Flatline_Constructs 2.10 Atroci-TV

Media, in The Atrocity Exhibition, function less as extra protective layers on the organism’s skin, than as conduits through which trauma can propagate itself. The Atrocity Exhibition anticipates the correlation between war and cinema Virilio will make, but in a sense, for it the age of cinema is substantially over. The Zapruder film of the Kennedy assassination - as both a found object and an avant-garde film - implies the supercession of the war/cinema duo by a new coupling: TV and assassination. For Ballard, McLuhan's global village is convened only ironically, brought together - in what Jameson calls "the projection of a new collective experience of reception" - by the shock of the Kennedy assassination: atroci-tv. "Kennedy's assassination presides over The Atrocity Exhibition , and in many ways the book is directly inspired by his death, and represents a desperate attempt to make sense of the tragedy, with its huge hidden agenda. The mass media created the Kennedy we know, and his death represented a tectonic shift in the communications landscape, sending fissures deep into the popular landscape that have not yet closed." (AEn 33-34)

Specifically, it is television which constructed Kennedy; it was TV’s power to simulate intimacy which produced the vast quantities of synthetic emotion it could then propagate as contagion. But if it's true that the "mass media created the Kennedy we know", it must also be the case that Kennedy's death creates the mass media with which we are now familiar. For Jameson, the Kennedy assassination, and the media coverage from which it is radically indistinguishable, constitute "something like the coming of age of the whole media culture that had been set in place in the late 1940s and early 1950s . Suddenly, and for a brief moment (which lasted, however, several long days), television showed what it could really do and what it really meant - a prodigious new display of synchronicity and a communicational situation that amounted to a dialectical leap over everything hitherto suspected." (PCLLC 355)

Trauma is not only the "content" of this experience, but the very mode of experience itself (insofar as it is possible to experience trauma itself at all). Echoing McLuhan's invocation of "battle shock", Jameson writes of "the shock of communicational explosion"(PCLLC 355). Compulsively repeating particular audio-visual sequences, the media itself functions like a trauma victim, and in a dogged refusal to accept the implications of McLuhan's analyses of "capitalist representation" (AO 240) Jameson writes of "the instant playbacks of the Reagan shooting or the Challenger disaster, which, borrowed from commercial sports, expertly emptied these events of their content". "Content", in the sense of meaning, is completely irrelevant to capitalism and its communicational systems which, as McLuhan never tired of pointing out, have always been flattening the medium into the message.

The Atrocity Exhibition focuses on what Jameson calls the “great Warhol figures - [such as] Marilyn [...] - the notorious cases of burnout and self-destruction of the ending 1960s, and the great dominant experiences of drugs and schizophrenia,” who themselves are signals of a new psychopathology, which “would seem to have little in common either with the hysterics and neurotics of Freud’s own day or with those canonical experiences of radical isolation and solitude, anomie, private revolt, Van Gogh-type madness, which dominated the period of high modernism.” (PCLLC, 14) A key trait of Ballard’s novel is a Warhol-like indifferent presentation of objects, in which banal objects that should be devoid of affect - commodities - are treated as equivalent to images which we might ordinarily expect to shock us - carcrashes. But in place of Warhol’s serial repetition of objects, Ballard favours techniques of blow-up that more closely recall Oldenberg . Both of these techniques combine in the commodification of the human body, its transposition into an image that is no longer recognizable as its own image. For Jameson, such techniques are an example of the death of affect. “The waning of affect,” he says, “is [...] perhaps best initially approached by way of the human figure, and it is obvious that what we have said about the commodification of objects holds as strongly for Warhol’s human subjects; stars - like Marilyn Monroe - who are themselves commodified and transformed into their own image.” (PCLLC, 11) But, bearing in mind the critique of the “death of affect” thesis we made in Chapter 1, Gothic Materialism would prefer to describe such techniques in terms of a distribution of impersonalised affect, a spread of affect beyond the confines of the emotional or psychological.

As Burroughs points out in his preface, the "magnification of image to the point where it becomes unrecognizable is a keynote of The Atrocity Exhibition. " (AE vii) Burroughs makes the connection with Pop Art: it "is what Bob Rauschenberg is doing [...] literally blowing up the image." (AE vii) The scene Burroughs cites is typical:

A group of workmen on a scaffolding truck were pasting up the last of the displays, a hundred-foot-long panel that appeared to represent a section of a sand-dune. Looking at it more closely, Dr Nathan realized that it was an immensely magnified portion of skin under the iliac crest. Glancing at the billboards, Dr Nathan recognised other magnified fragments: a segment of lower lip, a right nostril, a portion of female perineum. Only an anatomist could have identified these fragments, each represented as a formal geometric pattern.(AE 10)

For Ballard, what Virilio calls the "breaks in spatio-temporal continuity dreamt up by film-makers" have now become a commonplace feature of the external environment as it has become increasingly mediatized. The techniques of montage and jump-cutting that were once the preserve of experimental cinema now characterize the media landscape itself, which systematically breaks down "molar or human perception"[189] Here, "human beings have shrunk to the point of invisibility, while the images they have made of themselves, grotesquely enlarged to gigantic dimensions and no longer recognisable as human images at all, take on a life of their own." [190] Magnification, or amplification, has the effect of making the boundary between organic and inorganic seem arbitrary. (Ballard's early short story, "Track 12" had performed the same trick, but with sound: "'Amplified 100,000 times, animal cell division sounds like a lot of girders and steel sheets being ripped apart - how did you put it? - a car crash in slow motion.'"[191])

In Ballard’s neo-expressionist thematics landscape and event become equivalent. Geology is a slow-motion event, only arbitrarily and illegitimately distinguished from cultural production. From the point of view of Ballard’s geo-traumatics, it is necessary to

directly equate the physical aspect of Marilyn Monroe's body with the landscape of dunes around her. The hero attempts to try to make sense of this particular equation, and he realises that the suicide of Marilyn Monroe is in fact a disaster in space-time like the explosion of a space-capsule in orbit. It is not so much a personal disaster, though of course Marilyn Monroe committed suicide as an individual woman, but a disaster of a whole complex of relationships involving this screen actress who is presented to us in an endless series of advertisements, on a thousand magazine covers, and so on, whose body becomes part of the external landscape of our environment. The immense terraced figure of Marilyn Monroe stretched across a cinema hoarding is as real a portion of our external landscape as any system of mountains or lakes.[192]

"The star system stemmed from [an ...] instability of dimensions,"[193] Virilio suggests. What could appear to be a representation of the organism is in fact its deterritorialization. "The porous sand, reminiscent of the eroded walls of the apartment, and of the dead film star with her breasts of carved pumice and thighs of ash, diffused along its crests into the wind." (AE 43) "The apartment was a box clock, a cubicular extrapolation of the facial planes of the yantra, the cheekbones of Marilyn Monroe." (AE 43) The vast image of Monroe - and the other stars - is not like a landscape, it is a landscape. [194]

<< Back to Contents | Section 2.11 Catastrophe Management >>

[191]" Track 12", in Ballard, The Overloaded Man, London: Panther, 197, 61

[192] Ballard, "The New Science Fiction: A Conversation between J.G. Ballard and George MacBeth", in Jones ed., The New SF, 56

[193] Virilio, War and Cinema: The Logistics of Perception, trans. Patrick Camiller, London/ New York: Verso, 1984, 25

[194] We might be reminded here of the convergence of medical, military and media perception in Virilio’s War and Cinema, whose comments on Monroe may well owe something to Ballard. "Always in exile from its immediate, natural dimensions, never seeming to be connected to anything else, Marilyn's body was at once expandable like a giant screen and capable of being folded and reproduced like a poster, a magazine cover of a centre-spread." ( War and Cinema, 25) "Marilyn's body, which the Seventh Division doctors said they would most like to examine yet which no-one claimed from the morgue, reminds one of that penetrating gaze of the surgeon or cameraman which came into its own in the First World. War […] Like aerial reconnaissance photography [...] the use of endoscopy or scanners allows hidden organs to surface in an instrumental collage, an utterly obscene reading of the ravages of trauma or a disease." (War and Cinema, 25-26