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 ...?
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