Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Negotiations with the system: J.G. Ballard and Geoff Ryman writing London's architecture

2006; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 20; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/09502360601058862

1470-1308

Laura Colombino,

Crime and Detective Fiction Studies

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes 1 Roger Luckhurst, ‘The contemporary London Gothic and the limits of the “spectral turn”’, Textual Practice, 16.3 (2002), pp. 527–546. 2 Ibid., p. 532. Quoting M. Christine Boyer. 3 Ibid. Quoting Boyer. 4 Andrea Branzi, ‘Architecture: a different history’, in Germano Celant (ed), Architecture & Arts: 1900/2004. A Century of Creative Projects in Building, Design, Cinema, Painting, Sculpture (Torino: Skira, 2004), p. 440. 5 Hal Foster, The Return of the Real (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999), p. 172. 6 Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1991), p. 211. 7 Iain Sinclair, Lights Out for the Territory (1997; London: Penguin, 2003), p. 9. 8 Lefebvre, The Production of Space, p. 137. 9 Luckhurst, ‘The contemporary London Gothic’, p. 541. 10 Quoted from Geoff Ryman's 1996 Internet novel 253 (http://www.ryman-novel.com). A slightly different version was published in book form in 1998. 11 Jean Baudrillard and Jean Nouvel, The Singular Objects of Architecture, trans. Robert Bononno (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), p. 77. 12 J.G. Ballard, Concrete Island (1973; London: Vintage, 1994), Introduction, p. 5. Page references for quotations will be given parenthetically in the body of the article. 13 K.M. Hays, Foreword to Baudrillard and Nouvel, The Singular Objects of Architecture, pp. vii–xiii (xii). 14 Ibid. 15 Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain. The Making and Unmaking of the World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985). 16 J.G. Ballard interviewed by A. Juno and [V.] Vale, in Andrea Juno and [V.] Vale (eds), Re/Search: J.G. Ballard 8/9 (San Francisco: Re/Search Publishing, 1984), pp. 6–35 (14–15). 17 J.G. Ballard, Millennium People (2003; London: Harper, 2004), pp. 54–55. Page references for quotations will be given parenthetically in the body of the article. 18 Ian Borden, ‘Another pavement, another beach: skateboarding and performative critique of architecture’, in Ian Borden, Joe Kerr, Jane Rendell, with Alicia Pivaro (eds), The Unknown City. Contesting Architecture and Social Space (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002), pp. 179–199 (194). 19 See ibid., pp. 183–94. 20 This was exemplified by Frederic Jameson's description of Westin Bonaventura Hotel in Los Angeles. See his Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (London: Verso, 1991), pp. 38–45. 21 See also W.W. Wagar, ‘J.G. Ballard and the transvaluation of utopia’, Science-Fiction Studies, 18 (1991), pp. 53–70 (54). 22 See Paul Virilio, Speed and Politics. An Essay on Dromology, trans. Mark Polizzotti (New York: Semiotexte, 1986). 23 Jacques Derrida and Peter Eisenman, Chora L Works, Jeffrey Kipnis and Thomas Leeser (eds) (New York: The Monacelli Press, 1997), p. 9. 24 Ibid., p. 16. 25 Ibid., p. 34. 26 Ibid., p. 10. 27 ‘One's entering into a paradoxical realm where the psychopath is the only person who can imagine – who is capable of imagining – sanity, of conceiving what sanity is’. J.G. Ballard interviewed by Graeme Revell, in Re/Search, pp. 42–52 (44). 28 Wagar, ‘J.G. Ballard’, p. 54. 29 Ballard interviewed by Revell, p. 43. 30 J.G. Ballard, ‘The coming of the unconscious’, New Worlds, 164 (July 1966), reprinted in Re/Search, pp. 102–104 (103). Ballard mentions, in particular, Ernst's The Elephant of Celebes and The Eye of Silence. 31 Ibid., p. 103. 32 Georges Bataille, ‘Informe’, Documents 1 (critical dictionary), in Oeuvres Complètes, 12 vols (1929; Paris: Gallimard, 1971–88), vol. 1, p. 217. This edition of Bataille's writings will be cited as OC. 33 Ballard, ‘The coming of the unconscious’, p. 103. Emphasis added. 34 Bataille, ‘Architecture’, in Document 1, OC, vol 1, p. 433. Quoted in Denis Hollier, Against Architecture. The Writings of Georges Bataille, trans. Betsy Wing (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992), p. xi. The reference is to Jacques Lacan's essay ‘The mirror stage as formative of the function of the I as revealed in psychoanalytic experience’, in Écrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (London: Routledge, 2001), pp. 1–8 (2). 35 Baudrillard and Nouvel, The Singular Objects of Architecture, p. 16. 36 Ballard, ‘The coming of the unconscious’, p. 103. 37 Hollier, Against Architecture, p. 14. 38 See J.G. Ballard interviewed by Martin Bax, in Re/Search, pp. 36–41 (38). 39 See Yve-Alain Bois and Rosalind Krauss, Formless. A User's Guide (New York: Zone Books, 1997), pp. 51–62. 40 Bataille, ‘Abattoir’, Document 1, OC, vol 1, p. 205. 41 Quoted in Hollier, Against Architecture, p. xiii. 42 Raj Persaud, ‘Psychological scars of attacks are just beginning to surface’, in The Independent, Monday, 11 July 2005, p. 2. 43 Michael Truscello, ‘The architecture of information: open source software and tactical poststructuralist anarchism’, Postmodern Culture: An Electronic Journal of Interdisciplinary Criticism, 13:3 (2003), 16 Aug. 2004, 〈http://www.iath.virginia.edu/pmc/text-only/issue.503/13.3yiu.txt〉, p. 2. 44 Foster, The Return of the Real, p. 123. 45 Ibid. 46 Geoff Ryman, 253 (London: Flamingo, 1998), unnumbered opening advertisement page. Page references for quotations will be given parenthetically in the body of the article. 47 Slavoj Žižek, The Desert of the Real (London: Verso, 2002). 48 Foster, Compulsive Beauty (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000), p. 210. Similarly, Ballard contends that the ‘pervasiveness of surrealism is proof enough of its success’; ‘[t]he landscapes of the soul, the juxtaposition of the bizarre and the familiar’ ‘have become part of the stock-in-trade of publicity and the cinema’ (Ballard, ‘The coming of the unconscious’, p. 102). 49 Foster, Compulsive Beauty, p. 211 50 Scarry, The Body in Pain, p. 128. 51 Geoff Ryman, The Child Garden (1989; London: Victor Gollancz, 2005), p. 208. 52 Branzi, ‘Architecture’, p. 443. 53 Ibid. 54 Ballard interviewed by Revell, p. 44. 55 For Ballard's association of the revolutionaries with the thirties' avant-garde see the following quotation from the novel: ‘the public was unsettled, aware of a deranged fifth column in its midst, motiveless and impenetrable, Dada come to town’ (p. 205).