William S. Burroughs worked with sound and word as discrete, digital units of information, creating recombinant effects on a reader’s consciousness through the operation of chance operations that momentarily empty the semantic register and allow pure sound to occur, as in mantra. In novels such as Naked Lunch and The Soft Machine, Burroughs sought, through a sequence of recombined information, to reprogram consciousness into a cacophonous, silent register beyond the verbal.
Cutting texts into slices and rearranging them towards a reprogramming on the scale of consciousness anticipates the recombinant DNA technologies, if not the concepts, that would transform the evolutionary scale of life all the way up to today’s CRISPR. Assured by molecular biology that DNA is a kind of “word”, Burroughs seeks, like CRISPR, to rewrite it by cutting it up. As a “virus from outer space”, Burroughs’ imaginative meta-description of language is itself shaped by the discourse of both Francis Crick’s discourse of panspermia - where nucleic acids are ubiquitous galactic hitch hikers hosted by appropriate planetary petri dishes such as our own - and alien abduction, where abductee accounts have continual recourse to the language and practices of DNA manipulation - the informatic vision of nascent genomics. This talk will ponder the parallel fashion in which both discourse of the alien and of biotechnology itself can be seen through this digital lens to have been “abducted” by the idea of recombinant information, itself at play in Burroughs work. Modeling alien phenomena as themselves artificial life forms caught up in the sexual selective frameworks of human consciousness hosting them will be further explored.
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