Up Rising: Rehabilitating J.G. Ballard’s High-Rise with R.D. Laing and Lauren Berlant

Abstract

The balance between fiction and reality has changed significantly in the past decades. Increasingly their roles are reversed. We live in a world ruled by fictions of every kindmass-merchandising, advertising…the television screen. We live inside an enormous novel.-Ballard (1995, iii) A giant of 'literary geography' (Beaumont and Martin, 2016), J.G. Ballard ranks among the foremost critics, chroniclers and cartographers of consumer society's outer limits (Coverley, 2010). Suburban shopping malls, office parks, ring roads, drive-ins, flyovers, underpasses, traffic islands, leisure centres, cineplexes and billboard-festooned thoroughfares are his source material and satirical target (Baxter, 2008). In a long line of 'concrete and steel' novels, from Crash to Kingdom Come, Ballard lifts the lid on postmodern civilisation and reveals the discontents within. More than that, the Marco Polo of metropolitan peripheries shows how a cesspit of consumer psychosis seethes beneath the placid, placeless surface of anodyne, Ikeatized anonymity (Calcott and Shephard, 1998). Whether it be the coastal holiday resort in Cocaine Nights, the high-tech business park in Super-Cannes, or the luxury apartment block in High-Riseinitially entitled Up!-Ballard's ostensibly utopian settings unfailingly descend into dystopian anarchy, where blood is spilt, gore pores forth and late capitalism's societal stranglehold is strengthened.

Changing informal institutions via mimesis: Gender equality in marriage proposals

“…She argues that you are “damned if you do, and damned if you don't” and therewith gets to the heart of the matter of what living as a woman in, well, all societies amounts to. This double bind also correlates with the work of Bradshaw and Brown (2018), who offer an alternative psychoanalytical reading utilizing Laing and Esterson's (1964) Sanity, Madness and the Family . According to them, Laing and Esterson (1964) suggest that inhabiting multiple personalities enables women to function within the double standards placed on them by familial and societal expectations.…”

The haunting specter of retro consumption

“…He has also noted how more optimistic notions of “nostalgia” do not suffice to explain retro (Brown, 2013), described the marketing of “death” itself is an important category (Brown et al, 2012), and has extended his eloquent vocabulary to embrace the idea that what may be going on is “cultural necrophilia,” where marketer-necromancers “raise the dead” (Brown, 2009: 170). Indeed, he discussed Kotler as a specter early on (Brown, 2002) and has already noted the vertiginous oblivion of contemporary consumption (Bradshaw and Brown, 2018). Importantly, in recent work, he has engaged with the concept of hauntology directly (Brown, 2018; Cervellon and Brown, 2018b) as well, but even with all this attention, it stubbornly seems to offer little more than a curious aside, rather than something that might bring explanatory solace.…”

Abstract Machines in J. G. Ballard’s "High-rise"

“…In alliance with R. D. Laing, whose influence on the character of Laing has been studied by scholars such as Bradshaw and Brown (2018), Deleuze and Guattari claim that "the schizophrenic process" is "a voyage of initiation, a transcendental experience of the loss of the Ego" (2000: 84). This transcendental experience is the "process of the production of desire and desiring-machines" (2000: 24).…”