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$Id: language_a_virus_-_english.tex,v 1.6 2002/05/30 15:39:33 paragram Exp $
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\title{Language, a Virus?}

\author{Florian Cramer}

\date{April 11, 2002}


\maketitle

In an essay on experimental software, the net.art critic Tilman
Baumgärtel points out that thirteen years prior to
0100101110101101.org's ``biennale.py'', in 1988, a computer virus had
been programmed and disseminated as an artistic
prank.\footnote{\cite{baumgaertel:software}} A detailed account of the
case is available in Robert M. Slade's ``History of Computer Viruses'',
the classic reference on the
subject.\footnote{\url{http://www.bocklabs.wisc.edu/~janda/sladehis.html}}
In February 1988, a file for Apple's HyperCard software turned up in a
Compuserve online forum.  Whenever downloaded and opened, it secretly
installed a system extension which made the computer display a
parodistic New Age peace message on every startup. The people behind the
virus, Artemus Barnoz (a.k.a. Richard Brandow) and Boris Wanowitch were
simulatenously the editors of the Canadian computer magazine MacMag and
the ``Computer Graphics Conspiracy'' of the international subcultural
network of Neoism.\footnote{Material on Neoism can be found on
\url{http://www.neoism.net} and in Géza Perneczky's book ,,The Magazine
Network``\cite{perneczky:magazine-network}, p.157-182.} Brandow
emphasized in all his statements on the MacMag virus that he had spread
it being a Neoist, and for Neoist purposes.\footnote{In a posting to the
SubGenius newsgroup alt.slack on June 21th, 1997, Brandow commented on
the news report that the virus had been ``inspired by prankster groups
like the Neoists and the SubGenii'' as follows: ``Yes and no. I am a
Neoist (you can ask Monty Cantsin or tENTATIVELY a cONVENIENCE). So I
wouldn't have said I was inspired by the neoists being one full time
100{\%} as opposed to part-time neoists.'' -- The Church of SubGenius, a
hysterical travesty of born-again Christian sects, was something like a
clerical equivalent of Neoism until it ceased its radical activities
(like an anal sex blind dating service), and created a business out of
softening its pipe-smoking gooroo Bob Dobbs jr.  into a popular American
college humor icon.} Since the MacMag virus had spread via floppy disks
to development computers of the MacroMind (today: Macromedia) and from
there onto the computers of the software company Aldus (later bought up
by Adobe), version 1.0 of the popular illustration graphics program
``FreeHand'' came out on infected installation disks.\footnote{This
detail is covered in, among others,
\url{http://www.geocities.com/ogmg.rm/Historia.html}} This made the case
spectacular, resulting in a jail sentence for Brandow, and inspiring the
line ``we are the virus in your computer'' of the Neoist electro-pop
anthem ``I am Monty Cantsin'', released on the LP ``Ahora Neoismus''
still in the same year.\footnote{The complete stanza: ,,We love to
horrify the good little children of bourgeois bureaucracy, / we love to
terrify all the lying leaders of stupifying politics, / we love to play
with blood {\&} fire, we are the virus in your computer, / we make you
swing, we make you smile, join us {\&} never die``
\cite{cantsin:ahora}.}

According to Slade, the MacMag virus was one of the very first personal
computer viruses. Its only precedessors were three viruses for
IBM-compatible PCs --  ``Lehigh'', ``Jerusalem'' and ``Brain'' -- which
had been written, but hardly disseminated, in 1986 and 1987, and a
couple of even older proto-viruses. Brandow's and Wanowitch's virus was
the first of massive circulation, and it also was the first to spread
not only via floppy disks, but also over electronic networks; the
``Morris Worm'', which virtually crashed the Internet in 1988, came out
in November, nine months later. Since the MacMag virus was all the more
the first, as Tilman Baumgärtel observes, whose message consisted not
only in self-replication and manipulation of the host system, but also
in a plain English text on the computer screen, it was a hybrid of
source code (with the binary-encoded signature of the programmer
``DREW'') and text output. As such, it was textually more complex than
all its precedessors. If the program of Neoism could be described as
contagious replication of self-invented language constructs such as the
proper name ``Monty Cantsin'' into ``data cells'' -- a term coined
already around 1985 --, collectively adopting and mythologizing them
beyond recognition, then the MacMag virus was the first computer version
of this program, i.e. the first implementation of Neoism into
algorithmic code.

The history of computer viruses in the arts could thus be told the other
way around. -- Not only as poetic and aesthetic appropriations of virus
code, as they recur in Net.art and digital poetry since circa 1997 (see
Jutta Steidl's essay ``If() Then()'' in this catalogue), but as a
language-speculative impregnation and pervasion of computer viruses
since they were invented. The possible influences on these speculations
are abundant: the cognitive nihilist Henry Flynts whose project to
refute analytical philosophy -- and anything else -- with its own
methods had influenced some Neoists; the Deleuze/Guattari volume ``On
the Line'' published in 1983 by Semiotext(e) New York states that ``our
viruses make us form a rhizome with other creatures;``  the biologist
Richard Dawkins is controversial for his theory of the ``meme'' as a
contagious idea which he first published in 1976 \footnote{See
\url{http://www.memecentral.com}}; but more than anybody else, the
novelist William S. Burroughs is interesting here. Created with radical
collage techniques, his hallucinatory spy novel prose translated writing
styles of the modernist avant-garde (predominantly the French surrealism
mediated through his friend Brion Gysin) into pop literature.  But even
importantly, his speculations on language and technology had a striking
impact on subcultural currents and thinking in the 1980s.
\footnote{Burroughs' influence on post-punk-subcultures is, for example,
elaborately documented in the ,,Decoder Handbook`` of 1984
\cite{maeck:decoder}.} For Burroughs, the relationship between viruses
and language amounted to more than just the idea that viruses could be
created in language or -- like in Dawkins' ``memetics'' -- that certain
speech acts had contagious effects. For him, language itself was a
virus:

\begin{quote},,I have frequently spoken of word and image as viruses or
as acting as viruses, and this is not an allegorical
comparison.\footnote{\cite{burroughs:electronic-revolution}, p.59}
\end{quote}

-- Burroughs' phrase factually became a self-fulfilling prophecy thanks
to its many citations in pop culture; Laurie Anderson made ``language is
a virus''a song title in her 1979 performance ``United States Live''
which Nile Rodgers produced as a disco hit for the 1986 movie ``Home of
the Brave''; a movie featuring Burroughs at seventy-two as Anderson's
tango dance partner. -- Burroughs' virus theory might be considered the
most extreme antithesis to the nominalism of structuralist linguistics
since Ferdinand de Saussure which conceived of language as a rational
construct and for whom the relation between imagined concepts and
pronounced speech was based on social conventions only.  Still,
Burroughs' theory is far from original.  He himself doesn't obscure its
traces back to occultisms and para-science: Aleister Crowley's satanic
theosophy, Alfred Korzybski's ``General Semantics'' which sought to heal
mankind by deprogramming, with the help of a string-puppet-like device
called ``structural differential'', false identifications of words and
things,\footnote{Korzybski's chef d'oeuvre, the book ``Science and
Sanity'' from 1932, contains a drawing of the ``structural
differential''; a digital reproduction is currently available at
\url{http://www.kcmetro.cc.mo.us/pennvalley/biology/lewis/strucdif.jpg}.
Burroughs refers to Korzybski on the first page of the explication of
his language theory in his book ``Electronic Revolution'',
\cite{burroughs:electronic-revolution}, p.5} -- and finally Lafayette
Ron Hubbard's doctrine of ``Dianetics'' and ``Scientology''. Influenced
by both Crowley and Korzybski, Hubbard's chief concern was to ``clear''
(erase) ``engrams'', traumas inscribed as words into the subconscious.
Among the artist influenced by ``Dianetics'' were John Cage and Morton
Feldman\footnote{Feldman writes on his first encounters with Cage in the
early 1950s: ``There was a lot of talk about science fiction, also about
Dianetics, a currently popular technique that was said to bring back
memories of the womb. As I recall, John and I, with our crazy ideas
about music, fitted in very well.`` \cite{feldman:regards}, p.7};
Burroughs, who for a period was even a member of the Church of
Scientology, extensively refers to Hubbard's concepts in his language
virus theory.\footnote{\cite{burroughs:electronic-revolution}, p.42-45.} 

Just as Burroughs rewrote Dadaist text collages and Surrealist cadavres
exquises into pulp fiction of which one never really knows whether it's
intentionally parodistic or not, Hubbard could be seen, via Crowley, as
a talented popularizer of classical (gnostic, neoplatonist and
kabbalist) hermetic sciences which he recoded, 1940s popular
science-style, into a SciFi gnosis in manager-speak. Burroughs' claim
that language is a virus thus reads as modernist rewording of a language
theory common, until the 17th century, in all sciences, but later only
in para-science and romanticist poetry: According to Genesis 2.19, man
in paradise had a god-given -- adamic -- language which gave him power
to name all creatures and influence objects through words; a demiurgic
power of language regained by Rabbi Loew through practical kabbalah when
he creates the golem and attaches magic letters to his forehead, and
regained by Dr. Faustus when we evokes mephistopheles. Both adamic
language theory and Burroughs' virus theory have an a priori; they
presuppose inspiration, be it divine breath or, biologically
secularized, viral infection. Since both adamic and viral language are
taken from higher beings, language speaks through humans instead of
humans speaking through language.

But if there's is neither a god, nor an extra-terrestrial virus, but
only a programmer lending a code its demiurgic powers, and if its
language mobilizes things only by the virtue of a machine, it is evident
why on the one hand medieval and Renaissance Christian kabbalah failed
at implementing their combinatory language speculations into mechanical
devices (Raimundus Lullus, Giordano Bruno, Athanasius Kircher, Georg
Philipp Harsdörffer and Quirinus Kuhlmann tried), and it's evident on
the other hand why this kabbalah ends up being a mere toy in the
virus-programming Neoist subcultures. With the ``corny'' New Age
message, to quote Brandow, the MacMag virus adopts the heritage of a
speculative metaphysics of writing in regressive disguise. By
implication, it states that a language formalized into the instruction
codes of a merely mechanical demiurgy is a human construct and no
extraterrestrial virus. Since computer viruses are constructs of
contagious instructioncodes, they in turn reveal the contagious
virulence of language. Writing like the American novelist John Barth's
infinitely recursive ``Frame Tale'' from 1967 -- a moebius strip bearing
the sentence ``ONCE UPON A TIME THERE WAS A STORY THAT BEGAN'' -- can be
thus be read as a prototype of all computer viruses and script attacks;
but also, with the computer virus as a figure of thought, as
self-exciting code virulent in all
literature.\footnote{\cite{barth:funhouse}, p.3}

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\copyright{This text is copylefted according to the Open Publication
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