JG Ballard and the Death of Affect, Part 2

7/29/2019 JG Ballard and the Death of Affect, Part 2

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The Work of Emotion: Ballard and the Death of Affect,Part II

Chapter 2: J.G. Ballard and theDecaying Landscape of AffectI Take My Desires for Reality Because I Believe in the Reality of My Desires -- SituationistSlogan [1] We need to invent a series of imaginary sexual perversions, just to keep our feelingsalive -- The Atrocity

Exhibition (p . 120 )

The introduction that Ballard wrote for the French edition ofCrash, first published in 1974, could

very easily be taken as a kind of symptom map for what he saw as the characteristics,preoccupations and psychopathologies of life in the twentieth century; and the perception at itsheart, that affect had undergone a transformation, or died altogether, is a thread that can betraced back to The Atrocity Exhibition, fragments of which were published as far back as 1967.The Crash piece aligns this emotional death with the aforementioned voyeurism, self-disgustand the infantile basis of our dreams and what Ballard sees at the almost limitless possibilitiesof the late

twentieth century, and the massive interventions of the media and the communicationsnetworks, eliciting a kind of spectacularised society, that can no longer rely on its formerepistemologies and ontological certainties- let alone moral and ethical ones. There is also theconception of the scientific view as a form of pornographic stare- rendering everything in closeup, abstracted and uncanny. In an article written about Salvador Dali forNew Worlds in 1969

titled The Innocent as Paranoid Ballard pointed to Dalis paintings as ably highlighting thesemyriad issues (to which he added biomorphic horror), and performed, as it were, this demise offeeling and emotion [that] has paved the way for all our most real and tender pleasures- in theexcitements of pain and mutilation; in sex as the perfect arena, like a culture bed of sterile pus,for all the veronicas of our own perversions; in our moral freedom to pursue or own

psychopathology as a game; and in our ever greater powers of abstraction. [2]

This passage is repeated almost verbatim in a section ofThe Atrocity Exhibition entitledBiomorphic Horror (AE p. 116) in which the knowing Dr. Nathan delineates the psychopathicbehaviour of the fragmented protagonist, Traven. In view of this it seems the logical place tostart this explication of the demise of emotion is The Atrocity Exhibition. While I dont want to

view Ballards entire corpus as one vast manifesto or manual for some new mode of living(although Ballards oeuvre is perhaps viewable in this way and ripe for this kind of treatment, itstrikes me as a reductive methodology) The Atrocity Exhibition is like a constellation of the ideasthat dominate Ballards work, or its DNA, and can be viewed as a kind of nexus for hisobsessions and fixations, from which, and into which, his earlier and later works permeate and

feed. [3] If there is a trajectory to follow to trace the theme of affect then it seems apposite tobegin it here and move outward always acknowledging the presence ofThe Atrocity Exhibitionas a underlying node; and such a trajectory would have to include the following strands ofinvestigation: the death of feeling, intimately entwined with notions of sexuality and bodily affect-


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this will ultimately revolve around an examination ofAtrocity... and Crash which are close inproximity and in subject matter, the latter growing out of a chapter (and reoccurring themes) inthe first. Ultimately, how the relationship between self and world as already explored in theexposition of Wollheims theory of emotion has been indelibly altered and what has motivatedand eventuated this fundamental breach or schism. This is also closely aligned with how time isfigured in Ballard, and how a move toward a kind of spatialization of the life-world affects the

orientations and navigability of the life world in general, but specific to this piece, the formationand historical structure of emotions and emotional behaviour; this will involve a look at some ofthe earlier short stories such as the Voices of Time and The Terminal Beach and two novelsfrom the mid to late 70s, High Rise and Concrete Island.

Generat ing Blankness: The Atrocity Exhibition and Crash

Another aspect to Ballards introduction to Crash was his decrying of the traditional novelstructure, claiming its bourgeois form and the fact that it relied on notions of alienation andisolation, were outmoded and not suitable for describing the world of the late twentieth century;instead a new form was required. For Ballard this form was ostensibly science fiction which wasable to provide new morphologies and new ways of understanding the psyche and world. Thisscience fiction would attempt to place a philosophical and metaphysical frame around the mostimportant events within our lives and consciousness, and it would be able to move outside thegeneric formulations of outer space exploration (which by the mid-seventies had becomevirtually redundant and even banal) and explore innerspace, that psychological domain...wherethe inner world of the mind and the outer world of reality meet and fuse. [4] This became adesire to mythologize and transcribe the present, to write a fiction of the ever-changing moment.For Ballard the mode of science fiction, despite its strictures and boundaries, was the defaultmode for this operation. Damien Broderick has said that, science fiction is that species ofstorytelling native to a culture undergoing the epistemic changes implicated in the rise andsupersession of technical -industrial modes of production, distribution, consumption and

disposal, [5] a point embellished by Scott Bukatman who sees it as narrating the dissolution of

the very ontological structures that we usually take for granted. [6] Thus texts likeAtrocity...arent ostensibly classic science fiction as we might come to understand them, yet are

dominated by the technology of mapping the present (and the future as it appears, bothtemporally and in the guise of things-yet-to-appear) and all its idiosyncrasies, a style thatoccupies the middle ground between the death of the written word and the dominance of thevisual image. [7] In an interview with Douglas Reed, Ballard calledAtrocity ...fragments of thedream machine that produces our lifestyle right now. I mean fictions like TV, Radio, politics, the

press...life is an enormous novel. [8] This was echoed in the introduction to Crash: for the writerin particular it is less and less necessary for him to invent the fictional content of his novel. Thefiction is already there. The writers task is to invent reality [9]: this reality, as portrayed inAtrocityis a vivid appalling thing, populated by monstrous banalities and characterized by cinematicoverload and instrumentalized perversions; and the text in purely experiential terms, is markedby a surgical precision and a cold, steely edge that is impenetrable and impermeable. The styleis fractured and fragmented, shards of narrative that give off their own eerie light, and reflect off

one another, promising a deeper meaning yet resistant to it; a collage structuredaround a blackhole, or a scotoma. This is the shattering of the classic bourgeois novel form that Ballardproposed and it dramatically eschews all canonic forms to generate its own atmosphere. Thereare several possible nodes around which it might be possible to arrangeAtrocity, and for thepurposes of this piece and to facilitate a move outwards I want to concentrate on two areas thatinform the death of affect and the deepening psychosis of the central protagonist, in all his

varying guises [10]: namely the increasing affectless scientific instrumentalism andmeticulousness of the gaze and the manner in which the body and other phenomena arefigured; and the ways in which the psyche is affected by the sheer overbearing weight and


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horrific content of the perpetual media influence, the conversion of everything into spectacle,and the emotional detachment that arises from this.

Roger Luckhurst asks the following pertinent question: What does The Atrocity Exhibitionexhibit? (Angle p. 95). This incisive enquiry focuses on both the content ofAtrocityand itssplintered form. It also sets off a curious doubling process which places the reader at two

removes from the exhibits and the devices used to display them. What might this schemaproduce? One could spend hours tracing how these variform themes interact with one another,let alone watch them play across the entire text (and maybe Ballards whole oeuvre); so, tofocus a fragment entitled Planes Intersect is instructive: on one level, the tragedies of CapeKennedy and Vietnam serialized on billboards ...On another level, the immediate personalenvironment, the volume of space enclosed by your opposed hands, the geometry of yourpostures, the time-values contained in this office. On a third level, the inner world of the psyche.Where these planes intersect, images are born, some kind of valid reality begins to assertitself (AE p. 72). With this decoding device to hand we can examine a piece entitled Journeysto an Interior:

Waiting in Karen Novotnys apartment, Talbot made certain transits: (1) Spinal: The Eye ofSilence- these porous rock towers, with their luminosity of exposed organs, contained an

immense planetary silence.... (2) Media: montage landscapes of war- webbing heaped in thepits beside the Shanghai-Nanking railway...; dead Japanese stacked like firewood in L.C.T.s offWoosung pier (3) Contour: the unique parameters of Karens body- beckoning vents of mouthand vulva, the soft hypogeum of the anus. (4) Astral: segments of his posture mimetized in the

procession of space. These transits contained an image of the geometry assembling itself in themusculature of the young woman, in their postures during intercourse, in the angles betweenthe walls of the apartment(AE p. 27)

If we move in reverse fashion through these stratified layers, and unpack their convolutedparameters, dissonant themes appear through the mist of the free associative nature of thesyntax and coaleasce- revealing the obsessions at the distorted center of the Exhibition. Thecomplex imagery and accumulation of detail in (4) Astral illuminate a variety of Ballards focuspoints: the removal of the barrier between inside and outside that causes a confusion oflandscapes so that the human body is one more thing in a space, undifferentiated from themachinic and inorganic; the refiguring of internalizations, mimetized in the machinery andarchitecture of the surroundings, so that representations of the landscape and geometric formsin-the-world are, instead of internally represented and cognised, are left, as it were, to multiply,creating confusion and disorientation; there is also the iteration of this in the relationshipsbetween different anatomies, so in this case the interactions between Traven and KarenNovotny are re-enacted in the geometry of the room. There is no emotional involvement in theconduct or descriptions here, merely a kind of detached and objectified para-gaze that renderseverything in view with the same concretized formulations. This is repeated in the formulationsin (3) in which Karen Novotnys body is objectified and instrumentalized and the gaze hones inon the various orifices on display: humanity is abstracted. Thus there is a reading ofAtrocitywhich sees it as a process of individuation or a an attempt to move toward a wholeness that is

promised by the fragmentation of the text; except that Traven is at once trying to piece togethera world that is mediatized and seemingly unknowable and yet he also evinces behaviourredolent of this world in all its shameless cinematized glory.(2) Media refracts this imagerythrough a televisual medium so that the gaze is unsure of its subject matter and unsure of themedium- is what we are seeing on a screen or before us in a knowable space, are theseprojections from a now externalized unconscious or separate mode of projection, endlesslybroadcasting its infernal messages? This is a constant theme in the text with myriad recoursesto images of cameras and references to the zoom lens. [11] Finally, with (1) Spinal there is ainhabiting of a canvas space in the shape of Max Ernsts The Eye of Silence, a surrealist


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nightmare of an ossified landscape with huge looming forms half born of, half trapped in vastrocky outcrops, through which Traven chases the form of the nymph and traces his ownpalaces of flesh and bone in the monstrous towers of rock- at once an exploration of the deep stratified time-layers of the human form and psyche (elsewhere, Ballard has called this deeptime or archaeopsychic time [12]) and a reiteration of the confusion and disorientation of thecrossing

of the internal/external divide. The piece (indeed the entire ensemble) is dominated by a curiousjuxtaposition of febrile delirium brought on by the association of so many disjunctures; it is atonce overcoded and overdetermined and yet characterized by an affectless, scientized

language of description that refuses differentiation. [13] This is a dominant mode of discoursethat conflates anatomical and architectural description, skeletal and exoskeletal forms, projectedhorrific images of war and the avant-gardism of a surrealist landscape- all under the aegis of animpersonalized mediated gaze that rejects and repels value and tone, embodied in the form ofDr. Nathan the Daedalus in this neural drama (AE p. 87). Thus, Traven is adrift in a world inwhich he can find no purchase; everything has become colonized by a voracious media, eventhe third level of the psyche and the unconscious, so that even the febrile possibilities ofsurrealism are nullified and co-opted. Viewed in this light The Atrocity Exhibition can be seen asa series of codes to be deciphered, a mode of working through this new landscape and ofcracking it, finding new modes of expression; and Travens peregrinations as a method ofexploration, an attempt at transcendence. Roger Caillois in an essay written on natures voguefor mimicry wrote memorably about this confusion of space, he put it thus: the living being is nolonger the origin of the coordinates but is one point among others; it is dispossessed of its

privileges and, in the strongest sense of the term, no longer knows where to put itself . [14] Tocombat this

disorientation there is a profound need, both in a spatial and an emotional sense, to forge newmethods for orientation and feeling: we need to invent a series of imaginary sexual perversions,

just to keep our feelings alive; the only way we can make contact with each other is in terms ofconceptualizations; all violence for that matter, reflects the neutral exploration ofsensation ...Travers...has composed a series of new sexual deviations, of a wholly conceptual

character, in an attempt to surmount this death of affect (AE 95, 117, 120). And yet,maddeningly, the purveyor of these gnomic utterances, these possibilities of transcendentbehaviour, is always Dr. Nathan the embodiment of the affectless scientist whose gaze andmeticulous delineations of the symptoms of the psychotic Traven, preside over the text and thusreclaim any subversion, co-opt it back into the fragmented world of the Exhibition as if the wholeset-up were on a reel-to-reel projector. This way of seeing the text leads to a productive way ofunderstanding this maddening insensate realm; namely one which explores the notion of thesociety as spectacle as investigated by Guy Debord.

Society as Spectacle

As Roger Luckhurst has said, Atrocity concerns the explosion of the media landscape...reality isdefined as that constituted by the media (Angle p. 95). We have already established above howthis explosion has invaded all aspects of the lives of the characters even to the point of theunconscious; and the modes in which this manifests such as the confusing of landscapes, bothphysical and mental, and the ways in which the media instrumentally affects the desires andorientations of the characters. Michel Delville has figured this as the metastatic multiplication ofimages in our mass media world and the subsequent trivialization of war, murder and rape havegiven rise to a new semi-unconscious logic of violence. [15] This can be seen in the increasinglydetached and bizarre closing sections in which the infamous section titled Why I Want to FuckRonald Reagan is alongside two disconnected and detached pieces about plastic surgery,nominally upon the bodies of Mae West and Princess Margaret (AE pgs. 165, 177-184).


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Luckhurst seizes on two theorists of the sixties who were concerned with the influence of themedia on the human psyche and on a wider level of the effects of technology in general:McLuhan with his mantra of understanding media (the medium is the message [16]) andJacques Ellul who worked on ideas of technique and mechanization and the ways in whichthese have altered the both the social world and the psyche. We can also interpolate GuyDebord into this matrix of media theory. Debord with a hyperbole worthy ofThe Atrocity

Exhibition saw it that society had moved into a new realm utterly dominated by media and thatwas subjugated under the control of the all-powerful spectacle. Guy Debord was writing at atime of mass production, in the consumer boom of the 1950's and his theoretical work wasnotionally concenred with elements of social transformation and how the spectacle hadsaturated and permeated every level of the social system. Peter Wollen asserts that thisconsumer-led society confronted producers with their products alienated not only in moneyform, quantitatively, but also in image form, qualitatively, in advertising, publicity, media:

instances of the general form of the spectacle. [17]" So we have a situation in which thealienating effect is doubled, abstracted a second time, our products are beamed back at us, justpart of the continuous stream of images that perpetually play out before us. Thus, we have a

society dominated by the image, or in Guy Debord's phrase, The Society of the Spectacle. [18]

For Debord, then, society has come under the domination of the image; it is in thrall to it. Life ismerely an immense accumulation of spectacles" (Spectacle par. 1.) The spectacle is somethingproduced, but it has a life of its own. Debord calls it "the concrete inversion of life, it is theautonomous movement of the non-living" (par. 2); and it entrances our visual sense, plays onthe inherent hunger of our optic perception: The spectacle, has a tendency to make one see theworld by means of various specialised mediations (it can no longer be grasped directly) naturallyfinds vision to be the privileged human sense which the sense of touch was for other epochs:the most abstract, the most mystifiable sense correspond to the generalized abstraction ofpresent-day society (par. 18) As such it is inanimate but contemplation of it means, "lived realityis materially invaded by the contemplation of the spectacle" (par. 8.) It has imperial ambitions: itwants to invade reality; it is in a Marxist sense, ideology in its most insidious form. Allied to thisis the notion that the spectacle portrays an image of unity, but as Debord points out, "thespectacle reunites the separate, but reunites it as separate"(par. 29.) So, the passive viewerfeels unified in the spectacle, but in fact, the spectacle has a false unity. It promises a quasi-

mystical wholeness, but this wholeness is all schism, all fragment. This fragmentation is easilymapped onto Traven in his psychotic state of disintegration, as he seeks to decipher the codedworld around him and recalibrate it into a meaningful whole- a whole that is merely spectral,promised but unreachable. This is supplemented by what Debord highlights as the externality ofthe spectacle in relation to the active man appears in the act that his own gestures are no longerhis but those of another who represents them to him. This is why the spectator feels at homenowhere, because the spectacle is everywhere (par. 30). Thus the mediatized landscapepromises wholeness and yet does not deliver it, and its domain proves to be all pervasive andinescapable- a state of affairs that is easily recognisable in relation to Atrocity. The danger hereis to fall into a Debordian trap (or even worse, a Baudrillardian one) and seeAtrocityas merelyan endorsement of society as spectacle or a muted hyperreality, [19] and remove from it anysense of dynamism or critique. What many critics have seized on with Atrocity(indeed withmuch of Ballards experimental early work) is his ability to resist criticism in some way or

encompass the criticism within the work. Roger Luckhurst has, because of this, labelled textslikeAtrocityas thetic texts- texts which employ a certain amount of theory that seems toundercut the critic or at the very least create a certain doubleness that

seems to disorient or just involve the reader/critic in a maddening hermeneutic circle. I dontdoubt thatAtrocityhas the ability to do this and manages to draw in any critical comment into itsfractured landscapes, yet I think this kind of Baudrillardian reading tends to ossify Ballard insome way, or remove the dynamism that is inherent in the texts, and ignores the possibilitiesthat are produced. One might seize on Ballards own fascination with Ernsts Robing of the


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Bride (fragment title inAEp. 45) in which a woman is standing in a magnificent head dress ofred plumage and is transformed into a hybrid of woman and bird; behind her attached to the wallis a canvas recreation of the scene is which she is transformed into a kind of organic stone, anossified version of her dynamic self present in the room. One might say that to render Ballard asa lump of archaic coral is to miss the processes at play in this text, the possibilities produced bydynamic interaction and miss the mythologizinginstinct in Ballard, an urge toward a certain

didacticism. As he has said himself, the sort of mythologies Im interested in...are concernedwith ends rather than beginnings. Certainly theyre projections...Predictive mythologies...theseare mythologies you can actually live by: how to cope with the modern urban landscape, thewhole series of enciphered meanings that lie half-exposed within the urban landscape. [20]

Before moving to explore exactly how we might figure this ossification in terms of a death ofbodily affect as figured inAtrocityand Crash I want to reapply what we have examined so far-the affectless realm of the scientized gaze and the mediatized landscape- to the Wollhemianstudy of the emotions and ascertain how this moribund affect is compatible with a dynamic andnarrative informed theory of the emotions.

As we have seen above there is a strong emphasis in Wollheims delineation of the emotions onthe interface between the psyche of the individual, the psychological reality of emotional states,

and the life-world; indeed it might be said that Wollheims account of the emotions is aboutthisprimary relationship and the ways in which the emotions and emotional behaviour help us tonavigate this link. What Wollheim also concerns himself with is the narrative form of emotionalwork and the element of history in this process, thus there is a strong sense of time and itsfunction in both the short term in mental states and the longer term in mental dispositions. Howmight we view this when seen in the light of a text like The Atrocity Exhibition and its insistenceon altered states brought about by the infiltration of the media and the disorientation thiscauses; and the manner in which the affectless scientific gaze has caused a kind ofinstrumentalized voyeuristic gaze that confuses planes of being, and flattens out as it were,levels of differentiation?

The fundamental point here seems to be one about desire, in that it is desire that has beenknocked off course in some way, or has had its intentionality disrupted by a change in the

perception of objects. If we remember from the account earlier that desire (and thus emotion) isdirected outward into the lifeworld from the psyche toward an object, and if we are to take theworld ofAtrocityat face value, then it is this fundamental relationship that has been altered.Desire has come unmoored and seems to randomly fixate on various objects, to the point whereit becomes almost unrecognisable as classic desire, and floats free. Also, there is no sense ofa reality principle here; indeed it is unreality, in the guise of the all conquering spectacle that ismore alluring and powerful. In The Enormous Face, these designs were more than enormousreplicas. They were equations that embodied the relationship between the identity of the filmactress and the audiences who were distant reflections of her. The planes of their livesinterlocked at oblique angles, fragments of personal myths fusing with commercial cosmologies.The presiding deity of their lives the film actress provided a direct set of operating formulae fortheir passage through consciousness (AE p. 13). There is a new, off-kilter relationship herebetween object and desire, dictated to by different laws- the law of the spectacle that alters the

connections between inside and outside, subject and object etc. In this sense, the emotion thatforms on the back of desire that colours the world or create an attitude towards it, is malformed,or remains unformed altogether. This also informs the notion of the affectless scientized gazethat is unfazed by the tortuous scenes displayed endlessly in the media and the cool tonesemployed by Dr. Nathan to expound their cruel but perfect logic. In Love and Napalm: ExportU.S.A. Dr. Nathan in clinical and neutral language, describes how various experiments withextracts of footage of the war in Vietnam and torture of Viet Cong, close ups of genitalia of filmstars and fake recordings of Belsen and Auschwitz were carried out to ascertain there impacton audiences, ranging from suburban housewives to cancer patients. The crucial point here isnt


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necessarily the horror of what is being contemplated but the detached tone of the prose and thescientific language being

used- there is no differentiation apparent, no sense of outrage, just that the people who areviewing the multitude of images are deadened, blankly responsive to what they see. This feedsinto notions of the process of narrative and history in desire and emotion formation. In the

mediatized, spectacular society there is a perpetual present, modified by the omnipresence ofthe image. Paul Virillo talks of the image as now being so all pervasive as to have some of thesame properties as light: the image is no longer so much an image in the sense ofrepresentation, but in the sense of light. It's kind of seeing without knowing; a pure seeing.[21]Figured in this way time isnt a factor as such, and the usual processural aspect of desire andemotion formation are interrupted and dislocated. We could leave the explanation there, andfigureAtrocityas dead blankness, yet this would be to fall into the Baudrillardian trap highlightedabove, and allow the Ballardian project to become an ossified one and this would be to ignorethe obvious move toward new expressions of desire, new modes of understanding theseelemental landscapes. It is true that there is no denouement inAtrocityand that Travenultimately dissipates into the text, and into psychosis, yet what appears to be happening inthese experiments carried out by the egregious Dr. Nathan, is that desire has beenreprogrammed in some fashion, or has started to latch onto different objects, is in fact

experiencing a reawakening of sorts. He speaks of the latent sexual character of war and thatthese studies confirm that it is only in terms of a psychosexual module such as provided by theVietnam war that the United States can enter into a relationship with the world generallycharacterized by the term love (AE p. 151). There is also a multitude of references to ways inwhich the body is being realigned and new modes of desire being discovered in relationshipsbetween the body and technology, specifically, cars. What I want to move into now is adiscussion of the way in which bodily affect can be interpolated into the overall discussion ofemotion and emotional death and the ways in which desire and itsreawakening are refigured in

Atrocityand primarily, Crash.

[1] Quoted in Greil Marcus, Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century(London:Secker and Warburg 1989) p. 382

[2] The Innocent as Paranoid reprinted in The Users Guide to the Millennium (London:Flamingo 1998) p. 91. HereafterUGM. Ballard places Dali in the grand tradition of naives whotake the world innocently as it is and reproduce it. In this sense, Ballard sees the landscapes ofDali as showing the world as it really is, or as it were, revealing the latent content of the world.

[3] William Burroughs in his introduction to the book calls it literally an explosive book which isa neat metaphor for the way that the ideas and characters in it tend to reoccur both in pre-existing works and those that would follow after (p. vii).

[4] Ballard, intro. to Crash op. cit. p. 97[5] Damien Broderick, Reading By Starlight: Postmodern Science Fiction (London: Routledge1995) p.

155[6] Scott Bukatman, Terminal Identity(London: Duke University Press 1993) p. 10

[7] Andrzej Gasiorek, J.G. Ballard: Contemporary British Novelists (Manchester: ManchesterU.P. 2005) p. 4 Further references will appear parenthetically in the text as JGB.

[8] Interview with J.G. Ballard in Books and Bookmen,April 1971 [9] Ballard, intro. to Crash op.cit. p. 98


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[10] I will, for sake of clarity, call the central figure Traven. Roger Luckhurst uses thecontroversial label of T-Cell to bring together the fragmented psyche of Traven; controversialbecause the degenerative effect of HIV is measured by the depletion of T-cells in the body; yetas Luckhurst points out this depletion is mirrored in Travens disintegration and that cell is auseful way of describing a singular entity and a collective all under the one word. RogerLuckhurst, The Angle Between Two Walls: The Fiction of J.G. Ballard(Liverpool: Liverpool U.P.

1997) note p. 186. Further references to this book will appear parenthetically in the text asAngle. David Punter also draws attention to this splitting of character via the use of the name,but he instead points towards Freuds Psychopathology of Everyday Life and the ways in whichslips of the tongue and name mistakes are evidence of unconscious forces not yet mastered.See David Punter, J.G. Ballard: Alone Among the Murder Machines in The Hidden Script(London: Routledge 1985) For an interesting and thorough reading of the current conception ofemotion in deconstructive and post- structuralist thinking see Rei Terada, Feeling in Theory:Emotion After the Death of the Subject(London: Harvard 2001)

[11] Ballard enlarges the idea of the blank, two dimensional field of the zoom lens in The 60Minute Zoom in which a protagonist films his wifes sexual liaisons in a hotel room and isntemotionally affected by it but ends up joining the frame of the zoom and murdering her. Witnessalso Wilders insistence on filming everything in High Rise, clinging to his camera like it is some

kind of mythic object.

[12] Which Way to Inner Space first printed in 1962 in New Worlds reprinted in UGMp. 198

[13] While I dont want to pursue a line of criticism that focuses on a notion of a schizophrenicexperience of the world it is worth noting that Jameson sees this kind of glaring and painfulperception as indicative of this mode of seeing: The schizophrenic is thus given over to anundifferentiated vision of the world in the present, a by no means pleasant experience (PM p.120).

[14] From an essay entitled Mimicry and Legendary Psychasthenia cited in Rosalind Krauss,Corpus Delicti in Rosalind Krauss and Jane Livingston eds., LAmour Fou: Photography andSurrealism (London: Arts Council 1985) p. 74

[15] Michel Delville, J.G. Ballard(Plymouth: Northcote House 1998) [16] Marshall McLuhan,Understanding Media (London: Ark 1987)

[17] Peter Wollen, 'The Situationist International: On the Passage of a Few People Through aRather Brief Period of Time' in Raiding the Icebox(London: Verso 1993)

[18] Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle (Detroit: Black and Red 1983) All futurereferences refer to this edition and will appear parenthetically in the text

[19] Baudrillards reading ofCrash threw up arguments along these lines (see Baudrillard, Jean,Two Essay: Simulacra and Science Fiction; Ballard's Crash, Science Fiction Studies vol. 18

1991) in which he placed Crash outside of moral boundaries and in the realm of hyperreality.For responses to this see Science Fiction Studies Vol. 19 No. 3 1992

[20] Ballard in interview with Graeme Revell in Re/Search No.8/9 1984 p. 42 [21] Paul Virillo, in'The Work of Art in the Electronic Age' Block14 1988 p. 9


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JG Ballard and the Death of Affect, Part 2

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