| Shock represents a tension between speech and silence. Shock is a concept through which various authors and artists have understood the conflict between language as a therapeutic tool and language as a disruptive act. It marks the cessation of language, and the shocked individual is confronted by a moment, disruptive of expectation or circumstance, which provokes a radical reassessment of personal awareness and political possibility. Beginning with shell-shock during World War I, I consider basic linguistic elements of shock and their disruptive effects on the body as ways of understanding the interconnections between speech and the severe discontinuities of behavior and attitude manifested on the soldier's body. In psychoanalytic literature during and after World War I, emphasis was placed on the therapeutic role of language as a tool of narrativization and the recreation of self Taking the moment of silence actuated by the disruptive encounter, Breton and Benjamin sought to channel these discontinuities towards philosophical and political practices which would result in a destruction of unchecked social and personal tensions. Silence, which forced the individual to reconsider environment and self, would become meaningful language once the individual was reconfigured by this political mobilization. On the other end of the spectrum, Korzybski and Burroughs approached shock as an excess of language, not its lack. I consider how language became a problematic constraint on individual freedom, so much so that what Breton and Benjamin had initially sought in shock became an overt invitation to increased manipulation by political and medical discourses. Both Korzybski and Burroughs placed language at the foundation of shock. Exploring the body's reactions to language which did not accurately reflect the facts of the world, Korzybski created a linguistics whereby adverse physical reactions would be reduced and the individual brought into a healthier relationship with his environment. This system informed Burroughs, and eventually resulted in his aesthetics of radical skepticism, which his most famous dictum, 'Language is a virus,' emblemizes as a turn towards silence, not as a means of political or personal reassessment, but as a move away from the self entirely. I argue that although shock represents a moment in which disruption can effect improved personal or political potential, Burroughs' argument is one that cannot be ignored since it reveals the inherently violent nature of shock as an uncontrollable process of reactions that keeps the individual in a perpetual state of instability. |
