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

Chapter 2: J.G. Ballard and the Decaying Landscape of Affect

I Take My Desires for Reality Because I Believe in the Reality of My Desires -- Situationist Slogan [1] We need to invent a series of imaginary sexual perversions, just to keep our feelings alive -- The Atrocity Exhibition (p . 120 ) The introduction that Ballard wrote for the French edition of Crash, first published in 1974, could very easily be taken as a kind of symptom map for what he saw as the characteristics, preoccupations and psychopathologies of life in the twentieth century; and the perception at its heart, that affect had undergone a transformation, or died altogether, is a thread that can be traced back to The Atrocity Exhibition, fragments of which were published as far back as 1967. The Crash piece aligns this emotional death with the aforementioned voyeurism, self-disgust and the infantile basis of our dreams and what Ballard sees at the almost limitless possibilities of the late twentieth century, and the massive interventions of the media and the communications networks, eliciting a kind of spectacularised society, that can no longer rely on its former epistemologies and ontological certainties- let alone moral and ethical ones. There is also the conception of the scientific view as a form of pornographic stare- rendering everything in close up, abstracted and uncanny. In an article written about Salvador Dali for New Worlds in 1969 titled The Innocent as Paranoid Ballard pointed to Dalis paintings as ably highlighting these myriad issues (to which he added biomorphic horror), and performed, as it were, this demise of feeling and emotion [that] 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 or own psychopathology as a game; and in our ever greater powers of abstraction. [2] This passage is repeated almost verbatim in a section of The Atrocity Exhibition entitled Biomorphic Horror (AE p. 116) in which the knowing Dr. Nathan delineates the psychopathic behaviour of the fragmented protagonist, Traven. In view of this it seems the logical place to start this explication of the demise of emotion is The Atrocity Exhibition. While I dont want to view Ballards entire corpus as one vast manifesto or manual for some new mode of living (although Ballards oeuvre is perhaps viewable in this way and ripe for this kind of treatment, it strikes me as a reductive methodology) The Atrocity Exhibition is like a constellation of the ideas that dominate Ballards work, or its DNA, and can be viewed as a kind of nexus for his obsessions and fixations, from which, and into which, his earlier and later works permeate and feed. [3] If there is a trajectory to follow to trace the theme of affect then it seems apposite to begin it here and move outward always acknowledging the presence of The Atrocity Exhibition as a underlying node; and such a trajectory would have to include the following strands of investigation: the death of feeling, intimately entwined with notions of sexuality and bodily affect-

this will ultimately revolve around an examination of Atrocity... and Crash which are close in proximity and in subject matter, the latter growing out of a chapter (and reoccurring themes) in the first. Ultimately, how the relationship between self and world as already explored in the exposition of Wollheims theory of emotion has been indelibly altered and what has motivated and eventuated this fundamental breach or schism. This is also closely aligned with how time is figured in Ballard, and how a move toward a kind of spatialization of the life-world affects the orientations and navigability of the life world in general, but specific to this piece, the formation and historical structure of emotions and emotional behaviour; this will involve a look at some of the earlier short stories such as the Voices of Time and The Terminal Beach and two novels from the mid to late 70s, High Rise and Concrete Island.

Generat ing Blankness: The Atrocity Exhibition and Crash

Another aspect to Ballards introduction to Crash was his decrying of the traditional novel structure, claiming its bourgeois form and the fact that it relied on notions of alienation and isolation, were outmoded and not suitable for describing the world of the late twentieth century; instead a new form was required. For Ballard this form was ostensibly science fiction which was able to provide new morphologies and new ways of understanding the psyche and world. This science fiction would attempt to place a philosophical and metaphysical frame around the most important events within our lives and consciousness, and it would be able to move outside the generic formulations of outer space exploration (which by the mid-seventies had become virtually redundant and even banal) and explore inner space, that psychological domain...where the inner world of the mind and the outer world of reality meet and fuse. [4] This became a desire to mythologize and transcribe the present, to write a fiction of the ever-changing moment. For Ballard the mode of science fiction, despite its strictures and boundaries, was the default mode for this operation. Damien Broderick has said that, science fiction is that species of storytelling native to a culture undergoing the epistemic changes implicated in the rise and supersession of technical -industrial modes of production, distribution, consumption and disposal, [5] a point embellished by Scott Bukatman who sees it as narrating the dissolution of the very ontological structures that we usually take for granted. [6] Thus texts like Atrocity... arent ostensibly classic science fiction as we might come to understand them, yet are dominated by the technology of mapping the present (and the future as it appears, both temporally and in the guise of things-yet-to-appear) and all its idiosyncrasies, a style that occupies the middle ground between the death of the written word and the dominance of the visual image. [7] In an interview with Douglas Reed, Ballard called Atrocity ...fragments of the dream machine that produces our lifestyle right now. I mean fictions like TV, Radio, politics, the press...life is an enormous novel. [8] This was echoed in the introduction to Crash: 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 writers task is to invent reality [9]: this reality, as portrayed in Atrocity is a vivid appalling thing, populated by monstrous banalities and characterized by cinematic overload and instrumentalized perversions; and the text in purely experiential terms, is marked by a surgical precision and a cold, steely edge that is impenetrable and impermeable. The style is fractured and fragmented, shards of narrative that give off their own eerie light, and reflect off one another, promising a deeper meaning yet resistant to it; a collage structured around a black hole, or a scotoma. This is the shattering of the classic bourgeois novel form that Ballard proposed and it dramatically eschews all canonic forms to generate its own atmosphere. There are several possible nodes around which it might be possible to arrange Atrocity, and for the purposes of this piece and to facilitate a move outwards I want to concentrate on two areas that inform the death of affect and the deepening psychosis of the central protagonist, in all his varying guises [10]: namely the increasing affectless scientific instrumentalism and meticulousness of the gaze and the manner in which the body and other phenomena are figured; and the ways in which the psyche is affected by the sheer overbearing weight and

horrific content of the perpetual media influence, the conversion of everything into spectacle, and the emotional detachment that arises from this. Roger Luckhurst asks the following pertinent question: What does The Atrocity Exhibition exhibit? (Angle p. 95). This incisive enquiry focuses on both the content of Atrocity and its splintered form. It also sets off a curious doubling process which places the reader at two removes from the exhibits and the devices used to display them. What might this schema produce? One could spend hours tracing how these variform themes interact with one another, let alone watch them play across the entire text (and maybe Ballards whole oeuvre); so, to focus a fragment entitled Planes Intersect is instructive: on one level, the tragedies of Cape Kennedy and Vietnam serialized on billboards ...On another level, the immediate personal environment, the volume of space enclosed by your opposed hands, the geometry of your postures, the time-values contained in this office. On a third level, the inner world of the psyche. Where these planes intersect, images are born, some kind of valid reality begins to assert itself (AE p. 72). With this decoding device to hand we can examine a piece entitled Journeys to an Interior: Waiting in Karen Novotnys apartment, Talbot made certain transits: (1) Spinal: The Eye of Silence- these porous rock towers, with their luminosity of exposed organs, contained an immense planetary silence.... (2) Media: montage landscapes of war- webbing heaped in the pits beside the Shanghai-Nanking railway...; dead Japanese stacked like firewood in L.C.T.s off Woosung pier (3) Contour: the unique parameters of Karens body- beckoning vents of mouth and vulva, the soft hypogeum of the anus. (4) Astral: segments of his posture mimetized in the procession of space. These transits contained an image of the geometry assembling itself in the musculature of the young woman, in their postures during intercourse, in the angles between the walls of the apartment (AE p. 27) If we move in reverse fashion through these stratified layers, and unpack their convoluted parameters, dissonant themes appear through the mist of the free associative nature of the syntax and coaleasce- revealing the obsessions at the distorted center of the Exhibition. The complex imagery and accumulation of detail in (4) Astral illuminate a variety of Ballards focus points: the removal of the barrier between inside and outside that causes a confusion of landscapes so that the human body is one more thing in a space, undifferentiated from the machinic and inorganic; the refiguring of internalizations, mimetized in the machinery and architecture of the surroundings, so that representations of the landscape and geometric forms in-the-world are, instead of internally represented and cognised, are left, as it were, to multiply, creating confusion and disorientation; there is also the iteration of this in the relationships between different anatomies, so in this case the interactions between Traven and Karen Novotny are re-enacted in the geometry of the room. There is no emotional involvement in the conduct or descriptions here, merely a kind of detached and objectified para-gaze that renders everything in view with the same concretized formulations. This is repeated in the formulations in (3) in which Karen Novotnys body is objectified and instrumentalized and the gaze hones in on the various orifices on display: humanity is abstracted. Thus there is a reading of Atrocity which sees it as a process of individuation or a an attempt to move toward a wholeness that is promised by the fragmentation of the text; except that Traven is at once trying to piece together a world that is mediatized and seemingly unknowable and yet he also evinces behaviour redolent of this world in all its shameless cinematized glory.(2) Media refracts this imagery through a televisual medium so that the gaze is unsure of its subject matter and unsure of the medium- is what we are seeing on a screen or before us in a knowable space, are these projections from a now externalized unconscious or separate mode of projection, endlessly broadcasting its infernal messages? This is a constant theme in the text with myriad recourses to images of cameras and references to the zoom lens. [11] Finally, with (1) Spinal there is a inhabiting of a canvas space in the shape of Max Ernsts The Eye of Silence, a surrealist

nightmare of an ossified landscape with huge looming forms half born of, half trapped in vast rocky outcrops, through which Traven chases the form of the nymph and traces his own palaces of flesh and bone in the monstrous towers of rock- at once an exploration of the deep stratified time-layers of the human form and psyche (elsewhere, Ballard has called this deep time or archaeopsychic time [12]) and a reiteration of the confusion and disorientation of the crossing of the internal/external divide. The piece (indeed the entire ensemble) is dominated by a curious juxtaposition of febrile delirium brought on by the association of so many disjunctures; it is at once overcoded and overdetermined and yet characterized by an affectless, scientized language of description that refuses differentiation. [13] This is a dominant mode of discourse that conflates anatomical and architectural description, skeletal and exoskeletal forms, projected horrific images of war and the avant-gardism of a surrealist landscape- all under the aegis of an impersonalized mediated gaze that rejects and repels value and tone, embodied in the form of Dr. Nathan the Daedalus in this neural drama (AE p. 87). Thus, Traven is adrift in a world in which he can find no purchase; everything has become colonized by a voracious media, even the third level of the psyche and the unconscious, so that even the febrile possibilities of surrealism are nullified and co-opted. Viewed in this light The Atrocity Exhibition can be seen as a series of codes to be deciphered, a mode of working through this new landscape and of cracking it, finding new modes of expression; and Travens peregrinations as a method of exploration, an attempt at transcendence. Roger Caillois in an essay written on natures vogue for mimicry wrote memorably about this confusion of space, he put it thus: the living being is no longer the origin of the coordinates but is one point among others; it is dispossessed of its privileges and, in the strongest sense of the term, no longer knows where to put itself . [14] To combat this disorientation there is a profound need, both in a spatial and an emotional sense, to forge new methods for orientation and feeling: we need to invent a series of imaginary sexual perversions, just to keep our feelings alive; the only way we can make contact with each other is in terms of conceptualizations; all violence for that matter, reflects the neutral exploration of sensation ...Travers...has composed a series of new sexual deviations, of a wholly conceptual character, in an attempt to surmount this death of affect (AE 95, 117, 120). And yet, maddeningly, the purveyor of these gnomic utterances, these possibilities of transcendent behaviour, is always Dr. Nathan the embodiment of the affectless scientist whose gaze and meticulous delineations of the symptoms of the psychotic Traven, preside over the text and thus reclaim any subversion, co-opt it back into the fragmented world of the Exhibition as if the whole set-up were on a reel-to-reel projector. This way of seeing the text leads to a productive way of understanding this maddening insensate realm; namely one which explores the notion of the society as spectacle as investigated by Guy Debord.

Society as Spectacle
As Roger Luckhurst has said, Atrocity concerns the explosion of the media landscape...reality is defined as that constituted by the media (Angle p. 95). We have already established above how this explosion has invaded all aspects of the lives of the characters even to the point of the unconscious; and the modes in which this manifests such as the confusing of landscapes, both physical and mental, and the ways in which the media instrumentally affects the desires and orientations of the characters. Michel Delville has figured this as the metastatic multiplication of images in our mass media world and the subsequent trivialization of war, murder and rape have given rise to a new semi-unconscious logic of violence. [15] This can be seen in the increasingly detached and bizarre closing sections in which the infamous section titled Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan is alongside two disconnected and detached pieces about plastic surgery, nominally upon the bodies of Mae West and Princess Margaret (AE pgs. 165, 177-184).

Luckhurst seizes on two theorists of the sixties who were concerned with the influence of the media on the human psyche and on a wider level of the effects of technology in general: McLuhan with his mantra of understanding media (the medium is the message [16]) and Jacques Ellul who worked on ideas of technique and mechanization and the ways in which these have altered the both the social world and the psyche. We can also interpolate Guy Debord into this matrix of media theory. Debord with a hyperbole worthy of The Atrocity Exhibition saw it that society had moved into a new realm utterly dominated by media and that was subjugated under the control of the all-powerful spectacle. Guy Debord was writing at a time of mass production, in the consumer boom of the 1950's and his theoretical work was notionally concenred with elements of social transformation and how the spectacle had saturated and permeated every level of the social system. Peter Wollen asserts that this consumer-led society confronted producers with their products alienated not only in money form, quantitatively, but also in image form, qualitatively, in advertising, publicity, media: instances of the general form of the spectacle. [17]" So we have a situation in which the alienating effect is doubled, abstracted a second time, our products are beamed back at us, just part of the continuous stream of images that perpetually play out before us. Thus, we have a society dominated by the image, or in Guy Debord's phrase, The Society of the Spectacle. [18] For Debord, then, society has come under the domination of the image; it is in thrall to it. Life is merely an immense accumulation of spectacles" (Spectacle par. 1.) The spectacle is something produced, but it has a life of its own. Debord calls it "the concrete inversion of life, it is the autonomous movement of the non-living" (par. 2); and it entrances our visual sense, plays on the inherent hunger of our optic perception: The spectacle, has a tendency to make one see the world by means of various specialised mediations (it can no longer be grasped directly) naturally finds vision to be the privileged human sense which the sense of touch was for other epochs: the most abstract, the most mystifiable sense correspond to the generalized abstraction of present-day society (par. 18) As such it is inanimate but contemplation of it means, "lived reality is materially invaded by the contemplation of the spectacle" (par. 8.) It has imperial ambitions: it wants to invade reality; it is in a Marxist sense, ideology in its most insidious form. Allied to this is the notion that the spectacle portrays an image of unity, but as Debord points out, "the spectacle reunites the separate, but reunites it as separate" (par. 29.) So, the passive viewer feels unified in the spectacle, but in fact, the spectacle has a false unity. It promises a quasimystical wholeness, but this wholeness is all schism, all fragment. This fragmentation is easily mapped onto Traven in his psychotic state of disintegration, as he seeks to decipher the coded world around him and recalibrate it into a meaningful whole- a whole that is merely spectral, promised but unreachable. This is supplemented by what Debord highlights as the externality of the spectacle in relation to the active man appears in the act that his own gestures are no longer his but those of another who represents them to him. This is why the spectator feels at home nowhere, because the spectacle is everywhere (par. 30). Thus the mediatized landscape promises wholeness and yet does not deliver it, and its domain proves to be all pervasive and inescapable- a state of affairs that is easily recognisable in relation to Atrocity. The danger here is to fall into a Debordian trap (or even worse, a Baudrillardian one) and see Atrocity as merely an endorsement of society as spectacle or a muted hyperreality, [19] and remove from it any sense of dynamism or critique. What many critics have seized on with Atrocity (indeed with much of Ballards experimental early work) is his ability to resist criticism in some way or encompass the criticism within the work. Roger Luckhurst has, because of this, labelled texts like Atrocity as thetic texts- texts which employ a certain amount of theory that seems to undercut the critic or at the very least create a certain doubleness that seems to disorient or just involve the reader/critic in a maddening hermeneutic circle. I dont doubt that Atrocity has the ability to do this and manages to draw in any critical comment into its fractured landscapes, yet I think this kind of Baudrillardian reading tends to ossify Ballard in some way, or remove the dynamism that is inherent in the texts, and ignores the possibilities that are produced. One might seize on Ballards own fascination with Ernsts Robing of the

Bride (fragment title in AE p. 45) in which a woman is standing in a magnificent head dress of red plumage and is transformed into a hybrid of woman and bird; behind her attached to the wall is a canvas recreation of the scene is which she is transformed into a kind of organic stone, an ossified version of her dynamic self present in the room. One might say that to render Ballard as a lump of archaic coral is to miss the processes at play in this text, the possibilities produced by dynamic interaction and miss the mythologizing instinct in Ballard, an urge toward a certain didacticism. As he has said himself, the sort of mythologies Im interested in...are concerned with ends rather than beginnings. Certainly theyre projections...Predictive mythologies...these are mythologies you can actually live by: how to cope with the modern urban landscape, the whole series of enciphered meanings that lie half-exposed within the urban landscape. [20] Before moving to explore exactly how we might figure this ossification in terms of a death of bodily affect as figured in Atrocity and Crash I want to reapply what we have examined so farthe affectless realm of the scientized gaze and the mediatized landscape- to the Wollhemian study of the emotions and ascertain how this moribund affect is compatible with a dynamic and narrative informed theory of the emotions. As we have seen above there is a strong emphasis in Wollheims delineation of the emotions on the interface between the psyche of the individual, the psychological reality of emotional states, and the life-world; indeed it might be said that Wollheims account of the emotions is about this primary relationship and the ways in which the emotions and emotional behaviour help us to navigate this link. What Wollheim also concerns himself with is the narrative form of emotional work and the element of history in this process, thus there is a strong sense of time and its function in both the short term in mental states and the longer term in mental dispositions. How might we view this when seen in the light of a text like The Atrocity Exhibition and its insistence on altered states brought about by the infiltration of the media and the disorientation this causes; and the manner in which the affectless scientific gaze has caused a kind of instrumentalized voyeuristic gaze that confuses planes of being, and flattens out as it were, levels of differentiation? The fundamental point here seems to be one about desire, in that it is desire that has been knocked off course in some way, or has had its intentionality disrupted by a change in the perception of objects. If we remember from the account earlier that desire (and thus emotion) is directed outward into the lifeworld from the psyche toward an object, and if we are to take the world of Atrocity at face value, then it is this fundamental relationship that has been altered. Desire has come unmoored and seems to randomly fixate on various objects, to the point where it becomes almost unrecognisable as classic desire, and floats free. Also, there is no sense of a reality principle here; indeed it is unreality, in the guise of the all conquering spectacle that is more alluring and powerful. In The Enormous Face, these designs were more than enormous replicas. They were equations that embodied the relationship between the identity of the film actress and the audiences who were distant reflections of her. The planes of their lives interlocked at oblique angles, fragments of personal myths fusing with commercial cosmologies. The presiding deity of their lives the film actress provided a direct set of operating formulae for their passage through consciousness (AE p. 13). There is a new, off-kilter relationship here between object and desire, dictated to by different laws- the law of the spectacle that alters the connections between inside and outside, subject and object etc. In this sense, the emotion that forms on the back of desire that colours the world or create an attitude towards it, is malformed, or remains unformed altogether. This also informs the notion of the affectless scientized gaze that is unfazed by the tortuous scenes displayed endlessly in the media and the cool tones employed by Dr. Nathan to expound their cruel but perfect logic. In Love and Napalm: Export U.S.A. Dr. Nathan in clinical and neutral language, describes how various experiments with extracts of footage of the war in Vietnam and torture of Viet Cong, close ups of genitalia of film stars and fake recordings of Belsen and Auschwitz were carried out to ascertain there impact on audiences, ranging from suburban housewives to cancer patients. The crucial point here isnt

necessarily the horror of what is being contemplated but the detached tone of the prose and the scientific language being used- there is no differentiation apparent, no sense of outrage, just that the people who are viewing the multitude of images are deadened, blankly responsive to what they see. This feeds into notions of the process of narrative and history in desire and emotion formation. In the mediatized, spectacular society there is a perpetual present, modified by the omnipresence of the image. Paul Virillo talks of the image as now being so all pervasive as to have some of the same properties as light: the image is no longer so much an image in the sense of representation, but in the sense of light. It's kind of seeing without knowing; a pure seeing.[21] Figured in this way time isnt a factor as such, and the usual processural aspect of desire and emotion formation are interrupted and dislocated. We could leave the explanation there, and figure Atrocity as dead blankness, yet this would be to fall into the Baudrillardian trap highlighted above, and allow the Ballardian project to become an ossified one and this would be to ignore the obvious move toward new expressions of desire, new modes of understanding these elemental landscapes. It is true that there is no denouement in Atrocity and that Traven ultimately dissipates into the text, and into psychosis, yet what appears to be happening in these experiments carried out by the egregious Dr. Nathan, is that desire has been reprogrammed in some fashion, or has started to latch onto different objects, is in fact experiencing a reawakening of sorts. He speaks of the latent sexual character of war and that these studies confirm that it is only in terms of a psychosexual module such as provided by the Vietnam war that the United States can enter into a relationship with the world generally characterized by the term love (AE p. 151). There is also a multitude of references to ways in which the body is being realigned and new modes of desire being discovered in relationships between the body and technology, specifically, cars. What I want to move into now is a discussion of the way in which bodily affect can be interpolated into the overall discussion of emotion and emotional death and the ways in which desire and its reawakening are refigured in Atrocity and primarily, Crash. [1] Quoted in Greil Marcus, Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century (London: Secker and Warburg 1989) p. 382 [2] The Innocent as Paranoid reprinted in The Users Guide to the Millennium (London: Flamingo 1998) p. 91. Hereafter UGM. Ballard places Dali in the grand tradition of naives who take the world innocently as it is and reproduce it. In this sense, Ballard sees the landscapes of Dali as showing the world as it really is, or as it were, revealing the latent content of the world. [3] William Burroughs in his introduction to the book calls it literally an explosive book which is a neat metaphor for the way that the ideas and characters in it tend to reoccur both in preexisting works and those that would follow after (p. vii). [4] Ballard, intro. to Crash op. cit. p. 97 [5] Damien Broderick, Reading By Starlight: Postmodern Science Fiction (London: Routledge 1995) p. 155 [6] Scott Bukatman, Terminal Identity (London: Duke University Press 1993) p. 10 [7] Andrzej Gasiorek, J.G. Ballard: Contemporary British Novelist s (Manchester: Manchester U.P. 2005) p. 4 Further references will appear parenthetically in the text as JGB. [8] Interview with J.G. Ballard in Books and Bookmen, April 1971 [9] Ballard, intro. to Crash op. cit. p. 98

[10] I will, for sake of clarity, call the central figure Traven. Roger Luckhurst uses the controversial label of T-Cell to bring together the fragmented psyche of Traven; controversial because the degenerative effect of HIV is measured by the depletion of T-cells in the body; yet as Luckhurst points out this depletion is mirrored in Travens disintegration and that cell is a useful way of describing a singular entity and a collective all under the one word. Roger Luckhurst, The Angle Between Two Walls: The Fiction of J.G. Ballard (Liverpool: Liverpool U.P. 1997) note p. 186. Further references to this book will appear parenthetically in the text as Angle. David Punter also draws attention to this splitting of character via the use of the name, but he instead points towards Freuds Psychopathology of Everyday Life and the ways in which slips of the tongue and name mistakes are evidence of unconscious forces not yet mastered. See David Punter, J.G. Ballard: Alone Among the Murder Machines in The Hidden Script (London: Routledge 1985) For an interesting and thorough reading of the current conception of emotion in deconstructive and post- structuralist thinking see Rei Terada, Feeling in Theory: Emotion After the Death of the Subject (London: Harvard 2001) [11] Ballard enlarges the idea of the blank, two dimensional field of the zoom lens in The 60 Minute Zoom in which a protagonist films his wifes sexual liaisons in a hotel room and isnt emotionally affected by it but ends up joining the frame of the zoom and murdering her. Witness also Wilders insistence on filming everything in High Rise, clinging to his camera like it is some kind of mythic object. [12] Which Way to Inner Space first printed in 1962 in New Worlds reprinted in UGM p. 198 [13] While I dont want to pursue a line of criticism that focuses on a notion of a schizophrenic experience of the world it is worth noting that Jameson sees this kind of glaring and painful perception as indicative of this mode of seeing: The schizophrenic is thus given over to an undifferentiated vision of the world in the present, a by no means pleasant experience (PM p. 120). [14] From an essay entitled Mimicry and Legendary Psychasthenia cited in Rosalind Krauss, Corpus Delicti in Rosalind Krauss and Jane Livingston eds., LAmour Fou: Photography and Surrealism (London: Arts Council 1985) p. 74 [15] Michel Delville, J.G. Ballard (Plymouth: Northcote House 1998) [16] Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media (London: Ark 1987) [17] Peter Wollen, 'The Situationist International: On the Passage of a Few People Through a Rather Brief Period of Time' in Raiding the Icebox (London: Verso 1993) [18] Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle (Detroit: Black and Red 1983) All future references refer to this edition and will appear parenthetically in the text [19] Baudrillards reading of Crash threw up arguments along these lines (see Baudrillard, Jean, Two Essay: Simulacra and Science Fiction; Ballard's Crash, Science Fiction Studies vol. 18 1991) in which he placed Crash outside of moral boundaries and in the realm of hyperreality. For responses to this see Science Fiction Studies Vol. 19 No. 3 1992 [20] Ballard in interview with Graeme Revell in Re/Search No.8/9 1984 p. 42 [21] Paul Virillo, in 'The Work of Art in the Electronic Age' Block 14 1988 p. 9