{"id":41372,"date":"2020-09-01T12:41:06","date_gmt":"2020-09-01T16:41:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/?p=41372"},"modified":"2020-09-02T10:27:17","modified_gmt":"2020-09-02T14:27:17","slug":"william-burroughss-prophetic-mutterings","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/2020\/09\/william-burroughss-prophetic-mutterings.html","title":{"rendered":"William Burroughs’s Prophetic Mutterings<\/font>"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
‘This is Burroughs the self-styled revolutionary at his most historically explicit, the courageous whistle-blower in 1960 denouncing and exposing media magnates, business moguls, bankers, political leaders and scientists as part of a larger, deeper conspiracy at work behind the scenes of the mid-twentieth century.’<\/em><\/h5>\n\n\n\n

By Oliver Harris<\/strong><\/font>
<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"
Moloko Print [2020]<\/a><\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

BATTLE INSTRUCTIONS<\/em>  addresses particular individuals, which marks a key distinction from anything in Minutes to Go<\/em> and The Exterminator<\/em> before it or the Cut-Up Trilogy of The Soft Machine, Nova Express<\/em> and The Ticket That Exploded<\/em> that came after. Here, Burroughs doesn\u2019t just lecture his enemies in general terms\u2014\u201cLISTEN ALL YOU BOARDS SYNDICATES GOVERNMENTS\u201d\u2014but openly names names\u2014from \u201cROCKEFELLER LUCE GETTY\u201d to \u201cKHRUSHCHEV LENIN MARX EINSTEIN FREUD.\u201d <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Attacking American capitalism and imperialism in the shape of big oil and the news media, and Russian communism, science and psychoanalysis, Burroughs stands with the 99% (\u201cWHAT AM I DOING OVER HERE WITH THE WORKERS???\u201d) against the 1% (\u201cWHY DONT I COME OVER WITH THE BOARD???\u201d). Reneging on the class position of his birth, he performs the role of double-crossing defector from the ruling elites, \u201cONE OF THE GREAT RATS OF ALL TIME.. CALLED THE LAW ON ALL OF US. ALL RIGHT WILLY THE RAT TELL THE MARKS HOW IT WORKS.\u201d This is Burroughs the self-styled revolutionary at his most historically explicit, the courageous whistle-blower denouncing and exposing media magnates, business moguls, bankers, political leaders and scientists as part of a larger, deeper conspiracy at work behind the scenes of the mid-twentieth century. And yet, rather than being dated by such unusual specificity, his vision continues to resonate for two particular reasons.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Oliver
Oliver Harris<\/em><\/font><\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n
\"Burroughs
William S. Burroughs [Photo \u00a9 by Harriet Crowder]<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

One is the balance Burroughs strikes between present-time realities and projected futures, which makes his polemical ground as much ante- as anti-anything. Or to put it another way, \u201cROCKEFELLER LUCE GETTY\u201d is a shorthand Burroughs never expands upon: he gives no details of how Getty, named in 1957 the richest American alive by Luce\u2019s Fortune magazine, had his \u201cOILY HANDS\u201d all over the Middle East, for example. That\u2019s because such figures are for Burroughs themselves just more \u201cEARTH PUPPETS,\u201d not the Puppet Masters, to borrow the title of Robert Heinlein\u2019s 1951 alien invasion novel. The higher-level powers and the future conflicts that are dramatized here are never completely in focus or fully formed but always remain shrouded in vagueness, like his later account of Luce\u2019s media empire as \u201csome sort of police organisation.\u201d This was so even when\u2014or rather, especially when\u2014Burroughs sets out to explain his position, as in BATTLE INSTRUCTIONS\u2019 opening and closing texts: \u201cTHIS IS THE SPACE AGE\u201d thus begins with \u201cPOINTS TO CLARIFY\u201d that clarify nothing, while the final mock interview, \u201cOUT POSITION,\u201d subtitled \u201cWILLIAM BURROUGHS ANSWERS A FEW QUESTIONS,\u201d fails to answer anything.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

While Burroughs never theorised obscurity for self-evident reasons, he hinted at its strategic necessity in a letter to Mademoiselle magazine, who at the start of the year had published an amusingly cryptic piece of his imagining the 1960s: \u201cI regret that you find my prophetic mutterings incomprehensible but isn\u2019t it just a shade unreasonable to expect a road map of the next decade to be comprehensible in terms of present conditions?\u201d The phrase \u201cprophetic mutterings\u201d originates in Naked Lunch <\/em>and aligns Burroughs\u2019 elusive futurology with the drug-induced visions of an Amazonian brujo, to insist on realities that cannot be reduced to familiar known terms. This is the second reason why Burroughs\u2019 vision doesn\u2019t date: unprecedented historical changes can only be represented and therefore grasped at all from an alien point of view and a new, enigmatic language, and he recognised 1960 as a turning point in the history of global capitalism without parallel, forecasting \u201can UNIMAGINABLE DISASTER\u201d for the world and our species: \u201cHUMAN CREATURES. LOOK! LOOK AT YOUR PLANET.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Since the mid-1950s, Burroughs had been warning how technology might eliminate \u201cthe disturbing factor\u201d of imaginative spontaneity so that human \u201cbehaviour can be controlled and predicted by the scientific methods that have proved so useful in the physical sciences.\u201d<\/strong><\/em><\/h5>\n\n\n\n

Against the ecologically catastrophic \u201cGREEN DEAL,\u201d which appears here for the first time before returning in Nova Express,<\/em> Burroughs demands an end to \u201cBUSINESS. AS USUAL,\u201d and it\u2019s a grim irony that his terms are being repeated 60 years later, by the Swedish environmental activist Greta Thunberg, word for word (\u201cToday\u2019s business as usual is turning into a crime against humanity\u201d). Burroughs\u2019 front line of attack, however, was not fossil fuels (Getty, Rockefeller), but media technology (Luce) and machine intelligence (Norbert Wiener). He saw, felt, and imagined the looming \u201cUNIMAGINABLE DISASTER\u201d with particular force because it was being enabled by rapid developments in computing power led by the very corporation that bore his family name: \u201cMR BURROUGHS WHO MADE IT ALL POSSIBLE WITH HIS MACHINE […] THE MACHINE AGE FEEDS BACK FAVORABLE CONDITIONS FOR MACHINE MONOPOLY.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"
‘Those who need certainty are of no interest to this department.’<\/strong>
\u2014 William S. Burroughs<\/strong>
Page design by Robert Schalinski<\/em>.<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

Since the mid-1950s, Burroughs had been warning how technology might eliminate \u201cthe disturbing factor\u201d of imaginative spontaneity so that human \u201cbehaviour can be controlled and predicted by the scientific methods that have proved so useful in the physical sciences.\u201d Although his point of reference was the cybernetics of Wiener\u2014named and quoted in \u201cTHE OCCUPATION\u201d\u2014this is near verbatim B.F. Skinner, who had advocated a \u201ctechnology of behaviour\u201d and dismissed human autonomy as a myth in Walden Two<\/em> (1948). Since Skinner\u2019s radical behaviourism aimed to reify the world and reduce the people in it to predictable data, to things (\u201cNOW FOR GODS SAKE DONT LET THAT COCA COLA THING OUT…—… THING IS RIGHT\u201d), it\u2019s no surprise that it has informed the \u201cprediction imperative\u201d that drives the internet algorithms of Surveillance Capitalism. When Shoshana Zuboff describes how Google\u2019s targeted advertising \u201crevealed new capabilitie to infer and deduce the  thoughts, feelings, intentions and interests of individuals,\u201d she echoes with uncanny precision the formula of \u201cbiocontrol\u201d cited by Burrough in Naked Lunch<\/em> and The Exterminator,<\/em> repeated here in \u201cTHE OCCUPATION\u201d section: \u201cWORD LINES CONTROL YOUR \u2018THOUGHTS FEELINGS AND APPARENT SENSORY IMPRESSIONS.\u2019\u201d       <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Burroughs grasped not only the means but the scope of control systems to determine reality, and the emerging power of prediction and subliminal messaging over brute force or propaganda. In BATTLE INSTRUCTIONS,<\/em> the model of control shifts from an industrial or bureaucratic society to a fully commoditized market that creates a world of desires and needs through the news media (\u201cWhose LIFE TIME Owns Dreams?\u201d) and TRAK, \u201cTHE SEX AND DREAM UTILITIES CONTROL BOARD.\u201d TRAK is his vision of a total corpora- tion, one that incorporates the entire lives of its customers by selling the consumer to the product. Burroughs anticipates here not only the unprecedented asymmetrical power of 21st-century computerised mega-corporations that daily penetrate to the depths of our unconscious in order to monetize our experience, but also the totalising world-view that makes capitalism appear the only imaginable world, objectively true and perpetually necessary, rather than a masquerade of cataclysmic market interests: \u201c\u2018IMMUTABLE REALITY OF THE UNIVERSE.\u2019 TRAK UNIVERSE.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This excerpt from Oliver Harris’s introduction to ‘Battle Instructions’ is \u00a9 2020 by Moloko.<\/span><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

‘This is Burroughs the self-styled revolutionary at his most historically explicit, the courageous whistle-blower in 1960 denouncing and exposing media magnates, business moguls, bankers, political leaders and scientists as part of a larger, deeper conspiracy at work behind the scenes of the mid-twentieth century.’ By Oliver Harris BATTLE INSTRUCTIONS  addresses particular individuals, which marks a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":15084,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[26,18,4,20,23,17],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-41372","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-books","8":"category-literature","9":"category-main","10":"category-media","11":"category-news","12":"category-political-culture","13":"entry"},"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/02\/Burroughs-fedora360jpg.jpg","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pbvgEs-aLi","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41372","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=41372"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41372\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":41481,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41372\/revisions\/41481"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/15084"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=41372"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=41372"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/herman\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=41372"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}