JG Ballard's Introduction to the French Edition of Crash
Introduction to the French Edition of Crash
by J.G. Ballard, 1974
The marriage of reason and nightmare which has dominated the 20th century has given birth to an ever more ambiguous world. Across the communications landscape move the specters of sinister technologies and the dreams that money can buy.Thermonuclear weapons systems and soft drink commercials coexist in an overlit realm ruled by advertising and pseudoevents, science and pornography. Over our lives preside the great twin motifs of the 20th century – sex and paranoia. Despite McLuhan’s delight in high-speed information mosaics we are still reminded of Freud’s profound pessimism in Civilization and its Discontents . Voyeurism, self-disgust, the infantile basis of our dreams and longings – these diseases of the psyche have now culminated in the most terrifying casualty of the [20th] century: the death of affect.
This demise of feeling and emotion has paved the way for all our most real and tender pleasures – in the excitements of pain and mutilation; in sex as the perfect arena, like a culture bed of sterile pus, for all the veronicas of our own perversions; in our moral freedom to pursue our own psychopathology as a game; and in our apparently limitless powers for conceptualization – what our children have to fear is not the cars on the highways of tomorrow but our own pleasure in calculating the most elegant parameters of their deaths. To document the uneasy pleasures of living within this glaucous paradise have more and more become the role of science fiction. I firmly believe that science fiction, far from being and unimportant minor offshoot, in fact represents the main literary tradition of the 20th century, and certainly its oldest – a tradition of imaginative response to science and technology that runs in an intact line through H.G. Wells, Aldous Huxley, the writers of modern America science fiction, to such present-day innovators as William Burroughs.
The main fact of the 20th century is the concept of the unlimited possibility. This predicate of science and technology enshrines the notion of a moratorium on the past – the irrelevancy and even death of the past – and the limitless alternatives available to the present. What links the first flight of the Wright brothers to the invention of the Pill is the social and sexual philosophy of the ejector seat. Given this immense continent of possibility, few literatures seem to be better equipped to deal with their subject matter than science fiction. No other form of fiction has the vocabulary and images to deal with the present, let alone the future. The dominant characteristic of the modern mainstream novelist its sense of individual isolation; its mood of introspection and alienation, a state of mind assumed to be the hallmark of the 20th century consciousness. Far from it. On the contrary, it seems to me that this is a psychology that belongs entirely to the 19th century, part of a reaction against the massive restraints of bourgeois society, the monolithic character of Victorianism and the tyranny of the paterfamilias, secure in his financial and sexual authority. Apart from its marked retrospective bias and its obsession with the subjective nature of experience, its real subject matter is the rationalization of guilt and estrangement. Its elements are introspection, pessimism and sophistication. Yet if anything befits the 20th century it is optimism, the iconography of mass merchandising, naivety and a guilt free enjoyment of all the mind’s possibilities.
The kind of imagination that now manifests itself in science fiction is not something new. Homer, Shakespeare and Milton all invented new worlds to comment on this one. The split of science fiction into a separate and somewhat disreputable genre is a recent development. It is connected to the near disappearance of dramatic and philosophical poetry and the slow shrinking of the traditional novel as it concerns more and more exclusively with the nuances of human relationships. Among those areas neglected by the traditional novel are, above all, the dynamics of human societies [the traditional novel tends to depict society as static], and man’s place in the universe. However crudely or naively, science fiction at least attempts to place a philosophical and metaphysical frame around the most important events within our lives and consciousness. If I make this general defense of science fiction it is, obviously, because my own career as a writer has been involved with it for almost 20 years. From the very start, when I first turned to science fiction, I was convinced that the future was a better key to the present than the past. At the time, however, I was dissatisfied with science fiction’s obsession with its two principal themes – outer space and the far future. As much for emblematic purposes as any theoretical or programmatic ones, I christened the new terrain I wished to explore inner space, that psychological domain [manifest, for example, in surrealist painting] where the inner world of the mind and the outer world of reality meet and fuse.
Primarily I wanted to write a fiction about the present day. To do this in the context of the late 1950s, in a world where the call sign of Sputnik I could be heard on one’s radio like the advance beacon of a new universe, required completely different techniques from those available to the 19th century novelist. In fact, I believe that if it were possible to scrap the whole of existing literature, and be forced to begin again without a any knowledge of the past, all writers would find themselves inevitably producing something very close to science fiction. Science and technology multiply around us. To an increasing extent they dictate the languages in which we speak and think. Either we use those languages, or we remain mute. Yet, by an ironic paradox, modern science fiction became the first casualty of the changing world it anticipated and helped to create. The future envisaged by the science fiction of the 1940s and 1950s is already our past. Its dominant images, not merely of the first Moon flights and interplanetary voyages, but of our changing social and political relationships in a world governed by technology, now resemble huge pieces of discarded stage scenery. For me, this could be seen most touchingly in the film 2001: A Space Odyssey , which signified the end of the heroic period of modern science fiction – its lovingly imagined panoramas and costumes, its huge set pieces, reminded me of Gone With the Wind , a scientific pageant that became a kind of historical romance in reverse, a sealed world into which the hard light of contemporary reality was never allowed to penetrate.
Increasingly, our concepts of past, present and future are being forced to revise themselves. Just as the past itself, in social and psychological terms, became a casualty of Hiroshima and the nuclear age [almost by definition a period where we were all forced to think prospectively], so in its turn the future is ceasing to exist, devoured by the all voracious present. We have annexed the future into our own present, as merely one of those manifold alternatives open to us. Options multiply around us, we live in an almost infantile world where any demand, any possibility, whether for lifestyles, travel, sexual roles and identities, can be satisfied instantly.
In addition, I think that the balance between fiction and reality has changed significantly in the past decade [1960s]. Increasingly their roles are reversed. We live in a world ruled by fictions of every kind – mass merchandising, advertising, politics conducted as a branch of advertising, the instant translation of science and technology into popular imagery, the increasing blurring and intermingling of identities within the realm of consumer goods, the preempting of any free or imaginative response to experience by the television screen. We live inside an enormous novel. For the writer in particular it is less and less necessary for him to invent the fictional content of his novel. The fiction is already there. The writer’s task is to invent the reality.
In the past we have always assumed that the external world around us represented reality, however confusing or uncertain, and that the inner world of our minds, its dreams, hopes, ambitions, represented the realm of fantasy and the imagination. These roles, too, it seems to me, have been reversed. The most prudent and effective method of dealing with the world around us is to assume that it is a complete fiction – conversely, the one node of reality left to us is inside our own heads. Freud’s classic distinction between the latent and manifest content of the dream, between the apparent and the real, now needs to be applied to the external world of so-called reality.
Given these transformations, what is the main task facing the writer? Can he, any longer, make use of the techniques and perspectives of the traditional 19th century novel, with its linear narrative, its measured chronology, its consular characters grandly inhabiting domains within an ample time and space? Is his subject matter the sources of character and personality sunk deep in the past, the unhurried inspection of roots, the examination of the most subtle nuances of social behaviour and personal relationships? Has the writer still the moral authority to invent a self sufficient and self-enclosed world, to preside over his characters like an examiner, knowing all the questions in advance? Can he leave out anything he prefers not to understand, including his own motives, prejudices and psychopathologies?
I feel myself that the writer’s role, his authority and license to act, has changed radically. I feel that, in a sense, the writer knows nothing any longer. He has no moral stance. He offers the reader the contents of his own head, he offers a set of options and imaginative alternatives. His role is that of the scientist, whether on safari or in his laboratory, faced with a completely unknown terrain or subject. All he can do is to devise hypothesis and test them against the facts.
Crash! is such a book, an extreme metaphor for an extreme situation, a kit of desperate measures only for use in an extreme crisis. If I am right, and what I have done over the past years is to rediscover the present for myself, Crash! takes up its position as a cataclysmic novel of the present day in line with my previous novels of world cataclysm set in the near or immediate future – The Drowned World, The Drought and The Crystal World . Crash!, of course, is not concerned with an imaginary disaster, however imminent, but with a pandemic cataclysm institutionalized in all industrial societies that kills hundreds of thousands of people each year and injures millions. Do we see, in the car crash, a sinister portent of a nightmare marriage between sex and technology? Will modern technology provide us with a hitherto undreamed-of means for tapping our own psychopathologies? Is this harnessing of our innate perversity conceivably of benefit to us? Is there some deviant logic unfolding more powerful that that of reason?
Throughout Crash! I have used the car not only as a sexual image, but as a total metaphor for man’s life in today’s society. As such the novel has a political role quite apart from its sexual content, but I would like still to think that Crash! is the first pornographic novel based on technology. In a sense, pornography is the most political form of fiction, dealing with how we use and exploit each other in the most urgent and ruthless way. Needless to say, the ultimate role of Crash! is cautionary, a warning against that brutal, erotic realm that beckons more and more persuasively to us from the margins of technological landscapes.
Some Problems with Linda Williams' "Hard-Core Eroticism"
We are all lucky that we have feminist theorists like Linda Williams pioneering the field of Porn Studies. Without her work, it would be impossible for me (and so many others) to do much of what we do in our classes. Williams’ reading of Oshima’s In the Realm of the Senses, particularly the section on “The Bullfight of Love” is stellar. She does a lot of heavy lifting for me in this class so I can focus on other things. However, there’s at least one issue in the chapter that I feel I need to address. The problem lies not in her analysis of the film—which, again, I think is totally great—but in what I view as unnecessarily exaggerated claims about Oshima’s work:
My goal in this chapter will not be so much to understand this unique film as a stunning example of Japanese cinema (which it is), but as the first example of feature-length narrative cinema anywhere in the world to succeed as both art and pornography … (183–emphasis mine)
In fact, Fred Halsted’s L.A. Plays Itself (1972 – begun in ’68 and not completed until ’72), as well as his Sextool (1975) and Curt McDowell’s Thundercrack! (1974) were well known hard-core art films of the time (see footnote 1 below). Unfortunately, Williams was unaware of this other history of experimental pornography at the time she wrote Screening Sex:
In an article called “Theory of Experimental Pornographic Film,” published soon after he made Senses, Oshima explains that he had just heard from his colleagues returning from the 1975 Cannes Film Festival that not only were serious pornographic art films being made (in what was surely an exaggeration) ‘all the young directors are acting in their own sex scenes of sexual intercourse’ (emphasis mine)
Because Williams and her colleagues were not able to identify any such films, she states that this report from Cannes was a “mistaken impression” based on “a vague idea circulating around the potential of a newly emerged hard-core pornography” (187). In other words, Oshima’s friends simply made this idea up.
However, in 1975, Fred Halsted was well known as a director of hard-core art films who also starred in his own films. (I don’t know if “hard core art film” is the correct term, because I am not sure Halsted made any distinction between pornography and art–at this time, we did not yet have the view we have today that art and pornography, or even art and life, were totally separate spheres, which is precisely what one would expect of an era that experimented with this new form, particularly after the upheavals of May ’68). His films L.A. Plays Itself,Sex Garage, and Sextool are the only pornographic films in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art. Halsted directed and starred in Sextool, which was released in March of 1975 (just prior to Cannes), which he thought would eclipse the acclaim L.A. Plays Itself had previously received (it did not). According to IMDB, Sextool was released in France in 1975. I don’t know if it played at Cannes that year or not. It’s entirely possible–I strongly suspect it is likely–that Oshima’s friends returning from Cannes were referring directly to Halsted’s work (which was very well known at the time, but lost to subsequent generations).
According to Williams :
Oshima thus resolved to do what no Japanese director had ever done and no reputable director of art cinema in the West had ever done either: to make a narrative art film with frequent graphic displays of sexual organs. He made this resolution under the mistaken impression that this kind of hard-core art film was already quite common in the West (187–emphasis mine)
Halsted’s early 70’s films were artistic, experimental, narrative, and hard-core (as was the work of Curt McDowell–both defy simple genre classification). While I vaguely knew about the existence of Halsted’s film, I knew nothing “about” it. (In thinking back over it, I think someone told me to rent it in the 1990’s in the censored VHS version because it was an important film. If I am even remembering correctly, I was bored and alternately horrified by it.) I suppose this is owing to the post-70’s and post-AIDS marginalization of anything related to leather and S&M in pornography (L.A. Plays Itself was famously censored and the original remains presumably lost forever partially for this reason). I first learned about Halsted from the work of William E. Jones and his book, Halsted Plays Himself. I was, however, more than familiar with the work of Curt McDowell, having seen Thundercrack!, Loads, and Ronnie, as well as a rough cut of Sparkle’s Tavern in Seattle in the 1980’s. McDowell’s work has seen a bit of a renaissance since a screening at the SF International Gay and Lesbian Film Festival in 2010 (and a restoration has been forthcoming on DVD for the past three years). There are other queer films from this era that treat art, narrative, and pornography equally. I am using these directors as the most famous examples because they were so well known at the time.
First of all, there is nothing wrong with mistakes. They are a productive and important part of thought (possibly even their foundation). I believe Williams’ mistake here is productive in this sense (full of potentiality). Her perspective, announced in the first sentence of this chapter, that “Sex is too important to be left to the pornographers” (181), seems to preclude an immanent reading of pornography. I’ll try to make a separate post about this idea of an immanent theory of pornography (which is clearly “in” Oshima’s work) if I can find the time, because I have so much to say about it. Of course, the fact that there is no other explanation offered by Williams for Oshima’s innovations—by that I mean a material reason why he would come to make an experimental pornographic film—other than a “mistaken impression” based on “a vague idea circulating around the potential of a newly emerged hard-core pornography” (187), is important to note. New forms that emerge in the world are based on new practices. And it only makes sense that those experimenting at the limit of art, pornography, and life—sexual minorities—would be bound-up with the creation of these new forms.
In case it is not evident, I am not critiquing Williams for not being a gay man in the 1970’s. It is, rather, symptomatic of our larger culture that even those working in the discipline of porn studies would exclude these important contributions, and shows just how far removed we have become from the world that directors like Halsted, McDowell, and Oshima inhabited. That world did not define pornography as we do today, something that Williams discusses very well in this essay (so, please, don’t take my remarks as a reason not to take her seriously, she is good, very good!). (It bears stating here: Oshima was in ill-health and his friends that he mentions in this essay were already dead at the time of Williams’ research, so there was no way for her to verify the information.)
Finally, one last question. Why do you think pornography, art, and life would not be separate things for McDowell or Halsted? To be a sexual minority of any kind during this time was to have a life that was already defined as pornographic–a life that was supposed to be kept off the public stage (off/scene). The emergence of an explicitly queer, on/scene, subculture in the 1950’s and 60’s marked a time when people were openly experimenting with this problematic (as Warhol’s work attests to, as John Rechy’s writing attests to, and so much more). For many people, the relation between pornography and life during this time was literal: to embrace a sexual life was to embrace the possibility that at any moment—literally—a scene from a pornographic film could be played out in real life (and many people who lived through the era up through the 1970’s have described that “other” world in this way). My interest lies less in this literal relation between pornography and life (though it doesn’t exclude that) and more in the way it might have meaning paradigmatically (or, in a language easier for some students, metaphorically). The invention of pornography in the 19th century, after all, began with “a description of prostitutes or of prostitution, as a matter of public hygiene.” These are pornographic lives: prostitutes, sexual minorities, sex radicals, and artists of previous generations marked as pornographic or off/scene. The sex radicals of the 50’s/60’s/70’s, as well as untold writers and artists before them, present the idea of using this categorization of the pornographic against itself. It marked a material relation—these lives were already excluded from being on/scene—and a problematic; a limit that people faced in their everyday lives in order to fully live as sexual beings. I believe this idea of an immanent (existential) reading of pornography is more relevant than ever before precisely because we have moved, like the sex radicals of previous generations (whose lives were already coded as pornographic), from mere consumers of pornography to makers of pornography: that is, we have all become (more or less) pornographers.
—Rob Thomas, Ph.D.
1. Both Halsted and McDowell were gay and both met untimely ends. McDowell died of AIDS and Halsted eventually took his own life after the loss of his lover to AIDS. It is significant both that Williams’ exclusion centers on queer filmmakers from this era (and the sexual subculture they and their work exemplified), but also two directors who were lost in ways related to HIV/AIDS. An entire sexual subculture was wiped out by our social relations to AIDS—a subculture, I would argue, in which pornography was not separate from art or even from life—as well as the loss of an entire generation of sexual radicals to the disease itself. It is the loss of this subculture, and the erasure of its memory (and those who bear it) that accounts for this exclusion. Not Williams, personally, as a scholar. Everyone makes simple mistakes (in everything). Without them, I would argue, none of us would ever be thinking beings. And people can be wrong about one little thing and right about so much else.
For those who are interested, L.A. Plays Itself will be playing, February 28th, at SFMOMA. Sadly, I am teaching another night course, so I can’t make it.
Header image: Fred Halsted in L.A. Plays Itself
Note: this post was written very quickly this afternoon. I hope to have time to come back and annotate it and develop it further.