This is second Ballard I've read. The first was Crash, which I thought was brilliant in all of its grotesque, fucked-up glory. In case you're curious, Crash follows people who get-off by getting into car accidents. It's a strange book, but also very important, because it explores how technology has affected our lives. The novel was published in 1973, so it's not necessarily about how social media or smartphones are affecting our lives (which I feel is often written about in a completely condescending way and totally unproductive in actually trying to understand how they do affect us, because how could they not?), but more about urban landscapes: highways, buildings, cars.
High-Rise, in particular, zeroes in living in high-rise apartment buildings, and the growing culture of convenience and accessibility in cities. Published in 1975, High-Rise is about the residents of a new high-rise outside of London that is specifically meant to suit the needs of all of the residents. Within the 40-story structure is a supermarket, salon, restaurant, bank, school, swimming pools, recreation courts, etc. People do not necessarily need to leave the building, save for work.
The high-rise was a huge machine designed to serve, not the collective body of the tenants, but the individual resident in isolation. Its staff of air-conditioning conduits, elevators, garbage disposal chutes and electrical switching systems provided a never-failing supply of care and attention that a century earlier would have needed an army of tireless servants (17).
The quote above not only shows how the high-rise functions as a replacement of human labor, it is also meant to serve the individual, not a collective body. There is not necessarily a community built in to the fabric of the high-rise - it is actually meant to lessen human contact as much as possible. Furthermore, Robert Laing, one of the main characters of the novel, notes that although he feels a bit ambivalent about living in the high-rise, that one of its appeals is that it is 'an environment built, not for main, but for man's absence' (34). And Anthony Royal, a tenant of one of the penthouse suites in the high-rise, and a contributing architect to the building, says that Laing is 'probably its most true tenant' (91). There are kind of two implications in Laing's observation that the high-rise, and the block of high-rises it is a part of, is meant to imply man's absence:
- Laing desires less contact with other human beings. He want to be alone, and feel the absence of others
- Laing desires an obliteration of mankind, including himself
These two possibilities are really interesting to me because the conditions of the high-rise make the residents regress. Over time, people break more clearly into socioeconomic classes: the residents of the top floors vs. the middle floors vs. the lower floors. There are outbreaks of violence, the residents stop leaving the high-rise altogether, and the residents form 'tribes.' There is a complete breakdown of 'civilized' conventions, as people stop bathing, throw their garbage in the hallways and vents, shit and piss anywhere and everywhere in the building, and the men commit an absurd amount of sexual violence toward women (which is a lot, considering the real world problem of sexual violence against women). Throughout the novel, there is a sense that there people are regressing to a more 'primitive' state, but it is only achieved through the contained nature of the high-rise, a distinctly modern invention. So there is this question of whether these modern conditions of the high-rise is actually a regression to a primitive state, or a sense of an obliteration of mankind, or whether the high-rise is an evolution of sorts for humanity to a more individualistic/android state.
This paradox of technology and primitivism makes the high-rise atrophy. The residents begin to kill each other off, or die of starvation, and the only ones that survive are those that have formed 'clans' of two or three people. The bodies pile up just like garbage, with all of the garbage, and the last of the survivors forage for scraps of food among the garbage and bodies, and live among the filth that has gathered in their own apartments. Laing, one of the characters that is alive at least until the last page of the novel, has a hard time remembering the original functions of the things in his apartment like the washing machine or refrigerator,
To some extent they had taken on a new significance, a role that he had yet to understand. Even the rundown nature of the high-rise was a model of the world into which the future was carrying them, a landscape beyond technology where everything was either derelict or, more ambiguously, recombined in unexpected but more meaningful ways ... he found it difficult not to believe that they were living in a future that had already taken place, and was now exhausted (176).
The original purposes and facets of the high-rise - everything available, convenient, and perfectly functioning so that there is no effort on the part of the residents - are lost, or rather, made it possible for their meanings to be lost. And in that above passage, I think Laing sees a bit of that, but there is more. Not only have these meanings been lost, and Laing is bewildered at their existence, they also make new meanings in losing their original meanings. All of these things made it possible for there to be a future made for 'man's absence,' the next evolutionary step, 'the future that had already taken place, and was now exhausted.' The language of the passage suggests that the future has reached back to the past to bring the residents of the high-rise into the future: 'the future was carrying them.' Something has gotten mixed up, something in evolution has gone wrong, the future is reaching back, and the past can't handle it, hence the exhaustion, and maybe why this situation is incomprehensible in many ways to Laing, and the other surviving residents.
The atrophy of meaning, and then recombination of meaning, is the crux of the discussion of the influence of technology. But these are not necessarily only 'modern' problems. Laing's confusion of the future happening too soon, and being exhausted, points to the fact that they are not so separate, that there is not so clear a distinction. It's not necessarily about the regression, progress or evolution of mankind, but about recombinations of meanings in mankind.
Please let me know if you've read this novel, or any of Ballard's novels, especially Crash! I'd love to hear your thoughts.
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