Flatline_Constructs 2.11 Catastrophe Management

Baudrillard: “The car is not the appendix of a domestic universe, there are only incessant figures of circulation, and the Accident is everywhere, the elementary, irreversible figure, the banality of the anomaly of death. It is no longer at the margin, it is at the heart. It is no longer the exception to a triumphal rationality, it has become the Rule, it has devoured the Rule. It is no longer even ‘the accursed share,’ the one conceded to destiny by the system, and included in its general reckoning. Everything is reversed. It is the accident that gives form to life, it is the accident, the insane that is the sex of life.” (SS 113)

In both The Atrocity Exhibition and the subsequent Crash - in many ways an extrapolation of a particular obsession from the previous book (the fusion of erotics and carcrashes) - Ballard describes a generalized traumatics, in which power and catastrophe simulate each other, becoming indistinguishable. Catastrophes and their re-enactment circulate endlessly in Ballard's chaosmos, not necessarily only as mechanical repetition of what has already happened, but also as cybernetically anticipative simulations. The implication is that, by being projected in advance, any future possibility, no matter how horrific, can, in some sense, be "managed" .

Faced with the apparently senseless spectacle of the protracted conflict in Vietnam - "All political and military explanations fail to provide a rationale for the war's extended duration" - Ballard seeks out its sources in a mediatized unconscious “fixated to trauma.” Like Freud, impelled to postulate the death drive in part by his observation of the behaviour of First World War shellshock victims as they obsessively re-enacted their trauma, Ballard discovers in mediatized culture an obsessive "compulsion to repeat." Repetition both serves to alleviate trauma and to perpetuate it, wrecking any simple teleology: in the paradoxical logic Freud delineates in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, the organism preserves itself precisely by becoming-inorganic, and “life” is only a detour on the way to death. This emerges for Ballard at the level of deleometric catastrophe management systems in the form of perverse explanations for the war, irrationales: "'In terms of television and the news magazines the war in Vietnam has a latent significance very different from its manifest content. Far from repelling us, it appeals to us by virtue of its complex of polyperverse acts." (AE 87) Media - as the ambivalently functioning additions to the human perceptual system described by Freud and McLuhan - have a crucial role to play in this economy: (an)aestheticization, the translation of trauma into repeated images which, no matter how horrific they initially appear, soon become banal, in part by dint of repetition itself.

"Freud characterizes trauma as an 'invasion', a breach in an otherwise efficacious barrier against stimuli,' infiltrating alien desires - xenopulsions - into the organism."[195] But rather than damping down xenopulsive excitation, Ballard's cybernetic systems seem to hunt out and obsessively pore over trauma. Initially, according to Anti-Oedipus, an "anus-vampire" (AO 228), capitalism is, by the time of The Atrocity Exhibition, also a ghoul: mediatizing the feedback process of its own reproduction in endlessly reiterating loops of mass production and consumption of death. Deleometrics is the key science of Ballard's catastrophe management - the urge not now to banish death, nor to suicidally embrace it (as according to Deleuze-Guattari, fascism had[196]) but to quantify it, to "optimize" it. What Baudrillard calls the generalization of the Accident leads to what he characterizes as a “hyperfunctionalism” which moves beyond both teleology and transgression. If the accident has become the rule, then there is no law to transgress, just as there is no goal to head towards.

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[196] See “Micropolitics and Segmentarity” in TP, especially 230-231, where Deleuze-Guattari argue that fascism was characterized by "a will to wager everything you have ever had, to stake your own death against the death of others, and measure everything by 'deleometers'." (TP 230)