scrambles is the american way

The Burroughs text this week has a lot of potential to be enacted by working with it in different media. In part because I have been thinking about the project assignment, I noticed that Burroughs makes a lot of explicit suggestions for “research” and experiments in sound, video and performance.

But not only that, I think that the text in written form also performs some of the scrambling that he repeatedly calls for. Right off the bat, I found that the fact that the text has already been marked up by a previous reader had the effect of thought control. On page 7, I found myself wondering how mitochondria could be viruses that wouldn’t “necessarily be recognized as a virus.” This seems to me like a small scale version of how “riot sound effects can produce an actual riot in a riot situation” (20).

The ideas for action that Burroughs presents also recall the talk by Erkki Huhtamo this past week. Huhtamo argued against accepting Jonathan Crary’s claim that the screen is the “detachment of an image from a larger background,” especially in pre-cinematic media because attractions such as magic lanterns were often presented in public spaces where the external noise of a fairground was never separated from the image. That argument intersects with Burroughs’ ideas for guerilla scrambling at demonstrations. External playback and cut-up tape recording interact with the people, “continually subject to random juxtaposition” (21). In any case, Burroughs numerous suggestions were a very fruitful read in the week before we have our presentations.