Trying to exhaust himself, Vaughan devised an endless almanac of terrifying wounds and insane collisions: The lungs of elderly men punctured by door-handles; the chests of young women impaled on steering-columns; the cheek of handsome youths torn on the chromium latches of quarter-lights. To Vaughan, these wounds formed the key to a new sexuality, born from a perverse technology. The images of these wounds hung in the gallery of his mind, like exhibits in the museum of a slaughterhouse.
Interpretation
This quote explores the connection between technology and human experience, highlighting the dark side of innovation.
In this passage, J. G. Ballard presents a chilling vision of how technology can shape human sexuality and experience through pain and injury. Vaughan's obsession with the violent and traumatic aspects of technology raises questions about the relationship between modernity and the human condition, suggesting that our advancements may carry unsettling implications that are often overlooked. This perspective invites readers to consider the hidden costs of technological progress and its potential to distort our understanding of intimacy and desire.
In practice
In a discussion on the impact of technology on relationships during a seminar.
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.
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 gospel cannot be preached and heard enough, for it cannot be grasped well enough ... Moreover, our greatest task is to keep you faithful to this article and to bequeath this treasure to you when we die.
A culture is not the anonymous product of undifferentiate d masses, but the sum of the intellectual achievements of individual men.
In the life of the human spirit, words are action, much more so than many of us realize who live in countries where freedom of expression is taken for granted. The leaders of totalitarian nations understand this very well. The proof is that words are precisely the action for which dissidents in those countries are being persecuted.
And when man faces destiny, destiny ends and man comes into his own.
War is a racket. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives.
We have used the Bible as if it were a mere special constable's handbook, an opium dose for keeping beasts of burden patient while they are overloaded.
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