For Alastair Hunt and Stephanie Youngblood, contemporary biopolitics is marked by a âculture of lifeâ summed up by two broad assumptions: âlifeâs intelligibilityâ and lifeâs âultimate and uncontestable desirability.â1 Showcasing an âinability to think ethics and politics outside of life,â such a culture, in valuing above all the affirmation of this universalising principle, renders detractors of this impulse absurd (and even perverse): âWe realise,â they note, âthat to propose ⊠that we might be better off being against life invites the accusation of being intractable or impractical.â2 It is in response to such an accusation that J.G. Ballard, in an interview published in 1984, rallies against the perception that his fiction is âdefeatist, pessimistic, entropic,â and allied ultimately to death.3 âItâs a misreading,â Ballard notes, âto assume that because my work is populated by abandoned hotels, drained swimming pools, empty nightclubs, deserted airfields and the like, I am celebrating the run-down of a previous psychological and social order.â4 Rather, these images of the end of life harbour a sense of affirmation for Ballard, whose comments culminate in an optimistic proclamation: âDeath as the end of self, yes!â5
Whether or not Ballardâs fiction can be said to be âagainst lifeâ is a question this chapter poses in relation to the early novels and short stories linked in their depictions of the âend of the world.â Ballardâs visions of apocalypseâalways enacted through ânaturalâ forces, both unpredictable and inhumanâinvoke questions now commonly discussed within discourses surrounding the Anthropocene: how can the human comprehend itself as an actor on a geological scale? How can we imagine a geological subjectivity that reconciles the impersonal, unknowable, and inhuman with the idea of the human? Instead of viewing Ballardâs fiction exclusively through this lens, however, I want to suggest that his work sets out an alternative imaginary for the humanâs geological condition obscured by the terms of the Anthropocene. While the human is central to Ballardâs visions of apocalypse, the ethical stakes of this âeventâ do not concern the maintenance, reconstruction, or redemption of life. Rather, by characterising the end of the world with a sense of affirmative potential, Ballard throws into question the terms by which the concept of life is rendered meaningful (and for whom). Apocalypse, in this narrative mode, functions as a revelatory unveiling of the drives and desires that gesture beyond the world of the human from within.
Throughout the narratives under examination here, a recurring figure of this process is that of the fossil. Tied to the unveiling of lifeâs untold stories, fossils usually signify the logics of classification and order associated with the history of life. For Ballard, however, the fossil functions as an agent of transformation, enveloping the human within the vast evolutionary temporalities of its own prehistory. Presenting a reappearance of the humanâs primordial animal origins, the fossil enacts an ostensibly decentring force, untethering the human from the civilising confines of the ego and enacting what Ballard envisions as the âend of self.â And yet, far from antithetical to the fossilâs ordering of lifeâs narrative, this decentring impulse defines the very terms by which life is given form.6 By staging the fossil encounter as a confrontation with the humanâs own geological being, Ballard writes the human as occupying the threshold between life and death, itself embodying the animal remains of a paleontological history for which the human marks but a single moment. While this recontextualisation of human life offers a way to rethink the stability of the human/animal binary from the vantage of a paleontological (as well as geological) turn, it also functions for Ballard as a means for depicting a power that crosses from the biological into a manipulation of geological matter and mattering. In addition to tying together the humanâs beginnings and endings, Ballardâs animal remains speak to an undulating discourse of species that bridges the boundary between bio- and geological worlds.
Inhuman Intimacies: Theorising the Ballardian Fossil
As markers of the intersection between geology and the history of life, fossils have received growing attention of late as emblems of anthropogenic catastrophe. Most recently, in his book Footprints, David Farrier performs a cultural history of an increasingly pressing figure within the Anthropocene imagination pertinent to Ballardâs apocalyptic vision: the future fossil. As a mode of diagnosing how the humanâs presence has been written into the earthâs fabric, perceiving future fossils is a speculative process that involves imagining the humanâs lived, material present as a âtrace fossilâ legible âto our most distant successors.â7 From the concrete masses of urban centres to the inexhaustible temporalities of nuclear waste, Farrier argues that the human, as it currently inhabits the planet, will be readable to a future observer, âwritten into the earth like speech marks around a lost quotation.â8 In one sense, the process of speculating such an observer encapsulates the project of the Anthropocene. This epochal designation itself conjures a geological lexicon within which the totality of present humanity is legible, its collective actions inscribed deep into the textual fabric of geological history. Of course, such a project obscures for any future observer the biopolitical formations and capitalist hierarchies that dictate the uneven levels of geomorphic force exerted by the supposedly universal anthropos.9 But Farrierâs powerful simile avoids this universalising impulse precisely through its alignment (however paradoxically) of the âlegibleâ with the unknowable. The trace fossil, he writes, is an âaccidental memory,â signalling a reality that is always necessarily âbeyond our knowing.â10
Farrierâs point illuminates a central aspect of paleontological memory reflected in Ballardâs writing of the fossil. This is, namely, the conditional nature of the fossilâs claim to an epistemology of life. Far from unmediated artefacts, fossilsâwhether remnants of the deep past or echoes of catastrophic futuresâreflect the conditions of their own emergence, providing an outline that must be filled in by their observer. In this sense, rather than solidifying a false consistency applied to the human species, the fossil often functions as a generative figure for thinking through the inconsistencies that come along with the memorialisation of life in the geological archive. For Jussi Parikka, fossils, as âthe data that geology processes,â offer âonly a fragmented part of a totality that cannot be discovered.â11 Much akin to the effects of technologies of speed on our perceptions of space and time, fossils bring about a âdisappearance of distances,â producing smooth and linear narratives of life across unthinkable time scales.12 As objects that conjure temporalities that resist the boundaries of thought, fossils, for Timothy Morton, are hyperobjects, supplanting âforeverâ with the notion of the âvery large finitudeâ that displaces the humanâs perception of itself in space and time.13 Elizabeth A. Povinelli, in conversation with Quentin Meillassouxâs concept of the âarche-fossil,â shifts the power of the fossil away from the âthingâ itself into a more affective register: the fossil is âsomething that feels like it existed before us and is (thus) indifferent to us.â14
Across these theoretical accounts, the fossil appears as a trace of a totality that eludes representation. As Povinelli suggests, such radical indifference to human processes of meaning-making can tell us something about matter broadly conceived: receiving its epistemological status only via the touch of its contemporary observer, the fossil marks simply âthe latest object-event in an entire series of object-events.â15 Povinelliâs point allows for both the ancient and future fossil to be thought together as âthingsâ which, to echo Jane Bennett, act independently from their human observers, moving across the categories applied to them by virtue of their own inhuman agency.16 One such category central to Ballardâs fossil imaginaries is that of waste. As Rachele Dini argues, âwasteâ describes a classification of a thing defined by its place in time: rather than a fundamental characteristic, waste is âa stage in the lifecycle of a thing, which is also to say, a stage that can pass.â17 In addition to emphasising wasteâs temporal fluidity, Dini reads Ballardâs fiction as imbuing waste with a âdisruptiveâ agency, returning always to unsettle âthe totalising system(s) from which it has been expelled.â18 Building on Diniâs point, I want to suggest that the Ballardian fossil exerts a similar disorderly agency. Constituting both the inheritance of lifeâs history (the ancient fossil) and the possibility of catastrophic futures (the future fossil), Ballardâs fossils decentre the human insofar as they orient it towards both of these temporal locations simultaneously. The fossil aids Ballard in figuring not the humanâs place in time nor power over time, but rather the human as time.
Rather than universalising the presence of the human across temporal locations, my intention here is to show how Ballardâs depiction of human fossildom produces a dynamic and multidirectional subjectivity, constituted between different temporalities and different ontological categories. Put differently, the fossil allows Ballard to depict a human subject caught between an animal past and an ultra-human future. Animality, in this view, is a central feature of human identity that both enables and is obscured by the humanâs existence as a future-oriented being. Not only a figure of animality, however, the fossil also speaks to what Katherine Yusoff has suggested is the necessary centrality of geology to the ways in which we understand the biopolitical. In addition to representing periods of time, Yusoff argues that we should recognise geological strata âas planes of social production that both constrain and are expressive of relations.â19 Considering fossilisation as impacting this social field, Yusoff suggests the term âgeologic lifeâ as an expansion of the death/life binary assumed by normative accounts of the fossil, locating the space between life and nonlife as a zone in which subjectivities come into being.20 Inhabiting this space, the Ballardian human is depicted as paradoxically indebted to its animal past as a measure of the possible expression of its futures.
Read thus, it is possible to interpret Ballardâs use of animal remains as cementing the humanâs position as harbinger of environmental catastrophe, both product and producer of inevitable extinction events. While attending to this aspect of Ballardâs work, my emphasis is on the geologicalâand its language of inanimation, stratification, and deathâas a discursive and mobilisable category. In doing so, I borrow Mel Y. Chenâs term âdeathly lifeâ to signify the application of the geological as a mode of subjugation and subjectification in Ballardâs fiction. Concomitant with the deathly status that Chen locates in the discourse of toxicity, Ballardâs fossil imaginaries mediate the humanâs own inhuman nature through an application of the inhuman against those declared as falling outside the human frame.
âUnlimited Pleasureâ: Eroding the Human in The Drought, âNow Wakes the Sea,â and The Drow...