Late Ballard trades extinction fantasies for inaccessible utopia filtered through toxics

Evidence

To these are added at length the voices from galactic space, all of which finally converge on the ultimate target, Powers’s body at the center of his mandala. Yet the reassuring extinction fantasies of early Ballard, which no longer seem possible in the world cataclysms of the sixties, paradoxically exchange formulations of entropy and the geological past for the fragile acknowledgment of a future and a Utopia out of reach, all the more powerful for the toxic atmosphere it has to penetrate. With Wasow we are now in the eighties, and the dark, hallucinatory colors of his Utopian spinal bands have something of that tranquil and unearthly conflagration of sunsets over Santa Monica whose optical effects are due, we are told, to the extreme density of chemical pollution in the atmosphere. — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 414

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s noise/silence project: the ‘absent presence’ and pollution-tinted utopia echo how modern silence is only reachable through the toxicity that surrounds it. — connects to: Utopian presence survives in Ballard as empty form among toxic bands
• SEED: Essay angle: ‘the beauty of polluted sunsets’ — how aestheticized catastrophe (Santa Monica haze, Ballard’s toxic utopia) performs our waning of affect toward ecological disaster.
• yield-rescued: below the book’s yield-target cutoff, included anyway for connecting to: Utopian presence survives in Ballard as empty form among toxic bands