BALLARD AND WRITING

‘Where do we find enough innocence for generating universal history?’ ask Deleuze and Guattari. Innocence relates to both the legal and the moral so we are already at the crossroads of conflicting value systems: the technical and the social. Deleuze and Guattari trace the dissolution of universal history through the production and anti-production of the socio-cultural milieus that make way for the proliferation and tension of code. What are the differences and similarities shared by production and anti-production? Anti-production is any force which opposes movement within a system such that it governs the limitations and patrols their exterior. Production is the primary force that makes use of the virtual-potential of any material or abstract quantity which anti-production works to delimit. Both allow for the proliferation of positive and negative intensities to pass through matter; the process of production. Every socio-cultural expression emanates from the auto-processes of production and anti-production. Writing as a process is charged with these auto-productive processes. All this means is that the production of writing is always at the limit of signification while anti-production is the limit of this width as well as its exterior. As with the flows of Capital, the book limits ‘the possibility of its own dissolution’ and in the same movement ‘it is constantly opposing with its exasperated strength the movement that drives it toward its limit’. 

Universal history is the shared signification from which cultural expression completes the duality of signifier/signified, if it can be said that such a duality exists. The disruption of signification by the first great wave of deterritorialization, which we shall return to later, results in the severance of expression from universality; from that moment onwards everything comes at a remove of unintelligibility. Socio-cultural codes are re-written without reference to a coherent ontogenous logic, instead seemingly disparate entities enter into unity under a muddled cohesion. The result is the complete metaphorization of expression and the over-production of signification; everything is like the thing that it is, but nothing ever is what it is. Among the disparate and often conflicting drives of Capital is the drive to make signs work. Due to the ever-increasing speed of associations, signs work to regulate the waves of re-codification which speed-up at an exponential rate. Signs work infinitely harder in order to keep up with the fluctuations of meaning and its representation, while the primitive inscribing socius is substituted for axiomatic codes of ‘abstract quantities’. In short, signification is consumed by signal.

As with much of the first volume of Capitalism and Schizophrenia it is, as it always has been, a question of machines. Social inscription, what later becomes known as writing, is a social machine in the purest sense. It is not until writing crosses over to print that writing-as-technical-machine appears. Now, it is not to say that all words printed are technical or that all non-printed words are social, for there are always ruptures, crossovers and contingencies. Writing can be technically correct while socially incorrect, perhaps this is why Ballard mixes medical jargon with obscenities in his texts; fusing the technical and the obscene. The censorious reception ‘Do not publish!’ speaks to the exterior model of anti-production, while the medical jargon stifles the interior mode of free expression with a semantic stuffiness. It is such that the terms ‘technical’ and ‘social’, ‘productive’ and ‘anti-productive’ are interchangeable with manifold suggestions. Ballard expresses it well: whatever 'efforts to return to the perimeter’, border or limit we find ourselves ‘once more in the centre’. 

The whole of production is anti-productive just as the whole of anti-production is productive. This is not to presuppose a dualism where there is none, for while disparate in principle the two never cease to combine. Whenever a flow is controlled within the structure of production the limits of that structure are anti-production itself. But anti-production by its very nature generates new forms and contingencies; new ruptures are only possible by way of rupturing through a limit or perimeter. But this rupture is quickly taken up by Capital so that the limit once broken through is recodified so as to make a centre out of a limit. Rupturing the limit brings into existence the formation of a different centrality, this is the movement of axiomatics flowing through and beyond the body of the socius. Nothing is ever allowed to be out of place for too long, even the nomad has to set up camp each night. We arrive back by way of Ballard at writing. It becomes impossible to say which is out of place in a Ballardian text, graphic erotica or medical jargon. It would be reductive to conclude it is a process of assimilation within the same expressive mode, for both are stark in their contrast, serving different purposes and producing different effects. 

Meaning is stretched to an extremity, nothing resembles itself, cryptography gestures towards signs of incomprehensibility. In Terminal Beach we find Traven stranded on the shores of meaning led by the ‘symbols of a cryptic alphabet’ approaching nothingness. The bleak process, like a bunker giving ‘birth to a megalith’, is that of one nondescript shape producing another. A definitional nothingness, call it post-signification, is the achievement of over-signification: surplus-signification and over-decodification. The shores we wake up to at the terminal beach are strewn with the waste of an apocalypse of signification. An implosion of meaning as the result of extreme over-exertion. In a word, nothing means anything. Overproduction: the word collapses under the weight of over-signification; everything relates to everything else. Traven searches amongst the memory of his lost family, not as a symbol of primordial lack, but as the notion that expands his search for something solid in a homogenous sea of liquid nothingness. Traven finds himself following ‘emblematic beacons’ inferring the substitution of something in which place they stand at a remove; ‘runic ideograms’ always pointing towards a cryptographic sign and the unintelligible. ‘Their figures’ write Deleuze and Guattari ‘do not derive from a signifier nor are they even signs as minimal elements of the signifier; they are nonsigns, or rather nonsignifying signs, point-signs having several dimensions, flow-breaks or schizzes’. For Traven in Ballard’s own words they are ‘tutelary symbols of a futuristic myth’. 

Towards which myth do they gesture? Towards the unending process of axiomatization, the waves of deterritorialization that wash the terminal beach, whereby social and written codes are replaced by the free-flow of the logic of Capitalism. To be sure the logic of Capitalism does not refer to Capitalism directly, but rather the machinations that are proliferated by it, the same ones that found the unconscious being of man. Machinations present long before their actualisation. ‘In a sense, capitalism has haunted all forms of society, but it haunts them as their terrifying nightmare, it is the dread they feel of a flow that would elude their codes’. When the nightmare comes alive, writing becomes a ‘figurative...constellation that dissolves in order to be replaced by another one’. The dimensions of writing whereby meaning is rested in place are replaced by a process of axiomation whereby waves of representation reconfigure meaning each time. Thus the structure of language determined by the duality of the signifier/signified distinction is replaced by a theory of flows and breaks which ‘abandons all privileged reference’. This new process of language, a process which Ballard’s writing constitutes fully, involves the ‘concerted destruction of the signifier’, a written use of language that has ‘adapted to the nature of both the capitalist and the schizophrenic flows’. In Terminal Beach Traven follows the ‘symbols of a cryptic alphabet’ in his nomadic search for what is lost.

08 01 21

Like Turner we begin at the ‘Apocalypse’, starting as everything begins to end. The ‘long-incarcerated patients’, a ‘perimeter fence’, ‘zones’, ‘The Danger Area’, ‘The Skin Area’, ‘the Borderzone’, a ‘Zone of Nothing’, the narrative is tense with a territorial claustrophobia. Disparate zones of incarceration imply a differential inside and outside insisting upon an end; the limit of the territory. The history of Science Fiction is shadowed by a delirious obsession with alternate zones and hallucinatory spaces, each manifest zone attending to divergences and entanglements of physics and metaphysics. A zone can enclose the limit of Science Fiction or define the limit it breaks through, shifting the form of theory and fiction into a territorial contiguity. The dissolute ego who stalks the pages of the Atrocity Exhibition; a makeshift antagonist, a punk metaphysicist occupying and traversing the shadowy interstitial cavern delineating theory and fiction, that is, the outside and the inside of the text. As he is pulled towards the convergence of his mental breakdown and the end of the world he plants mines in the processual field of semiosis, revolutionising the holistic signifier through an explosion of polyvocality. Like Turner before him he turns a breakdown of representation into a breakthrough of form. An explosion from within the holistic tyranny of the master signifier that binds and limits, incarcerating and axiomatizing with the logic of static being of form and genre; this is and is not a work of Science Fiction. Enclosed his agoraphobia implodes, the limitations of zone and perimeter collapse; an exit has been made. 

Who was Travis now becomes Talbot and will later become Tallis who will become others in a revolutionary series; a reinvention of the self or the invention of a schizonomadic entity. A dispersal of the sign of the ego becoming imperceptible to the axiomatics of psychoanalysis and the patient-doctor relation. A relation which only ever seeks to triangulate as if number begins and ends with three. The ‘shadow of the number’ as McLuhan describes it, the sovereignty of the number that calls itself One and I, or Three and We, that the schizo-protagonist escapes via the infinite multiplication of the ego; the dissolution of the ego into an abstract multiplicity. He ‘has crossed over the limit’, write Deleuze and Guattari, ‘which maintained the production of desire always at the margins of social production’. Production is primary to mutations of the subject and the social. The subject produces the desire controlled by the social in a network of disjunctions. Depending on its exploitability the social and the subject are made immanent to one another as the boundary between the two disintegrates, but when the subject no longer works, when the part no longer benefits the whole, it is contained and incarcerated to be purged of revolutionary forces. The social field of containment that forces its subjects into doing its dirty work: You will fuck your mother unless the law says you shall not, aren’t you worse off without us? Ready-made cathectic nodes of mediatized exhibitionism charged beforehand with precise insidious limitations are left behind as the schizo entity breaks through, moving beyond limitations and creating new ones for itself. ‘The schizo knows how to leave’.

An exit, however, is only ever the prelude for a return. To exit would cut off the futural prospect of connections generating the same zonic claustrophobia the schizonomad tries to escape. It is an entire upheaval of the logic of the zone and border in that he ‘remains in disjunction: he does not abolish disjunction’ affirming each seemingly disparate zone ‘through continuous overflight spanning an indivisible distance’. The schizo’s modus operandi that connects partial zones like so many open doors in a high-rise allows for flight through a series of differences that he himself engenders. Slipping in and out of subjective positions, becoming transpositional, ‘no longer designate persons, but singularities flocking from all sides, evanescent agents of production’.

He over-signifies, assigns himself a new name, reinvents himself every chapter to out-run axiomatic un-logic and is thus irreducible to a set of laws called Oedipus/Psychoanalysis or Subject/Social. The I that is One dissolves as the signifier is reborn each day as meaning collapses in on itself. For Dr Nathan it is irrelevant if T-- is a ‘doctor, or a patient’ because the confines of signification separated by the negative no longer apply. The confines are endogamous to an apparatus the schizo oozes out of. ‘There is, then, no longer any call for wondering which is first, the father or the child because such a question can be raised within the framework of familialism’ write Deleuze-Guattari. So too the institutional network that assigns every patient a doctor and every doctor a patient is made obsolete by T--’s becoming-schiz. Negativized logic is inapplicable. The zone in which the terms generate meaning is exited via the usurpation of staticity by movement. This begins to explain the obsessive reference to Surrealism which exploits the fluidity of a transcendental schizophrenia, allowing it to ooze through the strictures of representation. Ballard’s obsessive reiteration and implication of Surrealism drives at the very essence of his own literary style, but we shall see how it is always more than a simple question of stylistics. T-- occupies a landscape of fluid objects, ‘a modulus that could be multiplied into the landscape of his consciousness’ and a ‘desire to merge with the object in an undifferentiated mass’. The total dissolution of the I and the corporeal boundary signals total eradication of any degree of separation, of zone, of borders, and into a state of absolute schizogenicity where ‘the self and the non-self, outside and inside, no longer have any meaning whatsoever’.

The projective essence of surrealism flowing through the Atrocity Exhibition is the same schizophrenic desire to ‘slip...into such machines as one part among others’. The Atrocity Exhibition is Ballard’s own Une semaine de bonte՛, Max Ernst’s collage novel in which depersonalised memory is cut, copy, and pasted over each other. Habitual connectives escaping the matrix of partial objects that traps and obstructs; place the mouth over the arse, it belongs there anyway. The aim of the collage novel is to create a world that already exists, but via reformulation of the images Ernst was able to re-present a world present but unseen. The stylistically reassembly of the assemblage fuses form and content in Atrocity Exhibition eroding the barrier between discipline and expression. The involvement of Surrealism is the process by which style overtakes representation, by which representation no longer becomes an inexorable obstacle, but a malleable juncture of bifurcation. This convergence is only ever the re-attachment of action to knowledge that is severed in the network of anti-production. The clock strikes five, production stops, the ego returns to itself. For Ballard it is a feature of modernity at the segmented instigation of clock-time that the ego is bound to its strictures. Ballard opposes this temporal binding through interminable vignettes that do not fragment into obstacles, but proliferate into globular formations that fuse and de-fuse.

Utilizing what McLuhan refers to as the ‘accelerating pace of human association’ Ballard shifts the representation of time and time as representation. By beginning the novel at an instigation of the apocalypse Ballard reverses the commonsensical unidirectionality of time. The elliptical compartmentalisation and narrative flashes in the semi-random vignettes forces a process of constant association and reassociation to a dizzying and delirious effect; fusion and de-fusion. Like T-- the book is a process of scrambling formalist codification, in short, the very process of schizophrenia itself. The destiny of the book is to break the limitations of flows, flows limited by the paranoia of the social field which takes the form of helicopters and follows T--. T-- must cross over entirely from the paranoiac and reshape his limitations in the limitless form of the schizo. Hence, he does not re-signify every chapter to escape the refrain of paranoia entirely for that would only be a change in relation to paranoia. Exit from the system of paranoia has to mirror the transcendental schizophrenia of Deleuze-Guattari; it must be a process whereby the subject oscillates along the entire spectrum of zero and infinity. That is to say between the absolute dissolution of the ego and its infinite multiplication.

To conclude that Surrealism is no more than a stylistic or aesthetic choice for Ballard would be a reductive syntheses no different from stuffing his work into a postmodern hole and expecting it to schizophrenise. The paranoiac assignment of literature as a literary movement does not allow for literature as movement in itself, instead it limits it within the framework of stylistic incarceration. In short, to delimit the exhibition as a work of Surrealism, rather than as a work whose Surrealist elements channel a spatio-temporal assault, means it can longer generate associations beyond the limit of the surreal. The dissociative principle of Ballardian exhibitionism counteracts a systematisation that would render it a stylistic catatonia. It is instead an assault on temporal representation that wrestles the subject of representation into a postmortem rigidity, that is, the synthesis of apperception. Ballard instead opens up the canals of representation into a free-flow endless becoming; escaping the trap of being, exiting its systematic paradigmation.

Like the freeflow representation of Surrealism the schizo flows into the landscape plugging himself into the undifferentiated porosity of the Earth. We have seen this before in the historical figure of Lenz who ‘is in the mountains’, who is ‘in contact with the profound life of every form, to have a soul for rocks, metals, water, and plants’. Only the Romantic’s notion of sublime nature is replaced by the motorway, the city, the airport or the car park which contain ‘an operating formula for their passage through consciousness’. Instead of being in a horrifying awe of the sublime nature of nature Lenz saw himself as part of its process. The sublime of nature that enraptured and captured the mind of the Romantic is replaced by the sublime of modernity. The alien landscape of the borderzone where the cranes of progress assemble as they dissemble, so that it is impossible to ascertain if the entirety is collapsing or being built, T-- himself mimics this sublime process of production and anti-production. The constant process of an architecture of schizophrenia in which everything is falling apart and being rebuilt simultaneously so that nothing retains a secure identification. In the Ballardian landscape nothing resembles itself for long.

‘As his own identity faded, its last fragments glimmered across the darkening landscape, lost integers in a hundred computer codes, sand-grains on a thousand beaches, fillings in a million mouths’. Finally the process of dispersal in which the self as non-agentic construct dissolves into a non-differentiated process and immersion in all things. Unlike subjectivity as the residuum of meta-machines, the abstract schizo entity T-- generates his own subject transpositionality by occupying each imperium of his own differentiation. Ballard concludes ‘it is clear that Freud’s classic distinction between the manifest and latent content of the inner world of the psyche now has to be applied to the outer world of reality’. The final zonic border has been destroyed, the schizo generates his own limitability in an endless network of connectability.

25 10 20

The crash has happened before the book begins. The persistent present breaks loose ‘like a haemorrhage of the sun’ in the violent rehearsal of death. The rehearsal is a simulated reality of an unreality; so many ‘bored spectators’ yawn at the scene of traumatic repetition. Another call to the Hollywood normalisation of atrocity; mass trauma rehearsal invoked by memetization of Vietnam, Cape Kennedy; the synthetic landscape of man-machine splicing. This repetition compulsion implies some pre-existing arche-trauma, but where, in the case of the car crash, is this original trauma found? The technophilic nature of these desire signs mean they are dislocated from any individual history: ‘For a moment I felt that we were the principal actors in an unrehearsed theatre of technology’. The ‘nightmare logic’ that the human is the actor in a play of machines is not reified in some Luddite dream narrative. Instead machines redress the fading body-image of the human in the same way Ballard is ‘in physical confrontation with…[his]...own body’. In the universe of Crash man is now more palpable, more material, more real than his historical counterpart. The real is relieved from traumatic tension, a ‘maze’ of ‘insane fantasies’ freed at the moment the object becomes the event. Violence, specifically technological violence, opens the fading body-image of man up to a new plateau of virulent sensuality, a kind of Promethean knowledge that cannot be un-known. This is why Vaughan must actualise the rehearsal of death in order to move not beyond "knowledge" and "sense", but to a space in which knowledge and sense are rendered useless. The object of the car becoming car crash is a movement not dissimilar to Vaughan’s. It transforms from object-in-space to event-in-time. Ballard stood on his balcony and realised that ‘the human inhabitants of this technological landscape no longer provided its sharpest pointers, its keys to the borderzones of identity’. This is because the object is no longer a holistic static entity in space, but an implosive spontaneous event in a time. Its dimensions cannot be hypostatized; intentional qualities no longer hold, replaced by spontaneous accidental qualities. Potential replaces functionality. The catastrophe signifies the liberation of the real, the release of trauma, desire and repression. Ballard knows he can ‘give something…[he]…wasn’t remotely aware of before’ as if something latent is reified, some potentiality that was almost subsumed within the morass of unreality makes its way out of the surface, between the ‘unseen and unseeing’. A release, in Ballard’s case, of all the ‘deviant possibilities of sex’. It is no wonder Baudrillard praised Crash with its ‘potent confusion of fiction and reality’, but it would be a disservice to Ballard not to acknowledge the liberation of the real which the novel enacts; the violence with which the collision of ontological modes allows for a break from the dizzying vicissitudes conducive of technomodern realities. ‘The world was beginning to flower into wounds’. Seeing themselves as ‘ghostly images’ fractured on the surface of an ‘ashtray’ or ‘in the vinyl window’ forming a ‘unique geometry’ in the violent landscape of machines.

THE CONCEPTUAL DEATH [2]

A single death is a tragedy, a million is a statistic.


In chapter thirteen, ‘The Generations of America’, Ballard plays on the genealogies of the Bible, the various lineages listed in the Book of Genesis, Ruth and the opening nine chapters of the First Book of Paralipomenon. The chapter first serves to abstract, in their abundance, the names of which it is made up. Occasionally certain figures stand out, but the effect Ballard achieves here is a sort of formal echo, at once a product and reflection of the psychic fragmentation of techno-media interfacing. The names are rattled off like bullets from a machine gun, the individual claps absorbed into a long, repetitive drone, mimicking the endless relay of crises now honed to almost entirely homogeneous blocks of sensation with great precision by the social media platforms keeping the news complex churning in cyberspace. The names are sourced from magazines, ‘the editorial mastheads of Look, Life and Time’, and Ballard acknowledges the ‘unintended irony’ of the choice, ‘recruiting the names from the editors and production staff of three mass-magazines that helped to create the media landscape at the heart of The Atrocity Exhibition’. Unintended or not, in the context of systems theory, this choice brings to the fore the role of media institutions in forming not just the inner world of psychic reality, but the environment itself. Though the creation of multiple recursive feedback loops mass media has a determining influence over reality through the distribution and circulation of the beliefs, customs and mimetic behaviors that create the transindividual network of culture, but this cannot be enclosed entirely within the scope of the human. This dissolution is the essence of the ‘media landscape’ he is describing - at once the very literal highway view of scattered billboards, the hypnotic repetition of imagery on television or in magazines and now propagating through the internet, homogenising messages of desire and crisis-management, beauty and catastrophe, but also the interior mental world, regulated and channeled through the same transindividual symbolic corridors, where names are decoupled from their host bodies to free-float in the public sphere. The name of the protagonist changes corresponding to vaguely distinct traits, but this fragmentation is not so much intrapersonal as environmental - the name changes with the situation, T remains blank as the environments flow through him. The equation of the changing media landscape coordinated with the postures of the body and nested with the erosion of geologic formations marks initially the abandonment of a generalised model of fixed or constant mass media, whose machinations are effectively isolated from feedback, to an active, adaptive mass media, where these systems are not simply acting on psychic or behavioural processes but the composition of the terrestrial surface: open not only to psychogenetics, material or mystical inductions, deep assignments or archeological egodramatics, but the inhuman chasm deep time, the absolute unhome at the heart of the local and known. The Earth’s mantle; the miniature, occulted sun, is fed directly into the technical systems forming everyday culture. The displacement of the name is the death of the body. The instant the body is named, that it is given to discontinuity through individuation, it has signed its execution. This is a form of subjectivity without history, or at least without metaphysical history, a synthetic history enacted by the subject. A history of nothing. The disintegration of geography, technology and psychology; the public world, personal environment and inner psyche, into one another, is the central motif of the book. The primordiality of homogeneity: the desire for undifferentiated substance. The site of revolutionary impulse relinquished to autopoietic colonisation by capital flows, the siphoning of life-force keeping the billboards lit in the endless day. The banishment of the dark to the realm of the useless was so easy.

THE CONCEPTUAL DEATH [1]

9. Fiction is a branch of neurology.

14. Neurology is a branch of fiction: the scenarios of nerve and blood-vessel are the written mythologies of brain and body. Does the angle between two walls have a happy ending?

Relaying bodily sensation through a-human geometry, Ballard attempts to create a new spatial ontology through science fiction, to equip SF with the ability to describe ‘the greatest transformation of the life of this planet - the exploration of outer space’. Constrictions are released, for a moment, as Yuri Gagarin returns from the heavens to tell us that he had found no God. The outside is revealed: man is unmoored from his attachments, place slips, space unfolds. The sacrilegious dissolution of the sublime and inaccessible heaven does not only deal a blow to the Christian, but the historicised man of Earth; the pagan, the superstitious, possessive colonialist: ‘the man, who wherever he is found, is eternally encrusted in his tradition, in his truth, in his history, and who does not want the sacred seats of his beautiful landscape and great past to be attacked’. This is the man of place, given to lethargy, the gatekeeper of tradition, for whom in-world status can only be maintained through staking claim over the future-present. A victory for technology. A further step in the direction of that which gradually decouples us from our territories. Kruschev’s rambling speech, however, forces our retreat. The emptiness of the phrase welcome back to your homeland echoes through the annals of history. Perhaps we were not so sure after all. Scientism’s closure only forges more openings through which to access superstition. In the face of the unknowable, human knowledge manifests as a murmur. So long as the murmuring continues, the void is held at bay. Knowing is relinquished to equivocation. 

Ballard’s problem, then, is with tradition. Narrative tradition specifically (‘the sequential and consequential narrative, based as it is on an already established set of events and relationships, is wholly unsuited to create the images of a future that has as yet made no concessions to us’) but is not narrative the very structure of tradition in general? Tradition is just the enactment of narrative, and once it is cast into outer space or future time, we necessarily come up short. If the murmur creates a non-dialectical experience of language, an experience of language without synthesis, in order to speak into the future, SF must do the same. However, there is something very organic about the murmur. It is the mode of speech without direction, materialising a bodied temporality that anchors it within an endless present.

Future time is inhuman. There is no going back. As soon as the human is detached from its cerebral history it becomes Homo Sapien, the vessel through which to commence bio-psychic dissolution into the spinal landscape. Phenomenological anguish: time makes no concessions. SF’s achievement is measured in inorganicity, the disruption of the organisation of the lived present, of a closed being-there that neutralises the generative potentialities of the tentacular invasion of a deindividualised future time. It's effectiveness is determined through these tensions. The human, Homo Sapien, the mineral world, the metal that holds the accelerator to the foot lodged into the calf muscle during the auto crash. Unless we concede to hopeful anthropomorphism the linear temporality of evolution leaves us adrift in a future-past relation devoid of narrative. SF must step beyond any present based on organic organisation, the loss and reinvention of the organs, moving outward beyond all anthropomorphised biogenesis. Mating rituals give way to relations of pure geometry. Must the organic be dethroned in order to avoid the reductive tendencies of narrative? It is not a question of form distinct from content, since the two are ultimately inextricable taken forward. The Atrocity Exhibition promises a future through the openings generated between concentrated blocks of space-time. The fragments can only manifest as such through the promise of a future cohesion: the deferral of the whole from any given part, the whole embedded in every fragment. Adrift in the mineral swamp, the void rushes in. 

Level 2 ...?

VIOLENCE - VIOLENCE

The beginning, the start of the ‘sinister dimensions’, the ‘forty floors’ with a ‘thousand apartments’. Something had to have gone wrong; excessive communication, enough actualised sensory experience, a tireless simstim. Pornography is only so many neon ghosts. The history of violence works beyond the regime of epistemic partitioning. Violence moves through a variable plethora of dimensions, each more sinister than the last. Too many dimensions, too many chances to clash. Gangs of little boys form on the beach; excessive friendship leads to excessive violence. All alone in their meat-sacks on their way to work. Violence comes from communication like werewolves at a houseparty. It comes from the ‘aggressive blare of a record player’. The chatter at the Ballardian party is ‘deliberately over-animated’, as if each guest screams “I am more violent than you, Listen to me, I can colonise your auditory system, I can throw you off balance”. Vertigo is caused by Labyrinthitis which is inflammation of the inner-ear. A push from a high-rise and you are dead. Violence is manifest not only in violence; all is a manifestation of violence. Laing cannot look up because the sensation has a violent effect on him; vertical violence. Too many windows, too many lives, too many coves of alienation, but only to define his own alienation in the only way alienation can be defined; outside of itself. Like Laing, who treasures his ‘subtle kind of anonymity’ only through the anonymity of others, and because ‘people in high-rises tended not to care about tenants more than two floors below them’. The high-rise ‘machine’, Ballard himself refers to it as a servile machine, a machine built to serve the individual, to form itself around each singularity. Each apartment is a singular church of the ego that serves not ‘the collective, but the individual’. The high-rise is a paradox machine; how can it be malleable to the individual and thus oppose the collective, when the individual is part of the collective just as the collective is part of the individual? This is why they all drink the same cheap wine at Alice’s party. Machines are at work inside of machines inside of machines inside of machines ad infinitum; vertigo strikes ad nauseum. Nausea is violence too, as in to be violently sick, to violently throw up.

Sex is nowhere without pleasure and pleasure is nowhere without violence, but violence precedes sex; how can one consent without language? One can only be resigned. The homo antecessor had no language available with which to consent. A species born from violence. A species literally born from a meat-sack into a puddle of blood. But these violent tendencies like smashing the wine bottle 10 stories above are not crude attempts to return to that state. There is no way back if you have not left. Everything is born from violence. When confronted by his dentist neighbor Laing expects him to ‘ram a metal clamp between his teeth’. Why would he not? It is his job after all. As Ballard says, all is ‘thinly veiled antagonisms’. The high-rise forms in the same pattern as the social matrix with a ‘second life of its own’. There is always a collective unconscious ignoring the violence of signs that cover those veiled antagonisms. The unconscious of a collective is only the swell of excess infomation; detritus after an info-blitz. ‘After breakfast, Laing cleared the glass from the balcony. Two of the decorative tiles had been cracked. Mildly irritated, Laing picked up the bottle neck, still with its wired cork and foil in place, and tossed it over the balcony rail’. Violence seems only to come after the fact, forming teleologically after an irritation, a provocation. This is not the case. The cause of irritation and of aggression is violence. Cause and effect are not so simply demarcated in the violent cosmos.

How the middle-class violently demarcate themselves from the working-class because they hate themselves; how the high-rise is violently split between floors. It is impossible to know thyself in a world of alienation except through what your violence is directed towards. The poor hate the rich because they see in themselves a petty envy, a desire to have what they have not. The lower levels of the high-rise hate those higher than themselves; it is always easier to shit on those below than those above you. What is repression if not an act of violence? Fashion forms as a kind of aggressive flamboyance. Fashion is the violent colonisation of empty space. This is the reason the art dealer is ‘squaring’ up to Laing and not walking up to him, it is all a matter of dress, the ‘lapels of his dinner jacket flexing like overworked bellows’. The jacket is a jacket and it is also not a jacket, but not a jacket only because it is more than a jacket. It moves through metaphor colonising conceptual space via refiguration, like a desert snake, flexible, mutable, impervious to solidity, most threatening when it is not moving at all, when it can simply be. Nothing is more terrifying than a thing being what it really is.

Those people, those civilised leaders of men, who peer out of blinds over the city in the morning, refreshed, relaxed, happy to go about their day. Self-styled masters of the universe who believe with ‘all the intensity of racial prejudice’ in their myth of progress and goodness. That it is thanks to their goodness and their progress no one can know suffering. Beyond their block and round the corner something erupts, people die, are attacked, sexually assaulted, but those grand grey beacons of progress are high enough to hide them in the shadows. Those writers, critics, philosophers, who tell us how terribly oppressed we all are and yet would be nothing without this oppression. And when their oppressions run out they begin to think up new ones.

COLLISION [1]

The move from experience to meaning: languish in repetition, the point of departure.
Rigorous automatism, another oxymoron: swimming in dregs, the sacrifice of form.



We were only two. If the node expresses both zero and one, where is the work among content?


> aminomimesis
> authority
> cthelegnosis
> miasma




> seeding
> dispersal




> pneuma
> blood moor
> agent orange