1Introduction: Catastrophic Strategies
Can we fight DNA?
Jean Baudrillard
Without a doubt, J.G. Ballard must be considered one of the most important writers of the 20th and early 21st century, whose influence has always extended well beyond the sphere of literature and continues to make itself felt after his death in 2009. His substantial oeuvre has been praised by numerous leading contemporary authors, among them William Burroughs, Graham Greene, Kingsley and Martin Amis, Anthony Burgess, Angela Carter and William Boyd, as well as by key cultural theorists such as Jean Baudrillard, Fredric Jameson and Susan Sontag, and has been acknowledged as a source of inspiration by artists across the cultural landscape. Ballardâs impact is distinguishable, for instance, in the work of writers like Will Self, Iain Sinclair and China MiĂ©ville, in the films of David Cronenberg, Michael Haneke, David Lynch and Brad Anderson,1 the artwork of Damien Hirst, Tacita Dean or Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, in the architectural imagination of Nigel Coates, Rem Koolhaas and Nic Clear, as well as in the work of a wide range of musicians and bands, most notably those associated with the Post-Punk and New Wave scenes of the late 70s and 80s such as Joy Division, The Comsat Angels, Cabaret Voltaire, Gary Numan and The Normal (Reynolds 2006), though connections can also be drawn to bands like Radiohead, Manic Street Preachers, Burial, Kode9, Klaxons and Django Django.2 As Jeannette Baxter and Rowland Wymer point out, Ballardâs unique imagination possesses an extra-ordinary âcapacity to initiate a dialogue with other imaginations, creating a shared dream (or nightmare) universeâ (2012: 2), a universe for which the Collins English Dictionary has introduced the term âBallardianâ. The acceptance of this adjective into the English language certainly is a sure sign of the enduring significance of the English writerâs work.
This significance is also attested to by the respectable and, it seems, steadily growing3 academic interest in Ballardâs oeuvre.4 The numerous essays and the handful of books devoted to his work investigate a wide variety of different aspects, many pieces of criticism reading his texts in the context of science fiction, utopian, dystopian, and apocalyptic traditions and discussing Ballardâs idiosyncratic contribution to or re-working of these traditions.5 Of the book-length studies, Gregory Stephensonâs 1991 monograph Out of the Night and Into the Dream: A Thematic Study of the Fiction of J. G. Ballard combines elements of New Critical methodology and archetypal criticism in order to explore the themes of illusion and transcendence in Ballardâs work, which he finds manifest in the content as well as in recurring motifs and imagery of the texts. Roger Luckhurstâs âThe Angle Between Two Wallsâ: The Fiction of J. G. Ballard (1997) expertly explores how, especially generically, Ballardâs writings time and again unsettle binary oppositions and received classifications, effectively inhabiting the place of the Derridean âhingeâ (la brisure) and thus both occupying and at the same time displacing established literary categories. Jeannette Baxterâs instructive study J. G. Ballardâs Surrealist Imagination: Spectacular Authorship, published in 2009, traces the visual as well as literary Surrealist contents, contexts and inter-texts of Ballardâs work and in this way establishes him as a radical Surrealist historiographer, who challenges official narratives of post-war history by accessing the historical unconscious and recovering suppressed or neglected realities. The most recent monograph, Samuel Francisâ The Psychological Fictions of J. G. Ballard (2011), focuses on the psychological dimension of Ballardâs writing by investigating its pronounced concern with matters of the human mind and its creative dialogue with various psychological theories and discourses, above all with Freudian psychoanalysis. Along with the two introductory books by Michel Delville (1998) and Andrzej Gasiorek (2005), which lack a thematic focus, but of which especially the latter constitutes an extremely valuable response to Ballardâs writing, these monographs, examining different facets of the Ballardian oeuvre, have all contributed to a better understanding of its complexities. However, what is still crucially lacking is a study of Ballardâs politics. For Ballard is not only a science fiction writer, not only â and just to some extent, I would argue, thus dampening Stephensonâs claim â a writer of transcendence and mysticism, not only a writer of the space of the between, and a Surrealist writer, but also, and fundamentally, a political writer.
For some time, critics â mainly of a Marxist orientation â have tended to see Ballard as a non-political, decadent, defeatist or quietist author, whose work, in one way or another, ultimately signals a passive acceptance of the status quo (cf. Fitting 1979; Franklin 1979; Finkelstein 1987). Stephenson, too, has asserted the a-political nature of Ballardâs writing, though he recasts it in a more positive light. Ballardâs work, he declares, ârepresents a sustained act of subversionâ, but âsubversion of an ultimate character, directed against nothing so trivial as the governmental or economic systemsâ; instead, the central concern of Ballardâs art lies âwith the problem of exceeding or escaping the limitations of the material world, the space-time continuum, the body, the senses and ordinary ego consciousness, all of which are seen as illusory in natureâ (1991: 1). Luckily, more recent analyses such as those of Luckhurst, Gasiorek and Baxter, to name only the most comprehensive ones, have rectified this distorted image and made it clear that Ballardâs fiction is far more complex and ambivalent than such readings allow. In fact, as this study intends to show, the âtrivialâ matter, as Stephenson absurdly puts it, of political resistance is of utmost importance to it.
The newer discussions of Ballardâs oeuvre thus sharpen our awareness not just for its political dimension generally, but also for its resistant character, that is, the fact that, like that of Ballardâs great hero Burroughs, it constitutes âan unmatched critique of the nature of modern society and the control and communication systems that shape our view of the worldâ (Ballard 1996e: 132). Yet, since the main thematic focus of these studies always lies elsewhere, this theme surfaces only occasionally and on the margins. A comprehensive analysis of the (subversive) politics of Ballardâs work has not yet been conducted. Only Baxterâs monograph explicitly politicizes Ballard, yet explores politics solely as a dimension of his Surrealism, which is the principal interest of her study. Thus, Baxterâs focus is, overall, a very different one from mine, which also comes to different conclusions. On the whole, I do not see Ballardâs work as determined âto recover that which the postmodern condition blocks â subjectivity, reality, time, memory and historyâ (Baxter 2009: 11). As I will argue, such a recovery is not an option anymore in Ballardâs work.
I would claim that rather than as non-political or quietist, Ballardâs writing should be considered as an unwavering exploration of the âpost-â or âtrans-politicalâ (cf. e. g. Baudrillard 2008: 45 ff). When, in an interview, Ballard states: âI write out of what I feel to be a sense of great urgency and commitment. Iâm certainly not a political writer, but I feel a great sense of urgencyâ (in Burns and Sugnet 1981: 19), it seems to me that it is precisely this shift from time-honored âpoliticsâ to something else that is at stake. This new arrangement is a concern Ballard shares with numerous contemporary theorists. It is surely no coincidence that â again mostly by critics of Marxist persuasion â similar charges of political resignation and quietism as were directed against Ballard were also levelled against these theorists. Thus, for instance, JĂŒrgen Habermas has famously spoken of a new generation of âyoung conservativesâ (1993: 103) (explicitly mentioning Georges Bataille, Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida) who, in his opinion, have effectively abandoned the emancipatory ideals of modernity, and like-minded critics such as Alex Callinicos (1989), Christopher Norris (1990) and Terry Eagleton have similarly lamented what they see as the essentially conservative tendencies of poststructuralist and/or postmodernist thinkersâ âlibertarian pessimismâ, which, they maintain, ârule[s] out the possibility of radical political programmes of an ambitious kindâ and is hence âcoupled with a political quiet-ism or reformismâ (Eagleton 2004: 51, 1991: 40 f, 40). The thought and writing of Ballard and the theorists criticized in this manner are a product of and reaction to the same cultural-socio-economic moment, one that can be broadly defined as the âpostmodern conditionâ.6 As we will see, Ballardâs work constitutes a sustained investigation of the postmodern,7 examining it specifically as an expression of what Ernest Mandel (1999) has described as âlate capitalismâ, the third and, in fact, âpurestâ stage in the evolution of capital. Ballardâs literary career, from its beginning, with the publication of his first short story in 1956, during the âgolden ageâ of capitalism (cf. Hobsbawm 1996: 225â402), to its end in 2008, the year of the global financial crisis, unfolded contemporaneously with late capitalism and can be read as a continuous and developing meditation on it. At the heart of this meditation lies the question of resistance.
Not unlike the work of influential cultural theorists such as Fredric Jameson (1991) and David Harvey (1990), Ballardâs fiction persistently maps the manifold (cultural, social, mental, emotional, spatial, etc.) transformations the new functional system entails. In doing so, it draws the picture of an airless world marked by an unprecedented expansion of capital, which ends up, in Jamesonâs words, âcolonizing those very precapitalist enclaves (Nature and the Unconscious) which offered extraterritorial and Archimedean footholds for critical effectivityâ (1991: 49). This system, in other words, has no âoutsideâ anymore. Its ever finer âmicro-physicalâ circuits of power pervade the entire social field and fully penetrate even the individual itself. Consistent with poststructuralist theories of âsubjectivationâ, Ballard portrays the subject as a social construction, whose formation takes place in a complex network of discourses and mechanisms of power that incessantly code and recode its mind and body. Beyond this, Ballardâs work consistently implies what Baudrillard has described as the âstructuralâ revolution of the law of value, which âsimultaneously puts an end to the regimes of production, political economy, representation and signsâ; â[w]ith the codeâ, Baudrillard avers, âall this collapses into simulationâ (1993b: 8). As we will see, Ballardâs texts time and again evoke this postmodern âhyperrealityâ, in which the âreality principleâ is cancelled, âsimulacraâ of a new kind proliferate vertiginously and signs as well as money float freely, both value/the market and sign/communication having been wholly deregulated. Ballardâs world thus emerges as one in which modernityâs âgrand narrativesâ (Lyotard 1984) and central categories have been completely invalidated.
It seems to me that it is all these factors that account for the absence of âpoliticsâ in his oeuvre. Certainly, critics have a point when they claim that â[p]raxis does not figure in Ballardâs writingâ, that â[p]olitics is sidelined in Ballardâs texts because it is seen to have little purchase on the economic, technological and social circuits that incessantly decode and recode twentieth-century lifeâ (Gasiorek 2005: 206). However, such observations are correct only insofar as we understand the term âpoliticsâ in its conventional conception. And it is precisely this conception that postmodernity has cancelled out. Class struggle, contradiction and opposition (dialectics), revolutionary movements, ideological critique, projects to âliberateâ use-value, the unconscious, and so on â these things indeed do not figure in Ballardâs works. Yet, this omission â and this is what critics like Bruce Franklin and Peter Fitting fail to see â does not signal Ballardâs alleged political quietism, but his realization of the fundamental ineffectiveness of received forms of resistance in the age of late capitalism. This conviction also transpires in several interviews. For instance, Ballard argues that whereas in the past, the cultural and political events of the day âwere all part of one whole â sort of graspable in a wayâ, this is coming to an end in our âmuch more fragmentedâ time and surmises that âprobably nobody will ever again be fully engaged with a sort of central experienceâ (in Vale 2012: 163), a statement that resonates with Jamesonâs observation that the subject under late capitalism lacks a âcognitive mapâ or representation of that totality which is the ensemble of societyâs structures and of its own positioning in it (1991: 45â54). Elsewhere, in an interview conducted in 1983, Ballard explicitly contends that â[t]he world economic systems are so interlocked that no radical, revolutionary change can be born anymore, as it was in the pastâ, an assertion he reaffirmed over 20 years later, when, in another interview, he declared that âsocial and political change of a radical kind are now virtually impossibleâ (in Revell 1984b: 52, in Baxter 2004: 33). As I will show, Ballardâs fiction can be read as being predicated on this belief in the total exhaustion of established modes of political action.
A very similar belief fueled the work of many poststructuralist and/or post-modernist thinkers, for whom particularly the events of May 1968 in France represented a decisive moment of dis-illusionment, understood in both senses of the term: as frustration and despair, but also as an elimination of all illusions these intellectuals may still have held regarding the nature of power. As Peter Starr (1995) and others have pointed out, (French) critical theory in the wake of May â68 became unmistakably based on a âlogic of failed revoltâ. In the face of late capitalismâs apparently inexhaustible recuperative power â â[t]hat which is excluded completes, that which perturbs stabilizes, that which attacks reinforces[;] [âŠ] [i]n the fully developed capitalist system, crisis is a state of normalcyâ (qtd. in Starr 1995: 33), RĂ©gis Debray observed â resistance had to be fundamentally reconceived. Thus, Michel Foucault declared: âWe are perhaps living the end of politics. For itâs true that politics is a field which was opened by the existence of the revolution, and if the question of revolution can no longer be raised in these terms, then politics risks disappearing.â (1996i: 223) This dilemma of the radical intelligentsia was, of course, further exacerbated by its increasing disenchantment with socialism, a process set into motion in 1956 by Nikita Khrushchevâs âsecret speechâ at the twentieth party congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and by the invasion of Hungary and intensifying especially in the 1970s in response to the crisis of Mao Zedongâs succession, the Khmer Rouge genocide, etc. In 1977, Foucault explained:
there is no longer anywhere a single point from which the light of hope shines. There is no longer an orientation. [âŠ] I would say that we have returned to the year 1830, that is, we must start over again. Anyway, 1830 had the French Revolution and the whole European tradition of the Enlightenment behind it. We must begin from the beginning and ask ourselves, Starting from what is it possible to engage in a critique of our society in a situation where the thing we have implicitly and explicitly relied on for support to make this critique, namely, the important tradition of socialism, has been placed fundamentally in question (1994: 397 f, trans. in Ransom 1997: 201fn6).
Faced with the uselessness of all the old revolutionary weapons and ideals, many of the âchildren of Mayâ, as SylvĂšre Lotringer has called them, ârevolutionaries bereft of a revolutionâ, âresolved to sleep with the enemyâ, that is, âturned to capitalism, eager to extract its subversive energy they no longer found in traditional class strugglesâ (2007: 11), or saw âno alternative to the present form of rule except a blind anarchic otherâ and hence partook in what the Marxist philosophers Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri have â disapprovingly â termed âa mysticism of the limitâ (2001: 387). To some extent, Ballardâs engagement with the question of resistance revolves around similar responses.
A particular closeness can be ascertained between Ballard and Baudrillard. As Michel Delville notes, the latterâs writings in fact âoften appear as a theoretical counterpart to Ballardâs fictional worldâ (1998: 2). This kinship has, to some degree, of course been acknowledged by both authors and been commented on by several critics. Yet, these commentaries rarely do more than observe and explicate the striking affinity between Baudrillardâs notion of âhyperrealityâ and the central role of mediation, simulacra and simulation in Ballardâs fiction.8 However, as will become evident in the chapters that follow, the correspondence between the two writers extends far beyond this and is particularly pronounced in relation to the political.
Perhaps more than any of his contemporaries, Baudrillard extensively concerned himself with the postmodern crisis of critique and resistance. Lotringer has rightly pointed out that the French philosopher âdidnât disagree with them on the nature of the beast [i. e. capitalism], only on the extent of the damageâ (2007: 11). As we will see, something similar could be said with regards to Ballardâs texts, which also seem to concur in respect to the unrivalled power of the system, but which present different strategies of subversion and consequently do not create a coherent image of the âextent of the damageâ. This being said, their vision is, nevertheless, closest to Baudrillardâs.
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