Love you in Throat Gristle: Subvocal Speech and Tainted Proprioception in the Work of William S. Burroughs

Abstract

The notion of subvocal speech looms over the American writer William S. Burroughs’ work and its defining feature is an involuntary continuity. Burroughs borrows the concept from the behaviorist psychologist John B. Watson’s attempts between the 1920s and ‘30s to come up with an image of thinking which foregrounds speech and its laryngeal correlates. Yet, while adopting this picture, Burroughs brings a much more pragmatic and experimental slant to subvocal speech, waging battle against a heteronomy lived as an impossibility of silence. Trying out a mimetic intervention that appropriates this elusive language conduct and the discourse of its description, he positions his formal experiments (“cut-ups”) as a medium of registration and acceleration that tries to disable the compulsory character of subvocal speech by taking it to its most extreme conclusions. When these experiments seem to reproduce instead of removing the heteronomy associated with subvocal speech, he explores other approaches, with the organic and evolutionary implications providing material for new directions in narrative, and the polyvalent status of the human throat coming under a detailed focus. Accordingly, Burroughs’ work opens out to a series of “organological” inquiries the richness of which finds philosophical and anthropological resonances. While philosophers like Deleuze and Guattari find inspiration in Burroughs for a concept of “the body without organs,” phenomenology also turns out to have a lot to contribute to a renewed understanding of subvocal speech. In sum, this paper aims to demonstrate that subvocal speech as an originally behaviorist notion has a much more layered character than is visible at first glance, enlisting at once the modes of cut-up, routine, and evolutionary speculation aside from straightforward critique.