J. G. Ballard’s Surrealist Liberalism

• Date: 01 December 2021
• Author: Duncan Bell
• DOI: 10.1177/0090591720981890
• Published date: 01 December 2021
• Subject Matter: Articles

https://doi.org/10.1177/0090591720981890

Political Theory

2021, Vol. 49(6) 934 –967

© The Author(s) 2020

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DOI: 10.1177/0090591720981890

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Article

J. G. Ballard’s Surrealist

Liberalism

Duncan Bell1

Abstract

J. G. Ballard was one of the most original writers of the postwar era. Although

he has drawn considerable attention from scholars across various fields, the

character of his political thinking remains a puzzle. He has been claimed

as both a radical and a conservative, while others suggest that his work

expresses no distinct political stance. Drawing on a wide range of source

materials, I argue that from the 1960s to the early years of the twenty-

first century Ballard developed a bold and intriguing account of liberalism

grounded in insights drawn from surrealism and Freudian psychoanalysis.

This was an idiosyncratic version of the liberalism of fear. The essay analyzes

Ballard’s sociopolitical vision, focusing in particular on his account of human

nature, social reality, totalitarianism, and the power of the imagination.

Keywords

J. G. Ballard, liberalism, surrealism, Freud, psychoanalysis, war

Introduction

I think my political views were forged by my childhood in Shanghai and my

years in a detention camp. I detest barbed wire, whether of the real or figurative

variety.1

J. G. Ballard (1930–2009) was one of the most important Anglophone writers

of the postwar era. Across six decades he produced a unique counter-history of

the twentieth century written in terms of its pathological obsessions. Exploring

1Christ’s College, Cambridge, UK

Corresponding Author:

Duncan Bell, Christ’s College, Cambridge, CB2 3BU, UK.

Email: dsab2@cam.ac.uk

981890PTXXXX10.1177/0090591720981890Political TheoryBell

research-article2020

Bell 935

the fraught intersection of consumerism, the information revolution, and

human psychology, his work—including notorious texts such as The Atrocity

Exhibition (1970), Crash (1973), and High-Rise (1975)—influenced numer-

ous other writers, musicians, visual artists, filmmakers, and cultural commen-

tators.2 It has also drawn considerable scholarly attention. Avant-garde

experimentalist, pioneering new wave science fiction writer, trenchant critic

of capitalism, ingenious urbanist, visionary of environmental apocalypse, dys-

topian dreamweaver, phenomenologist of the contemporary technoscape:

Ballard has been read as all of these and more. He was, cultural theorist Mark

Dery observes, a trailblazing cartographer of cyberculture.3 Novelist Angela

Carter wrote that “there is always that sense, present in everything J. G.

Ballard writes, of a unique and profoundly original mind discussing with itself

pressing questions about the nature of our species’ experience on this planet.”4

Ballard’s account of late twentieth-century life, political theorist John Gray

proclaims, “is unsurpassed in its clairvoyant exactitude.”5 Recently he has

been anointed as a guide to the psychosocial dynamics of the 2020 global

pandemic. “The visionary English novelist’s dystopian imagination, defined

by cataclysmic events, quarantines and technological isolation, has never felt

so prescient.” We are living, Mark O’Connell concludes, “in Ballard’s world.”6

Read as a critic of capitalist society, Ballard is routinely juxtaposed with

or compared to thinkers such as Jean Baudrillard, Jacques Derrida, and

Michel Foucault.7 Others discern a troubling streak of nihilism in his work.

Labelling him the “greatest of modern apocalyptic writers,” Frederic Jameson

suggests that Ballard’s early novels are “exemplary illustrations” of how “the

imagination of a dying class—in this case the cancelled future of a vanished

colonial and imperial destiny—seeks to intoxicate itself with images of

death.”8 A similar charge was levelled by H. Bruce Franklin, who argued that

Ballard’s renderings of apocalypse were projections of “the doomed social

structure in which he exists”; his was ultimately a literature of “despair, nega-

tion, and death.”9 In a less critical vein, novelist Jonathan Lethem character-

ized Ballard as a “poet of desolation,” and “perhaps the most cosmically

elegiac writer in literature.”10 He has been interpreted as a latter-day Oswald

Spengler, narrating the decline of Western civilization. Others see him as a

fabulator of spiritual fulfillment, a utopian of sorts, “the literary herald” of an

emancipated world: “His landscapes of the soul are also landscapes of jus-

tice.”11 Some conservatives claim him as a one of their own.12 Profoundly

elusive, Ballard’s work continues to stimulate, provoke, and confound.

This essay offers a new reading of Ballard’s politics. Although political

theorists have rarely engaged with his work, Gray is a notable exception.

Ballard once claimed that he was “not a political writer.”13 Gray concurs.

“Ballard’s achievement is not to have staked out any kind of political

936 Political Theory 49(6)

position,” he cautioned in 1999. “Rather it is to have communicated a vision

of what individual fulfillment might mean in a time of nihilism.”14 In the fol-

lowing pages I suggest that there is much more to be said about the subject.

There are two significant problems involved in pinpointing Ballard’s political

stance. One is methodological. Most interpretations focus on his fictional

output. But divining the politics of sophisticated writers from their artistic

production is a notoriously complicated enterprise, and in Ballard’s case this

difficulty is amplified by the calculated ambivalence of his novels and short

stories. He regarded his attempts to make sense of the world as a form of

rogue scientific inquiry. His fictions were elaborate thought-experiments,

designed to scrutinize emergent phenomena or latent features of contempo-

rary society rather than prescriptive manifestos for how best to live in it. “I

approach my subject matter very much in the spirit of a scientific investigator

who throws out hypotheses to explain the phenomena. At all times it is

impelled by a need to find a truth about a situation.”15 To provide a fuller

picture of his intellectual and political commitments, I utilize Ballard’s exten-

sive archive of interviews, essays, and reviews, as well as discussing some of

his novels—chiefly Empire of the Sun (1984), The Kindness of Women

(1991), and Kingdom Come (2006).16

The second issue is metatheoretical. Since there is little agreement on

what thinking politically encompasses, delineating the political dimensions

of a writer’s work is invariably a disputed exercise. Ballard rarely discussed

the structure of government, the nature of political ideologies, legislation and

public policy, or principles of justice. If the domain of politics is conceived in

this relatively narrow sense, Gray is right to claim that Ballard did not articu-

late a “political position.” But a different picture emerges if we open the

interpretive aperture. Ballard addressed some of the most fundamental issues

of the twentieth century: “the threat of nuclear war, over-population, the com-

puter revolution, the possibilities and abuses of medical science, the ecologi-

cal dangers to our planet, the consumer society as benign tyranny.”17 Political

thinking assumes many and varied forms. As Robert Gooding-Williams

argues, contrasting and sometimes conflicting genres are characterized by

their “thematic preoccupations,” and to illustrate the point he distinguishes

social contract theory, from Hobbes to Rawls, with an “Afro-modern” alter-

native that emphasizes the nature of white supremacy and the meaning of

black emancipation.18 These are but two among many genres. Ballard can be

located in a diffuse body of twentieth-century thought concerned with the

multiplex impact of technology on human subjectivity, systems of belief, and

social institutions. This draws him into the orbit of thinkers such as Guy

Debord, Lewis Mumford, and Marshall McLuhan, as well as a rich stream of