ballard and the near future

The giant shining face of Jim Ballard stared out at us, like some deity critically surveying his assembled congregation. Below this over-sized icon Nic Clear swayed back and forth on his feet, at times falling into a reverent chant as he picked up on some core Ballardian doctrine: the high priest behind his technological altar.

Nic, amongst other things, is the editor of a recent AD entitled “Architecture of the Near Future”, which began as an investigation into the influence of Ballard on contemporary architecture – and he began by answering the question: why “near” future? Conception necessarily precedes construction, so architecture is necessarily a profession founded in tomorrow’s work. It is, therefore, also necessarily utopian, in that it is always foreseeing the immediate future. The relevance of Ballard is his critique of ‘laissez-faire’ architecture; an architecture that avoids social engagement, searches only for form and which is based in the world of speculative finance (MP on speculative/specular architecture). “Architecture” Nic said “has replaced a vision of the future with an image of the future.” Touché.

It was basically a lecture exploring the juxtaposition of extremes in the events of Ballard’s life: the sudden and shocking death of his wife from pneumonia while on holiday was contrasted with his domestic situation, which Ballard called ‘dreary and boring, ubiquitous suburbia’. His feelings of injustice, that in some way Nature had committed a crime, inform his earlier novels: Drowned World, Drought, Crystal World.

His early life was a strong theme, as it almost always is in discussions of Ballard: his childhood in Shanghai as the son of a civil servant, the Japanese invasion, and his young adulthood in a prisoner of war camp. The speed with which the normal became extreme; the amazing capability for humans to adapt; protagonists that are simultaneously liberated and condemned; and the essential tendency of people towards power abuse and violence are all Ballardian motifs that find their roots in this time.

As the discourse moved on to Ballard’s later life in England, as Englishman yet somehow perpetual foreigner, he made a good point about just how influential the author has become: Ballard’s last novel Kingdom Come was based around the shopping centre, commercialism, a civilisation that lacks any civic identity except the shared experience of consumption (with undercurrents of latent nationalism, and borderline racism), and its protagonist was a mid-40’s advertising agent. This rang untrue, but only because, as a man in his mid-40’s, Nic knew that he would never have been sucked into the plot, because in reality he would have immediately identified the setting as Ballardian. To this extent, not being an author of meta-fiction, Ballard could not have written himself into his own novel, and its lack of credibility was based upon the fact that the influence of Ballard was absent in the characters of the Ballardian world. Ha.

The lecture accompanied the work of his studio. In the dark of the movie room, I asked several people what they thought, to which one said: “the films are provocative, and atmospheric, but they are not providing any solid ideas.” In any case, the production of the unit is truly remarkable. Nic’s conclusion about Ballard's thinking was this: we must embrace the future, if only because we have no other choice.

fistful of links

Ballard's Drowned World as bankers' swimming pool, via Transatlantis.

Slicing it up and dishing it out – the 'net, just like yo'mama used to make: some news.

We are living in times of universal bru-hah-ha: Obama has been politically castrated by the Nobel peace prize, and them old sea-levels just don't seem to be getting any lower. We're also running out of oil much faster than we thought (last two via Liam Young). But anyway, who can concentrate on the fact we've discovered the missing link, when we're going the way of the mammoth?

Jesus certainly can't save us, he can't even stop His signs getting nicked. And the only known immortal animal isn't giving up its secrets either. On the upside, when the apocalypse does come those of us living in sin will be able to get past Peter by faking our own virginity. Related, I'm not sure how this is going to work out for lesbians, who can't even fool the army. Also related, I wonder whether the fake blood in the virginity pack will work in the blood-powered lamp? Not related, worm sick could be the answer to underwater glue (I naively didn't even realise it was a question).

We're bombing the moon, in case you hadn't heard. Related, turns out playing God is a lot like an insect version of Gran Turismo. Also related, perhaps these radio-controlled insects will live in miniature homes carved out of IBMs. Not related, the geography of unemployment. Kind of related, Ford are doing their bit for our children's future. Tangentially related, the 'photography' of Levi van Veluw (I know how he did that). Gratuitously related, bunker Shots. Also in the world, a book cover design based on Dazzle, a really interesting form of camouflage. There's an AA studio devoted to it this year. Related, Themepark Heterotopia (there's another studio being run on that). Not related, I tracked down Stewart from Time Team – who is employed as a 'landscape investigator', though everyone else calls him the 'lumps and bumps man'. I think I would quite like to be a landscape investigator.

Finally, the sexist (or sexiest?) PUMA Index, via Sociological Images:

post: apocalyptic futures

'Mike', 1952, via zvis.

I was recently interviewed for a "cult", and, to my surprise and delight, I was accepted. They call themselves Intermediate 7, and they are one of the 13 units being run as part of the second and third year design studios at the AA school of architecture, here in London. Inter 7's other title is: The End of the World and Other Bedtime Stories, and the focus for the year-long studio is visions of the future, post-apocalyptic societies, etc. Think ballardian fiction, sci-fi flicks. Their modus operandi is to slip in and out of the real and imagined, to produce falsified verity (by means of media or objects). For me this seems like a great excuse to re-watch old favourites like Forbidden Planet (hopefully more on that one day, I've got a killer angle on the plot), re-read the Red Mars trilogy, the War in the Air, and so on. This will all hinge around a unit trip to study emerging environmental and political tensions in Greenland (supposedly in November, although what we are likely to see in the unending night of the Arctic winter, I'm not sure).

But I also see this studio as an opportunity to sit ourselves down, take stock of our bearings and have some deep-and-meaningfuls about not just the future (and post-future) but also the present. I believe we will use our visions of the end of the world to perhaps give some shape to the embryonic Zeitgeist of this new decade, as we all become truly New Millennium People. This is a rather happy coincidence given the rubric of this blog, of which I need hardly remind the regular reader (if you're not one now, carpe diem is all I can say).

As an outburst of over-excitement and puerile anticipation of the day the real work begins, I thought I would make the bulk of this post a summary of my initial reflections on the 'Apocalypse'.

My first instinct is to examine a problem through its etymology A problem well articulated is a problem solved, as I believe Einstein once said (quiet nod to A.Verge, M.Tawa and S.Fung). The etymology of Apocalypse comes from 'kaluptein' which means 'to cover'. Apocalypse is therefore the act of 'uncovering'. In the medieval sense, this referred to the coming of JC and the era of Zion (see Revelations).

This set me thinking about a Heidegger paper about the origins of the word 'light' (amongst other things). He talks about heavy, then light, lightness, illumination (bringing oneself to light) and finally the word 'leathe'. This means 'to conceal, to cover' and its opposite 'aleathea' is the Greek word for 'truth'. Truth is an act of 'unconcealment'. The Apocalypse is an act of 'uncovering'. The Apocalypse is an act of truth.

And since it lies beyond the imagination ('ability to be depicted') of the present day, it is also an evidence (evidentia = ex + videre, or "out of sight"). The Apocalypse is evident, and its prediction is an act of previewing. It is to search for patterns in history, to define the present, to project into the future. 'Post-Apocalyptic' accordingly means 'after the unconcealment' – and could refer to either utopic or distopic situations. It could of course refer to neither, and simply mean 'the era following the unforeseen truth'.

So the core of the Apocalypse is not to fabricate or falsify the future, but to reveal, to expose and uncover... the truth, or a truth. This definition hinges on, and leaves open, the dimension of time. The Apocalypse is not a single occurrence (28 Days Later; The Day After Tomorrow; Deep Impact, etc) but can be any period of time necessary to unconceal a truth: the demise of the Roman Empire; the collapse of the Soviet Union; the end of petrol; the decline of the offline...

My goal for the studio-cult is, in no naive terms, to gestate an Apocalyptic truth.

the seer of sheperton

Original cover for the serialised novella, now known as The Drowned World. 1962.

BALLARDIAN: (adj) 1. of James Graham Ballard (J.G. Ballard; born 1930), the British novelist, or his works. (2) resembling or suggestive of the conditions described in Ballard’s novels & stories, esp. dystopian modernity, bleak man-made landscapes & the psychological effects of technological, social or environmental developments.

Ballard was one of the greatest writers of the 20th Century, and yet he remains decidedly at the peripheries of mainstream media. I don't mean he is a cult figure, not at all – the man was so well recognised in his own lifetime that he had an adjective made of his name. He spawned his own genre of fiction. He influenced such diverse figures as Jean Baudrillard (whose commentary on Crash in Simulacra and Simulation was how I first heard of Ballard's name), Joy Division, the Klaxons, and Steven Spielberg. There are several websites dedicated to him and his works, the most famous is perhaps the Ballardian. Will Self, who was his friend for many years, recently recorded a production for Radio 4 (online here) in which he pays tribute to the 'seer of Sheperton'. Also worth a look are these images, inspired by his novel Drowned World.

Ballard died of prostate cancer several months ago.

The purpose of this post is not an attempt at summarising, or introducing, the work of Ballard. Its purpose is simply to identify one more reason that this blog is called Millennium People. Ballard's prose is rich, and over-saturated, at times heavy, even indigestible. His plots vary in subject, but rarely in theme – there is a coherent trajectory to his writing as he follows several ideas to their logical (or at times, their frighteningly realistic illogical) conclusions. His earlier works generally involve the transformation of people and societies as the world is subjected to some cataclysmic environmental change. These could be considered, perhaps, a type of science fiction set in the present day.

In The Drowned World "21st century fluctuations in solar radiation have cause the ice-caps to melt and the seas to rise. Global temperatures have climbed, and civilisation has retreated to the Arctic and Antarctic circles. London is a city now inundated by a primeval swamp, to which an expedition travels to record the flora and fauna of this new Triassic Age. " Wiki notes: "In contrast to much post-apocalyptic fiction, the novel features a central character who, rather than being disturbed by the end of the old world, is enraptured by the chaotic reality that has come to replace it."

This is a similarly prominent aspect of The Drought (as it sounds) and Hello America (due to the diversion in global air and water patterns caused by the damming of the Bering Strait the States are turned into a desert, and 100 years into the future a group of European explorers find themselves suddenly swept up by the remnants of American society, who have centred their new and violent civilization on Las Vegas).

'Enraptured by chaotic reality' is a good way to describe his middle and later works – High Rise, for example, is the story of a Corbusian-like ultra-modern tower block occupied by bored housewives and wealthy professionals that descends into a tribal warfare. Or Concrete Island, where an architect rolls his car off an overpass and finds himself trapped, marooned, between on-ramps, unable to be seen or to escape. Perhaps most famously Crash, "a story about car-crash sexual fetishism, its protagonists become sexually aroused by staging and participating in real car-crashes, often with real consequences..."

And so we come finally to Millennium People, written in 2003, and his second-last novel. Put simply, it is the tale of a middle-class revolt in a quiet suburban enclave of London called Chelsea Marina (Chelsea Harbour in reality). The protagonist is a psychiatrist searching for meaning in the death of his ex-wife, who was killed by a terrorist bomb at Heathrow Airport. By degrees he becomes involved with a bourgeois terrorist cell, who target the National Film Archives, libraries and cat shows. They are convinced that the financial obligations of the middle class (associated with consuming and possessing – homes, cars, designer clothes, etc) and the mind-numbing effects of "traditional values" on maintaining elitist social hierarchies amount to a type of present-day servitude. They equate themselves with the powerless proletariat of the Russian Revolution, and their goal is simple:

"'The travel agency you tried to attack, I assume there's a larger target... Chelsea Marina?'
'Far larger.' Relaxed again, Dexter raised his hands. 'One of the biggest of all. The 20th Century.'
'I thought it was over.'
'It lingers on. It shapes everything we do... the way we think. There's scarcely a good thing you can say for it. Genocidal wars, half the world destitute, the other half sleepwalking through its own brain-death. We bought its trashy dreams and now we can't wake up."

Shifting Shorelines #3: Atlantikwall

A fragment of bunker that has toppled from a cliff above and is slowly being pushed into the sea by coastal erosion. Normandy, via Flickr.

Today’s post concludes the Shifting Shorelines posts and is a cerebral journey through time and space…
If you're new to the series, start at the beginning.

The goal of this mini-series was to examine Western conceptions of space, and hopefully to show how our understanding of place in time is really quite flawed. From London to New York, the final geographical focus is the shoreline of Europe between Norway and Spain.

I am talking about the Atlantikwall, the massive system of military reinforcements and installations that the Nazi’s built way-back-when, and the subsequent subject of several fascinating analyses, namely by Ballard and Virilio.

The metropolitan bookends of the Atlantic demonstrated what happens when an object (a building, say) is fixed, and the shoreline or city moves around it. By contrast, the action of time on the coastal defences is exactly the opposite. Hitler’s unintentional eternal architecture is moving. Shamed by its parent it is creeping year by year towards the sea, and out of the limelight of history. Since space and time (according to Einstein) are completely relative, the two processes are consequently identical; it simply depends on your point of view.

The basis of our understanding of space is the cardinal (or Cartesian) crosshair: a three-dimensional matrix of x, y and z co-ordinates. It relegates any particle in the universe to a very specific point in space (which is an ether, or a vacuum, that is then filled with matter). But there is an essential paradox: space is defined by its volume – which is abstract and empty – and not by the matter that occupies it.

69, the Hackney Road will always be 69, the Hackney Road, even if the shady striptease that occupies the site is demolished, because in occidental terms the place is defined by its point relative to another place, and not by the materiality of the building. The building, by contrast, is restricted by its materiality. If the striptease is demolished, even if the same owner builds another striptease, we call that a new building, and demarcate it as different from the ‘old’. This is called a cadastral mentality. In China, certain thinkers would tell you that when the new Freedom Tower is finished, it will be the same tower as the one that occupied the site before – that is, there is a continuity of building identity, even when there is no material continuity.

It is, therefore, a relative universe we live in. Our precision about the location of material in space (and its associated properties of volume, velocity, etc.) is dependent on where we set the 0,0,0 of out cardinal grid, which is arbitrary. The basis of all perception of space starts with two points. So it is that we navigate our own planet (longitude and latitude), where the two fairly arbitrary starting points (Greenwich and the equator) thus determine the identity of all places on the planet for all time.

Take a white room with no doors or windows – it could be anywhere, and for precisely that reason it is nowhere or everywhere. Its lack of referents renders it aspatial. By contrast, the smallest aperture immediately infers context and location. It positions the room somewhere and therefore permits for the conditions of genus loci, or the particularities of a place.

But, given that matter is in constant flux, and that everything in the universe is constantly moving, how can one choose an Ultimate 0,0,0? Even Greenwich is spinning round at over a thousand miles per hour (or a little bit faster than the speed of sound), and the planet itself is revolving around a star, and that star is moving in the galaxy, which is… and so on. So there can be no objective stationary point, and therefore no ability to claim that one point in space remains the same over time.

The eventual difference is between place and location in space. We tend to use the two interchangeably, but I think it is fair to make a distinction. A location in space is the occidental way of saying “a position relative to me and my body whose definition I understand and accept, and which I believe exists in time, immutable”, while a place is something we recognise as completely subjective, and changeable, susceptible to our experience and relation to it. It may be linked to personal associations or a sense of identification. The adult that returns to their childhood home to find it has become a ruin recognises that it is no longer the same place – that the place survives solely in memory. By contrast, once the house is restored that adult may be tempted to view it as once again the place of their childhood, even though materially it is quite different.

Finally, I think Borges excellently outlines the absurdities of our belief in the absolute referential system of space over time, by reversing the situation – by making time the constant and space non-continuous. I have mentioned the fable before, but it bears repeating:

"The hypothetical case of nine men who on nine successive nights experience a sharp pain. Would it not be absurd, they asked, to pretend that the men had suffered one and the same pain?"

The continuation of a similar pain in the same location over nine nights is coincidental, and not evidence that it is the same pain. The same would be true of an object: a coin seen in a room by nine men over nine successive nights is, materially, equally non-continuous. Further, to claim that a lost coin on monday and a found coin on friday (that bears the traces of having spent several days in the rain) are the same coin is nothing more than the 'association of ideas'. Classic Borges. This is why the spirit of place is non-continuous in time, but exists only for the moment it is experienced. Try returning to any childhood holiday site and see if the essence of the locale remains...