Friday 31st October, 2008. William Burroughs

Warning signs of imminent eviction at rampART so we negotiated an obstacle course of barricades to get into the library for this month's meeting. We discussed Burroughs' and Gysin's cut-up method as a strategy for radical intervention and as an artform with links to Dada and Surrealism. We talked about its application in both literature and sound recording and how the technique de-familiarises concepts and thus allows for a critique of the way that normativity is constructed in language. Our discussion of Cities of the Red Night, a text that does not overtly utilise the cut-up, was focussed on the sense in which its structure and the tone of the narrative elicits similar responses, particularly with regard to the circumscription of the body by what Burroughs called (elsewhere) the 'envelope of words' that surrounds and pervades it. Burroughs' technique in this novel was referred to as 'mythmaking' in the sense that it offers fantastic origin stories which challenge the myths that have historically determined notions of subjectivity, sexuality and time. We agreed that there was something science fictional about both of the chosen passages although, strictly speaking, his work could not be classed as science fiction. Essentially, we found that he seemed to want to understand human being in terms of its realisation through technology. Although we didn't discuss it at the meeting, I would add here that his fascination with the possiblities of viral infection in 'Politics Here is Death' accords with his writings about tape recording and his belief that the externalising of the voice and cutting and splicing tape to produce new sounds could produce effects at the level of the body which he understood as infected with the 'virus' of words. He understands tape as a technology which can intervene in both the cultural construction of identity and the experience of embodiment which Deleuze and Guattari describe as 'molar'. We also found resonances with Derridean deconstruction and with Haraway's cyborgian politics, particularly in the sense in which tape can produce techno-organic configurations of the self/body. We agreed that the cut-up has much in common with the cultural politics of Duchamp's found objects and that it is a democratising technique which enables the production of new art through doing violence to those works deemed to be 'classics' (as advised by Gysin). This led us to a discussion of 'high' and 'low' culture and the connection between class and aesthetics. We understood Burroughs and Gysin to be engaged in challenging dominant aesthetic principles and that Gysin as a 'self taught' artist was offering the cut-up as a crtique of art school hegemony. We did, however, consider the fact that, particularly in the case of some of Burroughs' novels, what was produced was a form of literature that was itself inaccessible without an understanding of his poetics or an appreciation of techniques of textual engagement which do not rely on the expectation of a linear narrative.
The next reading group will be brought forward a week to co-incide with the next London Freeschool Weekend (November 21st). We'll be reading a selection from Cote, Day & de Peuter's Utopian Pedagogy