Sitting down to read on a cold day in Seattle. Not much to write at the moment, aside from six entries in the annotated bib for the exam lists, all of which I hope to post here in the next week or so.
In the meantime, this morning I came across this wonderful line in Burroughs’s The Ticket That Exploded: “Modern man has lost the option of silence. Try halting your sub-vocal speech. Try to achieve even ten seconds of inner silence. You will encounter a resisting organism that forces you to talk. That organism is the word. In the beginning was the word. In the beginning of what exactly?” (49-50). Elsewhere, Burroughs’s organism is at viral play (a play that is always outward, becoming-external) in his “Origin and Theory of the Tape of the Cut-Ups” (a talk), “Recalling All Active Agents” (actually by Brion Gysin at the BBC, but referred to by Burroughs in “Origin and Theory…” and The Ticket…) and “Silver Smoke of Dreams” (a sound-work), all of which are below and available — together with more Burroughs sounds — at UBUWEB.
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For me, what’s striking here is that “noise” and “fragmentation” are not attributed to, say, industrialism, modernization, or urbanity (compare with Ralph Ellison), but rather understood as forms of spliced subjectivity and internal-cum-external (and vice-versa) discourse. (Perhaps we do away with “external” and “internal” under this model?) I’m not sure whether I’m willing to call this sonic fragmentation the “postmodern” subject; however, I am interested in why the magnetic tape recorder is Burroughs’s crucial mode of production. That is, we could return to B.C. oral traditions and still locate phonocentrism in ancient Greek culture and elsewhere. However, the possibility for production, re-production, manipulation, distortion, cutting, pasting, fast-forwarding, and rewinding generated by works like “Silver Smoke of Dreams” in the early 1960s is a post-Gutenberg press phonocentrism — it seems — that stresses not the ephemeral voice, but rather an emergent one. As Burroughs states in “Origin and Theory…,” “When you cut into the present, the future leaks out.” The future. Not the past. What might occur. Not maybe what was.
The recording or transcription of the voice (and, by necessity, the body) onto magnetic tape is a capture and not writing, a capture that — for Burroughs — becomes part of an archive of the future, a Benjaminian propelling forward, a forcing of the organism out into articulation. I would further argue that this phonocentric capture does not lead to logocentrism or the search for a center, principle, or truth that holds. Even if “logos” means the “Word,” it is ultimately not Burroughs’s “word-organism.” The latter is a complex fluid connection or intermediation between — for example — bodies, the magnetic tape recorder, and discourse, whereas the former is a static origin, reason, or source. The question, then, has already been asked in The Ticket That Exploded: “In the beginning of what exactly?”
If, per Burroughs, “What we call history is the history of the word” (50), then perhaps what we call the future is the randomness and vulnerability of the word-organism. The next questions for me, then, are: How might sonic culture studies create an archive of the future? As a practice of cultural and literary criticism, how might it answer “what’s next?” instead of “what was?” and how might it emerge rather than negate?
Perhaps this sounds trite, but I’m hoping such questions will lead me to avoiding “literary criticism-as-rescue mention” or “cultural-studies-as-the-great-uncovering.” At the same time, I also want to avoid the reductive and paranoid, “everything’s connected.” More soon.
Intersections for future/recursive reading: Kittler, Ong, Jameson, Derrida, Artaud, Beckett, and Hayles.
Works Cited:
Burroughs, William S. The Ticket That Exploded. New York: Grove Press, 1967.
—. Break Through in Grey Room. Brussels, Belgium: Sub Rosa (CD006-8), 1993.
