High-Rise by J.G. Ballard
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Social Sci-Fi

For a few years in the 1980’s I had a flat in Lauderdale Tower at the Barbican in London. All of the Barbican development is brutalist - cast concrete with exposed cast marks etc. - but Lauderdale and it’s sister-towers are particularly extreme examples, sporting pebble-dashed balconies and bare internal walls that reject even the most technologically advanced wallpaper adhesives. I take it from Ballard’s descriptions that English architectural aesthetics hadn’t advanced very far when it came to the Docklands development which was several decades newer.

To call such architecture anti-human might be an exaggeration; but not by much. One can only tell oneself that it is post-modernist chic for so long. The fact is that it is depressing as hell. Even recollecting the lift lobbies provokes the phantasm of concrete dust in my throat. Concrete is as concrete does I suppose. And what it does primarily is drive people mad. As Ballard says, it is “an architecture designed for war.” And a kind of peace-time shell shock is not uncommon.

The problem is its unrelenting uniformity. Placed in proximity to another architectural style, brutalism may look merely bad. But when it is the only game for acres and acres, it presents a complete absence of any aesthetic whatsoever. It’s the equivalent of living in a sensory deprivation chamber. There’s nothing to react to. Everything - people, furniture, social interactions, art - is mediated by a grey blandness which doesn’t highlight any contents but reduces them to an uninteresting drabness. I found that when I wasn’t unaccountably aggressive toward my neighbours, I was becoming incipiently suicidal.

So I can identify with at least one of Ballard’s protagonists, Dr. Laing. High-rise stress is something that creeps up on you. The unconscious reacts slowly to the uniformity of life in identical concrete enclosures by attempting to differentiate itself. It constantly prods the conscious self to demonstrate its individuality. While such psychology is probably active to some degree in every human grouping, it reaches a peak of intensity in an enclosed habitation that provokes it without mercy.

Laing‘s mistake was to believe he could escape the demands of intimate relationships in the supposed anonymity of a large residential building. This is like joining a monastery to avoid family problems. In a high rise, as in a monastery, relationships may be more limited in scope but they are far more intense in their allowable aspects. And both high rise residents and monks have similar techniques for expressing fierce disapproval in complete silence.

Social nuance is proportionately heightened to the degree it is expressively repressed. This creates a pervasive field of energetic tension which needs only the social equivalent of the Higgs boson to create the matter of real violence. And there are many more of these particles to do the job - faulty lifts, interrupted utilities, children, pets, and parties will do the trick.

Ballard puts his finger on the precise mechanism which unleashed a potentially lethal game of tit for tat among the residents: “By its very efficiency, the high-rise took over the task of maintaining the social structure that supported them all. For the first time it removed the need to repress every kind of anti-social behaviour, and left them free to explore any deviant or wayward impulses.”

Talk about sick building syndrome! But of course the ‘structure’ Ballard refers to could equally be the internet, which didn’t come into being until twenty years after High Rise was published. The problem, then, isn’t the building but something in the physiology of human beings (Laing is coincidentally a physiologist) which responds badly when certain, apparently trivial, social interactions are replaced by any ‘rigid,’ that is to say, ‘efficient’ technology.

In other words, people act badly not when social norms are relaxed or abandoned, but when they are no longer apparently needed, when we believe they are enforced without our participation. But social physics is as sensitive to minor changes in structural constants as cosmological physics. Every new technology is a kind of unplanned experiment with variations in sociological constants equivalent to variations in scientific laws like gravity or the weak nuclear force. The main difference of course is that fictions of technology move toward reality rather less predictably.

My flat in the Barbican, by the way, was owned by the Corporation of London. I was therefore a Council tenant. Thanks to Margaret Thatcher, Council tenants were entitled to buy their properties at a price about 50% below market value. But about nine months before the scheduled sale date I decided that the certain financial gain was not worth the required mental strain, and moved out. Just an example I suppose of human unpredictability when inhabiting alternative worlds.

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