Aesthetic Politics—Revolutionary and Counter-Revolutionary || Consumerism's Endgame: Violence and...

Consumerism's Endgame: Violence and Community in J.G. Ballard's Late FictionAuthor(s): Graham MatthewsSource: Journal of Modern Literature, Vol. 36, No. 2, Aesthetic Politics—Revolutionary andCounter-Revolutionary (Winter 2013), pp. 122-139Published by: Indiana University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2979/jmodelite.36.2.122 .

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Consumerism’s Endgame: Violence and Community in J.G. Ballard’s Late Fiction

Graham MatthewsNewcastle University, UK

J.G. Ballard’s final four novels constitute a discrete phase of the novelist’s career, reveal-ing a writer preoccupied with the relation of violence to community. In each novel, Bal-lard’s narrator is initially repulsed yet later seduced by the allure of violence. Cocaine Nights (1996) and Super-Cannes (2000) suggest that, rather than silencing and isolat-ing individuals, the spectacle of violence unites and revives communities. Millennium People (2003) and Kingdom Come (2006) develop the representation of violence and community into a critique of consumer society. Ballard’s late fiction indicates that the infantilizing illusions promoted by consumerism will result in boredom punctured only by outbreaks of violence. Consequently, analysis of these novels in relation to violence reveals the ways in which Ballard envisions the end state of consumerism to consist of a perpetual cycle of sedation and psychopathy.

Keywords: J.G. Ballard / violence / community / consumerism

Violence is the True Poetry of Governments. — Richard Pearson, from

J.G. Ballard’s Kingdom Come (2006)

IntroductIon

J.G. Ballard is renowned for a lifetime’s work investigating the extremes of subjectivity in a series of novels influenced by psychoanalysis, experi-mental literature, and surrealist art. His fiction refuses easy categorization

and incorporates elements from a variety of genres including science fiction and the detective novel. In The Angle Between Two Walls, Roger Luckhurst identi-fies the series of generic slippages to be found within Ballard’s fiction: “Ballard renders visible the space between frames, exposes the hidden assumptions behind the secure categorizations of literature and literary judgment. These, operating dualistically (science fiction/mainstream, popular/serious, low/high, modernist/postmodernist, literature/theory, autobiography/fiction, and so on), all tend to find



Violence and Community in Ballard’s Late Fiction 123

their mechanisms troubled when confronting a Ballard text” (xiii). Accordingly in this essay, rather than attempting to fit Ballard within pre-established categories, I discuss Ballard’s oeuvre in his own peculiar terms.

The novels written in the 1960s are often characterized as science fiction, but can be more precisely read as “catastrophe novels” and include texts such as The Drowned World (1962) and The Crystal World (1966). These speculative novels, dubbed “extinction fantasies” by Fredric Jameson, depict the dissolution of civi-lization from a variety of imaginative causes. This period of Ballard’s writing was followed by what Martin Amis, in a review of David Cronenberg’s film adaptation of Crash (1973), dubbed Ballard’s “concrete and steel” period, which includes the novels The Atrocity Exhibition (1970), Concrete Island (1974), and High-Rise (1975). Those novels depict the body and its increasingly synergistic relationship with technology, which has resulted in increasingly affectless human relations. One group of texts that problematize the division of Ballard’s oeuvre into discrete time periods has been dubbed by Umberto Rossi the “life trilogy.” He notes that Empire of the Sun (1984), The Kindness of Women (1991) and Miracles of Life (2008) inter-weave elements of factual and fictional histories between them in order to contest the distinction between autobiography and fiction. As we can see, conceptual-izing specific groupings in Ballard’s oeuvre has led to phrases such as “extinction fantasy,” “life trilogy” and “concrete and steel” that demarcate a specific point of critical enquiry and establish links between an otherwise diverse series of texts.

I would argue that, in a similar way, the late fiction evinces an ongoing con-cern with violence and community. I propose to demonstrate the ways in which the late fiction draws on individual elements of Ballard’s oeuvre such as violence, technology, and surrealism, and reconfigures them in a naturalistic manner so as to offer unique insight into the formation of communities at the turn of the twenty-first century.

Ballard’s late fiction encompasses the novels Cocaine Nights (1996), Super-Cannes (2000), Millennium People (2003), and Kingdom Come (2006). It constitutes variants on the detective novel in which the protagonist investigates quotidian communities where the veneer of normalcy is supported by an undercurrent of criminality, violence, and madness. In each novel, the crime that provides the nar-rative impetus is swiftly solved, at times prior to the protagonist’s arrival. Instead, the protagonist is steadily drawn into the community he seeks to expose, with the result that he eventually enters into a shared complicity with the perpetrators of the original crime. Consequently, Ballard’s meticulously affectless prose is recon-figured in order to shift focus from individual (and by implication) containable acts of deviancy to a broader assessment of violence and the community. As Andrzej Gasiorek explains, “the detective’s work is that of ethnography: a social explorer in the tradition of the reformers who investigated urban slums in the nineteenth century, his job is to articulate a repressed knowledge” (171). Through his con-tinuing fascination with the obscene underside of a series of seemingly rational and productive communities, Ballard’s fiction offers insight into the relationship between violence, power, and group psychology.



124 Journal of Modern Literature Volume 36, Number 2

Ballard’s fiction not only resists traditional generic conventions but also elides precise moral certitudes. Instead, his treatment of violence acknowledges not only its horrific consequences but also its seductive appeal. Although violence is con-ventionally represented as a negative force that isolates and alienates individuals, Ballard’s late fiction suggests that the spectacle of violence in fact plays a vital role in producing communities and maintaining social cohesion. This theme is foreshadowed in The Atrocity Exhibition, in which Ballard, in an imitation of a scientific paper, states that by intercutting endless-loop newsreels of the Vietnam War with atrocity films it was found that, “an optimum environment was created in which work-tasks, social relationships and overall motivation reached sustained levels of excellence” (148). The appropriation of scientific discourse and various levels of irony employed within the text conceal whether this counter-intuitive notion should be taken with serious intent. However, in the late fiction, Ballard steps away from the overt surrealism of The Atrocity Exhibition and instead depicts communities in which this thesis is played out to its logical conclusion in a manner reminiscent of the naturalist literary tradition.

Literary naturalism replicates the conditions of the social experiment in literary form. By depicting a believable microcosm of everyday reality, natural-ism explores the influence of the environment on the individual. Ballard adopted this approach in High-Rise, which depicts a community living in a tower block. Whereas in the late fiction the semblance of a rational, ordered society is main-tained, in High-Rise a spontaneous outbreak of violence spreads like an infection and leads to the separation of families, the destruction of civilized norms, and aggressive, self-serving behavior. As such, the novel depicts violence in a conven-tional light as a force that threatens and fragments communities. By contrast, Bal-lard’s late fiction combines the theories contained in The Atrocity Exhibition with the form of the social experiment conducted in High-Rise in order to offer a more challenging representation of violence as a force that binds communities together.

Previous approaches to Ballard’s fiction have, to date, failed to acknowl-edge the seemingly contradictory approaches to violence taken by Ballard. Roger Luckhurst’s otherwise comprehensive study of Ballard’s fiction, published in 1997, extends only so far as Rushing to Paradise (1994); accordingly he is unable to comment on the direction the late fiction will come to take. At the same time, Andrzej Gasiorek’s book-length study focuses mainly on Ballard’s depiction of psychopathy and argues that the violence depicted in the novels is symptomatic of the waning of the affect endemic to contemporary culture.

More recently, Philip Tew considers Ballard’s final three novels in relation to the theme of sacrifice. Drawing on the work of René Girard, he argues that Ballard’s novels from Super-Cannes to Kingdom Come (due to its pre-millennial publication date, Cocaine Nights is somewhat arbitrarily excluded from the dis-cussion) animate “sacrificial energies” so as to acknowledge “that dark, ‘nega-tive,’ depressing ideas can exert an irresistible seductive power over us” (119). However, as Tew acknowledges, the exact nature of these ideas frequently remains opaque.




In response, I draw on an alternative range of critical approaches to violence in order to take account of the variegated character of violence and understand the wider implications of Ballard’s idiosyncratic approach. Through a precise engage-ment with the themes of violence and community, I position the representation of violence in Ballard’s novels as the means by which he comments on the regulatory frames that determine communal responses to suffering.

In place of traditional methods of characterization, Ballard frequently under-takes the role of the literary critic (literally in the case of the marginalia provided in the reissue of The Atrocity Exhibition) and provides a series of competing philo-sophical, psychological, political, and sociological explanations of events through a series of mouthpieces, primarily defined by their job description rather than any distinguishing character traits. This polyphonic discourse avoids reductively positioning violence as a problem to be solved or a formula that can be predicted. At the same time, these explanations indicate that any single theoretical approach to the text is likely to be anticipated by Ballard. In this respect the dilemma of the critic when faced by a novel that anticipates its own criticism is mirrored by the trope of the already solved crime that anticipates and challenges the reader’s desire to search for hidden meaning beneath the surface. In response, this essay acknowledges Ballard’s anticipation of criticism by placing his fiction into dia-logue with a wide variety of critical perspectives by authors including Walter Benjamin, Georges Bataille, and Antonio Negri. In line with Ballard’s perplexing of secure categories, reciprocity and exchange is developed between his fiction and non-fictional theories of violence.

utopIan VIolence

The first two novels under consideration depict violence as the obscene underside of otherwise rational and deterministic communities. Both Cocaine Nights and Super-Cannes depict near-future utopias situated in the Mediterranean that are shadowed by crime, violence, and perversion. Light is used as a recurrent image throughout in order to demarcate the contested boundaries between rationality and criminality. Indeed, the repeated references to the bright Mediterranean sunlight are frequently contrasted with the long shadows it casts. In an echo of Goya’s The Sleep of Reason Brings Monsters (1797–99), light in Ballard’s late work symbolizes the Enlightenment values of truth and reason that paradoxically generate the conditions necessary for criminality and violence.

Indeed, the Estrella de Mar of Cocaine Nights is depicted as a place of unlim-ited leisure in a world without work, a place with “a billion balconies facing the sun” (180). At the start of the novel, it appears as if sunlight and its associated attributes draws together the community. However, as the novel progresses, the town is revealed to be the site of a host of criminal activity ranging from drug-abuse and the production of snuff films to a series of brutal murders.

In an inversion of the depiction of leisure without labor in Cocaine Nights, the Eden-Olympia business park in Super-Cannes is a rationalist hub of productivity




and privilege, marred only by occasional outbursts of psychopathic violence. Again, sunlight is a recurrent trope that not only symbolizes rationality and order, but also constitutes an oppressive force to the extent that during the course of the narrator’s investigation, overexposure causes him to faint.

Both of these novels invert the generic conventions of the detective novel. In each text, the narrator arrives with the intent to uncover the truth behind a series of brutal murders. However, in each instance the perpetrator has already been identified and punished. In Cocaine Nights, Frank, the brother of the nar-rator, Charles Prentice, has already confessed and been imprisoned, while in Super-Cannes, David Greenwood was shot and killed by security officers at the scene of the crime. The prevailing sense of mystery in each case is preserved by the lack of a discernible motive, so that the question becomes not how but why the murders took place.

In Cocaine Nights, Frank Prentice was the proprietor of a popular night club and perpetrator of an arson attack at the Hollinger household, in which five people were killed. Charles arrives in the expatriate community of Estrella de Mar determined to clear his brother’s name, despite the fact that Frank has already confessed. As the manager of a popular night club, Frank provided a venue for shared social and cultural values. Charles’s decision to take over the operation of Club Nautico foreshadows his eventual complicity with the violent events that ensue. Alongside the thriving book club and art scene, the nightclub constitutes a shared space in which the community can congregate and find social cohesion.

In this respect, Ballard’s novel demonstrates the role art and culture plays in forming and sustaining group identification. As an expatriate community, Estrella de Mar calls to mind Benedict Anderson’s influential description of the nation as an imagined political community; imagined because “the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion” (8). Anderson highlights the importance of shared cultural norms — predomi-nantly disseminated through print media such as novels and newspapers — in the formation of national identities. However, bearing in mind Ballard’s recurrent motif of sunlight and the shadows it casts, Anderson’s exclusive focus on broadly positive, or productive, cultural values fails to acknowledge the role violence and criminality play in the formation of communities.

The seeming paradox between community and criminality is exemplified by the tennis coach, Bobby Crawford. As Charles himself comes to engage in initially minor yet progressively violent acts of criminality in order to uncover the secrets of Estrella de Mar, he increasingly falls under Crawford’s influence. Throughout the novel, the success of the thriving art scene, sports centre, and nightclub are attributed to Crawford. But it becomes swiftly apparent that he is also the nexus for all violent and criminal activity in Estrella de Mar: “He’s the saint as psychopath, or the psychopath as saint. Whichever way, he’s doing good” (CN 280). Despite appearances, Charles is led to believe that Crawford’s campaign of harassment, sabotage, and drug trafficking is not self-serving but designed




to awaken the population from its otherwise complacent slumber and foster a community spirit. Crawford claims that “crime and creativity go together, and always have done. The greater the sense of crime, the greater the civic awareness and richer the civilization. Nothing else binds a community together” (CN 281). Indeed, Crawford’s proposition suggests that violence, or the threat of violence, generates a sense of vulnerability in the population that causes it to seek solidarity with others and express itself creatively through arts, sports, and culture. Conse-quently, Ballard’s fiction appears to demonstrate not only Anderson’s argument that communities are formed through shared assumptions and cultural ideals, but also indicates that they are maintained by imagined threats. In other words, the sense of self or belonging in a community is formed only in relation to an Other, either real or imagined.

Cocaine Nights thus provides insight into the seductive allure of violence and, in a manner reminiscent of Walter Benjamin’s stance in his seminal essay “Critique of Violence” published in 1921, indicates that it plays a significant role in generating and sustaining communities. Benjamin characterizes violence in three distinct ways. Firstly, violence is “law-making” insofar as law and the con-ditions for peace emerge out of sustained acts of violence between two or more opposing factions. Law-making violence brings together otherwise irreconcilable parties through a distortion that renders the weak equal to the strong. Law can be understood to be a system of representation that conceals the violence inherent to the formation of communities. The second form of violence Benjamin identifies is “law-preserving” violence. This refers to the socially embedded administrative or policing violence required to sustain peace. The final concept Benjamin intro-duces is that of “divine violence,” which lies outside the law, evades conventional representative strategies, and facilitates the conditions for revolution.

In my consideration of Cocaine Nights, the second form, “law-preserving” violence, is of primary concern. Law-preserving violence simultaneously sustains and erodes the law by acting outside of it. Although regulatory mechanisms such as the police, the military, and the justice system work to preserve the rule of law and sustain the status quo by virtue of acting outside of its boundaries, they also constitute a potential threat. Accordingly, Benjamin argues that law and violence are mutually sustaining.

Benjamin’s thesis initially appears to be challenged by the distinct lack of police presence in Estrella de Mar. Indeed, the Spanish authorities are keen to avoid intervening in any aspect of the expatriate community. Instead of police intervention, the violence enacted by Crawford and his accomplices performs the rule of law stripped bare of its symbolic and legitimizing powers. Just as the artificial formation of the expatriate community is indicative of the fragility and contingency of national boundaries, the appearance of unpredictable outbreaks of violence exposes the fictions that support the discourse of law.

Ballard’s late fiction suggests that at the turn of the twenty-first century, the power of religion and politics to fascinate and bind communities has been considerably vitiated. Instead, violence is presented as a spectacle that generates




sensations of threat and uncertainty and, in doing so, promotes solidarity and order. As Crawford states: “Crime and vandalism are everywhere. You have to rise above these mindless thugs and the oafish world they inhabit. Insecurity forces you to cherish whatever moral strengths you have” (CN 245). The unpredictable threat of violence is sufficient to enervate the community and raise aspirational standards in sports, culture, and the arts. Consequently, although Benjamin’s work explores the violence embedded within otherwise legitimate forms of social control, Ballard’s fiction removes these regulatory mechanisms entirely in order to demonstrate that violence stands at the heart of communities.

Indeed, Ballard’s late fiction also speaks to the concerns of transgression and taboo discussed by Georges Bataille in Eroticism (1987). Bataille argues that although transgression appears in contradistinction to the law, it in fact sustains cultural norms and beliefs: “the transgression does not deny the taboo but transcends it and completes it” (63). In other words, the boundaries that comprise the law are generated and sustained only through their transgression. Only after a line is crossed does a community inscribe that line into law. By depicting a series of violent transgressions, Ballard demonstrates the ways in which boundaries are inscribed in order to produce social cohesion.

Against the received wisdom that violence is a destructive force that dis-perses, silences, and isolates individuals, Cocaine Nights demonstrates the ways in which violence paradoxically unites communities. Indeed, Crawford’s criminal acts achieve increasing levels of visibility as they progress from petty thefts to vandalism to what might or might not be a simulated rape in a car park, and culminate in the destruction of a yacht and the fire at the Hollinger house. Counter-intuitively, rather than producing apathy and social alienation, those acts of violence demonstrate its seductive appeal. Indeed, they are displayed by Craw-ford as visible signifiers of a shared enjoyment. Ballard’s surprising connection between violence, enjoyment, and community is more readily understood when we take into account Jacques Lacan’s notion of the “unary trait” that operates as the minimal point of signification within group dynamics.

In Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego, Freud begins to explicitly link psychoanalytic theory to the social and political spheres. He draws on numer-ous instances of identifications that stand as the earliest and most basic form of emotional bond between individuals, which Lacan later dubs the “unary trait.” Freud’s key example is of a group of girls in a boarding school between whom identification is established in the absence of any other similarities:

Supposing, for instance, that one of the girls in a boarding school has had a letter from someone with whom she is secretly in love which arouses her jealousy, and that she reacts to it with a fit of hysterics; then some of her friends who know about it will catch the fit, as we say, by mental infection. The mechanism is that of identification based upon the possibility or desire of putting oneself in the same situation. The other girls would like to have a secret love affair too, and under the influence of a sense of guilt they also accept the sense of suffering with it. (Freud 107)




Statements such as these should be understood as descriptive rather than prescriptive as a counter to Freud’s otherwise misogynistic assumption that young women are subject to sudden outbursts of hysteria. In any case, this example dem-onstrates that the “unary trait” draws together communities through an unspoken yet shared enjoyment. The nature of the love affair is arbitrary, but assumes a base level of signification for all of the subjects concerned. In the same way, Crawford’s spectacular acts of violence draw together the community though a shared sense of complicity and guilt. Although the spectator is not directly responsible for the violent act, his or her unspoken enjoyment of the scene marks a base level of identification that bonds with the wider community.

The spectacle of violence that unifies the community of Estrella de Mar is the fire at the Hollinger house that constitutes the focal point of Charles’s investiga-tion. As the doctor, Paula Hamilton, observes: “You never stopped looking at the house [. . .] Poor man, you were absolutely obsessed with the place” (CN 322). The arson attack left the house a gutted shell or an absent presence that constitutes a minimal point of signification or the “unary trait” for the community. In this respect, the house functions in a manner akin to a tribal totem that binds the community together in its complicity with the event, and acts as a reminder of the threat of violence. Although the residents claim ignorance of the cause of the fire, it becomes clear that they have taken enjoyment from its spectacle.

This site (or sight) is contrasted with the Residencia Costasol located down the coast. Whereas Estrella de Mar is an outward-looking community with artistic and literary events, sporting activities, and a festive communal spirit, Resi-dencia Costasol is an inward-looking space composed of white-washed buildings covered with security cameras and satellite dishes. Crawford notes that this is a rationalist environment filled with residents who are sheltered from the specter of violence: “They’re listening to the sun, Charles. Waiting for a new kind of light” (CN 213). Indeed, the citizens of Residencia Costasol renounce conventional sunlight in favor of the artificial light of the screen: “They had retreated to their shaded lounges, their bunkers with a view, needing only that part of the external world that was distilled from the sky by their satellite dishes” (CN 216).

The urban theorist Paul Virilio discusses the impact of audio-visual technol-ogy on subjectivity: “the locomotive illusion will thus be considered to be at the truth of vision, altogether as though the optical illusion will appear to be that of life” (120). In Virilio’s apocalyptic scenario, the fictions presented on the screen will come to replace the experience of life. Indeed, in line with Ballard’s recurrent emphasis on light, the residents of Residencia Costasol have replaced the light of the sun with the light of the screen, resulting in an atomized and sterile society, which is notably devoid of any form of violence.

The pathologically atomized community of Residencia Costasol is mirrored by Eden-Olympia, the setting of Cocaine Night’s companion novel, Super-Cannes. However, although they are both sterile and self-contained communities, Resi-dencia Costasol illustrates the outcome of a concerted withdrawal from the world, whilst Eden-Olympia is a thriving business park. Whereas Residencia Costasol




is dislocated from conventional perceptions of time due to the dominance of audio-visual technology (“there are no clocks anywhere and almost no one wears a wristwatch” [S-C 216]), Eden-Olympia is a pressurized environment in which productivity is measured against a continually ticking clock. Unlike Cocaine Nights’ Estrella de Mar, which is dedicated to a life of leisure, Eden-Olympia is an environment dedicated to productivity and efficiency. However, like Estrella de Mar, a criminal undercurrent of drug abuse, racism, deviant sexual encounters, and the threat of violence lies beneath the rationalist surface.

Paul Sinclair arrives in Eden-Olympia with his wife Jane and discovers that her former lover, David Greenwood, has committed a series of murders on the otherwise peaceful campus. Echoing the mystery of the Hollinger fire in Cocaine Nights, there is no apparent motive behind this outbreak of violence. As Paul notes, “there were photographs of Greenwood posing with his orphans at the La Bocca refuge, but no conceivable bridge between the smiley, dark-eyed girls and the harsh news pictures of bullet-starred doors and bloody elevators” (S-C 108). Although there is no direct causal relation between the two images, Sinclair’s juxtaposition is suggestive of the ways in which it functions as the Other to rationalistic communities.

Super-Cannes continues Ballard’s trope of sunlight and the shadows it casts. Here it demarcates social divisions, so that in contrast with the highly-paid com-pany executives who are involved in acts of criminal violence, Sinclair describes the “office juniors, cleaners and gardeners, the invisibles of Eden-Olympia, a population who left no shadows in the sun” (S-C 194). As Sinclair retraces the route of Greenwood’s killing spree, he arrives at the top of the building where he was shot by the security forces. Here the intense heat of the sun causes Sinclair to faint. As the guard wryly comments when he revives, “I guess too much light on anything isn’t a good idea” (S-C 199). The sun in Ballard’s fiction not only connotes truth and reason, but also generates shadows that represent violence and criminality.

In Eden-Olympia, the residents find their private lives steadily eroded by the demands of the culture of over-work and hyper-productivity. As a counter to the residents’ insomnia and symptoms of stress, Dr. Wilder Penrose, the resident psychiatrist, prescribes psychopathy as therapy. This organized madness takes the form of road-rage, petty drug dealing, racist attacks, and teenage vice rings: “the cure sounds drastic, the malaise is far more crippling. An inability to rest the mind, to find time for reflection and recreation. Small doses of insanity are the only solution” (S-C 251). As Gasiorek states, “Penrose in Super-Cannes sets out to foster individuals’ most atavistic, transgressive desires with the aim of mak-ing them more healthy and more economically productive” (191). In line with Crawford’s ethos in Cocaine Nights, Penrose’s “therapy” suggests that engaging in violent and criminal behavior results in a healthier and more productive workforce.

In each novel, violence provides a cure for apathy and cultural malaise. By translating the thesis at the heart of The Atrocity Exhibition into a series of natural-ist scenarios, Ballard undermines the commonsensical notion that violence isolates




and silences individuals. Instead, his depiction of violence within a microcosm of society shares much in common with Slavoj Žižek’s argument in Tarrying with the Negative that a community “exists only as long as its specific enjoyment continues to be materialized in a set of social practices and transmitted through [. . .] myths that structure these practices” (202). As Ballard’s late fiction demon-strates, enjoyment stands at the heart of cultural exchange as the minimal point of identification around which communities are formed. Rather than simply being alienated through their productivity and efficiency, the citizens of Eden-Olympia seek pleasure in a criminal subculture. Consequently, Greenwood’s massacre is elevated to the level of a cultural mythology, recorded through print media and surveillance footage, in order to bind together the community in a shared enjoyment of the violent spectacle.

reVolutIonary VIolence

Ballard’s concern with violence and community continues throughout his last two novels. However, rather than exploring the ways in which violence paradoxically sustains communities, Ballard now links enjoyment to consumerism and violence to revolutionary acts. Millennium People and Kingdom Come are set in the quotidian environments of the London suburbs and a generic shopping mall, respectively, and both novels highlight the potential for violence to not only preserve the status quo but also to initiate revolutionary political movements.

It is helpful to link one’s understanding of the revolutionaries in Millennium People to Walter Benjamin’s concept of “divine violence.” Unlike “law-making” and “law-preserving” violence, “divine violence” lies outside the law and evades conventional representational strategies in order to facilitate the conditions of proletarian revolution. Benjamin argues that the proletarian general strike “takes place not in readiness to resume work following external concessions and this or that modification to working conditions, but in the determination to resume only a wholly transformed work, no longer enforced by the state, an upheaval that this kind of strike not so much causes as consummates” (246). Whereas the first form of resistance Benjamin identifies is ultimately contained and becomes “law-making,” the second is anarchistic and causes a revaluation of the condi-tions of production. He argues that the judicial system limits excessive violence by implementing legal routes to conflict resolution. This is because, as Benjamin notes, “law sees violence in the hands of individuals as a danger undermining the legal system” (238). Consequently, he argues that law protects against violence, not in order to preserve peaceful resolution, but to preserve the rule of law itself. Violence outside of the law and in the hands of individuals threatens law, not because of its aims or ends, but because of its existence outside of law. It is for this reason that law condones certain violent actions, such as strikes, in order to preserve its own internal logic.

In this respect, the citizens depicted in Cocaine Nights and Super-Cannes engage in violent acts that are silently sanctified by the internal logic of the




community. By contrast, the violent uprisings depicted in Millennium People and Kingdom Come constitute a challenge to the state and the machinations of capital. It is my contention that they embody many of the attributes of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s concept of the “multitude” or the collective resistance to the globalized form of capitalist sovereignty that has emerged at the turn of the twenty-first century.

Millennium People is distinctive for its depiction of revolutionary struggle emerging from the middle classes, debunking the notion that dissatisfaction and alienation are the exclusive preserve of either the working classes or the intellec-tual elite. Indeed, the novel depicts a hypothetical shift in radical politics from the margins to the center: “the revolution of the middle class had begun, not the uprising of a desperate proletariat, but the rebellion of the educated profes-sional class who were society’s keel and anchor” (MP 5). In Millennium People, the dialectic of subversion and containment within contemporary British society is explored through the absurd juxtaposition of sedentary middle-class life with seemingly meaningless acts of terrorism and violence. The central protagonist is a corporate psychologist named David Markham who is inexorably drawn into a shadowy protest group based in the comfortable Chelsea Marina. Over time, the quotidian cornerstones of the middle-classes are steadily ruptured by a series of terrorist attacks, led by the ex-film studies lecturer Kay Churchill, culminating in a failed suburban revolution.

The aftermath of the middle-class uprising in Chelsea Marina produces a number of problematic statements. For instance, Markham declares that “no armed police would guard us, on the safe assumption that a rebellious middle class was too well mannered to pose a physical threat. But as I knew all too well, that was the threat. Appearances proved nothing and everything” (MP 4). This passage challenges the limits of sense in order to convey the surreal world produced by the revolutionaries. Although being “well mannered” is generally considered to be a positive, for Markham it reveals the ideologies that maintain the population’s oppression. From the protagonist’s ironic tone, it is possible to see that manners constitute a set of conventions that sustain the status quo.

In order to divest manners of their familiar, obvious quality, Ballard draws on the surrealist tradition by repeatedly placing two seemingly incompatible elements into sustained juxtaposition. Consequently, a recurrent truism voiced throughout the novel is that “the absurd answer was probably the correct one” (MP 9). Bal-lard’s inversion of normative values results in an uncanny atmosphere in which the familiar domestic sphere is placed side by side with violence and revolutionary energy. It quickly becomes clear to the reader that the middle classes are not in revolt against a specific, centralized organization but against their own traditional values: “Without the slightest regret, they had turned their back on themselves and all that they had once believed in” (MP 5).

Establishing the suburban revolutionaries in Ballard’s novel as elements of the “multitude” elucidates his focus on the educated professional classes rather than the working classes. Marx originally located the origins of class conflict in




the generation of surplus-labor through the exploitation of the proletariat by the bourgeoisie. By contrast, gauging a shift in general intellect, Ballard portrays the working classes as minority elements within society, while the middle classes stand at its heart.

This shift is reflective of the stance Hardt and Negri take in Empire (2000). These thinkers conceptualize globalization as a new period of sovereignty for the capitalist economy to the detriment of the power and autonomy of the traditional nation-state. Consequently, the hegemonic reach of global capital is conceptual-ized as a totalizing Empire governed by the powers of international organizations such as the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), the World Trade Orga-nization (WTO) and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). In their sequel to Empire, Multitude (2004), they focus on the possibilities of resistance implicit within Empire. Sustaining Marx’s belief that the capitalist mode of production is a necessary intermediary stage before the emergence of the Communist ideal, Hardt and Negri argue that the polyphonic fluidity of the globalized Empire offers the possibility for a truly radical democracy to emerge. The multitude is composed of a set of singularities or individuals brought together through the new circuits of cooperation and collaboration made possible by the globalized networks of Empire.

Hardt and Negri’s politics of resistance against the post-industrial capital-ist hegemony offers insight into the actions of the residents of Ballard’s Chel-sea Marina. Initially, the comfortable lives of the residents render them propo-nents of the dominant ideology, unopposed to the logic of capitalism. However, Markham’s commentary indicates a shift towards a new mode of collectivization reminiscent of Hardt and Negri’s multitude:

I was surprised by the growing number of protest groups. Leaderless and uncoordi-nated, they sprang up at dinner parties and PTS meetings [. . .] most of the residents were now set on a far more radical response to the social evils that transcended the local problems of the estate. (MP 120)

The radicalization of the residents inaugurates an expansion of focus from local to more general social concerns. However, at this stage, they lack leadership and a clearly identifiable target. Consequently, these protests stand outside of the well-trammeled lines of strike action that Benjamin criticized, and beyond the rule of law. The lack of a clearly identifiable aim defeats attempts to categorize and therefore contain the movement. Accordingly, the protest groups can align with Benjamin’s “divine violence,” which, rather than simply confronting small-scale instances of injustice, challenges the very foundations of society.

Nevertheless, the potential for radical change is undone at the climax of the revolution when the middle-class residents, now led by Kay Churchill, become a stereotypical protest group and stage a series of demonstrations in the normally quiet suburban streets. They construct barricades, set cars alight, and shout and jeer at the orderly ranks of policemen. Rather than displaying the liberating poten-tial of the “multitude” envisioned by Hardt and Negri, this constitutes separatism,




the dominant form of protest of the twentieth century. Rather than leading to a real transformation in living conditions, separatism all too often leads to either assimilation or destruction. This is borne out here by the actions of the residents in the face of the authorities. Initially at least, they appear to be victorious:

The street was on fire, but Chelsea Marina had begun to transcend itself, its rent arrears and credit-card debts. Already I could see London burning, a bonfire of bank statements as cleansing as the Great Fire [. . .] For the first time I fully believed that Kay was right, that we were on the edge of a social revolution with the power to seize the nation. (MP 228–30)

The middle-class residents destroy their own property to make a stand and abruptly the authorities begin to leave.

However, rather than constituting a victorious statement, the spectacle of the resistance is swiftly marginalized and contained. A residents’ delegation led by Kay is invited to participate in discussions with the police and the local councils. Despite this apparent dissimulation on the part of the authorities, the compro-mise reaffirms the hegemony of the capitalist State. As a consequence, the streets swiftly return to normal: “The single intact meter soon received its first coin” (MP 231). This detail marks the residents’ return to the circuits of capitalist exchange and their recognition of the authority of the liberal and seemingly tolerant State.

The Chelsea Marina revolt is flattened into an image for consumption and subsumed by the culture industry: “the new guerrilla chic inspired by Chelsea Marina [. . .] had already featured in an Evening Standard fashion spread” (MP 234). In the meantime, Kay Churchill agrees to make a television documen-tary about middle-class radicalism. This representation of culture contrasts the portrayal of celebrity culture in The Atrocity Exhibition in which Ballard splices famous names such as “Princess Margaret” and “Mae West” into ostensibly neu-tral accounts of operating procedures from a textbook of plastic surgery. Whereas in The Atrocity Exhibition the introduction of celebrity culture into even the most routine of contexts generates fascination, in Millennium People celebrity, and by extension violence, are themselves treated as routine. As Ballard states in the marginalia to The Atrocity Exhibition, appended twenty years after the novel’s publication: “A kind of banalisation of celebrity has occurred: we are now offered an instant, ready-to-mix fame as nutritious as packet soup” (17). Over a decade later, Millennium People shows that although violence can function as a disrup-tive spectacle that challenges the dominant order, its effects are temporary and it soon appears banal. The enduring strength of the consumer society is located in its ability to swiftly adapt to changing circumstances and assimilate hostile forces by flattening them into sanitized forms available for consumption.

Ultimately, Millennium People offers a cautionary tale about the use of violence within radical politics. Indeed, the novel’s depiction of the ineffectual violent protests in the London suburbs demonstrates that power and violence are, in fact, oppositional. As Hannah Arendt argues, “violence can destroy power; it is utterly incapable of creating it” (56). When systems of power are challenged,




violence appears in either the form of an uprising or a repressive state apparatus. The violent actions of the suburban revolutionaries are destructive and generate visibility for their cause. However, they are unable to create the conditions for a new, more equitable society. As such, Ballard’s novel not only demonstrates the potential but highlights the limitations of Hardt and Negri’s approach. Although they offer a compelling critique of Empire as a hegemonic world-order and theorize methods of resistance in the form of the multitude, they are unable to pragmatically describe new forms of governance that would be free of oppression and exploitation.

Millennium People does suggest that violence can be used, in the short-term at least, to generate greater visibility for otherwise marginalized causes or groups. However, the fate of the revolutionaries indicates that violence is ineffectual in the face of long-term objectives such as the transformation of working conditions, poverty, and world hunger. Although Ballard continues to portray the seductive allure of violence, he also offers a sharp and sobering corrective to Benjamin’s “divine violence.” Benjamin argues that “divine violence” operates as a powerful force that has the potential to radically destabilize both state and the law. The revolutionaries in Millennium People also adopt this position, but the novel ulti-mately suggests that directed and meaningful violence can only function to the betterment of short-term goals. As Arendt states, “the practice of violence, like all action, changes the world, but the most probable change is to a more violent world” (80).

Ballard’s final novel directly links the theme of violence to the end state of consumer society. In an inversion of the well-meaning violence of the suburban revolutionaries in Millennium People, violence in Kingdom Come is born out of apathy and boredom with the illusions of consumerism. In a world in which the individual is offered freedom of choice but limited in political agency, Ballard suggests that violence becomes a matter of aesthetics: “They lived in an eternal retail present, where the deepest moral decisions concerned the purchase of a refrigerator or washing machine” (KC 8). Within this moral vacuum, racism and fascism provide direction for the population’s discontent.

Like the revolutionaries in Millennium People, the citizens of the perimeter towns along the M25 are portrayed as the “real centre of the nation” (KC 4) whose parasitic relationship with consumerism replaces the need for social cohe-sion. As Richard Pearson, an advertising executive from central London states in the novel: “The suburbs, we would all believe to our last gasp, were defined by the products we sold them, by the brands and trademarks and logos that alone defined their lives” (KC 4). However, as the escalation of violence throughout the novel suggests, consumer goods cannot serve as a replacement for the pillars of the community traditionally provided by religious and political organizations.

Kingdom Come portrays a world in which religion, monarchy, and parliamen-tary democracy fail to inspire the populace and in their wake the Metro-Centre has become the social hub: “The Metro-Centre is a cathedral, a place of worship. Consumerism may seem pagan, but in fact it’s the last refuge of the religious




instinct” (KC 253). As Pearson continues his investigation, small-scale acts of violence directed by men in St. George’s shirts against immigrant families become increasingly organized in a manner reminiscent of the rise of Nazi Germany. A scene in which a crowd of intoxicated football supporters smash the shop windows of a street filled with Asian food wholesalers invites direct comparison with the SA’s attack on Jewish shops over Kristallnacht.

The immigrant population constitutes the Other to the values and ideals maintained by the Metro-Centre mall and its purveyors. Against the liberal values of dignity and freedom, the immigrant community is crudely caricatured by the Metro-Centre supporters as repressive, misogynistic, and backward. However, the violent attacks are catalyzed not solely by racial prejudice, but also in reaction to the notion of a community rooted in civic pride. The immigrant community is seen to resist the allure of consumerism and continues to function around seem-ingly anachronistic religious beliefs. By contrast, the residents of the motorway towns conspicuously lack civic pride and are united instead around sports and shopping. Ballard conflates the two by depicting sports teams bedecked in cor-porate sponsorship alongside commercial workers forming themselves into sports teams. In this way, consumerism is demonstrated to be not simply a passive activity but also the basis for an increasingly naturalized ethical and political position.

As Pearson continues his investigation, he encounters a series of figures who each attempt to make sense of the violent outbreaks in Brooklands. Despite their differences, the characters each adopt the same affectless, elevated register reminiscent of anthropologists rather than personal viewpoints. This is reflective of the homogenizing cultural norms instilled by the Metro-Centre that have replaced traditional social values: “Here in Brooklands we had a real community, not just a population of cash tills. Now it’s gone, vanished overnight when that money-factory opened” (KC 32). There is also a clear distinction between the way outsiders and the residents of Brooklands perceive the motorway town. Outsiders see “faceless inter-urban sprawl, a nightmare terrain of police cameras and security dogs, an uncentered realm devoid of civic tradition and human values” (KC 101). By contrast, Tom Carradine, the former talk-show host and spokesperson for the Metro-Centre, sees consumerism as a new collective enterprise.

Ballard’s novel warns that a paradigm shift is taking place through which the old bonds of religion, monarchy, and democracy no longer apply. He traces a shift from traditional civic values to a community whose social values are rooted in consumerism and identifies this as the primary source of feelings of boredom, alienation, and dissatisfaction. As is demonstrated by the three bears that func-tion as a mascot or totem for the Metro-Centre shoppers, consumer culture is infantilizing, offering only the illusion of free choice and ephemeral satisfactions. As Pearson notes, “the bears reminded me of all the toys never given to me during my childhood” (KC 175). Despite developing out of the Enlightenment values of reason and self-interest, consumer society asks individuals to suspend rational-ity; for Ballard this can only lead to boredom, which in turn results in fascism and violence. Within the consumer paradise, Ballard suggests, “sensation and




psychopathy are the only way people make contact with each other” (KC 147). In this way, the racially-charged violence in Kingdom Come echoes the therapeutic psychopathy depicted in Super-Cannes.

However, this marks a surprisingly traditional critique of consumer culture in Ballard’s fiction, one which is perhaps inevitable given his vision of the end state of consumerism as a perpetual cycle of sedation and psychopathy. Indeed, this critical deadlock is reflected in the way the late fiction recycles the same basic plotline in which outbreaks of violence initially appear to disrupt but ultimately reinforce the status quo. With the demise of state-sponsored Communism and the spread of capitalist markets across the globe, the traditionally non-fungible spheres of culture and economics are increasingly interlinked and the possibility of imagining alternatives to the consumer society appears increasingly remote. Ballard’s critique of consumerism in Kingdom Come is not especially illuminat-ing or revealing, but serves as a timely reminder of the infantilizing nature of consumer culture and the vitiation of effective forms of critique at the turn of the twenty-first century.

Millennium People and Kingdom Come constitute cautionary tales that warn against the erosion of real political choice and its impact on notions of community and solidarity. Although consumer society was born out of the Enlightenment ideal of rational self-interest and purports to offer a multitude of choices, Ballard’s fiction suggests that it ultimately curtails the rights of the individual and nullifies the opportunity to engage in radical decision-making. The revolutionaries in Mil-lennium People demonstrate their dissatisfaction through the spectacle of violence. They have no clear aim beyond voicing their discontent, and this renders them a threat to consumer culture, which seeks only to temporarily satisfy (and there-fore stimulate) demand. However, in Kingdom Come, violence does not directly challenge consumerism but is shown to be a constitutive element of its endgame, emerging when the illusion that commodities can provide satisfaction begins to fade. Ballard’s depiction of consumerism highlights its seductive appeal as it challenges traditional civic values and class distinctions. As Cruise states, “Com-munity means living in a little box, driving a little car, going on little holidays. It means obeying the rules that ‘they’ tell you to obey” (KC 176). Consumerism offers to disrupt the staid rules and traditions of the past, but its promise of new social values manifests itself only in the celebration of sports teams and gold-card loyalty nights. In Ballard’s critique of consumer culture, the commodity stands at the heart of the community but is an ultimately unstable foundation on which to build a future.

conclusIon

Ballard is a writer preoccupied with the synergistic relationship between violence and the community. In an interview shortly before his death, he describes the narrators in his late fiction as “outsiders beguiled into serving a regime that they dislike but which appeals to unsatisfied needs that they have long repressed”




(Baxter 127). Ballard’s narrators are detectives who are initially repulsed yet later seduced by the allure of violence. In each novel, they turn a blind eye to the poten-tially disastrous effects of violence in order to become a part of the revived com-munity. Counter-intuitively, this complicity suggests that violence is a necessary component of a disciplined and assertive community.

Cocaine Nights and Super-Cannes suggest that rather than isolating individu-als, the spectacle of violence paradoxically acts as a cohesive bond between other-wise atomized individuals. Millennium People and Kingdom Come link the theme of violence and the community to a critique of consumer society. In Millennium People, Ballard explores the probable outcome of a violent revolutionary move-ment that promises a new egalitarian society. Showing remarkable prescience in the wake of the London riots in 2011 and the Occupy Wall Street protests, the novel identifies the direction that this form of politics will take as unsettling yet deeply ambivalent.

In Kingdom Come, Ballard suggests that dissatisfaction with the infantilizing illusions of consumer society will generate boredom that will result in an elec-tive psychopathy, which in turn risks being co-opted by a fascist politics. At the conclusion of the novel, Ballard combines two images in a final description of the destroyed Metro-Centre at the centre of Brooklands, dubbed the “real England” by David Cruise (KC 176). The first is of a crashed airship, which as a symbol of modernity connotes the destruction of dreams of international travel, progress, and optimism about culture and civilization. The second is of the “caldera of a resting volcano” (KC 279). This second, more primitive, image suggests that the desire for violence is instinctual, born out of the evolutionary drive to survive. “Caldera” derives from the Latin word “caldaria” or cooking pot, which suggests that consumerism left unchecked by civic values will heat towards a boiling point and erupt in new violence. The images evoke the endgame of consumer society, not as a final collapse, but as a perpetual cycle of boredom, violence, and psychopathy.

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