scrambling, entropy, and exploding systems of control

Burrough’s theory of language as virus describes language as a system of control, and therefore oppression, with revolutionary potential through repetition. “Playback is the essential ingredient” in the revolutionary weapon of language. Playback for Burroughs is God, taperecorder 3, it kicks Adam and Eve out of the garden of Eden; in other words it lets all hell break lose. As Derrida would agree, the written word’s ability to be repeated allows for its manipulation and reappropriation.

In response to Meg’s passage about infected identities, that is, language as identity infected by power systems, I considered how Burroughs would respond to Fanon’s problem with language, that of submitting to the language of the oppressor, and that the power of language denies space for other identities. Burroughs suggests scrambling language in order to rail against and explode the power system. I’m not sure how well this idea applies to Fanon’s problem, because the use of creole does not lessen the French language’s power status, although it does allow for the emergence of other identities.

What I find interesting in language-scrambling is the loss of self; a loss of the distinction between sender and receiver into a big scrambled mess: “Everybody doing it, they all scramble in together and the populations of the earth just settle down a nice even brown color.”(36) He calls this “the way of full cellular representation.” ‘Scrambling in together’ thus destroys the system of repression because it singularizes while at the same time destroys the self/other binary, because ‘the other’ is the same as ‘the self’ in its one-ness. It degenerates into entropy, the devolution towards a chaos rendering everything indistinguishable from anything else.

I was confused by scrambling, however, because while it questions the agency of a receiver in deciphering the message (thus the system of control that can then be coopted by revolutionaries), does it assert the authority and power of the sender or does it suggest that the system of control lies in an external actor, context, that scrambles the message between sender and receiver?
The receiver gets a scrambled message, and has to descramble it, depending on his ability. But is the message scrambled by the sender, or is it only scrambled in transmission? In which case, is this scrambling a tool of the sender or an external force (context)? In other words, where does the power of language reside?

His proposed scrambling tests remind me of the Turing test’s effort to determine the ability of the players to establish the correct source of a message. Turing wanted to point out that people cannot fully descramble a message, or they would be able to tell which was computer and which was human (or male or female). Is it the cleverness of the other players that confuse the message, or the context, that of physical separation?