COMMUNITY PURIFIED BY COM-MUTINY: REMAPPING THE PATH TO DYSTOPIA IN J.G. BALLARD'S HIGH-RISE

Full text

Anahtar sözcükler
J. G. Ballard; Richard Sennett; High-
Rise; Arınmış Cemaatler, Distopya
J. G. Ballard; Richard Sennett; High-
Rise; Puried Communities, Dystopia
Keywords
Öz
Bu çalışmanın amacı J. G. Ballard'ın High-Rise adlı romanında şiddete giden yolu
belirlemektir. Bilim ve distopya unsurlarını geleceğe ve başka bir yere değil de buraya ve
şimdiye yerleştiren bir roman olarak High-Rise, okuru kendi inşa edilmiş çevresinden
yabancılaştırır. Odak noktasında homojen bir topluluk/cemaat bulunan roman kentlerin
mekânsal olarak ayrışmasına neden olan kentsel söylemleri sorgular. Romanın yerinin
Londra olması nedeniyle kurmaca ve gerçeklik arasındaki geçişkenlikten dolayı bu
çalışma ilk olarak edebiyat ve mekânsal beşeri bilimler arasında yok olan sınırları ve
sonrasında da ütopya ve distopya arasında yok olan sınırları kısaca tartışacaktır. İkinci
olarak, Richard Sennett'in kent anlayışı kuramsal bir çerçeve olarak kullanılarak
toplumsal ilişkilerde homojenliğin romanda yol açtığı olumsuz neticeler belirlenecektir.
Üçüncü olarak ise, can sıkıntısı olgusuna ve işbirliği yetersizliğine vurgu yapılarak güvenli
olduğu farz edilen topluluğun dağılmasında ekonomik refahın rolü ortaya koyulacaktır.
Bu şekilde, okurun gündelik çevresinde gizli ihtimalleri ortaya çıkaran distopyanın uyarıcı
yönü kullanılarak Ballard çalışmalarına katkıda bulunulması amaçlanmaktadır.
This paper aims to map the path leading to violence in J. G. Ballard's High-Rise. Being a
science ction and dystopian ction which locates these elements, not in the future and
somewhere else, but here and now, the novel defamiliarizes the reader from his/her built
environment. With a homogenous community at its center, the novel problematizes the
urban discourses that culminate in spatial segregation of the cities. Due to the
transgressive nature of the novel between ction and reality, as London is the location of
the novel, this paper will shortly deal with the blurring boundaries between the literature
and the spatial humanities, and those between utopia and dystopia. Secondly, the
negative outcomes of the homogeneity in social relations will be identied in the novel by
using Richard Sennett's urbanism as a theoretical framework. Thirdly, the role of the
afuence in the disintegration of the supposedly safe community will be revealed with an
emphasis on the phenomenon of boredom and lack of cooperation. In this way, the paper
will seek to contribute to Ballardian studies, using the cautionary aspect of the dystopia
that unearths the latent possibilities buried in the quotidian environment.
Abstract
DOI: 10.33171/dtcfjournal.2020.60.1.6
Makale Bilgisi
Gönderildiği tarih: 1 Mart 2020
Kabul edildiği tarih: 27 Nisan 2020
Yayınlanma tarihi: 22 Haziran 2020
Article Info
Date submitted: 1 March 2020
Date accepted: 27 April 2020
Date published: 22 June 2020
DTCF Dergisi 60.1 (2020): 97-118
COMMUNITY PURIFIED BY COM-MUTINY: REMAPPING THE
1
PATH TO DYSTOPIA IN J.G. BALLARD'S HIGH-RISE
ORTAK İSYANLA ARINAN CEMAAT: J. G. BALLARD'IN HIGH-RISE
ROMANINDA DİSTOPYAYA GİDEN YOLU YENİDEN ÇİZMEK
İsmail Serdar ALTAÇ
Arş. Gör. Dr., Nevşehir Hacı Bektaş Veli Üniversitesi,
Fen Edebiyat Fakültesi, Batı Dilleri ve Edebiyatları Bölümü,
İngiliz Dili ve Edebiyatı Anabilim Dalı, serdaraltac@nevsehir.edu.tr
97
1 This article has been extracted from the author's Ph.D. dissertation entitled “The
Representation of Urban Space in J. G. Ballard's Novels” submitted to Ankara University's
Graduate School of Social Sciences in December 2018.
Introduction: The Shifting Boundaries of Utopian Imagination and Dystopian
Reality
The participants of the Bastille Day military parade in Paris in July 2019
witnessed a hitherto unprecedented scene. Franky Zapata, with his jet-powered y
board hovering over the conventional French troops, became the focus of attraction,
displaying a futuristic scene reminiscent of science ction movies. It has also been
announced that the French Ministry of Defense would hire a team of science ction
writers, the “red team”, to anticipate the future threats to the national security which

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the military authorities may not predict. This anecdote is just one of the myriads of
examples in which fiction breaks away from its ontological boundaries. Architecture
or wider urban planning occupies no exceptional position in the shifting boundaries
between fiction and reality, the reciprocity that ignites the interest of this paper. The
resurgence of interest in the interrelatedness of these cultural forms finds a firm
foothold with the publication of Geocriticism: Real and Fictional Spaces by Bertrand
Westphal in 2007. Informed by postmodernism which has a penchant for violating
ontological boundaries, he notes that “[l]iterature is not a subordinate field, operating
in the service of other humanities and social sciences, but literature can certainly help
them in their projects” (Westphal 103). Especially, those works of literature which have
actual geographical references provide the geographers, urban planners or architects
with a plethora of materials which unveil “new virtualities hitherto unexpressed, which
then interact with the real according to the hypertextual logic of interfaces” (Westphal
103). Despite certain methodological differences from Westphal, geocriticism, as
understood by Robert T. Tally, Jr., undermines the hierarchical relations between
fiction and geography. By what he calls literary cartography, Tally contends that an
author is essentially a cartographer in that “narrative […] is a form of world-making
as much as it is a mode of world presenting, which in the end may come up to the same
thing” (Tally 49). Hence, it may be argued that geocritical venture to erase the
boundaries between spatial social sciences and literature equates the role of the
author to that of an architect or planner.
Therefore, geocritically speaking, Ballard can be read both as an
architect/planner and as an author. An architectural critic goes so far as to say that
“[w]e have more to learn from the fiction of J. G. Ballard […] than we do from Le
Corbusier” in BLDGBLOG to appreciate Ballard’s anticipatory skills regarding the
trends that may shape the urban space (Manaugh). Published in 1975, J. G. Ballard’s
High-Rise is a dystopian novel which reflects the socio-spatial trends of its period
through a distorting mirror. The novel relates the story of a gated-community resided
by the middle and upper-middle-class individuals who descend into barbarism for no
discernible reason. Though Ballard snapshots a scene from the 1970s, the kind of
community he delineates in High-Rise has cast a long shadow on the urban planning
of the subsequent decades. The rising number of these social formations in the 21st
century testifies to the topicality of the spatial form with which Ballard deals. Blakely
and Snyder outline a typology of these communities as lifestyle, prestige and security,
though they may also complement each other in any given gated-community (57-58).
Despite the differences in their typologies, several works have indicated that these

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social formations are results of an urban fear or fear of crime (Bauman, Liquid
Modernity 94; Blakely and Snyder 57; Caldeira 254; Lemanski 290; Low 262; Zukin
2). However, High-Rise challenges the taken for granted assumptions of the residents
of the gated communities regarding safety and crime by locating the violence in the
center of the community. This paper argues that homogeneity, affluence and search
for order are the very reasons contributing to the dystopic atmosphere depicted in
the novel. It will try to map the path leading to dystopia by using Richard Sennett’s
urbanism as a projection.
The novel has received much acclaim from the critics and proved to be rich
material for criticism from various points of view. Criticism on Ballard’s fiction
broadly falls into two categories, which also shows the sources of Ballardian fiction.
One strain of criticism evaluates his works from a psychological and psychiatric
perspective. Bradshaw and Brown’s study (2018) can be listed under this category,
for, drawing from R. D. Laing, and also Lauren Berlant, they argue that the novel is
not a dystopia but an account of reaching a better society. In a similar vein, Oramus
(2007) reads the novel from a Jungian perspective and states that the novel
eventually manifests an ironic utopia through a delineation of a “regress to the state
of social animals cherishing violence and wayward sexuality” (110). She argues that
the novel shows an attempt to reach the Jungian ideal of complete Self. The second
vein of criticism deals with the sociological aspect of the novel, putting a special
emphasis on the urban transformations and their social results. Within this
framework, Hewitt and Graham’s study (2014) delves into the social connotations of
verticality of the high-rise and shows the contribution of verticality to the sense of
power felt by the characters. Hatherley (2016) explores the historicity of the text as
well as its film adaptation by juxtaposing urban discourses and practices of the 1970s
and those represented in the novel. David Ian Paddy (2015) explores the ways by
which the novel is informed by the colonial and postcolonial discourses in a period
when immigration into the UK gained pace. Zang et al. (2008) explain the reason of
the dystopic outcome in the novel as the clash of, in Lefebvre’s terms, spatial
practices and representations of space. This study can be considered to be in the
second vein of criticism, though the psychological reasons and results of the social
shifts are also included to further substantiate the main argument. Of the studies
listed above, Zang et al.’s analysis is closest to this paper in that it aims to unearth
the reason of the dystopic outcome; however, what is novel in this study is that the
function of social homogeneity and affluence is examined to demonstrate the reason
of violence in the novel.

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Richard Sennett’s urbanism, which constitutes the main theoretical
framework of this study, draws from a wide array of disciplines including sociology,
psychology, fashion, history, and architecture. What makes Sennett’s approach to
the purified communities so invaluable in this study is its understanding of social
heterogeneities and disorder as maturing and civilizing agents for the individuals. His
The Uses of Disorder (1970), written in the same decade as High-Rise, warns the
reader of the oversimplification of the social sphere as a result of spatial
homogenization and spatially escapist orientations observed especially among the
affluent milieu of the Western societies. The work is based on an extended metaphor
between adolescent behavior and the members of affluent homogeneous
communities. According to Sennett, adolescence is a period when an individual takes
lifelong decisions and “assumes the lessons of experience without undergoing the
actual experience itself” (The Uses of Disorder… 20). Extending this approach to the
members of the purified communities, he proposes that the supposedly homogeneous
communities suffer from illusions of coherence whereas they are polarized due to
their lack of common experiential frame in reality. In this regard, Sennett’s
interpretation of the purified communities resembles Benedict Anderson’s
assessment of the nations as being imagined entities in that both emphasize the
imagined unity of discrete personalities and exclusivity of the communal body (6-7).
However, unlike Anderson, Sennett believes that this false image of the self is exactly
what jeopardizes the coherence among the community members, which renders the
given social body stillborn or ready to disintegrate when an internal issue that
compels the members to negotiate the differences among themselves. When the
homogeneous order becomes the defining characteristic of a community, claims
Sennett, “the escalation of discord into violence comes to be […] the means by which
‘law and order’ should be maintained” (The Uses of Disorder 45). The process can be
better understood by what he calls “destructive Gemeinschaft” in The Fall of Public
Man which differs from The Uses of Disorder in that the latter is an ahistorical account
of homogeneous communities. In this work, he relates the rise and demise of public
space with references to material social life and psychology beginning from the 18th
century down to the late 20th century. “The city,” says Sennett “is that human
settlement in which strangers are most likely to meet” (The Fall of Public Man 264).
This obvious explanation has, in fact, quite subtle ramifications in terms of the
nascent communities within the urban space inasmuch as Sennett thinks that it is
the anonymity of the urban public space that is the essence of civility, a word which
has a common etymology with “city”. However, a culture of intimacy coupled with

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narcissism violates the boundary between public and private:
The reigning belief today is that closeness between persons is a moral
good. The reigning aspiration today is to develop individual personality
through experiences of closeness and warmth with others. The
reigning myth today is that the evils of society can all be understood
as evils of impersonality, alienation and coldness. (Sennett, The Fall of
Public Man 67).
The reaction to the impersonality of the public space is a pursuit of an environment
where one seeks a collective image of the self, in other words, Gemeinschaft. What
makes these communities “destructive” is their obsession with the identities, which
has two immediate outcomes. Firstly, in these communities, “the shared imagery
becomes deterrent to shared action” (Sennett, The Fall of Public Man 223). Since these
communities take the social coherence for granted due to their collective identity, the
need to act becomes meaningless for their members. Secondly, these communities,
which seem to be the bodies of fraternity, paradoxically paves way for the fratricide
in that the question of authentic belonging to the fraternity is never settled, leading
a process of everlasting internal exclusion.
As to the 20th century, Sennett argues that “one of the unintended
consequences of modern capitalism is that it has strengthened the value of place,
aroused a longing for community” (The Corrosion… 138). However, the utopian
characteristic of these attempts per se is what makes them problematic, which, more
often than not, has put their desirability into question and even has blurred the
boundaries separating the utopia and the dystopia. Karl Popper highlights the side
effects of utopianism, considering that although it is based on rationalism, its
rationalism is “self-defeating and it leads to violence” (5). In a way that can be
comparable to Popper, J. G. Ballard, in an interview with H. U. Obrist in 2003,
dismisses any utopian hope, referring to Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia as the
epitomes of utopia which transformed into dystopia (“Nothing is real, everything is
fake” 393). Similarly, Northrop Frye illustrates an imaginary dialogue between a
reader and a utopia-writer where the former repudiates the utopia due to its
restrictive quality and the latter makes an apology of the utopia, stating that “What
you mean is that you don’t want your present ritual habits disturbed. My utopia would
feel different from inside, where the ritual habits would be customary and so carry with
them a sense of freedom rather than constraint” (329). This dialogue is essentially
precipitated by the discrepancy between fictitious unquestionability of a fictitious
community and the inability of the real reader to integrate himself/herself to a

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framework produced by the utopian writer. However, although this dialogue is based
on the reader’s interaction with the fiction, the 20th century witnessed a boom in the
number of gated-communities which promised to present a better life or a lost
paradise to their customers. A toponymical investigation on the gated-communities
in South Africa reveals that 48,5% of the names of these communities have
connotations of environment, peacefulness, other-worldliness and rusticity (Spocter
335). Though located within the cities or near the cities these social formations have
had only tentative ties with the cities due to a perceived danger associated with the
public spaces of the cities. While walling historically served to the protection of the
cities as a whole, “the walls […] now crisscross the city itself, and in a multitude of
directions” (Bauman, Globalization: Human Consequences 48). However, whether the
issue of security is fully achieved within these communities continues to be a topic
of discussion. For instance, Addington and Rennison report that although the gated
communities may diminish the incidence of burglaries, they may also provide with
an environment where the “victim is ‘locked in’ with the offender” (187). Simon warns
that the excessive levels of perceived danger and the resultantly built over-controlled
environments may actually provoke the people to disturb the public order (203). In
much the same vein as Simon, but years before him, J. G. Ballard alerts that:
[In the suburbs] the only freedom to be found is in madness. I mean,
in a completely sane world, madness is the only freedom! That’s what’s
coming. That’s why suburbs interest me. […] Where one’s almost got
to get up in the morning and make a resolution to perform some sort
of deviant or antisocial act, some perverse act, even if it’s sort of kicking
the dog, in order to establish one’s own freedom. Suburbs are very
sinister places, contrary to what most people imagine. (“An Interview
with JGB” 154).
Towards a Purified Community
The quote above reveals much about Ballard’s authorship. His fiction’s
distinctive characteristic is its ability to looking the quotidian scenes through a
dystopifying mirror. His authorship resembles the work of a jigsaw puzzle producer:
He prints an ordinary scene from the reader’s environment; cuts the pieces in such
a way that he can reconstruct pieces together in a completely different way, without
any mismatch, to exhibit a dystopic alternative of the original scene. Therefore,
Ballard’s novels concretize what Bertrand Westphal claims as literature’s potentiality
to expose the possibilities buried in the reader’s environment. Being one of the
epitomes of Ballardian fiction, High-Rise does not deal with an architectural form in

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a distant future but with the possible social consequences of a building enabled by
the then-current science and technology. For this reason, though there is not a
specific date in which the novel is set, the technology represented in the novel
strongly implies that it takes place during the 1970s. Historically, the publication of
the novel coincides with the rapid transformations taking place in the urban fabric
and the skyline of London. The historian Roy Porter assesses that in London “[t]he
high-rise heyday between 1964 and 1974 saw 384 tower blocks being built” (353).
However, when these high-rises were built, they were not designed to cater to the
needs of the middle or the upper-middle classes as in Ballard’s novel. Referring to
one of those buildings, Owen Hatherley indicates that “when Ballard wrote the novel,
it would have been hard to imagine any of his cast of solicitors, architects, doctors,
dentists, documentary filmmakers and pilots walking anywhere near Balfron Tower,
let alone living in it” (71). This may give the reader a clue of why the novel can be
classified as “science fiction”. Suvin (2016) defines this genre as one that uses the
technique of “cognitive estrangement”, a term that means the use of a ‘novum’,
something alien to the reader’s empirical environment yet not completely illogical or
against the laws of nature. If it had not been for the technology that enabled the
construction of a tower building, installation of elevators, pools and other facilities
that keep the residents inside the building, the distinctive environment that unfolds
the violent events in the novel would not have been possible. The building itself is a
‘novum’ in that the upper middle class luxury residences were not introduced to
London then. However, as it is highlighted above, Ballard is known for his mastery
for analyzing the trajectories shaping the web of social relations under the influence
of the technology of his own day. Accordingly, not long after the publication of the
novel, was London introduced with high-rises that appealed to the rich white-collar
professionals, one of them being Cascades designed by CZWG architects and,
curiously, built on the Isle of Dogs where Ballard’s fictional tower is located.
High-Rise questions the spatially secessionist tendencies of the affluent milieu
who regard the public space of the city as a source of danger or negligible space rather
than as somewhere they can acquire experience to mature. The meaning attached to
the building by the residents has utopian connotations as it can be understood from
Wilder who calls it “our hanging paradise” (Ballard, High-Rise 15). This characteristic
of the building, which also implies the detachment of it from the rest of the city, is
largely ensured through the homogeneous constitution of the community:

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The two thousand tenants formed a virtually homogeneous collection
of well-to-do professional people […] By the usual financial and
educational yardsticks they were probably closer to each other than
the members of any conceivable social mix […] In short, they
constituted a perfect background into which Laing could merge
invisibly. (Ballard, High-Rise 6).
The narrator focuses on three characters in the building. One of them is Richard
Wilder, a television producer who resides on the second floor with his wife and
children. He plans to shoot a documentary concerning the psychology of living in the
high-rise building. The other pivotal character is Anthony Royal, the architect of the
building who lives on the top floor with his wife, Anne. Though he plans to live there
temporarily at the beginning, he gradually grows fond of the nascent violence in the
building and lives in his penthouse like a clan leader until his murder by Wilder. The
other main character is Robert Laing, a physician who lives on the 25th floor. He is
notable for his reserved and indifferent demeanor and of the three focal characters
Laing is the one who survives at the end. Laing has a distinctive function in the novel
in that the narrator discloses the motivations of a typical high-rise dweller for living
there mainly in the chapters focusing on Laing. Through his move to high-rise, Laing
bypasses any kind of confrontation with the differences in the city by further
confining the limits of his, to borrow Lefebvre’s term, “spatial practices”: “when he
sold the lease of his Chelsea house and moved to the security of the high-rise, he
travelled […] away from crowded streets, traffic holds-ups, rush-hour journeys on the
Underground” (Ballard, High-Rise 4). However, his attitude to the heterogeneous
constitution of the city becomes a basic blueprint by which he organizes all his future
relations in the building. At the beginning of the novel, he has a certain level of
mutual respect and understanding with his neighbors. However, this environment is
a rather forced one than one which he and his neighbors construct. The social bonds
he forges are continually put to question through his withdrawn attitude. Although
he seems to be on good terms with Charlotte Melville, his immediate neighbor, and
Wilder who lives on the second floor, his relations with them can be defined by a level
of distance that prevents him from any kind of cooperation or affection. Being an
attractive widow, Charlotte attracts Laing’s attention, but, as in many other topics,
Laing evaluates his relationship with her with a pinch of salt, and even suspects that
she aims to use him for her interests like taking care of her child when she is at work.
It would be ironical, or even contradictory, for him not to have these suspicions, for
his initial move into high-rise is, in fact, a move behind his threshold. One of the

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early dialogues he held with Charlotte Melville, who shares her grievances over the
exclusion of the children from the swimming pool, reveals his mental attitude about
the world outside his own threshold:
“The terms of our leases guarantee us equal access to all facilities,”
Charlotte explained. “We have decided to set up a parents’ action
group.” “Doesn’t that leave me out?”, [says Laing]. “We need a doctor
on the committee. The pediatric argument would come much more
forcefully from you, Robert.” “Well, perhaps…” Laing hesitated to
commit himself. (Ballard, High-Rise 16).
Laing’s equivocation in this scene is largely an outcome of narcissistic disorder in
which, as Richard Sennett claims, one is preoccupied with “what this person, that
event means to me” (The Fall of Public Man 8). The intrusion of reality into Laing’s
illusions of self-sufficiency and completeness serves as a source of irritation and
anxiety. The same illusions can be observed in Laing’s notion of the high-rise as a
utopian enclave where social rapprochement is taken for granted by means of the
supposed homogeneity of the residents as well as the functional architecture of the
building. According to this conviction, the high-rise is thought to be a building where
one is not supposed to confront any discord, let alone bother to settle it. This is the
very reason why Laing keeps constantly being “surprised” (Ballard, High-Rise 8, 20,
25, 28) as the bickering in the building unfolds into fiercer clashes. The first chapters
of the novel portray an environment in which a forced peace gradually leads to the
disintegration of social order. The first chapter informs the reader that the last flat in
the building is occupied and the residents celebrate this with parties. However, it
should also be noted that the name of the first chapter is “Critical Mass”, a term that
refers to, amongst others, the necessary amount of material that can start the
reaction in nuclear weapons. This reference is significant because it implies that
peace is an illusion in the community and the residents are prone to ‘explode’.
The above-given dialogue between Laing and Melville unearths not only Laing’s
social shortcomings but those of Melville, as well. Her call for help from Laing, not as
a neighbor but as a doctor, testifies to her inability to navigate herself, without
professional assistance, on slightly challenging terrain. Her predicament can be
considered to be a result of what Jürgen Habermas would have called “technicization
of the lifeworld” or “colonization of the lifeworld” in The Theory of Communicative
Action, for she lets a purely rationalist mechanism replace her social agency.
Furthermore, her residence in a building that fosters the ideals of functionalism is
reflective of her lacking social competences. Just as she needs a pediatric argument

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for her right by contract, she needs the technical knowledge of Anthony Royal, the
architect of the building, who promises a purified community as well as a functional
building, to avoid any friction in her social relations. The residents rely so much on
the technical knowledge of Royal that he becomes a god-like figure who dwells on a
place that “had somehow preserved him from the ordinary process of aging” (High-Rise
31). Drawing from the studies of the psychologists, Sennett identifies three patterns
of avoidance assumed by the adolescents whom he equates with the seekers of purity
in the urban space. These patterns can be observed in the novel. These may be
summarized as resorting to a higher authority in one’s desire to control in order not
to confront surprises, the denial of regret in favor of previously made decisions and
the search for ideal partner reflecting one’s own image rather than a distinct
personality (The Uses of Disorder 14-15). The first of these patterns explains Melville’s
attitude which, in Sennett’s terms, freezes the personality in adolescence and inhibits
the intrusion of new experiences in one’s life. When the authority or bureaucratic
power ceases to exist, she and the other residents of the building are unable to cope
with the problems they face. For instance, the solution of the problems in the building
is left to a manager’s office acting as a third party whose closure would later serve to
exacerbation of the hostilities among the residents. Suffering from “moral
minimalism”, as M.P. Baumgartner calls it, they are not equipped with enough social
competences that will prevent the disputes from transforming into physical violence.
The second pattern can be observed in the adherence of the residents to the
high-rise even as the trivial disputes in the building culminate into fierce hostilities,
including murder, vandalism, and rape. Despite the severity of the atrocities everyone
inflicts upon each other, none of the residents are neither inclined to move out of the
building nor to inform legal authorities to call for an intervention. The building itself
becomes the only city where they can maintain a rigid group identity. The narrator’s
depiction of the high-rise as a “vertical city” (Ballard, High-Rise 4) further testifies to
the removal of London from the mental maps of the residents. As the hostilities
escalate, Helen Wilder, one of the lower floor residents, asks her husband, Richard
Wilder, if they should sell the apartment (Ballard High-Rise 60), which strikes as the
first sensible commentary after so much violence. However, the narrator immediately
mortifies this assumption:
Helen, of course, was thinking in terms of social advancement, of
moving in effect to a ‘better neighborhood’, away from this lower-class
suburb to those smarter residential districts somewhere between 15th
and 30th floors, where the corridors were clean and the children would

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not have to play in the streets, where tolerance and sophistication
civilized the air. (Ballard High-Rise 60-61).
Although Richard understands her proposal in a literal sense, he refuses to leave the
building, musing that this decision would be a “failure to deal on equal terms with his
professional neighbours” (Ballard, High-Rise 60). Thus, adopting one of the patterns
of avoidance, Richard opts for his initial decision to be a part of the community at
the expense of becoming a savage towards the end of the novel.
The last pattern of avoidance, seeking one’s own image in one’s relationships,
is inscribed in the homogeneous structure of the building and is closely associated
with what Sennett describes as destructive Gemeinschaft. The sociological account of
Georg Simmel whose point of view is shared by Sennett as to the matter of conflict is
highly elucidative in understanding the constructive function of conflict. Simmel
claims that “people who have many common features often do one another worse or
“worser” wrong than complete strangers do […] We confront the stranger with whom
we share neither characteristics nor broader interests, objectively; we hold our
personalities in reserve” (Conflict 44; also see Coser 68). The characters think that
they enter into an impersonal realm when they enter the building, much to their
relief; but they are wrong. The impersonality is left behind in the city which they have
deserted. The realm they have entered is somewhere they seek to find those people
similar to themselves. The novel undermines the assumption that any conflict arising
from differences is likely to lead to violence and emphasizes that sameness in the
communities is not a state of being but an endless process of becoming whereby the
shunning of the “unlike me” continues until the depletion of all social ties. This
orientation may also be explained by the term “narcissism of minor differences” that
Freud uses to designate the conflicts between the “communities with adjoining
territories, and related to each other” (72). Although Freud downplays the possible
catastrophic results of this phenomenon, considering that it provides with a
“harmless satisfaction of the inclination to aggression, by means of which cohesion
between the members of the community is made easier” (72), the novel reveals the
violence-prone aspect of the sameness. Since homogeneity becomes the lens through
which the residents scrutinize the world, any minor difference comes to be viewed
through a magnifying glass. For instance, despite the supposed homogeneity of the
building, the residents expeditiously label each other as those with children and
those with pets and interpersonal relations begin to be organized according to this
principle. This is also the reason why the culprit of the infrastructural deficiencies is
not deemed Royal, the architect of the building, but the other residents, having minor

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differences than the self. Consequently, for instance, despite the ethnical purity of
the community, a new racist discourse is directed against the other neighbors by
Steele who is Laing’s next-door neighbour. Steele, like many other residents of the
building, watches for opportunities to vilify the neighbors living on the lower floors.
When he expresses his grievances over the misuse of the electrical infrastructure by
the lower floor residents, Steele assumes such a hateful mode of speech that Laing
considers he was talking “as if he were describing a traditionally feckless band of
migrant workers rather than his well-to-do neighbours” (Ballard, High-Rise 28).
Although Laing’s lifestyle seems to be a source of irritation for the Steeles at the
outset, due to the identifications forged with floor height they eventually welcome
Laing and exclude the other residents. On the one hand, Laing’s observation testifies
to the overall racist discourse that settled in Great Britain especially during the 1960s
with the arrival of Commonwealth immigrants, which is one of the raison d’etre of the
purified community; on the other hand, Steele’s repugnance indicates that a
community construction which excludes “misfits” ironically produces new “misfits”
to be shunned. Since the kind of community in High-Rise is essentially a destructive
Gemeinschaft that is intimately related to the narcissistic obsession, not the collective
experiences, the infrastructural deficiencies which are apparently the source of
irritations are forgotten during the course of the novel and the violence among them
becomes one without reason.
This obsession with identity is also the reason why any reader of High Rise is
likely to fail to give a detailed plot summary of the novel. Any attempt to do it usually
ends up with the description of the building and the nascent barbarism in a
modernist tower block. Ballard’s own interferences into the narrative to do
commentaries through certain characters or the narrator play a role in this problem,
which, at the same time, confirms David Ian Paddy’s observation that Ballard’s
oeuvre can be classified as “novels of ideas” (2). However, particularly in the case of
High-Rise, the absence of any shared experience needed to build a sustainable
community is what eventually leads to the reader’s inability to summarize a proper
plotline. The experiential frame that will enable the formation of social history is
simply missing in High-Rise. Both the motivations of the characters for moving into
the building and the functionality of the building that minimizes human agency
prevent the ‘fermentation’ of a civilized environment and leave the residents
unguarded against their own impulses.

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The vertical organization of space further consolidates the narcissism based
on minor differences, though it cannot be considered the sole reason for the
breakdown of the social structure. As to the social connotations of the verticality in
the novel, Hewitt and Graham underline that “[it] highlights and concretises
inequities” (929). Although the residents are completely white-collar members of the
society, the building has its own “‘proletariat’ of film technicians, air-hostesses and
the like” (Ballard High-Rise 69- 70). The residents’ continual identification with the
floors or the narrator’s identification of the residents with the floors on which they
live is a result of a strong sense of hierarchical order needed to identify and negotiate
with the stranger. In an environment where the narcissism of minor differences holds
sway, the differences based on floor height catalyze the disintegration of social
structure. For instance, the residents begin to wear badges signaling their floor height
when the hostilities escalate (Ballard, High-Rise 141). In her seminal work, World of
Strangers: Order and Action in Urban Public Space, Lyn Lofland traces how the people
identify the strangers in a chaotic urban space from past to present day and she
claims that while the appearances were what distinguished people from each other
during the pre-industrial era, “[i]n the modern city, appearances are chaotic, space is
ordered” (82). The chaotic nature of the appearances stems from the mass production
of the clothes and lack of sumptuary laws which were in effect, for instance, during
Elizabethan England. Thus, the spatial ordering becomes a politics through which
one conducts his/her relations with the strangers. On a macro scale, the building
contributes much to the spatial ordering of the city by filtering out “undesirable”
members of the society. However, at a micro-level, this ordering does not stop, for
this ordering has become the basic blueprint by which the residents organize their
web of social relations. Thus, the vertical structure of the building consolidates the
implementation of this blueprint as an agent enforcing hierarchies rather than the
formation of a homogeneous community. The high-rise depicted in the novel produces
a horizontal segregation in the wider urban fabric and also a vertical segregation
inside itself: “The mysterious movement of the air-hostesses […], particularly on the
floors above her own clearly unsettled Alice, as if they in some way interfered with the
natural order of the building, […] entirely based on floor height” (Ballard, High-Rise 11).
Laing’s sister, Alice, is just one of the spatially obsessed residents. As the novel
unfolds the all floors transform into strongholds to be defended against the lower
floor residents. These internal divisions strongly echo Sennett’s dismissal of the
purified communities which he regards as destructive by its very nature:

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The narrower the scope of a community formed by collective
personality, the more destructive does the experience of fraternal
feeling becomes. […] [T]he very act of sharing becomes ever more
centered upon decisions about who can belong and who cannot. […]
The more intimate, however, the less sociable. For this process of
fraternity by exclusion of “outsiders” never ends, since a collective
image of “us” never solidifies. Fragmentation and internal division is the
very logic of this fraternity, as the units of people who really belong get
smaller and smaller. It is a version of fraternity which leads to fratricide.
(The Uses of Disorder 266). [italics mine]
The uneven distribution of the public spaces, too, if not the verticality itself alone,
further consolidates the self-defeating nature of the fraternity. Drawing from Frank
Lloyd Wright, Sennett voices the need for evenly distributed public spaces rather than
public spaces located on the top or the ground level in the planning of high-rises (The
Uses of Disorder 158). The spatial organization of Ballard’s building completely
dismisses this requirement which may alleviate the socio-spatial tensions. In a
building ridden with hierarchical consciousness, arranging the top floor as the only
internal public space of the building is likely to create controversy. For instance,
Royal calls Laing to the upper floors to play squash. However, his true aim is to
observe the reactions of his guests on the terrace to a lower floor resident. Indeed,
the elegantly dressed “well-to-do” guests throw menacing looks towards Laing whose
presence in a “private domain” seems puzzling (Ballard, High-Rise 19). The
banishment of the children from playing in the sculpture garden (Ballard, High-Rise
46) which had been designed by Royal specifically for the use of the children (Ballard,
High-Rise 103) is another example of strong identification with the floor heights.
These examples have proven that securing homogeneity becomes an unattainable
goal in the supposedly purified communities as a result of identity obsession.
However, there is also another factor that subtly undermines the social bonds and
social organization in the novel. The following section aims to ascertain to what extent
the affluence of residents is responsible for the violence in the novel.
Social Consequences of Affluence
During a lecture at Harvard University Graduate School of Design, Sennett
points out that “[i]nstead of making poor communities rich, we should learn from them”,
implying the positive social outcomes of scarcity (“The Open City”). In a similar vein,
Ballard states that “Marxism is a social philosophy for the poor, whereas what we
need nowadays is a social philosophy for the rich, which is what most people are” (“J.

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G. Ballard.” (an interview with Jon Savage)…” 108). By “rich”, Ballard refers to an
arriving class which is not related to manual labor power nor has the ownership of
the means of production; yet has enough affluence to fulfill their consumerist desires.
Ballard’s preoccupation with this class can also be observed in his Cocaine Nights
(1996), in which economic scarcity is simply removed from the lives of the characters.
In this novel, Sanger, a psychiatrist, makes a crucial prediction concerning such
communities:
[People] will retire in their late thirties, with fifty years of idleness in
front of them. […] But how do you energize people, give them some
sense of community? […] Politics are a pastime for a professional caste
and fail to excite the rest of us. Religious belief demands a vast effort
of imaginative and emotional commitment […]. Only one thing is left
which can rouse people, threaten them directly and force them to act
together […] Crime and transgressive behavior. (180).
Although the characters in High-Rise are not the retired individuals to whom Sanger
refers, the hours of the day they pass in their workplaces gradually diminish during
the course of the novel, which indicates that working to earn money is no longer a
pressing issue in their lives. The lack of materialistic needs (food, shelter, etc.) works
in two interrelated ways in the novel: firstly, it leads to boredom, which, in turn,
instigates the acts of violence that, according to the narrator, “represented a stand
against de-cerebration” (Ballard, High-Rise 69), which is also in line with Sanger’s
commentary and secondly, fostering the ideals of individualism, it leads to a lack of
cooperation between the residents.
Boredom and idleness as a result of abundance and technology, the sine qua
non for many utopian texts and contexts, are essentially recent phenomena that are
intimately related to modernity. While the phenomenon of boredom had been a
privilege of the noblemen and courtiers, “in today’s society [it] has been universalized
and democratized” (Kustermans and Ringmar 1776). Drawing a pessimistic picture
of rising affluence, the economist John M. Keynes warns that man will soon face a
problem as to “how to use his freedom from pressing economic cares, how to occupy
the leisure, which science and compound interest will have won for him, to live wisely
and agreeably and well” (367). The community in High-Rise faces exactly this
problem. As their daily hours of work diminish and as they cannot find anything to
dedicate themselves, the boredom from which they suffer leads them to socially
unacceptable behavior. As the narrator states, these people “[were] content to do
nothing but sit in his over-priced apartment, watch television with the sound turned

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down, and wait for his neighbours to make a mistake” (Ballard, High-Rise 44). Since
boredom appears to be one of the reasons for violence in the building, the neighbors
assault each other not for anything that will eventually settle the disputes but for the
sensation seeking. Furthermore, several studies carried out on the relation between
the boredom and socially unacceptable behavior indicate that the boredom may
result in aggression (Baumeister and Campbell 219), impulsivity (Watt and
Vodanovich 689) and disregard for rules (McGiboney and Carter 741). Not only the
interpersonal relations but also the relations between the residents and the
architecture of the building confirm these observations. The building, with its flat,
geometric and unadorned surfaces, represents the boredom of the residents and the
building itself falls prey to the sensation-seeking of its residents, as it is well
illustrated when the walls are begun to be aerosolled by the residents (Ballard, High-
Rise 55-56). As it were, the violence in the building is a mutiny against the built
environment. However, the aim of the mutiny is not the establishment of an
alternative social order but the breakdown of the order itself. The mutiny is against
the order that the modernist planning prescribes and it is also against the utopian
aspirations of 20th century massive urban projects. Moreover, Royal’s Janus-faced
position regarding the order of the building ceases to be a paradox and comes to be
explained in a relation of causality. Although he is one of the architects who designed
the modernist apartment building whose most salient characteristics are order and
hygiene, he gradually exposes his contempt for these traits. Designing an impeccable
order is a purposive act that would later invite violence into the community life. That
is the reason why he thinks that the “breakdown of the high-rise might well mark its
success rather than failure” (Ballard, High-Rise 96). Correlatively, the homogeneity of
the community members fuels the urge to violate the rules. Sennett explains this
paradox in the affluent communities as follows:
[T]he eruption of social tension becomes a situation in which the
ultimate methods of aggression, violent force and reprisal, seem to
become not only justified, but life preserving. It is a terrible paradox
that the escalation of discord into violence comes to be, in these
communities, the means by which “law and order” should be
maintained. (The Uses of Disorder 45).
Although Sennett highlights a need for disorder for the urban dwellers to grow
mature, he restricts it to those situations in which aggression can be diverted to the
objects or to those disagreements that can be settled through negotiations. However,
the disorder which the residents of the high-rise attempt to create is not a

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“Sennettian” disorder in that there is no safety valve that may prevent the aggression
from transforming into physical violence, for they, for reasons discussed in the
previous sections, do not have the social competence to keep this transformation in
check.
Another outcome of the homogeneity and affluence is the lack of social
cooperation. Supported also by the credit system2, the characters are able to own
anything they wish to have. The narrator describes this new social class as follows:
“These people were the first to master a new kind of late twentieth-century life. They
thrived on […] the lack of involvement with others, and the total self-sufficiency of lives
which, needing nothing, were never disappointed” (44). The portrayal of these
characters serves to question the sustainability of social bonds in affluent
communities. Sennett regards “scarcity” a socializing factor in the neighborhoods:
[I]n communities that are poor, or in times of scarcity, sharing between
individuals and families is a necessary element of survival. […] It is
the hallmark of abundance that the need for such sharing disappears.
[…] Thus the necessity for social interaction, the necessity to share is
no longer a driving force in communities of abundance; men can
withdraw into their self-contained, self-sustaining homes. […]
Abundance, in other words, increases the power to create isolation in
communal contacts at the same time that it opens up an avenue by
which men can easily conceive of their social relatedness in terms of
their similarity rather than their need for each other. (The Uses of
Disorder 48).
This observation problematizes any definition of community which includes the
interdependence of the members as an aspect of it when the defining characteristic
of any community is its affluence.3 The complicated technical knowledge that enables
the construction of the high-rise and the affluence which enables its ownership serve
nothing but the oversimplification of human relations. The functionalism of the
building, coupled with the affluence of the residents, turns the building into a “huge
machine designed to serve, not the collective body of tenants, but the individual
2 For example, Laing buys his apartment with a 99-year lease.
3 Robert E. Park (1936) lists three defining characteristics of a community, of which the third
is “a relationship of mutual interdependence that is symbiotic” (4).

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residents in isolation” (Ballard, High-Rise 6). Thus, returning to Sennett’s argument
in his lecture, what is needed to be learned from the poor is revealed to be a culture
of cooperation which the affluent may easily disregard. At this point, it is not argued
that the lack of cooperation necessarily leads to violence as described in High-Rise.
However, the lack of cooperation and the lack of lack simply degrade the need to be
civilized in the interpersonal relations of the residents4 and absorbed in their
narcissistic illusions of self-sufficiency, the members of the community in High-Rise
no longer need to assume socially acceptable behavior. As the narrator suggests the
residents are “passengers on board an automatically piloted airliner” (Ballard, High-
Rise 44), which enables them to “behave in any way they wished, explore the darkest
corners they could find” (Ballard, High-Rise 45). Adrian Talbot, a psychiatrist whom
Ballard occasionally uses as a mouthpiece, confirms the negative results of the sense
of completeness, diagnosing the residents as “outraged by all that over-indulgent toilet
training, dedicated breast-feeding and parental affection- obviously a more dangerous
mix than anything our Victorian forebears had to cope with” (Ballard, High-Rise 153).
Although this observation is not strictly relevant to material abundance that is
stressed above, it is, nevertheless, associated with the sense of completeness which
the residents seem to enjoy but in reality, suffer from. In a way that confirms Talbot’s
commentary, Sennett maintains that while hysteria, resulting from repressive
mechanisms, was the most common nervous disorder in the 19th century, narcissism,
resulting from the sense of completeness, has replaced it in the 20th century (The Fall
of Public Man 326). The residents, overprotected by their parents during their
childhood, do not cease to be overprotected by their economic immunity which
protects them not only from the sense of lack but also from the differences in the
wider urban space. However, as Zygmunt Bauman argues, playing with the immune
system, as an analogy with social relations, is “risky business and may prove
pathogenic in its own right” (Liquid Modernity 105). Extending this analogy to High-
Rise again, one may conclude that since the members of the community have not
received any weakened microorganism, a metaphor that can be used for
heterogeneities and lack, into their bodies, their immunity has remained unguarded
4 Though it may be a topic of a different study, Lacanian psychoanalysis may be relevant in
understanding this mechanism. In the Lacanian psychoanalysis, only if one accepts symbolic
castration and the resultant lack, does he becomes a speaking subject. The lack in which the
subject is constituted is what drives him into the wider social sphere where he seeks
recognition. On the social and cultural outcomes of affluence see Todd McGowan’s The End
of Dissatisfaction?: Jacques Lacan and the Emergent Society of Enjoyment.

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against any minor threat which could easily be overcome by those in whose lives the
differences and need for the other people are constant presences.
Conclusion
Robert T. Tally, Jr. argues that “the literary cartography present in one
narrative can become a part of future surveys, rhapsodies, and narratives, or of future
maps” (Spatiality 49), which has also been the underlying mechanism of this paper.
Although it is a fictional account of urban spatial trends and there is no known record
of such frenzy in any given community, High-Rise reveals the potentialities embedded
in the structure of the homogeneous and affluent communities. As a cartographer
does in his profession, Ballard determines what is to be included or highlighted in
his fiction, however unlikely they may seem to the reader. Certainly, this paper has
not argued that these communities, sooner or later, will transform into primitive and
violent enclaves. However, it has tried to prove that the path leading to dystopia is
full-fledged in the purified communities which have materiality in the social life and
there is little reason why they did not fall into chaos as depicted in High-Rise. The
formation of this path has been proven to owe much to the very characteristic of the
purified communities. Since purification becomes the preeminent criterion of
organizing social relations and purity turns out to be an unattainable goal as a result
of narcissistic orientations, the residents in the novel indulge in the demonization of
their “fellow” community members. Since these communities are principally based
on a narcissistic culture, their exclusivity not only excludes the apparent “misfits” of
the society but also works in ways that jeopardize the operation of the community
itself. Furthermore, the social organization of the building is not constructed through
shared experiences of the residents but it is a given in which the common identity
and conformity to it conduct all interpersonal relations. Another important point
contributing to the dystopic outcome in the novel has been shown to be the affluence
of its residents, which, in fact, is intimately related to the purified constitution of the
building, for only affluence does provide with the possibility of homogeneity and clear
demarcation of the community boundaries. The novel evinces the anti-social results
of affluence which strip one of the necessities of keeping social ties and which result
in boredom. Of these two elements, the first devalues the civility needed to maintain
such a web of relations while the latter sparks off impulsivity to overcome the
boredom. Thus, the novel proves to be a critique to which the urbanists may pay
regard in their planning, if not a guideline. Since Ballard himself is skeptical about
the utopian aspirations, it is hardly plausible to seek a description of an ideal

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environment in his writings. However, his fiction presents one of the myriads of
dystopic possibilities enabled by the current built environment.
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