This originally appeared in Vector #261. Thank you to then-editor Niall Harrison for helping it make some sense.
(1) Paradise
J. G. Ballard
died on the 19th of April 2009. You are the promising young angelic architect commissioned to
design his eternal paradise; time to step/flap up.
The seraphic refulgence
favoured by so many of your colleagues feels inappropriate. A scrunched-up,
half-hearted sketch of a cumulo-nimbus caryatid bounces from the rim of the
bin. Far too much like some nexus of crystallized flora and fauna from Ballard’s
1966 apocalyptic novel, The Crystal World.
Unsettled, you tear
a new sheet and begin to explore an Edenic concept, but your garden reveries
are infiltrated by great, sail-backed lizards. Boiling malarial lagoons breach
the levees. You remember Ballard’s 1962 apocalyptic novel, The Drowned World.
What about amenities?
Every intimation of luxury or convenience evokes High Rise (1975), Cocaine
Nights (1996) and Super-Cannes
(2000), novels in which ultra-comfortable, designer living arrangements become a
catalyst to ambiguous savagery, fetishism and sociopathy. “Over the swimming
pools and manicured lawns seemed to hover a dream of violence” (Super-Cannes, p. 75).
Maybe he could
learn to love great slabs baked to a malevolent glitter? Their service pipes
and water towers exposed, as though every solicitous euphemism, and comforting
illusion, were fallen victim to weird evisceration?
Oh boy. Did
Ballard like Brutalism? You’re not
sure. “I have always admired modernism and wish the whole of London could be rebuilt in the style of
Michael Manser’s brilliant Heathrow Hilton,” Ballard once wrote [1]. Was he
kidding?
Brutalism thrived from the 1950s to the
mid-1970s. Its signature material was concrete.
It took its name from concrete, specifically béton brut, raw concrete. It took its cue, or its
cube, from the heroism of early High Modernism, except now all heros were
tragic heros.
Concrete, jutting,
rough-hewn stone, brick, glass and steel: Brutalism has always baffled me a
bit. It feels like anti-architecture posing as architecture. Serving the only nine
crisps you own at your dinner party, trying to pass it off as the principled minimalism
of an austere populist. I’m pretty sure that’s ignorance and prejudice on my
part. But it’s widespread ignorance and prejudice. Brutalist tower blocks soon came
to both embody and symbolise the failures of the welfare state. You know the
deal. Heroin tinfoil twirling, leaflike, in puddles of piss. In High Rise Ballard wrote, “In principle,
the mutiny of these well-to-do professional people against the buildings they
had collectively purchased was no different from the dozens of well-documented
revolts by working-class tenants against municipal tower-blocks that had taken
place at frequent intervals during the post-war years” (p. 69).
I guess Brutalism
should be seen against the background – literally – of its prehistory. Brutalist
structures seem less antagonistic where they rise against archictecture of a
finnickier and more coy sort. Where Brutalism is a sparse elaboration upon a
crinkle-crankle, tumbledown backdrop, its ahistoricism seems good-humoured – at
least, a tantrum we can indulge.
Furthermore, in
the post-war period, impatience with frilly bits had a stronger rationale than
mere Enlightenment iconoclasm. Cunning, indirection, camouflage, nobility,
glory, ambition, cultural and traditional particularity and partiality – all
these were tainted by association with their equivalent martial “virtues.” The
prevailing spirit melted exhaustion with determination. The two world wars had
been bullshit. Openness,
accountability, stability, clarity, functionality, universality, neutrality,
democracy were “in.”
That meant honesty
in materials. That meant that, in post-war France, Le Corbusier’s
multi-functional super-structures came more and more to resemble
Medusa-stricken Decepticons. In Britain,
the gentle, humanist, compromise Modernism of the welfare state compromise was
increasingly confronted by the principled austerity of Alison and Peter
Smithson. At the same time, the Smithsons resisted certain trajectories of
continental Brutalism. Their chief beef was (ironically, in light of – well, in
the shadow of – High Rise) that urban
planning should foster community spirit. “‘Belonging’ is a basic emotional
need,” they wrote. “From ‘belonging’ – identity – comes the enriching sense of
neighbourliness. The short narrow street of the slum succeeds where spacious
redevelopment frequently fails.” [2]
Reyner Banham, the
architectural theorist and critic, dubbed the British Brutalism of the
Smithsons and their crew the “New Brutalism.” Banham characterised the style by
its formal legibility of plan, or memorability as an image; its clear
exhibition of structure (including exposed service features – “Water and
electricity do not come out of unexplained holes in the wall, but are delivered
to the point of use by visible pipes and conduits”); and its valuation of
materials for their inherent qualities as ‘found’. And he added, “In the last
resort what characterises the New Brutalism in architecture as in painting is
precisely its brutality, its je-’en-foutisme,
its bloody-mindedness, and that the Smithsons’ work is characterized by an
abstemious under-designing of the details, and much of the impact of the
building comes from ineloquence, but absolute consistency, of such components
as the stairs and handrails” [3].
So we have an
architectural philosophy which prioritizes function and in some degree
aestheticises it. Though it is often received as anti-humanist, it has a
commitment to the human which is revealed negatively, like someone
painstakingly avoiding mentioning his or her big crush. Space and material are
enslaved to an implicit ensemble of human needs. Every autonomous flourish is
treated with the utmost suspicion.
To entirely rationalise an environment
according to the real needs of its inhabitants requires you know those real needs, intimately. But that
implies the risk that unquantifiables will be shoehorned into categories, and
imperfection and idiosyncracy will be met with intolerance. Moreover, a utopia
designed for the desires of one kind of person could transform that kind of
person into a new kind of person, for
whom the utopia is – well, something else, un-utopian, perhaps dystopian.
Dystopia could
already be here. Current levels of
global inequality are vom-provoking, if you have anything in your belly. One
response to dystopia is to distinguish “real needs” from luxuries. (The term
“real needs” appears at least twice in High
Rise. “Real illusion,” another Marxist term, also pops up. I doubt whether
these were conscious allusions). Selecting some real needs is the first step of
the commonsense approach – more-or-less the Human Rights approach. Next you
struggle, righteously, to fulfil everyone’s real needs. Above all, you fight to
revoke any luxuries which are based on denying
someone her or his real needs.
But commonsense
runs into problems. As Karl Marx pointed out, an axiomatic anthropological
division between “real needs” and luxuries could set us on the path to . . .
well, the Marxian version of utopianism. That’s utopianism in a pejorative
sense, implicated with false consciousness, especially with “ideology.” An
updated term for what Marx usually meant by “ideology” is “idealism” – a kind
of sublimation of class struggle, a transfer of its forms to the infinitely
hospitable media of language and thought.
In essence, if we
declare in advance what are “real needs” and what are luxuries, we’re likely to
superimpose abstract reconciliations on a material world still riven with
conflict, then look cross-eyed, constipated, yet smug. Our utopian
project, founded in dogmatic anthropology, would have no resources against an
equally dogmatic counter-anthropology, one positing domination as an
ineradicable feature of human nature. (“Domination” can use various proxies –
self-interest, will to life, or the propensity for people to form efficient
markets at the drop of a hat).
In fact, the first
move of such conservative opponents will be to point out how falsely conceiving
of material antagonisms as errors of thought – idealism – can exacerbate those
antagonisms, and raise their stakes. Battlemechs do not respect peace treaties,
only other battlemechs. This is political Realism through and through.
So “commonsense” and “ideology” are
joined at the hip, as are “utopia” and “idealism.” Marx’s response to this quandry was complex
and, let me be square, a bit over my head. It had centrally to do, I think,
with why Marx had to claim his approach was both dialectic and scientific. But more
urgently – for our purposes -- where does all this leave Ballard and Brutalism?
Imagine you’re
strapped into a hair-cutting machine, which insists you’re an inch shorter than
you actually are.
Brutalism inclines
towards anthropological dogmatism. It never lets you forget which bits of the
shebang are the humans. In Brutalism’s dogged insistence on serving those
humans, it crops anything jutting outside of its idea of what is human.
Nobody, on the
other hand, could call Ballard
anthropologically dogmatic – and in the next bit I’ll say why.
(2) Soul
So anyway, which
Ballard wings his way hither? In Christian tradition, resurrection is of the flesh, since the soul, which can’t die,
can’t be said to live again. Saints get special bod mods: impassibility, glory,
agility, subtility. But which Ballard – or what
of Ballard is on its way? Could it be Jim, the little squirt tearing around a
Japanese prison camp in WWII? Or the dashing young RAF pilot in Canada?
The enfant terrible, centre of a controversial
obscenity trial? The middle-aged father, sitting in Shepperton, watching too
much TV and writing out High Rise and
Concrete Island long-hand? The dying Ballard?
Some strange council or admixture or Matryoshka?
In his 2008 memoir
Miracles of Life Ballard wrote:
“To return to Shanghai, for the first
time since I was a boy, was a strange experience for me. Memories were waiting
for me everywhere, like old friends at an arrivals gate, each carrying a piece
of cardboard bearing my name. I looked down from my room on the 17th floor of
the Hilton and could see at a glance that there were two Shanghais – the
skyscraper city newer than yesterday and at street level the old Shanghai that
I had cycled around as a boy [...] I was on an errand, though I had yet to
grasp the true nature of my assignment. I was looking for my younger self, the
boy in a Cathedral school cap and blazer who had played hide-and-seek with his
friends half a century earlier. I soon found him, hurrying with me along the Bubbling Well Road,
smiling at the puzzled typists and trying to hide the sweat that drenched my
shirt” (p. 266)
Was Ballard suggesting
that he had a deep authentic core, a private continuity underlying his life’s vicissitudes
and forgetfulnesses, which could be haphazardly accessed via an evocative taste,
or fragrance, or snatch of song?
If Ballard’s books
don’t exactly advertise a clear concept of paradise, then they’re even cagier when
it comes to “deep authentic cores.” Ballard was far too sensitive to how
authenticity today – like any moral concept – is mediated by representation, how
it turns and twists to suit the courses of swift flows of capital and glamour. Only
a lie for cash could be so convincing, so seductive, as authenticity.
Ballard fed his
characters to his themes. You can watch his characters writhe and transmogrify
in the guts of those themes. What survives from one phase of a character to the
next is often what the earlier phase would categorize as trivial, peripheral. In
High Rise, for example, when the
well-educated residents start to vandalise their luxury tower block with
quasi-tribal graffiti, their territorial sigils are witticisms, wordplays,
acrostics and palindromes.
In a way, Ballard
probably couldn’t write “good”
characters – that is, “well-developed” or “believeable” ones. At least, he was
never too interested in those networks of corroborative detail from whose
densities could spring George Eliot’s Dorothea Brooke, or Henry James’s Isabel
Archer.
“Today naturalism
has completely faltered,” Ballard said in a 1990 interview. “You only find it
in middle-brow fiction.” [4]
Rather, Ballard’s
characters are nailed to agendas as though to racks. The roboticist Masahiro
Mori coined the term “Uncanny
Valley” to describe how
people respond more and more warmly to robots (and cute anthropomorphic animals
and things) the more humanlike you make them – until they’re near-perfect
facsimiles, when suddenly our responses swerve into disquiet or revulsion. (The
Valley itself is the steep plunge when you plot these responses as a line
graph). The inner lives of Ballard’s characters resemble the outer rictuses of those
overly-lifelike droids. These characters seem to experience in extended similes.
“Now and then, the slight lateral movement of the building in the surrounding
airstream sent a warning ripple across the flat surface of the water, as if in
its pelagic deeps an immense creature was stirring in its sleep” (High Rise, p. 22). The bits of the
similes that “aren’t there” in the story – what linguists call the “vehicles”
or “figures” or “sources” – are so self-sufficient and suggestive, it feels
like they are there; and sometimes,
in Super-Cannes, say, they accumulate
so thickly as to compose the novel’s Unconscious. The characters’ casual drifts
of chat swirl into brutal prophesies, or miniaturised anthropological lectures,
as though some impatient Aspect of the authorial deity commandeered their
mouths.
Obsession with
pyschoanalysis part-substitutes for the carefully-evolved realist practices of
pysche-counterfeiting. Subjectivity isn’t patted into great homunculi like
Dorothea and Isabel; rather it gusts at the reader in huge flakes of human life,
which mix fragments of action and perception specified at psychoanalytic,
anthropological, architectural, biological, discursive and socio-cultural
levels, as well as at the level of the personality system, all arranged in
unpredictable proportions and configurations, and all constantly and
kaleidescopically disseminating and auto-dissecting. Characters are made into media
workers, doctors, pyschiatrists and architects, and into versions of Ballard (like
“James Ballard,” the protagonist of Crash)
to further mystify and enrich this reflexive, chaoplexic onslaught of psyche. Discourse
has never been so free and indirect.
The
counterintuitive fault-lines along which characters can shed characteristics are
pretty interesting. They comprise a poetics of startlement and discontinuity, a
kind of memento mori that isn’t
concentrated upon one terminal limit of a lifespan, but strewn throughout it. But
Ballard, as usual, was up to something more equivocal. The regressions which his
characters undergo also create new continuities. They re-establish
continuity with infantile drives, for example – drives which have been repressed,
or otherwise desultorily socialised. Sometimes, a psychic flyover springs up which
exceeds the individual lifespan. Racism, violence and perversity rescue
characters from modern anomie and isolation, and weave them into quasi-feudal
patterns of ingroup harmony. “For the first time it occurred to Wilder that the
residents enjoyed this breakdown of services, and the growing confrontation
between themselves. All this brought them together, and ended the frigid
isolation of the previous months.” (High
Rise, p. 60). Sometimes – in The
Drowned World, for instance – these eruptive continuities stretch even further back, foaming freak
solidarity with prehistoric homo sapiens,
or with their hominid or even reptilian
forebears.
The homologies
between Ballard’s childhood internment and his perennial themes – atavism, regression-sublimation,
hallucinogenic stupor, normalised violence, the State of Nature,
Eden, Empire
and entropy – are so absolutely in-your-face that they’re bound to attain
exaggerated significance in Ballardian criticism. My hunch is that most
quasi-autobiographical writing, especially writing as speculatively-spirited as
Ballard’s, works precisely by
minutely muddying its connection with experience. (When I brood on a fact of my
existence, it starts to suggest mutually incompatible modes by which it could
be processed. The fact is incorporated into me in one way, and sublimated into art or shouting in an incompatible way.
Experience also has a uniquely misleading relationship with the writing
it generates.)
That caveat aside
. . . Ballard once described Lunghua internment camp as “where I spent some of
my happiest years”. That’s in an excerpt
from Miracles of Life published in The Times [5] – interestingly, the phrase disappears in the published volume (p.
270). In an 1982 interview his
expression is more circumspect: “I have – I won’t say happy – not unpleasant memories of the camp,” [6] remarking on the
casual brutality, and on the many games the children enjoyed.
In Drowned World Ballard wrote, “For some
reason, however, this inverted Crusoeism – the deliberate marooning of himself
without the assistance of a gear-laden carrack wrecked on a convenient reef –
raised few anxieties in Kerans’ mind” (p. 48). In the 1994 novel Rushing to Paradise, as in The Drowned World, characters withdraw
from the wider world, pursuing a conscious – or quasi-conscious – agenda of
enislement. Ballard’s characters are often seen to endorse or solicit
transformations which are – in a knee-jerk kinda way – hideous.
Yet even
alienation, isolation and injury have a certain appeal. In Concrete Island,
Maitland constantly wonders whether he somehow, on some level, arranged to
maroon himself, whether in the shape of a primeval concrete succubus he seduced
himself. A quiet but clear echo of this aspect of Concrete Island can be heard in High
Rise: “It was here that Anthony Royal had been injured when his car had
been crushed by a reversing grader – it often struck Laing as ironic, and in a
way typical of Royal’s ambiguous personality, that he should not only have
become the project’s first road casualty, but have helped to design the site of
the accident” (pp. 36-7). The affluent, culturally-elite cave-dwellers of High Rise use their last vestiges of
civilisation to assure prying outsiders that everything’s all right, lest their
“dystopia” be confiscated. And of course in Crash,
well, these aren’t exactly car accidents.
In the short
story, “The Intensive Care Unit” (1977) (one of the prophetic ones – this time
it’s webcams, Skype and stuff), Ballard got his narrator to muse:
“True closeness, I now knew, was television closeness
– the intimacy of the zoom lens, the throat microphone, the close-up itself. On
the television screen there were no body odour or strained breathing, no pupil
contractions and facial reflexes, no mutual sizing up of emotions and disadvantage,
no distrust and insecurity. Affection and compassion demanded distance. Only at
distance could one find that true closeness to another human being which, with
grace, might transform itself into love” (p. 9).
In High Rise, the building begins to generate
a sinister new social type:
“a cool, unemotional personality
impervious to the psychological pressures of high-rise life, with minimal needs
for privacy, who thrived like an advanced species of machine in the neutral
atmosphere. This was the sort of resident who was content to do nothing but sit
in his over-priced apartment, watch television with the sound turned down, and
wait for his neighbours to make a mistake […] people who were content with
their lives in the high-rise, who felt no particular objection to an impersonal
steel and concrete landscape, no qualms about the invasion of their privacy by
government agencies and data-processing organizations, and if anything welcomed
these invisible intrusions, using them for their own purposes. These people
were the first to master a new kind of late twentieth-century life. They
thrived on the rapid turnover of acquaintances, the lack of involvement with
others, and the total self-sufficiency of lives which, needing nothing, were
never disappointed. // Alternatively, their real needs might emerge later” (p.
36).
One could draw
the lesson that any mode of human existence can develop the faculty to joyfully
authenticate itself. That would be good news for you, angelic architect – suggesting that every soul lugs around its
utopia like its snailshell.
But I don’t
think it’s the right lesson. Ballard was interested in what made abhorrent
subject positions appealing from the inside – what equillibrialised them,
harmonised them – but we don’t have to take these systems’ self-understandings
uncritically. For one thing, often Ballard was exploring a quite recent commodification of ontology. Cost-benefit
analysis (with a dash of Yippee-ish, gap year-vintage permissiveness) is how “homo capitalist” might articulate
encroaching violent rebirth to her- or himself . . . but it doesn’t prevail
universally over all such violent
rebirths. It’s only because we’re so accustomed to varying forms and levels of
alienation that we can coolly appraise extreme forms of alienation and
reconciliation like articles rummaged from a bargain bin.
Besides, even
when the multitude are content with their (parking) lot, there are outliers who
are not. “The Disaster Area” (1957,
originally “Build-Up”) is set in a probably-infinite urban space, the kind of
platform shooter Möbius would have designed if he hadn’t been into strips. Most
of its residents are down with that, but not the protagonist, and he grows
unhappily obsessed with the exotic concept of “free space.”
The
utopia-enabling scapegoat is a perennial theme of moral SF, of course. Check
out the New Testament (65-150), or Ursula LeGuin’s “The Ones Who Walk Away From
Omelas,” (1974). Sometimes not one or two, but whole swathes are brought under
regimes of torment. There are plenty of signs in High Rise that, for some residents, adaptation to a new way of life
is psychically harrowing:
“Helen moved
silently around the apartment, barely aware of her husband. After the fit of
compulsive laughter the previous evening, her face was waxy and expressionless.
Now and then a tic flickered in the right apex of her mouth, as if reflecting a
tremor deep within her mind. She sat at the dining-table, mechanically
straightening the boys’ hair. Watching her, and unable to think of what he
could do to help her, Wilder almost believed that it was she who was leaving
him, rather than the contrary” (p. 60).
When the uneven
misery begins to follow contours of gender, class or race, questions of justice
creep into the picture. Before the
high society disintegrates into a freakshow of lonesome copings, it goes
through a period of explicit class
struggle. The top five floors wear fancy pants and balkanize the middle
twenty-five floors, guarding their own privilege by playing off class fractions
one against the other. The bottom ten floors are muddled scum, abused, sullen
and sickly.
There are hints
that the sexual violence against the high-rise’s neo-cavewomen is only a minor insult,
that the cultural form of rape is
wrenched out of recognition . . . but Ballard didn’t come out and say that, and he was an author who could
unflinchingly come out and say things. I think that High Rise strongly implies mass war rape, experienced as such. I
think Ballard avoided first-person testimony (the book has three main
characters, all male) because the sexual victim, as a matter of cultural form,
invites pity, indignation, craving of custody and thirst for reprisal. These
responses are all part of the same system of gendered and sexualised violence
which High Rise is wrestling with on
the dissection table. There is a subtext to the high-rise’s pervasive all-women
groupings. In the world of High Rise,
those women who can live without men.
Justice, then, emerges
as an important makeshift division between utopia and dystopia. The idea of
justice lets that division go beyond determination by individual subjects. But
justice is part of bourgeois morality, and implicated in that morality’s indifference
to injustice. As such, Ballard seldom if ever introduces justice as clear-cut
concept. It is always peripheral, always vanishing, the lines to invoke it
coinciding with those to banish it.
(3) Islands
Could there be such
a thing as just architecture?
As the security
situation in High Rise begins to
deteriorate, the hard-drinking film critic Eleanor Powell exults, “For the
first time since we were three years old what we do makes absolutely no difference”
(p. 40).
Architecture in
a broad sense denotes more than buildings, more than physical stuff.
Architecture is
about the structures which confront us and channel our lives down their various
courses. Those structures limit our free will, but they also play a part in
making free will something worth wanting.
They delimit the ways in which what we do can make a difference – or determine
that it makes “absolutely no difference.”
Imagine there
was a just architecture, an architecture which could ensure the virtue of its
residents. What effect would it have on their free will?
Of course, the
networks of pathways which confront us all are,
in part, free will – the free will of
others. They are “built” out of the choices everyone else has made, in millennia or milliseconds gone by, or can be
expected to make. (For this reason, it’s often been thought that the terminal
unit of virtue is the polity, not the individual. Sometimes the architecture
enveloping particular person affords no opportunities for the good life).
When I heard
the premise of Concrete Island
– I was a kid, my dad described it to me – I had a quite different image of the
island. It was a tiny little thing, maybe enough to sustain one concrete
coconut tree. The marooned man stood in tatters waving his briefcase at an
endless torrent of traffic. Every driver saw him, every one sped grimly by. Eventually,
he sat down. His sitting down, I dimly reasoned, might be one of the best bits
of the book.
A friend of
mine had exactly the same experience: heard about Concrete Island, envisioned the pared-down set-up q.v., years later
was both disappointed and dazzled when she read the book. Maybe Dad just went
around giving little girls misleading summaries of Concrete Island,
I dunno. But I think that the distorted premonition does tell us something
about the emotional and thematic mush that inevitably bursts, like restaurant
waste from a black bag behind a mesh wire fence, when you change Crusoe’s
lagoon for a line of lorries. Hundreds of thousands of people queue up,
although only by chance, to confirm that they
don’t care about you at all. If they have nothing to gain in helping you,
then there is no natural sympathy, no moral law, which will compel them to.
Why didn’t someone stop for him? Could there
really be no break in the flow, 24/7?
Too weird. It manifested the precision of science, as humane affect was
subjected to rigorous physical demonstration and encoded as statistics. Percentage
love in universe: 0.000%. Simultaneously, mists of allegory enveloped the
fabled isle. Clearly, this could not be a realist work.
Structural
flaws pervade this allegorical monument to modern nihilism and ambivalence. It’s
cemented together with its own counterfactuality. Its genre is not satire, but
nightmare. It relies for its force or the reader’s conviction that this is all
wrong, that one should stop, that she
or he would stop. Our moral universe cannot be so badly damaged. Even as it
denounces the isolation and heartlessness of modernity, it whispers, “Things
aren’t so bad.”
The actual island of Concrete Island is quite different, a sunken
wasteground some two hundred yards long, cut off by steep embankments and three
massive motorways. Maitland’s injuries make it difficult and dangerous to climb
up onto the motorways. Most drivers don’t see him at all, or see him for only a
moment, like some subliminal image in a movie roll. Like the figure glimpsed
from a train in a Ford Maddox Ford memoir, he’ll take delivery of a multitude
of interpretations. He is perhaps the object of a small, faint calculation –
the possibility that “something is wrong,” weighed against the danger of
pulling over.
“He stood up
and turned to face the oncoming traffic. Three lines of vehicles sped towards
him. They emerged from the tunnel below the overpass and accelerated along he
fast bend [...] His jacket and trousers were stained with sweat, mud and engine
grease – few drivers, even if they did notice him, would be eager to give him a
lift. Besides, it would be almost impossible to slow down here and stop. The
pressure of the following traffic, free at last from the long tail-backs that
always blocked the Westway interchange during the rush-hour, forced them on
relentlessly” (p. 17).
The Kitty
Genovese effect is also in play. Every individual driver judges it absurd that no driver would stop – there are
thousands! – so no driver does. The physical architecture, in short, integrates
with the psychic architecture in such a way that Maitland’s neglect does not
entail an unrealistic world of ethical egoist sociopaths.
If it is
rational, is the architecture around the island then just? The walls of concrete and conventions of traffic safely
channel the potentially lethal machines and their occupants. The architecture
rationalises the behaviour of the motorway, in the sense that it forcibly aligns
private and public virtue. Whoever endangers another in this hum of high-speed
metal also endangers her- or himself. Yet clearly this architecture is unjust for
those who fall outside its remit.
One boingy spring-board for utopian
(and counter-utopian) thought is the premiss that when archictectures of action
prove themselves unjust, all their contingencies could be imaginatively cleared
away, and they could be rebuilt from scratch. Somewhere on the continuum
between cobweb and support strut, you draw a line. You chuck away what is
contingent, mere convention, the product of evolutionary eccentricity. You keep
what is essential to the human condition. In the society of bare bones, in this
State of Nature,
is there such a thing as justice? Is there “natural law”? Are there trade-offs
between potential moralities? Can we create, and not just evince, virtue?
Whatever the State of Nature is, whatever laws it sports or lacks,
it can be used to benchmark real
societies, to detect where they are malformed and could be healed, or to
recognise the limits of reform. The tradition linking the State of Nature with tales of island adventure is
long and illustrious. But the priority
which Ballard gave to the mediatization of experience led him to contest the
reality of reality and the naturalness of nature. It’s odd, therefore, that his
books should invest so heavily (if seldom explicitly) in this tradition. Power
relations in Ballard’s (quasi?) State(s) of Nature are complex, certainly irreducible to
“hard” power (direct control of resources), and probably irreducible to hard
and “soft” power (charisma, tricks). Power is intricately bound up with
identity-formation and maintenance. “Real needs” are dubious, since even the
will to life needn’t underwrite all possible subjectivities. Concrete Island
thematizes the Hegelian master-slave dialectic, probably. Maitland’s successes
in subduing the other inhabitants are somewhat incongruous. He is injured,
crazed; he relies on them for food and mobility. He uses sex and money, and
piss and booze, but it always feels as though he achieves more than he ought
to, that there is a discrepancy between his resources and his status.
I was deftly summarizing High Rise for someone – it’s like, this
TV executive, he’s covered in lipstick warpaint, his camera is practically a
mace, catching sight of his own heavy, brown penis in the mirror calms him
down, he can only grunt, it’s been like a month or something, – and this
person asked me, quite reasonably, what happens to seal the high-rise off.
I drew breath.
Because that’s the template for these
stories, right? Seal off a dinner party of anesthetists, social workers, et
al., give it ten minutes and voila abattoir with yetis. Sealing off
the nice people, or stranding them somewhere, does two things. It separates
them from abundance (Capitalist abundance, typically), and it separates them
from state institutions of law and order.
“Everyman is a gory savage, and his
latent violence is closer to the surface than we think” – that’s the moral, or
the cliché, which this genre trusts us to anticipate and rewards us with in the
end. We are Them. We are Them.
It is the convergence of science and
pornography. Although it is, by itself, not exactly
an authoritarian sentiment, it sports flanges serrated to dovetail perfectly
with the ass-dags any charismatic demagogue who happens to goose-amble by. Because
if Man (and it usually is “Man” by this point) is inherently a juggernaut of
atrocity, his civil manner, but a dissembling gauze, then we need strong leadership to keep us in
check.
Only the Hobbesian formula of
protection-obedience will do. We are Them. But for the Grace of omnipotent
authority, there go I. Never mind, like, separation of powers, checks and
balances, constitutionalism; that never happened. Justice (or, second-best,
security) must be built into a governmental architecture, since the “sealing
off” experiment has shown it is not a natural feature of Man.
In High
Rise, nothing seals them off! Nothing
triggers the regression; initially
there are some tensions about dog-owners, and a bit of a question mark over
when kids should use the pools. This is our clue that Ballard was up to
something quite different.
Are We, according to Ballard, Them? Almost.
Leap to the lead in the hic et nunc
cocobananas carousel, and you’re one of them.
Almost, but I think, not quite. Ballard
was abstemious in laying the causal foundations of the high-rise tribalism. In
Brian Aldiss’s Non-Stop (1958) it takes several generations aboard a
dodgy starship to regress. But High Rise is gently, and deliberately
underdetermined. It requires of its readers a suspension of disbelief something
in excess of what The Portrait of a Lady wants,
though not quite the level demanded by, “In the Mirror Universe, the
shapeshifter Odo is the supervisor of the mining complex at Terok Nor. He is a
brutal taskmaster over Terran slaves there [...]” etc.
Some folks – the feminist political
theorist Carol Pateman is a good’un – have criticised the State of Nature as a myth which
legitimates existing power relations. But Ballard combined the State of Nature with cutting
criticism of existing power relations. Rather than showing us the dystopia
which underlies and legitimates the status
quo (like Hobbes – or like John Locke, showing us the minimal model which
clarifies the status quo’s
rationality), Ballard’s States of Nature showed us the weird dystopian-utopian
spaces which already exist within the
status quo.
Ballard wasn’t just interested in what the
contrived spaces of a lab experiment, or the aftermath of a disaster, can tell
us about human nature and big social trends. For Ballard, they weren’t just allegories,
thought experiments, or models. He was also interested – I really think there
is a difference here – in the spaces
themselves, which he suspected appear more frequently and pervasively than
we care to admit.
Though Ballard’s work is cautionary, it
has a lot of good things to say about utopia. Especially if you think how
relatively unpopular the concept has been recently: the concepts of utopia and
dystopia are fused. It is quite
impossible to speak of a radically better world without alluding to the
utopianisms of Hitler and Stalin. You
can argue, again in a Marxist vein, that it is Late Capitalism itself that has
grotesquely glued gulags, artifical famine and Aushwitz all over the pure and
sweet concept of universal justice. You can argue that It does so to protect Itself
from criticism. You might be right, but this stuff is nonetheless still objectively glued together. Utopia-dystopia
is a “real illusion,” like the commodity form – it is an illusion we can’t
dispel by piercing it through thought and exposure with language, since the
“illusion” is invincibly reiterated every moment by our lived social relations;
it is reborn from everywhere, it is more logical than logic.
And yet. Utopia
has been a dirty word for so long . . . it’s sort of cleaned itself, a bit. Like
dirty hair which they say secretes its own shampoo, or an abandoned piece of
laundry that’s ambiguously wearable again. Ballard never treated this
utopia-dystopia hybrid as a weird limit condition, or latent dynamic, or
bogey-man. With a science fiction novelist’s perogative, he showed it as
something that was already here. He submitted its events to standards of justice,
however problematic, and he traced possible trajectories of subjectivity
through it.
Every time utopian
thought is criticised for ignoring some latent real need, we slightly enlarge
our idea of what it is to be human. Have our ideas of real needs simply needed
more paranoia and more imagination? Nothing could be more dogmatic than ruling
out utopia forever.
Post-script: Manaugh
So I’ve made three
small suggestions about Ballard. First, his work is supremely conscious of the
dynamic connection between environments and their inhabitants, and thus
critical of efforts to “perfect” environments on the basis of a particular idea
of the human. Second, despite his disdain for received notions of intrinsically
superior modes of life, Ballard resisted moral relativism, and submitted the
flux of subjectivity he depicted to standards of justice. Third, Ballard was
drawn to segregated, normatively autonomous spaces, but not only as experiments, or models, whose use
lay in extrapolation or generalisation or allegory. He was also fascinated by
the possibility that much of society already takes place in such spaces.
It would be nice
to get some closure on the J. G. Ballard’s celestial resting place question
q.v., even if it was just a thought
experiment gradually revealing its own patent absurdity.
Did Ballard like Brutalism? Bollards, ballustrades,
pallisades, flyovers, cloverleaf junctions, on-ramps, traffic islands, artifical
lakes, storm tunnels, multi-storey car parks, business parks, military camps, edge-of-town
mega-malls, abandoned cinemas, opulent, derelict hotels, ruined swimming pools
quarter-filled with yellow water, an Alsatian bobbing, or bone dry and piled
with human bones. Stairwells barricaded with chic utilitarian furniture,
shadows moving behind them; did Ballard like
this stuff?
My friend Posie
Rider told me a joke; she told it wrong (Posie could fluff the punchline of an
e-mail forward), but using Habermasian reconstructive science, I think this
East German guy is applying to emigrate to West Germany. This state bureaucrat
says, “Listen,
why do you want to emigrate? Here, you have a large, well-serviced apartment
overlooking the park. Will you get such a nice apartment in the West?” It may be an old
joke. The
would-be emigrant says, “Oh, can’t complain.” “And you finally got that car you’ve
been applying for?” “Oh, can’t complain.” “And you have a good, safe job at the
shoe factory!” “Oh, can’t complain.” “So why do you want to move to the West?” “There
I can complain!”
OK, so it’s about freedom of expression
and of political dissent. But I imagined hyper-democratic authorities in West Germany taking those complaints seriously. I
imagined them reconstructing the mortified immigrant’s old situation around
him.
Some subjects are deeply invested in
resisting their own conditions of possibility. It is a deep problem for progressive
politics of all kinds. It is the kernel of truth in the conservative slur that
grassroots activists and other political volunteers are troublemakers and attention-seekers.
By the end of Concrete Island, Maitland seems to be this kind of
subject. Crudely, he doesn’t want to escape from the island, he wants to be
someone trying to escape from the island. (This explains the apparent hypocrisy
of hiding from a police car and then, a paragraph later, thinking with delight
of imminent escape).
The social critic, the cautionary
visionary, implicated with his subject matter, is similarly constitutively
conflicted. Did Ballard like this stuff, well, yes, in a terribly complicated
iterative way, it was what he loved to hate to love to hate to love to hate . .
. etc., with new cognitive angles materializing with each iteration.
So I guess if I
were the angel architect (I’m not – it’s you)
I might build Ballard a limitless flux of only-ever-provisionally-distinguished
subjectivity and environment, in intricate and glorious iteration, more or less
laissez-faire but with safeguards
against the evolution of infinite loops and other cul-de-sacs of dei-diversity.
Plus bunting because that would kind of be my signature thingy. A cop-out based
on free market indifference and fetishization of choice, you say; I say, the
bunting’s not; also Plan B is consult with other mortals. Nic Clear and Simon
Kennedy have started a course on Ballardian architecture at the Bartlett School
of Architecture in London.
Maybe Geoff Manaugh is the mortal for the job. He has recently published a
book, The BLDGBLOG Book, based in
part on his speculative architecture blog, BLDGBLOG (bldgblog.blogspot.com). The
project is probably way too big for any one of us. But if we collectively came
up with a utopia good enough for Ballard, I bet it would be good enough for any
one of us.
Works cited
Brian
Aldiss(1958): Non-Stop, London: Faber & Faber
J. G. Ballard (1957): “The
Disaster Area,” (a.k.a. “Build-Up” / “The Concentration City”) in The Complete Short Stories, London:
Harper (2006)
J. G. Ballard (1962/2008): The Drowned World, London:
HarperCollins
J. G. Ballard (1973/2008): Concrete Island,
London: HarperCollins
J. G. Ballard (1975/2006): High-Rise, London:
HarperCollins
J. G. Ballard (2006): Super-Cannes,
London: HarperCollins
J. G. Ballard (2008): Miracles
of Life: Shanghai to Shepperton, an
Autobiography, London:
HarperCollins
J.G. Ballard (1977/2006): “The Intensive Care Unit” in High-Rise “P.S.” (q.v.)
George Eliot (1874): Middlemarch
Henry James (1881): Portrait
of a Lady
Ursula LeGuin (1974) “The Ones Who Walk Away From
Omelas” in The Wind's Twelve Quarters,
New York:
Harper & Row (1975)
Endnotes
[2] Alison and Peter Smithson, CIAM Congress 1953
(over-cited sound-byte)
[3] Reyner Banham (1966): “The New Brutalism: Ethic or
Aesthetic?” in As found: the discovery of
the ordinary (2001): ed. Claude Lichtenstein and Thomas Schregenberger,
Springer, p. 130
