Stuff

I quite enjoyed the Burroughs reading. What seems to be left unsaid is that if the word is a virus, then we are that virus. I don't believe he's really calling for revolution--he's not exactly a scientist, and most of what he says is metaphorical. It seems to me his goal was rather to make people aware of the power that they can have once they understand that events occur within them, not in the world--sort of bridging the gap produced by Lacan's mirror stage, or rather relocating the self in the abstraction where it actually resides, rather than in an interplay between the body and the environment. The opposite of Electronic Revolutions might well be Marxist theory, which attempts to circumscribe the actual relations between the self and the other. Burroughs tries to make us aware that there is only one, or perhaps two, most strongly in the long prose poem near the end of the text--in which he displays the ability of his words to intercut our memories and our ideas of emotion into a sort of collage, which we are meant to understand exists not on paper but in our heads. His discussion of playback, of course, has very little to do with actual tape--movies are language as much as audio tapes, newspapers, and spoken words; telling someone about it is enough to constitute playing back an event. It's interesting that he mentions Scientology (sarcastically, I think), considering that hundreds if not thousands of people around the world are currently engaged in a "war" on Hubbard's Church, which consists entirely of playing back events that the CoS has tried to conceal--displaying their more eccentric beliefs, and communicating the various scandals they have unsuccessfully attempted to cover up. The internet facilitates all this, and I imagine Burroughs would have had a laugh out of it.