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The Rules of Autogeddon: Sex Death and Law in JG Ballard's Crash

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The Rules of Autogeddon: Sex Death and Law in JG Ballard's Crash This may be the author’s version of a work that was submitted/accepted for publication in the following source: Thomas, Mark (2011) The rules of autogeddon : sex death and law in J G Ballard’s Crash. Griffith Law Review, 20(2), pp. 333-361. This file was downloaded from: https://eprints.qut.edu.au/46155/ c Consult author(s) regarding copyright matters This work is covered by copyright. Unless the document is being made available under a Creative Commons Licence, you must assume that re-use is limited to personal use and that permission from the copyright owner must be obtained for all other uses. If the docu- ment is available under a Creative Commons License (or other specified license) then refer to the Licence for details of permitted re-use. It is a condition of access that users recog- nise and abide by the legal requirements associated with these rights. If you believe that this work infringes copyright please provide details by email to [email protected] Notice: Please note that this document may not be the Version of Record (i.e. published version) of the work. Author manuscript versions (as Sub- mitted for peer review or as Accepted for publication after peer review) can be identified by an absence of publisher branding and/or typeset appear- ance. If there is any doubt, please refer to the published source. 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).
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