Paul Youngquist

Department of English

Penn State University
pby1@psu.edu

 

When I heard the crash on the hiway
I knew what it was from the start
I went down to the scene of destruction
And a picture was stamped on my heart.

 

I didn’t hear nobody pray, dear brother,
I didn’t hear nobody pray;
I heard the crash on the hiway
But I didn’t hear nobody pray.

 

–Roy Acuff

I

 

Crash!
One catastrophic instant can change your life forever.

 

J. G. Ballard’s Crash reveals the destiny of the human body in a world of automotive disaster: a new crash-body, ungodly offspring of cars and signs. Set in the concrete landscape of late industrial culture, the novel views the world through a wide-angle lens that deprives it of depth, rendering it an interminable surface. Ballard’s prose is that of the camera–flat, mechanical, omni-detailed, “hyperreal”–and shows that to write in a technological culture is to represent its technologies of perception. The hyper-reality of Ballard’s style is the representational effect of photography, the after-image in another medium of a pervasive perception technology. That’s why Vaughan, the sinister hero of Crash, is not a writer but a camera-monkey; the writer in the narrative, auspiciously named Ballard, takes up a position subordinate to the photographer, who becomes the subject of writing, the condition of narration: “Vaughan died yesterday in his last car-crash” (1). From its first sentence to its last, Crash pursues the image of Vaughan, its narrative alpha and omega. And that image is photographic, both product and producer of other images. Vaughan is defined by the technologies of photography that condition his perception, as in the following moment of recognition:

 

The tall man with the camera sauntered across the roof. I looked through the rear window of his car. The passenger seat was loaded with photographic equipment–cameras, a tripod, a carton packed with flashbulbs. A cine-camera was fastened to a dashboard clamp.

 

He walked back to his car, camera held like a weapon by its pistol grip. As he reached the balcony his face was lit by the headlamps of the police car. I realized that I had seen his pock-marked face many times before, projected from a dozen forgotten magazine profiles–this was Vaughan, Dr Robert Vaughan. (63)

 

Handsome is as handsome does; technologies of photography become the condition of all that Vaughan does and is. Identity is an effect of the photographic image, which is always already a technological representation, capable of being reproduced and disseminated. Photography is thus the a priori of (re)cognition in the technological culture of Crash. Ballard’s prose double-exposes this cultural function. With the disinterestedness of a camera, it reveals the operation of the lens in the language of the hyperreal. Stylistically and analytically, Ballard ‘s book is photo-Kantian.

 

And its world becomes a surface. One of the effects of the lens upon representation is to flatten it out, reconfiguring the image in a space of two dimensions, a surface without depth. Contiguity, mark of the metonym, regulates relations in such a space. As a result things lose substance. Boundaries lapse and features merge. Where difference once distinguished, contiguity now associates, deferring the substantive identity of things. Where a boundary once ruled, as between humanity and machine, a blur now occurs, creating unprecedented relations and new possibilities. Consider the effects of Vaughan’s camera upon the all too human act of love:

 

Vaughan stood at my shoulder, like an instructor ready to help a promising pupil. As I stared down at the photograph of myself at Renata’s breast, Vaughan leaned across me, his real attention elsewhere. With a broken thumbnail, its rim caked with engine oil, he pointed to the chromium window-sill and its junction with the overstretched strap of the young woman’s brassiere. By some freak of photography these two formed a sling of metal and nylon from which the distorted nipple seemed to extrude itself into my mouth. (102)

 

Photography breeds freaks by reconfiguring things. Boundaries that would assert substantive differences, as between metal and flesh, fall to new associations through the intervention of the lens. Vaughan’s camera registers a world where a breast is as much an automotive as a female accessory, where sexuality plays upon a surface that embraces the material and the organic. This surface extends as far as the images it reproduces: to the white border of the photograph proper but also to the ends of perception of a lens set on infinity. Representationally speaking, it is both terminal and interminable.

 

What most interests Ballard is the life of the human body on this surface. For a body without depth ceases to be an organism in the traditional sense. If to have a body means to inhabit a suit of flesh, then organic substance sets the terms for life, its aims and its ends. But in Ballard’s world, the technological world of late industrial culture, semiotics subsumes substance. The vital, active organism gives way to the conceptual, abstract image. The body becomes conceptualized, and life turns semiotic. So it is for Elizabeth Taylor, “real life” film actress, appearing in Vaughan’s apartment and on the novel’s opening page in image only:

 

The walls of his apartment near the film studios at Shepperton were covered with the photographs he had taken through his zoom lens each morning as she left her hotel in London, from the pedestrian bridges above the westbound motorways, and from the roof of the multi-storey car-park at the studios. The magnified details of her knees and hands, of the inner surface of her thighs and the left apex of her mouth, I uneasily prepared for Vaughan on the copying machine in my office, handing him the packages of prints as if they were the installments of a death warrant. At his apartment I watched him matching the details of her body with the photographs of grotesque wounds in a textbook of plastic surgery. (7-8)

 

The body, in this instance the body of Elizabeth Taylor, is no longer an organic entity. Technologies of photographic representation (re)produce images that usurp its priority and reconfigure its integrity. The resulting body conceptual can be interminably manipulated: enlarged, reduced, bisected, rearranged, transcoded, transported, and most importantly, transposed. Once conceptualized, the body is transposable to any homologous geometry. Elizabeth Taylor’s conceptually assimilates the textbook wounds of other anonymous bodies. And because proliferation of conceptual equivalence can distribute such a body over the whole extent of the world as surface, life itself, once an organic matter, becomes a semiotic function.

 

In the context of late industrial culture, the old organic model of the body is vestigial of an earlier age, a pastoral moment in cultural history when nature at its most benign could serve as a trope for life at its most general. All that has changed. The body has become a conceptual phenomenon (an appropriately peculiar designation). The nearness of the flesh may persuade us daily to live in the faith that we inhabit a vital organism. But in Ballard’s novel such faith proves to be, culturally speaking, habitual nostalgia. His characters no longer animate an organic body. Rather a conceptual body animates them. The flesh has become its after-image and lives within the semiotic horizon of the world as surface. Such a body in such a world has no substance, no interior opposable to an exterior. As with graphic images generally, it is all surface–even to its vital depths, a point made strikingly by the cover of The Atrocity Exhibition, Ballard’s apocalyptic fractal-fiction recently reissued by RE/SEARCH (Figure 1). The body conceptual stands revealed in its full glory as an image that collapses vital depths of substance onto a surface both self-contained and culturally continuous. An image of neither the inside nor the outside of a body neither living nor dead, it reconfigures those old organic oppositions to represent the new form of life characteristic of late industrial culture. As a cultural historian of the body, Ballard documents this sublation of the organism.

 

Figure 1. Cover image from The Atrocity Exhibition. Image copyright (c) Re/Search Publications. (Illustration: Phoebe Gloeckner.)

II

 

Conceptual bodies inhabit the world as surface less as human individuals than abstract integers. Technologies invented to enhance life have reinvented it, transforming the human into a cipher in a technological horizon. Viewing the world from the veranda of his apartment, Ballard’s hero Ballard remarks in Crash that “the human inhabitants of this technological landscape no longer provided its sharpest pointers, its keys to the borderzones of identity” (49). That landscape, so obviously technological, bears no essential relation to the human as either end or origin. As an end, the human has ended, and in its place has arisen technology itself, or more specifically the technologies that in fact provide the keys to identity in this landscape. For if the condition of (re)cognition in late industrial culture is the photograph, the condition of agency is the automobile. Crash plots the remarkable logic of an unremarkable observation: that the car sets the terms for life as we know it. Life has ceased to be an exclusively organic phenomenon, and the automobile, as “a total metaphor for man’s life in today’s society” (Introduction 6), plays a decisive role in its transformation.

 

The car materializes the body conceptual. The photographic image may disseminate that body, but the automobile produces it. A body in a car becomes the prosthesis of a speed machine. As organism, it dies into the life of motor oil and steel, losing human substance and relating conceptually to an entity neither animate nor sentient in the traditional sense. And yet life and even passion persist. Witness Ballard’s increasing sense of connection with the car he drives, superseding even passion for his young lover:

 

The aggressive stylization of this mass-produced cockpit, the exaggerated mouldings of the instrument binnacles emphasized my growing sense of a new junction between my own body and the automobile, closer than my feelings for Renata’s broad hips and strong legs stowed out of sight beneath her red plastic raincoat. I leaned forward, feeling the rim of the steering wheel against the scars on my chest, pressing my knees against the ignition switch and handbrake. (55)

 

Built for the average buyer, the interior of the car (mass) produces a conceptual body assimilable to the material geometry of instrument panel and steering wheel. The condition of such a body’s agency becomes the automobile itself. Life in late industrial culture turns auto-telic.

 

The impact of the automobile upon the organic body is thus to transform it. Literally. The body becomes a surface in relation to the car’s stylized cockpit, a surface which, like that of the photographic image, lacks opposable interior and exterior. However counterintuitive it may seem, the body in vehiculo loses its organic substantiality. Consider the logistics of automobility. You place your body inside a car. The exterior of your organic substance confronts the interior of your vehicle. But since that interior is outside you, it turns you, so to speak, inside out. In the cockpit of a car your body loses its organic interiority, becoming part of a conceptual surface that assimilates it–materially. The interior of a car is more like a fold in flexible material than an inner space with an outer edge. Once inside, the body unfolds, becoming a surface without vital depth. The boundary between interior and exterior disappears as body and machine unite conceptually and materially on this surface. It is in this sense that Ballard can describe an automobile with the tender phrase “my own metal body” (113). The lesson of his violent confrontation with a car’s interior is that his body shares its life, not as organic substance but as conceptual surface:

 

As I looked down at myself I realized that the precise make and model-year of my car could have been reconstructed by an automobile engineer from the pattern of my wounds. The layout of the instrument panel, like the profile of the steering wheel bruised into my chest, was inset on my knees and shinbones. (28)

 

Wounds here are not organic traumas but abstract signs that refer body and automobile to a surface that assimilates them both, auto-referentially. The car, in its brute materiality, transforms the body from organic substance to semiotic function.

 

The passage above continues suggestively: “The impact of the second collision between my body and the interior compartment of the car was defined in these wounds, like the contours of a woman’s body remembered in the responding pressure of one’s own skin for a few hours after a sexual act.” The automobile resexualizes as it reconfigures the body. The result is a “new sexuality born of a perverse technology,” one liberated from both eros and desire. For the sexuality of the body conceptual is less libidinal than semiotic. With the end of the substantive organism comes the release of its semiotic function onto a surface that assimilates body and machine. Libido turns semio-erotic on such a surface, the occurrence of not physical urge but conceptual equivalence. Because such equivalence is abstract it as easily embraces an automobile as a lover. Hence the place of the car in the sexuality of late industrial culture. It is less as erotic object than semio-erotic signifier that it stimulates the body conceptual. Witness the encounter between Ballard and Helen Remington, wife of the man killed in a crash with his car:

 

The volumes of Helen’s thighs pressing against my hips, her left fist buried in my shoulder, her mouth grasping at my own, the shape and moisture of her anus as I stroked it with my ring finger, were each overlaid by the inventories of a benevolent technology–the moulded binnacle of the instrument dials, the jutting carapace of the steering column shroud, the extravagant pistol grip of the handbrake. I felt the warm vinyl of the seat beside me, and then stroked the damp aisle of Helen’s perineum. Her hand pressed against my right testicle. The plastic laminates around me, the colour of washed anthracite, were the same tones as her pubic hairs parted at the vestibule of her vulva. The passenger compartment enclosed us like a machine generating from our sexual act an homunculus of blood, semen and engine coolant. (80-81)

 

The automobile is more a sexual signifier than object, condition of conceptual equivalence between body and technology that breeds a new form of life.

 

The auto-eroticism of Crash is thus thoroughly disembodied. Ballard documents the rise of “a new sexuality divorced from any possible physical expression” (35), a disembodied eroticism that lacks passion even as it multiplies sexual possibilities. Sexual acts themselves–and Crash is full of them: genital, oral, anal, manual, material–confirm no intimacy, communicate no love, proliferate pleasures that are purely formal. Liberated from the organic body, they become “conceptualized acts abstracted from all feeling” (129). The trans-physical sexuality that Ballard describes in such dispassionate detail recapitulates what he elsewhere calls the “death of affect” characteristic of late industrial culture. Disembodied, dissociated from affect, sexuality plays semiotically upon the world as surface, celebrating the conceptual equivalence of body and machine. Or so Ballard concludes, watching his wife Catherine and his friend Vaughan at it in the back seat:

 

This act was a ritual devoid of ordinary sexuality, a stylized encounter between two bodies which recapitulated their sense of motion and collision. Vaughan’s postures, the way in which he held his arms as he moved my wife across the seat, lifting her left knee so that his body was in the fork between her thighs, reminded me of the driver of a complex vehicle, a gymnastic ballet celebrating a new technology. His hands explored the back of her thighs in a slow rhythm, holding her buttocks and lifting her exposed pubis towards his scarred mouth without touching it. He was arranging her body in a series of positions, carefully searching the codes of her limbs and musculature. Catherine seemed still only half aware of Vaughan, holding his penis in her left hand and sliding her fingers towards his anus as if performing an act divorced from all feeling. (161)

 

Such is the new sexuality that Crashdocuments: a formal reenactment of conceptual equivalencies, a disembodied ritual without affect, a semiotics without meaning.

III

 

Without meaning? Isn’t it the function of signs, even sexual ones, to signify? Not in the world as surface. The semio-eroticism of its new sexuality serves the purpose not of representation but of dissemination. It distributes conceptual equivalence over the whole semiotic horizon of late industrial culture. Sexuality becomes a function of a trans-cultural system of signification and not vice versa; desire is no longer a biotic urge impelling an organism that gets represented in private fantasies, but a systemic function structuring an equivalence that gets disseminated in public reenactments. In The Atrocity Exhibition Ballard makes the canny suggestion that “Freud’s classic distinction between the manifest and latent content of the inner world of the psyche now has to be applied to the outer world of reality” (98-99). That “outer world” has acquired the semiotic function Freud ascribed to the Unconscious. It disseminates sexuality over the whole of the world as surface.

 

Elsewhere Ballard describes the function of the semiotic system that disseminates this new sexuality:

 

Just as the sleeping mind extemporizes a narrative form of the random memories veering through the cortical night, so our waking imaginations are stitching together a set of narratives to give meaning to the random events that swerve through our conscious lives. A roadside billboard advertising something or other, to TV programmes or news magazines or the radio or in-flight movies, or what have you. (Mississippi Review 31)

 

The semiotic system that disseminates sexuality is not psychological but socio-material. It includes billboards, TV shows, magazines, movies. It goes by the familiar name of “the media” and stitches together a set of narratives that structure the otherwise random life of late industrial culture. But the “meaning” this semiotic system (re)produces is not “meaningful” in the traditional sense, since it is always a reenactment of a purely conceptual equivalence: between her face and that of the movie star, between my body and that of the automobile, between our sexual postures and those of the porn magazines. It is in this sense that “sex,” as Ballard describes it, “has become a sort of communal activity” (Mississippi Review 32): it is the behavioral after-image of a semiotic system that disseminates sexuality without representing its “meaning.”

 

Photography is the means of its dissemination and the automobile the place of its reenactment. Car and photograph, the cultural a priori of this new sexuality, together condition the operation of this semiotic system. Without Vaughan’s photographs the sexuality of the body conceptual would be inert, for they advance the logic of equivalence latent in the limbs of the human organism:

 

His photographs of sexual acts, of sections of automobile radiator grilles and instrument panels, conjunctions between elbow and chromium window sill, vulva and instrument binnacle, summed up the possibilities of a new logic created by these multiplying artifacts, the codes of a new marriage of sensation and possibility. (106)

 

These codes are not biological but conceptual, the function of a semiotic system that disseminates sex as a set of gestures, postures, behaviors, positions. The media lifts sexuality out of the body and onto a surface determined by a new mimetic logic. Specific sexual acts become reenactments of the images that pervade the semiotic horizon, which is why the car plays so central a role in this sexual mimesis. It is the vehicle of our dreams, and the site of our communal equivalence.

 

Vaughan imitates in his sexual behavior the imagery that pervades the world as surface and by doing so assimilates himself conceptually to the only transcendental available to such a world: the semiotic system itself. The automobile is simply the site of a conceptualized salvation: imitatio vehiculi. Hence Vaughan’s curious, compulsive need to imitate the imagery of vehicular homicide. It confirms the possibility of a sexuality wholly liberated from the life of the organism, so completely a semiotic function that it includes even postures of violent death. So observes Ballard observing Vaughan:

 

Often I watched him lingering over the photographs of crash fatalities, gazing at their burnt faces with a terrifying concern, as he calculated the most elegant parameters of their injuries, the junctions of their wounded bodies with the fractured windshield and instrument assemblies. He would mimic these injuries in his own driving postures, turning the same dispassionate eyes on the young women he picked up near the airport. Using their bodies, he recapitulated the deformed anatomies of vehicle crash victims, gently bending the arms of these girls against their shoulders, pressing their knees against his own chest, always curious to see their reactions. (145)

 

Photograph, automobile, imitation: such are the means to a semiotic transcendence of the life–and the death–of the organic body. Vaughan is the weird messiah of this new transcendence.

 

And the crash is his crucifixion. If the body conceptual is produced and disseminated by means of a semiotics that has the camera and the car as its material conditions, the automobile accident reveals the way that system works. It is the technological equivalent of apocalypse. As its title suggests, Crash is not primarily about technology or even sex; it is about catastrophe, a sudden and violent shock to the system that interrupts and illuminates its function. Metal crumples, flesh tears, fluids squirt, signs multiply: CRASH. The word is onomatopoeic of disaster. A car crash enacts the banal apocalypse of the body conceptual, revealing its status as a semiotic and not organic phenomenon. After his auto wreck, Ballard awakens to a new perception of his body:

 

The week after the accident had been a maze of pain and insane fantasies. After the commonplaces of everyday life, with their muffled dramas, all my organic expertise for dealing with physical injury had long been blunted or forgotten. The crash was the only real experience I had been through for years. For the first time I was in physical confrontation with my own body, an inexhaustible encyclopedia of pains and discharges. (39)

 

Ballard’s crash jolts him out of the organic world and into the conceptual. His body ceases to be a vital organism and becomes, in its most physical experience, a conceptual lexicon, an inexhaustible encyclopedia of pains. Trauma to the body reveals the whole system that produces it. For it is only when something breaks–a tool, a car, a body–that its function is fully revealed. Heidegger makes just this observation in regard to the broken tool, which illuminates a whole system of relations that remains otherwise unrecognized: “for the circumspection that comes up against the damaging of the tool,… the context of equipment is lit up, not as something never seen before, but as a totality constantly sighted beforehand in circumspection. With this totality, however, the world announces itself” (105). For Heidegger as for Ballard, this world is conceptual, since reference, the relation of one sign to another, serves as an “ontological foundation… constitutive of worldhood in general” (114). Is it mere coincidence Heidegger’s example of the sign constitutive of such a world is an automobile’s blinker? A failure to signal could mean catastrophe.

 

The broken tool illuminates a totality of relations; the crashed car lights up a system of reference. Both reveal a world less substantial than semiotic, one in which the body is a systems function. Such at least is Ballard’s post-traumatic conception of the crash-body. His accident reveals his body’s semiotic status in a system as wide as the world as surface. Ballard’s meta-physical lust for Catherine shows how far that system extends the body conceptual:

 

Every aspect of Catherine at this time seemed a model of something else, endlessly extending the possibilities of her body and personality. As she stepped naked across the floor of the bathroom, pushing past me with a look of nervous distraction; as she masturbated in the bed beside me in the mornings, thighs splayed symmetrically, fingers groveling at her pubis as if rolling to death some small venereal snot; as she sprayed deodorant into her armpits, those tender fossas like mysterious universes; as she walked with me to my car, fingers playing amiably across my left shoulder–all these acts and emotions were ciphers searching for their meaning among the hard, chromium furniture of our minds. A car-crash in which she would die was the one event which would release the codes waiting within her. (180)

 

Catherine’s every move models in its geometry some other aspect of the system, disseminating the body conceptual throughout the world as surface. The shock to this system that the crash inflicts reveals the worldhood of that surface even as it assimilates, in one final, fatal catastrophe, the human organism to it. This transfiguration is as close to salvation as late industrial culture has come, and Vaughan is its messiah. Its immanence is what makes him so angelic and so appalling, an “ugly golden creature, made beautiful by its scars and wounds” (201). He is the alien messenger of some new semio-gnosis, and his crash-body is its risen Christ.

 

IV

 

Vaughan bears comparison to the old messiah. For nearly two millennia, Western culture wound a web of signs around the body of Christ crucified. It is clearly an overstatement, but one worth pondering, to say that this brutalized, broken body set the terms for representation in the culture of the Christian West. Hanging limp from a wooden cross, the body of God was the locus Christus of signification. Alpha and Omega, all signs began and ended there. But how different the effect of this image of somatic catastrophe than that of Ballard’s crash-body. If the latter reveals, in its trauma, its status as a semiotic function, the crucified body of Christ asserts instead its own empty substance. Vaughan’s is a semiotic body where Christ’s is organic. The latter grounds representation in a dead substance that solicits transcendence. Representing the dead substance of the organic body, Christ crucified transcendentalizes representation. It is after all God’s body that hangs from the cross. The world that announces itself with the broken body of God is not a semiotic but a sacred totality. The catastrophe of crucifixion reveals only one meaningful relationship, that between death and Life, us and Him. Through the representation of the body crucified, then, catastrophe effects transcendence.

 

Figure 2. Panel from the Isenheimer Altar by Matthias Grünewald. Picture: Octave Zimmerman, Musée d’Unterlinden, Colmar, Germany. Click image for larger picture.

 

The myriad images of the crucifixion that still permeate Western culture disseminate this effect. A brief look at one of the most famous should illustrate the point. The Isenheimer Altar, painted by the mysterious master Matthias Grünewald sometime between 1512 and 1516, presents an image of Christ crucified that has become renowned for its horror. Never has the body of Christ appeared so gruesome (Figure 2). As if suspended between the ground below and an unfathomable abyss above, it hangs from a cross, flanked by Johns (the Baptist and the Beloved) and Marys (the Mother and the Magdalen), awaiting a proper burial. Christ’s body is unnervingly inert, unambiguously dead. And not merely dead–but rotting. Fingers splayed with rigor mortis, toes dripping congealed blood, it bears the viscid signs of impossible suffering (Figure 3). The skin is pierced in a thousand places by thorns that gouged and broke. The wounds have begun to fester, peppering the entire torso with putrid spots. The flesh beneath is cold and sallow, as if hung on a hook to drain. In the hollow just below the ribs on the left gapes an oozing laceration–a new orifice, voluble with blood. Above it the head of Christ drops earthward in decay. Impaled, not crowned, with thorns, it bows to gravity, a dead weight. The mouth that spoke in cure and parable now grimaces in silence. Its teeth and tongue frame an inner dark; its lips are thick and blue. Grünewald’s body of Christ crucified succumbs to putrefaction. It signifies its own inertia: the materiality of a dead and meaningless letter. The pale moon that shines above illuminates only a palpable absence. Christ’s body in its silence cries to heaven for restitution.

 

Figure 3. Detail from The Isenheimer Altar by Mattias Grünewald. Picture: Octave Zimmerman, Musée d’Unterlinden, Colmar, Germany.

 

Hence the cultural function of its representation: to ground transcendence in bodily trauma. A dead and rotting organism needs a meaning that will heal it. Such is the problem that bodily suffering presents; it inspires an absolute solution. As Nietzsche said, not suffering but meaningless suffering is the curse that plagues humanity. The body crucified offers up a meaning that mitigates the curse. It grounds a transcendence that suffuses and redeems its emptiness. In this regard it makes perfect sense that the Isenheimer Altar stood originally in a church that was also a hospital, a place of solace for those suffering the boil-plague of St. Anthony’s fire. Itself a medicament, Grünewald’s painting served to treat the suffering it depicted. As pilgrims identified their pains with those appearing in the dead flesh of Christ’s body, they awakened to the prospect of divine restitution. Grünewald’s painting is a subjectivity-machine, remaking sufferers into subjects of transcendence. The Isenheimer Altar (re)produces a subjectivity conducive to a higher meaning for human suffering, which it then legitimates by means of a narrative of salvation.

 

Figure 4. Panel from the Isenheimer Altar by Matthais Grünewald. Picture: Octave Zimmerman, Musée d’Unterlinden, Colmar, Germany. Click image for larger picture.

 

The painting unfolds a story that adds depth to its dismal surface–literally unfolds, as its panels open to reveal this salubrious meaning (Figure 4). Erupting with movement, light, and color, it confronts the sufferer with a narrative that opens from within the empty body of Christ crucified to subsume it in a higher presence. At the center of the narrative is that body, appearing palpably in three different forms: newborn, cadaver, and risen Christ. It instantly becomes clear that the rotting flesh of Christ crucified amounts only to a static moment in a larger movement that would explain it. Inside Grünewald’s crucifixion hides a metanarrative of salvation. That this metanarrative includes the sumptuous episodes of the Annunciation, Birth, and Resurrection of Christ shows it to be underwritten by the Word of God. But the role of Christ’s body in substantiating this Story of stories is what is remarkable here. Its three incarnations center in its substance a logos of transcendence. If for Ballard the body has become a semiotic function, here it makes semiotics possible. The body crucified grounds the circulation of signs in this metanarrative of salvation. Its putrefying flesh is revealed to be the condition of a semiotics that moves dialectically from birth to resurrection. What at first appeared a dead cadaver signifies instead the antithesis of Christ’s thetic birth, the reversal of a synthetic body-logic that reaches fulfillment in the resurrection. It doesn’t take a Hegel to see that these three bodies substantiate a dialectical logos that subsumes organic suffering. Even their placement–the dead body beneath the newborn, the risen body above both–enacts the logos of the body crucified. This body is not a function of signs but their foundation.

 

And the operation of its logic reproduces a subject of transcendence. As Grünewald’s painting unfolds, it opens up a higher perspective–again, quite literally. Part of the confusion involved in contemplating this particular crucifixion comes with the multiple perspectives that swirl around it. Christ on the cross appears directly opposite and lit from above while the other figures are lit from the front and appear from various perspectives: John the Baptist from the side, Mary Magdalen from on high, etc. This multiplication of perspectives deprives any one of them absolute authority. Death disrupts the subject as it rots the body. With the opening of the triptych, however, two alternatives emerge. The tableau of Mother Mary all but lacks perspective, a surface in high medieval style ordered by the faint but imperious image at the upper left of God. All is coherent here, but in a condition of innocence prior to the crucifixion. It is in the dialectical movement to the image of the risen Christ that a new perspective emerges. Its all but unbearable brightness of being brings to the space of the final tableau an unprecedented depth, which the foreshortened postures of the fallen guards beneath only exaggerate. This is a space wholly structured by the subject of transcendence. Here appears in all its glory the ultimate solution to the problem of meaningless suffering: a higher and undying perspective from which to view the body crucified. The Isenheimer Altar reproduces in its viewers this subject of transcendence, to the healthful end of healing bodily miseries with a much higher meaning.

 

And what of bodily delight? The subject of transcendence views sexuality from on high, radically devaluing its substantial pleasures. The logic of the body crucified subsumes them in its upward movement, identifying human sexuality with death and promoting a higher, post-sexual life. Archetypal unwed mother, Mary holds in her arms the tender body of the infant Christ, the fully developed image of which lies dead and decaying in the tableau immediately beneath her. The organic body fulfills its possibilities only by dying. Brief, then, and lethal are the joys of bodily love. Christ’s livid cadaver attests to it loudly, demonstrating that a sexuality of the body dies with the body. Only when delight originates not in the body but in the life above does it lead to something better than a corpse. The Isenheimer Altar conveys this sublimation of organic sexuality by locating high above Christ’s limp loincloth a glowing image of God the father, holding in his radiant hands a Sceptre and a Globe. Good sex is God sex. When the life of the body originates above, it transcends the dying animal. In the world of Grünewald’s masterpiece, as in the culture of the Christian West, an organic sexuality breeds an ontology of death. The subject of transcendence that the painting reproduces, however, subsumes it in the post-sexual perspective of a risen life.

 

V

 

According to Ballard, all has changed. If the trauma of the body crucified lights up this transcendence, that of the body conceptual reveals its collapse into signs. A post-sexual perspective is not possible in a world where the body has been reborn as a semiotic function. Sexuality becomes a matter no longer of life and death but of dissemination. Sown over the whole field of culture, it reproduces signs of desire. And because its origins are not organic but semiotic, this sexuality cannot die; it lives persistently as signs. Ballard’s crash-body reveals a new alternative to the old transcendence, an eschatological semiotics coextensive with culture. Where once the rotting body of the crucifixion contained the play of signs, now the ruptured body of a crash multiplies it. Vaughan, the weird messiah of this perpetual resurrection, inhabits a strange new cultural space beyond both the opposition of life and death and the organic body that substantiates it. From his perspective, human life has outlived these distinctions, as Ballard observes through his eyes: “I looked out at the drivers of the cars alongside us, visualizing their lives in the terms Vaughan had defined for them. For Vaughan they were already dead” (137). Already dead because never alive, not in the traditional sense. Theirs is an existence made real not by body and blood but by speed and steel. Sexuality sustains such an existence by reproducing appearance rather than substance. Hence the high eroticism of a crash: it releases a sexuality of signs that supersede the organic body: “This pervasive sexuality filled the air, as if we were members of a congregation leaving after a sermon urging us to celebrate our sexualities with friends and strangers, and were driving into the night to imitate the bloody eucharist we had observed with the most unlikely partners” (157). This new eucharist transignifies where the old one transfigures, resurrecting the sexuality of signs in the catastrophe of a crash.

 

Crash thus documents the obsolescence of transcendence, its collapse into a sexual semiotics driven by cars and cameras. In the landscape of late industrial culture, the new transcendental is the media, sexuality its pervasive paraclete, and Vaughan its only begotten son–at least for now. The body crucified has finally died and in its place has arisen the body conceptual. Vaughan’s genius–and his dark example–is simply to give his life over to the semiotic system that produces and disseminates it, working ultimately to unite them. No subject of transcendence emerges to meliorate a suffering body. Signification assimilates both, rendering misery superfluous. What matters to Vaughan is total equivalence between the body conceptual and a semiotic system that disseminates the life of signs. It falls to Ballard, the accidental apostle, to witness this transignification. He sees that Vaughan’s life is irreducible to the organic: “Vaughan’s body was a collection of loosely coupled planes. The elements of his musculature and personality were suspended a few millimetres apart” (198). Ballard sees too that such a life fulfills itself, not in some higher meaning, but in the system of signification itself.

 

His infatuation with Vaughan unfolds incrementally according to the logos of that system, as Ballard recognizes in retrospect: “Thinking of the photographs in the questionnaires, I knew that they defined the logic of a sexual act between Vaughan and myself” (137). Because “for Vaughan the motor-car was the sexual act’s greatest and only true locus” (171), Ballard’s initiation into the mysteries of the body conceptual can only occur in transit, the car serving as a signification module, a steel bower less of sexual than of semiotic intercourse: “His attraction lay not so much in a complex of familiar anatomical triggers… but in the stylization of posture achieved between Vaughan and the car. Detached from his automobile, particularly his own emblem-filled highway cruiser, Vaughan ceased to hold any interest” (117). Only when reconstituted conceptually by the interior of an automobile does Vaughan’s body seem appealing, only when assimilated to the sexuality of signs. Then it can circulate throughout the semiotic system and the world as surface.

 

The epiphany of this system and thus of the body conceptual that it disseminates comes in the LSD apocalypse that consummates Ballard’s liaison with Vaughan. Like a car wreck or a crucifixion, hallucinogens crash the subject. The benign catastrophe they inflict also lights up “a totality constantly sighted beforehand in circumspection” (Heidegger 105). Where the catastrophe of the crucifixion reveals a compensatory transcendence, this one reveals its return to the world as surface:

 

An armada of angelic creatures, each surrounded by an immense corona of light, was landing on the motorway on either side of us, sweeping down in opposite directions. They soared past, a few feet above the ground, landing everywhere on these endless runways that covered the landscape. I realized that all these roads and expressways had been built by us unknowingly for their reception. (199)

 

These angels herald not the risen Christ but his latest avatar, the disseminated Vaughan. In this acid-driven vision of the world as surface Vaughan has become coextensive with its totality, as Ballard will as well through their semio-sexual union. Vaughan excarnates the system that disseminates the body conceptual: “I was sure that the white ramp [of the motorway] was a section of Vaughan’s body” (205). Assimilated to the world as surface, he achieves the perpetual resurrection of signs: “The spurs of deformed metal, the triangles of fractured glass, were signals that had lain unread for years in this shabby grass, ciphers translated by Vaughan and myself as we sat with our arms around each other” (200). So when Ballard finally fulfills the sexual logic of their liaison, he experiences with his new messiah this resurrection without transcendence, this rebirth of a crash-body neither living nor dead:

 

Together we showed our wounds to each other, exposing the scars on our chests and hands to the beckoning injury sites on the interior of the car, to the pointed sills of the chromium ashtrays, to the lights of a distant intersection. In our wounds we celebrated the re-birth of the traffic-slain dead, the deaths and injuries of those we had seen dying by the roadside and the imaginary wounds and postures of the millions yet to die. (203)

 

With the collapse of transcendence into a culturally pervasive semiotic system comes new life everlasting–in haec signi.

 

This, then, is the landscape of late industrial culture according to Ballard: a world as surface continuous with the semiotic system that reproduces it. In such a world the human body is transformed, best revealed by the banal, pervasive catastrophe of a crash. The crash serves our culture as the crucifixion served the Christian West, its images circulating to sustain the possibility of another life. For Ballard’s crash-body cannot die. It revives with every traffic fatality. Ballard sees in Vaughan’s example the life of signs, even after Vaughan’s “death”: “I thought of Vaughan, covered with flies like a resurrected corpse, watching me with a mixture of irony and affection. I knew that Vaughan could never really die in a car-crash, but would in some way be re-born through those twisted radiator grilles and cascading windshield glass” (210). Vaughan lives in the myriad crashes that resurrect the life of signs. What is the death of the organic body to this system of signification? A superfluity, a nostalgia. The coming of AIDS since the publication of Crash in 1973 renders its documentation of this change all the more unnerving. Among contemporary artists Andy Warhol best understands the latter (Figure 5). He too knows that the crash is our crucifixion, the crash-body our alpha and omega. His prints define the logic of an atrocity that transignifies. Crash.

 

Figure 5. Andy Warhol, White Burning Car I, 1963. Image copyright (c) 2000 Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts / ARS, New York. Click image for larger picture.

Coda: Princess Die!

 

It was in a strange state of surreality that I awoke some time ago to the sound of a bereaved radio reporter quietly announcing the death in a car crash of Princess Diana. Was it a sick if inevitable joke? A pirated BBC broadcast of Ballard’s latest atrocity fiction? For a few peculiar moments I felt I had been translated onto the pages of some hyper-realist sequel to Crash. The scene was so familiar: the crumpled Mercedes, the oozing fluids, the broken body of a celebrity known to me, with peculiar intimacy, only through media images. And the photographers, the real makers of the immortal Princess Di: brutes clutching sinister mechanisms by pistol grips trained upon her corpse. The imputation of their responsibility came as a supreme banality. Of course. The logic of the life of signs requires their perpetration of this sacrifice. The surprise is not that Princess Di is dead, or that she died in a car crash, or that photographers had a hand in it. These are the simple facts of our semiotic life. The surprise is how perfectly Ballard documented it all twenty years in advance. He is the prophet of the new life of signs, the vita nuova of crash and camera. The remaining question, the darker question, is how the death of Princess Di will affect us sexually. Are we, with Vaughan, at one with her in the cockpit of that fated Mercedes?

 

Works Cited

 

• Ballard, J. G. The Atrocity Exhibition. 1969. San Francisco: RE/SEARCH Publications, 1990.
• —. Crash. 1973. New York: Vintage, 1995.
• Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. Trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1962.
• Lewis, Jeremy. “An Interview with J. G. Ballard.” Mississippi Review 20.1-2 (1991): 27-40.