“And now, in Empire of the Sun, he gives shape to what shaped him.” —Martin Amis on J. G. Ballard
“Man, to a great extent, can shape that which shapes him.” —Jean-Pierre Dupuy on the condition of modern man
In 2013 at Expo 1, held at MoMA PS1 in New York City, philosopher Ray Brassier delivered a now-infamous polemic (later published in the anthology #Accelerate: The Accelerationist Reader) referencing artist Adrián Villar Rojas’ The Theater of Disappearance in relation to the philosophical tradition of prometheanism and its epistemological roots. At this conference, which had a somewhat eschatological undertone, Brassier gave a philosophical defense of accelerationism on two fundamental grounds: firstly according to the modernist understanding of knowledge and time (in the sense that accelerationism is largely an extension of the modernist project); secondly by responding to ongoing debates around accelerationist ethics of technology. Brassier begins his defense with the claim “Knowing takes time, but time impregnates knowing.” [1] then looks at this disequilibrium between time and knowledge—fully acknowledged by accelerationism—in a positive light, in order to address its critics. According to Brassier, criticisms of accelerationist technological ethics have largely relied on the assumption of an imperiled “fragile equilibrium” while dogmatically demarcating—on no scientific footing—the productive power of mankind as separate from the creative force of nature on no scientific footing. The promethean pathology, on this view, would lie in its denial of the ontological finitude of human existence through “making the given.” No writer has better captured this disequilibrium than JG Ballard, whose sci-fi works, in Brassier’s words, “spring time out of joint.”
In his reading of Ballard’s short story “The Voice of Time,” Brassier argues that disequilibrium occurs in the precise moment of a subject’s encounter with the future. In the short story, the scientist uses X-rays to stimulate the genes of plants and animals, leading to mutations that produce a new sensory system. This new system can sense time and the geological age of its surroundings, and is even capable of adapting to new natural environments. In this way, Brassier observes: “We orient ourselves towards the production and logic of catastrophe, so that we may become masters of trauma and seize the future.” [2]
More specifically, how do novelists cast time towards disequilibrium? Ballard is known within the sci-fi community as a kind of a prophet, and has been credited for, among other things, “foreseeing the Reagan administration, the arrival of gated communities, the architecture of Canary Wharf and widespread ecological disaster.” [3] Following Brassier’s logic, Ballard’s novels could be considered as wielding metaphors for the disequilibrium between the productive power of mankind and the creative force of nature. Martin Amis, a fellow English writer, also alludes to the notion of disequilibrium in his commentary on Ballard’s Empire of the Sun—“[it] gives shape to what shaped him.” [4]
Who shaped Ballard? In his own words, during those years in Shanghai (where he spent his childhood), it was film that “leaked out into reality” from the cinema and left him with a great deal of surrealist material to consider—that which, in Amis’ words, gave shape to what shaped him. [5] This trajectory aligns Ballard with his contemporary Paul Virilio, who grew up in a French village bearing witness to the speed of advancing German troops—an early experience that prompted him to develop an acute perception of speed and technology, both quintessential characteristics of modernity. [6] Ballard’s writing is much like the sci-fi verso of a philosophy of speed. In the documentary Crash! he appears on camera and succinctly observes: “I think the key image of the 20th century is the man in a motor car. It sums up everything. The elements of speed, drama, aggression. The junction of advertising and consumer goods, the technological landscape, the sense of violence and desire, power and energy, the shared experience of moving together through an elaborately signaled landscape.” [7] In the eponymous novel, the author (through a protagonist also named Ballard, living near the London airport) provocatively muses on car accidents in a way that seems to anticipate, consciously or not, his semi-autobiographical later work, Empire of the Sun, where he reveals in the character of a naive child an admiration for the Japanese air force, known for their suicidal crashes.
In the filmic adaptation of Empire of the Sun, the scene in which protagonist Jim offers a devoted military salute to the kamikaze is highlighted as the climax of the story. It is widely known that the aviators of this unit never returned after takeoff. Set to a markedly Hollywood soundtrack, the camera swiftly moves between the faces of different characters to the effect of interweaving their gazes together. It is almost as if these characters, belonging to different ranks and classes, are sublimated by the music to an equal status. The oppressed of the third world, the oppressors of the first world, and Jim are brought into momentary reconciliation by their shared sight of the violence of war. This catharsis-as-entertainment, a hybrid of tropes from industrialized Hollywood and Greek tragedy, not only announces a turning point in the plot, but also alludes to a force driving the protagonist’s subject formation. The disjuncture of body and spirit in this scene is a motif that Ballard constantly revisited in his later fiction. Also worth noticing is that, in this climax, the kamikaze aviators—the absolute Other—have taken the place of the main characters by becoming the subject of the gaze on screen. With their aid, the empire of the sun has managed to force the teenager to become an automated, machine-like other: a precision-guided munition.
In the original novel Jim imagines a young, diseased Kamikaze aviator to be his alter ego. In the end, after the war, his imagined twin turns into somewhat of a Schrödinger’s cat—since Jim has never told anyone this story, whether the aviator is alive or dead will forever remain a secret to himself. Here war and death are reduced to Jim’s personal play, a projected space within literary imagination. According to standard psychoanalysis, trauma must be treated by re-conceiving the unbearable disaster in reality as fictional experience. But isn’t the urge Ballard is shaping something that cannot be subsumed under the simplistic separation between reality and fiction?
The paradox of the kamikaze aviators is precisely that they have broken the alleged “fragile equilibrium” defended by those technologically-attuned ethicists. The special unit in fact took its name from two tropical storms or “divine winds” said to have saved Japan from two Mongol fleets. The wartime gesture of employing the name as such amounts to a hope, or a promise, that the common people would become divine troops. This was accomplished as follows: before setting out on a mission, kamikaze aviators would seal themselves inside the cockpits of their Kamikaze-go or A6M Zero, ensuring there would be no turning back from the aircraft’s unidirectional flight. Apart from hitting (or missing) the target, there was no choice. The aircraft was the material embodiment of a unidirectional progressivism whose roots can be traced back to the Enlightenment. But of course, as for the aviators sitting inside the cockpits, this period of gliding no longer had much to do with time. Imagine this as the Schrödinger’s cockpit: it shuts you away from the external world and pronounces the end of social time. Life has yet to come to its final end at this moment, as there is still a mission to accomplish, and it won’t come until you finish the ride. If modern war is a state of exception from quotidian life, then the modus operandi of the kamikaze is a further layer of exception to what is already an exceptional state. The second the aircraft leaves the ground, the only future is extermination; life has already been taken away. In this space time no longer affects the life or death of the aviator, only the aircraft he pilots. In any case, time does not always affect anyone, at least not the aviators in Ballard’s story. And let us think further about this transitional state of vacuum between their departure from the ground and the moment they hit the target: do they still have language?
The answer is yes. They will use any language they know to respond to the linear time presupposed by Brassier.
Usually, during this paradoxical period of time out of joint, the professionally-trained aviator would remind himself—before sending the aircraft into its final plunge—to focus on the horizon. Perhaps today they would even have an AI audio reminder, like Brassier’s post-humanist voice. Looking from outside the cockpit, we would see the aircraft leaving a trace on the sky-canvas, already under erasure… as it cuts across the sky it also tears apart our understanding of the horizon: inadequate yet unnecessary. Once the aircraft loses its balance, the (presumably) stable horizon and the grid-like space it connotes—perhaps just a vintage holdover from the Renaissance—will also vanish in the blink of an eye.
[1] Brassier, Ray (2014). ‘Prometheanism and its Critiques’ in #Accelerate: the Accelerationist Reader. Ed. Robin Mackay and Armen Avanessian. Falmouth: Urbanomic Media. 469-487.
[2] Russell, John (2014). ‘Bruce Willis, Irigaray, and the Aesthetics of Space Travel’ in Mute online magazine. 5 December 2014. <http://www.metamute.org/editorial/articles/bruce-willis-irigaray-and-aesthetics-space-travel>.
[3] Dodson, Sean (2008). ‘JG Ballard’s crystal ball.’ The Guardian. Film blog. 10 March 2008. <http://www.theguardian.com/film/filmblog/2008/mar/10/jgballardscrystalball>.
[4] Amis, Martin (2010). Visiting Mrs. Nabokov And Other Excursions. London: Vintage Digital. Kindle AZW file.
[5] Frick, Thomas (1984). The Paris Review No. 94 Winter. New York. <http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/2929/the-art-of-fiction-no-85-j-g-ballard>.
[6] Der Derian, James (1998). ‘Is the author dead? An Interview with Paul Virilio’ in The Virilio Reader. Ed. James Der Derian. Oxford, Massachusetts: Blackwell Publishers.
[7] Cokeliss, Harley (1971). Crash! London: BBC. <www.youtube.com/watch?v=5cqn6zA1sMg&>
Image: Ray Brassier at Speculations (“The future is ___________”) EXPO1 MoMA 2013.
