WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS’ REACTIONARY MEDIA:

Seizing Our Reality From Contemporary Historians

Author:

Philip R. Fagan

1998

“ The underground press serves as the only effective counter to a growing power and more sophisticated techniques used by the establishment mass media to falsify, misrepresent, misquote, rule out of consideration as a priori ridiculous or simply ignore and blot out of existence: data, books, discoveries that they consider prejudicial to establishment interest.”

Last year, the world did not mourn when it lost one of the greatest minds of the Twentieth Century. Following so closely on the heels of Allen Ginsberg’s demise, there was little mention of the death of William Seward Burroughs, the last surviving partner of the Beat Trinity. The powers that be, including those that control the press, had every reason to breathe a sigh of relief at his passing and trivialize such a loss to their utmost abilities. While Ginsberg, the great love of Burroughs’ life, had long since put his communist manifesto and radical public image behind him in favor of a beloved teddybear Whitmanesque American poet reputation, Burroughs never stopped rattling the establishment’s cage and speaking out in a voice so few could comprehend of the dangers of the world we were allowing to be created at the expense of all we should hold sacred. A revolutionary till death, he questioned every standard, broke the strictest of laws, challenged every opinion, and lived by his own rules, however changeable and contradictory they might appear to others. Above all else, like Orwell and others before him, he was a prophet who used his gift of language to warn us of the incomprehensible price we would pay for allowing human laziness to rob us of the gift of freedom. An intensely learned man, Burroughs had something to say on every subject under the sun, but none of his theories were as complex and interesting as those dealing with the notion of control and manipulation by a worldwide government machine, and, more particularly, the role of the media in such a conspiracy that threatens all our lives and livelihood. The only way out, he told us, was to turn the tables on the machine and throw its own shit back in its face; to create reality instead of having it drummed into our beings by the televisions, radios, newspapers, and thousands of other sources that seek to rule our psyches in the interests of Control.

Born in 1914 in St. Louis, Missouri, Burroughs obtained a degree in anthropology from Harvard before serving a brief stint in the Army during World War II. Disenchanted with the American Dream after the evil business of Hiroshima, he embraced the taboo-riddled big city underworlds of Chicago and New York City; a homosexual, petty criminal, and drug addict. In New York, he also commandeered the creative circle that would become the Beat Generation, although neither his writings-a bizarre moralist experimental hybrid of detective, western and sci-fi pulp fiction, alternative history, gay pornography, French surrealism and prophetic social commentary and satire- nor his personal philosophy- asked if he believed, like Ginsberg and the hippies, that nonviolence and giving the police flowers could change the world, his response was “The only way I like to see cops given flowers is in a flower pot from a high window”. - seemed to contain any element of the peacefully-pissed Buddhist-inspired humanity of his contemporaries. This was clearly a different animal and even more of a threat to an homogenized order of humankind. Only at home when out of his element, Burroughs lived extensively in west Texas, New Orleans, London, Paris, Mexico City(where he fatally shot his wife), and Tangier, where he collaborated at length with the artist Brion Gysin, an experimentalist much more of his ilk than his beat compatriots had been. In addition to his artistic endeavors, Burroughs took part in scientific expeditions to remote parts of the world and dabbled in the occult, believing intensely in the magical properties, whether good or evil, of the arts and all forms of communication. He spent the last years of his life in Kansas and New York. While hailed by critics as the “greatest living writer” and the only one to do “anything original with the English language since Shakespeare” , only at the end did the mainstream begin to remotely embrace him. He appeared in several films; recorded music with REM, John Cale and others, and, most ironic, was featured in a Nike television commercial; an obvious comical infiltration into the enemy media which he so feared, despised, and waged war against.

The manipulation of the media by Control is akin to Burroughs’ own autobiographical creation El Hombre Invisible: spectral, gray, anonymous. It thrives solely by relying on the mass ignorance of its existence . If an enlightened soul should suddenly glimpse the truth, the “naked lunch” that is on the end of all the forks, as Burroughs did, then its cover is blown; the gig is up. The media preconceives our every thought and expression; it shapes our self-knowledge; it represses and condemns, forging our reality for us and twisting it to suit its needs. Just as history is written by the victors, so our day-to-day notions of the world and our lives are dictated by the powers that be. The media’s influence is so prevalent and far-reaching in these times that we are unable to truly free our minds from its grasp for even an hour of our daily waking lives. We rely on it for our world view, putting a religious faith in its honesty of portrayal without questioning its ulterior motives or who it is really meant to serve. We accept it altruistically, like a child accepts the rules his parents set to govern him. In this age of Neoliberal Globalism, Control has more need than ever to suppress our ability to think for ourselves. The success of is mission relies on this criteria. In The Ticket That Exploded, Burroughs paints the following portrait of “modern America in the grip of total communications control- a world of computers, tape recorders, and other bizarre electronic devices”:

"All music and talk and sound recorded by a battery of tape recorders recording and playing back moving on conveyor belts and tracks spilling the talk and metal music fountains and speech as the recorders moved from one exhibit to another- Vast mobile sculptures of music boxes and recorders wind chimes and movies of the exhibit reflected from ponds and canals and islands where restaurants enclosed in flicker cylinders spilled light and talk and music across the water- Movies mix on screen half one half the other- Characters walk in and out of the screen flickering different films on and off- Conversations recorded in movies taken during the exhibit appear on the screen until all the spectators are involved situations permutating and moving-(Since the recorders and movies of the exhibition are in constant operation it will be readily seen that any spectator appears on the screen sooner or later... "

The idea here seems to be that the electronic media has not just blurred the line between reality and perception; it has mutated our reality to suit its own purposes and control the collective public mind. We are no longer able to distinguish our individual lives from the rampant sensory assault that assails us. In The Place of Dead Roads, Burroughs contends that history is in fact a deadly virus manipulated by Control through the electronic media, and the hero of the novel, a time-traveling Western gunslinger, seeks the antidote in order to “forge the new man, who will have thought and behavior patterns that are not imprinted or prerecorded” . The theme of man’s very soul being at the mercy of omnipotent electronica- televisions, tape recorders, computers, typewriters, film projectors- is developed to some degree in everything Burroughs wrote from Naked Lunch on. Not only are the machines wiser and more malevolent than man could ever aspire to be, they have also declared war on us; the end result being to reduce mankind to a simple recording device that plays back preordained data in the interests of Control. Our past, present and future are all subject to manipulation: “I advance the theory that in the electronic revolution a virus is a very small unit of word and image. I have suggested that such units can be biologically activated to act as communicable virus strains. Let us start with three tape recorders in the Garden of Eden. Tape recorder one is Adam. Tape recorder two is Eve. Tape recorder three is God, who deteriorated after Hiroshima into the Ugly American. Or to return to our primeval scene: tape recorder one is the male ape in a helpless sexual frenzy as the virus strangles him. Tape recorder two is the cooing female ape who straddles him. Tape recorder three is DEATH.”

According to such an apocalyptic vision, mankind as a whole is very much at the mercy of a media that controls our thoughts and actions; our very destiny. In a collection of interviews conducted in London by the French writer Daniel Odier, Burroughs expounds at length on the methods by which to fight back and reclaim our history, reality and self: Turning the weapons of Control back on themselves thereby creating a reactionary media of sorts. This theory has its roots in the “cut-up” method of writing he developed with Brion Gysin in Morocco:

"The method is simple...Take a page...now cut down the middle and across the middle. You have four sections...Now rearrange the sections placing section four with section one and section two with section three. And you have a new page. Sometimes it says the same thing. Sometimes something quite different- cutting up political speeches is an interesting exercise- in any case you will find that it says something quite definite... "

Burroughs goes on to demonstrate how such a scrambling technique might be used to infiltrate the press and even influence actual events. Applying the same principles to the electronic media, he concocted many plans of attack:

"With minimal equipment you can do the same thing on a smaller scale. You need a scrambling device, TV, radio, two video cameras, a ham radio station and a simple photo studio with a few props and actors. For a start you scramble the news all together and spit it out every which way on ham radio and street recorders. You construct fake news broadcasts on video camera. For the pictures you can use mostly old footage. Mexico City will do for a riot in Saigon and vice versa. For a riot in Santiago, Chile you can use the Londonderry pictures. Nobody knows the difference. Fires, earthquakes, plane crashes can be moved around. for example, here is a plane crash, 112 dead north of Barcelona and here is a plane crash in Toronto 108 dead. so move the picture of the Barcelona plane crash over to Toronto and Toronto to Barcelona. And you scramble your fabricated news in with actual news broadcasts...You have an advantage which the opposing player does not have. He must conceal his manipulation. You are under no such necessity. In fact you can advertise the fact that you are writing news in advance and trying to make it happen by techniques which anybody can use. And that makes you NEWS. And a TV personality as well, if you play it right. You want the widest possible circulation for your cut/up video tapes. Cut/up techniques could swamp the mass media with total illusion. "

Such a media takeover would of course be impossible without a well trained army of specialists working in cohesive units. The individual reactionary would have to start small and build his skills step by step alongside like-minded comrades. Step one of the assault is naturally the print news media; whole issues of the Times and Newsweek would be filled with false cut-up information; the creation of news instead of a biased recording of it. The next offensive would naturally involve the use of tape recorders to influence events and disorient the enemy. Burroughs develops this method more extensively than any other. Rumors can be spread by strategically placed recorders; politicians can be discredited; riots can be produced and escalated. Suggestion tapes can be implemented to induce mind control. Tapes will distort concrete notions of time and space and enlarge or inhibit perception. Burroughs seems convinced that the mechanism of the human mind is so similar to a tape recorder to begin with that it is defenseless against such an assault- “...Our sensory input is in effect recorded on an endless time loop, providing some seven seconds of delay for scanning before erasure. In this time the brain edits, makes sense of, and selects for storage key features. The weird deja vu sensation that ‘now’ has happened before is clearly due to brief erasure failure, so that we encounter already stored memory data coming round again. Time dragging or racing must reflect tape speed.”

From there, the revolution embraces the tactics involving visual images and devices such as cameras, projectors, and televisions. A simple experiment would involve walking down any street with a camera and moving it as closely as possible in the normal direction of the eye. At the same time, the street is being shot at a wide angle from different positions. “ The street of the operator is, of course, the street as seen by the operator. It is different than the street seen at wide angle. Much of it in fact is missing. Now you can make arbitrary scanning patterns-that is cover first one side of the street then the other in accordance with a preconceived plan. So you are breaking down the automatic scanning patterns... That is, you are using an arbitrary scanning pattern to break down automatic scanning patterns. a number of operators do this and then scramble in their takes together and with wide angle tapes. This could train the subject to see at a wider angle and also to ignore and erase at will.”

Burroughs’ vision was to use the tools of the mass media as a long range weapon to scramble and nullify the associational lines put down by that same entity. His theories and experiments grew increasingly further out and implausible (a good example is his contention that projecting films of venereal disease onto the enemy will in fact infect them!); however it is not the plausibility of the techniques that he was necessarily trying to broadcast. He was issuing a warning against an invasive mass media that has failed to serve the populace and has instead become an oppressive weapon for those that govern and control us. He hoped to plant the seeds for a revolution which he knew would occur, if ever, after his time. With his passing, we have lost not only one of the greatest literary and cultural figures of the century, but a true revolutionary of human freedom and a tireless watchdog guarding against the unseen forces that steal it day by day. The war is now ours. To quote Mr. Burroughs a final time: “The possibilities here for research and experiment are virtually unlimited and I have made a few very simple suggestions.” May he rest in peace.

SOURCES:

Books by William S. Burroughs:

Naked Lunch copyright 1966; Grove Press; NY
The Ticket That Exploded copyright 1967; Grove Press; NY
The Third Mind copyright 1978; Wylie, Aitkin, & Stone; London

Other Sources:

The Job: Interviews with William S. Burroughs by Daniel Odier copyright 1974; Grove Press; NY

Back to Scribblings >>