A
virus operates
autonomously,
without
human intervention. It attaches itself to a host and feeds off of it,
growing and spreading from host to host.
Language
infects us; its power derives not from its straightforward ability
to communicate or persuade but rather from this
infectious
nature, this power of bits of language to graft itself onto other bits of
language, spreading and reproducing, using human beings as hosts.The notion
of the
meme -- coined in 1976
by
Richard Dawkins to illustrate the field of
memetics -- crystallizes
this view of the communication process.
Georges Bataille
similarly argued that communication was best understood from the perspective
of
contagion. In Bataille
any human being is no more than a conduit for communicative process, a channel
for ideas which pass through him/her."If, as it appears to me, a
book is communication,
then the
author
is only a link among many readings."
* The
author is simply a
node on a network, through which ideas pass.
At stake in such a conception is a radical reworking of the notion of the
subject
in communicative experience. Bataille writes:
a man is only a particle inserted
in unstable and entangled wholes. These wholes are composed in personal life
in the form of multiple possibilities, starting with a knowledge that is
crossed like a threshold - and the existence of the particle can in no way
be isolated from this composition.... This extreme instability
of connections alone permits one to introduce, as a puerile
but convenient illusion, a representation of isolated existence turning in
on itself. ("The Labyrinth," 174).
Subjectivity is an illusion, one that
allows us to operate comfortably in this plane of existence, but which nonetheless
masks true reality, in which there is no division between subject and object:
"There is no longer subject-object, but a '
yawning gap' between the one and the other and, in
the
gap, the subject, the object are dissolved; there is passage, communication,
but not from one to the other:
the one and
the other have lost
their separate existence" ("The Torment," 89).