The Atrocity Organization: JG Ballard & the Technologies of Psychopathology
Management
Friday November 13th, 2009.
School of Business and Management
University of London, Queen Mary
Sponsored by the Standing Conference on Organizational Symbolism.
A kind of waiting madness, like a state of undeclared war, haunted the
office buildings of the business park. – J.G. Ballard, Super-Cannes
This workshop will engage with the work of British novelist and science
fiction writer JG Ballard (15 November 1930 – 19 April 2009). As an author
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, perhaps what is really psychopathological is the desire to
impose order upon an inherently ungovernable and excessive condition.
The influence and popularity of Ballard’s writing, aptly demonstrated by
existence of ‘Ballardian’ as an adjective, enacts what Carl Rhodes describes
as a ‘critique in culture’ (as opposed to a critique of culture). This
workshop engages with the form of critique and its development through
circulation that has been activated by Ballard’s work, which is likely to be
particularly intense at the moment and in the near future because of his
recent death.
Possible topics for consideration could include:
 Ballard’s bestiary & petting zoo monsters
 Technological dystopianism & the radical imagination
 Science fiction & organizational analysis
 The dark side of the multitude
 Libidinal economies and immaterial parasites
 Avant-garde arts & the fetish of suffering
 Excessive media flows & the pathologies of immaterial labor
 The violence of affective states & conditioning
 Autodestructive & homicidal art
 Reagan, Obama, and the mediation of the political body
Please send proposals to Stevphen Shukaitis ([log in to unmask]).
Deadline for proposals: September 30th, 2009.
Organized by Stevphen Shukaitis (Autonomedia / University of Essex) and
Peter Fleming (University of London, Queen Mary).
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