The articulate lobster: two Gilles and a double Felix

I want to continue exploring the potential linkages between Burroughs and D/G. I want particularly to look at the ways in which theories of machines, assemblages, and stratifications can help us formulate a relation between Burroughs' bodily virus and his cut-up media, between the written word and the material/natural world, between the body and the collective of bodies.

Take the example of the cut-up video that can activate a latent virus in the viewer's body. What is the link between the image and the physical symptoms? For a moment, let's place the video in the realm of "expression" (in D/G's sense) and the symptomization in the realm of "content" (ignore, for now, the symptom as an organic stratum within which the virus plays "content" and the symptom "expression"--this is a matter of scale and relativity). If we place video and symptom in the stratosphere (hah) of the symbolic, the relationship between the two would be one of translation. If content were strictly opposed to expression, the activation of the virus would be magical; but because of the "machinic assemblages" that link the strata together with two-way roads, and that link these with the plane of consistency in which a term can form a rhizomatic bond with any other, a translation is effectuated between the world of things and the world of symbolization. The "incorporeal transformation" of the body into the "sick body" through the language of the cut-up activates a latent "sickness" much in the way that Lenin's slogans activate a revolutionary proletariat that seemingly didn't exist before.

Burroughs' virus, I think, is an instrument of translation, transduction, and induction. It is what D/G call a sign-particle, both hieroglyph and pathogen, both symbolic code and genetic code. And it is important to note that the virus isn't a metaphor for writing--Burroughs claims that writing is actually a virus, irreducibly. In the same way, expression (the sign) is never reducible to content (the particle), and vise versa (through, say, metaphor, which D/G dismiss as a secondary part of language). The paradoxical sign-particle, on the plane of consistency, can become sign or particle when it enters the stratosphere--the virus can be the cut-up, or it can be the bodily reaction to the cut-up; the hieroglyph can be a representation of nature, or a piece of nature itself ("representations are bodies, too!" cry D/G). It's a two(trillion)-way road.

Through machinic assemblages, inside and outside are blown wide. The subject is not safe in its body, the body is not safe in the familial/Oedipal realm, the realm of social production is not safe from the body. Social production is deterritorialized by the production of desire, which is in turn reterritorialized as a kind of social product/consumer/consumed. D/G emphasize in "Anti-Oedipus" that the realm of social production and the realm of desire-production are not reducible to one another, as stratum/substratum, as content/expression--yet, on a plane of consistency or a BwO, they are vitally linked and mutually influencing; they form an assemblage like that of the "semiotic, material, social"("Rhizome," 22-23). The loved subject, for instance, is named at the "instantaneous apprehension of the multiplicities belonging to him or her, and to which he or she belongs"(35). So for Burroughs, the subject lies somewhere in the assemblage of social, symbolic, linguistic, bodily multiplicities: the body becomes bodies (a pack, reproduction through contagion (241)) when it is exposed to the backdrop of cut-up images and other stimuli that establish its social contexts. Assemblage, pronounced the French way, is actually a form of artistic production involving cut-up and collage.

D/G's Challenger character reminded me a lot of the presentation that Joe, Josh, Cory, and I created. As he slowly turns into the BwO, he becomes doubly articulated. He is described as becoming more and more abstract even as he becomes more animal. The (remnants of the) audience aren't sure if his language is becoming "thicker or more water"(72). Just so, as Burroughs' language loses its definite articles, its state-of-being verbs, its metaphysical imperatives, the hieroglyph comes closer to becoming total abstraction even as it returns to a natural state (that of juxtaposition); he speaks of the atom bomb in the same breath as he speaks of a regression to tooth-and-claw warfare. So the hieroglyph-virus comes closer to becoming the pure state of energy that is the sign-particle. And just so, in our presentation, the voices become both more animal and technologically abstracted until a pure tone is reached, a tone doubly articulated as infinitely significant and totally meaningless: the body without organs.


(gah, didn't have time to mention scale/relativity which I thought was another important parallel)