North & South

NORTH & SOUTH. It is an astonishing fact of history that no one successfully travelled to either the North or South Pole before the twentieth century; that less than sixty years separated Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen’s expedition to Antarctica from astronaut Neil Armstrong’s first steps on the moon. In his 1971 essay Fictions of Every Kind, the author J.G. Ballard wrote:

“Everything is becoming science fiction. From the margins of an almost invisible literature has sprung the intact reality of the 20th century.”

Indeed, there is a well-documented sense that, at some point over the course of the twentieth century, fiction ‘overtook’ reality; a phenomenon Baudrillard referred to as the hyperreal.

In his 1987 text The Evil Demon of Images, Baudrillard wrote that, to the extent that there is a “dialectical relation between reality and images” (by which he means those ‘technical images’ of which ‘science fiction’ could be considered a member) it is one in which “the image has taken over and imposed its own immanent, ephemeral logic…”, one without depth, beyond good and evil, beyond truth and falsity – a ‘collusion’ between screen and daily life: a “short circuit”.

The photographer Wolfgang Tillmans – arch-image technician – deals with this short-circuiting in his research project: Truth Study Center, first shown at Maureen Paley in 2005. The series combines photographs taken by the artist with found ephemera, newspaper clippings and typeset phrases. In a 2010 interview on the project Tillmans said: “it is not claiming to be delivering truth, but rather looking at all these different, opposed truths.”¹ For example, on the dispute over WMDs in Iraq, he comments: “the whole war came about from a single question: is this true or not?”

The question of war is never far from the question of truth. Indeed, the phrase: “Truth is the first casualty of war”, has been attributed to C20th US Senator Hiram Johnson, C18th poet & playwright Samuel Johnson and Greek dramatist Aeschylus of the C6th BC, alike. Ballard developed much of his oeuvre from his formative experiences as a child in a WWII Japanese internment camp; Baudrillard, his theories of hypermedia out of representations of the war in Vietnam; and Tillmans’ Truth Study Center, in the context of the so-called ‘War on Terror’. For Baudrillard, the ‘hyperreal’ – produced, in part, from this ‘overflow of technology’ of which both war and media are co-conspirators – is a state in which the ‘referent’ (the ‘thing’ a symbol refers to) has quite simply disappeared; a reversal in which reality becomes an “effect of the sign” itself.

The effect of this hyperreal ‘structure of feeling’ (as Raymond Williams might call it) is, of course, one of profound disorientation; in Simulacra and Simulation Baudrillard writes, “[the] territory no longer precedes the map, nor survives it...” How to find one’s way at a time without time, in a world neither real nor imaginary? On visiting Tillmans retrospective at the Tate Modern in 2017 I came across an appropriately disorienting sheet of A4 paper, placed under a glass display, on which was written:

“1969 was 24 years away from 1945. 24 years back from now is 1992.”

Yes, the moon landing haunts all these discussions – Ballard once described it as the only meaningful event of the twentieth century, Baudrillard as a hyperreal event par excellence – all these men and their histories, their lost certainties! What are we to do with these boys and their toys? What to do when even this sense of fragmented reality falls apart? How are we to find ‘a way’ through this undisciplined form of reality?

*

“A handful of small white stones hit the windscreen, making me jump. It was so long since I had experienced winter in the north that I failed to recognize the phenomenon. The hail soon turned to snow, diminishing visibility and making driving more difficult. It was bitterly cold, and I became aware of a connexion between this fact and my increasing uneasiness…”²

In Anna Kavan’s 1967 novel Ice, a male narrator pursues a young woman (both nameless) north. As the plot develops we learn that a nuclear war has set an apocalyptic ice shelf into motion, and the man is determined to find and ‘save’ the girl who is travelling – under mysterious pretexts – into a maelstrom of catastrophes, both natural and political.

Much is made, in reviews of Ice, of the comparison between Kavan and Ballard (whose testimonial adorns the back cover of my Penguin edition). Ice, like Ballard's Crash, is commonly interpreted as a “distillation of its creators' distinctive world view [...] animated by a corruption of sexual desire” – both seek to explore the chauvinist fetishization of modernity itself, its capacity for exploitation, ruthlessness and apocalypticism; both begin and end in cars.

As with Ballard's Empire of the Sun, Kavan's lifestory encourages a particularly didactic reading of Ice, the role of ‘the girl’ – abused, pathologised, (self-)identified only as a victim – is, of course, a prism through which is reflected the author's real-life experiences: her father's suicide, her heroin addiction, her own mental illness, her time spent at sanatoriums, her death. However these ‘authors’ – as Foucault reminds us, echoing both Barthes and Baudrillard – are not so much the arbiters of a ‘true’ reading of their works as protagonists within a more general literary discourse. In The Death of the Author Barthes writes that “[to] give a text an Author is to impose a limit on that text, to furnish it with a final signified, to close the writing.”

In a hyperreal world, what Crash – and much of Ballards writing – has in common with Ice is then a reflexive concern with the relationship between ‘inner’ and ‘outer’ worlds. In his break from ‘rigid’ science fiction, Ballard once said that he was rejecting “outer space” (i.e. aliens and moon-landings) for “inner space” (i.e. the psyche and its discontents), and in Ice we likewise see the narrator slip unwillingly between alternate narratives, media spin, real-and-unreal versions of the same apocalyptic story, perhaps even autobiography and fiction. The journey north, the journey into the ice shelf consuming the world, is then a paranoiac response to another dissolution of the real, a desire to ‘hold on’ and ‘save’ that which might ground the narrator in some kind of reality:

“It was hard to believe the place was really in use; that anything really functioned. I was aware of an uncertainty of the real, in my surroundings and in myself. [...] Big tears fell from her eyes like icicles, like diamonds, but I was unmoved. They did not seem to me like real tears. She herself did not seem quite real.”

Ballard, on the other hand, sends his protagonists south. South, in Cocaine Nights and Super-Cannes, to the retirement paradises of ‘Estrella de Mar’ and ‘Eden-Olympia’; and south, above all, in his dystopian science fiction The Drowned World:

“Caging the compass, he swung it around towards himself, without realising it sank into a momentary reverie in which his entire consciousness became focused on the serpentine terminal touched by the pointer, on the confused, uncertain but curiously potent image summed up by the concept 'South', with all its dormant magic and mesmeric power, diffusing outwards from the brass bowl held in his hands like the heady vapours of some spectral grail.” ³

In The Drowned World, first published in 1962, protagonist Dr Robert Kerans is sent to explore a tropical C22nd London. Like in Ice, global radiation – here caused by solar storms – has drastically altered the climate, warming the equator to uninhabitable temperatures and forcing widespread migration to the north and south poles. Over the course of the novel Kerans contends with the pirates and military authorities of London’s lagoons as he tries to catalogue the flora and fauna growing within them, slowly losing his sense of reality from an output on ‘the beach at the Ritz.’

Throughout his time in London, Kerans’ colleague Dr Hardman is somehow ‘drawn’ south – a schizophrenic sensibility which begins to also infect Kerans. At a pivotal moment, Colonel Riggs, their shared commander, asks why Hardman is travelling into the tropical wasteland:

Looking out across the water again, Kerans replied in a flat voice: "Colonel, there isn't any other direction."

*

In Old English the words norð and sūð occurred predominantly as adverbs. The words ‘north’ and ‘south’ were not, in themselves, thought of as locations as we might imagine them today, but rather directions or orientations relative to movement or spatial relationships. For example, in The Voyages of Ohthere and Wulfstan, a major work of Old English, produced during the C9th reign of King Alfred, one reads:

“Þa wæs he swa feor norþ swa þa hwælhuntan firrest faraþ.”⁴ > [Then he was as far north as the whale-hunters travel farthest]

In Baudrillard’s view, hyperreality is a space where everything is connected, constantly shifting, and mediated by signs which precede an underlying referent, a ‘real’ state of affairs to which one might return. The whale-hunters may move further north still. The ‘enchanted’ world of Old English fables – once replaced by a ‘disenchanted’ form of industrial capitalism (as outlined by Weber) – is enchanted once more, albeit now by an overabundance of irrational simulations, signs and responses:

...in the world which I evoke, the one where illusion or magic thought plays a key role, the signs evolve, they concatenate and produce themselves, always one upon the other…

Deleuze and Guattari, in their major work Capitalism & Schizophrenia (completed in 1980) outline what might be considered two poles through which to interpret responses to this state of affairs – what Eugene Holland calls the ‘fundamental organizing principles and dynamics of capitalist society’ – they write:

“The social axiomatic of modern societies is caught between two poles, and is constantly oscillating from one pole to the other. [...] They are torn in two directions: archaism and futurism, neoarchaism and ex-futurism, paranoia and schizophrenia.” ⁵

One might add North or South? Kavan and Ballard provide a re-articulation of these two poles, directions or ‘intensities’ – forms of rationality remade for times undone by runaway processes of technological accumulation, climate collapse and hypermediatised signification. If, for Deleuze and Guattari, ‘paranoia’ represents what is archaic in capitalism (as Holland describes, “the resuscitation of obsolete, or traditional, belief-centered modes of social organization”) Kavan’s protagonist follows this ‘way out’ in his desperate attempts to hold on to an increasingly fragile reality, the despotic figure of the ‘warden’ and their shared abuse of ‘the girl’. Likewise, if ‘schizophrenia’ signifies a state of ‘permanent revolution’, or dissolution through a form of limitless sign production (elsewhere they write of the ‘and…’ inherent to this mode of thought), Ballard’s protagonist similarly ‘gets out’ through his integration with the “outside”... the final etymology of ‘south’ being the Proto-Germanic ‘sunþraz’, sunward!

How far we have strayed from even the question of truth – perhaps that is the only ‘direction’ in which we are moving. Indeed, these poles – these ‘tendencies’ – sit at the heart of contemporary ‘accelerationist’ discourses (rejuvenated by artist Joshua Citarella’s recent work) through which one might attempt to ‘exit’ the contradictions of contemporary capitalism, either by way of Kavan or Ballard, North or South. As Deleuze and Guattari write in Anti-Oedipus, on the schizophrenic irrationalism of capital:

“...more capitalist than the capitalist and more proletarian than the proletariat. This tendency is being carried further and further, to the point that capitalism with all its flows may dispatch itself straight to the moon: we really haven't seen anything yet!”

How the moon landing haunts us!

*

If everything is relative, all one can learn from these journeys is of where one began, of one’s expectations, one’s ‘inner space’. At the geographic South Pole a large wooden sign has been erected with a map of the Antarctic, and a compass at its centre. On it are written two quotes, the first by Roald Amundsen and a second from British Royal Navy officer Robert F. Scott, who travelled to the pole on the 17th of January 1912. His account goes:

“The Pole. Yes, but under very different circumstances than those expected.”

Footnotes

1. https://selfselector.co.uk/2010/11/15/interview-with-wolfgang-tillmans/ ↩

2. Ice, p.3 ↩

3. ↩

4. Account Voy. Ohthere & Wulfstan in translation of Orosius, History ↩

5. https://files.libcom.org/files/Anti-Oedipus.pdf p.260 ↩