'"Going mad is their only way of staying sane": Norbert Elias and the Civilised Violence of J. G. Ballard' more

‘Going mad is their only way of staying sane’: Norbert Elias and the Civilized Violence of J.G. Ballard John Carter Wood (Draft essay: to appear in J. G. Ballard: Visions and Revisions, ed. Jeannette Baxter and Rowland Wymer. London: Palgrave, forthcoming, 2011.) 1. Introduction How should we evaluate J. G. Ballard‘s fiction as social commentary? There have been a range of answers to this question. Many analyses of Ballard‘s writing—inspired not least by the author‘s emphasis on exploring the psychological terrain of ‗inner space‘1—have focused on the unconscious and symbolic or emphasized the transcendence of materiality rather than engagement with social life itself.2 Others have stressed Ballard‘s attention to the mediaconstructed simulacra of reality: ‗a concern with the material conditions of production and consumption of mass-media artefacts‘, Michel Delville claims, is ‗conspicuously absent‘ from Ballard‘s work.3 But Ballard commented on numerous political and aesthetic topics, and developed a reputation for perceptive, even prophetic, analysis of social change, a view perhaps more reflected in recent criticism. Andrzej Gasiorek has referred to Ballard as both ‗a historian of the post-war era, who is interested in the unfolding of social developments over time‘ and ‗a cartographer of the contemporary period‘.4 Dominika Oramus sees in Ballard‘s later work a chronicle of the ‗twilight of the West‘.5 Iain Sinclair even suggests that sociology has triumphed over literature in Ballard‘s recent work, remarking that the novel Kingdom Come (2006) ‗could have been stripped down to be a series of savage essays or presentations about the motorway corridor with dramatised events happening in the middle‘.6 ‗Going mad is their only way of staying sane‘, 2 In my view Ballard‘s writing—however idiosyncratic and experimental—offers an insightful understanding of psychology, social life and historical change that extends well beyond the post-war period. The importance of an innate human nature has long been a key interest of his. In a 2005 interview with the German newspaper Die Zeit, he observed: All of my books deal with the fact that our human civilization is like the crust of the lava discharged from a volcano. It looks stable, but when you put your foot on it, you feel the fire. Asked about the apocalyptic tone in some of his writing, he responded, that the ‗worst‘ type of ‗war and terror‘: is the subtle way that violence fascinates us. If we want to successfully work against it, we have to finally admit that human beings are not completely capable of being civilized. Regrettable but true.7 Ballard‘s contrasting of civilization‘s potential with its limits recalls a methodological approach that has yet to be connected to his writings: Norbert Elias‘s theory of the ‗civilizing process‘, which has become influential in the historiography of violence.8 Without suggesting a specific adoption (whether conscious or not) by Ballard of Elias‘s ideas, I do think they have had overlapping insights into the human condition. Some of Ballard‘s novels, for example, can be seen as staging fictional crises in the historical and sociological processes that Elias explained. From this perspective, I will examine High-Rise (1975) and Super-Cannes (2000), which, although separated by a quarter century, reflect different aspects of the author‘s recurring ‗Going mad is their only way of staying sane‘, 3 interests in social alienation, violence and human psychology. Their distinct emphases also recall different aspects of Elias‘s thinking: ‗de-civilization‘ and the ‗quest for excitement in unexciting societies‘. I present, first, a brief summary of the theory of the ‗civilizing process‘. 2. A Crash Course in Civilizing Processes In 1930s Germany, Norbert Elias began developing an innovative historical sociology that focused on manners, emotions, and self-restraint. Painfully aware of the fragility of modern civilization (as he watched it being destroyed by Nazism), he nonetheless explored the profound historical developments that had reshaped everyday human life. Elias saw the social and the self as inseparable: society and psyche advanced (or retreated) together, with a particular ‗balance of tensions within the personality‘ being influenced by innate psychology, socialization and day-today interaction.9 The ‗tensions‘ are primarily between ‗affects‘—emotions or drives toward pleasure—and the psychological mechanisms that rein them in. Elias‘s emphasis on the unconscious and on an internal conflict between drives and self-control was clearly influenced by Freud.10 However, his use of such notions was rather vague and selective. Elias ignored, for example, the central Freudian emphasis on childhood sexual development, and he avoided speculations—such as those Freud made in Civilization and Its Discontents—about a ‗death drive‘; moreover, he distanced his historical analysis from what he saw as Freud‘s static and ahistorical psychology.11 (Elias‘s Freudian inheritance is thus less direct and more ambiguous than Ballard‘s.) In Elias‘s theory, a particular psychological ‗balance of tensions‘ derives from a ‗drive and affect-economy‘12 that varies across different times and places, shaped by social relationships that Elias called ‗figurations‘. Post-medieval figurations in Western Europe were mainly characterized by rising self-control, expanding foresight, and a growing restraint of ‗Going mad is their only way of staying sane‘, 4 emotions and impulses, what he called a ‗civilizing process‘. He later spoke of processes that might run at different rates, such as the enforcement of a monopoly on legitimate violence by increasingly powerful states; lengthening chains of interdependence through trade and production; shrinking power differentials among social groups (i.e., ‗functional democratization‘); growing refinement of and subtlety in manners; growing pressure to restrain emotional, sexual and aggressive impulses; and a greater role for ‗conscience‘ in regulating behaviour.13 Social interdependence and the monopolization of violence were most significant. Interdependence referred to trends—trade, division of labour, urbanization—compelling individuals to regulate their conduct in an increasingly differentiated, subtle, consistent and restrained manner.14 He used automobile traffic as one metaphor to explain this relationship: Cars are rushing in all directions; pedestrians and cyclists are trying to thread their way through the mêlée of cars; policemen stand at the main crossroads to regulate the traffic with varying success. But this external control is founded on the assumption that every individual is himself regulating his behaviour with the utmost exactitude in accordance with the necessities of this network. The chief danger that people here represent for others results from someone in this bustle losing his self-control.15 He also focused on the state enforcement of ‗pacified social spheres‘, in which violent acts were criminalized and alternative means of dispute settlement were provided, making private vengeance—previously common—less necessary. Thus, the ‗moulding of affects‘ and the ‗standards of the economy of instincts‘16 develop historically, through social processes interacting with innate psychological capabilities. ‗Going mad is their only way of staying sane‘, 5 Elias was acutely aware that European society after the Second World War presented a historical anomaly. He resisted—in contrast to some of his contemporaries—an anti-modernist perspective, and instead highlighted the real benefits that a large portion of the population of modern societies enjoyed. ‗In the more developed nation-states,‘ he observed in one of his later works, ‗people‘s security, their protection against the more brutal strokes of fate such as illness and sudden death, is much greater than in earlier periods, and perhaps greater than at any time in the development of humanity.‘17 This echoes a comment by Ballard: Many people have said to me, ‗What an extraordinary life you‘ve had‘, but of course my childhood in Shanghai was far closer to the way the majority of people on this planet, in previous centuries and in the 20th century, have lived than, say, life in Western Europe and the United States. It‘s we here, in our quiet suburbs and our comparatively peaceful cities, who are the anomalies.18 Perhaps because of his comparatively positive view of modern life, Elias has been misunderstood as positing an optimistic and naively progressive view of historical development. However, like Ballard, he had painful personal experiences in the Second World War19 and was well aware of the contingency of (and tensions within) the process he described. These points lead us to HighRise and Super-Cannes, which dramatize two aspects of the civilizing process: its potential reversal and its susceptibility to producing psychological dissatisfaction. 3. Tower, infernal: dismantling civilization in High-Rise One of Ballard‘s consistent themes has been the social and psychological dimensions of the ‗gated enclave‘; he is fascinated by ‗worlds within a world‘ where the physical environment ‗Going mad is their only way of staying sane‘, 6 distorts human nature into an ‗asocial habitus‘.20 In several of his novels, characters revert to more impulsive and primal forms of behaviour, a process often accompanied by cruelty and/or violence. Here, Ballard‘s interest in the darker side of human psychology combines with an awareness of the fragility of civilized social relationships. Ballard himself often suggested that this theme originated in his own life experiences as a boy in Shanghai, particularly the Japanese conquest of the city and his internment with his family in a prison camp. From that, he gained ‗the sense that reality itself was a stage set that could be dismantled at any moment, and that no matter how magnificent anything appeared, it could be swept aside into the debris of the past‘.21 The inherently unstable nature of civilized life is a consistent theme across Ballard‘s oeuvre. Social disintegration plays an often underestimated role in Elias‘s theories. While he has been accused of describing social change as automatic, inevitable and one-directional, Jonathan Fletcher rightly argues that he saw the civilizing process as ‗never completed and constantly endangered‘.22 Indeed, as Abram de Swaan observes, he came to believe that civilization ‗is not a permanent state but rather a precarious process, that may very well reverse itself‘.23 Despite increasing self-control, ‗cruelty and joy in the destruction and torment of others‘ continued: ‗affective outbursts may still occur as exceptional phenomena, as a ―pathological‖ degeneration, in later phases of social development‘.24 In crises, the ‗armor of civilized conduct‘ could ‗crumble very rapidly‘,25 and Elias drew attention to the conditions required to maintain an even relatively pacified society, observing dryly, ‗Classes living permanently in danger of starving to death or of being killed by enemies can hardly develop or maintain those stable restraints characteristic of the more civilized forms of conduct‘.26 Fletcher summarises Elias‘s three main symptoms of de-civilization: a shift from selfcontrol toward externally enforced limits; increasingly unstable patterns of self-restraint; and ‗a contraction in the scope of mutual identification between constituent groups and individuals‘.27 ‗Going mad is their only way of staying sane‘, 7 These have tended to occur where ‗there was a decrease in the (state) control of the monopoly of violence, a fragmentation of social ties and a shortening of chains of commercial, emotional and cognitive interdependence‘. Such a society would be characterized by: a rise in the levels of fear, insecurity, danger and incalculability; the re-emergence of violence into the public sphere; growing inequality or heightening of tensions in the balance of power between constituent groups; a decrease in the distance between the standards of adults and children; a freer expression of aggressiveness and an increase in cruelty; an increase in impulsiveness; an increase in involved forms of thinking with their concomitantly high fantasy content and a decrease in detached forms of thought with an accompanying decrease in the ‗reality-congruence‘ of concepts.28 These factors might ‗trigger‘ each other in a ‗mutually reinforcing spiral‘.29 Such a de-civilizing ‗spiral‘ is vividly enacted in High-Rise within a single, massive residential complex that descends into a conflict characterized by all the de-civilizing criteria Fletcher describes. Elias saw increasing social interdependence as a key civilizing factor. In High-Rise, the titular setting of the novel is an isolated (and isolating) structure: a world unto itself.30 With few exceptions, the lifestyle of one of the book‘s protagonists, Dr. Robert Laing, is ‗as self-contained as the building itself‘ (9). Residents have few traditional community ties. As conflict among them intensifies, their already weak interdependencies—both external and internal—break down further. Ever fewer residents go to work (98), and even those who maintain some pretence of normality become increasingly focused on events within the building. Later, telephone lines (both public and private) are disconnected, externally resident building workers stop showing up, and ‗Going mad is their only way of staying sane‘, 8 shipments to the supermarket and restaurant cease. The residents, effectively, ‗were cutting themselves off from the outside world‘ (102). The residents disperse into increasingly fragmented warring factions, and a creeping ‗separation of loyalties‘ occurs as three ‗classes‘ emerge based on different groupings of floors (53). Minor conflicts turn into violent disputes, and group identities coalesce around new ‗established‘ and ‗outsider‘ groups distinguished by floor, ‗clan‘ (65) and ‗small scale tribal enclaves‘ (70).31 Those groups deemed to be ‗lower‘ in status are denigrated: residents of lower floors, for instance, are referred to as a ‗band of migrant workers‘ (25) or as ‗animals‘ (27). Eventually, even the clan-system breaks down, and people begin ‗retreating into their own apartments‘ and ‗barricading themselves away‘ (120). These trends are accompanied by a ‗renascent barbarism‘ (79) that recalls an important principle for Elias. Human affects form a unified ‗whole‘: We may call particular instincts by different names according to their different directions and functions, we may speak of hunger and the need to spit, of the sexual drive and of aggressive impulses, but in life these different instincts are no more separable than the heart from the stomach or the blood in the brain from the blood in the genitalia.32 Changes in the self-control of impulsive acts in different areas, he suggests, are mutually influencing. In High-Rise, declining restraint with regard to noise (84), sexual inhibitions (‗blue movies‘, 31) and outward aggression (the ‗grilling‘ and ‗slapping‘ of a woman identified as a ‗vagrant‘, 33) are connected at an early stage, with one of the protagonists, Richard Wilder, exemplifying the turn to impulsivity. Wilder commits the novel‘s first act of violence when, during a power outage, a ‗cruel but powerful impulse‘ (48) drives him to drown an Afghan hound ‗Going mad is their only way of staying sane‘, 9 in one of the complex‘s swimming pools. In the novel, growing impulsivity regarding sex and violence is connected to decreasing restraint with regard to bodily functions, recalling Elias‘s linking of changing standards of restraint regarding acts such as spitting, the revealing of nakedness, vomiting, flatulence, urination and defecation. High-Rise emphasizes its characters‘ reversal of such trends, resulting in a marked decline in hygiene—whether personal33 or public34—and a ‗falling interest in civilized conventions of any kind‘ (100). Wilder succinctly exemplifies the interconnected nature of impulsivity when he breaks into the flat of his neighbour Charlotte Melville: he trashes it, urinates into the bath, exposes himself, lies in a drunken stupor recording his own belches and, when she returns, rapes her (128-30). While the interconnections between different kinds of impulsive behaviour are complex, a recent survey of the history of murder highlights the possibly significant ‗relationship between levels of aggression and of hygiene‘.35 As Fletcher notes, the relaxation of restraints also reduces the differences between adult and child behaviour, a tendency exemplified at various points in High-Rise. Having had the ‗longest possible childhood‘ (47) that his mother could arrange for him, Wilder allowed his childlike impulsiveness to continue, resulting in the ‗childish [sex] games‘ (48) that he (unsuccessfully) attempted to play with his wife early in their marriage. Other residents are compared to children in various contexts. Wilder‘s wife refers to the growing conflict in the tower as ‗a huge children‘s game that‘s got out of hand‘ (57). ‗For the first time since we were three years old‘, says one resident to Laing, ‗what we do makes absolutely no difference‘ (40). The growing conflict brings out the ‗childish strains‘ (71) in Anne Royal, wife of the complex‘s architect. As one resident tells Laing, ‗everyone‘s working off the most extraordinary backlog of infantile aggressions‘ (109). Wilder observes the shrinking difference in behavioural standards from another direction, when he considers that the ‗civil war‘ in the building had made the ‗Going mad is their only way of staying sane‘, 10 children ‗as combative as their parents‘ (116). He also tries to dissuade two airline pilots from the ‗childish act‘ of ‗raiding‘ the upper floors with the ultimate goal of urinating in the pool (58), combining the themes of childishness, aggression and bodily functions. The tower‘s decivilizing spiral is most vividly signalled by violence. Elias highlighted a historical process he called the ‗courtization of warriors‘, which made social advancement and power less dependent on brute force during the early-modern period. This process is vividly reversed in High-Rise, where a process that we might call ‗warriorization‘ sees the re-emergence of violence into formerly pacified public spaces. These processes are signalled by the book‘s first (human) death: the plunge of a resident known as ‗the jeweller‘ from a fortieth floor window (41) causes no change in everyday life. Wilder‘s comment to Laing that the death would make ‗a good starting point‘ (55) for a television documentary on the conflict in the building is entirely appropriate, as more episodes of violence and counter-violence follow. The building residents‘ increasing alienation from the state monopolization of force is made clear by an exchange between Anne and Anthony Royal: ‗Anne, we‘re leaving…‘ ‗At last – and why has no one called the police? Or complained to the owners?‘ ‗We are the owners.‘ (71) But even the Royals‘ internalized control wanes. The tower‘s authorities (e.g., the building manager or the pool attendant) have abandoned their posts (43, 55), and the public spaces of this ‗unpoliced city‘ (40)—such as its hallways and elevator lobbies—become arenas of disorder. De Swaan has analysed incidents of modern mass-slaughter, arguing that brutal emotionality and cool, calculating restraint can coexist when the ‗barbarity‘ is ‗Going mad is their only way of staying sane‘, 11 ‗compartmentalized‘.36 He refers specifically to the use of terror in Bosnia by Serb paramilitary units: ‗Here, the wildness and brutality are let loose, or maybe even instilled, and at the same time instrumentalized, for specific purposes, within demarcated spaces at an appointed time: an archipelago of enclaves where cruelty reigns while being reined in all the while.‘37 In High-Rise, similarly, the broader society seems untouched—and unaware—of the savage descent of the complex into disorder. De Swaan‘s analysis focuses on the large-scale violence of totalitarianism or war, but he makes clear that the ‗modus operandi of compartmentalization need not be so extreme‘ and might function in social conditions that are, at least on the surface, far more normal and ‗innocuous‘.38 Although High-Rise does not offer a strictly realistic scenario, some American inner-city areas, Loïc Wacquant has argued, have had rates of violence that meet or exceed those of war-zones; these islands of extreme violence have existed in an otherwise orderly society.39 Ballard, of course, is not simply dramatizing a particular sociological or historical model, and High-Rise exhibits classic Ballardian idiosyncrasies and interests. Rather than Elias‘s emphasis on the crumbling of refined behavioural standards resulting from a sudden catastrophe, for instance, Ballard depicts a wilful—and oddly fulfilling—dismantling of civilizing mechanisms. Whereas Elias saw (correctly) that increasingly restrained, stable interdependencies within effectively pacified social spaces tend to produce stronger levels of self-control and reduced violence, Ballard suggests (not implausibly) how intensely controlled societies might generate new forms of ‗psychopathology‘. While important, these differences do not prevent seeing important connections between the two authors. Elias was not only aware that the civilizing processes he theorized could be reversed in a total fashion, he also believed that civilization bred its own more chronic dissatisfactions. This point leads us to Ballard‘s novel Super-Cannes which makes use of a similar assumption. ‗Going mad is their only way of staying sane‘, 12 4. At play in the garden of the gods: Super-Cannes and the quest for excitement in unexciting societies Ballard‘s observations about the double-edged nature of modern life—that its unprecedented levels of comfort and security may lead to new forms of frustration and discontent—have been reiterated throughout his fiction and non-fiction. In a 2004 interview, he doubted that new technologies—such as the Internet—could ‗halt the slide into boredom and conformism‘, speculating: the human race will inevitably move like a sleepwalker towards that vast resource it has hesitated to tap—its own psychopathy. This adventure playground of the soul is waiting for us with its gates wide open, and admission is free.40 This tension between strict discipline and the emotional extremity that Ballard has often referred to as ‗psychopathy‘, is indeed at the centre of his 2000 novel, Super-Cannes, set in a French business park (modelled on the real-world Sophia Antipolis) on the Mediterranean coast.41 Although Elias‘s overall perspective was in many ways different from Ballard‘s, he similarly emphasized that the significant benefits of the civilizing process (such as greater security) had a psychological ‗price‘: ‗it requires and instils greater restraint in the individual, more exact control of his affects and conduct, it demands a stricter regulation of drives and— from a particular stage on—more even self-restraint‘.42 Spontaneous actions, strong emotions and even violent acts, he believed, were sources of pleasure and satisfaction; their constraint, however, increased across history, restricting a person‘s conduct ‗like a tight ring‘ and causing ‗a ‗Going mad is their only way of staying sane‘, 13 more steady regulation of his drives according to the social norms‘.43 Elias explored these themes with Eric Dunning in a 1967 essay originally titled ‗The Quest for Excitement in Unexciting Societies‘.44 ‗Civilized‘ societies are ‗unexciting‘ in that they prohibit extremes of the ‗spontaneous, elementary and unreflected type of excitement, in joy as in sorrow, in love as in hatred‘ (71); here, work discipline extends into everyday life.45 Even elites ‗can never release the circumspection and the foresight which are the concomitants of emotional restraint without endangering their position in society‘.46 A long historical process developed individual selfcontrol until it had become ‗second nature‘.47 The continuing need for excitement, however, drove the parallel rise of ‗mimetic‘ leisure activities—such as sport: a ‗change of gear which concerns the whole organism on all levels‘.48 Activities were ‗mimetic‘ in that they produced affect-laden reactions like those of earlier, less restrained ages; rather than a ‗liberation from tensions‘, they aimed, Elias and Dunning argued, to restore ‗that measure of tension which is an essential ingredient of mental health‘.49 (It has recently been suggested that the ‗optimal level of anxiety and aggression in human societies—that is the level at which peaceableness is maximized—may not be zero‘).50 Most people find the release offered by well-defined ‗mimetic‘ activities to be sufficient; but, not all of them do. Super-Cannes explores these tensions. Indeed, the main setting in Super-Cannes, the business park ‗Eden-Olympia‘, can be seen as a zone of hyper-civilization where the main psycho-social processes Elias concentrated upon operate in heightened form: the vast interdependencies of global capitalism, the monopolization of physical force by bureaucratized authorities and the internalized restraint of emotions demanded by high-pressure work routines. The theme of impulsivity—and Eden-Olympia‘s hostility to it—is repeatedly raised, particularly by the narrator, Paul Sinclair. Paul accompanies his wife Jane to the park, where she has taken up the job formerly belonging to David ‗Going mad is their only way of staying sane‘, 14 Greenwood, a doctor who had gone on a deadly shooting spree for reasons that—until the end of the novel—are unclear. The park seems to epitomize restraint, work-discipline and order. Upon arrival, Jane remarks upon the incongruence between the park‘s appearance and Greenwood‘s bloody rampage. ‗ ―It all looks very civilized, in a Euro kind of way,‖ ‘ she notes, ‗ ―Not a drifting leaf in sight. It‘s hard to believe anyone would be allowed to go mad here‖ ‘ (9).51 One of the park‘s psychologists, Wilder Penrose, introduces the pair to their new environment and praises the predictable and planned ‗intelligent city‘ designed for maximum productivity and devoid of traditional community identity or interaction. Instead, an ‗invisible infrastructure‘ ensures a smoothly running, thoroughly pacified environment with ‗no parking problems, no fears of burglars or purse-snatchers, no rapes or muggings‘ (38). Paul resists the park‘s ‗ceaseless work and its ethic of corporate responsibility‘; the ‗civility and polity‘ that had been ‗designed into‘ it, he notes, leave him feeling ‗deeply bored‘ (38). He later identifies the park as an ‗outpost of an advanced kind of puritanism, and a virtually sex-free zone‘ (155). Not that there is no sex in the park: television pornography is plentiful and Paul has glimpses of furtive, intense sex among his neighbours; however, that activity seems carefully channelled, having little connection with spontaneous desire. He watches through his married neighbours‘ window as the husband returns from what—we later discover—is likely to have been an evening of organized brutality: Paul sees his animated recounting of the night‘s violence segue into lovemaking (76). Paul too begins to link sex to other forms of illicit impulsivity. During a jaunt in Cannes, Jane nonchalantly shoplifts a magazine. She and Paul make love upon their return (‗a rare event after her long working days‘) after Jane ‗had been excited by the illicit pleasure of leaving for Cannes on the spur of the moment. An impulsive decision ran counter to the entire ethos of Eden-Olympia‘ (77). She had smiled after the theft: ‗Going mad is their only way of staying sane‘, 15 accepting that a benign lightning strike had illuminated our excessively ordered world. … The emotion had been draining from our lives, leaving a numbness that paled the sun. The stolen magazine quickened our lovemaking. (77) As Jane loses herself in work discipline, Paul not only investigates Greenwood‘s rampage but is also drawn to impulsive acts: he damages Penrose‘s car (90-91) and, on the spur of the moment, steals a BMW (118-19). The latter belongs to Frances Baring, an Eden-Olympia executive who plays a key role in Paul‘s introduction to the park‘s seamier side. In Super-Cannes, as in High-Rise, many links are drawn between impulsivity, violence, crime and sex; this recalls Elias‘s emphasis on impulsivity and self-control being part of ‗the personality structure as a whole‘.52 Paul, for instance, finds that in the wake of the impulsive Cannes daytrip, his relationship becomes enervated: ‗Jane and I rarely made love‘, he notes, their passion ‗smothered by a sleep of eye-masks and sedatives, followed by cold showers and snatched breakfasts‘ (155). Jane, Paul states, ‗moved naked around our bedroom, in full view of [their neighbours] Simone Delage and her husband, flaunting not her sex but her indifference to it‘; Cannes offers ‗an antidote to this spartan regime‘ (155), to which Paul continues to flee. Distanced from his wife (who develops an oddly affectless sexual relationship with the Delages) Paul sadly observes that their marriage ‗had been the last of her hippie gestures, the belief that impulsive acts alone gave meaning to life‘ (272). There is, however, another side to impulsivity in Eden-Olympia. In a lengthy conversation with Penrose, Paul discovers that the furtive criminality he has become aware of is one element of a ‗controlled and supervised madness‘ the psychologist has organised to help ‗cure‘ a crippling ‗malaise‘ previously apparent among the park‘s hard-working professionals. Recalling Paul and Jane‘s own experience, Penrose observes: ‗Going mad is their only way of staying sane‘, 16 They weren‘t having sex at all. … The adult film channel, hours of explicit hardcore, did no better. People watched, but in a nostalgic way, as if they were seeing a documentary about morris dancing or roof-thatching, an old craft skill popular with a previous generation. … Short of making sexual intercourse a corporate requirement, there was nothing we could do. (257-58) The decline in sex was emblematic of a broader crisis: the park‘s executives suffered from ‗an inability to rest the mind, to find time for reflection and recreation‘ (251) due to the high degree of ‗self-restraint‘ (256) in their work. The ‗malaise‘ recalls Elias‘s suggestion that emotional restraint—‗affect-inhibition‘—might make an individual ‗no longer capable of any form of fearless expression of the modified affects, or of direct gratification of the repressed drives‘.53 But Penrose found fantasies ‗filled with suppressed yearnings for violence, and ugly narratives of anger and revenge‘ in the ‗strange dreams‘ of the ‗highly disciplined professionals‘ (258). Seeing these as remnants of a long historical process of psychological repression, he identifies a solution: ‗Small doses of insanity are the only solution. Their own psychopathy is all that can rescue these people‘ (251). Based on his theory, he had developed a ‗therapeutic‘ regimen beginning with theft, drug-taking and sexual perversion and ending with organised violence: so-called ‗special actions‘ (349) involving attacks on the immigrant and petty-criminal underclass near the business park. As a senior security officer says to Paul, ‗Going mad is their only way of staying sane‘ (202). There are elements here of the compartmentalized ‗de-civilizing process‘ found in HighRise; however, Super-Cannes also highlights a different aspect of Eliasian sociology, one that, curious as it may seem, involves sport. Throughout Super-Cannes, the violent ‗special actions‘ ‗Going mad is their only way of staying sane‘, 17 are referred to—in many contexts and by different characters—in terms of leisure activities, ‗games‘ or sports. They are, for instance, carried out by men in ‗bowling jackets‘ organised like sports teams. Frances Baring refers to some of the more ‗fun‘ actions as ‗rugger club japes‘ (307). Penrose compares them to an ‗adventure-training course‘ or a ‗game of touch rugby‘ (259), and he refers to ‗a voluntary and elective psychopathy, as you can see in any boxing ring or ice-hockey rink‘ (264). He tells Paul that the original notion of using violence to restore people to health occurred to him through boxing (242-43). (Elias also made use of boxing as an important example of the civilization of impulsive violence into rule-bound enclaves. 54) Referring to a brutally executed crime that Paul had witnessed, Penrose states, it ‗was really a kind of sporting event. The film was a record of a successful hunting party. In fact, all the crimes are somehow…recreational‘ (247). The connection between sport and violence—which recurs even more directly in Ballard‘s novel Kingdom Come (2006)—brings us back to the ‗quest for excitement‘. Elias, too, claimed that excessive self-control caused ‗constant feelings of boredom or solitude‘; the internalized struggle caused by civilizing pressures did not always find ‗a happy resolution‘, leading to ‗perpetual restlessness and dissatisfaction‘ since ‗inclinations and impulses‘ could only be indulged in limited form.55 Excessive self-restraint might prevent even the satisfactions of these ‗modified affects‘.56 Elias and Dunning emphasized that ‗mimetic‘ activities had become central to advanced human societies, providing the refined, controlled and spectatorial joys of, for example, sport, film, fantasy and mild perversion. Penrose‘s ‗therapy‘ in Super-Cannes, of course, involves brutality and fascistic political extremism. It is, as Paul recognises, ‗deranged‘ (360) and hardly a fictional application of Elias‘s figurational sociology. However, the same social and psychological tensions Elias and Dunning addressed are vividly dramatized in ‗Going mad is their only way of staying sane‘, 18 Ballard‘s novel, and the whole notion of Penrose‘s violent, therapeutic ‗games‘ recalls the ‗controlled decontrolling of emotional controls‘ explored by the two social psychologists. 5. Conclusion Ballard offered no comprehensive analysis of real-world violence, most of which—in whatever time or place—can be explained without reference to middle-class psychopathology. However, whether in the context of acute social breakdown or chronic psychological dissatisfaction, his fiction provides vivid insights into the operation of, and limits to, civilizing processes. Both Elias and Ballard considered the difficult interaction between human nature and changing social and technological environments. To some extent, Ballard‘s fictional approach to ‗civilization‘ begins where Elias‘s ends: Elias sought to understand systematically how it increased (even if he warned of its fragility) while Ballard focused his gaze on its shadowy borders, limits and failures. The social collapse dramatised in High-Rise is hardly ‗realistic‘; however, it draws on the main elements of the social and psychological reality Elias analysed. By dismantling a society, Ballard, in effect, reverse-engineered the processes through which it was built. In Super-Cannes, Frances Baring refers, accurately enough, to Penrose‘s ‗lunatic ideology‘ (350). But it was Ballard‘s talent to use such madness so lucidly. It is mad, but it fascinates because it appeals to deep-seated motivations. Asked about violence in 2004, Ballard suggested his novels offer ‗an extreme hypothesis‘ about the future: As I've often said, someone who puts up a road sign saying ‗dangerous bends ahead‘ is not inciting drivers to speed up, though I hope that my fiction is sufficiently ambiguous to make the accelerator seem strangely attractive.57 ‗Going mad is their only way of staying sane‘, 19 Although rather more staid, Elias‘s theories offer some similar insights into psychology. If Ballard explored what we are and where we are (possibly) going, Elias confined himself to understanding how we got here. Ballard the novelist, of course, had far more freedom to produce variations on the possibilities of human life than Elias the sociologist. While there is no coherent Ballardian ‗theory of violence‘ which extends throughout his work, I suggest that the framework of recurring assumptions about human psychology he developed has some parallels with Elias‘s more systematic view. Such parallels are one reason that, to answer the question I posed at the opening of this essay, I think we should take Ballard‘s role as a historical sociologist—his warnings about the ‗dangerous bends‘ ahead—rather seriously indeed. 1 See, for example, ‗Which Way to Inner Space?‘ (1962) and ‗Time, Memory and Inner Space‘ (1963), reprinted in J. G. Ballard, A User’s Guide to the Millennium: Essays and Reviews (London: HarperCollins, 1996), pp. 195-8, 199-201. 2 See many of the essays in a special edition of Science Fiction Studies 55 (Nov. 1991), esp., Jean Beaudrillard, ‗Ballard‘s Crash‘, Trans. Arthur B. Evans, Science Fiction Studies 55 (Nov. 1991), 313-20; Nicholas Ruddick, ‗Ballard/Crash/Baudrillard‘, Science Fiction Studies 58 (Nov. 1992), 354-60. 3 Michel Delville, J. G. Ballard (Plymouth: Northcote House/British Council, 1998), p. 89. Andrzej Gasiorek, J. G. Ballard (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005), p. 5. Dominka Oramus, Grave New World: The Decline of the West in the Fiction of J. G. Ballard 4 5 (Warsaw: University of Warsaw, 2007), p. 14. 6 Tim Chapman, ‗When in Doubt, Quote Ballard: An Interview with Iain Sinclair‘, Ballardian, 29 August 2006, http://www.ballardian.com/iain-sinclair-when-in-doubt-quote-ballard/, accessed 24 November 2010. ‗Going mad is their only way of staying sane‘, 20 7 ‗Gewalt ohne Ende‘, Die Zeit, 8 September 2005, p. 43. My translation. Original quotes: ‗All meine Bücher handeln ja davon, dass unsere humane Gesittung wie die Kruste über der ausgespienen Lava eines Vulkans ist. Sie sieht fest aus, aber wenn man den Fuß daraufsetzt, spürt man das Feuer.‘ ‗Es gibt viele Arten von Krieg und Terror, aber das Schlimmste ist, dass Gewalt einen unterschwelligen Reiz auf uns ausübt. Wenn wir sie erfolgreich bekämpfen wollen, müssen wir endlich zugeben, dass der Mensch nicht komplett zivilisierbar ist. Bedauerlich, aber wahr.‘ 8 For a summary of this historiography in a British context, see J. Carter Wood ‗Criminal Violence in Modern Britain‘, History Compass 4, no. 1 (2006), 77-90. 9 Eric Dunning, ‗Preface‘, in Norbert Elias and Eric Dunning, Quest for Excitement: Sport and Leisure in the Civilizing Process (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986), pp. 6-7; Jonathan Fletcher, Violence and Civilization: An Introduction to the Work of Norbert Elias (Cambridge: Polity, 1997), p. 22. 10 E.g., Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process: The History of Manners and State Formation and Civilization (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994 [1939]), p. 249. 11 As Alan Sica has put it with reference to the Civilizing Process, the use of Freud ‗does not make or break the book‘: cited in George Cavalletto, Crossing the Psycho-Social Divide: Freud, Weber, Adorno and Elias (Aldershot: Ashgate), p. 174. Chris Rojek criticises Elias for being inattentive and ‗over-complacent‘ about the miseries caused by civilisation which Freud highlighted: Decentring Leisure: Rethinking Leisure Theory (London: Sage, 1995), p. 54. Fletcher argues that ‗by historicizing Freud‘s basic categories Elias thus releases himself from Freud‘s reductionist and static notions‘. Fletcher, Violence and Civilization, p. 26. Steven Pinker has recently observed that Elias‘s emphasis on ‗increases in self-control, long-term planning, and sensitivity to the thoughts and feelings of others‘ are ‗precisely the functions that today‘s ‗Going mad is their only way of staying sane‘, 21 cognitive neuroscientists attribute to the prefrontal cortex‘. Steven Pinker, ‗A History of Violence‘, The New Republic, 19 March 2007, and available at http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/pinker07/pinker07_index.html, accessed 24 November 2010. 12 Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process: The History of Manners and State Formation and Civilization (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994 [1939]), p. 452. 13 Dunning, ‗Preface‘, p. 13. Elias, Civilizing Process, p. 445. Elias, Civilizing Process, p. 446. Both citations, Civilizing Process, p. 165. Norbert Elias, The Loneliness of the Dying, trans. Edmund Jephcott (New York: Continuum, 14 15 16 17 2001 [1985]), p. 7. 18 J. G. Ballard, from the voiceover of the television documentary ‗Shanghai Jim‘ (BBC Bookmark, 1991; produced by James Runcie). Transcript: http://www.ballardian.com/shanghaijim-voiceover-transcription, accessed 24 November 2010. 19 Elias, who was Jewish, fled Germany in 1933, coming to Britain in 1935. Because he was a German, however, he spent several months in internment camps near Liverpool and on the Isle of Man after the outbreak of war. His mother is thought to have died in Auschwitz. Norbert Elias, Stephen Mennell and Johan Goudsblom, Norbert Elias on Civilization, Power and Knowledge: Selected Writings (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), p. 10. 20 Gasiorek, J. G. Ballard, pp. 25, 110. Quoted here from J. G. Ballard, Miracles of Life: Shanghai to Shepperton (London: Harper 21 Perennial, 2008), p. 58. 22 Fletcher, Violence and Civilization, p. 178. ‗Going mad is their only way of staying sane‘, 22 23 Abram De Swaan, ‗Dyscivilization, Mass Extermination and the State‘, Theory, Culture & Society, 18, no. 2-3 (2001): p. 266, referring to Norbert Elias, The Germans: Power Struggles and the Development of Habitus in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, trans. Eric Dunning and Stephen Mennell, ed. Michael Schroeter (New York, 1996). 24 Elias, Civilizing Process, p. 158; Elias, Civilizing Process, p. 159. Elias, Civilizing Process, p. 253. Elias, Civilizing Process, p. 506. Fletcher, Violence and Civilization, p. 83. Fletcher, Violence and Civilization, p. 83. Fletcher, Violence and Civilization, pp. 84-5. J. G. Ballard, High-Rise (London: Harper Perennial, 2005 [1975]). Further page references are 25 26 27 28 29 30 provided within the text. 31 For a real-world sociological examination of this sort of pattern partly based upon Eliasian concepts, see Abram de Swaan, ‗Widening Circles of Disidentification: On the Psycho- and Sociogenesis of the Hatred of Distant Strangers; Reflections on Rwanda‘, Theory, Culture and Society 14, 2 (1997): 105-22. 32 Elias, Civilizing Process, pp. 156-7. E.g.: ‗The sweat on Laing‘s body, like the plaque that coated his teeth, surrounded him in an 33 envelope of dirt and body odour, but the stench gave him confidence, the feeling that he had dominated the terrain with the products of his own body.‘ Ballard, High Rise, p.107. 34 Exemplified by the piling up of garbage in the hallways and apartments. Pieter Spierenburg, A History of Murder: Personal Violence in Europe from the Middle Ages to 35 the Present (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2008), p. 206. 36 De Swaan, ‗Dyscivilization‘, p. 268. ‗Going mad is their only way of staying sane‘, 23 37 De Swaan, ‗Dyscivilization‘, p. 269. De Swaan, ‗Dyscivilization‘, pp. 270-1. Loïc Wacquant, ‗Decivilizing and Demonizing: The Social and Symbolic Remaking of the 38 39 Black Ghetto and Elias in the Dark Ghetto‘, in Steven Loyal and Stephen Quilley, eds, The Sociology of Norbert Elias (Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 95-121 esp. pp. 88-9. 40 Interview by Jeannette Baxter, ‗Age of Unreason‘, Guardian, 22 June 2004, http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2004/jun/22/sciencefictionfantasyandhorror.jgballard, accessed 18 May 2009. 41 Alexander Gutzmer, ‗Wer Alles Sieht, Wird Traurig‗, Welt Online, 3 June 2007, http://www.welt.de/wams_print/article916363/Wer_alles_sieht_wird_traurig.html, accessed 24 November 2010. Available in translation as ‗Seeing Everything Makes You Sad‘, Ballardian, 7 December 2007, http://www.ballardian.com/seeing-everything-makes-you-sad, accessed 24 November 2010. 42 Elias, Civilizing Process, pp. 506-7. Elias, Civilizing Process, p. 452. First presented at the Annual Conference of the British Sociological Association in 1967, the 43 44 essay was published two years later in Sport and Leisure as ‗The Quest for Excitement in Leisure‘ and reprinted in Norbert Elias and Eric Dunning, The Quest for Excitement: Sport and Leisure in the Civilizing Process (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986). 45 Elias and Dunning, ‗Quest for Excitement‘, p. 71. Elias and Dunning, ‗Quest for Excitement‘, p. 70. Elias, Civilizing Process, pp. 450, 447. Elias and Dunning, ‗Quest for Excitement‘, p. 76. Elias and Dunning, ‗Quest for Excitement‘, p. 89. 46 47 48 49 ‗Going mad is their only way of staying sane‘, 24 50 Nancy Dess, ‗Violence and Its Antidotes: Promises and Pitfalls of Evolutionarily Aware Policy Development‘, in Richard W. Bloom and Nancy Dess, eds., Evolutionary Psychology and Violence: A Primer for Policymakers and Public Policy Advocates (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2003), pp. 239-68, p. 262. 51 J. G. Ballard, Super-Cannes (London: Flamingo, 2001 [2000]). Further page references are provided within the text. 52 Elias, Civilizing Process, p. 157. Elias, Civilizing Process, p. 454. Elias, Civilizing Process, p. 166. Elias, Civilizing Process, pp. 453-4. Elias, Civilizing Process, p. 454. Baxter, ‗Age of Unreason‘. 53 54 55 56 57