Applied Ballardianism is a fictionalised account of my life as a former academic, travel writer and architecture critic. Throughout, the unnamed narrator, my avatar, struggles to complete a PhD on the author J.G. Ballard. In the end, he internalises Ballard’s dystopian fiction so much, he attempts to spark a suburban apocalypse in his hometown of Melbourne.
Official trailer: Applied Ballardianism: Memoir from a Parallel Universe
Applied Ballardianism is set in a series of indeterminate locations that are appended to their immediate surrounds, such as the exclusion zones of tsunami-ridden Japan, the mega freeways of Melbourne, the war ruins of the North Pacific. In these locations, the narrator enters a fugue state, engendered by the strange inbetweenness of these zones, in which he believes he has developed telepathic abilities, the power to summon UFOs and even the means to travel sideways in time.
Despite its science-fictional overlay, Applied Ballardianism is, in essence, my memoir, and so this talk, ‘A Secret History of Zones’, will attempt to explain my fatal attraction to zones as they appear in the book.
Part I
In 1991, I was a high school dropout, dissolute and drifting, pinballing between dead-end jobs. One day, I learned about Ballard’s most notorious novel Crash, and decided to read it. Quickly, Crash changed my life, reversing the negativity that engulfed me, channelling it into something new, radical and sensuous.
Crash is about a group of urban professionals bored with their jobs, their marriages and themselves. This damaged crew pledge allegiance to a man called Vaughan, who nurtures their darkest desires, exhorting them to descend upon car accidents and even cause and stage their own, modifying their bodies through trauma and pain, using their subsequent injuries and post-accident prostheses to extend their physicality into a proto-posthuman future.
Excerpt from Crash (1996), directed by David Cronenberg. Based on the novel by J.G. Ballard.
Crash takes place within a completely enclosed world: the motorway system orbiting London, as well as subsidiary locations like hospitals and airport car parks, zones that are in limbo, between destinations, both inside and outside the society they’re part of. These Ballardian zones, free from history and morality, seem to sanction the deviant behaviour in Crash, allowing the novel’s characters to interpret the world in a way that makes sense to their disordered psyches. It also made sense to my wayward mind, and I formed an instant, deep connection to the work, one I’m only beginning to now understand and articulate, after an odyssey of obsession spanning 25 years.
Part II
In 1994, despite my earlier failures, I somehow managed to scrape into university as a mature-age student, and eventually even commenced a PhD on Ballard. My thesis, building on my awakening with Crash, explored how almost all his novels and stories take place in zones where only the mad and reckless dare to tread: not just the motorways of Crash, but also the barbaric residential building in High-Rise, the heavily surveilled gated communities of Super Cannes and Cocaine Nights, the climate-ravaged world in The Drowned World. Somehow, these zones seem to have a therapeutic effect on the characters, forcing them into a confrontation with their own worst impulses, and a cathartic renewal. However, as I recount in Applied Ballardianism, the more I embraced these mirror worlds, the more I began to lose my mind, until I abandoned the PhD, defeated by the effort of trying to explain the Ballardian worldview, which somehow I’d extrapolated into a cosmic theory of the universe.
After another extended period of unemployment, I became a travel writer, but I soon went rogue, abandoning my assignments and furthering instead my zonal obsessions. In Japan, I spent all my time in the Tohoku region, recently hit by tsunamis and earthquakes. As I wrote in Applied Ballardianism, ‘There was nothing like the possibility inherent in a disaster zone, with its promise of rebooting society from the ruins, for luring someone as disconnected from reality as myself.’
Teaser trailer: Into Eternity (2010), directed by Michael Madsen.
On assignment in the North Pacific, I was preoccupied with tracking down the WWII memorials, markers and ruins, bunkers especially, that are festooned across the region. To me, these ruins symbolised how the memory of the conflict, which killed thousands of islanders during Japanese occupation and America retaliation, is kept alive at the deepest structural level so that the region can never find peace.
Architectural materiality and
cultural atemporality were the abiding themes in my bunker meditations: the
collapse of the past into a dystopian future as seen from the present—the
contemplation of ruins. The result: a suspended zone, an eternal present, where
trauma constantly
contaminates reality, an endless loop of circular time from which there is no
escape.
Part III
Soon after the North Pacific mission, I was asked to contribute to a very unusual travel book. It was designed to be a satirical guidebook to micronations, the world’s most unlikely nations. Micronations are formed when people declare patches of land as independent territories, sometimes forgotten and abandoned land, sometimes their own homes. Sometimes micronations are created as a joke, sometimes with serious political intent. Indeed, the urge to form micronations can be attributed to globalisation and the failure of political action to ignite the mass imagination. As Ballard once said, the ‘overriding power of the global economy threatens the autonomy of the nation state, while the ability of politicians to intervene as an equalising force has faded’.
When I was offered the job, I hadn’t read Ballard in years, or even thought much about him, but my academic training came flooding back, for what is ‘community’ in Ballard’s work if not an artificial environment sealed off from the world?
In 2007, I returned to academia to finish my PhD after an absence of ten years. Accordingly, the first academic paper I gave on my return was on Ballard and micronations at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, England, but my wanderlust was never far away. While on that trip, I somehow talked my way onto Sealand, the world’s most notorious micronation, just off the English coast, which hadn’t accepted visitors for years. Sealand is an old, rusting WWII gun platform in the North Sea: I slept overnight in one of the concrete pillars that support the platform. Abandoned by the UK after the war, and lying outside British maritime jurisdiction, the platform had been taken over in the 60s and declared the Principality of Sealand by a group of ex-pirate radio operators.
At the time, I was fired up by the secessionists in Ballard’s final novel, Kingdom Come, who actually take over a large shopping mall, seal it from the outside world, and declare it an independent ‘shopping republic’ as a comment on the saturation of consumerism in our lives. I hoped Sealanders would be full of similar revolutionary zeal, but I discovered they were more concerned with firing guns at the British Navy and violently protecting their turf at all costs than philosophising about the role of their zone of transition out in the sea.
Part IV
However, the more I considered the theme in Ballard’s work, the more I learned that when characters in Ballard proclaim acts of hard secession, as in Kingdom Come, they fall victim to the same forces that caused them to secede in the first place, that is, rampant territorialism and a fatal withdrawal from the world, resulting in death in some of his more overtly micronational stories. By contrast, the characters that survive tend to be the ones who actively merge with the leavings of late capitalism. Rather than divorcing from it, they seek out the already existing transitional zones of urban space, the hidden folds in the map, colonising them in the imaginative sense. In his novel Concrete Island, for example, an architect rolls his car on an elevated motorway, landing on a patch of wasteland beneath the road system. Injured and unable to move, hidden from the view of passing motorists (both inside and outside of society), he decides to stay there forever, even as his injuries heal.
In the 90s, the anthropologist Marc Augé published his theory of ‘non-place’ in order to classify the rise of the new, anonymous urban zones that lie on the edge of awareness as we pass through them: car parks, airport terminals, hospital waiting rooms, hotel lobbies, freeway underpasses. If that sounds familiar, it’s because it is, of course, rich Ballardian territory.
For Augé, our world is so saturated by fictions of every kind that it produces a conception of simultaneous time. The physical result is non-place, inorganic, transitional zones detached from history and culture, where individuals are linked by a superabundance of information and technology rather than community or historical awareness.
Today, we no longer have time for relationships or meaningful connections before we are required to devour the next moment, the next product, the next lifestyle, the next soundbite, the next belief system. Because we are so consumed by this hunger, we are enslaved to what Augé identifies as “solitary individuality, a communication so peculiar that it often puts individuals in contact only with another image” of themselves. Concrete Island seems to predict this scenario when the willingly marooned protagonist, haunted, or perhaps even energised, by the blurred zone in which he finds himself, announces, “I am the island”, and with this simple act, negates the type of fatal inwardness that Auge identifies.
Perhaps, then, the most radical
strategy of all is not be one of ‘becoming known’, as the wide-awake visibility
of social media, or even micronationalism, would have us believe, but of
refusal and withdrawal: embracing obscurity and banality by inhabiting the
greyed-out, blurred zones of hypercapitalism. The point would not be to
disengage completely (and risk entering a suicidal inwardness, as Ballard
repeatedly warns) but knowing when to stop and when to withdraw. When to resist
classification and when to exercise choice. When to re-form and when to re-emerge.
Part V
In the 2000s, Marion Shoard coined the term ‘edgelands’ to describe the interfacial interzone between urban and rural, a mix of rubbish tips, superstores, office parks, rough-hewn farmland, gas towers, industrial ruins, electricity pylons, wildlife and service stations. Throughout the Western world, edgelands form the same relationship to the built environment as the unconscious does to the human mind: as a repository of fear, desire and repression. In Melbourne, when trouble strikes on the edge, it is invariably described in terms more akin to the Wild West. New York City has its Meadowlands, a part-natural, part-industrial wilderness just five miles from the city centre, a typical in-between zone once described by the New York Times as a ‘reviled land of burning garbage dumps, of polluted canals, of smokestacked factories, and impenetrable reeds’.
However, Shoard uncovers the hidden dynamics at work in this ‘apparently unplanned, certainly uncelebrated and largely incomprehensible territory’. She maps a symbiotic relationship between the waste product, both physical and psychological, of the human world, and its co-dependency with an emergent version of the natural realm that defies all preconceived, ‘rational’ notions of sustainability and environmental care. Instead of condemning this rubbish-strewn landscape, she celebrates how the chaotic, neglected nature of the edgelands allows it to play host to emergent life that would previously have been impossible, such as hybrid flora that thrives in the mixed-use soil—recombinant industrial lifeforms that otherwise cannot occur in nature.
Discussing the edgelands of England, Shoard frames that terrain as ‘a vaguely menacing frontier land where the normal rules governing human behaviour cannot be relied upon’.
When I read those words, the pealing bells of truth began to sound: for me, Shoard’s evocation was both a warning and an invitation.
Part VI
In 2011, having finally graduated with my PhD on Ballard and interstitial urban space, I became editor of the magazine Architectural Review Asia Pacific. I visited Christchurch, New Zealand, to give a talk on the therapeutic power of ruins in dystopian literature and film. It was just after the big earthquake and the city had been hit hard, divided into colour-coded exclusion zones based on the extent of damage to buildings and infrastructure.
Christchurch’s entire Central Business District had been classified as a Red Zone, a no-go area. It had been evacuated and military personnel were installed around the perimeter. I was taken on a tour through the Red Zone. A toxic clean-up team had swept through, spray-painting warning messages on facades and windows. The smell from rotting food in markets, restaurants and food courts was horrendous. Books, laptops and half-full coffee cups sat on office desks, left by those fleeing the scene. The CTV building, where most people died, was a vacant lot, a ghost site.
As we walked around the Red Zone, I couldn’t help but compare the isolation to the last-people-on-Earth SF film, The Quiet Earth, but take your pick from any number of similar storylines: The Omega Man, The Road, 28 Days Later. If comparisons with war are inevitable, then so too are parallels with cinema’s post-apocalyptic imagination. Somehow, such visions are able to articulate what is ontologically unknowable: our isolation from ourselves.
During that tour, I thought again about the presence of ruins in Ballard’s work. There is a fascination with decay woven throughout his writing, materialising in the submerged London cityscapes of The Drowned World, the crumbling concrete jungle of High-Rise and the abandoned New York of his post-apocalypse novella ‘The Ultimate City’. Once, an interviewer asked him if ‘The Ultimate City’ signalled a certain relish for decay, but Ballard denied the charge, suggesting that instead it signifies potential. The central character, he explains, who recolonises New York almost single-handedly, is ‘trying to recapture something of the dynamism, aggression and freedom for the imagination to soar that was so lacking in the small rural town where he was brought up … The city is abandoned, and with it, suspended in time, is a whole set of formulae for expressing human energy, imagination, ambition. The clock has stopped, but it will be possible for the boy to start it up again.’
Ballard’s comments presage Western society’s compulsion towards
‘ruins lust’, the fetishisation of destroyed, once-grand symbols of permanence.
Ruins lust is intrinsic to the popular pastime of ‘dark tourism’: voluntarily
visiting ruined and abandoned places inscribed with trauma, such as Chernobyl
and Auschwitz, even Christchurch, where quake tourists were dubbed
‘rubbleneckers’. In any dissection of urban devastation, whether natural or
manmade, we must admit its appeal, for ruins lust highlights our deep desire to
stare into the sublime, to swim both within and against the chaos at the heart
of the post-traumatic city.
Part VII
In 2010, the architecture critic Will Wiles wrote about the “nested, CCTV-covered, drone-overflown soft zones” that complemented the paramilitary exclusion zone around the new US embassy in London.
“Although ID cards might not be here yet,’ Wiles said, ‘ID card culture is. We face the slow advance of soft-zone ambivalence, that creeping sense of being unwelcome on the street, a desire to look over one’s shoulder. Soft zones are easy to introduce and difficult to shift; they exist in the mind as much as in the city.”
Reading that, I remembered a line from Ballard’s novel Super-Cannes: ‘In a totally sane society,’ Ballard writes, ‘madness is the only freedom. Our latent psychopathology is the last nature reserve, a place of refuge for the endangered mind.’
In that light, perhaps the sovereignty of the imagination is the only valid ‘micronationalism’ in a world where everything has been mapped, commodified, zoned and surveilled. Perhaps such a movement has already emerged. In the early 2000s, a micronation, ‘State in Time’, was founded by the Slovenian art collective NSK. According to NSK, the State in Time ‘claims no territory, but rather confers the status of a state not to territory but to mind, whose borders are in a state of flux, in accordance with the movements and changes of its symbolic and physical collective body’.
That message is even more applicable today, with the widespread suspicion that the invasive machinery of hypercapitalism has planted cameras and microphones inside our heads, that we are so crowded and so composed of omnidirectional informational flows as to lose sight of the territoriality of inner space.
As for physical
micronations, like Sealand, without that third dimension of the imagination, they
seem destined to degenerate into a replication of pointless nationalism,
defeating the impulse that led them to be created in the first place.
Part VIII
In her essay, ‘Alien Rhythms’, the theorist Amy Ireland refers to ‘a persistent theme in contemporary science fiction—the “zone” trope, first innovated by the Strugatsky Brothers in their 1972 novel, Roadside Picnic”. Newer ‘invocations of the “zone trope” are found in M. John Harrison’s novel Nova Swing, Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach Trilogy and the Alex Garland film Annihilation.
For Ireland, the characters in these works enter these zones to search “for the very thing that breaks up their human rhythm, the source of their automatisms, and an indefinable dissolution synonymous with a loss of the thing that maintains this restriction — the self. Memory ceases to function; names evaporate in the zone. Those who enter it finish up by becoming something else, subject to invasion by exterior forces.”
This transmogrification powers Andrei Tarkovsky’s film Stalker, an adaptation of Roadside Picnic. Stalker is the most famous example of the zone trope, and the most effective evocation of urban edgelands in cinematic history. The film is set in a ruined landscape, a vague terrain of junk and abandoned industrial detritus on the outskirts of the city, referred to by all the characters as The Zone, where strange and mystical occurrences are commonplace.
Stalker features heavily in Applied Ballardianism, becoming a touchstone for the narrator after he becomes fixated with a comment in Tarkovsky’s diaries. Tarkovsky had recorded ‘something I thought of in connection with flying saucers, humanoids and the remains of unbelievably advanced technology found in some ancient ruins. They write about aliens, but I think that in these phenomena we are in fact confronting ourselves; that is our future, our descendants who are actually travelling in time.’
In the Zone of Stalker, the laws of human engagement cease to apply. Gravity can be bent and levitation can occur, and for much of the film it is implied that this is because the uncanny landscape has been irradiated after an alien landing. Eventually, the viewer begins to suspect that the Zone is actually a projection of the damaged psyches of the people wandering among it, forcing them into a confrontation with their own worst impulses—taking up the theme from Tarkovskys diary entry, what was initially thought to be an alien intelligence originates instead from within the dark depths of the human psyche. In turn, that dynamic comments on the torment my narrator goes through, with his UFO obsession and overpowering need to merge with zones. As my narrator says: “As I worked my way through these connections, I knew that Tarkovsky’s hunch was correct. Obsessed by anomalies in the sky and ruins on the ground, whenever I looked skywards or stalked the urban landscape, what I was searching for were reflections of myself.”
Recently, in an interview to promote Applied Ballardianism, I was asked about the humour in my book, and I said this: ‘I guess the humour comes from how ridiculous I found myself spouting all that theoretical nonsense as an academic. But it’s also outsider humour. There’s a strong theme in the book of feeling uncomfortable in one’s own skin and it manifests in all kinds of ways: being on the fringes of academia, being unsure of one’s sexuality and masculinity, being Australian and on the edge of the world—geographically and culturally. It’s why the narrator consistently feels as though he’s floating outside of his body.’
This year, I have exiled myself again. After the publication of Applied Ballardianism, I announced that I was retiring from Ballard Studies. I’d said all I could about his work. My Twitter handle used to be @ballardian, the alias that made my reputation, now it is simply @simon_sellars. I am post-Ballardian.
Currently I am working on a new novel, in which a global augmented reality network has replaced the internet. The dominant mode of cultural production are Dream Zones, artificial realities overlaid onto physical locations and that immerse users inside four-dimensional worlds. Users can create new versions of themselves, new identities, new sexualities, new universes. However, these artificial realities become haunted by what may be digital ghosts created from data pollution, code junk, a lack of protocols and regulations governing the Vexworld. There are even whispers that the chaos has been caused by subliminal infiltration of microscopic alien spores dumped from a strange object entering the solar system. No one knows for sure because consensus reality has ceased to exist.
Reading my work in progress now, it strikes me that what I’m writing about is precisely the type of non-human rhythm that Amy Ireland describes, an alien infestation that has stalked me all my adult life. Even as I attempt to shed the past and write something new, I can’t help but reinhabit the alien rhythms of the edgelands, of non-place.
In preparing this talk, I realised how much my life has been defined by undecidability and my subconscious efforts to resist categorisation. I’ve changed professions so many times that I never know what to say when people ask what I do for a living, sabotaging any chance at career progression. When I find physical manifestations of that condition in the urban landscape, even in the digital universe—that sensation of inhabiting the spaces between, of existing in null space—I feel untouchable, charged with cosmic energy.
For in the zones, I am reborn.