J.G. Ballard: Chrontopia and Post-Consumerist Society about:reader?url=https://web.archive.org/web/201506070215...

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J.G. Ballard: Chrontopia and Post-

Consumerist Society
by S.C. Hickman
17-22 minutos

For the first time Man will be living a full twenty-four hour day,
not spending a third of it as an invalid, snoring his way through an
eight-hour peepshow of infantile erotica.
– J.G. Ballard – Manhole 69
Continuing the line of thought I began in Nick Land:
Chronogenesis & Urbanomy we discover in J.G. Ballard’s short
story Manhole 69 he will envision a world where humans no
longer sleep and the future is set adrift. One of the scientists who is
part of an advanced exploratory team in this new world of
sleeplessness, speaking to his team members says:
‘None of you realize it yet, but this is as big an advance as the step
the first ichthyoid took out of the protozoic sea 300 million years
ago. At last we’ve freed the mind, raised it out of that archaic sump
called sleep, its nightly retreat into the medulla. With virtually one
cut of the scalpel we’ve added twenty years to those men’s lives.’
(Ballard, p. 51)
When we think of Sleep we think of its porous, and suffused in-
flows between waking, night and the dreamlands or nightmares we

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succumb to in its dark internal worlds; and, opposing this

is its light twin whose departures into activity, daylight, and work
send us back to the pain of our daily lives in consciousness. Sleep
is the recurrence in our lives of a waiting, of a pause, a break in the
temporal flow of our timebound lives in consciousness. It affirms
the necessity of postponement, and the deferred retrieval or
recommencement of whatever has been postponed. Sleep is a
remission, a release from the “constant continuity” of all the
threads in which one is enmeshed while waking. It seems too
obvious to state that sleep requires periodic disengagement and
withdrawal from networks and devices in order to enter a state of
inactivity and uselessness. It is a form of time that leads us
elsewhere than to the things we own or are told we need. Sleep is
the dream of a non-utilitarian world, a world without labor.2
So when Ballard portrays a world beyond sleep, of endless light
and work, he is satirizing the core motif of our hypercapitalism of
24/7 non-stop speed: non-stop production – otherwise known as
interminable work (or as in Weber’s notion of the Protestant work
ethic unbound). In defense of this 24/7 world of sleeplessness
Neill, one of Morley’s protégé’s will say: “For the first time Man
will be living a full twenty-four hour day, not spending a third of it
as an invalid, snoring his way through an eight-hour peepshow of
infantile erotica.” (Ballard, p. 51) Morley will remind him of the
short story by Chekov of a young man who bet his life-in-total
isolation and sense-deprivation to win a million rubles. At one
minute before he is to emerge and win the bet suddenly steps out
of the cage: and, as Morley says: “He was totally insane!” Neill for
his part will chortle, saying:‘I suppose you’re trying to say that
sleep is some sort of communal activity and that these three men
are now isolated, exiled from the group unconscious, the dark
oceanic dream. Is that it?’ (Ballard, p. 52) Finally, in exasperation
Morley will throw up his hands and shout at Neill:
They’re never going to be able to get away, not even for a couple of
minutes, let alone eight hours. How much of yourself can you
stand? Maybe you need eight hours off a day just to get over the
shock of being yourself. (Ballard, p. 52)
One of the participants or victims of the experiment Lang will
the next day speak up, speaking to Morley:
Lang gestured expansively. ‘I mean up the evolutionary slope.
Three hundred million years ago we became air-breathers and left
the seas behind. Now we’ve taken the next logical step forward and
eliminated sleep. What’s next?’

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Morley shook his head. ‘The two steps aren’t analogous. Anyway,
in point of fact you haven’t left the primeval sea behind. You’re still
carrying a private replica of it around as your bloodstream. All you
did was encapsulate a necessary piece of the physical environment
in order to escape it.’ (Ballard, p. 58)
This notion of encapsulation of a “necessary piece of the physical
environment in order to escape it” has been central to many self-
organizing forces in the world and universe. Boot-strapping
processes or recursion is that ability to insert the loop of thought,
self, process into its own circle of self-organization. A sort of time-
spiral of progression in which things continually spawn ever
greater change within their own systems. Complexity
unbound. One of the central motifs of complexity theory, non-
linear dynamics, and chaos theory in connection to the life
sciences is this very ability of non-organic matter to display
through these very processes the thing we term life. Some believe
that this very notion of self-organizing complexity is not bound to
humans only, but will in fact at some point in the ‘future’ be
productive of machinic-life, too.
As the story goes on we see the men slowly devolve into insanity,
their minds slowly losing all sense of time and space. Slowly they
begin to feel a certain amount of closure of the world upon them
till in the last instance each of them feels that they haven been shut
up in a small manhole from which there is no escape. Neill and
Morley will find them the next morning sitting in the gymnasium
blank and unresponsive. They will try many things to bring the
subjects back out of their psychosis. Speaking among themselves
they surmise:
‘This room in which the man is penned for ten years symbolizes
the mind driven to the furthest limits of self-awareness . . .
Something very similar happened to Avery, Gorrell and Lang. They
must have reached a stage beyond which they could no longer
contain the idea of their own identity. But far from being unable to
grasp the idea, I’d say that they were conscious of nothing else.
Like the man in the spherical mirror, who can only see a single
gigantic eye staring back at him.’ ‘So you think their withdrawal is
a straightforward escape from the eye, the overwhelming ego?’
‘Not escape,’ Neill corrected. ‘The psychotic never escapes from
anything. He’s much more sensible. He merely readjusts reality to
suit himself. Quite a trick to learn, too. The room in Chekov’s story
gives me an idea as to how they might have re-adjusted. Their
particular equivalent of this room was the gym. I’m beginning to

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realize it was a mistake to put them in there – all those lights

blazing down, the huge floor, high walls. They merely exaggerate
the sensation of overload. In fact the gym might easily have
become an external projection of their own egos.’ Neill drummed
his fingers on the desk. ‘My guess is that at this moment they’re
either striding around in there the size of hundred-foot giants, or
else they’ve cut it down to their own dimensions. More probably
that. They’ve just pulled the gym in on themselves.’ (Ballard, p. 66)
This notion of psychotic closure and breakdown as a response to
sleeplessness has been described in many journals of psychiatry,
etc. In one recent article the researchers discovered:
Recent research suggests that each day with insufficient sleep
increases our sleep debt and, when this sleep debt becomes large
enough, noticeable problems appear (Coren, 1996a). These sleep-
debt-related problems are most predictable at certain times of the
day. This is because the efficiency of our physical and mental
functions show cyclic increases and decreases in the form of
circadian rhythms. While our major sleep/wakefulness rhythm has
a cycle length of roughly 24 hours, there are shorter cycles as well,
with the most important of these being a secondary
sleep/wakefulness cycle that is around 12 hours. – See Sleep
Deprivation, Psychosis and Mental Efficiency
This notion of circadian rhythms is related to our perception of
time: day/night, etc. Humans, like most living organisms, have
biological rhythms, known as circadian rhythms (“body clocks”),
which are controlled by a biological clock and work on a daily time
scale. These affect body temperature, alertness, appetite, hormone
secretion etc. as well as sleep timing. Due to the circadian clock,
sleepiness does not continuously increase as time passes. A
person’s desire and ability to fall asleep is influenced by both the
length of time since the person woke from an adequate sleep, and
by internal circadian rhythms. Thus, the body is ready for sleep
and for wakefulness at different times of the day. (see Circadian
rhythm sleep disorder)
Chronobiology studies the affects of temporality upon living
organisms. It is a field of biology that examines periodic (cyclic)
phenomena in living organisms and their adaptation to solar- and
lunar-related rhythms. These cycles are known as biological
rhythms. Chronobiology comes from the ancient Greek χρόνος
(chrónos, meaning “time”), and biology, which pertains to the
study, or science, of life. The related terms chronomics and
chronome have been used in some cases to describe either the

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molecular mechanisms involved in chronobiological phenomena

or the more quantitative aspects of chronobiology, particularly
where comparison of cycles between organisms is required. (see
Chronobiology)
In a previous post on Jonathan Crary’s 24/7: Late Capitalism and
the Ends of Sleep I spoke of Ballard’s notion of the fugue state as a
form of space sickness:
At first touching only a small minority of the population, it took
root like a lingering disease in the interstices of its victims’ lives, in
the slightest changes of habit and behaviour. Invariably there was
the same reluctance to go out of doors, the abandonment of job,
family and friends, a dislike of daylight, a gradual loss of weight
and retreat into a hibernating self.(Ballard, 1064)
Crary will see in our inability to envision the future a form of this
space sickness, an inversion of the original Enlightenment project
of progress that has instead begun to fill in the gaps of the future
with pure simulations: this means in our contemporary world: the
relentless capture and control of time and experience (Crary, 40) is
the new project, the financialization of experience is the closure of
the future within a command and control simulator that seeks
algorithms of speed rather than acceleration and evolution in the
usual sense of that term. Instead of self-organizing processes that
lead to invention, design, art, and play we see the involuted dis-
organizing principles of a static state-machine revolving in its own
empty systems of hypersignification. The Reality Engineers of our
new economics have taken over the place of religious prophets of
ages past and now dictate the future as a financial project that only
they as the truth mouthpiece of the invisible hand of the Market
Gods know or understand. The new Economics of Reality is the
closure of the loopholes in time, the exclusion of growth and the
evolving systems of life for those of death and the interminable
dance of a void that seeks only to overcome the Second Law of
Thermodynamics.
We know that before the establishment of the Second Law, many
people who were interested in inventing a perpetual motion
machine had tried to circumvent the restrictions of First Law of
Thermodynamics by extracting the massive internal energy of the
environment as the power of the machine. Such a machine is
called a “perpetual motion machine of the second kind”. The
second law declared the impossibility of such machines. Yet, we
see out Oracles of the New Economics of Globalization seeking just
that: the power of a “perpetual motion machine” in which the

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InfoSphere as an data energy system changes the game. What they

seek is to escape the “arrow of time” and entropy, to install a
machinic pylum that will feed off the very thing it seeks to escape:
the Future. The Future is a debt system, a way of pushing the debt
indefinitely beyond out present moment. One could say that the
new cosmopolitan centers of financial capitalism in the global
context are Time Machines to stave off the ever accelerating truth
of entropy. Chrontopias that seek to push the entropic affects into
the far future through a veritable speeding up of the
hypermediation of technology.
Most of these ideas are not new. One can see the notional truth of
this scattered among various thinkers from Plato and Aristotle
onward. Yet, it was only in the age of modern physics that these
ideas could take on a more distinctive hue, enable thinkers in
various worlds of physcis, economics, sociology, philosophy, and
the sciences of complexity, non-linear dynamics, and chaos theory,
etc. that a new enframing of the world became apparent. As
Maurizio Lazzarato has shown in his The Making of the Indebted
Man we live in a vacuum world that creates its illusion of
timelessness on the backs of blackmail. Debt itself has become the
new commodity, and the humans that support this death machine
create a future that is always just out of reach because if the
payment of the bill ever stepped out of the future into our present
moment everything would collapse. So debt becomes the engine
against entropy in a financial system that fears both the future and
the payment it entails. One thinks of those sleep researches that
discovered in their findings that as insufficient sleep increases our
sleep debt noticeable problems appear. One can only begin to
understand the problems appearing in a sleepless world of zombie
consumerism as austerity measures and the insurmountable debt
against the Future piles up, and the humans in various countries
supporting such a Time-Machine begin to close down in their own
manholes. How will the psychotic break that is to come discover its
way out of the dark rooms of its own sleepless mind?
Ballard in many stories will study the effects of temporality from
various perspectives. Ballard will in one of his interviews speak of
the sense that Time is ending, not in the sense of an apocalypse
but rather our very inner sense of time as change and movement:
Sections of the landscape will have no connection whatsoever with
each other, in the way that many arts, such as pottery or ceramics
have no connection to the events of politics or social eruptions.
(Extreme Metaphors, p. 163)3

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He will tell the interviewer that people no longer share a sense of a

‘central experience': not “in the way people from the thirties can
speak of a shared feeling of everyone being involved in great
political currents, when you could see change coming and
everybody shared in it equally” (EM, p. 163)
“Time will in a sense cease to exist; it won’t matter whether you’re
living in 1982 or 1992 or 2002 – that sense of a single world will
go. – (EM, p. 164)
Are we not living in that bleak landscape of timelessness in which
the future has stopped, a speed world of accelerating electronic
hypermedia in which the closure of time has encapsulated us
within an irreal, anti-realist realm of simulated indifference rather
than brought us to a point of emergent newness? Franco “Bifo”
Berardi will document this Age of Apathy and disengagement, the
slow corrosion of time and its closure within the speed factories of
financial globalization:
During the twentieth-century social struggle could change things
in a collective and conscious way because industrial workers could
maintain solidarity and unity in daily life, and so could fight and
win. Autonomy was the condition of victory because autonomy
means the ability to create social solidarity in daily life, and the
ability to self-organize outside the rules of labor and exploitation.4
He will see the new ICT technologies of information and
communication as the key to this accelerating disaffection, saying,
the “InfoSphere has dramatically changed and accelerated, and
this is jeopardizing the very possibility of communication,
empathy, and solidarity.” (Berardi, p. 14)
The Philosopher of Information Luciano Floridi will explore this
notion of the accelerating InfoSphere suggesting that it denotes
the whole informational environment constituted by all
informational entities (thus including information agents as well),
their properties, interactions, processes, and mutual relations. It is
an environment comparable to, but different from, cyberspace,
which is only one of its sub-regions, as it were, since it also
includes offline and analogue spaces of information. Maximally, it
is a concept that, given an informational ontology, can also be used
as synonymous with reality, or Being.5
So the notion that financial capitalism and globalization are a
project to stop time and the temporal movement of the future
through speed techniques of hypermedia, an inversion of temporal
evolution and progress – replacing a notion of a self-organizing

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evolving economy and political world of human solidarity with a

timeless ultraconsumer society of zombies feeding off the
remaining resources and each other for the profit and pleasure of a
specific elite and cosmopolitan class of wealth is at the heart of this
diagnosis.
Ballard himself in his last three novels began to explore this
devolving world of the new wealthy elite and its global shutdown
of the future. The voyeuristic zombification of the wealthy as
vampiric and apathetic consumers of a rotting pleasure-pain 
criminality is at the heart of Cocaine Nights, Millennium People,
and Super-Cannes. I have barely touched the surface of J.G.
Ballard’s prescient diagnosis and fictionalization of our current
malaise. At the center of it is a dark vision of Time in its various
temporal stabilizations/destabilizations, its synchronic/diachronic
time-loops and bootstrapping fallbacks, its
deterretorializations/reterretorializations, and
decodings/recodings of what Nick Land might suggest is its
Templexity. If as Nick Land suggests cities of the global financial
system, the cosmopolitan home of the great corporate networks
and their affiliates, the playlands of the corporate and political
elite are becoming Time-Machines, then what of the excluded
realms beyond the glint and glitz of these paradisial enclaves?

1. Ballard, J. G. (2012-06-01). The Complete Stories of J. G.

Ballard (p. 51). Norton. Kindle Edition.
2. Crary, Jonathan (2013-06-04). 24/7: Late Capitalism and the
Ends of Sleep (p. 126). Verso Books. Kindle Edition.
3. Extreme Metaphors. J. G. Ballard Collected Interviews Editors,
Simon Sellars and Dan O’Hara (Fourth Estate 2014)
4. Franco “Bifo” Berardi. After the Future. ( AK Press, 2011)
5. Floridi, Luciano (2013-10-10). The Ethics of Information (p. 6).
Oxford University Press, USA. Kindle Edition.

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