Applied Ballardianism, Simon Sellars (reseña en inglés)

The Ballardian Desert

Ballardian times. In Mark Fisher’s books, Capitalist Realism and Ghosts of My Life, and in Simon Reynolds’ Retromania, it is proposed that late capitalism has exhausted the future. For the last examples of meaningful cultural theory concerning the future, we must return to the late 90s and stand-out texts such as Kodwo Eshun’s More Brilliant than the Sun (although we might consider The Matrix, too, with its "peak of human civilisation" stuck in 1999). For much of the mainstream, and as a more-or-less general description of the 21^st century’s globalised culture, the future has dissolved into an ineffable present, and the past has become a theme park – as in Stranger Things. And the most curious thing: none of this is surprising, because forty years ago J.G. Ballard made that idea the core of his work. At first, he did it in a catastrophic or post-apocalyptic way (as in his early novels The Drowned World, The Drought and The Crystal World), but soon even that genre-bound appeal to a possible future was unnecessary as his catastrophes became confined to the present or some faintly parallel world – like the short stories in his Vermilion Sands collection.

No future. As Pablo Capanna wrote in El tiempo desolado, "time" is one of the most frequent words found in Ballard’s work, more frequent than, for instance, “space”. And Capanna wrote his book, by the way, at a time when it was still possible to read Ballard as a warning. Perhaps there was something of a tired culture’s utopia in those summers spent under the sun of Vermilion Sands, with its coral towers, its sensitive houses and its cloud sculptors. It was, for Ballard, the world of The Persistence of Memory and The Disquieting Muses but turned real. Now, we live in a world where the autopsy of the future (to cite a key Ballardian theme) is re-enacted everywhere. That’s our daily reality, and if at some time it was fascinating, now it’s just terminal (as Ballard would say) ennui.

Orbis Tertius. What would happen if we read the world surrounding us the way we read Ballard’s novels? That question is the key to Applied Ballardianism: Memoir from a Parallel Universe, the new novel by Simon Sellars: Ballardian agents invaded Earth sometime in the 70s and, forty years later, the world became not Tlön, as in Borges’ short story, but Vermilion Sands.

No alternative. Think of Ballard, then, as a virus: an invasive code in the matrix of our reality. What would happen if someone thought that was strictly true? Sellars’ novel traces the adventures and misadventures of an aspiring academic who assumes the Ballardian nature of the world: he reads Ballard’s books as if they were the key to the times we live in, and our world as an extension of Ballard’s terminal beaches and concrete islands.

Beautiful as a molten reactor’s core at Chernobyl. Maybe applying Ballardianism is not that hard. Why are we fascinated with series like Netflix’s Dark Tourist, with Soviet nuclear test sites in Kazakhstan, with catastrophe zones in Pripyat and Fukushima, with ersatz cities raised in former dictatorships or post-Soviet states like Turkmenistan? There is a new beauty there, a beauty of the eerie as the presence of something that should be absent, or the absence of something that should be present, following Fisher’s typology in The Weird and the Eerie: the beauty of the ineffable present, compartmentalised in many imitations of the past, and of the futures we dreamed the day before yesterday. The myths of the near future make up the theme park of the nuclear age: pictures of Chernobyl’s "elephant foot" in the waiting room of our dentist.

Out of (inner) space, the call of the lurker at the threshold of madness. But there’s more to Applied Ballardianism, not just because it provides abundant ways to read it according to both halves of the “theory-fiction” formula, and not just because it has a clear relationship with the novel as a genre. After all, it’s easy to track the development of the narrator as he enters his downward spiral, like a Quixote or a Madame Bovary imprisoned in addiction to theory. No, it’s because in the folds and crevices of the world proposed by Sellars there is always something more, something lurking in the threshold. Here and there, through UFO sightings, urban legends, parallel worlds that threaten to break through, ghosts and mysterious characters, a weird Lovecraftian world threatens to manifest itself.

After the singularity. If it is true that something is rotten in the state of Vermilion Sands, if it is true that the future will come anyway, whether we can conceive it or not, then it will take us by surprise and terrify us like the pale horse and the woodsmen in Twin Peaks: The Return. From the cracks that open in our Ballardian world, the monsters of Lovecraft emerge, returned to their purest, weird essence: that which cannot be (but is), that which we cannot think about (but which confront us). The Applied Ballardianism of global and late capitalism has drained our ability to think about the future, and that’s why everything that’s about to come belongs to the field of the unthinkable, to the weird. And so in the interstices of Applied Ballardianism appear the threats of a future as inhumane as it is incomprehensible, as if the exit from the Ballardian theme park to which we have moved years ago (or in which we have been locked up, if you like) was (and is) waiting for us in Nick Land’s old texts from the 90s: "Meltdown" and "Circuitries".

Cocaine Nights. Applied Ballardianism, as expected, abounds in references and allusions to Ballard’s novels (Sellars’ protagonist struggles to finish his doctoral thesis on Ballard). The process by which the world makes itself Ballardian is lived through and commented on by the narrator in a clear self-referential and meta-literary gesture, adding levels of complexity to the novel and making re-reading necessary. At the same time, his travels and adventures are highly novelistic. The protagonist loses all sense of reality by immersing himself too much in his reading and enacts the impossible to make sense of his delusions, triggered by his struggle to distance himself from the Ballardcore continuum, so to speak, and to rationalise his experiences (which stem from failed relationships, the struggles of being an aspiring academic, mediocre jobs, drugs and travel). It is as if the reality and power of the Ballardian virus are so undeniable that any attempt to return to an understanding of the world pre-Ballard is destined to failure.         

The Overloaded Man. The protagonist is imprisoned in a vicious circle. He has fallen victim to all the Ballardian traps and is no longer able to do anything other than circulate through this spiral towards an increasingly miserable and desolate world. Another possible way to read Applied Ballardianism, then, is to pay special attention to the question of how we conceive ourselves as subjects in a world that does away with all the old notions of subjectivity – a world that multiplies doppelgangers, tulpas, clones and ghosts.

Applied Lovecraftianism, applied Lynchianism. Applied Ballardianism is more than a beautifully crafted and fascinating novel: it’s an urgent book, which seems to ask us to conceive our very inconceivable exit from the world while watching the cracks from which the tentacles will emerge. As in Land's writings, the future will come, but not in a way by which we’ll still understand ourselves as human. If the character in Sellars's novel delves into a Ballardianised world to equally Ballardianise himself, perhaps we must find a way to weirdise ourselves, to think the unthinkable at the very moment when it devours us.