Abstract
This paper offers a discussion of J. G. Ballard’s first four novels, The Wind From Nowhere (1962), The Drowned World (1962), The Drought (1965), and The Crystal World (1966) that centers on their portrayal of environmental transformation. Drawing on revised conceptualizations of the second law of thermodynamics and recent materialist scholarship, I illustrate how Ballard invokes material transformations that are ambivalently coded as terminal stasis and morphogenesis. In anticipations of the paradigm of the Anthropocene and ecocritical approaches to global climate change, Ballard’s novels re-embed the human in an ecology of inhuman forces and modes of self-organization that radically challenge entrenched ontological divisions and systemic boundaries. Particular attention is paid to the ways in which emergent structures, such as hurricanes and crystals identify his landscapes as dissipative systems far from equilibrium and rife with potential for the spontaneous generation of form. This resonance with scientific frameworks reveals itself in poetic registers that parallelize metaphors of life and death, and hinge on an estrangement of not only landscape, but also temporality, thus literalizing what it might mean to understand the human as a geological subject in the age of the Anthropocene.
Highlights
Are we going or are we staying? The implications of what has been called the Anthropocene are ambivalent
The Anthropocene invokes the limited hegemony of the modern industrial human as a geological force
The human is returned to the ground and unsettled in its belief in transcendence and its fantasized detachment from an ontologically separate environment
Summary
Are we going or are we staying? The implications of what has been called the Anthropocene are ambivalent. What I aim to show in this paper is how Ballard’s climate quartet novels portray the resurgence of material forces in terms that suggest a deep-seated ambivalence with respect to the relationship between human subjectivity and the inhuman environment. Ballard’s quartet anticipates a late twentieth-century ecological discourse that regards the self-contained liberal humanist subject as illusory and by virtue of its planetary emplacement always already physically and psychologically extended and mixed up with inhuman materialities Whereas the former raises anxieties of stasis and death, the latter foregrounds the potential for morphogenesis and emergence—concepts that originate in the natural sciences to describe processes of self-organization amidst far-from equilibrium conditions.. Rather than suggest that the outcome is a variation of human extinction or death, I contend that Ballard heralds a different type of embodied subjectivity that uncovers the boundary between the human and the inorganic as always already porous and subject to diffusion and hybridization
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