J G Ballard at Club Med

J G Ballard at Club Med

[I wrote about the novelist J G Ballard in April 2016. He was a writer preoccupied with what he saw as the frailties of the structures holding modern civilisations together, and the chaos and savagery that have the potential to emerge if those structures bend or collapse. He also detected in human nature a disturbing tendency to be drawn towards such anarchy. His fictions explore these themes in imagined closed, or closely-linked, communities that “go wrong” in horrible ways. Much though I enjoyed my stay in a Club Med resort, it immediately struck me as fertile ground for the Ballardian imagination…]

Tate v NEO Bankside: a theme fit for Ballard

Tate v NEO Bankside: a Theme fit for Ballard

On the viewing deck of Tate Modern’s interesting new extension (Switch House), there are a number of notices fixed to the concrete pillars: “Please respect the privacy of our neighbours”. Is this is a Tate snigger, or a futile Canute command?

Beyond Hobbes's Leviathan: the Alarming Visions of JG Ballard

         Beyond Hobbes’s Leviathan: The Alarming Visions of JG Ballard

The 17^th philosopher Thomas Hobbes believed that, without a civilising authority, humankind is condemned to live in a state of nature, where there is war of all against all and life is nasty, brutish and short. In his book Leviathan, Hobbes proposed that there was a profound drive, or law of nature, to escape this fate: