Language Parasites: Of Phorontology

by Sean Braune

Who speaks when you speak? Who writes when you write? Is it "you"-is it the "I" that you think you are? Or are we the chance inheritors of an invasive, exterior parasite-a parasite that calls itself "Being" or "Language?" If our sense of self is best defined on the basis of an exterior, parasitical force that enters us from the outside, then the "self" is no longer a centralized or agential "inside," but rather becomes reconfigured as the result of an "outside" that parasitizes the "inside"-as-host. Rough versions of this model can be found in several traditions of continental philosophy: in Lacan, Derrida, Serres, Kristeva, Foucault, Baudrillard, to name a few. However, the full implications of this ontological model have yet to be addressed: what are its consequences for a theory of subjects, objects, and the agencies that intersect with them? How does this framework alter our understandings of the human and the non-human, the vital and the material? An off-kilter point of view is required to consider this historical and philosophical situation. Language Parasites argues that the best way to conceive of the "self" or "subject" as something linguistically and ontologically constituted by an aggressive and parasitical outside is by asking the following question: "what is the being of a parasite?" In addressing this challenge, Braune combines speculative philosophy with 'Pataphysics (the absurdist science, invented by Alfred Jarry, that theorizes a physics beyond both the para and the meta, resulting in the pata). These theoretical collisions betray a variety of swerves that extend to the social (as a parasite semiotics), the cultural (as the invasive force of memes), the aesthetic (as the transition of postmodernism to postmortemism), the linguistic (as found in Saussure's paranoid researches into the paragram), the poetic (as seen in Christopher Dewdney's journey into "Parasite Maintenance" and Christian Bok's attempts to embed a poem in a bacterium), and the literary (as para-cited in Henry Miller's experience of housing a parasite named "Conrad Moricand"). The "voice" of the parasite can be found in what Saussure calls the "paragram"-the uncanny messages that lurk hidden underneath the written word. And what does the parasite say? Or, does its speech reject human ears? If the voice of the parasite mutters in the ear of the subject, then an anterior theoretical listening-a phorontology-is required, one that can negate the anthropocentric regimes of binaristic thought: the dyads of good and evil, right and wrong, male and female, inside and outside, etc. Language Parasites effectively transjects these dyads and emerges from these revealed sites and para-sites with a banquet of new philosophical concepts. Each of these concepts-such as "postmortemism," "hyperhistory," "the subject-of" or the "transject"-is selected for its intrinsic usefulness: they are scalpels and tools that can helpfully transcend anthropocentric dyads in order to unveil the continua of the non-human. The careful reader will already realize that Language Parasites is the result of a philosophical continental infection: it is the location of a meeting between the Derrida-parasite, the Serres-parasite, the Lacan-parasite, the Foucault-parasite, the Hegel-parasite, the Laruelle-parasite, and many other philosophical parasites. These parasites act as the hosts of other philosophies, each parasiting the other. Philosophy qua philosophy becomes the complex locale of a vigorous negotiation between host and parasite-a complex world that also implicates the author (lying on the postmortem slab) and the reader (requiring some form of medical or philosophical intervention). Language Parasites offers exactly this kind of medico-philosophical treatment: it is a tincture and a curative for your philosophical needs and ailments. You will feel full after reading this book.

Genres: Linguistics

136 pages, Paperback

Published May 4, 2017

Reviews

[Marc · Rating 4 out of 5]

“Cinematic technology, camera, audio, and special effects allow for an “active” subject who experiences an intensely tactile world. Tracing the lineage of cuneiform to the sound byte would demonstrate the influence of these “extensions of the human” when they are given economic reign over the patterns that code for the subject. This ontological development is very much about situations: situations that situate the subject and align him or her with a site while influencing that site with a para-site — a para-site that confines the subject within an imaginary body. There is no “self ” in this model and no “I.” Instead, there are only a variety of sites that code a so-called “subject” as being of certain sites and para-sites. This emphasized “of” that makes, in phorontology, a subject into a “subject-of” emerges across a realm of sites and para-sites through an imagined narrative coherency that disguises an underlying transjection. The phorontological transject is necessarily thrown into the world and operates ontologically and phenomenologically through a variety of ofs that shift and morph that particular transject across time and space (or place).”

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How did I come across this book? I'm really glad you asked that because it shows you care and I'd like to answer your question. Also, you can't read the first sentence of this paragraph and not ask the question. But that's language, no?

This whole circumstance is my phone's fault. My "smart phone" is either brilliant or a few charges away from adding its poison to the landfill. It only charges on a wireless charger now and even though powered off, it vibrates once charged and "glows" showing a "100%" on the screen. And it will randomly repeat this process sometimes. I think it's actually dropping the connection with the charger and then re-connecting. Anyhow, it did this around 3:45am one night. And, of course, it woke my wife up, not me. But then she woke me up and I took it off the charger. Couldn't fall back asleep despite only having gone to bed 3 hours earlier. You have a lot more time in the day when you wake up at 3:45am; however, you have a lot less energy, so the next 4 hours were spent in bed reading and bouncing around the Internet, which is how I discovered Punctum Books (and this free-to-download version of Language Parasites, which I sucked right off the web like the cyber-parasite I've become, a true glutton for nonstop "content.").

We'll pause here to share the book cover, which I can't add to GR unless I create a new edition...

Is all this going somewhere? Another great question! I knew I liked you. The short answer is: yes/no.

I see this book as sort of the next step after I fell off the proverbial cliff two decades ago when I read Structuralism and Semiotics (I guess that would make it less a "step" and more like a rock outcropping I bounced off on my continual fall). The structuralism/semiotics book kind of blew my mind because it was the first time I really thought of language as a virtually random system of matryoshka dolls stretching infinitely in both nested directions. A word leads to a word leads to a... You get the idea. It's similar to the mind/body split where the mind is nothing but language. And you can't really escape or examine it outside of language. Part of me felt like my conception of reality was completely dismantled. In the same way you can't ever truly "prove" you're not dreaming this very moment, it was kind of horrifying, and yet, it also made not the slightest difference in how I lived my daily life (which, I find, is the case with a lot of theory---you find out everything you believe is a sham, but you still need to eat and pay bills).

So, in comes Mr. Braune, like a critical theorist in the night, cyber-magically embedded in my devices, his para-cited words backlit by electronics built several thousand miles away from my home. His "phorontology" deals with the study of sites, parasites, and parasitic living. His analogy is less matryoshka dolls and more Ouroboros. We are the sites and language is the parasite that has infected us.

”First, we can deconstruct, but any deconstruction is already the construction of a new site and para-site. However, this problem goes deeper still: the parasite of language is akin to a self-replicating meme that rebuilds itself as quickly as any discourse can deconstruct it. The primary problem of the parasite is that there is no way to kill it off.”

Much like biological parasites are able to “rewrite” the behaviors of the hosts in order to ensure the survival/continuation of the parasite, language rewrites the subject to the extent we’re now what Braune refers to as “transjects” (my own take here, but it may be helpful to think of this in terms of translations---the subject replaced with shifting context- and time-dependent translations continually translating and being translated).

”...we are living in an era of metasentient parasites. ...every thought is already a parasite. … There is no escape from the para-sites of thought.”

“What is called “the subject” is subject of various constraints. If society is situated as a site, then the subject becomes a para-site. Linguistic and logical feedback can be found everywhere. This feedback can be found in even the most banal communication. Linguistic feedback is supplemental to normative communication and hints at a kind of semantic void that watches over the subject’s shoulder. This loop is chaotic and fractal and repeats itself forever — as a stammering in echoes, without solution.”

“A transject is, like a subject and an object, thrown into being, but it is a being that is thrown into a space that resides in between subject and object — the transject resists and rejects the requirements of power that position and site the subject as disempowered and also the observing mind that brings the object into existence. As a combinant entity, the transject exists as that which transfers and transitions between subjects and objects, abjects and projects, dejects and rejects. The transject is the localized entity of a drastically anterior—anterior to the “human”—notion of Being. The transject is the local face of the xenoject.”

It’s not just the “self” that has shifted, but history as well moving/mutating from a “cumulative,” linear amalgamation to a “constellation” of sorts.

”We must begin to ask ourselves what sites we occupy. If we do not, then the current phase of hyperhistory will create a presentation or representation of “reality” that is so persuasive that we will find ourselves living under a more frightening despotic regime than ever before (I include in this statement all the current and troubling trends towards the so-called “alt-right” or neo-fascist political parties or movements that have been emerging around the world from roughly 2014 to the present).”

I’m convinced there’s a type of high created by theoretical writing in that it elicits a feeling that essential truths are being revealed and the reader/writer is on the cusp of developments---riding a wave of revolutionary change. And this often lends itself to hyperbole: “Phorontology offers a first attempt at a differential diagnosis on the illness that lurks within language.”

At other times, it is extremely cogent:

“The posthuman subject or historically determinate transject perceives external phenomena as stimuli and filters these stimuli into a simulacrum of appearances that is hegemonically coded as “reality.” I call this process of reality production or reality normalization indivisualization. The transject becomes normalized as a “subject-of” when indivisualization takes hold; however, this indivisualizing process is not “individual” per se, but prone to the whims and preferences of the underlying language-parasite.”

“In The Immaculate Perception (1985), Dewdney explicitly asserts that language is a self-replicating organism: Once conceived, language became self-replicating, a lexical organism imbedded in the species. The evolution of language, inextricably bound with the evolution of our consciousness as a species, has diverged from its parallel status and taken on a life of its own. Language is virtually an independent intelligence utilizing humans as neural components in a vast and inconceivable sentience. The living language exists symbiotically with the human ‘host.’“

At this point, you can see I’ve lost all control of this review. I mean this is a slim book and I could go on sharing every third paragraph (which is almost how frequently I underlined, highlighted, or took notes).

Instead, I’ll abruptly leave you with three of the most fascinating ideas/concepts Braune touches upon:

1) A literary/language experiment in which poet Christian Bök embeds a poem in the DNA of a bacterium so that it might be replicated and live on biologically. See here for an interview.

2) Self-consciousness itself as a parasitic, recursive concept. Braune moves from the fascinating example of Natasha the monkey, who becomes exclusively bipedal after suffering from a flu (i.e., a virus alters her behavior permanently) to Peter Watts concept of self-consciousness potentially being a virus or mutation within humans.

3) This last one is possibly harder to accept and yet, it’s not beyond the realm of possibility… It’s the idea that our belief in and search for alien life forms is actually a kind of program or message embedded in our own DNA by an alien life form.

”What if the soul remains a monad that moves across sites and para-sites and parasitizes another body? What if we are floating intelligences that have temporarily infected our hosts and have forgotten about the transition? Metasentience would then be, in this speculative leap, a realist code that was transmitted from outer space: it would then be the monolithic residue of a frightening anteriority that does not fit into the earthly realm except as infection or mutation. In this model, metasentience would be the chance-based fluke that has taken up residence in the corpus callosum.”

Unlike many traditional concepts of communication and semiotics (given my limited understanding), “parasite semiotics” always consists of a triadic or multiple dynamic: “There would never only be one speaker and one addressee because the parasites are already muttering within the signal itself.”

”If language is configured as an emergent structure that contains certain features and properties that self-organize in manners that are similar to the emergent properties found in nature, then the secret codes within language would be similarly emergent. The paragram could be consid- ered a chance-based signal that emanates from language; or, even further, the paragram could be considered the voice of the parasite. Saussure recognizes the paranoid implications of his own paragrammic search, which suggests that language may be working independently of us [my emphasis]."

Needless to say, I don’t charge my phone by my bedside anymore.
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MORE PARASITIC WORDS WITHIN WHICH TO INFEST YOUR MIND
recursivity | hyperhistory | Homo loquens | ontogeny | proglottid | paragram | scolex | exergum
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For deeper engagement, see Parasite of a Parasite (Jihave’s peer review/response to the book)
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4/1/21 ADDENDUM (not an April Fool’s joke)
I’m beginning to think it’s not that there’s a mind body split, it’s that language creates it because communication between mind and body cannot be captured/deciphered/represented by language. Delightful article about the brain here: That Is Not How Your Brain Works.
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Also, art is a way we communicate without language (or, each medium has its own language).

[b · Rating 4 out of 5]

All things considered, this theoretical writeup works better than it has the right to. Braune’s writing is actually pretty clear for the most part, and writing in the weeds of theory needs this clarity so that it can be load-bearing, because the jargon comes fast and hard and heavvvvy. The examples Braune references (some that I love, like The Tapeworm Foundry) are odd how though probably apropos choices for explaining his halfways low-theory devouring of philosophical messiness and its obfuscations. This is worth reading if you’re interested in deconstructive treatises, and when I used it in my too-long fantasy seminar’s final research paper on Star Wars, I think I gave my teacher a hernia by citing a book that lists its publishing city as “Earth, Milkyway.” I wrote something poetic about hauntology being a call from a ghost to come look for its corpse, curtailed it into Braune’s metaphor of the corpus/corpse being hollowed out by parasites, postmortemism, blah blah blah. I wish I’d taken more time to work with the book before I tried to apply it because I sounded like a vogue jargon-cudgel-wielder, I’m sure, but the ideas are there, and the whole argument is readable and a manageable length. I look forward to reading more offerings from punctum.