k-punk

WHY BURROUGHS IS A COLD RATIONALIST

(Back, back, back.... like Case re-descending into the cool green black of the Matrix...

My addiction to the net should be frightening I spose.... I kept it under control last week when I had only limited ability to jack in, but it really did feel like a part of my body was missing (and only from the POV of anti-cybernetic organicism could that appear to be metaphorical....) Again, like Case... 'trying to reach the console that wasn't there....'

To anyone who has emailed me during the period of my holiday: thanks, I will reply in the next day or so without fail... To those I promised to send things to but didn't --- SORRY ---- holiday preparations and other matters made things v. hectic prior to my departure to Wales --- will sort out v. soon ----

Now, back to bizniz....

I agree with more or less everything John says in his post on Burroughs below, but I see no reason, given all that, to disqualify WSB from the ranks of the Cold Rationalists.

On the contrary.

It's certainly the case that Burroughs' great tempation was Romanticism (much the same is true of Beckett, incidentally, who also always seemed to have to rein himself in from doing nothing but turning out passages of luminous lyricism). But it is the tension between Burroughs' own personal proclivities and the rigours of the impersonal Spinozist program to which he submitted himself that make his writing so powerful and so astonishing.

It was Burroughs' assiduous and unflinching purging of any tendency towards Romanticism in himself that I found most unsettling when, as a sentimental Romantico-subjectivist teenager (it's the rare teenager who isn't a sentimental Romantico-subjectivist after all!!), I first encountered his work. Burroughs' pitiless interrogration of his own passions and passivity; his continual 'breaking of the frame' to upset any sense either that his writing was an expression of a substantive self OR that it was a representational 'window on the world'; the sudden petering out of narrative lines or their 'descent' into hyperbolic farce... all of these tendencies were part of a deliberate (and deliberated) move from Romanticism to NeuroMancy (cybernetic sorcery) = Spinozist Neurobotics.

I've always read Burroughs through Spinoza and Spinoza through Burroughs.

Burroughs' own addiction gave him an insight into 'artificial need' as the basic motor of the Human Operating System. With Spinoza, Burroughs recognized that the human organism has a marked (pun absolutely intended) tendency to seek out and identify itself with parasites that debilitate but never quite destroy it. (One of the many paradoxes of the Control virus that Burroughs so carefully delineates is its need to keep its victims alive: no control without something to be controlled, no parastitism without a host. Hence the slow death of hollowed out anthrobotic zombiefication so endemic amongst us TMHs...)

Spinoza gives absolute philosophical legitimation for Burroughs' claim that the entities that drive human beings into destruction and self-destruction are NO METAPHOR alien occupying forces. Spinoza's famous argument about suicide was that, strictly speaking, it was impossible. An individual entity is defined simply by its tendency to persist in its own being (what Spinoza calls its 'conatus'). If something is acting contrary to its own interests, then it has been overtaken by forces external to it. 'Your planet has been invaded....'

What makes Burroughs a Cold Rationalist is his ruthless Spinozistic commitment to three propositions: (1) contrary to PoMo subjectivo-Fuzz, there are human interests (2) these interests are being blocked by alien occupying forces and (3) human freedom consists in first of all enumerating and then eliminating these forces (i.e. in dealing with the causes of human servitude). Being free is not in the first instance about doing what you 'want' to do, since the human organism's defaults tend towards repetitious-compulsive controlled hedonic circuits (the penny arcade picture show). For WSB, most sex was indistinguishable from pornography, and both, like drug addiction, were induced in the organism by Control. (Here Burroughs converges not only with Spinoza, but with Foucault...)

Somewhat cheekily, I'm going to quote from my thesis to back this up:

'Alongside drug addiction, pornography serves as one of Burroughs’ chief examples of a control process. Pornography assumes a privileged position in Burroughs’ cut-up texts because it exemplifies the process he calls “image addiction”, exposing the mechanisms by which desire is simultaneously artificialized and channelled. What Burroughs derives from psychoanalysis - and his study of scientology* - is principally the idea of the subject as a recording - and recorded - system. The “reprogramming” of the human nervous system - the major theme, as McLuhan says, of Burroughs’ Nova Express - is a neo-Spinozist model of the production of sad passions. Like addiction, pornography is an ostensibly participatory process which commensurates the organism to exogenous - and arbitrary - stimuli. For Burroughs, the consumer of pornography, like the addict, is ultimately himself consumed, locked into ever-more predictable circuits of dead affect; desire learns to love its own repression by allowing itself to be looped into the desolate repetition of mechanical stimulus-response patterns.

Needless to say, Burroughs makes no distinction between pornography and “ordinary” sexuality; on the contrary, for Burroughs, all sexuality needs to be understood on the model of pornography. Sex is a recording, to be re-cut, spliced together and replayed. It is all purely technical, a question of habituation to stimuli that could be anything; the body is slaved into idiot compulsive-repetitive behaviours by the triggering of what Burroughs calls “images”. The “image”, for Burroughs is essentially a particular neuronic stimuli, around which associations cluster. Repeat the image and you repeat whatsoever is associated with it. Where Freud privileges one particular image, or set of images - what Deleuze-Guattari call the family photo - so as to freeze desire into familial representations , Burroughs realises that, in principle, any image can function to capture desire. Sexuality operates in Burroughs less as a primary instinct than as a reprogrammable stimulus-response circuitry. “You see sex is an electrical charge that can be turned on and off if you know the electromagnetic switchboard.” (NE 140) Burroughs’ work endlessly insists that pornography operates not as a representation of sex, but as its deterritorialization (out onto the technical machines), and complementary capture. Sex escapes into recording technologies that sample and loop repetition-compulsions before feeding them back into bio-behaviour that increasingly functions as their idiotic replay. As with Spinoza, Burroughs presents a version of behaviourism that operates through rudimentary techniques of associationism:

The operation is very technical - Look at photomontage - It makes a statement in flexible picture language - Let us take the statement made by a given photomontage X - We can use X words X colors X odors X images and so forth to define the various aspects of X - Now we feed X into the calculating machine and X scans out related colors, juxtapositions, affect-charged images and so forth we can attenuate or concentrate X by taking out or adding elements and feeding back into the machine elements we wish to concentrate - A Technician learns to think and write in association blocks which can then be manipulated according to the laws of association and juxtaposition - The basic law of association and conditioning is known to college students even in America: Any object, feeling, odor, word, image in juxtaposition with any other object, feeling, odor, word or image will be associated with it - Our technicians learn to read newspapers and magazines for juxtaposition statements rather than alleged content - We express these statements in Juxtaposition Formulae - The Formulae of course control populations of the world - [NE 171]

Association is not a cognitive process, but something physical; all cognitive narrativization is always derivative from a more primary zone of bodily affect. But rather than all stimulus being ultimately attributable to bio-sexuality - as a certain crude psychoanalytic reductionism would insist - Burroughs shows that associationist collaging can flash-cut any random image into a neuronic series and libidinize it. “Flash from words to colors on the association screen - Associate silently from colors to the act - Substitute other factors for the words - Arab drum music - Musty smell of erections in outhouses- Feel of orgasm- Color-music-smell-fell to the million sex acts all time place -”[NE 172] The body, then, emerges as a set of nonorganic recordings, triggers and replays.'

NE = Nova Express

On the cut-ups: while I agree that the later books are more enjoyable, I get more out of the earlier novels, especially the Nova trilogy. The cut-ups work best if you hear them read aloud I think....

But the main difficulty with the cut-up lies in Burroughs' equivocal account of it. On the one hand, Burroughs presents the cut-up as a strictly accurate representation of how reality operates (this is more or less how Ballard celebrates it in his essay, 'Mythmaker of the Twentieth Century', and how Burroughs describes it in the incredibly informative Paris Review interview). On the other hand, Burroughs presents the cut-up as a randomizing, ludic and aleatory disruption of the Pre-Sent control program of the Reality Studio.

However much Ballard might have admired Burroughs, it is he - in the Atrocity Exhibition - who implicitly produces one of the most effective critiques of this latter notion. Ballard shows how the ludic collage, far from being disruptive of power, is how power itself operates in Societies of Control. Surely, in these post-MTV times of ubiquitous nanospliced micro-editing and obligatory random juxtapositions, it is clear that the cut-up, far from being radical, is Kapital's preferred expressive mode. As ever, the threat to power lies not in the irrationalist aleatory but in the machinically consistent.

* Burroughs' interest in scientology is fascinating, and not only because of scientology's hyperstitional miraculation of itself as pulp religion. What little I know about scientology and dianetics suggest that they are in effect pulp Spinozism. Hubbard's notions of Reactive Mind and engrams are pure Spinoza...

More to be said about magic and sorcery, but sorcery is Cold Rationalist, that goes without saying, surely.... :-)

Simon R: posts in reply to yr comments on Blissblog coming soon: 'Why God does not improvise (against Deleuze-Guattari's Vitalism)' and 'The Outer Child'...

Posted by mark at August 29, 2004 11:44 PM | TrackBack