Lizza Littlewort's 'We Live In The Past'

On Wednesday, Cape Town’s 99 Loop gallery opened its doors for the first day of Lizza Littlewort’s ‘We Live In The Past’ exhibition. The artist aims to draw out South Africa’s colonial past, as found in the ‘Golden Age’ of Dutch painting, but reinvents this work to convey the legacy to contemporary eyes.

As an illustrator, Ms. Littlewort previously produced educational works on such topics as healthcare and the environment. She helped set up a permaculture project called ‘Tyisa Nabanye’, a collective that aims to promote food security and sustainable living. She has degrees in architecture, fine art and English literature from the University of Cape Town (UCT), the city of her birth.

“The point of the show is really about the political background to ‘art treasures’ in general, using South Africa and my family as particular examples,” Ms. Littlewort told The World Weekly. “The same discussion would really cover where the Queen got the gold and diamonds in her crown and where anybody ever got so much money that they could develop such a sumptuous ‘high art’ culture.”

“Each painting in this body of work is a play upon an earlier painting by a Dutch Master painter,” explains Ms. Littlewort. “The less famous ones were chosen because they were painted by my ancestor, Jakob Willemzoon de Wet the Elder. I chose these works in order to make my comments about the continuities between past and present more personal, embedding them in my own family history.”

The reinterpretation of this body of work filters the original images through neon tones, thereby accentuating and distorting the subjects. In this way, the realism of the Dutch Masters is reimagined in a modernist trajectory: from the desolate landscapes of Max Ernst and Salvador Dali’s paranoiac-critical method to Neo Rauch of the New Leipzig School. The end result was described by academic Niklas Zimmer as “uncomfortably beautiful”.

Mr. Zimmer argues this effectively subverts the naturalist style, which was so conducive to the establishment’s version of history. The original purpose of the Dutch paintings was to “warn the viewer that we cannot take our riches with us when we die”. Now Ms. Littlewort wants to remind viewers that “the astonishing wealth Holland accrued at this time has fundamentally shaped global history”.

Not only does the project have a strong historical focus, it is informed by South African literature and particularly the work of JM Coetzee. “My honours dissertation was on Dusklands, which is an extremely violent story about the genocide of indigenous people at the Cape,” Ms. Littlewort told The World Weekly. She took this literary account alongside Dr. Nigel Penn’s work on the displacement and ethnic cleansing of the Khoi and San peoples by white settlers.

“I am examining here my complicity and predicament as one who benefits from Dutch merchants’ wealth and power,” Ms. Littlewort explained. “My mother was born a de Wet, and her mother was a Versveld. Both the de Wet and Versveld families owned large farms in the Robertson and Darling areas respectively.” She goes on to relate that the de Wets’ ancestor, Jakob Willemzoon, was a Haarlem-based painter and art dealer, whose son was given a powerful post in the Dutch East India Company’s outpost in the Cape.

A major point of the exhibition is the close proximity of the art world to colonialism. “Painting and art is conventionally seen as ‘innocent’ and outside of the overarching political condition,” said Ms. Littlewort. “To me it’s much the same as the first-world white person having ‘subjectivity’ and ‘individuality’, while the conquered are represented as non-human stereotypes.”

It’s all too convenient, in her view, for white South Africans to tell black South Africans to “get over the past”. Yet the call for the statue of Cecil Rhodes to be removed from UCT grounds drew opposition from the white community, as she sees it. In this case, white South Africans were afraid of their own historical and cultural heritage being erased. The fact that apartheid ended in 1994 and Cecil Rhodes died in 1902 is lost in all of this.

Appropriately, ‘We Live In The Past’ makes reference to the campaign to oust the Cecil Rhodes statue at UCT, but it also takes place against a backdrop of protest. Student campaigners brought 10 universities to a halt and forced the South African government to freeze tuition fees. Mass demonstrations have been organised throughout South Africa’s major cities. This may be an ideal time for a resurgence of political art.

This article was originally published at The World Weekly on November 5, 2015.

The Proper Task of Life.

 

The anti-philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche deemed art “the proper task of life.” He had moved on much farther than the view of Schopenhauer's, where art is a means to deceive the Will and escape from the treadmill of its domination. Nietzsche advocates a radical acceptance of the imperfection of the world and this life in resistance to the otherworldly. He associates art with this embrace of the domination of the Will. This is far from a glum acceptance of a horrible existence. He wants us to rejoice in existence and laugh at the world in all of its absurdity. The knowledge of our existence beyond the precepts of religion provides us with a certain freedom. It is not that man should be freed from emotion, rather life is made meaningful by the passions - which are a source of insight, orientation and understanding. The attachments we build through our passions provide meaning, whether it be the attachments we form with people, ideals or aspirations. The creativity involved in art is particularly important here, especially the attachment forged with a work of art.

It is in this light that the Will to Power is to be understood as a celebration of the passionate life rather than in terms of metaphysics or motivation. Art is not just an escape route but an affirmation of existence, as it can even serve as the process of revaluation insofar as art allows us to participate in the nature of things. This is the development of culture out of the unfolding of human capacities. It is not simply instrumental, works of art may be seen as ends-in-themselves. For this very reason culture is not undermined by heterogeneity, far from it. It is homogeneity which leads to culture going stale and even becoming a lifeless scroll rolled up in the canon. Before you know it, we are to impart this stale culture to the next generation without reflection. Yet high and low culture are not fixed in stone. As Terry Eagleton has observed, there are works once considered canon-worthy which are much less brilliant than the early episodes of The Simpsons. Culture is not ahistorical or unchanging, it is forever transient.
 

 

Loving Decay

 

Too often culture is taken to be ahistorical and unchanging. Only for change to be received as deeply threatening to the artefacts preserved in formaldehyde by a cultural elite. To presuppose this is to accept a rather narrow conception of culture. Even still it is a widespread understanding of culture. We even find it in the work of Michel Houellebecq, a new self-styled Céline, in his nihilism. In Atomised (1998) Houellebecq portrays a vision of late capitalist society as in the thrall of its own decay. The chaos of the market society and its depredations has blown away the traditional order of morality. Sexual liberalism has prevailed to the extent that the very act has become a commodity in a marketplace. Even though Houellebecq seems to accept a conservative thesis on culture he is pessimistic at the possibility of any kind of deliverance from this process. The collapse of the old order is irreversible. It may be better to take what pleasure can be procured from its final twitches than to try and turn the clock back as Evelyn Waugh wanted.

In his nihilism Houellebecq identifies more so with the decay of culture which he seems to disdain. The pages of Atomised (1998) are littered with philosophical conundrums, scientific history and the material pre-conditions for the society which we inhabit. He focuses a great deal on the emergence of sexual freedom in the 1960s, its origins in the Hippie scene and the spread of the Commune movement around Europe and America. His protagonists Michel Djerzinski and Bruno Clément endure the explosion of new possibilities before even reaching pubescence: abandoned by their Hippie mother, only to drift through numerous encounters and non-encounters with members of the opposite sex. Bruno represents the failed attempts at hedonism divorced from the utopianism of the '68 Generation; whereas Michel languishes in anhedonic distance from human relations to prioritise the life of the mind. The dichotomy is set between the unsated and the undesiring to lead us from the 1960s to the 90s. Like the society in which we live the brothers are forever shaped by the events of the 60s. 

 

Grand Catastrophes


The cultural revolution of the 1960s had an undeniably profound impact on the people who lived amidst its birth pangs. In 1986 a film crew came to make a short documentary about the writer JG Ballard. In the interview, Ballard pointed out that the world which we inhabit requires a certain amount of oil to make the cogs go around and keep the wheels turning. For Ballard it was sex which played such a role in the 1960s, but now sex is no longer a new frontier and increasingly violence has become the oil which keeps the wheels turning. The media landscape of narratives thrives on sensation and requires sensation to go on, like a drowsy beast we find ourselves in need of constant electric shocks just to stay awake. Ballard suggests that the electric shocks are provided more so by violence today.

A major focus of Ballardian fiction is a secondary world which has been constructed on the media landscape of television, film, radio and the press etc. For Ballard we live in an environment saturated to the extent that we live in a two-tier world, we inhabit a dual reality. The immediate reality of everyday life and the secondary reality forged as the media acts as a map in search of a territory. It is a search for something in ordinary reality which meshes with this secondary reality, only to magnify disasters, confrontations, personal tragedies and so on. At once this secondary world is the subject matter of Ballard's novels, it is described and developments within it are predicted. Too often do we assume that the violence on television is bad for us, the truth about violence is good for us and cannot be repressed. The edge is a cautionary one, e.g. “Dangerous Bends Ahead, Slow Down!” with the paradox being Crash (1973) in which Ballard bellows “Dangerous Bends Ahead, Speed Up!” All in an appreciation of the chaos underneath the surface of modern civilisation. Ballard may have basked in the fires of this chaos, but he was ultimately on the side of it.

Living the Dirt

 

 

If we turn to the post-Beat scene of writing from the American West Coast we find another noteworthy literary creature. The poetry of Charles Bukowski stands in contrast to Houellebecq's nihilism. Bukowski's dirty realism pulsates with the same themes as Houellebecq albeit with much more in the way of exuberance. He doesn't so much languish in complacent affluence as live and breathe the filthier side of life. Bukowski remains an essentially American writer in his unabashed individualism, which serves to complement the reservoir of squalor and misanthropy in his prose. He has no coherent social message to convey only defiant exultation in the decline of civilisation. Take the closing lines of Dinosauria, We “And there will be the most beautiful silence never heard” only to add “Born out of that./The sun still hidden there/Awaiting the next chapter.” Thereby Bukowski turns the Apocalypse into another twisted turn in the anfractuous road of progress. We are to be superseded, along with the transient stage which we have made for ourselves. Perhaps Bukowski and Houellebecq share an appreciation of the flux of this world because they were both poets.

In his reasoning Bukowski derided other writers for starting out with pretentious attempts at setting a captivating scene for the readers. It was dead prose, no longer wriggling with life. Instead Bukowski went for the jugular and opened Post Office (1971) with a real hook “It began as a mistake”. He was a working-class poet, often unemployed, usually drifting and forever inebriated. He found the bottle analogous to a fine symphony - something he knew plenty about in his love of classical music. His publisher John Martin considered Bukowski the Walt Whitman of the 20th Century in putting pen to paper in the gutter. He conveyed the grittiest of experiences in his own melancholic brand of free verse. Black Sparrow Press marketed Bukowski as the poet who wrote for the average man in contemporary America. Yet Bukowski was much more misanthropic and self-centred in his alcoholism to be concerned with the wants of the masses. Even still the dirty old man chewed up Wagner and Kant only to spit them back out in his portrayals of a life lived in the darkest corners of American society.

Beautiful Chaos


As Ballard was the middle-class doctor who ventured into bohemian territory after the death of his wife, Bukowski yearned for a normal life and Houellebecq accepted that it would never be found. With Chuck Palahniuk it seems more so that there is more joy to be found in the absurdity of modern society. Picking fun at society by highlighting its more obscure and obscene side is not a new method for satirists. Neither are the themes developed in Palahniuk's work particularly earth-shattering. If you haven’t read Chuck Palahniuk then you should rush out and obtain, possibly by violent means, a copy of Survivor (1999) or Fight Club (1996) as soon as possible. He originally set out to emulate much more conventional modes of writing, but ended up in Tom Spanbauer's workshop. There Chuck took on a radical minimalism which has become the form for the transgressive content of his novels. Though transgressive in content Palahniuk's corpus contains thematic links reaching back to the origins of English literature. You can find courtly love in the deliberate variations made on the boy-meets-girl frame of events in his writing. The foreground stories with their dysfunctional and deranged characters falls against a background worth further examination. Fight Club is not just a tale of madness, or even the love story concealed within it, there is the emergence of an anti-capitalist terrorist network working to bring down America's credit system.

Unlike Houellebecq and Bukowski, Chuck Palahniuk is not a nihilist for he still clings to modernism and romanticism at heart. He may have much more in common with the existentialist tradition. He sets out to carve out a unique place as a writer, dismissing the likes of Martin Amis as a purveyor of “beautifully padded sentences”. It is not enough to try and posture as a living classic as Amis and McEwan does. To put it as Chuck has “We're living in a different world than Charles Dickens lived in”. A radical minimalism strips down the prose for all to view, but this is not a reductionist task as the battle is to build deep layers into the narrative in themes, allusions, symbolism and ideas. To this end Palahniuk may have recycled old themes and fed them into his projects. The mission of dangerous writing is to seek out and cover those aspects of life most uncomfortable, embarrassing and unsettling for us to confront. That is the locus of transgressive fiction and its purveyors. This is the flux of culture before our eyes.

It could've been a shoe.

It is worth noting that the 1960s witnessed the so-called "democratisation" of art, as low-culture and high-culture were rendered relative and the distinction between the two became increasingly blurred. It was the birth of postmodernism, as well as the beginning of entrepreneurial art. Pop Art began as a satire on the burgeoning obsession with image, as soup tins worth pennies in the supermarkets were transformed into prints worth thousands. In a studio known as "the factory" Andy Warhol and his assistants churned out those famous prints, which epitomise the repetitive monotony of consumerism. The psychedelic prints of soup cans and bottles of Coca-Cola were ironic. There was no message, no point at all and it was intended as a joke. But it  was a satirical slant on the rampant consumer culture of Western capitalist societies. The prints later increased in value to obscene amounts of dough, and yet they were famously depictions of banal objects - the sort of thing you throw in the trolley in the supermarket. It was soon absorbed by what it was mocking, the burgeoning commercialism.

It was never the aim to undermine the Establishment and melt down consumer capitalism to unleash the creative capacities of the proletariat. Its satiric reflection of passive consumption and pop culture was sold to the same consumers ensnared in fashion trends. Rather the capitalist system had to exit in order for it be mimmicked cynically with a nudge and a wink. It was a part of the burgeoning commercialisation of cultural forms. Pop Art could be seen as conservative in this way, it would inevitably be subsumed into what it was mimmicking as it subverted the traditional standards of fine art. The radical relativisation of all standards leveled the art scene, but only to become the Establishment. Today it's Tracy Emin as well as Gilbert and George who are the conservatives. What about Warhol? He died a millionaire. Before doing so, he decorated his own home with antiques and fine art which he personally picked over the work he delivered to the world. Ultimately the trajectory is nihilistic, again this is something else capitalism has in common with it. As Warhol remarked when asked why he painted Elvis Presley "No, it could've been a shoe."

However, Warhol was not the first to get rich quick in the art world. It isn't particularly shocking to us today, as we now live in a world where the man who had a shark preserved in formaldehyde has amassed an estimated net worth of £235 million. In 2008 Damien Hirst sold an entire show for £111 million, if we want to know where this began we have Salvador Dalí to thank at a fundamental level. In a sense Dalí was the prototype for the postmodern artist now predominant. You know, the crass kind who revel in commercial success. He would sign his name to hundreds of blank pieces of paper sometimes at $100 a pop, which were then used to produce forgeries of his work and in turn undermined the value of his own paintings. It should be noted that all along Dalí was fixated on commercial success and courted it with great luck thanks to his business manager and wife Gala. A lot of the money went to funding an extravagant lifestyle, of multiple homes and multiple lovers. The commercialism in which Dalí indulged as a whore artiste inevitably drew the ire of his fellow surrealists even before Dalí's shameful complicity in Francoism.

 

In the later works we can detect a fundamental shift to the postmodern Dalí after the Second World War where the works increasingly began to degenerate into high kitsch - with only a few glimpses of exception. In these years Dalí was guilty of the reduction of art's value to an instrumental level, whether the end be the stated aim of reaching a higher plain of consciousness or filling his wallet. He never shirked from offending the aestheticism of the Establishment as well as his fellow surrealists. Ironically, he may have given greater ground in his work to the extreme formulation of aestheticism that "What is useful is ugly!" As the work of Duchamp and Picasso were formerly derided as "ugly" before becoming the Establishment, so too has Dalí and the process began in his lifetime.  The accusation that this particular brand of surrealism exemplifies bourgeois decadence is not entirely undeserved. It could be that the work of the surrealist school, in its bid to empty-out the subconscious onto the canvas, has been symptomatic rather than exemplary.

Barbie Doll feminism.

In a debate earlier this year on feminism Louise Mensch responded to Laurie Penny's suggestion that she may be a feminist but she's not the right kind. Defence for right-wing feminism was fought from the trenches of relativism. There are just different feminisms as opposed to a correct feminism. This is the force of the market on show, the limit of equality is 'sameness' and meandering populist strikes against institutions such as the BBC. The Mensch formula for a feminism of feminisms corners the convergence of class and women's rights in a convenient blind-spot. This helps to sustain a much narrower conception of women's liberation within capitalism. It's less fine to talk about women's rights with class war in mind. It might even get scarier when we start to talk about oppression with its multiple fronts - what about race? You can forget about Africana womanism! The irony is that the leftist Laurie Penny has since reverted to relativism on a different case.

With the explosion of Fifty Shades of Grey onto the shelf of literary history there has been a great deal of thundering criticism against the book. In reaction Laurie Penny found the time to pen a defence of Fifty Shades as porn for women. She made it clear that she couldn't care less about snooty liberal critics who seem so enraged at the prospect of millions of women masturbating. It's just a defence of the likeability of the likeable. There are over 2.3 million women reading Fifty Shades of Grey in Britain, so it's easy to play populist firebrand against the cultural elites. Elsewhere Victoria Coren observes: "Romantic heroes have always been stern and bossy, for obvious reasons: their autocracy relieves the female fantasist from any responsibility for the filth that's going to ensue. She can remain nice, sweet, ladylike and marriageable. If she ends up naked over a tree stump with her pants between her teeth: not her fault! Just following orders!" Thus the appeal of Christian Grey and Edward Cullen.

Sylvia Plath's poem Daddy comes to mind in which she writes "Every woman adores a fascist." Especially as Grey seems to be the poster boy for dangerous signs to look for in a boyfriend: jealous, controlling, stalking, sexually sadistic behaviour, hypersensitivity to any perceived slight, mood swings and relationships with less powerful women. Given that Fifty Shades grew out of Twilight fan fiction, it could be that it is the repressed filth beneath the Mormon veneer of Twilight's chastity. The bondage of Grey is the implied side of Edward's abusive relationship with Bella. It would be ideal for Robert Pattinson to play Christian Grey for this reason, this would swiftly lure the target market of the Twilight films to the Fifty Shades films. For Penny there is no issue here, it's just a matter of defending the fantasies of women - even if that amounts to being spanked by a multi-millionaire. The critics are simply prudes looking to make women feel guilty about their fantasies, about sexual pleasure and masturbation. This fits in with Penny's odd thesis that capitalism hates women's bodies.

The fact that the line "My very own Christian Grey-flavoured popsicle" may soon be one of the most read sentences in history does not confine it to the greats of the literary canon. This is not a position that Laurie Penny would have a problem with. But she seems unaware that the problem is not snobbery, but that this work should be taken for more than it is. If it is just pornography for millions of dissatisfied married women with children, why should it be made into a Hollywood film? It's not a matter of equivalence that the archives of RedTube are not about to be transformed onto the silver screen. The question of what counts as art is totally absent from Penny's argument, never mind what constitutes 'good art'. Instead there is only a reactive position to the critic who yearns for a great novel. Bentham's famous words come to mind "Prejudice apart, the game of push-pin is of equal value with the arts and sciences of music and poetry."

The defence of this book is a highly bourgeois fixation for a feminist. Especially as we live in a world in which women remain largely subjugated in one form or another. There hasn't been much progress in this world. The practice of wife-selling is long gone in Europe along with the advocacy by doctors of female genital mutilation of the late 19th Century. In many of American prisons women have to give birth in shackles, meanwhile the soldiers of God are still fighting to place more and more limits on the right to choose. It seems everywhere women are still waiting for economic justice, which means more than equal pay. It shouldn't be forgotten that the working-class has long been predominantly female since proletarianization. This is what we might call 'Menschian' feminism - or Barbie doll feminism - can never acknowledge let alone put right. Feminism can be embraced as a liberal populist means of flushing clear the clogged pipes of capitalism. But it is stunted from the beginning.

To be exact Barbie doll feminism is at its core about an equality of 'sameness', a process of colour-blind transcendence which subsumes every group - race, gender, sexuality etc. - and overcomes every boundary by eliminating difference. The only 'difference' which can never be overcome, or even acknowledged, is that of class. The populist battering-ram of bourgeois liberalism emanates as relativism from the mechanisms of capitalism. This process of relativisation is partly what constitutes capitalist ideology, its nihilism is found in its capacity to negate any set of values within reach. The capitalist system can function with a shift away form old forms of chauvinist domination. The machine thrives not just when the cogs are well oiled but when the cogs are actually cleaned to run smoothly. The means of overcoming each barrier secures the system from its overthrow. The ruling-class knows full well that the best way to hold off revolution is through reform.

When Heidegger meets Ballard...

The examples Heidegger chose are seemingly far removed from the forms of art which saturate our world today. This seems especially true when talking about JG Ballard, a science fiction writer whose primary influences include Freud and Dali. And yet it seems as though Heidegger’s view of art is highly applicable to Ballardian fiction. For Heidegger art can be identified in what it does for society and the individual. It can function to ‘found’ the world of a society and for an individual already in such a world it can ‘light up’ this world and Being itself. These are both instances of unconcealment.[1] Art can shape and even constitute the background world of meanings within which the whole experience of an age runs. If this isn’t too crude a point, I think there may be something along these lines going on in Ballard’s work. His major themes were desire and human nature in a post-industrial (sometimes post-apocalyptic) society, which are in tune with what our world has become. Not just a ‘realistic’ representation, but a hyper-real portrayal. As Will Self notes "Ballard may have started out as a science fiction writer - now his texts read as social fact."[2]

Heidegger explored a process of emergence and limit in terms of ‘aletheia’ though we shouldn’t neglect the importance of other terms such as world and earth. The use of such terms is specific, world as a “clearing of paths for the essential guiding directions with which all decision complies” – every decision is based on something concealed – whereas earth is connected to world at the same time it is ‘belligerent’ with it.[3] We may take ‘aletheia’ to signify the process of opening up (unconcealment of beings) a space of clearing as well as of change and disclosure. In conjunction to this there is a sense of veiling and self-seclusion, which is inextricably a part of unconcealment and refers to what cannot be said or thought within a particular historical epoch.[4] Heidegger went as far as to claim that “Truth, in its essence, is un-truth.” The acceptance that there is much that cannot be said within a certain schema indicates that there is a limit to any such framework of knowledge.

Heidegger points us to the peasant shoes painted by Van Gogh as the shoes disclose that which would normally go unacknowledged – specifically the world of the peasant – and even taken for granted. What the equipment, the pair of shoes are, in truth is unconcealed. In a sense it would have been remained unconscious had it not been brought forth in art. This is the truth of the essence of tools and products. It is not that the stroke of a paintbrush determines the truth. It is the work of art as an end or rather a “happening”. The role of manifestation is not to be assigned to the aspect of Dasein called ‘techne’, even as it brings forth the essence of tools and products.[5] It is the work of art itself and in that sense is a “happening of truth”. We shouldn’t take this to mean that the work of art is a form of representation; rather it opens up and portrays a world to us as viewers.

It is not that the peasant shoes are symbolic of a truth about the life of a peasant. Heidegger wants us to refrain from stating what we already know and resist any temptation to explicate it in this reading of artwork. The peasant woman wears the shoes in the field; this is where the shoes function as she is unaware of them and going about her work. In spite of the “undefined space” we encounter the peasant shoes, the lack of mud and so on, – which we might think would deprive us of any hint of the function of these shoes – Heidegger notes the ways in which the shoes reveal to us the world of the peasant.[6] There is the pervasive worry carried with the shoes as equipment which “vibrates the silent call of the earth”, while the ‘withstood want’ and the menace of death hang in the air. The shoes belong to the earth and are protected in the peasant’s world. The open region ‘happens’ in the midst of beings, in which there belongs the world and the earth that clash with one another by nature and can only emerge in the clearing as such.

Perhaps in Heideggerian terms we find a “secondary world” is disclosed in Ballardian fiction, itself a construct from the media landscape which Ballard describes as “a map in search of a territory”.[7] It is a search for something in ordinary reality which meshes with this secondary reality, only to magnify ecological disasters, violent confrontations, the personal tragedies of celebrities and politicians. And all under clean veneer of bourgeois life which isn’t quite satisfactory for white professionals. For Ballard we live in an environment saturated to the extent that we live in a “two-tier world” torn between everyday life and this media landscape. In his works there is always an ugly secret which in some way helps maintain the bourgeois veneer and in other times it helps tear it apart as in High-Rise.

The high-rise apartment building in which High-Rise is set emerges, sets its own limits and opens up a space from which the characters then emerge. They seem to be an extension of the building, the deterioration of conditions in the high-rise is matched by the descent of the inhabitants into a semi-primitive mode of living. This is the change that was set by the initial clearing that the building is in itself, the different levels of the building, its hierarchy and the trajectory of the story are a disclosure of worlds. The first ten floors are said to represent the working-class in the building, with the next twenty-five floors being the middle-class and the top five are the ruling-class. This stratified structure collapses into competing tribes, then further to disassociated hunter-gatherers and then to a battle of the sexes. This partly connects with the way Heidegger viewed art in terms of historical significance.

The artworks of every age lay out how that time is ready to see and value things. It is debatable whether or not it is meant that art is constitutive of a world (an ontological point) or that art unveils a world a people already has (an epistemic point). We’ll put aside this debate, but note that the epistemic and the ontological are not totally irreconcilable.[8] History can be broken down into epochs distinguishable by their particular understanding of Being which is embodied in artworks. The ‘look and outlook’ is embedded in a physical thing by the artist. It stands there for the masses and lends concrete presence to the basic values and world-view of the group. Art is world-founding for Heidegger, when a work of art happens a thrust enters history and it can first begin or begin again. So it is art which is the origin of each successive world.[9] Heidegger sometimes draws the conclusion that there is no art in the modern age. Perhaps we lack a world or our world derives its unity from another source.

The role of art is not world-founding today. Instead it reminds us of what we’re lacking and there could be a great deal of truth in that. It just unconceals the concealment we are subject to and the absence of a unifying point to what we do. At that level it may begin to put pieces of a new world in place in order to constitute the unity ours now lacks. It’s highly disputable whether or not modern art rises to even that standard. It seems possible that Ballard was engaged in the unconcealment of the concealed, only to unveil a missing unity to his audience. The role of art has been subverted to service technology and ‘enframing’, it’s much more like a resource with cultural-economic value that can be determined through comparison with other works.[10] The exceptions are in the private, which is the reason that Heidegger picked Van Gogh's painting as an unconcealment of its Being and that could not be found in the simple observing of some shoes in daily life.

The epistemic power of art is in the insight that need have no impact on the structure of one’s world, the unveiling of the structure the world has for us and the peasant woman. Heidegger may have hoped that this epistemic effect will lead to a constitutive one - the artwork lights up the world in a way that gives it a manifest unity it had lacked previously. It does so by embodying a new overall point. In High-Rise and Crash the unity is found in transgression, though it’s not less clear how this may reconstitute a world. It opens up an ideal of a different relation to equipment, the way out of ‘enframing’ and technology by beginning to construct the new world we can hope will come. As we live in the world which has been partially opened up by the artwork, we become its ‘preservers’. The temple constitutes its people's world, but the painting has the power to begin to construct a new world for us. In both instances the piece of art is a ‘becoming’ and a ‘happening’ of truth.

What are we to make of the unsettling fixation on violence in Ballard’s work with this in mind? In 1986 Ballard pointed out that the world which we inhabit requires “a certain amount of oil to make the cogs go around and keep the wheels turning”.[11] Ballard went on to claim it was sex which filled this role in the 1960s, but now sex is no longer a “new frontier” and increasingly violence has replaced it in this role. The media landscape of narratives thrives on such sensation and requires sensation to go on, like a drowsy beast we find ourselves in need of constant electric shocks just to stay awake. The electric shocks are provided by violence today. This is particular pertinent in Crash where Ballard graphically explores the eroticism of the car-crash, with a coldly surgical description of mangled bodies and twisted wreckage. This is where it seems Ballard demonstrates the absence of a unity. But there is a more direct way that the car-crash meshes with Heideggerian thought.[12]

As Heidegger notes of the hammer, the driver is hardly aware of the car in the middle of driving and its function as a means of transport is obscured. It's not just about ends and purposes, rather it is the world as equipment where we engage in tasks. The world is no neutral space of objects and subjects where interaction could take place. To see the hammer and the plank as ‘things’ is to stop hammering, the hammer is no longer just something used for a purpose along with the nail and the plank serves as a material to work with. It is almost as though the machine functions almost as an extension of the body. In order to be truly aware of the car as a vehicle we have to stop driving, or in this case we have to actually crash the car. The collision is the moment at which the head of the hammer falls off and we finally become aware of the tool as a 'thing'. The hammer is for hammering in terms of its significance for Dasein, whose concern is for its own Being, it is towards-which and for-the-sake-of-which; ultimately the hammer is for-the-sake-of Dasein.[13]

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[1] Richardson, J; Heidegger (2012, Routledge) pg.294-311

[2] Self, W; Crash: A Homage to JG Ballard  –  http://will-self.com/2010/04/19/crash-homage-to-jg-ballard/#.T5AWgB4NNvk.facebook

[3] Heidegger, M: The Origin of the Work of Art, Basic Writings (edited by David Farrell Krell|2010, Routledge) pg.165-182

[4] Kul-want, Christopher: Philosophers on Art from Kant to the Postmodernists (2010, Columbia University Press) pg.118-148

[5] Kul-want, Christopher: Philosophers on Art from Kant to the Postmodernists (2010, Columbia University Press) pg.118-148

[6] Heidegger, M: The Origin of the Work of Art, Basic Writings (edited by David Farrell Krell|2010, Routledge) pg.146-165

[7] JG Ballard interview, Face to Face: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xyZPRL90hNY

[8] If we accept this dichotomy in Heidegger’s work then we should keep in mind that the multiplicity of shared practices requires unity to become a world. The artwork provides such unity, going as far as to give them a destiny. At the same time, the piece pulls together a world by the way it manifests such unity and the work of art calls attention to it repeatedly through its own conspicuous presence. This is how the epistemic meets the ontological.

Richardson, J; Heidegger (2012, Routledge) pg.294-311

[9] This may demonstrate a nostalgia for the past of Greek and medieval when art was principally religious. The temple and the cathedral gave convincing embodiment to the qualities of the divine and the human. The religious nostalgia is significant given his post-monotheism and sympathy with the Pagan plethora of Greek gods that Heidegger held in common with Nietzsche. This is what oriented these societies in their worlds and this is how 'look and outlook' are shaped. Heidegger holds out with hope that art may someday play this role again.

Richardson, J; Heidegger (2012, Routledge) pg.342-360

[10] Richardson, J; Heidegger (2012, Routledge) pg.294-311

[11] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SS6MWpFX_N0 – Future Now, with JG Ballard (1986)

[12] The car-crash fits in well with notions of authenticity, less so in the Nietzschean sense of a ‘becoming’ of who we are. It is more in accordance with Heidegger’s talk of being-toward-death – the path we must all walk towards it – which provides the push to extricate ourselves from the ‘dictatorship of They’. In Crash the character Vaughan is literally propelled towards death in search of sexual fulfilment. Notably the death in the opening chapter graphically sets out the risk of this adventure before we are even confronted with how the protagonist ‘got into this’ – the first car crash he survived. Authenticity is not a moral ideal here, just as for Heidegger it is a self-directed ideal and it is just one means of relating our being to Being. Inauthenticity is not excluded as a way to relate our being to Being, it’s just that there is truth in authentic behaviour. There is something amoral in both instances, yet Ballard would have agreed that the behaviour of his characters in Crash unconceal a truth about desire.

[13] Purcell, M; Levinas and Theology (2006, Cambridge Press) pg.74-78

The Marriage of Reason and Nightmare.

The marriage of reason and nightmare that has dominated the 20th Century has given birth to an ever more ambiguous world. Across the communications landscape move the spectres of sinister technologies and the dreams that money can buy. Thermo-nuclear weapons systems and soft-drink commercials coexist in an overlit realm ruled by advertising and pseudo-events, science and pornography. Over our lives preside the great twin leitmotifs of the 20th century - sex and paranoia.

Increasingly, our concepts of past, present and future are being forced to revise themselves. Just as the past, in social and psychological terms, became a casualty of Hiroshima and the nuclear age, so in its turn the future is ceasing to exist, devoured by the all-voracious present. We have annexed the future into the present, as merely one of those manifold alternatives open to us. Options multiply around us, and we live in an almost infantile world where any demand, any possibility, whether for life-styles, travel, sexual roles and identities, can be satisfied instantly.

In addition, I feel that 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 kind - mass-merchandizing, advertising, politics conducted as a branch of advertising, the pre-empting of any original response to experience by the television screen. We live inside an enormous novel. It is now less and less necessary for the writer to invent the fictional content of his novel. The fiction is already there. The writer's task is to invent the reality.

In the past we have always assumed that the external world around us has represented reality, however confusing or uncertain, and that the inner world of our minds, its dreams, hopes, ambitions, represented the realm of fantasy and the imagination. These roles, it seems to me, have been reversed. The most prudent and effective method of dealing with the world around us is to assume that it is a complete fiction - conversely, the one small node of reality left to us is inside our own heads. Freud's classic distinction between the latent and manifest content of the dream, between the apparent and the real, now needs to be applied to the external world of so-called reality.

Given these transformations, what is the main task facing the writer? Can he, any longer, make use of the techniques and perspectives of the traditional 19th century novel, with its linear narrative, its measured chronology, its consular characters grandly inhabiting their domains within an ample time and space? Is his subject matter the sources of character and personality sunk deep in the past, the unhurried inspection of roots, the examination of the most subtle nuances of social behaviour and personal relationships? Has the writer still the moral authority to invent a self-sufficient and self-enclosed world, to preside over his characters like an examiner, knowing all the questions in advance? Can he leave out anything he prefers not to understand, including his own motives, prejudices and psychopathology?

I feel myself that the writer's role, his authority and licence to act, have changed radically. I feel that, in a sense, the writer knows nothing any longer. He has no moral stance. He offers the reader the contents of his own head, a set of options and imaginative alternatives. His role is that of the scientist, whether on safari or in his laboratory, faced with an unknown terrain or subject. All he can do is to devise various hypotheses and test them against the facts.

Crash is such a book, an extreme metaphor for an extreme situation, a kit of desperate measures only for use in an extreme crisis. Crash, of course, is not concerned with an imaginary disaster, however imminent, but with a pandemic cataclysm that kills hundreds of thousands of people each year and injures millions. Do we see, in the car crash, a sinister portent of a nightmare marriage between sex and technology? Will modern technology provide us with hitherto undreamed-of means for tapping our own psychopathologies? Is this harnessing of our innate perversity conceivably of benefit to us? Is there some deviant logic unfolding more powerful than that provided by reason?

Throughout Crash I have used the car not only as a sexual image, but as a total metaphor for man's life in today's society. As such the novel has a political role quite apart from its sexual content, but I would still like to think that Crash is the first pornographic novel based on technology. In a sense, pornography is the most political form of fiction, dealing with how we use and exploit each other, in the most urgent and ruthless way. Needless to say, the ultimate role of Crash is cautionary, a warning against that brutal, erotic and overlit realm that beckons more and more persuasively to us from the margins of the technological landscape.

JG Ballard on Crash, 1995