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The Rules of Autogeddon

Sex Death and Law in J G Ballard’s Crash

It was reported that the manuscript of Crash was returned to the publisher with a note reading ‘The author is beyond psychiatric help’. Ballard took the lay diagnosis as proof of complete artistic success. Crash conflates the Freudian tropes of libido and thanatos, overlaying these onto the twentieth century erotic icon, the car. Beyond mere incompetent adolescent copulatory fumblings in the back seat of the parental sedan or the clichéd phallic locomotor of the mid-life Ferrari, Ballard engages the full potentialities of the automobile as the locus and sine qua non of a perverse, though functional erotic. ‘Autoeroticism’ is transformed into automotive, traumatic or surgical paraphilia, driving Helmut Newton’s insipid photo-essays of BDSM and orthopædics into an entirely new dimension, dancing precisely where (but more crucially, because) the ‘body is bruised to pleasure soul’.

The serendipity of quotidian accidental collisions is supplanted, in pursuit of the fetishised object, by contrived (though not simulated) recreations of iconographic celebrity deaths. Penetration remains as a guiding trope of sexuality, but it is confounded by a perversity of focus. Such an obsessive pursuit of this autoerotic-as- reality necessitates the rejection of the law of human sexual regulation, requiring the re-interpretation of what constitutes sex itself by looking beyond or through conventional sexuality into Ballard’s paraphiliac and nightmarish consensual Other. This Other allows for (if not demands) the tangled wreckage of a sportscar to function as a transformative sexual agent, creating, of woman, a being of ‘free and perverse sexuality, releasing within its dying chromium and leaking engine-parts, all the deviant possibilities of her sex’.1

The hand brake | Penetrates your thigh Quick - Let's make love | Before you die The Normal: ‘Warm Leatherette’

Introduction

J G Ballard’s novel, Crash,2 ‘perfects’ – an odd term, I know – a hypothesis whose ætiology lies scattered throughout a much earlier novel, The Atrocity Exhibition.3 Chapter 12 of that work, itself entitled ‘Crash!’, provided a concentrated articulation of one of the underlying tropes of

The Atrocity Exhibition and the later Crash in the form of the ‘latent sexual content of the

1 Ballard (1993), p 79 2 Ballard (1993). 3 Ballard (1972). 2 automobile crash’,4 citing (fictional) studies which purported to assess the sexual appeal of celebrities who had died in what became notorious fatal car accidents – James Dean, Jayne

Mansfield and Albert Camus among them – or the indicia of arousal (accelerated pulse and respiration) precipitated in an unlikely (and certainly skewed) cross section of the public when exposed to film sequences of car crash victims.5 Other studies claimed to identify an ‘upsurge in sexual activity’ in the relatives of victims, with an extreme 2% of cases reporting

‘spontaneous orgasms … during a simulated run along the crash route’,6 and a ‘conspicuous improvement in both marital and extra-marital relationships, combined with a more tolerant attitude towards perverse behaviour’7 demonstrated by spectators at fatal automobile accidents.

The fascination with car accidents and their aftermath is explored further by citing the imagined ‘optimum wound profile’ imagined by a participants in the research programme, with distinctions drawn between psychotics (facial and neck wounds);8 filling station personnel

(abdominal wounds); and suburban housewives, who demonstrated a ‘marked pre-occupation with severe genital wounds of an obscene character’.9 Ballard10 invokes a Freudian explanation for the ‘poly-perverse obsessions’11 revealed in the research, highlighting the distinction between the ‘manifest and the latent content of the inner world of the psyche’.12 Ballard’s term

‘poly-perverse’ echoes Freud’s ‘polymorphous perversity’, the description of pre-socialised unfocussed sexual drives observable in the development of infantile sexuality:

It is instructive to know that under the influence of seduction the child may become polymorphous-perverse and may be misled into all sorts of transgressions. This goes to show that it carries along the adaptation for them in its disposition. The

4 Ballard (1972), p121. 5 The subject panels were “(a) suburban housewives”; (b) terminal paretics, and (c) filling station personnel” – Ballard (1972), p121 6 Ballard (1972), p121. 7 Ballard (1972), p122. 8 There is no explanation for the slippage between the category of terminal paretics at page 121 into psychotics at p123, while the remaining categories remain constant. 9 Ballard (1972), p123. 10 Since both the author and the protagonist of Crash share the same name, it is necessary to distinguish Ballard-as-author (hereafter Ballard) from Ballard-as-character (hereafter James Ballard). 11 Ballard (1972), p123. 12 Ballard (1972), p123-124. - cf Freud (1920) “II, The Infantile Sexuality” (The Masturbatic Sexual Manifestations: Polymorphous Perverse Disposition), p52. 3

formation of such perversions meets but slight resistance because the psychic dams against sexual transgressions, such as shame, loathing and morality – which depend on the age of the child – are not yet erected or are only in the process of formation.13

Yet far from the ‘transgressions’ identified by Freud as the result of being misled, Ballard’s poly-perverse obsessions, and their manifestation in action, are celebrated, rather than condemned, and the ‘psychic dams’, characterised by Freud as offering resistance to the perversity of such obsessions as the child matures, appear either to have failed to develop, or have been purposely discarded or rejected, by the central characters of Crash.14 James Ballard,

Gabrielle, Dr Helen Remington and, most notoriously (and perversely), Vaughan are, to varying degrees, devoid of the inhibiting impulses and the subjugation of impulse to the control of intrapsychic restraint or the co-ercive force of law which, in a more conventional universe, maturity represents.

Target? – The End of Trajectory

To adapt a method utilised by Malins in ‘Machinic Assemblages’,15 consider the following

(modified) observation from Deleuze:16 ‘As an assemblage, a [human] has only itself, in connection with other assemblages and in relation to other bodies without organs’. The

‘meaning’ of Ballard’s characters proceeds from their exploratory machinic assemblage as they seek satisfaction either with machine, either directly, or through the mediation of other like- minded disciples of the Messianic Vaughan, constructing in the mediated stages of their transition/transformation, a transhuman menage-e-trois. Though their assemblages, and the

13 Freud (1920), p52. 14 The maintenance of poly-perversity in the absence of “appropriate” development (as a product of modern Western life) is alluded to in Lingis (2003), p169: ‘Brought up in a … high rise apartment where the parents stay home weeknights watching action movies on television … and go for rides weekends through a landscape of streets, boulevards, underpasses and highways, seeing only other cars outside the window, the baby would reach sexual maturity with the feelings of Ballard and Vaughan in J G Ballard’s Crash’. 15 Malins (2004), “Machinic Assemblages” p84. Malins’s own exploration of drug use proceeds from his substitution of the Deleuzian original “book” with “drug user”. Indeed, the remapping of Delueze’s “book” to Malins’s “drug user” to Ballard’s “human” is not entrirely remote – nsofar as Ballard’s characters exhibit many f the classic indicia of addiction and the addicted personality. 16 Deleuze (1988), p4 4 increasingly dominant connection with machine, they redraft their selves within a fresh organisation of self and socius in which their conformity to norms of (Western bourgeois) human sexual life diminishes in favour of a freshly constructed and idiosyncratic norm of the machinic self.

Chapter 12 of The Atrocity Exhibition concludes the cited research with a statement that might serve to encapsulate the perverse extrapolations of the later novel, Crash:

It is clear that the car crash is seen as a fertilizing rather than a destructive experience, a liberation of sexual and machine libido, mediating the sexuality of those who have died with an erotic intensity impossible in any other form.17

Crash conflates the Freudian tropes of libido and thanatos, cathexis and anti-cathexis, overlaying these onto the twentieth century erotic icon, the automobile, literalising the cosy metaphor of Western culture’s ‘love affair with the car’ while simultaneously denuding it of passion, creating a techno-image of Eliot’s (or Prufrock’s) unromantic ‘restless nights in one- night cheap hotels’. In Crash, James Ballard is involved in a collision while driving home from a meeting with his secretary (with whom he has been having an affair). A tyre on his car blows out, and the car veers onto the wrong side of the road. He avoids colliding with the first two on- coming cars, but strikes the third head on. The driver is killed, ‘propelled through his windshield like a mattress from a circus cannon’,18 dying on the bonnet of James Ballard’s car, his blood spraying ‘through the fractured windscreen and across [James Ballard’s] face and chest’.19

The driver’s wife, Dr Helen Remington, is saved by her seat belt, subsequently forming a sexual relationship with James Ballard within which they, together with a small coterie of crash- aficionados who orbit the charismatic ‘hoodlum scientist’, Vaughan,20 explore the limits of the positive and liberating potentialities of the car crash postulated in The Atrocity Exhibition,

17 Ballard (1972), p125. 18 Ballard (1993), p20. 19 Ballard (1993), p20. 20 Ballard (1993), p20. 5

literalising the libidinal possibilities of an auto-mechanical erotic. Indeed, the trajectory of the novel is one which might be described (if perhaps ironically) by Freud’s own commentary on

Part IV of ‘Beyond the Pleasure Principle’:

What follows is speculation, often far-fetched speculation, which the reader will consider or dismiss according to his individual predilection. It is further an attempt to follow out an idea consistently, out of curiosity to see where it will lead.21

The irony is compounded, in the case of Crash, by Freud’s constant use of the steam-engine as the principal analogy for illustrating such psychological concepts as libido, cathexis and anti- cathexis.

The modernist-liberal trajectory towards ultimate knowledge and social perfection, manifested in Vaughan’s obsessive categorisation-taxonomisation of injuries inflicted in motor vehicle crashes, is transfigured and metaphorised by Ballard into the purely ballistic arc of

Vaughan’s final (and, at least partially, successful) attempt to be united in death with Elizabeth

Taylor, leaving in its wake a trail of distorted and tangled metal and flesh, itself eroticised by a

Freudian conflation of sex and death, libido and thanatos. The entire trajectory of Vaughan and his fellow-travellers provides a ‘perverse logic of blood-soaked instrument panels, seat-belts smeared with excrement, sun-visors lined with brain tissue,’22 pushing the metaphor as far as logic permits and beyond.

The marriage of technology, death and desire is not, of course, an entirely new metaphor.

Zola, in La Bête Humaine (described by Seltzer as a ‘mapping of the psychotopography of machine culture’23 wrote of Flore that she ‘loved accidents: any mention of an animal run over, a man cut to pieces by a train, was bound to make her rush to the spot.’24 Similarly, some 40

21 Freud (1961), p18. 22 Ballard (1993), p 14-15. 23 Seltzer (1998), p31 24 Zola (1890). The passage in its original French (“Elle avait la curiosité des accidents: dès qu'on annonçait une bête broyée, un homme coupé par un train, on était sûr de la faire accourir” – Ch II, http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/5154/pg5154.html) is perhaps less strong (la curiosité des accidents) than the conventional English translation (she ,loved accidents), cited for example by Seltzer (1997), p 3 – see also Creed (1998), p176. 6 years later, Bunuel had, in Un Chien Andalou shown a a man sexually aroused when a young woman is run over by a car. Both, however, describe a voyeuristic engagement with the car or train crash, recording a desire to engage as observer, rather than participant.

Incomprehensible though the liberating potential envisaged might be, the conflicted self imagined by Freud beyond (or perhaps outside) the pleasure principle25 resolves for Vaughan

(and increasingly for his disciples, James Ballard, Gabrielle and Dr Helen Remington among them) in favour of thanatos, not libido, in a resolution at odds with Freud’s own observations that ‘if such a dominance [of the pleasure principle] existed, the immense majority of our mental processes would have to be accompanied by pleasure or to lead to pleasure, whereas universal experience completely contradicts any such conclusion.’26

Freud, for example, posits the self-preservation instinct of the ego as a primary inhibitor of the pleasure principle’s functioning in the ‘external world’, in which its pre-eminence would be

‘inefficient and even highly dangerous’.27 For James Ballard and friends, Freud’s ‘long indirect road to pleasure’,28 characterised by deferred gratification and tolerance of unpleasure in pursuit of a longer-term goal, is abandoned by an increasingly obsessive (and classically ‘immature’) engagement with the means of achieving their ends, to which the ordinary processes of life in the external world, including compliance with law, become subservient. The pursuit of pleasure

– unrestrained hedonism – is for Freud not the pre-eminent function of the psyche, and the utter dominance which fetish-eroticism exerts over Vaughan’s acolytes’ lives and actions represents a dysfunctional adaptation to life in the external world (or at least an underlying shift in the categorisations of life, the living and the technological artefact which re-imagines ‘the functions, purposes and significance’ of the machine’)29 The danger identified by Freud is thus

25 See passim Freud (1961) – Freud acknowledges (p1) the unnamed philosophical precursors which have informed the psychoanalytic concept of the pleasure principle (chief among them, perhaps, Jeremy Bentham’s taxonomy of pleasure and pain in An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation (1789). 26 Freud (1961), p 3. 27 Freud (1961), p 4. 28 Freud (1961), p 4. 29 See, for example, Parikka & Ruskin (2008). 7

transformed into an absolute requirement of pleasure, for it is the danger which enlivens the crash-erotic. So for Vaughan’s coterie, the voice of psychoanalysis (which might murmur

‘Stop, find yourself again’)30 yields to the adventure of the antiphonal ‘Let’s go further still … we haven’t sufficiently dismantled our self’.31 Crash thus prefigures themes of cyberpunk – a literary genre most ‘centrally concerned with the rhetorical production of a complex imbrication between the human subject and the electronically defined realities of the Dataist Era’, negotiating ‘a complex and delicate trajectory between the forces of instrumental reason and the abandon of a sacrificial excess.’32

Crash’s landscape echoes the post-human, although the echo is perhaps imperfect.

Posthumanism (as diagnosed by N Katherine Hayles):33

thinks of the body as the original prosthesis we all learn to manipulate, so that

extending or replacing the body parts with other prostheses becomes a continuation of

a process that began before we were born.

Yet, the post human condition is generated through ‘smooth and unbroken articulation with intelligent machines’.34 Vaughan’s metaphysical end-product of unity in sex and death with Elizabeth Taylor (or his automotive impact-flirtations with James Ballard’s wife

Catherine) may resonate in the perverse site of gratification as an unquenched

30 Bukatman (1991), p (3pp from end) 31 Bukatman (1991), p (p 14 A4) 32 Bukatman ((1991), (6th page A4) my emphasis – see also the discussion of Haraway’s writing as a “striking interplay of of continuities and discontinuities, such that her cyborg myth is about “transgressed boundaries, potent fusions and dangerous possibilities which progressive people might explore as one part of a needed political work” (Haraway (1985), p71) 33 Hayles (1999), pp 2-3. 34 Lenoir (2002), p203: cf Hayles (1999), p2-3 – “… the posthuman view configures human being so that it can be seamlessly articulated with intelligent machines”. Posthumanity, in this context is primarily concerned with the merging of human and machinic intelligence. While it may comprehend the possibility of a break from the Cartesian mind-body split, with the mind dominating as an informational process, and embody a less localised paradigm of human existence with emotion (and thus presumably human emotional drives) as part of a related whole, it nonetheless focuses on such ideas as AI. See Lenoir (2002), pp 205ff. But, like J G Ballard’s “cautionary tale”, posthumanism argues that “the time for intervention is now” (cf Lenoir (2002), p217), and the fear of eschaton informs boith J G Ballard’s mapping of the machinic nightmare as much as posthumanism’s concern for the cyborg. 8

‘efflorescence of infantile sexual life’,35 not doomed to extinction because of an incompatibility with reality, but flowering within a perverse reality commandeered to that precise purpose. But there is no intelligence (in the sense used by Lenoir) at the heart of any of the unifications of human and machine described in Crash. The technology that is embraced, both literally and figuratively, is not the technology of the computer chip or AI, but the brute material facets, angles and crumplings of the machine body. The technology is mute, for were it to speak, it would destroy the misogynist illusion of the inflatable doll, whose mouth exists solely for other purposes.

Vaughan’s death resonates as a Bataillean ‘bloody death’, comparable ‘in its irresistible hideous nature, to the blinding flashes of lightning that transform the most withering storm into transports of joy’.36 The Crash body is quintessentially not the culturally constructed body determined by systems of discourse such as those of medical, legal, political and economic regulation for which the body is an object to be organised or controlled.37 In the human- machine couplings, a moment of transition is initiated akin to the high of drug use – ‘a little rush of infinity’ which is an “ecstatic standing outside of oneself”.38 Thus, the perseverance of polymorphous perversity into an adult world expands beyond the limited (and organic) possibilities of infantile sexual exploration,39 and defies the normal development of existence within a functional community of discourse, specifically (for present purposes) refusing to be subject to the restraints imposed by either internal or external regulation. The drive to the machinic assemblage (like the addiction to drugs) occludes the presence or effect of law.

Rejecting moralisation, (psychological) normalisation or effective social co-ercion, the bodies of

Crash are, within the novel’s landscape at least, ‘not captured or assimilated into’40 a legal discourse, remaining forever Other

35 Freud(1961), p 14. 36 Bataille (1985), p69. 37 See Lenoir (2002), pp 211ff. 38 Klein (1993), p16, cited in Malins (2004), p89 39 See Freud (1920), p52. 40 See Lenoir (2002), pp 211ff 9

It was reported that the manuscript of Crash was returned to the publisher with a note attached, reading ‘[t]he author is beyond psychiatric help’.41 One wonders how the same reviewer might have responded to the manuscript of Swift’s Modest Proposal42 or what he or she might have added to the urbanely mythical ‘Lose the gerbil, Brett’ of Brett Easton Ellis’s

American Psycho fame. But Ballard apparently took the lay diagnosis as proof of complete artistic success. If, however, a conventional erotic fails to elucidate the mechano-sexual dynamics of Crash, what explanation – beyond mere self-indulgent fantasy or gratuitous misogynist pornography – is there for the intricate calculations and geometries of Crash’s central trope of death-embracing sexuality? Defying conventional analyses of sex and death in

Crash, Baudrillard, for example, suggests that death in Crash is ‘a natural implication in this limitless exploration of the possible forms of violence to the body’:43 a logical space, in effect, in which the body becomes the object for ‘physical and technical experiments in order to discover its limitations’.44 Such dedication to the experimentation and exploration probing the boundaries of anatomical possibility is echoed in James Ballard’s dream of:

other accidents that might enlarge this repertory of orifices, relating them to more elements of the automobile's engineering, to the ever-more complex technologies of the future.45

But Baudrillard takes this beyond any critical accusation of mere fetishism, qualifying the rôle of pain, disfigurement and death within this limitless exploration as ‘never (as in sadism or masochism) what the violence purposely and perversely aims at.’46 By denying sex/death the comfortable diagnostic cloak of sado-masochism, Baudrillard allows for Crash’s seemingly brutal mutilation of man/woman/machine to be stripped of values conventionally imported through such analyses, allowing it ‘no psychology, no ambivalence or desire, no libido or death-

41 The Times, Obituary, J G Ballard, 20 April 2009 (online) at http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/obituaries/article6129021.ece. 42 see Hultkrans (1997). 43 Baudrillard (1991), “2: Ballard’s Crash”, para 4 - cited in Ruddick (1992) – cf Stelarc, “the poetic challenge of technology that humanity finds revelation through the utilization of form”; Fernandes, (2002). 44 Atzori et al (1995). 45 Ballard (XXXX), p (Ch 19) 46 Baudrillard (1991), ‘2: Ballard’s Crash’, para 4. 10 drive’.47 The world of Crash is seemingly anarchic (though not strictly nihilistic) and amoral: as such, it is not susceptible, for Baudrillard, to conventional analyses of either the conventionally perceived world or the (merely) fictional:

In Crash, there is neither fiction nor reality—a kind of hyper-reality has abolished both. Even critical regression is no longer possible. This mutating and commutating world of simulation and death, this violently sexualized world totally lacking in desire, full of violent and violated bodies but curiously neutered, this chromatic and intensely metallic world empty of the sensorial, a world of hyper-technology without finality—is it good or bad? We can’t say. It is simply fascinating, without this fascination implying any kind of value judgment whatsoever. And this is the miracle of Crash. The moral gaze—the critical judgmentalism that is still a part of the old world’s functionality— cannot touch it. Crash is hypercritical, in the sense of being beyond the critical.48

That, of course, is not to say that Crash is not susceptible to various forms of critical analysis: indeed, its flagrant sexism exposes it to a ruthless feminist critique, exemplified by

Creed’s ‘The Crash Debate: Anal wounds, metallic kisses’: ‘It is disturbing to note that in all of the sex scenes the woman offers herself to be penetrated: she bears the ‘wound’ that is fucked, and she is represented as the prosthetic other’ … or the ‘conduit for male desire’.49 The transformations and re-imaginings of sexuality in this Ballardian frame are wholly asymmetric.

J G Ballard’s woman are the stuff (almost literally) of misogynist fantasy. Woman’s

[imagined?] desire might ‘merge with those of the man/car’ but the reciprocal opposition – of man subjugated to female desire – is wholly absent.50 In the same vein, Baudrillard’s decriticalisation of Crash is decried as ‘obscene’ by Sobchack as mere ‘romanticism and fantasies of techno-sexual transcendence’ which ignore lived reality.

Similarly, the religious iconography of Crash is inescapable: Vaughan’s rhizomatic significance lies as a psychotic, scarred and stigmatised Christ, bearing (and baring) the multiple

47 Baudrillard (1991), ‘2: Ballard’s Crash’, para 4. 48 Baudrillard (1991), ‘2: Ballard’s Crash’, para 13 – emphasis added. 49 Creed (1998), p 177 50 Creed, 1998, p178. 11

scars of his scourging and crucifixion.51 ‘Vaughan calls his disciples to the path of sacrifice in the pursuit of redemption: the loosening of ‘his leather jacket, exposing the re-opened wounds that marked his chest and abdomen’ recalls Christ’s proffering of the scars on his hands and side as proof of his crucifixion and resurrection to Thomas. Dr Helen Remington, ‘[h]er handsome face, topped by a broad, intelligent forehead’ is characterised by ‘the blank and unresponsive look of a madonna in an early Renaissance icon, unwilling to accept the miracle, or nightmare, sprung from her loins’,52 or ‘seated like a demented madonna between the doors of the second ambulance.’53

But neither is the ‘moral flatness’ attributed to the Ballardian landscape of Crash by

Baudrillard necessarily to be seen as authorial approval, any more than one might attribute the moral sensibilities of the A Modest Proposal to Swift. Indeed, Ballard himself compares the

“deadpan” approach of Crash to the nightmarish implications of a hypertechnological society to

Swift’s Modest Proposal, insofar as, like the Swiftian tradition of “cautionary tales”, its method is to ‘embrace the very subject of [the author’s] anger’.54 Authorial intrusion in the form of overt moral signals would clash irreconcilably with the psychic landscape of the novel’s protagonists.

Thus, a tension is generated through Baudrillard’s inversion of the pejorative (and psychoanalytic) vision of a ‘lost unity of subject’ into a positive symbolic vision ‘without referentiality and without limits’.55 In such a vision, it would perhaps be unsurprising that normative points of reference, including the normative-coercive force of law, fail to make any overt appearance. Yet Ballard’s own view was that Crash was, like other, earlier works, a

‘cataclysmic’ novel,56 embodying not a future, envisioned or imagined, disaster, but documenting a present scuffle at the edge of the final battle, carrying with it a prophetic warning of the Apocalypse-to-come:

51 Ballard (1993), p “ … what marked him [Vaughan] out was the scar tissue around his forehead and mouth, residues of some terrifying act of violence”, Ballard, p 37. 52 Ballard (1993), p (Ch 2,par 4) 53 Ballard (1993), p (Ch 2,par 4) 54 Hultkrans (1997 55 Baudrillard (1991), ‘2: Ballard’s Crash’, para 2. 56 Ballard (1975), p 49. 12

… a pandemic cataclysm institutionalised in all industrialised societies that kills

hundreds of thousands of people each year and injures millions. Do we see, in

the car crash, the portent of a nightmare marriage between sex and technology.57

Crash for Ballard was a ‘cautionary’ tale, a ‘warning against the brutal, erotic and overlit realm that beckons more and more persuasively to us from the margins of the technological landscape’.58 As such, the nature of the novel-so-described is not lost in translation into the legal imaginary, even if the presence of law is, more often than not, elided or (at best) emasculated and rendered wholly ineffectual. In a theme to which I shall return, then, there are no rules of engagement on the field of Armageddon.

The ‘true significance of the automobile crash’59

Beyond mere incompetent adolescent copulatory fumblings in the back seat of the parental sedan or the clichéd phallic locomotor of the mid-life Ferrari, however, Ballard engages the full fatal potentialities of the automobile as both the locus and sine qua non of a perverse, though nonetheless apparently functional (albeit male) erotic – ‘auto-eroticism’ transformed into automotive, traumatic or surgical paraphilia, transfiguring the car crash as ‘a fertilizing rather than a destructive experience, a liberation of sexual and machine libido’,60 giving concrete form to the embrace of technology, as, for example, imagined by Stelarc:

Technology is what defines being human. It's not an antagonistic alien sort of object, it's part of our human nature. It constructs our human nature. We shouldn't have a Frankensteinian fear of incorporating technology into the body, and we shouldn't consider our relationship to technology in a Faustian

57 Ballard (1975), p 49. 58 Ballard, Introduction to the French edition of Crash (1974), Ballard (1993), pp5-9. Ballard elsewhere, however, disavowed this cautionary aspect of the novel, insisting that Crash was “what it appears to be. It is a psychopathic hymn” – Smith, “The Work of Emotion: Ballard and the Death of Affect”, http://www.jgballard.ca/criticism/death_of_affect3.html, n 14 (accessed 18 Oct 2010), citing Iain Sinclair (1999), Crash BFI, p 188. 59 Ballard (1993), p 13 60 Ballard (1972), p125. 13

way - that we're somehow selling our soul because we're using these forbidden energies. My attitude is that technology is, and always has been, an appendage of the body.61

Yet Stelarc’s vision is, however, essentially positive. While the body is ‘obsolete and

‘biologically inadequate’,62 its obsolescence and inadequacies are redeemable by the possibilities of a productive evolution:

the body must overcome centuries of prejudices and begin to be considered as an extendible evolutionary structure enhanced with the most disparate technologies, which are more precise, accurate and powerful: ‘the body lacks of modular design’. Technology is what defines the meaning of being human, it's part of being human.’ 63

A landscape defined in such terms – whether within the category-denying frame of reference of

Baudrillard’s hypercriticality or Ballard’s own inversion of the conventional dynamics of crash, sex and ultimately death – is inimical to law’s primary method of category-affirming legal tests.

For Crash is a Bildungsroman in which James Ballard transforms to a new erotic, manifested from the first page of Chapter 1, where Ballard records his early experience of the

‘hoodlum scientist’ 64 Vaughan’s obsessive preoccupation with the marriage of the human and the technological: a union which ultimately obliterates the identity of these categories, as flesh and twisted steel fuse into a single undifferentiated bio-metallic protoplasm, in which the details of a female body are matched with ‘the photographs of grotesque wounds in a textbook of plastic surgery’;65 where the aspiring whores who populate the concourses of London Heathrow are, for Vaughan, the ‘first cousins of the patients illustrated in his surgical textbook’;66 and where ultimately personal anatomical minutiæ are mirrored by and imprinted with the industrial forms of engineered steel and chrome.

61 Atzori (1995). 62 Atzori (1995). 63 Atzori (1995) – my emphasis 64 Ballard (1993), p 20. 65 Ballard (1993), p 11. 66 Ballard (1993), p 13. 14

Convalescing from that first car crash, Ballard realises that ‘the crash between our two cars was a model of some ultimate and yet undreamt sexual union.’67 His transformation is guided b

Vaughan, who is obsessed with many wounds and impacts – by the ‘dying chromium and collapsing bulkheads of … two cars meeting head-on in complex collisions repeated endlessly in slow-motion films, by the identical wounds inflicted on their bodies, by the compound fractures of their thighs impacted against their handbrake mountings, and above all, by the wounds to their genitalia – her uterus pierced by the heraldic beak of the manufacturer’s medallion, his semen emptying across the luminescent dials that registered for ever the last temperature and fuel levels of the engine.’68 The damage to, and death of, the car assumes an equal significance with the injuries to and death of its occupant, a trope re-inforced by the linguistic inversion of the terms ordinarily appropriate to flesh and engineered materials: wounded flesh might be ‘annealed’, bodywork ’lacerated’, and vinyl possesses ‘sulci’.69

Through Vaughan, James Ballard discovers the ‘true significance of the automobile crash, the meaning of whiplash injuries, the ecstasies of head-on collisions’.70 The transformational journey is marked by an increasing retreat from James Ballard’s sexual/affective life, in which the ‘exaggerated mouldings of the instrument binnacles emphasized [his] growing sense of a new junction between my own body and the automobile’71 which are ‘closer than [his] feelings for Renata's broad hips and strong legs stowed out of sight beneath her red plastic raincoat’.72

His sexuality is wholly redirected from flesh to metal. Eventually, his connection to humanity, in the form of his wife and his own erotic self is supplanted by the romanticised vision of the crash, He becomes immune to the threat to his own wife, Catherine, posed by Vaughan’s brutal

67 Ballard (1993), p 27. 68 Ballard (1993), p 12. 69 Ballard (1993), p 114 (‘in which I could take his body in my hands … and anneal its wounds”); p 163 (‘the open cockpit of the sports car with its lacerated bodywork’) and p 112 (‘The ivory globes searched for the steepest gradient to the central sulcus of the [black vinyl of the] seat’). Compare the “obsessive deployment of technological and biological metaphors [in Sterling’s cyborg prose]: each is nearly always in terms of the other”, Bukataman (1991), [36]. 70 Ballard (1993), p 13. 71 Ballard (1993), p 47. 72 Ballard (1993), p 47. 15

and machinic version of seduction, and oblivious to any sense of personal loss which might follow, concerned only to apotheosise her in death as a god of his new world-view:

Still uncertain of whether Vaughan would try to crash his car into Catherine’s, I made no attempt to warn her. Her death would be a model of my care for all the victims of air-crashes and natural disasters … 73

After this transformation, his subsequent sexual encounters with Catherine become a grotesque pre-enactment of her hypothesised seduction by Vaughan, and her eventual death:

As I lay beside Catherine at night, my hands modelling her breasts, I visualised her body in contact with various points of [Vaughan’s] Lincoln’s interior, rehearsing for Vaughan the postures she might assume.74

By way of contrast, and as if to partially re-normalise the perversity of this refocusing of the erotic, the final scene of the film version of Crash75 depicts James Ballard in a large US convertible pursuing Catherine, who is driving a small sports car, eventually running her off the road, where her car overturns and she is thrown out onto the grass. He enquires as to whether she is alright, and she replies (seemingly disappointed) that she is, although she has clearly suffered a series of gashes and contusions. James Ballard consoles her: ‘Maybe the next one, darling. Maybe the next one’ - and as the camera pans back, they appear to begin having sex a tergo.76

Ultimately, James Ballard shifts focus from Catherine’s possible death at the hands (or car) of Vaughan to his own calculations of an even more impressive death for her which out-

Vaughans Vaughan:

73 Ballard (1993), p 166. 74 Ballard (1993), p 166. 75 Crash (1996) dir David Cronenberg (dir), (screenplay J G Ballard, David Cronenberg) (NC17) 76 (1:31:30-1:36:52) 16

I began to think about Catherine's death in a more calculated way, trying to devise in my mind an even richer exit than the death which Vaughan had designed for Elizabeth Taylor.77

Crash documents James Ballard’s substitutive escalation, deepening beyond the simple, if grotesque, transference implicit in his relationship with Gabrielle, a crippled accident victim among Vaughan’s acolytes, with whom:

[d]uring the next few days my orgasms took place within the scars below her breast and within her left armpit, in the wounds on her neck and shoulder …78

James Ballard’s objet d'hantise transforms into new and traumatic sites of human penetration and ultimately beyond the ‘mysterious eroticism of wounds’79 and into the ‘sexual apertures formed by fragmenting windshield louvres and dashboard dials in a high-speed impact’, and in doing so, ‘marrying through my own penis the car in which I had crashed and the car in which

Gabrielle had met her near-death’.80 James Ballard’s transformation is, perhaps, complete, as his sexuality is wholly displaced from human contact, and has extended even beyond the psycho- anatomical analogies of wounds as pubic ambiguity into a consummated marriage to the technological artefact, a machinic assemblage, for which such analogues have been merely stages of development in his post-genital libido.

Orthopædic chic or fashion victim?

The linking of the technological and the erotic is, of course, not a new phenomenon: the lurking id of Victor Frankenstein’s creation (eventually, perhaps, made sexually explicit in Madelaine

Kahn’s proportional speculation about his Schwannstücker in Young Frankenstein)81 derives from the fictional technology, and seductive attraction, of re-animation. Crash, too, flirts with

77 Ballard (1993), p 139. 78 Ballard (1993), p 137. 79 Ballard (1993), p 14. 80 Ballard (1993), p 137. 81 Young Frankenstein (1974), dir Mel Brooks, screenplay Mel Brooks and Gene Wilder 17

the trope of re-animation through technology, overlaid with aggressive penetration near, but not exactly in, its conventional sites : ‘How could I bring her [a laboratory technician] to life - by ramming one of these massive steel plugs into a socket at the base of her spine?’82

The glamourisation of violence in the context of beauty is, however, a relatively recent phenomenon. Rebecca Blake’s photographs – composed through the eyes of Laura Mars83 – unite haute couture glamour with the immediate aftermath of urban violence, replete with models draped elegantly in faux-trauma across the bonnets of pristine concours d’elegance sports cars or scrapping against a backdrop of burning cars. Helmut Newton’s series of photographs of the orthopaedic-chic transplant the recuperative brace onto the bodies of high fashion models. Images abound which marry the technology of support at its simplest – the recurring literal prop of the walking stick – through to the high-tech braces of modern orthopædics and flirtation with dismemberment, moving from images of abasiophilia through, eventually, to implied acrotomotphila:84 ‘Cyberwoman 7’ shows a woman wearing nothing but stockings using a walking stick as a prop. 85 in ‘Jenny Kapitän, Pension Dorian, Berlin, 1977’86 a naked woman in an elegant salon is depicted with her leg in a cast, wearing a neck brace and supported by a walking stick. ‘Jassara, rue Aubriot, Paris’87 shows a model wearing an elaborate plastic and leather back brace which leaves her breasts and pubic area exposed.

Newton’s Vogue February 1995 layout88 includes photographs of Nadja Auermann with her left leg encased in a complex orthopædic brace and supported by a cane; wheelchair-bound; being assisted up a flight of stairs while supporting herself on Cooper Elbow (forearm) crutches; and leaning against a black SUV with her right, stocking-clad, leg entirely displaced from her body.

82 Ballard (1993), p36. 83 The Eyes of Laura Mars (1978), dir Irvin Kershner, screenplay John Carpenter and David Z Goodman. 84 The term ‘abasiophilia’ was coined by Money (1990) to fill the ‘lexical gap’ in relation to the paraphilia of seeking a partner who is ‘lamed, crippled and unable to walk’ (p165), as a related term to acrotomophilia –a paraphilia directed to amputees. 85 Commissioned work for Eyestorm, 2000 – www.eyestorm.com. 86 Newton (2000), p 109 87 Newton (1978). 88 Helmut Newton (1995), pp 214ff – see Mower, New York Times, 21 Sept 2003, “Under her [Anna Wintour’s] editorship, Vogue has printed, among many others, his photographs of the six-foot model Nadja Auermann with a surgically pinned leg being pushed in a wheelchair for a fashion spread about stilettos”. 18

More recently, the themes of car-crash and orthopaedic chic have re-emerged in popular culture. In the Lady Gaga video, ‘Papparazi’89 she is assisted from a limousine into a wheelchair;90 stripped by four male attendants in tuxedoes, re-emerging wearing a metallic corset, headgear and arm-brace91 and climbs out of the wheelchair with the assistance of two aluminium Cooper crutches.92 In a Diesel Jeans advertisement, the bodies of models are

‘picturesquely splayed on concrete amid a four car pile-up’, while ‘spectators seated on the periphery buy popcorn from a vendor, as if the catastrophe were a sports event’,93 reminiscent of Ballard’s description of the re-enactment of a ‘spectacular road accident’ as entertainment. 94

Reality television has its own version, BBC 3’s Britain’s Missing Top Model, in which ‘[e]ight young disabled women discover what it takes to be a model - but which of them will win a photo shoot and appear in a top fashion magazine?’.95

There is a superficial visual and thematic similarity between Newton’s (or Lady Gaga’s) excursions into orthopædic chic and Crash: the visual image in David Cronenberg’s film version of Crash of Gabrielle leaning over the drivers’ side door of a shining cabriolet in a

Mercedes showroom wearing a short black skirt, riding up as she strains to see into the cockpit, her legs spread and supported by leather and stainless steel orthopædic braces over fishnet stockings, a surgical scar providing a visual metaphor of female genitalia as she engages provocatively with the salesman about the possibility of fitting into ‘a car designed for a normal body’ 96 closely follows the thematic trace of Newton’s braced models.

89 See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d2smz_1L2_0: 90 Time = 2:38. 91 Time = 3:05 92 Time = 3:15 93 Kauffman (1998), p178 and Fig 33. The description continues: ‘One model’s head is draped on a chrome fender pillow, another body is draped over the roof; the scarf of a third is arranged to suggest strangulation . . . . Spectators seated on the periphery buy popcorn from a vendor, as if the catastrophe were a sports event. In the back seat, a black model spreads her legs wide, while a pathologist check’s another model’s pulse.” 94 Ballard (1993), p 68. 95 http://www.bbc.co.uk/missingmodel/. The program aired in the UK for five consecutive weeks, starting on 1 July 2008, and was shown in Australia on ABC2 each Wednesday at 9:30pm from March 2, 2011. 96 Crash (1996), dir David Cronenberg, screenplay David Cronenberg; at 01:12:40-1:13:20 – compare Ballard’s text: “Vaughan, Gabrielle and myself visited the motor show at Earls Court. Calm and 19

But in neither Blake’s nor Newton’s photographs, or Lady Gaga’s video or the Diesel Jeans advertisement, is there any true union of the technology of trauma and the erotic. Both seek an erotic within an essentially conventional, modernist (if masculine) aesthetic. Framed against these utterly conservative images of women as sexual artefact, the technological bracing appears as nothing more than quirky metallic maquillage. Blake’s blood is patently applied rather than exuded. Beneath Newton’s orthopædic appliances, the muscles, ligaments and tendons of couture-femininity are physically untraumatised (even if these images might, on one view, be constructed as a deeply misogynistic 20th Century manifestation of the whalebone corset or the hobble skirt). After the photoshoot, the neck and leg braces come off, the Cooper Elbow crutches are cast aside (without any need for evangelical healing), to be returned to the prop room.

Baudrillard – in an image at once redolent of Freud’s ‘indirect road’,97 yet equally (if tacitly) dismissive of its underlying metaphor - likened Crash to fashion:

Like death or fashion, it becomes a short-cut … a more rapid road than the main highway, or going where the main highway doesn't go, or, better yet ‘a road going nowhere, but going there faster than the others.’98

Yet to equate fashion and Crash (at least in the current context) is to over-valorise fashion’s superficial forays into the world of death and couture, to give too much literal force to observations such as Benjamin’s ‘fashion affirms the rights of the corpse over the living.’99 It is not so much that violence and disfigurement are sexualised in Crash in the same way that they

gallant, Vaughan steered Gabrielle through the crowd, parading his scarred face as if these wounds were a sympathetic response to Gabrielle's crippled legs. Gabrielle swung herself among the hundreds of cars displayed on their stands, their chromium and cellulosed bodies gleaming like the coronation armour of an archangelic host. Pivoting about on her heels, Gabrielle seemed to take immense pleasure from these immaculate vehicles, placing her scarred hands on their paintwork, rolling her injured hips against them like an unpleasant cat. She provoked a young salesman on the Mercedes stand to ask her to inspect a white sports car, relishing his embarrassment when he helped her shackled legs into the front seat” 97 Freud (1961), p 4. 98 Baudrillard (1991) ‘2: Ballard’s Crash’, para 12. 99 Benjamin (1999), p51. 20 appear in the fashion spreads of Blake or Newton. Crash’s violence and disfigurement are not imprinted temporarily onto the pre-sexualised object of Newton’s orthopædic chic, merely adding a perverse frisson, but rather violence, disfigurement and the erotic are fused (or welded) irrevocably into a new substance.

In Crash, notwithstanding its fictional status, the blood is real … the orthopædic paraphernalia support – in fact functionalise – the traumatised body. The novel’s natural stage is the hospital ward and the morgue, rather than the wardrobe or make-up stations of the film set or the photoshoot. Blake and Newton play with technology-as-the-sexual. While Cronenberg’s film version suffers the same fate as Mary Harron’s American Psycho,100 substituting depoliticized and de-intellectualised elegance for the viscerality of their respective novels,

Crash-as-novel evokes a life lived within a true marriage of metallurgy, the body and (more significantly), the mind: a true fetish for the techno-Apocalypse, driving (as it must) Helmut

Newton’s insipid photo-conceptual montage of BDSM and orthopædics into an entirely new dimension, dancing precisely where – but more crucially, because – the body (to invert William

Butler Yeats’s phrase) ‘is bruised to pleasure soul’.101 Crash’s couture evening dress, a little off-the shoulder number, is Dr Helen Remington’s ‘rib-cage partly shielded by a sheath of white plaster that ran from one shoulder to the opposite armpit like a classical Hollywood ball- gown’,102 marking out a field of actual physical trauma that co-incidentally maps the human topology within an armature of high-couture. Within the field of the novel, chests are punctured by shattered car parts, bodies are ripped by torn metal … Vaughan dies as his

Lincoln Continental plunges over a flyover at London Heathrow and through the roof of a bus full of airline passengers (albeit that his sexual object, Elizabeth Taylor is unharmed).

100 American Psycho (2000), dir Mary Harron, screenplay Mary Harron. 101 W B Yeats, “Among School Children”, Stanza VIII 102 Ballard (1993), p 38. 21

Despite semiotic readings of Crash which construct the physical penetrations and injuries as ‘symbolic and semiotic’ wounds-as-signs,103 the limited scope of such a reading might resonate more sympathetically in the Blake-Newton paradigm. For there, the implicit injuries are more easily read as symbolic, since they have no physical presence: they are mere chimeræ.

As pornography, the overt niche market for Newton’s images – the incipient or full-blown abasiophiliac – is too narrow a constituency, and given Newton’s undoubted commercial acumen, their attractiveness must lie in a less confronting aesthetic, resonating with comparatively innocuous male fantasies. As delict, within the construct of the normative world of law, they have no more substance than the airbrush, and invite no more interdiction that the occasional overzealousness of the censor.

A Sexuality for the Apocalypse

Vaughan’s body manifests the dual nature of scar-as-sign and scar-as-trauma, simultaneously mapping the fused substance that arises from the coupling of flesh and engineering:

The whiteness of his arms and chest, and the scars that marked his skin like my own, gave his body an unhealthy and metallic sheen, like the worn vinyl of the car interior. These apparently meaningless notches on his skin, like the gouges of a chisel, marked the sharp embrace of a collapsing passenger compartment, a cuneiform of the flesh formed by shattering instrument dials, fractured gear levers and parking-light switches.104

But their semiotic significance also traces traumatised flesh: ‘together [the ‘meaningless’ notches] described an exact language of pain and sensation, eroticism and desire.’105 While convalescing from his own crash, James Ballard:

103 See Chrysochou (2009), p7, cf Baudrillard (1991), “the explosive vision of a body given over to "symbolic wounds," a body commixed with technology's capacity for violation and violence and in the brutal surgery that it continually performs…”, para 2. 104 Ballard (1993), p 72. 105 Ballard (1993), p 72. 22

saw the interior of the motor car as a kaleidoscope of illuminated pieces of the bodies of women. This anthology of wrists and elbow, thigh and pubis formed ever-changing marriages with the contours of the automobile.106

The machinic assemblage – the union of the human body and the car body – itself presents an inversion of the terminology of orthopaedics or the cultural artefact of technology as extensional to the human. Baudrillard describes this ‘classical-cybernetic’107 relationship as ‘the evolved functional capacity of a human organism which allows it both to rival Nature and to triumphantly remould its own image’108 … Frankenstein unbound, with both the body and the vehicle reconceived as a series of Deleuzian ‘spare parts’, the stuff of a recombinant sexualised

Other.109

Conventionally, the car is the extension of` masculinity … the male person extended, transformed, released and (perhaps) enlarged by technology – a Freudian lesson learned, painfully, by the American car industry with the launch of the Edsel.110 In many ways, Ballard reverses this: the human occupants of vehicles serve only as a means to technology’s ends (both philosophically and literally): is the car anthropomorphised by its analogous leakage of internal fluids, or is the human technologised by the imprint of the steering wheel, the penetration of the handbrake lever?111

106 Ballard, Crash, p 131. 107 Baudrillard (1991), ‘2: Ballard’s Crash’, para 1. 108 Baudrillard (1991), ‘2: Ballard’s Crash’, para 1. 109 Bukatman (1991) Pt 5, para 6, citing Deleuze(1987) p20. 110 See Peter Carlson, Washington Post, September 4, 2007. Among the numerous factors which were said to contribute to the failure of the Edsel was the infamous “horse-collar” grille: described as making the car look like it was sucking a lemon, but more frequently characterised as “feminine”, as it gave the appearance of stylised female genitalia. 111 For a lived (counter-)example of the feminine ‘techno-body’, see Sobchack (1998), p312: ‘Indeed, there is nothing like a little pain to bring us back to our senses, nothing like a real (not imagined) mark or wound to counter the romanticism and fantasies of techno-sexual transcendence that characterize so much of the current discourse on the techno-body that is thought to occupy the cyberspaces of post- modernity … Sitting there reading Baudrillard as I was living my artificial orifice and technical scars, I could attest to the scandal of the metaphor and the bad faith informing the ‘political economy of the sign’, and at p 314: ‘My prosthesis has not incorporated me. Rather, the whole aim of my physical existence over the last year has been to incorporate it’: see also two self-reports published by Money (1990), one of acrotomophilia, the other requiring the coinage, as noted above, of a specific term, ‘abasiophilia’ – see above note 84 (Money) 23

Often I watched him [Vaughan] lingering over the photographs of crash

fatalities … as he calculated the most elegant parameters of their injuries, the

junctions of their wounded bodies with the fractured windscreens and

instrument assemblies.112

In Crash, once within the interior of the car, its human occupants become, in Youngquist’s words, ‘the prosthesis of a speed machine’.113 Like Frankenstein’s creature reversing roles, ‘the passenger compartment enclosed us like a machine, generating from our sexual act an homunculus of blood, semen and engine coolant’.114 The human no longer utilises (enslaves?) technology to its own purposes, remoulding, in either Baudrillard’s or Stelarc’s sense, humanity itself by the extensional potentiality of the mechanical. The human, here, ultimately becomes an extension of technology-as-agent: it is the passenger compartment, syntactically and thematically, which ‘generates’ this hybrid homunculus, merely utilising its human occupants as a passive component or the raw material of its regenerative self – the true terror of the unrestrained cyborg. Ballard’s vision of the conspiratorial Apocalypse encompasses the agency and ends of technology:

The wounds on my knees and chest were beacons tuned to a series of beckoning transmitters, carrying the signals, unknown to myself, which would unlock this immense stasis and free these drivers for the real destinations set for their vehicles, the paradises of the electric highway.115

La petite mort, literalised, is Ballard’s darkness tangible: the serendipity of quotidian accidental collisions is supplanted, in pursuit of the fetishised object, by the actual re-enactment of a ‘spectacular road accident’, a multiple pile-up in which seven people had died on the North

Circular Road during the previous summer,116 and the endless planning of contrived re-

112 Ballard, Crash, p 112. 113 Youngquist (2000), p 5 . 114 Ballard (1993), p 65. 115 Ballard (1993), p 45-46. 116 Ballard (1993), p 68. 24 enactments of iconographic celebrity deaths – James Dean’s head-on in a Porsche 550 Spyder,

Jayne Mansfield’s alleged decapitation in a Buick Electra 225, Camus’s death in a Facel Vega, the assassination of Kennedy in Dealey Plaza117 – and Vaughan’s designs for mutual orgasm- in-death with Elizabeth Taylor. A fetish for the techno-Apocalypse, intermingling blood, semen, engine oil and the violent reconstruction of anatomy and the anatomised.

Conventional sexuality, insofar as it is portrayed at all in Crash, is inadequate for the techno-Apocalypse – more moribund than petite mort, an anodyne reflex, almost literally de- coupled from libido, where sexual ennui devalues even the vitality of James Ballard’s own ejaculate, manifest by his thoughts of his ‘last forced orgasms with Catherine, the sluggish semen urged into her vagina by my bored pelvis’,118 itself redolent of Freud’s ‘general enfeeblement’ which attends traumatic neurosis.119 Similarly, with the crippled (though transformed) accident victim, Gabrielle, ‘the nominal junction points of the sexual act – breast and penis, anus and vulva, nipple and clitoris’120 – fail to provide any sexual arousal, and James

Ballard feels disappointment that Gabrielle’s breast is real, dashing his expectations that it would be ‘a detachable latex structure, fitted on each morning along with her spinal brace and leg supports’.121 Nonetheless, the perverse sites of penetration provide a marked contrast, within which James Ballard’s ‘first orgasm, within the deep wound on her thigh, jolted my semen along this channel, irrigating its corrugated ditch.’122 Ballard is not merely impotent except in the presence of a motor vehicle:

Strangely, our sexual acts took place only within my automobile. In the large bedroom of her rented house I was unable even to mount an erection … Once

117 Ballard (1993), pp 17, 105. More latterly, Ballard would have found, in the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, the quintessential celebrity death:of the crushed Mercedes in a Paris tunnel, Pat Kane, of The Herald, wrote: ‘If sex, death and technology were ever compacted into one object, this would be it’, cited in Black (2002), p176 (my emphasis). 118 Ballard (1993), p 36. 119 Freud (1961), Section II, p 5. 120 Ballard (1993), p 136. 121 Ballard (1993), p 136. 122 Ballard (1993), pp 137. 25

together in my car, with the crowded traffic lanes through which we had moved forming an unseen and unseeing audience, we were able to arouse each other.123

Rather the car itself, and more specifically, its post-crash remnants, become the physical locus of penetration and sexual connection itself. Even the fact that sex in this context takes place between people is ultimately defeated by the wholesale substitution of engineered steel, alloy, glass and plastic as sexual actors, the gratification of male desire or lust being, at last, wholly accomplished by the fetishised object:124

each crashed car set off a tremor of excitement, in the complex geometries of a dented fender, in the unexpected variations of crushed radiator grilles, in the grotesque overhang of an instrument panel forced on to a driver's crotch as if in some calibrated act of machine fellatio. The intimate time and space of a single human being had been fossilized for ever in this web of chromium knives and frosted glass.125

Vaughan’s obsessive drive to create the ultimate car-crash in which he and Elizabeth

Taylor die at the point of her orgasm,126 and in doing so to construct a machinic ménage a trois, mimics the sadistic element of the genital ego’s function of ‘overpowering the sexual object to the extent necessary for carrying out the sexual act’,127 while nonetheless paradoxically retaining the expansive, imaginative and efflorescent characteristics of the earlier, but as-yet- unextinguished pre-genital stage of libido.128 The idea of ‘machine fellatio’ defies constructs of human sexual action inter se, (and, given the agency attributable to technology in the novel, extends beyond mere assisted masturbation). But equally, it sits outside the boundaries of the

123 Ballard (1993), pp 66-67. 124 See Freud’s definition of ‘fetish’: ‘in which for the normal sexual object another is substituted which is related to it but which is totally unfit for the normal sexual aim’ Freud (1920), p7; cf Freud (1953) p153 - ‘The case becomes pathological only when the striving for the fetich fixes itself beyond such determinations and takes the place of the normal sexual aim; or again, when the fetich disengages itself from the person concerned and itself becomes a sexual object. These are the general determinations for the transition of mere variations of the sexual impulse into pathological aberrations.’ (Freud (1920), p 15) cf: Hartwich (1959) re Krafft-Ebing’s distinction between ‘partial fetishism’ and ‘pathological fetishism’ (p126): ‘The decisive factor in any question whether in a given case one can speak of partial fetishism is the attitude of the person in question towards normal intercourse, to coitus”, p127. 125 Ballard (1993), pp 14-15. 126 Ballard (1993), p 11. 127 Freud (1961), Section VI, p 48. 128 Freud, (1961), Section VI, p 48, see also p14. 26 tropes of human sexual criminality such as consent. Ultimately, the polymorphously perverse infant, having succumbed to the genitalisation of sexuality, re-inscribes libido, as an act of

‘liberation’, to the inanimate, fulfilling, perhaps, the proposition of machinic assemblage that it become a ‘body that is multiple’ whose function or meaning ‘no longer depends on an interior truth or identity, but on the particular assemblages it forms with other bodies” 129

Morality, Normativity and Recht in Ballard-land

It is clear enough from the outset that conventional bourgeois sexual morality has long since been abandoned in James Ballard’s personal world: his marriage to Catherine persists amid mutual (and uncritical) assumptions of real and imagined infidelities. Crash’s internal moral significance – the decoupling of appropriate passion tied to human contact in a world dominated by technology130 – is clear: ‘The destruction of this motorcar and its occupants seemed, in turn, to sanction the sexual penetration of Vaughan’s body; both were conceptualized acts abstracted from all feeling, carrying any ideas or emotions which we cared to freight them’.131 Novel paraphiliæ are required to bridge the gap:

At the logic of fashion, such once popular perversions as pædophilia and sodomy will become derided clichés, as amusing as pottery ducks on suburban walls.132

As conceptualised acts (as opposed to conventional physical eroticism/sexuality), sexual penetration is ‘de-invested of libidinal cathexis’133

129 Malins (2004), p 84. 130 See above, n35?, Ballard, Introduction to the French edition 131 Ballard (1993), p 101. 132 Ballard (1972), p97. The increasing “tolerance” and the escalation of fetishistic behaviour ensilaged by need for “novel paraphiliæ” might be inferred from the graphic distinction between the nearest comparable, but relatively benign, fetish recorded by Krafft-Ebing (Case 45 in Hartwich (1959) p145: ‘Since the age of 17, he has been exclusively excited in the sexual sense by female deformities, especially women who limp and have twisted feet”) as compared with the compound fetishism/BDSM James Ballard exhibits towards Gabrielle. 133 Chrysochou (2009), p 2. 27

This moral significance is displayed in a language which is at odds with the raw viscerality of what is actually happening. Whereas in American Psycho, Bateman’s psychopathology is played out and narratised (repetitively) in the crudest of Anglo-Saxon vulgar vernacular,

Crash’s sexuality – both humanly inter se and trans-technological – takes the form of clinical reportage, defined in the detached Latinate polysyllables of the forensic pathologist, and invested with no more affective significance than would normally attend their technological parallels:

Her body, with its angular contours, its unexpected junctions of mucous membrane and hair, detrusor muscle and erectile tissue, was a ripening anthology of perverse possibilities.134

Where Bateman’s narration (and inner landscape) is a melange of shit, pricks, cunts and asses, Ballard’s record of his transformation – whether in terms of general anatomy (‘left zygomatic arch’, ‘natal cleft’, ‘nasal bridge’, ‘sulcus’135), the specifics of sexual ritual (penises, vaginas and vulvas, rectums and anuses) or the interspersed sexualised anatomical minutiæ for which the vulgar tongue has no currency: perineum, frenulum or nasolabial fold.136

Within a staunchly patriarchal (yet paradoxically egalitarian) landscape – the freeway, the car park and the police holding-yard – sex is transformed by the replacement of the normative sites of penetration with the inflicted wound: ‘the lungs of elderly men punctured by door- handles; the chests of young women impaled on steering-columns; the cheeks of handsome youths torn on the chromium latches of quarter-lights’.137 Penetration remains as a guiding trope of sexuality, but it is confounded by a perversity of focus by way of a mechanised and

134 Ballard (1993), p 135: cf Ellis (1991), p 288. 135 Ballard (1993), p138, p139, p145 and p112 respectively. 136 See Baudrillard (1991), ‘2: Ballard’s Crash’, para 9: ‘No slang, no intimacy in the sexual violence, only functional language: equivalency of chrome and mucous membranes’. 137 Ballard (1993), p 15. 28

‘artificial invagination’,138 creating for itself a site of undifferentiated sexual orientation, born of violence and manifest in an ambivalent and impressionable anatomy:

I visualized my wife injured in a high-impact collision, her mouth and face destroyed, and a new and exciting orifice opened in her perineum by the splintering steering column, neither vagina nor rectum, an orifice we could dress with all our deepest affections.139

The ambivalent orifice, halfway between the vagina and the anus, is reminiscent of Freud’s

‘amphigenously inverted’ (psychosexually hermaphroditic) subject, 140 and stresses again the creative fluidity and perseverance of the efflorescent infantile sexual life,141 unconstrained by either intrapsychic or social regulation.

Such an obsessive pursuit of this autoerotic-as-reality necessitates the rejection of the law of human sexual regulation, requiring the re-interpretation of what constitutes sex itself by looking beyond or through conventional sexuality into Ballard’s paraphiliac and nightmarish consensual Other. This Other, born of the twentieth century’s love affair with the car, allows for (if not demands) the tangled wreckage of a sportscar to function as a transformative sexual agent, creating, of ‘woman’, a being of ‘free and perverse sexuality, releasing within its dying chromium and leaking engine-parts, all the deviant possibilities of her sex’.142 It is a transformation that is at once literally crippling, yet ultimately (or so it is said) liberating,143 generating in death a liberation of sexual energy mediating the sexuality of those who have died in such circumstances (Dean, Mansfield, Camus and Kennedy) ‘with an intensity impossible in

138 Baudrillard (1991), ‘2: Ballard’s Crash’, para 7. 139 Ballard (1993), p 138: this theme of the ‘new orifice’ is rehearsed by J G Ballard in James Ballard’s Oedipal visualisations of his own mother ‘at various stages of her life, injured in a succession of accidents, fitted with orifices of ever greater abstraction and ingenuity, so that my incest with her might become more and more cerebral, allowing me at last to come to terms with her embraces and postures’, Ballard (1993), p 138. Freud (1920), p7) and James Ballard’s own ambivalent sexual orientation. 140 See Freud (1920), p7) and James Ballard’s own ambivalent sexual orientation. 141 See above, n39. 142 Ballard (1993), p 79. 143 Freud (1961), Section VI, p 48. 29

any other form’.144 Such transformation gives perverse form to Stelarc’s radical redesign of the body through its fusion with the technological as the sole possibility for the development of

‘significantly different thoughts and philosophies’.145

Yet the abandonment of human affect – either real or delusional – is conventionally accompanied by the positive (and positivist?) postures of coercive legality against which perversion is assessed, measured and ultimately sanctioned. While Patrick Bateman’s public self might identify with his immediate exterior environment, manifesting itself in behaviours which are manifestly ultra-conformist within his immediate social context and its rules and regulations, his private self, dominated by ultra-sadistic misogyny and murder, is played out against the dogged interrogations of the private detective, Donald Kimball, signifying the existence of a normative legal exterior against which Bateman’s conduct (or fantasy) must, and will, be judged.146

The conventional trajectories of power within the body of dystopian literature – the imposition of Orwellian coercive force, or manipulative Foucauldian self-censorship – are inverted in the dystopian anarchy of Ballardland. Bateman’s repeated plea for conformity – ‘I … want … to … fit … in’147 – has no place in the self-determined world of Vaughan’s coterie, whose exterior selves are as self-absorbed as Bateman’s interior.

Law is impotent in the face of Ballard’s vision. Such a fetishised or transformed anatomy subverts the paradigms of conventional (or even conventionally perverse) sexuality. The legal ambiguity (or ambivalence) of fetishised abasiophilia – the pseudo-orifice; the glass-shard gash as displaced vagina; the surgical scar as the perverse site of erogeneity – are penetrations not conceived of either in the language or the ontology of the criminal calendar of sexual offences.

144 Ballard (1972), p125. 145 Atzori (1995). 146 eg Ellis (1991), pp 268 ff. 147 Ellis (1991), p 377: see also Sahli (2010), p 133. 30

… the deviant technology of the car-crash provided the sanction for any perverse act. For the first time, a benevolent psychopathology beckoned towards us, enshrined in the tens of thousands of vehicles moving down the highways.148

In a sexualised and eroticised landscape constituted by broken glass and steel, with torn and distorted metal reflecting an equally transformed and shattered anatomy, conventional regulation of the erotic falls short of any historical analogue of a claim by Recht to effective normative force. In a rare reference to the concept of an ‘offence’, it is neither the actuality of assault, either in personam or per machina, nor the eternal backdrop of Vaughan’s conspiracies to escalating levels of vehicle-inspired injuries and death which attract opprobrious or condemnatory commentary of criminality, but the mere innocent (if ironic) fact of having been involved in a motor-vehicle accident. A non-participant in the fetish, uncomprehending therefore of the liberating effect of the motor-vehicle collision, a prostitute:

began to work systematically at my penis with both mouth and hand, spreading her arms comfortably across my knees. I flinched from the pressure of her hard elbows.

'What's the matter with your legs - have you been in an accident?'

She made it sound like a sexual offence.149

Against the perverse catalogue of ritualised erotic mayhem, the idea of a legally-defined concept of assault seems limp. The excesses of mechanic-anatomical sexual violence are, as Baudrillard suggests, ‘no longer the exception to a triumphant rationality’ which justifies the imposition of

Law: rather they have ‘become the Rule . . . devoured the Rule’.150

148 Ballard, Crash, p 107. 149 Ballard, Crash, p 51. 150 Baudrillard (1991), ‘2: Ballard’s Crash’, para 3. 31

The re-codification of the body as sign – an anatomical semiotic where erogenous zones are replaced by dehumanised ‘holes for reflex discharges’151 or where semen functions as a medium for marking territory and literalising the potency of the motor vehicle152 – confounds the conventional taxonomy of criminal conduct, notwithstanding that the described (a)relational landscape is devoted (literally) to violence, injury and ultimately, death. In Crash, police – to the extent that they have any tangible presence – are mute witnesses to the sexual dysphoria, or ex post facto repositories of the post-orgasmic debris. In fact, the police at times even function as innocent facilitators for James Ballard’s education at the hands of Vaughan. As they prowl the night in search of fresh stimulation:

on the calm summer evenings these fast boulevards became a zone of nightmare collisions. Listening to the police broadcasts on Vaughan’s radio, we moved from one accident to the next. Often we stopped under arc-lights that flared over the sites of our major collisions, watching while firemen and police engineers worked … to free unconscious wives from beside their dead husbands.153

In neither case do they – the police – represent agency or normative force, easily deflected by the irrelevant, vaguely ineffectual in even such a simple task as crowd control at the site of (yet another) fatal accident, or reduced to menial occupations such a sweeping the road in the aftermath of an accident:

A policeman with a broom scattered lime on the blood-smeared concrete beside the sports car. With careful strokes, as if frightened of working out the complex human arithmetic of these injuries, he swept the darkening clots against the verge of the central reservation. 154

151 Baudrillard (1991), ‘2: Ballard’s Crash’, para 5. 152 Ballard (1993), p 171; see also Baudrillard (1991), ‘2: Ballard’s Crash’, para 9: ‘The copulations and semen which fill this book have no more sensual value than the outlines of wounds have the value of violence, even metaphorical’ (my emphasis); see also Ballard (1972), p 28 153 Ballard (1993), pp 13-14. 154 Ballard (1993), p 120. 32

Police remain, it seems, wholly uncomprehending of the nature of the events – of the

(r)evolution of the human-machine interface – which they witness as, for the most part, passive voyeurs.

Conclusion: Life is a Cabriolet, Old Chum.

Mad in pursuit and in possession so Had, having, and in quest to have, extreme.

It would, perhaps, be too easy to dismiss Crash as an ultra-violent misogynist fantasy, reducing the feminine to little more than a series of orifices generated by the violent interaction with the metallic. After all, in the passage quoted earlier, it is woman who is disfigured by the hard surfaces of the car’s interior, her uterus pierced by ‘the heraldic beak of the manufacturer’s mark’, while the male presence is signified by no more than a scattering ejaculation, anthropologically no more than the male drive to spread his DNA as widely as possible throughout the population. Ballard’s perverse techno-Apocalypse is liberating only from the perspective of a male gaze into a misogynist microscope.

Yet the characterisation as misogynist male fantasy sits more readily on the images by

Newton of the partially crippled models, whose capacity for escape from the predatory male embodied/metaphorised in the camera lens is compromised by their (faux) incapacities. Their facial expressions are neutral or resigned, reflecting an acceptance of their passive role as objet de fétiche, deprived of agency and autonomy – the capacity to resist – by the imposition of physical constraints and limitations.

Conversely, Dr Helen Remington – the widow of (and witness to) the driver who was launched through the windscreen onto the bonnet of Ballard’s car, the very moment at which

Ballard himself is launched on his perverse trajectory – becomes at least as enthusiastic a 33

participant in the drama as any of Vaughan’s other disciples. She is, in fact, Vaughan’s

Madonna.

Despite the disfiguring possibilities, the female participants act throughout consensually – although that, too, might be explained as a post-traumatic false consciousness, akin (at least in

Remington’s case) to a hitherto unexplored variant on Stockholm syndrome. If I have passed

(perhaps surprisingly without comment) over the numerous sites of a demanded feminist critique, not least the phallicism of Freudian tropes, it is because, they are the uncritical – or

Baudrillard’s hypercritical – given. The overt linguistic hostility to women evident in The

Atrocity Exhibition – ‘[t]his elegant bitch, like all women she intruded her sexuality at the most inopportune moments’155 – is ameliorated in Crash, where the ‘grammar of callousness and aggression’156 gives way to a more neutral vocabulary.

This uncritical given pre-exists the assembly lines at Ford, Chrysler or General Motors, and is simply carried, ineluctably, to a transcendent and aspirational, but perversely auto-erotic, omega point of human evolution. What remains is the psychological landscape which facilitates the self-destructive extremes of behaviour exhibited by Crash’s protagonists: if they are mad in pursuit, where does this madness come from?

Common to the participants in the auto-erotic fetish is the lack of development of any internal mechanism for regulating the perverse impulses which link life, sex and death with the fatal potentialities of the motor vehicle, either re-establishing a self-preservational restraint or recognising an exterior limitation through the force of Law. They might be seen as eternal children, at least as far as their sexual development might be measured against a functional erotic, having failed to form the psychic dams against sexual transgression to which Freud refers. Without these (identified by Freud as shame, loathing and morality), they are misled into the immediate gratification and the abandonment of consequence which their egos might otherwise forego, choosing instead the longer, indirect (and presumably slower) road to pleasure which Freud asserts as a characteristic of the integrated personality.

155 Ballard (1972), p 38. 156 Ballard (1972), p 95. 34

The absence of any significant social institution of law as a regulator of their behaviour is thus both an external metaphor for their own internal lack of regulation, but also a real and necessary artefact of the external world characterised by the postmodern/posthuman aspects of

Ballardland. Much as conventional forms of sexuality are inadequate for the stuff of the recombinant sexualisation of the machinic assemblage, Law (as understood in its Modernist frame) simply does not comprehend, and therefore cannot accommodate, the nature of such a construct within its conventional discourse. Law must therefore become Law: an institution rendered mute and ineffectual in its contemplation of the nightmare Other, and therefore a topographical anomaly in the landscape which Ballard has fabricated from his view of the emotional ruins of a hypertechnologised late 20th Century society.

35

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