BALLARD AND WRITING

‘Where do we find enough innocence for generating universal history?’ ask Deleuze and Guattari. Innocence relates to both the legal and the moral so we are already at the crossroads of conflicting value systems: the technical and the social. Deleuze and Guattari trace the dissolution of universal history through the production and anti-production of the socio-cultural milieus that make way for the proliferation and tension of code. What are the differences and similarities shared by production and anti-production? Anti-production is any force which opposes movement within a system such that it governs the limitations and patrols their exterior. Production is the primary force that makes use of the virtual-potential of any material or abstract quantity which anti-production works to delimit. Both allow for the proliferation of positive and negative intensities to pass through matter; the process of production. Every socio-cultural expression emanates from the auto-processes of production and anti-production. Writing as a process is charged with these auto-productive processes. All this means is that the production of writing is always at the limit of signification while anti-production is the limit of this width as well as its exterior. As with the flows of Capital, the book limits ‘the possibility of its own dissolution’ and in the same movement ‘it is constantly opposing with its exasperated strength the movement that drives it toward its limit’. 

Universal history is the shared signification from which cultural expression completes the duality of signifier/signified, if it can be said that such a duality exists. The disruption of signification by the first great wave of deterritorialization, which we shall return to later, results in the severance of expression from universality; from that moment onwards everything comes at a remove of unintelligibility. Socio-cultural codes are re-written without reference to a coherent ontogenous logic, instead seemingly disparate entities enter into unity under a muddled cohesion. The result is the complete metaphorization of expression and the over-production of signification; everything is like the thing that it is, but nothing ever is what it is. Among the disparate and often conflicting drives of Capital is the drive to make signs work. Due to the ever-increasing speed of associations, signs work to regulate the waves of re-codification which speed-up at an exponential rate. Signs work infinitely harder in order to keep up with the fluctuations of meaning and its representation, while the primitive inscribing socius is substituted for axiomatic codes of ‘abstract quantities’. In short, signification is consumed by signal.

As with much of the first volume of Capitalism and Schizophrenia it is, as it always has been, a question of machines. Social inscription, what later becomes known as writing, is a social machine in the purest sense. It is not until writing crosses over to print that writing-as-technical-machine appears. Now, it is not to say that all words printed are technical or that all non-printed words are social, for there are always ruptures, crossovers and contingencies. Writing can be technically correct while socially incorrect, perhaps this is why Ballard mixes medical jargon with obscenities in his texts; fusing the technical and the obscene. The censorious reception ‘Do not publish!’ speaks to the exterior model of anti-production, while the medical jargon stifles the interior mode of free expression with a semantic stuffiness. It is such that the terms ‘technical’ and ‘social’, ‘productive’ and ‘anti-productive’ are interchangeable with manifold suggestions. Ballard expresses it well: whatever 'efforts to return to the perimeter’, border or limit we find ourselves ‘once more in the centre’. 

The whole of production is anti-productive just as the whole of anti-production is productive. This is not to presuppose a dualism where there is none, for while disparate in principle the two never cease to combine. Whenever a flow is controlled within the structure of production the limits of that structure are anti-production itself. But anti-production by its very nature generates new forms and contingencies; new ruptures are only possible by way of rupturing through a limit or perimeter. But this rupture is quickly taken up by Capital so that the limit once broken through is recodified so as to make a centre out of a limit. Rupturing the limit brings into existence the formation of a different centrality, this is the movement of axiomatics flowing through and beyond the body of the socius. Nothing is ever allowed to be out of place for too long, even the nomad has to set up camp each night. We arrive back by way of Ballard at writing. It becomes impossible to say which is out of place in a Ballardian text, graphic erotica or medical jargon. It would be reductive to conclude it is a process of assimilation within the same expressive mode, for both are stark in their contrast, serving different purposes and producing different effects. 

Meaning is stretched to an extremity, nothing resembles itself, cryptography gestures towards signs of incomprehensibility. In Terminal Beach we find Traven stranded on the shores of meaning led by the ‘symbols of a cryptic alphabet’ approaching nothingness. The bleak process, like a bunker giving ‘birth to a megalith’, is that of one nondescript shape producing another. A definitional nothingness, call it post-signification, is the achievement of over-signification: surplus-signification and over-decodification. The shores we wake up to at the terminal beach are strewn with the waste of an apocalypse of signification. An implosion of meaning as the result of extreme over-exertion. In a word, nothing means anything. Overproduction: the word collapses under the weight of over-signification; everything relates to everything else. Traven searches amongst the memory of his lost family, not as a symbol of primordial lack, but as the notion that expands his search for something solid in a homogenous sea of liquid nothingness. Traven finds himself following ‘emblematic beacons’ inferring the substitution of something in which place they stand at a remove; ‘runic ideograms’ always pointing towards a cryptographic sign and the unintelligible. ‘Their figures’ write Deleuze and Guattari ‘do not derive from a signifier nor are they even signs as minimal elements of the signifier; they are nonsigns, or rather nonsignifying signs, point-signs having several dimensions, flow-breaks or schizzes’. For Traven in Ballard’s own words they are ‘tutelary symbols of a futuristic myth’. 

Towards which myth do they gesture? Towards the unending process of axiomatization, the waves of deterritorialization that wash the terminal beach, whereby social and written codes are replaced by the free-flow of the logic of Capitalism. To be sure the logic of Capitalism does not refer to Capitalism directly, but rather the machinations that are proliferated by it, the same ones that found the unconscious being of man. Machinations present long before their actualisation. ‘In a sense, capitalism has haunted all forms of society, but it haunts them as their terrifying nightmare, it is the dread they feel of a flow that would elude their codes’. When the nightmare comes alive, writing becomes a ‘figurative...constellation that dissolves in order to be replaced by another one’. The dimensions of writing whereby meaning is rested in place are replaced by a process of axiomation whereby waves of representation reconfigure meaning each time. Thus the structure of language determined by the duality of the signifier/signified distinction is replaced by a theory of flows and breaks which ‘abandons all privileged reference’. This new process of language, a process which Ballard’s writing constitutes fully, involves the ‘concerted destruction of the signifier’, a written use of language that has ‘adapted to the nature of both the capitalist and the schizophrenic flows’. In Terminal Beach Traven follows the ‘symbols of a cryptic alphabet’ in his nomadic search for what is lost.