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.
