Language as a Virus: a reading of the Xenotext Experiment by Christian Bök
Contemporary poetry; The Xenotext Experiment; Christian Bok; Cyborg.
At the turn of the century. XX to the XXI, the Canadian experimental poet Christian Bok starts a poetic project that is still ongoing called The Xenotext Experiment. Such an experiment, inspired by the proposal of the beat writer and cyberneticist William Burroughs that “language is now a virus”, intends to contaminate literary discourse with the vectors of biochemistry and bioengineering, by producing a Xenotext: a “beautiful and anomalous” poem that inhabits, like a parasite, the body of the extremophile bacterium Deinococcus Radiodurans. Transforming the micro-organism into a writer and archive of the poem at the same time, the Experiment is a curious reflection of a society under the regime of pharmacoponographic control, which increasingly blurs and confuses a series of corporeal-semiotic hierarchies — making literal the confusion of metaphysical barriers proposed by the cyborg creature imagined by philosopher Donna Haraway. In this dissertation, I intend to understand how the manipulation of living bodies for literary purposes can change the for coming (à venir) of literature and, more extensively, of the human being who creates it.