J.G. Ballard: Landscapes of Tomorrow Book

Following on from the 2014 'Landscapes of Tomorrow: J.G. Ballard in Space and Time' conference, a new edited volume of essays, J.G. Ballard: Landscapes of Tomorrow, has been published by Brill. The publisher recently shared an editor interview on their Facebook page, reproduced below:

An interview with Richard Brown, Elizabeth Stainforth and Christopher Duffy, editors of Dialogue 22, J.G. Ballard: Landscapes of Tomorrow, who answer questions about the volume they recently collected and edited for the Dialogue Series.

1. Describe your interest in J.G. Ballard’s life and art. How did you come to study his writings?

Richard Brown: Personally speaking, I’ve been a fan since I was studying and working in London in the 70s and 80s. It was the experimental Atrocity Exhibition that first excited me. Coincidentally my father-in-law worked in Road Safety which lent an unusual perspective to my early readings of Crash! As a critic of postmodern and millennial literatures I came back to his work in a big way as it matured in new directions around the turn of the century.

Elizabeth Stainforth: I first encountered Ballard’s work as a reader of science fiction and, following on from that, I did my BA dissertation on the The Atrocity Exhibition. Later, I became interested in Ballard’s collaborations with Eduardo Paolozzi in Ambit, which led to an exhibition and essay for the Henry Moore Institute in 2011.

Christopher Duffy: I’ve been a long-time fan, beginning with a teenage enthusiasm for science fiction that steadily matured into an interest in experimental and postmodern literature. Given Ballard’s widespread influence in contemporary British culture – including films, music, and visual art – it seems like he has been a constant presence in many areas during my academic development. Fascinated by textual representations of space, I finally decided to make him the subject of my PhD thesis.

2. Was there a method involved in the selection of essay-chapters for the volume? What were the selection criteria for the work?

As we explain in the Introduction the volume partly emerged from a conference we ran in the University of Leeds on May 4th 2014. Ballardian expert David Pringle had once been a student at Leeds and enthusiasm for his work across the Humanities has grown strongly since those days and entered the curriculum in ways that would have been hard to anticipate back then, partly as a result of the rise of Postmodernist cultural theory and partly, no doubt also, as a result of the successful film adaptations of his work. Contributors to that conference provided the core of the volume. Gradually the Landscapes theme emerged as the focus of a volume and we selected essays and developed them through the editorial process towards various aspects of that theme.

3. How would you describe the current field of Ballard scholarship and criticism, and your volume’s relationship to it?

We chose the Landscapes of Tomorrow theme to highlight significant aspects of emerging research in physical, social, cultural, digital spaces and selected or encouraged development of essays in the light of that theme. One of the great things about Ballard’s work that we hope the volume takes forward is the wide range of academic disciplines that are beginning to register its importance centrally in what they do. Much great work on Ballard has begun to appear and we hope our volume will take this further and with an international dimension for example for North America and for China, areas where Ballard’s work has clear relevance but is not yet fully recognised.

4. How did Fay Ballard’s work come to be included in the volume, and on the book’s cover?

Fay Ballard was brilliant from the start, picking up on news of the conference and contributing fully, though really busy at the time with the exhibition of her own drawings House Clearance, based on found objects from her father’s house following his death in 2009. She was fantastically generous in her enthusiasm for our project and in letting us use a detail from one of her “Memory Box” works, which became our cover image. Her sister Bea was also terrific in her support for our project.

5. What will your next Ballard-related projects be?

Now that Landscapes is out we are having a small launch event together in Leeds and lots of other Ballard related projects are taking place. Chris did a lecture for Liverpool John Moore’s University around the launch of the film of High-Rise, Liz’s invisible library collaboration with Mike Bonsall is ongoing (http://fentonville.co.uk/invisible-library/), Richard is appearing in Rick McGrath’s Deep Ends 2016 and soon speaking at Thomas Knowles’s day workshop on Ballard and the Natural World at Birmingham City University.

About the editors:

Richard H. Brown, Reader in Modern Literature at the University of Leeds, has published widely on the works of James Joyce, among others, and teaches courses in modern, contemporary and millennial literatures.

Liz Stainforth is a Ph.D. Candidate at the University of Leeds, where she is conducting research on digital culture and memory.

Christopher Duffy earned his Ph.D. from the University of Leeds; his doctoral dissertation was on the writings of J.G. Ballard.

J.G. Ballard's Invisible Library

Untitled (White Library) by Wilfredo Prieto at MoNA

“... I have always been a voracious reader of what I call invisible literatures” - JG Ballard, The Pleasure of Reading, Antonia Fraser (ed.), 1992.

A couple of months ago I published a write-up of the 'Landscapes of Tomorrow: J.G. Ballard in Space and Time' conference, which took place at the University of Leeds on 3 May 2014. In that post, I mentioned the collection of ephemera that Ballard would refer to as 'invisible literatures', including but not limited to scientific journals, technical manuals, pharmaceutical company brochures, think-tank internal documents and PR company position papers - in Ballard's own words: 'part of that universe of published material to which most literate people have scarcely any access but which provides the most potent compost for the imagination'.

For some time, I've been interested in the significance of these texts and their influence on Ballard's writing, which prompted the current Invisible Library project, a collaborative online catalogue. This is a joint effort with Mike Bonsall, whose own site, Digital Ballard, carries the tagline 'Adventures with J.G. Ballard in the Digital Humanities'. Mike's site interprets Ballard's fiction using a variety of digital tools, with fascinating results. Highlights include Another Terminal Beach, an Interactive Fiction based on Ballard's short story, The Concordance, compiled using all the material in Ballard's published novels and High-Rise: The Movie, an animation of the High Rise plot, made using SketchUp.

With Mike's help an open source list has now been created, collected from various sources, to record the reading material Ballard came into contact with and attempt to make the invisible visible.

So far, the list comprises over 600 items. It's an ongoing project, which invites contributions. To find out more, please visit: http://fentonville.co.uk/invisible-library/

Landscapes of Tomorrow: J.G. Ballard - University of Leeds Event

Date and Time: Saturday 3 May 2014, 10am-4.30pm

Venue: Stanley & Audrey Burton Gallery, University of Leeds



This workshop-conference, 'Landscapes of Tomorrow: J.G. Ballard in Space and Time', which took place earlier in the month, was co-organised by myself and colleagues Dr Richard Brown and Chris Duffy (University of Leeds). Here, I'll try and give an overview of what was a thoroughly interesting day of research sharing and lively discussion. The theme - space and time - was deliberately broad to allow for the inclusion of papers exploring diverse aspects of Ballard's writing, including physical and psychological zones of transit, modern consumerism and post-cultural spaces. Being in the Gallery, Ballard's visual art influences were also a central focus of the conference. Papers covered topics including:

* Non-places of Modernity
* Collective Memory
* Space and Mediation
* Romanticism
* Modernism and the History of the Future
* Desire, Class and Consumer Millenarianism
* Invisible Literatures
* Inner Space and Geometries of the Imagination

The keynote speaker, Dr. Jeanette Baxter (Anglia Ruskin University), started off the day with her paper, ‘Fascisms and the Politics of Nowhere in Kingdom Come’. After presenting Giorgio De Chirico’s little-known, interwar novel Hebdomeros (1929) as a narrative of 'nowhere' that resists all sense of orientation, she spoke about how in the novel, Kingdom Come (2006), Ballard takes up, and re-conceives, the 'nowhere' motif as part of his surrealist analysis of contemporary history, politics and culture. Within the surrealist imagination, an imagination rendered artistically and politically out-of-place in an emerging Fascist Europe, 'nowhere' repeats as a resonant motif for interrogating narratives of geo-political displacement, homelessness and exile. Baxter argued that fascism returns in modified forms in Ballard’s contemporary 'nowhere', from the 'soft-totalitarianism' forged by the illusion of consumerist choice, to the neo-fascist communities that commit racially-motivated acts of violence against displaced, immigrant workers.

The morning sessions 'Zones of Transit' and  '(In)visible Literatures' followed. In the afternoon, the sessions were themed around 'Consuming Futures' and 'Post-cultural Spaces', which featured a paper from PhD candidate Catherine McKenna (King's College, London), who catalogued 565 items from the Ballard estate. These will be the subject of a new book by Chris Beckett (forthcoming, 2015). An evening panel discussion, 'Ballard’s Shanghai Orientation', introduced special guest Fay Ballard, who shared recollections of her father, and spoke a bit about related influences in her exhibition 'House Clearance' (2 May-27 June 2014), at Eleven Spitalfields Gallery.

My own paper, entitled 'Ballard's Invisible Literatures', was included in the morning session and discussed the collection of ephemera known as invisible literatures, compiled during Ballard's lifetime and kept in his coal-shed:- he would describe them, aptly, as 'the most potent compost for the imagination'. They included material such as market research reports, pharmaceutical company house magazines, promotional copy, technical journals and scientific manuals. I explored the significance of these texts further and traced their influence, focusing on Ballard's time as prose editor at the journal Ambit and his own modification of Surrealist collage in The Atrocity Exhibition novel. I also raised the tentative question of if and to what extent it might be possible to reconstruct Ballard’s invisible library as an object of study.

Thanks again to the speakers, delegates and to everyone that helped to make the conference possible.

Memory-Technology-Utopia

Or, Can We Salvage the Future?

[The following is an excerpt from a longer piece of writing, which forms part of my PhD research]

‘Why are there no utopias today?’ is Judith Shklar’s opening gambit in her essay, ‘The Political Theory of Utopia: From Melancholy to Nostalgia’,  a question that assumes the utopian project to be a thing of the past, a historical artefact. This view forms part of a broader narrative of utopia, dominant since the late 1960s, which attributes its disappearance to the decline of modernist narratives of collective progress and improvement. So, where did these utopian visions go? Were they banished to the convenient ‘no place’ of the word’s Greek origins? Was the unfashionable and deterministic idea of progress responsible for their fall from grace? And what, if anything, stood in their (no)place? One version of events is that by the 1970s, the unifying drive of utopia was no longer up to the task of reconciling the competing claims of minority groups in a world with increasingly global perspectives.  As the utopian project waned, the concept of collective memory began to emerge in academic discourse, with all its evocative, recuperative and inclusive potential. Offering a means of coming to terms with the events of the past in order to move forward, memory seemed like an antidote to the perceived authoritarian strain in historical narratives. The past, then, having achieved a healthy distance from the present, was once again close and familiar, no longer a foreign country, but the vehicle for societies’ shared inheritance.  This temporal manoeuvre is well documented, whereby the past, through a discourse of social remembering, is shaped and interpreted according to the present situation.  However, there is something in the latest incarnation which, under the banner of memory, speaks of a particular anxiety about the future. The renewed impetus to remember, memorialise and pass on a legacy, particularly in the sphere of culture, is underpinned by the fear that a failure to do so will perpetuate the already pervasive spectre of cultural amnesia.   Consequently, stories, sites and monuments of the past were never so popular, as much for what they represent as for what they are. But the question of what they represent now is critical; do they memorialise the glories of the past or hold the promise of the future? Is there something faintly utopian about the new and oft cited memory boom?

I want to explore this possibility further and to argue for a theory of utopia that goes beyond its status as an artefact of the modernist era. So rather than asking, as Skhlar does, ‘why are there no utopias today?’, I will not foreclose the question of utopia because it seems to me to be intimately linked to the contemporary concern with memory, borne out of a desire for the future. There is, of course, a well-established precedent for locating the utopian impulse within the realms of memory, for example, in the figure Walter Benjamin's angel of history,  or in the mixing of ‘memory and desire’  in T.S. Eliot’s opening to The Waste Land. Theodor Adorno gave a succinct expression of this relationship in Aesthetic Theory, writing ‘ever since Plato’s doctrine of anamnesis, the not-yet-existing has been dreamed of in remembrance’.  Here, memory appears as the anchor for utopia, opening up the space from which it emerges. The anchoring function of memory is significant in an age where temporal boundaries are being increasingly challenged, effecting a sense of displacement that has been noted by several cultural theorists. For instance, Zygmunt Bauman comments that, ‘due to the ‘pendulum-like’ trajectory of historical sequences a close proximity of forward and backward or ‘utopia’ and ‘nostalgia’ pregnant with confusion is virtually inevitable’.  In this regard, utopia is peculiarly relevant to my study, where the museum, that shrine to the past, is explored in its relation to digital technologies, the current symbol of the future par excellence. Furthermore, my focus is on memory, specifically the discourse of collective memory, and its uptake in discussions about preserving cultural heritage digitally. The question of digital technology is not insignificant, since it potentially re-defines the transmission of culture as the flow of information. Nor is memory a politically benign concept in the projects, press and policies that have the digitisation of cultural heritage as their goal. The central proposition is that a loss of memory is what is at stake in a failure to digitise. Yet there is an irony in making claims, in the name of memory, for a technology which, arguably, changes the nature of how we experience time. As Andreas Huyssen, claims ‘the very organization of this high-tech world threatens to make categories like past and future, experience and expectation, memory and anticipation themselves obsolete’.  The study of memorial forms also entails the study of the history of communication technologies; Paul Ricoeur’s observation that ‘what is peculiar to a history of memory is the history of the modes of its transmission’  highlights the extent to which they are inter-related. Developing this thought, Patrick Hutton adapts Walter J. Ong’s theory of media communications to broadly distinguish four modes of mnemonic representation. He links ‘orality with the reiteration of living memory; manuscript literacy with the recovery of lost wisdom; print literacy with the reconstruction of a distinct past; and media literacy with the deconstruction of the forms with which past images are composed’.  In its latest phase, the opportunities for a more reflexive engagement with memory are both obstructed and enabled by technology. While the capacity to access and interact with heritage collections are greatly increased by their presence online, the process of digitisation potentially disrupts the conventional sequence of past, present and future events, since cultural memory (that sense of the past defined through human actions or social phenomena), is not applicable to the digital archive, which has a time-based element internal to the workings of technical media.  The attendant concern is that in an environment of instant messaging and real-time updates, temporal categories will be swallowed up by an all-pervasive present. 

However, rather than allowing that this situation precludes the emergence of utopian visions, I want to examine how the utopian project is manifested in the wake of temporal crisis. Contra Huyssen who concludes that ‘there can be no utopia in cyberspace, because there is no there there from which a utopia could emerge’,  I will suggest that there is a viable account of memory, technology and utopia beyond the narrative of ‘techno-utopianism’ critiqued by many contemporary commentators. 

Employment of Time (excerpt)

I recall one weekend, aged 8 or 9, going with my father to his place of work. An occurrence not necessarily out of the ordinary - I have a series of recollections of my mother refusing to leave the car, constantly complaining of the smell (my dad worked in sewage) and generally not looking very pleased at all to have her weekend imposed upon her husband’s work ethic. Anyway, she wasn’t present on this occasion. I think my brother was, but he has no part to play in this story so might as well be left out.

On this particular trip, in one of the offices my father set up some apparatus: a television, VHS player and a home video camera (VHS) mounted on a tripod. He played a video on the television, checked the sound levels, and started recording on the camera.  We left the room and occupied ourselves for the next hour or so - For me this usually involved riding down a hill on my skateboard.  I never stood up on this hill as at the time it seemed very steep.  Instead I would lie down on my chest, much like a surfer or a skeleton-bobsledder might lie, or perhaps, in later years when I’d become too large for the skateboard, in the way a Vietnam war veteran who has lost the use of his legs might sit on a skateboard - calves folded under thighs, using my hands to paddle along. I should also mention here, that this hill was excellent for sledging, and was, due to it’s location on a sewage works, a private ski-slope of sorts. After the recording was complete we returned to the office, dismantled the equipment and went home. I remember the film being Short Circuit 2.

Over the intervening years, on several occasions I’ve spoken to my dad about this trip. He says he doesn’t remember ever having made a copy of a film, and has no recollection of the specific event outlined above [Though almost any of this may be a false memory -  from the recording of the film through to my memory of my father failing to recall having done so, the skateboard (which had a ninja printed on it’s underside) and that hill were both most definitely REAL and TRUE].

The lack of corroboration from my father doesn’t really concern me, the memory seems such a strong one for me because it was a little out of the ordinary while for my dad it was just a typical weekend trip to work (there were a lot). Recently while I was thinking about this memory, it struck me that this may have had an impact on my later interests,  my own (art) practice, my writing things such as this thing you’re reading now, and even my job (I photograph and scan things in a library), but the idea of somehow condensing the seed of all future developments into this one event on a weekend from childhood is too simplistic to bear any interest or to glean any real meaning from.  What I do find interesting in this memory is the real-time-ness of the experience, the scale of the passage of time  in the undertaking of this analogue recording, the 1:1 ratio of it all, the fact that the recording of something will take the time it will take to occur - you know, like in real-life.

[A few years after this Short Circuit 2 incident, I recall my brother bringing home a copy of Predator 2. Upon further questioning it was revealed to me that this copy was created not by the screen/camera setup outlined above but in a Double-Decker video recorder (made by Amstrad?) which still took an analogue real-time duration to record, but provided the operator the opportunity to watch something else while the copying was being done. A development in technology which blew my mind at the time.]

It’s interesting to think of the 1:1 ratio now, these days, when it’s possible to digitally copy time based media very quickly indeed. It would seem that the transition from analogue to digital in these media has affected the very nature of our relationship to them.  The shift in the user experience of these digital media has precipitated the erosion of it’s relationship to our attention: that because things are so readily available, abundant, and free, they become somewhat more diffuse or disposable, providing the user the opportunity to graze or browse rather than immerse. Instantaneity means experiences can be cherry picked for immediate gratification. I’m uncomfortable with this kind of relationship as I’m sure a lot of other people are too, but I tend not to answer my phone (and subsequently don’t call people back), and I take a long time to reply to text messages or emails.  Why should this be the case when everything is so readily available? 

Perhaps it is precisely because of this abundance and availability that postponement becomes a seemingly reasonable manner in which to communicate.  I have several draft responses to emails where the intent to respond is most certainly there, but the actual response, the part that matters, isn’t. I’ve been sent emails from friends with links to youtube videos that I don’t get around to watching in their entirety, or .mp3s that I download then never listen to. Recently I received a .pdf copy of Notes on Cinematography by Robert Bresson. I know because I download it, it’s on my desktop, though I have never had a look inside [However, in the course of writing this, I’ve since had a brief look, so you’d best discount that last sentence]. I’d like to argue that this is a matter of technology, that if I owned an iPad or Kindle, that I’d of course read it straight away, and this would be precisely because of the availability and malleability of the media, but I’m not so sure. Likewise, if I had a comfortable room where I could listen to these mp3’s on a good stereo, of course I’d listen to them. But perhaps it’s just that I never seem to find the time, because, to do so I'd have to care enough about these ephemeral items, and because they don’t have any weight - they don’t exist through time expended (on my part) in accessing them - I don’t give them any intellectual weight.  Maybe this is a side effect of having grown up alongside these technological developments - I still have hundreds of CDs, untouched in years, at my parents house - I wonder whether I’ll ever listen to them again - DVDs that I meant to get round to watch but just never-managed-to-find-the-time. Maybe the cause of this is an internal confusion of what exists and what doesn’t, that because these are here in an instant I can get them anytime, however much I know that anytime roughly translates to never.

This text is an excerpt from the piece Employment of Time written for the exhibition of the same name curated by my friend Pernille Leggat Ramfelt. It has been (very minimally) adapted. The full text can be found here.