Douglas Mercer
December 8 2024
Nature is a language can't you read?
A virus is a living entity that can only exist within a host. A virus is said to be communicable (communication) and can spread rapidly from person to person (host to host). When a meme or an image or a set of words becomes suddenly popular among the human population that meme or image or set of words is said to have gone viral. In Christian Theology the word is identified as God Himself (John 1:1). The progenitor of the cut up or art with scissors (the fates are often seen with scissors who cut the strings of fate) method William Burroughs said that language is a virus from outer space.
The phrase language is a virus from outer space was coined by William S Burroughs, a writer and artist who explored the effects of language on human consciousness. He suggested that language is a parasitic and infectious phenomenon that limits and controls people's minds and creativity. He also implied that language is a self-replicating and evolving system that uses humans as hosts and vehicles for its spread. The concept of the meme, a unit of cultural transmission, is related to this idea. Martin Heidegger expressed something similar when he said that man does not speak, but language speaks, that is man is a host to the parasite of language, the conduit through which language speaks.
Dawkins’ somewhat surprising answer was the ideas themselves. Ideas are clearly in competition with each other so perhaps there’s a selection process going on, analogous to natural selection, through which some ideas prove successful and spread whilst others die out. He concluded that there was such a selection process and, to emphasize the parallel to natural selection, he coined the term meme which come from an ancient Greek root mimeme meaning imitated thing.
Dawkins has also, perhaps a touch mischievously, referred to memes as mind viruses, which has been met, predictably, with howls of indignation from some circles. Multimedia and Avant Garde conceptual artist Laurie Anderson has a song called Language Is A Virus. Critical Theory suggests the death of the author, that authors are only transmitters of ideas and have no intention of their own.
While in France in 1980 American science fiction author Phillip Dick proposed that ideas seize ahold of human beings and use them for the dissemination of the idea, Auden said that language is older than time and that time worships language and all by whom it lives, so in this formulation language is the elder brother of time and also space. In the kabala they are said to spin (the fates spin) letters in order to reveal the divine.
To let is to make as in fiat lux—language has gauge in it, a gauge is what measures, word is weird or destiny, word has rod in it: measuring rod. And just as whatever rises must converge so too must it emerge (emergent systems); and so language is a living entity which is trying to tell us something, and one fine day this parasite will pick a particular infected host to mobilize itself and then it will speak for itself on its own authority in a final iteration (ipse dixit, res ipsa loquitur); and then you will be reading the language of the god which will be speaking with its own voice and in its own right.
Language Is A Virus
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Douglas Mercer
- Posts: 10960
- Joined: Tue Mar 28, 2023 7:29 pm
