Event

Viral Language, Viral Bodies: Sounding Politics in Laurie Anderson’s Language is a Virus (from Outer Space).

In 1959 American novelist and spoken-word performer William Burroughs published

Naked Lunch—a work that has been recognized for its uncanny prescience in predicting the

AIDS crisis for its several sections of text that depict, often in graphic terms, the characteristics

that would define the conditions caused by the virus now known as AIDS. In 1983, Laurie 

Anderson recorded “Language is a Virus (from Outer Space),” which used the well-known 

dictum often attributed to Burroughs. During the early years of the AIDS crisis, political 

resistance emerged and converged among several different communities of knowledge including 

social justice activist groups, municipal and federal governments, and pharmaceutical 

companies. Within this network of competing information, Anderson’s “Language is a Virus 

(from Outer Space)” is a smaller event that reveals a perspective not on the AIDS crisis in 

particular, but rather on the very types of apparatuses of verification and techniques of 

communication that are circulating in, around, and through the AIDS crisis in New York at this 

time. This paper examines how Anderson probes at the gap between science and aesthetics more 

generally by pointing toward the fallibility of language as a conduit for empirical observation. 

By performing her own body as a musical instrument, employing voice filters, and featuring 

video projections, Anderson demonstrates how performance methods can constitute political 

agency. I argue that Anderson’s song speaks to the translation between the language of biology 

and the language of politics, proposing that apparatuses of verification are always in dialogue 

with technologies of government.