‘A benevolent technology’: Desiring-production and the petromodern death drive in J. G. Ballard’s Crash

Abstract Published in the same year as the 1973 oil crisis, J. G. Ballard’s Crash examines the pathological desires that maintain the subject’s entanglement and complicity with fossil fuel infrastructure. The novel functions as a colliding network of hallucinatory renderings that reveal the unconscious, programmed compulsions underpinning petromodern destruction. Combining recent work in the energy humanities with Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s theory of ‘desiring-production’, I consider subjectivity as a form of energy input, arguing that a process of psychological engineering coopts flows of desiring-energy to fuel the engine of petroculture’s death drive. This engineering not only naturalizes petro-consumption but aggressively sexualizes the inherent violence of petrocultural values, aesthetics, and technologies. Drawing on the tropes and narratorial styles of horror, fantasy, and science fiction, Crash stages a contrast between this culture’s assumed technological ‘Autopia’ and the perverse reality of its dehumanizing ‘autogeddon’. In this way, the novel both echoes and undermines the utopian imaginaries that powered the construction of a social reality based on the movement of the car itself.