j.g. ballard: “consumerism governs everything.” osvaldo espino & isidro lópez
I txo!? British writer J.G. Ballard (Shanghai 1930) spent a large part of his childhood in a Japanese concentration camp during the Second World War. In the 1960s, his novels set in a very near future full of empty beaches, abandoned buildings, closed communities and motorways caused quite a stir in the world of science fiction. In this ambiguous world “where the ghosts of evil technology and buyable dreams roam about the landscapes of communication.” The influence and prestige of Ballard’s work has grown constantly since then. How did your childhood in Shanghai and the time you spent as a child in Japan during the war affect your work?
Incredibly so. I experimented a foretaste of the end of the world.
You’ve mostly written about the middle classes. Even though they have lived in luxury houses, have their holiday residencies and have been educated and lived in private schools, are they condemned to an ideological cul-de-sac as a social group?
Without doubt, the middle classes feel threatened. They have lived in a privileged situation for the last two hundred years, but they now fell threatened by a new type of society. The status they have achieved in society and culture (they have the best jobs and the highest levels of education) is now being threatened by a new populist way of understanding culture. The increase in security measures and the need to meet in closed communities is a symptom of this.
Why do you set your stories in “non-places” like industrial areas, closed communities and tourist resorts?
These are the key areas. Important psychological changes are happening in these places. They are new spaces that owe nothing to the past. You need a very definite behaviour to be able to submerge in one of these places.
In connection to that sense of lack of security, you have described the explosion of middle-class nihilistic violence. You have written about the mass consumerism and the dark fearful face of desperation that it creates. Do you feel that the middle classes have buried deeper into their elitist education and their language of consumerism and have lost their capacity to bring forward their political discourse?
The middle class was the backbone of society. In change for some privileges – work, security, good pensions, the possibility of private education... – they offered social responsibility. They maintained the pulse of society. They took care of prestigious professions, they were civil servants or part of the military. They have now begun o realise that they too have been exploited many times just as happened to the proletariat. And it now seems that they are breaking away from their responsible attitudes and model behavioural character traits and they have started protesting. They protest against nuclear power, for animal rights, against the new local motorway, against cars (especially against jeeps – the middle classes favourite vehicle until now.)
In the introduction to the novel Crash (1975) you wrote: “Traffic accidents are an institutionalised pandemic cataclysm in the industrialised world. Every year, hundreds of thousands of people are killed and millions are maimed in car crashes”. That is the only introduction you have ever written for one of your books. That ‘pandemic cataclysm’ has become so institutionalised that it is now almost invisible to us... Does this make you want to evade any misinterpretations of your book?
Yes. More than two thousand American soldiers have died in Iraq, a tragic loss, but totally miniscule if you compare it to the 30,000 people killed on the roads in the USA every year. If the same amount of people were killed in plane crashes, every airline in the world would have been closed down by now. We are incomprehensibly tolerant to traffic accidents. Why? Maybe there is a dark attractiveness with the primitive obsessions we fell towards pain and death. Crash fixed on the catalyst nature of how technology (car and car crashes) influences our impulsive malicious thought process. In crash, the car accidents are like a religious sacrament.
In High Rise (1973) and Concrete Island (1974) you explore the modern city. In this space you suggest that traditional social relationships are of no use on the modern stage and that the community per se is no more. There is a return to savage individualism in both books. Is this a hypothetical representation of the individualism that existed before the coming into existence of community?
Cities have always fed on that lack of connection. We work five miles from where we live, we shop in one neighbourhood, go to the movies in another, visit the doctor in a third and we send our children to school to another. Our family and friends are spread out over dozens of miles. And despite this, we still maintain a virtual sense of community. That however, is disappearing also because we are beginning to hide what is closet around us. Like the phenomenon of urban terrorism which makes different areas of the city potentially dangerous. An inevitable primitive fear causes this and that ca push us as far as hating and fearing strangers and the unknown. This in turn causes an acceptance of the use of violence and other attitudes against these people and situations.
If they are the changes in the city ‘interior landscapes’, what do mean when you speak of "suburbanisation of the soul"?
It’s about frightening uniformity imposed by a conformist society, one that to a certain extent pertains to no given class. This society is not governed as it was before, it is governed by publicity, the huge shopping centres on the outskirts and the by accepted defined model of lifestyle in place today. We don’t talk now of those urban areas where you had to pull the curtains because your neighbour was always nosing around and to be divorced or to have robbed in a shop was enough to be socially excluded. We now live in a new suburbia where we are condemned to having the latest barbeque, the newest plasma screen TV or the ultimate in hip cars.
Incredibly so. I experimented a foretaste of the end of the world.
You’ve mostly written about the middle classes. Even though they have lived in luxury houses, have their holiday residencies and have been educated and lived in private schools, are they condemned to an ideological cul-de-sac as a social group?
Without doubt, the middle classes feel threatened. They have lived in a privileged situation for the last two hundred years, but they now fell threatened by a new type of society. The status they have achieved in society and culture (they have the best jobs and the highest levels of education) is now being threatened by a new populist way of understanding culture. The increase in security measures and the need to meet in closed communities is a symptom of this.
Why do you set your stories in “non-places” like industrial areas, closed communities and tourist resorts?
These are the key areas. Important psychological changes are happening in these places. They are new spaces that owe nothing to the past. You need a very definite behaviour to be able to submerge in one of these places.
In connection to that sense of lack of security, you have described the explosion of middle-class nihilistic violence. You have written about the mass consumerism and the dark fearful face of desperation that it creates. Do you feel that the middle classes have buried deeper into their elitist education and their language of consumerism and have lost their capacity to bring forward their political discourse?
The middle class was the backbone of society. In change for some privileges – work, security, good pensions, the possibility of private education... – they offered social responsibility. They maintained the pulse of society. They took care of prestigious professions, they were civil servants or part of the military. They have now begun o realise that they too have been exploited many times just as happened to the proletariat. And it now seems that they are breaking away from their responsible attitudes and model behavioural character traits and they have started protesting. They protest against nuclear power, for animal rights, against the new local motorway, against cars (especially against jeeps – the middle classes favourite vehicle until now.)
In the introduction to the novel Crash (1975) you wrote: “Traffic accidents are an institutionalised pandemic cataclysm in the industrialised world. Every year, hundreds of thousands of people are killed and millions are maimed in car crashes”. That is the only introduction you have ever written for one of your books. That ‘pandemic cataclysm’ has become so institutionalised that it is now almost invisible to us... Does this make you want to evade any misinterpretations of your book?
Yes. More than two thousand American soldiers have died in Iraq, a tragic loss, but totally miniscule if you compare it to the 30,000 people killed on the roads in the USA every year. If the same amount of people were killed in plane crashes, every airline in the world would have been closed down by now. We are incomprehensibly tolerant to traffic accidents. Why? Maybe there is a dark attractiveness with the primitive obsessions we fell towards pain and death. Crash fixed on the catalyst nature of how technology (car and car crashes) influences our impulsive malicious thought process. In crash, the car accidents are like a religious sacrament.
In High Rise (1973) and Concrete Island (1974) you explore the modern city. In this space you suggest that traditional social relationships are of no use on the modern stage and that the community per se is no more. There is a return to savage individualism in both books. Is this a hypothetical representation of the individualism that existed before the coming into existence of community?
Cities have always fed on that lack of connection. We work five miles from where we live, we shop in one neighbourhood, go to the movies in another, visit the doctor in a third and we send our children to school to another. Our family and friends are spread out over dozens of miles. And despite this, we still maintain a virtual sense of community. That however, is disappearing also because we are beginning to hide what is closet around us. Like the phenomenon of urban terrorism which makes different areas of the city potentially dangerous. An inevitable primitive fear causes this and that ca push us as far as hating and fearing strangers and the unknown. This in turn causes an acceptance of the use of violence and other attitudes against these people and situations.
If they are the changes in the city ‘interior landscapes’, what do mean when you speak of "suburbanisation of the soul"?
It’s about frightening uniformity imposed by a conformist society, one that to a certain extent pertains to no given class. This society is not governed as it was before, it is governed by publicity, the huge shopping centres on the outskirts and the by accepted defined model of lifestyle in place today. We don’t talk now of those urban areas where you had to pull the curtains because your neighbour was always nosing around and to be divorced or to have robbed in a shop was enough to be socially excluded. We now live in a new suburbia where we are condemned to having the latest barbeque, the newest plasma screen TV or the ultimate in hip cars.
