Ballard's introduction to 'Crash' (French edition)

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
I read this yesterday and it seemed to chime in with a lot of discussions happening in the music forum re: the future, advertising, death of soul/emotion, etc.

I thought I'd plonk it all in here, where we can talk about it and perhaps this thread could be linked from those other threads instead of invading them?

Introduction to the French Edition of Crash

by J.G. Ballard, 1974


The marriage of reason and nightmare which has dominated the 20th century has given birth to an ever more ambiguous world. Across the communications landscape move the specters of sinister technologies and the dreams that money can buy.Thermonuclear weapons systems and soft drink commercials coexist in an overlit realm ruled by advertising and pseudoevents, science and pornography. Over our lives preside the great twin motifs of the 20th century – sex and paranoia. Despite McLuhan’s delight in high-speed information mosaics we are still reminded of Freud’s profound pessimism in Civilization and its Discontents . Voyeurism, self-disgust, the infantile basis of our dreams and longings – these diseases of the psyche have now culminated in the most terrifying casualty of the [20th] century: the death of affect.

This demise of feeling and emotion has paved the way for all our most real and tender pleasures – in the excitements of pain and mutilation; in sex as the perfect arena, like a culture bed of sterile pus, for all the veronicas of our own perversions; in our moral freedom to pursue our own psychopathology as a game; and in our apparently limitless powers for conceptualization – what our children have to fear is not the cars on the highways of tomorrow but our own pleasure in calculating the most elegant parameters of their deaths. To document the uneasy pleasures of living within this glaucous paradise have more and more become the role of science fiction. I firmly believe that science fiction, far from being and unimportant minor offshoot, in fact represents the main literary tradition of the 20th century, and certainly its oldest – a tradition of imaginative response to science and technology that runs in an intact line through H.G. Wells, Aldous Huxley, the writers of modern America science fiction, to such present-day innovators as William Burroughs.

The main fact of the 20th century is the concept of the unlimited possibility. This predicate of science and technology enshrines the notion of a moratorium on the past – the irrelevancy and even death of the past – and the limitless alternatives available to the present. What links the first flight of the Wright brothers to the invention of the Pill is the social and sexual philosophy of the ejector seat. Given this immense continent of possibility, few literatures seem to be better equipped to deal with their subject matter than science fiction. No other form of fiction has the vocabulary and images to deal with the present, let alone the future. The dominant characteristic of the modern mainstream novelist its sense of individual isolation; its mood of introspection and alienation, a state of mind assumed to be the hallmark of the 20th century consciousness. Far from it. On the contrary, it seems to me that this is a psychology that belongs entirely to the 19th century, part of a reaction against the massive restraints of bourgeois society, the monolithic character of Victorianism and the tyranny of the paterfamilias, secure in his financial and sexual authority. Apart from its marked retrospective bias and its obsession with the subjective nature of experience, its real subject matter is the rationalization of guilt and estrangement. Its elements are introspection, pessimism and sophistication. Yet if anything befits the 20th century it is optimism, the iconography of mass merchandising, naivety and a guilt free enjoyment of all the mind’s possibilities.

The kind of imagination that now manifests itself in science fiction is not something new. Homer, Shakespeare and Milton all invented new worlds to comment on this one. The split of science fiction into a separate and somewhat disreputable genre is a recent development. It is connected to the near disappearance of dramatic and philosophical poetry and the slow shrinking of the traditional novel as it concerns more and more exclusively with the nuances of human relationships. Among those areas neglected by the traditional novel are, above all, the dynamics of human societies [the traditional novel tends to depict society as static], and man’s place in the universe. However crudely or naively, science fiction at least attempts to place a philosophical and metaphysical frame around the most important events within our lives and consciousness. If I make this general defense of science fiction it is, obviously, because my own career as a writer has been involved with it for almost 20 years. From the very start, when I first turned to science fiction, I was convinced that the future was a better key to the present than the past. At the time, however, I was dissatisfied with science fiction’s obsession with its two principal themes – outer space and the far future. As much for emblematic purposes as any theoretical or programmatic ones, I christened the new terrain I wished to explore inner space, that psychological domain [manifest, for example, in surrealist painting] where the inner world of the mind and the outer world of reality meet and fuse.

Primarily I wanted to write a fiction about the present day. To do this in the context of the late 1950s, in a world where the call sign of Sputnik I could be heard on one’s radio like the advance beacon of a new universe, required completely different techniques from those available to the 19th century novelist. In fact, I believe that if it were possible to scrap the whole of existing literature, and be forced to begin again without a any knowledge of the past, all writers would find themselves inevitably producing something very close to science fiction. Science and technology multiply around us. To an increasing extent they dictate the languages in which we speak and think. Either we use those languages, or we remain mute. Yet, by an ironic paradox, modern science fiction became the first casualty of the changing world it anticipated and helped to create. The future envisaged by the science fiction of the 1940s and 1950s is already our past. Its dominant images, not merely of the first Moon flights and interplanetary voyages, but of our changing social and political relationships in a world governed by technology, now resemble huge pieces of discarded stage scenery. For me, this could be seen most touchingly in the film 2001: A Space Odyssey , which signified the end of the heroic period of modern science fiction – its lovingly imagined panoramas and costumes, its huge set pieces, reminded me of Gone With the Wind , a scientific pageant that became a kind of historical romance in reverse, a sealed world into which the hard light of contemporary reality was never allowed to penetrate.

Increasingly, our concepts of past, present and future are being forced to revise themselves. Just as the past itself, in social and psychological terms, became a casualty of Hiroshima and the nuclear age [almost by definition a period where we were all forced to think prospectively], so in its turn the future is ceasing to exist, devoured by the all voracious present. We have annexed the future into our own present, as merely one of those manifold alternatives open to us. Options multiply around us, we live in an almost infantile world where any demand, any possibility, whether for lifestyles, travel, sexual roles and identities, can be satisfied instantly.

In addition, I think that the balance between fiction and reality has changed significantly in the past decade [1960s]. Increasingly their roles are reversed. We live in a world ruled by fictions of every kind – mass merchandising, advertising, politics conducted as a branch of advertising, the instant translation of science and technology into popular imagery, the increasing blurring and intermingling of identities within the realm of consumer goods, the preempting of any free or imaginative response to experience by the television screen. We live inside an enormous novel. For the writer in particular it is less and less necessary for him to invent the fictional content of his novel. The fiction is already there. The writer’s task is to invent the reality.

In the past we have always assumed that the external world around us represented reality, however confusing or uncertain, and that the inner world of our minds, its dreams, hopes, ambitions, represented the realm of fantasy and the imagination. These roles, too, it seems to me, have been reversed. The most prudent and effective method of dealing with the world around us is to assume that it is a complete fiction – conversely, the one node of reality left to us is inside our own heads. Freud’s classic distinction between the latent and manifest content of the dream, between the apparent and the real, now needs to be applied to the external world of so-called reality.
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
Given these transformations, what is the main task facing the writer? Can he, any longer, make use of the techniques and perspectives of the traditional 19th century novel, with its linear narrative, its measured chronology, its consular characters grandly inhabiting domains within an ample time and space? Is his subject matter the sources of character and personality sunk deep in the past, the unhurried inspection of roots, the examination of the most subtle nuances of social behaviour and personal relationships? Has the writer still the moral authority to invent a self sufficient and self-enclosed world, to preside over his characters like an examiner, knowing all the questions in advance? Can he leave out anything he prefers not to understand, including his own motives, prejudices and psychopathologies?

I feel myself that the writer’s role, his authority and license to act, has changed radically. I feel that, in a sense, the writer knows nothing any longer. He has no moral stance. He offers the reader the contents of his own head, he offers a set of options and imaginative alternatives. His role is that of the scientist, whether on safari or in his laboratory, faced with a completely unknown terrain or subject. All he can do is to devise hypothesis and test them against the facts.

Crash! is such a book, an extreme metaphor for an extreme situation, a kit of desperate measures only for use in an extreme crisis. If I am right, and what I have done over the past years is to rediscover the present for myself, Crash! takes up its position as a cataclysmic novel of the present day in line with my previous novels of world cataclysm set in the near or immediate future – The Drowned World, The Drought and The Crystal World . Crash!, of course, is not concerned with an imaginary disaster, however imminent, but with a pandemic cataclysm institutionalized in all industrial societies that kills hundreds of thousands of people each year and injures millions. Do we see, in the car crash, a sinister portent of a nightmare marriage between sex and technology? Will modern technology provide us with a hitherto undreamed-of means for tapping our own psychopathologies? Is this harnessing of our innate perversity conceivably of benefit to us? Is there some deviant logic unfolding more powerful that that of reason?

Throughout Crash! I have used the car not only as a sexual image, but as a total metaphor for man’s life in today’s society. As such the novel has a political role quite apart from its sexual content, but I would like still to think that Crash! is the first pornographic novel based on technology. In a sense, pornography is the most political form of fiction, dealing with how we use and exploit each other in the most urgent and ruthless way. Needless to say, the ultimate role of Crash! is cautionary, a warning against that brutal, erotic realm that beckons more and more persuasively to us from the margins of technological landscapes.
 

catalog

Well-known member
I think of the crashes of psychopaths, implausible accidents contrived in stolen cars on evening freeways among tired office-workers.I think of the absurd crashes of neurasthnic housewives returning from their VD clinics, hitting parked cars in suburban high streets. I think of the crashes of excited schizophrenics colliding head-on into stalled laundry vans in one way streets; of manic-depressives crushed while making pointless U-turns on motorway access roads; of luckless paranoids driving at full speed into the brick walls at the ends of known culs-de-sac; of sadistic charge nurses decapitated in inverted crashes on complex interchanges; of lesbian supermarket manageresses burning to death in the collapsed frames of their midget cars before the stoical eyes of middle-aged firemen; of autistic children crushed in rear-end collisions, their eyes less wounded in death; of buses filled with mental defectives drowning together stoically in roadside industrial canals.
 

you

Well-known member
I love Ballard. Of course. But this aspect of equating technology with libido, particularly in this way, feels dated now. Doesn't it?

We are a long way from the tactility of yesteryear automotive culture... there is not the gothic beastliness of a 'purring' 'throaty' curvy machine we project desire through.... unless you are the type to still earnestly buy into Clarkson's tongue in cheek Top Gear panto. Cars are more like iPhones, or GlaxoSmithKlein, things we utilise but do not 'possess' and enjoy. There a sterility and indifference to cars now. I think Crash came from a very gendered view of machines, a sort of suburban frisson hung-over from Russolo-esque Dynamicism of a Car mixed with 70s oh-err values.

I can well imagine a group of 18 year olds reading Crash and just not getting it at all.
 

catalog

Well-known member
it's true that the new EVs are more like phones than cars. but i think it's reductive to say ballard is equating technology with libido.
 

you

Well-known member
Equating is probably too strong, too flat. You're right. But I think he poses a certain interplay between the two that is not longer what it was. And there is a clear relationship between sexual 'fetish' in crash and the motorcar, and I think this fetishism of tactile machines is not what it was. Perhaps because, as Berardi often points out, tactility is on the wane.

Over and above all of this, sexuality has drained out of consumerism and technology generally - has it not? Cigarettes, Flake adverts, all that dreadful but dreamy 70s stuff... Take something like shampoo, the Herbal Essences orgasm in the shower stuff (that felt dated at the time) - I'm not sure it'd be received well at all now, not because of values around sex but because products simply are not viewed through the same prism. Most perfume adverts shifted to power and opulence but not sex and corporeal desire.... J'adore Dior with Kanye and Theron is a long way from, say, Opium by YSL or those Jean Paul Gaultier ads.
 

catalog

Well-known member
it's difficult to say what ballard would be writing about were he still alive. crash was really just a 70s thing anyway wasn't it? he's always concerned with physical environments definitely, but i'm not so sure about tactility. he was pretty excited by cable telly iirc.

i think with him it always goes back to his childhood traumas, so it's basically "people doing weird shit cos society has gone awry".

i think he'd be peeking at the lives of the super-rich, them and the tent city inhabitants in LA. Russian oligarchs hunting elk. Poets for hire slashing each others faces open.
 

catalog

Well-known member
"sexuality has drained out of consumerism and technology generally" but what about eg VR porn and all that? porn's still a massive seller online even if it's not quite anything exciting anymore. but i also don't know if he (ballard) would be arsed about it. as in, yes, you are right, the subversive power of crash is now diminished, but what is good about that para is that he can write well.

like, ballard cannot tell us about what is happening now, unfortunately, but i suppose what i'm saying is, he might have done if he were alive.
 

catalog

Well-known member
as iain sinclair said in that post-nearly interview, balard cottoned onto the hot take snippet early. the books didn't matter anyway, he gave good interview. so he'd have loved twitter i reckon.
 

you

Well-known member
"sexuality has drained out of consumerism and technology generally" but what about eg VR porn and all that? porn's still a massive seller online even if it's not quite anything exciting anymore.
I think that is different to what I was trying to describe. Technology being used for sex and in the sex industry is very different to a certain culture finding technology 'sexy' - pitching certain technologies as being associated, being about sexiness or being the object of desire and fetish. There is a big difference between something like trite and cringe-y doctors and nurses (which isn't a million miles from some Ballard narratives, they are novels of a time) role play and viagra - the latter doesn't play on desire in quite the same way.

The technological facet of online pornography is almost invisible, technology is not the object. And anyway, pornography is a difficult and troublesome thing to probe here (yes, let's keep in tenor), because it is not libidinous. It is about sex but not lust and desire.
 

you

Well-known member
It is a good thing technology and other consumable goods are not pitched in this prism anymore. Because what is sexy, desirable, exciting etc came from a certain set of acute values - values we are all the better for getting away from, and certainly better for moving on from the soft and subtle cultural propagation of such values.
 

catalog

Well-known member
I think that is different to what I was trying to describe. Technology being used for sex and in the sex industry is very different to a certain culture finding technology 'sexy' - pitching certain technologies as being associated, being about sexiness or being the object of desire and fetish. There is a big difference between something like trite and cringe-y doctors and nurses (which isn't a million miles from some Ballard narratives, they are novels of a time) role play and viagra - the latter doesn't play on desire in quite the same way.

The technological facet of online pornography is almost invisible, technology is not the object. And anyway, pornography is a difficult and troublesome thing to probe here (yes, let's keep in tenor), because it is not libidinous. It is about sex but not lust and desire.
Ah I see. I think I got the wrong end of thd stick. I think ballard is a bit carry on as it goes. Same sort of pushing out of the 50s and trying to drag the 60s in to fusty England.
 

catalog

Well-known member
It is a good thing technology and other consumable goods are not pitched in this prism anymore. Because what is sexy, desirable, exciting etc came from a certain set of acute values - values we are all the better for getting away from, and certainly better for moving on from the soft and subtle cultural propagation of such values.
So what do you think is sexy now @you?
 

version

Well-known member
as iain sinclair said in that post-nearly interview, balard cottoned onto the hot take snippet early. the books didn't matter anyway, he gave good interview. so he'd have loved twitter i reckon.

You can see why he was such a fan of Baudrillard.
 

version

Well-known member
I love Ballard. Of course. But this aspect of equating technology with libido, particularly in this way, feels dated now. Doesn't it?

We are a long way from the tactility of yesteryear automotive culture... there is not the gothic beastliness of a 'purring' 'throaty' curvy machine we project desire through.... unless you are the type to still earnestly buy into Clarkson's tongue in cheek Top Gear panto. Cars are more like iPhones, or GlaxoSmithKlein, things we utilise but do not 'possess' and enjoy. There a sterility and indifference to cars now. I think Crash came from a very gendered view of machines, a sort of suburban frisson hung-over from Russolo-esque Dynamicism of a Car mixed with 70s oh-err values.

I can well imagine a group of 18 year olds reading Crash and just not getting it at all.

Have you seen Titane?
 

luka

Well-known member
i was taking the elizabeth line today thinking something a little simialr to you today. there's a weird feel to it, definitely contemporary. reminds me of damiens hirst medicine cabinets for some reason. feels very pharmaceutical. a bit euthenasia clinic. a bit prozac packaging.
 

luka

Well-known member
it's not beautiful, but its not ugly either. its not muscular, its not ethereal. its unassertive, thats part of it
 
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