Ballard defined Surrealism’s key mood as glassy isolation drained of emotional association

Evidence

The reference to Delvaux and Ernst is not idle, since Foxx’s songs, like Ballard’s stories and novels, often seemed to take place inside Surrealist paintings. This is not only a matter of imagery, but also of mood and tone (or, catatone); there is a certain languor, a radically depersonalised serenity on loan from dreams here. ‘If anything,’ Ballard wrote in his 1966 essay on Surrealism, ‘Coming of the Unconscious’, ‘surrealist painting has one dominant characteristic: a glassy isolation, as if all the objects in its landscapes had been drained of their emotional associations, the accretions of sentiment and common usage.’ — Mark Fisher, Ghosts of My Life, 355

Categorization

• DEFINE: Preserves Ballard’s precise characterization of Surrealism — ‘glassy isolation’ with objects drained of sentiment — as a critical-epistemic tool.
• SHARE: A quote to send to someone into Ballard, Surrealism, or hauntological aesthetics.
• XREF: connects to: Ballard grounded his method in psychoanalysis and surrealism’s impersonal accounts of the self — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 136

Broader Connections

• Ballard grounded his method in psychoanalysis and surrealism’s impersonal accounts of the self #expands (0.82) — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 136