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.
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.
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