From Ballardian.com:
As publisher of this site, my goal has always been to take J.G. Ballard as a philosopher, rather than simply a 'novelist'. Sometimes this has truly angered fans and champions of his work, more often it has brought me into brilliant and inspiring contact with writers, artists, musicians, filmmakers and theorists who all see the world through that same Ballardian lens -- and with Jim Ballard himself, who, along with his partner Claire Walsh, always remained supportive of the site.
Ballard articulates clearly to me the implications of living in an age of total consumerism, of blanket surveillance, of enslavement designed as mass entertainment. But he also speaks to me of resistance through irony, immersion, ambivalence, imagination -- of remixing, recycling, remaking, remodelling.
His work embraces dystopian scenarios, including the archetypal non-space often characterised as a deadening feature of late capitalism. But this is not simply a call for nihilism. Ballard's characters are not disengaged from their world. Rather, they embody a sense of resistance that derives from full immersion, a therapeutic confrontation with the powers of darkness, whereby merging with dystopian alienation negates its power. This is predicated on concurrency: Ballard's writing turns objectivity into subjectivity, opens up gaps where there is room for new subjects. His scenarios are what I term 'affirmative dystopias', neither straight utopia nor straight dystopia, but an occupant of the interstitial space between them, perpetual oscillation between the poles – the 'yes or no of the borderzone', to use a phrase from his work.
Here, dystopia becomes the real utopia, and utopian ideals, typically represented as a stifling of the imagination, the true dystopia. He reinhabits the frame to present a clearinghouse in which corporate and national governance is overthrown and regoverned as a 'state of mind'.
To read and to understand Ballard, then, is to be gloriously, finally liberated.
To James Graham Ballard: thank you.