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

Chapter 4: Psychic Landscapes, Physical Environments




The sort of architectural spaces we inhabit are enormously important- they are powerful. If every member of the human race where to vanish, our successors from another planet could reconstitute the psychology of the people on this planet from its architecture -- J.G. Ballard [1]


In this city, where suburb, strip, and urban centre have merged indistinguishably into a series of states of mind and which is marked by no systematic map that might be carried in the memory, we wander, like Freud in Genoa, surprised but not shocked by the continuous repetition of the same, the continuous movement across already vanished thresholds that leave only traces of their former status as places -- Anthony Vidler [2]  

This section of the piece will examine the ways in which we can figure into the equation of affect decay the twin features of landscape and architecture; and via an understanding of the ways in which space place and how the perception of these affects emotional entwinement with the world, move toward an understanding of how we are affected by environment and architecture. In the two main texts I wish to look at, Concrete Island and High Rise, [3] there is a fundamental disruption caused by the environments that are constructed by and as part of modernity and modern urban planning. Something in these modern constructions has caused and is caused by a neutered emotional disposition and as such is indicative of a paucity of emotional content in modern life. I want to examine how this is featured in these two novels and how we might come to understand the ways in which it might be possible to bypass these new formations, or encompass them and map their uncanny spaces.

One of the major aspects of Atrocity’s febrile delirium is the confusion caused by the general landscape that the characters interface with. There are numerous occasions in which Traven and Karen Novotny seem to be in a drugged state and see features and contours of the architecture and specifically the road systems as facets of some larger organism, or confuse its geometry with their own bodies. ‘The Impact Zone’ contains a reverie in which Traven sees the face a young woman and figures in it the ‘geometry of the plaza’ (AE p. 28) ‘A Confusion of Mathematical Models’ sees Traven turning towards a multi-storey car park and seeing that its ‘inclined floors contained an operating formula for their passage through consciousness (AE p. 93). And in ‘The Death of Affect’ when Traven and Novotny are trying to piece together a car crash from the abandoned scene Novotny is mesmerised by the edifices around them: ‘He felt Karen touch his arm. She was staring at the culvert between bridge and motorway, an elegant conjunction of rain-washed concrete forming a huge motion sculpture’ (AE p. 108). This is mirrored in Crash when Ballard convalesces on his balcony, above the beetling traffic on the motorways beneath his flat and scrutinizes the scene before him: ‘looking closely at this silent terrain, I realized that the entire zone which defined the landscape of my life was bounded by a continuous artificial horizon’ (Crash p. 53). Ostensibly, the world as described in Crash is very much our own world. It is the suburbs around London, and precisely, the suburbs around Heathrow Airport. The areas described- the motorways, the all-night cafes and the reservoirs- are real places, but in many senses, they are very much unreal places. These are zones that defy the usual categorization of place: they are artificial areas, man-made and machine-like. Christopher Tilley has characterized places as, constituting ‘space as centres of human meaning’ [4], yet in these ‘places’, meaning is subtly fractured or displaced. One might say that Ballard is playing on the idea of Utopia. The word literally means ‘no-place’ or ‘non-place’ and these areas that proliferate in Crash, Concrete Island and High Rise are precisely that: non-places, outside time, not of this world or of any other. As Marc Augé has said, ‘non places are the real measure of our time…. The airports and railway stations, hotel chains, leisure parks, large retail outlets.’ [5] So the landscape of this utopia is dominated by unreal architecture, liminal zones of artificiality; and these regions of ontological uncertainty are dominated by an uncanny and perverse logic that manifests itself in both the landscape and the psyches of those contained within them- an unholy fusion of place and mind in which normalised notions of affective human relationships are distorted, undercut by the alienating environment.

Is Concrete Island a non-place as it is figured above? As Margaret Morse has said, ‘the first distinguishing feature of non-space is its dreamlike displacement or separation from its surroundings’ [6]v- Concrete Island and its location are essentially dreamlike, despite its built status and its connectedness to the world from which it is displaced. I would argue that whilst the island bears the classic hallmarks of a non-place and can be seen as an isolated example of an alienated urban space, it is markedly altered by the fact of its liminality and by this I mean that it is ‘uncreated’ as it were, an unplanned, accidental interstitial zone. It is in this way made uncanny because it is at once a metonymic example of the confusion of modern urban life, a ‘something one does not know one’s way about in’ [7] yet it is at one remove from this, because of its accidental nature, and is thus made doubly alienating and uncanny: this is a place out of time and a space out of geography. If we take Christopher Tilley’s explanation of what a space is, namely that ‘space can’t exist apart from the events and activities within which it is implicated… The spaces, as social productions, are always centered in relation to human agency and are amenable to reproduction or change because their constitution takes place as part of the day-to-day praxis or practical activity of individuals and groups in the world. They are meaningfully constituted in relation to human agency and activity’ [8], then this splinter of land is divorced from this and as such has its own anomalous reality. Yet, Maitland’s entry to this abjected world, hurtling through the crash barriers from the artificial world of the motorway system, doesn’t signal a total removal from reality because this uncanny space is of course both peopled and has its own hidden histories buried beneath the layers of soil and foliage. So it becomes not merely a zone out of time but an anathothic space of possibility, a zone of echoes and strata which Maitland gradually uncovers. [9] In this way Concrete Island becomes like a movement of free association with the cities detritus, a recollaging of lost meaning, a reconnecting with the emotional zones of the city, as if this forced crash has been a means of understanding.

The ostensible narrative of the novel is one that broadly follows that of Robinson Crusoe in that there is an accident, a shipwreck, and the protagonist fights to be free of the place in which he has become, essentially, a captive of circumstance. In this example, Maitland is captive because of the hostile environment from which he cannot escape; he is bounded on all sides by roaring motorways and steep embankments. This entrapment ensures then, that Maitland has to thoroughly explore this triangular patch of land, and like Crusoe, attempt to ‘use’ its resources and come to understand its contours and stratification. [10] Maitland’s initial attempts to escape are straightforward responses to his predicament: he climbs an embankment and tries to flag down the endless stream of anonymous cars; he starts a fire using the petrol from his vanquished car; he tries to write a message on the parched ground of the island- all reasoned attempts to flee to the life he has been cut off from. All of these come to nothing yet all the while Maitland seems to be becoming entranced by this uncanny space and starts to proceed according to its strange logic; trying to understand the messages he perceives in the swaying grass, and the ciphers hidden in the unfamiliar geometries around him. [11] He notices that the land he is on, despite its artificial demeanour actually bears the hallmarks of a once-lived space: ‘Comparing [the island] with the motorway system, he saw that it was far older than the surrounding terrain, as if this triangular patch of waste ground had survived by the exercise of unique guile and persistence, and would continue to survive, unknown and disregarded, long after the motorways had collapsed’ (CI pp 68-9). He discovers remnants of Victorian houses, a churchyard and some later Edwardian houses (CI p. 69), an air-raid shelter and a basement of an old cinema complex (CI pgs. 76, 88). There is an element here of psychogeography, or of a derivé- a reclamation of urban space by reconnecting obsolete lines of force, or by random associations, uncovering new ways of seeing, and new methods of exploration. By navigating the terrain in this fashion, Maitland is recovering the original emotional structures buried in the ruins of this uncanny, fragmented topography and on a microcosmic level, balancing out the deadened affective force of the artificial zones of being inherent to urban colonisation. By uncovering these remnants of a buried urban geography it could be said that Maitland is attempting an act of recovery of a space made alien uncanny by its separated, artificial nature and restoring to it a sense of place, of human presence. Yet this optimistic and reductive reading, whilst valid to a certain degree works against the final outcome of the novel. Maitland might well reconnect these lines of force yet they do not bring about a reawakening of affect; instead he seeks to dominate the island and his man Friday (incarnated in two figures, the mad tramp Proctor and the prostitute Jane) becomes subjugated to his imperial ambitions. Maitland ultimately falls in line with the internal logic of this abandoned space. In effect, the island with its affectless isolation and topography, and all its contingent possibilities, ‘traps’ Maitland and he remains there as its lord and heir, not returning like Crusoe, but with his escape as an iteration, projected into the future. There is a sense then, that Maitland has achieved the pinnacle of capitalistic monadic life, marooned in this abjected space, and whilst pointing towards the possibility of movement and dynamic escape, ultimately the novel is pessimistic; and the inability of Maitland indeed, his perpetual deferral of the act of escaping is a potent symbol of failure. One can figure High Rise in the same fashion: that ultimately the attempt at mastery of the environment is a failure, and that the affect-deadening of the architecture is all-consuming. I want to examine how this is envisioned in this brutal text, and probe it for signs of optimism.

Edward Relph has said, ‘the paradox of modern landscapes is that they are dehumanising because they are excessively humanised. There is almost nothing in them that has not been conceieved and planned so that it will serve those human needs which can be assessed in terms of efficiency or improved material conditions. But there is almost nothing in them that can happen spontaneously, autonomously or accidentally, or which expresses human emotions and feelings.’ [12] High Rise works in this milieu and works against it, providing both a critique of it and seeking to examine how we are complicit in our architectural creations, and use it for our own ends. In this sense then, the novel is at once a site of affectual and ontological decay and a rebirth of these basic categories in a new, mutated psychopathology.  Andrzej Gasiorek has claimed that ‘the real psychopathology at work in the high-rise manifests itself in the production of a certain kind of subjectivity; the numerous examples of deviant behaviour catalogued in the novel are epiphenomena of an affectless, detached, morally neutral state of mind’ (JGB p. 128): the questions must be then, why has this state of affairs come about?

The high-rises, jutting into the sky are like isolated time-capsules or laboratories, cut-off from the rest of the landscape and as such allowing for new forms of living to be explored. They are at once, anchored in reality and yet floating free from it, aimed halfway into space and the realm of new possibilities. This movement toward the realm of space is at once a metaphoric advancement into psychosis [13] and also a mode of inward isolation, an arena of psychopathologic dynamism. The rest of the world is out there, metonymically present in the form of the absent city ‘hidden by the smog’ but ‘each day, the towers of central London seemed slightly more distant, the landscape of an abandoned planet receding slowly from [the] mind …blurring Laing’s memory of the past’ (HR pp. 8-9): it infinitely recedes; and this recession is figured as spatial and temporal (‘When he had moved to the high-rise, he had travelled forward fifty years in time’ HR p. 9) so that history diminishes as the psychic space of the high rise takes hold. For Anthony Vidler this architectural shift away from notions of history was born of a therapeutic need to escape the horrors of slums of the nineteenth century and thus this new ‘clean’ living style was to ‘be reinforced on every level by design.’ Yet, as Vidler goes on to point out, this insistence on an historical blindness inevitably ‘this housecleaning operation produced its own ghosts, the nostalgic shadows of all the “houses” now condemned to history or the demolition site’ (Vidler pp. 63-4). Corbusier’s house-machine was a solution to slums, but it was also an isolationist technique, creating a zone of affectless territory, characterized by a machine-like atmosphere, something that Tristan Tzara called ‘the complete negation of the image of the dwelling’ [14]; and it brought into being new (buried?) modes of existing, innovative behaviours. Viewed in this way, the living space had ‘been transformed into a potentially dangerous psychopathological space populated by half-natural, half-prosthetic individuals, where walls reflect the sight of their viewers, where the house surveys its occupants with silent menace’ (Vidler p. 161). This concept of a new psychopathological space is the very fibre of High Rise and the matrix of symptomatic conduct is very much the product of it: ‘Secure within the shell of the high-rise…they were free to behave in any way they wished, explore the darkest corners they could find. In many ways, the high-rise was a model of all that technology had done to make possible the expression of a truly ‘free’ psychopathology’ (HR p. 36). The occupants become a new breed, exploring the possibilities of this newly imagined space and it attendant psychopathologies. Thus, the high-rise was a ‘Pandora’s Box whose thousand lids were one by one inwardly opening. The dominant tenants of the high-rise, Laing reflected, those who had adapted most successfully to life there…a new social type was being created by the apartment building, a cool, unemotional personality impervious to the psychological pressures of high-rise life, with minimal needs for privacy, who thrived like an advanced species of machine in the neutral atmosphere’ (HR p. 35). And this new species alienated by its immediate surroundings and from the wider world is slowly made savage, roaming the corridors of the high-rise like rabid morality-free clans, or packs of wild animals. And the high-rise presides over this melee like an organicised deity, at once a larger figure on the stage, and an extrapolated projected version of these newly forming psychopathologies. ‘She referred to the high-rise as if it were some huge animate presence, brooding over them and keeping a magisterial eye on the events taking place. There was something in this feeling- the elevators pumping up and down the long shafts resembled pistons in the chamber of a heart. The residents moving along the corridors were the cells in a network of arteries, the lights in their apartments the neurones of a brain’ (HR p. 40). [15]

Where I think Ballard departs from this damning of Corbusier’s machinic living spaces is in his insistence that we explore the possibilities inherent in alienating spaces and that the changes brought about by it are welcomed as much as despised. As Laing [16] succinctly puts it, ‘It’s a mistake to assume we are moving towards a state of happy primitivism. The model here seems to be less the noble savage than our over-indulgent post-Freudian selves, outraged by all that over-indulgent toilet training, dedicated breast-feeding and parental affection…Our neighbours never had happy childhoods to a man and still feel angry. Perhaps they resent never having had a chance to be perverse’ (HR p. 109). So High Rise becomes a visionary text of possibility, of new ways of awakening affect through pursuing alienation to its logical extremes and seeing it as a mode of existence; the atavistic degeneration is an exploratory method of transcendence of a world that no longer sees transcendence as viable, or in which transgression is possible.

Ballard has said elsewhere, ‘in the case of Crash, High Rise and The Atrocity Exhibition, I offer an extreme hypothesis, for the reader to decide whether the hypothesis I advance is proven’ [17]: one’s instinctive reaction is that the hypothesis is not proven, at least outside the body of the text itself (they are, of course intense in their internal logical coherence) and that the very extremity of the texts negates the possibility of any didactic or pedagogic outcome- ultimately, what are we to learn from such fanatically imagined texts such as High Rise and the others that have been explored in this piece? They seem pessimistic in their premises, defeatist and apocalyptic: how then, are we to understand these portrayals and symptomatic explorations of the death of affect and more pertinently, the ways in which we might envisage its reawakening? My own instinct is that Ballard is working in the realms of freedom here and his pessimistic, apocalyptic tone is one that strongly recognises the increasing erosion of personal and social freedom- and on a deeper level the fundamental freedom of transgression. ‘I would sum up my fear about the future in one word: boring…the future is just going to be a vast, conforming, suburb of the soul, one’s almost got to get up in the morning and make a resolution to perform some sort of deviant or antisocial act, some perverse act…in order to establish one’s own freedom’ [18]  These texts and their ideas are extreme engagements with the ways in which we as humans cope with life in the late twentieth century, the ways in which this has affected our emotional lives- in effect, deadened us-  and the possibility of ways of ‘altering’ ourselves to transgress these newly defined limits. In his later novels, such as Cocaine Nights and Millennium People, where one might argue that Ballard has become a more ‘orthodox’ writer, these transgressions are figured as violent assaults, actual aggression (indeed, murder) used by a central, dominant figure to awaken and stir up the valium enclaves to which we have banished ourselves. [19] I am not convinced that these later novels are powerful enough to suggest a valid methodology - or indeed a manifesto, for these are novels that seem to be about rediscovering a sense of agency – for generating a new organization of emotional behaviour, or for enabling a healthier and free affective disposition. What I want to do in concluding this piece, by way of a reading of one of Ballard’s most celebrated short stories, ‘The Drowned Giant’, is to finally think a way through and beyond the ‘Death of Affect’ to a place which restores a sense of emotional praxis and a reclamation of this damaged and decayed affective behaviour.

Conclusion: The Freedom of Emotional Praxis

It would be nonsense to insist that, regarding our emotional lives, we are the ‘captains of our fate’ but nevertheless we are the oarsmen and that is enough to hold that we are responsible for our emotions -- Robert C. Solomon [20]

One of the threads that has passed through this entire piece is one that expounds a theory of emotional praxis, a way of envisioning a return to (or return of) emotion that seeks to emphasise the way in which we use emotion, and indeed the way it uses us. As we have come to understand it, emotion is: a dynamic, narrative force that we at once produce and at once produces us; a processural force that commits us and orients us to the lifeworld; something that is at once a profoundly individual and yet transcendent of the individual and present in societal ‘structures of feeling’; an intense and self-reflective expression of what and who we are. Yet the central thesis as we have seen, as figured through the works of J.G. Ballard is that something has occurred to cause this to breakdown and die away completely: there has been a rupture or schism that has entailed a death of affect, a fundamental break between our emotional lives and the world which we inhabit. The result is a poorer life, dominated by an affectless anaesthesia, and a lack of emotional engagement in respect of our relationships with others and our environment. The reasons for this are manifold but as we have envisioned them they are as follows: in High Rise and Concrete Island as a change in our environmental awareness and the ways in which the architecture and modern experience of urban life has unseated us, caused a sense of disorientation and a spatial and temporal confusion; in Crash as a marked decrease in bodily affect as caused by zones of artificiality and the invasion of an instrumentalized, technical logic figured in the metallized aesthetic of the motorcar and as such desire had become mutated and dictated to by this all-consuming spurious logic; and in The Atrocity Exhibition there was an intensifying of these themes to the point of structural collapse with the characters so subjugated to the world of the spectacle as to be unsure of their own ontological and epistemological grounding, and this was characterized in the shift in dominance to a scientized, affectless gaze that refused differentiation. What I think needs to be addressed in this conclusion is to what extent we ‘buy’ Ballard’s hyperbolic thesis; and if we concur that there is an acceptance that there has been a ‘Death of Affect’ then what are we to do about it and combat it?

Frederic Jameson in Postmodernism…, called for a new mode of cognitive mapping, or a new way of mapping the new globalized space of late-capitalism. He used the modern city as a metonymic device for illustrating the ways in which we have become unmoored from our usual ontological coordinates: ‘disalienation in the city, then, involves the practical reconquest of a sense of place and the construction or reconstruction of an articulated ensemble which can be retained in memory, and which the individual subject can map and remap along the moments of mobile, alternative trajectories’ (PM p. 51). This rather vague formulation, is something of a Debord-inspired reclamation of space, and is ultimately a mode of reorienting ourselves with the lifeworld and although Jameson doesn’t refer to the role of emotion in his portentous delineation I think it is a metaphorically resonant and useful way of examining how we might see the bridging work of emotion in this reorienting process. For if there is any truth in Ballard’s inflated claims then it is that there has been a modification in the ways in which we interact with the world, and one of the casualties of this alteration has been emotion, or at least the ways in which we emote and it is this we have to come to terms with. As such, Ballard’s extreme hypotheses are a part of the acknowledgment of this and a need to reinstate or reawaken emotion in accord with these fundamental changes. As we have seen, Ballard’s texts deal with these reawakenings in odd, cataclysmic ways, pushing the latent possibilities in the environments they describe to their logical extremes, but at their heart is an urge to resuscitation, a brutal yet strangely subtle method of stirring up this deadened affect. Frederic Jameson has also said that ‘the serious writer is obliged to reawaken the reader’s numbed sense of the concrete through the administration of linguistic shocks, by restructuring the overfamiliar or by appealing to those deeper layers of the physiological which alone retain a kind of fitful unnamed intensity’ [21] and I think we can place Ballard in this arena. There has been a notable upsurge in academic interest in the emotions and particularly in a notion of re-exploring emotion, or learning again to understand it and how it might be said to work for us; and I think this tends toward two parallel but converging ideals: one that seeks to train and contain the emotions, in a nominally Aristotelian sense, so that one can lead a healthier emotional life; and the other that seeks to leave yet harness the raw unpredictable power of emotion and use it in its most vigorous state to our own ends. In ‘The Drowned Giant’ the body of a huge human form is washed up on a beach the people of the local city journey on mass to the beach to look at this monstrous being. The sheer vastness of the body is originally shocking, yet this shock is soon assimilated by the dulled affectless psyches of the city folk, and the huge structure becomes firstly a massive plaything for the children of the city and ultimately an abandoned monolithic skeleton, unrecognisable from the ship wrecks that adorn the rest of the coastline. However some of the townsfolk carve off huge chunks of the body, or carry off parts of its skeleton, and the narrator, as he makes his way through the city sees parts of the carcass: ‘the mummified right hand was exhibited on a carnival float’, ‘I noticed two ribs of the giant forming a decorative arch in a waterside garden’ and ‘a large square of tanned and tattooed skin…forms a backcloth to the dolls and masks in a novelty shop.’ [22] My slightly indirect reading of this is one in which the washed up body figures as our moribund emotive force: a vast yet intimate part of our being that lies wasted on the periphery of our being and yet whilst we ignore it reappears in the very heart of our existence waiting to be recognised and reworked, built back into a complete structure and celebrated. My feeling is that Ballard’s ‘Death of Affect’ is very much part of his fears for the future, a future which he sees as characterized by a lessening of our personal and social freedoms and political agency, in which personal and collectivised moral, political and emotional decisions are eroded; and that there is a fundamental and very real need to hang on to the intensely personal and inherent potential power of our emotional praxis.


[1] Interview with Graeme Revell op. cit. p.44

[2] Anthony Vidler, The Architectural Uncanny (London: M.I.T. 1996) pp. 184-5. Further references will appear in the text as Vidler

[3] Concrete Island (London: Vintage 1985), High Rise (London: Triad 1977). Further citations will appear in the text as CI and HR

[4] Christopher Tilley, A Phenomenology of Landscape (Oxford: Berg 1994) p. 14

[5] Marc Augé, Non-Places: An Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity tr. John Howe (London: Verso 2000)

[6] Margaret Morse,  'An Ontology of Everyday Distraction: The Freeway, the Mall and Television in Patricia Mellencamp ed., Logics of Television (London: BFI 1990) p. 197

[7] This statement from Charles Jentsch figured as one possibility in Freud’s delineation of the Uncanny and was as such can a figure for the way we struggle to understand and navigate city spaces. As Anthony Vidler puts it, ‘Jentsch attributed the feeling of uncanniness to a fundamental insecurity brought about by a lack of orientation, a sense of something new, foreign and hostile invading an old, familiar, customary world’ Vidler, p. 23

[8] Tilley, op. cit., p. 10

[9] This solidification of time, or deep-time ossified in rock and historical strata is a common theme of Ballard’s earlier science fiction stories. See ‘The Voices of Time’ (1960) in The Voices of Time (London: Indigo 1997), ‘The Time Tombs’ (1963) The Venus Hunters (London: Flamingo 1992). Jameson performs a masterly reading of ‘The Voices of Time’ in Postmodernism… to accentuate what he sees as the move from the old concerns of time intrinsic to modernity to the ultimate concern with space in postmodernity.

[10] Whilst I am cognizant that the text also plays on the position of the island as a map of Maitland’s inner space and the ways in which the island acts as a geography of his psyche, (‘The island was becoming an exact model of his head’ (CI p. 69); ‘Moving across it he seemed to be following a contour line inside his head’ (CI p. 131)) I want here to concentrate on the ways in which the ‘actual’ space is constructed and influences Maitland’s interactions with it. 

[11] This obsession with strange, liminal zones of possibility is explored often in Ballard’s short fiction, notably ‘The Terminal Beach’ (1964) and ‘The Reptile Enclosure’ (1963), The Terminal Beach (Harmondsworth: Penguin 1974). These beach fictions, in which the beach is figured as a marginal zone: ‘I think the psychological role of the beach is more interesting. The tide-line is a particularly significant area, a penumbral zone that is both of the sea and above it, forever half-immersed in the great time-womb. If you accept the sea as an image of the unconscious, then this beachward urge might be seen as an attempt from the existential role of ordinary life and return to the universal time-sea’ ‘The Reptile Enclosure’ p. 111. There is an almost Camusian existentialism at work in these stories with the beach as the desert of the mind where one must face the absurd. See Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus (London: Penguin 1975)

[12] Cited in Tilley, op. cit., p. 22

[13] In ‘The Venus Hunters’ (1964), earth is visited by Venutians who attempt to warn off man from space travel. ‘for the ostensible reason that, just as the sea was a universal image of the unconscious, so space was nothing less that an image of psychosis and death, and that if he tried to penetrate the interplanetary voids man would only plunge to earth like a demented Icarus, unable to scale the vastness of the cosmic zero’ The Venus Hunters  op. cit., p. 96

[14] Cited in Vidler op. cit., p. 150

[15] In the more extreme dislocation of The Atrocity Exhibition the motorways are perceived as ‘spinal highways’ the cars as ‘neuronic icons’ (AE p. 68)

[16] The echoes of R.D. Laing here can’t be coincidental

[17] Interview wit Graeme Revell op. cit. p. 42 italics in original

[18] Interview with Vale and A. Juno in Re/Search 8/9 op. cit. pp. 8,15

[19] Something Gasoriek terms ‘exhausted futures’ pp. 171-201

[20] ‘What is a Cognitive Theory of Emotion’ in Anthony Hatzimoysis ed., Philosophy and the Emotions (Cambridge: Cambridge U.P. 2003) p. 13

[21] Frederic Jameson, Marxism and Form (London: Princeton 1971) pp. 20-1

[22] ‘The Drowned Giant’ in The Terminal Beach op. cit., all  p. 50





Appendix 1:

Examples of Collages produced by J.G. Ballard for Ambit Magazine 1967/8.



Ambit #33, 1967



Ambit #36, 1968





Ballard and the Death of Affect: Bibliography

Primary Bibliography: J.G. Ballard

The Drowned World (London: Victor Gollancz 2001) First Published 1962 
The Voices of Time (London: Indigo 1997) First Published as The Four Dimensional Nightmares 1963
The Terminal Beach (Harmondsworth: Penguin 1974) First Published 1964
The Crystal World (London: Flaming 2000) First Published 1966
The Atrocity Exhibition (London: Flamingo 2001) First Published 1970
Crash (London: Vintage 1995) First Published 1973
Concrete Island (London: Vintage 1985) First Published 1973
High Rise (London: Triad 1977) First Published 1975
The Best Short Stories of J.G. Ballard (New York: Henry Holt 1995) First Published 1978
The Unlimited Dream Company (London: Flamingo 2000) First Published 1979
The Venus Hunters (London: Flamingo 1992) First Published 1980 
J.G. Ballard eds., Vale and Andrea Juno Re/Search 8/9:1984
Cocaine Nights (London: Flamingo 1997) 
A Users Guide to the Millennium (London: Flamingo 1998) 
Super-Cannes (London: Flamingo 2001)
Millennium People (London: Flamingo 2003)


Secondary Bibliography: Critical Works and Other

Adams, Parveen, 'Cars and Scars' New Formations 35 Autumn 1998

Anderson, Perry, The Origins of Postmodernity (London: Verso 1998)

Augé, Marc, Non-Places: An Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity tr. John Howe (London: Verso 2000)

Baudrillard et al, The Work of Art in the Electronic Age Block 14 1988

Baudrillard, Jean, Two Essay: Simulacra and Science Fiction; Ballard's Crash, Science Fiction Studies vol. 18 1991

Baudrillard et al, The Work of Art in the Electronic Age Block 14 1988

Bayley, Stephen, Sex, Drink and Fast Cars (London: Faber and Faber 1986)

Benjamin, Walter, 'The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction' in Illuminations tr., Harry Zohn (London: Fontana 1982)

Bollas, Christopher, Cracking Up: The Work of Unconscious Experience (London: Routledge 1995)

Borges, Jorge Luis, The Total Library; Non-Fiction 1922-86 (London: Penguin 2002)

Bresson, Cartier, ‘J.G. Ballard at Home’ Metaphores 7 March 1982

Broderick, Damien, Reading by Starlight: Postmodern Science Fiction (London: Routledge 1995)

Bukatman, Scott, Terminal Identity (London: Duke University Press 1993)

Butterfield, Bradley, 'Ethical Value and Negative Aesthetics: Reconsidering the Ballard/Baudrillard Connection' PMLA vol. 114 (1) 1999

Camus, Albert, The Myth of Sisyphus (London: Penguin 1975)

Debord, Guy, The Society of the Spectacle (Detroit: Black and Red 1983)

de Certeau, Michel, The Practice of Everyday Life (London: University College Press 1988)

Delville, Michel, J.G. Ballard (Plymouth: Northcote House 1998)

Eagleton, Terry, The Ideology of the Aesthetic (Oxford: Blackwell 1997)

Forgas, Joseph, ed., Feeling and Thinking: The Role of Affect in Social Cognition (Cambridge: Cambridge U.P. 2000)

Foster, Denis A., J.G. Ballard's Empire of the Sense: Perversion and the Failure of Authority PMLA vol. 108 1993

Freud, Sigmund, The Penguin Freud Library vol.14: Art and Literature (London: Penguin 1990)

Freud, Sigmund, The Psychopathology of Everyday Life (London: Penguin 2002)

Freud, Sigmund, Two Short Accounts of Psychoanalysis (Harmondsworth: Penguin 1968)

Gay, Peter, The Freud Reader (London: Vintage 1995)

Garfield, David A. S., Unbearable Affect (Chichester: John Wiley 1995)

Gasoriek, Andrzej, JG Ballard (Manchester: Manchester U.P. 2005)

Gaukroger, Stephen, ed., The Soft Underbelly of Reason (London: Routledge 1998)

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