Detecting Discipline & Control: J.G. Ballard’s Running Wild

J.G. Ballard‘s 13th novel Running Wild (1996) investigates our media-saturated society and its representations. His ideas are explored through experimental and confrontational narratives, which invite us into a world in which desire, violence and innovation collide. Denying neat categorization and incorporating elements from a variety of genres including dystopian science fiction and the detective novel, Ballard’s books are confronting, disturbing and exhilarating. Ballard employs the tropes of the detective novel to examine homicidal obsessions, extreme violence, and controlled communities and, as a result, analyzes the sense of communal anxiety and brooding hostility which predominates ostensibly safe and secure gated-communities. Through this investigation he interrogates the cultural associations and motifs of violent trauma. Ballard, however, goes beyond merely identifying the violence and instead focuses on the systems that precipitate the violence and how society reacts to crimes that contradict its understanding of the world. Thus, Running Wild manipulates the tropes of detective fiction to explore the world of privilege, gated communities and wealth. Ballard’s novel employs the tropes of crime fiction in an unorthodox way to interrogate the pathological manifestations of the society of control as described by Gilles Deleuze and to delve into how these disciplinary processes may affect modern society.