A Network of Reference and Implications: Electronic Revolution & its Peers

William Burroughs' "Electronic Revolution" is a fascinating text, both proto-cyberpunk in its technological fetishism (a la Neuromancer) and discomfortingly pseudo-medical in its aspirations to a higher biological causalties of human development (possibly related to the bionuclear power of Akira and/or the apes & monolith opening of 2001) . Additionally, "Electronic Revolution" functions as a possible antidote to Hans Magnus Enzensberger's "Constituents of a Theory of the Media" by arguing for exactly what Enzensberger believes is only half the battle, namely, equipping the populous with the tools of mediation through which they are controlled and to thus overturn the order of things as they are. Hence the title "Revolution." I think that tracing out this idea of the 'guerrila media producer' who be a fascinating study, particularly as it intersects with economic criterion, and inevitably must be considered along with the production of "prosumer" audio/visual products that have been a force in the politics of the everyday as long they were seen as documenting reality, not reconstructing it as Burroughs seems to prefer.

When I think over, there is a bizarre erasure (or perhaps it is a more naive overlooking) in the Burroughs text, in regard to the 'guerrila media,' and this is the nature of the devices used for capturing, playing back, and editting tape. As proprietary objects, how does Burroughs feel he can subvert order using the same devices order uses to propigate itself? Are not the technologies involved in the undermining of politics also the means by which that politics is maintained? So is Burroughs simply substituting?

Here, it would probably good to interrogate Burroughs' emphasis on "scrambling," on the intense, disorienting, recombination of recorded mediums. Is this a radical discourse? What exactly does Burrough's believe it achieves? And what do you do when commercial media recuperates the scrambling (such as MTV's "switching channels" aesthetics of the 1980's, or high speed montage of commercial film that has become so mainstream that it is a naturalized filmic device)? Has Burrough's recombiant spirit been so absorbed by culture (in musical mash-ups or remixes, or youtube parodies) that it can no longer show culture a new part of itself?

Snow Crash & Electronic Revolution

Perhaps more interesting is the idea of the virus and the belief that the virus through words might actually have a more direct physical impact that society typically gives it credit for. While Burrough's was describing how "scrambled words and tape act like a virus in that they force something on the subject against his will" (Burroughs 32), I could not shake the eerie connection of Burrough's idea to the concept of the "me" and "nam-shub" of Neal Stephenson's "Snow Crash." In that text, Neal Stephenson employs the idea of code-mediated viruses that effect human hackers, and not necessarily their computer hosts. These viruses, are related to Sumerian mythology, where the "me" is a sort of human software, actually programming them to execute certain tasks. The success of these programs was predicated on the existence of the Sumerian language, which essentially worked like a common operating system through which "me" were compiled and executed. The "nam-shub" is a sort of anti-virus, which caused people to forget Sumerian and thus become free from being human-computer slaves. The fascinating thing about the comparison between Snow Crash and Electronic Revolution is that the virus is the danger of the former, and the promising subversive liberator of the latter. However, at one point, Snow Crash's protagonist wonders like Burroughs does, about the origins and meanings of the idea of a virus: "I wonder if viruses have always been with us, or not. There's sort of an implicit assumption that they have been around forever. But maybe that's not true..." (Stephenson 233).

Does it matter? It seems to matter to Burroughs, who not only acknowledges von Steinplatz's theory of the origin of spoken langauge (Burroughs 8) but also wonders if he can "write a passage that will make someone physically ill" with the emphasis on the idea of the written effecting physicality(Burroughs 39). Like the Christian-Right villain of "Snow Crash," Burroughs believes "a far-reaching biologic weapon can be forged from ... language" (53). And it's at that point if not sooner, that we as readers suddenly must confront the violence and power that has been at work throughout not only Burroughs' writing but everything we've read. Is language an operating system and the texts merely programs as in "Snow Crash"? Or have we been wounded and indoctrinated at the hands of fascists like Burroughs, who at least, near the end, has the decency to reveal what's been happening to us.