Determining the Body, Resisting Cultural Hegemony

In Electronic Revolution and The Fact of Blackness, Burroughs and Fanon discuss the ways in which language is inscribed onto human bodies, how words are mapped onto each person’s material, corporeal existence. A cut-up, “scrambled” narrative combining theories of virology and calls for subversive media production, Electronic Revolution defines the written word as a virus that predates—and makes possible—the spoken word. An inversion of Derrida’s articulation of Condillac’s theories of the origins of language, Burroughs’ notion that writing precedes speech calls into question the dominant schema that places writing as an outgrowth and evolutionary product of speech. Fanon’s The Fact of Blackness and The Negro and Language treat, respectively, the consequences of being black in a white-controlled discursive network and the issue of borrowed, assumed, or appropriated linguistic identities. While drastically different in form, content, and purpose, both pieces explore how language is mapped onto the bodily experience of humanness or, in Fanon’s case, the experience of being “marked” by one’s bodily or corporeal schema.

“To stay present…A boy masturbates in front of sex pictures…Cut to face of white man who is burning off black genitals with blow torch” (Burroughs 46)

“To stay absent…Sex phantasies of the boy…The black slumps dead with genitals burned off and intestines popping out.” (Burroughs 46)

Juxtaposing images of a young boy masturbating with images of a white man brutally lynching a black man, Burroughs’ evocative scrambling technique highlights the fetishization of the black body in media and popular culture. Burroughs’ frightening depiction of the bodily results from his splicing and scrambling of sexual imagery and racialized bodies into a cacophony of disgusting yet intriguing imagery. The meanings of the black body are fixed by rigid cultural norms governing race relations and the history of black bodies in relation to white aggressors. In Burroughs’ schema of the reactive mind (RM), seemingly harmless commands such as “to be animals” and “to be a body” become problematic, possessing what Borough’s calls “the most horrific consequences.” Inhabiting a black body, in this schema, may possess the most horrific of these “most horrific consequences,” for the black body is and has been so often reduced to an object of control or possession. While perhaps not an explicit discussion of the meanings of the black body and the embodiment of language within it, Burroughs’ cut-up narrative is full of traces of what Fanon terms the “crushing objecthood” imposed upon those marked by black skin.

Fanon, writing what is in its own way a “cut-up” or scrambled narrative (characterized by extensive citationality and external references), underscores the bodily nature of blackness and the “consciousness of the body” with which the black man is perpetually saddled. (“Fact” 110) The black man’s inability to define himself except in relation to whiteness feeds into the “crushing objecthood” by which “every ontology is made unattainable.” (“Fact” 109) Just as Burroughs’ depiction of a fetishized lyching of a black man shows the determination of blackness through white eyes, Fanon describes how black people, in contrast with jews (an interesting comparison worthy of more critical interrogation), are “overdetermined from without,” their meaning and existence “fixed” by the powerful white elite constituting society’s apparatus of control. (“Fact” 116)

Where Fanon and Burroughs seem to agree—or at least overlap—on the determination of blackness through white-dominated media culture and discursive relations, they differ in their choice of tactics by which to throw off this yoke of oppression. Fanon, whose “only weapon is reason,” becomes frustrated and neurotic by his continual contact with the “unreason” of racism and white oppression. (“Fact” 118). Burroughs, on the other hand, proposes a subversion of reason and order—the cutting up and splicing of language and reality—as the means of subverting the entrenched language systems which govern our experience of reality. Instead of using reason as a weapon, Burroughs effectively inverts reason, cause and effect, and rational speech patterns to create new forms of resistance to dominant cultural hegemony.

While at the time a fringe proposition, it seems that Burroughs’ attention towards processes of cutting, splicing, and reconstitution media such as sound and video has had huge impacts on the development of new media forms and the opening of new sites of resistance to hegemonic systems of power and oppression. Surely that is something that both Burroughs and Fanon could celebrate.