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.
Theoretical physics is one of the few fields in which being disabled is no handicap - it is all in the mind.
You can stop splitting the atom; you can stop visiting the moon; you can stop using aerosols; you may even decide not to kill entire populations by the use of a few bombs. But you cannot recall a new form of life.
It is mere rubbish thinking, at present, of origin of life; one might as well think of origin of matter.
The study and knowledge of the universe would somehow be lame and defective were no practical results to follow.
Intellectual-property rules are clearly necessary to spur innovation: if every invention could be stolen, or every new drug immediately copied, few people would invest in innovation. But too much protection can strangle competition and can limit what economists call 'incremental innovation' - innovations that build, in some way, on others.
There are no miracles in agricultural production.
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