Khairei, deerslayers!

“And this is how it is: if only you do not try to utter what is unutterable then nothing gets lost. But the unutterable will be – unutterably – contained in what has been uttered!”

Ballard’s contribution, in The Atrocity Exhibition, is to radicalise the Freudian account of trauma by generalizing it. Rather than treating trauma as something with which the organism is affected only contingently, Ballard implies that trauma is a general condition, a non – or anti- – biotic transmission system, distributing particular tics – swarms of repetition-compulsions – across a culture that is indistinguishable from nature. Culture, like the organism, is composed of tics, compulsions and looped behaviours, rather than simply afflicted by them. The “abstract patterns” that Dr. Nathan and his supposedly psychotic patients discover repeated across architectural, biological and geological assemblages are the vectors through which this trauma spreads. Trauma is not merely about processes of wounding and scarring, but also about the response to violent incursions (indeed, wounding and scarring are already such responses); it is a distributed event, not merely echoed or referenced in the repetition-compulsions, but continued, prolonged, propagated.