Westfield Revisited in the Mind.

Still trying to puzzle out why I was banned from taking photos of Westfields unless a member of the family or friends was in the photo ( as if that would make much different to Westfield being depicted in the background if a terrorist threat is detected. )

Notice that Westfield is not even on the logo outside termed The Westfields Shopping Centre. It's now just Westfield, a district of London like Southfields is in South London near Wimbledon but a new form of community entire of itself with its own "policy".

Westfield is a place where the same boring branded shops are offered but the idea, as Ballard put it in Kingdom Come, is to offer more of something akin to a religious experience, a collective affirimation of identity through compulsive shopping and spending rituals embraced freely.
All of this was as deeply weird. The place is weird. Not least considering I was told my presence was not welcome with the comforting knowledge that I could take photos only if a relative or friend was in it. But it was breaking the code by taking photos of the building itself.

Perhaps it was the wrong kind of emotional reaction to the place, one of ritual affirmation of the new "community" being At One in their shared pursuit of the same driven goal-consuming. A lingerer taking photos by definition is a) not spending and b) not being part of it: that is not consuming.

This shows a kind of intolerance of the outsider, a fear that in buying nothing I was rejecting the shared community values of compulsive obsessive consumerism as a lifestyle choice, without which the mystique of Westfield would break down.

For Westfield is more that a place to shop: it is a place of worship. And one shall not make any graven images of Westfield. I should have been consuming or, at least fully engaged with consumption. To take pictures for free is a kind of heresy.

It might have expressed disapproval instead of affirmation. Perhaps, as Ballard said, consumerism could lead to fascism. Here could be the future of a "happy face fascism" where only positive and selective versions of satisfied consumers was the emotionally correct response.

Such is Westfield's policy the security guard who told me robotically that taking photos was forbidden. As Westfield's policy. This privatisation of public shared space means a person is required voluntarily to do something he ought to feel compelled to do-and to call it a choice.

Taking photos without being part of Westfields means not sharing what Tony Blair, the ex-PM who looks like a daytime TV presenter or other oily permatanned creeps trying to incite the masses to feel good about tribalised identities through consumption or "our values".

These Temples of Consumption are there to eradicate history, the sense of past and future and create an eternal present in which nothing else matters but the entitlement one must expect as a human right: disappointment and satiety breeds the desire for more and more.

Thus it is never enough and breeds resentment. One that could lead to lead to "elective psychopathology" , the hatred of those who do not share "herd values" by the herd and those who know how to manipulate them

That is as a herd of the bewildered who are mesmerised into consumerism. J G Ballard actually based Kingdom Come on The Bentall Centre in Kingston-upon-Thames but his meditations on these places,

"I remember four or five years ago going into the Bentall Centre, a huge shopping mall in Kingston, a town I hate. It was before Christmas, and there were these three gigantic bears on a plinth in the centre of this huge atrium … automatons, moving to Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer. The place was packed; crowds looking up at them. And I thought, God, these people have left their brains somewhere. What’s going on here? And then I noticed that my head was moving, too. I thought, Jesus, get out fast.’

Ballard said in an in interview, 2006

What he also said of these bland generic Palaces of Consumerism applies to Westfield. In an interview for The Independent in September 2006 Ballard reflected,

"Consumerism is so weird. It's a sort of conspiracy we collude in....You'd think shoppers spending their hard-earned cash would be highly critical. You know that the manufacturers are trying to have you on. But they do not".

Literally, then, they buy into being conned. Ballard continued,

"Why do I dislike the Bentall Centre so much?.....because it's so... cretinous." They ( the consumers ) seem to be moving though a kind of commercial dream space and vague signals float through their brains. That's why it's a potentially fertile basis for some major psychological shift."

"Boredom is a fearsome prospect. There's a limit to the number of cars and microwaves you can buy. What do you do then?.... In the past he has predicted a future where boredom will be interrupted by violent, unpredictable acts.

Consumerism does have certain affinities with fascism. It's a way of voting not at the ballet box but at the cash counter... The one civic activity we take part in is shopping, particularly in big malls. These are ceremonies of mass affirmation.".

The only reaction for and against these places Ballard has mused is psychopathology. Those who cannot take it any more will emerge of of the "desert" and let rip with their mail order Kalashnikovs simply in order to force what some contemptuously call "consumerbots" to feel something.

Those who participate in the boredom will need more and more and the latent drift towards a voyeuristic culture based on cruelty will be furthered by those who hunger for violence and outrage to quicken the adrenals: hence the way rough contact sports will play a bigger role as well as ritualist and choreographed street violence and hooliganism.

All four of Ballard's last four novels Super Cannes, Cocaine Nights, Millennium People and Kingdom Come deal with the notion that the world is overcrowded and increasingly homogenised and organised for perfect order and stability in which the architecture of malls, hotels, airports and business parks eradicate historical consciousness and plunge infantile consumers into a fairytale Neverland.

And yet with Ballard these"architectures of control" always lead with their residents and visitors to a lethal psychic entropy in the nervous system in which long periods of banal boredom will give way to "the new pathology of everyday life." and random acts of violence, rape, murder and meaningless terrorism.

In Central Europe I noticed in Bratislava and Krakow that not only rollerblading, smoking and dogs were banned but also photos and, more oddly, guns, as if people would ordinarily carry their guns around with them in Poland and Krakow. What on earth could have been the thinking behind that ?

The idea that consumers would walk through a mall with a gun is curious. Perhaps it is true that if life becomes so boring and deracinatred that people will seek to resort to meaningless acts of violence simply to make themselves and others feel more alive.

In Kingdom Come, the looming dominance of the shopping mall becomes an example of what Ballard termed "the architecture of control"

"The ideas offered by Dr Maxted I endorse, by and large.....In Kingdom Come the psychiatrist Maxted observes that: "Consumerism creates huge unconscious needs that only fascism can satisfy. If anything, fascism is the form that consumerism takes when it opts for elective madness."

The fascination with Nazism in England, the reference to "New Hitlers" or "Little Hitlers" as petty bureaucrats frustrated with their own lives, has now merged with the resentful feeling people have as Britain becomes a shoddy half cock version of the USA, without the remaining charms of continental Europe.

That offers one reason for the way Blair was able to tap into the notion that Britain along with the USA could embark on military regime change in Iraq led by some odder figures on the fringe of "neoconservatism" and invoke all enemies as "new Hitler's" in what could be called the pyschology of projection.

Blair sought to tap into the man of messianic destiny pose in a very English way but the danger to British democracy is not only what Lord Hailsham warned long ago as the danger of an "elective dictatorship" but also in a fascist style type of eschatological politics being promoted by the PM's ministerial executive machine.

As Ballard wrote,

Bush and the neo-cons are driven by emotion, and this appeals to Blair. The emotions are the one language that he understands, and reality is defined by what he feels he ought to believe.

It if often forgotten that Hitler and Mussolini were experts at oratory and of of having political rallies devoted to kitschy choreography and parades and the systematic and perverted use of language to distort reality in the was that Blair did over Iraq with the soundbites and the spin.

Not having been dominated by a Nazi or Communist totalitarian regime and faced with inexorable decline from the status of a world power to satellite state of the USA has created a new hunger for Britain to reassert it's importance as compensation for being an offshore island of a European superstate which is supposedly meant to take Britain seriously as the major player

Yet, as Ballard commented,

Britain's per capita income is one of the lowest in western Europe. Without the largely foreign-owned City of London the whole country would be a suburb of Longbridge, retraining as an offshore call-centre servicing the Chinese super-economy.

In Kingdom Come Ballard wrote in the Guardian in 2008 that in in relation to Consumerism and Fascism, that

The underlying psychologies aren't all that far removed from one another. If you go into a huge shopping mall and you're looking down the parade, it's the same theatrical aspect: these disciplined ranks of merchandise, all glittering like fascist uniforms.

When you enter a mall, you are taking part in a ceremony of affirmation, which you endorse just by your presence."

Consumerism has to a large extent replaced art and culture in this country. The principal entertainment industry nowadays is soccer which, with its marching supporters' groups, is not that far removed from fascism."

Then in the New Stateman Ballard continued A Fascist's Guide to the Premiership in September 2006 that,

The notion of being British has never been so devalued. Sport alone seems able to be the catalyst of significant social change. Could consumerism evolve into fascism?

Is the English working class re-tribalising itself? Out here, to the west of London, in the motorway towns near Heathrow, a few St George's flags still hang in a dispirited way from council house windows and the coat-hanger aerials of white vans. As I drive from Shepperton past the airport, there's a sense of a failed insurrection

During the World Cup, a forest of flags flew proudly from almost every shop, factory and car, a passionate display willing on more than Beckham's boys in Germany.

This wasn't patriotism so much as a waking sense of tribal identity, dormant for decades. The notion of being British has never been so devalued.

Sport alone seems able to be the catalyst of significant social change. Football crowds rocking stadiums and bellowing anthems are taking part in political rallies without realising it, as would-be fascist leaders will have noted.

The English, thank God, have always detested jackboots, searchlight parades and Führers ranting from balconies.

But the Premier League, at the pinnacle of our entertainment culture, is a huge engine of potential change, waiting to be switched on.Could consumerism evolve into fascism? There is nothing to stop some strange consumer trend becoming a new ideology.

Whilst resident in Poland I warned that Poles ought to be beware that England, where some million migrants thought of as a land of milk and honey is an increasingly dystopian version of the future and that veneration for England is entirely misplaced.

Yet the psychopathologies are already coming here with the gated communities of Salvator Tower in Bronowice and elsewhere in parts of Krakow. Be careful what you wish for. As Ballard ends on an almost apocalyptic note,

Real power has gone, migrating to the shopping malls and hypermarkets where we make the important decisions in our lives. Consumerism controls everything, and the ballot box defers to the cash counter.

The only escape from all this is probably out-and-out madness, and I expect the number of supermarket shootings and meaningless crimes to increase dramatically in the coming years.

If anywhere, the future seems to lie with competing systems of psychopathology.

The Looming Presence of Trellick Tower.

The Brutalist concrete Trellick Tower in North Kensington seems to have received a cult status over the years and has certainly received , absurdly, a Grade II listing though it remains, in a peculiar sense fascinating in its faded and decayed futuristic way.

Built near Westway and finished by the early 70s it draws a person to it in the sense of dread best described by Soren Kierkegaard as the desire for what one dreads, that breeds anxiety as it looms sinisterly over the entire area of this part of north London,

"Anxiety is a desire for what one fears, a sympathetic antipathy; anxiety is an alien power which grips the individual, and yet one cannot tear himself free from it and does not want to, for one fears, but what he fears he desires".

Today on an urban walk towards Maida Hill down from Queens Park it drew me ever closer to it all the time almost against my will from Bravington Road down to the main Harrow Road where it was east to cross a small footbridge over the Grand Union Canal.

Clearly, the tenants do not care much for the council's regulations, as the rubbish bins where overflowing but across from Trellick stands one forlorn public house as a reminder this was one a densely built working class area of terraced housing before being smashed in the 60s.

This area is really the tail end of Notting Hill, though it is classified as North Kensington, but it stands in its own way from Kensal Way as arbitrarily positioned between the canal and the railway line close to the Westway which crunches its way towards Paddington.

Perhaps this is why it is said Ballard wrote a novel based on brutalist architecture like iit with its ability to brutalise the residents by sticking them high up in a nowhere land perched above the area. Unlike other tower blocks along towards Westbourne Grove it was a one off edifice.

As one commentator suggests,

The Trellick Tower is the largest and latest of these projects, a 31-story apartment slab, part of a complex of several buildings in North Kensington called Cheltenham Estate, built for the Greater London Council.

When it was built, Trellick was one of the tallest buildings in Europe and it came to epitomize all that was thought to be wrong with modern housing and urbanism following the wave of negative public sentiment about this kind of high-rise apartments that swept many countries in the 1970’s.

Trellick may have been the inspiration for the novel, High-Rise, written in 1975 by the English science fiction writer J.G. Ballard.

The last of a trilogy of books (Crash, 1973, Concrete Island, 1974) exploring common dystopian themes about the impact of modern technology on the human physic, High-Rise is a bleak apocalyptic tale about the social and physical disintegration of a community of 2000 people living in a 40-story apartment tower in London.

Much of the description of the tower in Ballard’s novel seem to have been derived directly from Trellick, the extended height, the facades and balconies, the articulated stairs and elevators, and the general Brutalist quality of the” concrete landscape”.

Ballard’s description of the tower as “an architecture built for war” certainly seems apropos vis-à-vis the Brutalist quality of the complex.

By the time High-Rise was published, there was already heightened public antagonism towards the typical modernist social housing development of the 1960’s and an accompanying fear of high rise buildings in general.

The questions is should the Trellick Tower have been listed. I do not think so. Rather as with large cooling towers I feel weirdly drawn to them but relieved when they get the necessary levels of TNT that level them down to the ground again.

( My own photos & more commentary tomorrow....)

The Way Towards the West has Gone West.

Welcome to Westway. It takes the driver West but only out of London. From Westfields Shopping Mall the driver drives East. The whole area is a blighted one. One passes through this zone of transience which defines the nature of the horrid area of Shepherd's Bush and the home of the BBC Television Centre.

Then again when alighting from the Shepherd's Bush Tube Station, it must be remembered that IKEA, the kind of store where riots break out as frantic consumers battle to get in first to grab the best bargains during their sales, has an advert on the Oyster Card reading "Travel is a means to an end. Home".


The most prescient of British novelists J G Ballard was correct to see Crash a dystopian version of the future in the 1970s when he used Westway, the inner city motorway which zooms into central London from Hammersmith to Paddington as an example of the 'Death of Affect'.
By this Ballard meant the deconstruction of cities and the settled life they once contained as leading to pathological reactions amongst a deracinated citizenry in which the car would become seen as a liberating means people use to overcome their sense of being detached from the city.

In Concrete Island ( 1974 ), the driver's crash off Westway into a Traffic Island he cannot escape from and who is ignored by the cars zooming their way towards Central London was a satire based on the retelling of the myth of Robinson Crusoe. Crusoe was a man on an Island, a metaphor Daniel Defoe used to describe as Merlin Coverley puts it in Psychogeography,

' ( that ) with its twin leitmotifs of the imaginary voyage and isolation, provides a broad outline of a character who encapsulates the freedom and detachment of the wanderer, the resourcefulness of the adventurer and amorality of the survivor'.

Merlin Coverley emphasises the Robinson, a man cast adrift in an oceanic and unknowable place with all the fear that entails comes back into Ballard thus,

"Ballard describes modern life in advanced industrialised societies as characterised by a lack of emotional sensitivity. Amidst the barrage of media imagery to which we are subjected, our emotional response is blunted and we become unable to engage directly with our surroundings.

When walking along Westway from Westfields in Shepherd's Bush, a meaningless and weird zone of alienation and spiritual poverty, the reaction of the White Van men, known to drive manically through London, was one of total hostility to my decision to walk there. Pedestrians are subversive in a city dictated to by the demands of the automobile.

With St George's Flags fluttering, White Van Men screamed abuse, though the little pathway alongside it is just wide enough to allow one to pass without getting in the way. One driver screamed 'nutter' and another 'wanker'. A curious form of Road Rage. Aggressive banality was omnipresent in this zone.

Naturally, a lot of this aggression is a reaction to the sheer boredom and banality of London's descent into a large conduit for Capital, hot money and cars coursing through its veins and arteries, a City State that has become a law unto itself detached from England as a territorial nation.

Asserting one's" identity", the desire to feel radical and transgressive is not just connected with cocky attitudes and the empowerment of having an SUV, those "Gated Communities on wheels" but also in pseudo-libertarian proponents of the Great Car Economy such as the BBC's populist presenter on Top Gear, Jeremy Clarkson, who advocated knocking down cyclists.

The fact that this mutton headed dolt has books are best sellers shows the need to tap into the aggressive and liberating aspects of the car from the world surrounding atomised individuals. It appeals to those for who the banalisation of everyday life requires aggression as a marketing tool. Including stunts like ramming an SUV into a tree to show "toughness".

Indeed outside Westfields, there were utterly moronic adverts with an underlying mood of implicit aggression. Gym Box, soon to open at Westfields, seemed to advertise aggression as the only way of maintaining one's freedom. As only losers could think that being on the straight and narrow was the way forward.

Yet even weirder was the advert that shows the "drivenness" of contemporary Britain in 2010 where the same Gym Box, informs Westfields consumers that they have a human right given them by God to be absolutely beautiful, something again which gives credence to Ballard's notion in Kingdom Come about a similar Mall where it is seen as a religious experience.


Bibliography

Merlin Coverly. Psychogeography.
J G Ballard, Concrete Island.
J G Ballard, Kingdom Come

J G Ballard and Millennium People

Protests in London come and go as designer fashion shows these days.

Last year some of the G20 protesters in 2009 were very silly but some are more akin to the bored characters in JG Ballard's recent novels e.g Millennium People who want to trash and subvert the over-mediated consumer landscape and find meaning in a meaningless word.

The decline of the left, socialism, conservatism and, increasingly, of political liberalism means that we have left as an ideology is consumerism. History has reached a dead end of banality and narcissistic consumption where values are redundant.

As Ballard writes,

"People resent the fact that the most moral decision in their lives is choosing what colour the next car will be," he says witheringly. "All we've got left is our own psychopathology. It's the only freedom we have – that's a dangerous state of affairs.

"The sheer meaninglessness of a society based on the hallucinatory substitute for reality that the vast masses of consumers have bought into has defined the New Labour period.

Now that the illusions have crashed with the finance system, the result is going to be a rejection of the boredom and conformity that comes from reducing nearly every aspect of everyday life to nothing more than a series of money transactions.

Ballard believes that this can 'only be relieved by some sort of violent act; by taking your mail-order Kalashnikov into the nearest supermarket and letting rip.".

Just as the Vietnam War was to the 1968 media conscious rebels, so too the Iraq War and the frustration that the cloistered 'Metropolitan elites', all on first name terms and who play at politics to give the illusion of brand distinction, is going to mobilise people to reject the system.

Unfortunately, it will not be peaceful: there is the potential for massive and gratuitous acts of psychopathological violence, just anything that will force the masses to question the 'inauthentic' nature of their existence.

'Consumers Suck' read some of the banners: if they fail to respond, it is quite possible that extreme radicals might take to selecting less obviously 'political' targets such as shopping malls, multiplex cinemas, airports and theme parks.

The victims of terror were aiding global capitalism by consuming: their deaths will be a small price to pay if it helps to destroy the fake consumer confidence that keeps the system going and directly causes Third World immiseration and global warming.

The novel starts off with a bomb explosion at Heathrow that turns out to be the work of a demented paediatrician, Dr Richard Gould who later tell the main character David Markham that the sheer meaninglessness of such an outrage forced people to ask 'why'.

Ballard's Millennium People tended to just laugh at the middle class protesters 'the Kropotkins with Pink Gin' and that the "the middle-classes are the new proletariat", and that's the main weakness of the book. Ballard does not know the radicals: just the Guardian reading middle classes.

For Millennium People could have included the deracinated Islamists and Class War nihilists, as well as the anti-road protesters and the increasingly psychopathological journalist hacks who rationalise in metaphysical terms every terror threat or terrorist action to push a revolutionary agenda.

A lot of the street carnival protesters at G 20 were like those, as in Ballard's Chelsea Marina who desire to escape the "self-imposed burdens" of civic responsibility and consumer culture.

By only focusing on the trashing of the RSB, people are missing the point about much of the 'global justice movement'.

It is not merely the 'Good' anger of wanting to right wrongs and injustice: a look at the G20 Meltdown groups shows the usual 'hard left' sects whose leaders are motivated by 'Bad' anger, a craving for destruction more than any real policy of a constructive alternative.

Just as the 1968 insurrections fomented a climate of opinion in which the Angry Brigades and the Baader Meinhof were created, so too will 2009 lead to radical psychopathological terror groups.

In 2009 , however,there are the added ethnic and sectarian tensions bred by wars in 'the Muslim World' and the growth of Islamism and religious faith based apocalyptic politics.

As Ballard writes,

"There are shifts in the unseen tectonic plates that make up our national consciousness. I've tried to nail down a certain kind of nihilism that people may embrace, and which politicians may embrace, which is much more terrifying; all tapping into this vast, untouched resource as big as the Arabian oilfields called psychopathology."

That hunger for apocalyptic violence is innate in human beings and the more people's lives are confined to a mind numbing routine of frenetic work and regulated consumer fun, the more people will turn to violence and nastiness

Not least when the cosmetic 'niceness' of the system conceals iniquities and inequalities that are screened from perception by the mainstream media and by happening in poorer countries.
The result could be something like the Baader-Meinhof-in Islamism that already evident.

J G Ballard on London and the United Kingdom

One of the most prescient observers on London and the UK was the late J G Ballard who pointed to what he regarded as the state of crisis that 'England' was heading for, terming it in The Spectator and spiritually and culturally impoverished land.

One of his best essays in the New Statesman was written in 2005just before the General Election Now parliament is just another hypermarket . Ballard wrote devastatingly,

'Britain's per capita income is one of the lowest in western Europe. Without the largely foreign-owned City of London the whole country would be a suburb of Longbridge, retraining as an offshore call-centre servicing the Chinese super-economy.

What really kept me away from the polling booth was the sense that the rate of political change has been slowing since the early 1990s'.

A decayed monarchy-a "Ruritarian Charade- and the atrophied class system where the old middle class had been reduced to 'three button suited proles' working as corporate clones had reduced it to the scrapheap of history.

Ballard warned of Britain's obsession with a re-presented past which increasingly meant nothing, a point reinforced by Professor John Gray who saw that neoliberalism, flows of hot money from Saudi Arabia and China had created an unsustainable form of debt fuelled consumerism.

None of these changes could be tackled by the present political system, however, even if the will was there. I would like to see the Labour Party lead a full-scale assault on the English class system, which still amazes visitors to this country, but I know it will never happen.

Outside heritage London - not just Bloomsbury and St Paul's, but all those areas of the city dominated by a dinner-party culture - there are vast forgotten terrains where the greatest force for enlightenment is the nearest Ikea.

Out on the London perimeter, in the motorway towns and retail parks that are the real Britain today, everything is ruled by consumerism. The cash till and the Pin preside.

Consumerism defines people's lives, but, like sex with prostitutes, it demands special skills from the customer and there is no money-back guarantee.

The huge vacuum this creates may soon implode. The monarchy, the Church and politics have all faltered. The British monarchy is an afterthought of central Europe, the tale of a dysfunctional German family that destroyed itself in the supreme effort of trying to be English.

The Church of England has long been secularising itself from within, and even atheism is now tolerated of its bishops.

As for parliament and the ballot box, I fear that politics can no longer bring about the radical changes this country needs. It's surprising that this happened so quickly.

After I came to England in 1946 I found the professional middle class completely stunned by the huge changes brought in by the Attlee government - nationalisation, the health service, a crash programme of house-building, decent living standards for all.

The new barbarians were at the gates. Later, Harold Wilson at least made an effort to move Britain on from the radio-valve age, and refused to join the Vietnam tragedy. Margaret Thatcher, in her turn, challenged the outer limits of ideology and change, leaving Blair with little to do except sweep up after the storm.

But now politics has lost its will, and may even have reached its close, absorbed into consumerism and public relations. Perhaps elections and the ballot box are little more than a folkloric ritual, along with parliament itself.

Like university lecturers and psychiatrists, politicians may incidentally do some good, but their real loyalty is to themselves and their profession. The chief function of election campaigns is to convince us that politics and politicians are still important.

Real power has gone, migrating to the shopping malls and hypermarkets where we make the important decisions in our lives. Consumerism controls everything, and the ballot box defers to the cash counter.

The only escape from all this is probably out-and-out madness, and I expect the number of supermarket shootings and meaningless crimes to increase dramatically in the coming years. If anywhere, the future seems to lie with competing systems of psychopathology.

Gordon Brown gave the task of controlling inflation to the Bank of England, and perhaps our politicians should surrender more of their roles to better-qualified agencies.

Perhaps UK plc would thrive if assigned to the two companies that will decide our planet's future - Microsoft and the Disney Corporation. Tony Blair would at last feel completely at home.