Jean Baudrillard, in Simulacra and Simulation, says, "From a classical (even cybernetic) perspective, technology is an extension of the body....In this 'rational' perspective the body itself is nothing but a medium (111)." Baudrilliard goes on to discuss machines as "relays, extensions, media mediators of nature ideally destined to become the organic body of man." This brings us to Crash, a hallucinatory novel by J.G. Ballard. The novel tells of Vaughan, a "TV scientist" turned "nightmare angel of the highways": a man who has discovered a new world, one where car crashes and eroticism are intricately interwoven. The novel follows the life the narrator, James, a television commercial producer, who slowly discover's of Vaughan's world. For Vaughan, wounds resulting from car crashes are the keys to a new sexuality born from a "perverse technology" (13). To him, the modern world gives rise to modes of pleasure that were previously unthinkable. What are Ballard's intentions for such a striking concept--the idea that technology and eroticism are so intimately related? One may think Crash is mere perversion, but further investigation reveals something far more profound: the idea that it is the inherent nature of technology to simulate. Crash is merely a hyperreal exposÈ of this concept.

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