Up Rising: Rehabilitating J.G. Ballard’s High-Rise with R.D. Laing and Lauren Berlant

A little history of literary geography

Geographers have long regarded novels and analogous cultural artefacts as valuable sources of spatial information (Alexander, 2015). From the early analyses of realistically represented Victorian landscapes, like those of Hardy and Eliot (Pocock, 1981), via telling tales of migration and exile, not least Joyce’s Ulyssean Dublin tour (Preston and Simpson-Housley, 1994), to excursions into wildly imaginative secondary worlds, like Tolkien’s Middle Earth and Lovecraft’s Cluthu Mythos (Kneale, 2006), the fictional frontier has been progressively pushed back by humanistic geography’s homesteaders. And while these clearances have not gone unchallenged (Hones, 2008), they are reinforced by spatial and cultural ‘turns’ in sociology and geography, respectively.

As Sharp’s (2000), Saunders’ (2010) and Hones’ (2015) reveal, the realm of literary geography has four cardinal directions. Terminologically, it goes by a host of semi-synonymous descriptors including ‘geocriticism’, ‘imaginary geographies’, ‘literary cartography’, and ‘spatial literary studies’, to say nothing of ‘narrative cartography’, ‘romans-géographes’ and ‘geopoetics’ (Peraldo, 2016). Conceptually, it mines the rich, thick and frequently fault-fissured seams of pre-existing literary theory, from Feminist and Psychoanalytical to post-colonialist and good old-fashioned New Criticism (Thacker, 2005–2006). Ideologically, it is no longer treated as a decorative garnish – a source of well-wrought words that enliven research reports – but as a deep-seated, spatially situated activity where literary production, distribution and reception is conditioned by the circuits, and channelled by the conduits, of multinational capital (Hones, 2008). Empirically, it ventures into ever more literary genres, as well as contiguous cultural forms like film, dance, sculpture and visual arts (Alexander, 2015). According to Brosseau (2017), studies of the place of space in works of literature started with 19th-century novels, turned to the tomes of modernism, gravitated toward pulp fiction, tackled children’s adventure stories thereafter and has since explored crime, SF, poetry, short stories, comic books and autobiography, in that order.

The compass of this corpus also includes psychogeography. An aptly named, conceptually accommodating, ideologically freighted and empirically engaged literary genre, psychogeography’s genesis is variously identified with William Blake’s 18th-century poetic visions, Daniel Defoe’s pseudo-biographical Robinson Crusoe, Thomas de Quincy’s opium-fuelled journeys around old London town, Edgar Allan Poe’s profoundly unsettling essay ‘The Man in the Crowd’, and the oneiric Parisian novels of prominent surrealists André Breton and Louis Aragon (Coverley, 2010). However, most commentators agree that it was the radical, openly insurgent writings of Guy Debord and the Situationists that put psychogeography on the map (Pinder, 2005). This map has guided assorted avant-garde novelists including Martin Amis, Will Self, Iain Sinclair and Britain’s astronaut of ‘inner space’, J.G. Ballard. Few wordsmiths, Taylor (2002) shows, have done more to explore the ill-defined borderlands between geography, literature and the psyche. And fewer still have better expressed the ‘subjectivity of the near future’. Ballard’s works of the 1970s, especially his dystopian urban trilogy Crash, Concrete Island and High-Rise, not only anticipated the blandscapes that now surround us – non-places (Augé, 1995), junk-spaces (Koolhas, 2002), in-between places (Prieto, 2013), leftover edgelands (Moss, 2016), etc. – but have acquired new significance in today’s world of sick cities (LeDuff, 2013), vampire empires (Pile, 2005) and psychotic geographies (Baker, 2005). As the Grenfell disaster of 2017 attests, it is an infernal world, where apartment blocks are death traps once more.

The lowdown on High-Rise

In the topography of texts, first lines loom large, be it ‘The past is a foreign country’, ‘A spectre is haunting Europe’, or ‘In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit’ (Oz, 1999). The Everest of opening sentences is of course much debated, but Ballard’s High-Rise must rank among the Himalayan peaks. Its ostensibly cosy vision of an affluent, middle-class professional enjoying the view from the veranda of his expensive apartment in a newly built tower block is undercut by the fact that he is barbequing an animal companion. This high-rise is a hellhole. Our protagonist has survived the carnage and, like Marlow in Heart of Darkness, is about to recount the horror, the horror:

Later, as he sat on his balcony eating the dog, Dr. Robert Laing reflected on the unusual events that had taken place within this huge apartment building during the previous three months.

Soon a dog is drowned, a woman is groped, and a man inexplicably plummets to his death. Yet, the tenants remain unmoved. They prefer, perversely, to keep themselves to themselves. Even when the fatality takes place, no one bothers to inform the police. Slowly but surely the residents withdraw from their outside lives, disconnect telephones and attend to the unsettling situation within the building which now functions as a discreet place where repressed desire is unleashed. Seemingly bent on mutually assured destruction, the internecine conflict swiftly escalates to extremities of violence, vandalism, degeneracy, defilement and inter-floor conflict. The latter takes the form of intense class-racism as the various levels of the high-rise find temporary tribal solidarity in their collective hatred of those above and below. As Amis (2001: 102) observes, ‘Eventually the high-rise takes on that quality common to all Ballardian loci: it is suspended, no longer to do with the rest of the planet, screened off by its own surreal logic’.

This surreal logic is embodied in three focal characters, each representative of their respective social situation. In the lower floors, television producer Richard Wilder becomes fixated on his self-actualizing mission of climbing the tower and seizing the top floor. Above, the building’s architect and occupant of the penthouse suite, Anthony Royal, strives to maintain his mastery as self-styled ‘lord of the manor’ (p.100). Meanwhile Dr. Robert Laing ‘knew his place’ (p.101) in the mayhem’s social and spatial middle. He observes the mounting chaos as, up and down the building, its female inhabitants are abandoned by their partners and routinely subjected to gratuitous sexual abuse.

As the apartment block slides ever deeper into violence, Wilder climbs higher and, at the same time, becomes increasingly brutish and infantile. On reaching the summit, he shoots Royal in cold blood, only to be murdered in turn by women cannibals, who have somehow commandeered the rooftop play area. Dr. Laing survives the slaughter, albeit as a lackey for two demanding matriarchs, and helps rehabilitate the ransacked building alongside the remaining women. Meanwhile, a second high-rise, 400 yards from the original, reaches full occupancy and suffers its first unaccountable power outage: ‘Already torch beams were moving about in the darkness, as the residents made their first confused attempts to discover where they were. Laing watched them contentedly, ready to welcome them to their new world’ (Ballard, 1975: 248).

Placing critics on the couch

Epitomised by the grotesquery of its first line and ominous portents in the last, High-Rise is conventionally described as a ‘classic tale of urban disintegration’ (Child, 2013). Critics typically read it as a ‘de-civilizing process’ (Baxter and Wymer, 2012: 12), an ‘urban disaster’ (Brigg, 1985: 67), a ‘dystopian evocation of urban life’ (Gasiorek, 2005: 20), ‘a return to primitivism and tribal warfare’ (Taylor, 2002: 4) and ‘a towering inferno of violence and debauchery’ (Hewitt, 2016: 82) in which, ‘relieved of social restraints, a group of civilized humans will revert swiftly to savagery’ (Baxter, 2009: 235). High-Rise comes across as a spectacularly squalid rendering of geo-psychosis, where the building’s occupants actively dissolve their social order into a murderous man-eating bloodbath (Graham, 2016; Thrift, 2005). It is an allegory of urban nullity. It is a parable of consumer society consuming itself.

There is more to High-Rise, though. Perhaps, the most intriguing aspect is that, throughout the narrative, readers encounter ‘psychoanalytical innuendos’ (Oramus, 2015: 108) which portend richer theoretical pickings. It is no coincidence, for instance, that two of the central characters are called Wilder and Royal. The former yields to animality and finishes in an infantile state, whereas the latter is the building’s designer who presides with regal charisma, considering himself the keeper of ‘a private zoo’ (p.138). Their names are thus indicative of id and superego, as are the characters’ actions. In between Wilder and Royal, Ballard’s third focal character is the ego figure Dr. Robert Laing. Described by Royal as the ‘most true tenant’ (p.101), his name gestures toward the notable psychiatric theorist, Dr. Ronald David Laing (cf. Brigg, 1985; Groes, 2012; O’Hara, 2012). Ballard, it seems, teases well-informed readers but also actively engages theory by artfully alluding to his sources of inspiration.

It is possible, therefore, to read High-Rise as more than an admittedly compelling account of crazed destruction. It is interpretable psychoanalytically; an approach long employed by learned literary critics (Vice, 1996; Wright, 1998) and latterly embraced by ‘psychoanalytic geographers’ (Kingsbury and Pile, 2016). As Ogden and Ogden (2013: 7) observe about the former,

contemporary psychoanalytic literary critics continue to produce readings of literature based on the supposition that literary characters behave and think like real human beings; that fictional characters have unconscious psychological problems that the reader may identify and diagnose; and that the author and his characters share the same unconscious dilemmas.

That said, psychoanalysts are often traduced for heavy-handed interpretations, effectively force-fitting fixed interpretations on inherently ambiguous texts (Eagleton, 1986; Frosh, 2010). And while the same charges have yet to be levelled at psychoanalytic geographers, ‘maps of misreading’ remain an ever-present possibility (Bloom, 1975). Felman (1982), accordingly, recommends flexible and open-ended interpretive approaches from psychoanalysts and literary critics alike. The same principle should presumably apply to the rapidly growing field of psychoanalytical geography, whose exponents ‘now feel confident enough to embrace psychoanalytic approaches in ways that are unfettered by a sense of marginality or fear of crude caricatures or deliberately contrary interpretations’ (Kingsbury and Pile, 2016: 6).

When it comes to analyses of Ballard, however, even the most flexible and open-minded readings are complicated by the incontrovertible fact that his oeuvre is always-already informed by theory. According to Francis (2011: 1), Ballard’s works are ‘imbued with the discursive textures of psychoanalysis’. Baxter and Wymer (2012) likewise argue that he deliberately introduces, and systematically embeds, psychological paradoxes imported from readings of Freud and Jung. Elsewhere, Baxter (2009) maintains that Ballard was not only working within a Surrealist tradition inspired by those proto-psychogeographers Aragon and Breton but also drawing from Adorno, Benjamin, Barthes, Marcuse and more.

Of course, Ballard does not engage with theory in the manner expected of academics. But, as Francis (2011: 26) puts it, he can be seen to ‘make use of particular psychological texts as conceptual raw material for his narrative fictions’. Accordingly, Ballard generates fictive forms by imaginatively mixing theoretical insights in a way that conventional psychoanalytical scholars might find uncomfortable and unsettling. In Luckhurst’s (1997: xvii) words:

His work at once constantly activates theoretical models, but it is also awkward, didactic, and over-theorized, tending to evade or supersede the theories meant to ‘explain’ it. This is to be caught on the horns of readability and unreadability, graspability and ungraspability. It is such that his texts at once welcome theoretical ‘capture’ but always escape it.

Reading high-rise metaphorically

Famously described by an early reviewer as being beyond psychiatric help, Ballard is nowadays considered disturbingly prescient, nothing less than a soothsayer of consumer society (see Elborough, 2008). Dubbed the Seer of Shepperton, he has been credited with predicting Ronald Reagan’s presidency (in a 1967 short story), anticipating the aftermath of Princess Diana’s untimely death (in his 1970 novel Crash), foretelling terrorist bomb attacks on airports (with 2003’s Millennium People), prophesying the Berlin Wall (four years before the event), grasping the apocalyptic implications of global warming (way back in 1961's Drowned World), intuiting the inexorable advance of advertising-saturated consumer society (the ‘Subliminal Man’ short story of 1963), and inventing Facebook for good measure (in a 1977 article for Vogue). According to Baxter (2008: 2), Ballard encapsulates ‘the contemporary condition in all of its violence and ambiguity: murdered celebrities, crashed cars, surveillance technologies, media politicians, gated communities, vast shopping malls, drowned cities, nuclear weapons ranges and testing sites, landscaped business parks’. His books are an allegory of, and metaphor for, today’s decentred, demented world.

Read closely, however, the most striking thing about High-Rise is its reliance on that most ancient of rhetorical devices: prosopopeia (aka personification). Thus, the apartment block in Ballard’s novel is consistently construed as a living thing, a sentient creature with malevolence in mind. Situated in east London, the skyline of which ‘resembled the disturbed encephalograph of an unresolved mental crisis’ (p.5), the condominium is ‘less a habitable architecture … than the unconscious diagram of a mysterious psychic event’ (p.28). An immense creature (p.24), with an apparent ability to expand and contract diurnally (p.19), it has its own rhythms (p.9), a second life (p.8), a natural social order (p.11) and, early on in the narrative, a kind of knowing calm (p.25) that infiltrated the minds of residents, creating a new social type that was impervious to the social pressures of high-rise life (p.43). The building, one character suggests, is nothing less than a ‘huge animate presence, brooding over and keeping a magisterial eye on the events taking place’:

There was something in this feeling – the elevators pumping up and down the long shafts resembled pistons in the chamber of a heart. The residents moving along the corridors were the cells in a network of arteries, the lights in their apartments the neurons of a brain. (p.50)

Personification, of course, is one of humankind’s most deeply rooted tropes (Lakoff and Johnson, 1980), a primal propensity made manifest from the man in the moon and houses that look like Hitler to Jesus’s face mysteriously materialising on Margherita pizzas (Guthrie, 1995). Ever-popular among lyric poets, who happily apostrophise ‘dancing’ daffodils, ‘babbling’ brooks, ‘smiling’ sunbeams and, for T.S. Eliot at least, the feline fog that rubs its back on windowpanes, prosopopeia is no less evident in the social sciences, where Winnicott wrestled with object-relations, Latour enlivens actor-networks and material anthropologists like Miller (2010) maintain that the notion of agentic or animate buildings is best understood through the multiple meanings of the word ‘accommodation’.

At the most basic, Miller claims, accommodation refers to finding a place to live. But accommodation also involves a process of accommodating, that is ‘an appropriation of the home by its inhabitants’ (Miller, 2010: 96). This second meaning is reciprocal; ‘it may imply our changing of a home to suit ourselves, but it can also imply the need to change ourselves in order to suit our accommodation’ (Miller, 2010). More importantly …

… the term accommodating expresses a sense of willing, of benign agreement to compromise on behalf of the other, often the only spirit within which accommodation can be achieved. By considering our relationship to the home through the term accommodating we face the home not as a thing but a process. Being accommodating and being accommodated is something in which we are constantly engaged. So how, then, does accommodating become accommodating? How do we, in practice, achieve this balance between our agency and that of the home? (Miller, 2010: 96)

Reading High-Rise psychoanalytically

Miller’s accommodating metaphor is likewise applicable to High-Rise readings, insofar as the conventional account – descent into demented degeneracy – accommodates a very different interpretation. Namely, the characters’ behaviour is intelligible within a particular constellation’s set of processes, praxes and material reality. As the grisly opening vignette intimates, Laing’s dog-eating is not a moment of madness but something that (eventually) makes sense within the narrative’s logic; a new normative structure is produced in which mad acts become intelligible. The reader must reshuffle conceptions to grasp this new normal. Unless readers reshuffle, they only see delinquency and disintegration. Equipped with the appropriate theoretical lens, however, readers may recognize a redemptive and rehabilitating collective journey.

That lens is R.D. Laing’s allegedly ‘anti-psychiatric’ theory, first reported in The Divided Self and later reconfigured in interpersonal (Self and Other) and societal terms (The Politics of Experience). Many critics have, of course, noted Laing’s influence on Ballard (Baxter and Wymer, 2012; Francis, 2011; Luckhurst, 1997), although Self (2000) stresses that the latter parodied not parroted the former. As Stephenson (1991: 7) suggests, nevertheless,

both share the notion that we are profoundly ambivalent with regard to our individual identities and our collective social identity, that we are clinging determinedly, apprehensively, to an illusion while at the same time forces within our psyches are working to overturn that illusion. Both writers also share the belief that “break-down” and “break-through” are inextricably intertwined, that what may appear to be madness or disaster may be … “veritable manna from heaven”.

Regardless of Laing’s reputation as a shaman, charlatan or poet without portfolio, four aspects of his theories are pertinent to High-Rise. First, he contended that the status-quo of everyday living did not provide an index point for normality or sanity but is defined by alienation and violence. The everyday functioning of (consumer) society is fundamentally violent:

We are bemused and crazed creatures, strangers to our true selves, to one another and to the spiritual and material world – mad, even, from an ideal standpoint we can glimpse but not adopt. We are born into a world where alienation awaits us. We are potentially men, but we are in an alienated state, and this state is not simply a natural system. Alienation as our present destiny is achieved only by outrageous violence perpetrated by human beings on human beings. (Laing, 1967: 12)

Second, Laing posited that schizophrenia should be regarded, not as a mental illness that assails certain individuals, but as a rational reaction to disturbing social modalities. ‘Schizophrenia,’ he states, ‘is a special strategy that a person invents in order to live in an unliveable situation’ (Laing, 1967: 95). One of psychiatry’s foremost errors, Laing believed, is that instead of investigating what sort of unliveable situation nurtures this special strategy – such as a deeply dysfunctional family relationship – psychiatry seeks to return the patient to their pre-schizophrenic state. Laing preferred to think of the condition as a ‘course to run’. Sometimes, he said, ‘actions may be part of a potentially orderly natural sequence of experiences’, a sequence which is ‘seldom allowed to occur’ (p.102). Laing further claimed that psychiatrists should not interrupt the sequence by seeking to restore a semblance of ‘normal’ conduct and return the person to their previous way of being – the mark of success by standard criteria – but rather to ‘understand sanity and madness in existential social terms and then confront common problems’ (p.108). Expressions, in short, that seem mad from the perspective of a notionally sane person may be intelligible if understood in their social situation.

The third aspect of Laing’s work relevant to High-Rise is his methodology. In conjunction with Aaron Esterson, Laing conducted longitudinal research on the topic of sanity, madness and the family (Laing and Esterson, 1964). The authors regarded schizophrenia as a hypothesis not a fact. Therefore, a schizophrenic was a person diagnosed and treated as such. Laing and Esterson investigated whether the utterances and behaviour of ‘schizophrenics’ were intelligible within the family context where the supposed ‘schizophrenia’ arose. As they asked about a patient: ‘is the way this girl acts and are the things she says intelligible in terms of social praxis, or are they purely and simply the unintelligible effluxion of a pathological process?’ (Laing and Esterson, 1964: 132). Their answer was that study should not be limited to individuals, but take appropriate account of each person in the family, the relationships between family members and the family itself as a spatially situated social system. These bounded relationships, driven by interpersonal perception, projection, phantasy and interpretation, sometimes unleash a ‘spiral of reciprocity’: a social constellation that explodes into extreme dysfunction when paranoia enters the fray but only intelligible when approached in terms of its own interpersonal dynamics (Laing et al., 1966).

Fourth, Laing (1967) argued that as socio-spatial settings expand from micro to macro, revolutionary changes tend not to occur at the poles (neither the ‘individual pirouette of solitary repentance on the one hand, or by a seizure of the machinery of the state on the other’, p.16) but tend to be brought about by ‘sudden, structural, radical qualitative changes in the intermediate system levels’, which typically consist of transformations in a factory, a hospital, a university or, indeed, an apartment block. The conceptual gaze should therefore fall, not on isolated individuals nor broader socio-economic phenomena, but on situations at the meso level, much like the activities that transpire in Ballard’s fictional setting. To this end, Laing’s work may be regarded as dedicatedly spatial because not only should a person be ‘grounded’ in their material context, but that material context too may be a source of mental destabalisation (McGeachan, 2014).

Taken together, Laing’s theorizing provides us with the following key considerations in relation to High-Rise: (a) madness, alienation and violence is not something that suddenly overcomes the tenants; they were already in a state of ‘extreme normality’ over the course of ordinary psychogeographical existence; (b) rather than regard the actions of the tenants as mad or as moments of disintegration, we should consider the actions as intelligible with reference to the process and praxis of the situation within the building, the specific socio-spatial setting and (c) the characters are engaged in a process, a voyage or a sequence which takes the protagonists to a resolution of their unbearable position. The overall sequence, therefore, is not a journey into madness (as the novel is ordinarily understood) but a journey away from madness.

Indeed, the emplotment of High-Rise is predicated on this idea of a quest or journey – a spatial trail – through collective communal madness. A defining aspect of Ballard’s novel, much like the amnesiac party animals in The Hangover who cleave to the credo ‘what happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas’ (Pile, 2016), is how determined the tenants are to see things through to the bitter end while maintaining a conspiracy of silence from the wider world. As Wilder reflects, there is a need, shared by everyone, ‘to shift away, most of all from oneself, any realization of what was actually happening in the high-rise, so that events there could follow their own logic and get even more out of hand’ (p.56). And, as Laing likewise concedes about his own spatial settings, residents are ‘united in assuring any outsiders that all was well – partly out of a displaced pride in the high-rise, but also out of a need to resolve the confrontation between them without interference’ (p.103).

Similarly, Gasiorek (2005: 23) observes that Ballard regularly explored characters who seek ‘immersion in the destructive element’, because it ‘offers the only chance of confronting these ambiguities head-on. The protagonists who receive authorial approval in Ballard’s texts embrace the new challenges with which they are confronted, welcoming them as portals to new experiences’. Optimism, therefore, is the outcome. ‘This is what enables Ballard to claim that his is a “fiction of psychic fulfilment” because it encourages his characters to discover “the truth about themselves” even if this process of discovery culminates in their deaths’ (Gasiorek, 2005). We see this process in High-Rise as tenants embrace each escalation of violence:

Each one brought them a step closer to the ultimate goal of the high-rise, a realm where their most deviant impulses were free at last to exercise themselves in any way they wished. At this point physical violence would cease at last. (Gasiorek, 2005: 150)

Reading High-Rise matriarchally

In Laing and Esterson’s (1964) Sanity, Madness & the Family, a series of socially and spatially situated case studies of ‘schizophrenic’ women are presented. A shared supposed symptom of the women is ‘flat affect’ (Lebeau, 2015). In the case of ‘Maya’, for example, it was noted that amongst her clinical attribution, she was ‘depersonalised; showed signs of catatonia; exhibited affective impoverishment and autistic withdrawal’ (p.32). These ‘symptoms’ recur throughout their case studies: patients are found to have ‘impoverished affect’ (p.75), to be ‘listless, apathetic, quiet, withdrawn and lacking in concentration’ (p.109), to be in a ‘inaccessible catatonic stupor’ with ‘shallowness of affect’ (p.131), ‘withdrawal from external reality, rigidity of posture and movement, thought disorder (vagueness, thought blocking), affective flattening’ (p.144), to be like a ‘puzzled child doing her best to meet the demands of adults’ (p.176) and as demonstrating ‘emotional apathy’ (p.203).

The women of Laing and Esterson’s case studies behave very like the women in High-Rise who stage a communal mental withdrawal from the action. Throughout the novel, we encounter descriptions of women disengaged from the traumatic events surrounding them: ‘(she was) barely aware of what she was doing, as if a large part of her mind had been switched off’ (p.78); ‘she was detached and uneasy at the same time, like a spectator forced to watch someone about to be involved in an accident’ (p.66); ‘she soon became tiresomely maudlin, wandering about the corridors in a vacant way as if she had lost the key to her own mind’ (p.96); ‘Mrs Wilder stood passively … the sexual assault itself had ceased to have any meaning’ (p.135). Even the women on the reception desk turned a blind eye to it all:

In the absence of the manager – still lying in a state of mental collapse in his ground-floor apartment – his dwindling staff of two (the wives of a dubbing-mixer on the 2^nd floor and a first violinist on the 3^rd) sat stoically at their desks in the entrance lobby, oblivious of the deterioration going on apace over their heads. (p.105)

This invites a rather more utopian interpretation of High-Rise. Perhaps, Ballard tricks readers into reproducing a homonormative and psychiatric gaze that grounds the novel in the perspective of three male protagonists, each of whom is oblivious to the conduct of the women. In this dominant reading, the women exist merely as passive victims. Yet, by the conclusion, we realise that Laing’s existence is spared because he meets the needs of two powerful matriarchs. Consequentially, it is surprising that none of the academic analyses seem to note the uterine uprising of the gynocrats and instead fixate upon the violence of the male characters. When Gasiorek (2005: 127), for instance, writes, ‘Some paradigm, this. Large-scale vandalism, total collapse of social ties and any sense of community, casual sexual abuse and indiscriminate violence leading to murder’, he misses the point that High-Rise concludes with a highly knit post-patriarchal community that sets about the task of child-friendly rehabilitation and communal action. How can this count for nothing?

Children were playing in the sculpture garden. The doors, chained for so long to exclude them, were now wide open, and Wilder could see the geometric forms of the play-structures, their vivid colours standing out against the white walls. Everything had been freshly painted, and the roof was vibrant with light. (p.238)

Up! for discussion

In a 1984 interview with The Paris Review, Ballard discussed the inspiration for High-Rise (Frick, 1984). On vacation in Rosas, right beside Salvador Dali’s domicile at Port Lligat, he witnessed a surreal episode. A ground-floor tenant in their holiday apartment block was driven to distraction by cigarette butts thrown from the upper floors. A photographer by profession, he started patrolling the beach, taking zoom lens photos of fellow holiday-makers’ boorish behaviours, then displayed them in the foyer of the shared high-rise. ‘It was a very curious exhibition,’ Ballard recalled. ‘It was a green light to my imagination’ (Frick, 1984).

This green light, the pioneering explorer of ‘inner space’ adds, inspired him to write Up!, the working title for High-Rise, in the form of a flat, dispassionate social worker’s report on the strange events that had transpired in the 40-storey building. It was an imaginary building that epitomised the utopian spirit of post-war inner-city redevelopment. As well as the half-mad megalomania of Robert ‘master builder’ Moses in plate glass and pre-stressed concrete.

Today, when the utopian visions of Corbusier and Goldfinger and grand urban redevelopment projects like the Heygate Estate are discredited, demolished or consumed by capital – but also when the charred remains of Grenfell Tower mark a ‘tomb in the sky’ of neoliberal neglect – the ambivalent position of High-Rise towards utopian planning is as prescient and relevant as ever. For some conservatives, the lesson of the 20th century is that utopian imagination is inherently dangerous and the hallmark of a fundamentalist and immature mind wherein, as Badiou puts it, ‘to want something better is to want something worse’ (Badiou, 2015: 1). From such a stance, the overall pejorative framing of utopianism means that any ambitious urban planning can be quickly dismissed as unworthy of serious attention. Yet, to dismiss utopia is to accept severe limitations on the horizons of political possibility (see Pinder, 2005). The ideology that suggests utopianism has failed, and the attendant rise of post-utopian city-scapes in such contemporary developments as the Battersea Power Station – now re-purposed as a playground for the rich and a financial instrument for the overseas investor – is a concomitant of neoliberalism’s new world order and Margaret Thatcher’s notorious maxim that ‘there is no alternative’.

As Hatherley (2016) explores, the particular phase of British modernism that High-Rise addresses is now often recalled as the moment in which socialist or social democratic imagination collapsed into chaos and thereafter disappeared from the political landscape. Whereupon once in London there were experiments in architecture and urban design that echoed post-War British social democracy and spoke to utopian imagination, today there stands bland expressions of class hegemony. Ballard’s High-Rise might well be read as representing the final failure of an attempt towards modernist spatial planning; as modernism’s death-knell. Indeed, this is one possible interpretation of Ben Wheatley’s recent cinematic adaptation of High-Rise, which concludes with an image of a child climbing to the top of the ravaged high-rise to listen to a broadcast of Margaret Thatcher’s speech where she announces the hegemony of neoliberal thought. Neoliberal realism, it appears, arises from the ruins of utopian failure.

Our alternative reading of Ballard’s novel, where we find regeneration in the chaos, is instructive in this regard. Just as we here rediscover and appreciate anew the utopia of Ballard’s imagination, so too it is necessary to escape the bleak belief that utopianism bespeaks failure. Utopian spatial design is a project reclaimable via the rediscovery and retransmission of the utopian spatial possibilities that survive in our cities. As Walter Benjamin would have it, we must read the city as containing the ‘still burning embers of hope from the past that might yet burn anew’ (Proctor, 2015: 16). ‘What should haunt us’, Mark Fisher (2014: 27) maintains, ‘is not the no longer of actually existing social democracy, but the not yet of the futures that popular modernism trained us to expect, but which never materialised’.

A further, closely related theme that inheres in High-Rise is militant modernism (Hatherley, 2016). An ideology that Royal wholeheartedly believed in, this was his determination to, as Bertolt Brecht put it in 1926, ‘erase the traces!’ This was the belief that modernity must not be built upon the ‘stifling pile-up of historicist detritus that made up the bourgeois aesthetic’ (Hatherley, 2008: 3) but rather should be a bold assertion of radical new ways of living in new urban infrastructures that could only be built on razed spaces, on places purged of slum dwellings, prior streetscapes, pre-existing communities, the entire urban palimpsest. To embrace the modern life was to be committed to brutally eradicating remnants of the past.

This provides us with another lens to interpret High-Rise. Rather than the building being too modern for its tenants, it was simply not modern enough. Hence, the destruction we see is the laying to waste of all those objects and ways of living (homonormativity, class hierarchy, patriarchy) that simply would not fit in, or indeed might have obstructed, the new order. Perhaps, the story of High-Rise is best explained by Gramsci’s famous line: ‘the crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear’.

If we allow ourselves to read High-Rise as speaking to the not yet of futurism, and do so in a present in which we are haunted by narratives of utopian failure, then what are we now allowed to read? We can read High-Rise as an uprising, where the proletariat and bourgeoisie go to class warfare with both unexpectedly overtaken at the last moment by a brutally effective gynocracy. High-Rise, in other words, is the science fiction of the ultimate utopian project; a feminist revolution.

What we offer in this article is an amalgam of psychoanalytically inspired insights into a classic work of literary geography that has long been viewed from a singular, arguably single-minded perspective. We offer a Berlantine reading that chimes with recent Bechdel-tested, where’s-the-woman critiques of iconic androcentric novels like The Great Gatsby and Fight Club (Vanmouwerik, 2017). We offer a close reading that juxtaposes the works of a literary and spatially inclined psychoanalyst, R.D. Laing, and a spatially and psychoanalytically inclined novelist, J.G. Ballard. We offer a subversive reading that recuperates at least some of the radical, revolutionary, unashamedly utopian aspirations of 1960s city planners – and 1960s anti-psychiatrists – albeit through a dark gynocritical glass. We offer a retroactive reading that reaches back to the personified prehistory of urban geography, not least its primal publication, Robert E. Park’s The City. Explicating his ‘ecological’ model of urban development, Park (1925) posited that there is more to the city than its physical form, its infrastructure, its buildings. The city, he said, is ‘a state of mind’ (p.1). But what, Ballard asks, if that state of mind is disturbed, psychotic, schizophrenic? If it is, then Laing and Berlant help ‘re-ground’ the ever-growing community of literary geographers (Alexander, 2015; Hones, 2015; Peraldo, 2016).

High-Rise is a prescient parable of consumer society’s spatial compulsions. According to Fitchett (2002: 310), Ballard’s entire oeuvre is characterized by general concerns with how ‘the utopian hopes and visions for an ever more confident and capable consumer culture that were conceived in the middle of the twentieth century are … simultaneously being realized and disintegrated’. Francis (2011: 8), similarly, suggests that Ballard’s primary concern was composing fiction ‘closely relevant to some of the inherent problems and contradictions of contemporary Western culture’. More forcefully still, Gasiorek (2005: 20) proclaims that Ballard’s basic preoccupation is with consumer society ‘as end-game and terminal zone, the site of late capitalist colonization so complete that temporality has been evacuated from it and can only be conceived in terms of spatial extension: more buildings, roads, airports, shopping malls, car parks’. Ballard, he goes on …

… objects to a world that has been mechanized, affectless and aggressive, but he is exhilarated by its electric dreams, so potent, glamorous and unpredictable. Inasmuch as his writing traces the sinister trajectories often taken by a potentially world-annihilating technology, it also explores the emancipatory hopes and uneasy pleasures unleashed by the juggernaut of modernity. (ibid: 22–23)

Conclusion

A one-time medical student at Cambridge, who aspired to be a psychoanalyst and who was regarded by his family and friends as a somewhat schizophrenic child, J.G. Ballard was unusually attuned to the interplay of space and society. As he reports in his semi-autobiographical novel, The Kindness of Women (Ballard, 1991: 200).

The central nervous system is nature’s Sistine Chapel, but we have to bear in mind that the world our senses present to us … is a ramshackle construct which our brains have devised to let us get on with the job of maintaining ourselves and reproducing our species. What we see is a highly conventionalized picture, a simple tourist guide to a very strange city.

We beg to differ. High-Rise, like all great works of literature, chimes with its times and changes with them too. Our reading, we believe, is in tune with our time, a time when post-truth prevails, when macho male posturing threatens apocalyptic ruination and when the world is even madder, if such a thing were possible, than when Ballard was writing his works of futuristic wonder.