballardian: RT @ColinPeters: two great panics that taste great together. Body Scan vs. Child porn law RT: @juliangough @Fergal: http://is.gd/5MhZI

2010-01-05 23:42:33
ballardian: RT @paleofuture: NASA’s 1965 press kit for the Gemini V mission [pdf] http://bit.ly/4Pa4OQ (via @alexismadrigal)

2010-01-05 23:14:53
ballardian: RT @stephenhero: RT @jojeda Parkour flip book-style http://post.ly/HKUV

2010-01-05 22:46:21
ballardian: Just discovered Google Chrome’s “incognito” function, which is wicked sick! Especially this bit: “Be wary of surveillance by secret agents.”

2010-01-05 22:24:33
ballardian: Pot, meet kettle… In the UK, “rich, swollen”, ISPs smack Bono down: http://bit.ly/6EQfxv | via @Glinner

2010-01-05 12:40:56
ballardian: “Foretelling human ends” – Ballardian.com: Paul Roth views Edward Burtynsky’s work on oil through a Ballardian lens http://bit.ly/5rWJL3 Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate
12:28
ballardian: RT @jimrossignol: More camera-confiscation madness from British police: http://bit.ly/5XOkB7

2010-01-05 11:01:32
ballardian: RT @timmaughan: The original #Avatar story – shame so much of this depth is missing: http://bit.ly/7o7xA3 (@MariKurisato)

2010-01-05 10:49:56
ballardian: “Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.” Lewis Carroll

2010-01-05 07:19:21
ballardian: “Time does not exist. The universe is static. Movement is an illusion.” – Julian Barbour, Killing Time (film) http://bit.ly/QBMOv

2010-01-05 06:30:30
ballardian: “The only way through a crisis of space is to invent a new space” – Fredric Jameson

2010-01-05 06:10:00
ballardian: RT @melchil: Janek Schaefer’s ‘Recorded Delivery’, sound-activated tape recording sent through British post http://bit.ly/5mAEyR 1995

2010-01-05 05:40:41
ballardian: The only thing better than William Basinki’s Disintegration Loops is William Basinski’s shortwave loops.

2010-01-05 04:34:23
ballardian: Delhi’s Raqs Media Collective – interstitial urban capillary veins: “conversing about the ‘debris of the unrealizable’” http://bit.ly/7SGros

2010-01-04 23:48:21
ballardian: Believe it when I see it… Dubai & Moscow’s rotating skyscrapers, “made possible by 79 giant wind turbines”: http://bit.ly/171p02

2010-01-04 23:44:05
ballardian: RT @soundscrapers: U.S. Military is Meeting Recruitment Goals With Video Games – But at What Cost? http://is.gd/5Mjqa

2010-01-04 23:40:45
ballardian: So the reports *are* true: the Newark airport lockdown *was* hell… Hey Jude sing-a-long: http://bit.ly/8Kful3

2010-01-04 23:11:38
ballardian: RT @johncoulthart: So if the Burj Khalifa needs to be bailed out in the future will it change its name again? Burj Walmart, Burj Tesco?

2010-01-04 23:08:44
ballardian: I feel sick… BASE jumping off the Burj (video): http://bit.ly/xc7cu

2010-01-04 22:54:36
ballardian: “Life is getting friendlier but less interesting. Blame technology, globalisation and feminism” http://bit.ly/4XydbF | via @cityofsound

2010-01-04 22:52:52
ballardian: I’m all for ‘injecting playful moments into the urban fabric’: PlastiCity FantastiCity design comp http://bit.ly/7ZlYA8 | via @pruned

2010-01-04 22:38:56
ballardian: Remember Pillars of Wisdom, Paul’s great film about Abu Dhabi’s artificial skyline? It can be downloaded w/ new s/track http://bit.ly/8zs3rd

2010-01-04 22:22:41
ballardian: Narrow Streets LA, a Fantasy Urban Makeover: “Century City, a Ballardian complex of futuristic ruins preserved intact” http://bit.ly/59HDFz

2010-01-04 22:19:56
ballardian: Disney’s RiverCountry Rotting in Fittingly Ballardian Way: http://bit.ly/87t3ns

2010-01-04 21:29:40
ballardian: RT @LittleMonsta: 10 Sci-Fi Weapons That Actually Exist http://bit.ly/8wq5EK

2010-01-04 21:13:10
ballardian: My mate Paul arrived just in time to see the Burj explode into life. Here’s his film of the opening – incredible stuff: http://bit.ly/8J1FWI

2010-01-04 21:08:30
ballardian: RT @jomc: “alpha fail” : man who says obvious and/or officious things in a booming voice with overwhelming confidence.

2010-01-04 13:22:53
ballardian: I’m off to bed now, to dream of the Burj…

2010-01-04 13:00:33
ballardian: Open lecture series, School of Architecture, Sheffield U: “emergence, dead-zones, edge spaces, terrain vague, subcults” http://bit.ly/4Fj7LE

2010-01-04 03:26:38
ballardian: Window cleaners on the Burj Dubai. Only 142,000 sq m to go. “Get a move on, lads!”: http://bit.ly/2E7CWS

2010-01-04 02:13:47
ballardian: @johnny_neurotic Vincenzo Natali, who is directing High-Rise, has apparently based the building’s design on the Burj: http://bit.ly/4CUHFV

2010-01-04 02:09:06
ballardian: Burj Dubai opens today: “designed so that those who so wish will never have to leave, or descend below the 108th floor” http://bit.ly/5qbbIa

2010-01-04 02:04:36
ballardian: Newark airport: this phrase scares me more than terrorism “this act breached the ’sterile’ sections of the terminal” http://bit.ly/59pMGQ

2010-01-03 23:26:35
ballardian: RT @ethel_baraona: Lost Formats Preservation Society http://tinyurl.com/loxvjr <------- reminiscent of @bruces's Dead Media Project

2010-01-03 22:48:13
ballardian: "Disneyland & Las Vegas rolled into one" - minus the people. Utopia pt 3: Sth China Mall (film): http://bit.ly/6ch9hn | http://bit.ly/7qBF1c

2010-01-03 22:30:58
ballardian: A model to believe in? The “slow-budget” film approach” http://bit.ly/843Hbh | via @christydena

2010-01-03 22:29:30
ballardian: @The_Art_Life I’m interested enough in Avatar’s ideas & tech to see it again. The debates are enlightening. At least film matters again.

2010-01-03 22:17:59
ballardian: Reading the comments = deja vu; will publishing learn from music biz mistakes? Ebook piracy increases http://bit.ly/6SUSnN | via @bruces

2010-01-03 11:15:51
ballardian: A quote for the times (again): “You’ve still got the paradigms print gave you, & you’re barely print-literate” (William Gibson, Neuromancer)

2010-01-03 10:54:26
ballardian: “The Burj Dubai – just the latest example of mankind’s edifice complex (Times): http://bit.ly/4yFuIY

2010-01-03 10:52:24
ballardian: Times: “Burj Dubai, the first superscraper, opens for business tomorrow – if it can find any” http://bit.ly/76rEYj

2010-01-03 10:13:01
ballardian: RT @morphocode: Beautiful parking structures: http://bit.ly/7rZvJD | also: http://bit.ly/rVZaL

2010-01-03 10:11:37
ballardian: @The_Art_Life Good pts re Avatar. Yet I still feel certain aspects undermined Av’s cleverest ideas. Twitter not best medium for elaboration.

2010-01-03 09:22:48
ballardian: Moorcock on Ballard: “There were fights, bad acid trips, wild drives through the London night” – http://bit.ly/4MGxm5 | via @johncoulthart

2010-01-03 08:19:37
ballardian: Backing up my Twitter account, I was astonished to find I’d written over 42,000 words on here in 09. Hope yet for getting my book done!

2010-01-03 08:14:07
ballardian: Great to see a savvy MSM Twitter angle for a change (NYTimes) “the real value is listening to a wired collective voice” http://bit.ly/7pIqmQ

2010-01-03 08:00:31
ballardian: Happy NY! After R.A. Wilson, my 2010 goal is to “create the happiest, funniest, most romantic reality-tunnel consistent w/ my brain signals”

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

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

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

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

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

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

All images can be clicked to enlarge.

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

The subject is not oil.

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

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

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

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

Extractions

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Unseen Reservoir

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Invisible Seer

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Overlook

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mapping the Unknown

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Vertigo

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

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

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

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

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

A Certain Lucidity

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Precipice

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

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

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

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

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

Inexorable

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

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

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

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

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

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

After Robert Anton Wilson, my 2010 goal is to “create the happiest, funniest, most romantic reality-tunnel consistent with my brain signals”. And so the following is probably of no interest to anyone but me…

But here goes, anyway: for 2009, ballardian.com’s top 10 most-read posts, search terms leading to the site and links from other sites:

TOP 10 MOST-READ POSTS ON BALLARDIAN.COM FOR 2009
(Note that most of these are old posts, and, surprise, surprise: the X-ray porn comes in at no. 1; there’s depravity also at no. 5, 6 & 10. Good to see urbanism and film posts making a strong showing, too.):

1. ‘The fusion of science and pornography’ (WARNING! Exceptionally unsafe for work) – 1 July 2008

“Wim Delvoye’s ‘Kiss’ series of x-ray art echoes The Atrocity Exhibition and the illustrations of Phoebe Gloeckner. WARNING: this post is indisputably unsafe for work. No, seriously: you have been warned.”

2. Coming Never: Richard Gere as Blake – 7 May 2008

“Aside from the films of Empire and Crash, Ballard has had almost all his novels optioned for the screen at some stage. Suitors include Richard Gere, Samuel L. Jackson, Jack Nicholson, David Frost and a trio of scantily-clad cavegirls.”

3. Crash! Full-Tilt Autogeddon – 10 August 2007

“Although little known, Harley Cokliss’s 1971 short film Crash!, based on passages from The Atrocity Exhibition, has something even more prized, something else the Cronenberg and Spielberg adaptations could never have: it stars J.G. Ballard. With his brooding, hypermasculine presence, Ballard plays a version of Atrocity’s ‘T’ character alongside Gabrielle Drake, her own role a composite of the book’s archetypal ’sex-kit’ women.”

4. Michael Jackson’s Facelift – 2 July 2009

“‘As Michael Jackson reached middle age, the skin of both his cheeks and neck tended to sag from failure of the supporting structures. His naso-labial folds deepened, and the soft tissues along his jaw fell forward. His jowls tended to increase. In profile the creases of his neck lengthened and the chin-neck contour lost its youthful outline and became convex.’”

5. Dead Models – 31 October 2007

“A photo shoot for America’s Next Top Model, on the subject of dead girls. The judges’ comments have to be seen to be believed.”

6. Triple Transgression – 26 December 2007

“This disturbing photo feature focuses on peeping toms in Japan and Kohei Yoshiyuki, the photographer who documented them in the 1970s.”

7. ‘Architectures of the Near Future’: An Interview with Nic Clear – 24 December 2008

“Nic Clear leads the remarkable Unit 15 course on the built environment at the Bartlett School of Architecture in London. In this interview, Nic explains the course’s focus on the work of Ballard as a way to counter the lamentable state of current discourse on architecture. The article includes clips of six stunning films produced by students as part of this Ballard-inspired methodology.”

8. Crown Casino: ‘A snarling, digitised mutilation’ – 27 May 2009

“Simon Sellars, Mel Chilianis and Melb Psy take an audiovisual tour of Melbourne’s Crown Casino, seeking to map the coordinates of this micronational zone — consumer-driven control space with a raging need.”

9. R.I.P. JG Ballard, 1930-2009 – 20 April 2009

“Goodbye, Jim…”

10. Love Among the Mannequins – 15 January 2008

“Here’s a new campaign from fashion label Dsquared2, featuring sex with crash-test mannequins. But it doesn’t appear to be selling anything. What exactly *is* it selling? Note the photographer: none other than our old mucker, Steven Meisel.”

TOP 10 MOST-FOLLOWED LINKS TO BALLARDIAN.COM FROM OTHER SITES:
(surprise: no porn)

1. http://www.radiohead.com/deadairspace/index.php?a=469
2. http://www.jgballard.com
3. http://www.planetaki.com
4. http://www.metafilter.com
5. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingdom_Come_(Ballard_novel)
6. http://www.facebook.com
7. http://www.warrenellis.com/?p=7221
8. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._G._Ballard
9. http://twitter.com/ballardian
10. http://k-punk.abstractdynamics.org

TOP 10 SEARCH-ENGINE TERMS LEADING VISITORS TO BALLARDIAN.COM:
(very surprised at the paucity of porn, also that ‘ballardian’ beats ‘jg ballard’)

1. ballardian
2. jg ballard
3. gabrielle drake
4. ballard
5. medical fetish
6. make love
7. computers internet blog
8. concrete island
9. ballardian.com
10. atrocity exhibition

JG BALLARD, 1930–2009

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

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

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

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

Nic Clear, 2009.

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

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

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

Later, as he sat on the balcony eating the dog, Dr Robert Laing reflected on the unusual events that had taken place within this huge apartment building during the previous three months.

JG Ballard, High-Rise, 1975, p 7.[2]

Architectural design is always about the future; when architects make a proposition they always assume that it takes place in some imagined future. Architects nearly always assume that this future will be ‘better’ than the present, often as a consequence of what is being proposed. Architecture is, by its very nature, utopian.

Contemporary architecture, unlike earlier models of ‘utopian’ architecture, or perhaps because of the stigma attached to those models, has resisted an explicitly social and political agenda. Instead it has become driven by ‘ideal’ formalist agendas facilitated by the ‘shape-making’ potential of new computer-based design tools and funded by speculative finance.

Indeed, the most important transformations that have occurred in architecture over the last 30 years have not been in the shifts in fashion marking out new typologies, new forms of representation, new materials or new forms of manufacture; the biggest single shift has been in the new economic relations within the building industry and the new forms of contractual relationships that this has brought about. The rise of fast-track construction in the 1980s heralded a major change in the motivations for construction and brought about a homogenisation of building output largely predicated on maximising the economic value of the project, often with little regard for its social value.

And with the introduction of the Private Finance Initiative (PFI) the current UK government has turned even health-care and educational building programmes into a speculative enterprise. PFI has always been presented as a cost-effective way of financing large infrastructural projects; however, like the government’s recent bail out of the banks, it works on the principle of the public financing the risk while the private sector skims off the profit.[3]

For a number of years the single model that has shaped the type of future that the architectural profession has based its assumptions on is one of unfettered consumer expansion. The majority of recent architectural debates have not tried to call into question the economic imperatives of late capitalism that drive financial speculation and generate the context within which private development is presented as the only option. Even the avant-garde architectural firms of the 1980s are now operating as large international commercial practices, and the Deconstructivists have proved to be more than enthusiastic capitalists. The critical and intellectual ambitions inspired by Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze and Guy Debord have been replaced with the monetarist ideologies of Milton Friedman and Alan Greenspan.

The architectural profession has embraced the late capitalist model enthusiastically and uncritically, while all the time pandering to the concepts of social and environmental responsibility. The fact is that this model has been funded through speculative investment, and now that the money has run out the profession is bereft of alternatives.

The promise of an ‘urban renaissance’ has left buildings empty and negative equity is becoming once again the dominant economic value across the property world.

The architectural world has proved completely incapable of suggesting what the future may hold; can one still believe in the shiny renders of the corporate architectural complex when this world has replaced a vision of the future with an image of the future?

But the profession is resourceful and in the same way that all contemporary architects play the ‘sustainability’ game, whether they are designing sustainable airports, sustainable shopping centres, sustainable luxury hotels, sustainable office blocks, sustainable cities in the middle of deserts or sustainable single private dwellings for the ultrarich, we will, no doubt, see a gritty ‘new realism’ starting to appear in architectural discourse that responds to the new economic conditions.[4]

Exactly how these new imperatives will drive the formal shape- making methodologies that have filled so many glossy pages for so long we shall see; and how will the interactive and responsive landscapes interact with, and respond to, bankruptcy, increasing unemployment and a general sense of despair?

Nic Clear, ‘Game with Vestiges: After Ballard Triptych, 2009′. The series of drawings here was set up in the same way as any standard CAD drawing in VectorWorks using layers, classes and libraries of objects. The drawings work as a narrative triptych, bringing together a number of elements — cityscapes, high-rise buildings, surrealist curios, fetish and banal objects — all in keeping with the memory of ‘Jim’, to whom the drawings are dedicated.

Progress
Contemporary culture has put its faith in the ideology of progress; progress will make things better, as well as making things faster and smaller (or bigger depending on the value system). This faith in progress and betterment fails to ring true in the light of economic downturn, environmental catastrophe, increased levels of crime, the threats of terrorism and global pandemics.[5] If the future cannot be guaranteed, where does that leave architecture?

However, a loss of faith is only a problem if that faith exists in the first place.

Within literature there is a major strand that looks at the future in a completely different way; science fiction can also be seen as a ‘utopian’ genre,[6] and in works by writers ranging from Jules Verne and HG Wells, through to Aldous Huxley and George Orwell and more latterly Philip K Dick, JG Ballard, Neal Stephenson and William Gibson, the future is depicted in a variety of different hues, not all of them as rosy as the futures promised by the architectural profession. As a result such speculations are often more believable.

While these writings appear to reflect on the future, more often than not they are actually concerned with issues contemporaneous to their production. To cite two obvious examples, Huxley’s Brave New World (1932) and Orwell’s 1984 (1949) are political reflections on the societies around them, and in Huxley’s case it is not altogether clear whether he is entirely critical of the world that he describes.

However, the writings of JG Ballard are of particular interest here as they filter through a number of the texts contained in this issue, either directly or lingering in the background.[7] Ballard is of special significance largely due to the fact that in so much of his writing architecture and architects play such a pivotal role.

The prescience of Ballard’s writing is obvious; his early works encompass environmental disaster, both drought and flooding; in the 1970s, novels such as Crash[8] and High-Rise[9] dealt with technological fetishisation, urban anomie and alienation, and, long before such issues hit the mainstream, he looked at the links between consumerism and social collapse. In his recent writings, Millennium People[10] and Kingdom Come,[11] Ballard depicts a Britain bereft of social values other than those of daytime TV and the shopping centre, and while his central characters can lack credibility his general description of the cultural landscape is far more accurate than almost anything that has been published in the pages of any recent architectural publication.

The future as presented by Ballard is often stark, bleak and uncompromising. There are few happy endings in his future. However, his faith in our collective ability to endure almost any hardship, drawn almost certainly from his experiences in Shanghai during the Second World War, leads us to believe that despite whatever is thrown at us we will adapt and we will survive.[12]

Like Ballard, let us not despair; though the future may be uncertain, uncertainty is not without its attractions.

The current economic situation offers great potential for developing a new agenda in architecture. The fact that the discipline of architecture has become synonymous with the architectural profession is something that will no doubt become contested as unemployment rises throughout the building industry[13] — those of us who can remember previous recessions can also remember them as highly creative periods. The fact that architects may have to redefine their operations is potentially a wonderful opportunity to recalibrate and reconsider who and what architecture is actually for.

This will bring to life the obvious gulf between expectation and reality that permeates architectural practice. Architecture is a wonderful discourse and training; however, it can be a very tedious job. Of course it does not have to be like this. Freed from the limitations of the profession, architectural projects can offer fantastic opportunities to develop narratives that can help us understand why we are doing the things we do.[14]

The fact that architects may have to redefine their operations is potentially a wonderful opportunity to recalibrate and reconsider who and what architecture is actually for.

In particular these uncertain times may be a blessing for a younger generation of designers; equipped with a vast array of technical skills and understanding they are almost certain to cope with the vagaries of future practice. As the skills demonstrated in many of the projects collected in this issue suggest, future architects may be just as adept at web design, graphics and film-making as they are at producing information for buildings.

The last few years have witnessed a gradual disenchantment within architectural education with the goals espoused by the architectural profession. Increased levels of student debt coupled with a creeping homogenisation of architectural practice have resulted in there being a darker aspect to student projects. Rather than shrinking away from the potential difficulties, the younger generation of architects may use information technologies to create new sites of architectural endeavour and give a whole new meaning to the term ‘architectural design’.

The essays and projects gathered together here cover a wide variety of positions. Many develop the themes suggested by Ballard and others, while some give the current situation a broader historical perspective, suggesting that certain of the scenarios that we face are not without precedent.

Nic Clear, ‘Game with Vestiges: After Ballard Triptych, 2009′. The series of drawings here was set up in the same way as any standard CAD drawing in VectorWorks using layers, classes and libraries of objects. The drawings work as a narrative triptych, bringing together a number of elements — cityscapes, high-rise buildings, surrealist curios, fetish and banal objects — all in keeping with the memory of ‘Jim’, to whom the drawings are dedicated.

Matthew Gandy’s ‘Urban Flux’ gives a historical perspective to our current situation and argues that we need to recover the urban imagination in order to enrich 21st-century public culture. Michael Aling returns to his home town of Swindon, statistically the most average town in Britain, to find people sharing identities, stricken with gout and going to a deserted shopping centre for no real reason other than to fulfil a forgotten collective desire. And John Culmer Bell looks at the nature of electromagnetic radiation as a shaper of 19th- and 20th- century urban form, provocatively questioning whether sacrificing the pleasures of ‘noctambulism’ simply on environmental grounds is actually a good thing.

Bastian Glassner of uber-trendy video directors Lynn Fox presents a series of luxurious images, hybridising the body as meat, a clear homage to Francis Bacon (pun intended) with a bit of Roland Barthes’ A Lover’s Discourse thrown in.

Soki So reimagines Piranesi’s Carceri as a near-future Hong Kong with a series of appropriately spectacular and sumptuous images that also address real concerns over the concept of urban intensity and vertical sprawl. Rubedo send out a provocative declaration concerning the omnipresence of technological systems and the necessity of developing transdisciplinary tactics to negotiate the immersive hybridised spaces of late capitalism.

Richard Bevan constructs a worryingly believable scenario whereby Heathrow airport becomes a carbon casino trading in carbon credits with air-mile-hungry oligarchs gambling to stay aloft, and Geoff Manaugh explores and questions the use of the term ‘feral city’. In ‘London After the Rain’, Ben Marzys presents a beautiful graphic Surrealist landscape, a posthuman picturesque. In ‘L.A.W.u.N Project #21: Cybucolia’ the Invisible University suggest that the near future may carry with it many of the seeds sown with 19th-century Romanticism; and Dan Farmer suggests that the near future may be all in the mind with excerpts from his research on cortical plasticity. Ben Nicholson reflects on his 2004 book The World Who Wants It?, one of the finest pieces of satirical writing of recent years, and presents a series of images that were absent from the original publication.

Simon Sellars and George Thomson explore the most explicitly Ballardian line, with Sellars looking at the aural nature of the urban environment, beautifully illustrated with Michelle Lord’s exquisite assemblages, and Thomson reimagining Ballard’s ‘Sound-Sweep’ as a community occupying a derelict M25.

Finally, Art in Ruins show work from installations that are 20 years old, an important conceptual reminder that none of the ideas in this issue are particularly new.

This issue was first conceived in 2007; the proposal was put forward in early 2008 and most of the text written late 2008/ early 2009. You will be reading this, at the very earliest, in autumn 2009. Like any other architectural project its relevance is shaped by a number of external forces far beyond the control of its authors; the economic events that are taking place as this text is being written (and rewritten) make any allusion to future certainties look foolish. The severity of the current economic situation makes any attempt to try to predict what light, if any, is at the end of this particular tunnel seem absurd. However, what happens if we imagine a number of scenarios, not necessarily the usual convivial scenarios that mainstream architecture usually relies on, but scenarios where the traditional certainties are replaced by something less predictable? Like the heroes of many of Ballard’s stories, the authors of the essays in this issue face the future with a sense of resigned stoicism and the ability to create beauty wherever they find it.

In many ways the near future could be very much like the past, with one obvious exception — it will be completely different.

Notes
[1] Frederic Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, Duke University Press (Durham, NC), 1991, p 5.
[2] JG Ballard, High Rise, Jonathan Cape (London), 1975, p 7.
[3] See George Monbiot, ‘The Biggest Weirdest Rip Off Yet’, Guardian, 7 April 2009. In this article, Monbiot references a paper published in 2002 in the British Medical Journal in which five key criticisms were made of the PFI funding of hospitals: 1) that PFI brings no new capital investments; 2) that the assessments of value for money are skewed in favour of private finance; 3) the higher costs of PFI are due to financing costs which would be incurred under public financing; 4) any PFI schemes only show value for money after ‘risk transfer’, for risks that are not justified; 5) PFI more than doubles the cost of capital as a percentage of annual operating income. From Allyson M Pollock, Jean Shaoul and Neil Vickers, ‘Private finance and “value for money” in NHS hospitals: a policy in search of a rationale?’, BMJ, Vol 324, 18 May 2002, pp 1205–09.
[4] One can imagine that such texts have already begun to emanate from Rotterdam and Boston.
[5] For a critique of ‘progress’, see John Gray, Heresies Against Progress and Other Illusions, Granta Books (London), 2004.
[6] See Frederic Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions, Verso (London and New York), 2005.
[7] Ballard has been a central interest of my diploma unit at the Bartlett School of Architecture where I have been running a programme entitled ‘Architecture of the Near Future’ for several years. The work of Michael Aling, Richard Bevan, Dan Farmer, Ben Marzys, Soki So and George Thomson, all contributors to this issue, came out of this programme.
[8] JG Ballard, Crash, Jonathan Cape (London), 1973.
[9] JG Ballard, High Rise, op cit.
[10] JG Ballard, Millennium People, Flamingo (London), 2003.
[11] JG Ballard, Kingdom Come, Fourth Estate (London), 2006.
[12] Beautifully described in his memoir Miracles of Life: Shanghai to Shepperton, Fourth Estate (London), 2008.
[13] Job losses in architecture between February 2008 and February 2009 were reportedly up by 760%. See Will Hirst, ‘Architect Job Losses up by 760%’, Building Design, 20 March 2009, p 3.
[14] The drawings that accompany this essay come from my sheer enjoyment of producing CAD drawings simply because they are something I like doing.

Text © 2009 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Images © Nic Clear.

Nic Clear, ‘Game with Vestiges: After Ballard Triptych, 2009′. The series of drawings here was set up in the same way as any standard CAD drawing in VectorWorks using layers, classes and libraries of objects. The drawings work as a narrative triptych, bringing together a number of elements — cityscapes, high-rise buildings, surrealist curios, fetish and banal objects — all in keeping with the memory of ‘Jim’, to whom the drawings are dedicated.

…:: Previously on Ballardian:
+ Stereoscopic Urbanism: JG Ballard & the Built Enviroment
+ ‘Architectures of the Near Future’: An Interview with Nic Clear

Information on Architectures of the Near Future: Architectural Design.

In this highly pertinent issue, guest-editor Nic Clear questions received notions of the future. Are the accepted norms of economic growth and expansion the only means by which society can develop and prosper? Should the current economic crisis be making us call into question a future of unlimited growth? Can this moment of crisis – economic, environmental and technological – enable us to make more informed choices about the type of future that we want and can actually achieve? Architectures of the Near Future offers a series of alternative voices, developing some of the neglected areas of contemporary urban life and original visions of what might be to come. Rather than providing simplistic and seductive images of an intangible shiny future, it rocks the cosy world of architecture with polemical blasts.

* Draws on topics as diverse as synthetic space, psychoanalysis, Postmodern geography, post-economics, cybernetics and developments in neurology.
* Includes an exploration of the work of JG Ballard.
* Features the work of Ben Nicholson.

Editorial (Helen Castle ).
Introduction: A Near Future (Nic Clear).
Urban Flux (Matthew Gandy).
Postindividualism: Fata Morgana and the Swindon Gout Clinic (Michael Aling).
Urban Otaku: Electric Lighting and the Noctambulist (John Culmer Bell).
The Groom’s Gospel (Bastian Glassner).
Hong Kong Labyrinths (Soki So).
Distructuring Utopias (Rubedo: Laurent-Paul Robert and Vesna Petresin Robert).
The Carbon Casino (Richard Bevan).
Cities Gone Wild (Geoff Manaugh).
London After the Rain (Nic Clear).
L.A.W.u.N. Project #21: Cybucolia (Samantha Hardingham and David Greene).
Cortical Plasticity (Dan Farmer).
The Ridiculous and the Sublime (Ben Nicholson).
Stereoscopic Urbanism: JG Ballard and the Built Environment (Simon Sellars).
The Sound Stage (George Thomson).
Recent History – Art In Ruins (Hannah Vowles and Glyn Banks/Art in Ruins and Nic Clear)

Practice Profile.
Snøhetta (Jayne Merkel).
Interior Eye.
Biochemistry Department, University of Oxford (Howard Watson).
Building Profile.
St Benedict’s School, West London (David Littlefield).
Unit Factor.
Migration Pattern Process (Simon Beames and Kenneth Fraser).
Spiller’s Bits.
Mathematics of the Ideal Pavilion (Neil Spiller).
Yeang’s Eco-Files.
Computational Building Performance Modelling and Ecodesign (Khee Poh Lam and Ken Yeang).
McLean’s Nuggets (Will McLean).
Userscape
Scaleable Technology for Smart Spaces (Valentina Croci).

interview by Simon Sellars.

In the wake of J.G. Ballard’s passing, Berlin’s 032c magazine asked me to rework my 2007 Simon Reynolds interview. I put some new questions to Simon, and here is the result…

“‘Magisterial, precise, unsettling’: Simon Reynolds on JG Ballard”, originally published in 032c, no. 18, winter 2009/10, pp. 126-9.

Simon Reynolds is one of the most recognizable music critics around. He possesses a willingness to tackle pop music as an art form worthy of intellectual discourse rather than a fleeting moment of adolescent flash. Reynolds breaks new ground, melding unchecked enthusiasm with a robust theoretical foundation in a body of work that is exciting for its eclecticism alone: he’s just as compelling writing on hip hop, Britney, and rave, as he is on grunge, prog rock, and grime.

Reynolds’s work reached a peak with the publication of Rip It Up and Start Again, a timely excavation of post-punk: Cabaret Voltaire, PiL, Magazine, and so on. What’s more, J.G. Ballard was a thread throughout the book, as Reynolds charted the influence of JGB — and especially his experimental novel, The Atrocity Exhibition — on the era.

Simon Sellars: For you, what’s the relationship between J.G. Ballard and music?

Simon Reynolds: Obviously I always loved music, but it was things my parents had introduced me to — Beethoven, or Hollywood musicals, plus stray things I’d heard on the radio like the Beatles. And then when I was around fifteen, I was inducted into that whole rock apparatus of taking music -pop culture, youth culture, rock criticism — seriously. And what I was into on a fanatical level immediately before entering rock culture was science fiction, and particularly Ballard. The new fanaticism simply replaced the old one, and I stuck to music journalism!

SS: Do you still return to his work?

SR: It’s only in the last decade or so that I rediscovered science fiction, and particularly Ballard. I’ve also started reading more of his critical work, his interviews and journalism, and become more impressed by him — he was clearly the most advanced writer and thinker in his field.

SS: Which of his books have impacted you the most?

SR: In some ways the one that grabbed me most, and has yet to relinquish its hold, was the first one I read, The Drowned World. Penguin used to do these great science fiction paperback editions, and they had one series with really evocative paintings — glossy, garish, almost hyperrealist — on the covers. The Drowned World, The Drought, and The Wind From Nowhere were all in that series and looked particularly good. But in The Drowned World, the severity of Ballard’s imagination was what hooked me, and just the idea of the protagonist who — as in all Ballard’s cataclysm novels — is perversely drawn towards the heart of catastrophe, and finds his true self in the transformed landscape. That really grabbed me.

Also, the idea of the world you know being drastically transformed … I lived near London, in a commuter town 30 miles north of the capital, and went down to the city quite frequently; so imagining it submerged was exciting.

Two David Pelham-illustrated ’softcover classics’ (both Penguin, London, 1974).

SS: Has he influenced your work in any way, either as a critic of popular culture, or stylistically?

SR: Actually, the influences on my writing and thinking come from a totally different place, although there are certain affinities — a sense of the power of the irrational, these atavistic drives pulsing inside culture. I’ve long felt that pop music is driven by ambivalent, sometimes outright malevolent energies. But I’ve probably derived that more from various French thinkers, and Nietzsche; or certain rock writers. Still, you can see the connection between music and the Ballardian worldview, which sees human culture as fundamentally perverse. And the self-reflexivity in science fiction is very similar to music criticism, because neither genre gets respect from the literary establishment, give or take a Kingsley Amis or an Anthony Burgess in science fiction. Both science fiction and rock writing have an inferiority and superiority complex. Science fiction writers love to think of what they’re doing as one really crucial, contemporary form of literature — a literature of ideas with elements of speculation and an estrangement effect.

Rock critics are just the same: they crave that validation from mainstream art criticism, but they also like being the renegade form. Ballard exemplifies this meta aspect of science fiction, although he goes beyond it as a great cultural critic.

SS: His work can also be read as philosophical inquiry, an approach that seems to sum up a particular late-capitalist mode of being. What makes the Ballardian worldview so prescient?

SR: He was dealing with similar things as Marshall McLuhan, and, later, as Jean Baudrillard. But he was doing it with far greater clarity, sharper perceptions, and more style and wit than either. All the obscenity of mass communication, simulation, and social implosion in Baudrillard’s books was being explored earlier, and more effectively, in Ballard’s fiction. He was dealing with the pornification of everything very early.

SS: You’ve remarked elsewhere that Ballard’s short stories have more appeal to you than his novels.

SR: After the disaster novels, the mid-1970s urban breakdown ones like Concrete Island and High-Rise, I think that, as a critic, Ballard’s shorts are his supreme achievement — so magisterial, so distilled and precise, atmospheric and unsettling. I recently re-read “The Ultimate City,” which is about a young man who lives in a near future that’s very green-conscious and placid and dull. So he goes to the deserted city and starts up urban life again — gets generators going, and then misfits start to flock in from the eco-communes and garden towns. But of course the whole thing goes haywire.

It was only a few years ago that I finally read Crash all the way through. I was writing Rip It Up and Start Again, and I wanted to understand why it had such a big influence on post-punk. In away, I prefer the side of Ballard that relates to someone like John Wyndham over the side that relates to William S. Burroughs. I like that dour, flat Britishness confronted by something alien or catastrophic.

SS: I was surprised by your Ballard tribute in Salon, in which you wrote: “While his novels of the late 1980s and thereafter, such as Cocaine Nights and Super-Cannes, have admirers, few would argue they’ve contributed a jot to his enduring cult.” For me, Super-Cannes seems to be one of his very best, a hyper-aware distillation of the “pornification” you were talking about earlier, a sense of entrapment within a system that only recognizes exchange values as authentic modes of being.

SR: It’s not about the relative merits of his books, but about what his cult is based on. It’s a bit like with rock stars. Morrissey put out a number of solo albums, ranging from dire to mediocre to excellent. But the basis of his cult will always be the Smiths. The same goes for the Rolling Stones — their last album, A Bigger Bang, was actually a really fine album, but “Stones-iness” was defined by the 1960s albums, plus Sticky Fingers and Exile on Main Street. It’s hard to imagine many people starting their Stones fandom with A Bigger Bang, just as it’s hard to imagine many people becoming obsessed with Morrissey on account of You are the Quarry. I think the same thing applies to Ballard’s work. Not to say you’re wrong about Super-Cannes.

SS: You’ve mentioned Ballard’s influence on post-punk. Growing up on this music, Ballard was always a vague referent, glimpsed through obscure Cabaret Voltaire or Ultravox interviews. So I appreciated the way Rip It Up and Start Again unpacked the connection. But what about today’s crop? Is there a continuum from then to now? For example, the dubstep musicians Kode9 and Burial — every second review of their albums seems to invoke the dreaded word “Ballardian,” possibly becoming as much a cliché as it was during the post-punk period.

SR: That relates more to the Spaceape’s contribution to the Kode9 album Memories of the Future. His lyrics and delivery are a bit like Linton Kwesi Johnson reading excerpts from The Atrocity Exhibition. With Burial, the connection is that his album is supposed to be a concept record about South London becoming flooded when the Thames Barrier breaks in the global-warmed near future. I think Katrina and New Orleans is more likely to be the inspiration, but there’s an obvious parallel there with The Drowned World.

There is also an urban psychogeography thing going on in Burial’s music that recalls Ballard in Crash. The album draws a lot from South London, this inter-zone of semi-suburbia between Brixton, where the tube line stops, and Croydon, which is on the city’s periphery. So it’s a hinterland similar to the outer London areas near Heathrow where Ballard situated Crash. A real anomie zone, but possessed with a certain desolate beauty. Burial has also talked of putting his tunes through the “Car Test,” driving around South London playing music from his car to see if it has the atmosphere he wants, the “distance” he’s looking for.

People have also compared Burial to Joy Division in terms of bleak urbanism. And Martin Hannett, their producer, used to do a similar thing: drive around Manchester’s most brutally industrialized zones in his car, stoned, listening to Joy Division, PiL, or Pere Ubu.

SS: Does “Ballardian” mean anything substantial to you, or do you think Ballard’s work is too complex to be contained in this way?

SR: It has become something of a cliché, and that’s perhaps the inevitable result of having an impact and becoming famous — that your ideas become simplified, reduced to a caption. So Ballardian equals “picturesque, postindustrial decay,” “kinky technophilia,” and “perverted obsessions with celebrities.”

When the Diana and Dodi crash happened, people in TV newsrooms were apparently like, “Let’s get Ballard on the phone.”

SS: You’ve casually mentioned that Ballard and Brian Eno are “the two greatest British thinkers of the second half of the 20th century.”

SR: That’s slightly over the top, isn’t it? I wonder if it really stands up. Then again, as thinkers specifically on culture, in the British context, I can’t honestly think of too many rivals, especially for the generation who came out of the 1960s and developed during the 1970s.

One of the fantasy projects that I’ve toyed with for a while is a book on Ballard and Eno. They feel like the patron saints of post-punk to an extent. But it’s difficult, because they’ve said it all better than anyone else. I suppose you could historicize or contextualize them – Ballard with the ICA milieu and Eno with the UK art schools. In some ways the affinity seems as much temperamental as anything conceptual. They have this wonderful Englishness — you imagine they would get on like a house on fire, trading ideas over whisky in a Shepperton living room. One thing they both do is take ideas from science and set them loose in culture, find applications.

Ballard is like a British McLuhan, except better because he’s a far better writer and thinker — more original, more convincing. In some ways, Eno is almost like a British Barthes.

SS: While explaining his collage method in The Atrocity Exhibition, Ballard said he wanted to produce “crossovers and linkages between unexpected and previously totally unrelated things, events, elements of the narration, ideas that begin to generate new matter.” Could you draw parallels to Eno’s formulation of “generative” music?

SR: I’m not sure about that. It seems more related to Burroughs, and perhaps also to Ballard’s debt to surrealism.

Eno’s generative music is much more cybernetics-meets-Zen, emptying out the authorial ego, setting up a process and then withdrawing. I don’t think Ballard has that Eastern mystical aspect. With Ballard, there’s always more of a violence bubbling up from below, even though the writing is cold and controlled. If Eno is a British Barthes, a languid sensualist, Ballard would be a British Bataille. I can also imagine Ballard enjoying Camille Paglia’s writing, which I can’t imagine Eno doing — it would be too passionate for him.

SS: Both Ballard and Eno inverted, retooled, and then abandoned the genre they started out in. As Richard Sutherland writes, “To call Ballard’s work science fiction is a bit like describing Brian Eno’s music as rock ‘n’ roll.”

SR: Yes and no. Eno is like the culmination or extension of certain ideas within rock to the point where they verge on un-rock. But when he started he owed a lot to Syd Barrett’s Pink Floyd, a certain English kind of psychedelia. And he could do the “idiot energy” thing with “Third Uncle.” As for Ballard, to divorce him from his genre is unnecessary. The methodology in his disaster stories and in the bulk of his short stories is totally science fiction.

SS: As someone who has successfully integrated critical theory into writing about music, what do you think of the growing incursion of theory into music criticism?

SR: I’d make a distinction here between theorizing about music and applying critical theory to music. The former happens a lot, obviously — and you could argue that any critical position is at some level theoretical. What I don’t see a lot of is people using ideas from critical theory or philosophy to explicate pop music. Even I don’t do nearly as much as I used to. But I certainly still generate theorems and analytical ideas that go beyond the thumbs up/thumbs down consumer guidance aspect.

SS: To return to Ballard, is it possible to imagine, after his death, what his enduring legacy might be?

SR: That’s too big a question really. But I guess his legacy is due to his invention of a completely original way of perceiving reality, which merges reality with the unreality of the entertainment-scape. He did this to the point where it seems almost obvious, even cliché, as we discussed earlier. You see that a lot in music. I’ve argued that coming up with a cliché is the highest achievement in dance music, a sound or a beat or a riff pattern that everyone wants to copy. Becoming a cliché is, in lots of ways, a triumphant success for any artist.

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Rick McGrath’s Letter From London: The JG Ballard Memorial

All photography by Rick McGrath.

Sunday, November 15, 2009, 3:45pm, The Founders Pub, London.

Dear Simon,

Greetings from London! Hope all is well with you. I’ve just attended the long-anticipated JG Ballard Memorial celebration at the Tate Modern and now I’m catching my breath — and a few beers — at a nearby Thames-side pub with fellow Ballardians David Pringle, Mike Holliday, Vale, Marian Wallace and Gee Vaucher. We’re having a wonderful time — wish you were here.

Left: Toby Litt.

But let’s start at the beginning. We have time to order some Alsatian off the barbie. For the first two days in London I actually wondered if somebody’s god was sending us a message, as the elements did their best to batter us with the kind of weather that resembled a vicious blend of The Drowned World and The Wind From Nowhere. Running from doorway to doorway in search of a tube entrance, I kept stumbling through the usual detritus: soggy cigarette ends, broken umbrellas, empty condom packs. I kept wondering where JG might have visited to inspire The Drought. Certainly nowhere in the UK.

The day of the Memorial, however, broke bright and sunny and warm — a good sign and a fitting description of the events to follow.

The plan was for everyone to meet at the Tate Modern at 11am for an 11:30 start. I overtook a walking Toby Litt about a block away and together we made our way to the top floor of the Tate’s east wing where a substantial crowd had already gathered, spritzers in hand, strung out along a glass and steel corridor that emptied to a large anteroom with a commanding view of old London to the north and the high tech security guards of Canary Wharf to the east. I kept looking down to the Thames, though, hoping to see a bit of wing floating by from a light airplane. Not today. The venue might also have reminded some of Royal’s penthouse suite in High-Rise, but regardless of the number of people fighting their way up the stairs it was an appropriately Ballardian venue, made even more so by the Tate’s current show of “Pop Life: Art in a Material World”, featuring Andy Warhol, Damien Hirst and Jeff Koons. Synchronicity? Perhaps.

Claire Walsh.

It was in this enormous space the 100 or so celebrants convened for the Memorial – tributes to The Man from JG’s family, friends, colleagues and admirers on what would have been his 79th birthday. The area was liquid with light and the format was a simple stage and microphone with flanking video screens. We sat in chairs that fanned in a wide arc along the length of the room. Our mistress of ceremonies was Bea Ballard, and after thanking the event’s organizers — her sister Fay, Claire Walsh and JG’s agent, Maggie Hanbury — away we went.

Our speakers — 13 in all, four reporting in by video — gave us a wonderfully Ballardian triad of facts, stories and myths about JG, and I couldn’t help thinking that once again Life is reflecting Art, unconsciously reproducing his Atrocity Exhibition structure of the public, the personal, and the symbolic. His work, his life, and his myth were the topics we wanted to hear about, and Simon, no one was disappointed.

Hold on. We’ve just had a discussion here at the pub, and Mike has suggested that this three-part structure may also be the most appropriate for this re-telling. Vale? Dave? You agree? OK. Planes do intersect.

THE PUBLIC

Will Self.

The celebration of JG’s work is also the celebration of his deep impact and the shock waves he sent through the literary community, emphasis on the later generations. And then there was that second wave of carpet bombing in the 1970s, the one that resonated with punk, with the abandoned, with RE/Search, with architecture, with the whole explosion of everyone’s quantification and eroticism of the “outer world of reality”. Unfortunately, Simon, the room held mostly literary types, so JG’s influence on the Ballardian arts was not addressed. Never mind. What was missing in breadth was made up in breath. “A touchstone of authentic genius,” Will Self intoned in his best British boom, “my single most important mentor and influence.” Will also commented about the length and consistency of JG’s oeuvre (pronounced as if it had 14 syllables), and how JG rarely left the road he most preferred, the one where he was caught in the wet headlights ironically waving a warning flag to a population already asleep at the wheel. He’s been at it, Will said, from his early changing planet stories to his last four novels of wacky westerners, that quartet or warnings about the dangers of boredom associated with living behind gated minds and programmed lives.

Not to be outdone, but still a tad cagey about it, Martin Amis beamed in on video to announce JG was “uniquely unique”, and spoke at length about JG’s art and his high place in the pantheon of imaginative writers. He was the only speaker who basically concentrated on JG the writer, rather than the man, and it was good to have him there even in video, although the final effect was a bit Intensive Care Unit, if you know what I mean.

JG’s life story has long been part of the public domain, and The Man did make an appearance, appearing onscreen in segments from the BBC documentary of his 1991 return to Shanghai. We see an obviously emotional JG standing in the yard of his family home on Amherst Avenue, wandering through the rooms, wondering about that second life he might have had if the war had not occurred and he stayed in the terrible city. Then the famous scene at Lunghua where he stands in the cramped room in G Block his family of four called home for three years. This is the closest thing to what I call home, JG told us, “I came close to an adult mind” here. We were treated to one other bit of Ballard before the day was over: the organizers had obtained a video of the What I Believe light display shown at Barcelona, and once again we were all reassured the power of the imagination can remake the world. In a way, that’s why we were there.

THE PERSONAL

Fay Ballard.

Here’s the heart of the matter. The angles between the walls. Let’s start with the daughters, Fay and Bea. Both talked exclusively about their relationship with ‘Daddy’ and their rather envious home life among the muck, movies and manuscripts. Fay, the artist, spoke first, and I was amazed and amused when she announced she would simply read out a series of thoughts, a verbal collage of unstructured memories. Perfect, I thought. It’ll be just like an Atrocity Exhibition list. And it was. Bea, also, offered up her remembrances, but took a more organized approach, mixing the humour with tales of darker times, such as the passing of her husband, and how she relied on JG’s help and experience from his own tragedy, and now even that support is gone. Sobering. And from Bea we have another inkling of JG’s self-deprecatory nature when he described himself as domestically “slattern”, when in reality the organisation level was probably at full Lunghua. “You can clean a house in five minutes if you don’t make a fetish of it”, JG once told her. I got the feeling the regimen was simply an extension of JG’s life: work hard, play hard.

Other Jimbits? JG never or rarely replaced or updated anything in the house. Nor did he throw much out, viz a peeled orange that had stood on the mantelpiece for 40 years. The daughters remember the clacking old typewriter and JG perched over it, speaking aloud the words he’s typing. Spending an entire summer naked in his back yard. Watching a tape of Double Indemnity together on TV, all the lights out, and talking about Civilization and Its Discontents. JG doing surrealist paintings! Constant encouragement for all their enthusiasms. Acceptance of a menagerie of pets, including Bea’s rat. Chinese dinners with — get this, Simon — lobster and noodles. A serious approach to education. Bear hugs. The unicycle. Trips to the movies after school. Ahh, memories.

Michael Moorcock.

Mike Moorcock stayed on this plane for his presentation, too, after he managed with some difficulty to negotiate passage to the stage with his crutches, and then actually alight it. Mike stayed Mike, fumbling thru masses of folded paper to find his notes, and then regaling us with stories of domesticity rather than literary appreciation and New Worlds gossip. It was very interesting to hear stories of JG’s early days, and nowadays Mike treasures most his memories of their times in restaurants, pubs and kitchens, wives at one end, Mike and Jim at the other, with all “forever arguing”. Mike had to put up with “cobblers” from his wife, JG with “you know that’s not true, Jim” from Mary. If you were eavesdropping you might think they were plotting the overthrow of SF, except nothing happened because no one could agree. Alpha males, no? When Mary died Mike was there for JG, not only helping him out of his “closed down” fugue, but ultimately introducing him to Claire — “the best possible choice for Jim” — and finally becoming each other’s editors — “logrolling”.

By far the most famous of the name-brand personalities to attend was Steven Spielberg — I got to sit right beside him! Ha, just kidding. Steve and the two Empire producers also attended, albeit in pixilated form, and gave an obviously glowing, but also somewhat underwhelming appreciation of their brief time together. They liked having JG around to help in the “dimensionalizing” of the book, whatever that means, and, of course, they had lots of fun shooting him in the Shanghai party scene, even if that clip was cut.

Steve’s warm memories of JG were also shared by Crash producer Jeremy Thomas, who recalled JG was unusually generous to his film adaptors. His memories involved food and cars, the former being a meal he enjoyed with JG in Cannes after Crash was panned, or should we say skewered? The latter involves a ride he gave JG in a Ferrari, and The Man reaching out to fondle the dashboard leather. A fellow “petrol-head” Jeremy called JG, a secret connoisseur of car magazines, “the equivalent of centerfolds in Penthouse”. I think he’s confusing the author and character here a wee bit, no?

Thomas made way for the enthusiastic and entertaining V Vale, who flew in from his RE/Search offices in San Francisco to breathlessly relate his stories of how he first became aware of JG and his immense appreciation for The Man: “He’s the Shakespeare of the Twentieth Century, the bard of Shepperton”, Vale pronounced, much to the glee of the audience. I’m toasting Vale right now, Simon, for that great line! Dressed in his trademark all black (as he still is), Vale began by confessing he started off as a Burroughs man, and first became aware of JG in 1974 when someone told him Bill had written a preface to a book called Love & Napalm: Export USA. He read it and experienced a life-changing moment. In 1978 Vale interviewed both Bs for the 10th issue of his seminal punkpaper, Search and Destroy. He then realized he had “spent his entire life preparing to meet JG Ballard”, and Burroughs slipped to second place. Cheers, Vale, and thanks for pointing out the obvious to the locals.

Left: V. Vale. Right: Bea Ballard.

After Vale the long, lean and lanky body of Will Self undulated itself to the microphone, and Will amused us all by reading out a handwritten letter –- actually, two of JG’s ubiquitous postcards — he received 16 years ago. Will had written JG, tentatively suggesting he might be the man to write a screenplay for Crash. The reply was short on encouragement, but long on suggestions: JG recommended Will immediately go out and buy a book called The Black Box, which featured the final recordings of crews involved in aircraft crashes. “I’m thinking of writing a novel based entirely on black box recordings,” JG enthusiastically wrote, then suggested it might be a technique Will might try. “He was always suggesting story ideas to me,” Will intoned in a lazy, eccentric drawl oddly reminiscent of JG’s dulcet tones. “I knew it was because he had already thought about it and had abandoned the concept”. Much laughter. Will also revealed a bit of JG’s horror of all things literary and fête. When JG won a PEN Award four months before his passing, it was Will who accepted on JG’s behalf. When he delivered the award, JG took pains to warn Will about the “tweedy” side of the literary world — “It’s very good of them to give me the award but we must always remember” (here, Will’s voice drops conspiratorially) “they are the enemy”.

Left: Jonathan Waxman. Centre: Chris Petit. Right: James Ballard, Jnr.

A very interesting speaker was Professor Jonathan Waxman, JG’s oncologist, who movingly re-emphasized JG’s stoicism and bravery, usually expressed as endless concern for others rather than himself. I kept wondering if this Doctor was anything at all like the endless Doctors who passed through JG’s fiction. He didn’t look like he’d ever been to Africa, though. We learned of the closeness between JG and Claire near the end, although even these emotional moments were subject to JG’s wicked one-liners, such as the time Jonathan called up to see how things were going. “Claire’s been absolutely magnificent,” JG replied, “but then I have to say that, as she’s sitting opposite me cradling a Luger in her lap”. Or his description of chemotherapy being akin to “continually eating bad oysters”.

THE PSYCHE

Left: Bill Spencer.

This is where these planes intersect, and images are born. Or, in this case, reinforced, as blending the public and private in JG is essentially the basis of his creative technique. JG has said himself his greatest story is his life, and the image I think we all will carry forward is of a bifurcated genius — generous family man on the one hand, hard-drinking shockwave rider of a writer on the other. Unique, to paraphrase Amis. My takeaway image was the vid of JG at Lunghua, white hat, white suit, looking suspiciously like someone who firmly expects to see their 14-year-old self appear around a corner. When I got home I patted my brick from G Block.

And that was basically it for the tributes, although they might have gone on all afternoon given the guest list, which included Iain Sinclair, Chris Petit, Toby Litt, Tom Sutcliffe, Maggie Hanbury, Marian Wallace, Joan Bakewell, Solveig Nordlund, Peter York, and JG’s friend from his Cambridge days at the Copper Kettle, Bill Spencer, looking sharp in a hot pink bow tie. Yowsers!

Direct family members who were in attendance but didn’t speak included James Ballard, Jr. — who shares many physical similarities with JG — and JG’s sister Margaret.

Absent or unable to attend were Brian Aldiss, Emma Tennant from Bananas, Hilary Bailey, Martin Bax and Michael Foreman from Ambit, and academics such as Roger Luckhurst, Jeanette Baxter and you.

Left: Iain Sinclair.

What else did I find out during the informal chit-chat afterwards? A few items you may find interesting. Remember all those stories about JG taking his manuscripts out to his back yard and burning them after the book was published? I asked Bea Ballard about this, and she looked at me like I had been in the care of Dr Nathan. No, they haven’t been burned — the girls have all that stuff. Good news. Toby Litt was saying he’s heard the ICA is negotiating with the CCCB in Barcelona in an attempt to get the Autopsy exhibition in London. Their space is quite a bit less than the 90,000 square feet the CCCB lavished, so we’ll see what transpires. I was also approached by Claire Walsh and Gee Vaucher regarding another proposed Ballard exhibition the ladies are planning for a subterranean exhibition at Waterloo. So, perhaps things are picking up in the UK after all.

The memorial ended as these events normally do, Simon, with a sort of time trickle of people down to the remaining few — us, of course — followed by a vote to repair to the nearest bar to discuss the experience, which we’re now doing. Interestingly enough, all of us at the table agree the event was also a sort of Rubicon, a boundary we have now crossed which marks the end of mourning JG’s passing to celebrating his extraordinary life, his loving and generous personality, and, of course, his amazing legacy of work.

It was a helluva day. I’m glad I was there.

Cheers,
Rick.

..:: Previously on Ballardian:
+ ‘What exactly is he trying to sell?’: J.G. Ballard’s Adventures in Advertising
+ ‘Like Alice in Wonderland’: Solveig Nordlund on J.G. Ballard
+ Rick McGrath’s Letter from Barcelona: The Exquisite Corpse, An Autopsy of the New Millennium
+ Review: Grave New World
+ It’s An Ad, Ad, Ad World
+ ‘Woefully Underconceptualised’: Rick McGrath on J.G. Ballard’s Cover Art

Images by Michelle Lord, from Future Ruins (inspired by JG Ballard’s ‘The Ultimate City’), 2008.

‘Pulled apart by the elders, many of the sets revealed their internal wiring. The green and yellow circuitry, the blue capacitors and modulators, mingled with the bright berries of the firethorn, rival orders of a wayward nature merging again after millions of years of separate evolution.’

JG Ballard, ‘The Ultimate City’, 1976.

Originally published in Architectures of the Near Future: Architectural Design (ed. Nic Clear), September-October 2009, pp. 82-7.

The fiction of JG Ballard was centred almost wholly on the built environment. Ballard took architectural design to its logical extreme and then contorted it further. Simon Sellars looks at how architects can learn from Ballard and, specifically, his use of urban sound as a metaphor.

In JG Ballard’s ‘The Sound-Sweep’,[1] the sonic strata of everyday urban life – a ‘frenzied hypermanic babel of jostling horns, shrilling tyres, plunging brakes and engines’[2] – is so without respite that it is literally embedded within walls and surfaces and must be vacuumed away with a device called the ’sonovac’. The central character, Mangon, is a mute who has developed hyperacute hearing, making him a valued sound- sweep. His main client is Madame Gioconda, an ex-opera singer whose career ended with the advent of ‘ultrasonic music’. Ultrasonic producers electronically rescore classical symphonies into musical notation that operates on a subliminal level, making use of the sensorium beyond the normal range of the human ear. Supposedly the new music, ostensibly silent, has richer texture, theme and emotion, but whether this is merely a placebo effect to placate the frazzled masses remains ambiguous.

Mangon strives to resurrect Gioconda’s career, but when he does eventually stage her comeback, she botches it, her voice so cracked, out of practice and out of tune that it causes great distress to all who hear it. The story ends with Mangon driving off in his sound truck as he turns on the vehicle’s inbuilt sonovac – filled with the city’s sonic detritus – to drown out Gioconda singing like an ‘insane banshee’. Effectively, Mangon manipulates the sounds of the city to assuage his psychological turmoil.

Ballard’s story anticipates R Murray Schafer’s World Soundscape project, which aimed to reduce the noise pollution of industrial environments in favour of an ‘acoustic ecology’, eliminating so-called ‘bad’ sounds in favour of prescribed ‘good’ sounds, returning to ‘the Ursound’ supposedly found in nature, where, Schafer rhapsodises, ‘listening blindly to our ancestors and the wild creatures, we will feel it surge within us again, in our speaking and in our music’.[3] But as Geoff Manaugh notes: ‘Where the Project went wrong … was when it thought it had a kind of sonic monopoly over what sounded good. Industrial noises would be scrubbed from the city … and a nostalgic calm … infused in its place. Think church bells, not automobiles. But where would such sensory cleansing leave those … who enjoy the sounds of factories?’[4]

‘Halloway had the distinct impression that this solitary young mute was a prisoner here, high above this museum of cars in the centre of the abandoned airport.’

JG Ballard, ‘The Ultimate City’, 1976.

For Ballard, too, neither full reliance on technology (represented by the sterile, calming aesthetic of ultrasonic music) nor the reactionary turn to nostalgia and a safe retreat into the past (ie Mangon’s initial deification of the opera singer) is posited as an adequate solution. Instead, a middle ground is sought, a strategy found throughout his career, grounded in the sense that the built environment must be met on its own terms.

In the novella ‘The Ultimate City’,[5] Ballard moves beyond Mangon’s half-aware thumbnail sketch and into a three-dimensionality: a full-scale cognitive remapping. A future ecotopia, Garden City, has developed wind power and alternative technologies after New York has fallen into ruins from the exhaustion of fossil fuels. The central character, Halloway, dissatisfied with what he sees as the dulling of the imagination in Garden City, with its organic conformity, makes his way back to the abandoned New York, where he attempts to restart the metropolis and its power supplies. Significantly, it is the noise of the city that he misses and that he is inescapably drawn to. With the help of Olds (another mute), Halloway manages to restart the generators and power supplies of a small sector of the city, bringing to life neon and traffic lights, while broadcasting sound- effects records of automobile and aircraft noise:

Halloway moved from one apartment to the next, flicking lights on and off, working the appliances in the kitchens. Mixers chattered, toasters and refrigerators hummed, warning lights glowed in control panels … Television sets came on, radios emitted a ghostly tonelessness interrupted now and then by static from the remote-controlled switching units of the tidal pumps twenty miles away.

It was only now, in this raucous light and noise, that the city was being its true self, only in this flood of cheap neon that it was really alive …[6]

Like Mangon, but on a grander scale, Halloway tunes the city rather than shutting it out, rejecting the sterile, affectless Garden City for a complete reimagining and re-envisaging of the city’s technological grid, including the acoustic footprint that so disturbed the inventors of ultrasonic music. This time, the story anticipates the Positive Soundscapes research project, funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council and comprising five British universities, which aims to convince architects and town planners to think beyond the traditional focus on reducing noise levels and to pay attention instead to ‘the many possibilities for creating positive environments in the soundscapes in which we live. People can completely change their perception of a sound once they have identified it. In the laboratory, many listeners prefer distant motorway noise to rushing water, until they are told what the sounds are.’[7]

I have cited these examples of urban sound in Ballard because they represent the key components of a framework he uses to critique the psychological and perceptual dimensions that are saturated in the built environment, but that seem lacking in the discourse that generates architectural practice. In a sense, Ballard’s work is about nothing but the built environment. It is often said that technology and the liminal zones of suburbia and non- place urban fields are his main characters, and indeed the buildings and zones he erects – the motorway system in Crash,[8] the apartment block in High-Rise (‘an environment built, not for man, but for man’s absence’),[9] the secessionist shopping centre in Kingdom Come[10] – all seem imbued with an artificial intelligence determined to eradicate human life as if it were a disease.

This is a gambit that brings sociologist Ron Smith’s observation into stark relief: ‘If you want to see what’s wrong with architecture today, pick up the latest issue of almost any architectural design magazine. They’re filled with pictures of interesting architecture, but you rarely see any people actually using those buildings.’[11] In Ballard, trends (and flaws) in architectural design are pursued to their logical extremes, and then bent backwards or forwards through time to go completely beyond logic. In the real world, people might complain about an escalator too far away from a baggage chute in an airport or a concourse in a mall that heats up too quickly, or overly processed floors that make far too much noise when walked upon. In Ballard, the unspoken tension and psychopathology engendered by such scenarios is recycled, reheated and allowed free rein to play itself out to the bitterest of ends.

‘Buckmaster tried to point out to Halloway how the Twentieth Century had met its self-made death. They stood on the shores of artificial lagoons filled with chemical wastes, drove along canals silvered by metallic scum, across landscapes covered by thousands of tons of untreated garbage, fields piled high with cans, broken glass and derelict machinery.’

JG Ballard, ‘The Ultimate City’, 1976.

In High-Rise, which charts the breakdown of the social order in a neo-Corbusian residential building, at first it is the little things that niggle. These then overlay and overlap, each new escalation of hostilities a clear and logical progression from the previous strata, however bizarre each incident might seem in isolation. Parents find that the building hasn’t been designed for children: there is no free, open space, only ’someone else’s car park’. Shared garbage disposal causes anxiety and division between residents. Raucous parties occur on the upper floors, and residents in ‘better-sited apartments’ are unsympathetic to those living below them. Dog owners are attacked for allowing their pets to urinate and defecate in the elevators, culminating in the fateful moment when one resident’s Afghan hound is drowned in the swimming pool.

Thereafter, things really take off: incidents of violent aggression morph into tribal skirmishes and warring groups cut off escalator access, barricading their apartments and ‘Balkanising’ the middle section of flats to form a buffer zone. Yet, after the system has collapsed and failed, what we are left with is more than a mere glimmer of hope, and clearly akin to a programme of resistance based on emergent psychologies and a radical new approach to the built environment: ‘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.’[12]

Yet just as Positive Soundscapes has encountered resistance in persuading architects and engineers to re- evaluate environmental sound, ‘perhaps because of barriers to communication across different disciplines’[13], chances are you will not find Ballard on the syllabus. According to Nic Clear, who has used Ballard’s work as an aid in architectural learning: ‘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.’[14]

Yet architects have no compunction about appropriating critical theory to their own ends. Peter Eisenman drew heavily on Deleuze and Baudrillard for his conception of ‘interstitial’ architecture and ‘blurred zones’, where the aim was to examine the way the virtual has invaded the actual, displacing architecture’s traditional role as an anchor for the real. Eisenman’s ‘philosophy lite’ sought to invite architecture to explore conceptual spaces located within the ‘folds’ of the built environment, with the aim of ‘refram[ing] existing urbanism, to set it off in a new direction’.[15] But surely the theory of Deleuze (which has more than a few correspondences with the work of Ballard) is designed to inspire affirmation in the reader, the user, the inhabitant; surely it must be tangible and must work in practice, in real-world terms, in that it must inspire thought and positive action to affirm its validity.

‘Halloway was fascinated by the glimmering sheen of the metal- scummed canals, by the strange submarine melancholy of drowned cars looming up at him from abandoned lakes, by the brilliant colours of the garbage hills, by the glitter of a million cans embedded in a matrix of detergent packs and tinfoil, a kaleidoscope of everything they could wear, eat and drink.’

JG Ballard, ‘The Ultimate City’, 1976.

That to me seems the Deleuzian ideal – indeed, the Ballardian ideal. It would seem apposite to say the majority of criticism of Eisenman’s buildings implies that not only are most users unaware of the inner workings of the ‘process of the interstitial’ that built the thing, but that in the final product antagonism and negation is placed before affirmation and interaction. As Roger Kimball writes: ‘When we encounter a stairway that leads nowhere … we need [Eisenman's] help to understand that we are being given a lesson in linguistic futility. Otherwise we might foolishly conclude that it was just a stairway that led nowhere and wonder about the sanity of the chap who paid the architect’s bill.’[16]

Ballard is interested in urbanism and spatial dynamics as a way to understand the city as narrative. The psychological dimension of urban life plays an important part, ‘reading’ and ‘writing’ the city on a sensory level. Indeed, he should be required reading for anyone seriously interested in making architecture more ‘user friendly’, or to anyone who thinks that architecture should be more than a series of shiny icons designed by remote starchitects. In this, he is ideally matched with the aims of Smith, who believes that ‘to become truly great architects [architecture students] also have to be great social psychologists, community sociologists, and organizational theorists’,[17] and also those of Michael Kroelinger, who teaches a course in ‘Architectural Sociology’ at the University of Nevada that ‘underscores the importance of understanding people’s values, needs, and attitudes, from an individual level to an organizational one’.[18]

Architects: read, study and learn from Ballard’s writing. Because it should not be the job of the architect to build worlds and indulge the luxury of allowing them to fail at our expense, but that of the writer, the constructor of virtual worlds that live, breathe and, indeed, die in virtuality so that we, in the actual, do not have to expire to prove a point. Only then should we overlay the virtual with the actual to create a stereoscopic representation, a truly interstitial process that places the user at the centre with the power to inform, direct, stage and manage the terms of his or her movement through time and space, perhaps nudging us one step closer to a read/write city in which we are free to ‘tune’ the built environment, [19] free to contribute to the conditions of our cohabitation.

In fact, an interdisciplinary, specifically Ballardian approach may be exactly what is required to shake architecture out of its ‘business as usual’ mentality, forcing it to confront the global economic and environmental crises just over the horizon. Ask the question: is another ’shiny, happy’ building really what we want or need to see or inhabit?

‘He knew now that he would never return to Garden City, with its pastoral calm … he would set off on foot, … following the memorials westwards across the continent, until he found the old man again and could help him raise his pyramids of washing machines, radiator-grilles and typewriters.’

JG Ballard, ‘The Ultimate City’, 1976.

Notes
[1] JG Ballard, ‘The Sound-Sweep’ [1960], in The Complete Short Stories, Flamingo (London), 2001.
[2] Ibid, p 106.
[3] Quoted in Brandon LaBelle, Perspectives on Sound Art, Continuum (New York and London), 2006, p 204.
[4] Geoff Manaugh, ‘Audio Architecture’, BLDGBLOG, 10 August 2007. See http://bldgblog.blogspot.com/2007/08/audio-architecture.html, accessed 26 January 2008.
[5] JG Ballard, ‘The Ultimate City’ [1976], in The Complete Short Stories, Flamingo (London), 2001.
[6] Ibid, pp 902, 907.
[7] Positive Soundscapes, ‘Project Overview’, Positive Soundscapes: A Re- evaluation of Environmental Sound. See www.positivesoundscapes.org/project_overview, accessed 26 January 2009.
[8] JG Ballard, Crash [1973], Vintage (London), 1995.
[9] JG Ballard, High-Rise [1975], Flamingo (London), 1993.
[10] JG Ballard, Kingdom Come, Fourth Estate (London), 2006.
[11] Quoted in Gian Galassi, ‘Community by Design’, UNLV Magazine, Fall 2004. See http://magazine.unlv.edu/Issues/Fall04/community.html>, accessed 26 January 2009.
[12] JG Ballard, High Rise, op cit, p 147.
[13] Positive Soundscapes, op cit.
[14] Simon Sellars, ‘Architectures of the Near Future: An Interview with Nic
Clear’, Ballardian, 24 December 2008. See www.ballardian.com/near-future-nic-clear- interview, accessed 26 January 2009.
[15] Peter Eisenman (ed), Blurred Zones: Investigations of the Interstitial: Eisenman Architects 1988–1998, Monacelli Press (New York), 2002, p 132.
[16] Roger Kimball, ‘Architecture and ideology’, New Criterion, December 2002. See http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_hb3345/is_4_21/ai_n28962509>, accessed 26 January 2009.
[17] Quoted in Gian Galassi, op cit.
[18] Ibid.
[19] I’ve borrowed the concept of the ‘read/write’ city from Steve Lambert of the Anti- Advertising Agency who, writing about the visual environment and street art, states: ‘Why is read/write better? Because you can consume, process, and respond. This is how we think critically. This is how we learn. You can talk back. You can express yourself. You don’t just consume expression, you create expression. Read/write is how democracy works. There’s a reason kids want to write their names on walls. There’s a reason why people take graffiti seriously. Granted, graffiti writers don’t always know how to direct this energy, but I’d argue there’s some overlap with the reasons one writes their name on a wall and the reasons one runs for the school board. Being able to write means being able to affect your environment. To change it. You exist in the world not as a consumer, but an active citizen. Read only culture creates apathy.’ From Steve Lambert, ‘Demand a Read/Write City’, The Anti-Advertising Agency, 3 October, 2008. See http://antiadvertisingagency.com/news/demand-a-readwrite-city, accessed 26 January 2009.

Text © 2009 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Images © Michelle Lord.

…:: Previously on Ballardian: + ‘Architectures of the Near Future’: An Interview with Nic Clear

Although we never met in real life, I considered Mac Tonnies a great friend. We corresponded often via Twitter and email, and I interviewed him in 2007 about our shared passion for the writing of J.G. Ballard. Appropriately, given Mac’s status as a Fortean investigator, and the fact that we only ever knew each other disembodied via cyberspace, he would appear in my dreams as a man from the future who used black holes to travel through time. Mac was intensely interested in the paranormal, but he was a bigger skeptic than many who aren’t. It is this sharp intelligence that always made his writing so readable, filled with sharp angles and deep crevices, even when dealing with the most twisted theories.

Today, I’ve been informed that Mac was found dead in his apartment on Thursday. He will be greatly missed.

+ Mac’s blog, Posthuman Blues
+ Mac’s Twitter stream
+ Mac’s last interview on Coast to Coast

..:: Previously on Ballardian:

+ Crash! Full-tilt Autogeddon
+ Negative Acoustic Space: Ballardian Sound Art
+ A Ballardian Burial
+ Tribute to J.G. Ballard & Brian Eno
+ Escaping the Gaze: A Review of John Foxx’s Tiny Colour Movies
+ A Whirlpool with Seductive Furniture: the John Foxx Interview
+ ‘Magisterial, Precise, Unsettling’: Simon Reynolds on the Ballard Connection
+ Cousin Silas: Another Flask of Ballard
+ ‘No One Dances in Ballard’: An Interview with Mike Ryan
+ A Premeditated Ballard Playlist
+ Crash: A Tribute to James Graham Ballard
+ Critical Mass: Sound, Story and Music in David Cronenberg’s Crash

This is the foreword to the Greek edition of Ballard’s Miracles of Life, due to be published by Oxy in November 2009.

In 2006 I interviewed Jim Ballard. I was nervous at the thought of matching wits with this towering figure but my anxiety was quickly banished, for he was a charming and generous conversationalist. Although taxed from the recent discovery of the cancer that would claim him, he applied his blowtorch intelligence to everything from CSI and the ‘soft fascism’ of consumer culture to the surreality of having an English queen as an Australian head of state, weaving such cultural flashpoints in among the warps and wefts of a philosophy that has sustained his writing across 19 novels and around 100 short stories. Performing a similar function, but in reverse, his wonderful memoir contextualises some of the darkest and strangest corners of his fiction – as elements hotwired into his life.

It was never easy, perhaps not even possible for Ballard to separate his life from his work. Nominally English, he was born in Shanghai and lived in the expatriate community there before being interned in 1943 with his family in Lunghua, a Japanese war camp. He didn’t see England until he was 16. Accordingly, the Shanghai years, and the squalor and horror of Lunghua, take up almost half of Miracles, an index to its deep psychological fissures. Marguerite Duras once said she only truly recognised herself in her novels, not the biographies written about her. Perhaps Ballard felt the same. Like Duras, who also wrote iterative, fictionalised accounts of her expatriate upbringing in Saigon, he has practised a form of time travel throughout his career, most famously in the 1984 novel Empire of the Sun, reinhabiting his Lunghua memories in numerous stories, blurring the edges in each incarnation, incrementally shifting the background scenery, erasing forever the demarcation between fiction and reality. The summoning of memory is a key theme in Miracles. But it is memory that becomes hopelessly, irrevocably contaminated with the writer’s imaginative life. The sudden death of his wife, Mary, in 1964 takes up barely a page, but Ballard’s dream of her returning to his world to say goodbye takes up considerably more, as does a discussion of his experimental novel The Atrocity Exhibition, which Ballard has said was in part his attempt to sublimate the hurt and anger he felt at losing Mary so unexpectedly. Motifs from Ballard’s fiction bleed into the autobiographical frame, reversing the process set in train by Empire. When he writes that he was drawn to science fiction because it examined the trend towards ‘politics conducted as a branch of advertising’, we recognise the echoes from Crash, where the phrase was first used in the original introduction to that work.

Significantly, when he describes his holidays with his girlfriend Claire and his children, he says they took very few photographs for ‘memory is the greatest gallery in the world, and I can play an endless archive of images of the happy time’. Looking back at the creative process that led to Empire, he suggests, ‘I was frisking myself of memories that popped out of every pocket. By the time I finished, Shanghai had advanced out of its own mirage and become a real city again’. Bizarrely, when Empire becomes a Spielberg film and production begins at the studios near his home in Shepperton, Ballard describes how his neighbours are recruited as extras in the film, portraying his fellow Lunghua inmates. Christian Bale, playing the young Jim, comes up to him to announce, ‘Hello, Mr Ballard, I’m you’. At every turn, Lunghua erupts from the subconscious well. The sense is of a man simultaneously cursed and blessed with the task of processing a remarkable upbringing – blessed, because to Ballard Lunghua was his ‘happy childhood’, an experience that, although shocking, fed the first stirrings of his startling imagination.

Perhaps surprisingly for an autobiography, there’s very little ego on display and not much gossip, save for a scurrilous tale about Kingsley Amis, which sounds like it’s common coin anyway. But there is extraordinary detail. Interspersed throughout are lingering snapshots that impart a sense of a man enamoured of his three children (the ‘miracles of life’ that give the book its title), of his wife Mary and, later, Claire … and of cats. Ballard’s eye is as scalpel-sharp as ever, and his remembrances of domestic bliss, ‘days of wonder’ with the kids – like the vivid scene where he takes them scavenging among abandoned film sets – resonate with as much intensity as the immorality of the early Shanghai street scenes, or the bleak humour inhabiting his medical-student days when he would dissect corpses and keep skeletons under his bed.

Finally, Miracles of Life is another version of his past, as gloriously open-minded as all his fiction. It is brief, modest, honest – and poignant, with Ballard confronting his cancer in the final chapter. But shortly before this terminal appointment, Ballard realises ‘the true nature of my assignment. I was looking for my younger self’. Perhaps he is like the man in Chris Marker’s La Jetée, a film that he openly admired, about the mutability of memory. In La Jetée, the man, via the peculiarities of time travel, realises that as a boy he had witnessed his own death. In Miracles, via the peculiarities of auto(bio)graphy, Ballard time travels with the ongoing revelation that as a boy, Lunghua was the map of his future. Miracles, then, reunites his younger self with the older man, allowing Ballard to again see through young Jim’s eyes, viewing his own impending death with detached, yet remarkably clear vision.

Simon Sellars, June 2009.

Image: JG Ballard and Iain Sinclair in London Orbital (dirs. Chris Petit and Iain Sinclair, 2002).

by David Cunningham

There are few concepts in contemporary social and cultural theory whose meaning is so apparently nebulous, and whose historical novelty (or even reality) is so disputed, as that of ‘globalisation’. Yet, for better or worse, the questions that it serves to frame are ones that increasingly work to define a trans-disciplinary problematic across all the humanities and social sciences, as attested to by a range of celebrated publications in the last few years. In the case of the critical analysis of cultural and artistic production, perhaps of utmost importance has been the issue of the historical transformations being undergone by ‘local’ forms and practices in the face of the global generalization of capitalist relations of production and exchange; an issue which, for literary theory and criticism, goes beyond, and in some sense historically sublates, the specific problematic of post-colonialism.[1] As such, what is customarily thought to be at stake here might, in its broadest terms, be summarised in the following questions: If there is, for the first time, now (tendentially at least) a ‘single spatial ground to the definition of the historical present’, what happens to place as a spatial variable in such a new global economy of a capitalist modernity? How is it inscribed ‘in the [new] spaces of culture?’[2] And what critical ‘role’ can cultural forms and practices, that have been historically associated with the specificities of place and localised traditions, realistically hope to play at such an historical moment?

While then its qualitative historical newness has undoubtedly been over-exaggerated in some quarters, the emergent spatial dominance of what Castells terms the ‘space of flows’ that traverses the planetary ground of contemporary capitalist modernity — ‘flows of capital, flows of information, flows of technology, flows of organisational interaction, flows of images, sounds and symbols’ — clearly does bring radically into question the ontological character of what has traditionally been understood as spaces of place, whether ethnologically or sociologically; that is, a ‘locale whose form, function and meaning are self-contained within the boundaries of physical contiguity’. It is the ‘concrete outcome’ of such an immanent negation that, famously, the French anthropologist Marc Augé, and, more recently, Hardt and Negri, have sought to articulate as new forms of non-place: the proliferation of spaces which ‘cannot be defined as relational, historical and concerned with identity’, and which, indeed, resist all localised patterns of legibility. Materially, and most visibly, it is these spaces that are reproduced through the now familiar ‘glass phantasms’ of an ‘architectural Esperanto’ — the built form and ambiences of airports, motorways, corporate towers, and retail outlets — populating an ‘urban panorama’ across the planet, which progressively engenders an ‘inexorable sameness of…landscape that turns all travel into arrival at the same destination’.[3]

If such presently operative ideas — several of the most influential articulations of which I have rather bundled together here — provoke certain questions in relation to the specific concerns of this essay, it is, of course, because if there is one distinctive aspect of the work of Iain Sinclair — a formal and thematic principle that might seem to unify his entire oeuvre — it would relate to the intimate association it suggests between literary production and the particularities of place; in Sinclair’s own case the unique locale of East London. ‘The poet’, he claims in a 1979 interview, is distinguished by the way in which he or she is necessarily ‘drawn to a specific location; to activate a monologue that is already available there’: ‘Place needs the person to give it voice. Place activates the poet’.[4] Nearly twenty years on, such a poetics is re-iterated in Sinclair’s essay ‘The Shamanism of Intent’, in which the contemporary shaman’s ’sickness-vocation’ is explicitly defined as the capacity to ‘re-enchant place’ through ‘working their own turf’. For the true artist as shaman: ‘The life-force of the city is measured in the candlepower of its keepers, the activators of place’. The writer is a chronographer, ‘hungry for place as expressively potent, place as experience…as a trigger to memory, imagination, and mythic presence’.[5]

Image: Iain Sinclair in London Orbital (dirs. Chris Petit and Iain Sinclair, 2002).

In its literary origins, such a poetics of place is in fact most immediately traceable in Sinclair’s work, not to the present resuscitation of the politicised European avant-gardism of Surrealist re-mappings and Situationist psychogeography, with which it has been latterly associated, but rather to the largely occluded influence of a certain post-Poundian, mainly American poetry that played a crucial role within the so-called British poetry revival of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Perhaps most important, in this respect, would be Charles Olson’s Maximus Poems, centred around his home town of Gloucester, Massachusetts, and their poetic conception of a ‘new localism’; a modulation of Poundian epic ambitions in which writing, as the construction of spatio-temporal matrices capable of generating form, becomes what Eric Mottram describes as a ‘locationary action’.[6] Nonetheless, whatever the distinctive cultural roots of such an ‘action’, as it manifests itself within Sinclair’s writing, it is fair to say that its somewhat belated mainstream fashionablity has coincided with a far more culturally generalised ‘poetics of place’ which would seem to draw together a bewilderingly wide range of different artistic forms and practices of the last few decades, and which appears — if we are to judge by current academic discourses — to have reached a certain fever pitch in our own contemporary moment. To note this is not to diminish the singularity of Sinclair’s work. Rather it is, I want to suggest, to provide a necessary interpretative framework for the kind of critical reflection that may serve to bring forth this singularity all the more forcefully within its contemporary context.[7]

Potential examples of the contemporary ‘hunger’ for place are various: the proclaimed return in architectural theory, after the final disintegration of the Modern Movement, back towards what Christian Norberg-Schulz terms ‘the “vocation” of place’ and the regulative ideal of the genius loci;[8] the increasing dominance of site-specific works within post-conceptualist art practice of a type that would seek ‘to animate old sites … reoccupy lost cultural spaces, and propose historical counter-memories’;[9] the seductive melancholia of W. G Sebald’s books that conjure a ‘heartache…caused by the vortex of past time’ accumulated on the sites of Liverpool Street Station or the Sailors’ Reading Room in Southwold;[10] and what might best be described as the pseudo-Situationist and Benjaminian aspirations of much contemporary urban theory.[11] The desire for what the architectural theorist Kenneth Frampton calls a critical regionalism, whose ‘salient cultural precept’ would be that of ‘place creation’, is seemingly rampant in our time.[12]

Yet what cultural function does such an apparently ubiquitous ‘precept’ serve in a resurgent globalised capitalism? As one recent commentator on contemporary art has put it, it is certainly hard not to suspect, given the increasing ‘historical loss of distinctions of place’, that ‘the ideological function of site-specific work’ is ‘now to manufacture such distinctions artificially, in order to compensate and cover over the loss’. For if, in the words of Hal Foster, ‘the local and the everyday are [commonly] thought to resist economic development, they can also attract it, [insofar as] such development needs the local and the everyday even as it erodes these qualities, renders them siteless’. The renewed importance, within globalised capitalist development, of ‘monopoly rent’ — the ‘exclusive control over some directly or indirectly tradeable item which is in some respects unique and non-replicable’ — gives rise to a very contemporary form of what we might call the ‘capital of location’, and to new forms of financial speculation that follow from it. In a familiar pattern, the regeneration of the East End of London, with which Sinclair has long been concerned, might well be understood as exemplary in these terms, promoting itself on the basis of a collective symbolic capital deriving from its distinctive (spectacularised) history and myth (from the distant pathos of Huguenot and Jewish immigrants to the gothic frisson of Jack the Ripper and gangster chic). Yet, as David Harvey observes, this process rapidly heads ‘deep into contradiction’. For ‘as opportunities to pocket monopoly rents galore present themselves on the basis of [this] collective symbolic capital … so their irresistible lure draws more and more homogenising commodification in its wake’. It is the tension at work here that determines the cultural politics of globalization in general.[13]

Explicitly resistant, then, as his work may well be to the contemporary construction of literature’s latest ideological role as an effective branch of the heritage industry — fetishising the quirky and mildly exotic signs of ‘local colour’ for a global market — the marks of such a problematic complicity with the forces of investment capital cannot be entirely erased from Sinclair’s own works, as he is clearly aware. Indeed it is an alertness to the danger of such complicity which is increasingly, even obsessively, self-reflexively enunciated, in a familiar narratorial conceit, throughout the pages of a novel like Downriver. ‘Would it be ethical to make our discovery public?’, the narrator asks at one point. ‘To endanger this time-warped reservation?’. For to ‘make public’ is always to risk feeding those who need ‘a mythology to underwrite property values’; the ‘standard pre-development scenario’:

When artists walk through a wilderness in epiphanous ‘bliss-out’, fiddling with polaroids, grim estate agents dog their footsteps…The visionary reclaims the ground of his nightmares only to present it, framed in Perspex, to the Docklands Development Board .[14]

Such self-conscious marking out of the changing socio-economic processes which would culturally enframe and threaten his poetics of place — the reshaping of London by the ‘occult logic of “market forces”’ which serve to dictate ‘a new geography’ — is a persistent feature of the ironic distance apparent within the narrative voices of Sinclair’s recent prose; a specific modulation of the kind of reflexive commentary that ‘is so thoroughly interwoven with action that the distinction between the two disappears’.[15] Indeed, something of the distinctiveness of Sinclair’s recent works is precisely to be found — unlike in, say, the ultimately conservative pleasures of Sebald’s superficially similar writings — in the ways in which they immanently register a certain crisis within their own mode of literary production. For if it is indeed a certain ‘magnetism’ of place that activates the ‘poet’, the historical loss of distinctions of place clearly raises questions about the contemporary possibility of poetic experience in general, as Sinclair conceives it. Moreover, and as such, this problematic comes to constitute far more than a mere historical ‘backdrop’ or thematic ‘context’, but necessarily manifests itself as an immanent problem of form; rendering visible within its own formal structures, and stylistic constellations, the social contradictions that it engages.

If, therefore, the conception of literary production as ‘locationary action’ is evidently one that persists, in a certain continuous fashion, through all of Sinclair’s writings, up to the present day, it must also be thought of as subject to, and as immanently registering, an irresistible transformation. The stories and forms of poetic experience engendered by what Patrick Wright describes as ‘the precipitations of history, rumour and memory which were still clinging to the streets of Whitechapel as Sinclair knew them in the seventies’ — and which provide much of the material for Lud Heat, Suicide Bridge and White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings — are, by the early 1990s, presented as progressively fragile in the face of the ‘deregulated energies’ unleashed by Thatcherism. In the pages of Downriver and Radon Daughters, one previously ‘disregarded landscape’ after another is ‘dragged from cyclical time’ to the ‘pragmatic time’ of capital accumulation.[16]

Image: JG Ballard in London Orbital (dirs. Chris Petit and Iain Sinclair, 2002).

What might be at stake in this for the politics of contemporary literature, more generally, is something that I want to consider here through the staging of a ‘confrontation’ between the very different — in some sense, opposed — manifestations of the contemporary novel’s spatial and formal possibilities to be found within the oeuvres of Sinclair and of J.G. Ballard. Such a confrontation is not one that is imposed from the outside. It is, crucially, internal to Sinclair’s writings of the last five years, and, I want to claim, serves, in part, to mediate their developing relations both to the history of the novel form and to the contemporary problematics of place and non-place, of spaces of places and spaces of flows. Yet, as such, this textual presence of Ballard is a rather more disturbing presence within Sinclair’s writing than are the familiar allusions to Blake, Dickens, Conrad, et al. For Ballard’s own style and concerns, in their tension with Sinclair’s, mark something like an introjected point of resistance (which cannot simply be digested or overcome) to the poetics of place upon which the latter continues to insist.

In London Orbital, Sinclair records an actual meeting with Ballard at his home in Shepperton — an act of ‘homage’, he suggests — but we find the first explicit staging of this confrontation a few years earlier in the short book on Crash, written for the BFI Modern Classics series, in which Sinclair addresses, at some length, his particular interest in Ballard’s definitive ‘fascination with a frozen aesthetic of motorways, business parks, airport hotels … A present tense world of swift, sharp sentences’. This is a fiction that ‘grows out of [an] undisclosed, over-familiar urban landscape. Ballard’s trick [is] to forge a poetic out of that which contains least poetry’ (Crash 77). In this way, Sinclair argues, Ballard’s writing conforms, in its own idiosyncratic manner, to a poetics of place. Like the areas of London that, in Lights Out For The Territory, Sinclair parcels out to the likes of Angela Carter, Allen Fisher and Aidan Dun, this fiction can be sited, insofar as it is a particular place, Sinclair claims—’the transitional landscape of gravel pits, reservoirs and slip-roads that surround Heathrow’ — that activates Ballard the poet. The ‘psychogeographical field’ of Crash ‘was posited entirely on the London perimeter, the Heathrow pentagram that Ballard knew so well’.[17]

Yet it is worth noting that there is — by contrast to Fisher or Dun, who fully subscribe to their own versions of an Olsonian poetics of place — a rather deliberate elision of certain key aspects of Ballard’s own self-understanding apparent in such a reading; an elision which is, for example, revealed in discussion with Sinclair’s sometime collaborator Chris Petit. As Sinclair relates the latter’s conversations with Ballard around the possibility of making a film of Crash, he recounts that a major problem for Petit concerned his difficulty in imagining it ‘being set anywhere except the isthmus between the Westway, Heathrow and Shepperton’. The implicit basis for such a view is re-iterated in Sinclair’s own judgement on the David Cronenberg film that was eventually made, where, he writes, ‘the strange particulars of London that Ballard pressed into a Blakean mapping of his own…dissolve into the netherworld of … Toronto’. Yet, as Sinclair is also compelled to acknowledge here, such disappointment was emphatically not shared by Ballard himself. Indeed Ballard would love Cronenberg’s film.[18]

Now, the dissensus at this point can, perhaps, precisely be conceptualised in terms of the dialectic of space and place at work, respectively, in Ballard’s novel and in Sinclair’s reading — or, rather, creative mis-reading — of it. As Petit relates, Ballard himself saw ‘Crash as much a Tokyo novel or a Toronto novel as a London novel’; the reasoning for which is made quite evident in Sinclair’s own interview with the writer:

The areas peripheral to great airports are identical all over the world. You can land at any airport these days and for the first twenty minutes, as you take your cab, you go through a landscape that is identical … Two-storey factories, flat housing, warehouses.[19]

Image: JG Ballard in London Orbital (dirs. Chris Petit and Iain Sinclair, 2002).

In this sense, for Ballard himself, the ’spatial field’ of Crash, and of the novels that followed, is not, in fact, related to a ‘place’, as Sinclair might like to imagine, but to a necessarily generalised non-place, in something like Augé’s terms. The spaces of Ballard’s fiction are those populated by ‘the same car-rental agencies and hotel rooms, with their adult movies and deodorized bathrooms’. As one of his characters says of the central ‘location’ in Cocaine Nights: ‘Estrella de Mar isn’t anywhere’.[20]

In exemplary ethnological fashion, such spaces of non-place are taxonomised by Augé himself as including ‘air, rail and motorway routes, the mobile cabins called “means of transport”…the airports and railway stations, hotel chains, leisure parks, and large retail outlets’, both ‘transit points and temporary abodes’, ‘holiday clubs and refugee camps’, as well as the spaces ‘where the habitué of supermarkets, slot machines and credit cards communicates wordlessly, through gestures, with an abstract, unmediated commerce’.[21] I will not be entirely the first to note that this check-list in fact reads like a thematic summary of Ballard’s own fiction, from the concrete dystopias of High-Rise and Crash through to the decadent, gated communities of Cocaine Nights and Super-Cannes.[22] And the spaces of such fiction cast a considerable shadow over much of Sinclair’s recent work, most obviously London Orbital, obsessively returned to throughout its pages. Indeed, this latter book might well be read as a kind of self-conscious encroachment upon, and rewriting of, what Sinclair regards as Ballard’s own territory, from the Bluewater shopping centre — described as a ‘Ballardian resort’ — to the ‘enclaves with no memory’ that constitute the new housing estates ringing London, to, above all, the M25 itself.[23] The echoes of Ballard would thus seem entirely deliberate. Compare, for example, the following two fictional ‘spaces’, selected almost at random; the first from a recent Ballard novel, the second from London Orbital:

Despite its title, the Pangbourne Village estate was not built near the site of any former or existing village…[It] has no connections, social, historical or civic with Pangbourne itself…Secure behind their high walls and surveillance cameras, these estates in effect constitute a chain of closed communities whose lifelines run directly along the M4 to the offices and consulting rooms, restaurants and private clinics of central London.

A colony of the disenchanted in a panorama of disenchantment. Amnesiaville…Chafford Hundred thrives because it is not really there. It’s displaced, not placed: 2,000 (and rising) pristine, anti-vernacular units. Scimitar-shaped Draylon-grass carpets. Second cars. An empty-by-day enclave with no centres and no purpose.[24]

In this way, Ballard’s work provides something like the intertextual point of mediation for Sinclair’s own engagement with the contemporary dialectic of place and non-place; that is, with what is earlier figured by the ‘sorry meniscus’ of the Millenium Dome, Canary Wharf’s ‘crystal synthesis of capital’ — ‘Treeless, broad, focusing on nothing’ — or the ‘discreet tyranny of “now”’ established in the ‘money lake’ of the City of London’s archetypal space of flows. The British supermarket chain Sainsbury’s, Sinclair writes in London Orbital, ‘is universal…In supermarket heaven, you’re at home everywhere’. You are, in other words, lodging in Ballard’s home; a home which is, it might be said, no kind of home at all. Just as Sinclair seeks to re-read Crash through his own poetics of place, so we might say, more generally, that he thus seeks also to re-place the fictional spaces of Ballard’s novels through what is described as a tenuous act of re-enchantment. In doing so, the formal and conceptual dialogue between these two poles of contemporary British writing is rendered internal to the text, allowing the remorseless absences and solitudes of Ballard’s own spatial configurations to immanently inscribe the historical limitations of Sinclair’s poetics; a kind of dialogic imperative which, collapsing the distinction between form and reflection, allows the dialogue to debate the very basis of the work itself. Ballard’s stripped-down language of dislocation, with its unvarying stylistic register, comes to be dialectically entwined with Sinclair’s own characteristically dense prose style and its encyclopaedic accumulation of literary and cultural allusions, as if the lexical variety and richness of the latter might overcome the emptiness that it confronts; re-vivifying place through a Rimbaudian alchemy of the word. At the same time, if the imagistic intensity of Sinclair’s prose, with its dazzling expansiveness of diction, would seek, in an act of memory and ‘counter-magic’, to re-instate the image of place within the space of flows, the present-tense ‘images’ of Ballard’s writing, and of its ‘willed limbo’, provide its opposition and resistance. As Vidler writes of Martha Rossler’s (very Ballardian) photographs of American freeways and airport terminals, they ‘assert’ that ‘not only is no orientation possible in the technically determined scheme of road and vehicle [or passages and ramps], but that no amount of image proliferation will restore orientation’.[25]

Image: JG Ballard in London Orbital (dirs. Chris Petit and Iain Sinclair, 2002).

At the structural heart of this tense conjunction is, of course, the endless dislocated space of the M25 itself. ‘Out here on the motorway rim’, Sinclair writes, ‘there were no memories’. ‘Back stories’ are ‘erased’; history is ‘revised on a daily basis’.[26] The great gambit of London Orbital is to try — against all odds — to re-form the images and paths of place and memory within this kind of non-place that Ballard’s texts so powerfully render; creating, through a familiar urban metaphorics of the body, the organic pump of blood that would circulate around the tourniquet which might otherwise kill the city.[27] For Augé, contemporary ‘traveller’s space’ is ‘the archetype of non-place’. The artist’s ‘counter-magic’, the ‘pedestrian circuit of London’s orbital motorway’, thus might be understood as a re-placing of the anthropological ‘route’ or ‘path’ — what, for Bakhtin famously, was the pivotal ‘space of encounter’ for one of the novel’s dominant historical chronotopes — in the exemplary non-place of the continuous motorway.[28] Although Sinclair claims, in his conversations with Kevin Jackson, that the ‘road is the river, the M25 is the equivalent of the Thames’, he must know that in fact an unbridgeable history divides them. (The trick is, if only for a moment, to bring them together). For if the rivers and roads, that are the sites of the journeys in Downriver, still (just) retain a liberatory passage to past and future — in the ‘posthumous brilliance’ of their history — the endless, circular ‘ribbon’ of the orbital allows for no such opening. Perhaps its most obvious prefiguring in the earlier novel is found in the central metonymic image of the nineteenth-century establishment of ‘railway time’ in chapter six, which, pressed forward by the capitalist ratio, already abstracts and negates the temporal nuances of place. Yet, even here, the train itself provides a novelistic space of encounter and narrative production — Strangers on a Train, Murder on the Orient Express, Woolf’s ‘Mrs Brown’ — that the ‘mobile cabins’ circulating the motorway cannot.

Following Bakhtin, in his 1998 ‘atlas’ of the nineteenth-century novel Franco Moretti asserts that ‘in modern European novels, what happens depends a lot on where it happens’; ‘without a certain kind of space, a certain kind of story is simply impossible’. Hence what he describes as the ‘place-bound nature’ of the novel (what Reiner Hawsherr calls Ortegebunden) — its ‘peculiar geometry, its boundaries, its spatial taboos and favourite routes’ — a ‘platial’ character which he traces through its relation to the formation of the modern spatial configurations of the nation state and the nineteenth-century metropolis. It is the changing ‘chronotopes’, formally constitutive of the novel, that serve, Moretti argues, to explain its historical development in complex relation to ‘an actual material reality’. Citing the exceptional moments of the late nineteenth-century Russian novel of ideas and post-war Latin American Magic Realism, ‘in both cases’, he asserts, ‘the new model is the product of a new space…A new space poses new problems — and so asks for new answers’.[29] Yet what new stories might the spaces of non-place and of flows provoke? What answers might be given to the problems that it poses? The M25, as Petit states in the London Orbital film, seemingly ‘resists any kind of story’. Without beginning or end — a kind of purgatorial eternity — no narrative or image can finally stick. ‘What other than a surveillance camera’, asks the soundtrack, ‘would want to record its ceaseless undramatic motion?’ In the absence of the orientations of place, the dynamics of story are displaced by the perpetual, un-editable loop.[30]

The power of Ballard’s writings — no doubt, in some sense, for Sinclair himself — come, then, from the ways in which they imply the irresistible submission of the novel’s narrative modes to the contemporary forms of a present-tense ‘information loop’ that characterise a globalised commodity culture. The attempt to locate a sub-Benjaminian agenda of redemption here in a kind of ‘technological uncanny’ — such as is apparent in, for example, Roger Luckhurst’s (otherwise very useful) book on Ballard — fails to engage what is most challenging in this work:[31] its absolute self-dissolution into a contemporary language of abstraction and dislocation, of advertising copy, technocratic jargon and cheap pornography. As Tafuri writes of Mies van der Rohe’s post-war sheets of reflective glass, Ballard’s texts ‘assume in themselves the ineluctability of absence that the contemporary world imposes on the language of forms’. They ‘negate dwelling as they reflect the metropolis’. For Ballard, in Adorno’s withering phrase, ‘dwelling, in the proper sense, is now impossible’. Against this, the danger inherent within the current obsessions with memoration, as supposed ‘act of resistance against the totality of spectacularisation’, is simply that, as Stewart Martin argues, it in fact becomes an art of forgetting; a forgetting of real historical movements and of the changed conditions of present. In a world of heritage, retro and Rough Guide-style ‘alternative’ tourism, to evoke the flâneur or the rag picker (or, even, the Situationist dérive) is, without qualification, to fail to understand the road historically travelled. Sinclair’s force as a writer comes from his (only rarely acknowledged) refusal to do so; re-asserting a poetics of place only through the textual introjection of that which would historically challenge it.[32]

It is not here a fatuous question of choosing between Sinclair and Ballard — as if such a thing were possible — but of tracing, through their immanent confrontation, the role of writing, and of cultural production more generally, at an historical moment marked by the particular spatial relations generated by the dialectic of places and flows; an historical moment in which ‘the relationships between the local and the global are all in flux’. If, as Adorno once suggested, it is part of the modern novel’s distinctive fate to incorporate its ongoing dissolution within its very form, then it is perhaps as a new stage in such a process that the (dialectically inseparable) novelistic forms of space and time inscribed within the singular prose styles of Sinclair and Ballard might best be understood.[33] What, in time, will come to re-place the novel remains, of course, an open question.

Image: JG Ballard in London Orbital (dirs. Chris Petit and Iain Sinclair, 2002).

This essay was first published in Robert Bond and Jenny Bavidge (eds), City Visions: The Work of Iain Sinclair (Cambridge Scholars Press, 2007), pp. 134-146. Reprinted with permission.

NOTES

[1] See David Cunningham, ‘Notes on Nuance: Rethinking a Philosophy of Modern Music’ in Radical Philosophy 125 (May/June 2004), 22-26.
[2] Peter Osborne, ‘Non-Places and the Spaces of Art’ in The Journal of Architecture 6, 2 (Summer 2001), 184; Saskia Sassen, ‘Analytic Borderlands: Economy and Culture in the Global City’ in D: Columbia Documents of Architecture and Theory, Volume Three (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993), p. 5.
[3] Manuel Castells, The Rise of the Network Society (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), pp. 442, 423. See also pp. 408-9; Marc Augé, Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity, trans. John Howe (London & New York: Verso, 1995), pp. 77-8. See also Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), pp. 216-7; Manfredo Tafuri and Francesco Dal Co, Modern Architecture/2, trans. Robert Erich Wolf (New York: Rizzoli, 1976), p. 339; Anthony Vidler, Warped Space: Art, Architecture, and Anxiety in Modern Culture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000), p. 173.
[4] Iain Sinclair, unbroadcast interview with Paul Green for BBC radio (1979).
[5] Lights, pp. 246-7, 252; Orbital, p. 101.
[6] See Jerome Rothenberg & Pierre Joris (eds.), Poems for the Millenium Volume Two (Berkeley & Los Angeles: University of California Press 1998), p. 102; See Peter Barry, ‘Allen Fisher and “Content-Specific” Poetry’ in Robert Hampson & Peter Barry (eds.), New British Poetries: The Scope of the Possible (Manchester: Manchester University Press 1993), pp. 198-215. The Olsonian character of Sinclair’s early poetics of place is clearest in the opening piece of Suicide Bridge (1979), ‘Intimate Associations: Myth and Place’ (Lud/ Suicide pp. 147-154).
[7] For even if it is a question here of resisting the facile appropriation of Sinclair’s work in the name of some fairly dubious forms of cultural politics, then it must be in relation to such a context that this resistance is articulated.
[8] Christian Norberg-Schulz, ‘The Phenomenon of Place’ in Kate Nesbit (ed.), Theorizing a New Agenda for Architecture: An Anthology of Architectural Theory 1965-1995 (New York: Princeton University Press, 1996), p. 426.
[9] Hal Foster, The Return of the Real (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press 1996), p. 197.
[10] W. G. Sebald, Austerlitz, trans. Anthea Bell (London: Penguin, 2002), pp. 182-3. See also W. G. Sebald, Rings of Saturn, trans. Michael Hulse (London: Harvill Press, 1998).
[11] See, for example, Ash Amin and Nigel Thrift, Cities: Reimagining the Urban (Cambridge: Polity, 2002); Steve Pile and Nigel Thrift (eds.), City A-Z: Urban Fragments (London & New York: Routledge, 2000); Iain Borden, Joe Kerr, Alicia Pivana and Jane Rendell (eds.), Strangely Familiar: Narratives of Architecture in the City (London & New York: Routledge, 1996).
[12] Kenneth Frampton, ‘Prospects for a Critical Regionalism’ in Nesbit (ed.), p. 482.
[13] Peter Osborne, ‘Installation, Performance or What?’ in Oxford Art Journal 24, 2 (2001), 151-2; Foster, Return of the Real, p. 197; David Harvey, Spaces of Capital: Towards a Critical Geography (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2001), pp. 395, 406.
[14] Downriver, p. 397; Rodinsky, pp. 66-7; Downriver, pp. 16, 265.
[15] Theodor Adorno ‘The Position of the Narrator in the Contemporary Novel’ in Notes to Literature, Volume One, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), p. 34;
[16] Patrick Wright, ‘Rodinsky’s Place’ in The London Review of Books 9, 19 (October 29 1987), 3-5. In his conversations with Kevin Jackson, Sinclair remarks that, in the 1970s, Brick Lane in London’s East End ‘still had the ambience of the Late Victorian era, a derelict area with the brewery as its focus’ (Verbals, p. 71). By the 1990s, of course, the brewery, in which Sinclair once worked, had stopped brewing, having been ‘redeveloped’ as a complex of bar, offices and studios; Downriver, pp. 158, 33.
[17] Crash, pp. 37, 77. Lights, pp. 145-6; Crash, p. 15.
[18] Ibid., pp. 87, 11.
[19] Ibid., pp. 87, 48.
[20] J. G. Ballard, Cocaine Nights (London: Flamingo, 1997), pp. 10, 17.
[21] Augé, pp. 79, 78.
[22] See Roger Luckhurst, The Angle Between the Walls: The Fiction of J. G. Ballard (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1997), pp. 129-31.
[23] Orbital, pp. 388, 136.
[24] J. G. Ballard, Running Wild (London: Flamingo, 1997), pp. 11-12; Orbital, p. 400.
[25] Downriver pp. 276-7; Lights pp. 91, 107; Orbital p. 262; Ballard, Cocaine Nights, p. 34; Vidler, Warped Space, p. 175.
[26] Orbital, pp. 141, 123-4.
[27] Given the organicist tendencies which always underlie the metaphor of city as body, Sinclair’s admiration for the liberal Christian account of the city to be found in the work of Richard Sennett is perhaps less surprising than it might otherwise seem. See Richard Sennett, Flesh and Stone: The Body and the City in Western Civilization (London: Faber & Faber, 1994), especially chapter eight on the anthropomorphic projections in urbanism derived from Harvey’s work on the circulation of blood (pp. 255-281).
[28] Augé, p. 86; See Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, trans. Caryl Emerson & Michael Holquist (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981), pp. 243-5; Verbals, p. 135; Downriver, pp. 6, 170-1.
[29] Franco Moretti, Atlas of the European Novel 1800-1900 (London & New York: Verso, 1998), pp. 70, 100, 5, 196.
[30] Soundtrack to Iain Sinclair and Chris Petit, London Orbital (Illuminations Films/Channel 4, 2002).
[31] See Luckhurst, p. 135. Luckhurst’s argument for an uncanny return of the repressed at work in Ballard rests on the evidence of a fairly short passage in the novel Concrete Island — in which the central character stumbles upon the half-buried ‘grand-plans of Edwardian terraced houses’ — and draws (all-too-typically) on that conception of the ‘outmoded’ to be found in Benjamin’s 1929 essay on Surrealism. But there is, it seems to me, little ‘revolutionary nostalgia’ at work in Ballard’s fictional world, little sense of an alternative future figured within that which lies derelict and discarded in ‘the interstices of new economies’, only a rigorously non-nostalgic vision of a coming desert in which all ‘cultural accretions’ are finally erased.
[32] Tafuri & Dal Co, p. 312; Massimo Cacciari, ‘Eupalinos or Architecture’, trans. Stephen Sartarelli, in K. Michael Hays (ed.), Architecture Theory Since 1968 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998), p. 400. See also David Cunningham, ‘The Phenomenology of Non-Dwelling: Massimo Cacciari, Modernism and the Philosophy of the Metropolis’ in Crossings: A Counter-Disciplinary Journal 7 (Fall 2004), 156-8; Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia, trans. E. F. N. Jephcott (London & New York: Verso, 1978), p. 38. As Sinclair acknowledges in London Orbital, for Ballard the ‘“local” was finished as a concept’ (Orbital 177); Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, Neo-Avant-Garde and Culture Industry (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000), p. xxv; See Stewart Martin, ‘W. G. Sebald and the Modern Art of Memory’ in David Cunningham, Andrew Fisher & Sas Mays (eds.), Photography and Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2005), pp. 180-201.
[33] Harvey, Spaces of Capital, p. 226; See Adorno, ‘Position of the Narrator’, pp. 30-36.

…:: Previously on Ballardian:
+ ‘When in doubt, quote Ballard’: An Interview with Iain Sinclair
+ ‘Obeying the surrealist formula’: Iain Sinclair & Hermione Lee on Ballard
+ ‘His personal horizon’: Sinclair and Self on Ballard

Still from La Jetée (1962), dir. Chris Marker.

If you’re in Melbourne this Thursday, come and say hello! I’m giving a paper on Ballard, circular time and the nouvelle vague this Thursday, October 1, at 3pm 3.45pm at ACMI in the city. It’s part of the time.transcendence.performance conference, held over three days at ACMI and Monash University’s Caulfield campus. Guests include Stelarc (very exciting, for me), Brian Massumi and more. Here’s the conference blurb, followed by the abstract for my paper:

time.transcendence.performance brings together artists, designers and thinkers who work with time, to explore how they might inform each other. How do performers think time? How do thinkers perform time? What shared or different understandings are at work in the different practices?

Even before Aristotle wrote that time is the number of motion with respect to before and after, and Heraclitus observed that it was impossible to step into the same river twice, philosophers – Eastern and Western – have wondered about time. Is it real or just an abstraction? Is it reversible? Does it pass? Do we experience it directly? Is it relative or constant? Does it exist? So far, the consensus is that we do not have satisfactory answers to these questions.

More than an academic conference: the three-day program features public performances, exhibitions, installations, screenings and workshops.

‘CONFRONTING OURSELVES’: J.G. BALLARD & CIRCULAR TIME
Dr Simon Sellars
School of English, Communication & Performance Studies
Monash University, Clayton

J.G. Ballard’s oeuvre features numerous examples of self-contained societies that many critics perceive as disguised versions of Lunghua, the insular WWII camp he was interned in as a child. His novel, Empire of the Sun, widely seen as Ballard’s ‘authentic’ autobiography and the key to decoding his fiction, activated this perception. However, by cross-examining his body of work, I will argue that there is no definitive reconstruction of this wartime experience – rather, Empire should be viewed as Ballard’s life seen through the holograph of his fiction – and that, moreover, this holistic recycling of memory forms the model for a program of resistance to late capitalism. In wider terms, Ballard positions time as an artificial construct imposing control on the chaotic subconscious: the clock stops, past and future collapsed in the drive to homogenise the planet. Liberation derives from circular time – revisiting memory – and even sideways time, restaging and reinhabiting parallel worlds.

To illustrate this, the paper analyses Ballard’s affinity with nouvelle vague cinema — non-linear film technique, which, incorporated into the fabric of his work, reveals the ‘true’ nature of perception, time and memory. Ballard’s fiction is the fictional doubling of Deleuze’s work on the cinema of the ‘time-image’: both locate ‘nodes of resistance’ in post-war cinema, deploying the nouvelle vague as revealing the truth of the merger between the virtual and the actual. Focusing on repetition and déjà vu, the critical concept of revisiting and reinhabiting memory emerges in Ballardian and Deleuzian philosophy. Ballard’s malleable, circular Lunghua memories become a mutant psychopathology that focuses on inner mental states as reality and the external world of media and consumerism as irreality – a reversal that his work posits as the only viable antidote to an increasingly stylised and mediated post-war realm, the only effective form of resistance to totalising, naturalised systems of control.

..:: Previously on Ballardian:
+ ‘Confronting Ourselves’: Ballard and Circular Time
+ Ballard and the Vicissitudes of Time

The following are the full versions of three book reviews originally published elsewhere in edited form.

The BLDGBLOG Book, by Geoff Manaugh. San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 2009. ISBN: 0811866440.

This review was originally published in Blueprint, September 2009, p. 67.

Geoff Manaugh has been described by fellow futurist Bruce Sterling as ‘the world’s greatest practitioner of “architecture fiction”’. His online ideas factory, BLDGBLOG, attracts descriptors like ‘promiscuous’ and ‘omnivorous’. His new book-of-the-blog, beautifully designed, delivers more of the same. It even features cartoon renderings of his trademark ‘urban speculation’, maybe the only medium flexible enough to capture the onslaught. There are four components treating eclectic aspects of the built environment: subterranean worlds, music/sound/noise, ‘landscape futures’, even climate (the ’space between buildings’). The section on ‘noise’ works best, considering something many architects seem to disregard: the acoustic footprint of urban areas and how this might be ‘tuned’ to satisfactory ‘user’ experiences (discussing the psychological effects of the built environment, Manaugh’s self-acknowledged debt to J.G. Ballard is most apparent). That’s the value of Manaugh’s work. At heart, he’s an outsider, perhaps, an enthusiast armed with a surplus of imagination and creative latitude, voicing ideas a professional ‘insider’, armed (burdened) with all the right references, might miss (or wilfully ignore).

He’s written a lot of new material, and some has been reworked from online. If you know the blog, you’ll know the style: breathless, italicised for emphasis, exhorting ‘you’ to consider video games and spam email as ‘architecture’ as much as actual buildings. Such writing might work best in the cross-linkage of the online matrix, although it doesn’t suffer noticeably on the page. Among the thoughtful features and interviews (with the likes of Mike Davis, Patrick McGrath and Lebbeus Woods) are numerous sidebars, allowing the reading experience to fold in on itself. Take Manaugh’s discussion of ‘a medieval treatise on the use of mirrors’. He contemplates how a man with no soul could walk into the infinite non-space generated when two mirrors reflect each other, but then we’re suddenly aboard the International Space Station and he’s conjured up an astronaut, ‘crazed with loneliness’, who sets up two mirrors before wandering inside them, never to return, while back on Earth children sing hymns in remembrance. The hall-of-mirrors metaphor is apt: follow Manaugh, and you never know where you’ll end up – a long way from home, certainly. The man should write a novel.

There’ll be protests: ‘That’s not architecture!’ But surely all architecture is fantasy on the drawing board until it meets the harsh reality of governance, big business, the real world. And, as Manaugh points out, ‘If architectural critics can get people to realize the everyday spatial world of earthquake safety plans and prison break films – and suburban Home Depot parking lots and bad funhouse rides – is worthy of architectural analysis, and that architecture is everywhere and everything, then perhaps we’ll learn to stop taking those spaces for granted’. Besides, his burgeoning popularity might help to finally break Ballard in the States, no bad thing.

But why no index? It’s annoying: Manaugh chews through so many topics, but good luck finding them in a hurry.

..:: Previously on Ballardian:
+ The Politics of Enthusiasm: An Interview with Geoff Manaugh

Robert Bond and Jenny Bavidge, editors. City Visions: The Work of Iain Sinclair. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2007. ISBN 1-84718-153-8.

Jeannette Baxter. J G Ballard’s Surrealist Imagination: Spectacular Authorship. Farnham and Burlington: Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2009. ISBN 978-0-7546-6267-9.

This double review was originally published in Colloquy, issue 17, August 2009, pp. 108-12.

City Visions: The Work of Iain Sinclair

It is perhaps surprising that Iain Sinclair has courted less academic attention than might be expected from a writer of his stature. His circular excisions of the written word, rewoven into the circuitous labyrinth of London’s urban fabric, his insistent intertextual frameworks and syntactic ambiguity seem to beg, at the least, a type of speculative literary criticism. Yet, as City Visions’ editors, Robert Bond and Jenny Bavidge, propose, perhaps Sinclair’s critical absence is a result of the peculiar tension his body of work engenders — tension between genres, between film, poetry and literature, between critical and commercial success and obscure, small-press inaccessibility, all of which he straddles. For Bond and Bavidge, “the multidiscursive and multi-encyclopaedic range of his sources and references … has made it difficult for commentators … to grasp the scope, and identities, of Sinclair’s various colliding projects” (2). However, it is in this fluidity that the various contributors to City Visions, which collects papers given at the University of Greenwich’s 2004 conference of the same name, find a way in. According to the editors: “Sinclair suggest[s] that the river could teach us a way of interacting with urban history and culture – a fluid imagination-work, as it were … as playful, democratic and formless as nature itself: as organic, grounded and experimental as the city could continue to be” (8). Accordingly, City Visions is far away from opaque literary theory, typified by Ben Watson, who admits to being stung by, and then colluding with, “Sinclair’s scorn for the patronising academic ‘overview’ [that] burn[s] occult insignia on the back of [my] neck” (82).

The anthology has four sections with titles that give an indication of the focus: Contexts, Culture and Critique, Connections, and Space. “Resistance” is a recurring concept, embodied, it is claimed, in Sinclair’s micro-detail. Because there are no real narrative arcs in his writing, the overarching critical strategy on display involves deep excavation of the mechanics of discourse. Kirstin Seale suggests that Sinclair “alienates the reader through use of digressive narrative, which, in its Blakean insistence on cyclical shapes, resists the linear structure of rational imagination” (105). Robert Hampson charts connections between Sinclair’s mapping of urban space, intertwined with the latterly reborn pyschogeography movement, and Sinclair’s sense of evasion of the all-consuming gaze of late capitalism: “The ‘fresh’ relations of collage coincide with visions of a transformed city” (113). David James skilfully picks apart Sinclair’s “cryogenic narrative” logic (a “bolting together of clauses,” like cryogenic suspension), where the artificiality of prose language is attacked, and reordered, to counter the “violence” it wreaks upon “felt experience,” resulting in what Sinclair in Dining on Stones describes as the “futility of fixing the present moment, instead of experiencing it” (157).

Indeed, “dispensing with the sub-clause,” to use Hampson’s term, comes to have macroscopic significance, paratactical resistance that might well be a “fidelity to the writer’s unconscious” (88), as Watson asserts regarding the dissent in Sinclair’s early poetry. Brian Baker, too, holds that “it is in fact the poetry that is vital to an understanding of Sinclair’s writing practice” (133), an experimental freezone where many of Sinclair’s core obsessions are developed.

I was disappointed by the lack of interest in Sinclair’s film work with Chris Petit, a long, fruitful and ongoing partnership. Although the films are mentioned sporadically throughout City Visions, only Esther Leslie’s essay on London Orbital (the Petit/Sinclair film of Sinclair’s book) applies any kind of weighty critique. Yet while her analysis is perceptive, dubbing the filmmakers’ interest in image overload and recovery as an “aesthetics of refuse” (refuse as both garbage and resistance), she misses a trick by failing to mention the overarching influence of J G Ballard, such an acknowledged influence on the film he may as well be credited as the third director.

David Cunningham rectifies this, albeit referring only to Sinclair’s written work. While many commentators tend to simplify the Ballard/Sinclair symbiosis, smelting it down to an effortless story of compatible writers, Cunningham deftly challenges that assertion by exposing the Ballardian influence as the grit in Sinclair’s work, a productive f(r)iction that allows Sinclair to revivify Ballard’s archetypal non-place: “re-plac[ing] the fictional spaces of Ballard’s novels through what is described as a tenuous act of re-enchantment … as if the lexical variety and richness of [Sinclair's prose] might overcome the emptiness that it confronts” (142).

All up, this is a very impressive collection (despite the niggling problem of multiple typos that renders some footnotes unintelligible). It meets Sinclair’s work on its own terms, becoming state-of-the-art literary theory that is intelligent and deep, but never anything less than playful, engaging and revelatory.

J G Ballard’s Surrealist Imagination: Spectacular Authorship

In contrast to Sinclair, Ballard has been very well served by academia. J G Ballard’s Surrealist Imagination represents the fifth book-length, critical analysis of his work (alongside numerous essays) and the second by Jeannette Baxter, who also edited Continuum’s collection of essays, J G Ballard: Contemporary Critical Perspectives (2009). One wonders what Ballard himself might have made of it all. In 1991, he penned a wonderfully distemperate letter to Science Fiction Studies, in which he denounced the critical consciousness surrounding SF (a genre he is strongly associated with) as “bourgeoisification in the form of an over-professionalized academia with nowhere to take its girlfriend for a bottle of wine and a dance.”

What more can be said about his work? Quite a bit, according to Baxter, especially regarding his highly developed visual sensibility. The work of surrealist artists, Dalí especially, corroborated his decision to invert the standard tropes of science fiction in the 1960s, to explore inner rather than outer space, using the language of dreams to remap the reality of a burgeoning, mass-mediated consciousness — a parallel excavation of McLuhan’s global village. Yet, as Baxter points out, while “‘surreal” and “surrealist” have become standard terms for reviewers and critics when describing Ballard’s work … remarkably, no sustained analysis of the extent and order of Ballard’s Surrealism exists” (1).

While this may be true — “surrealist,” like “dystopian,” undeniably forms part of the clichéd critical lexicon surrounding Ballard’s material — is it that “remarkable” that a sustained analysis of his Surrealism doesn’t exist? (If by “sustained” Baxter means “book-length”). After all, how many authors have entire volumes devoted to a single element of their work? In J G Ballard’s Surrealist Imagination, this becomes problematic in that, over the course of Baxter’s 237 pages, the thesis sometimes stretches thinly. For example, discussing Ballard’s novel The Crystal World (1966), she asserts that it offers a “critique of emergent US Neo-Imperialism within ‘decolonised’ Africa” (39). The Crystal World clearly draws on Surrealist technique, resulting in some of the most striking and uncanny imagery of Ballard’s career. But to suggest it has an extratextual political, postcolonial dimension seems more a result of Baxter adapting the novel to her critical framework, which avowedly aims to explore the “historical, political [and] visual dimensions” of Ballard’s Surrealism, rather than simply the “aesthetic (and purely) textual aspects” (13).

All the same, the book is commendable in its desire to parse the entirety of Ballard’s output: not just his novels, but also the numerous interviews he gave, his journalism, his short stories and particularly his graphic art. This imbues Baxter’s analysis with considerable depth, typified by her discussion of Ballard’s experimental novel, The Atrocity Exhibition (1970), which returns the Atrocity chapters to their original sources as standalone “condensed novels,” often accompanied by collages, in Michael Moorcock’s New Worlds magazine.

J G Ballard’s Surrealist Imagination is recommended to those already familiar with Ballard, and who want to examine his influences in more detail. Otherwise, the dense, single-subject approach and the equally dense writing, tightly compacted with substantial academic language, might not be the best entry point. Like City Visions, typos plague it, surprisingly, given how long Ashgate has taken to release it. According to Baxter’s endnotes, the manuscript was finished in 2006 and published three years later, highlighting the perils of academic publishing, which can be slow to match the pace of the outside world. The book misses out on Ballard’s last novel, Kingdom Come (2006), and his autobiography, Miracles of Life (2008), omissions that immediately date any overview of Ballard published in 2009. The former would have slotted in well — according to Baxter’s prerequisites, it is blackly funny (she adroitly teases out the sly humour in the rest of Ballard’s work, locating it as an index of the Surrealist influence), political and highly visual — while the latter offers extended insights into the sway of Surrealism in his life.

The bibliography, as in most academic appraisals of Ballard, is somewhat predictable (at least in the material directly concerned with the writer), a feedback loop that references a select few, visible publications. This becomes apparent when Baxter discusses Jean Baudrillard’s article on Crash, returning to the same vehement reactions to Baudrillard’s interpetation that were levelled within academia back in 1991. Recently, there have been some productive re-readings of the Ba(udri)llardian symbiosis online in both blog and non-mainstream academic formats. These would surely have enhanced Baxter’s research in that they share her admirable central ideal: to rejuvenate the ossified critical shorthand that so often marks readings of Ballard.

..:: Previously on Ballardian:
+ When in Doubt, Quote Ballard: An Interview with Iain Sinclair
+ From Shanghai to Norwich: An Interview with Jeannette Baxter

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, as this paper will argue, 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 thinks 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, as this paper will argue further, 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).

‘Iterative Architecture: a Ballardian Text’

by Brian Baker

Instructions/ Introduction

Readers hoping to solve the mystery of J.G. Ballard’s ‘The Beach Murders’ may care to approach it in the form of a card game. Some of the principal clues have been alphabetized, some left as they were found, scrawled on to the backs of a deck of cards. Readers are invited to recombine the order of the cards to arrive at a solution.* Obviously any number of solutions is possible, and the final answer to the mystery lies forever hidden.

Brian Baker, 2009

Originally published in 21: Journal of Contemporary and Innovative Fiction, Issue 1 (autumn/winter 2008/09). Reproduced with permission.

♣♠♥♦

Architecture (A♣). Physical space is crucial to the Ballardian imaginary, from the eponymous tower block in High-Rise (1975) to the ‘gated communities’ and science parks of Super-Cannes (2000) and Millennium People (2003). Counterposed to images of flight and transcendence found in many of his stories, the urban environment is often an imprisoning space. In his article ‘J.G. Ballard and the Architectures of Control’, Dan Lockton argues that ‘One of the many ‘obsessions’ running through Ballard’s work is what we might characterise as the effect of architecture on the individual’, while complicating his argument by acknowledging the mutual implication of inner and outer, psychological and environment: this blurring being Ballard’s method of ‘reflecting the participants’ mental state in the environment itself’. [1] Lockton also suggests that ‘[t]he architecture […] acts as a structure for the story’ in locating the protagonist and ‘plot’ firmly in an ‘obsessively explained and expounded’ architecture. I would like to develop this argument by suggesting that the informing structural principles of Ballard’s short stories, particularly that of the period beginning with ‘The Terminal Beach’ (1964) and embracing The Atrocity Exhibition (1969) but also later short fictions, are spatial and iterative: geometry and algebra.

Ballardian (2♣). On the BBC Radio 4 arts review programme Front Row, presenter Mark Lawson, in introducing a discussion of Ballard’s autobiography Miracles of Life, suggested that ‘he’s one of the few writers to have become an adjective — Ballardian’. [2] An author who attains the status of an adjective runs the risk of reduction to culturally received ideas of their work (often erroneous and masking the texts themselves) or, worse still, it makes them the object of caricature or burlesque. To become an adjective suggests a certain kind of cultural visibility (or even cultural power), but also indicates a possible ossification through repetition: another reduction, to a set of representative images, ideas and tropes. In this case, ‘Ballardian’ signifies a recurrent set of narrative structures, characters, and particularly iconic places and things, many of which were identified by David Pringle in his groundbreaking critical work of the 1970s:

Such things as concrete weapons ranges, dead fish, abandoned airfields, radio telescopes, crashed space-capsules, sand dunes, empty cities, […] beaches, fossils, broken juke-boxes, crystals, lizards, multi-storey car-parks, dry lake-beds, medical laboratories, drained swimming-pools, […] high-rise buildings, predatory birds, and low-flying aircraft. [3]

To assert a ‘Ballardian’ imaginary is to suggest a limitation to his work, a finite set of materials out of which a range of texts are worked (and re-worked). It is a critical commonplace to note the ‘obsessional’ return to key images, objects and concerns in Ballard’s work – from emptied swimming pools to a desire to transcend time – that could have reduced his texts to a set of symptoms of an identifiable pathology (and did, in the notorious judgement on Crash by a publisher’s reader). At best, Ballard’s ‘obsessional’ return to a limited creative palette can be used to articulate a consistent and particular vision of the world – what Mark Lawson, characterising ‘Ballardian’, called a ‘way of looking at the world and describing it’ – or is, at worst, a boring and repetitive re-working of the same old material by a ‘minor’ (genre) writer who lacks a wider engagement with human life. ‘Ballardian’ is perhaps best understood (a) as a symptom of genre, and the repetition-with-difference pattern of much genre fiction; and (b) as an effect of Ballard’s structural reliance on iteration.

Confetti Royale (9♣). The original title of the story collected in the 2001 Collected Short Stories as ‘The Beach Murders’ is ‘Confetti Royale’, signifying its intertextual relation to Ian Fleming’s Casino Royale (1953) and the Cold War spy or espionage narrative. The impenetrable motivations of the characters in ‘Confetti Royale’ – two Russian agents, on CIA operative, an ‘absconded State Department cipher chief’ and ‘American limbo dancer’ (whose actions entirely exceed this belittling characterization) – both anticipate the labyrinthine logic of Le Carré’s espionage fiction and compromises the more straightforward and linear adventures of Fleming’s secret agent. There has been some recent speculation on the Ballardian website about the connection between Ballard and Fleming, particularly with regard to The Wind from Nowhere (Ballard’s 1962 ‘disowned’ apprentice novel) and its megalomaniacal industrialist Hardoon, who could be seen as a an analogue of the Bond super-villains who seek the chimera of ‘world domination’. [4] While ‘Confetti Royale’ is a playful iteration of espionage fiction, its card-game structure raises to a formal principle the centrality of the game between Bond and Le Chiffre in Casino Royale. Here, the 27 textual elements (Introduction plus 26 alphabeticized titled paragraphs) are strewn as ‘confetti’, compromising the ordering principles of the baccarat tables or Cold War ideologies.

Diamonds Are Forever (6♣). The 1969 James Bond film On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (OHMSS) was the first to be made without Sean Connery. The opening 15 minutes is suffused by a self-reflexivity which marks out the problematic nature of generic repetition-with-difference. The new Bond, George Lazenby, looks directly at the camera at the end of the pre-credits sequence, when the ‘girl’ he has been fighting for drives off, and says ‘This never happened to the other fellah’; the film’s title sequence replays scenes from earlier Bond films; and when Bond ‘resigns’ and clears his office drawer, key objects from earlier films are introduced with aide-memoire musical leitmotifs from previous Bond films overlaid on the soundtrack. Anxiety-provoking difference is suppressed by reference to the recognisable and familiar, even at the risk of disrupting the film diegesis. In 1971, not only did Bond return, but so did Connery. Diamonds Are Forever is Bond’s ‘revenge’ mission for the death, in OHMSS, of Bond’s wife Tracey (the ‘girl’ who escaped him at the beginning), and is largely set in Nixon’s USA. A morally rotten, bloated film (featuring two sadistic homosexual assassins as an index of its gender sensitivities), Diamonds Are Forever’s main location is Las Vegas, the ‘old’ Vegas of the Dunes and the Sands, the excessive, corrupt Vegas of Bugsy Siegel and the Mob.

Diamonds Are Forever plays the megalomaniacal Blofeld – murderer of Bond’s wife and manipulator of the diamond trade to create a laser-bearing ‘killer’ satellite – against one ‘Willard Whyte’, a helpful billionaire resident of a Las Vegas penthouse suite. This character’s good-ole-boy persona fails to mask the fact that he is a Whyte-washed reiteration of a real-life Las Vegas resident, Howard Hughes, who in real life more nearly approximated Blofeld. Unlike Fleming’s Casino Royale (1953) and the 2006 film version of this Bond narrative, where the high-stakes card games function as a trope for ideological conflict and the dangerous fluidity of capital markets and financial flows, Diamonds Are Forever makes little or no play with the casino chronotope. Ballard’s own Las Vegas novel is Hello America (1981), the most generically ‘science fiction’ of his later works. This novel narrates a journey by a European exploratory mission to a depopulated, post-apocalyptic United States, where they find a self-anointed (and self-named) President Charles Manson, who has assumed command of the remainder of America’s nuclear arsenal. Hello America uses the Las Vegas gambling icon of the roulette wheel, rather than the card table, to critique the logic of Mutually Assured Destruction. As Ken Cooper suggests, ‘self-destruction […] is the inevitable payoff of atomic roulette’. [5]

Experimental Fiction (7♣). Ballard’s most formally experimental period lies between ‘The Terminal Beach’ and The Atrocity Exhibition. Although his later novels are iterative in their narrative and textual patterning, they are much closer to ‘mainstream’ literary fiction’s spatial continuity and temporal causality. However, in his short fiction Ballard did return to formally experimental or innovative texts, often playing with textual conventions. ‘The Index’ (1977) consists of just that, ‘the index to the unpublished and perhaps suppressed autobiography of a man who may well have been one of the most remarkable figures of the 20th century’, one Henry Rhodes Hamilton, but the mystery of who he was and the status of the text remains unresolved; ‘Notes Towards a Mental Breakdown’ (1976) consists of annotations to the subtitle of the story (‘A discharged Broadmoor patient compiles “Notes Towards A Mental Breakdown”, recalling his wife’s murder, his trial and exoneration’), each word of which is footnoted; and in ‘Answers to a Questionnaire’ (1985) the respondent implies that he has assassinated the second incarnation of Christ in 100 ‘answers’. [6] These texts are organised by absence or ellipsis, the architecture of the stories signifying a missing central element or text that reader must configure or enunciate for herself/himself. Non-linear, spatial in design, Ballard’s later experimental short stories are textual games that posit a foundational enigma, a mystery that the reader must work to decode.

ABOVE: Artwork by Jeffrey K. Potter for ‘Memories of the Space Age’ (commissioned for the collection Memories of the Space Age).

Fugue Fiction (5♣). The ‘fugue fictions’ are three connected short stories that Ballard published around the turn of the 1980s: ‘News from the Sun’ (1981), ‘Memories of the Space Age’ (1982) and ‘Myths of the Near Future’ (1982). A close examination of these stories discloses the iterative principle at work even in Ballard’s later texts, where formal fragmentation has given way to more linear narrative models. A paragraph from ‘A Question of Re-Entry’ (1962) pinpoints the shared emphases of these stories:

The implication was that the entire space programme was a symptom of some inner unconscious malaise afflicting mankind, and in particular the Western technocracies, and that the space-craft and satellites had been launched because their flights satisfied certain buried compulsions and desires. [7]

In ‘Memories of the Space Age’, the protagonist Mallory, a doctor in the NASA program, confesses to his unconscious complicity in the first orbital murder, by a borderline-disturbed astronaut named Hinton. This act produced a kind of ‘space-sickness’ of fugue-states and loss of temporal awareness that is centred on Cape Canaveral: ‘he had torn the fabric of time and space, cracked the hour-glass from which time was running’. [8] The fugues experienced by Mallory and the protagonists of the two other stories are a kind of congealing of time, a transcendence of clock time; in ‘News from the Sun’, these fugues are explicitly typed as a return to a pre-lapsarian state of consciousness. In ‘Myth of the Near Future’, the protagonist Sheppard pursues his terminally ill wife to Canaveral, where the time-effect may ultimately revivify her. All three stories are patterned on a triangulation between the protagonist, his wife (or lover), and an antagonist; a fourth figure is present, outside of the primary triangulation, who is either an astronaut or connected to the space program.

‘News from the Sun’: Franklin-Ursula-Slade (Trippett)
‘Memories of the Space Age’: Mallory-Anna-Hinton (Gale Shepley)
‘Myths of the Near Future’: Sheppard-Elaine-Martinsen (Anne Godwin)

The triangulations suggests a geometric/architectural emphasis, but the sense that these three fictions, published in sequence, are reworkings of the same conceptual material and re-deploy the same motifs (flight, the space programme, fugue states and time) signifies their centrality to the Ballardian iterative complex.

Gemini. (4♣) The Space Age is a crucial source for the Ballardian imaginary, from the negotiations of cargo-cult imperialism in ‘A Question of Re-Entry’ (1963) to the assassination of a messianic astronaut in ‘The Object of the Attack’ (1984). The icon of the astronaut is central to the ‘fugue fictions’ and their sense that NASA’s manned space programs were a cosmic transgression, an hubristic leap out of biological time which has catastrophic psychological consequences. Many of Ballard’s texts are centred on Cape Canaveral, from ‘The Illuminated Man’ (1964) (itself later incorporated – reiterated – into The Crystal World (1965)), where time crystallizes, to ‘Memories of the Space Age’ (1982), where the Cape is the epicentre of a kind of ‘space sickness’. However, it is not Apollo imagery – the Moon landings – that regulate Ballard’s Space Age imaginary. His astronauts have orbital trajectories. In ‘The Dead Astronaut’ (1968) and ‘The Cage of Sand’ (1962) orbiting capsules containing dead astronauts form a kind of artificial constellation in the night sky, while the protagonists wait at Canaveral for their orbits to decay. It is not Apollo, but the Mercury and Gemini programs – manned orbital missions that grew in complexity and duration, but stayed within the ambit of Earth – that provide the backdrop for Ballard’s Space Age. This is no New Frontier, no ascension to other planets, but a limited, problematic endeavour.

Hearts and Minds (8♣). The title sequence of the 2006 Casino Royale plays with the centrality of the card game and the casino to its narrative. In motion-capture animation (where computer-generated graphics are overlaid on live action), a silhouetted polygon Bond fights, shoots, and is finally shown (in a live-action ‘reveal’) to be Daniel Craig, the ‘new’ Bond. The roulette wheel becomes a sniper-scope target in these graphics, as clubs, diamonds and spades become weapons embedded in the torsos of antagonists, ‘blood’ flowing across the screen from their wounds. Bond is himself ‘cut’ by playing cards in one animated sequence, but is invulnerable; no blood seems to flow there. The interrelationship of the casino, the roulette wheel and the playing card with the neo-colonial adventurism represented by the Bond imaginary invites us to read the film itself as a kind of spectacle or game, masking its ideological premises.

Iterative (3♣). Crucial to the idea of a ‘Ballardian’ text is patterning or what I have suggested as iterability. It would be difficult to deny that Ballard returns to similar ideas, or narrative structures throughout his work: it is the effectiveness of the patterning that is crucial, the combination and re-combination of elements to work through a coherent world that provides Ballard’s texts with imaginative power. David Punter, in Modernity, concurs, stating: ‘What is most significant […] is that Ballard is a repetitive writer, a writer of repetition.’ [9] The first formally ‘iterative’ Ballard short story is ‘The Terminal Beach’ (1964), in which the textual fabric of the story is fragmented, split into 22 sections (21 of them subtitled), echoing the psychological fragmentation of the protagonist Traven (the earliest incarnation of the ‘T-‘ figure who recurs, as ‘Tallis’ or ‘Talbot’ or ‘Trabert’) who can also be found in Ballard’s iterative masterwork, The Atrocity Exhibition. ‘The Terminal Beach’ and particularly the Atrocity Exhibition texts are non-linear and non-causal in terms of narrative; in ‘The Terminal Beach’, the concrete blocks of the nuclear testing site Eniwetok Island form a maze, ‘their geometric regularity and finish [seeming] to occupy more than their own volumes of space, imposing on him a mood of absolute calm and order.’ [10] Here the spatial ordering of the text is more properly geometric rather than algebraic (iterative), but the repetitive, disorienting regularity of the field of blocks is a figure for a space that repeats itself endlessly. This motif can also be found in the more classically dystopian short story ‘The Concentration City’, where the urban ‘build-up’ has no boundary, no end, and a train journey to find its limits returns the protagonist to the starting point is a regressive, looping trajectory; and in the repeated face of Cordobès on the deck of cards placed upon Quimby’s balcony table in ‘Confetti Royale’.

James (10♣). J.G. Ballard’s first names are James Graham. Only in his Crash alter-ego is Ballard ‘James’, a knowing self-implication in that text’s transgressive sexual material; he was ‘Jimmy’ as a boy, ‘Jim’ to his adult friends. The diminutive, ‘Jim’, humanises Ballard, and it is this name which is given to his ‘autobiographical’ selves in Empire of the Sun (1985) and The Kindness of Women (1991). Opposing this is the self-alienated ‘J.G.’, a not-quite nom de plume that masks the ‘real’ Jim Ballard. Ballard’s textual interrogation of unitary subjectivity is reflected in this circulation of names, and the surnames of his protagonists – Sheppard, Maitland, Franklin, Sinclair – are themselves iterative signs. James Bond, by way of contrast, is never ‘Jimmy’, ‘Jim’ or ‘Jamie’: always ‘James’.

Kennedy (J♣). After his assassination in 1963, President John F. Kennedy’s name was given to the Cape where the NASA space program still has its operational base: Canaveral. This naming has now been reversed, but the Space Center still bears JFK’s name. It is Kennedy who is seen to be the ‘author’ of Apollo, giving the political and economic impetus to reach the Moon through the rhetoric of the ‘New Frontier’ and a sustained arms race (symbolically as well as militarily), though it could be argued that it is Lyndon Johnson who was most committed to the American space program in the 1950s and 1960s. Kennedy’s assassination is, in some sense, a ‘ground zero’ for contemporary American culture, and he looms large in the algebra of icons that Ballard constructs in the period of The Atrocity Exhibition, along with the president’s widow, Jackie. The implication of glamour, celebrity and violent death is embodied in the icon of JFK; in ‘The Assassination of John F. Kennedy Considered as a Downhill Motor Race’, a key text in The Atrocity Exhibition, the moment of assassination also becomes a fatal game.

‘Continuously creating his own image’: J.G. Ballard self-portrait, double exposure, 1950 (photo via RE/Search Publications).

Lunghua (Q♣). With the publication of Ballard’s autobiography, Miracles of Life, it became apparent that, as much as I would like to resist a biographical reading of Ballard’s work, it is Ballard’s own childhood that has had a fundamental regulatory effect on the Ballardian imaginary. In Empire of the Sun, Ballard playfully encouraged the reader to ‘spot’ the Ballardian icon in an autobiographical context – the drained swimming pool, the crashed plane – while simultaneously denying that autobiography provided any kind of key or code to understanding his work. His life, as represented in both Empire of the Sun and The Kindness of Women, is filtered through the medium of fiction. In the light of Miracles of Life, I would now like to suggest that it is Lunghua, the resettlement camp into which he, his parents and his sister were interned during the Japanese occupation of Shanghai in World War Two, that is the model for the Ballardian social environment. Lunghua is enclosed, fenced off from the outside world; it is a place where work is scarce; where a system of social codes and conventions regulate personal interaction; where games, hobbies, organised events schedule the lives of its inhabitants; and where existence shades inevitably into a slow decline unto death. A place to rebel against, if space can be found; a space to escape from, if escape is possible. Lunghua is the model for the high-rises, gated communities, science parks and suburban dormitory towns of Ballard’s later fiction.

Metacriticism/metatext (K♣). ‘What is distinctive about The Arcades Project – in Benjamin’s mind, it always dwelt apart – is the working of quotations into the framework of montage [….] the transcendence of the conventional book form would go together, in this case, with the blasting apart of pragmatic historicism – grounded, as this always is, on the premise of a continuous and homogenous temporality. Citation and commentary might then be perceived as intersecting at a thousand different angles, setting up vibrations across the epochs of recent history, so as to effect “the cracking open of natural teleology.” And all of this would unfold through the medium of hints or “blinks” – a discontinuous presentation deliberately opposed to traditional modes of argument.’ [11]

Spades ♠

(A♠) Macro-economic tidal systems. B sat down in the oak-panelled room of state opposite Sir Richard Markham. Markham assessed this loose-limbed man in the ragged flying jacket. A constellation of scars around his mouth and jaw-line traced the trajectory of his chequered history as an agent. Markham accepted the logic of the situation – an agent lasted a few years in the field, no more – but B had gone further than most, much further in many ways. The grey, haunted eyes that looked through Markham scanned the ocean bottom of his psyche, cut adrift from the time system of Whitehall.
‘You’ve been away, B,’ said Markham.
B’s eyes refocused.
‘In a manner of speaking.’

(2♠) Auto-intentional displacement. B realised, as he stood on the moving walkway in the inner hub of Charles de Gaulle airport, that the geometry of the architecture expressed a latent psychopathology. The concrete tunnels of the travellators indicated a profound desire to return to the amniotic peacefulness of the womb, the octagonal central atrium and suspended Perspex walkways revealing a fascist worship of the late General in the form of an architectural homage to his nasal septum and zygomatic arch. B found himself profoundly identifying with the unknown would-be assassin who had missed his opportunity to be the French Oswald in 1965. It was clear to him that the French, for all their insistence on grands projets like CDG, inhabited a fundamental and psychotic cultural landscape in which the tension between their embrace of modernity and their nostalgia for empire went unresolved.

(3♠) Goldeneye. As he dipped the clutch of the Aston and thrust the gearstick into fifth, B remembered the death of his wife. It was, he now understood, a special form of automobile accident. Blauveldt and Blunt, whom he had previously recognised as enemies, were in fact the agents of an underlying logic of necessity. Since the death of his wife, B had slipped further and further out of time, occupying fugue states where hours slipped by. Now, as blades of sodium light accelerated across his windshield, B felt himself again returning to the fugue state that had plagued him since her death, the Aston congealing in a viscid block of time.

(4♠) Operation Grand Slam. B opened the attaché case. In it he found what Markham had called his ‘assassination weapon’. It consisted of: (a) reproductions of Marcel Duchamp’s ‘Nude Descending a Staircase’; (b) a pulp spy novel by one Richard Markham; (c) Eadweard Muybridge’s series photographs of horse and rider; (d) soft inner flying helmet and communication rig of B-29 navigator, USAAF issue; (e) November 1963 edition of Time magazine; (f) an unused prophylactic wrapped in a tin foil sachet; (g) black-box voice recording of co-pilot, Concorde air disaster, Charles de Gaulle Airport, Paris; (h) .25 Beretta pistol.

(5♠) Heliotropic. Dr Catherine Penny waited in the secure car park of the Jodrell Bank radio telescopes, as the man in the ragged flying jacket paced the grounds, where the massive volumes of the dishes sprouted like some monstrous alien crop. Dr Penny thought of B‘s grey, haunted eyes, and turned the heating in the MGC up a notch. What B was looking for, he could not find amongst the files and despatch boxes of Whitehall. Could he find it here, among the constellations?

(6♠) Index of Alienation. B calculated the angle between Dr Penny’s rigid torso and her splayed thighs, as she sat like an ill-propped mannequin on the edge of his bed. The conjunction between her naked body, the vintage bottle of Bollinger and the torn foil of the prophylactic sachet brought back disconcerting memories of the buckled armcove on Monaco race day. He turned back to the light box he was building to display x-ray plates of his own fractured clavicle, femur, and kneecap.

(7♠) Quantum theory. ‘Pay attention, B,’ said Quinn, the head of the special quartermaster stores. ‘One day these things could conceivably save your life.’
He placed another card on the desk and invited B to respond.
‘Come on,’ said B. ‘What will it be next? Solitaire? The Tarot pack?’
‘This is for the good of your health, not mine,’ replied Quinn, ‘though God knows it’s difficult enough to tell the difference these days. How did you find Switzerland?’
B smiled. ‘The facilities were excellent. The doctors pronounced me in fine physical shape.’ The lie was automatic, almost unconscious, thought Quinn.
B’s eyes defocused, the deck of cards indecipherable sigils beneath his hands.

(8♠) Beretta .25. Sitting on the balcony of his room in the Loew’s hotel in Monte Carlo, B watched the workmen fix road markings for the motor racing that would take place next week. The late afternoon sun painted the harbour with gold as he finished the club sandwich and drained the last of the glass of Johnny Walker Black Label. On his knees was the conference pack of the neurosurgery symposium he was attending, where he hoped to catch up with Blufeldt. Blufeldt had assumed the legitimate identity of a specialist doctor and had attached himself to a radical clinic in Bern, Switzerland. He was giving a paper on neurology, brain injury and fugue states. B stood up, brushed the crumbs from his knees, and pinned his identification tag onto his shirt. At least the others would know who he was supposed to be.

(9♠) Jackie O. As B entered Catherine Penny from behind, he registered the way her hips, flaring out from the waist, repeated the sensual curves of the mouthpiece of the telephone. Her back, bent rigidly over Markham’s desk, echoed the planes of the reclining chair that sat, as in a psychiatrist’s consulting room, to one side of the grand office. As he moved inside her, B thought of the coil that sat in Catherine’s womb like an ironic plastic echo of the DNA double-helix. He held Catherine’s hips as if he were piloting the Aston at high speed down the autobahn between Köln and Berlin.

(10♠) Neverland. ‘Blaufeld is in Florida,’ said Markham, looking at B carefully. ‘Down at the Cape, the disused launch site. We don’t think he’s interested in the physical possibilities of the gantries, but…’
‘I always wanted to be an astronaut,’ said B. ‘The NASA program drew a lot of astronauts from Navy fliers, like Sheppard. I met him once. A difficult man. He told me flatly that no Royal Navy Commander could ever make NASA grade.’
‘Space,’ Blaufeld had said, ‘is money.’

(J♠) Solar Transits. The strip lighting haloed from Bluffield’s large, pink, shaven skull as he looked up at B from under cerebrotonic brows.
‘You’ve never understood my work, James. God knows I’ve tried to explain. But I knew you’d come. Particularly here, of all places.’
B looked out of the office windows and saw the rusted, half-ruined gantries propped like a disused stage-set against the Florida sky. He could feel the .25 Beretta in its clam-shell holster beneath his left arm, but knew he would never use it now. The cool afternoon seemed to stretch forever, like the nearby glades.
‘How long have you been having these fugues, James?’ asked Bluffield.

(Q♠) Restitution. Karen Blunt sat astride the Yamaha, revving it slowly, her aviator shades reflecting the parking lot where B sat in the open-top Pontiac. One side of B’s face was turning coral in the intense afternoon sun, as he lived out a waking dream, his memory tapping out the algebra of his past. Karen’s dark hair cascaded onto her sturdy shoulders and chest, which were buttoned up in a grubby NASA flight suit scavenged from Kennedy. Here at Cocoa Beach, outside the bar where the astronauts once dreamed of flight, B and Karen pitched in the oceanic tides of time.

(K♠) Pinewood to Shepperton. In the attaché case B found his instructions from Markham, consisting of a sequence of defaced postcards posted to B by Bloveldt, from Cape Kennedy, Florida; the Alamagordo testing grounds, New Mexico; Utah Beach, Normandy, France; and Fort Knox, Kentucky. They read, in date order: ‘(1) Maiden flight of Concorde (2) Abbey Road (3) Rolling Thunder (4) Apollo 11 astronaut Neil Armstrong walks on moon (5) The Wild Bunch (6) Inauguration of President Richard Milhous Nixon (7) Medium Cool (8) d.o.b 20 March (9) Let It Bleed (10) The Stones in the Park (11) Tommy (12) The election of French President Georges Pompidou, succeeding General de Gaulle (13) Woodstock (14) Altamont Speedway (15) On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (16) The Atrocity Exhibition.’

..:: CONTINUED: >> Part 2 ::…

‘Iterative Architecture: a Ballardian Text’

by Brian Baker

..:: CONTINUED from >> Part 1 ::…

♣♠♥♦

The Joker. The Joker in the pack is the card that, in some games, can replace (or substitute for, take the place of) any of the others. In this sense, the Joker is the empty sign.

♣♠♥♦

(A♥) Time Drill. ‘I don’t remember much about my father,’ replied B.
‘No, I’m sorry, you misunderstand,’ said Bluefield. ‘I meant Markham, Sir Richard Markham.’
‘Ah…’ B looked a little confused, then passed a thin, sunburnt hand across his eyes. Bluefield thought B looked exhausted after his ordeal in the Pontiac. Karen Blunt had finally rescued the half-blistered scarecrow figure in his ragged flying jacket, and at least the soft flying helmet had prevented too much sunstroke. Even now, after a week’s rest and medical attention, Bluefield could see the sores around B’s dirty neckline, beneath the leather collar of his jacket.
‘Are you really a doctor?’ asked B, looking up.
‘Of a special kind.’

(2♥) Unwritten histories. ‘You’ve been in Florida before?’ asked Karen.
B was surprised to hear her speak in light, rather melodious accentless English.
‘Yes, some time ago. I met a man by the name of Scaramanga.’
Blowfield smiled gently and looked down at his large, soft hands. Pink and scrubbed, they looked out of place on the dusty grey melamine table-top. They sat in a red vinyl horseshoe-shaped booth in the abandoned diner, three Coca-Colas in green bottles growing ever closer to blood heat in front of them.
‘I read that case,’ said Blowfield. ‘You weren’t quite yourself to begin with, I recall.’
B’s eyes flickered as he began to enter another fugue.
‘And who am I now, doctor?’

(3♥) Whisky and soda. The fugues seemed to take the place of any true dream sleep, but that afternoon B drew up a sun-lounger beneath an overgrown palm, and drifted to sleep by the side of the drained swimming pool. He dreamed of flight. Propeller blades flashed from his shoulders in the golden sunlight as he ascended into the Florida sky, below him the gantries and concrete aprons of Canaveral. A space-age archangel, clothed in light, he rose until he could see the curvature on the blue rim of the earth and the vault of the sky deepened to a crushing black. Turning on his back, in coronation armour flashing like a new star, he awaited blissful deliverance.

(4♥) Kuomintang. B sat in the wrecked Aston, its red leather trim burst like a rotten scarecrow. He toyed with the broken instrument stalk as he stared at the cracked dials and buckled binnacle, the Aston’s instruments frozen at the crash speed of a hundred and twenty. Feeling his cracked kneecap, B pressed down on the accelerator pedal and saw, through the frosted windshield, the roads of the International Settlement in Shanghai, where he sat on his father’s lap as they drove down empty boulevards in the grandiose Packard that his father bought to impress high-ranking Chinese officials.

(5♥) Viennese Benediction. ‘Who do you want to be, James?’ asked Blovelt.
‘Is it a matter of choice, doctor?’
‘For you, it’s a matter of necessity,’ said Blovelt, drawing aside the Styrofoam cup of coffee.
‘I think you may have the question wrong, if I may say so,’ said B. ‘It’s not a matter of who do I want to be, but why?’
Blovelt slowly traced the parabola of his pink skull with his left palm.
‘Have you seen her, again?’
B seemed, with an effort of will, to come to himself, and looked searchingly at Blovelt, certainty and horror at home in the grey eyes.
‘She’s out there on the gantries, doctor,’ said B. ‘She keeps escaping me, and I don’t have much time left. But I’ll find her.’

(6♥) X-1. In one of his increasingly rare periods of physical activity, B walked towards the Apollo gantry and heard the spluttering engine of the Cessna. Through the cockpit window, as the aircraft circled the gantry, B could make out the habitual white coat, red shirt and pink skull of Blyfield, the man who had murdered his wife, but who had now somehow brought her back to him. Blyfield was waving, pointing to the top of the gantry, and as B looked up, he saw a figure clambering among the rusted geometry of the access platforms. There she was. As B made his way to the stairwell on aching, sore legs, he heard the Cessna’s engine cut out, and watched as Blyfield wrestled the aircraft to a controlled crash landing on the concrete apron.

(7♥) Cobalt Blue. B and Blueweldt met in the mezzanine of the Monte Carlo convention centre, which presented itself as a provincial casino without the formal wear. The foyer was crowded with middle-aged men in light summer suits.
‘Dr. Blueweldt, I assume?’ asked Bond, peering at a name tag.
‘My dear James! How lovely to see you here!’ Blueweldt warmly clasped B’s hand. ‘How have you been?’
B looked searchingly into Blueweldt’s eyes for signs of dissimulation.
‘Have you been to any of the panels?’ asked Blueweldt ruefully. ‘Second rate, to a man. As you can see, they all look like middle-management executives. Appearances, in this case, are not deceptive.’
Blueweldt’s own light-blue three-piece blended him in perfectly with the crowd, but B’s worn leather jacket, cracked aviator glasses and khaki pants identified him either as a media don or a stray patient. B opened his conference pack and scanned the schedule of panels.
‘Nothing of interest next, doctor. Shall we step outside for a sundowner and a talk?’

ABOVE: Artwork by Jeffrey K. Potter for ‘Myths of the Near Future’ (commissioned for the collection Memories of the Space Age).

(8♥) Yarrow Stalks. As he finally stepped onto the access platform near the top of the rusting Apollo gantry, legs shaking and a fugue beginning to come on, B saw his wife looking at him from a pool of silver sunlight. His wife pointed away from Canaveral, out into the light and air. He wondered if she was beckoning him to step out into the æther and join her. He edged further along the platform towards the open end, feeling the pull of the light airs that breathed past the gap. As he approached, time slowing, he realised what his wife was pointing towards – there he seemed to see, in the far distance, the light shining on the Everglades, a burnished mirror of the sun. He stared, the reflected light searing an image onto his retina. Turning, slowly turning, he realised that his wife had gone.

(9♥) Dilation of the Iris. Ordinarily, B only found motor vehicles interesting if he was behind the wheel, and despite the glamour of the grand prix circus that had now arrived in Monaco, this week was no exception. He had lost track of Blaufield some time before the end of the neurology conference, having become bored by the presentations of the delegates and unimpressed by the exhibits and displays. He had drifted off into strolling the streets of the city principality, unwilling to return to London and admit – perhaps to himself most of all – that he had lost the urgency of the hunt. He haunted the harbour, obsessed with the Mediterranean light playing upon the water and the large white motor yachts that now filled the marina. Time, here in this piece of France that was not France, seemed to stretch into a long, martini-filled afternoon.

(10♥) Emergency Procedures. Using his conference accreditation to flash the security staff, B made his way with the crowd onto the deck of a large motor launch and accepted a glass of champagne from a waiter. His worn leather jacket and aviator sunshades gave him just the right kind of down-at-heel glamour so that the crowd accepted him as an out-of-work American character actor or throwback racing driver, scion of a far less technical and bureaucratic age. Bored by the upscale small talk, he drifted to the stern rail of the launch and looked back across the marina. At his elbow, a young woman in matching aviator glasses coughed slightly, and said, ‘Thinking of jumping?’
He turned and looked at the self-possessed young woman in the pale blue silk dress who leaned into him, looking up, and saw his own rather ragged features reflected in her glasses. She was a head shorter than B, but held herself with a kind of rakish confidence that marked her difference from the crowd behind them.
‘No, of flying,’ he said.
‘You’re not a race driver, then?’
‘I can’t say I’m much of anything.’
‘You do, however, have a name?’
‘It’s James. James B.’

(J♥) Facts in the Case. They stood arm in arm as the fumes from the high-octane engines hazed the sidewalk, pressed as it was with spectators. Their ill-timed stroll had locked them into the very circus they had hoped to avoid. The falsetto roar of the factory-team racing cars blasting past the barriers stilled their conversation, and they communicated by way of near-hysterical mime, raised eyebrows, pointedly directed eye movement and clasps of the hand. Both wore smiles that the crush and the noise could not erase. B motioned with his head to cut past the end of a run-off area to walk away from the crowds and up into the town away from the circuit. As they disengaged themselves from the crowd and walked past a race marshall frantically waving a red flag, B was suddenly conscious of a blast of engine-hot air that lifted him bodily then slammed him back onto the asphalt. Time and space wheeled like a burst tyre. His ears full of the roar of the dying high-performance engine, he turned his head to the right and saw her propped up against the buckled armcove, smiling slightly at him and tenderly brushing away the drops of blood that spilled from a graze in her scalp onto the white cotton dress.

(Q♥) Left Luggage Office. ‘Come in,’ said Markham.
‘Thank you,’ replied Professor Blowfield with a slight bow. ‘You would like to discuss the case of James B?’
‘Yes. Although when he came back from Switzerland, he profess