The Atrocity Organization: JG Ballard & the Technologies of Psychopathology Management

:: Tuesday November 10th :: 5PM
:: Foundry, London :: 86 Great Eastern Street ::


A kind of waiting madness, like a state of undeclared war, haunted the office buildings of the business park. – J.G. Ballard, Super-Cannes

As a novelist and fiction SF writer, JG Ballard developed one of the most dynamic (and disturbing) exploration of collective psychopathology, excesses in organizational life, and the collapsing of the Western imaginary. From the fetish of the car crash to obscene hidden violence of the business park, internment camps to masochist fantasies directed through the mediated form of Ronald Reagan’s body, Ballard’s work ventures into territories that are disconcerting to explore, but from which one can learn a great deal. Rather than assuming that disorder and excess is a condition that management and organization must respond to, this event will explore the proposition that what might really be psychopathological is the desire to impose order upon an inherently ungovernable and excessive condition.

Participants in this event include Debra Shaw (University of East London), Tomasz Vine (University of Essex), Ann Rippin (University of Bristol), and Erika Biddle (York University).

Organized by Stevphen Shukaitis & Peter Fleming.
Sponsored by Minor Compositions (http://www.minorcompositions.info) and the
Standing Conference on Organizational Symbolism events funds