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.
