SOURCE: Luckhurst, Roger. “The Atrocity Exhibition and the Problematic of the Avant-Garde.” In ‘The Angle Between Two Walls’: The Fiction of J. G. Ballard, pp. 73-117. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1997.

How is one to approach this object, this text or texts? The fifteen sections that make up The Atrocity Exhibition¹ appeared singly, across a wide range of journals, both science fiction and non-science fiction; are these short stories, then, separable as such? James Blish sensed a design: ‘pieces of a mosaic, the central subject of which is not yet visible … these fragments … are going somewhere, by the most unusual method of trying to surround it, or work into it from the edges of a frame’ (127). The assumption here is that the sequence will coalesce. Blish's statement, that ‘the plain, blunt fact is that we do not yet know what it is Ballard is talking about’ (128) has echoed ever since. Ballard and subsequent commentators, have used the term ‘condensed novels’ for [The Atrocity Exhibition: hereafter cited as Atrocity]. The compacted space of these micro-novels performs a self-consciously ‘experimental’ stripping-down of the ‘social novel’, declared ‘dead’ by the accompanying manifesto, ‘Notes From Nowhere’. This strategy of condensation is to be taken seriously; to unpack the compacted space of this disquieting text or set of texts will require a counteracting expansiveness.

How to determine this new, condensed space? Contemporaneous statements by Ballard propose ‘We're living inside an enormous novel’ and that ‘the function of the writer is no longer the addition of fiction to the world, but rather to seek its abstraction, to direct enquiry aimed at recovering elements of reality from this debauch of fiction’ (Louit, 53). This breaches entirely the frame of the ‘literary’. Even if this is rhetorical excess, there is still a sense in which Atrocity's status is problematic: for Greenland, this text is ‘a minimal overlay of narrative gestures on a mass of theory’ (Greenland, 115). Is it possible to divide the literary and the theoretical, defend Atrocity as a novel centring on T——, with an appendix of scientific reports, those ‘psychoanalytic’ papers that conclude it? Or is it entirely a scientific report, written by Doctor Nathan? Many have noted that the form of the text (or texts), with its brief paragraphs titled in bold type, parodies the structure of scientific papers. Where to insert the border? How to frame Atrocity?

This persistent recourse to the notion of a frame opens yet another approach. The densely allusionistic text frequently involves citations of artworks. Paragraph titles refer to ‘The Exploding Madonna’, ‘The Persistence of Memory’ (Dali, 16, 22), ‘The Annunciation’ (Magritte, 23), ‘The Robing of the Bride’ (Ernst, 39), ‘The Bride Stripped Bare of Her Bachelors, Even’ (Duchamp, 35). ‘Chapter’ titles also cite artworks, like ‘The Great American Nude’ (a series of works by Wesselman), or else allude to them, like ‘The Summer Cannibals’ (a shift of season from Dali's ‘Autumn Cannibalism’). Ballard had already presented the co-ordinates of his work in relation to Surrealism in his essay “The Coming of the Unconscious” by an invocation of the titles of key paintings (De Chirico's ‘The Disquieting Muses’, Magritte's ‘The Annunciation’, Ernst's ‘The Eye of Silence’). In 1969 Ballard curated an exhibition of crashed cars at the New Arts Laboratory. Could Atrocity in some way become a bizarre exhibition catalogue, paragraphs as statements or evocations on their ‘titles’, a kind of narrativized set of ‘commentary notes’, where action takes place within a sequence of framed paintings? But then this simple relation of text to image was itself interrogated by ‘the surrealist book’: ‘For the surrealists, the work to be illustrated does not constitute a model or even an antecedent. Text, drawing, or photograph plays … the role of an inner model that stimulates but never contains his imagination’ (Hubert, 21). This implies a more complex model than indebtedness to the painterly, and if Ballard has been commonly described as a ‘surrealist’ writer, Atrocity is the place to determine the full effect of that paradoxical pictoriality.

Titles do not solely refer to artworks, however; ‘Concentration City’ (112), ‘Venus Smiles’ (35), ‘The Sixty Minute Zoom’ (24) refer to titles of other Ballard stories, and ‘chapters’ titles are elsewhere paragraph titles within other ‘chapters’. With the ‘hierarchy’ of titles constantly shifting, this echoes those questions central to Derrida's interrogation of genre, literature and painting:

What happens when one entitles a ‘work of art’? What is the topos of the title? Does it take place (and where?) in relation to the work? On the edge? Over the edge? On the internal border? In an over-board that is re-marked and re-applied, by invagination, within, between the presumed centre and the circumference?

(The Truth in Painting, 24)

These questions also arise when reading Atrocity, as titles reveal a fundamental instability, a troubling lack of authority, making the edges of the text difficult to discern.

If these concerns are opened by the form of Atrocity, it also becomes difficult to offer a ‘commentary’ on it. As Noel King has remarked of Don DeLillo's White Noise, ‘any act of criticism would seem misplaced … for seeming to be everywhere anticipated, pre-empted, forced into an unsettling critical sphere between the welcome and the redundant’ (69). Atrocity is similar: the ‘thetic’ voice of Nathan's dogged exegeses dominates; the props of character later disappear entirely in the ‘scientific’ reports. Further, in the recent American (re-)publication of Atrocity by the Re/Search group, each page has a wide margin down which Ballard, some twenty years later, has provided a commentary and elucidation of obscure references. The space of the text was difficult enough to determine, but the critic now also finds the margins occupied. Another frame is breached; the scribbled explanatory notes of the reader have already been written.

This indetermination, this difficulty of approach, may mark Atrocity's success; it is, it may be said, the quality of the avant-garde to destabilize, burst the frame of the ‘object’ or ‘artwork’. Parallels abound here: of working (in Blish's phrase) on ‘the edges of a frame’ (‘To set the frame in itself in motion: to pry it loose from its mute invisibility and free it for circulation; that too is the task of the avant-garde’ (Mann, 100)); of breaching the autonomy of the literary by ‘recovering elements of reality’, a technique familiar from the collage and the ready-made; of using disgusting or obscene material precisely to shock or make tremble delicate literary sensibilities. To call Atrocity an avant-garde work, however, is to invoke the whole armature of the theory of the avant-garde—of modernism and postmodernism, of the death (or not) of the avant-garde, of the crucial place of the 1960s in the fortunes of avant-garde practice. To de-compress the explosive violence of Atrocity is to negotiate this territory, both to install Ballard in its lineage and to find that the peculiar positionality of Atrocity (as both science fiction and avant-garde) inserts an intolerable oscillation in the borders that still patrol literary and artistic practice.

‘AVANT-GARDE SCIENCE FICTION’?

Generational condemnation: Kingsley Amis, calling himself one of the first intellectuals to deal ‘properly’ with science fiction feels his control slipping. Atrocity indicates that ‘Sf is dying, disappearing, changing into something else’ (‘ARRGH!’ 6); Martin Amis concludes that Ballard in his experimental phase between Atrocity and Crash has failed: ‘In sf Ballard had a tight framework for his unnerving ideas; out on the lunatic fringe, he can only flail and shout’ (cited Pringle, Bibliography, 99). What is this ‘something else’ and where is this ‘lunatic fringe’? The answer in the anonymous review in The Times Literary Supplement in 1973, is that with Atrocity and Crash Ballard ‘earned the disparaging reputation of being the intellectual of avant-garde science fiction’ (Anon, 1466).

It is worth pausing on this phrase ‘avant-garde science fiction’, for what could it mean? It might obviously serve to nominate the New Wave, science fiction's ‘leading edge’ in the 1960s to which Ballard became ‘the Voice’, in Moorcock's phrase. But is it the internal edge of a popular genre, or a breaching of the very boundaries of the generic? As an ‘internal’ avant-garde, this would appear to demolish the opposition set up so influentially by Clement Greenberg in ‘Avant-garde and Kitsch’. Against the avant-garde's aim to ‘maintain the high level of … art by both narrowing and raising it to the expression of an absolute’ (crystallized by the move to the ‘formal immanence’ of Abstraction (5)), would not science fiction, in Greenberg's élitist terms, precisely embody the kitsch of mass culture—its formulaic, repetitious, vicarious and unreflective enjoyments? The Modernist conception of the avant-garde, as Andreas Huyssen has noted, is rigorously defined against the popular. ‘Avant-garde science fiction’, then, would be a problematic transposition of a strategy to a place where, strictly speaking, the avant-garde could not perform. But if it is merely internal, what to do with Ballard's evident debts in Atrocity to ‘Modernist’ devices derived from Surrealism, Cubism, and other movements?

‘Avant-garde science fiction’ could be read in another model: the vanguard breaching of the boundaries of artistic institutions as guarantors of taste. Contemporaneous with Ballard's experimental fictions, Leslie Fiedler had announced science fiction as the form in which writers were turning ‘high art into vaudeville and burlesque’ (478). This ‘crossing the border’ between high and low art, avant-garde and kitsch, however, is premised on the destruction of avant-garde strategies by a move to popular genres like science fiction ‘at the furthest possible remove from art and avant-garde’ (469). In this incipient moment of the emergence of the rhetoric of definitional postmodernism, science fiction might lose its ghettoized status but the whole force of Fiedler's essays is to render the phrase ‘avant-garde science fiction’ a nonsense. If paradoxically coupling a high art modifier to a low art genre, the announcement of Post-Modernist fiction is built on the grave of the very distinction which gives the phrase its force. Atrocity could not be avant-garde in this formulation either: it could, however, become an exemplary instance (as it is for Brian McHale) of postmodernist fiction.

The aggression shown by many science fiction critics towards the New Wave and Atrocity in particular works by shifting the meaning of ‘avant-garde’ once more. Peter Rønnov-Jessen, for instance, narrates the move of New Worlds from science fiction pulp magazine to avant-garde journal supported by the Arts Council as a story of eventual demise by progressive incorporation. Here, the avant-garde does not signal that which is in revolt against bourgeois taste or art institutions but is exactly equated with ‘dominant culture’. In a reversal of value, the heroic marginality of the pulps guarantees subversive edge; Moorcock's New Worlds, by becoming avant-garde, wanted to insert itself into the mainstream tradition of ‘Eng. Lit’. Extrapolating from this argument, Atrocity might appear to be a radical text, but is in fact the leading edge of a willed recuperation and neutralization of science fiction's subversiveness.

The above three paragraphs recapitulate, very precisely, the tangled web of theories of the avant-garde. The ‘modernist’ avant-garde defines itself in opposition to the popular; Atrocity could apparently find no place there, despite its substantial use of collage, found texts, shock and textual violence. Postmodernism, eliding high and low art, garners its politics from the abandonment of avant-garde strategies, which would seem to deny many of the devices deployed by Ballard. The concern of Rønnov-Jessen, whilst reversing values, yet retains the central issue of avant-gardism as defined by Susan Rubin Suleiman: how to avoid recuperation. It seems that a serious investigation of Atrocity cannot avoid a sustained engagement with the theory of the avant-garde, for Atrocity traverses its field in an insistent way. In doing so, in the ‘impossible’ simultaneity of its Modernist and Postmodernist, avant-garde and ‘post’-avant-garde stances, it places itself, in a phrase that echoes constantly through the text, ‘in the angle between two walls’.

THEORIES OF THE AVANT-GARDE

The theory of the avant-garde is a paradoxical and fraught discourse: to develop a systematized theory is virtually to admit to the avant-garde's failure to resist theorization; to offer a history of its practices is to reduce it to the ‘art history’ it sought to explode. To theorize it is to announce its death. It is also a contested discourse: its two main theorists—Bürger and Adorno—completely contradict each other on its definition, the one stressing ‘sublation’ of art and life, the other insisting on the autonomy of art.

Peter Bürger's The Theory of the Avant-Garde has been very influential. Bürger wishes to move beyond the implacable opposition of Adorno versus Luckàcs, (avant-garde as resolutely political and anti-bourgeois; avant-garde as a sign of bourgeois decadence). For Bürger, the avant-garde is not a left or right politics within art, but a politics opposed to the very notion of ‘Art’. In this debate Kant is the key figure and Bürger unfolds a retroactive history of his influence. Kant is the first to determine aesthetics as an autonomous non-purposive sphere. For Bürger, this is co-terminous with the rise of the bourgeois state, and is double edged. Firstly, art is removed from the ‘means-end rationality’ of the productive economy (tied ‘ideally’ to use, but ultimately exchange); art stalls this process not in being its own end but by proceeding with an end in view that cannot be realized. Secondly, however, autonomy is gained with the very loss of integration into everyday praxis. If Art is measured by social function, it gains the ability to evade re-functioning by external factors (this, for Adorno, constitutes the power of its critique), but loses any effective social function.

It is Bürger's thesis that such autonomy did not become ‘visible’ as art's condition until autonomy became the very subject of art in aestheticism in the late nineteenth century. Further, the conditions of aestheticism only become clear once the avant-garde launches its attack. The central elements of Bürger's avant-garde can thus be established: at the apex of autonomy Art's institutional foundations are revealed and displayed as socially ineffective. The avant-garde is to be defined as seeking to destroy institutional inefficacy by three routes: problematizing the non-purposive by dissolving the distinction of art and life; by a ‘radical negation’ of institutional artistic production (determined by the signature, and the ‘framable’ work); and by attacking the passive bourgeois reception of artworks by insisting on strategies that provoke a participatory response, either by meanings that need to be ‘completed’ (collage, say) or by emphasizing ‘democratic’ methods (the ready-made, automatism). These three elements circulate through the majority of discussions of the avant-garde.

Adorno's conception of the avant-garde is very different; briefly, Art's negation can only be operable as it evades instrumental rationality (re-functioning for use) and so autonomy must be maintained. Any breach into social effectivity thus erases the avant-garde partition, since it risks its useless use being processed into instrumentality, swept into the relativism of the exchange economy. In Bürger's terms, this remains internal to the institutional parameters laid down for Art's field, but also offers an unequal equation: the avant-garde's explosion of the institutional frame does not re-absorb art into the everyday as it stands, since it aims to sublate both art and the means-end rationality that dominates the everyday into an entirely new, utopian relation.

Both agree, however, on the result of this project. Bürger initially indicates his position in a footnote, which names the avant-garde he adopts as models: Dada, Surrealism, the Russian and Italian Futurists (109). The very ability to ‘name’ them marks their reintegration into art history. Dada and Surrealism used ‘shock’, but these punctural effects were quickly repaired. Hence these attempts are termed the historical avant-garde, indicating their irrecuperable pastness. Bürger contends that subsequent attempts to revive avant-gardism can only mimic already pacified strategies: ‘the demand that art be reintegrated in the praxis of life within the existing society can no longer be seriously made’ (109) for ‘the culture industry has brought about the false elimination of the distance between art and life’ (50).

The culture industry is the ‘spreading ooze’ (in Dwight MacDonald's phrase) that is in the process of eroding the autonomy of the avant-garde in Adorno's terms: ‘There are no longer any hiding places’ (The Culture Industry, 103). The very uselessness of art has become appropriated within a vastly and uniformly expanding market, as a specific marker for use—‘tolerated negativity’ as cachet, symbolic value, traded on the art markets. Shock tactics and anti-institutional stances are resumed elsewhere: ‘Advertising has absorbed surrealism and the champions of this movement have given their blessing to this commercialization of their own murderous attacks on culture’ (The Culture Industry, 59). Negation becomes affirmative. If the high is brought low, the low, the mass, becomes the normalizing and neutralizing programme of affirmative culture.

These positions (as baldly stated) lead directly into well-established and polarized positions within postmodernism. For those who would equate autonomy and negativity solely within the position of the historical avant-garde, the postmodern turn is fatal: for Terry Eagleton ‘The culture industry in its postmodernist phase has achieved what the avant-garde always wanted: the sublation of the difference between art and life’. Postmodernist culture is a ‘sick joke’, a ‘sardonic commentary on the avant-garde work’ in its blissful and uncritical merging with commodity culture (61). On the other side, the ‘celebrants’ of postmodernism tend to emphasize in their criticism of modernism not Bürger but Adorno, arguing that the maintenance of autonomy was a regressive withdrawal, a misfired ‘shoring up’ that itself constituted the divide between high and low. Others, with Bürger as support, but shifting his conclusion, contend that the modernist conception of negativity must not be lauded as an ahistorical fixed set of strategies; the avant-garde may be specifically modernist, but its ‘death’ does not negate negation. John Tagg warns of romanticizing the position of marginality and joins with Rosalind Krauss in attacking the mobilizing myth of the avant-garde: the marginal critique by the specific, unique, ‘original’ artist. ‘In deconstructing the sister notion of origin and originality, postmodernism establishes a schism between itself and the domain of the avant-garde, looking back at it across a gulf that in turn establishes a historical divide’ (Krauss, The Originality of the Avant-garde, 170).

Where to place the avant-gardism of Atrocity in these accounts? There seems to be nowhere, for if Atrocity ‘rises’ from a ‘low’ genre and so threatens to dissolve Adorno's theorization of the avant-garde, then placing it within the frame of postmodernism—which is in opposition, positively or negatively, to the avant-garde—doubly denies any linkage.

The terms of the above debate are crudely stated: they need to be problematized. The coherence of definitional postmodernism always seems to depend on a caricatured modernism, and this works, in one method, through a simplification of Adorno. Peter Osborne has usefully suggested that, at least for art theory, Adorno's position has been collapsed into the more monumentally fixed opposition of Clement Greenberg's ‘Avant-garde and Kitsch’, such that Adorno's autonomy is mistakenly read as pure formal immanence. There is thus the contention by certain art theorists that against this formal immanence, postmodernism re-introduces a ‘politics of representation’ (as if it could not be there in immanental, abstract forms). As Adorno's Aesthetic Theory indicates, the autonomy of modernism, whilst giving space for negation, is a space precisely given by bourgeois socioeconomic organization, and is therefore always implicated in its structures. Autonomy is a goal of ‘purity’ that is never attained; the antagonisms of the everyday ‘re-appear in art in the guise of immanent problems’ (8); in short, ‘it becomes impossible to criticize the culture industry without criticizing art at the same time’ (26). A much earlier essay, which adds to Adorno's famous statement on the ‘torn halves’ of high and low culture, suggests that the divide is not an immanent difference of form or evaluation, but is an artificial erection of ‘wire fences’, because without this segmentation ‘the inhabitants could all too easily come to an understanding of the whole’ (The Culture Industry, 31). For Adorno, then, the avant-garde and autonomy are never coincident, and the high and low are never ‘purely’ opposed.

Bürger has ‘served’ definitional postmodernism by failing to emphasize how far Adorno puts the avant-garde ‘in play’ rather than as an isolatable position. If Bürger attempts to shift the definition of the avant-garde away from ‘pure’ negation to emphasizing the breach of art as institution, he nevertheless concludes that the project of the sublation of art and life can never succeed within bourgeois society, and so the only strategy left is precisely that initially criticized in Adorno: negation by the autonomous work. For postmodernism, a double death is announced: the first two routes of avant-garde strategy are blocked, for if sublation fails, the retreat to autonomy is already blocked by Adorno himself: ‘There are no longer any places to hide’.

It is interesting that Bürger criticizes the neo-avant-garde for precisely the strategy that earlier he had posited as the third route, reception. Warhol, as exemplar of neo-avant-gardism, is dangerously ambivalent, for his work ‘contains resistance to the commodity society only for the person who wants to see it there’ (53); it is a ‘manifestation that is void of sense and that permits the positing of any meaning whatsoever’ (61). This disturbance of the passive reception of works is deemed not enough; Warhol's work entertains a fatal complicity with commodification. However, it is precisely ambivalence, the indeterminability of affirmation or negation, that is central to positive or negative evaluations of postmodernist art. Despite ‘pure’ negation being questioned by the collapse of modernism's ‘self-constituted’ divide from the ‘mass’, it is negation that remains the measure of critical art. Linda Hutcheon, for example, initially supports the ‘democratizing’ aspects of postmodernism in its critique of élitist Modernist practices, but she still requires a distinction between ‘critical’ postmodernism and its merely ‘kitsch’ imitation. Once she sets up a mutual interference of postmodernism and feminism, the former's ‘complicitous critique’ is too ambivalent to support a ‘distinct, unambiguous’ feminist politics (The Politics of Postmodernism, 141). Ambivalence, from the view of negation, cannot register a politics.

I have consistently proposed that Ballard's work effects an oscillation. Atrocity intensifies this in its uncertain status between the art historical categories just elaborated. Ballard's own statements oscillate between compartments. His view that ‘I consider I left the [science fiction] genre completely with The Atrocity Exhibition, but I don't have any substitute terminology for what I write’ (Louit, 51) is flatly contradicted elsewhere. Ballard criticized New Worlds for moving ‘outside’ science fiction in specific terms. He praised the ‘conventional’ editor of New Worlds, Ted Carnell, as far more radical than Moorcock: ‘Moorcock in fact was following what were wholly traditional and conventional lines—the avant-garde in short; experimental and exploratory writing of a kind long since established in the early years of the 20th Century’ (‘A Personal View’, 10-11). Testing boundaries within science fiction is more radical than avant-gardism (in this he evidently agrees with Rønnov-Jessen). This, however, needs further qualification. Ballard has recently viewed his career as departing from science fiction in 1966: ‘But labels stick … one must break down these damned categories’ (interview with Pringle 1987, 14).

The publishing history of Atrocity is also confusing in this regard. Doubleday, the American pulp fiction house, almost published it before its director decided to withdraw it before the first print run had been distributed, as it was considered obscene and libellous. Atrocity was then picked up, re-titled as Love and Napalm: Export USA, and given the avant-garde cachet of a William Burroughs introduction in a Grove Press edition, the avant-garde publishers who translated and distributed work by William Burroughs, Georges Bataille and the Marquis de Sade. Bizarrely, then, pulp pulped becomes in effect ‘high art’.

The specific case of the ‘chapter’, ‘Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan’, further indicates this circulation. ‘Plan for the Assassination of Jacqueline Kennedy’ had provoked questions in the Houses of Parliament (and an anxious reassertion of British respect for the Kennedys by Randolph Churchill), but the Reagan piece, unpublishable except in pamphlet form in the strangely titled Ronald Reagan: Magazine for Poetry, had one of its stockists, the Unicorn Bookshop in Brighton, successfully prosecuted for obscenity. Ballard's book was only one piece of evidence alongside works by Bataille and Burroughs. Despite the successful defence of Selby's Last Exit to Brooklyn, through similar ‘high art’ grounds that famously allowed the publication of Lady Chatterley's Lover, one suspects that ‘Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan’, as a ‘chapter’ of a book entitled The Atrocity Exhibition, escaped prosecution was because, in Britain, it was published within the confines of science fiction. Obscene pamphlet and non-obscene ‘chapter’, the piece also reappeared in non-art guise at the 1980 Republican Convention as an official ‘Survey’ document, distributed to delegates as an analysis of Reagan's potential. Vale and Juno report that ‘some ex-Situationists were responsible for this black humour critique’ (88). This text displays a remarkable mobility, and this intrusion, however briefly disruptive, is consonant with avant-garde surrealist and situationist strategies of subversion.

Atrocity still effectuated ‘shock’ therefore. This is not enough to cite it within the problematic of the avant-garde, however, even though Bürger ultimately tends to reduce avant-gardism to this one effect, and the non-repeatable nature of shock to its recuperation and failure. ‘Shock’ is not enough, period. Bürger's intention is to set in motion historicized aesthetic categories, to move away from the ahistorical (as he perceives it) ‘completed’ aesthetics of the avant-garde in Adorno. It is strange, however, that this historicization effectively stops, as Hal Foster has noted, on consigning the historical avant-garde to failure. All theories of aesthetics are historical, he states. Very well: Bürger's ‘Postscript’ to a Second Edition states that, despite criticism, the book has remained unchanged because ‘it reflects a historical constellation of problems that emerged after the events of May 1968 and the failure of the student movement in the early seventies’ (95). It is necessary to historicize Bürger's historicization of the avant-garde; it is as if, just as the avant-garde only revealed retroactively the institution of art, so ‘May 68’ reveals, retroactively, the failure of the avant-garde. Narratives of avant-gardist failure only begin to appear decades after their initial disruptive effects; it is as much these narratives as the events they narrate that are historically significant. Bürger's The Theory of the Avant-Garde appeared in Germany in 1974, which places it two years after Peter Wollen's suggestion that the dissolution of the Situationist International in 1972 constitutes the terminal point of the twentieth century avant-garde. ‘May 1968’ and its failure reveal, for Bürger, the end of avant-gardism, which is then displaced back in time.

In these terms, the time in which the sections of Atrocity were written (1966-9) could still fall within the moment of the avant-garde as long as the avant-garde is not considered as a completed, historical set of strategies, but as a mobile and constantly self-transforming set of tactics. The monolithic opposition of modernist avant-garde and postmodernist neo-avant-garde is far too straightforward. Atrocity is nothing if not a sustained and reflexive investigation of the complex of negation, affirmation and oscillation that constituted countercultural avant-gardism in the 1960s.

The perception of the time was that the counterculture was an avant-garde sublation of art and life. The aim of the milieu was ‘to ignore all boundaries and conventions, and as far as possible to escape the imposed definitions of material reality by exploring inner space’ (Hewison, 86). The counterculture was premised on the belief that the economics of post-scarcity has arrived. Complicit and co-terminous with economic boom, the problematic of production was deemed solved. This is the premise both of Marcuse's One Dimensional Man and An Essay on Liberation, as well as other equally influential texts, like McLuhan's Understanding Media. Marcuse, in the Essay, is careful to signal only signs of ‘hope’, but this is nevertheless only the first indication of a genuine liberation: ‘the space, both physical and mental, for building a realm of freedom, which is not that of the present: liberation also from the liberties of the post-exploitative order’—de-sublimation in effect. With the arrival of post-scarcity, vital needs, the basis for authentic, non-alienated Man, have to be revised. Marcuse sees this imaginative reconfiguration of vital needs in ‘The New Sensibility’ of the new historical subjects: blacks in the American ghettos and the student rebellion. Since the proletariat have been integrated into advanced industrialism, revolutionary consciousness shifts to these new subjects. This avant-garde cadre cannot proceed through any organized party, however, but through ‘surrealistic forms of protest’ (30). Surrealism, in fact, is the constant measure of the counterculture. Breaking the Kantian boundaries of Art to re-situate the ‘sensual power’ of the imagination as a productive force is a shared goal. Marcuse argued that the first anti-art fell within form, and thus remained within recuperable categories of Art. The new avant-garde desublimates form: ‘The new object of art is not yet “given”, but the familiar object has become impossible, false’ (38). ‘Today's rebels’ step entirely beyond Kantian, the ‘orderly, harmonizing forms’ (46) that re-captured the first anti-art attempts.

It is vital to note firstly that the perception here is both of a shift in the site and an intensification of negation, and that secondly this is powered by new subjects, ‘groups which have thus far remained outside the entire realm of higher culture’ (46). Although Marcuse rather problematically cites black music as exemplary of this (natural rhythm as subversive), he begins to indicate that Sixties avant-gardism is no longer to be located in the extremities of ‘high culture’. Rather it is a set of mobile strategies that move through the high and low as well as between groups. Atrocity as ‘avant-garde’ here becomes less the flat contradiction that it first appeared—and indeed the whole project of New Worlds begins to make sense in what becomes a punctual (if unsustainable) moment, where a science fiction journal could begin to contribute to the nouveau roman (Brian Aldiss' Report on Probability A), publish Thomas Pynchon's ‘Entropy’, undertake collaborative writing projects (like the multi-authored Jerry Cornelius stories), and cite avant-garde writers and film-makers like William Burroughs and Chris Marker as exemplary of new forms.

At the time of the composition of Atrocity, state ‘liberalization’ co-existed with a counter-reaction: homosexuality was legalized, but convictions increased; the ‘servants’ could now read Lady Chatterley's Lover, but controls intensified on ‘obscene’ publications. Stuart Hall has latterly tempered the ‘transgressiveness’ of the counterculture. Hall terms it ‘profoundly adaptive to the system's productive base’ (65) largely necessitated by shifts in production away from a ‘conserving’ work ethic towards a ‘repetitive cycle of consumption’ (64). A ‘caesura’ within formations, Hall thus accounts for oscillating forms of the counterculture: incorporable elements are the ‘planned permissiveness’ of alternative ‘life-styles’; oppositional elements, remain never wholly recuperable (gay and feminist politics, terrorism).

Internally disaffiliated, forming into a diffuse milieu, the strategy operated by ‘pushing contradictory tendencies in the culture to extremes … subvert[ing] them, but from the inside, and by a negation’ (Hall, 62) Negation still operates here, but across and between an oscillation of incorporation/opposition. Combining both Marcuse's contemporaneous account with Hall's narrative, an extension of avant-gardism is being posited here. The accounts of both the modernist avant-garde and postmodernism are united by an intolerance of ambivalence. Oscillation, however, in Hall's account marks the very milieu of the counterculture. What if indeterminability, lack of fixity, could form a ‘politics’? If ‘pure’ states of affirmation and negation are rendered inoperable through the capitalist penetration of the ‘cultural’ sphere, the strategy of playing on the edge between affirmation and negation troubles simple accounts of the ‘political’ spaces of art.

Atrocity is a ‘punctual’ text, of its moment. If it has been seen as both modernist (Pfeil) and postmodernist (McHale), it is not a question of deciding one or the other, but of marking its oscillation. This can be discerned very exactly. In what follows I unpick the density of Atrocity by analysing its extension—in strategy, reference and device—of Surrealism and Pop Art, two distinct moments in the problematic of the avant-garde.

THE ATROCITY EXHIBITION AS AVANT-GARDE COMPOSITION

Traven/Talbot/Tallis/Trabert/Travis/Talbert/Travers—the figure I shall call ‘the T-cell’²—appears in disjunctive guises: as both lecturer and patient at a psychiatric institution, a former H-bomb pilot, as well as signifier of ‘Christ's return’. In the opening sections of Atrocity the T-cell is searching for a ‘modulus’, a measure, a mode of explanation, that would both re-fix his name and identity as well as serve to de-code the densely overdetermined landscapes in which he appears. The landscapes of the text are synaesthetic, as it were, capable of absolute translation from one level to another, different meanings collapsing into nodal points of simultaneity. This is the primary content of Nathan's didactic theorizing, that ‘for him [the T-cell] all junctions, whether of our own soft biologies or the hard geometries of these walls and ceilings, are equivalent to one another’ (56).

If Nathan is analysing his fellow doctor or patient (‘Mrs Travis, I'm not sure if the question is valid any longer. These matters involve a relativity of a different kind’ (12)—admirably Laingian), he is also offering a commentary on the central device of the text itself. Nathan re-cites the manifesto ‘Notes From Nowhere’, published in New Worlds. Its crucial premise is:

Planes intersect: on one level, the world of public events, Cape Kennedy and Viet Nam mimetized on billboards. On another level, the immediate personal environment, the volumes of space enclosed by my opposed hands, the geometry of my own postures, the time-values contained in this room, the motion-space of highways, staircases, the angle between these walls. On a third level, the inner world of the psyche. Where these planes intersect, images are born. With these co-ordinates, some kind of valid reality begins to assert itself

(‘Notes From Nowhere’, 148)

This is a step-by-step statement of the central device of Atrocity. Practice, however, erases this progressive layering, and its density makes it difficult and lengthy to loosen the process of narrative. The effect is of a compacted simultaneity, a dense, ‘unreadable’ space, recalling the Cubist canvas (‘Notes From Nowhere’ comments: ‘Cubism … had a greater destructive power than all the explosives discharged during World War I’ [150]).

This overdetermined synaesthetic collapse of levels is signalled by two methods: the list and the associative chain. In ‘You and Me and the Continuum’, where the T-cell is so dispersed that even a relativized proper name cannot ‘fix’ him, evidence of his identity is collected in a set of photographs:

Kodachrome. Captain Kirby, MI5, studied the prints. They showed: (1) a thick set man in an Air Force jacket, unshaven face half-hidden by the dented hat-peak; (2) a transverse section through the spinal level T-12; (3) a crayon self-portrait by David Feary, seven year-old schizophrenic at the Belmont Asylum, Sutton; (4) radio-spectra from the quasar CTA 102; (5) an antero-posterior radiograph of a skull, estimated capacity 1500cc; (6) spectroheliogram of the sun taken with the K line of calcium; (7) left and right hand-prints showing massive scarring between second and third metacarpal bones. To Doctor Nathan, he said, ‘And all these make up one picture?’

(83)

Apparently heterogeneous images are forced into a conjunction, playing on the tension between a chaotic range of reference and a strict logic of regimented order by numbered ‘exhibits’. The condensed ‘fusions’ operate to elide different discursive regimes, as if co-habiting the same space were enough to spring connections: Ernst, after all, defined collage as ‘the coupling of two realities, irreconcilable in appearance, upon a plane which apparently does not suit them’ (cited Chipp, 427). Even the logic of the ‘levels’ chosen, however, is elusive, as the T-cell, for example, charts the transitions of the ‘(1) Spinal … (2) Media … (3) Contour … (4) Astral’ which form a ‘renascent geometry assembling in the musculature of the young woman, in their postures during intercourse, in the angles between the walls of the apartment’ (24).

Alongside this ‘random’ listing is the process of an associative linkage of ‘levels’. ‘You: Coma: Marilyn Monroe’ offers a complex drift between the undulating dunes, the female body, the ‘damaged dome of the planetarium’, the geometry of the apartment as ‘a cubicular extrapolation of … the cheekbones of Marilyn Monroe’ (42), and Karen Novotny as the ‘modulus’, the obscure switching centre for these translations. It is difficult to transcribe the peculiar effect of this drift, which operates on a macro-level, cumulatively, as well as at the micro-level:

The ‘Soft’ Death of Marilyn Monroe. Standing in front of him as she dressed, Karen Novotny's body seemed as smooth and annealed as these frozen planes [of the walls]. Yet a displacement of time would drain away the soft interstices, leaving walls like scraped clinkers. He remembered Ernst's ‘Robing’: Marilyn's pitted skin, breasts of carved pumice, volcanic things, a face of ash. The widowed bride of Vesuvius.

(39)

There is a complex chain of associations here; their density indicates how difficult it is to ‘unpick’ Atrocity. Initially, there is a straight analogy between Novotny's body and the walls of the apartment. The second sentence (‘Yet a displacement …’) is incomprehensible without jumping to the first phrase of the third. ‘The Robing of the Bride’, the title of the opening paragraph of the ‘chapter’, is a disturbing double portrait by Max Ernst of the Bride and her attendants. She dresses in an enormous red gown before a mirror which reflects back an ossified image of herself. This is nowhere imaged in the text, but there is a transcription of Ernst's painting back into the T-cell's double vision of the white walls of the apartment as suddenly excoriated, reduced to ‘scraped clinkers’ by a ‘displacement of time’. This analogical reference to Ernst thus explains the colon of the final sentence which posits an equivalence between the painting and Monroe as reduced ‘to stone’—‘volcanic thighs’ her sexuality, ‘a face of ash’ her death mask. This is complex enough, but the title of the paragraph also marks a citation of Dali's ‘soft’ images. One of Dali's devices, anamorphosis (an image or drawing distorted in such a way that it becomes recognizable only when viewed in a specified manner or through a special device), describes the process undertaken in the paragraph; a ‘secret code’ deciphers the logic of association.

The list and the associative chain recall a central element of Bürger's determination of the avant-garde ‘work’: collage. Opposed to organic form, a harmonized unity passively received, collage detaches fragments from their original contexts and re-contextualizes them. Bizarre juxtapositions demand a ‘closing’ response, the ‘spacings’ between fragments necessitating an explanation of their proximity: an active, allegorical interpretation, as Benjamin Buchloh suggests, is unavoidable (‘Allegorical Procedures’). If Bürger draws heavily on the work of Walter Benjamin, Benjamin's theory of allegory is central for the logic at work in Atrocity. Scholem's view of Benjamin's allegory is that it works as ‘an infinite network of meanings and correlatives in which everything can become a representation of everything else’ (cited Buck-Morss, 236). This is the sense gained by the overdetermined, condensed spaces of Atrocity, where ‘all junctions … are equivalent to one another’ (56), endlessly transposing meanings in a synaesthetic promiscuity.

The T-cell's search for a ‘modulus’ is a search for an allegorical reading that would link the fragments into narrative. This is doubled by the reader's constant attempt to decode the compacted sentences of Atrocity. Just as ‘The “Soft” Death of Marilyn Monroe’ can have a logic uncovered, so Perry and Wilkie note that the list quoted above is not as random as it appears: the T-cell figures here as a returning Messiah, not in a singular embodiment, but as dispersed through evidential traces. So the ‘scarring between second and third metacarpal bones’ alludes to the crucifixion, just as ‘radio-spectra from quasar CTA 102’ refers to reports of the time that ‘the emissions from the quasar provided evidence of an intelligence at work’ (Perry and Wilkie, ‘The Atrocity Exhibition’, 181).

Yet, as in The Drought's density of ciphers and untranslatable cryptic languages, Atrocity's proliferation of connection between levels fails to uncover a final interpretation, and the T-cell's erasure in the closing sections of Atrocity, his dispersal into traces across numerous discourses, seems to signal failure to prevent promiscuous translatability. The compulsiveness of the production of allegorical narratives to ‘explain’ these posited patterns is thus unending—for the T-cell, for the reader.

The main device of collage is ‘the insertion of reality fragments into the painting, i.e. the insertion of material left unchanged by the artist’ (Bürger, 77). This accords with Ballard's view that Atrocity aims at ‘recovering elements of reality’. The Re/Search edition also contains an ‘Appendix’ of other texts written at the same time as the other ‘chapters’: these are ‘found texts’ from cosmetic surgery manuals which replace proper names (Mae West, Princess Margaret) for the anonymity of ‘the patient’. This Appendix, added after the appended mock-scientific reports, makes the bottom edge of the text even more difficult to mark, ending as it does in folds of citation, ‘plugging in’ to ever wider discursive frames.

The space of Atrocity can also be seen as Cubist. The condensed texts suppress the connectives which might establish narrative links. Each paragraph or block appears as if superimposed on previous blocks. In ‘The University of Death’ the space in which the ‘events’ are enacted is continuously re-inscribed; in painterly terms, the ground on which the figures are drawn is no longer fixed, the ground itself becomes a figure: this is Cubism as Rosalind Krauss describes it (‘In the Name of Picasso’, The Originality of the Avant-Garde). Seemingly set at the edges of a city (the previous ‘chapter’ loosely references Eurydice in ‘the suburbs of hell’), under abandoned motorway overpasses, the T-cell takes a helicopter flight (signifier of Vietnam) to the (Demilitarized) Zone, which nevertheless appears to be the same site. The Zone is also The Plaza, and the embankments and underpasses are clearly the fantasyinvested space of Dealey Plaza, the site of Kennedy's assassination. The Plaza is ‘a modulus that could be multiplied into the landscape of his consciousness’ (23), and the T-cell wishes ‘to kill Kennedy again, but in a way that makes sense’ (36). The space shifts again, however, as the topography of ridges and embankments becomes a crash-testing circuit.

This ‘chapter’ also contains the paragraph title ‘The Persistence of Memory’, a clear reference to one of Dali's most famous paintings. The paragraph appears, on one level, to be a simple description of the painting, but there is also a clear sense that the T-cell conceives himself as a figure within it, walking on its expansive beach, the infinitely receding ground that Dali repetitively used as a space on which bizarre figurations could be invoked. The space of ‘The University of Death’ is thus complexly overdetermined, a simultaneity of differently perceived perspectives which patently do not ‘add up’; the space does not ‘work’, the gaps between fragmentary references constantly foreground themselves.

Although the suggestion is that this is a ‘Cubist’ strategy, it can only ever be a Cubism in quotation marks. It is a displaced, a citational avant-gardism. There is the strange effect of deploying, as one fragment, Dali's ‘The Persistence of Memory’, a painterly space that in its illusionistic quality is resolutely opposed to collage, yet is cited within collage. One avant-garde, Surrealistic illusionism, is cited within another. These two devices are combined in a citation whose quotation marks signal a difference from the historical avant-garde rather than a simple identity with it.

BALLARD AND PAINTERLY/PARANOIAC SURREALISM

Ballard is frequently seen in terms of his ‘visual’ style, the evocative landscapes, the attention to ground far more than (human) figure. When Kingsley Amis worried that Ballard was escaping from Amis' definitional rights over the genre, the solution was to ‘encourag[e] Ballard to abandon writing for painting’ (‘ARRGH!’ 6). The allusions in his work to Surrealist painting begin early: The Drought written ‘within’ Yves Tanguy's ‘Jours de Lenteur’; The Drowned World invoking the ‘metaphysical’ spaces of the Chirico's vertiginous town squares, and where Strangman directs action according to his recovered Paul Delvaux painting.

And yet, as Ballard notes to Will Self, painting had a precarious position in Surrealism. Maurice Nadeau's History of the Surrealist Movement ‘centres’ the movement in political debates of the 1920s. Breton asserted the dissolution of art/life through Surrealism, but simultaneously defended its artistic autonomy from the Communist's demand that Surrealism be subsumed to its project. Nadeau considers the constitution of a ‘surrealist aesthetic’ in the 1930s as marking the failure of Surrealism as an avant-garde. The propulsive force of this failure, Nadeau intimates, is the dominance of Dali, and the rise of painterly surrealism.

Other narratives of Surrealism, however, suggest that the 1920s were prototypical moves, ineffective attempts at elaborating avant-garde strategies before it fully flowered in the 1930s. For Laurent Jenny, Dali's arrival saves the movement. Sarane Alexandrian makes Surrealism co-extensive with Breton's life (Surrealism died with him in 1966), but Whitney Chadwick, in ‘recovering’ the largely erased history of women involved in Surrealism, moves the centre of concern away from the (all-male) experiments and definitions of the 1920s to the late 1930s, where women artists established an internal distance from Breton's continuing attempts to control the movement. The ‘centre’ of Surrealism is difficult to determine, but the arrival of Dali is crucial in all these narratives. This is all the more remarkable given that Dali was only a member for a brief time. His entry in 1930 was delayed over the shit-smeared figure in ‘The Lugubrious Game’ (a painting Breton's rival Bataille praised, nearly ‘poaching’ Dali from Surrealism). Praising Hitler as a ‘surrealist innovator’ in 1934, he was estranged by 1936 and expelled in 1939.

It does in fact possess a satisfying symmetry that Ballard should cite Dali as his major influence. Dali meets Ballard, as it were, at the edge of the high/low divide; Dali's sensationalism, avidity (Dali was anagrammatically christened Avida Dollars by the Surrealists on his expulsion), and above all popularity, have marginalized him from Surrealist accounts and this is mirrored—exactly in reverse—by the account of Ballard rising above popular ghetto origins and thus betraying science fiction. Carter Ratcliff is prepared to place Dali's ‘perverse’ play with the ‘low’ as far beyond that ever achieved by Pop Art: thrown out of the high, he entered into ‘the lower depths—and that is precisely where he wanted to be, for it is in the limitless mudflats of consumerism, with no heaven of high art above, that his image-ingestion and regurgitation brings him the fullest degree of worldly power’ (66). Strangely, Ballard, was requested to remove all references to Surrealism from the catastrophe novels because association with this movement might compromise his work.

Surrealist activity at first centred on dream and automatic writing and emphasized writing rather than painting. Breton rejected ‘the stabilizing of dream images in the kind of still-life depiction known as trompe-l'oeil’ (cited, Krauss, ‘Photography in the Service of Surrealism’, 20). However, when Naville pronounced ‘Everyone knows there is no surrealist painting’ (cited, Nadeau, 118), Breton removed him from the editorship of La Revolution Surrealiste, and set about finding a place for the painterly.

Dali's arrival re-invigorated the tortuous logic of ‘automatism’ and the conception of painting as a secondary form. Automatic writing attempted the fantasy of absolute, non-delayed identity with the expression of the unconscious. Dali moved from this expressivist model to the notion of the paranoid construction of art. In Dali's reading this was an active and always interpretive mode of perceiving the external world according to the subject's perverse desire. Paranoia, rather than purely internal, perceived the same everyday objects as everyone else, but according to a bizarre and perverse narrative establishing unforeseen connections. The advantages were clear: if automatism, little more than a realist fantasy trying to avoid representation, Dali's paranoiac-critical method made a virtue of its ‘secondary’ interpretive role. It moved from passivity to the ‘active derealization’ (Jenny, 110) of a shared environment.

Atrocity can be seen to deploy this Dali-esque device. Dali defined the paranoiac-critical method as ‘the critical and systematic objectification of delirious associations and interpretations’ (cited, Ades, 200), which operated according to double or multiple condensation in a single image. The most ambitious use of the device was ‘The Endless Enigma’, in which six readings of the same landscape could be discerned. This unstable oscillation condensed different meanings within the same object. There is a link here to the compression of landscapes analysed in Atrocity, and a certain similarity between Dali's very public performance of his obsessions and the T-cell's experimental re-enactments of atrocities.

For Dali, the paranoiac exploits the external world, imposing his obsessions and transforming reality itself. So, if paranoia already constitutes a form of interpretation itself, as Jenny suggests, the T-cell's search for a ‘modulus’ is disturbingly doubled in the act of reading the attempt to make Atrocity make sense. The disturbing thought here is Ballard's provocation that Atrocity is the distillation of ‘reality’ from a ‘debauch’ of fiction; what form of knowledge is this? The specificity, the peculiarity of paranoia is its masterly mimicry of reason, and Jacques Lacan (whose early work appeared alongside Dali's in Minotaure) confesses at the end of his essay ‘On a Question Preliminary to Any Possible Treatment of Psychosis’ that the psychoanalysts' knowledge cannot be separated from the paranoiac's, that the former's shares the same structure as the latter's. As Lacan notes: ‘That such a psychosis may prove to be compatible with what is called good order is not in question, but neither does it authorize the psychiatrist, even if he is a psychoanalyst, to trust to his own compatibility with that order to the extent of believing that he is in possession of an adequate idea of the reality to which his patient appears to be unequal’ (Lacan, 216). Remembering Nathan's inability to answer the question ‘Was my husband a doctor or a patient?’, this might further illuminate Perry and Wilkie's sardonic comment that Nathan constitutes the paranoid's ideal doctor: he agrees and shares the delusion.

Given the ‘terminal irony’ of Ballard's experimental work, his ‘sanity’ is often put in question. Peter Nicholls views Ballard as ‘advocating a life style quite likely to involve the sudden death of yourself or those you love’ (Nicholls, 31). If part of the device of Atrocity is indeed a taking up of Dali's methodology, paranoia-criticism's mimicry precisely rests on the confusion of sanity and madness. Breton and Eluard's The Immaculate Conception used parody to simulate madness: ‘the authors hope to show that, given a state of poetic tension, the normal mind is capable of furnishing verbal material of the most profoundly paradoxical and eccentric nature, and it is possible for such a mind to harbour the main ideas of delirium without being permanently affected thereby’ (Breton, 50-51). Parody distances, but what of paranoia?

The mimicry of mental states, the parody of paranoia's ‘reasoning madness’ also recalls Roger Caillois' beautifully Surrealistic analogy between animal camouflage and schizophrenia, first published in Minotaure. Sanity, rational order, is determined by distinction from the environment; the morphological mimicry of environment by insects might serve as a model for a madness driven by a ‘temptation by space’ (70). The T-cell occupies ‘impossible’, overdetermined spaces, spaces which do not ‘work’, or which confuse the real and the boundaries of the art-work. Even the unstable name of the T-cell disappears from the closing sections in a way which anticipates the erasure of Tyrone Slothrop from the manically proliferating surveillance devices in Gravity's Rainbow. But this disappearance enacts the schizophrenic as understood by Caillois: ‘space seems to be a devouring force. Space pursues them, encircles them, digests them in a gigantic phagocystosis. It ends by replacing them. Then the body separates itself from thought, the individual breaks the boundary of his skin and occupies the other side of his senses … He feels himself becoming space, dark space where things cannot be put’ (72). Atrocity is thus firmly in the tradition of Surrealism's problematic celebration of ‘madness’—a surrender which, very soon, might turn around to become startlingly aggressive and sadistic.

Bürger argues that the appearance of the avant-garde, the very possibility of its strategies, was opened by the ‘end’ of the historical development of ‘artistic means’; all previous methods, bounded then by their historical evolution, were now open to citation and combination. Setting in motion Bürger's ‘end of art history’, refusing this termination, it is plain that Atrocity begins to re-cite ‘Cubism’ or ‘Surrealism’ as themselves open to re-contextualization and re-combination. This is neither posited identity with the ‘historical avant-garde’ (Ballard as ‘modernist’) nor a hollow and savagely ironic repetition of it (Ballard as ‘postmodernist’); the relation is more complex than that.

Paranoia-criticism's extreme subjectivism is disturbing in its communicability and rational mimicry. For Perry and Wilkie, Atrocity is to be read through the T-cell's obsessional interpretive frame, and is to be ‘vindicated’ as the only ‘sane’ response: ‘Owing to the absence of fixed, determinate values, the only relevant measure of meaning is subjective conviction’ (183) This is opposed to David Punter who suggests that Atrocity concerns the erasure of Self, subjectivity ‘transcended by mechanism and the massive systems of information and data’ (9-10). This again evokes the difficulty of establishing the status of Ballard's fictional worlds: are his landscapes to be seen as inner spaces, or as threatening the self with annihilation? Where the Surrealist emphasis privileges the former, it is important to signal how Surrealist desire is absolutely transformed by the media landscape of the 1960s. This is where Ballard's simultaneous deployment of neo-avant-garde Pop Art strategies becomes just as important to trace.

THE ATROCITY EXHIBITION, MASS CULTURE AND THE NEO-AVANT-GARDE

If mass culture has already become one great exhibition, then everyone who stumbles into it feels as lonely as a stranger on an exhibition site … Mass culture [is] a system of signals that signals itself.

(Adorno, The Culture Industry, 71)

What does The Atrocity Exhibition exhibit? Does this ‘stylish anatomy of outrage’ (Theroux, 56) anatomize or embody? Is this body of texts negating or affirming what it exhibits? With its mass cultural concerns, how can Atrocity be positioned in relation to that mass culture from which in part it derives?

I have suspended what is evident at the outset: Atrocity concerns the explosion of the ‘media landscape’. Televisions, film festivals and billboards project images from Vietnam. The Zapruder film of Kennedy's assassination endlessly replays. The content of these images suddenly matches the violence that had been for so long accorded to the form of the media channels of mass culture. Reality is defined as that constituted by the media: for the T-cell, the fragmented projections of Elizabeth Taylor renders her ‘a presiding deity’, for ‘the film actress provided a set of operating formulae for their passage through consciousness’ (16). The T-cell's hope for unitary identity seems to be premised on whether Monroe's suicide can be ‘solved’, whether it is possible ‘to kill Kennedy again, but in a way that makes sense’. The media have released irresolvable traumatic material which can only induce repetition of the trauma, in a futile attempt at mastery. This is the media as the embodiment of the death drive, the compulsion to repeat.

Punter's statement that in Atrocity subjectivity is ‘transcended by mechanism and the massive systems of information and data’ corresponds with a narrative of the effect on the subject of technologization in advanced industrial capitalism that has been endlessly told and re-told. If, for Jameson, postmodernism marks the invasion of the unconscious, the evisceration of ‘the bourgeois ego or monad’ and so ‘the end of psychopathologies of that ego’ (‘Postmodernism’, 64), then Jacques Ellul used virtually the same terms for the triumph of ‘technique’, its ‘mechanical penetration of the unconscious’ (404) in the 1950s. Ellul's account of a society dominated by the logic of the machine is not a simple determinism, for ‘technique’ can inhabit any sphere. However, ‘when technique enters into every area of life, including the human, it ceases to be external to man, and becomes his very substance’ (6). Human society becomes a test ground to discover the greatest ‘efficiency’. Central to this is mass culture which aims for ‘the simultaneous fusion of … consciousness with an omnipresent technical diversion’ (380). Ellul sees in mass culture the ‘disappearance of reality in a world of hallucinations’ (372).

This is a long way from the Surrealists' avant-garde assault on what Breton called ‘the paucity of reality’ through the injection of irrational dream, desire and hallucination. Surreality was premised on a sublation of dream and reality, the communicable and the incommunicable; many commentators claim it is advanced capitalism that is seen to have achieved this, and not the revolutionary avant-garde. The historical avant-garde in effect posited that the return of the repressed (desire) could explode the instrumental rationality of a mechanized social, but postmodernism, defined as the cultural logic of late capitalism, manipulates and routinizes the very desire now recuperated to the system. The impasse of the historical avant-garde in this respect can be precisely measured: when Ellul posits that ‘Man’ has become a ‘device for recording effects and results obtained by various techniques’ (79), it immediately recalls Breton's definition of automatism in the first Manifesto, that the experimenters aimed to be ‘the silent receptacles of so many echoes, modest recording instruments’ (What is Surrealism?, 123). Again, when Breton later admits ‘we remain as little informed as ever regarding the origin of the voice which it is open to each of us to hear and which speaks to us, in the most singular fashion, of something different from what we believe we are thinking’ (What is Surrealism?, 133), then a new and disturbing origin for this voice begins to be suggested by these mass media accounts. If ‘technique’ has penetrated even the unconscious, then the ‘voice’ automatism tried to capture can no longer be fantasized as self-presence, but is an ‘external’ implantation. Dali's paranoia-criticism was also founded the subject's desire. Ellul refuses the essentialization of desire: desire is the programmed expression of L'homme machine.

Could not the T-cell be seen as l'homme machine, his desires encoded by media circuits, his compulsions instigated by televisual trauma? The text is tediously repetitive: Karen Novotny is repeatedly killed in conceptual deaths that replay the irresolvable violence unleashed by television: Kennedy's assassination, Monroe's suicide, the invasive cameras that wait outside the Hilton Hotel for Elizabeth Taylor's death to be announced, the cycle of reports on atrocities from Vietnam. The Zapruder film of Kennedy's death is replayed, both to signify collective trauma and the attempt at mastery, but also to affirm the power of the media, to celebrate its capacity to capture the full horror, and with triumph to ‘hook’ the nation to its networks in a ‘prodigious new display of synchronicity’ (Jameson, Postmodernism, 355). Atrocity mantrically repeats proper names—Kennedy, Taylor, Nader, Oswald, Reagan, Monroe—and key phrases: ‘geometry’, ‘formulae’, ‘modulus’. The cipher, a final signified that would stop this circulation, can only itself be repeated, remaining forever unreadable: ‘an immense cipher’ (21), ‘elongated ciphers’ (23), ‘muffled ciphers’ (39), ‘a random cipher’ (41), ‘unravelling ciphers’ (48).

Does Atrocity ‘negate’ this mediatized disaster or embody it? Marshall McLuhan argues that ‘experimental’ art gives ‘the exact specifications of coming violence’, information on ‘how to re-arrange one's psyche in order to anticipate the next blow from our own extended faculties’ (64). For Ellul, however, the ‘psychic shock absorber’ is developed out of technique, for ‘only another technique is able to give sufficient protection against the aggression of techniques’ (332). David Porush argues that Burroughs and others ‘seek a way to innoculate themselves against technique by injecting its hardness into the soft body of their texts’ (x). If Atrocity belongs to this strategy, there is an intolerable uncertainty as to intent. Andrew Ross' description of McLuhan's deep ambivalence might be transcribed for Ballard here: ‘chillingly grave, apocalyptically nonchalant and swollen with emancipatory promise’ (No Respect, 118). The remorseless, machinic, clinical rhetoric of Atrocity renders its distance or proximity to the violence of media networks profoundly ambivalent.

Nathan's didactic explanatory role shifts from a view of the technological penetration and disruption of subjective integrity (‘… the failure of his [the T-cell's] psyche to accept the fact of its own consciousness, and his revolt against the present continuum of time and space’ [12]) to one which appears to advocate the T-cell's project of complete interpenetration of body and technology. The ‘authorless’ scientific reports centre solely on how ‘the latent identity of the machine is ambiguous even to the skilled investigator’ (98), and where the car crash is ‘a liberation of sexual and machine libido’ (my emphasis, 98), this is a startling moment which would seem to posit not the cathecting of technology, but gives technology a desire of its own.

Cautionary or affirmative, Atrocity oscillates. Technology in this text, like Ellul's ‘technique’, extends beyond the machinic: as the introduction to Crash states, reality is fiction determined by ‘mass merchandizing, 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 …’ (‘Introduction’, 97-98). This is the iconography of mass culture, but it is also the context for the transformed strategies of neo-avant-garde Pop Art.

The sequence of rooms in the Warhol Retrospective exhibition at the Hayward Gallery in London in 1990 was an uncanny embodiment of Atrocity, both in terms of ‘visual’, thematic parallels (darkened, chapel-like rooms housing the Jackie Kennedy and Elizabeth Taylor sequences; brash, overlit spaces for the ‘Death and Disaster’ series), and as an enactment of the ‘maze of billboards’ the T-cell negotiates. There are two elements to be discussed here: Pop Art as neo-avant-garde, and Ballard's relation to the English artists of the Independent Group. Each one evokes specific concerns of the problematic of the avant-garde.

Where Bürger and Jameson agree on the avant-garde is the question of space and distance. Against the depth and spacing of Van Gogh's shoes are Warhol's ‘Diamond Dust Shoes’, too close, in this epoch of instantaneity, to effect a critique. However, the perception of a disrupted and transforming avant-garde practice would refuse this fixity of what constitutes an ‘avant-garde’. Ambivalence, oscillation, is central to Pop Art, as Lucy Lippard suggests of one key artist: ‘it is the narrow distance between the original and the Lichtenstein that provokes the tension and the great drama of his best work’ (90) Bürger's third route of attack on the institution—reception—is also in Lippard's account: ‘Parody in Pop Art largely seems to depend on the viewer's response’ (86). This is what Thierry de Duve means by the irrecoverable intention of the works: Warhol does not promise, he simply testifies.

Just as the T-cell's modulus becomes a plug with which he is ‘jacked’ into networks that annihilate any traces of identity, so Warhol famously desired to be a machine, to erase and de-subjectivize the ‘artist’. Breton's ‘modest recording device’ speaks not of the authentic self, but the market. Repetition and seriality in the Factory production of silk screens structurally repeats the mass-produced commodity. It is difficult to know if Warhol's work is serious or parodic (the ‘oxidized’ metal works are literal ‘piss-takes’, of course).

Whilst Warhol represents for Bürger the end of the avant-garde, Benjamin Buchloh has carefully reconstructed the initial reception of Warhol's early shows. If these early exhibitions did shock, breach the institution, Buchloh is not simply claiming an avant-garde status which, in repeating the historical avant-garde, was then recuperated. From the very beginning, Warhol's work played on the undecidable edge between negation and affirmation, denying easy ‘access to a dimension of critical resistance’ (Buchloh, ‘Andy Warhol's One Dimensional Art’, 57). The later work (which becomes advertising) if anything intensifies this ambivalence, as David James suggests.

Both Atrocity and Warhol are repetitive, use similar ‘visual’ contents and appear to express a ‘machinic’ desire. Just as Warhol's ‘non-art’ commercial graphics deployed the gestures of ‘high’ art and his ‘high’ art commercial sources, so Ballard's ‘experimental’ phase cannot be delimited to after his ‘commercial’ science fiction beginnings, as in McHale. In the late 1950s, Ballard put together a series of collages, which were plans for a putative novel based purely on typography, on the styles of type and spacing of text, with little concern for meaning. Ballard entertained the notion of using billboards as the site for this new novel to unfold. Later, he paid for a series of ‘adverts’—having failed to get an Arts Council grant—to ‘sell’ the ideas of his text, the product's name being his own signature. It is the use of billboard space which transforms the historical avant-garde's concern with textual spacings (Mallarmé), typographic play (Apollinaire and Dada poetry), and found scientific texts (Ballard collaged material from scientific journals, just as Ernst did) into a neo-avant-garde focus on the very institutional framing of the text. To disperse texts across the public spaces of the city evokes the strategies begun in the 1960s by artists like Daniel Buren, and which continue with Jenny Holzer's ‘Truisms’ flashing up on Times Square and Piccadilly Circus electronic boards in the 1980s. To détourne (in Situationist language) those spaces, not by gestures of refusal but by occupation and transformation, is a model that could assist a reading of Atrocity's position in relation to mass culture.³

There is another connection to Warhol to be considered. In one of Warhol's last projects, the ‘Myths’ sequence, his most famous icons were silk-screened onto a single canvas. There too was one of his own self-portraits. This might recall the presence of a character called ‘Ballard’ in Crash; loss of distance and control, the ‘author’ within the space of his own text, no longer writing it, but being written by it. This is not the main point, however. It becomes difficult in Warhol to mark a line where parody lurches towards self-parody: so too with Ballard. Atrocity is frequently hilarious in its clash of registers. The highly technical listings often end with Captain Kirby/Webster's banal questions (‘You say these constitute an assassination weapon?’ (34), ‘So you think the Novotny girl is in some kind of danger?’ (56), ‘And all these make up one picture?’ [83]) puncturing the portentousness. The descriptive sentences can also teeter on a self-parodic edge. Consider: ‘This strange young woman, moving in a complex of undefined roles, the gun moll of intellectual hoodlums with her art critical jargon and bizarre magazine subscriptions’ (70). This is as meaningless as the description of Buddy Holly: ‘the capped teeth of the dead pop singer, like the melancholy dolmens of the Brittany coastline, were globes of milk, condensations of the sleeping mind’ (74). It is precisely the jargon that is important, its repetitive combinations and re-combinations, that have the effect of ‘closing’ the space of the text into its own logic, meaning giving way to pure effect. An impossible demand is requested of the reader: too close misses the parodic element, but too far makes the text collapse into self-parody.

Questions of ‘high’ and ‘low’ are brought into focus by moving to British Pop Art. The convergence of method and image amongst artists in America was initially without a stable name. ‘Pop Art’ was taken up from the English critic Lawrence Alloway. Alloway was the first to narrate a ‘secret history’ of the 1950s experimental group that met at the Institute of Contemporary Art: the Independent Group. Ballard subsequently associated with some of its key members (especially Eduardo Paolozzi and Richard Hamilton) in the 1960s and participated in ‘performances’ and readings at the ICA.

The links of the IG to science fiction are often noted: in two documented seminars at the ICA, Paolozzi displayed the vibrancy of American popular art by referring to gaudy science fiction magazine covers (he later declared: ‘It is conceivable that in 1958 a higher order of imagination exists in a SF pulp produced on the outskirts of LA than [in] the little magazines of today’ [cited Lawson]), and Alloway himself developed a non-Aristotelian aesthetic (in opposition to the predominant ICA aesthetic of Herbert Read) through a reading of A. E. Van Vogt (!). Reyner Banham was also enthusiastic about science fiction: the influence of Banham's work on the commercial architecture of Los Angeles is everywhere evident in the stylized spaces of Atrocity. Eugenie Tsai suggests that the IG were fascinated by science fiction ‘as a genre that was particularly in touch with the radical technological changes that were underway’ (71). This fitted with a kind of post-Futurist celebration of the machine. Tsai details Ballard's visit to the famous ‘This is Tomorrow’ exhibition in 1956 and the narrative produced from this visit is fascinating. Not yet a science fiction writer, Tsai links the publication of Ballard's first story, four months later, exactly to this visit: ‘while it remained tied to traditional science fiction, “This is Tomorrow” contributed to the more critical and cynical “new wave” through its influence on Ballard’ (73); in turn, in a kind of feedback loop, Ballard influenced the work of Robert Smithson (see Finkelstein).

The mistranslation that occurred in exporting Alloway's ‘pop art’ into American ‘Pop Art’ is crucial. As has been noted by Massey and Sparke, Alloway's pop art referred only to sources that were to be worked on within ‘high art’; pop was not conceived as an erasure of the boundary between high and low. A 1962 Alloway article makes this plain: ‘The term refers to the use of popular art by fine artists: movie stills, science fiction, advertisements, games boards, heroes of the mass media’. Alloway, however, goes on to criticize Derek Boshier for ‘seem[ing] to use pop art literally, believing in it as teenagers believe in the “top twenty”’ (1087).

However, the perception of lack of critical distance accords with the definitional centre for pop moving from England to America—and Warhol's work is difficult in its indiscernible distance from its commercial sources. This shift is important to any analysis of Atrocity; Atrocity seems too mobile, too oscillatory to ‘fit’ an equation of the ‘high’ with critical distance and negation and of the ‘low’ with mindless complicity. Tsai's story of Ballard's entry into science fiction via Pop Art depends on a legitimation of ‘low art’ by its recontextualization in a ‘high’ art setting. Many, however, including the artists of the IG, would refuse this distance of ironic quotation. Brian Wallis sees the IG as having the ‘whole-hearted enthusiasm of consumers’ (9), and Alloway himself quotes Hamilton's insistence that his work is not ‘a sardonic comment on our society’ (1085), but purely celebratory (at least in its early phases; his later work, from ‘Swingeing London’ on, displays clear critical content).

Tsai glosses over the fact that ‘This is Tomorrow’, using conventionalized science fiction imagery, managed to inspire Ballard to nonconventional science fiction work. In fact, as Massey notes, ‘This is Tomorrow’ had only two display environments (of twelve) that could be coded as pop; the rest were constructivist pieces. Rather than visual connections, then, methodology is again a more appropriate link. In 1953, the ICA allowed Paolozzi and others to put on an exhibition called ‘The Parallel of Art and Life’. This contained ‘sampled photographs, all blown-up to the same size and ranging from “art” contents to images of radio-valves, televisions, radiograph readouts, burnt-out forests, tribal ceremonies and car designs’ (Massey, 240). Reviews of the time were shocked at the implicit equivalence being proposed by this semiotic range and its violent staging. As Lawson suggests: ‘the aggressive all-over organization of the images made the exhibition itself a microcosm of the intrusive reality of pop culture’ (Lawson, 24). The IG seminars covered popular imagery, car-styling, helicopter design, modern architecture and A. J. Ayer's philosophy. Such semiotic promiscuity and implicit equivalence is more clearly related to the strategy of Atrocity.

Like Surrealism, then, it is not shared iconography that puts Atrocity and Pop into the same frame, but a methodology, one which contracted the space of a simple critique, and set in motion oscillation. The seriality and machinism of Warhol, the knife-edge of complicity and critique of Pop Art in general, produces the same difficulties of reading as Ballard's text. By the 1960s a simple opposition of subjectivity to instrumentalized technologization is no longer sustainable. In Ballard's disturbing imbrication of the subject and media networks, it is possible, perhaps, to see a trace of Marcuse. In the ‘humanist’ account of Ellul and Porush the history of the liberatory potential of technology is erased, but for Marcuse post-scarcity results from the increase in ‘technological forces’; utopia is ‘inherent in the technical and technological forces of advanced capitalism’ (One Dimensional Society, 4). These are the forces which can potentially burst the stasis of capitalist relations of production and induce revolution. Marcuse insists on taking technology to the end of its logic. Technological post-scarcity is precisely that which necessitates the re-invention of the ‘biology’ of Man. How far within or beyond is Atrocity in this scheme? If Marcuse invokes Eros in this liberative potential, he tends to erase its counter-force, Thanatos, the death drive, which Ballard does not. This is Ballard's ‘thesis’: ‘Just as sex is key to the Freudian world, so violence is the key to the external world of fantasy that we inhabit. There's this clash between what we all believe to be true, such as that violence is bad, in all its forms, and the actual truth, which is that violence may well serve beneficial roles’ (Henessy, 63). This link of liberation with violence allows a final consideration of Atrocity as avant-garde in its perhaps most problematic set of concerns.

THE AVANT-GARDE, VIOLENCE AND THE ‘FEMININE’

In the smooth neutralizations of Ballard's oeuvre into narratives of transcendence, what is nearly always evaded, skirted? Warren Wagar's efficient schematization sweeps Atrocity into the model without much difficulty: ‘The point, again, is simply to transcend reality, including the technological landscape of the late 20th century, by passing through it rather than around it’ (64). Whilst a dubious reading at best, Wagar does not consider the violence of this strategy, or consider that this ‘passing through’ is staged, repetitively, on a shattering of the female body in the conceptual deaths that recur through the text. The extremity of violence toward the feminine in Atrocity is nearly always evaded by critics.⁴ If held as an avant-garde text, however, this thematic becomes dramatically foregrounded: Atrocity finds itself in the notorious company of de Sade and Bataille, and returns to expose the sadistic aggressivity that insistently haunts the ‘liberatory’ potential of desire in Surrealism. The T-cell's compulsive actions could well be figured as answers to Bataille's provocative questions: ‘What does physical eroticism signify if not a violation of the very being of its practitioners?—a violation bordering on death, bordering on murder?’ (Eroticism, 17). As avant-garde text verging on the pornographic, Atrocity discomfitingly demonstrates the imbrication of sexuality and the death drive.

The ‘meat’ of Atrocity is Karen Novotny, the switching centre, the ‘modulus’ (for it is nearly always her), the traversed site on which discursive regimes simultaneously condense and disseminate meaning. She is consistently manipulated and brutally re-functioned by the obsessive T-cell. The choice of the name must be a referrence to the call-girl Marielle Novotny, allegedly a mistress of John F. Kennedy and involved in the Profumo scandal in 1963. The ‘geometry’ of Novotny's body is collapsed into architectural space (the smoothness of walls, the angles of balconies), and ‘translates’ for Hollywood icons. To seize the ‘secrets’ of her geometry, the T-cell places her in a series of postures and draws ‘chalk outlines on the floor around her chair, around the cups and utensils on the breakfast table, and lastly around herself’ (25). He is already chalking out the posture of a dead body, as indeed she is repeatedly killed, sometimes as herself, sometimes playing roles. At one point Novotny is simply the list of objects in a ‘sex kit’:

It contains the following items: (1) Pad of pubic hair, (2) a latex face mask, (3) six detachable mouths, (4) a set of smiles, (5) a pair of breasts, left nipple marked by a small ulcer, (6) a set of non-chafe orifices, (7) photo cut-outs of a number of narrative situations—the girl doing this and that, (8) a list of dialogue samples, of inane chatter, (9) a set of noise levels, (10) descriptive techniques for a variety of sex acts, (11) a torn anal detrusor muscle, (12) a glossary of idioms and catch phases, (13) an analysis of odour traces (from various vents), mostly purines & c., (14) a chart of body temperatures (axillary, buccal, rectal), (15) slides of vaginal smears, chiefly Ortho-Gynol jelly, (16) a set of blood pressures, systolic 120, diastolic 70, rising to 200/150 at the onset of orgasm …

(54)

Affectless scientific language mixes an obsessive medical penetration and disassemblage of the body with the reduction of Novotny to a mannequin. In perhaps the most startling synaesthetic translation of the female body into car styling, a paragraph entitled ‘Elements of an Orgasm’ simply lists the fourteen precise muscular movements it takes for the T-cell to exchange seats with Novotny so that she can drive (63). This is Ballard's wicked parody of the sexological discourses of the 1960s which had finally claimed to determine the exact physiology of the ‘mysterious’ female orgasm (a parody made sense of by Lynne Segal's attack on 1960s sexology in Straight Sex). Obscenity is abstracted to the conceptual level and the ‘authorless’ scientific reports are a wider analysis of bodies, judging the effects of car-crashes and atrocity films on mentally and physically disabled test groups. It is this very choice of language which for Baudrillard (as it also operates in Crash) and for Warren Wagar denies erotic titillation in its sheer functionalism and repetitiveness. Moral outrage, they suggest, misreads the intent.

But the ‘terminal irony’ of Ballard's text has a corrosive effect on intention. The marginal comments of the Re/Search edition only heighten the difficulty. The ‘found texts’ on cosmetic surgery are framed by two contradictory marginal notes. The first states: ‘the present pieces … show, I hope, the reductive drive of the scientific text as it moves on a collision course with the most obsessive pornography’ (111); the second is a eulogy to Mae West and the Hollywood screen stars. It continues: ‘Beyond our physical touch, the breasts of these screen actresses incite our imaginations to explore and reshape them. The bodies of these extraordinary women form a kit of spare parts, a set of mental mannequins … As they tease us, so we begin to dismantle them, removing sections of a smile, a leg stance, an enticing cleavage’ (114). What ‘voice’ is Ballard using here? Against the assertion of distance in the first statement, this seems to be a continuation of the T-cell, an affirmation that ‘our’ spectatorship is nothing other than ‘obsessive pornography’. This is all the more alarming given the brilliant stroke of placing the proper name ‘Mae West’ in this description of reduction mammoplasty. It suddenly injects an elegiac tone to the medical discourse, as if this operation figured for the loss of the Hollywood stars of the studio system, and as this desperate attempt to maintain eroticism is failing, so indeed the mammoplasty risks ‘losing all’, since the last, devastating sentence concludes: ‘The ultimate results of this operation with regard to the sexual function are not known’ (116). What Wagar terms the non-moral ‘value-neutral’ (64) language of science cannot simply be used as a protective, distancing strategy ascribed to Ballard. It is not only the continuation of this language ‘outside’ the fictive frame in the marginal note here; Ballard's oscillation can also be seen within Bataille's insight that sexology, the reduction of sex to a determinable object of the scientific gaze, cannot evade the enticement, the radical complicity, that the disruptions of the sex act induces even in its allegedly neutral observers (Eroticism).

This entanglement with problematic conceptions of the feminine is, in fact, an inevitable result of Atrocity's constitution as avant-garde text. A peculiar assertion, no doubt, but it is one which can be tracked along converging lines in art history and psychoanalysis. Rosalind Krauss has consistently sought to recover an avant-garde suppressed by the dominant histories of Modernist art. Clement Greenberg's conception of the avant-garde as the pursuit of a transcendent, pure opticality, reaching its zenith in Abstraction, works by displacing a Surrealism he denounced as ‘a reactionary tendency which is attempting to restore “outside” matter' to art (The Optical Unconscious, 7). Krauss reconstitutes Surrealism as invoking an ‘optical unconscious’ which contests the transcendent eye that never blinks in its reification of the indivisible moment of seeing. The optical unconscious is ‘a projection of the way that human vision can be thought to be less than a master of all it surveys, in conflict as it is with what is internal to the organism that houses it’ (The Optical Unconscious, 179-80). In other words, the historical avant-garde sought to link vision to cornality, to re-corporealize opticality through ‘the optical system's porousness to the operation of its internal organs’ (The Optical Unconscious, 124)—that is, the beat of carnal desire. To re-embody vision, to re-sexualize it by re-integrating it to the networks of the unconscious, is to link rebellion with the lifting of repression.

That de-sublimation, in Lacanian terms, is a refusal of the Father's law: the avant-garde artist becomes, in effect, a rebellious son who disobeys the founding Oedipal moment of acceding to repressive Law. And the first object to open to this ‘pervert’ is that which was the aim of the Father's interdiction: the mother's body. ‘The emblematic subject of male avant-garde practice’, claims Susan Rubin Suleiman, ‘is … a transgressive son’ (87) who enacts his violent refusal over the body of the woman, now seen as the (silenced) stage of a battle between father and son. It is Barthes' The Pleasure of the Text which emphasizes that what is de-sublimated is not simply desire but also aggressivity, a violence toward the feminine: ‘The writer is someone who plays with the body of the mother: in order to glorify it, to embellish it, or to dismember it, to take it to the limit of what can be known about the body. I would go as far as to take jouissance in a disfiguration’ (cited, Suleiman, 9).

Ballard's debt to Surrealism in Atrocity can now be considered in different—and much darker—terms. There is no doubt that Breton's oft repeated declaration that ‘The problem of woman is the most marvellous and most disturbing in the world’ is continued here: Karen Novotny embodies the modulus that will provide a solution to the compulsions induced by the media landscape. But if Woman veils the truth she must be mutilated, ripped open, in order to reveal it. Again and again this mutilation must be enacted, for she is put in the place of the bearer of Truth precisely by the Law. The son's transgression remains bound to the taboo installed by the father, and the desire that is directed to Woman is bound by aggressivity, sadism and the deathly compulsion to repeat.

In Atrocity, ‘The Great American Nude’ contains a paragraph entitled ‘Baby Dolls’, which opens: ‘Catherine Austin stared at the object on Talbert's desk. These flaccid globes, like the obscene sculptures of Bellmer, reminded her of elements of her own body transformed into a series of imaginary sexual organs’ (53). The marginal commentary note expands: ‘Hans Bellmer's work is now totally out of fashion, hovering as it does on the edge of child pornography … his vision is far too close for comfort to the truth’ (53). Bellmer's poupées (dolls) takes the locus of the female body as the site of avant-garde rebellion to its extreme.

The test-crash mannequins that pepper Atrocity, Crash and ‘The Terminal Beach’ have a link to the set of female mannequins for the 1936 International Surrealist exhibition, which were in fact inspired by Bellmer's first Doll, constructed in 1933 after Bellmer had seen ‘Tales of Hoffmann’. The inevitable recourse here is to Freud's essay ‘The Uncanny’ where Hoffmann's ‘The Sand Man’ is the central document, concerning as it does a mechanical doll mistaken for a woman. Bellmer is uncomfortably more exact to Hoffmann's tale, which involves dismemberment of the doll. A sequence of staged photographs, Bellmer's dolls are obsessional dismemberments, perverse combinations of limbs and bulbous protuberances: his view (echoed in Ballard's comments on the Hollywood stars cited earlier) is that ‘The body is like a sentence that invites us to rearrange it’ (cited Foster, Compulsive Beauty, 103).

For Krauss, these represent ‘the obsessional re-invention of an always-same creature—continually re-contrived, compulsively repositioned within the hideously banal space of kitchen, stairwell, parlour’ (‘Corpus Delicti’, 86). That the T-cell's similar dismemberments of Novotny in stylized scenarios find an equivalent male sadism toward the feminine is made clear by Bellmer's own commentary: ‘Wasn't exactly that which the imagination seeks in desire and intensification to be found in the doll (in the image of precisely her dollishness), who only had life insofar as one projected it onto her, who despite her limitless submissiveness understood that she was reserved for despair?’ (cited, Peter Webb, my emphasis, 33). And yet the context shifts slightly when it is observed that Bellmer was the son of an enthusiastic advocate of fascism who built the doll as a staging of his own simultaneous rebellion and abjection to his Father's law. Bellmer's commentaries insist that the work figured his father's threat in terms of castration and the refusal of his father in terms of a fetishized displacement onto the doll. In some ways, the dolls ‘perversely’ traverse sadism and masochism, objectification and identification, and ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’. Hal Foster whilst accepting this narrative, worries that Bellmer uses precisely a ‘fascist’ strategy—dismemberment—to counter Nazism (‘Armor Fou’). The avant-garde son's perversity yet comes to mimic the Father's law.

In Atrocity the question of oscillation between complicity and critique, refusal or absorption, the textual ‘world’ as subjective projection or objective penetration of the T-cell, cystallizes around the obsessive re-functioning of the doll-women. As sadistic act it recapitulates the delusion of woman as Truth; as masochistic identification, it can only pre-figure his own disappearance into the tabulations of scientific taxonomies. As avant-garde text, Atrocity reiterates the blindnesses of the project with regard to the violence toward the feminine. And could not its scopophilic epistemology go much further than that, and become pornography?

Linda Williams has attempted to trace pornography's premise of ‘maximum visibility’ in a frame derived from Foucault's first volume of The History of Sexuality: the implantation of the compulsion that sex speak the entire truth of being. Muybridge's stop-action scenarios of female movement and Charcot's photographic record of hysterical seizures constitute voyeuristic atrocity exhibitions, recalling Atrocity's newsreels of Vietnam, car crashes and assassinations. Hard-core ‘obsessively seeks knowledge, through a voyeuristic record of the confessional, involuntary paroxysm, of the “thing” itself’ (49). This ‘frenzy of the visible’ is, for Williams, impossibly contradictory, however. Hard-core films are directed towards unrepresentable on the woman's body (the ‘absence’ of a visible record of female orgasm), but this is displaced onto the ejaculating penis as signifier of the other's pleasure.

Is there an analogy to Atrocity here?

Questions, always questions … ‘What are you trying to build?’ she asked. He assembled the mirrors into a box-like structure … ‘A trap’. She stood beside him as he knelt on the floor. ‘For what? Time?.’ He placed a hand between her knees and gripped her right thigh, handhold of reality. ‘For your womb, Karen’.

(32-33)

The T-cell tries to capture the ‘secret’ truth of Novotny's body precisely in the ‘vanishing point’ of her genitalia. The compulsion to repeat the mutilations of her body record the inevitable failure but reiterated attempts to grasp that ‘truth’. And that is because this epistemology works, according to Elisabeth Bronfen, in a logic in which ‘to attribute a fixed meaning to a woman, to solve the mystery of her duplicity is coterminous with killing her’. The inevitable death, Bronfen continues, ‘can be read in part as a trope for the fatality with which any hermeneutic enterprise is inscribed’ (294). This accords with Peter Brooks' analysis of the body of Emma Bovary. For a novel that centres on the body of Emma so obsessively, Brooks notes that that body is rarely represented as a whole; as she undresses, there is always a turning away, onto the clothes, onto fragments. It is ‘repeatedly “metonymized”, fragmented into a set of accessory details rather than achieving coherence as either object or subject’ (48). This does, in fact, echo, with the billboards throughout Atrocity, those which display ‘a segment of the lower lip, a right nostril, a portion of the female perineum … At least five hundred signs would be needed to contain the whole of this gargantuan woman’ (15). With Freud, the visual field, as the privileged field of knowledge, is shot through with desire and disavowal: the female body is never fully knowable because the (male) scopophilic gaze is seeking an imaginary object, a body without lack. Emma's body is finally only seen ‘whole’ in death, and Brooks states: ‘At one extreme, the body must be killed before it can be represented, and indeed Freud acknowledges the link of the instinct for knowledge to sadism’ (63) For the Sadist to kill, as de Beauvoir notes in ‘Must we Burn de Sade?’, means not the victory of power but its complete loss; the other's suffering no longer affirms power.⁵ The death must be repeated again and again therefore. Does this explain Atrocity's repetition?

And yet … and yet it could be argued that despite the pervasive logic of violence toward the feminine that uncomfortably reiterates Bellmer and the pornographic, the operation fails because something radical has happened at another level of the text. The composition of the text in its overdetermined, ‘impossible’ spaces collapses levels and sets in train a promiscuous and unending semiosis even to the extent of displacing both the phallic economy and the ultimate truth of being in sexuality. Nathan ponders that

it's an interesting question—in what way is intercourse per vagina more stimulating than with this ashtray, say, or with the angle between two walls? Sex is now a conceptual act, it's probably only in terms of the perversions that we can make contact with each other at all. The perversions are completely neutral, cut off from any suggestion of psychopathology—in fact, most of the ones I've tried are out of date. We need to invent a series of imaginary sexual perversions just to keep the activity alive.

(61-63)

The unending translation between levels prevents a single containment of desire within a phallic economy. On this point there is a certain agreement with Barthes' distinction between Sade and Bataille. Sade is merely expansive; taxonomical and encyclopaedic, it is, as Susan Sontag says, ‘the body as machine and of the orgy as an inventory of the hopefully indefinite possibilities of several machines in collaboration with one another’ (‘The Pornographic Imagination’, 99). Crash opens with an encyclopedic array of extremities, and forever moves towards epiphanies that are little more than taxonomical listings of perversity; Vaughan's photojournal of crash victims and their subsequent sexual ‘swerves’ is the zenith of the text, which works through a remorseless accumulation of the ‘unacceptable’. Barthes, in contrast, sees Bataille's The Story of the Eye working through metonymical chains of association that begin to cathect objects ‘beyond’ the sexual, and entrains these objects to the movement of desire. Such associative chains and bizarre cathecting of ‘non-sexual’ objects has been seen to operate in Atrocity. Further, Barthes sees Sade as remorselessly phallic, whilst Bataille's chains move across the eye and the eye-like: triumphantly non-phallic, even ‘feminine’ (this is not the eye of the ‘male gaze’, but one ‘pregnant’ with associations), Bataille transgresses the phallic economy. Crash, I would argue, is obsessively phallic; the centre of the text is the spreading stain of repeatedly discharged semen on the crotch of Vaughan's jeans. If ‘Ballard’ comes to desire Vaughan, and finally consummates this desire, it is not so much a ‘gay’ act as the desire to be Vaughan's phallus, the ‘modulus’ which unlocks the logic of the eroticized car-crash. Crash tries, clinically and affectlessly, to list perverse acts; the sexual performances with Gabrielle, crippled and supported in a set of leg and back braces (an echo of Frida Kahlo's injuries?), moves away from the vagina to a dream of ‘other orifices’ ‘opened’ by the scars and indentations of the car-crash, the grooves and weals produced by the braces. These still remain, however, to be penetrated. If wounds are fetishized, this is exactly because the fetish disavows and displaces—but also affirms—the lacking phallus.

Atrocity's locus is difficult to determine. There is no privileged ‘level’ or term; chains of association are always reversible. The action of desire can be read either as the T-cell's or the implantation of the ‘machine libido’ of mass culture. What shifts this beyond the simple celebration of subversive desire by the Surrealists, or the ‘liberation’ narrative of Marcuse is the emphasis that Eros and Thanatos are equally unleashed by de-sublimation, that violence and death are concentrated obsessively on the figure of the Woman. This remains intractable and troubling.

And yet … and yet I want to risk reading Atrocity one final time in a way which re-writes this violence toward the feminine in figural terms, and which returns to the impossible place of Ballard's work between high and low art.

DOES THE ANGLE BETWEEN TWO WALLS HAVE A HAPPY ENDING?

What has happened to science fiction in this treatment of Atrocity? In part, I have been concerned to track the emergence of a possible place for Ballard's most experimental work in the moment between the historical avant-garde and the neo-avant-garde, the 1960s as the ambivalent site of transfer and transformation erased by the monolithic opposition of modernism and postmodernism. But it has also been necessary to depart from the science fiction milieu in order to treat Atrocity seriously in the bewilderingly dense connections it makes to a century of artistic practices which the critics of Atrocity have hitherto failed to consider. Now it is time to return to the thesis that Ballard's work constitutes the very edge, the limit, both the inside and the outside of science fiction, and how the oeuvre returns to allegorize that limit in displaced forms.

A marginal note in Atrocity praises Sontag's essay, ‘The Pornographic Imagination’, which wants to save a literary pornography, where ‘inherent standards of artistic excellence pertain’ against the ‘avalanche of pornographic potboilers’ (Sontag, 84). The former is clearly coded as avant-garde; they are limit texts, beyond good and evil. Sontag has constant recourse to science fiction in relation to pornography, surprisingly perhaps after the dismissal of science fiction film in ‘The Imagination of Disaster’. ‘As literary forms’, Sontag suggests, ‘pornography and science fiction resemble each other in several interesting ways’ (84). The de-legitimation of pornography as literature—because it has an uncomplex address, single intent, a ruthless functionalism with regard to language, and no interest in character—meshes, to some extent, with the ghettoization of science fiction. For Sontag, however, ‘Pornography is one of the branches of literature—science fiction is another—aiming at disorientation, at psychic dislocation’ (94).

Anxious to avoid the fall into sociologizing pornography, Sontag proposes—for a specific French ‘high’ tradition—an ahistorical expression of the sexual drive in extremity. For de Sade and Bataille, Sontag suggests ‘the “obscene” is a primal notion of human consciousness’ (103); it has been the ambivalent ‘gift’ of these writers to reveal the ‘authentic’ extremity of sexual ecstasy, that Man has, in his ‘sexual capacity’, an impetus which ‘can drive a wedge between one's existence as a full human being and one's existence as a sexual being’ (104—05). Sontag's emphasis on the responsibility of these works recalls Simone de Beauvoir's Sade-as-existentialist. Avant-gardism becomes inseparable from this discharge of desire which is both beyond the self and simultaneously more ‘authentic’ than that merely human self.

This strategy takes the ‘high’ pornographic text into a space beyond moralism (which is left for ‘low’, generic pornography). That science fiction should cross her argument is significant, for this division of high and low echoes the legitimations of Ballard's work. Ballard's texts have ‘value’ in their unacceptability in science fiction, their outraging and out-reaching of the ghetto.

If the strategy of legitimation by appealing to ‘high’ art status has been questioned throughout (and ought, perhaps, to be particularly questioned in this context),⁶ does not treating Atrocity as an avant-garde text insist on its ‘high’ literary status? This is where the figure of Woman becomes important again. I want to consider the violence to the feminine in highly figural terms, as it operates in ‘You: Coma: Marilyn Monroe’. The ‘chapter’ concerns the use of Novotny as the ‘modulus’ through which the T-cell ‘had come to this apartment in order to solve (Monroe's) suicide’ (42). After this statement, Novotny is obliquely murdered:

Murder … At intervals Karen Novotny moved across it [the room], carrying out a sequence of apparently random acts. Already she was confusing the perspectives of the room, transforming it into a dislocated clock. She noticed Tallis behind the door and walked towards him. Tallis waited for her to leave. Her figure interrupted the junction between the walls in the corner on his right. After a few seconds her presence became an unbearable intrusion into the time geometry of the room.

(42)

Later, when Coma arrives at the apartment, Novotny's death is explained thus: ‘She was standing in the angle between two walls’ (42).

Now, just as this phrase is the leitmotif of Atrocity, so I have adopted it to site Ballard in the non-site between high and low, the ‘hinge’ of both. It is possible to argue that it serves precisely that function here. Andreas Huyssen's ‘Modernism's Other: Mass Culture as Woman’ is a well-known essay that displays how the mass was coded feminine by modernism. Huyssen's sources are largely from late nineteenth century German writers, but it possible also to consider English sources at the same moment which reverse this coding: high culture as Woman. I have already shown how Haggard's revitalization of the romance attacks Naturalism as ‘carnal and filthy’, but Haggard also notes that the American novel has developed worrying characteristics: ‘their men … are emasculated specimens … with culture on their lips … About their work is an atmosphere like that of the boudoir of a luxurious woman, faint and delicate’ (175). Between the high and the low, each marks the other as Woman, each projects as its edge a feminine form.

That Woman is in the liminal position, the ‘angle between two walls’, connects to Lynda Nead's treatment of the female nude as a troubling category for art history. ‘More than any other subject, the female nude connotes “Art” … it is an icon of western culture, a symbol of civilization and accomplishment’ (1); on the other hand, the nude woman must be contained and idealized within the frame, otherwise it threatens collapse into obscenity: ‘The obscene body is the body without borders or containment and obscenity is representation that moves and arouses the viewer rather than bringing about stillness and wholeness’ (2). At once idealized and denigrated, art history polices this figure so insistently because it at once the site on which the border between ‘high’ art and ‘low’ obscenity is affirmed, but is also the internally divided moment where that distinction may collapse.

Could the conceptual death of Novotny perhaps signal the attempted destruction of this mutual projection, to clear the space of the ‘angle between two walls’ for an impossible occupation, precisely by Ballard's texts? It is important that the angle is maintained, for this is no erasure of the border between high and low, but rather a ‘double’ death, of the low's high and the high's low. Whilst Bellmer's strategy is problematic, there is a reason for Ballard's echo of it: as the doll is placed in banal spaces between—in stairwells and in the angle between two walls—so Ballard deploys his figure of Woman to stage an occupation of the limit between high and low, modernism and postmodernism, science fiction and mainstream. Neither a simple definitional postmodernism (erasure of the border), nor simple avant-gardism (sublation of the border); the angle remains intolerably present. Does the angle between two walls have a happy ending? Yes and no: oscillation.

This is the most tentatively ‘positive’ reading of the conceptual deaths of Atrocity. However, it unacceptably waives the physicality of violence towards Woman. It repeats, too, Breton's denial of les femmes for La Femme—the object, the image of the feminine. If, in the disaster novels, Beatrice and Suzanne Clair stand for veiled apocalyptic knowledge, Atrocity may mark a new stage in the dismemberment of the feminine cipher, a violence to force a giving up of the truth.

Hal Foster's work on Bellmer's dolls and Ernst's collages is concerned that these may participate in the very devices they seek to criticize. For Foster, Ernst's body-as-tank, body-as-diagrammatized-engineering-plan, has a worrying analogy with Theweleit's analysis of the fascist Freikorps soldier: the state-manufactured body, metallized armour replacing the ego. Such armour is constantly under threat, tested only by pain. Anything which threatens is violently attacked, most particularly the ‘oozing’, non-bounded state of the feminine. If Ernst's collages of the body-as-machine serve to ‘shore up a disrupted body image or to support a ruined ego construction’ (Foster, ‘Armor Fou’, 68), the machines are dysfunctional, as wild and fantastically inoperative as any in Roussel's fiction (to which Atrocity also refers in two cited titles of Roussel's fiction, Locus Solus and Impressions of Africa). Bellmer's sadism and mastery the doll, however, may mean his ‘misogynistic effects … may well overwhelm his liberatory intentions’ (Foster, ‘Armor Fou’, 87).

To take the violence towards Woman in Atrocity in such terms may be the most positive statement, that Ballard, like Bellmer, is ‘ambiguously reflexive about masculinist fantasies rather than merely expressive of them’ (Foster, ‘Armor Fou’, 87)—the same undecidability that has been emphasized throughout this [essay]. If Woman holds the truth, a sadistic attack must be launched, a compulsive re-killing of Novotny. And yet Nathan's narrative of the T-cell's activity may begin with this attempt to shore up the ego, but the T-cell himself is eventually dispersed into traces, footnotes of a main document that has now been lost. No object or subject can hold the truth or the gaze that would pierce the truth.

The oscillation I have ascribed to The Atrocity Exhibition is an over-determined one, moving between high and low, affirmation and negation, ‘historical’ and ‘neo’ avant-garde. I hope to have displayed that if the text has exemplary ‘postmodernist’ concerns, it also adopts strategies more properly ascribed to ‘modernism’. The art-historical and literary frames that would distribute the places of texts discretely between these categories seem too monolithic, troubled by a text that coils them within one another in a complex simultaneity. One leitmotif of the text, the phrase ‘the angle between two walls’, determines the impossible site of The Atrocity Exhibition itself.

Notes

1. All quotations from this text, for reasons that will become clear, derive from the Re/Search edition.

2. The decision to use ‘T-cell’ is partly for convenience, partly for its dubious evocation of the use of depletion of T-cells to measure the advance of the HIV virus. The main figure of The Atrocity Exhibition also undergoes ‘depletion’ until finally disappearing. Although this is in questionable taste the medical reference (and the question of ‘taste’ itself) is in keeping with the logic of the book. ‘Cell’ is also useful in that it implies both a singular entity as well as a close-knit collective (a ‘terrorist cell’ for instance). This seems more effective than using each version of the name, even if that means certain resonances are lost: the name Traven must be a reference to the reclusive American novelist, B Traven; Travis now wonderfully echoes with Travis Bickle, the ‘psychotic’ hero of Martin Scorsese's film, Taxi Driver.

3. Ballard's use of his own signature as ‘brand name’ on adverts could be compared to the objects Richard Hamilton embossed with ‘Richard’ in parody of the familiar ‘Ricard’ logo. The use of billboard art by Daniel Buren is discussed by Hal Foster in ‘What's Neo about the Neo Avant Garde?’ Jacqueline Rose has also referred to Jenny Holzer's use of billboards: ‘There is a violence in these slogans that works at the level of content, but also, and more crucially, in the disruption caused by their presence and by the very mode of address. They add to the confusion of city space and then appropriate that confusion for a blatant political intention. What would it mean to ask that we are able, in any simple sense, to orientate ourselves in relation to them’ (‘The Man who Mistook His Wife for a Hat’, 247).

4. Only Jonathan Benison, it seems, makes one brief comment on this question, and that in parentheses. Benison queries Ballard's ‘apparently overfacile adoption of a woman figure to act as cipher, as key object’ (‘In Default of a Poet in Space’, 414).

5. A useful extension to this, in terms of Sadeian writing, are Pierre Klossowski's comments: ‘Dealing with a personal experience condemned by its very nature to remain incommunicable, Sade chooses to translate this experience into the conventional form characteristic of all communication. Then the conventional becomes “unreadable” each time the incommunicable experience asserts itself, but becomes all the more readable when this experience disappears again … This ecstasy cannot be conveyed by language; what language describes are the ways to it, the dispositions that prepare for it’ (Sade My Neighbour, 39). Hence, Klossowski explains, the need for endless reiteration in writing of the violent, pornographic act of possession, one that always slides away from the Sadist. My thanks to Julie Crofts for pointing out this source.

6. Those impatient with such attempts to negotiate with texts by Sade and Bataille, where they can see only misogyny, violently acted out, inevitably have a point, and Sontag's strategy of legitimation here is difficult to sustain or comply with. Sontag and Ballard belong to that generation which were bound up with ‘liberation’ narratives in the 1960s, and thus have wholly different attitudes to ‘pornographic’ writing just emerging from the cachet of censorship. Nevertheless, my reading, full of risks, is indirectly in the spirit of reassessments such as Angela Carter's The Sadeian Woman.