The Work of Emotion: Ballard and the Death of Affect, Part III
Surrealism, Desire and Bodily Affect
No model exists for him who seeks what he has never seen -- Paul Eluard [1]
What I want to explore in this section is the ways in which desire is refigured, or re-examined in the wake of an affectless world. As we have seen above it is in the realm of desire that the production of emotion resides, with desire acting as a kind of directive crucible in which emotion is created and sustained. How then are we to understand this refiguring of desire as it is acted out in texts like Atrocity and Crash? If we are to trace the movement of desire in these texts it is necessary first to comprehend the trajectory of Ballard’s imaginative project, from a surrealistic foundation to a realigned surrealism that pitches outwards into the now fictionally colonized world of reality.
Perhaps the simplest way to consider surrealism and the surrealist movement is as a kind of rebirth; as a new way of living and of perceiving the world to be sure, but as a rebirth of man in new landscapes of desire. This was to be achieved by a synthesis of two opposed worlds- that of the world of reality and that of the mysterious and transformative unconscious. From this primal synthesis, new forms could be created. As Andrzej Gasoriek has said, ‘central to the quest for this higher synthesis- a sur-realite- was the rejection of constraining limits, the insistence on thinking and experiencing the world anew to untrammel desire and to open the self up to as yet unimagined ways of perceiving and being’ (JGB pp. 10-11) and to this end, ‘Libido, Chance and the Dream were the new gods’. [2] These new gods would allow for the field of perception to grow, to greedily drink in the phenomenological world that was kept mostly under wraps by the guardians of Reason and to tap secret sources and thus free the creative powers of the unconscious to create a new, more complete reality- a sur-reality. This movement, with Andre Breton as its magus, was nominally Freudian in structure and yet was part of a tradition that had existed on the fringes of intellectual and exploratory society for centuries. The insistence on bracketing the surrealists as cod-Freudian psychonauts is to me a restrictive one; they may have couched their explorations in Freudian language but the desire to free man from the overpowering strictures of Reason and logic were not new ideas, they were just re-awoken by the surrealists and given a new, invigorating idiom to work with. What the surrealists believed in was the power of art to carry this project forward- in all its many guises. Initially a primarily literary endeavour, surrealism came to enfold all aspects of art but its two main techniques were automatic writing and the collage- the first a method for tapping the unmediated potential of the unconscious, the other a mode of synthesis that brought together objects and reorganised them in original and liberating ways. Max Ernst who worked voraciously in the area of collages described them as ‘the chance meeting of two distant realities on an unfamiliar plane’[3]: such meetings would allow for new ways of seeing, news ways of visioning the reality that was unencumbered before. Ernst had stumbled across the idea of collage after finding a text called the Bibliographica Paedogogica, a booklet for schoolchildren that laid out the alphabet, geometric shapes and various schematized drawings and diagrams, all the essential elements of a good education. Ernst said that this booklet
showing objects designed for anthropologic, microscopic, psychologic, mineralogic, paleontologic demonstration…brought together elements if figuration so remote that the sheer absurdity of that collection provoked a sudden intensification of the visionary faculties. It was enough at the time to embellish these catalogue pages…with a colour, a pencil mark, and landscape foreign to the represented objects, the desert, a tempest, a geological cross section [4]
Essentially, then, this was the ideal item from which to create the collage as it was an itemized, and logical booklet that was the epitome of the workings and teachings of a reasoning mind, and the perfect place from which to attack the order of things. The collage provided for Ernst the perfect medium for achieving the surrealist mantra of fusing the inner world of the dream with the outer world of reality and in doing so creating new forms, new ways of perceiving to free man from the shackles of Reason.
This detour via the technique of collage is a way of highlighting both the methods used by the surrealists in their adventures and performances and also a neat segue way into understanding the influences of the surrealists and particularly Ernst and his collage technique on the work of Ballard. He has often been called a surrealist writer, and Atrocity has often been labelled a surrealist novel, indeed a collage novel. [5] Ballard had produced some collages of his own in the late 60’s that were ostensibly ‘flat’ collages, or adverts that appeared in Ambit magazine. He said that he wanted them to appear as if they were genuine adverts and capable of appearing in Vogue or Newsweek. They are grotesque images, almost like visual outtakes from The Atrocity Exhibition; misshapen, vivified Bellmer dolls. [6] They are certainly surrealist in formation and ideation but are given a glossy blankness by their finish that removes them from the works of Man Ray or Maurice Tabard. There is also a kind of genius in their role as adverts, perfectly mirroring the monstrous world of commodity culture and the soulless banalities of advertising. There is a dark obscenity about the collages that highlight many of Ballard’s themes at the time and signal his intent for the works of the late 60’s and early 70’s. [7]
For Ballard, from the vantage point of the 60’s and its manifold discourses of inner exploration and psychic wholeness, the message was that there was a need to explore inner workings of the as yet little understood human psyche- what he termed inner space. [8] This was fairly standard surrealist fare and thus Ballard was able to state that ‘what uniquely characterizes this fusion of the outer world of reality with the inner world of the psyche…inner space, is its redemptive and therapeutic power. To move through these landscapes is a journey of return to one’s innermost being’ [9] In the early novels such as The Drowned World and The Crystal World one can see this process of inner journey coming to fruition and a sense of psychic wholeness or individuation being achieved; and in early short stories also, such as ‘The Overloaded Man’ (1963) and ‘The Giaconda of the Twilight Noon’ (1964) [10] this inner psychic space is favoured altogether over the tortured reality of the ‘real’ world. Both protagonists in these stories favour a kind of death over the intrusion of reality: in the former a shutting down of the outer world, much like an inversion of Huxley’s invigoration of reality through the use of mescaline; and the latter in which the main character puts out his own eyes to preserve the purity of his inner visions. [11] Yet this landscape is subtly altered in Atroctiy and in Crash also, in that the journey to individuation has become confused in some way or mediated- and it isn’t individuation as such that is being sought out as much as a finding of the self full stop, as if the territory has become alien and unmappable. This isn’t to say that the journey to inner space is ignored altogether, (witness for instance the LSD trip in Crash) more that it has been displaced, or superseded. Ballard notes that Dali had understood that ‘after Freud’s explorations within the psyche it is now the outer world which will have to be eroticized and quantified’ [12]; and this fits with Ballard’s own notion of the way in which ‘Freud's classic distinction between the latent manifest content of the dream, between the apparent and the real, now needs to be applied to the external world of so-called reality.’ [13] So the classic surrealist dictum has been transferred and altered slightly, altered to fit with the mediatized world of the late twentieth century and its horizons refocused not so much on the world of inner space but on the external world- this is to be the site from which to reawaken desire, to reinvigorate the depleted psyche, unsure of its moorings; and it is from this vantage point that I would like to examine Crash.
Crash and Formulating New Aspects of Desire
There are various sections in Atrocity which prefigure the wider explorations of Crash and in which Ballard appears to be working through preoccupations that will fill the landscape of his later world. In a fragment entitled ‘The Death of Affect’, Traven explores a crash site, combing the environment for details, trying to piece together the remnants of a collision; a section titled ‘A New Algebra’ figures both the equations of geometry and sexual desire and the enigmatic figure of Vaughan who later appears as the shamanic central force in Crash; and the chapter ‘Crash’ foreshadows many of the connections explored in Crash including the conjunction of celebrity and death, the fascination with auto-disasters and the horrific injuries caused by these and the aesthetics involved in this union of body and technology (AE pgs. 108, 109,153). There is also the question of the meta-themes in Atrocity and how these fan out and inform the general plot and content of Crash- there is a continuation of the fascination with spectacle and the odd juxtapositions of bodies, advertising and technology. But in Crash these concerns are more thoroughly and rigorously investigated, and in a more linear fashion. Crash has a very different aesthetic to Atrocity, one that I am tempted to say is more didactic and pedagogic, as if Ballard has a more definite direction or set of operating rules to impart. Whilst there is always a confusion in Ballard’s texts about to what extent the characters are mere manifestations of their environment and as such, powerless ciphers, unable to perform any act of agency, or whether they are to some extent morality tales, with protagonists attempting to work with and against their environments to achieve some sort of epiphany or new mode of living, I think Crash can certainly be read in a more positive fashion, and as both evidence of a death of affect and a railing against it. [14] At the hub of this seems to be a will to discover a way of reawakening desire, or at least the will to explore new areas in which desire can be reappraised and rekindled. In this way we can see the complete unhomeliness and alienation of Atrocity which seems to speak of a fundamental condition of almost Heideggerian anxiety, refigured as a condition of possibility, a crucible for regeneration. Indeed, one is driven to the possibility that whereas Atrocity is obsessed with the breakdown of affect, its waning and eventual collapse, Crash is a meditation on the return of the repressed, of the kind of which Jameson speaks in Postmodernism. What I want to explore here then is a notion of an exploration of a re-enlivening of emotion through an interface of an understanding of the real world via a method surrealism that works itself upon the raw materials of the phenomenological world; and ultimately reinstates an idea of the rediscovery of the body and its role in the production of affect.
Ballard has said ‘rather than fearing alienation, people should embrace it. It may be the doorway to something more interesting… We need to explore total alienation and find what lies beyond. The secret module that underpins who we are and our imaginative remaking of ourselves that all embrace’ [15]: Crash can be read as a complete commitment to this dictum and all that it entails. Thus, to reawaken desire, or to make it move in new ways, we must comprehend the world in new ways, and push our explorations of what it contains to its logical end. There are two main themes that this working through follows: the idea of environmental alienation, which is figured through the idea of a landscape that is at artificial and requires new epistemic resources to absorb and understand it, something I will move onto examine in the next section in a broader look at Ballard’s ‘landscape’ or ‘concrete and steel’ novels in the shape of Concrete Island and High Rise; and a situation in which the characters are seemingly alienated from their own bodies, or have become detached from their own concept of bodily reality- and it is this that has caused a death of affect that can only be resuscitated through the bizarre logic of the car crash.
The questions here must be: What is it that is occurring in the text that constitutes this rebirthing of desire, gives it its content and form; and what object does this new desire take as its focal point, how is the intentionality to be understood? I would like to argue that Crash can be read as being about an overcoming of deadened bodily affect, caused by a dislocation and disassociation as an aspect of the spectacular society as examined above and an alienation brought on by a technology suffused within the overall ontic being of the characters involved- embodied in the shape and morphed Marrinettian aesthetic of the car. In this light the object of desire, and thus its potential catalyst, is a union of these dynamic factors- so we have a deep exploration of the sexual possibilities triggered in the coming together of human and machine, notably in the stylized possibilities of the car crash.
The text opens with what might be seen as a removed denouement for The Atrocity Exhibition, with the death of Vaughan in a car crash, one in which he was supposed to die with the screen actress Elizabeth Taylor, her ‘dying as she reached her orgasm’ [16] providing a piecing together, a kind of closure for that text’s splintered narrative and occluded death drive. Yet the real opening of the text is the narrator’s own automobile crash, which acts as a kind of catalyst, a motif of reawakening from which the refigurations of desire proceed. This set piece is characterized by an almost painful level of detail as if there has been a stirring of sensual actitivity or a reawakening of some sort; and this shockingly lurid and close-up detail is something that feeds into the very body of the text- a continuation of the style of Atrocity, but more honed and fixated. At the scene of the crash, when the narrator is trapped behind his wheel he sees into the car ahead with which he has had a head-on collision, a vivid detail rises out of the matrix: ‘her husband’s hand…lay palm upwards beside the right windshield wiper…the patter of a sign formed itself as I sat there, pumped up by his dying circulation into a huge blood-blister- the triton signature of my radiator emblem’ (Crash p. 20). This stands as a symbol for the marriage of mechanism and body that dominates Crash and is representative for the notion of the way in which the body has been overtaken in some way, claimed by this marriage of technology and flesh, and made uncanny and alien. [17] In this way, the characters in the text are often to be found examining their bodies for clues of its point and function, or surprised by its existence. Thus examining one of her wounds, Dr. Remington tries to read ‘an imaginary biography into this history of the skin’, and Ballard stares at his own ‘pale, mannequin-like face, trying to read its lines’, and feels a ‘sense of disembodiment, of the unreality of my own muscles and bones (pgs. 36, 43, 122). So there is at once an extraordinary enhancement of the visual sense of the characters and yet a remarkable down turn in they way they feel about their bodies, and the way they feel in their bodies. As Denis Foster perceptively puts it, ‘the body and the self do not form an organic whole…. The body as a symbol…reveals itself, under violence, to be the uncanny body’. [18] Rather, the characters seek and fumble for new ways of feeling, via the interface of desire- mutated by the interface of machine and body- with Vaughan as shamanic figure, guiding them through this ‘new logic’ (Crash p.106). We can see this conjunction of body and machine, repeated with mantric intensity throughout the text, to the point of overload. [19] The narrator is complicit in this overloading of imagery, is overwhelmed by it himself: ‘Two months before my accident, during a journey to Paris, I had become so excited by the conjunction of an air hostess's fawn gabardine skirt on the escalator in front of me and the distant fuselages of the aircraft, each inclined like a silver penis towards her natal cleft, that I had involuntarily touched her left buttock’ (p. 41). And it infects his sexual liaisons as well, which become affectless, conceptual; experiments (‘now that sex is becoming more and more a conceptual act, an intellectualization divorced from affect (AE p. 85)); as Ballard and Dr. Remington couple in a car: ‘as she brought my penis to life I looked down at her strong back, at the junction between the contours of her shoulder demarked by the straps of her brassière and the elaborately decorated instrument panel of this American car, between her thick buttock in my left hand and the pastel-shaded instrument binnacles of the clock and speedometer’ (p. 62); ‘her strong body, with its nervous sexuality, formed a powerful junction with the dented and mud-stained car’ (p. 71) ; and the ultimate expression of the fusion of human and machine in "the soft technology of Catherine's breasts’ (p. 33). How might we understand this deadened bodily affect and its contingent emotional anaesthetizing then, and its manifestations in the alienated conjunctions of machine and body? We might say that if one main are of concern of Atrocity… deals with the effect on the deep emotional structures of the psyche, then Crash is concerned with the way we have come to understand feeling and its role in our emotional behaviour; [20] and its extreme hypothesis is that we have forgotten how to feel our bodies, or that the usual feedback mechanism between body and mind has become deranged in some way. This would certainly account for the fascination with injury patterns and the horrific wound-ciphers which the characters attempt to interpret in endeavouring to understand this new psycho-somatic order. One feels that the most obvious area of study here would be William James’ notion of emotion as bodily affect and to see the polymorphousness of the desire expressed in the text as a mode for revitalizating this. [21] Yet there is a certain absurdity to James’ claims that it is merely the bodily responses that constitute emotion, and that there is no underlying mental dispositions at work at all in the process (indeed, Wollheim uses the word ‘preposterous’ (OE p. 120)); and although there would be an efficiency to be able to leave his theory in toto and apply it to Crash and simply identify that what the characters and the narrative line is characterized by is a diminution of feeling, founded on a monumental anaesthetizing of their viscerality, there is a far more subtle integration of what James appears to be saying needed here. The approach thus far has been very much centered on mental states, and the phenomenology present in the mind- what James’ exposition highlights is the need to understand emotion and affect as holistic experiences. So whereas currently we are to understand emotion as the correlate of desire and its fixation on an object and the satisfaction or frustration of that desire- disembodied, psychic phenomena – this allows for a reintegration of a feeling edge to the makeup of emotions and their work. Jack Katz’s sociological studies of various subjects’ behaviour in their cars on the freeways around LA I think provides the much needed subtlety that is missing form James’ work whilst retaining the importance of bodily affect in the role of emotions in general.
In Katz’s idiom, the notion of bodily affect is one that incorporates a sense of work, in that we use our bodies as a kind of corporeal metaphors, one that allows us to ‘reach back sensually to grasp the tacit, embodied foundations of ourselves’ [22]. Katz acknowledges, like Wollheim, that our emotional lives are bound up with self-reflection, representation, and imagination yet he sees this discursive element of emotional behaviour as performed by the body: ‘emotions…which have so often been treated as opposed to thinking are paradoxically self-reflexive actions and experiences. But the self-reflection in emotions is corporeal rather than a matter of discursive reasoning’ (Katz p. 7). He uses a Jamesian paradigm in that he acknowledges the vital importance of bodily affect in emotional behaviour, yet he moves beyond James in incorporating the body as part of a feedback system in which the body is used as an expressive tool, as an actual interface with the world- a kind of bridge between the turbulent emotional production that takes place in the mind and the world into which this emotion is aimed or discharged. [23] We would have to surmise that it is this connection which has been indelibly fractured in Crash, that the corporeal interface with the world has no responsive relationship with the realm of emotional production and behaviour, thus the characters see their bodies as confusing and so much dead meat and so to be used in that way. Katz’s own take on our overtly aggressive behaviours in cars is that we are suffering from what he calls ‘the emotional provocations of asymmetrical interaction’ (Katz p. 24) or in other words the technology involved in cars and the ways in which they cut us off from the world, spatially and temporally, cause a breakdown in the ways in which we use our bodies to work emotionally (‘these sensual forms of self-consciousness’ (Katz p. 34)) for us in communication- so we compensate with ferocious indignation, and exaggerated aggression. The car disrupts the relationship with the ‘phenomenological’ body in that it causes a sense of being cut-off; the visual sensory flow is interrupted and one made aware of the production/reception of emotion. In this sense the flips of the fingers and hand gestures are literally reclamations of this communicative process which are artificially mediated by and distorted by the metallized tubes we drive around in.
Katz’s optimistic view of our performance in our cars and the ways in which we can use our bodies to reclaim the communicative space that is destroyed by the artificial space of the motor car, isn’t borne out in the flattened, affectless world of Crash. Here the schism in the feedback loop is terminal and the characters seek to fill it with explorations of polymorphous perversions, twisted desires set off by technological relationships: the self-conscious reflection inherent in the bodily-affective process is fatally damaged. Viewed in this way then, how are we to understand the anaesthetized responses of the characters in the world described in Crash? There is a very real sense of the characters being obsessed with their bodies and the ways in which they have become fused with their environments, and yet they do not seem to understand them in any ‘normal’ functional manner- it is as if there has been some fundamental rupture in the organic processes that establish and constitute emotional production and response. I approached the question at the beginning of this section about whether or not Crash signified a reinvigoration of desire via the interface of the rediscovery of bodily affect and its role in emotional production, and whether the characters rediscovery of their bodies and retooling it to ‘free up’ desire constituted a return of the repressed, emotion reappearing in a distorted fashion. Yet one must conclude that the dreadful ambivalence at the heart of Crash doesn’t allow for a definite answering of this question. We might read the obsession with wounds as ciphers as a mode for this rediscovery of the body, as the characters’ explorations of new ways of seeing the body, so for Vaughan ‘these wounds were the keys to a new sexuality born from perverse technology’ (Crash p. 13); and yet as Parveen Adams has said, ‘the world of the wound is quite different; it is not a kind of writing on the body so much as an unwriting of the body.’ [24] Instead ‘in our wounds we celebrated the re-birth of those we had seen dying by the roadside and the imaginary wounds and postures of millions yet to die (Crash p. 203). So this isn’t reinvigoration but a further erasure of the body and the possibility of redemption in bodily affect, and ultimately, the urge of characters, personified by the thanatonaut Vaughan is toward death, and that this new union between car and body is, apocalyptically figured as the incarnated death drive made conscious. Essentially, Crash isn’t about a redemptive return to the body then but an indictment on the extreme alienation from it, of a move ever further away from it and a healthy production of emotive responses. The finale and Vaughan’s spectacularised death, is one more grand spectacle and ‘Ballard’ realises that his own behaviour has merely been a rehearsal and that ‘I knew that I was designing the elements of my own car crash’ (Crash p. 224).
This awful ambivalence then is primarily another step toward complete emotional death. The spectacular society envisioned in Atrocity and continued in Crash comprises a detached mental state, and thus a disorienting world, in which the characters are fundamentally unable to dwell in any real sense, or interact on any authentic emotional level. This is also apparent in the physically anaesthetized behaviour of Traven and all the characters in Crash who seem to dwell in an essentially post-emotional world, ever further from any redemptive force. What I would like to examine now is how this retreat from the body and its contingent possibilities in evoking an emotional response, is figured in view of the landscape the characters inhabit and the environment they are depicted in to see how this effects their emotional behaviour: how they respond to it, and how it reflects their mental states, and responds to them. I will look at Atrocity and Crash for sake of continuity and then move on to explore the worlds of High Rise and Concrete Island.
[1] Cited in Patrick Waldberg, Surrealism (Paris: Albert Skira 1962) p. 15
[2] Waldberg op. cit. p. 15 capitalization in original
[3] cited in Pepe Karmel, ‘Max Ernst and Contemporary Art’ in Max Ernst: A Retrospective (London: Arts Council 2005) note p. 104
[4] cited in Karmel op. cit p. 82 It is hard to imagine a more Ballardian passage than this.
[5] Ernst produced several collage novels, notably La Femme 100 Tetes, but these were genuinely collagistic in that they included much ‘found’ material and drawings.
[6] These unsettling, uncanny creations, ostensibly dolls, but more like manifestations of a diseased psyche are explored in depth in Rosalind Krauss’, ‘Corpus Delicti’ op. cit.
[7] For examples of these collages, see Appendix 1.
[8] This phrase, common in 60’s counter culture is attributed to R.D. Laing who pursued the phenomena in his work with schizophrenics. See The Divided Self (Harmondsworth: Penguin 1966) and The Politics of Experience (London: Penguin 1988)
[9] ‘The Coming of the Unconscious’ in UGM op. cit. p. 84
[10] The Best Short Stories of J.G. Ballard (New York: Henry Holt 1995), The Terminal Beach (Harmondsworth: Penguin 1964)
[11] Borges tells us of ‘Democritus of Abdea tore out his eyes in a garden so that the spectacle of reality would not distract him’ in ‘Blindness’ in The Total Library- Non Fiction 1922-1986 (London: Penguin 2002) p. 482
[12] ‘The Coming of the Unconscious’ op. cit., p. 88
[13] Intro to French Edition of Crash op. cit p. 97
[14] Ballard seems equally ambivalent about this, calling Crash both a morality tale, and a psychopathic hymn: ‘the ultimate role of Crash is cautionary’ (intro to Crash op. cit p. 97); ‘Crash is not a cautionary tale. Crash is what it appears to be. It is a psychopathic hymn’ cited in Iain Sinclair op. cit. p. 188
[15] Interview with Ballard in Iain Sinclair, Crash (London: BFI 1999) p. 42
[16] J.G. Ballard, Crash (London: Vintage 1995) p. 8. Further citations refer to this edition and will appear in the text as Crash.
[17] This extension of the body by technology, or the way in which the body is extended into the environment is something I want to return to later
[18] Denis A. Foster, ‘J.G. Ballard's Empire of the Senseless: Perversion and the Failure of Authority’ PMLA vol. 108 1993 p. 524
[19] Maybe even to the point of farce: big sections of Atrocity are almost farcical in their makeup and it is important to recognise this aspect of Ballard’s work, an aspect which is often ignored or discarded. This is especially relevant when one remembers that, as Patrick Waldberg points out, that the term surrealism was first used to describe a farcical play (see Waldberg op. cit. p. 1).
[20] David Pugmire in his aforementioned Rediscovering Emotion, defines ‘affect, or feeling, as the sharp or dull edge of an emotion’ op. cit. p. 2
[21] See William James, The Principles of Psychology (New York: Henry Holt 1950) p. 440-494
[22] Katz, op. cit., p. 7. Further references will appear parenthetically in the text as Katz
[23] In his study on the way in which we use laughter in comedic situations, especially when confronted with a comedian ‘audience members, if they are to maintain coherence in their watching, build bridges with their laughing bodies’ (Katz p. 109).
[24] Parveen Adams, Cars and Scars New Formations 35 Autumn 1998 p. 62
Part IV: Psychic Landscapes, Physical Environments
Jump to Part I
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