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.
The imposing edifice of science provides a challenging view of what can be achieved by the accumulation of many small efforts in a steady objective and dedicated search for truth.
I do not remember how it got into my head to make the first calculations related to rocket. It seems to me the first seeds were planted by famous fantaseour, J. Verne.
And what I wanted to do was, I wanted to explore problems and areas where we didn't have answers. In fact, where we didn't even know the right questions to ask.
Nothing in the natural world makes sense - except when seen in the light of evolution
I'm not trying to copy Nature, I'm trying to find the principles she's using.
Astronomy would not provide me with bread if men did not entertain hopes of reading the future in the heavens.
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