Aquarius Rising

Woe to you, my Princess, when I come. I will kiss you quite red and feed you till you are plump. And if you are froward, you shall see who is the stronger, a gentle little girl who doesn't eat enough, or a big wild man who has cocaine in his body.

Letter from Sigmund Freud to his fiancee

The sun, the moon and the stars would have disappeared long ago had they happened to be within the reach of predatory human hands." - See more at: http://quotationsbook.com/quotes/tag/ecology/#sthash.Zgz3KQEA.dpuf

The sun, the moon and the stars would have disappeared long ago had they happened to be within the reach of predatory human hands." - See more at: http://quotationsbook.com/quotes/tag/ecology/#sthash.Zgz3KQEA.dpuf

I've often thought that there isn't any "I" at all; that we are simply the means of expression of something else; that when we think we are ourselves, we are simply the victims of a delusion. 

 Aleister Crowley, Diary of a Drug Fiend

It is not heroin or cocaine that makes one an addict, it is the need to escape from a harsh reality. There are more television addicts, more baseball and football addicts, more movie addicts, and certainly more alcohol addicts in this country than there are narcotics addicts.

Shirley Chisholm

The sun, the moon and the stars would have disappeared long ago... had they happened to be within the reach of predatory human hands.

 Havelock Ellis

Extinction is the rule. Survival is the exception.  

Carl Sagan, The Varieties of Scientific Experience

The sun, the moon and the stars would have disappeared long ago had they happened to be within the reach of predatory human hands." - See more at: http://quotationsbook.com/quotes/tag/ecology/#sthash.Zgz3KQEA.dpuf

The sun, the moon and the stars would have disappeared long ago had they happened to be within the reach of predatory human hands." - See more at: http://quotationsbook.com/quotes/tag/ecology/#sthash.Zgz3KQEA.dpuf

As a good socialist I’m going where the money is

A common reaction of conservatives to the trade union militancy of the 1970s was to complain about ‘greedy unions’: ungrateful workers, causing chaos for a few quid more in their pay-packets. An extended version of this argument pointed to the supposed hypocrisy between the socialist ideals of equality and solidarity and the ‘selfish’ materialism of union members’ demands.

Kenneth Williams once expounded this view on Parkinson and got slapped down for his troubles. (A rare moment of Parky not being a crawling brown noser)

A more sophisticated depiction of this conflict was the character of Roy Bland, ex-socialist turned jaded spy, in Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. Bland will only co-operate with George Smiley’s attempts to stop the power struggles in ‘The Circus’ (a fictionalised Mi6) if his demand for £5, 000 is met. He has no shame about this blatant horse-trading – this is the way Britain is now he tells Smiley, ‘You scratch my conscience, I’ll drive your Jag’:

cropped with SnipSnip

Contemporary leftists looking back on 70s militancy tend to focus on its socialist aspects over the material ones - the common belief in the power of collective action, the respect for picket lines, secondary picketing and so on. Owen Hatherley recently quoted a shop steward interviewed in Huw Beynon’s Working for Ford who rejected the company’s efforts to get the workforce into car or home ownership:

“[The workers] get made up, earn a lot more money and then the company starts encouraging them to buy a house, to get a car on the company's scheme. I know this for a fact. Then when they're up to their neck in debt they put the screws on them, and they've got no chance. A shop steward should never be in that position, where he can't afford to go on strike pay. I'd never buy a house when I was a shop steward. I don't think any steward should."

But we can forget that at the heart of most 70s dispute were basic wage demands, either as compensation for Fordist drudgery or to combat the inflation following the 1973 oil crisis. Speaking on the BBC’s 1974 election coverage an NUM official, hotly denying the Miners’ Strike of that year was political, makes the very opposite point to the shop steward at the Ford Plant, “I don’t envy the man who has two Rolls-Royces or two £20, 000 houses, what I want our members to have is the right to buy one of each.”

No political group in Britain at the time really found a way of taking this materialism further in a radical direction. The bureaucratic language of the TUC and corporate-Keynesian (‘Phase Three’ ‘The Social Contract’) couldn’t express the failures of the welfare state to remedy inequalities of wealth and power, as experienced on the shop floor. In Italy however, Potere Operaio (Workers’ Power) with its slogan ‘More money, less work’ placed wage demands at the centre of political strategy. They were the way to overthrow capitalism:

“[R]aising the price of labour-power was a working-class act of force which coincided for a moment with a necessity of capital, and then overthrew it, surpassing and upsetting it ... the imbalance between wages and productivity is a political fact, and must be understood as a political fact and utilised as such”

[Mario Tronti, Operai e capital (1971) quoted in Steve Wright, Storming heaven (2002) p.66]

With Maria Rosa Dalla Costa’s call for ‘Wages for Housework’ they even saw extending monetisation as an anti-capitalist measure. The Autonomia group also addressed the other side of the coin: working class consumption. Leading a series of direct actions against rising prices, they encouraged people to ride the subway for free or to take part in ‘proletarian shopping’ where protestors forced supermarkets to cut prices. [Phil Edwards, More work! Less pay! (2009) p.73]

Back in Britain, Parkinson invited Kenneth Williams back to debate with Jimmy Reid, then riding high after leading the victory at the UCS working.

Reid bested Williams and showed he was more the capable of handling the tension between political ideas and material necessity. Reid stood for Parliament several times but tied to a well-past its peak Communist Party, never made it into full time politics. Watching him ‘going down fighting’ you get a real sense of a lost opportunity for the British Left.

An Endless Almanac Of Terrifying Wounds

I grew up along a main road, among concrete monstrosities that once appeared pregnant with mystery and possibility (but in retrospect were bloody tragedies). Like many others living near a city centre, I witnessed my fair share of motor accidents, both minor and horrific. Even now, cars bring to mind the stench of eye-watering emissions, small animal carcasses and ominous smears of blood along the kerb: brands of unearned power over nature and the fragile pedestrian (another vulnerable constituency neglected by neoliberalism). Every triumphant roar replaced by a new one, as traffic proceeded on its predatory journey, oblivious to it's own final destination. As a virginal teenager, it was perhaps unsurprising that J.G. Ballard's Crash would strike such a nerve. A pornographic, but highly unerotic, novel centered around the allures and traumas of motoring held a perverse glamour. To this confused adolescent, the popular obsession with the motorcar was as mysterious and ominous as sex itself. The destructive - or of course liberating - potential of both leads western societies to mystify them with layers of distorted exchange value; not least with their taunting promises of plentitude. Our lonely, Faustian trade between alienated desire, the consumer spectacle and the infernal machines of capitalism are even more starkly apparent in this century of fractured communities, economic pillage, and wars of peak oil denial.

Although often regarded as a cold, clinical author, I'd argue that Ballard is anything but. The supposed 'blankness 'of his prose opens up caverns of unspoken yearning and a need for human connection. A widower for most of his adult life, there's a recurring sense of loss to his stories. His extended autopsies on "the death of affect" are thinly-veiled acts of mourning, made explicit in later autobiographical works. Crash is a typical example of his characters compensating with flights of creative hubris, according to technology and its audiovisual sermons (or 'the media landscape'). His innerspace visionaries and 'hoodlum priests' invariably fall to earth with burnt wings, his survivors remaining as seduced observers. Not so much scarred by their (sexually ambiguous) love triangles, as by the environments within which this desire operates. Ending on notes of muted sadness and resignation, the Spectacle remains as impregnable and distant as the intimate, but alien, landscapes that negotiate the desires of his characters. For all of Vaughn's grand claims, he climaxes as an anonymous victim to the Elizabeth Taylor of his fantasies. The pornographic imaginary ultimately answers to the faceless technology that generated it (a motif of Ballard's beloved surrealists). For stories set in the present, this entropy is largely private, internal. If technology dictates the inner world, then humanity as whole is dwarfed by unpredictable nature. Explicitly so in his 'disaster cycle', and other futuristic stories where it overwhelms the grandest of human designs. For Ballard, the future is haunted by the imaginative consolations to be found within departures. Emotion is replaced by theory, a coping strategy in denial of the remorseful, vulnerable mechanics of being human. A resource with which to steer around trauma:

The above film was directed by Harley Cokliss, a name suggestive of some pornographic car part. Older readers may also recognise Gabrielle Drake, Crossroads heroine and sister of Nick. This was actually broadcast before publication of Crash the 1973 novel, inspired by the Atrocity Exhibition passage that preceeded it. Unlike many 'name' novelists, Ballard actually talks like he writes. Always a comfortable and engaging television presence, he aquits himself well in this 'adaptation'. It's also a relic of the days when pulp, public television and the avant-garde would cross paths for a general audience. It has an atmosphere of reverence and horror for the urban environment, an approach common to early 70s British culture. Later, and in tune with the rise of Thatcherism, this became supplanted by revulsion at the population as well as the design of urban Britain. The New Right ethos paradoxically promoted the car as a means to belong in a society that was "no such thing"; with Thatcher famously dismissing public transport passengers as 'losers'. In line with this paradox, 80s advertising tended to promote the car as protective rather than free; concealing its sexual appeal within promises to prevent against mingling. Somewhere along this intersection lay Crash's status as the cult novel for post-punk subcultures, appropriate to their consumerist ambivalence and morbid sexual mores. 

                     

For a writer of supposedly 'narrow' concerns, Ballard is someone I return to far more than other teenage favourites (you can guess the usual suspects - I am a cliche). Despite reoccuring obsessions, his passive dialogue opens more room for speculation on the part of the reader than, say, Burroughs (infected as he is with a distinctly macho insistence on writerly authority). Indeed, Ballard's obsessions are feasible basis for an always interesting blog. Perhaps time will embed his more trans-literary qualities. As with Don Quixote, Gulliver's Travels, Peter Pan, Frankenstein, The Trial, 1984, Waiting For Godot etc. his stories could acquire the texture of fable, where the strength of concept can outweigh literary merit. It's somewhat surprising how rare film adaptations of Ballard's work have been. Compared to his Burroughs misfire (or anything starring Jeremy Irons), David Cronenberg's Crash has aged surprisingly well. It captures that removed sense of emotional desperation so common to Ballard. However, its location neglects a central underlying theme: how the British middle-class are, well... fucking weird. Perhaps compelled by the post-war welfare consensus (and experience of total war), enough of its cultural producers were once aware of this; unafraid to document it from a variety of angles. Nowadays, they appear too preoccupied with celebrity evisceration, narcissistic self-surveilance and fetishised motorist entitlements to notice anymore.