J.G. Ballard's Politics

Florian Cord

• Editorial: De Gruyter
• Año: 2017
• ISBN:
  9783110488302
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Literatura
• Categoría: Crítica literaria inglesa

This book is the first sustained investigation of the political dimension in the work of J.G. Ballard. A product of and reaction to the cultural-socio-economic moment commonly designated as the postmodern condition, Ballard's oeuvre is read as a continuous and developing meditation on the postmodern, examining it specifically as an expression of late capitalism. The book shows that at the heart of this meditation lies the question of resistance. Drawing on a wide range of concepts and ideas taken from the field of critical theory, it argues that in the face of a world marked by an unprecedented expansion of capital, in which modernity's grand narratives have been invalidated and in which received forms of political struggle have lost their effectiveness, Ballard's fiction commits itself to a deliberately irrational and extreme, pataphysical thought in order to develop a new discourse of resistance. Against past readings that have construed Ballard's writing as non-political, decadent, or quietist, the study thus reveals Ballard as a thoroughly political author, committed to a subversive politics. In this way, the book also constitutes a timely intervention in the ongoing discussion concerning the nature and state of the political.

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. Ballard’s impact is distinguishable, for instance, in the work of writers like Will Self, Iain Sinclair and China Miéville, 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, Ballard’s unique imagination possesses an extra-ordinary “capacity to initiate a dialogue with other imaginations, creating a shared dream (or nightmare) universe” (2012: 2), a universe for which the Collins English Dictionary has introduced the term ‘Ballardian’. The acceptance of this adjective into the English language certainly is a sure sign of the enduring significance of the English writer’s work.

This significance is also attested to by the respectable and, it seems, steadily growing3 academic interest in Ballard’s 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 Ballard’s idiosyncratic contribution to or re-working of these traditions.5 Of the book-length studies, Gregory Stephenson’s 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 Ballard’s work, which he finds manifest in the content as well as in recurring motifs and imagery of the texts. Roger Luckhurst’s ‘The Angle Between Two Walls’: The Fiction of J. G. Ballard (1997) expertly explores how, especially generically, Ballard’s writings time and again unsettle binary oppositions and received classifications, effectively inhabiting the place of the Derridean ‘hinge’ (la brisure) and thus both occupying and at the same time displacing established literary categories. Jeannette Baxter’s instructive study J. G. Ballard’s Surrealist Imagination: Spectacular Authorship, published in 2009, traces the visual as well as literary Surrealist contents, contexts and inter-texts of Ballard’s 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 Francis’ The Psychological Fictions of J. G. Ballard (2011), focuses on the psychological dimension of Ballard’s 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 Ballard’s 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 Ballard’s politics. For Ballard is not only a science fiction writer, not only – and just to some extent, I would argue, thus dampening Stephenson’s claim – 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 – mainly of a Marxist orientation – 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 Ballard’s writing, though he recasts it in a more positive light. Ballard’s work, he declares, “represents a sustained act of subversion”, but “subversion of an ultimate character, directed against nothing so trivial as the governmental or economic systems”; instead, the central concern of Ballard’s art lies “with 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 nature” (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 Ballard’s fiction is far more complex and ambivalent than such readings allow. In fact, as this study intends to show, the ‘trivial’ matter, as Stephenson absurdly puts it, of political resistance is of utmost importance to it.

The newer discussions of Ballard’s 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 Ballard’s great hero Burroughs, it constitutes “an unmatched critique of the nature of modern society and the control and communication systems that shape our view of the world” (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 Ballard’s work has not yet been conducted. Only Baxter’s monograph explicitly politicizes Ballard, yet explores politics solely as a dimension of his Surrealism, which is the principal interest of her study. Thus, Baxter’s focus is, overall, a very different one from mine, which also comes to different conclusions. On the whole, I do not see Ballard’s work as determined “to recover that which the postmodern condition blocks – subjectivity, reality, time, memory and history” (Baxter 2009: 11). As I will argue, such a recovery is not an option anymore in Ballard’s work.

I would claim that rather than as non-political or quietist, Ballard’s writing should be considered as an unwavering exploration of the ‘post-’ or ‘trans-political’ (cf. e. g. Baudrillard 2008: 45 ff). When, in an interview, Ballard states: “I write out of what I feel to be a sense of great urgency and commitment. I’m certainly not a political writer, but I feel a great sense of urgency” (in Burns and Sugnet 1981: 19), it seems to me that it is precisely this shift from time-honored ‘politics’ 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 – again mostly by critics of Marxist persuasion – similar charges of political resignation and quietism as were directed against Ballard were also levelled against these theorists. Thus, for instance, Jürgen Habermas has famously spoken of a new generation of “young conservatives” (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 thinkers’ “libertarian pessimism”, which, they maintain, “rule[s] out the possibility of radical political programmes of an ambitious kind” and is hence “coupled with a political quiet-ism or reformism” (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 ‘postmodern condition’.6 As we will see, Ballard’s work constitutes a sustained investigation of the postmodern,7 examining it specifically as an expression of what Ernest Mandel (1999) has described as ‘late capitalism’, the third and, in fact, ‘purest’ stage in the evolution of capital. Ballard’s literary career, from its beginning, with the publication of his first short story in 1956, during the ‘golden age’ of capitalism (cf. Hobsbawm 1996: 225–402), 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), Ballard’s 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 Jameson’s words, “colonizing those very precapitalist enclaves (Nature and the Unconscious) which offered extraterritorial and Archimedean footholds for critical effectivity” (1991: 49). This system, in other words, has no ‘outside’ anymore. Its ever finer ‘micro-physical’ circuits of power pervade the entire social field and fully penetrate even the individual itself. Consistent with poststructuralist theories of ‘subjectivation’, 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, Ballard’s work consistently implies what Baudrillard has described as the ‘structural’ revolution of the law of value, which “simultaneously puts an end to the regimes of production, political economy, representation and signs”; “[w]ith the code”, Baudrillard avers, “all this collapses into simulation” (1993b: 8). As we will see, Ballard’s texts time and again evoke this postmodern ‘hyperreality’, in which the ‘reality principle’ is cancelled, ‘simulacra’ 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. Ballard’s world thus emerges as one in which modernity’s ‘grand narratives’ (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 ‘politics’ in his oeuvre. Certainly, critics have a point when they claim that “[p]raxis does not figure in Ballard’s writing”, that “[p]olitics is sidelined in Ballard’s texts because it is seen to have little purchase on the economic, technological and social circuits that incessantly decode and recode twentieth-century life” (Gasiorek 2005: 206). However, such observations are correct only insofar as we understand the term ‘politics’ 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 ‘liberate’ use-value, the unconscious, and so on – these things indeed do not figure in Ballard’s works. Yet, this omission – and this is what critics like Bruce Franklin and Peter Fitting fail to see – does not signal Ballard’s 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 “were all part of one whole – sort of graspable in a way”, this is coming to an end in our “much more fragmented” time and surmises that “probably nobody will ever again be fully engaged with a sort of central experience” (in Vale 2012: 163), a statement that resonates with Jameson’s observation that the subject under late capitalism lacks a ‘cognitive map’ or representation of that totality which is the ensemble of society’s structures and of its own positioning in it (1991: 45–54). Elsewhere, in an interview conducted in 1983, Ballard explicitly contends that “[t]he world economic systems are so interlocked that no radical, revolutionary change can be born anymore, as it was in the past”, an assertion he reaffirmed over 20 years later, when, in another interview, he declared that “social and political change of a radical kind are now virtually impossible” (in Revell 1984b: 52, in Baxter 2004: 33). As I will show, Ballard’s 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 ’68 became unmistakably based on a ‘logic of failed revolt’. In the face of late capitalism’s apparently inexhaustible recuperative power – “[t]hat which is excluded completes, that which perturbs stabilizes, that which attacks reinforces[;] […] [i]n the fully developed capitalist system, crisis is a state of normalcy” (qtd. in Starr 1995: 33), Régis Debray observed – resistance had to be fundamentally reconceived. Thus, Michel Foucault declared: “We are perhaps living the end of politics. For it’s 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.” (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 Khrushchev’s ‘secret speech’ 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 Zedong’s 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. […] 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 ‘children of May’, as Sylvère Lotringer has called them, “revolutionaries bereft of a revolution”, “resolved to sleep with the enemy”, that is, “turned to capitalism, eager to extract its subversive energy they no longer found in traditional class struggles” (2007: 11), or saw “no alternative to the present form of rule except a blind anarchic other” and hence partook in what the Marxist philosophers Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri have – disapprovingly – termed “a mysticism of the limit” (2001: 387). To some extent, Ballard’s 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 latter’s writings in fact “often appear as a theoretical counterpart to Ballard’s fictional world” (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 Baudrillard’s notion of ‘hyperreality’ and the central role of mediation, simulacra and simulation in Ballard’s 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 “didn’t disagree with them on the nature of the beast [i. e. capitalism], only on the extent of the damage” (2007: 11). As we will see, something similar could be said with regards to Ballard’s 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 ‘extent of the damage’. This being said, their vision is, nevertheless, closest to Baudrillard’s.

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