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Acts of reconsideration: J.G.
Ballard (1930–2009) annotating
and revising editions of The
Atrocity Exhibition

Philip Tew

a

a

Brunel University

Published online: 24 May 2012.

To cite this article: Philip Tew (2012) Acts of reconsideration: J.G. Ballard (1930–2009)
annotating and revising editions of The Atrocity Exhibition , Textual Practice, 26:3,
399-420, DOI:

10.1080/0950236X.2012.684936

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Philip Tew

Acts of reconsideration: J.G. Ballard (1930 – 2009)
annotating and revising editions of The Atrocity Exhibition

This essay analyses J.G. Ballard’s The Atrocity Exhibition (1970) primarily in
terms of its author’s numerous additions and annotations incorporated in new
revised editions (1990; 1993), while considering the influence of radical,
avant-garde 1960s’ experimentation during its initial composition. Such
changes transform the book’s aesthetic meaning; they evidence Ballard’s
sense that over time his inchoate and fragmentary form required further expla-
nation and contextualization. As a turbulent palimpsest the novel problema-
tizes its reading; it centres on trauma and the spectacle. Recurrent symbols
evoke feelings of disproportion, alienation, and disassociation. The trivial
mundanities of bourgeois existence are rendered grotesque. Negativity tri-
umphs both in the personal and cultural spheres. Only pathological desires
and violence allow Ballard’s alienated, dissociated characters any putative
affect or meaning. Ballard’s revisions evoke further radical uncertainty, poten-
tially undermining the novel s fragmentary form. An economy of cultural
wounding recurs, symbolized graphically by images of Kennedy’s motorcade
assassination, and of Marilyn Monroe’s body. If such traumatized figures
imply victimhood and violence, prevailing cultural perversities rather
confirm a public fascination for wounding, a switching point between
private and public spheres. Drawing on Theodor Adorno, Maurice Blanchot,
Guy Debord Henri Lefebvre, and Mark Seltzer among others, this essay cri-
tiques Ballard’s representation of modernity and meaninglessness, analysing
his representation of pain in a commodified world lacking empathy.

Keywords

Cultural wounding; the spectacle; alienation; wound culture; post-war literary
innovation; annotation; Kennedy motorcade assassination; Marilyn Monroe

Textual Practice 26(3), 2012, 399 – 420

Textual Practice ISSN 0950-236X print/ISSN 1470-1308 online # 2012 Taylor & Francis

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Desire of writing, writing of desire. Desire of knowledge, knowledge
of desire. Let us not believe that we have said anything at all with
these reversals. Desire, writing, do not remain in place, but pass
one over the other: these are not plays on words, for desire is
always the desire of dying, not a wish. And yet, desire is related to
Wunsch, and is a nondesire too – the powerless power that traverses
writing – just as writing is the desired, undesired torment which
endures everything, even impatience. Dying desire, desire to die,
we live these together – not that they coincide – in the obscurity
of the interim. (Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of Disaster)

1

J.G. Ballard’s active focus on The Atrocity Exhibition (1969; rev. ed. 1990;

1993) stretched over a 30-year period, since early elements had first been
drafted perhaps as early as the late 1950s and a number published in various
radical magazines in the 1960s as detailed by Jeanette Baxter in ‘J.G. Ballard
and the Contemporary’.

2

These fragments were drawn together later for the

first book-length publication in 1970, which Baxter describes as an ‘elaborate
collage novel’.

3

Such work reflected the challenging aesthetic zeitgeist found in

radical and avant-garde circles, both represented and recalled in Ballard’s
apparently imploding and turbulent palimpsest, highly confusing and
elusive for the reader, perhaps especially so for those only familiar with
Ballard as a popular science fiction writer. For Baxter, such writing ‘would,
with its semiotics of chaos, be confrontational and produce a variety of
reader/audience responses [ . . . ]’.

4

The Atrocity Exhibition is arguably the

most challenging and important of his experimental literary ‘projects’, one
its author revisited towards the end of the 1980s as if still not fully satisfied
with its condition or form. And from that juncture, he continued to expand
and further justify the text, adding a layer of explanatory annotations that
Baxter describes as a ‘peritextual commentary [ . . . ]’.

5

In a sense, Baxter’s

description at least implicitly posits an original, authentic core text which is
open to later interrogation by which process Ballard produces supplementary
material and meaning of some sort. Naturally, such an account seems at least
topographically accurate, indicated by the layout and typeface of the revised
version issued by Re/search Publications in 1990, which also includes
various intriguing illustrations, whose inclusion adds a further layer to Ballard’s
meanings.

6

A UK Flamingo 1993 edition is far more readily available; hence,

unless otherwise indicated, this paper refers to this edition as a source.

7

It rep-

rints most aspects of the 1990 edition, including those which Baxter suggests
may serve as ‘an explicatory framework?’

8

I consider that both the 1990 and

1993 editions subsume previous drafts and many of their additional elements
considered below entirely reconfigure the text as new forms of narrative.

By the time, the annotated versions appeared, Ballard had been

engaged in this aesthetic project from around his late 20s to beyond his

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sixtieth birthday, effectively for most of his adult life, a period of both
immense personal and cultural change. Ballard’s on-going artistic engage-
ment indicates that he neither intended nor envisaged his text either to be
static or offer immediacy in either its formal or thematic economy of
meaning. Complexity and protraction are its core elements, the latter in
terms of both authorial involvement and its own historicity. Retracing
that extended process of Ballard producing his recension may offer some
understanding of the genealogy of post-war literary innovation, of its chan-
ging emphases; equally attending specifically to the implications of Bal-
lard’s annotations may provide new understandings of his sensibilities as
an experimental writer. The novel’s strategies and devices have affinities
to those of other British avant-garde writers of the 1960s.

9

Given that at

this point of original publication, it must have seemed adequate in terms
of context and meaning as an anti-novel, a term familiar at the time to
many readers and subsequently to scholars of the avant-garde of this
period, Ballard’s later revisions are suggestive, demonstrating not only
the novel’s importance to him, but that at least unconsciously he came
to regard the text as requiring further explanation, certainly for new gener-
ations of readers. Such an admission together with his additional elabor-
ations serves to emphasize the historicity of the narrative and its
production, and the changing nature of its meaning.

So, what exactly is the nature of Ballard’s interventions in his own text?

The later annotated 1990 version appears physically far more expansive,
extending the page with diagrams, pictures, explanatory margins, and also
adding prefatory remarks by William Burroughs, who comments this is ‘a
profound and disquieting book’ where ‘The line between inner and outer
landscape is breaking down’.

10

It is my suggestion that in the revised editions

one does not encounter a bifurcation; that is the original ideas and drafts are
not just supplemented at a certain crossroads by additions going off on a new
tangent. Rather, the whole is quite radically transformed, becoming a carto-
graphically far more complex and demanding series of aesthetic acts, the act
of its comprehension entirely reconfigured. For instance, the anatomical
pencil drawings – chiefly of young women – resonate with the same dehu-
manizing, quasi-clinical objectivity of much of the narrative, including those
of sexual acts depicted on the page opposite to Ballard’s description of ‘The
Sex Kit’ discussed below.

11

In combination, they emphasize the narrative,

the added commentary and the visual aspects extend the text’s potential
meaning by synthesizing these various elements into a singular if challenging
aesthetic act, as a whole much weightier than the component parts. The sup-
plementary ending of ‘The Secret History of World War 3’ focused on
Reagan and news of his onscreen war,

12

as Ballard notes, offers a pleasing

chaotic symmetry since ‘the many ambiguities surrounding the former
film actor were among the book’s formative influences’.

13

However, it

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also alludes to Ballard’s perspicuity given the place in history the former B-
list actor had achieved by that time. Although Baxter suggests Ballard’s revi-
sions might be read as diminishing the reader’s role,

14

she adds that in reality

they render more complex the text’s possibilities of response.

15

Even the

experienced reader may feel somewhat uncertain as to the nature of the
experience this text solicits, for in comparison to traditional narrative
fiction all of Ballard’s versions appear chaotic, almost as if permeable. It is
a palimpsest that relates as a whole constantly and explicitly to each of its nar-
rative vignettes, its mutually permeating shorter series of narratives, many of
which existed separately, and as Burroughs comments, which are marked
by a ‘magnification of image to the point where it becomes unrecognizable
[ . . . ]’.

16

In this largely unsettling and bizarre environment, Ballard seems

determined to absolutely defy any overall sense of coherence, curiously ren-
dering the reader both central and yet simultaneously thwarted in terms of
most traditional readerly expectations.

In this context, consider the general issue of a reader’s rapport with and

visceral understanding of characters. In all editions, The Atrocity Exhibition
problematizes empathy and mutual identification, Ballard’s anti-affect is
even more emphatic in that his apparently central characters seem peripheral
to what occurs, overshadowed by larger events, existing in an interstitial con-
dition (between various potential states) at best accruing only a ‘powerless
power’, to adopt Blanchot’s terminology from the epigraph quoted above.
A quality of the landscape overshadows even the threat to individuals.
‘Karen Novotny waited as he reversed the car on to the farm track. Half a
mile across the meadows she could see the steel bowls of the three radio tele-
scopes in the sunlight. So the attempt was to be made here? There seemed to be
nothing to kill except the sky’.

17

Almost paradoxically, the contexts are both

vivid and yet in terms of meaning exceedingly elusive, these lives utterly
obscure among the strident visual symbols and emotional semaphore of late
capitalism. It appears Ballard intends that his text should remain more a
matter of interim judgements, hinting at an ontological incompletion that
contrasts the hubris involved in the attempt in such circumstances to create
definitive statements or understandings. Yet, simultaneously, the latter possi-
bility still fascinates Ballard; his polysemic structures of meaning are in stark
contrast to the almost maniacal certainty that seems to inform the world-view
of his characters. In this sense, these two elements convey something of the
paradoxes of existence in the late twentieth century, obsessive individuality
in an age of growing alienation. In decoding his book in the added marginalia,
Ballard feels he might apply the ‘transformational grammars’

18

of insanity to

situate ‘the characters [who] behave as if they were pieces of geometry inter-
locking in a series of mysterious equations’.

19

Despite its equivocal qualities, the novel is also marked by both

numerous historical details and aesthetic preoccupations typical of the

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age of its first creation, and a sense of the period’s history is crucial to com-
prehending its narrative impulses. Andrej Gasiorek notes in J.G. Ballard
(2005) that the writer’s work and its literary imagination are very inter-
connected with the cultural narrative and mood of ‘the late 1960s and
early 1970s, [which] exhibit a paranoia and pessimism in keeping with
the strange unsettling occurrences of that period [ . . . ]’.

20

The novel lit-

erally exhibits a sense of atrocity at the heart of the history of the mid-twen-
tieth century, responding variously to the aftershock of World War II as it
revealed the Holocaust, growing Cold War paranoia, a fear of global
nuclear annihilation, and the escalating and televised Vietnam War all
haunting the interstices of the text, feeding into its impression of impend-
ing doom, and heightening an obsession with an overriding threat of loss
and extinction. Also recurrent is a sense of cultural wounding, exemplified
in the graphic symbols of Kennedy’s assassination. Throughout, the char-
acters’ world-views are suffused by such imagery and its portentous qual-
ities: ‘As Trabert prepared for his departure, the elements of apocalyptic
landscapes waited on the horizons of his mind, helicopters burning
among broken gantries’.

21

Ballard’s later notation qualifies or situates

this textual moment: ‘Here I see the disaster on the launch-pad at Cape
Kennedy in terms of the most common dislocation of time and space
the rest of us ever know – the car crash, and in particular the most
extreme auto-disaster of our age, the motorcade assassination of JFK’.

22

Arguably, much of post-war culture was predicated on such an underlying
sense of imminent disaster, yet as Maurice Blanchot says in The Writing of
Disaster that fate remains unreachable. ‘There is no reaching the disaster.
Out of reach is he whom it threatens, whether from afar or close up, it
is impossible to say: the infiniteness of the threat has in some way
broken every limit’.

23

An understanding that one’s fate is apocalyptically

beyond one’s control pervades Ballard’s text, evoking a sense both of the
immediacy of fear and of meaning deferred, overwhelmed by incogitable
possibilities.

I would suggest that the later revisions and annotations change radi-

cally the text’s emphasis even if they appear to do so only subtly. They
serve to further reconfigure the text by foregrounding Ballard’s acts of
recovery, emphasizing his attempts to retrace its genesis in the maelstrom
of 1960s avant-gardism with its emphasis on contingency, while negating
its core uncertainties. Despite the Surrealism that is central to Baxter’s
reading of the author, Ballard’s notations impose an explanatory vocabu-
lary and stabilize the disparate qualities of the narrative, militating
against any impression of the inchoate, adding something either far
more coherent or at least generally apprehensible as a contextual frame.
Hence, although The Atrocity Exhibition seems to militate against its for-
mulation as a novel, for instance by including ‘many lists’, in the added

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annotations Ballard explains that much like the rest of the novel they were
the product of ‘free association which accounts for the repetition [ . . . ]’.

24

The text appears to incorporate randomness. Yet, this is mediated through
the unconscious self, a mechanism or mediation that expresses underlying
fears while also articulating the impossibility of reaching, understanding, or
defining disaster. Moreover, Ballard instructs us in these matters, which
counters the text’s apparent randomness. By the very act of annotation,
Ballard admits a need to re-inscribe precisely those possibilities he recog-
nized as inherent in the cultural practices typifying the 1960s, which act
of re-inscription emphasizes an immediacy of historical perception achiev-
able at the time of composition that later seems potentially lacking for new,
less-informed readers. Clearly, at the time Ballard drew on an active artistic
scene in which he was enmeshed. Hence, the earlier version depended on a
specific range of elements such as object trouve´, cut-up techniques, collage,
and free association that were characteristic of the 1960s avant-garde zeit-
geist. Such propinquity both counters and yet culturally locates the cen-
trifugal energy of the narrative form itself. However, the annotated
interventions undermine Ballard’s original aesthetic logic, of an inchoate
disorderliness and a formal disintegration, precisely because in their retro-
spection Ballard’s additions reveal that such localized coordinates now
require and rely upon precise and detailed contextualizations. At the
time, the plenitude of shared experiences and an overarching ideological
engagement seemed sufficient, with such elements both absorbed and
understood by a process akin to osmosis, rather than the posterior quasi-
scholarly descriptions we find in both later editions. Rather than emphasize
the re-inscription of history that Baxter foregrounds, the annotations admit
implicitly that the dynamics of this aesthetic phase are largely lost, its
processes at best opaque for younger generations of readers.

Initially for certain critics, the earlier 1970 version of The Atrocity Exhi-

bition represented a landmark in Ballard’s career; Nick Perry and Roy Wilkie
describe it as a ‘breakthrough’ novel for Ballard, allowing him to transcend
the genre limitations of the science fiction field in which he gained earlier
recognition, ‘doing so by breaking down traditional linearity, using
shorter images and situations’.

25

As Brian Baker points out in ‘The Geome-

try of the Space Age: J.G. Ballard’s Short Fiction and Science Fiction of the
1960s’, the treatment of Cold War images and concepts ‘in an oblique and
disturbing way’

26

in stories such as ‘The Terminal Beach’ rehearse Ballard’s

aesthetic more fully developed in The Atrocity Exhibition incorporating
American science fiction’s bleak dystopian world-view.

27

Even the charac-

terizations of Ballard’s novel are unstable and challenging, evoking inter-
textual significance. As Perry and Wilkie note ‘The central character is var-
iously named Traven, Talbot, Tallis, Trabert, TravisTalbert, Travers. (Some
of these names had appeared in Ballard’s previously published work.)’,

28

all

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of which produces what Perry and Wilkie (citing Ballard) describe as a ‘com-
posite portrait’.

29

Perry and Wilkie add:

In the relationship between subject and object, between the knower
and what he knows, Ballard’s attention is on the subjective, on the
knower. What he implies is that when advertising and the visual
media in some meaningful sense are the world – then the concomi-
tant multiplicity of images provides a challenge to conventional
notions of an objective reality that has clear-cut and tangible
attributes.

30

Although superficially and descriptively accurate, this assertion finally lacks
sufficient depth not only in its analysis, but also in its conception of certain
key structural aspects of the novel. Surely, despite the appearance of dialec-
tical fusion in The Atrocity Exhibition, it would be more accurately
described as exhibiting a disjointed, almost degraded sub-negative dialec-
tic. Ballard represents not just the negation of negation, but its degra-
dation. He insists on its insufficiency, the affect akin to the conscious
negation of negation opposing tradition that is found in modern art, as
described by Theodor W. Adorno in Aesthetic Theory (1997), and which
he characterizes as follows: ‘What is qualitatively new in recent art may
be that in an allergic reaction it wants to eliminate harmonizations even
in their negated form [ . . . ]’.

31

And Adorno adds that ‘False positivity is

the technological locus of the loss of meaning’.

32

And paradoxically such

a loss permeates Ballard’s textual palimpsest, binding together its disparate
elements, vacuity transposed to the level of technique, which seems sugges-
tive in critically situating and reading any of the versions of the text. Ballard
formally denies the ‘contrived immortality, utopia, and hubris’ that
Adorno finds in the ‘closure of artworks’.

33

At a deep structural level,

Ballard rejects the very artistic purposiveness that Adorno describes in
Kantian terms as being removed from reality and thereby possessing ‘some-
thing chimerical’.

34

Ballard incorporates and amplifies the ‘open forms’

that Adorno implies have long preceded modernism.

35

In various ways, The Atrocity Exhibition also relates intimately to the

broader zeitgeist of the 1960s, particularly its sense of loss, annihilation,
and purposelessness, at least in responding to traditional value systems.
Thereby, the novel incorporates reflexively the cultural tensions of the
period of its composition both formally and thematically. In doing so,
Ballard abuts the spectacular – a public realm inherent in late capitalism
theorized by Guy Debord in The Society of the Spectacle (1994), and con-
sidered below

36

– which is replete with apparent meaning with recurrent

images of death, immolation associated raw sexual desire, with the chaotic
underbelly of modernity, most especially its vulnerability, and its

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vituperative psychopathological tendencies. A revelation of these undercur-
rents becomes explicit and insistent and the antinomies in these elements
are all conjoined by modernity’s constant desire to classify the unclassifi-
able that Zygmunt Bauman describes in Modernity and Ambivalence
(1991). ‘Through its naming/classifying function, language posits itself
between a solidly founded, orderly world fit for human habitation, and a
contingent world of randomness, in which human survival weapons –
memory, the capacity for learning – would be useless, if not downright
suicidal. Language strives to sustain the order and to deny or suppress ran-
domness and contingency’.

37

The latter condition referred to here indicates

much of the Ballardian world-view, particularly as encountered in this
novel, where meaning exists only as a kind of perversity, always potentially
a fissure, or a wound. And as Mark Seltzer observes in ‘Wound Culture:
Trauma in the Pathological Public Sphere’: ‘It may not be entirely perverse
to suggest that the “opening” of bodies and persons to public experience is
intimated in the very notion of the public sphere as o¨ffentlich, “openness”
(the etymological root of the German word for “public”)’.

38

In Ballard’s

novel, all of these elements gyrate as if centrifugally inclined (although
usually novels in terms of deep structure act centripetally), a series of frag-
ments made up of conscious and unconscious desire, the latter surfacing
and thereby mutating into an almost apparently random pattern of
objects and observations. Blanchot in The Writing of Disaster perhaps
best describes the effect of the fragmentary, in a fashion that serves coinci-
dentally to largely explain and situate the overriding structure of Ballard’s
text.

Fragments are written as unfinished separations. Their incompletion,
their insufficiency, the disappointment at work in them, is their
aimless drift, the indication that, neither unifiable nor consistent,
they accommodate a certain array of marks – the marks with
which thought (in decline and declining itself) represents the
furtive groupings that fictively open and close the absence of totality.
Not that thought ever stops, definitively fascinated, at the absence;
always it is carried on, by the watch, the ever-uninterrupted wake.

39

So, the mourning is not just oriented towards the deathliness inherent in
contemporary culture, but towards the impossibility of taking a position,
of accounting for any global meaning beyond an innate spectacular mor-
bidity. Clearly, Ballard’s spectacular and negative version of an ars moriendi
is explored most obsessively through certain publicly significant, and sym-
bolically charged historical moments, particularly the assassination of
Kennedy and the death of astronauts to which Ballard returns throughout.
There is an inherent exaggeration in collectively identifying with such

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tragedies as if everything were disrupted and transformed fundamentally by
the spectacle of suffering and death, a response Ballard both reflects upon
and very possibly undercuts, for as Blanchot says ‘There is disaster only
because, ceaselessly, it falls short of disaster. The end of nature, the end
of culture’.

40

In fictionally making such public events, the site of the appre-

hension of personal viscerality, Ballard evokes something of the nature of
collective or cultural trauma, Jeffrey C. Alexander outlines in ‘Toward a
Theory of Cultural Trauma’:

Events do not, in and of themselves, create collective trauma. Events
are not inherently traumatic. Trauma is a socially mediated attribu-
tion. The attribution may be made in real time, as an event unfolds;
it may also be made before the event occurs, as an adumbration, or
after the event has concluded, as a post-hoc reconstruction.

41

It is through such contradictions that Ballard indicates a sense of the under-
lying lack of balance in the personal responses (exhibited in forms of almost
uncontrolled excess) that characterizes identity formations and collective
interactions of the spectacular(ized) public sphere, a loss of any sense of
proportion, mirrored quite literally in terms of many of the images
found in The Atrocity Exhibition appearing out of scale, grotesque. Such
lack of proportionality is not simply a matter of a physical register, but a
conceptual and ethical one. In terms of its absurdist elements, The Atrocity
Exhibition mirrors late twentieth-century culture where the unlikely and
bizarre can be rendered as part of historical factuality. In this context, Bal-
lard’s orientation towards the possibilities of the public sphere is at its most
intuitive concerning the political potential and ambition of former second-
rate Hollywood actor, Ronald Reagan, image over substance on a grand
scale. Given that Perry and Wilkie reviewed the novel in 1975 after
Reagan had been defeated in two Republican presidential nominations,
perhaps they can be forgiven for offering no sense of the uncanny pre-
science exhibited by Ballard about Reagan’s forthcoming electoral victories
on the national stage for as Baxter indicates: ‘Most famously [ . . . ] Ballard
imagined the rise of Ronald Reagan from Hollywood Cowboy to U.S. Pre-
sident’.

42

Perhaps Reagan and Hollywood serve to emphasize not only the

place of the spectacular in America’s political vocabulary and its economy
of meaning, but that it results in a widespread, yet mostly repressed sense of
personal alienation.

Despite their own alienated states, the characters in The Atrocity

Exhibition desire an apparently intimate connection with reality, even
though ironically they suffer the paranoia of an acute disconnection or
‘disassociation’,

43

symptomatic of a malaise that permeates their lives.

Ballard produces a layered irresolution. And however bold and

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provocative the narrative appears in topographical terms, it nevertheless
combines paradox with an almost wilful multiplicity. Casual enjoyment
is not the emphasis of this classic Ballardian text, which synthesizes the
trivia and mundanity of bourgeois existence with a palpable sense of
trauma, pain, alienation, ennui, misplaced passion, pornography, and
an underlying fear of culture’s erupting meaninglessness which underlies
the world’s symbolic order. Throughout, Dr Nathan seems variously
clinical, at one removed and bemused; Karen Novotny feels increasingly
‘disembodied’,

44

for Tallis she is reduced to an embodied ‘geometric

equation’;

45

Travers despite their couplings sees in her face ‘a geometry

of murder’.

46

Affect eludes all of the characters. And yet, a trajectory,

or at least a symbolic sense of ideological possibility haunts each
part of the text. Throughout Ballard’s novel, trauma, violence, and sexu-
ality are intertwined in a curious and exaggerated fashion, where any
sense of reality is interfused (or confused) with the spectacular and the
commodity. Certainly, the text’s iconography indicates an element
Debord describes:

17. An earlier stage in the economy’s domination of social life
entailed an obvious downgrading of being into having that left its
stamp on all human endeavor. The present stage in which social
life is completely taken over by the accumulated products of the
economy, entails a generalized shift from having to appearing: all
effective ‘having’ must now derive both its immediate prestige and
its ultimate raison d’e`tre from appearances. At the same time all indi-
vidual reality, being directly dependent on social power and comple-
tely shaped by that power, has assumed a social character.

47

Yet, not only is possession insufficient, one overriding sense of Ballard’s
narrative is the instability of variously rationality (in both a personal and
abstract sense), social interrelations, and reflexively speaking artistic narra-
tive ambitions. The very underlying darkness of its world-view overwhelms
its spectacular elements. As Jake Huntley recognizes in ‘Disquieting Fea-
tures: An Introductory Tour of the Atrocity Exhibition’ the novel is situ-
ated in both a particular period of protest and a distinct phase of
Ballard’s writing ‘that is more grimly apocalyptic than exuberantly specu-
lative’.

48

In the Ballardian world, an iteration and adoption of recursive

modes infiltrates agency, events, symbols, images, behaviour, thought,
sexuality, ideology, forms of expression, and even intersubjective
exchanges. The emphatic collapse of the individual and the social is as
symptomatic of the real and eventfulness as it is symbolic, part of an
emphatic disaffection, a diminishment of both affect and agency that the
responding forms of extreme behaviour cannot prevent despite seeming

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to allow a certain degree of expressiveness, of self-avowal. If life renders
multiple copies, they are grotesque, dynamic, and exaggerated, significantly
so, for as Seltzer comments:

This reversal of the real, along the axis of representation, is, we have
seen, one way of describing the switching between inside and outside
that is called the trauma: the subject in a state of shock who appears,
at the same time, as the subject shot through by the social. The
subject of wound culture is not merely subject to recurrence but to
the recurrence of recurrence itself; this traumatic ‘failure of his
psyche to accept the fact of his own consciousness’ is what Ballard
calls ‘our traumas mimetized’ – that is, the mimetic compulsion
mimetized, in the transfers between what is inside us and the
machine.

49

In the 1960s, even sexuality which appears to subtend the personal and
intimate spheres became commodified and part of an erotic spectacle in
Debord’s sense of the term, explicitly public property, situated at the
centre of the Western commodified consciousness. Free love current as a
legitimate term in the 1960s, by the 1970s was finally regarded in terms
of all its ironic contradictions, revealing its patriarchal, capitalized, and
macro-ideological nature. In another sense perhaps in the very contradic-
tions of the 1960s in retrospect (in what one might label a ‘Withnail’ per-
spective), Ballard intuits certain negative opinions that will much later
emerge in judging the earlier decade. Slavoj Z

´ iz´ek in Violence: Six Sideways

Reflections (2008) describes ‘the morning-after of the Sexual Revolution,
the sterility of a universe dominated by the superego injunction to
enjoy’.

50

The exhibition of sculptures at the Institute is exaggerated and

includes both ‘the fractured profiles of Mia Farrow and Elizabeth
Taylor’

51

and ‘a large tableau sculpture, a Segal showing a man and

woman copulating in the bath’.

52

The latter represents Talbert and

Karen Novotny, much to the latter’s surprise. Talbert is irritated she
cannot see this simply as an exhibit, an objective form, implicitly freed
from the personal. Thereby, according to Ballard’s narrative, the visceral
elements of passion are negated. ‘Amatory elements nil. The act of love
became a vector in an applied geometry’.

53

There lurks in this reduction

a fear of the other in its potential affect, for as Franc¸ois Flahault postulates
in Malice (2003):

Once the other is required in order for me to fulfil my own existence,
I depend on him in my very being; so that the fact that he exists
outside me and independently of me constitutes an intolerable
obstacle to my full and total affirmation of myself.

54

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Ballard also extends his vocabularies and economies of perverse meaning
(creating a form of non-knowledge in Bataille’s terms

55

) with a sense of

the pervasive corrosion of independent imagination by the overriding
extremes of commodification. The latter permeates the imagination on
multiple levels, creating an objectification that ceases to be defined
simply by alterity and its problematics, but by a commercialization of
desire and all sexual interaction. Hence, consequently in a perverse
fashion Talbert reduces Karen Novotny to ‘The Sex Kit’,

56

of which speak-

ing to Koester, Dr Nathan notes,

It might even be feasible to market it commercially. 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 phrases, (13) an analysis of odour traces (from various
vents), mostly purines, etc., (14) a chart of body temperature (axil-
lary, 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 onset of orgasm.

57

As Debord says, ‘4. The spectacle is not a collection of images; rather it is
a social relationship between people that is mediated by images’.

58

The

kit both evidences and doubly commodifies such relations, supposedly
of the most intimate kind, now part of a spectacular distortion of inti-
macy. Huntley intuits the influence of surrealism in the references to
automata

59

and bricolage.

60

Freud cites Jentsch in his essay, ‘The

Uncanny’ to stress that such automata are ‘able to arouse in us a
feeling of the uncanny in a particularly forcible and definite form [ . . .
] Jentsch has taken as a very good instance “doubts whether an apparently
animate being is really alive; or conversely, whether a lifeless object might
not be in fact animate”’.

61

Animate and inanimate in some senses become

indistinguishable in the Ballardian rendition of market conditions where
an economy of objectifying desire prevails, a commentary upon the
inflection of the times.

The psychological aspects of sexuality are subsumed into the cultural

turn. In the notes, Ballard added to the earlier version of his text, he
describes the compulsive turning towards sex in the 1960s, where ‘Any
sex act can become a nerve-wracking psycho-drama in which one is
recruited into someone else’s company of players. Dimestore de Sades

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stalk the bedrooms of suburbia, re-enacting the traumas of weaning and
potty training’.

62

Ballard takes this far beyond the bedroom of the

luminal urban zones, and centres male bourgeois cultural identity
precisely on such apparent perversions increasingly publicly avowed and
celebrated. In this move, he charts a similar trajectory described by
Seltzer, who identifies precisely a

coalescence, or collapse, of private and public registers: the conver-
gence that makes possible the emergence of something like a patho-
logical public sphere in the first place. The pathological public sphere
is everywhere crossed by the vague and shifting lines between the
singularity or privacy of the subject, on the one side, and collective
forms of representation, exhibition, and witnessing, on the other.
Along these lines, the trauma has surfaced as a sort of crossing-
point of the ‘psychosocial’.

63

According to Dr Nathan, Talbert is driven by the multiplication of the
image of the film actress whereas ‘For the most part the phenomenology
of the world is a nightmarish excrescence. Our bodies, for example, are
for him monstrous extensions of puffy tissue he can barely tolerate. The
inventory of the young woman is in reality a death kit’.

64

In such segues

Eros and Thanatos are so dialectically interfused that they thereby
become indistinguishable, an intimate and yet outwardly oriented psycho-
social bonding. The individual signifies the possibility of a more collective
suffering and abjection, exhibiting the kind of over-generalizing trauma
that Seltzer calls in parenthesis ‘the “abnormal normality”’.

65

Interestingly,

the emphasis on subjectivity identified by Perry and Wilkie is permeated
throughout by the exaggeration of the externalities such as billboards,

66

by images of radiation burns and other wounding, by celebrity, and by a
sense of the perversity of images of war. Ballard accounts for Vietnam ret-
rospectively and the legacy of its media coverage in his marginal notes,
commenting

As for the apparent anti-Americanism, the hidden logic at work
within the mass media — above all, the inadvertent packaging of vio-
lence and cruelty like attractive commercial products — had already
spread throughout the world. If anything the process was even more
advanced in Britain. [ . . . ] On British TV is the ‘serious’ documen-
tary, the ostensibly highminded ‘news’ programme that gives a
seductive authority to the manipulated images of violence and suffer-
ing offered by conscience-stricken presenters – an even more insi-
dious form of pornography.

67

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As Baxter concludes, Vietnam has acquired spectacular historical status.

68

In Ballard’s various versions of his text, the image may be everything in one
sense, but in its reductive simplicity of incoherent possibilities it becomes
part of blind or discordant acts of semaphore by a soulless, tortured gener-
ation. Surely Ballard seeks also to convey an ideological recognition akin to
that asserted by Debord cited above that the spectacle cannot be reduced to
a series of images, but rather exudes those social relations mediated by
images. Debord adds:

8. The spectacle, though it turns reality on its head, is itself a product
of real activity, Likewise, lived reality suffers the material assaults of
the spectacle’s mechanisms of contemplation, incorporating the
spectacular order and lending that order positive support. Each
side therefore has its share of objective reality. And every concept,
as it takes its place on one side or the other, has no foundation
apart from its transformation into its opposite: reality erupts
within the spectacle, and the spectacle is real. This reciprocal alien-
ation is the essence and underpinning of society as it exists.

69

Hence, Vietnam genuinely happens as both reality (event) and spectacle
(image), and exists as both a cultural symptom and part of that very cul-
ture’s reality, revealing the atrocity inherent in its foundational, innate
consciousness and understanding of itself. As Ballard’s character,
Nathan, posits about a facsimile of a projected assassination of Ralph
Nader,

Nader’s true role is clearly very different from his apparent one, to be
deciphered in terms of the postures we assume, our anxieties mime-
tized in the junction between wall and ceiling. In the post-Warhol era
a single gesture such as uncrossing one’s legs will have more signifi-
cance than all the pages in War and Peace. In twentieth-century terms
the crucifixion, for example, would be re-enacted as a conceptual
auto-disaster.

70

The style and tone of such passages seems to assume an intellectualized
analysis of society marked by a sense of cultural authority, and yet so
utterly provisional do such statements cumulatively become that simul-
taneously Ballard thwarts his own acts of polemical knowingness.

Despite this denial quite pathetically the characters seek to exemplify

or enact larger meanings and truths. Koester has students set out manne-
quins in a strange tableau among the wrecked vehicles ‘wound areas
marked on their broken bodies. Koester had named them Jackie, Ralph,
Abraham. Perhaps he saw the tableau as a rape?’

71

Perry and Wilkie

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intuit the intangibility of knowing and factuality in Ballard. However, his
novel does not express incoherence. It explores the paradoxical nature of
various kinds of literal and ideological spaces such as those Henri Lefebvre
outlines in The Production of Space (1991), where the ‘concept of mental
space’

72

is often conflated with other possibilities of space, and any ‘semiol-

ogy’ of meaning is finally limited to ‘the purely descriptive level’.

73

Lefebvre

insists ‘Space considered in isolation is an empty abstraction; likewise energy
and time’.

74

Ballard’s abuts the surreal, absurd and paradoxical creating a

sense of the incoherence of structures and the apparent illogicality of perver-
sity. Yet, it is the cultural shift from understanding concrete conditions
towards evoking abstractions and absurd contradictions that most obsesses
Ballard in The Atrocity Exhibition. Its world evokes a hegemonic space
that is controlled, that yet might be subverted. Lefebvre describes ‘the antag-
onism between a knowledge which serves power and a form of knowing
which refuses to acknowledge power’

75

which complex reality is the tortuous

Ballardian one in which the characters struggle, and where hegemony pre-
vails in spite of their ideas of potentially radical resistance, surely another Bal-
lardian undercutting of the ethos of this epoch.

Cultural negativity in an age of apparent confidence and exuberance

and plenty lies at the heart of Ballard’s vision in The Atrocity Exhibition,
for he seems to sense the impending catastrophic loss of public confidence
in meaning, structure, and transcendence, while the image and permeation
of commodities became part of the social spectacle used by variously the
industrial, cultural, and political classes. The novel initiates a phase
where an existential trauma permeates life, where at times the veneer of
civilization is torn away to reveal a libidinous uneasiness, a common
motif in Ballard’s ensuing phase of writing. Overall, the perspective
remains both bemused and bemusing. Certain potential points of influence
(or inter-textual reference) are summarized by Huntley (emphasizing its
‘jarring montage of jump-cut prose – narrative rather than novelistic, con-
voluted by repetitive free-association’).

76

To this one might usefully add

Thomas S. Szasz, exponent of anti-psychiatry, whose sceptical view of psy-
chiatry can contextualize the shiftings and blurrings of patient – doctor
roles among the fraudulence of such supposedly therapeutic relationships,
ones that so fascinate Ballard. Szasz warns in The Myth of Psychotherapy
(1979) that ‘Often, however, attempts to treat a patient are really efforts
to alter his conduct from one mode to another’,

77

adding in Ideology

and Insanity: Essays on the Psychiatric Dehumanization of Man (1970)
that: ‘Naming or labeling persons – that is, the taxonomic approach to
people – is a tactic full of hidden pitfalls’.

78

Additionally, the surrealist bricolage effect noted by Huntley and the

surrealism at the heart of Baxter’s account are surely mediated, dimin-
ished in some ways, and if understanding is to misunderstand in the

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surrealist tradition in which Huntley locates Ballard, why then is the
latter’s impulse to further account for and situate the incomprehensibility
of the text with its ‘dream logic: Tantalizingly indecipherable, uncannily
familiar’.

79

Surely Ballard’s additions at least implicitly refer the reader to

a realist tradition with affinities to rational account, intentionality, and
authenticity, or is it as Terry Lovell contends in Pictures of Reality: Aes-
thetics, Politics, Pleasure (1980) that ‘The moment of ideological recog-
nition – that this is indeed the way things are – only occurs when the
reader accepts the position offered by the text’?

80

Perhaps though amend-

ments and augmentations Ballard both problematizes and insinuates such
an acceptance, at least ironically?

Whatever their effect upon the novel’s structure and economy of

meaning, Ballard’s annotations do explicitly emphasize his sense of the
sexual dimension of assassination, particularly the pornographic voyeurism
inherent in the creation of the Kennedy death cult, its mythic images des-
tined to permeate the communal imagination. Ballard ruminates,

Special Agent William R. Greer of the Secret Service was the driver of
the Presidential limousine. One can’t help wondering how the events in
Dealey Plaza affected him. Has his sense of space and time been altered?
What role in his imagination is played by the desperate widow? The
facilities exist for a complete neuro-psychiatric profile, though one
will never be carried out. The results would be interesting since
we were all in a sense in the driver’s seat on that day in Dallas.

81

Of course even such a sexualized account represents a slippage to an
assumption of a shared historicity which however erotically obsessed is
implicitly understood empathically, as a public spectacle that can be dis-
sected and reconfigured in an intelligibly interpretive fashion. In fact,
the affinity Ballard describes in attempting to illuminate the meaning of
(or intentionality subtending) his earlier version of the text is akin to the
crossover Seltzer describes as a

place in a public culture in which addictive violence has become not
merely a collective spectacle but one of the crucial sites where private
desire and public space cross. The convening of the public around
scenes of violence – the rushing to the scene of the accident, the
milling around the point of impact – has come to make up a
wound culture: the public fascination with torn and opened bodies
and torn and opened persons, a collective gathering around shock,
trauma, and the wound.

I have been tracing, in a series of studies, some of the ways in

which the mass attraction to atrocity exhibitions, in the pathological

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public sphere, takes the form of a fascination with the shock of
contact between bodies and technologies: a shock of contact that
encodes, in turn, a breakdown in the distinction between the individ-
ual and the mass, and between private and public registers. One dis-
covers again and again the excitations in the opening of private and
bodily and psychic interiors: the exhibition and witnessing, the end-
lessly reproducible display, of wounded bodies and wounded minds
in public. In wound culture, the very notion of sociality is bound to
the excitations of the torn and opened body, the torn and exposed
individual, as public spectacle.

82

It is in this context that one may understand the obsession exhibited in the
text with those such as Marilyn Monroe. Ballard writes in his marginalia
‘Marilyn Monroe’s death was another psychic cataclysm. Here was the
first and greatest of the new-style film goddesses, whose images, unlike
those of their predecessors, were fashioned from something close to the
truth, not from utter fiction’.

83

Monroe offered a tragedy fashioned

from weaknesses, an uber- or meta-reality. And yet that very frailty is
refashioned by a culture of iconography and consumption. Monroe in
the text is imagined as if transformed into massive facsimile, where ‘The
apartment was a box clock, a cubicular extrapolation of the facial planes
of the yantra, the cheekbones of Marilyn Monroe. The annealed walls
froze all the rigid grief of the actress. He [Tallis] had come to this apart-
ment in order to solve her suicide’.

84

Tallis’ vision is part of the monumen-

tality of space and understanding that Lefebrve indicates, offering to each
individual the illusion of ‘membership [ . . . ]. The monument thus effected
a “consensus”, and this in the strongest sense of the term, rendering it prac-
tical and concrete’.

85

This is a curious reassertion of the fundamentals of

reality. Tallis seeks his belonging in the perverse detritus and violence of
mid-twentieth-century culture. As Ballard demonstrates, also in such mon-
umentality is the possibility of cultural subversion, more than just a rever-
sal, in fact a fragmentation of cultural forms and meaning. Its dialectic
derives too from the underlying relation indicated by Debord: ‘9. In a
world that really has been turned on its head, truth is a moment of false-
hood’.

86

As Lefebvre explains a repression is involved, which monumental-

ity metamorphizes into ‘exaltation’.

87

Hence, Ballard undertakes a fusion

of these elements in the iconography of his novel.

Travers and his alter egos in The Atrocity Exhibition may appear super-

ficially to exalt the literal objects of their quest, like Monroe and the widow
of martyred JFK, but the actual hoped for terminus is to seek affect in a
world where that quality seems radically diminished, with a culture
excited only by the detritus of psychopathological desire or voyeurism,
found everywhere. However, the extremities of excitation lack permanence,

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for even the intensity of a car crash fades along with its memorialization.
Sex suffers a similar fate allied as it is with finitude. Karen Novotny recog-
nizes that ‘Travers had embarked on the inventory of imaginary psycho-
pathologies, using her body and reflexes as a module for a series of
unsavoury routines, as if hoping in this way to recapitulate his wife’s
death’.

88

And there is a biographical correlation in all of this, and as Bal-

lard’s annotations admit, the spectacle of violence and disaster found in tel-
evisual culture creates a cultural norm (one where as Perry and Wilkie
conclude ‘What is “real” continues to be problematic’

89

),

Also, clearly, my younger self was hoping to understand his wife’s
meaningless death. Nature’s betrayal of this young woman seemed
to be mimicked in the larger ambiguities to which the modern
world was so eager to give birth, and its finish line was that death
of affect, the lack of feeling.

90

Wounding both literal and psychological is essential to unlocking Ballard’s
fictional world-view. Interestingly, Seltzer offers evidence when he says
specifically of Ballard:

The switch point, or crash point, between inside and outside is,
above all, the wound. This is nowhere more incisively set out than
in the work of J. G. Ballard, one of the compulsive cartographers
of wound culture. Thus, in Ballard’s novel Crash, the shock of
contact between bodies and machines (eroticized accidents: real,
planned, simulated) is also the traumatic reversal between private
fantasy and the public sphere: ‘In the past we have always assumed
that the external world around us has represented reality, and that
the inner worlds of our minds, its dreams, hopes, ambitions, rep-
resented the realm of fantasy and imagination. These roles, it
seems to me, have been reversed’.

91

Such exaltation persists in these perversities of the spectacular, and even in
what Seltzer describes as the ‘switch point’. The wound is deeply implicated
in notions of ecstasy in Christian (therefore Western) culture and iconogra-
phy that pervaded a sense of religio-cultural identity in Christendom. In this
sense, the subject was always inseparable from the categories of shock and
trauma, and not just in modernity as Seltzer suggests. The public and
private in terms of Christ are conjoined in and defined by his literal, psycho-
logical, and psychic wounding. As reported in ‘Matthew’ 27:46 Christ just
before he dies cries loudly ‘Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani? that is to say, My
God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?’

92

In this despairing utterance,

one imagines a realm of abandonment, and the momentary comprehension

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that without faith in something, life and death are rendered utterly bleak. For
Ballard, such an underlying despairing unconscious realization underpins
Western culture, expressing its true self-defeating, yet anticipatory terminal
point, death, as exemplified in ‘Chapter 13: The Generations of
America’

93

in which he lists killings real and imagined, mimicking the scrip-

tures in that ‘shot’ replaces ‘begat’. Ballard’s palimpsest is finally only capable
of evoking a fundamental lack of faith and of meaning faced by the secular
reality of a culture of death. The recurrence of the multiple car crashes dis-
places the spurious uniqueness of the sacral crucifixion, rendering such suffer-
ing simultaneously banal and spectacular, leaving Ballard’s explorations of
abandonment suggestive, protean, and yet finally meaningless.

Brunel University

Notes

1 Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of Disaster, trans. Ann Smock (Lincoln: Uni-

versity of Nebraska Press, 1986), p. 42.

2 Jeanette Baxter, ‘J.G. Ballard and the Contemporary’ in Jeanette Baxter (ed.),

J.G. Ballard’s Surrealist Imagination: Spectacular Authorship (Farnham, Surrey
and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2009), p. 61.

3 Ibid., p. 69.
4 Ibid., p. 66.
5 Ibid., pp. 1– 10, p. 88.
6 J.G. Ballard, The Atrocity Exhibition, rev. ed. (San Francisco, CA: Re/search

Publications, 1990).

7 J.G. Ballard, The Atrocity Exhibition, rev. ed. (London: Flamingo, 1993).
8 Baxter, ‘J.G. Ballard and the Contemporary’, p. 60.
9 One can see many parallels in the works of other contemporaneous experimen-

talists including Alan Burns, Wilson Harris, Gabriel Josipovici, B.S. Johnson,
Christine Brooke-Rose, and Ann Quin among others. However, most did not
return to annotate and further underpin their texts.

10 William Burroughs, ‘Preface’ in J.G. Ballard (ed.), The Atrocity Exhibition, rev.

ed. (London: Flamingo, 1993), pp. vii – viii, p. vii.

11 J.G. Ballard, The Atrocity Exhibition (1990), pp. 54– 55.
12 Ibid., p. 127.
13 Ibid., p. 119.
14 Baxter, ‘J.G. Ballard and the Contemporary’, p. 89.
15 Ibid., pp. 91– 92
16 Burroughs, ‘Preface’, p. vii.
17 Ballard, The Atrocity Exhibition (1993), p. 34.
18 Ibid., p. 41.
19 Ibid., p. 42.

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20 Andrzej Gasiorek, J.G. Ballard (Manchester and New York: Manchester Uni-

versity Press, 2005), p. 22.

21 Ballard, The Atrocity Exhibition (1993), p. 47.
22 Ibid., p. 47.
23 Blanchot, The Writing of Disaster, p. 1.
24 Ballard, The Atrocity Exhibition (1993), p. 1.
25 Nick Perry and Roy Wilkie, ‘The atrocity exhibition’ The Riverside Quarterly,

6.3 (August 1975), pp. 180 – 188, p. 180.

26 Brian Baker, ‘The Geometry of the Space Age: J. G. Ballard’s Short Fiction

and Science Fiction of the 1960s’, in Jeanette Baxter (ed.), J.G. Ballard’s Sur-
realist Imagination: Spectacular Authorship (Farnham, Surrey and Burlington,
VT: Ashgate, 2009), pp. 11 –22. p. 12.

27 Ibid., p. 13.
28 Perry and Wilkie, ‘The atrocity exhibition’, p. 180.
29 Ibid., p. 181.
30 Ibid., p. 182.
31 Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (Minnea-

polis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), p. 159.

32 Ibid., p. 159.
33 Ibid., p. 139.
34 Ibid., p. 139.
35 Ibid., p. 141.
36 Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle (New York: Zone Books, 1994).
37 Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and Ambivalence (Ithaca, NY: Cornell Univer-

sity Press, 1991), p. 1.

38 Mark Seltzer, ‘Wound Culture: Trauma in the Pathological Public Sphere’

October, 80 (Spring, 1997), pp. 3 – 26, p. 4.

39 Blanchot, The Writing of Disaster, p. 58.
40 Ibid., p. 41.
41 Jeffrey C. Alexander, ‘Toward a Theory of Cultural Trauma’, in Jeffrey

C. Alexander et al. (eds.), Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity (Berkeley,
CA: University of California Press, 2004), pp. 1 –30, p. 8.

42 Baxter, ‘J.G. Ballard and the Contemporary’, pp. 1– 2. Reagan was elected as

President twice, first in 1980 and again in 1984.

43 Ballard, The Atrocity Exhibition (1993), p. 55.
44 Ibid., p. 41.
45 Ibid., p. 40.
46 Ibid., p. 79.
47 Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, p. 16.
48 Jake Huntley, ‘Disquieting Features: An Introductory Tour of the Atrocity

Exhibition’, In Jeanette Baxter (ed.), J.G. Ballard’s Surrealist Imagination: Spec-
tacular Authorship (Farnham, Surrey and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2009),
pp. 23– 33, p. 23.

49 Seltzer, ‘Wound Culture: Trauma in the Pathological Public Sphere’, p. 16.
50 Slavoj Z

´ iz´ek, Violence : Six Sideways Reflections (London: Profile Books, 2008),

p. 30.

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51 Ballard, The Atrocity Exhibition (1993), p. 56.
52 Ibid., p. 57.
53 Ibid., p. 57.
54 Franc¸ois Flahault, Malice, trans. Liz Heron (London: Verso, 2003), p. 109.
55 As exemplified in Georges Bataille, The Unfinished System of Nonknowledge, ed.

Stuart Kendall and trans. Michelle Kendall and Stuart Kendall (Minneapolis,
MN and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2001).

56 Ballard, The Atrocity Exhibition (1993), p. 59.
57 Ibid., pp. 59– 60.
58 Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, p. 121.
59 Huntley, ‘Disquieting Features: An Introductory Tour of the Atrocity Exhibi-

tion’, p. 27.

60 Ibid., p. 29.
61 Freud, Sigmund. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of

Sigmund Freud. Vol. 17. (1917 – 1919). Ed. James Strachey and Anna
Freud. London: Vintage, 2001, p. 226.

62 Ballard, The Atrocity Exhibition (1993), p. 60.
63 Seltzer, ‘Wound Culture: Trauma in the Pathological Public Sphere’, p. 4.
64 Ballard, The Atrocity Exhibition (1993), p. 61.
65 Seltzer, ‘Wound Culture: Trauma in the Pathological Public Sphere’, p. 6.
66 Perry and Wilkie, ‘The atrocity exhibition’, pp. 11, 51.
67 Ballard, The Atrocity Exhibition (1993), pp. 103 –104.
68 Baxter, ‘J.G. Ballard and the Contemporary’, p. 87.
69 Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, p. 14.
70 Ballard, The Atrocity Exhibition (1993), p. 25.
71 Ibid., p. 25.
72 Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith

(Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), p. 3.

73 Ibid., p. 7.
74 Ibid., p. 12.
75 Ibid., p. 10.
76 Huntley, ‘Disquieting Features: An Introductory Tour of the Atrocity Exhibi-

tion’, p. 24.

77 Thomas S. Szasz, The Myth of Psychotherapy: Mental Healing as Religion, Rheto-

ric and Repression (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), p. 9.

78 Thomas S. Szasz, Ideology and Insanity: Essays on the Psychiatric Dehumaniza-

tion of Man, (Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, 1970), p. 51.

79 Huntley, ‘Disquieting Features: An Introductory Tour of the Atrocity Exhibi-

tion’, p. 33.

80 Terry Lovell, Pictures of Reality: Aesthetics, Politics, Pleasure, p. 85.
81 Ballard, The Atrocity Exhibition (1993), pp. 25 –26.
82 Seltzer, ‘Wound Culture: Trauma in the Pathological Public Sphere’, pp. 3 – 4.
83 Ballard, The Atrocity Exhibition (1993), pp. 39 –40.
84 Ibid., p. 43.
85 Lefebvre, The Production of Space, p. 220.
86 Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, p. 14.

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87 Lefebvre, The Production of Space, p. 220.
88 Ballard, The Atrocity Exhibition (1993), p. 79.
89 Perry and Wilkie, ‘The atrocity exhibition’, p. 188.
90 Ballard, The Atrocity Exhibition (1993), p. 80.
91 Seltzer, ‘Wound Culture: Trauma in the Pathological Public Sphere’,

pp. 15– 16.

92 Anon., The Bible: Authorized Version (London: The British & Foreign Bible

Society, 1954), pp. 37 –38.

93 Ballard, The Atrocity Exhibition (1993), pp. 113 – 117.

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