P41.
the
virus is itself the command. It is a machine for reproduction, but without any
external
or referential content to be reproduced. A virus is thus a simulacrum: a copy
for which there is no original, emptily duplicating itself to infinity. It
doesn’t
represent
anything, and it doesn’t have to refer back to any standard measure or first
instance, because it already contains all the information—and only the
information—needed
for its own further replication.
Reproduction
is so far from being straightforwardly “organic,” that it necessarily involves
vampirism, parasitism, and cancerous simulation. We are all
tainted
with viral origins, because life itself is commanded and impelled by something
alien to life. The life possessed by a cell, and all the more so by a
multicellular organism, is finally only its ability to carry out the orders transmitted
to it by DNA and RNA. It scarcely matters whether these orders originate from a
virus, or from what we conceive as the cell’s own nucleus. For this distinction
is only a matter of practical convenience….
Our
cells’ own DNA is perhaps best regarded as a viral intruder that has so
successfully and over so long a stretch of time managed
to
insinuate itself within us, that we have forgotten its alien origin. Our genes’
“purposes” are not ours. As Richard Dawkins puts it, our bodies and minds are
“survival machines” programmed for replicating genes, “gigantic lumbering
robots” created for the sole purpose of transmitting DNA. Burroughs describes
language (or sexuality, or any form of consciousness) as “the human virus.” All
our mechanisms of reproduction follow the viral logic according to which life
produces death, and death in turn lives off life.
41-42
Language
is one of these mechanisms of reproduction. Its purpose is not to indicate or
communicate any particular content, but merely to perpetuate and replicate
itself…. its supposed content is only a contingent means (the host cell or the
particular commodity form) that it parasitically appropriates for the end of
self valorization and self proliferation.
P42
Both
communicational and structural approaches try to define what language is,
instead
of looking at what it does.
Language
does not represent the world: it intervenes in the world, invades the world,
appropriates the world. The supposed
postmodern
“disappearance of the referent” in fact testifies to the success of this
invasion. It’s not that language doesn’t refer to anything real, but—to the
contrary—
that
language itself has become increasingly real. Far from referring only to
itself, language is powerfully intertwined with all the other aspects of
contemporary social reality. It is a virus that has all too fully incorporated
itself into the everyday life of its hosts.
Morse
Peckham, Deleuze and Guattari, and
Wittgenstein
all suggest that language is less performative than it is imperative or
prescriptive: to speak is to give orders. To understand language and speech is
then to acknowledge these orders: to obey them or resist them, but to react to
them in some way. An alien force has taken hold of me, and I cannot not
respond. Our bodies similarly respond with symptoms to infection, or to the
orders of viral DNA and RNA. As Burroughs reminds us: “the symptoms of a virus
are the attempts of the body to deal with the virus attack.
The
material force of the utterance compels me to respond, but no
hermeneutics
can guarantee or legislate the precise nature of my response. The only workable
way to define “meaning” is therefore to say, with Peckham, that it is radically
arbitrary, since “any response to an utterance is a meaning of that utterance.”
Any response whatsoever.
that
language never “speaks itself as language”: it’s always some particular
parasite, with its own interests and perspective, that’s issuing the orders and
collecting the profits. What distinguishes a virus or parasite is precisely
that it has no proper relation to Being. It only inhabits somebody else’s
dwelling. Every discourse is an unwelcome guest that sponges off
me,
without paying its share of the rent. My body and home are always infested—
Michel
Serres, in The Parasite, traces endless chains of appropriation and transfer,
subtending all forms of communication. (He plays on the fact
that
in French the word parasite has the additional connotation of static, the noise
on the line that interferes with or contaminates every message.) In this
incessant
commerce,
there is no Being of Language. But there are always voices: voices and more
voices, voices within and behind voices, voices interfering with or replacing
or capturing other voices.
I
hear these voices whenever I speak, whenever I write, or whenever I pick up the
telephone…. Today we don’t need shamans any longer, since modems and FAXes are
enough to put us in contact with the world of vampires and demons, the world of
the dead…. The buzzing or static that we hear on the telephone line is the sum
of all the faint murmurings of the dead, blank voices of missed connections,
echoing to infinity. These senseless utterances at once feed upon, and serve as
the preconditions for, my own attempts to generate
discourse.
But such parasitic voices also easily become fodder for centralizing
apparatuses of power, like the military’s C3I system (command/control/communication/intelligence).
Doom Patrol reveals that the Pentagon is really a pentagram, “a spirit trap, a
lens to focus energy.” The “astral husks” of the dead are trapped in its depths,
fed to the voracious Telephone Avatar, and put to work on the Ant Farm, “a
machinery whose only purpose is to be its own sweet self.” As Burroughs also
notes, the life in death of endless viral replication is at once the method and
the aim of postmodern arrangements of power. Don’t try to express “yourself,”
then; learn rather to write from dictation, and to speak rapturously in
tongues. An author is not a sublime creator, as Dr. Frankenstein wanted to be.
He or she is more what is called a channeller, or what Jack Spicer describes as
a radio picking up messages from Mars, and what Jacques Derrida refers to as a
sphincter.
