Participant observers coming homeward…

Any practice that slows processing creates a local pocket in which noticing becomes possible.

In this way, the local becomes focal; and, at last, we dwell alongside rather than standing at a distance.

Aphorism sent via text to Alicia Re Cruz, 28 June 2026

I have been carrying something around for a while now, and I think it is time to set it out on “paper” and see what it looks like in daylight. It has to do with two thinkers I have been reading for most of my adult life, in different decades, for different reasons, and with what happens when you stop treating them as separate influences and start letting them talk to each other inside the same head.

The two thinkers are William S. Burroughs and Gilles Deleuze.

If you have read both, you may already see the resonance. If you have read only one, bear with me. And if you have read neither, this essay might actually be for you more than for anyone, because one of the things I want to argue is that the resonance between these two writers has implications for how any of us, regardless of reading history, goes about the daily business of thinking, noticing, and staying alive to our own experience.

Here is what I am not going to do: I am not going to write a scholarly article with sixty footnotes and a literature review. I have done that elsewhere and will do it again. What I want to do here is something closer to what I call thinkering: thinking and tinkering at the same time, working with ideas the way a carpenter works with wood, hands on the material, willing to follow the grain where it goes rather than forcing it into a shape I decided on before I picked it up.

This essay rambles on purpose. I will explain why in Part Three.

§1. Burroughs and the Word Virus (Taken Literally)

I read William Burroughs before I read Karl Jaspers, before I read Deleuze, before I read most of the philosophers who have ended up shaping my professional life. This matters biographically because it means the Burroughsian current in my thinking is not a late addition to an existing philosophical framework. It is one of the deep strata. Before Jaspers there was Burroughs, and before Burroughs there was Jung, Campbell, and Castaneda. The line runs from archetypal depth through comparative myth through disciplined derangement and hovers with the word virus before it ever lands at Existenz or the Encompassing. By the time Jaspers showed up, I had already been prepared, by Burroughs, to take seriously the idea that something non-human thinks through us.

So when I encounter Burroughs’ central thesis, I do not encounter it as a literary provocation that needs to be tamed by philosophical interpretation. I encounter it as a claim I was prepared to hear.

The claim, stated as plainly as Burroughs ever stated anything: the word is a virus.

Not a metaphor for a virus. Not like a virus. A virus.

Burroughs spelled this out most directly in the piece called “Operation Rewrite,” from The Ticket That Exploded. The word, he says, is the “Other Half,” a separate organism attached to the human nervous system. It may once have been a healthy neural cell. It is now a parasitic organism that invades and damages the central nervous system.

The evidence? Try to stop your sub-vocal speech. Try to achieve even ten seconds of inner silence. You will encounter a resisting organism that forces you to talk. That organism is the word.

Most readers, even sympathetic ones, treat this as Burroughs being Burroughs. Colorful, provocative, slightly nuts. I want to take it seriously. I want to ask: what would follow if this were literally true?

And… Here is what follows.

First, the standard image of thinking as something a sovereign self does with a neutral tool called “language” collapses. If the word is a virus, then the self that seems to be thinking its own thoughts is, at least in part, an effect of the virus’s occupation. The feeling of interiority, the sense that “these are my thoughts and I am thinking them,” is the hallmark of a successful parasite, because a parasite that announced itself would be less reproductively effective than one that convinced the host of its own authorship. You do not notice the word virus for the same reason a fish does not notice water. It is not hidden from you. It is the medium through which your noticing occurs.

Second, and this is where the thesis gets uncomfortable, the feeling of intellectual excitement that accompanies a “breakthrough” in thinking is not reliable evidence that the breakthrough is true or valuable. It may be evidence only that a particularly successful viral strain has just completed a replication cycle. A philosophical vocabulary that spreads rapidly through a university, captures graduate students, and produces prolific secondary literature is exhibiting the traits that, in any other biological context, would mark successful infection. This does not mean the vocabulary is false. The virus has no particular interest in truth or falsity. It means only that the spread and the truth are independent variables. Thus, that warm feeling of intellectual arrival cannot be used to confirm that you have actually arrived anywhere.

Third, the examined life, the Socratic imperative to know thyself, acquires a diagnostic dimension. You are no longer discovering an authentic self—“a genuine me”—beneath the layers of social conditioning. There is no such substantial self. You are tracking which strains have taken hold, which refrains keep cycling through your nervous system, which order-words (to borrow from Deleuze and Guattari) organize your daily conduct without your having chosen them. The philosophical questions what do I believe? and how should I live? become inseparable from the virological questions what is replicating in me? and whose reproduction am I serving?

Now, I know this sounds paranoid. Burroughs himself was frequently accused of paranoia, and the accusation was not always wrong. But notice what happens when you place his thesis alongside claims that academic philosophy has long found respectable. Heidegger said die Sprache spricht: language speaks, and the human being is the site where language comes to word rather than the sovereign wielder of a linguistic instrument. Wittgenstein said the limits of my language are the limits of my world. Deleuze and Guattari said the order-word is the elementary unit of language, and its function is not to communicate information but to transmit commands that organize bodies into assemblages.

Each of these positions already concedes most of Burroughs’ thesis. What Burroughs adds is only the pathological register: his perennial insistence that this non-human agency of language has interests that may not coincide with the flourishing of its hosts, and that the appropriate stance toward it is therefore diagnostic rather than celebratory.

Burroughs’ distinctive contribution to philosophy, if we allow ourselves to call it that, is the refusal to make the situation sound dignified.

And I think that refusal is something philosophy needs more of. We have spent a long time making very similar claims in much nicer language, and the nice language has not produced the kind of noticing the claims are supposed to produce. Maybe the reason is that nice language is itself a viral adaptation: a strain that has learned to dress up the diagnosis so that the diagnosis no longer disturbs the host.

Let me offer an analogy from popular culture that I have found useful in my teaching. Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson, in their 1975 novel The Illuminatus! Trilogy, introduced a concept called the fnord. In their fictional world, the word “fnord” is inserted into news articles and advertisements, and children have been conditioned from an early age to experience anxiety upon encountering it but also conditioned to not consciously perceive it. The result is a population that reads its newspapers, feels chronically uneasy, attributes the unease to whatever the headlines say, and never notices that the fnords are doing the work. Advertising copy contains no fnords, so ads feel like relief. The population buys what the ads are selling.

It is a joke. It is also not a joke. It is a remarkably precise illustration of how the word virus operates below the threshold of conscious notice. And once you have read it, you cannot read an advertisement or a news cycle in quite the same way. You start asking: where are the fnords in this? What is operating below my conscious attention? The asking itself is a form of the diagnostic work for which Burroughs’ thesis calls.

One more thing before I leave Part One. Burroughs identified what he called “a basic impasse of all control machines.” Control, he observed, needs time in which to exercise control. It also needs opposition or acquiescence; otherwise it ceases to be control. You do not control a tape recorder. You use it. If you established total control over a human population, there would be nothing left to control. No persons there. Life is will, and the totally controlled are no longer alive. (A dangerous but necessary concept to hold for the diagnositc.)

This impasse is important because it means the word virus cannot fully colonize its host without destroying itself. Total control is self-defeating. There is always a margin, always a gap, always a space where the virus’s grip is looser than it would like to be.

That margin is where the work I want to describe in Part Three takes place.

§2. Deleuze and Slowing Process

Gilles Deleuze enters this essay not as an addition to Burroughs but as a thinker who was already working the same terrain in a different register. The connection between them is not accidental. Deleuze cited Burroughs by name in the “Postscript on Control Societies,” the short text in which he described the transition from Foucault’s disciplinary societies (organized through sites of confinement: family, school, factory, prison) to what he called control societies (organized through continuous modulation: codes, passwords, floating exchange rates, perpetual training, instant communication). The very term “control” came from Burroughs.

But the connection runs deeper than one citation. Let me trace it through three of Deleuze’s major texts.

In his first book, Empiricism and Subjectivity (1953), Deleuze laid down a thesis about David Hume that would govern everything he wrote afterward: relations are external to their terms. Ideas do not contain their relations to other ideas. The relations come from elsewhere, from principles of association, from habit, from the passions. The subject is not a substance that precedes its relations but a movement that is constituted by them. To be a subject, for Hume as Deleuze reads him, is to do two things: to believe (to infer from what is given the existence of something not given) and to invent (to construct functional totalities, rules, institutions, artifices that are not given in nature).

This sounds abstract. It is not. Read through the word virus thesis, it is the philosophical structure that makes Burroughs’ diagnosis intelligible. The word virus is precisely a set of external relations (sub-vocal chains, refrains, order-words) that constitute a subject who then mistakes itself for the origin of its own thoughts. The “Other Half” Burroughs describes is, in Deleuzian terms, the set of external relations that produce subjectivity while remaining irreducible to the terms (the perceptions, the neural events) they relate. The host experiences the virus as “myself thinking.” Deleuze’s empiricism explains why: because the subject has no content other than the relations that constitute it, and the relations are not the subject’s own. They come from the principles that operate on the given. They come, if you will, from the virus.

In What Is Philosophy? (1991), written with Félix Guattari near the end of both their lives, Deleuze laid out a tripartite account of what philosophy, science, and art each do. Philosophy creates concepts on a plane of immanence through conceptual personae. The plane of immanence is prephilosophical: it is the absolute ground of philosophy, the earth on which concepts are created, but it is not itself a concept. It is presupposed rather than produced by philosophical work.

Two features of this account matter for the present essay.

First, Deleuze and Guattari insist that the nonphilosophical “is perhaps closer to the heart of philosophy than philosophy itself.” Philosophy cannot be content to be understood only by philosophers. It is addressed essentially to non-philosophers as well. This is a theoretical warrant for a claim I have been making throughout my career as a teacher of freshmen: that the folks who show up in a general-education humanities course without a background in philosophy are not receiving a simplified version of the real thing. They are encountering the prephilosophical ground, the plane, that the professional apparatus has paved over.

Second, the concept of the conceptual persona is doing work I want to borrow. A conceptual persona is not the philosopher’s representative but the figure, Deleuze says, providing “only the envelope of his principal conceptual persona.” The nomadic virologist, the figure I have been developing in my recent work, is a conceptual persona in this strict Deleuzian sense. It is not a metaphor for the philosopher; rather, the figure whose figurations trace the plane on which my concepts are being created.

In Negotiations (1990), a collection of interviews and short texts spanning two decades, Deleuze said two things I want to place side by side because their juxtaposition is what generates the third part of this essay.

The first: “Creating has always been something different from communicating. The key thing may be to create vacuoles of noncommunication, circuit breakers, so we can elude control.”

The second: “What we most lack is a belief in the world, we’ve quite lost the world, it’s been taken from us. If you believe in the world you precipitate events, however inconspicuous, that elude control, you engender new space-times, however small their surface or volume.”

These two statements, taken together, say something remarkable. The first says our task, in a society of control: Not to communicate better or say more but to create pockets where communication’s rapid normalizing velocity gets locally suspended. The second says that how such creation becomes possible requires a specific kind of faith: a belief in the world that precipitates events, however small, that the control apparatus cannot capture.

Here is where Deleuze and Jaspers, who are not usually read together, converge with an almost eerie precision. Jaspers said: “Philosophical faith is not a content we believe in, but an action we believe by.” Deleuze’s “precipitate events that elude control” discloses such projeccts. Both are describing faith as an activity that produces effects rather than as a state of mind that represents the world. And both are describing a faith oriented toward the world as it actually is, contaminated and controlled, rather than toward a fantasy elsewhere.

So… Burroughs diagnoses the word virus. Deleuze provides the philosophical structure (the externality of relations, the plane of immanence, the vacuole of noncommunication) that makes the diagnosis intelligible. And both point toward the need for practices that slow the processing down below the velocity at which the word virus, the control society, the ambient machinery of modulation, can keep us from noticing what is actually happening to us.

Slowing things down is the whole game. And slowing things down is what Part Three is about.

§3. Rambling Reason and the Six Slow Practices

“Rambling reason,” as I call my way of philosophizing, names what happens when I stop pretending I always know where I am going before I get there. I wander, meander, drift, etc., a great deal more than many politicians and educators prefer “productive citizens” do. And I do this not because I am lost, but because I have learned that the most important things are always slightly off the marked trail, i.e. the kinds of discoveries findable only when I left the itinerary behind. It is not the same as roving aimlessly; such rambling has genuine intentions, genuine questions, genuine hunger. I just refuse to let those intentions harden into a predetermined route that would wall off everything for which the route did not plan. Think of the difference between a tourist with a checklist and a traveler who keeps stopping because something caught their eye: both are moving, both are curious, but only one is actually available to be surprised.

Rambling reason is the philosophical version of that availability: a willingness to follow the thought where it actually goes rather than where I might expect it to go, to let a digression become the main road, to discover that the thing I was really trying to think was hiding three turns behind the thing I announced to others that I was “definitely” thinking about. This is not a failure of discipline. It is a different and more demanding discipline: staying alert, staying genuinely open, staying honest about the difference between a conclusion I earned by following the thought and a conclusion packed-up for me before I even left home.

I want to introduce rambling reason here, at the end of this essay, because it names the disposition that connects the diagnosis (Burroughs) to the philosophical structure (Deleuze) to the actual, practical, day-to-day work of doing something about the situation they both describe.

The word virus operates at velocity.

The control society operates through continuous modulation.

Both depend on the host processing signals faster than the host can notice what the processing is doing to them. Any practice that slows the processing below that velocity creates a local pocket in which noticing becomes possible. And noticing is not a passive state. Rather, to notice becomes the beginning of what I am calling nomadic virology: the practice of tracking the word virus by traveling with it, at a slower tempo, through the ordinary structures it has colonized.

The phrase I keep coming back to is one I arrived at recently in doing a cut-up of a proposed project on the evolution of the notion of “asylum”:

Transistance at the slow margins or in the ambiguous trenches circuit breaks the transistors that organize the mechanics of control.

That is dense. Let me unpack it a little.

Transistance is a word I have been developing since my dissertation. It names a way of moving through conditions rather than against them or merely submitting to them. It is not resistance in the traditional sense, because resistance tries to stop the machinery and the machinery is not stoppable. It is not compliance, because compliance gives the machinery everything it needs to keep running. Transistance is the practice of occupying the machinery’s own switching components and running a different signal through them, at a different tempo, with a different orientation. The transistor, the elementary unit of the cybernetic machines that run the control society, is hidden inside the word transistance. The practice uses the control apparatus’s own components to interrupt the control apparatus’s own signal flow.

I am the transistor that has learned to switch differently.

Slow margins are the edges of the controlled field where the machinery’s attention is weakest. The fifteen minutes of poetry before the algorithmic day begins. The sketchbook in the back of the lecture hall. The walk through the neighborhood the commute has been routing around.

Ambiguous trenches are the contested spaces where the machinery is fully operative and you are inside it. The classroom. The department meeting. The assessment rubric. The syllabus. These are trenches because I am under fire, and they are ambiguous because my position within them is genuinely dual: I fill out the forms and I practice criticality at the same time. The institution cannot fully distinguish between the two because it needs my compliance to function, and my compliance is the medium through which any transistant practice must operate.

So what does the practice actually look like? Here are six things I do, that I teach my students to do, and that I believe constitute the concrete work of nomadic virology. I call them the slow practices because slowness is their common feature: each drops the tempo below the velocity at which the word virus can replicate without being noticed.

1. Reading and writing poetry. Poetry is a tempo technology. It puts language together in a way that makes you slow down. Something about the rhythm, the word choice, the line breaks makes you stop, back up, read again. Importantly, read aloud again and again to hear it. Once in that slower processing speed, I start noticing things about language that the fast speed hides. I start seeing which words are doing real work and which are filler, which refrains have been cycling through the nervous system without my choosing them, which order-words have been organizing my attention without my consent. Writing poetry is the stronger version because it forces me to notice what is already replicating within me. I cannot write a line without discovering whose/which virus I have been carrying.

2. Reading and writing fiction. If poetry slows down to the level of the word, fiction slows down to the level of the world. A novel constructs an alternative assemblage: a different way bodies, institutions, desires, and histories can be arranged. A reader who has inhabited many alternative assemblages develops a kind of imaginative immunity. They are harder to convince that the current arrangement is the only possible one. And that conviction, “this is just how things are,” is one of the word virus’s most effective replication strategies. Fiction inoculates against it by populating the host’s imagination with alternatives. To this day, I declaim to any who will heed me that Greek and Norse mythology along with Star Trek and Star Wars saved me from the capture of evangelical Christian nationalism despite growing up in the buckle of the Bible Belt.

3. Reading and writing history. History slows down to the level of time. Good history shows students that the arrangement all around us, the one within which I “make a life,” was not inevitable: somebody set it up, there were other arrangements before it, there will be other arrangements after it. The anthropologist David Graeber spent his career showing this: that hierarchy is not inevitable, that the state is not inevitable, that the current arrangement is one possibility among many. Reading history denatures the apparent necessity of the present. Writing history, even the small history of my own family or neighborhood, teaches me how contested the sources always are, which is itself a philosophical lesson about how the word virus covers its tracks.

4. Drawing pictures. This is the practice that surprises people. Everything else on this list works through language, and language is the word virus’s primary medium. Drawing is a way of paying attention that does not go through language. When I draw carefully, I have to look carefully. When I look carefully, I see things my language has been hiding from me. The visual world is always richer and stranger than any vocabulary; hence, the truth of the cliche: A picture is worth a thousand words. Drawing lets me access that strangeness directly, without the verbal mediation that the word virus depends on for its replication.

5. Careful listening. Listening, understood as a discipline rather than a passive reception, requires the temporary suspension of the transmission reflex. Most of the time, when someone is talking to me, I am not listening. I am either occupied with somehjting totally different or maybe even composing my next transmission. Careful listening means letting the other person’s words land before deciding what to do about them. This suspension is itself “a vacuole of noncommunication” in Deleuze’s sense: a pocket where the usual signal flow is interrupted, and where something can be received that the usual flow would have blocked. This is also the practice that makes philosophical conversation possible. I cannot have a real conversation with someone to whom I am not willing to listen. I can only have a superficial contest that pretends to be a conversation.

6. Exploring. The last practice takes me out of familiar territory. Exploring does not require a plane ticket. I can explore the block on which I have lived for years if I walk it slowly enough to notice what I have been walking past. The point is to put myself somewhere my usual refrains do not apply. When in a place I know well, my attention runs a compressed summary of the place rather than actually seeing it. When I am in an unfamiliar place, the compression has nothing to work with. My attention has to look around. And in that looking-around, I get a brief window of genuine perception, unmediated by the habitual categories the word virus has installed.

These six practices are not exotic disciplines. They are things humans have been doing forever. They become philosophical practices when they are conducted deliberately, at a tempo that creates the diagnostic pocket the word virus cannot tolerate, and with the kind of integrated feeling-thinking that the academic tradition has trained us to be embarrassed about.

Let me close with a word about that last point. In Latin America, among the fisherfolk of the Colombian Caribbean coast, the sociologist Orlando Fals Borda encountered a word for the kind of person the community trusted: sentipensante. Feeling-thinking. The person whose thinking is inseparable from their feeling and whose feeling is inseparable from their thinking. The separation of the two, the fisherfolk understood, is not a natural condition of human cognition. It is a cultural achievement, and not a benign one.

I have been translating sentipensante into English as senti-mental, with the hyphen. The hyphen is doing real work to slow the viral load by interrupting the fast read that would deliver the dismissive contemporary meaning:“sentimental” as soft, excessive, intellectually unserious. Instead, it forces the slow read that recovers the older sense: sentire (to feel) joined to mental (having to do with thinking). A senti-mental person is someone whose mentality is feeling-inflected, someone who thinks through care rather than apart from it.

The slow practices are all senti-mental practices.

Not sentimental in the captured, dismissive sense. Senti-mental in the recovered sense: practices that integrate feeling and thinking rather than separating them, that insist the integration is a strength rather than a weakness, and that treat the separation as itself a symptom of the infection the practices are designed to diagnose.

This is preliminary thinkering. I am not done with any of it. The Deleuze-Burroughs resonance has more to give than I have extracted here, and the slow practices need more sustained development than a blog post can provide. I am working on both of these in a series of companion essays, and the work will take as long as it takes.

But I wanted to get this much down to share because the ideas have been moving in me for a while now, and one of the things the slow practices teach you is that you should not hold on to a thought longer than the thought wants to be held. Let it out. See what it does in the air. Trust that the rambling will take you somewhere you could not have reached by planning.

Transistance in the slow margins. Transistance in the ambiguous trenches. The transistors are circuit-breaking. The word virus is being noticed. The slow practices are doing their work.

We are, as always, on the way.

I want to dedicate this entry on my blog to all of my young colleagues who traveled with me in the La Raya borderland between Spain and Portugal. It was a joy for me to see young thinkers who slowed-down and discovered that “method” can be a “way beyond” control.