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.
