Eroticism is constituted by signs and machines, not just mediated by them

Evidence

With psychoanalysis (and Ballard is nothing if not a committed reader of Freud), Ballard recognised that there is no “biological” sexuality waiting beneath the “alienated layers” of civilisation. Ballard’s compulsively repeated theme of reversion to savagery does not present a return to a non-symbolised bucolic Nature, but a fall back into an intensely semioticised and ritualised symbolic space. (It is only the postmoderns who believe in a pre-symbolic Nature.) Eroticism is made possible — not merely mediated — by signs and technical apparatus, such that the body, signs and machines become interchangeable. — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 1045

Categorization

• XREF: Develops the reader’s established Ballard thread (chs 8-11) about sex as irreducibly fantasmatic and cultural. — connects to: Authentic emotion itself operates as a repetition of signifying machines, not their opposite — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 1189; Machine rhythm fuses sexuality and labor into one unconscious automatism. — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the…, 175; Erotic desire is constituted by signs and technology, not natural sex — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 1045 (+1 more)

Broader Connections

• Authentic emotion itself operates as a repetition of signifying machines, not their opposite #corroborates (0.82) — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 1189
• Machine rhythm fuses sexuality and labor into one unconscious automatism. #expands (0.78) — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, 175