Author: sshaviro

“The attack on the World Trade Center in 2001 was a brave attempt to free America from the 20th Century.” In his new novel Millennium People (available in the UK only), J. G. Ballard continues his provocative exploration of the pathologies of late capitalism. Ballard has been publishing fiction for over forty years, and in all this time he has remained consistent in his vision of the violence and willful perversity that underly normative consumer culture. (Violence and psychopathology are not really transgressive in Ballard’s fiction; they always end up reinforcing the very order whose laws they seem to contest). There’s scarcely any writer alive who seems so stuck inside his own head, so trapped in his own peculiar and utterly private obsessions as Ballard is; yet there’s also scarcely any writer alive whose vision resonates so powerfully with the larger social and economic forces that are shaping the planet today. This is the mysterious key to Ballard’s greatness as a writer (and, I would add, as a social theorist). All his books are in certain ways precisely the same: they all feature the same clinical prose, the same detached fascination with destruction, the same focus on creepy charismatic figures. Yet Ballard’s writing has also changed radically in certain ways, as the society around him has changed; his last two novels before this one, Cocaine Nights and Super-Cannes were among his best ever, as he explored the sacrificial logic of the 1990s economic boom (which is something very different from the visions of entropy and detritus that dominated many of Ballard’s earlier books).
Millennium People veers off in another direction, yet again, as it tells the story of two failed “revolutions.” The first one is a revolt of the normally orderly and obedient British middle class, “a small revolution… so modest and well behaved that almost no one had noticed,” as we are told on the book’s first page. The other is a more sinister rebellion, indulging in meaningless violence for its own sake, a violence that its (equally middle-class) proponents see as redemptive precisely to the extent that it has no meanings or motivations, and accomplishes nothing. “Violence… should always be gratuitous, and no serious revolution should ever achieve its aims.” A complex irony is at work here. The novel’s professional-class rebels see themselves as the “new proletariat,” exploited because their substantial disposable income is eaten away in condo fees and bills for their children’s private schools. They rebel against consumer society, by trashing their own cars and houses, and vandalizing video stores and art galleries. But of course these people cannot really give up their Range Rovers and cappuccinos, so the rebellion fizzles out and bourgeois propriety is restored. Meanwhile, under cover of this mild disorder, a smaller, more serious group of nihilists is bombing airport lounges and murdering random minor celebrities. They seem to take seriously Andre Breton’s dictum that the ultimate surrealist act is to shoot a revolver into a crowd (Breton himself, of course, did not take his own dictum seriously; for all his radical rhetoric, he never fired a gun into a crowd, and in fact is the last person one could ever imagine doing so). But this second rebellion also ends up a failure, though it partly seduces the novel’s stolid narrator. Meaninglessness and surrealist nonsense fail to prove themselves redemptive, and instead are all too easily reabsorbed, like everything else, within the fabric of bourgeois life. Ballard himself seems to wistfully admire the idea of nihilistic violence and directionless rebellion, even as he slyly suggests that such romantic revolt is itself part of what seduces us into accepting consumer society with its relentless fetishes of status and comfort.

John Horgan is my favorite science writer. His books The End of Science and The Undiscovered Mind were both valuable for their lucid explanations, and their hard-headed skepticism and debunking of hype. The former book cast doubt upon scientific claims to be on the verge of discovering “a theory of everything”: the latter suggested that current research programs like evolutionary psychology, behavioral genetics, and artificial intelligence were far from probing adequately the mysteries of the mind, In his latest latest book, Rational Mysticism, Horgan turns his attention to “the border between science and spirituality.” Specifically, he looks into explorations of mysticism made by a variety of researchers, from religious scholars to neuroscientists to psychologists to self-experimenters (a category that overlaps with the others). The emphasis is mostly on mystical states of consciousness: their physiology, their relation to other forms of experience, and the kinds of (extra-scientific) truths they may convey. This also involves detours into (briefly) parapsychology and (more extensively) psychedelic drugs. Any discussion of spirituality and mysticism quickly turns into a morass, but Horgan is very careful in avoiding both mystical dismissals of scientific rationality, and reductivistic scientific dismissals of spiritual experience as rubbish. He is rightly skeptical of New Age claims to transcendent truth; but this is in pretty much the same way that he is skeptical, in his previous books, of scientific theories that make extreme claims about the nature of being, life, and the mind on the basis of very slender empirical evidence. Horgan (again, rightly, to my mind) finds much to admire in such figures as Susan Blackmore (who combines a Buddhist perspective with a refusal to be taken in by vapid claims for parapsychology and the like) and the late Terence McKenna (of whom Horgan gives an affectionate portrait, bringing out the humor and irony that underlay McKenna’s often extravagant theories). The book’s conclusion, with which I can only agree, is that neither mysticism nor science can explain (or explain away) the mysteriousness and sheer weirdness (as McKenna liked to insist) of being; but they can both lead us to appreciate these qualities more. Personally, I found the parts of the book where Horgan deals with psychedelic drugs the most interesting, because of my own psychedelic experiences when I was younger. On the other hand, I seem to be utterly devoid of any craving for a larger truth, or for a consolation for the pains of existence, that most often drives the mystical quest, and that Horgan admits to feeling himself. The only form of “spirituality” discussed in the book that has any emotional appeal for me is (again) McKenna’s quest, not for God or nirvana or some sort of ultimate enlightenment, but for novelty. (The question of “how is newness possible?”, which McKenna addressed in his own wacky way, is of course the same question that animates the philosophies of Bergson, Whitehead, and Deleuze).

Shelley Jackson has announced a “mortal work of art”: a text written by her, to be tattooed on peoples’ bodies, one word per person. The work will not be published in any other form, and “the full text will be known only to participants, who may, but need not choose to establish communication with one another.” (Via Die, Puny Humans). The participants ” are not understood as carriers or agents of the texts they bear, but as its embodiments.” Consequently, the work will not be immortal, but will perish as the people whose bodies bear it pass away.
I’ve long admired Jackson’s prose, both her hypertext works (like Patchwork Girl and My Body) and her printed volume of short stories, The Melancholy of Anatomy.
But this new project is so beautiful it takes my breath away.