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 Chapter One: ‘Check and Cross Check Your Instruments’: an introduction to the writing of J.G. Ballard and the scope of this dissertation.
Part I. Technology and the subject The trajectory of English writer J. G. Ballard’s life and work parallels the growth and change in industrial and military technologies of World War II and the Cold War. He is both product and critic of the cultures that evolved from these technologies. This thesis investigates the circumstances of Ballard’s invention of writing beyond literature, a powerful fiction that proceeds from the technological facts of his time, through surrealism to a unique vision of post-war life as a collage, in which the new ‘mythologies of memory and desire’ are wrought by technology. It is particularly concerned with the experimental ‘instruments’ he developed to enter and navigate the ‘near future’, the ever-shrinking space between life as experienced in the present and as technology will make it. With these instruments Ballard charts the delivery of a new, technologically constituted subject. In 1979 Ballard noted, ‘if I had to pick a single image which best represented the middle and late 20th century, it would be that of a man sitting in a car, driving down a superhighway.’ [3] This image exemplifies the way that various and disparate impulses, responses, and desires are configured at speed into a subject who is a reader and product of technology. In many ways it closely mirrors that of the World War Two pilot who also functions in the public consciousness as a model of human identity. He embodies the capacity to adapt to situations in which technology is an extension of intention and desire generated by human work and thought. He, like his quotidian counterpart the driver of a car on a superhighway, is an example of ‘man’ made anew by himself as his own android.[4] Both show how technology is a condition of experience in the late twentieth century. It affects the landscape of the body and psyche, the conditions of human thought, action and desire. It delineates, measures and defines a space wherein humanity may be configured. Powerful metaphors arise in the language and images of this configuration, metaphors that make visible the ramifications of power and desire in the relationship between humans and their technologies. Ballard’s writing shows how one can plot an architectonics of the conditions of thought, action and desire in and through technology by means of an analysis of these metaphors. Walter Benjamin, writing in 1925, was one of the first to recognize that literature was no longer ‘equal to the moment’, the conditions produced by scientific and technological change:
Benjamin’s definition of the future writer accords with Ballard’s career. In the period after World War II, at the apogee of inward self-referential literature, that of psychology and anxiety, whether modernist, realist or existentialist, and ‘professional’ literary criticism, Ballard set out to produce a writing from the facts of technological experience, in which humanity emerges from the site specific conditions of its existence, in technology and technological metaphors, from ‘the angle between two walls’[6] not from some dislocated ground of being. Ballard did not inhabit Benjamin’s ‘agit prop’ context, but he has certainly struggled with ‘the facts’ through many forms of writing and the occasional action, his attitude can be summed up by borrowing André Breton’s words, ‘We have nothing to do with literature, but we are quite capable, when the need arises, of making use of it like every one else’.[7] Ballard too was capable of making use of literature when the need arose. In the 1990s he crystallized his practice by stating that if war itself is an extreme metaphor then the writer might supply more extreme fictions, absolute metaphors that could defeat it on the plane of language:
The origins of the technological development that are now integral to western quotidian life and often in less benign forms in the third world, may be traced to the beginnings of the industrial revolution, a time according to Félix Guattari that is ‘marked by a growing disequilibrium in the relations of human being to tool’.[9] The middle decades of the twentieth century, however, which provide the conditions for Ballard’s writing, may bear a more significant insight into our present condition. Writing in the early 1940s, Herbert Marcuse identified changes in the way technology has come to dominate everyday life. Referring to Lewis Mumford’s identification of ‘business, or power over other men’[10] as the motive behind ‘mechanical discipline’, he comments on the ramifications of technological change in his contemporary society:
Marcuse notes the shift from what he calls ‘individualistic rationality’ to ‘technological rationality’ that occurs in the late 1930s and early 1940s. He refers to Mumford’s characterization of ‘man in the machine age as an “objective personality”, one who has learned to transfer all subjective spontaneity to the machinery which he serves, to subordinate his life to the “matter-of-factness” of a world in which the machine is the factor and he the factum’.[12] According to Marcuse, this acceptance of ‘matter-of-factness’ is different from the awareness and acceptance of facts that underpinned thought and action in the past. In the middle of the twentieth century this ‘matter-of-factness’ is marked by the ‘highly rational compliance which typifies it’. The facts underpinning the conditions of thought and action ‘are those of the machine process, which itself appears as the embodiment of rational expediency’:[13]
The rapid growth of technologies in the period in which Marcuse is writing, is made possible by science but becomes independent of it. Science makes possible new choices, new versions of humanity but technology, according to Marcuse, pre-empts those choices.[15] It is also clearly linked to the growth of military power and production. At the end of World War II the Cold War became a means of maintaining military production, a production again underpinned by ‘technological rationality’, as is indicated by such notions as ‘Mutually Assured Destruction’, arguments about the necessity for weapons testing, and other examples of the rhetoric of East-West tension. This is also a period in which the daily life of most modern western populations was shaped by the domestication of this ‘technological rationality’, as Ballard’s analysis also shows, in the form of consumerism. The objects consumed were frequently developments of the military technologies that overshadowed this period of great prosperity. Transport, telecommunications, cybernetics, kitchen appliances and so forth frequently were, and remain, developments or disguised versions of military technologies. The architectonics of human-technological relationships is visible in the quotidian experience of the post-war subject. The operations of technological rationality in the post-war period may be described in other ways. In his account of the definition, problematics, philosophy and psychology of ‘attention’, Jonathon Crary draws attention to the ways in which human attention was represented in terms of its use in the technologies of war.
Crary argues that evolution has armed humans with a set of responses to stimuli from the world, and that technology — in particular military technology — colonizes these and employs them to its own ends. He quotes L. S. Hearnshaw:
Crary shows how the technological appropriation of human vigilance has implications for the conditions of thought, actions and desire in the post-war period, by referring to David Riesman’s notion of the ‘other-direction’:
Technological metaphors are also used to represent changing understandings of the human subject far beyond the implications of technological surveillance and its effects in the generation of ‘diffuse anxiety’. It is not only that radar operators require ‘vigilance’. Humans may themselves be understood to function like radar. As this dissertation will show, Ballard’s characters too are psychic maps of the encounter between the central nervous system and the technological landscape. Other examples of the ways in which technology informs subjectivity during this period may be found in wartime pilot training manuals, the materials that document the manner in which a world war two pilot is produced. An American warrior pilot sitting in the cockpit of his fighter or bomber plane, is surrounded, and indeed shaped, by the technologies that figure him as the agent of their own fulfilment, a successful mission. The World War II pilot is prepared with training that, following an industrial model, is comprehensive and intensive, but frequently short. He is the end point of the work of a ‘team’ of engineers, mechanics, strategists and so forth, and yet he is not the end point, since the end point is the mission itself. His value is transformed instrumentally into that of the mission, which in the case of bombing, is the conversion of matter into energy. The survival of the pilot is also important, since his training and equipment is expensive, and each successful mission means that his usefulness increases, but his potential value decreases. This reconfiguration of the relations of labour and technology reveals the emergence of a new human subject at the time. In reviewing materials used by US Air Force pilots and flight engineers in World War II one may observe the proposition that technology replaces normative subjective responses. Pilots are told to ignore their own responses to stimuli when flying an aircraft, especially in emergencies, and to rely entirely upon instruments. This instruction is repeated throughout the Pilot’s Information File.[19] The ability to give attention only to instruments is an essential skill in flying. This may appear to differ from the example of the radar operator, whose nervous system is appropriated by the operation of radar, but the ultimate effect is the same. Attention to the meters of technology redeploys or represses responses and subordinates them to technological rationality. Man is no longer the only measure of mankind. The pilot’s need to rely solely on instruments in particular situations is brought about by the inappropriateness of the human body’s normal responses while flying (such as the instinctive response to sensations of falling or tilting), or by the actual conditions of flight, such as thunderstorms or snow. Vertigo is a particular risk which the Pilot’s Information File warns pilots about:
The need to trust the aircraft’s instruments rather than the senses is highlighted by the example of the ‘Graveyard Spiral’:
There are many such warnings about situations where responses based on ‘individualistically rational’ thought are inappropriate and where technology provides the only safe measure of a location, of relationships between self and objects or between self and ground level. In the case of failure of technology the expectation might be that one makes an individual effort to extend one’s ‘normal’ powers and make adjustments, but the opposite frequently applies. The more extreme the situation, the more important the role technology must take. The confidence in this technology as it is manifested in these documents is remarkable. Such confidence is historically part of American culture and ideology, but is also a feature of British military technological research and the texts it generated during the forties and fifties. As Marcuse argues, ‘The facts directing man’s thought and action are not those of nature which must be accepted in order to be mastered or those of society which must be changed because they no longer correspond to human needs and potentialities. Rather they are those of the machine process, which itself appears as the embodiment of rationality and expediency.’[22] He gives an example of this effect in daily life, one reminiscent of Ballard’s ‘man sitting in a car’:
In the relations between humans and technology in the period there is either an appropriation by technology, or a rejection or mistrust, of the ‘natural’ or ‘instinctive’ powers of the human body, for example, ‘deep sensibility’ or balance. This is accompanied efforts to define the individual as a reader of signs generated by instruments, in for example, the case of flying, of the ‘pitot-static system’. This system calculates airspeed by differentiating between impact or dynamic and atmospheric pressures, and altitude and rate of climb from static pressure alone, manifested in indicators such as altimeters, airspeed indicators and so forth. The word ‘instrument’ may be used both for the devices that calculate information and for the clocks or dials that indicate the measures. ‘Indicator’ is also used for these clocks and dials. The dual use of ‘instrument’ also suggests a confidence in the accurate transmission of information from device to indicator. The instruments are calibrated and checked frequently by ground and flight crew both on the ground and by radio contact during flight. The pilot or flight engineer reads the indicators and makes decisions based on the readings. These technological constructions of human responses are also translated into daily experience by the mass media in advertising and feature films, again, a focus of Ballard’s writing. The domestication of alarming technology at this time appears in the fantastic prosthetics of James Bond films, for example. As mass culture represents technology, the grafting of technology into the human subject is figured in terms of excess — something beyond the psychic and somatic field of experience and knowledge. The nightmare of technology emerges as the psychic other of the situation in which the subject is the technologically rational reader of technology, obedient to its logic. This may be imaged in the relation of technology to the body. The body already functions and is located within a tension between blastospheric symmetry and vertical asymmetry—that is to say between a fantasy of monadic completeness and its pseudo opposite, an upright figure with frontally oriented perception–but technology disturbs this equilibrium. The experience of driving a car, using an electric eggbeater or observing a distant object through a zoom lens, requires the central nervous system to adjust, and vertigo and panic are accordingly latent in these experiences. The mass media is effective in that it represents this excess and terror as well being its vector. The consumer is constructed to be permanently vigilant. Another suggestive example of the way that the human subject becomes a reader of military technology is ‘the theory of lead’. This is a theory about ballistics in aerial combat, and derives from conventional trigonometry of gunnery except, ‘it must be remembered that to obtain a hit, the bullet and the enemy airplane must arrive at the same point simultaneously’, and there is no ground against which to make calculations.[24] The gunner or pilot in aerial combat must aim, not directly at the enemy aircraft, but at a point in its line of flight. This involves the following calculations:
Flight and speed complicate gunnery, and the human subject must be completely attentive to the mathematics of this technology. Similar ideas relate to the release of bombs from aircraft. By 1944 the technology of high explosive bombs was developing at a considerable rate, parallel to the development of thermo-nuclear armaments,[26] but also closely tied to the latter. Although aerial bombing was an important part of warfare in World War I, in the 1920s a development of this practice took place that shifted the focus in geopolitical conflict from naval to aerial power. Naval power was still important, but until the development of the Nautilus submarine and the Polaris missile its use was mainly as an adjunct to aerial warfare. Pilots and crew were advised of the calculations necessary to the successful and ‘safe’ release of bombs from aircraft. Some types of bombs were fitted with a propeller device that armed the bomb fuse by rotating during the fall. A particular number of rotations was required to achieve arming, therefore the altitude from which the bomb was dropped had to be accurately assessed for successful detonation. Different calculations were necessary for different target surfaces, (for example concrete or mud). The logic of bomb delivery was the ruling logic. Once again the pilot and other crew are reliant on technologies which figure them as highly skilled interpreters or readers of these technologies. It is assumed that if the individual has worked with others adequately to prepare himself and his equipment, the technology will work and the mission will be successful. The individual must refine and develop himself to match the refinement of the technology. It would be illogical to carry a bomb a long way and not then ‘deliver’ it, just as Marcuse argues, ‘the machine process, which itself appears as the embodiment of rationality and expediency’ makes it illogical not to follow the road when driving a car. Just as humans are increasingly compelled to follow technological ‘rationality and expediency’ so the speed with which technology does things turns everything into weapon and target. In Bunker Archaeology (1975), Paul Virilio argues that technology has dissolved the distinction between the vehicle and the military projectile. He writes about the links between territory, mapping, roads, the city and war, to draw attention to the relationship between war and the organization of space throughout history. He discusses the fortifications and bunkers of Hitler’s ‘Atlantic Wall’ as archaeological evidence of a process of eventual ‘aeronautical coalescence’, that is, the gradual reduction of space that occurs as a result of the speed of flight between cities. He argues that the history of war is the history of a concealed ‘implosion’, resulting in a ‘global disintegration’:
The aim of a bombing raid is to detonate bombs at a prescribed point where they will do what is perceived to be the most damage to the enemy, as either physical damage or terror. Most of the technological effort is directed toward this moment. Time is obviously a key factor here. Considerations of physics, chemistry, mathematics, metallurgy and telecommunications all come into force at a particular moment of time in a particular space.[28] The pilot of the Enola Gay, the B-29 which carried the first plutonium bomb to Hiroshima on 6 August 1945, speaks of his mission with what sounds like extraordinary disaffection. Colonel Paul Tibbets, who had ‘practised’ this bombing raid for a year with a special unit of the United States Air Force, recalls wanting to improve the accuracy rate from 5-600 feet to within 100 feet. He describes the bombing run in a television interview. This was a journey of fifteen hundred miles from the Pacific island base of Tinian in the Marianas. There were three aircraft: Tibbets piloted his plane in the centre, Charles Sweeney flew to his right and a third plane carrying photographic instruments flew at Tibbets’ left. This was to pull away from the bombing, and Sweeney was there as back up if Tibbets’ mission failed.[29] Tibbets describes all this in a way that demonstrates his interest in the success of the mission. He speaks of the ‘beautiful night’, and of the ‘rendezvous’ with the other two planes over a moonlit Pacific among little powder puffs of cloud. Time was an important factor. The bomb was to explode 53 seconds after leaving the plane at 32,000 feet above Hiroshima. Tibbets had to bank the plane away from the explosion in this time. He describes the ‘relief’ with which he felt the shock wave of the explosion; the distance had been judged correctly. Two minutes later Tibbets saw the cloud caused by the explosion at 32,000 feet and rising. He looked down and saw what he described as a black and boiling surface, like ‘a barrel of tar’. He speaks of the excitement of the crew subsiding as they flew back to base, allowing them to get some sleep.[30] Tibbets’ responses are shaped by the technologies of his mission. It is primarily questions of time, space, distance and the technologies which bring these together, that position and identify this pilot in terms of his militarized role. Tens of thousands of B-29s were built in the years leading up to the end of the war, and thousands of these crashed during testing. A huge effort under Curtis LeMay [31] had gone into the development of these long-range aircraft, firstly to attack Japan, but secondly as a show of strength to Stalin. The B-29s were needed to cover ground, to close up the space between the captured islands in the Pacific and the Japanese home islands. Immediately after the Japanese surrender LeMay commanded a mass flight of B-29s non-stop from Tokyo to Alaska to emphasize their long-range capabilities. The beginnings of the Cold War were the beginnings of ‘aeronautical coalescence’,[32] and Tibbets was the exemplary subject of this process. From these examples it is clear that the middle decades of the twentieth century were significant in the establishment of the rule of technological rationality. The same force dominates military, industrial and domestic life, having entered and consolidated its authority in these spheres during this period. One of the ideas that both describes and assists this colonization is futurism, and its attendant discourses of streamlining, speed, growth and progress. The future gets closer and closer, and even co-exists with the present in the many signs of its potential. It is glimpsed in a freeway flyover, a city skyline, in the images reproduced from a biologist’s microscope or a physics laboratory. In the 1950s it was still possible to name an exhibition ‘This is Tomorrow’. Eventually, however, the present and future collide and the effect is that described by the computer Alpha-60 in Jean Luc Godard’s Alphaville: ‘But no one has lived in the past and no one will live in the future. The present is the form of all life.’ As I will argue, Ballard’s works shows that the point at which the future becomes co-terminous with the present — the late 1960s — is, the point of the death of affect. Figures of the Cold War and the media landscape, actual and imagined, have entered social and individual consciousness as recognizable entities. They are almost iconic, so that particular meanings can be associated with them. The abandoned motels, rusting rocket gantries, drained swimming pools and deserted bars of Ballard’s fiction become, as he puts it, ‘spinal landscapes’, the settings which arouse liminal memories of ‘the formation of the brain’s visual centres’,[33] revealing the evolutionary development of vision and consciousness and the informing power of technology over this development. They even suggest a parasitical relationship, in that technology exploits and mimics the structures of human consciousness in order to evolve. This implies not so much an effect that is beyond ideology, as a necessary condition for ideology to function at all. An analysis of Ballard’s writing in the light of the technological changes of the Cold War period, reveals a new, transitional subject, which emerges and is identified as a trace fossil of the future, a simultaneous invocation of presence and absence, in which what one is to become is made present. That is to say, the Cold War subject is one that is shaped by the technologies of the time, a frottage of the impact of technology on the body and psyche. The central nervous system either adjusts to, or is confronted by, the demands of technologies, in particular those of speed and force, and this leaves traces on the human subject, which becomes an inverse mould of technological conditions. This process may be compared to the account of subjectivation that Gilles Deleuze gives in his discussion of Foucault’s definition of the subject,[34] and in Deleuze’s discussion of Leibniz.[35] Deleuze uses the metaphor of ‘folding’, describing the subject as always in process, folded into itself, neither fixed nor reducible, but nonetheless produced by the exterior, a folding of the outside. Inasmuch as it may be described at all, subjectivity may thus be defined as an infinite landscape, subject to aleatory forces, with surprising folds and rises, shifts and plains, wherein bodies may cluster and intermingle. This landscape is geological and biological, tectonic and cloacal. ‘What regulates the obligatory, necessary, or permitted intermingling of bodies’, Deleuze and Guattari observe, ‘is above all an alimentary regime and a sexual regime’.[36] Ballard’s entry point into technology and its effects is through the media landscape — that is to say via the technologies of reproduction. This landscape also suggests another model of subjectivity, that of the doubling enabled by reproductive technologies. The emergent subject is, as Marcuse suggests, formed by the ‘highly rational compliance’[37] with which he or she responds to technology. He or she is a manufactured double, whose pseudo integrity is sustained by the myth of a unified and stable monadic subject. The closest that technology comes to the infinitude of the landscape of subjectivation is in the reproduction and reiteration that masquerades as possibility. Ballard negotiates this contradiction, observing the pressures that are brought to bear on modern humans by experimentally replicating and textualizing these conditions. Part II. Ballard and literature The post-war English Literary ‘scene’, as Benjamin predicted, was incapable of the urgent response demanded by the new technological landscape. Ballard agrees:
The times demanded a new approach, and Ballard responded with a method is similar to the Situationist practice of detournement. He took images of the technological landscape of his time and place, images from literature and film, of science, war and the suburbs, and made their cultural function visible through a creative displacement. From the start, he chose science fiction as the most appropriate form for this set of facts. It provided the means to deal with the future, which, for Ballard, was crucial to an understanding of the present. He argued in 1971 that the post-war technological world could not be adequately analysed or described by nineteenth century psychological realism:
Science fiction provided Ballard with a linguistic model, a grammar of fiction that focuses on the material facts of the matter, not personality or bourgeois social dilemmas. Surrealism prompted him to extend this into a series of experimental ‘landscapes’. He uses the term ‘landscape’ to stress the factual, autonomous nature of the new technological environment and of all experience and desire. A landscape is something one explores, a spectacle, a map. Ballard aims to turn the subject inside-out, to invert the Freudian analytical project to examine the latent potential of the outer realm; for him the Oedipus complex now resides ‘in the styling of an automobile dash board’.[40] This includes the physical and psychic space of the suburbs, motorways, and also those of the ‘technological landscape’ and the ‘media landscape’. Ballard’s landscapes are nearly always complex combinations of time and space, liminal moments, zones of transition, or fault lines in time, such as those that provided the entry points for situationism. They are where he finds his points of entry into what he calls the near future. Like many whose lives were interrupted and informed by war and military service, Ballard considered himself something of a late-starter. He reflected that this was a matter of acknowledging the pressures that made him an imaginative writer. Such pressures — the constituting experience of a lifetime — brought him very close to the material conditions of experience; the problem was to find the means to articulate this insight. While Ballard was discovering that the study of literature would not help him to respond to the Cold War technological environment and the horrific memories of World War II,[41] a symposium and exhibition was held in London called Aspects of Form: A Symposium on Form in Nature and Art, in collaboration with the Institute of Contemporary Arts (Summer 1951). This was a response to developments in the scientific investigations into form. Its project was to bring together scientists and visual artists to explore the relationships that might be observed between them. In the publication accompanying this symposium Lancelot Law Whyte wrote of the ‘increasing awareness of the morphological character of many of the sciences, which are now seen to be concerned with complex structures or forms of particular kinds’, and the anticipation of ‘a simple and comprehensive method of describing the changing form or structure of a complex of relationships'[42] which can be seen to arrive with the discovery of DNA in 1953. This development of the study of morphologies of nature and culture is crucial to the definitions of Cold War culture. In the years that followed his time at London University, Ballard wrote advertising copy, served in the RAF in Canada, worked as a librarian and as an editor for a chemistry magazine. These experiences, along with his medical training, equipped him in various ways to respond to the understandings of the cultural environment suggested by the Symposium on Form. Like a number of visual artists of the time he came to represent his environment scientifically, using scientific models of representation. Ballard’s description of the emergence of new conditions of thought, action and desire, or more problematically, subjectivity, through a palaeontological treatment of technologies as cultural artefacts, is crucial for analysis of the culture of the period, as a brief example from his short story ‘The Terminal Beach’ (1964) shows:
The series of weapons tests had fused the sand in layers, and the pseudo-geological strata condensed the brief epochs, microseconds in duration of thermonuclear time. Typically the island inverted the geologist’s maxim, ‘The key to the past lies in the present.’ Here, the key to the present lay in the future. This island was a fossil of time future, its bunkers and blockhouses illustrating the principle that the fossil record of life was one of armour and the exoskeleton.[43] Ballard’s imagery makes visible the emergent ontological structures of the post-war — or Cold War subject. He accordingly continues the surrealist project, in so far as he ‘does not open up words without forcing something of the visible to emerge…’, as Deleuze says of Roussel.[44] His imagery reveals the emergence of a subject in a relationship between the body (the skeleton, the tissues, the cells of the flesh) and the technological prosthesis of the ‘outside’ world in which nature and artifice are violently conjoined. This is apparent both in his method and subject matter. Part III. ‘Passport to Eternity’ (1955/1962) [45]
After writing advertising copy for a short while Ballard joined the RAF in 1953, training in Moose Jaw, Canada. This place had been a wartime base, part of the RCAF’s training programme which led Roosevelt to call Canada ‘the aerodrome of democracy’. It re-opened in 1952 as a training base. To relieve the boredom Ballard read a lot of American science fiction magazines.[47] Impressed with what he read, he wrote a first draft of ‘Passport to Eternity’ in late 1955 in England, while waiting to be released from the RAF at an airfield near High Wycombe. It was published ‘slightly embroidered’, in Amazing Stories in 1962. The story involves a situation familiar in Ballard’s writing, and which recurs even in his most recent fiction, although it is set in a future time of space colonies on distant planets. It is a story about desire, ennui and entropy, inspired, as the following account of it by Ballard suggests, by his situation at the time:
The story fulfils the general criteria of science fiction: it is futuristic in setting, it speculates about technologies, in particular, the relationship between boredom, leisure and technology, and it predicts the development of biotechnologies and the technologies of ‘virtual reality’. It takes place in Sunset Ridge, a wealthy suburb on Mars overlooking ‘the brilliant diadem of down-town Zenith’ in the distance a space-port, where ‘the ascending arcs of hyperliners flared across the sky’.[49] Clifford and Margot Gorrell, a middle-class married couple, bored with each other and their lives, sit in their hyper-advanced sitting-room and argue about their vacation.In this story Ballard identifies the new role of marriage. Where it once was an institution in the apparatus of patriarchy, it has become an instrument of technology. Although, ‘The husband is always right’,[50] this is only because this sustains the technocratic structure of the society. Wives of the technocratic elite are soothed by ‘play-boys’ like Margot’s Trantino:
To avoid spending time with his wife on a shared accommodation holiday, Clifford agrees to choose something more adventurous, and sends his assistant, Tony Harcourt, to get a list of suggestions from both ‘registered’ and the more risky unregistered agencies in ‘Upper and Lower Cities and the Colonial Bazaar’.[52] The latter is normally off-limits to ‘respectable’ people like the Gorrells, and Harcourt’s visit there has many of the motifs of film noir — dubious offices, security thugs and seductive exotic women. Harcourt’s investigations lead him to discover all sorts of sinister operations. These include vacations where one can conduct one’s own war, such as that offered by the unregistered company ARCO Productions Inc.:
ARCO’s offices are fortified. The colonel who explains to Harcourt that ‘we always advise our clients to invoke some doctrine as a casus belli, not only to avoid adverse publicity and any feelings of guilt or remorse, but to lend colour and purpose to the campaign.’[54] Ballard thus presents war as a leisure activity, something that may be conducted alongside ‘normal’ life in a technologically advanced society. Harcourt’s list of other vacations includes sex tours to the Gomorrah Plaza on Venus, (an apparently francophone colony), the tri-millennial Pan Galactic Tournament where ‘every conceivable game in the Cosmos is played’,[55] and that offered by the Seven Sirens Company:
All the vacations are linked by the manipulations of fantasy and desire; they involve sado-masochism, and the risk of psychosis. ‘Passport to Eternity’ is thus balanced between a comfortably clichéd sci-fi costume epic and an attempt to reach the real near future via a collage of present possibilities, identifiable in the choice of holidays offered to the lucky couple, as Harcourt reports:
The media landscape that surrounds the characters is total. One agency consulted by Harcourt is not explicitly engaged in vacations, but rather the generation of all history and time by the registered company ‘General Enterprises’. This is the last he reads out:
‘Passport to Eternity’ also contains situations and images that recur in Ballard’s work through to the novels of the last decade. Just as Ballard’s later fiction frequently reveals the menace that underpins the apparently smooth operations of technologically advanced society, so the desire of the middle class couple for an exotic interplanetary holiday unleashes mayhem outside their villa. The technology which has constructed their lives is suddenly on the doorstep, and all the vacation operators arrive at once. Harcourt and the Gorrells are bombarded with music and ‘a sick musky odour’ that ‘seeped through the air’:
The Gorrells end up being forced to take the virtual journey suggested by the story’s title. The professor ‘of Applied Drama at the University of Alpha Leporis’ — significantly named Burlington, a reference that invokes the Burlington Galleries in London which showed the International Surrealist Exhibition in 1936 — controls their entry into The Dream of Osiris, the virtual ship which will sail forever. It is run by one of the companies from Harcourt’s list:
In ‘Passport to Eternity’ Ballard produces a fiction that textualizes the relationship between military technologies and leisure, something that arises from the conditions of the making of this story. These are the conditions for the beginnings of the nuclear arms race, NATO politics, in particular the contest for nuclear weapons and their delivery systems, and for the break-up of the globe into zones regulated by the speed and range of these systems. They are also the conditions of rapid growth of wealth, civil and mercantile communications, consumerism and leisure in the west, all of which were subject to the same ordering into militarily defined zones. The pilots who had been so much a part of the iconography of World War II were soon to be superseded by ICBMs.[61] The cold hut on the airfield at High Wycombe where the pilots were processed for entry into civilian life, is a suggestive metaphor, a factory for the production of a new subject. The displacement of human labour by machine has the effect, as it did in the industrial revolution, of defining superseded human labourers, not as inappropriate because of their human qualities, but as inadequate machines. In this case however, the labour was not simply manual, but intellectually complex, an advance on the one time mystique of the engine driver. Expertise in itself was now no guarantee of status or success. Many of Ballard’s characters are constructed as enslaved to the new technologies. Those ‘reject aircrew’ who shared Ballard’s hangar at High Wycombe, presumably unfit for the new world order of B-52s and jet fighters, were being returned, for the time being, to the quotidian where they would be enlisted as consumers. While Ballard was casting around for a way of making use of his imagination, Eduardo Paolozzi, Nigel Henderson, Ronald Jenkins and Alison and Peter Smithson organized the exhibition Parallel of Life and Art (1953) at the Institute of Contemporary Art in London. In this exhibition the practices of sculpture, photography and architecture were set together to make an exhibition of images from reproductive media (photography of different kinds) anthropological images and objects, children’s art and other sources. It drew from the flux of images that had accompanied the American rise to industrial power and the domestication of powerful technological structures. These were merely dreams yet to be realized in the scarcities and rationing of post war Britain. For example the Smithsons’ Golden Lane City, Great Britain, a pastiche of a drawing of high-rise domestic architecture, photographs of people enjoying ‘modern life’, and popular heroes Joe di Maggio and Marilyn Monroe, prefigures the media culture construction of daily life that will become prevalent in the 1960s. The technology of what was, for Britain, the near future provides the domestic structures, both social and physical, and the images of human life that are to take place within these structures. Britain’s relationship to America is thus figured in a manner that appears as a corollary to the bleak airfield and its cold huts filled with idle airmen where Ballard wrote his first science fiction story. Both are fully articulated in ‘Passport to Eternity’, which is itself an essay on desire flickering between the active fields of military and consumerist technologies. It was at this time that the word ‘image’ became a term that could, according to Lawrence Alloway, be used to ‘describe evocative visual material from any source, with or without the status of art’.[62] Reproductive technologies increased the availability of images and their use in advertising and popular culture. Just as Lancelot Law White suggested in 1951, images became specimens to be collected, configured and exhibited, as a lepidopterist might arrange butterflies, and ‘accessioned’ into taxonomies categorising the morphologies of desire. These images were produced by technologies that demanded performances at least as technical as those of the Second World War pilot. Film and photography, but more particularly, colour printing, became more accessible and more technologically complex. British artists, notably Paolozzi, gathered images from all available sources into archives. Magazines such as Life and Look became increasingly aware of the potency of images in consumer culture, and reproduced reiterative cycles of images that were the symbolic currency of the time. These images are now a vocabulary of the twentieth century, on the one hand a repository of cute kitsch, on the other, a powerful set of revelatory devices, as attested by the fact that many of the ‘key’ images of the period are now ‘owned’ by corporations like Time-Warner and Microsoft. Their multiplicity, omnipresence and familiarity were entirely new. It was quickly clear that they were not auratic, not icons. They no longer reside in the cultural memory, but in the media landscape as facts. This new status of imagery, banal, apparently transient, but absolutely compelling, is very important for Ballard’s taxonomy. They enter so much of private and public life as to be ubiquitous and total. They guide people as to how to dress, what to eat, as to who is powerful, who is beautiful, and they also established new codes of what could or could not be presented as an image. Ballard argues in his writing that the power and significance of consumerist images went far beyond their stated function. This was the first glimpse of what became for him ‘the death of affect’. He became a visual writer, as he would have it, a painter with no talent who textually deployed images from his own archive of obsessions and memories and those of other artists and of the mass media in new sequences, as a new kind of fiction designed to reveal the emergent ecologies of desire in the technological landscape of the Cold War:
Table of Contents: Introduction Chapter One Chapter Two Chapter Three Chapter Four Chapter Five Chapter Six Chapter Seven Chapter Eight Conclusion Bibliography Acknowledgements Footnotes:
[1] J.G. Ballard, from a collage first published in Ambit, no 33, 1967, reproduced in V. Vale and A. Juno (eds.), J.G. Ballard, RE/Search, no. 8/9, (San Francisco: RE/Search, 1984), 1991), 149.
[2]‘Fictions of Every Kind’, Books and Bookmen, February, 1971, repr. in V. Vale and A. Juno (eds.), 98-101, 99.
[3] J. G. Ballard, interview with Dr Chris Evans, Penthouse, vol 14, April 1979. excerpt quoted in ‘Quotations by Ballard’, in V. Vale and A. Juno, J. G. Ballard, 154-164, 157.
[4] The term ‘android’ implies something more than a robot. An android’s subjectivity is self-generating by means of programmed interiority — memories, dreams and so forth. Its superhuman strength and skills are constitutional, whereas the pilot wears his on the outside as it were. This kind of technological hybrid is seen in Philip K Dick, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968) made into the Hollywood feature film Blade Runner (1982), directed by Ridley Scott and, We Can Build You (1972).
[5] Walter Benjamin, ‘Filling Station’, from One Way Street and Other Writings, trans. Edmund Jephcott and Kingsley Shorter (London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978, repr. 1979) 45.
[6] J. G. Ballard, ‘Interview by Graeme Revell’, (1983), V. Vale and A. Juno, J. G. Ballard, 42-52, 49. Ballard uses the phrase in a collage in Ambit, no 33, 1967, and reiterates this phrase in writing and interviews.
[8] J.G. Ballard, ‘Project for a Glossary of the Twentieth Century’, Zone 6, Incorporations, ed. Jonathon Crary and Sanford Kwinter (New York: Urzone, 1992), 268-279, 279.
[9] Félix Guattari, ‘Regimes, Pathways, Subjects’, translated by Brian Massumi, Crary and Kwinter, 26.
[10] Lewis Mumford quoted in Herbert Marcuse, ‘Some Social Implications of Modern Technology’ (1941) in Technology, War and Fascism, Collected Papers of Herbert Marcuse, Volume 1, edited by David Kellner, (London: Routledge, 1998) 41, n.1. In the original, Mumford says that ‘“the machine” was not … the passive by-product of technics itself. … On the contrary, the mechanical discipline and many of the primary inventions themselves were the result of deliberate effort to achieve a mechanical way of life: the motive in back of this was not technical efficiency but holiness, or power over other men.’ Lewis Mumford, Technics and Civilization, (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1934), 364.
[11] Herbert Marcuse, ‘Some Social Implications of Modern Technology’ (1941) in Technology, War and Fascism, Collected Papers of Herbert Marcuse, Volume 1, edited by David Kellner, (London: Routledge, 1998), 41.
[12] Ibid. 44. Mumford writes that ‘while one must take care not to confuse the objective or rational personality with the whole personality’ … its area ‘has increased—if only because it represents an adaptation indispensable to the running of the machine itself. And the adaptation in turn has further effects: a modulation of emphasis, a matter-of-factness, a reasonableness….’ Mumford, Technics and Civilization, 362.
[15] As Marcuse points out, ‘It has been frequently stressed that scientific discoveries are shelved as soon as they seem to interfere with the requirements of profitable marketing.’ Ibid. 46-47.
[16] Jonathon Crary, Suspension of Perception: Attention, Spectacle and Modern Culture, (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Massachusetts Institute of Technology, October Books, 1999), 34.
[17] Crary, 34, n. 60. L. S. Hearnshaw, The Shaping of Modern Psychology, (London: Routledge, 1987), 206-209. Hearnshaw cites Head, Aphasia and Kindred Disorders of Speech, vol. 2, 1926, Part 4, and N. F. Mackworth, ‘Vigilance’, The Advancement of Science, vol. 53, 1957, 389; Researches on the Measurement of Human Performance, Medical Research Council Special Report no.268, 1950.
[18] Crary, 53. Crary emphasizes ‘to attend’ in quoting David Riesman, The Lonely Crowd: a Study of the Changing American Character. Crary quotes from the revised edition, (New York: Doubleday, 1953), 41-42. In the first edition, Riesman emphasizes ‘anxiety’. (New York: Yale University Press, 1950), 26.
[19] Pilot’s Information File, 1944: The Authentic World War II Guidebook for Pilots and Flight Engineers, (Atglen Pennsylvania: Schiffer Military/Aviation History, 1995).
[25] Ibid. Paul Virilio also argues: ‘The act of taking aim is a geometrification of looking, a way of technically aligning ocular perception along an imaginary axis that is known to the French as the ‘faith line’ (ligne de foi).’ In War and Cinema: The Logistics of Perception, 1984; trans. Patrick Camiller (London: Verso, 1989), 2.
[26] The US Army had taken control of the atomic bomb research and named it the Manhattan Project by the middle of 1942. The project became a marriage of science and military engineering, with its own logic.
[27] Paul Virilio, Bunker Archaeology, 1975, trans George Collins, 1995, (Princeton: Princeton Architectural Press), 20. Virilio’s bunkers are interesting, in part because of his personal and philosophical interests in them, but also because of their beauty and dream-like qualities in his photographs. J. G. Ballard writes of them in the short story ‘One Afternoon at Utah Beach’, (Anticipations, 1978), The Complete Short Stories, (London: Flamingo, 2001), 972-81. All citations to Ballard’s short stories will refer to this collection.
[28] The trope of ‘ground zero’ frames this moment. For a discussion of this consideration see Conclusion.
[29] Unless there is information to the contrary that has not yet been declassified, the back up aircraft was probably armed with conventional weapons.
[30] Tibbets recollects his experience in ‘The Atom Bomb’, an episode of The World at War, (United Kingdom: Thames Television, 1973).
[31] LeMay was a US Air Force officer in command of B-29 bombing of China and Japan in the latter part of the Pacific war, commanding general of the strategic air command 1948-1957, and USAF Chief of Staff during the Cuban Missile Crisis.
[33] Ballard’s note to revised edition of ‘The Assassination Weapon’, The Atrocity Exhibition, (London: Cape, 1970; revised edition, San Francisco: RE/Search Publications, 1990), 31.
[34] The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, trans. Tom Conley, (Minneapolis. University of Minnesota Press, 1993).
[35] Deleuze, Foucault, trans. and ed. Seán Hand, (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 1988), 104, 120.
[36] Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 90.
[37] Ibid.
[41] After reading medicine at Cambridge for two years he went to London University to study literature, thinking that this would help him to be a writer.
[42] Lancelot Law White, Note to ‘Chronological Survey on Form’, in Lancelot Law Whyte, (ed.) Aspects of Form: A Symposium on Form in Nature and Art, in collaboration with the Institute of Contemporary Arts on the occasion of their Exhibition, Summer, 1951, Growth and Form (London and Bradford: Lund Humphries, 1951), 237.
[44] Deleuze, Foucault, trans. and ed. Seán Hand, (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 1988), 66.
[45] In first references to Ballard’s short stories I will include the date of writing when it is available, if it is different from the publication date. These dates come from ‘Chronological Listing of Stories’ in J. G. Ballard: A Bibliography by James Goddard (Lymington: Cypher Press, 1970), quoted in post # 6779 by David Pringle, JGB List, 25 February, 2004, http://groups.yahoo.com/group/jgb/
[46] Ballard’s acknowledgement of Vance appears in ‘Letter from J.G. Ballard’ (JGB News no. 22, February 1994). I am grateful to David Pringle for drawing this to my attention.
[47] ‘J.G. Ballard Interview,’ by James Goddard & David Pringle, 4th January 1975 (published variously), repr. in post # 6370 by David Pringle, JGB List, 19 January, 2004. http://groups.yahoo.com/group/jgb/.
[61] A British Act of Parliament (under Defence Minister Duncan Sandys) stopped the development of fighter aircraft 4 April 1957, as their range was inadequate in light of the development of Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles. Lightning Fighters, however, were subsequently continued.
[62] Lawrence Alloway, ‘The Development of British Pop’, Lucy Lippard, (ed) Pop Art, (London: Thames & Hudson, 1966), 33.
[63] Interview by David Pringle, J.G. Ballard, The First Twenty Years, 1976, excerpt quoted in ‘Quotations by Ballard’, 164.
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