TH2. Ballardian Kinesics

Barker is only the most recent to have mapped Spinal Catastrophism.1 Others had journeyed this landscape before him, in fact and in fiction. Indeed, the troupe of eccentric sources from whom Barker drew his inspiration hailed as much from the speculative worlds of science fiction as from the sciences of cryptanalysis, astrobiology, and signaletics. And foremost among these visionaries is J.G. Ballard (1930–2009), whom Barker cites, approvingly, as having lucidly preempted the ideas of ‘DNA as a transorganic memory-bank and the spine as a fossil record’.2

The prose of this one-time medical student become ‘Seer of Shepperton’ drips with physiological terminology—with spinal columns ostentatiously prevalent: ‘[E]xposed spinal levels’ jag down Atrocity Exhibition’s pages, and vertebral series—‘medullary’, ‘thoracic’, ‘sacral’—consistently concatenate its segmented vignettes, providing some illegible compass of tagmata.3 Already diagrammed in Ballard’s early novels of catastrophe such as 1962’s The Drowned World, characters’ postures are catalogued with orthopaedic precision. These postures, moreover, are ‘mimetised in the procession of [urban] space’: a diagonalization of ‘inner’ and ‘outer’ space, as inhabitant, habit, and habitat are enfolded in a tightening stigmergic loop, a techonomic pirouette of mutual reinvention.4

For Ballard, it seems, the built environment externalizes our anatomical poises and desires, but such externalization in turn reprograms us from the inside out. He thus augurs that any society attaining suitable informatic density and media massification experiences severe chronotopic leakage. As explored above, when enough of our environment is captured by and entangled within intentional and artefactual systems, the distinction between ‘artifice’ and ‘nature’ progressively collapses.5 Civilization grows an ectopic unconscious—an outpouching of drive-mechanism and erotic-cathexes, extracranially exported—like the mutant spider in the short story ‘The Voices of Time’, whose artificially expedited evolution enables it to externally ramify its CNS by weaving extra-somatic ganglion networks instead of a web, fabricating an everted second brain.6 Ballardian kinesics, however, do not merely resonate with external space, they also provide a cipher for outer time:

Entry points into the future = Levels in a spinal landscape = zones of significant time.7

For Ballard, a consistently nonconforming Kantian in his approach to space-time, temporality becomes a global secretion of the CNS: a dendritic ejaculate, a product of innervation, an offshoot of being immured within a nervous system.8 This ipso facto means that alterations to nervous systems are transportations in time. The vicissitudes of this process are catalogued in Ballard’s nosologies of temporal disruption, accounts of ‘time-sicknesses’ wherein alterations to the CNS trigger catastrophic modifications of chronoreceptivity: for example, the new time-sensitive receptors and nervous extrusions of modified organisms in ‘The Voices of Time’. For if time is an ejaculate of the nerves, then to alter an organism’s nervous system is to move it forward or backward in organic time. Accordingly, Ballard pictures genetically altered organisms displaying the tempos of macro-evolution (and even cosmic evolution) at diverging rates, with strange organs and spandrels from some future evolutionary event arriving early, expressed as mutations and strange sensory bulbs with as-yet-unknown usages and sensitivities.

This ‘time-sickness’ afflicts organisms altered by intervention, but in Ballard’s stories it can also overwhelm characters altered by a changing environment, stimulated and aroused by ‘levels above [their] existing nervous system’. To experience the radically accelerating changes of our built environment is to experience the future coming early—which, again, is indistinguishable from experiencing the drag of the past—and this demands of us new appendages and new ‘forms of intuition’, which Ballard registers as subtle changes to the nervous system, mapped onto the spine, whose vertically ascending series of vertebrae, from pelvis to skull, easily becomes transliterated as the linear ordering of time, from past to future: spinal levels as time-steps. He reasons that if the ‘autonomic system’ (the lower regions of the CNS) are ‘dominated by the past’, then the ‘cerebro-spinal’ (in its zenith-scraping upward thrust) reaches ‘towards the future’.9 The higher regions are those through which we communicate with the arriving future, the lower regions those through which we intercourse with our buried past. Accordingly, Ballard announces that the ‘Thoracic Drop’ down the vertebrae—a shutting off of the higher centres of consciousness—moves us towards the palaeo-temporal nadir, i.e. our deepest evolutionary heritage. This ‘shutting off’ or ‘dropping away’, however, is not to be interpreted as nosological deviation from some functional norm but merely as preparation for some new environment or oncoming state of being. (Which, indeed, may be produced by modern technoscience’s tendency to externalize and materially consecrate our deepest drives.) Indeed, at a certain point in this descent the distinction between inside and outside (dermal, psychic, genomic) completely unravels—Ballard speaks of a new ‘landscape’ being ‘revealed at the level of T-12’ (thoracic vertebra #12).10 Time, because it is the arena of all geneses, is the medium of vivisection. It provides the thread which, when pulled, procedurally unravels all interiorities: in so far as to move down the spine is to move back in time, it is also to move outwards, opening onto vistas beyond all individuality, all personality. This is the Spinal Landscape.

Organic ‘development’ is just the future arriving early, organic ‘structure’ is just the retention of the past, and our experience of time is nothing but movement within this morpho-space. If new chronoreceptive organs are caenogenetic (arriving from some unforeseen evolutionary future), ‘spinal descent’ traces the palingenetic retrogression into deep pasts.11 The implication being that, if time is emitted by CNS-architecture, then there are other possible receptivity profiles, other workable organizations of time: organizations which, from within our current CNS-architectonic, can only appear to us as instances of time travel, as contortions of unilinearity: precocious futures or recidivist pasts.

This thesis is scaled and extrapolated globally in the 1962 novel The Drowned World. In this near-future scenario, climatic shift, caused by solar fluctuations, triggers temporal-developmental retrogradation across all natural echelons—floral, faunal, and spiritual. As ‘Triassic’ mangroves and ‘Paleocene’ iguanids reemerge, the novel’s characters psychologically experience an ‘uncovering’ of ‘taboos and drives’ that have been dormant ‘for epochs’.12 As the ectopic unconscious (the built environment) disappears in an ‘avalanche backwards into the past’, giving way to regressive natural environs, the characters accordingly undergo ‘total biopsychic recall’, an awakening of the ‘oldest memories of Earth’, ‘time-codes carried in every chromosome and gene’ revealed under pressure of climate change, new chronoreceptivity profiles beckoned forth by environmental catastrophe. According to the ‘new psychology of Neuronics developed by one of Ballard’s characters as he studies these effects on his colleagues, the

central nervous system is a coded time scale, each nexus of neurons and each spinal level marking a symbolic station, a unit of neuronic time.13

Bodkin, the scientist behind this new Neuronic psychology, provides the following prospectus:

The further down the CNS you move, from the hind-brain through the medulla into the spinal cord, you descend back into the neuronic past. For example, the junction between thoracic and lumbar vertebrae, between T-12 and L-1, is the great zone of transit between the gill-breathing fish and air-breathing amphibians [with] rib-cages.14

Spine become deep time submersible; the CNS as time-machine. From a perspective sensitive to the neural apriority of time, alterations to chronoreceptivity are indistinguishable from bona fide chronolocomotion, or genuine environmental ecphory (epoch regurgitation; biota anamnesis). Ballard, indeed, once exclaimed to an interviewer that our CNS provides far more powerful opportunities for ‘time travel’ than any Wellsian ‘machine’.15

The importance of these insights for Barker’s ulterior development of Spinal Catastrophism cannot be overstated. Ballard, however, was himself merely vocalizing the same thought patterns—undulating to the same conceptions—that had led many others, previously, to similar conclusions. Wittingly or not, he was becoming part of a centuries-old ‘tradition’. But before we explore some of Ballard’s more immediate precursors, it will be necessary to set forth some of the larger-scale philosophical notions that inform this tradition.