As is well-known, Burroughs regards language as a virus that has invaded humanity, making humans dual creatures, alienated from a more interesting (not necessarily truer) universe. Language is a parasite, benefiting from human activity and directing it. Recording could be seen as a way in which language holds, imposing a simple linearity on experience. Hence, the cut-up is a way of disrupting this. The cutting-up of recording is not just the written cut-up by other means—it is a deeper operation, not because it operates with voice instead of writing, but precisely because it operates through a prosthetic living, a prosthetic speaking, both of which emphasize that there is only ever prosthesis when it comes to the ideas or conditions of living. The mixing of different recordings intervenes directly in the symbiotic evolution of recording and the human. It refuses the immunity of inoculation (i.e., living with recording, accepting linear, spool-based life) and replaces it with a constant test situation. Disrupting the “natural” progress of recording methods in order to illustrate the chance elements and the “flaws” in systems that allow operation, cutting up recordings, literally or otherwise, takes the recording into the realm of recombinant DNA. This might seem an obvious and only metaphorical connection, but the working of DNA occurs very much within the thinking induced by recording as medium.

7. The author of the passage would consider which of the following to be most similar to Burroughs’ reasoning?

A. Those who do not contribute to society are less intelligent than those who do.
B. If a joke is not funny, the words are to blame, not the joke teller.
C. The act of regarding a star makes it real; until then, it does not exist.
D. The image of a photograph held in one’s mind is illusory; the actual photograph is less real than its subject.
E. An adult is more encumbered than a newborn baby is in terms of experiencing things that foster excitement and delight.



8. Select the sentence of the passage in which the author expresses skepticism about established wisdom about a topic.






9. In the context in which it appears, “holds” most nearly means

A. grasps
B. supports
C. retains
D. controls
E. withstands