Relationship between Observation and Power in Control Societies

Relationship between Observation and Power in Control Societies

Introduction

J.G. Ballard wrote his Crash Science fiction in 1973. Seven years elapsed between publication of The Crystal World and the appearance of Crash. Although Ballard published numerous retrospective collections in the interim, his one major project was a collection of what he called “condensed novels”, a series of verbal collages featuring surreal combinations of images encapsulating what Ballard saw as the contemporary zeitgeist. In the world portrayed in these collages, there is a great deal of violence and perverted sexual arousal. Ubiquitous Ballardian images recur regularly: dead birds, junked space hardware, derelict buildings. Mixed in with these are secular icons: the suicide of entertainer Marilyn Monroe, the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, and other personalities whose fates could be seen as symbolic of the era in decline.

The theme of Crash is already well developed in the condensed novels, which were collected in the United Kingdom under the title The Atrocity Exhibition (1969) and in the United States under the title Love and Napalm: Export U.S.A. Cars, within the novel, are seen as symbols of power, speed, and sexuality, a commonplace psychoanalytic observation, to which Ballard adds the surprising further representation of the car crash as a kind of orgasm. The protagonist of the novel, who is called Ballard, finds his first car crash, despite all the pain and attendant anxiety, to be an initiation into a new way of being, whereby he is forced to reformulate his social relationships and his sense of purpose. Ballard apparently decided to write the book while considering the reactions of members of the public to an exhibition of crashed cars that he held at the New Arts Laboratory in London.

Discussion

Crash, shows how different the modern technology capitalist societies and the previous societies focusing on visual desire. This novel is a work of pornography in which man and woman, the car and the human being, life and death are all mixed with desire. There are always power structures in pornography. In the introduction of Crash, J.G. Ballard said that he would still like to think that Crash is the first pornographic novel based on technology. In a sense, pornography is the most political form of fiction, dealing with how we use and exploit each other, in the most urgent and ruthless way. Meanwhile, the sexual exploitation side holds a high status in the power structure with woman occupying the weak position as a sexual victim most of the time. However, in a media control society, the idea that “to see” is not in a higher position than “to be seen” means that most existence for modern people, who put a high value on observation of desire, now stand in a weak position concerning desire, when we see this society as pornographic in a broad sense. In this society and culture, because the means to attain power is strongly influenced by observation, modern people are eager to advertise them in order ...