Virus, Language, Race

While Burroughs' text establishes as its basis theory "that the written word was literally a virus that made the spoken word possible," the experiments and research projects he then goes on to propose or describe having performed would suggest rather that recorded material when played back in the space of its recording transforms the situation which might otherwise have occurred in a different manner, where the distinction writing/speech would line up with the distinction recording/action. Because it is mostly the nature of a virus that is developed after Burroughs notes this, it's fairly unclear what Burroughs' said basis theory has to do with, for example, a Derridean deconstruction of the privileging of speech over writing by demonstrating that the category of writing is a precondition for the category of speech in the first place. In addition, Electronic Revolution problematizes presence and absence, which we discussed last week in reading "Signature Event Context," with reference to the idea of the Reactive Mind developed by L. Ron Hubbard. Hubbard, the founder of Scientology, has his credibility rendered suspect before his concepts even enter the text ("the target moves" - a Scientology center where a playback operation was taken out). So why use these RM distinctions developed by Hubbard later in the text, in a quasi-poetic sequence intended, perhaps, to develop a series of associations which I later collude in evoking when instead of "To stay up... Erect phallus," I encounter simply "To stay up" (46, 47).

When discussing a pre-riot situation, Burroughs says, "Could you cool a riot by recording the calmest cop and the most reasonable demonstrator? Maybe! However, it's a lot easier to start trouble than to stop it" (20). Electronic Revolution is a sort of guide book for starting trouble (and being THE God) via playback. I wonder, like Patrick, how Burroughs' social position informed his interest in such destabilizing tactics. Fanon may be "overdetermined from outside," but Burroughs seems to posit that universal empowerment can be an effect of widespread tape recorder use and picture-taking.

According to Burroughs, a virus
- mutated the structure of the (male ape) host's throat, but is passed to his female mate in a sexual frenzy that results from the virus, and this throat continues to exist as part of the structure for posterity,
- (unproblematically) produced the "yellow races"

Whiteness appears (in my reading) to be implicitly aligned with unity and the absolute in Burroughs' text, yet never explicitly treated. In "The Negro and Language," Fanon describes speaking of French by black men as being essential to social status in a colonial structure. "To express it in genetic terms, his phenotype undergoes a definitive, an absolute mutation" (19). What might be the implications of such a mutation, or of mutation in general? How does this scientific analogy play into questions of pattern and transmission that we have discussed before?