"Other Opinions"

Reading it through twice and looking at specific passages more than that, I still don't feel I have a good handle on Burroughs's thesis, and honestly from first read through now, I think a large part of that is simply that he doesn't really treat his notion of word as virus in sufficient depth. In trying to distill out where the problem lies, I've come to conclude that it is in lack of information and in jumps of thought rather than in any kind of logical fallacy, which makes it difficult to argue against; it just makes it frustrating for me in trying to consider his argument critically. A lot obviously hinges for him on this scrambling technique and on playback, and those are interesting ideas in themselves. I love and believe the ideas of riot provocation, &c. But what precisely he's aiming to prove with the Moka Bar example escapes me. Or rather, I think I understand what he's aiming to prove, and it has to do with the definition of "produce" in his observation that "playing back recordings of an accident can produce another accident" (14). At first I thought he was talking about a circumstance in which the effect on listeners somehow engenders a situation in which an accident happens, as in the riot example. But to take the Moka Bar seriously, we have to read "produce" as literally "causing," giving these tapes a G-d-like power over circumstance. You might argue against my calling them "G-d-like," and I think that's fair-- I'm not attaching myself to this particular comparison-- but what I mean is that I don't think it aligns necessarily with the notion of virus. Yes, it is parasitic. Yes it in the playback he describes invades the host area. But his relations still feel associative: "Copy DNA/RNA"---"make image copies of a place". "Destroy/lyse cell (thereby enabling infection of others)"---"Damage/destroy place," possibly with the addition that "we thereby we can go and selectively do the same to other places," but of course this is quite a jump because the initial tape/virus itself has nothing to do with that.

Also, the tape scramblings and playbacks might be called art or experimentation, but they're not science. It doesn't even sound like other than a passing reference to the Law of Averages that Burroughs even looked at basic statistics when considering his field "research." All of that is fine; it can still be an interesting argument, but why he brings viruses into it at all still escapes and bothers me. Spiraling prose that seems like it should (but I do not find to actually) complement his argument, and leaps in causality and possible mathematical ignorance are enough to disgust me away from the text (which means I'm actually fairly happy that we will be discussing it in class because I don't like thinking that about really any text at all, and discussions have sometimes in the past led to a complete change in heart and mind. Already as I work through the text yet again I see passages specific about viruses that I'd like to look at more).

This is all strange for me to begin with, because in reading semiotics I tend to err very much on the side of little narratives, which my truth-value/scientific proof problems with Burroughs obviously do not reflect. But ultimately I just feel like Burroughs gains nothing and loses credibility by his poorly supported although trendy sounding virus thesis.

The comparison to G-d-like power that I mentioned earlier reminds me that I do like his hypothetical three tape-recorder arrangements, in particular the one in which G-d is the third recorder, so that G-d is basically reduced to or at least considered caused by one's feelings of shame and self-conscienceness. Indeed he says the third tape "is objective reality produced by the virus in the host" (10), so G-d is kind of a byproduct of innate ethics and their effects.

As to Fanon... well I'm less opinionated, at least. The structure he's examining as at work in the racial difference is I think very interesting, because it is not merely Otherness, not quite like Ideology, not simply Master-Slave.* One particular section I'd like to look at is on page 133, the paragraphs beginning "But that does not prevent" and "When I read that page." It seems to me here that what he's saying is that he wants racial difference to remain, just not racial hierarchy. Differance, multiplicity, perhaps? Except maybe not simply, because of the overdetermined from the inside and out nature of what he's talking about.

* - Marginally entertaining marginal comment... footnote #24 on page 138 mentions white man as "master," which is from where I took this structure. Interesting self-observation is that I can never think of "master-slave" without thinking of the RS flip-flop circuit in computer hardware. I have since learned that "master-slave" is a common moniker for the latch (although they never told us that in CS0310), but my first exposure to it was as the first page of our very own professor's "On Software, or the Persistence of Visual Knowledge!" This I note here and call marginally entertaining (if not marginal) because this kind of random overlay of information enters in Burroughs's argument, and is something that I would consider useful in looking at what his view of information outright is.