To counter these trends, they both firmly relied on Surrealism to bolster the human imagination as a catalysator for personal and social transformation. To Anders and Ballard, nuclear weapons symbolised, and were the most extreme manifestation of, the pathologies they associated with technological modernity: mass consumption, spectacular violence, a deadening of affect, and an increased inability of humans to psychologically process and grasp the destructive capacities of science and technology. Both authors critically and creatively reworked central Existentialist ideas in the context of postwar technological acceleration and the development of nuclear weapons. Ballard (1930–2009), offer a rich intellectual ancestry and inspiration to such scholarship. In this article, I argue that two postwar intellectuals, Günther Anders (1902–1992) and J. IR scholars increasingly turn to the writings of Existentialists to make sense of the multiple and entangled planetary crises that characterise the twenty-first century. This article therefore engages in a reading of a psychogeographical text via theory implicitly alluded to by the text itself. High-Rise is read as a classic of psychogeography, an established genre which is argued to be of great relevance to the study of society and space. Re-focusing a subject gaze in accordance with these theoretical analyses, allows for an entirely alternative understanding of the text in which Ballard was more than a pessimistic prophet of inexorable urban breakdown, he foretold societal rehabilitation as well.

Re-reading Ballard's classic text through the prism of Laing’s theories, with further explication of the role of flat affect via Lauren Berlant, this article presents a new interpretation of a classic text that argues that Ballard ingeniously misdirected his readers into making identifications with precisely the wrong characters and the wrong actions. Robert Laing, surely an allusion to the then influential psychiatric writer, Dr. Ballard intriguingly contains a pivotal character named Dr.

High-Rise by J.G. Ballard