Flatline_Constructs 2.9 The Atrocity Exhibition

The - until then - implicit connection between Cronenberg and J. G. Ballard as theory-fictional explorers of contemporary cybernetic culture was concretized in Cronenberg’s notorious film version of Ballard’s Crash. A scene added by Cronenberg himself to the original Crash novel immediately reminds us of Videodrome’s logic of sensation, its fusion of body and media landscape. At one point in the film, we find Vaughan, Crash’s anti-hero trauma theoro-technician, performing a public restaging of the crash which killed James Dean, complete with live commentary. We are reminded immediately of McLuhan’s “curious fusion of sex, technology and death”, a phrase which could serve as a handy soundbite introduction to Ballard’s universe. Here we have it: a mediamatic repetition-compulsion culture in which trauma and mass communication have become indivisible, where any experience is inseparable from its mediatization.

Cronenberg’s appropriation of Ballard - absolutely logical given their shared obsessions with the interactions between media, technical systems and the body - gives an intriguing hint that we may be able to approach Ballard as a Gothic writer. Fundamentally, it is Ballard’s treatment of technical, organic and geological features as elements belonging to a single plane that makes him an explorer of the Gothic line: “all junctions, whether of our own biologies or the hard geometries of these walls and ceilings, are equivalent to one another.” (AE 61) What Crash - both the novel and the film - radically displaces, as Baudrillard says, is the “classical” account of technology and of the body. In its place, according to Baudrillard, we have “a body confused with technology in its violating and violent dimension, in the savage and continual surgery that violence exercises: incisions, excisions, scarifications, the chasms of the body, of which the sexual wounds and pleasures of the body are only a particular case [...] - a body without organs or pleasure of the organs.” (SS 111)

In his key works, Ballard performs a literal de-territorialization of Science Fiction, a shift from the thematics of spatial domination that, according to Baudrillard, had dominated it in its “classical” period. What Ballard has himself characterised as his stress on “inner” as opposed to “outer” space could give the misleading impression that Ballard has made a phenomenological move, privileging a psychological interiority over a concern with “the outside world”. Nothing could be further from the truth. In Ballard’s world, the distinction between inner and outer has fallen away, but not in favour of interiority. Ballard’s reversal of Promethean SF goes by way of a new account of the body, or, more Spinozistically, of bodies. Rather than positing a neutral or transcendent body that can terraform space, Ballard shows that it is analytically impossible for bodies to dominate any environment because (1) bodies are radically inextricable from landscape, and immediately become part of it as soon as they enter it; to enter a milieu is immediately to enter into composition with it and (2) bodies are themselves landscapes, which must be treated as geological residue.

Ballard’s fictions are anti-organicist and cybernetic, not because they hypostatise technical machines, but because in them it is exteriority, the milieu, that becomes the most dynamic element. It is not technology that Ballard confronts (indeed some of his most important works make little or no reference to technical machines at all) so much as media, in McLuhan's sense of "total environment." In a discussion of Ballard, Martin Bax shows how, in traditional literature, "the scenery, the physical surrounding doesn't really matter"[178]. Media - whether the car or the landscape - are assumed to be vehicles for content ("intraphyschic behaviour") . In a “condensed novel” such as The Atrocity Exhibition, Ballard radically reverses this priority; landscape is no longer the enduring (an)organic backdrop to a theatre of human activity, but is the principal focus of a schizo-analytic procedure.

In his Minimal Self, Christopher Lasch discusses this effect in Ballard’s work in the context of what he calls “the replacement of a reliable world of durable objects by a world of flickering images that make it harder and harder to distinguish reality from fantasy.” (19) . Like Jameson, who has tried to distance himself from Lasch [179] but whose critique of postmodern culture is in many respects strikingly parallel, Lasch reads Ballard’s work symptomatically, as a cultural expression of an all-pervasive process of commodification, one of whose defining characteristics is the collapse of what he calls “the imperial ego”[180] . But, as Bukatman points out, in many crucial respects Ballard anticipates and outflanks these kinds of positions on postmodernism. “Jameson’s own essay [on postmodernism] [...] is strikingly anticipated by J. G. Ballard’s introduction to his high-tech porn novel Crash. It was Ballard who, in advance of Jameson, isolated ‘the death of affect,’ ‘the moratorium on the past,’ and the irrelevance of ‘the subjective nature of existence’ as hallmarks of contemporary life.”[181] However, for the Ballard of novels such as The Atrocity Exhibition and Crash, it is Jameson and Lasch who can be read symptomatically - of what Ballard has called a “retrospective” culture and its obsolete baggage. Ballard’s fiction suggests that the position of transcendent social critic assumed by Jameson and Lasch itself marks a failure to adequately register the immanentizing processes capitalism’s cyber-socius is undergoing. These processes, Ballard insists, can only be tracked homeopathically, using techniques that are flat with them.

The ficto-theoretical elaboration of the concept of anorganic continuum is what makes Ballard so crucial a resource for Gothic Materialism. Ballard’s schizophrenic gaze recapitulates what the set designers of The Cabinet of Dr Caligari had produced - a radical continuity between supposedly organic bodies and inorganic landscape, emerging in a refusal to distinguish figure from (back)ground. But, this time, there is no framing narrative that will attribute the perception to a disordered mind. Instead, Ballard replaces psychology - and Oedipal psychoanalysis - with what is, in effect, a geo-traumatics. At its most radical, this implies a a metapsychology stripped of all vestigial organicism, an analytic procedure complementary to Deleuze-Guattari’s stratoanalysis, whose object is not persons but landscapes; all psychology collapses back into geology. “Ballard often talks about the conflict between geometry and posture, the competition between the animate and inanimate and the way the inanimate often creeps in and wins.”[182]

According to Brian McHale, Ballard's earliest key works had obsessively played out "a pattern of repetition-with-variation." "In each, Earth is subject to a global disaster, whether a plague of sleeping sickness ["The Voices of Time"], rising sea-level [The Drowned World ], a manmade drought [The Drought], or the bizarre crystallization of living matter [The Crystal World ]. (PF 69) Of this early sequence, the most important is the first, The Drowned World. The Drowned World had described the deluging of the anthropomorphic strata by what Deleuze-Guattari call “the biocosmic memory that threatens to deluge all attempts at collectivity.” (AO 190). In The Drowned World, the global disaster is not presented as something against which the characters can struggle as if it were simply an external threat; the rising sea level brings changes in the environment that produce a “slackening” of the characters’ metabolisms, a recalibration of their physiologies. The journey out across the landscape is also an exploration of the body-as-landscape. The geological scene is a schizoanalytic trauma-map of the human body; particular geologic features correlate with stages in the development of the human organism (whose very organicity is radically denied by its subsumption back into anorganic process). “‘The further down the CNS you move, from the hind-brain through the medulla into the spinal cord, you descend back into the neuronic past. For example, the junction between T-12 and L-1, is the great zone of transit between the gill-breathing fish and the air-breathing amphibians with their respiratory rib-cages, the very junction where we stand now on the shores of this lagoon, between the Paleozoic and Triassic eras.'"[183]

When Jameson theorises Ballard in Postmodernism, he subsumes both The Atrocity Exhibition and the important early short story “The Voices of Time” under his thesis of the spatialization of time. This analysis kills space just as surely as it kills time, since it equates space (only) with extension . In fact, and exactly contrary to what Jameson argues, Ballard intensifies both space and time: this is what is implied by Ballard’s geologization of fiction. If geology spatializes time it also temporalizes space. "The brief span of an individual life is misleading. Each one of us is as old as the entire biological kingdom, and our bloodstreams are tributaries of the great sea and its total memory. The uterine odyssey of the growing foetus recapitulates the entire evolutionary past, and its central nervous system is a coded time-scale, each nexus of neurones and each spinal level marking a symbolic station, a unit of neuronic time."[184] As with Deleuze-Guattari’s strata, space becomes a time-coding (or time-coded) system: both space and time dissolve into aspects of a single, intensive space-time process.

Hence one of the crucial figure for Ballard’s geo-traumatics: the “spinal landscape.”

Thoraic Drop. The spinal landscape, revealed at the level of T-12, is that of the porous rock towers of Tenerife, and of the native of the Canaries, Oscar Dominguez, who created the technique of decalcomania and so exposed the first spinal landscape. The clinker-like rock towers, suspended above the silent swamp, create an impression of profound anguish. The inhospitability of the mineral world, with its inorganic growths, is relieved only by the balloons flying in the clear sky. They are painted with names: Jackie, Lee Harvey, Malcolm. In the mirror of the swamp, there are no reflections. (AE 30)

Like much of Ballard’s most important imagery, the concept of the spinal landscape is derived from surrealism. “Oscar Domingues, a leading member of the surrealist group in Paris, invented the technique of crushing gouache between layers of paper. When separated they reveal eroded, rock-like forms that touch some deeply buried memory, perhaps at some earlier stage in the formation of the brain’s visual centres, before the wiring is fully in place.” (AE n30) But - as we shall see when we look again at Ballard in Chapter 4 - Ballard’s appropriation of surrealism proceeds by way of an excision of anything belonging to the category of the marvellous. In Ballard, the aleatory or dream-like alterity of classical surrealism gives way to a coolly hypernaturalized schizophrenia.

It is in The Atrocity Exhibition that offers the most sustained theory-fictional account of contemporary media culture in terms of the spinal landscape. While the earlier novels made an important contribution to the “earthing” of Science Fiction (none concerned the traditional speculative panoply of outer space journeys, alien civilizations, or rarefied technology), all retained enough generic elements to be recognizably placed as traditional fiction. The key events they focused on (droughts, floods), whilst not necessarily the ordinary province of Science Fiction, were recognizable fictional tropes (belonging, if not to SF, then to the Conradian adventure story, or the disaster novel). But The Atrocity Exhibition occupies a more radical place by simultaneously downplaying many of fiction’s traditional concerns - mimetic representation, narrative and psychology - whilst insisting that to in any way deal with contemporary reality, a new fictional mode - composed of collaged micro-narratives, “found texts”, and schizo-typologies - must be innovated. Unlike the earlier novels, The Atrocity Exhibition adds nothing; the traumatic events which are its concern are simply those which took place in the 1960s. There is no need to postulate some additional environmental transmutation on the order of a natural disaster, the novel implies: contemporary culture is itself a disaster-in-progress, an unnatural disaster, an atrocity exhibition.

In The Atrocity Exhibition that Ballard’s concerns mesh closely with the media theories of McLuhan and Baudrillard. The Atrocity Exhibition demands to be read as a belated (and corrective) sequel to Freud (particularly to the Freud of Beyond the Pleasure Principle), and as a schizoanalytic counterpart to McLuhan, revealing the convergence of the darkside of both in trauma theory or future-shock. Here in particular, Ballard’s "work is marked by [...] its sustained refusal of individual psychology"[185], by "the complete absence of the imperial ego."[186] In The Atrocity Exhibition, the identity of the male figure who occupies the position of trying to make sense of his increasingly senseless environment is barely vestigial, and isn't even nominal; "as if to emphasize his lack of defining personal characteristics", Ballard's "uncharacterised protagonist" doesn't retain the same name from section to section of the novel.[187] Ballard’s male "characters" - the word itself belongs to a nineteenth-century vocabulary which Ballard’s work obsolesces - are victims of future shock, impelled by the need to come to terms with a vast environmental rupturing imaged in a series of repeated disasters: car crashes, war footage, assassinations. Breakdown behaviour - as manifested in the ritualised search for “a single abstract form which is repeated in a series of apparently unrelated or irregular phenomena: photographs, erotic poses, urban landscapes” (PF 70) - replaces any overarching strategy of rational analysis. Or, more accurately, breakdown behaviour becomes the only conceivable “rational” response to a world that is itself breaking down.

The novel examines the enormously distended contours of what it calls "the media landscape" (the modern urban environment as transformed by coca-colonizing US mediatization) . In an environment increasingly dominated by billboards and advertising hoardings, the word "landscape" is not at all metaphorical. "What The Atrocity Exhibition was about was the way that the media landscape has created something very close to a gigantic art gallery with a lot of very lurid paintings on exhibition [...] and the way in which psychopathic strains which were normally either ignored or suppressed were beginning to use the media landscape to express and reveal themselves."[188]

In a sense, the phrase "atrocity exhibition" is a strictly literal description of this media landscape as it emerged in the early 1960s, populated by images of Vietnam, the Kennedys, Martin Luther King and Malcolm X. The novel deals with the violence that haemorrhaged in the 1969 in which it was published: Manson, Altamont, War across the USA. But, for Ballard, the events of 1969 are merely the culmination of a decade whose guiding logic has been one of violence; a mediatized violence, where "mediatization" is a profoundly ambiguous term which doesn't necessarily imply a disintensification. As they begin to achieve the instantaneous speed Virilio thinks characteristic of postmodern communication, media (paradoxically) immediatize trauma, making it instantly available even as they prepackage it into what will become increasingly preprogrammed stimulus-response circuitries .

Freud describes trauma in terms of the “conservative” tendency of the death drives, a return to the inorganic, under the sign of the cybernegatively-configured “principle of constancy.” At its most mechanistic, trauma is a simple register of impact upon the organism - Freud cites the example of railway accidents - the transmission and distribution, through the organism, of exogenous stimuli. Ballard’s contribution, in The Atrocity Exhibition, is to radicalise the Freudian account of trauma by generalizing it. Rather than treating trauma as something with which the organism is affected only contingently, Ballard implies that trauma is a general condition, a non - or anti- - biotic transmission system, distributing particular tics - swarms of repetition-compulsions - across a culture that is indistinguishable from nature. Culture, like the organism, is composed of tics, compulsions and looped behaviours, rather than simply afflicted by them. The “abstract patterns” that Dr Nathan and his supposedly psychotic patients discover repeated across architectural, biological and geological assemblages are the vectors through which this trauma spreads. Trauma is not merely about processes of wounding and scarring, but also about the response to violent incursions (indeed, wounding and scarring are already such responses); it is a distributed event, not merely echoed or referenced in the repetition-compulsions, but continued, prolonged, propagated.

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[178] Martin Bax, “Interview” in Vale ed., Re/Search; J.G. Ballard, 36

[179] During the course of his discussion of schizophrenia, Jameson feels the need to point out that his is not “some culture-and-personality diagnosis of the type of Christopher Lasch’s influential The Culture of Narcissism, from which I am concerned radically to distance the spirit and the methodology of the present remarks: there are, one would think, far more damaging things to be said about our social system than are available through the use of psychological categories.” (PCLLC 24)

[180] One key difference between Lasch and Jameson is on this point: while Lasch unambiguously mourns the loss of a solid sense of identity, Jameson, as ever, is ambivalent.

[182] Eshun, Motion Capture [Interview], Abstract Culture 2, Winter 97

[183] Ballard, The Drowned World, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1965, 42-43