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.
Chemistry... is like the maid occupied with daily civilisation; she is busy with fertilisers, medicines, glass, insecticides ... for she dispenses the recipes.
Space or science fiction has become a dialect for our time.
Mathematics is one of the deepest and most powerful expressions of pure human reason, and, at the same time, the most fundamental resource for description and analysis of the experiential world.
I like mathematics because it is not human and has nothing particular to do with this planet or with the whole accidental universe - because, like Spinoza's God, it won't love us in return.
Nuclear power plants must be prepared to withstand everything from earthquakes to tsunamis, from fires to floods to acts of terrorism.
What's been gratifying is to live long enough to see molecular biology and evolutionary biology growing toward each other and uniting in research efforts.
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