"Language is virus from outer space""Language is virus from outer space"

is a quote that comes from the novel of William S. Burrough's, The Ticket that Exploded and is an idea he explores a little further in The Electronic Revolution. Hopefully I will get around to reading The Nova Trilogy of which the above mentioned novel is a part. But I did give "The Electronic Revolution" a read.

Below are my notes and reflections on some of the points he is making in that work, yours to enjoy.

Engrams and Cut/upsEngrams and Cut/ups

Burroughs was interested in Elon Hubbard's belief that he can effectively cast spells and writes quite a bit about it here.

Ron Hubbard, founder of Scientology, says that certain words and word com- binations can produces serious illnesses and mental disturbances. I can claim some skill in the scrivener’s trade, but I cannot guarantee to write a passage that will make someone physically ill. If Mr.Hubbard’s claim is justified, this is certainly a matter for further research, and we can easily find out experimentally whether his claim is justified or not. Mr. Hubbard bases the power he attributes to words on his theory of engrams. An engram is defined as word,sound,image recorded by the subject in a period of pain and unconsciousness. Some of his material may be reassuring: “I think he’s going to be alright.” Reassuring material is an ally engram. Ally engrams, according to Mr Hubbard, are just as bad as hostile as pain engrams. Any part of this recording played back to the subject later will reactivate operation pain, he may actually develop a headache and feel depressed, anxious, or tense.

And this leads him to a discussion of the reactive mind, which, i'm not so sure as to the mechanics of, nor did I have the time to research too deeply before writing.

This is roughly similar to Freud’s ID, a sort of built-in self defeating mechanism. As set forth by Mr. Hubbard this consists of a number of quite ordinary phrases. He claims that reading these phrases, or hearing them spoken, can cause illness, and gives this as his reason for not publishing this material. Is he perhaps saying that these are magic words? Spells, in fact? If so, they could be quite a weapon scrambled up with imaginative sound-and-image track. Here now is the magic that turns men into swine.

In any case, you should really read the essay. It is an artifact. It contains plenty of neurotic and drug-fuelled predictions about the future that you really might find compelling. One such example regarding technology is:

I consider the potential of thousands of people with recorders, portable and stationary, messages passed along like signal drums, a parody of the President’s speech up and down the balconies, in and out open windows, through walls, over courtyards, taken up by barking dogs, muttering bums, music, traffic down windy streets, across parks and soccer fields. Illusion is a revolutionary weapon:
TO SPREAD RUMOURS
Put ten operators with carefully prepared recordings out at rush hour and see how quick the words get around. People don’t know where they heard it but they heard it,
TO DISCREDIT OPPONENTS

An uncannily similar notion to the phenomenon today where you have everyone walking around with recording devices in their pocket, everything is mass surveilled, or otherwise, everything done in public is obsessively recorded and played back ad nauseum over social media feeds.

One of the reasons he considers these predictions is that he has attempted to untangle the question of whether viruses can be activated or created by sound and images. Obviously, this is all very scientific and rational.

New viruses turn up from time to time but from where do they turn up? Well, lets see how we could make a virus turn up. We plot now our virus’s symptoms and make a scramble tape. The susceptible subjects, that is those who reproduce some of the desired symptoms, will then be scrambled into more tapes till we scramble our virus into existence. This birth of a virus occurs when our virus is able to reproduce itself in a host and pass itself on to another host.

Again, if you were paying attention during covid, then this, too, sounds uncanny doesn't it? The following, perhaps not ... at least, not in my circles.

Now let us attempt the same thing with tape. We organise a sex-tape festival. We organise a sex-tape festival. 100,000 people bring their scrambled sex tapes, and video tapes as well, to scramble in together. Projected on vast screens, muttering out over the crowd, sometimes it slows down, so that you see a few seconds, then scrambled again, then slow down, scramble. Soon it will scramble them all naked. The cops and the National Guard are stripping down. LET’S GET OURSELVES SOME CIVVIES. Now a thing like that could be messy, but those who survive it recover from the madness. Or, say, a small select group of really like-minded people get together with their sex tapes, you see the process is now being brought under control. And the fact that anybody can do it is in itself a limiting factor. Here is Mr. Hart, who wants to infect everyone with his own image and turn them all into himself, so he scrambles himself and dumps himself out in search of worthy vessels. If nobody else knows about scrambling techniques he might scramble himself quite a stable of replicas. but anybody can do it. So go on, scramble your sex words, and find suitable mates. If you want to, scramble yourself out there, every stale joke, fart, chew, sneeze, and stomach rumble. If your trick no work you better run. Everybody doing it, they all scramble in together and the populations of the earth just better settle down a nice even brown colour. Scrambles is the democratic way, the way full cellular representation. Scrambles is the American way.

So you can see where paranoid-conspiracy churning turns art-form. It is really not all of it completely the musings of a tin-foil-hatter. The ensuring descriptions of how recording, cutting-up and splicing together news for experimental purposes feels obsessive and painstaking but riotous and fun. The point he is driving toward, to put it indelicately, is that, if we are to believe that Hubbard's mechanisms are effective, then they can and are implemented en masse. One possible reason for doing so is for the propagation of the language virus.

But this is a revolution, his writing, the avant-garde, of course, which he states sets out with the following aim:

... to build up a language in which certain falsifications inherit in all existing western languages will be made incapable of formulation. The follow-falsifications to be deleted from the proposed language. This IS OF IDENTITY. You are an animal. You are a body. Now whatever you may be you are not an “animal”, you are not a “body”, because these are verbal labels. The IS of identity always carries the assignment of permanent condition. To stay that way. All name calling presupposes the IS of identity. This concept is unnecessary in a hieroglyphic language like ancient Egyptian and in fact frequently omitted. No need to say the sun IS in the sky, sun in sky suffices. ... THE DEFINITE ARTICLE THE. THE contains the implication of one and only: THE God, THE universe, THE way, THE right, The wrong, If there is another, then THAT universe, THAT way is no longer THE universe, The way. The definite article THE will be deleted and the indefinite article A will take it’s place. THE WHOLE CONCEPT OF EITHER/OR. Right or wrong, physical or mental, true or false, the whole concept of OR will be deleted from the language and replaced by juxtaposition, by AND This is done to some extent in any pictorial language where two concepts stand literally side by side. These falsifications inherent in the English and other western alphabetical languages give the reactive mind commands their overwhelming force in these languages.

I have frequently spoken of word and image as viruses or as acting as viruses, and this is not an allegorical comparison. It will be seen that the falsifications of syllabic western languages are in point of fact actual virus mechanisms. The IS of identity the purpose of a virus is to SURVIVE

Even though this essay might be riddled with contradictory statements, solipsism, and might even draw irrational conclusions, it was worth the time spend thinking about. I think it is the spawn of science/speculative fiction and the metaphysical and I'm there for it. I don't suppose to have quite mastered these ideas, novice I am, but I found his conclusion captivating and wondered whether this Electronic Revolution bears any relation to the thinking of cypherpunks, in a more substantial capacity than just in name.

That is what this revolution is about. End of game. New games? There are no new games from here to eternity. END OF THE WAR GAME.