Information theory and esthetic perception

Title Information theory and esthetic perception [by] Abraham Moles. Translated by Joel F. Cohen. Author Moles, Abraham A. Imprint Urbana, University of Illinois Press, 1966.

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post human bodies: two lessons from W. Burroughs

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.

sense of nonsense Alison Rieke Iowa City : University of Iowa Press, 1992

P7

The Encyclopedia of Philosophy lists six distinct types of nonsense. Of course, a writer may use any or all of these, singly or combined.

1.Utterances (spoken or written) that are contrary to fact.

2. Utterances or actions performed out of their expected context. For instance, a man orders a pizza from a bride during a wedding ceremony.

3. Utterances containing what is known as a "category mistake": a syntactically correct sentence attaches an unsuitable predicate to

a subject or vice versa. In semantics, this may be any use of language violating semantic laws rather than syntactic laws; for example, we know that a sentence can be correctly formed out of words of inappropriate semantic function: "Colourless green ideas sleep furiously."

4. Utterances constructed from strings of actual words

lacking, to a greater or lesser degree, the syntactic structure of the paradigms of sense.

5. "Vocabulary nonsense,'' or utterances which have a discernible syntax, but

whose vocabulary is unfamiliar and untranslatable into recognizable sense.

6. Utterances which are total gibberish, where no recognizable vocabulary or syntax

appears (this would be "pure" or "true'' nonsense).