The Throat

Abstract

This visual essay revisits William Burroughs’ methodology in “The Electronic Revolution” (1970) and, tracing an archaeology of the viral load contained on the word, one discovers the throat as a medium. We know how in the beginning there was the word, and the word became flesh: human flesh in the beginning of the throat, the organ that programmed the first hominids for speech. Seminally, the throat is the technical-media that manufactured the so-called human and produced History – a tapeworm is lodged in the throat, a parasitic micro-film that is still and always active, which eagerly and incessantly wants to expand, conquer territories, and desires the place of discourse: hence the word (image-text and discourse), which is both code and programme, is susceptible to being worked on, copied, amplified, retransmitted, censored, boycotted, assembled and imagined.