Science is the ultimate pornography, analytic activity whose main aim is to isolate objects or events from their contexts in time and space. This obsession with the specific activity of quantified functions is what science shares with pornography.
Interpretation
The quote suggests that science, like pornography, focuses on specific details at the expense of broader context.
J.G. Ballard's quote draws a provocative parallel between science and pornography, highlighting how both disciplines focus intensely on particular aspects or functions while often neglecting the larger context in which they exist. Science's objective analysis and pursuit of isolation of objects and events can mirror the way pornography presents isolated fantasies devoid of relational depth, thus raising questions about the implications of such analytic obsession in understanding life and reality.
In practice
In a lecture on the implications of scientific inquiry, one might quote Ballard to challenge students to consider the ethical dimension of their work.
The American Dream has run out of gas. The car has stopped. It no longer supplies the world with its images, its dreams, its fantasies. No more. It's over. It supplies the world with its nightmares now: the Kennedy assassination, Watergate, Vietnam.
Au revoir, jewelled alligators and white hotels, hallucinatory forests, farewell.
Science and technology multiply around us. To an increasing extent they dictate the languages in which we speak and think. Either we use those languages, or we remain mute.
Most English writers are not interested in change but in the social novel. That demands a static backdrop. I'm intensely interested in change - probably as a matter of self-preservation. What the hell is going to happen next?
Deserts possess a particular magic, since they have exhausted their own futures, and are thus free of time. Anything erected there, a city, a pyramid, a motel, stands outside time. It's no coincidence that religious leaders emerge from the desert. Modern shopping malls have much the same function. A future Rimbaud, Van Gogh or Adolf Hitler will emerge from their timeless wastes.
The chief role of the universities is to prolong adolescence into middle age, at which point early retirement ensures that we lack the means or the will to enforce significant change.
It is hard to overstate how valuable it is to have all the incredible tools that are used for human disease to study plants.
The greatest service which can be rendered any country is to add a useful plant to its culture. --The Fruit Hunters
I think that in the discussion of natural problems we ought to begin not with the Scriptures, but with experiments, and demonstrations.
In the history of physics, there have been three great revolutions in thought that first seemed absurd yet proved to be true. The first proposed that the earth, instead of being stationary, was moving around at a great and variable speed in a universe that is much bigger than it appears to our immediate perception. That proposal, I believe, was first made by Aristarchos two millenia ago ... Remarkably enough, the name Aristarchos in Greek means best beginning.
If we find life out there, and it's not us, we will deem it not intelligent. But what may be equally as likely is that we find life that's vastly more intelligent than we are. If that's the case, we are putty in their hands.
For me, arguably the story of telomeres and telomerase began thousands of years ago, in the cornfields of the Maya highlands of Central America.
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