The Fanon MixTape

From the start, Burroughs throws out controversial statements in his "Electronic Revolution." Written language came before spoken word? The only was to pass on information through time/space is via writing? Writing/language is an undetected virus?

The first day of my intro Linguistics class we learn to value the spoken word over the written word (there are languages with no written transcription), I've read about the Old Testament as passed down for years and years over a vast land area before a written transcription became available, and language does not need the vocal tract caused by the ancient virus Burroughs references (we have sign language, don't we?). Once I stopped taking Burroughs literally, and opened up to a broader interpretation of his writing, things began to click.

I will look at the three tape recorders he talks about.

We arrive at the initial example on page 10.
#1 is the object we wish to effect (Adam, errors of the senator, pristine Moka Bar)
#2 is access material from tape #1, or the material tape recorder #3 will use to effect tape recorder #1 (Eve, the senator's sexual activity, the surrounding Moka Bar)
#3 "is the objective reality produced by the virus in the host" thus God, the controller, or the operator of power.

Thus, we take the notion of tape recorder, and can apply that to any sort of language/sign/picture/word/audio sound/message we want. As an example of the race situation Fanon speaks of in "The Negro and Language," we could put Fanon in tape recorder 1, Fanon speaking pidgin and then eliete French in tape recorder 2, and the audio conversation from the racist drunk in the bar in tape recorder 3.

Playback or repetition from recorder 3 causes reality to come out from the "reality" on the tape recorder. The reality we have is of Fanon being the "host" for the virus of the French language, a reality which construes Fanon only as the Other within society.

But Burroughs uses the example of tape recorders becuase it allows one to fight back (tape recorders are a realtively inexpensive, democratized technology). He fights back against the Moka Bar, and he urges us to fight back against mass media and the police state by making our own wild mixes (by breaking up "lines of association" (21)).

I guess I have two questions from this scenario.
A. We always see utopian ideals when it comes to technological idealism (a la Enzensberger), but is Burroughs hitting at something beyond the mere technological aspect of the virus/the 3 tape recorders? I don't think YouTube was what he was looking for, so why didn't what he wanted to happen in all of his experiements actually happen?
2. How would it be best to change the Fanon + three tape recorders scenario layed out above? Which aspect of his essay fits each tape recorder?

Other questions:
1. How close is scrambling to noise or encryption (23)? It seems like he is emphasing syntax does not matter with the sign/word/photo/image, some sort of semantic meaning always gets across (in his discussion of subliminal messages). An example of this would be the theoretical alternative "cut-up" press on page 22.

2. Does the "re-interpretation" of scrambled messages hand over the agency of a message to the receiver (24)? How would this "self-ascribed" message play into Fanon's white mask (where a scrambled message "forces something on the subject against his will" (32))?

3. Do we have a new riff on cybernetics by equating language with a biological virus? Do words have control over bodies (e.g., the dicussion of Hubbard's pain producing engrams on 39)? Are we moving too fast when we say that language causes physical effects (such as when Fanon wishes to measure "the modifications of body fluids taht occur in Negros when they arrive in France (Fanon, 22)).

4. I see Burroughs's proposal for a new language as the elimination of identidy. Viruses/tapes control us by giving us an identidy and changing that identidy's reality; such as Fanon's identity giving Creol language or broken French. Fanon wishes to identify the virus and not try to "compete" in a lose-lose situation where the Other is always giving the losing hand identidy (Fanon 28,29). Am I right in thinking that these are the two articles modes of resistance, and if not, what am I missing here? The language virus strangled the ancient humans and labeld him a host, the white attacker tried to strangle Fanon and labeled him as a cultureless foreigner. But both persons must remember they are more than labels: "to the mechanical problem of respiration it must be unsound to gaft a psychological element, the impossibility of expansion" (Fanon, 28).