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2017 Overwriting Literature and Other Acts of Cultural Terrorism in the Control Era Raymond Blake Stricklin

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COLLEGE OF ARTS AND SCIENCES

OVERWRITING LITERATURE

AND OTHER ACTS OF CULTURAL TERRORISM IN THE CONTROL ERA

By

RAYMOND BLAKE STRICKLIN

A Dissertation submitted to the Department of English in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

2017 Raymond Blake Stricklin defended this dissertation on April 12, 2017. The members of the supervisory committee were:

S.E. Gontarski Professor Directing Dissertation

Krzysztof Salata University Representative

Andrew Epstein Committee Member

Barry Faulk Committee Member

Aaron Jaffe Committee Member

The Graduate School has verified and approved the above-named committee members, and certifies that the dissertation has been approved in accordance with university requirements.

ii

For Stefanie, always

iii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Writing is never a solitary endeavor. I have had support from many since I began this project. This project would not have been possible without support and advice from my

dissertation committee. My dissertation director S.E. Gontarski has shown his support for my project since the beginning. This manuscript has certainly benefited from his advice and careful

editing of my work. I also wish to thank my dissertation committee Andrew Epstein, Barry

Faulk, Aaron Jaffe, and Kris Salata for their insights and suggestions throughout this process.

iv TABLE OF CONTENTS

List of Figures ...... vi Abstract ...... vii

INTRODUCTION: NOVEMBER 1975: A SCHIZO REPORT ...... 1

1. CHAPTER ONE: “OPERATION REWRITE”: BURROUGHS OVERWRITES THE IMAGE OF THE BOOK ...... 33

2. CHAPTER TWO: “CULTURE STINKS”: KATHY ACKER OVERWRITES THE CANON WITH BLOOD AND GUTS ...... 58

3. CHAPTER THREE: “TO FINNAGAIN”: JOHN CAGE OVERWRITES MODERNISM .....78

POSTSCRIPT: JANUARY 1984: NAM JUNE PAIK SAYS GOOD MORNING, MR. ORWELL ...... 103

APPENDICES ...... 110

A. DEAD FINGERS TALK: AN ATROPHIED BIBLIOGRAPHY ...... 110 B. RUB OUT THE WORD ...... 123

References ...... 135

Biographical Sketch ...... 142

v LIST OF FIGURES

1. Mother ...... 123

2. Empty Words ...... 124

3. Semiotic of Janeys ...... 125

4. The Freud Pack ...... 126

5. Time Cut-up ...... 127

6. Seimotext(e) USA ...... 128

7. Censored Page in Semiotext(e) USA ...... 129

8. Censored Enclosure in Semiotext(e) USA ...... 129

9. Genital Collage ...... 130

10. Janey’s Ode to a Grecian Urn ...... 130

11. Discipline and Anarchy...... 131

12. Writing for a Second Time Through Finnegans Wake ...... 132

13. Mesostics re Merce Cunningham...... 133

14. Zen for TV ...... 134

15. Merce Cunningham Dances With Himself ...... 134

vi ABSTRACT

Overwriting Literature and Other Acts of Cultural Terrorism in the Control Era examines late 20th century American experimental writers and artists who rethink the book as a

viable communication technology. This study locates historically locates the work from these

literary programmers to the 1975 Schizo-Culture conference at Columbia University. The

conference, which introduced the French philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari to the

American public, featured two key artists from the American avant-garde: William S. Burroughs

and John Cage. This study examines the connections between culture and theory and argues that both artists and theorists were responding to a new form of society, which Deleuze labeled the

“control society” in a 1990 essay. The introduction to this study lays out the history and theory of

this new society. The chapters that follow the introduction focus on writers and artists who

construct what Deleuze describes as effective weapons against control. Burroughs, Kathy Acker,

and Cage “hijack” literary texts in order to reprogram its message. While this study examines

experimental writing, it uses these writers to think of how one might apply these techniques to

mass media and information networks.

vii INTRODUCTION

NOVEMBER 1975: A SCHIZO REPORT

I think Schizo-culture is being used here in a special sense, not referring so much to clinical schizophrenia but to the fact that the culture is divided up into all sorts of classes and groups, etc. Some of the old lines are breaking down, and this is a healthy sign.

William S. Burroughs on Schizo-Culture, Burroughs Live

The Last Countercultural Conference In November 1975, the French philosopher Michel Foucault delivered a talk on Wilhelm

Reich and repression to a crowd at Columbia University. The occasion for the lecture was the

Schizo-Culture conference, which was organized by Semiotext(e) founder Sylvère Lotringer and

John Rajchman. During Foucault’s lecture, an audience member interrupted to accuse Foucault of being paid by the CIA. As Lotringer recalls, Foucault “fumbled for a reply and vehemently denied everything.” Frustrated and angered over such an accusation, Foucault later told Lotringer that the event was “the last counterculture conference of the 60s” (22). This statement, even in jest, makes Schizo-Culture into a significant event. And if the conference does signal the end of the 60s counterculture, it perhaps concurrently suggests the beginning of a new era.

The four-day conference at Columbia University featured French theorists such as Jean-

Francois Lyotard, and it introduced Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari to the American public.

Schizo-Culture, however, was not a conference on French theory. Foucault shared a stage with

the American writer William S. Burroughs, and the American composer John Cage read on the

same panel as Deleuze. While advertised as a conference on semiotics, the conference also

included workshops on prison and psychiatry. These subjects, however, correspond more than

they differ. Three years before Schizo-Culture, Deleuze and Foucault discussed the status of the

1 intellectual. Deleuze noted that the “intellectual and theorist has ceased to be a subject” in post-

1968 political discourse. For Deleuze, who speaks and acts always concerns a “multiplicity” or

“groupuscles.” He thus concludes, “There is no more representation. There is only action, the action of theory, the action of praxis, in the relations of relays and networks” (Desert Islands

207). Foucault too discussed how collective discourse could challenge the major language of disciplinary institutions. His comments refer to prisoners, who begin to speak and develop their own theories on the prison industry. Foucault explains, “What really matters is this kind of discourse against power, the counter-discourse expressed by prisoners or those we call criminals, and not a discourse on criminality” (Desert Islands 208). Their discussion on a counter-discourse of prisoners occurs in the context of the 1972 Nancy prison revolt. Deleuze and Foucault’s dialogue, however, seems equally applicable to prison revolts in America, such as Attica. The

Schizo-Culture conference, then, extended the need for counter-discourses against capitalist and disciplinary institutions.

Yet fifteen years after the Schizo-Culture conference Deleuze found that these disciplinary institutions had been replaced with a new system. In his brief essay, “Postscript on

Control Societies” (1990), Deleuze notes, “we’re in the midst of a general breakdown of all sites of confinement—prisons, hospitals, factories, schools, the family” (178). While Foucault’s analyses on these enclosed sites in Discipline and Punishment are important for Deleuze,

Foucault’s theories also mark a point of departure. As Alexander Galloway writes, “Foucault is the rhetorical stand-in for the modern disciplinary societies, while Deleuze claims to speak about the future” (Protocol 87). This future, however, was already a topic of conversation at Schizo-

Culture. At the conference, after Foucault introduced him to an eager audience, the American author William S. Burroughs read from his essay, “The Limits of Control.” In the text, which

2 was later published in the Schizo-Culture issue in 1978, Burroughs describes how institutions must regulate their control over individuals to ensure that their power remains effective.

“Successful control,” Burroughs posits, “means achieving a balance” (SC 40). Such a balance gives the sense of new freedoms that were previously denied in the more confined disciplinary society. Yet, as Deleuze argues in the “Postscript” essay, control does not simply go away. It instead becomes more ubiquitous and continuous when it moves from a closed system.

While fifteen years separate Burroughs and Deleuze’s texts, new technologies are crucial to their analyses on control. For Burroughs, “modern control societies depend on a universal literacy since they operate through mass media” (SC 39). Communication technologies, such as

the telephone, radio and television, correspond to this new society. Yet whereas Burroughs uses

“mass media” in his Schizo-Culture lecture, Deleuze specifically refers to the computer as the primary instrument of control in the “Postscript” essay. This “new” information technology

structures societies that are digital instead of analogical. As Deleuze explains, the confined

spaces of a disciplinary society are molds, while “controls are a modulation, like a self-

transmuting molding continually changing from one moment to the next” (Negotiations 179). A

different relationship exists between the “mold” of the factory or home. “Control,” however, “is

short-term and rapidly shifting, but at the same time continuous and unbounded” (181). Prison

cells are thus replaced with home monitoring systems. The office cubicle moves to your email

inbox.

It might seem odd that Deleuze seems so critical of computers in the “Postscript” essay,

especially when many see the Internet as a more decentralized or rhizomatic space. Deleuze and

Guattari describe the rhizome in their introduction to A Thousand Plateaus as a “map” that has

“multiple entryways” and “has no beginning or end.” Their definition is close to how Lev

3 Manovich characterizes “the computer age,” where “new media objects do not tell stories; they

do not have a beginning or end” (218). The database thus replaces narrative. Yet the rhizomatic

and open nature of websites are only one structural component of the Internet. As Alexander

Galloway argues in his study on computer protocols, the misconception that the Internet is

chaotic results from “a contradiction between two opposing machines” (Protocol 8). These machines, he notes, have different rules and recommendations that control how one navigates the

Internet. TCP/IP (Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol) is one such machine that

Galloway describes, and its protocol resembles the anarchic structure of the rhizome. Its protocol enables “any computer on the network [to] talk to any other computer, resulting in a nonhierarchical, peer-to-peer relationship” (8). However, another machine exists that creates a more hierarchical structure. DNS (Domain Name System), which Galloway notes is “required for every network transaction,” connects domain names to IP addresses. Contrary to TCP/IP protocols, “all DNS information is controlled in a hierarchical, inverted tree structure” (9). On a technical level, then, the “computer age” remains highly controlled, yet in fundamentally different ways. As Burroughs notes, “all modern control systems are riddled with contradictions”

(SC 41). A close analysis of Burroughs and Deleuze’s texts, then, must not ignore these contradictions.

The question of how best to counter control in this new era remains an important question.

For Deleuze, “It’s not a question of worrying or hoping for the best, but of finding new weapons” (Negotiations 178). He lists a few of these weapons in an interview with Antoni Negri, where Deleuze predicts, “computer piracy and viruses […] will replace strikes” (Negotiations

175). Yet Deleuze also finds that one can resist this new control society by “hijacking speech.”

Such an act, he adds, will create “something very different from communicating,” where the

4 “key thing maybe to create vacuoles of noncommunication” (Negotiations 175). This weapon returns us to Burroughs and his Schizo-Culture lecture, where he notes how “words are still the principal instruments of control,” and adds how “no control machine so far devised can operate without words” (SC 38). While Burroughs addresses “control” directly in his Schizo-Culture address, he also makes “control” an important subject of his fiction. Deleuze even refers to

Burroughs as the writer who has attempted to “characterize this new monster” in the “Postscript” essay (178). This characterization, then, began fifteen years before Deleuze’s attempt to describe this new society. These two essays, thus, introduce a study on post-1945 experimental writers and artists who work within and against this “new monster.” Overwriting Literature features texts from writers who were integral to the Schizo-Culture event. Burroughs, Cage, and Kathy

Acker1 all “hijack” previously published texts for their own compositions. With their appropriation of recognizable narratives, these writers experiment with narrative to create other versions of canonical texts. Such a process of overwriting and literary remixing challenges language as the primary site for control.

Overwriting Literature thus closely reads the compositional methods of Burroughs, Cage, and Acker in the context of this new control society. Yet these literary experiments are just one mode of expression. As Galloway argues, protocological language differs from literary language:

“Protocol is a circuit, not a sentence” (53). Protocol thus remains more interested in the

“sciences of possibility” than the “sciences of meaning.” A protocological language such as

XML does not interpret words, but instead wraps them with a command. Protocol presents rather than represents. This explains why Galloway does not include any literary writers

in his study on computer protocols. Galloway instead focuses on hackers and web artists, who

1 While Acker was not present at the conference in 1975, her “Persian Poems” from Blood and Guts in High School did appear in the Schizo-Culture issue in 1978. 5 realize that with protocol “comes the exciting new ability to leverage possibility and action

through code” (172). While the hacker is perhaps the best-known exploiter of protocols, to limit

the term to its use in computer culture ignores how hacking might work in a larger cultural

context. McKenzie Wark thus begins A Hacker Manifesto with a dedication to a literary writer:

the “King of the Pirates,” Kathy Acker. It might seem odd to start a manifesto on hacking with a

writer, but Wark notes the hacker can work with many different codes. Wark thus writes that

“whatever code we hack, be it programming language, poetic language, math or music, curves or

colorings, we are the abstracters of new words” (Thesis 002).

The writers in Overwriting Literature are more concerned with an emancipated media

and not a media that emancipates. To make this claim, however, we must first reevaluate the

reception of the historical avant-garde, which has often been interpreted as an analog precursor

to “new media.” Lev Manovich finds “the avant-garde vision materialized in a computer”

(“Avant-Garde as Software” 5). The cut-up method is now a standard feature of human-computer

interface, as cut and paste commands replace scissors and glue. Marjorie Perloff also notes that

the extensive use of citation in Eliot’s The Waste Land makes the poem a foundational text for

our present digital environment (Unoriginal Genius 12). Yet even before the computer, the

avant-garde encountered its own image in newer media. Dada artists once outraged the public

with their art, but German cultural critic Walter Benjamin explains how “film [had] taken the physical shock effect out of the wrappers in which Dadaism had, as it were, kept it inside the

moral shock effect” (238). Such accounts of the avant-garde’s disappearance into technology

suggest its inevitable obsolescence. Similar experiments after the historical avant-garde are thus

seen as an ineffectual repetition of their ancestors (Bürger 58). The lines that connect the

historical (European) avant-garde and the American rhizome are often direct. Cage notes that his

6 1952 Black Mountain performance was indebted, in part, to “[Kurt] Schiwtters’ descriptions of

Dada theater” and Artaud (FtB 165). Burroughs references Tristan Tzara and his stunt at a surrealist rally as an early example of the cut-up method. Burroughs and Cage, however, do not simply repeat the gestures of Dada and Surrealism; they find new possibilities in their histories.

Burroughs explains how André Breton had “expelled Tristan Tzara from the movement and grounded the cut-ups on the Freudian couch.” It was not a coincidence, then, when Breton later expelled Gysin from the Surrealist movement.

Burroughs and Gysin reevaluate an experimental method that was previously policed by

Freudian psychoanalysis. The artists and theorists at the Schizo-Culture event similarly reevaluated psychoanalysis and other institutions that suppress other “semiotic regimes.” Yet, as

Guattari writes in his 1985 essay on postmodernism, we are still under the influence of the linguistic Signifier—the “word virus.” Guattari and Deleuze already spoke of an alternative semiotics at Schizo-Culture, and Guattari noted how such sign systems are still possible in the control era. However, these “semiotic regimes” do not arise spontaneously; they are instead

“constructed, within reach of our hands, at the intersection of new analytic, aesthetic, and social practices.” Guattari adds that the emergence of these new practices “will be greatly facilitated by a concerted reappropriation of communicational and information technology” (Soft Subversions

299). He thus describes a “post-media” era that multiplies “existential operators,” who, in their subjective formations, “cannot be reduced to a single semiotic entity” (Soft Subversions 303).

These operators manipulate media to find alternative enunciations that hijack communication.

The writers and artists at Schizo-Culture likewise overwrite literary codes with their

reappropriation of canonical texts. To overwrite literature concerns how writers use their

medium to find new contexts. As Acker tells Lotringer, when “you take texts apart and look at

7 the language that’s being used, the genre, the kind of sentence structure, there’s a lot of contents here that most readers don’t see” (Hannibal Lecter 14). Acker, Burroughs, and Cage hijack literary texts to realize other possible alternate narratives, and not the one that we already know.

The experimental writers and artists in at Schizo-Culture redirect literary language to express alternative signs and narratives. Burroughs often describes his experiments with language as a hybrid of alphabetic and pictorial scripts that will open up language to numerous combinatory possibilities. He discusses this sign system further in The Book of Breeething, where he claims that while “the English word leg has to be written in one way […] a pictorial leg can be written as any number of legs” (3). Burroughs, then, uses this more pictorial sign to break with the formal restrictions of literary language. As he explains in “Electronic Revolution”

(1971), hieroglyphs are a sign system that allows the writer to erase “either/or” from his or her language. Burroughs locates this dialectical linguistic model in the definite article “the,” which

“contains the implication of no other.” He further notes “if other universes are possible, then the universe is no longer THE it becomes A” (The Job 201). Deleuze similarly suggests in Anti-

Oedipus that we should replace “and then” with the “either…or…or” of the schizophrenic. This schizo sequence, Deleuze argues, “refers to a system of possible permutations between differences that always amount to the same as they shift and slide about” (AO 12). In Anti-

Oedipus, Deleuze and Guattari specifically refer to Burroughs and Cage as schizo-evolutionary writers who create these schizo series in their writings.

The American Rhizome or We Have Nothing To Say And Are Saying It

The “either…or…or” series of the schizo writer counters what Guattari calls “semiotic subjugation” of control. In his talk on “molecular revolutions” at the Schizo-Culture event,

Guattari describes how all modes of semiotization, which include “singing, dancing, mimicry,

8 caressing, contact,” risk being “reduced to the dominant language, the language of power” (187).

For Guattari, capitalism not only structures the economy, it also regulates speech and gestures.

He adds that capitalist discourse requires a major or national language that puts semiotic

components into digits (190). Deleuze will later address this digitalization in his “Postcript”

essay more directly, where he notes how “the digital language of control is made up of codes

indicating whether access to some information should be allowed or denied”(180). The question

of how best to counter or resist this binary code remains a question for both Guattari in his 1975

talk and Deleuze in his “Postscript” essay. In his lecture, Guattari notes how “no myth of a return

to spontaneity or to nature will change anything” (188). New strategies are thus required to resist

the digital semiotics that Deleuze and Guattari locate in the society of control. To restate

Deleuze, one must acquire new weapons.

The problem of a major language was likewise addressed in Jean-François Lyotard’s improvised lecture at the Schizo-Culture conference. Lyotard delivered his lecture in French while two graduate students simultaneously translated his speech into English. Lyotard’s talk, which he entitled “On the Subject of the Weak,” discusses tactics on how to counter a major language. According to Lyotard, countercultural and political groups since the 60s attempted to attack or resist major language from the outside. Yet, as Roger McKeon translates, such an exterior approach “is what the masterly position asks for,” since “it is a complement the masterly discourse must and intends to conquer” (SC 83). Lyotard instead suggests that “one should imagine a strategy without exteriority” which will “use the rule of that discourse itself by including meta-statements inside its own statements” (SC 84). This interior linguistic attack echoes one of the characteristics of a minor literature that Deleuze and Guattari describe in

Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature. In this short text, which was published the same year as the

9 Schizo-Culture conference, Deleuze and Guattari note how “a minor literature doesn’t come

from a minor language; it is rather that which a minority constructs within a major language”

(16). The interest in a minor or “weaker” language and its potential to disrupt major discourses

was thus a primary concern of the Schizo-Culture event. Yet a silent disagreement between

Deleuze and Guattari, and Lyotard was obvious at the conference. As Lotringer recalls, Deleuze,

Guattari, and Foucault stood at the back of the room while Lyotard delivered his lecture. Lyotard was aware of their presence, and noted that he was eager to start a conversation with them.

However, all three “didn’t say anything […] they just turned on their heels and left the room”

(SC 21). Deleuze and Guattari were more vocal in their critique of Lyotard in Anti-Oedipus.

While they praise Lyotard’s Discours, Figure (1971) for reversing the primacy of the linguistic

signifier for a more figural language, Deleuze and Guattari found that Lyotard still “steer[s] the

schizzes toward shores he has so recently left behind: toward coded or overcoded territories”

(244). In a 1985 essay on “postmodern deadlock,” Guattari further accuses Lyotard and other postmodernists of constraining language in a “structuralist corset” (Soft Subversions 298). Such

deference to the linguistic signifier was evident in Lyotard’s lecture at the conference, where

there was a constant demand for clarity from both the audience and translators. When one

audience member did not agree with McKeon’s translation, the attendee began to translate

Lyotard sentence-by-sentence. This, however, only further agitated the rest of the audience, who

in turn accused the new translator of making Lyotard even harder to understand: “We can’t

follow the French or the English now” (SC 87). Eventually the translator was told to “knock off

the shit,” and it was suggested that those who could “speak French and English sit next to

somebody who can’t understand French and translate for them” (SC 89). In a talk that posits how

10 to disrupt the master language from within, it seems ironic that the translators and audience still

sought clarification from a “master.”

Guattari notes in his Schizo-Culture lecture that his work with Deleuze seeks to question

the linguistic and semiotic elements of control. Their analysis, however, considers more than just

the signifying chain that interests linguists. A semiotic chain for Deleuze and Guattari is more

“like a tuber gathering up very diverse acts—linguistic, but also perceptual, mimetic, gestural,

and cognitive” (TP 7). In their introduction to A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari contrast the rhizome to Noam Chomsky’s linguistic tree. Contrary to the arboreal model, the rhizome “does not necessarily refer to only the linguistic feature,” as it concerns a semiotic that

“put[s] into play not only regimes of different signs, but also different states of differing status”

(TP 7). Deleuze and Guattari elaborate on these differing states in the fifth chapter of A

Thousand Plateaus where they identify at least “four regimes of signs”: a presignifying, a signifying, a countersignifying, and a postsignifying semiotic. Yet not one of these four

“regimes” has a primary or privileged status. For Deleuze and Guattari, “every semiotic is mixed and only functions as such,” and these mixtures lead to creative transformations of a language or signs. Thus, there exists “no general semiology but rather a transsemiotic” (TP 136). One example of the “transsemiotic” that Deleuze and Guattari describe in A Thousand Plateaus concerns the songs of black Americans, who mix the “English” signifier with their own language and expressions.

Such transformations for Deleuze and Guattari have thus never concerned the linguistic

Signifier; they have always been political: “There is no mother tongue, but a seizure of power by a dominant language within a political multiplicity” (TP 13). Guattari’s lecture at the Schizo-

Culture conference concerns this arrangement of power within certain “linguistic castes.” For

11 Guattari (and Deleuze), “what is at issue is what type of politics is pursued with regard to

different linguistic arrangements that exist” (SC 193). Institutions in capitalist societies, such as psychoanalysis or the university, subjugate different signs to a homogenous linguistic

community in order to effectively communicate and propagate information. As Deleuze notes,

there is no information or communication outside such transmissions, which he clarifies “is the

same thing as saying that information is exactly the system of control” (Madness 326). The

control society is thus an information society, and its organization still resembles a tree. Deleuze

and Guattari, however, are sick of trees (TP 15). They instead propose a linguistic arrangement

of the “rhizome type” that “can only analyze language by de-centering into other dimensions and

into other registers” (TP 13). Their Kafka monograph again provides a useful analysis for how

such a linguistic organization deterritorializes or “de-centers” a major language. Kafka is the

exemplary writer of a minor literature for Deleuze and Guattari, as he mixes Czech and Yiddish

expressions with the German language. The characters in Kafka’s animal stories likewise

transform any recognizable speech into an inhuman noise. When Gregor Samsa attempts to

communicate after his transformation, it is “unmistakably his earlier voice, but with a painful and

insuppressible squeal blending in as if from below” (120). Deleuze and Guattari read Gregor’s

“becoming-animal” as an attempt to flee familial bureaucratic institutions in order “to reach that

region where the voice no longer does anything but hum” (Minor 13). To his parents, his sister,

and his manager, Gregor merely hisses; he does not communicate. This total breakdown in

communication, however, becomes a potential weapon against the control society.

Make language hiss or stammer or mutter. This semiotic regime becomes an important

instrument for Deleuze and Guattari. In a 1987 lecture to the FEMIS film school, Deleuze

discusses how art and literature can best resist this new control society. While “counter-

12 information” might seem effective against control systems, Deleuze cautions that this only works

“when [counter-information] becomes an act of resistance” (Madness 327). However, Deleuze

finds “a fundamental affinity” between art and acts of resistance. He concludes that art only “has

something to do with information and communication as an act of resistance” (Madness 328).

Deleuze places art against theories of information, such as Shannon and Weaver’s

communication model, which defines communication as the successful contact between a sender

and receiver. Any noise detected in the signal that passes between the two parties will disrupt the

message. Communication thus depends on a low signal to noise ratio, and any interference becomes the enemy of communication. Yet, as Tiziana Terranova notes, ”there is no doubt that

the manipulation of affects and signs is an essential part of the politics of communication in

informational cultures” (14). Guattari discusses this manipulation of signs in his Schizo-Culture

lecture. He refers to this instrument as the “collective arrangement of enunciation,” which “is

simply an attempt to create opportunities of conjunction between different semiotic components”

(SCE 193). A collective enunciation likewise characterizes a “minor literature,” wherein

“literature finds itself positively charged with the role and function of collective, and even

revolutionary, enunciation” (Minor 17). It seems significant, then, that this critical conversation

at Schizo-Culture on art and a collective enunciation occurred with two prominent artists/writers present: John Cage and William S. Burroughs.

While Kafka remains at the center of their analysis on minor literature, Deleuze and

Guattari’s interest in literary writers extend well beyond Europe. Guattari expresses an interest in

America in his lecture, and he explains that it “has been happening for a number of years,

notably with the beat generation, and is probably due to the very acuteness of the problems

concerning the semiotics of the body, of perception” (187). Guattari does not elaborate on this

13 remark in his lecture, but Deleuze and Guattari note that they are still interested in the “American

rhizome” when they publish A Thousand Plateaus in 1980. In a statement similar to Guattari’s

comment at Schizo-Culture, they write:

Everything important that has happened or is happening takes the route of the American rhizome: the beatniks, the underground, bands and gangs […] The American singer Patti Smith sings the bible of the American dentist: Don’t go for the root, follow the canal. (TP 19)

The interest that two French theorists take in American “underground” culture was an explicit

goal of the 1975 conference. As Lotringer explains, the Schizo-Culture event was an attempt to

“narrow the gap between radicalism, philosophy, and art on both sides of the Atlantic” (SCE 11).

This was further realized when Semiotext(e) published their Schizo-Culture issue three years

after the conference. Lotringer, however, is quick to distinguish the magazine from the

conference. Though the issue continues the connections between French theory and American

art, Lotringer “turn[s] the magazine itself towards art” (v). While the magazine includes essays

from Lyotard, Foucault, and Deleuze, the Schizo-Culture issue features more artists than

theorists. In addition to the Burroughs and Cage texts that were read at the 1975 conference, the

magazine adds “The Persian Poems” from Kathy Acker, The Ramones’s “Teenage Lobotomy,” a poem from John Giorno, as well as interviews with Philip Glass, Robert Wilson, and Jack Smith.

Acker, Cage, Glass, and Wilson were also present at another Semiotext(e) event that occurred

the same week as the Schizo-Culture publication. Organized by Lotringer with John Giorno and

James Grauerholz in 1978, the Nova Convention centered on William Burroughs’s work and his

countercultural celebrity. And while the convention did not have any lectures by post-68 French

theorists, it did feature notable “beatnik” and “underground” artists that Deleuze and Guattari

associate with the American rhizome. Patti Smith, that singer of “the bible of the American

dentist,” even performed at the convention.

14 The two Semiotext(e) events and the 1978 Schizo-Culture issue thus place the American

avant-garde in the context of Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of the rhizome (and vice versa).

And while Deleuze and Guattari distinguish the creation of philosophical concepts from art, they

admit that both “can slip into each other to the degree that parts of one may be occupied by

entities of the other” (WiP 66). The layout of the Schizo-Culture issue resembles this art- philosophy hybrid, as many of the essays are printed in two columns on the same page. Lyotard’s essay on “The Strength of the Weak” thus appears on the same pages as Lotringer’s interview with the American dancer Douglas Dunn. Acker welcomes such correspondence when she tells

Lotringer that she did not have a way to articulate her experiments with language until she encountered Deleuze and Guattari. After Acker “read ANTI-OEDIPUS and Foucault’s work,” she explains how “suddenly I had this whole language at my disposal. I could say, Hi! And that other people were doing the same thing. I remember thinking, Why don’t they know me? I know exactly what they are talking about. And I could go farther” (Hannibal Lecter 10). What Acker

(as well as Burroughs and Cage) takes farther is the primary subject of this study on American experimental writing in the control era. The artists and writers at the center of Overwriting

Literature find new alternative “semiotic regimes” that breaks with traditional literary language.

These experiments with language in turn create art that directly resist what Deleuze labels as the primary interest of the control era: communication.

No writer, as Deleuze notes in the “Postscript” essay, has described control to the extent

that Burroughs has done in his texts. While drug addiction might seem the most obvious form of

control in his fiction, Burroughs gives a much more comprehensive definition of the term in

Naked Lunch: “You see control can never be a means to any practical end…It can never be a

means to anything but more control…Like junk” (137). “Junk,” then, becomes the analogical

15 term that Burroughs uses to describe an individual (or institutional) addiction to control. He

likewise compares “junk” to language when he posits that “word authority [is] more habit

forming than heroin,” which “is not the old power addicts talk [.] I am talking about a certain

exercise of authority through words” (Mice 37). For Burroughs, words are the primary vehicle for institutions to exercise in the control era.

Burroughs, however, develops a method to counter this “word authority” in his cut-up experiments. Burroughs’s collaborator and friend, Brion Gysin, first introduced the cut-up method to Burroughs in 1959 at the Paris Beat Hotel. After cutting a mount for a drawing, Gysin assembled the scrapes of newspapers into a linguistic collage. Gysin then showed the result to

Burroughs who immediately saw its potential for literature. The cut-up method thus began with a technique already used in visual art: collage. This seems especially fitting in the context of

Gysin’s oft-quoted line that “writing is fifty years behind painting.” Burroughs likewise finds that writing “is still confined in the sequential straightjacket of the novel” (Adding Machine 80).

Burroughs envisions a future of the novel (and literary writing) that will break with a linear language. This concept was already present in the “atrophying preface” of Naked Lunch:

The Word is divided into units which be all in one piece and should be so taken, but the pieces can be had in any order being tied up back and forth in and out fore and aft like an innaresting sex arrangement. This book [Naked Lunch] spill of the space in in all directions, kaleidoscope of vistas… (NL 191)

While Burroughs did not yet know of the cut-up method when he wrote Naked Lunch, he nevertheless describes the alternative ways a writer might use language. A writer uses the cut- ups to reprogram the linear message of a major language. In the cut-up novels, The Soft Machine

(1961), The Ticket That Exploded (1962) and Nova Express (1964), Burroughs is more direct at how the cut-ups counter a word authority: “Cut word lines—Cut music lines—Smash the control images—Smash the control machine” (SM 91).

16 The cut-ups that Burroughs experiments with in the 1960s actively resist the control

society that Deleuze will describe in 1990. Such experiments thus act as a weapon against a

linear or hierarchal language. The cut-ups are thus one potential instrument against control

systems, as the method creates “vacuoles” of non- communication in language. Burroughs often

describes the cut-ups as a tactile method that can “rub out the word.” This statement appeared in

an early cut-up poem from Brion Gysin in The Exterminator (1960). The poem begins:

RUB OUT THE WORDS RUB OUT THE WORDS (43)

On the next page, however, Gysin effectively “rubs out the words” when he replaces the letters

with symbols:

RUB OUT THE WORDS # $ % & # $ % & (44)

In Gysin’s poem, words slide into less determinate signs, and Gysin will later reproduce a similar

sign system in The Ticket That Exploded, wherein Gysin’s calligraphic poem closes the cut-up

novel. As Oliver Harris notes, Gysin’s calligraphy ends the text by “visualizing silence, a vital

space of possibility beyond words” (TE lii). This “silent” space, however, is not a simple blank page. The calligraphic text materially visualizes an abstract language that does not communicate

effectively. The text, then, contains information, and as Wark notes, information always

“exceeds communication” since it “expresses the potential of potential” (Thesis 128). One can

see the difference between information and communication in Burroughs’s short cut-up for

Mother (1964). Similar to the final page in The Ticket That Exploded, the Mother cut-up (Figure

1) contains both calligraphic and typed script. While Burroughs divides the typed text into three

17 separate columns on the page, he then wraps the words in red and blue calligraphic writing. He

even recommends that if the blue and red ink are “difficult to reproduce, a strip of dots between

columns suggesting IBM ticker tape would be appropriate” (2). Two different semiotic codes

exist on the same page. The typescript contains recognizable text from Burroughs’s published

texts: Naked Lunch, Nova Express, and “The ‘Priest’ They Called Him.” The calligraphic script, however, remains visible at the margins, which provides a visible reminder that other sign systems exist. This “semiotic regime” of red calligraphic marks threatens to overwrite what the text communicates into a more abstract language.

What Deleuze and Guattari find in Burroughs and the American rhizome concerns these alternative semiotic regimes that “hijack” speech to create “vacuoles” of non-communication.

Cage is one artist who has “nothing to say,” yet he nevertheless “say[s] it and that is poetry”

(Silence 109). Cage, then, prefers dialogue to communication. As he explains to Daniel Charles, communication “always imposes something […] while in conversation, nothing imposes itself”

(FtB 148). When Cage read Empty Words at the Schizo-Culture conference, the source text was almost unrecognizable. Cage applied I-Ching chance operations to passages in Henry David

Thoreau’s Journal in Empty Words. The result transforms Thoreau’s sentences into a different semiotic register: “a transition from language to music (a language already without sentences, and not confined to any subject” (EW 65). In the fourth part of Empty Words, Cage omits sentences, phrases, and words so that only “letters and silences” remain (Figure 2). Cage thus creates alternative signs from the sentences in Thoreau to make the language of the Journal less literary and more “musical.”

A selection from Empty Words was later published in the Schizo-Culture issue, where

Cage’s experiments with Thoreau appear next to other artists who likewise explore alternative

18 “semiotic regimes.” An interview with the American theater director Robert Wilson comes before Empty Words, wherein Wilson discusses his collaborations with the young artist

Christopher Knowles. Wilson first included Knowles’s poetry in his opera with Philip Glass,

Einstein on the Beach (1976). Knowles, as Wilson explains, “would take ordinary, everyday

words and destroy them. [Words] became like molecules that were always changing” (SC 22).

Though not recorded until after the publication of Schizo-Culture, one can hear the

“molecularization” of speech in Knowles’s poem, “George Klauber and George Klauber.”

Knowles repeatedly spells out the name “George Klauber” for the duration of the twenty-plus

minute recording. However, there are variations pronunciations and spelling of the name. At

more than one point in the recording, Knowles breaks with the repetitive series to spell “George

Klauberlikeschocolateicecream” and “George Klauberlikeschocolatecake.” Variations thus creep

into the spelling to create other words or expressions.2 Yet while Wilson finds Knowles’s poetry

and drawings valuable, he notes how teachers at Knowles’s school were “trying to correct [his

art] instead of encouraging it. No one was really concerned about his drawings as a work of art”

(SC 24). The school system, then, evaluated Knowles’s drawings with its own standards for art.

Such an institution can only correct what it sees as a deviation from its standard. In his Schizo-

Culture talk, Guattari discusses how institutions subjugate these aberrant “semiotic regimes” to a

major language. Guattari admits that while “one can hardly imagine refusing to teach children

how to write or to recognize linguistic traffic signs,” the question we should ask concerns “where

the emphasis is put” (SC 194). Whether the emphasis falls on the “semiotic subjugation” by

capitalist institutions or an alternative sign system, the answer remains political for Deleuze and

Guattari.

2 Knowles, Christopher. “George Klauber and George Klauber.” Archived at Ubuweb. 19 Acker is yet another artist in the Schizo-Culture issue who directly critiques

“communication” in her fiction. The magazine includes a selection of poems from Acker’s Blood and Guts in High School, and in the text, Acker examines how a certain “linguistic caste” controls language. As the male characters in the text proclaim, “We own the language. Language must be used clearly and precisely to reveal our universe.” When the men, who Acker labels

“capitalists,” hear the rebels outside their window, they complain that the rebels “are never clear” since “what they say doesn’t make any sense” (136). The rebels and workers instead “play these records of screams,” and knife each other to amuse themselves, which leads the men who “own the language” to question if one can even call this communication. Acker thus constructs a

“screaming” semiotic that the “capitalists” attempt to suppress with their demand for clarity.

Janey Smith remains the constant voice of this aberrant language in Acker’s text. Her voice, however, is not that of an individual subject. The men in the novel note how the rebels “are all

Janeys. They’re all perverts, transsexuals, criminals, and women” (136). When Janey speaks or writes, she does so in the plural voice of a “criminal” subculture that remains far too noisy for patriarchal and capitalist discourse. The semiotic of Janeys (Figure 3) that Acker considers in

Blood and Guts in High School threatens the clarity of a major language. Thus, when Janey translates the poem of a Latin poet or gives a book report on Hawthorne’s A Scarlet Letter, she transforms the source texts into the “collective enunciation” of “perverts,” “criminals,” and

“women.”

“Playback is the essential ingredient”: Deleuze and Guattari Send Back Monsters

When Acker, Burroughs, or Cage appropriates a canonical text, they transform their respective sources into a new expressive language. This simultaneous creative and critical reevaluation of culture depends on a more active reader, wherein the receiver becomes the

20 sender. Galloway finds that the architecture of electronic networks allows for this possible two-

sided transmission. Is such a feedback loop only possible in new media? Roland Barthes notes

that literature produces a “readerly text” which can only be read, and not written. Barthes,

however, describes a “writerly text” that makes “the reader no longer a consumer, but a producer

of the text” (S/Z 4). In a response to Barthes, the Language writer Bruce Andrews notes that when the “author dies, writing begins” (“Code Words” 54). With the death of the author,

“reading becomes the first production, rather than consumption,” and thus “operates the text, is a rewriting, a new inscription” (“Code Words” 55). When Cage reads Thoreau, Joyce, and Pound, he produces different versions of their texts. Cage describes this act of reading as “writing through” a text. With the cut-up method, Burroughs envisions a “writing machine,” where readers are “invited to feed into the machine any pages of their own text in fifty-fifty juxtaposition with any author of their choice” (TE 73). The Burroughs machine turns the reader into a coauthor of a text.

Readers, then, are not passive consumers of culture; they respond! Lotringer thus asks the audience at Schizo-Culture to experiment with the ideas and concepts that they will hear at the conference. The motto of the event, as Lotringer stated in his introductory address, was to “put

Freud and Marx to work; not to worship them.” It seems fitting, then, that Schizo-Culture introduced the American public to the authors of Anti-Oedipus. For Deleuze and Guattari, the task of criticism and philosophy concerns the creation of new concepts. The history of philosophy, then, is only of interest to Deleuze and Guattari when it “undertake[s] to awaken a dormant concept and to play it again on a new stage, even if this comes at the price of turning against itself” (WiP 83). The task of philosophy, then, consists of a critical reevaluation of older concepts. Deleuze and Guattari make philosophers speak with words that are not their own.

21 Deleuze describes his reading of philosophy “as a sort of buggery,” where he takes “an author

from behind and [gives] him a child that would be his own offspring, yet monstrous” (N 6). One image of Deleuze and Guattari’s monstrous offspring appeared on the cover of a 1976

Semiotext(e) issue (Figure 4) The cover features an illustration of a tree with five wolves sitting on its branches. The wolves’ heads, however, are replaced with the face(s) of Freud. The image illustrates the Deleuze and Guattari essay that appears in the Semiotext(e) issue, wherein they overwrite Freud’s case study on the Wolf-Man. In the essay, which will later become the second plateau in A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari accuse Freud of not knowing anything about wolves. They ask, “Who is ignorant of the fact that wolves travel in packs?” The answer:

“Only Freud” (TP 28). Freud reduces the Wolf-Man’s drawing of a pack of wolves to a single wolf, which he then interprets as the father. Freudian psychoanalysis always explains the unconscious in the singular images of the father, the penis, or the vagina. Deleuze and Guattari, however, replace the reductive procedures in psychoanalysis with schizoanalysis. They find that

“the problem of the unconscious has most certainly nothing to do with generation but rather peopling, population” (TP 30). When a population or a pack speaks, it does so in a “collective enunciation” that the psychoanalyst refuses to hear. Deleuze and Guattari accuse Freud of hearing only an “Oedipal enunciation,” which promises to restore personal statements to the patient. Freud depends on the Signifier to reestablish a unity or totality from the “collective enunciation” of the pack. Freud, then, does nothing but “silence[s] people, prevent[s] them from speaking, and above all when they do speak, pretend[s] they haven’t said a thing: the famous psychoanalytic neutrality” (TP 38). Deleuze and Guattari, however, overwrite the Freudian concept of the unconscious with a “counter-Oedipal apparatus” in their essay. The unconscious for Deleuze and Guattari resists the unifying familial and social institutions that psychoanalysis

22 inscribes on a patient’s voice. Their “monstrous” Freudian concept thus sends a counter message

to psychoanalysis that restores a collective enunciation to the unconscious.

The patient talks, but Dr. Freud does not listen. When the Wolf-Man speaks, Deleuze and

Guattari note that he still has “his wolves in his throat” (TP 38). Their criticism of Freud concerns how the psychoanalyst controls the direction of information. And while Deleuze and

Guattari make linguistic and semiotic control central to their criticism of Freud, similar concerns appear in Burroughs’s fiction. “Telepathy is not, by its nature, a one-way process,” Burroughs writes in Naked Lunch, and “to attempt to set up a one-way telepathic broadcast must be

regarded as an unqualified evil” (NL 140). Control, as Burroughs defines it, depends on a one-

way channel of information, where the sender sends messages but never receives them. Yet, in

his Schizo-Culture lecture, Burroughs finds that “the more completely hermetic and seemingly

successful a control system is, the more vulnerable it becomes” (SC 39). Mass media, then, pose

a threat to these closed systems, as new technologies allow writers and artists to redirect the

transmission of information, wherein “the alternative press” and “alternative society [becomes]

news” (SC 39).

How twentieth-century electronic media reshaped culture was a question well before the

Schizo-Culture conference. In his influential essay on art and its mechanical reproduction (1936),

the German cultural critic Walter Benjamin discussed how twentieth-century media changed

how the public perceived art. With the introduction of technologies that reproduce images,

Benjamin found that art had lost its ritual function. Without this ritualistic or religious basis, art

thus “begins to be based on another practice—politics” (224). A political art holds both

revolutionary and reactionary possibilities for Benjamin. The “letters for the editor” feature in

the press gives readers the space to see themselves as writers. Benjamin likewise notes how

23 Soviet cinema allowed workers, who often portrayed themselves on film, to see their work processes on the screen. The “literary license” in the twentieth-century, Benjamin writes, “is now

founded on polytechnic rather than specialized training and thus becomes common property”

(232). The public previously did not see itself represented in culture, but with the newspaper, the public can see itself as a co-collaborator or author.

Benjamin addressed this transition from consumer to producer two years before his essay

on mechanical reproduction. His 1934 address (“The Author as Producer”) to the Institute for the

Study of Fascism explained how “we are in the midst of a mighty recasting of literary forms”

(Reflections 224). For Benjamin, the newspaper was the exemplary medium for this formal

transition. He noted that the fragmented layout of a newspaper could distract readers, but it also

made them “believe [they had] the right to see [their] own interests expressed” in print (224).

Readers, then, became authors or producers when they write in letters to the editor. Yet while the

newspaper created a different reader, Benjamin found that the form in “Western Europe” did

“not constitute a serviceable instrument of production in the hands of the writer” since “it still belongs to capital” (Reflections 225). The press as controlled under capitalism constitutes what

Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer called the “culture industry.” The power that new and

emerging technologies are gaining over culture, they argue, “is the power of those whose

economic position is the strongest. Technical rationality today is the rationality of domination”

(95). So while new technologies provide the public with an opportunity to shape culture,

Benjamin cautions the reader that this “common property” remains under threat from a politics

that seek to preserve private property. In the epilogue to his essay on mechanical reproduction,

Benjamin writes that Fascism “seeks to give [the masses] an expression while preserving

24 property” (241). Futurism was the aesthetic extension of this politics. While Communism politicizes art, Futurism attempts to render politics aesthetic. Benjamin thus concludes:

If the natural utilization of productive forces is impeded by the property system, the increase in technical devices, in speed, and in the sources of energy will press for an unnatural utilization, and this is found in war. (242)

Such a statement carries obvious traces of the political situation when Benjamin published the

essay in 1936. Yet Benjamin’s warning remains as relevant, if not more so, in the control era that

Deleuze described in his 1990 essay. In his 1934 lecture on literary production, Benjamin

described a weapon against the economic domination that Adorno and Horkheimer diagnose in

their analysis on the culture industry. Technology, for Benjamin, can have “a revolutionary

useful value” that does not serve the interests of capital. “What matters,” he argues, “is the

exemplary character of production, which is able first to induce other producers to produce, and

second to put an improved apparatus at their disposal” (Reflections 233). The “revolutionary

useful value” that Benjamin details in his lecture proliferates the number of operators who direct

communication technologies against the interests of capitalist power.

If information is the form of property in a control society, the privatization of “common property” is still a major political concern. Wark writes how all forms of property, whether it

concerns land, capitol or information, “appear as domains of struggle between possessors

defending or expending the claim of private property, and the dispossessed, who struggle to

extend or defend public property” (Thesis 193). In the control era, the hacker class continues the

farming and working classes interest in a “common property.” Hackers, then, seek to free

information from the control of a class3 who wants to limit the access to all information. The

technical tools at the end of the twentieth-century, then, do not promise liberation. In his

3 Wark labels this class “vectoral” in A Hacker Manifesto. 25 “Guerilla Open Access Manifesto,” the American programmer and political activist Aaron

Swartz proclaims, “Information is power. But like all power, there are those that want to keep it

for themselves.” However, to challenge or redirect such power comes with serious consequences.

When Swartz downloaded thousands of JSTOR articles from MIT’s server allegedly to make the

documents public, the U.S. government charged him with computer fraud and stealing

information from a protected computer. Swartz took his own life before the trial against him began.

The demands for a “common property” are not limited to the manifestos of computer programmers and Internet activists. The artists and writers associated with Schizo-Culture are

likewise critical of private intellectual property. Burroughs writes a manifesto for “voleurs,”

wherein he tells artists and writers to “steal everything in sight” (AM 26). Burroughs, however, admits that “he had been conditioned to the idea of words as property,” and had thus developed a

“deep repugnance for the black sin of plagiarism” (Adding Machine 25). It was not until

Burroughs encountered Gysin and the cut-up method that he abandoned “the fetish of

originality.” The cult of the author as the primary or sole genius has long been a value in

literature. Yet, as Acker tells Lotringer, the literary ego became “a dead issue” for her when she

“realized you make the I and what makes the I are texts” (Hannibal Lecter 11). Writers’ words,

then, do not belong to an individual enunciation or an author. Burroughs thus proclaims in his

manifesto that “words colors, light, sounds, stone, wood, bronze belong to the living artist. They belong to anyone who can use them” (AM 26). Or as Cage writes, “we are getting / rid of

ownership / [and] substituting use (Monday 3). Cage adds that we should also get rid of

copyright (Monday 17). Acker notes how her texts constantly violate copyright, but she admits that she depends on the law to make a living as a writer. However, in a 1995 article, Acker sees

26 the Internet as a potential threat to the literary industry and its enforcement of copyright laws.

While the literary industry has long defined writing as a medium for individuals, Acker describes

another possible model for literature. With the Internet, Acker speculates if we will go back to a

time “when literature and economics met each other in the region of friendship” (97). Friendship,

then, extends the definition of property from the personal to the collective. Wark describes a

similar economics of the hacker class when he defines the gift economy. He writes: “The gift is

marginal, but nevertheless, plays a vital role in cementing reciprocal and communal relations

among people who otherwise can only confront each other as buyers and sellers of commodities”

(Thesis 201). When writers in the control era align their texts with the hacker class, literature no

longer concerns the intellectual property of a single author. Literature gains its value in how it

circulates in the commons. Such a class produces a culture of use against a culture of ownership.

Plagiarism is an act that violates the property interests of the literary industry. In a note to his plagiarized essay on plagiarism, Jonathan Lethem explains that while “the essay wasn’t concerned with Internet culture in itself,” his “target was the reactionary backlash at what

Internet and sampling culture happened to make (even more) obvious: the eternal intertextuality of cultural participation” (122). Acker admits she uses plagiarism as a compositional method, yet, in Blood and Guts in High School, she concedes the act as a necessity since capitalist men

“own the language.” As Janey explains to one of the men, “We use your words: we eat your food. Every way we get money has to be a crime. We are plagiarists, liars, and criminals” (B&G

132). Plagiarism, then, concerns more than the words that the “plagiarist” lifts without

attribution. When Janeys speak in a language that they do not own, they misuse or

misappropriate the words of their owner. The “we” speaks in a “collective enunciation” that

27 threatens the values of intellectual property. The criminal “we” places the words of the individual genius into the mouths of a pack.

Burroughs too explains how “the whole sublime concept of total theft is implicit in cut- ups and montage” (Adding Machine 25). He admits that the method seems to upset literary writers because the cut-ups challenge the reverence that they hold for the Word. Burroughs adds that most “serious writers” who dismiss the cut-up method likewise “refuse to make themselves to the things that technology is doing […] Many of them are afraid of tape recorders and the idea of using any mechanical means for literary purposes seems to them some sort of sacrilege” (Live

66). New technologies threaten a literary culture that views the author as the organic receiver of a message. The tape recorder, which Burroughs finds produces the best cut-ups, remains central to the narrative in The Ticket That Exploded, wherein the device becomes “an externalized section of the human nervous system” (185). This apparatus moves the scene of writing from the vocal cords or hands of a writer into a mechanical device, which the operator can then manipulate. The voice thus becomes auditory material for experimentation, and in The Ticket

That Exploded, Burroughs gives the reader instructions on how to best experiment with a tape recorder. He describes a process of “inched tape,” where operators “take the same recording

[they] just heard pulled back and forth across the head.” One can “get the same effect by switching a recording on and off at very short intervals,” which produces “words that were not in the original text” (TE 21). The tape recordings Burroughs made with Ian Sommerville provide an audio sample of the experiments that Burroughs describes in his fiction. On the track, “Silver

Smoke of Dreams,” Sommervile and Burroughs splice in their voices to an extent that it becomes difficult to discern who speaks on the tape.4 Such experiments with technology challenge the

4 Burroughs, William S. and Ian Sommerville. “Silver Smoke of Dreams.” Archived at Ubuweb. 28 primacy of the linguistic signifier that Deleuze and Guattari questioned in their Schizo-Culture

lectures and their subsequent texts.

Burroughs’s experiments with electronic media are likewise potential weapons against

communication and control systems. In The Ticket That Exploded, Burroughs encourages readers

to “splice [themselves] with newscasters, prime ministers, presidents […] everybody splice

himself in with everybody else. Communication must be made total. Only way to stop it” (TE

188). Splicing or inching creates feedback loops that will playback messages with mutations and alterations. Burroughs thus finds that “any machine can be redirected” since “nobody can control the whole operation” (Live 81). German media critic Friedrich Kittler writes that “if ‘control,’ or, as engineers say, negative feedback, is the key to power in this century, then fighting that power requires positive feedback” (Gramophone 110). Kittler cites Burroughs’s “Feedback from

Watergate to the Garden of Eden” as a case study in media manipulation. In the brief essay,

Burroughs imagines scenarios where a cut-up recording can take down a political figure. Yet while Kittler concludes “what technological media record is their own opposition to the state and school” (DN 240), we should remain skeptical about such a claim. If indeed “media determines our situation” (Gramophone xxxix), we are still at the same impasse Benjamin describes in his essay on mechanical reproduction. As Benjamin explained, “technical progress is for the author as producer the foundation of his political progress” (Reflections 230). We need a politics that uses technology, not a technology that determines our politics. Deleuze thus inverts Kittler’s techno-determined media theory when he states that technology is “social before it is technical”

(Foucault 40). In his essay for the Schizo-Culture issue, Deleuze anticipates the critical tone of the “Postscript” text, wherein he describes a “large abstract machine” that “encodes monetary, industrial and technological fluxes” (SC 162). The “world market” and the “extension of global

29 capitalism” form this machine, where “the means of exploitation, of control and of surveillance become more and more subtle [and] diffuse” (SC 162). Yet whereas Burroughs notes how a closed control system remains vulnerable, Deleuze explains how such a large control network

“no longer has the political, institutional or financial means to combat or resist the social counterattacks of the machine” (SC 162). Playback, then, becomes “the essential ingredient”

(The Job 17) and weapon in the control era.

Bulletins From the Rewrite Department

The chapters that follow are a few bulletins from the rewrite department. They are manuals on how one can “playback” a message:

The first bulletin locates Burroughs’s essay on control in his literary texts. His conclusion that the “word” is a tool of power and control remains an important topic in his fiction. In the

Nova Trilogy, he discusses cut-ups as a primary method to counteract linguistic power, and

Burroughs scholarship reads the cut-ups as a literary method that challenges dominant “semiotic regimes.” Yet much analysis on this method closely interprets Burroughs’s major texts. This report on Burroughs instead looks at his 1963 novel Dead Fingers Talk, which has never been published in the United States. The novel is perhaps best known for John Willet’s negative review in the Times Literary Supplement, which started a fourteen-week long correspondence between critics who defended and attacked the text. Many of the reviewers, however, mistakenly referred to the book as Naked Lunch. They were partially correct, as almost every word in Dead

Fingers Talk already appeared in Naked Lunch, The Soft Machine, and The Ticket That

Exploded. The constant rewriting and recycling of his writing emphasizes production rather than a product. Burroughs’s “operation rewrite,” then, challenges the image of the book as a finished

30 product. This report also considers how Burroughs’s work appears in mimeograph presses and

other media in order to continually playback a message.

While the first bulletin considers how Burroughs questions the image of a stable or fixed book, the second report examines the importance of the pirate in Kathy Acker’s work. The pirate

in Acker’s last novel becomes an important cultural figure that allows the reader to imagine a

world without ownership or property. As Janey Smith states in Blood and Guts in High School, a culture organized around capital “stinks.” Acker, however, frequently cites this stinking culture in her texts, as she appropriates or plagiarizes numerous texts in The Scarlet Letter, such as

Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter or Jean Genet’s The Screens. Her next two novels even bear

titles of two canonical books: Great Expectations and Don Quixote. Acker, however, does not plagiarize Cervantes and Dickens verbatim. Her method of literary piracy instead inserts a

different narrative voice that alters the source text. When Janey Smith copies lines from a Latin poet in Blood and Guts, she translates the poem in a language that those who control the

language cannot understand.

The third bulletin begins with John Cage’s performance at the Nova Convention in 1978,

where he read from his Writing for the Second Time Through Finnegans Wake. To “write

through” the text, Cage used a mesostic rule in which he lifted words from Finnegans Wake.

Similar to Cage’s performance at Schizo-Culture, where he scrambled the sentences in Henry

David Thoreau’s Journal, his appropriation of Joyce’s text removes the syntax and punctuation

from the book. Whereas the early chapters of Finnegans Wake published in transition stressed

Joyce’s “revolution of the world,” Cage reevaluates the text with a different literary revolution.

As he explains in An Alphabet, his writings through Joyce and Pound give readers “a modernism

without sentences.” Cage, then, overwrites the rigid ordering and hierarchy in language when he

31 writes through Joyce’s Wake and Pound’s Cantos. This bulletin concludes with a close

examination of Cage’s radio adaptation of his Second writing through, Roaraotorio. His “Irish

Circus on Finnegans Wake” fits within the “musicircus” genre, which concerns a performance

where different actions and sounds occur simultaneously. This radio text, then, becomes the

soundboard for a new language that eliminates “the military march” of sentences.

Overwriting Literature begins with a date and it ends with a date: 1984. The conclusion

looks at video artist Nam June Paik’s live television broadcast, Good Morning, Mr. Orwell.

While Orwell’s 1948 novel concerns how totalitarian governments control media in a disciplinary society, Paik’s live program suggests different uses for television. One of these uses occurred on January 1st 1984 when many avant-garde artists and musicians that were at the 1978

Nova Convention appeared on Good Morning, Mr. Orwell. These bulletins, then, detail alternative approaches to media.

So concludes the first report and begins the next transmission:

32 CHAPTER ONE

“OPERATION REWRITE”: BURROUGHS OVERWRITES THE IMAGE OF THE BOOK

I cut-up his cut-ups, allegory of an allegory of an allegory of a waterfall of mental curlicues whose new meaning is no meaning in extremity.

Robert Glück, “Burroughs”

Don’t Just Report The News—Write It

On November 30, 1962, Time magazine printed their review of Naked Lunch, which had just been published in America by Grove Press. The review, entitled “King of the YADS (Young

American Disaffiliates),” begins with a brief dismissal of Beat writers, wherein the reviewer notes how Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, and Jack Kerouac might have written something worth reading if they “had not been lured by the sirens of faucet composition and second-growth

Dada” (96). The reviewer then prefaces his criticism of Naked Lunch with reference to

Burroughs’s biography. Burroughs, as the reviewer writes, “is not only an ex-junkie, but an ex- con, and by accident, a killer” (96). The review even mentions Burroughs’s time in the army, but notes it was cut short after Burroughs cut off his finger joint. The critic concludes that

Burroughs’s life presents itself “as proof that the universe is foul,” and thus “achieves the somewhat honesty of hysteria” (96). Burroughs was so incensed with the Time review that he sued the magazine for libel. He won the case, but was only awarded five pounds (Literary

Outlaw 372).

Burroughs’s antipathy toward Time, however, exceeds such personal slights. In his 1965 interview with The Paris Review, Burroughs noted that he has no admiration for Henry Luce, the owner of Time, Life, and Fortune. For Burroughs, Luce “has set up one of the greatest word and image banks in the world.” He compared Luce and his media empire to the Mayan calendar, 33 which Burroughs suggests are control systems. Time, Life, and Fortune, then, have “nothing to do with reporting.” Burroughs thus saw Luce’s media outlets as more of a “police organization”

(Burroughs Live 73). In an essay entitled “Ten Years and a Billion Dollars,” Burroughs writes how media operators, such as Luce and William Randolph Hearst, can write the news before it happens, which explains “why [Time] print[s] so many false statements that they have to retract”

(Adding Machine 60). Luce and Hearst do not report the news; they make the news. Yet, as

Burroughs states in his Schizo-Culture lecture, mass media is “a very two-edged control instrument.” The underground or alternative press threatens the monopolies of Hearst and Luce

(SC 39). Whereas “Time, Life, Fortune applies a more complex, effective control system than the

Mayan calendar,” Burroughs finds that “it is also more vulnerable because it is so vast and mechanized” (Burroughs Live 81). Burroughs locates the vulnerabilities in such a large abstract machine, which Deleuze similarly describes in his “Politics” text for the Schizo-Culture issue. To resist the control mechanisms of corporate media, Burroughs instructs us “to wise up [to] all the marks everywhere. Show them the rigged wheel of Life-Time-Fortune. Storm The Reality

Studio. And retake the universe” (NE 60). Burroughs, however, finds the bombardment of police stations and government buildings to be an outdated revolutionary tactic. The effective tactic in the control era concerns “the use of mass media.” Burroughs states, “If you could take over mass media, you could take over the country” (Burroughs Live 151). While the cut-ups as a method remain an essential weapon to manipulate and redirect a text, Burroughs effectively exploits all communication technologies in order to create alternatives to institutional discourses. To counter

Luce and his media monopoly, Burroughs turns to the underground press.

In 1965, Burroughs and Gysin created a version of Time magazine that was published by the American poet Ted Berrigan’s C Press. Burroughs’s Time incorporates the cover from the

34 November 1962 Time issue, but he cuts the image in half with an illustration. The rest of the text, as Robert A. Sobieszek describes in Ports of Entry, includes “four drawings by Gysin, and

twenty-six pages of typescripts comprised of cut-up texts and various photographs serving as

news items” (37). Burroughs reproduces the three-column structure used in Time magazine, but

his imitation serves to disrupt any sequential reading of the text. On one page of the C issue

(Figure 5), Burroughs inserts his writing over a September 1963 Time article on Mao Tse-tung.

And while the cut-up text overwrites the third column of the article, Burroughs adds an

advertisement on “Modern Living” in the middle of the page further obscuring the initial

message. Burroughs thus recreates Time in the image of a small avant-garde press, where he uses

the cut-up method and visual collage to “cut the word lines” from Luce’s magazine.

Burroughs frequently published his writing in underground and avant-garde periodicals.

Yet many of the critical monographs on Burroughs read these publications as secondary or

marginal to the major texts that were published by Maurice Girodias (Olympia Press), Barney

Rosset (Grove Press), and John Calder (Calder Ltd.). While these texts are of course integral to

the Burroughs canon, this chapter considers how Burroughs consistently re-contextualizes his

writing in small presses and different media. Textual scholar Jerome McGann explains how

literary theory often “ignores the transmissive […] aspects of literary events,” wherein “meaning

is transmitted through bibliographical as well as linguistic codes” (The Textual Condition 57).

With smaller avant-garde presses, Burroughs was able to present his cut-up writing in a manner

that larger publishing houses did not or could not offer him. Harris thus notes how “the little

magazines of the 1960s mimeograph revolution allowed variety in typography and layout” for

Burroughs’s cut-ups. Harris adds that the “rougher aesthetic of some magazines” likewise

“represented the provisional, process-based nature of his mass of short experimental work” (TE

35 xxxviii). The mimeograph press, then, allows for different material conditions than those of

Burroughs’s major publishers.

Yet while avant-garde periodicals provided Burroughs with a format to present his more

experimental texts, these small presses also extended his work to a larger network of artists and

writers. The Burroughs bibliographical code thus connects his writings to other discourses that

are not necessarily literary. If we examine the contents in the Schizo-Culture issue, Burroughs’s

writing rubs against the radical Left politics of the 1970s, French theory, and texts from other

experimental artists. His essay on control appears just four pages after the Ramones lyrics,

“Gonna get my PhD / I’m a teenage lobotomy” (SC 32). This chapter also considers how

Burroughs extends his bibliography beyond the codex form and into other media. His collaborations with sound engineers and musicians invite punk and rock culture into literary expression. Burroughs, then, uses diverse publication networks in order to multiply the “semiotic regimes” that Deleuze and Guattari discussed at Schizo-Culture.

The alternative presses in the 1960s and 1970s placed the avant-garde next to political

tracts and manifestos. Todd Gitlin recalls how the underground press had “regularly reported on

the black revolt, on GI movements and later, on the women’s movement, on police strategies and

attacks, most of it news which was not deemed fit to print in most respectable organs” (22).

Semiotext(e) was one of these less “respectable organs,” and Lotringer often published essays

from the militant Left in the Semiotext(e) journal. The 1978 Schizo-Culture issue features text

from a 1974 speech by the Red Army Faction (RAF) co-founder Ulrike Meinhof. In the speech

she addressed the “GUERILLA” and called militant liberation movements “the avant-gardes of

the world proletariat” (SC 140). Meinhof then proceeded to explain the tactics against imperial

and fascist governments, and she concluded her speech with a comment on the 150,000 state

36 personnel who moved against the RAF. Such a large police presence, Meinhof found, “meant

that at this point all material and personnel forces of this state were in motion because of a small

number of revolutionaries.” It was immediately obvious to Meinhof that “the force monopoly of

the state is limited, its powers can be exhausted” (SC 153). Her conclusion echoed Burroughs’s claim earlier in the Schizo-Culture issue, wherein he noted how “mass media” reveals the limits of state control. The format of the Semiotext(e) journal invites this correspondence between an

American writer and a German anti-fascist militant. The cut-up experiments, then, are not limited to literature alone. One can thus read Burroughs’s essay on control and mass media in a political or revolutionary context. Yet while Meinhof spoke on an armed, anti-imperialist struggle, Burroughs called for “Carry Corders of the world [to] unite.”5 When Burroughs

reported on the 1968 Democratic convention for Esquire magazine, he walked around Chicago

recording the crowd and riot noises (Call Me Burroughs 475). The personal tape recorder became a weapon of resistance for Burroughs: “And think what several hundred people with

Carry Corders could do at a political rally […] Sublimate the subliminators” (TE 189).

Burroughs acts as one of Guattari’s “existential operators” who playback a mutant or

compromised message. The tape recorder remains an important apparatus to counter control, but

Burroughs likewise describes the “alternative press” and mass media as a potential instrument to

disseminate counter-information.

In “The Limits of Control,” Burroughs explains how mass media has “spread any cultural

movements in all directions” (SC 42). The alternative press created a more decentralized network for publication. If a magazine or newspaper were seized by the post office, another small press

5 Timothy Murphy notes that this call to unite is a clear reference to Marx and Engel’s Communist Manifesto: “Proletarians of all countries, unite!” (Portable Marx 242)

37 likely printed the text. Burroughs thus found that mass media was “uncontrollable owing to its basic need for NEWS. If one paper or even a string of papers owned by the same person tries to kill a story, that makes that story hotter as NEWS. Some paper will pick it up” (SC 42). Yet while the underground press thrived in the 1960s, the American government consistently monitored and policed alternative media. In Geoffrey Rips’s comprehensive report on the campaign against the underground press, he notes that government agencies, such as the FBI and

CIA, harassed publishers and journalists. Rips writes how “records were lost, typewriters destroyed, and staffs disbanded as a result of police raids” (51). The report also finds that

“recording tape, the computer, and the silicon chip have brought new sophistication to the control of the written word” (47). In the Schizo-Culture issue, pictures of security cameras and other devices of “clandestine surveillance” frequently appear in the magazine. These images not only reinforce the commentaries from Burroughs and Foucault on control, but the cameras are a consistent reminder on how the underground press remained under constant surveillance.

Semiotext(e), which was founded in 1974, was a late edition to the underground press. The

1987 Semiotext(e) USA issue defined the journal as the “Sears ‘n’ Roebuck catalog of th’American Underground” (4) (Figure 6). Even in the 1980s, the journal faced censorship from the U.S. government. On the back of the Semiotext(e) USA, a statement proclaims Semiotext(e) as “the journal denounced in the U.S. Senate for its advocacy of animal sex.” The curious advertisement references an earlier Semiotext(e) issue, entitled Polysexuality (1981), which includes an essay from Deleuze and Guattari on “A Bloated Oedipus.” The essay appears under the heading “Animal Sex.” Semiotext(e) USA encountered similar problems when several printers refused to print it. A note stamped on the back cover of the issue reads:

38 Calling it ‘subversive’ and ‘obscene,’ five book printers in the spring of 1987 refused to print Semiotext(e) USA. A sixth printer agreed to do all but four pages, which we have printed separately and included here.

The back cover, however, includes a plastic pocket with the obscene pages that the sixth printer

refused to print (Figure 7). The corresponding pages within Semiotext(e) USA indicates that these

“subversive” and “obscene” texts were censored (Figure 8). Burroughs, of course, had his own

censorship battles. And while the case against Naked Lunch is certainly well known, the government equally scrutinized Burroughs’s writings in the alternative press. Both the

Polysexuality and USA issues include texts from Burroughs. The latter issue features a short

Burroughs essay, entitled “Sects and Death.” And while the text was not one of the pages the

sixth printer refused to print, its bibliographical history gives insight into how Burroughs’s texts

circulated outside mainstream publishing networks. These texts instead appear in small

alternative presses that distribute such “obscene” and “subversive” material.

Before the editors of Semiotext(e) selected “Sects and Death” for the 1987 issue, the

short text appeared in Roosevelt After Inauguration and Other Atrocities, which was published by City Lights in 1979. In the introduction to the book, Burroughs notes that the titular atrocity,

“Roosevelt After Inauguration,” was “deleted from The Yage Letters [in 1963] by the English printers.” This was perhaps not without reason, as Burroughs explains how “Roosevelt After

Inauguration” was “first published in Floating Bear # 9 by Leroi Jones,” which resulted in an obscenity case against Jones “when copies were sent to someone in a penal institution” (10).

“Roosevelt After Inauguration” first materialized in a 1953 letter to Allen Ginsberg, wherein

Burroughs instructs Ginsberg to read the enclosed routine. The routine, however, would not appear in The Yage Letters until the third edition was printed in 1988. Yet a note to the 1965 edition tells readers “copies of a new pirated edition of [“Roosevelt After Inauguration”] are

39 obtainable from City Lights at 50c postpaid” (42). The routine thus circulated in pirated editions

and a small newsletter before City Lights published it with “other atrocities” in 1979.

Floating Bear was a small semi-monthly newsletter co-edited by Jones and Diane Di Prima.

While Jones admits Floating Bear had a small circulation of around 300, he notes, “those 300

were sufficiently wired for sound to project the Bear’s presence and ‘message’ (of a new

literature and a new criticism) in all directions” (Autobiography of Leroi Jones 251). The

newsletter published texts from Black Mountain College writers, such as Robert Creely and

Charles Olson, as well as texts from the New York School and the Beat Generation. Floating

Bear thus created a wide and diverse network of writers that intersected in the newsletter. When

Jones and Di Prima published “Roosevelt After Inauguration” in the ninth issue, Burroughs’s

text appeared between a Philip Whalen poem and an excerpt from Jones’s The System of Dante’s

Hell. It was Burroughs’s routine and Jones’s text that brought FBI agents to Jones’s house in the

middle of the night, and he was charged with sending obscene material in the mail. At the trial

Jones defended himself, where he “read all the good parts of Joyce’s Ulysses and Catullus aloud

to the jury and then read Judge Woolsey’s decision on Ulysses, which described obscene

literature as being arousing ‘to the normal person.’ [Jones] went on, saying, ‘But I know none of

you [grand jury] were aroused by any of these thing’”(The Autobiography of Leroi Jones 251-

252). The case against Jones was soon dismissed, but the routine would appear again in another

small mimeograph press in 1964.

The American printer and Fugs musician Ed Sanders published “Roosevelt After

Inauguration” in his Fuck You Press three years after the Floating Bear issue. While Jones and

Di Prima remove the epistolary context from the text, the Fuck You “Roosevelt” reinserts

Burroughs’s 1953 letter to Ginsberg. The issue also includes sketches and illustrations from

40 Ginsberg, which further emphasizes the collaborative element in Burroughs’s work. A brief bibliographical history on the text appears beneath the letter. The note reads: “This routine was bricked out of the City Lights Volume by paranoid printers in England. It was first stomped into print in Floating Bear # 9.” While Sanders did not face any legal consequences for printing the

routine, he differentiated Fuck You from the “paranoid printers” in mainstream publishing. The

title page of the issue notes what the press prints is more of an “ejaculation” than a publication,

and it serves as a “TOTAL ASSUALT ON THE CULTURE!!”

The routine published in Jones and Di Prima’s Floating Bear and Sanders’s Fuck You

centers on the imagined actions that Roosevelt took shortly after his inauguration. In Burroughs’s

text, Roosevelt appointed “a veteran panhandler” as the Secretary of State, who “solicited nickels

and dimes in the corridors of the State Department” (16). When the Supreme Court rejected

“some of the legislation perpetrated by this vile rout,” Roosevelt “forced that august body […] to

submit to intercourse with a purple-assed baboon” (18). Roosevelt later appointed the baboon to

replace a Justice on the court. Yet while the 1953 letter to Ginsberg literally dates the text,

Burroughs sees the routine as prediction of the Nixon administration. In the introduction to the

1979 City Lights edition, Burroughs felt that “Roosevelt After Inauguration” was “prophetic of

Watergate” (10), and he made a similar statement when he read the routine at the Nova

Convention in 1978. For Burroughs, Nixon was obsessed with total control, and to maintain it,

Nixon needed a closed circuit. This “perhaps explains why the Nixon Administration is out to

close down sex films and reestablish censorship of all films and books” (The Job 16). It also

explains why his Administration went after the underground press in the 1970s. Burroughs,

however, details a plan for resistance in “Playback from Watergate to Eden,” wherein he

explains how

41 Playback can be carried out by anyone with a recorder and a camera. Any number can play. Millions of people carrying out this basic operation could nullify the control system which those who are behind Watergate and Nixon are attempting to impose. (The Job 20)

Burroughs calls for all agents to use media to break open all closed control systems. And while he focuses on tape machines in the “Playback” text, mimeograph machines and other technologies of textual reproduction proliferate the number of printers. Anyone with a mimeograph machine can publish and distribute a text. Di Prima notes how she and Jones used a

Gestetner mimeograph to print the Floating Bear newsletter. They would “mimeograph it at the

[Phoenix] bookstore, and mail it out to people who mattered” (New York 244). Ed Sanders too bought a mimeograph machine when he started Fuck You Press, and he imagines “a network of mimeographs steadily publishing, coast to coast, city to town to bookstore to rebel café.” The

Roosevelt routine, which was initially edited out by “paranoid publishers,” first circulated outside traditional publishing networks. The text was reproduced with a print technology that broke the printer’s monopoly on literary distribution. How “Roosevelt After Inauguration” was distributed remains just as important as the content of the text. If Burroughs’s routine on

Roosevelt predicted the Nixon Administration, its circulation in small presses and newsletters likewise anticipated an alternative media that challenged Nixon’s closed and one-sided political power. We should not forget, then, that Daniel Ellsberg photocopied the “Pentagon Papers” on a

Xerox machine.

Burroughs cuts-up and repurposes his bibliography so that the content in a 1953 letter about FDR predicts an event that will happen twenty years later. He often notes how cut-ups can anticipate future events. “When you cut-up word lines,” Burroughs writes, “the future leaks out”

(The Job 28). Yet the future also leaks when Burroughs recirculates his older material with new editions and smaller presses, which in turn gives his narratives new contexts. Grauerholz calls

42 Burroughs one of “the great recyclers in literary history” (Interzone ix), and we can see this

textual recycling when “Sects and Death” appeared in the 1987 Semiotext(e) issue. “Sects and

Death,” the last atrocity in the City Lights book, also concludes with a statement on Nixon. Yet

when the short text was published in 1979, Watergate had already occurred. It was almost fifteen

years in the past when “Sects and Death” appeared in Semiotext(e) USA. The introduction to

Semiotext(e), however, states that these texts in the issue are “meant for a great battlefield” in a

new civil war. The editors, then, publish these essays, both old and new, to realize a different

vision of America, in which “a government that offs the people, buys the people, forks the people, shall soon perish” (0). In “Sects and Death,” Burroughs similarly questions the leaders of

churches, armies, and nations who all claim to possess the answers. “Anyone,” Burroughs writes,

“who believes he owns all the answers is a lunatic” (54). The publication histories of both

“Roosevelt After Inauguration” and “Sects and Death” show how these texts continually

circulate and recirculate to create counter-discourses that a political class actively seeks to

suppress or censor. Yet, as Burroughs notes in his “Playback” essay, their control weakens as

more people playback these subversive or obscene texts. New electronic and print technologies

allow for this multiplication of mass media agents. To quote Burroughs again: mass media

“spreads any cultural movements in all directions” (SC 41).

Dead Fingers Talk: An Atrophied Bibliography

Burroughs, then, widely disseminates his texts in various publications and media so that his

writing spreads in multiple directions. This multi-directional bibliographical code in Burroughs

suggests an image of the rhizome, which Deleuze spoke about at the Schizo-Culture conference

in 1975. In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari speak directly to literary writers when

they command them to “write to the nth power, the n – 1 power, write with slogans: Make

43 rhizomes, not roots, never plant” (TP 24). They find these writers in American literature, who

“manifest this rhizomatic direction to an even greater extent; they know how to move between

things, establish a logic of the AND […] do away with foundations, nullify endings and beginnings” (TP 25). Burroughs’s bibliographical recycling does not allow his writings to stay rooted for long. Barry Miles thus notes how all Burroughs’s texts are “fugitive,” where “no fixed

text seems possible.” Miles instead suggests that all Burroughs’s writings “have to be seen as one

giant multivolume book including all the different versions” (Call Me Burroughs 542). Yet the book Miles describes finds a totality or unity in the mass of Burroughs’s pages. And while

Deleuze and Guattari note such a book confirms a “superior unity,” it still offers a totalized

image of the world, albeit one less linear than the “root-book.” However, one can never

completely avoid these totalizing territories. Deleuze and Guattari even admit, “trees have

rhizome lines, and the rhizome points of arborescence” (TP 34). Their concept of the book, then, breaks with the “deeply rooted belief” that the book is an image of the world. For Deleuze and

Guattari, the book is more of a “little machine” that “assures the deterritorialization of the world,

[while] the world effects a reterriorialization of the book” (TP 11). A book does not tell us what

the world is; it shows us what the world can be. Timothy Murphy explains how Burroughs

strategically constructs “a false unity” in order to find “alternatives to the constituted socius.”

These alternatives, Murphy adds, “can inspire revolutionary subject-groups capable of

undertaking the transformation of material practices” (42). We “sewed up the planet,” but

Burroughs commands us to “now unsew it” (TE 152). And though a prerecorded universe

implies a totality of all recordings, Burroughs finds that “the only thing not prerecorded […] is

any recording that contains a random factor” (TE 188). Cut-ups introduce this random factor in

the prerecorded universe, and subtracts (n-1) from the totality of recordings so that language

44 becomes less static. The cut-up method opens language to every possible enunciation and

“semiotic regime.”

When Burroughs cuts up narrative or recycles his own writing, he effectively cuts up the

traditional image of the book that Deleuze and Guattari attack in A Thousand Plateaus. A

“rhizome-book” does not have a beginning, and it resists finality. Oliver Harris, however, rightly

tells readers and critics not to ignore the material histories of Burroughs’s texts. Such a genetic

approach to Burroughs does not fix or stabilize his work. On the contrary, Harris finds that the

differences between the original Naked Lunch manuscript and its published versions do “not

stabilize its meanings or simply multiply them,” but instead show “that there can be no

satisfactory resolution of a text whose meanings are not ambiguous but antagonistic (Fascination

218). Similar to “Roosevelt After Inauguration,” Naked Lunch first appeared in Burroughs’s

letters to Ginsberg. Before Maurice Giordias published the book with Olympia Press, ten

episodes of Naked Lunch were published in Big Table 1. Harris thus explains how the changes

and variants from Burroughs’s early letters to its publication as The Naked Lunch are “a material

extension of that original instability and a true measure of the unbound, perverse, and

inexhaustible vitality of Burroughs’s creation” (“Beginnings” 24). Lydenberg likewise concludes

that Burroughs’s “texts resist finality by being constantly reissued in different versions,

fragments large and small surfacing in new works and new contexts” (52). The textual alterations

in Naked Lunch did not stop after Giordias published the novel in 1959. When Burroughs’s

British publisher, John Calder, published selections from Naked Lunch in 1963, it was under a

new title: Dead Fingers Talk.

Calder published Dead Fingers Talk as a primer for Naked Lunch, which had previously

not been available to British readers. The text was published after the Olympia first editions of

45 Naked Lunch (1959), The Soft Machine (1961), and The Ticket That Exploded (1962). Nearly every word in Dead Fingers Talk recycles text from these three published books. As Burroughs states in an interview with W.J. Weatherby, “[Dead Fingers Talk] is selections from Naked

Lunch, The Soft Machine, and The Ticket Exploded” (Burroughs Live 52). Burroughs, however,

does not define the Calder book as an anthology or compilation. In a letter to Alan Ansen, he

explained how “by rearranging the material and adding some new sections I have endeavored to

create a new novel rather than miscellaneous selections” (qtd. in Call Me Burroughs 407). Dead

Fingers Talk, then, creates a new text from Burroughs’s sampling and remixing of his bibliography.

Dead Fingers Talk is perhaps best known as the subject of a fourteen-week

correspondence in The Times Literary Supplement. The initial review of Dead Fingers Talk,

written by John Willet, appeared on November 14, 1963 under the title “UGH.” In his review,

Willet asked if “there is a moral message” in Burroughs’s text, and if so, “what if the moral

message is itself disgusting” (919). The first review, then, attacked the content of Burroughs’s

text, and it concluded with a statement about the “probable impact on [Calder’s] reputation and

indirectly that of the other authors on their list” (919). The tone of criticism continued throughout

the fourteen-week correspondence, with critics like Edith Sitwell noting that she “does not wish

to spend the rest of my life with my nose nailed to other people’s lavatories” (993). Using a

similar scatological analogy, Nicolas Bentley found that “the only direction The Naked Lunch

[…] is likely to extend the boundaries of the novel form is towards the public lavatory, where it

is still not uncommon to see walls scrawled with the stuff that is in The Naked Lunch” (53). This

criticism of Dead Fingers Talk addressed the content in Burroughs’s narratives instead of the

formal experimentation implicit in the cut-up method. These critics, as Robin Lydenberg notes,

46 approach Burroughs’s text with a criticism “based on the very structures of metaphor and

morality which Burroughs attacks” (Word Cultures 3) in his cut-up or fold-in experiments.

In the second week of the “UGH” correspondence, Eric Mottram did direct the critical

conversation to Burroughs’s cut-up method. He claimed that Burroughs’s use of “collage and

cutting methods are deliberately built into a program of revolt against authority” (993). Yet not

all reviewers of Dead Fingers Talk were as sympathetic to Burroughs’s literary experiments.

Even Calder claimed that he did not “personally have very much sympathy for the fold-in

technique, which in [his] personal opinion has so far failed more than it has succeeded” (947).

Most of the early reviews, then, attacked or defended what Burroughs wrote instead of how he

wrote Dead Fingers Talk. The business of literary criticism rests on interpretations that see the book as a condensed image of the world. The book as an image of the world: Deleuze and

Guattari find this “a vapid idea” (TP 6).

The question of how Burroughs constructed Dead Fingers Talk makes the book more

than just a minor curiosity in the Burroughs canon. With its cut-up bibliographical code, the book unsettles the image of any book as a stable or fixed medium. It is telling, then, that so many

reviews confuse Dead Fingers Talk with Naked Lunch. Mottram attempts to correct this mistake

when he notes the text is “a collation of sections from two of Burroughs’s novels,” and he adds

that Willet should have informed readers “about its construction and relation to these earlier

novels” (993). Willet, however, did describe Dead Fingers Talk as “an assortment of lumps from

all three [books], stirring the mixture and topping it to make a fourth” (919). His description of

the text was more accurate than Mottram’s. It is easy to see how critics might mistake Dead

Fingers Talk for Burroughs’s earlier text since the beginning of the book corresponds to the

opening section of Naked Lunch. Dead Fingers Talk, however, combines the opening and

47 closing narratives of Naked Lunch in its opening section. Dead Fingers Talk, then, “cuts into

Naked Lunch at many intersection points” (187). Yet the text does not only correspond with

Naked Lunch, as the second section in Dead Fingers Talk, entitled “in a strange bed,” uses text from The Ticket That Exploded. The Calder book concludes with the concluding section from that cut-up “novel.” Dead Fingers Talk thus begins with writing from Naked Lunch but ends with writing from The Ticket That Exploded.

Naked Lunch has often been read as a separate text from the three cut-up books that

follow its publication: The Soft Machine, The Ticket That Exploded, and Nova Express (1964).

These three cut-up “novels” are often grouped as The Nova Trilogy, but in a letter to Irving

Rosenthal, Burroughs admits, “Naked Lunch is all cut-up, though [he] was not fully realizing the method and the need for actual scissors” (Rub Out the Word 191). In Dead Fingers Talk,

Burroughs connects Naked Lunch to the two earlier cut-up novels, and thus constructs an earlier cut-up trilogy that predates the publication of Nova Express. Burroughs, however, tells Gysin

that he “might say Naked Lunch, The Soft Machine, Nova Express, The Ticket That Exploded, all

derive from one store of material a good part of which was written between 1957 and 1959”

(Rub Out the Word 243). Dead Fingers Talk condenses his three published narratives to a single book. Several chapters in Dead Fingers Talk combine narratives from all three books are cut-up

in a single section.

Burroughs recycles “the black fruit” chapter from The Ticket That Exploded in Dead

Fingers Talk, but if one reads the “the black fruit” in the latter book, they will first read text from

“the black meat” chapter in Naked Lunch. While “the black fruit” in Dead Fingers Talk

corresponds to the title in The Ticket That Exploded, text from that section does not appear until

after the Naked Lunch chapter ends. Burroughs further complicates the section when he splices

48 in passages from The Soft Machine with “the black fruit.” The chapter in Dead Fingers Talk thus culminates with quick cuts between two narratives. The characters in these two narratives likewise dissolve into each other in this section, as Bradley in “the black fruit” intermingles with

Carl in The Soft Machine.

If the textual sampling and remixing in Dead Fingers Talk seem dizzying enough,

Burroughs continued to rewrite The Soft Machine and The Ticket That Exploded. After Olympia

Press published The Soft Machine in 1961, the book was published again in 1966 (Grove) and

1968 (John Calder) with significant changes. These different editions thus produced “enough

Soft Machines for a trilogy of trilogies” (Harris xii). Burroughs gives one reason for the revision in a 1966 letter to Gysin, where fans told Burorughs “they found the Olympia edition difficult to read and it [thus] never sold well.” Burroughs admits the 1961 Olympia edition was more a

“collection of essays” than an actual book, and that “there was not enough narrative material to carry such a load of cut ups […] so [Burroughs] attempted to give the book a narrative structure”

(Rub Out the Words 243). The necessity to include narrative, however, only makes the material history of The Soft Machine more opaque. Similar to Dead Fingers Talk, the three altered Soft

Machines feature a complicated remixing and recombination of other narratives. In the 1966 Soft

Machine, Burroughs added Dr. Benway to the narrative in the “puerto located” section, and he

also retitled this section, “pretend an interest.” Text from “puerto located” (and “pretend an

interest”) likewise appeared in the “black fruit” section of Dead Fingers Talk. A “trilogy” of versions is thus evident in this small section of Soft Machine(s).

Yet critics, as Harris finds, often ignore the “perverse history” of these cut-up texts. With his altered editions, Burroughs’s writing “has managed to reverse beginnings and ends, to lose its center, and for lack of due attention to which edition they are reading, to [further] confuse

49 critics” (Fascination 244-245). This confusion, in part, results from Burroughs’s compositional

methods that produce unstable and contradictory textual histories. His impulse to rewrite his books shows the limitations of a literary criticism that relies on a fixed bibliographical code.

Carol Loranger, however, proposes a postmodern edition that will provide a space for all the

textual mutations in Burroughs’s texts. Such an edition, Loranger explains, will likely be in

hypertext, and will allow readers to move between all the textual variants.6 The composition of

these “fugitive” texts is thus similar to Manovich’s description of a new media object, which “is

not something fixed once and for all, but something that can exist in different, potentially infinite

versions” (Language of New Media 36). While Loranger’s proposal is useful (yet still unrealized) for readers and critics, it risks constraining Burroughs’s experiments to “the structuralist corset” that Guattari describes in his essay on postmodernism and the “post-media” era. When

Burroughs started to experiment with tape recorders in the 1960s, he noted how the instrument allowed for “effects of simultaneity, speed-ups, slow downs,” which “cannot be indicated on the printed page” (The Job 29). His tape recorder experiments with Ian Sommerville proliferate sounds that exceed a single “semiotic regime.”

Two years after Calder published Dead Fingers Talk, Burroughs collaborated with

Sommerville on the album, Call Me Burroughs (1965). Similar to the Calder book, the album

cuts across three Burroughs texts on the album’s six tracks. Call Me Burroughs includes

selections from Naked Lunch, The Soft Machine, and Nova Express, and the album begins with

Burroughs reading from the “Bradley, the Buyer” routine in Naked Lunch. Burroughs reads a

selection from Nova Express on the third track, but there remains some connective narrative

tissue between these two texts. In the Naked Lunch routine, Burroughs describes a narcotics

6 Loranger, Carol. “‘This Book Spill Off the Page in All Directions’: What is the Text of Naked Lunch?” Postmodern Culture, vol. 10, no. 1, 1999. 50 agent, Bradley, who rubs against junkies to get his fix. His flesh turns to a gelatinous blob that

absorbs both junkies and agents. The Nova Express track features a similar character who

contracts a “Venusian virus” and proceeds “to dissolve [himself] in poison juices and assimilate passers-by” (Nova Express 22). While the album remixes and connects Burroughs’s narratives, it also features a rewritten section from The Soft Machine. The title for The Soft Machine track,

“Where You Belong,” initially corresponds to that section in the book, but Burroughs cuts-in text from a later chapter in The Soft Machine.

Call Me Burroughs does not feature much experimentation on tape recorders, but

Sommerville does plug Burroughs’s writing into electronic technology. The album introduces readers to Burroughs’s voice. In the liner notes, Emmett Williams states that his voice sounds

“like a slow but faithful old Ford.” Such a mechanical description was already present in Naked

Lunch, where Burroughs states that he is more of “a recording instrument,” and does not

“presume to impose ‘story’ ‘plot’ [or] ‘continuity’” (184). In the 1960s, he fed his voice into a tape recorder so that there was nothing left but the recordings. Davis Schneiderman hears a double resonance in Burroughs’s voice in his recordings with other musicians. In his collaboration with Material, Burroughs reads from his last novel The Western Lands. Yet at least three of the tracks on the album are remixed. Schneiderman thus explains that “Burroughs finds his flickering persona fed into the recording machine in so many iterations, both through his own instrumentation and that of other like-minded collaborators, that it is cut backward and chopped apart until the computer sample of ‘his’ voice, the recording of the recording, implodes” (157).

As the underground press used mimeograph machines to reproduce and distribute his writing in all directions, rock musicians and other media agents remixed Burroughs’s voice with electronic

51 technologies that will play on every record player. Playback, then, becomes an essential

ingredient for all media.

“Rock and Roll Adolescent Hoodlums Storm the Streets of All Nations”

Burroughs, then, did not limit his experiments to a literary medium or the codex form. In

his introduction to The Ticket That Exploded, Burroughs acknowledges the contributions that

Gysin, Sommerville, and Anthony Balch made to the text. These collaborators frame his project in three different media: visual art, audio, and film respectively. The Nova Convention presented these diverse multi-media texts to the public. The “Cine-Virus” segment of the Convention screened Burroughs’s three films with Balch, and Frank Zappa indirectly collaborated with

Burroughs when he read “The Talking Asshole” routine at the Convention. Zappa told the audience that he was not much for reading books, but he did make an exception for Naked

Lunch. Yet even before the Nova Convention, Burroughs separated his writing from historical literary conventions. In his 1963 lecture at the Edinburgh Festival, Burroughs explained that the

“fold-in method extends to writing the flashback used in films,” and he noted that the “method is of course used in music, where we are continually moved backward and forward on the time track by repetition and rearrangements” (Word Virus 272). Burroughs’s comments on the “future of the novel” overlap with Marshall McLuhan’s analysis on electronic media in The Gutenberg

Galaxy (1962) and Understanding Media (1964). When McLuhan wrote his review on Nova

Express in 19647, he explained how Burroughs’s text served as a “kind of engineer’s report” on

“the new electronic environment.” McLuhan also claimed that Burroughs was “not asking for merit marks as a writer.” His fiction instead shows how we might reprogram the twentieth-

7 Burroughs told Gysin, “McLuhan wrote one of the very few intelligent and appreciative reviews on Nova Express” (Rub Out the Word 244).

52 century electronic environment (“Notes on Burroughs”). As Burroughs details in The Soft

Machine, Nova agents “fold writers of all time in together and record radio programs, movie

sound tracks, TV and juke box songs of all the words of the world stirring around in a cement

mixer and pour in the resistance message” (Soft Machine 147). Burroughs prints a resistance

message in books and broadcasts it on the airwaves. He thus attacks linguistic control through

the manipulation of mass media. If the medium is indeed the message, Burroughs suggests

alternative uses of media will produce alternative messages.

In 1974, a year before the Schizo-Culture conference, Burroughs interviewed David Bowie

for Rolling Stone. Bowie had just read Nova Express, and he told Burroughs that he found many

similarities between that book and his concept for Ziggy Stardust (1972). With such

correspondence between them, Bowie concluded that they were perhaps “the Rogers and

Hammerstein of the ‘70s” (Burroughs Live 231). Bowie also explained his interest in working

with multiple media, and he noted to Burroughs how “media is either our salvation, or our death.

I’d like to think it’s our salvation. My particular thing is discovering what can be done with

media and how it can be used” (Burroughs Live 239). How a rock musician or an experimental

writer plans to use these electronic technologies differs significantly from their initial use by the

state. As Kittler explains in his history of the gramophone, broadcasting information “came

about for the purpose of the mass transmission of records” between government officials

(Gramophone 94). Electronic technologies likewise aided in the Second World War, as radio

allowed “Luftwaffe bombers to reach their destinations without having to depend on daylight or

the absence of fog” (Gramophone 100). Kittler, however, explains that when rock musicians

used this technology after the war, they abused army equipment. In his 1975 interview with

53 Jimmy Page for Crawdaddy8 magazine, Burroughs discussed infrared technology with the Led

Zeppelin guitarist. While a French scientist developed the technology as a military weapon,

Burroughs tells Page he is “not concerned with military applications however unlimited, but with

more interesting and useful possibilities” (38). Burroughs’s Nova agents “ride music beam[s]” as

they broadcast “the message of Total Resistance on [the] short wave of the world” (NE 69). Rock

and punk music are thus a “mass interception” that “amount[s] to mobilization” (Gramophone

111). Both Burroughs and the rock n’ roll hoodlums storm the studio to misuse the old army

equipment.

If Burroughs and Bowie are “the Rogers and Hammerstein of the ‘70s,” Burroughs and

Paul McCartney are perhaps the unlikely pair of the ‘60s. Burroughs appeared on the cover of

Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band in 1967, but he met McCartney at least a year before that album was released. Miles recalls how McCartney wanted to set up a small recording studio in

1966. McCartney rented Ringo Starr’s apartment on Montagu Square to house the audio equipment, and he asked Sommerville to watch over it for him. Miles notes that the two people who made the most use of the equipment were McCartney and Burroughs. McCartney remembers that he “thought about getting into cut-ups and things like that and [he] thought [he] would use the studio for cut-ups. But it ended up being of more practical use for [McCartney]

(quoted in Call Me Burroughs 452). Sommerville engineered the tape experiments with

Burroughs while McCartney composed “Eleanor Rigby.”

Many cut-up tapes, Burroughs writes in Electronic Revolution, are ideally suited for

entertainment (The Job 181). He imagines a rock festival where as many tape recorders as

8 Crawdaddy was an American rock magazine that Paul Williams created in 1966. In the mid- 1970s, Burroughs had a regular column with Crawdaddy, entitled “Time of the Assassins.”

54 possible are placed throughout the festival grounds. These recorders will have “tapes of prerecorded material, music, news broadcasts, recordings, [and] from other festivals.” Burroughs

further envisions “projection screens and video cameras” that might project “sex films, films of

other festivals,” with this material “cut in with live TV broadcasts and shots of the crowd” (The

Job 182). Musicians and the audience bring their own recorders, and more in attendance at the

festival, the more material there is to record and playback. While such a festival never

materialized, the Nova Convention assembled Burroughs’s writing with a large network of

avant-garde artists and rock musicians. Patti Smith prefaced her performance of “Bumblebee”

with a statement on Burroughs and Gysin. She noted how “the thing they’ve given me is the

foresight and the freedom to communicate with the future through sound.”9 After her statement,

Smith’s voice soon dissolved into noise.

Laurie Anderson also performed at the convention, where she distorted her voice with a vocoder. This, Laurie Anderson explained, “is the language of the on again off again future, and it is digital.”10 Parts of her performance later appeared on the opening track of Big Science

(1982), and Anderson continued to work with Burroughs both directly and indirectly after the

Nova Convention. In 1981, she collaborated with Burroughs and Giorno on a tour that was later

released as a record: You’re the Guy I Want to Share My Money With. In 1984, Burroughs spoke on the closing track of Anderson’s Mister Heartbreak, and his voice pairs well with her trance- like instrumentation. Kittler writes that Burroughs’s collaboration with Anderson “maximizes all electro-acoustic possibilities, occupies recording studios and FM transmitters, and uses tape montages to subvert the writing-induced separation into composers and writers, arrangers and

9 Smith, Patti. “Poem for Jim Morrison and Bumblebee.” The Nova Convention. Giorno Poetry Systems, 1979. < http://www.ubu.com/sound/nova.html> 10 Anderson, Laurie and Julie Heyward. “Song from America on the Move. The Nova Convention. Giorno Poetry Systems. < http://www.ubu.com/sound/nova.html> 55 interpreters” (Gramophone 110-111). Burroughs plugs his writing and voice into so many

different media that he upends the cultural line that often divides literary expression from other

semiotic registers. Deleuze and Guattari note that writers who “submit linguistic elements to a

treatment producing continuous variation,” also “treat nonlinguistic elements such as gestures

and instruments in the same fashion” (TP 98). Burroughs’s “operation rewrite” consistently experiments on literary and electronic media in order to find alternative uses for these communication technologies. These experiments with media further produce other sign systems, which Guattari notes are subjugated to the linguistic signifier. Guattari adds that the “rules of speech not only depend on a certain syntax, but on a certain law of writing” (SCE 189). In his

Schizo-Culture lecture, Burroughs too found that modern control systems still depended on

writing and literacy. He thus wrote how “language is a virus,” and Laurie Anderson repeats this

line in her song entitled “Language is a Virus.” Yet when she sings this Burroughsian aphorism

on the United States Live album, she distorts his words with a synthesizer.

Anderson’s vocal manipulations parallel Burroughs’s approach to literature. And while

Burroughs collaborated with rock musicians, Paul Miller a.k.a. DJ Spooky, whose other alias,

“That Subliminal Kid,” references a character in Nova Express, compares Burroughs’s writing

method to a DJ.11 Miller notes how Burroughs’s texts express “the acoustic imagination” as “a place we can all think of as a liberated zone—a place where the mix can absorb any pattern, any

sequence, and any text” (237). One can read a more complete account of Burroughs’s textual

mixing and sampling in the first appendix to this text, which details the atrophying bibliography

11 DJ Spooky applied the DJ technique to cinema in his remix of D.W. Griffith’s Rebirth of a Nation (2007). Similar to all of the writers discussed in these reports, Miller questions the finality of any text, and uses media to playback a different message from Griffith’s film. In his commentary to the film, Miller comments on how new media allows for film viewers to become collaborators. He thus tells the viewer of his film that Rebirth of a Nation is only one of many potential versions. 56 in Dead Fingers Talk. This bibliographical mash-up cuts-up a “liberated zone” within media that a powerful political and corporate class control. Burroughs’s work, as Miller explains, “is about the noise of liberation” (Miller 237). Kathy Acker picks up on this noise in his texts, and she directs it against a literary culture that stinks with its claims of ownership and property. Pirates in

Acker’s fiction pillage the Western canon.

57 CHAPTER TWO

“CULTURE STINKS”: KATHY ACKER OVERWRITES THE CANON WITH BLOOD AND GUTS

Don’t produce and don’t reproduce, my friend said. But really there is no such thing as reproduction, only acts of production. No lack, only desiring machines.

Maggie Nelson, The Argonauts

Desiring-machines […] continually break down as they run, and in fact only when they are not functioning properly: the product is always an offshoot of production, implanting itself upon it like a graft, and at the same time the parts of the machine are the fuel that makes it run.

Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus

The Weight of Culture

A year before Kathy Acker’s untimely death in 1997, her last novel, Pussy, King of the

Pirates, was published. A musical companion was released simultaneously with the book, and it

features text from Pussy read by Acker as well as music from the London based band The

Mekons. This collaboration with a rock group allows for a sonic interpretation of the “whore-

songs” that Acker includes in her novel. Just as musicians sample and remix Burroughs’s words

with electronic instruments, Sally Timms sings Acker’s pirate poems so that a new expression

can enter her prose. Such an expression is what the whores and pirates in Pussy seek in their language. They find that “if language or words whose meanings seem definite are dissolved into a substance of multiple gestures or cries […] then all the weight that the current social, political, and religious hegemonic forms of expression carry will be questioned” (31). Acker thus questions the “weight of culture” through the figure of the pirate. Yet her Long John Silver is a woman who sings about “filthy girls on [a] dead man’s chest” (221). The pirates in Pussy are also “the destroyers of all obstacles” (206), but one obstacle was introduced the same year as

58 Acker’s novel. The Telecommunications Act of 1996 was a law that deregulated the

telecommunications industry and permitted the consolidation or cross-ownership of media

companies. Many political activists, however, saw the consolation of “commercial media as

standing in the way of other uses of a media system, including cultural and musical programming

free of corporate control” (Dunbar-Hester 3). Low-Fi and pirate radio channels were a challenge

to this corporate control of media. One can hear samples from London pirate radio on the second

track of the Pussy album. The track, then, re-contextualizes Acker’s literary piracy with radio piracy. If “poetry is what fucks up this world” (Pussy 211), imagine how a poem will fuck it up when it plays on an underground radio station.

Piracy, in both the Pussy novel and album, serves as a means for realizing a cultural space beyond ownership or property. Yet while Acker’s fiction considers this utopia of cultural commons, she also acknowledges the difficulty of maintaining such a space. She admits that she violates copyright in her fiction, but sells it for her own books because “that’s how writers make money.” This, she adds, is “one of the basic contradictions of living in capitalism” (Hannibal

Lecter 12). The final scene in Pussy exemplifies this contradiction, as Silver and the pirate girls refuse the treasure Ostracism (“O”) and Ange find in the cave. If Silver and her girls “take all this treasure, the reign of girl piracy will stop.” They would “rather go a-pirating.” Though O took the treasure at the end of the novel, she “understood” Silver, and “watched in awe” when

“those girls walked out of the cave” (276).

This report on Acker considers how her writing exploits the contradictions inherent in capitalism. In her essay on Kathy Acker’s “stuff,” Dodie Bellamy finds that “despite [Acker’s] virulent consumerism, she critiqued capitalism—often and grandly” (140). Nicola Pitchford likewise notes how Acker’s fiction “denounces the inequality and destruction at the core of

59 society’s current structure, but it depends on that society’s products to do so” (63). She thus

simultaneously cites culturally significant texts and rewrites their value with a different

expression. In order to express an alternative value system, Acker appropriates canonical

literature, such as Dickens and Cervantes. She then grafts semi-autobiographical and sexually

explicit writing onto this canon. This writing method overwrites the cultural value of these texts

with a language that many critics deem obscene or non-literary.

When the German Inspection Office for Publications found Acker’s Blood and Guts in

High School harmful to minors in 1986, they listed several reasons for their decision. One reason

centered on Acker’s work in the sex industry, where “after being confronted with the fact that

she had already written pornography before and performed in sex shows she was accused of

imitating traditional literature.” The decision from the Inspection Office concluded that “the

novel [did] not reach the level worthy to be of value to the pluralistic society” (Hannibal Lecter

148). One of Acker’s major offenses, however, was the experimental style that she used in Blood

and Guts in High School. The experimental form of Acker’s text, as Georgina Colby finds,

“obstructs and challenges the denotative structures of meaning,” which is often “the key factor in

the work being considered to be devoid of literary merit” (68). Obscene content, then, can have a

literary value so long as it fits within traditional or accepted forms. The literary scholars that

Janey Smith describes in Blood and Guts are “top cop[s],” who “define the roads by which people live so they won’t get in trouble and so society will survive.” Academics, then, “replace

“living dangerous creatings with dead ideas and teach these ideas as the history and meaning of

the world” (B&G 68). Acker challenges how traditional literary culture excludes these

“dangerous creatings” or expressions from literature in her fiction. Men are the “top cops” in

Blood and Guts in High School, and Janey’s writing and speech remains indecipherable to them.

60 When she copies a Latin poem or writes a book report, Janey overwrites culture in a voice that

“the men who own language” cannot understand.

Such cultural overwriting in Acker’s work parallels Burroughs and Guattari’s comments on

linguistic control at the Schizo-Culture event. While Acker was not at the 1975 conference, her

“Persian Poems” from Blood and Guts in High School did appear in the Schizo-Culture issue.

Since the novel was not published until 1984, Schizo-Culture provided an early glimpse of

Acker’s text. While the magazine did not include the entire “Persian Poems,” a line from the

novel captured the goal of Schizo-Culture: “Culture stinks: books and great men and the fine arts” (73). Lotringer explains how the 1978 issue “consummated [Semiotext(e)’s] rupture with academe” (v). Semiotext(e), then, was more interested in the New York City art world, and

Acker too collaborated with these artists. As she tells Lotringer, the conceptual artist Sol Lewitt

“subsidized” much of her earlier work (Hannibal Lecter 5) Her first texts were also distributed in the mail with other mail artists. Acker’s work first circulated in small underground presses, and had not yet (and perhaps has not yet) been accepted in universities or mainstream culture.

For Acker, the writers and texts in the Schizo-Culture issue were directly political. As she explained in a 1989 interview with Ellen Friedman, Burroughs was an influence on her work because he “considered how language is used and abused within a political context” (14). When

Acker first read Deleuze and Guattari, she found that their work was also concerned with politics. The artists and theorists who appeared in Schizo-Culture, then, were writing “about what was happening to the economy and about the changing political system” (Friedman 20). The politics in these texts, however, was ignored when academics began to bring these texts into

universities. Acker accused academics of only using Deleuze and Guattari to build their careers.

She likewise discussed how critics often label literature as experimental in order to “hide the

61 radicalness of some writers.” Culture then “uphold[s] the postcapitalist [control] society, and the

idea that art has nothing to do with politics is a wonderful construction in order to mask the deep political significance that art has” (21). Yet this culture, as Janey Smith writes in Blood and

Guts, stinks. With her literary piracy and formal experimentalism, Acker calls readers’ attention to how cultural-capitalist institutions value certain linguistic arrangements. She creates other arrangements that express an alternative politics.

Culture Stink$$$

Janey’s conclusion that “culture stinks” contrasts with another character’s defense of art and literature in the text. Mr. Linker, who kidnaps Janey into his sex slave ring, gives Janey and other “hoodlums” a lecture on culture. He explains how “the only thing we have […] which separates us from the beasts is Culture.” It becomes “our highest form of life,” and “it is literature more than any other art which enables us to grasp this higher life” (64). Janey, however, questions such an impassioned defense when she begins to write her book report on

The Scarlet Letter. Janey breaks from her report to note that how she “can speak as directly as

[she] want[s] ‘cause no one gives a shit about writing and ideas, all anyone cares about is money” (66). This subject of how money and art appears again in Acker’s Great Expectations

(1982), where she writes:

Since the American culture allows only the material to be real (actually, only money), those who want to do art unless they transfer their art into non-art i.e. the making of commodities, can’t earn money and stay alive. (77)

Capitalism creates a similar value system for literature. Janey thus describes culture as “a book that can be advertised” (B&G 66). Acker’s commentary on culture remains close to the Marxist art critic John Berger’s theses in Ways of Seeing. In the first episode of the 1972 television program, Berger stood before Leonardo da Vinci’s Virgin on the Rocks at the National Gallery

62 and explained how the viewer should feel a sense of awe, but he clarified that such a feeling

came “not because of what [the painting] shows—not because of the meaning of its image. It has become impressive, mysterious, because of its market value” (23). How commerce shapes

culture likewise concerns Acker’s fiction. Her writing, however, does not dismiss the culture

industry entirely. Acker instead alters canonical texts through her literary appropriations, which

introduce different narrative voices: Janey’s and literary pirates’.

How such a voice overwrites culture is clear in Blood and Guts in High School. Janey’s book report on The Scarlet Letter initially reads like an analysis a teenager in high school would

write. However, as her report continues, Janey hijacks Hester’s voice. When she states, “I,

Hester, am a red house lost in the thickening mist,” the “I” exceeds any one narrative voice. The

“I” of Janey-Hester thus notes, “I want to fuck you, Dimwit […] I want to write myself between

your lips and between your thighs” (95). She writes all “the wild things” Hawthorne wanted to

say but could not since he lived in a society that still cared about writing and ideas. This writing

in Blood and Guts, as Janey confesses, “is terrible plagiarism because all culture stinks and

there’s no reason to make new culture-stink” (137). But while Acker appropriates canonical

literature, she does not repeat the text verbatim. To cite Antonin Artaud: “Masterpieces of the past are good for the past: they are not good for us” (74). Artaud, who was the main “punk boy”

in Pussy, King of the Pirates, explains how an “expression does not have the same value twice,”

as “all words, once spoken, are dead and function only the moment when they are uttered” (75).

When Acker overwrites Hawthorne’s prose, she inserts new expressions that worship “S & M

sex” and “punk rock.”

The textual sampling and appropriation in Blood and Guts in High School, however, goes

well beyond Hawthorne. Acker lifts writing from Erica Jong’s Fear of Flying (1973), Jean

63 Genet’s The Screens (1961), as well as lines from Céline and Mallarmé. Acker often acknowledges her plagiarism via Janey, who admits that she “had no idea how to write poetry,” and thus “copied down all she could remember [from] every pukey bit by the Latin poet Sextus

Propertius” (101). Yet similar to her book report on Hawthorne, Janey alters the poem when she copies it. Acker’s copying, then, becomes a form of authorship that overwrites its source text. As

Caren Irr explains, “copying is tangibly the same act as writing,” and thus “Acker pulls these different sorts of tangibility into conversation with one another” (130). Appropriation and copying are thus valued as a creative labor in her writing, which conceptual writers, such as

Caroline Bergvall and Vanessa Place, continue in their work. In her introduction to Drown This

Book, Bergvall notes how Acker “famously proposed a literary mode which exists through other texts,” and this writing method “provides a trajectory that negates the original authorial voice”

(18). Acker’s bibliographical sampling thus represents text before it represents a self or the “I.”

As she tells Lotringer:

If there’s no problem with the “I,” then in terms of text there was no self or other, I could use everyone else’s writing. And then it’s like a kid; suddenly a toy shop opens up and the toy shop was called culture. (Hannibal Lecter 11)

Dodie Bellamy remembers how Acker credited Juan Goytisolo as a writer that she sampled in her novel, Empire of the Senseless (1988). She said it “so nonchalantly with no sense or discomfort about owning or not owning the passage” (128). Acker often admitted the plagiarism in her work, which certainly was clear when she titled the first section of Great Expectations

(1983) a “Plagiarism.” This admission directly questions how the culture industry values ownership and intellectual property. Her literary piracy, then, becomes an act of resistance against those who own or control language.

64 While Acker remains suspicious of the “I” in her writing, the pronoun does not disappear

from her texts. The personal pronoun instead serves as an empty signifier that multiple subjects

can occupy. Acker empties the “I” in Pussy, King of the Pirates when she writes:

I will not do, I, Antigone, I refuse. I will be instead. (177)

This allows the “I” to exceed an individual subject. When Acker uses the pronoun, she

refers to “an unknown number of individuals” (Eye 137). In one of her earlier texts, The

Childlike Life of the Black Tarantula, the “I” depends on the texts that Acker copies. The subject

of the pronoun thus changes from chapter to chapter. Hence, a note that begins chapter three

states: “I begin to copy my favorite pornography books and become the main person in each of

them” (29). The narrator in the Black Tarantula “becomes” many individuals throughout the

narrative: characters from Leduc’s Thérèse and Isabelle, Moll Flanders, as well as Alexander

Trochi and William Butler Yeats. Acker’s narrators are “interested solely in getting into someone

else,” as they “find the heavy flesh sensual, as if it were permanent” (Eye 58). The narrator slips

into other peoples skin through a tissue of citations. As Burroughs would say, Acker is more of a

recording instrument than an entertainer. Or as she tells McKenzie Wark, “Fuck, I’m a style

sponge” (I’m Very Into You 35). The “I” in Acker’s work, then, works as a porous textual

machine that absorbs other writers’ texts.

Acker, then, reaches a point in her writing where “it is no longer of any importance whether

one says I” (TP 3). What matters is not so much the “I,” as Deleuze and Guattari explain in A

Thousand Plateaus, but that “we are no longer ourselves […] we have been aided, inspired,

multiplied” (3). At the conclusion of Blood and Guts, Janey dies from cancer. Yet her death is only temporary in the novel. Soon after she died “other Janeys were born and these Janeys

65 covered the earth” (165). When Janey multiplies into Janeys, the name no longer refers to an

individual. These Janeys, as one of the male characters finds, are “all perverts, transsexuals,

criminals, and women” (136). Janey thus takes on social characteristics in Blood and Guts, and

when such a character speaks, it does so in a collective expression. Deleuze and Guattari note

that this “notion of a collective assemblage of enunciation takes on primary importance since it is

what must account for a social character” (TP 80). Guattari discussed this enunciation at the

Schizo-Culture conference. The issue for him “is what type of politics is pursued with regard to

different linguistic arrangements that exist” (SCE 193). A linguistic caste organized around

capitalist power regulates certain expressions from other “semiotic regimes.” Deleuze and

Guattari, however, describe a collective enunciation that will serve as a political instrument

against this linguistic control. They explain in their Kafka monograph how this collective expression creates a “connection of the individual to a political immediacy” (ML 18). Who controls these linguistic arrangements likewise concerns Acker’s work. As she writes in the second part of Don Quixote (1986):

BEING BORN INTO AND PART OF A MALE WORLD, SHE HAD NO SPEECH OF HER OWN. ALL SHE COULD DO WAS READ MALE TEXTS WHICH WEREN’T HERS. (39)

Acker thus copies a literary culture that values a predominately male canon. However, she told

Friedman that while Don Quixote was “about appropriating male texts,” the second part of the novel was “very much about trying to find your voice as a woman” (13). One should not ignore the absence of a personal pronoun in her response. Acker seeks a collective enunciation over an individual one, and such a linguistic arrangement remains an important characteristic of a minor literature. The voice in Acker’s Don Quixote thus establishes “the revolutionary conditions for every literature within the heart of what is great literature” (ML 18). When Janey speaks or

66 writes through the male canon, she does so in a collective expression within the texts she copies.

This semiotic of Janeys thus overwrites literature with alternative “semiotic regimes.”

Yet the men and capitalists who own the language in Blood and Guts dismiss all this

Janey talk as unintelligible. They complain that what these Janeys say “doesn’t make any sense”

(B&G 136). The perverts, criminals, and women who constitute this collective enunciation speak

in a more affective language; they talk as a pack. Acker describes her narratives as “an emotional

moving” (GE 58), but this writing does not concern an individual. As Deleuze and Guattari

explain, affect “is not a personal feeling, nor is it a characteristic; it is the effectuation of a power of the pack that throws the self into upheaval and makes it reel” (TP 240). The textual montage that Acker pieces together creates a more affective sign system. Without a consistent narrative voice, the language in her texts frequently changes. The narrator in Acker’s I Dreamt I Was a

Nymphomaniac (1974) becomes other characters, which causes her writing to mutate throughout the text. When she changes into Rita, the narrator’s voice breaks with “low resonances, deep and long fluted sounds, sudden register and modulation changes” (Eye 156). With her assemblage of different texts, Acker constructs a diagrammatic prose that makes language stammer and stutter.

In the 1980s, she directed this linguistic stammering at two canonical texts.

Acker Overwrites Great Expectations and Don Quixote

While Blood and Guts in High School features a wide range of textual sampling, the titles of her next two novels imply a more direct appropriation. Her choice of Great Expectations

(1983) and Don Quixote (1986) as titles clearly invokes Dickens and Cervantes. In her interview with Friedman, Acker compared her plagiarisms of these authors to the conceptual artist Sherrie

Levine (Friedman 12). Two years before Great Expectations was published, Levine exhibited her photographic reproductions of Walker Evans’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men at the Metro

67 Pictures gallery. Levine retitled her appropriated images of Evans’s rural subjects, “after Walker

Evans.” She foregrounded the author’s name, “even as [she] puts the issue of [that] name, and

certainly ‘self-expression,’ under question” (Singerman 66). Acker conversely leaves the title of

the texts she plagiarizes, but replaces the authors’ names with her own. Both these acts of

appropriation, however, decontextualize their respective sources. When “you take other texts,”

Acker explains how “you put them in different contexts to see how they work” (Hannibal Lecter

14). While her Great Expectations and Don Quixote seem to refer to stable texts, Acker

decentralizes their narratives with more political or sexually charged passages. Colby thus rightly

notes how Acker’s experiments with narrative are not pure acts of plagiarisms (114). These

literary assemblages intercept the source texts’ initial message. What Dickens or Cervantes

communicated in their work now serves as material that Acker continually overwrites. As she

tells Lotringer, her writing practice “seems to [Acker] quite a different procedure than the act of plagiarism.” She “had changed words,” and thus “changed intentionality” (Hannibal Lecter 13).

Her texts, then, are not simple reproductions of others’ writing. They are more concerned with production than a final product. When Acker adds her name to these canonical texts, she

demonstrates how one can reframe their cultural value with other expressions.

At the beginning of her Great Expectations, Acker alters text from Dickens’s novel. Her

version begins: “My father’s name being Pirrip, and my Christian name Philip, my infant tongue

could make of both names nothing longer or more explicit than Peter” (5). She directly plagiarizes the first sentence in Dickens’s text, but replaces “Pip” with “Peter.” While this

change appears insignificant at first, “Peter” is a name that often appears in her work. In Diary of

a Nymphomaniac, Peter at one point refers to Acker’s second husband, Peter Gordon. Yet his

name does not suggest a turn to autobiographical writing. The narrator(s) in Nymphomaniac

68 notes how “Peter and I occur together; and [when] Peter disappears, I remain.” A name for Acker

thus “depends on (my) lacks of stabilities” (Eye 125). The slight textual alteration at the beginning of her Great Expectations, then, highlights Peter-Pip’s difficulty when he articulates a

name. The narrative voices in both texts are thus unstable and uncertain, and Acker’s Great

Expectations increases this instability when “Peter” comments on his mother’s suicide “on

Christmas Eve 1978” (5). The temporal jump cut in Acker’s text overwrites the historical setting

and copyright date of the nineteenth-century text.

This twentieth-century Great Expectations features writing that was published well after

Dickens’s novel. One of the texts Acker spliced into Dickens was Pierre Guyotat’s Eden, Eden,

Eden. The brief sample from Guyotat’s book begins with a description of “helmeted bowlegged

stiff-muscled soldiers” who “trample on just-born babies swaddled in scarlet violet shawls” (7).

In Eden, Eden, Eden, Guyotat detailed his experiences as a soldier in the Algerian war. The

French novel was not published in English until 1995, and so American readers would have

likely first read Eden, Eden, Eden in Acker’s Great Expectations. In a 1979 SUNY-Buffalo

lecture, Acker explained she was translating Eden, Eden, Eden “very slowly.” She told the

audience that they could not get the novel in America, and that it was practically banned in

France.12 When Acker translated Guyotat in Great Expectations, she thus served as a curator for

his work, grafting a little known avant-garde book onto Dickens’s novel. Lines from Eden, Eden,

Eden, then, first appeared in English under title of this more canonical text.

Acker admired Guyotat because so much of his work was “concerned with the body as

text” (Friedman 18). Guyotat’s short essay, fittingly titled “The Body as Text,” provides insight

into his interest on the corporeal and literature. In the essay, which first appeared in English in

12 Kathy Acker’s December 12th and 13th talk at SUNY-Buffalo, 1979. Archived at PennSound: < http://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Acker.php> 69 Semiotext(e)’s Polysexuality (1981) issue, Guyotat described a composition method where he writes and masturbates simultaneously. Such a writing process, he explained, will result in an

“irregular alteration” in “narrative/speech.” Guyotat observed how “a pronounced erection accelerates orgasmic urgency, which means the text has to be written in haste.” This accelerated writing will produce “fragments of words [and] interjections without syntactic links” (20). The language in Eden, Eden, Eden reads as if Guyotat wrote it in a rush. The entire narrative consists of one uninterrupted block of prose. So when Acker grafts sections from Eden, Eden, Eden onto

Great Expectations, Guyotat’s language noticeably disrupts the syntax in her novel.

The body for Guyotat becomes a literary machine that can alter or mutate language.

Guyotat’s method of masturbating and writing was evident in Acker’s Pussy, King of the Pirates.

Antigone composes text “while masturbating so that [she] can write” or “see more clearly”

(170). Acker often makes the body a generative writing instrument in her novels. In Blood and

Guts, Janey’s “pelvic inflammation” becomes a subject of her narration, and graphic depictions of male and female genitalia frequently interrupt Acker’s prose (Figure 9). This collage of genitals and literature implicates the body in culture. Janey, then, writes in her book report that

“at this point in The Scarlet Letter and in my life politics don’t disappear but take place inside my body” (97). She reframes Hawthorne via a politicized body that calls attention to how women were used as cultural objects. Elsewhere in Blood and Guts, Mr. Linker explains to Janey how

“all of our ancient culture comes from ancient Greece” (61). Yet an illustration that appears on the next page complicates his Philhellenism. The image (Figure 10) shows a nude female figure whose hands and feet are bound with rope. Text underneath the illustration reads: “Ode to a

Grecian Urn,” which directly references Keats’s ekphrastic verse. Such an image, as Susan

Hawkins notes, “functions metonymically for all those real, material bodies, countless slaves and

70 colonial populations that made possible the culture that Linker fondly tells his audience” (650).

The female figure, then, serves as a cultural and economic object that men evaluate and control.

As Janey finds, “All men own the money. A man is a walking mass of gold” (B&G 129).

In a 1995 talk at SUNY-Buffalo, Acker discussed this control further when she explained

how women historically had to be either wives or whores to earn a living. Women were thus

“economically dependent on the functions of their sexual organs.”13 Acker herself worked in sex

shows on New York City’s 42nd Street to earn money. As she tells Lotringer, she had “two lives,

the poetry and the sex-show,” but her work in sex-shows placed her at odds with other New York poets. While the poets in the St. Mark’s Poetry Project were “very much into fucking each other

and writing about it,” Acker found that “working in a sex-show really didn’t make [her] feel very

nice about sex. It was all about money and that’s how [she] thought about it” (Hannibal Lecter

5). The 42nd shows briefly become a subject in Great Expectations, where the narrator describes police raids on the performances. Cops, however, break up sex stores “only when the D.A.’s

office needs publicity” (Great Expectations 83). For Acker, including descriptions of 42nd Street

within the covers of Great Expectations was directly political. In her 1995 SUNY lecture, Acker explained that while such work was “relegated to the sexual realm,” women could “not say the words that refer to their bodies.” Yet when women begin to use this language, they are “suddenly allowed to talk about [their] histories and [their] lives.” Acker’s Great Expectations and Don

Quixote invoke the cultural value attached to these titles, but she overwrites their narratives with expressions and gestures that critics would interpret as obscene or non-literary.

How these more corporeal signs alter literary language is evident in both Guyotat and

Acker. Yet Dodie Bellamy, who admits Acker’s influence on her work, continues the bodily and

13 Kathy Acker’s 1995 interview and reading at SUNY-Buffalo (1995). Archived at PennSound: < http://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Acker.php> 71 textual mash-ups in Cunt Norton (2013). The book initially reads as a collection of canonical poets, but Bellamy inserts a Cunt into her Norton anthology. She thus grafts a more erotic

language onto the poems of Shakespeare, Whitman, Dickinson, Eliot, Ginsberg, and others.

Ariana Reines explains that Bellamy’s cunt poems are a “Frankensteinian body,” wherein

“written English returns to the mouth and the organs of desire where it belongs, to become the

fountain through which its own matter gushes” (ii). These more “erotic texts,” as Acker told

Friedman, bring literature “very close to the body” (18). But while writers do not always place

literature in close proximity to the corporeal, Acker finds that “it’s always true that the tattooist

has to follow the body” (Friedman 18). She even dedicated Empire of the Senseless to her

tattooist, and the tattoo serves as a positive sign system in that book (Figure 11). A tattoo for

Acker allows people “to take their own sign-making into their own hands” (Friedman 18). The power of this inked “semiotic regime” remains “intertwined with the power of those who

[choose] to live beyond the norms of society” (Empire of the Senseless 140). In her texts, Acker

acts as a tattoo artist who re-inks culture with this more deviant sign system. Her Don Quixote,

then, rewrites Cervantes’s hero as a woman knight who battles American institutions with her

dog Saint Simeon.

Acker’s female knight acquires her name after having an abortion, which she has so she

can begin her quest to love (10). Yet her Don Quixote also explains early in the text that she is

“fighting all of your Culture” (14), which includes “the evil enchanters of this world such as the

editors of TLS or Ronald Reagan” (101). How one can effectively counter this control is one of a

central issues in Don Quixote. “All political techniques [on the] left and right,” the female knight

finds, “are the praxis and speech of the controllers” (22). A few of the controllers in third section

of the book are members in the Nixon Administration. Acker includes Nixon 1968 campaign

72 pledge to support Biafran independence. Henry Kissinger, who Don Quixote explained was pursuing the Nobel Peace Prize, “barked orders to [Roger] Morris to woof negotiations secretly with the Foreign Minister of Biafra in the SATURDAY REVIEW’s editor’s department” (106).

The message in the Saturday Review, however, did not save “about one and one-half million

Biafrans [from] starving to death.” Morris found that while Kissinger “had no rational reason for letting those kids starve,” he did so because Kissinger “and [Elliot] Richardson had other fish to fry” (DQ 106). Pitchford describes the Biafran passage in Acker’s novel as an example of realpolitik. The Nixon Administration, Pitchford argues, practiced realpolitik, which allowed

“for the power of life and death to be wielded through the ability to control representation” (88).

Nixon and Kissinger leaked stories to the press in order to control the narrative. Acker’s female knight thus concludes: “The USA government is run via the media by dogs’ greed” (104).

The pertinent question for Don Quixote, then, concerns how to resist this control. She asks: “How can we get rid of these controllers, their praxis and speech or politics” (16)?

Semiotics is one potential instrument against control, but in a response that echoes Foucault’s comments on the Schizo-Culture conference, Don Quixote has “a theory that we are at the end of a generation. Semiotics’s [sic] are no longer applicable. At the moment there’s nothing’” (54).

Acker, however, gives an answer in a brief section entitled “ANOTHER INSERT,” which likewise explains the structure of Don Quixote. The “INSERT” describes how “Arabs” write by

“cutting chunks out of all-ready written texts and in other ways defacing traditions: changing important names into silly ones, making dirty jokes out of matters that should be of the utmost importance to us such as nuclear warfare” (DQ 25). The “INSERT” condemns Arabic culture for its “lack of originality” and tendency to lie, but Acker writes Don Quixote in this Arabic style.

Her woman-knight plagiarizes already published texts and “defaces” their content. Don Quixote

73 discovers that “an alteration of language, rather than of material, usually changes material

conditions” (27). Acker, then, constructs a weapon similar to the one Deleuze describes to

Antonio Negri. Her writing method “hijacks” or overwrites speech in order to produce glitches in

communication.

These glitches are evident in the second section of Don Quixote, where the title character

appropriates Andrei Bely’s St Petersburg (1913), Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s The Leopard

(1958), and Frank Wedekind’s Lulu plays (1892). When Acker’s female knight reads the

Lampedusa’s historical novel, she discusses the “Girarbaldis” and other “bourgeois shit.” Acker

simultaneously cites these texts while altering its language with her female knight. The third plagiarized text in the second section, however, consists of multiple writings “on war for those

who live in silence” (69). Acker constructs a textual mash-up that comments on nuclear war and

U.S. imperialism with writings from American General Smedley Butler, Rigoberto López, as

well as documents on the Cold War and scenes from the 1972 monster film, Godzilla vs.

Megalon.

Don Quixote references one of the most popular monsters in film. Yet, as Godzilla hovers

over the narrative, the female knight asks, “Is there no escape from all these different forms of

terror, of evil” (71)? Acker then proceeds to describe these “different forms of terror” via an

assemblage of different texts. She lifts speech from Smedley D. Butler, whose War is a Racket

(1935) addressed the close relationship between American corporations and the military. In

Acker’s novel, Butler comments on the “interest of American oil companies” in Tampico (73).

The narrative quickly cuts from Tampico to the U.S. lead coup in Nicaragua, which resulted in

the death of Augusto Sandino and the election of Somoza García. Acker also inserts a verse from

the Nicaraguan Rigoberto López, who assassinated García in 1956. These references to U.S.

74 interference in Central American politics in Don Quixote show the scale and reach of the

American government: “The interests of these banks and companies are truly global, for the

United States controls, or believes it controls […] the globe” (DQ 73). The United States, then,

casts a bigger shadow on the world than Godzilla or Megalon. Yet such a large control system,

as Deleuze argues in his Schizo-Culture essay, does not have the means to fight counterattacks

against it. In Don Quixote, Godzilla is also a monster who “not only isn’t human but also wasn’t

made by humans [and] therefore is unidentifiable and incomprehendable” to them (DQ 71-72).

The large reptile becomes a figure that exceeds human understanding. So when Acker splices in

scenes from a monster movie into texts on U.S. government policy, normal institutional

discourse fails to explain its monstrous existence. While Deleuze takes an author from behind to produce a “monstrous” creation, Acker inserts a monster into the discourse of realpolitik. If

“vacuoles of communication” are the best instruments against the control society, then Godzilla

might be one of the more effective weapons.

Deleuze and Guattari similarly use a B movie to explain a concept in A Thousand

Plateaus. Their “becoming-animal” begins with an analysis of Willard, which they call a “fine

film” that was only unpopular because the heroes were rats (233). Though Willard befriends a rat

named Ben, his companion leads a pack of rats that “tear him to shreds” at the end of the film.

Deleuze and Guattari find that the “proliferation of rats, the pack, brings a becoming-molecular

that undermines the great molar powers of family, career, and conjugality” (TP 233). Similar to

Ben the rat, St. Simeon leads a pack of dogs in Don Quixote, and they all howl and bark their

antipathy toward those who own property. The pack yaps how “the only way a dog can attack its

landlord is by biting its leg.” They can only fight these owners with “terrorism, which the

landlords call useless” (DQ 198). At the end of Acker’s novel, this pack of barking terrorists

75 forms a pirate gang who exclaim that they “will never own, whatever and whenever [they] want,

[they] take” (DQ 199). These songs would appear ten years later in Pussy, King of the Pirates, but Acker interestingly changed her pirates from dogs to rats.

Another pirate appears in a section of Don Quixote entitled “Wedekind’s Words.” Acker

uses text from Wedekind’s Earth Spirit and Pandora’s Box, but Lulu does not suffer the same

fate in Acker’s novel. Instead of ending up as one of Jack the Ripper’s victims, Lulu tries to

“find others who are,” like her, “pirates journeying from place to place, who knowing only

change and the true responsibilities that come from such knowing sing to and with each other”

(97). The songs of pirates sing differ from the language that Schön teaches Lulu. He tells her that

she can’t possibly know herself because she does not “know how to speak properly,” and she

must remember that her “soul’s language is the language of Milton and Shakespeare and the

English Empire” (DQ 78). Don Quixote speaks through Wedekind’s plays as his character

speaks through other men’s texts. Acker, however, imagines Lulu conversing and singing with

other pirates. Her Don Quixote finds that pirates or a pack of dogs have an alternative sign

system, where “words sit on the edges of meanings and aren’t properly grammatical” (191). She

writes this language for a community of dogs who are against ownership and property.

Acker tells Lotringer that she too has no interest in the bourgeois novel since “the real

content of that novel is the property structure and reality.” Her fiction “isn’t about ownership,” but about “people who don’t even remember their names” (Hannibal Lecter 23). Acker remains

more interested in production than a product, and she foregrounds her process of overwriting

over a fixed or final text. Similar to Burroughs’s cut-up method, culture serves as material basis

for Acker to sample and reframe. Yet the culture she cites in her texts stinks. It relies on a system

of ownership and property that her writing method undermines. While Acker makes the pirate

76 the main figure in her last book, piracy has always been crucial to her writing. With her band of

tattooed pirates and packs of dogs and Janeys, she sends back a different Don Quixote and Great

Expectations. This literary piracy was evident when she read from Blood and Guts at the Nova

Convention in 1978. At the same event, Cage was reading from his second writing through

Finnegans Wake. He too intercepted Joyce’s initial message in order to playback a Wake without

sentences.

77 CHAPTER THREE

“TO FINNAGAIN”: JOHN CAGE OVERWRITES MODERNISM

Since words, when they communicate, have no effect, it dawns on us that we need a society in which communication is not practiced, in which words become nonsense as they do between lovers, in which words become what they originally were: trees and stars and the rest of primeval environment. The demilitarization of language: a serious musical concern.

John Cage, “The Future of Music”

Cage Hijacks Finnegans Wake On December 1st 1978, American composer John Cage read from his Writing for a

Second Time Through Finnegans Wake on stage at the Entermedia Theatre. The occasion for the performance was Nova Convention. Yet while the Nova Convention did focus on Burroughs’s

reputation as a “literary outlaw,” it also featured many more artists from the “American

rhizome.” In her study on Acker, Colby rightly compares Acker’s literary appropriations with

Cage and Jackson Mac Low’s method of “writing through,” which “facilitates decentralization”

that “displace[s] and thereby depose[s] the centralized narrative of the original source text”

(114). Both Acker and Cage’s readings at the Nova Convention worked to destabilize their

respective source texts. Burroughs too associated Cage with the cut-up method on more than one

occasion. In a response to a question on the novelty of the method, Burroughs acknowledged

“cut-ups have been in use for many years now. People like John Cage have been using them in

music” (Burroughs Live 432). He noted elsewhere that “Cage and Earle Brown have carried [cut-

ups] further in music than it’s ever been carried in writing” (Burroughs Live 119). The Nova

Convention finds Cage in close proximity to Burroughs’s experimental writing. However, by

1978 Burroughs used the cut-up method less frequently in his own writing and began to focus

more on “straightforward narrative.” It is worth noting that the book Burroughs uses to distance

78 himself from his previous experiments was the very text Cage writes through at The Nova

Convention. As Burroughs tells Daniel Odier, “I think Finnegans Wake rather represents a trap

into which experimental writing can fall when it becomes purely experimental.” Burroughs

instead notes his own restraint: “I would only go so far with any given experiment and then come back” (The Job 55). Thus, while Burroughs circles back to narrative, Cage continues to work

with “purely experimental” language in Finnegans Wake.

Experimentation was one of one of the major interests at the Schizo-Culture conference.

In addition to bringing art and theory together, the artists and theorists put culture to work, and not to worship it. For Lotringer, Cage was “the bridge [he] was looking for between the two cultures” of theory and art (17). Such a connection, however, was already evident before Cage and Deleuze shared a stage at Columbia University. French three years before the Schizo-Culture conference, Cage appeared in a footnote to Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus. In their chapter that describes the “schizorevolutionary,” Deleuze and Guattari refer the reader to all of Cage’s music and his book Silence. The schizorevolutionary, as they explain, writes or composes with no intention or goal in mind. Deleuze and Guattari find that it is with this non-intentional writing where

Art accedes to its authentic modernity, which simply consists in liberating what was present in art from its beginnings, but was hidden underneath aims on objects, even if aesthetic, and underneath recordings or axiomatics: the pure process that fulfills itself, and that never ceases to reach fulfillment as it proceeds—art as ‘experimentation. (AO 371)

The experimentation Deleuze and Guattari associate with a schizorevolutionary such as Cage

(and Burroughs) concerns a continuing process with no intended object. As Cage explains, “the goal is / not to have a goal” (M 57).

79 A text with a goal or object has something to say. Yet, as Cage states in his “Lecture on

Nothing,” he has “nothing to say and [he is] saying it and that is poetry” (Silence 109). This poetics of nothingness makes nothing the subject of speech. Thus, while Cage still speaks, his

words in the lecture lack any goal or intention. The method of writing through, as Jackson Mac

Low notes, similarly “involve[s] a large degree of non-intentionality” (226). Thus, while the

writings through Finnegans Wake cite the words of its source text, Cage does not have any single

interpretive aim. The writings through Joyce, then, differ significantly from another abridged

Finnegans Wake: Anthony Burgess’s A Shorter Finnegans Wake (1967). Norman Brown noted

the differences between Cage’s project and Burgess’ text when he told Cage that his “mesostics

were actually the best shortened version” because “there is no intention in them” (‘Laughtears’

36). The writings through Finnegans Wake do not attempt explain “What It’s All About,” as the title to Burgess’s introduction states.

When Cage makes nothing the subject of his compositions, it seems that he continues the

nihilist impulse of the early avant-garde. As Tristan Tzara states in the 1918 Dada manifesto,

“Dada does not mean anything” (4). Cage even admits that critics who associate his work with

Dada are not wrong. But he adds “that the Dada of 1920 had a much deeper need to break with

everything that had been done, to create emptiness, than the Dada of 1950” (For the Birds 222).

In the first half of the statement, Cage essentially restates Peter Bürger’s thesis in Theory of the

Avant-Garde (1974) that stresses the historic avant-garde’s critique of the institution of art.

Perhaps the most aggressive critique of cultural institutions comes from the 1909 Futurist manifesto, where Marinetti demands the destruction of art museums, libraries, and universities

(14). The Dada of 1950, however, breaks with this destructive critical perspective. In a response that contrasts with Marinetti’s militant rhetoric, Cage finds it is no longer necessary to “destroy

80 the past; it is gone. At any moment it might reappear […] and be the present” (Monday 106). He does not negate a source text when he writes through it; Cage instead reuses older content to generate alternate versions of a text. Critics on the writings through, as Marjorie Perloff argues in her analysis of Roaratorio, often fail to note this difference between Cage’s compositional methods and the avant-garde. Roger Rothman, however, suggests an alternate way to read Cage and the Fluxus artists of the 1950s in his essay, “Against Critique: Fluxus and the Hacker

Aesthetic” (2015). Rothman notes how these artists reimagine an avant-garde “constructed around hacking rather than dismantling, reshaping rather than debunking, an avant-garde responsive to the conditions of electronic information and its network protocols” (806). A “new” media requires a new avant-garde, and much of Cage’s writings through, especially Finnegans

Wake, use electronic technology to recode the literary signs in a source text. This “affirmative” gesture was further evident in the critical positions voiced at the Schizo-Cutlure conference. In his opening remarks, Lotringer tells the audience they might “submit” to the concepts they hear at the event, or they can “use them in a perverse way, catching them off guard, quickly snatching them up in order to plug them into something else” (47). When Cage read Empty Words at the conference, he used Thoreau’s Journal to plugs its sentences into I Ching chance operations. Yet this does not negate Thoreau’s text. Cage scrambles the syntax to affirm the anarchic ideas in the

Journal.

While Cage distinguishes his work from the Dada of the 1920s, he does prefer one

Dadaist: Marcel Duchamp. He even briefly mentions Duchamp’s ready-mades in relation to his

Second writing through Finnegans Wake. The task of finding the name James Joyce in the Wake,

Cage notes, was “sometimes that of identifying, as Duchamp had, found objects” (EW 136).

Duchamp and Cage, then, experiment with cultural objects to find new uses and contexts for

81 them. The innovative gesture of the ready-made, as Boris Groys explains, permits this

“possibility of re-valuating already existing things” (87). The ready-made, however, seems less

innovative (or shocking) now that it appears in museum collections, but Cage notes that artists

such as Duchamp or Joyce are still useful “outside museums, libraries, and conservatories in

each moment of our daily lives” (X 53). Cage does not, as Bürger would argue, institutionalize the avant-garde critique of art as art. “It’s not a question of doing again what Duchamp already did,” Cage writes, adding, “we must at least be able to look through to what’s beyond—as though we were in it looking out” (A Year from Monday 71). Cage, then, cites the Duchamp ready-made and Duchamp’s words to make a “duchamp unto himself.” Perloff closely interprets

Cage’s “26 Statements Re Duchamp” and the “Alphabet” play-lecture as texts that pay homage to Duchamp (118). Cage, however, simultaneously reconsiders Duchamp’s texts in the context to his own concepts on indeterminacy and non-intention. In his writings through modernist texts, such as Finnegans Wake and The Cantos, Cage likewise repeats the words, but alters their arrangement. Cage wants “to remove the punctuation […] from our experience of modernism, to illustrate it with something like its own excitement” (X 55). He constructs an alternate modernism without sentences, which reshapes its linguistic and formal innovations to a “non- syntactical” language.

J.A.M.E.S. J.O.Y.C.E.

Citing Jackson Mac Low and Clark Coolidge, Cage admits his “work in [poetry] is tardy,” but Cage sees their texts as analogous to his work in music (M x). The writing through method typically includes a rule or constraint that an author applies to a source text, and Cage employs a new rule each time he writes through Finnegans Wake. In the writings through Joyce,

Cage follows mesostic rules, which he uses in four of the five writings through the Wake. For

82 Cage, “what makes a mesostic […] is that the first letter of a word or name is on the first line and

following it on the first line the second letter of the word or name is not to be found” (Empty

Words 134). In the Writing Through Finnegans Wake, the letters in James Joyce are the structure

in Cage’s mesostic series. Thus, starting with the first page, Cage begins “looking for a J without

an A. And then for the next A without an M. Etcetera” (Empty Words 134). When Cage applies

this constraint to Finnegans Wake, the rule prohibits Cage from beginning the text via the

cyclical broken sentence that opens (or ends) the text.

The first lines in the writings through Finnegans Wake do not even begin until the middle

of the Wake’s first page. Cage detours the text from “Eve and Adam’s” and “Howth Castle and

Environs” to find another passage. While he finds another entry into the text, the writing-through

carries the signature of the author. The writings through Finnegans Wake, then, always retain the

trace of its source text. This is evident on the Giorno Poetry Systems recording of Cage at the

Nova Convention, where the track begins with Cage reading the entire first page of Finnegans

Wake:

riverrun past Eve and Adam’s, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodious vicus of recircultation back to Howth Castle and Environs. Sir Tristram, violer d’amores, fr’over the short sea, had passencore rearrived from North Amorica on this side the scraggy isthmus of Europe Minor to wielderfight this penisolate war: nor had topsawyer’s rocks by the stream Oconee exaggerated themselse to Laurens Coumty’s gorgios while they went doubling their mumper all the time: nor avoice from afire bellowsed mishe mishe to tauftauf thuartpeatrick: not yet, though venison after, had a kidscad buttended a bland old isaac: not yet, though all’s fair in vanessy, were sosie sesthers wroth with twone and nathandjoe. Rot a peck of pa’s malt had Jhem or Shen brewed by arclight and rory end to the regginbrow was to be seen ringsome on the aquaface. The fall(bababadalgharaghtakamminarronnkonnbronntonnerronntuonn- thunntrovarrhounawnskawntoohoohoordenenthunuk!) of a once wallstrait oldparr is retaled early in bed and later on life down through all Christian minstrelsy. The great fall of the offwall entailed at such short notice of the pftschute of Finnegan, erse solid man, that humtpyhillhead of humself pumptly sends an unquiring one well to the west in quest of his tumptytumtoes: and their upturnpikepointandplace is at the knock out in the park where oragnes have been laid to rust upon the green since devlinsfirst loved livvy. (3)

83 Cage then reads from his Second writing through, which significantly reduces the text to a few

lines:

wroth with twone nathandJoe A Malt jhEm Shen

pftJschute Of finnegan that humptYhillhead of humself is at the knoCk out in thE park (EW 136)

With this citation of Finnegans Wake at the start of the track, Cage recognizes the value of the

text, as he tells the audience at the Convention, Finnegans Wake remains “one of the books

[Cage] always loved but never read.” This statement, however, seems disingenuous since Cage admits he read parts of Finnegans Wake when the chapters appeared in transition (EW 133). Yet

while his admission of not reading Finnegans Wake might appear misleading, Cage does suggest

there are other ways to read or evaluate a text.

Lawrence Rainey notes one such evaluation in his comprehensive study of The Waste

Land’s publication history, “The Price of Modernism.” Most publishers and editors, Rainey

finds, made bids on Eliot’s poem without even reading it. Such offers, then, “”were not the

consequence of an aesthetic encounter with a work [editors] had read and admired, but an

eagerness to buy a product that promised to meet a series of minimum conditions” (94). Ezra

Pound established these conditions in his letters to editors and academics that promised The

Waste Land would be “the justification of the ‘movement,’ of our modern experiment since

1900” (qtd in Rainey 94). Similar statements on the promise of Joyce’s new project were

likewise made by the disciples of Finnegans Wake in the Exagmination of his Work in Progress.

84 Published by Sylvia Beach in 1929, the Exagmination features essays from Samuel

Beckett, Eugene Jolas, Stuart Gilbert, and others that offer a defense of Finnegans Wake from its

critics. William Carlos Williams gives one of the more direct defenses of the book when he

addresses Rebecca West’s 1928 article on Joyce. West and other English critics, Williams

argues, dismiss the experimental style in the Wake as too strange or debased for literature.

English criticism, however, fails to hear that “what Joyce is saying is a literary thing. It is a

literary value he is forwarding” (179). Williams describes this value as writing that “maims

words” because their meanings have been “dulled or lost over time.” Joyce, as Eugene Jolas

writes in another essay on the Wake, creates a language that is not static, but “is in a constant state of becoming” (82). The essays in the Exagmination point to this revolutionary new language as one of the values in Finnegans Wake. Yet these evaluations were published ten years before Joyce completed Finnegans Wake. The Exagmination, as Beach explains, was published

as a guide for the perplexed reader (viii). This critical apparatus, then, specifically instructed

early readers how to read and value the literary innovations of the developing Work in Progress.

Most of the essays in the Exagmination initially appeared in issues of transistion

alongside chapters of the Work in Progress. Since Cage notes he first read and encountered

Finnegans Wake in transition, it seems likely he was at least aware of the comments that

defended the text. Cage even affirms the literary value of its “maimed words” when he tells

Klaus Schöning he “was always fascinated with the language” in Finnegans Wake and had

“thought of it as the most important book of the century” (Roaratorio 30). Yet while Cage

affirms the value of the language in Joyce’s book, he also makes a new evaluation of the text

when he begins to write through it. As Cage states in the introduction to Empty Words: “James

Joyce = new words; old syntax” (Empty Words 11).

85 Cage cites the “maimed words” in his writings through the text, but he also advances

another innovation that scrambles the prose in Finnegans Wake. The “revolution of the word,” then, no longer seems as revolutionary. “Every innovation,” Groys notes, “results from a new interpretation, a new contextualization or decontexualization of a cultural attitude or act” (On the

New 53). Cage, then, reevaluates Finnegans Wake with a new set of values that reinterpret and offer new readings of the text. These cultural attitudes concern both aesthetics and politics, neither of which is separate for Cage. The writings through result from Cage’s early experiments with music, and he often relates this language without syntax to his earlier musical compositions.

An effort to “musicate language,” as Cage explains to Daniel Charles, attempts to “let words exist, as [he] let sounds exist” (FTB 151). Cage often directs listeners’ attention to sounds traditional music excludes: noise. With this new experimental music (see: Christian Woolf,

Morton Feldman, David Tudor), “a new rhythm results which is a far cry from horses hooves and other regular beats” (S 11). Cage also hears a similar rhythm in the sentences of literary writing.

Thoreau too, Cage writes, “said that [when] hearing a sentence he heard feet marching.” And as

Norman O. Brown tells Cage, “syntax […] is the arrangement of the army” (EW 183). To demilitarize language, Cage submits sentences to chance operations, or, in the mesostics, non- intentional rules.

Empty Words, which Cage read at the Schizo-Culture conference in 1975, scrambles the sentences in Henry David Thoreau’s Journal. Empty Words predates the first writing through

Finnegans Wake, but the text still contains numerous references to Joyce. Both projects, then, re-

contextualize the conventions of literary writing to the innovations Cage finds in twentieth-

century experimental music. When Cage first read Thoreau’s Journal, he was “struck by the

twentieth-century way Thoreau listened […] He paid attention to each sound whether musical or

86 not” (M ix). Cage uses chance operations that he first applied to music in Empty Words to reach this “non-syntactical language.. He writes through the Journal to create what he describes as “a transition from language to music (a language already without sentences, and not confined to any subject)” (65). Consisting of four parts, the syntax in Empty Words increasingly breaks down until, by its conclusion, there are no discernable words at all: “eeeaeh geierrds sn iendtngtch – h t” (66). Empty Words, then, resembles a Cagean score that creates an experimental environment where music no longer comes out of concert halls and words are not confined between the covers of the book.

This non-syntactical language (or ‘unmusical’ sound) that Cage creates in his writing through Thoreau and Joyce concerns more than that a formal or aesthetic value. Cage describes his compositions as texts that directly engage with social concerns, and he often aligns his work with the thought of Buckminster Fuller and Mao Tse-tung. Cage admits an affinity with the latter since Mao too “had studied with great interests the texts of anarchism” (M xii). Yet Cage connects his own anarchic politics most with Thoreau. In his diary, he cites the opening sentences of Civil Disobedience where Thoreau states that the best government is one that does not govern at all. For Cage, this claim also applies to writing: “Syntax, like / government, can only be obeyed” (M 215). In Empty Words, Cage submits the content of Thoreau’s Journal to the anarchic constraints of his writings through. Formal and aesthetic evaluations, then, are never separate from a political or historical context. Jerome McGann defines the textual condition as such when he notes how “the universe of literature is socially generated and does not exist in a steady state” (The Textual Condition 75). A culturally significant text such as Finnegans Wake enters the canon because it forwards a new literary value. Yet these first evaluations, while

87 historically produced, are not fixed, as Cage demonstrates in his method of writing through the

text.

This “revolution of the word” that was a primary value in Finnegans Wake is not the primary for Cage when he begins to write through it. After Empty Words, Cage noticed how

“Joyce seemed to have kept the old structures […] in which he put the new words he made”

(Empty Words 133). The writings through the Wake, then, continue to “demilitarize” the

sentences that Cage first heard in Thoreau’s Journal. Rather than apply chance operations from

the I Ching to sentences, as he does with Empty Words, Cage reconfigures the prose in

Finnegans Wake into mesostic verses. The line breaks in the mesostics first calls attention to this

rearrangement of the words on the page, which remove punctuation from the text. The punctuation marks in Finnegans Wake, however, are not entirely omitted from the first two

writings through the text. Cage notes that while punctuation marks are not kept in the mesostic

lines, they are “disposed in the space and those other than periods given an orientation by means

of I Ching chance operations” (EW 135). The chance procedure that Cage applies to the punctuation marks in Finnegans Wake (Figure 12) reinforces his critical reevaluation of syntax

in the text. Each page in the writings through, Cage notes, “is illustrated by its punctuation rather

than clarified by its punctuation” (R 38). Because the punctuation marks remain independent of

the mesostics, they lose their purpose to arrange the words (“the army”) into sentences.

In addition to “demilitarizing” the prose in Finnegans Wake, the writings through

significantly decrease the page number of the source text. Whereas the first Writing Through

Finnegans Wake reduces the text from six 625 pages to 115, Writing for the Second Time

Through Finnegans Wake cuts an additional seventy-five pages. As Cage explains, the editor at

Wesleyan thought his first writing-through was too long and boring to publish. Instead of

88 actively (or consciously) cutting out passages from the first writing-through, Cage adds a new

constraint that “did not permit the reappearance of a syllable for a given letter of the name

[James Joyce]” (Empty Words 135). It seems practical that Cage adopts a new system of writing-

through to satisfy the demands of his editor, but this new rule also creates numerous textual

variants. In the first writing-through, the lines

whase on the Joint of A desh finfoefoM thE fuSh (Writing Through Finnegans Wake 2)

are noticeably different the second time around :

whase on the Joint whAse foaMous oldE aS you (Empty Words 138)

With the new restrictions Cage places on the text, he can no longer use “A” again since the letter

already appears in the first lines of the text: “wroth with twone nathandJoe / A” (Empty Words

137). This constraint requires Cage to find the letter ‘A’ elsewhere in Finnegans Wake. After

“whase” appears again on the second line, Cage must skip ahead two sentences. The second

writing through features words that do not appear in the first writing through. This series of

mesostics, then, recirculates through Finnegans Wake to restore what the first writing-through

cuts out.

As Cage continues to write through (or recirculate) the Wake, he applies new constraints

that further reduce the size of the source text. Cage recalls that after reading the first Writing

Through, Louis Mink told him that he was writing an “impure mesostic.” A pure mesostic, as

Mink defines it, does “not permit the appearance of either letter between two of the name” (X 1).

89 In a pure mesostic, a word that contains the letters j or o could not appear between the indexical

letters J and O. Cage applies this new mesostic rule to his third and fourth writings through. He

explains that the third Writing Through follows mesostic rule used in the first, while the fourth follows the second. The Mink rule makes the latter the shortest in the series, but this subtraction also adds new textual variants that the more “pure” mesostic rule creates. One difference between the second and fourth Writing arises when Cage writes through page twenty-seven in the Wake. In the second Writing, Cage samples the words:

you were the doubleJoynted jAnitor the Morning thEy were delivered and you’ll be a grandfer when the ritehand Seizes what the lovearm knows (Empty Words 140)

When he applies the constraint suggested by Mink in the fourth writing through, however, Cage gets the lines:

Just doAt with his postMan’s knock round his oldE lauS (X 6)

The Mink rule prohibits the use of “doubleJoynted” because the “e” comes between the mesostic letters “J” in JAMES and “E” in JOYCE. The lines in the fourth Writing Through appear on the

same page as the lines in the second mesostic series. Cage applies these rules to Finnegans

Wake in order to rearrange the “maimed words” on the page, which results in alternate versions of a single text.

The variants between the first to fourth Writing Through approximate the ever-changing state of a work in process. “If you are in that state of mutation,” Cage writes, “you are situated in change and immersed in process” (FTB 147). Joyce suggests this state with the “changably

90 meaning vocable scriptsigns” in Finnegans Wake. The words in Joyce’s “litter letter”, change

over the course of time, which goes “on as it will variously inflected, differently pronounced,

otherwise spelled” (FW 118). Each time Cage writes through Finnegans Wake, he alters and

reconfigures the text. This constant rewriting exceeds the early title of Joyce’s text, as a Work in

Progress implies a progression toward an intended conclusion. Cage instead appropriates the

Wake to turn the book into a work in process.

Yet “normal” language can never access this process. The non-syntactical writing in the mesostics redirects the revolution of the word to the sentence. Cage, however, does not ignore the material value of the word (or letter) in his writings through. “To raise language’s / temperature,” he explains, “we not only remove syntax: we / give each letter undivided attention,

/ setting it in unique face and size” (M 107). The process of writing through a text requires such attention, as Cage selects the letters in Joyce’s name to construct the mesostic. To find these letters, Cage read “each passage at least three times and once or twice upside down.” He adds that when read upside down, the “J’s can be spotted by their dots and by their dipping below the line which i’s don’t do” (Empty Words 136). Cage first selects the letter before he finds a word to fit the mesostic rule. Thus, the capital letter that makes a mesostic often breaks up a word:

iJypt sAw lord saloMon hEr bullS they were ruhring surfed with spree (Empty Words 154).

The mesostic stresses the materiality of the letter here. Thus, when Cage writes through

Finnegans Wake, he divides the name of James Joyce into J.A.M.E.S. J.O.Y.C.E. This undivided attention he gives to each letter generates other referents that exceed the name of the author.

While “O” refers to Joyce, the writings through add new words such as “sOlid,” (EW 137),

91 “jOkes” (EW 156), “skillytOn” (EW 168), and “bathOuse” (EW 175) to the mesostic. A similar

stress on the letter exists in Finnegans Wake, where H.C.E. can mean “Humprhey Chimpenden

Earwicker,” Howth, Castle, and Enviorns,” (3), “High Church of England” (36), or “H2 C E3,”

(107). The encoded signs in Joyce and Cage create a complex linguistic network that finds all the

“pluarabilities” in a letter.

Cage further raises language’s temperature when he experiments with typography. His attention for such details was evident when Wesleyan University Press published X in 1983.

Cage disliked the way the editor had “altered his indentations, ignored his changes of typeface,

and misread some of his text.” Cage was so troubled by the editorial interferences that he penned

a letter “to the press and to the president of Wesleyan University offering to buy the entire stock

of X and have it destroyed” (Silverman 343). The press did eventually correct the mistakes in the

1985 edition, but Cage’s reaction to the first edition shows his serious consideration of language’s materiality.

Whereas the mesostics emphasize the letter, the writings through Finnegans Wake do not feature much typographical experimentation. This experimentation is more evident in his earlier mesostic series, 62 Mesostics re Merce Cunningham (1971). For the Cunningham mesostics,

Cage “used over seven hundred different type faces and sizes available in Letraset” which he then “subjected to I Ching chance operations” (Figure 13). Cage found the words for the mesostics in Cunningham’s Changes: Notes on Choreography (1968) and “thirty-two other books” that Cunningham used for his work. Yet, while he recycles older content, Cage finds that the mesostics “produced new words not to be found in any dictionary but reminiscent of words to be found everywhere to be found in James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake” (M x). The Cunningham mesostics “maim words” as Joyce does in the Wake; however, the meaning of a word remains

92 secondary for Cage. The materiality of the signifier—the image of a word or letter, its typeface,

and its arrangement on the page—are primary concerns in his writing through a text.

“An ear alone is not being”

This attention Cage gives towards the material aspects of language further reconsiders the

status of the codex. Cage finds the book “will work better when it breaks with all restrictive

conventions, all forms of organization, all the norms, including typography” (For the Birds 117).

While Joyce experiments with language in Finnegans Wake, his new words still correspond to

the conventions of print. In 1979, at the request Klaus Schöning, Cage adapted his Writing for a

Second Time Through Finnegans Wake for radio. The score for the radio play, Roaratorio: An

Irish Circus on Finnegans Wake, serves as a “means for translating a book into a performance.”

In addition to writing mesostics, Cage directs the composer or composers of a circus to list all the places and sounds mentioned in the chosen text, and then “collect as many recordings as possible

made in the places […] and sounds mentioned in the book” (Roaratorio 60). Cage consulted

Louis Mink’s A Finnegans Wake Gazetteer (1978) for a list of all the places found in the text.

Roaratorio also includes Irish ballads, which were performed by tenor Joe Heaney, as well as

other various noises, such as “shouts, laughter, tears, various birds and animals, sounds of nature,

water, wind, etc.” (Roaratorio 5). Once these recordings were complete, Cage then “re-

record[ed] [the sounds] in stereo on a multitrack tape at proper points in time following chance

determinations.” Cage does not erase the disparate sounds on the tapes, but instead “reduce[s] the

collection of multitrack tapes to a single one,” where “the material is then in a plurality of forms”

(Roaratorio 61). Thus, the sounds and noises in Roaratorio overlap to create a sonic collage that

often overtakes the mesostics read by Cage.

93 When you compare the Nova Convention LP to Roaratorio, the differences are

noticeable. In the Nova Convention recording, the listener only hears Cage’s voice as he reads

the mesostics in his Second writing through. Because the voice cannot verbalize the scattered punctuation marks or the capital index letter, the recording stresses the word. The Giorno LP

simply becomes a record of the Second writing through Finnegans Wake. Yet Roaratorio, which began as a radio broadcast, re-contextualizes the literary object into another medium. The radio play incorporates other sounds with Cage’s reading, and these sounds, at times, overwhelm the

mesostic words. Cage’s voice, for instance, is barely audible at the beginning of the third part, as birdcalls and Uillean pipes play simultaneously with the mesostic words. Other voices, especially

the Irish tenor Joe Heaney, also mix with Cage’s. Thus, when Cage reads the lines, “spatched fun

Juhn/ that dandyfOrth from the night we are and feel and / phaYnix” (EW 170) in Roaratorio, the

listener also hears a traditional Irish ballad.

In Roaratorio, Cage turns Finnegans Wake into a “radiooscillating epiepistle,” as the

hörspiel moves around the literary elements of its source text (the mesostics), traditional music,

and non-linguistic sounds. This simultaneous play of signs and noises creates a text that seems

almost sui generis for literary, or even musical, criticism. In Elissa S. Guralnick’s rather

dismissive analysis of Roaratorio, she notes how Cage “finds the place where language and

music promise to become one,” and adds it is “radio alone that yields appropriate conditions for

realizing the music in language” (98). Guralnick, however, does not refer specifically to Cage’s

concept of music. As Cage tells Schöning, he “wanted [Roaratorio] not to be music in the sense

of music,” but it to be “music in the sense of Finnegans Wake.” This music is “free of melody and free of harmony” and “turn[s] away from music itself” (R 41). Cage’s concepts on the sounds for Roaratorio are similar to the earlier comments he makes on experimental music in

94 Silence. For Cage, twentieth-century music moves “towards theatre” since “we have eyes as well

as ears, and it is business while we are alive to use them” (S 12). This contradicts the claim that

Guralnick makes for radio. This focus on a single medium perhaps explains why Guralnick

dismisses later live performances of Roaratorio and finds the subtitle of the play—An Irish

Circus on Finnegans Wake—so “curious.”

The Circus in the title refers to the genre of the Musicircus, which concerns a performance that requires multiple simultaneous, yet independent, actions. Cage produced the

first Musicircus (Musicircus) in 1967 at the University of Illinois, where an estimated five

thousand people attended. Fifteen years before the Illinois event, Cage orchestrated a similar

simultaneous performance at the Black Mountain College. At this early “happening,” Cage

recalls:

There were ladders, which you could climb to read poems or to recite texts. I climbed up there myself and delivered a lecture. There were also poems by M.C. Richards and Charles Olson, piano by David Tudor, films projected on the ceiling and the walls of the room. Finally, there were Rauschenberg’s white canvases, while he himself played old records on an antique phonograph and Merce Cunningham improvised amidst and around that” (FtB 165).

As the Black Mountain performance included poetry, painting, film, music, and dance, the

Musicircus genre likewise does not privilege any single medium. It instead fashions a space that

allows for “a practical demonstration of anarchic dissociation and interplay, of the environmental

use of sound and visuals in a large-scale format” (Fetterman 147). While Roaratorio begins with

a “circus” of sounds, Cage did introduce a visual element to the radio play when he collaborated

with with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company in 1983. This performance consisted of

Cunningham’s choreography that the Company performed while Cage read from his Second

writing through. In addition to Cage’s live reading, the Company danced as the Roaratorio soundtrack played. This performance of simultaneous movements, sounds, and words requires

95 more than just the listener’s ear. In The New York Times review of the 1986 performance, Anna

Gisselgoff warns audiences’ that their “senses will be working overtime at the very start of the piece.”

Roaratorio, then, is not a simple radio adaptation of Finnegans Wake or even Cage’s

writing through it. Rather than reduce Finnegans Wake to a single medium, Cage uses radio as

an instrument. In earlier compositions, such as Imaginary Landscape No. 4, the composers acted

as radio operators, changing the radio stations and volume based on chance operations. Thus,

Perloff rightly notes that Roaratorio is as much an homage to technology as it is to Joyce (225).

However, she does not mention Marshall McLuhan and McLuhan’s influence on Cage. Cage remembers that it was McLuhan who first encouraged him “to write a musical work based on the

Wake’s Ten Thunderclaps,” since “the Thunderclaps were, in fact, a history of technology” (EW

133). Cage did plan to compose the Finnegans Wake piece with Lejaren Hiller in the late sixties, but their work on HPSCHD prevented its realization. While Roaratorio does include ten thunderclaps and fifty-six thunder rumbles (R 71), the Irish Circus seems less concerned with the

“history of technology.” The overlapping and disparate sounds in Roaratorio instead approximate a new sense ratio that McLuhan connects with electronic media.

As the Gutenberg era traded an eye for an ear, McLuhan finds another sensory transition in the twentieth-century. Electronic technologies, such as radio or film, no longer stress the visual sign of the word. These “new” media instead restore an “audile-tactile” sense to a text, which requires the simultaneous use of all sense perceptions. This thesis had a noticeable influence on

Cage, who explains that his 1961 lecture Where Are We Going? And What Are We Doing? was written with an “awareness of McLuhan’s point that nowadays everything happens at once, not just one thing at a time” (JC 170). With Roaratorio, Cage re-contextualizes Finnegans Wake in

96 the “electronic” environment that McLuhan describes in The Gutenberg Galaxy (1962) and

Understanding Media (1964).

The Gutenberg Galaxy, as David Theall notes, initially began as a project on Finnegans

Wake (185). For McLuhan, it was Joyce who “discovered the means of living simultaneously in all cultural modes” (GG 84). This discovery Joyce makes in Finnegans Wake is crucial to

McLuhan’s analysis on twentieth-century media. Using language that clearly references

Finnegans Wake, McLuhan explains that any “culture can be locked in the sleep of any one sense,” but “the sleeper awakes when challenged in any other sense” (GG 84). Joyce writes about such a clash in the “Mookse and the Gripes” section of the Wake. In this brief narrative,

“Mookse had a sound eyes but he could not all hear” and “the Gripes had light ears left yet he could but ill see” (FW 158). The “characters” constantly insult each other’s failing sense, but by the end both are “bread by the same fire and signed with the same salt […] tucked in the bed and bit by the one flea” (168). Similar to this story, the language in Finnegans Wake never lets any one sense sleep or dominate since “what can’t be corded can be decorded if an ear aye seize what no eye ere grieved for” (FW 483). McLuhan interprets these “curious of sings” Finnegans Wake as a language that challenges the visual monopoly of print. The “revolution of the word,” then, has more than a literary value for McLuhan and Cage. Its “maimed words” anticipate an

“electronic revolution.”

The codex requires that writers fit their words to the linear and sequential printed page.

McLuhan, however, notes “the advent of electric media released art from this straightjacket at once” (Understanding Media 54). For McLuhan, this “new” media environment creates the conditions that produce a text like Finnegans Wake. Yet, as Cage finds, Joyce’s book is still confined to the “straightjacket” of its medium. The writings through, however, apply non-

97 intentional rules and typographic experiments to disrupt the linear, sequential, or even circular,

format of the codex. The Musicircus likewise breaks with the fixed perspective of the Gutenberg

eye. A “circus,” as Cage defines it, “means that there is not one center but that life itself is a plurality of centers” (R 54). In the Irish Circus, Cage acts so there are too many uses in a

center(s).

The “pluralabilities” of the Musicircus center, however, are not always maintained in a performance. Craig Dworkin remembers the 1992 Stanford Musicircus as one such instance, where Cage read from Muoyce (the Fifth writing through Finnegans Wake) in a separated room at the very center of the complex. In addition to his physical position at the event, Cage also became the center of the audiences’ attention. This created an almost spiritual atmosphere “of having entered the sacred cave of the sibyl” (199). Dworkin also sees this contradiction between non-intentional rules and control in the writings through, which “still carries the proper name [of an author], the very sign of the ego” (96). The circus situation and writings through are not free from this impulse to organize, and Cage was critical of many performances that were too controlled, including the Stanford event. Yet the Musicircus and the writings through still create a situation that disperses the single authorial voice. Charles Junkerman recalls that when Cage read Muyoce at Stanford, his “speech was not singular and authorial but multiplied three times on distortion free DAT tapes,” which were then “synchronized with his own live speech so the audience could not identify with certainty the original source for the words they head” (51).

Much like the mesostics in Roaratorio, Cage’s voice in Muoyce is multiplied to such a degree that the words become indeterminate. Thus, while the Musicircus contains individual sounds and words, the performers play these fragments simultaneously. As Cage explains, “Although we can

98 still organize a lot and even multiply organizations […] the whole will make a disorganization”

(FB 53).

The disorganization in a Musicircus results from the slight shades of differences within the

individual sounds. As Perloff notes, Cage does not combine the sonic and verbal centers in

Roaratorio, but instead “produce[s] a system of differences, in which each sign or set of signs can retain its own identity” (224). Cage, then, permits the sounds to sound and the words to word within Finnegans Wake. The writings through and the Irish Circus stop short of giving an explanation of its source text. Because Cage does not give preference to a single word or sound, he avoids what John Bishop calls the “notorious truism” of Finnegans Wake that the book

“serves as something a Rorschach test, revealing a reader’s monomanias, deferentialities, and peculiar little areas of expertise” (xi). While Mink notes his “specialized guide” offers a “topo- maniacal” analysis of the Wake, he cautions the reader to not read too much into such obsessive interpretations. Mink adds, “until there is a single annotated version of the Wake which aggregates glosses of all types [of references] the reader must blink frequently to change the focus of the overburdened eye” (xiv). In the Gazetteer, Mink exploits the visual sense when he organizes the place names into “Linear” and “Alphabetical” categories. This classification system further reinforces a linear and alphabetic script that McLuhan links with the Gutenberg legacy. Cage, however, removes these categories in Roaratorio when he applies I Ching chance

operations to 626 places that Mink lists in the Gazetteer.

This disinterested system of differences that Cage maintains in the writings through and

Irish Circus replaces specialism and individualism with dialogue and participation. McLuhan

sees such a transition as the result of electronic technologies, and Cage likewise notes how this

new “technology has brought about the blurring of the distinctions between composers,

99 performers, and listeners” (EW 181). Such collaboration is necessary and evident in the

Roaratorio broadcast. To complete the hörspiel, required a team of musicians and sound engineers, which included an Irish tenor, a Swiss American engineer [John Fullerman], a

German radio station, and the resources of a French research studio.

For Cage, the future of music rests on the effects of electronic media, which “makes

[music] relevant to society, even society outside musical society” (EW 181). Electronic music

invites any sound, however disharmonious, into a composition. Thus, sounds such as a car horn

or airplane engine are no longer regarded as disruptive noises. Cage, then, turns a listener’s ear

(and eyes) to the world itself. This attention to sounds outside the concert hall leads Junkerman

to label the Musicircus an “urban genre” that seems “peculiarly American” (40). A year before

the Irish Circus broadcast, Cage composed 49 Waltzes for the Five Boroughs (1977). The score,

which was published in Rolling Stone, listed 147 New York locations in forty-nine groups of three. A New York resident could visit the addresses in the score and listen or record the sounds from a selected location. Cage also directed listeners’ attention to the sonic life of New York

City in Variations VII. For the 1966 performance at the Regiment Armory, Cage had

The New York Telephone Company install ten telephones in a steamer trunk, each phone connected to some place characteristic to life in New York: the kitchen at Luchow’s […] a myanhbird cage at the Bronx zoo; a garbage disposal works; the New York Times pressroom. (Silverman 235)

Along with David Tudor and engineers from Experiments with in Art and Technology (EAT),

Cage left the telephones lines open to mix with twenty radio receivers and other sounds. Cage, however, was vocally unhappy with the performance since the EAT engineers hung up several telephones (Silverman 235). Any disconnection is antithetical to Cage’s musical processes, which finds and amplifies all environmental sounds.

100 Roaratorio likewise assembles a sonic collage from the virtual map in Finnegans Wake.

Joyce, as McLuhan notes, listened to “the simultaneous messages of Dublin,” when writing his

Work in Progress (Massage 120). To record these simultaneous signs for Roaratorio, Cage went to Dublin with John Fullerman. Yet their recordings were not limited to just the metropolitan sounds in Dublin . Whereas Finnegans Wake includes oblique and encoded references to the city, its map also suggests a book of “Doublends Joined.” Cage, thus, asked radio stations and colleges around the world to record the global sounds in the Wake. The Irish Circus, as Cage finds tells Schöning, “is international […} it’s all the world” (R 44). Roaratorio = a soundboard for the global village.

‘Laughtears’: A Sacrilegious Homage

The writings through Joyce (and Thoreau) continue to experiment within the pages of its source text. In his introductory remarks to the Schizo-Culture conference, Lotringer defines this experimentation as “the affirmative refusal to get bogged down in speculation or piety.” He further directs artists and cultural critics to put writers such as “Freud or Marx to work, don’t worship them” (47). Cage puts Thoreau and Joyce to work in Empty Words and the writings through Finnegans Wake, both of which Cage read at Semiotext(e) events. And while Cage revers these respective writers, he tells Schöning that the Joyce mesostics resembles a

“sacrilegious homage.” He uses a term that appears in Finnegans Wake—“laughtears”—to further explain bow this homage “opens the possibility of doing many things with the book,” which brings “it to life in other forms” (R 37). The writings through do not offer an explanation or a critique of the book. Cage instead uses, or rather reuses, the content in Finnegans Wake to realize alternate versions of the text. These versions remove the syntax from the prose, and extend its linguistic signs into the simultaneous and multiple senses of electronic media.

101 Cage was confident that Joyce would have been “delighted” at his “sacrilegious homage,” which tries to rid his text from all authorial intention. Cage, however, hesitates when he reflects on what Ezra Pound would have thought about his Writing Through the Cantos. “If not delighted,” Cage notes, Pound “would have been relieved” (X x). Cage places this remark next to a line in Canto CXX—a final fragment in Pound’s epic: “Let those I love try to forgive what I have made” (qtd. in X x). What Pound made, or failed to make, in The Cantos concerns the authorial control that Pound exerts over the fragments in his poem. Unlike Cage, Pound attempts to shape the disparate citations in The Cantos into a homogenous cultural voice. Charles

Bernstein reads this impulse toward control with Pound’s fascist politics. Yet Pound’s ideology often differs from his poetic form. As Bernstein argues, Pound’s politics “are absorbed into The

Cantos not as truth but as a befouled rubble […] framed and denounced by readers able to pick and choose for themselves” (125). In his Writing Through The Cantos, Cage frees the poem from

Pound’s authorial intention by ironically using the author’s name. The Pound mesostics appeared in the 1984 Unmuzzled Ox issue Jackson Mac Low’s writings through The Cantos. While their methods differ slightly, Dworkin notes that Mac Low and Cage both “perform an ideological hijacking of sorts” when they submit Pound’s Cantos non-intentional rules (101). Cage, then, reshapes the Cantos to his own aesthetic concept(s) that let the citations exist as individual fragments—“Part sOme last crUmbs of civilizatioN Damn” (X 111). It is here, in the crumbs of

Pound’s poem, where Cage splits the authorial voice into anarchic chatter.

102 POSTSCRIPT

JANUARY 1984: NAM JUNE PAIK SAYS GOOD MORNING, MR. ORWELL

The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.

William Gibson, Neuromancer

Someday they will get you now you must agree The times they are a telling And the changing isn’t free You’ve read it in the tea leaves And the tracks are on TV Beware the savage lure of 1984

David Bowie, “1984”

While John Cage created his sacrilegious homages to Thoreau, Joyce, and Pound, he too became the subject of heretical praise when the Korean video artist Nam June Paik performed his

Homage to John Cage. For Cage, the whole experience was terrifying. As he told Daniel

Charles, Paik “suddenly approached me, cut off my tie and began to shred my clothes, as if to rip

them off me.” Paik then left the room while Cage and others “remained dazed, immobile, and

terrified for some time” (FtB 187). Despite this frightening homage, Cage often collaborated

with Paik, and he specifically stressed that Paik “produced some extraordinary things on

television” (FtB 187). One of these television programs was his Tribute to John Cage (1973), an

earlier homage to the avant-garde musician. Paik’s Tribute began with one his robot sculpture,

K-456, rolling through the New York City streets as the program host explained how Cage and

Paik met in a small German town in the late ‘50s. This meeting resulted in a “close and

sometimes violent” friendship that lasted over twenty years.

Cage appears early in the Tribute to give a performance of 4’33” at Harvard Square. The program announcer explains that the performance is close to the famous newspaper stand that

103 “was burned down during the violent days of student revolution.” Numerous spectators surround

Cage as he sits silently at the piano, and their chatter mixes with the sounds of passing city traffic. Yet while he performs the piece, Paik inserts a series of messages on the TV screen.

These messages during Cage’s performance tell the audience to “open your window and count

the stars,” and a later text asks if anyone can hear a cricket. Yet the first message that appears

over the performance reads as an alternate title for 4’33”: “This is Zen for TV” (Figure 14). The

“title” in the Tribute links Cage’s silent composition with Paik’s sculpture, Zen For TV. The

sculpture is of a television set turned on its side and programmed it to broadcast one vertical line

on its screen. Similar to Duchamp’s Fountain, Paik reorients an object and gives it a new name.

His “Zen” for television also renders the TV screen useless for the commercial interests of the

entertainment industry.

As Paik experimented with TV sets in the ‘60s, McLuhan was offering a critical analysis

on the medium. The chapter on television in Understanding Media is the longest chapter in the book, and McLuhan stresses how TV radically changed the way one processes information. He

explains that the television image “offers some three million dots per second to the receiver, and

“from these [the viewer] accepts only a few dozen each instant, from which to make an image”

(Understanding Media 313). The viewer, then, participates in the creation of the televisual image

since TV “favors the creation of processes rather than products,” and is thus more oriented

toward a producer than a consumer. In his 1966 manifesto on a “Utopian” TV station, Paik notes

that “McLuhan is surely great,” but he also finds an inconsistency in McLuhan’s analysis: he still

writes books. He concludes that McLuhan “became well-known mainly through books,” and thus

“doesn’t care” enough about the very media he evangelizes. That Paik writes this criticism

instead of televising it should not go unnoticed. In an article for Artforum, Paik later explained

104 how “the ‘book’ is the oldest form of random access information” (48). Television and videotape, however, were still “time-based” media when he wrote the article in 1980. For Paik,

“combining random access with video is a major problem that needs to be solved” (49). Yet he already saw a change with digital video recordings, which would make random access more plausible for the artist. Paik predicted how “in the future, the only artwork that will survive will have no gravity at all” (49). New digital technologies will thus allow the user to control how they watch a program.

Yet if television makes the viewer a participant, as McLuhan suggests, it does so indirectly.

What Adorno and Horkheimer said about radio also applied to television. While television

“democratically” turns “everyone equally into [viewers],” it also limits them “in authoritarian fashion to the same programs put out by different stations” (Adorno and Horkheimer 96). Very few television viewers are in control of network programming. Paik, however, explained in his

“Utopia” manifesto how “very very very high-frequency oscillation of laser[s] will enable us to afford thousands of large and small TV stations,” which will “free us from the monopoly of a few commercial TV channels.”14 Thirty-four years before Paik’s TV station, the German Marxist playwright Bertolt Brecht similarly imagined a radio apparatus that would allow “the listener to speak as well as hear” (52). For Benjamin, Brecht’s radio was an exemplary model of a technology changed for “revolutionary use.” Brecht admits that his plan for radio seems utopian, but he explains that “it is not at all our job to renovate ideological institutions on the basis of the

existing social order […] Instead our innovations must force them to surrender to that basis”

(53). Paik too finds a different use for television, and his “Utopia” station allows for “new practices subjectivation” that Guattari discusses in his “post-media” essay. One such

14 Paik, Nam June. “Utopian TV Station.” Manifestos: A Great Bear Pamphlet. Something Else Press: 1966. < http://www.ubu.com/historical/gb/manifestos.pdf> 105 appropriation of communication technologies concerns the “miniaturization and the personalization of equipments [sic],” which Guattari presumes “will offer us the most surprising views” (Soft Subversions 299). The television network that Paik describes in his manifesto challenges the monopoly that Adorno and Horkheimer find in the [mass] culture industry through this strange personalization of broadcasting equipment. Similar to Burroughs and

Gysin’s Time magazine, this “Utopian” TV station uses mass media to playback a weird message.

Paik proposed that we broadcast ourselves almost forty years before YouTube. His

“Utopian” television network multiplies the “existential operators,” who will permit “access to mutant creative universes” (Soft Subversions 300). Such operators are detailed in the twenty-four hour program for the “Utopian” TV station. The morning programs include a chess lesson from

Marcel Duchamp at 7am; a “Meet the Press” segment with John Cage at 8am; and morning gymnastics led by Merce Cunningham and Carolyn Brown at 9am. In the manifesto, Paik noted that he was “video-taping” these “TV programs to be telecast March 1, 1996.” While the program never aired, Paik did produce several television specials that put the avant-garde in

everyone’s living rooms. Paik’s Tribute to John Cage remains one such program. Cage is, of

course, the primary focus of the special, but the Tribute also features a long excerpt from Paik’s

collaboration with Charlotte Moorman. After Moorman’s cello performance, the program then

cuts to an image of a piano, which someone soon demolishes with a pickaxe. The destroyed

instrument is perhaps indirect reference to Cage’s “prepared pianos,” but Paik’s preparation

renders the piano unplayable. In Edited for Television, art critic Calvin Tomkins tells Paik that

many have labeled him a “cultural terrorist,” and his Tribute and Homage to Cage certainly fit

such a description.

106 Cage appeared on another Paik television special in 1984. Good Morning, Mr. Orwell was a program that was broadcasted live via the Bright Star satellite from four different countries and seven different cities on January 1, 1984. The program was an "Orwellian celebration that

[was] not quite Orwellian." As Paik explained:

Whereas the TV screen for [Orwell] was an omnipotent means of suppression (needless to say, it is so subconsciously now, everywhere in the world), we would treat this tool neutrally and try to inject a better vitamin into it” (quoted in Becoming Robot 29).

George Plimpton, the host for the American broadcast, made a similar comment at the beginning

of the program. While Orwell warned about the dangers of totalitarian governments and

electronic technology, Plimpton told the viewer what they were about to witness were “positive

and interactive uses of electronic media, which Mr. Orwell, the first media prophet, never predicted.” The German critic Siegfried Zielinski writes how “out of cultural pessimism, one can

either submit to or confront as a challenge the idea of total visual control that Orwell outlines

with his telescreen novel” (98). Paik chose to confront this control with what he called a

televised “global disco.”

Many of the performers in Good Morning, Mr. Orwell were also at the 1978 Nova

Convention. At the “global disco,” John Cage rubs a feather against objects as fireworks play in

the background. Laurie Anderson sings with Peter Gabriel, but she reprises her performance

from the Nova Convention later in the broadcast. With her electronically altered voice, Anderson

tells a story in a “language of sounds, of noise, of switching.” A piece from Philip Glass, who

also performed at the Nova Convention, follows a song and dance routine by Yves Montand.

“Act III” from Glass’s The Photographer plays while neon spirals and other three-dimensional shapes bend to the repetitive notes in the score. Later in the program, Merce Cunningham uses the one-second delay from the transatlantic satellite transmission “to become the first man in

107 1984 to truly dance with himself.” When transmitted from Paris to New York, the feedback multiplies Cunningham’s limbs when he moves (Figure 15). In Paik’s program, Plimpton compares this feedback to a “space yodel” that echoes and reverberates from the satellite transmission. The broadcast ends with such a yodel in Peter Orlovsky and Allen Ginsberg’s rendition of “Feeding Them Raspberries to Grow.” They performed the song at the Nova

Convention, but when Ginsberg translates Orlovsky’s yodel in Good Morning, Mr. Orwell, he notes that it occurs “on the satellite.” All of these “anarchic presentations,” Zielinski writes, “cut the ground from under the feet of the notion that cultural processes can be totally controlled.

[The performers] play around with chance, disruptions, sudden events, deviations, grammatically non-determinable tears, and laughter” (98). Over twenty million people across the world watched

Paik’s “global disco” when it aired on New Years Day. What they witnessed was a televised version of Cage’s “musicircus.” Paik created a space where these widely different expressions and performances occurred simultaneously.

Less than month after Paik’s New Year’s broadcast, a commercial from Apple Computer aired that also referenced Orwell’s novel. Apple created the advertisement to introduce its personal computer Macintosh to the public. Ridley Scott directed the commercial two years after

Blade Runner, and traces of the cyberpunk aesthetic from that film are evident in the Apple advertisement. The sixty-second ad begins with bald men marching down a hall. Several small

TVs display a man who delivers a message from Big Brother. A larger television screen then appears, and the ad concludes when a woman throws a sledgehammer at the screen. As the bald men bath in this new light, a voice states: “On January 24th, Apple Computer will introduce

Macintosh. And you’ll see why 1984, won’t be like 1984.” Similar to Paik’s Good Morning, Mr.

Orwell, Apple uses the literary text to propose a different future. New communication

108 technologies are not necessarily totalitarian; it all comes down to how we use them. Yet while

Paik envisioned a Utopian TV station that would free viewers from the control of major networks, the Macintosh itself “was a closed and controlled system, like something designed by

Big Brother rather than by a hacker (Issacson 163). Steve Jobs designed his personal computer so that users could not mess with its hardware.

Paik, however, injects “a better vitamin” into media. He puts cultural terrorists on the airwaves to broadcast their messages. Acker, Burroughs, Cage, and Paik are a few of these terrorists who overwrite literary language and take over public television networks. They suggest a different approach to communication technologies that still remain relevant today. Since the election of failed business mogul turned reality TV personality turned president Donald Trump,

Orwell’s 1984 has gained more readers. Yet one should also turn to Paik’s 1984 or artists and writers in the Schizo-Culture issue. These cultural terrorists show how one might construct instruments against an Administration that uses media for control.

109 APPENDIX A

DEAD FINGERS TALK: AN ATROPHIED BIBLIOGRAPHY

This appendix serves as a comprehensive map of the bibliographical sources in Dead

Fingers Talk (1963): the Olympia Press first editions of The Naked Lunch (1959), The Soft

Machine (1961), and The Ticket That Exploded (1962). The titles of the twenty-eight sections are in bold.

The Heat Closing In

“I can feel the heat closing in […] Walked past the cocktail lounge where they blasted the

Jai Lai bookie”: pages 1-15 in Dead Fingers Talk and pages 7-25 in The Naked Lunch.

“When they walked in on me that morning at 8 o’clock […] Far side of the world’s mirror, moving into the past with Hauser and O’Brien”: pages 15-22 in Dead Fingers Talk and pages 199-208 in The Naked Lunch.

In a Strange Bed

“Lykin was the first awake […] East St. Louis music on call out into other rooms”: pages

22-28 in Dead Fingers Talk and pages 17-26 in The Ticket That Exploded.

No Good No Bueno

“I was working The Hole with The Sailor and we did not bad […] No good. No bueno”: pages 29-33 in Dead Fingers Talk and pages 158-164 in The Soft Machine.

“Stay away from Queen’s Plaza, son […] The Beagle is dead of an overdose and the Fag

went wrong”: pages 33-34 in Dead Fingers Talk and pages 189-190 in The Naked Lunch.

Coke Bugs

110 “The Sailor’s grey felt hat and black overcoat hung twisted in atrophied yen-wait […]

The subway sweeps by with a black blast of iron”: pages 35-36 in Dead Fingers Talk and page

190-192 in The Naked Lunch.

The Exterminator Does a Good Job

“Note: Queen’s Plaza is a bad spot for workers […] You can’t go back no more”: pages

37-39 in Dead Fingers Talk and pages 193-196 in The Naked Lunch.

Cut City

“The Sailor and I burned down The Republic of Panama from Darien swamps to David trout streams on paregoric and goof balls […] Break Through in the Grey Room”: pages 39-50.

Note: This section contains material not included in the 1961 edition.

To Quiet the Marks

So pack your ermines, Mary […] hands cold and blue as liquid air on wrist and ankle just frozen there in a heavy blue mist of vaporized bank notes”: pages 50-51 in Dead Fingers Talk

and pages 136-138 in The Ticket That Exploded.

“The cold heavy fluid settled in his spine 70 tons per square inch […] Leave I need”: page 51 in Dead Fingers Talk. Note: This passage derives from later editions of The Soft

Machine.

Science Pure Science

“So I am assigned to engage the services of Doctor Benway for Islam Inc. […] It is only

a few crazies who have from the crazy place outbroken”: pages 52-69 in Dead Fingers Talk and pages 25-47 in The Naked Lunch.

The Meat Handler

111 “So I am a public agent and don’t know who I work for […] My time was running out its last black grains”: pages 70-73 in Dead Fingers Talk and 164-170 in The Soft Machine.

“I promise anything […] Among other things”: page 73 in Dead Fingers Talk and pages

168-169 in The Soft Machine.

“MEETING OF INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE OF TECHNOLOGICAL

PSYCHIATRY […] They storm the exists screaming and clawing”: pages 73-75 in Dead

Fingers Talk and pages 97-99 in The Naked Lunch.

“Senators leap up and bray for the Death Penalty with inflexible authority of virus yen

[…] Time ran out”: pages 75-76 in Dead Fingers Talk and pages 214-215 in The Naked Lunch.

But This Is Interesting

“Some day later they were sitting in The Blue Rune when Johnny Yen let out his melodious little bird cry […] The doctor pulled a scalpel out of Johnny’s ear and trimmed the papules into an ash tray where they stirred slowly exuding a green juice”: pages 76-77 in Dead

Fingers Talk and pages 127-128 in The Soft Machine.

“They say his prick didn’t synchronize at all so he cut it off and made some kinda awful cunt between the two sides of him […] ‘But this is interesting’”: page 77 in Dead Fingers Talk and page 130 in The Soft Machine.

“AMERICAN HOUSEWIFE […] K.E. musta sold me the wrong kit again”: pages 77-78 in Dead Fingers Talk and pages 119-120 in The Naked Lunch

“Switch envelopes in clip clap joint where fraudulent girls put the B on you […] ‘I’ll put this capon I mean caper”: page 78 in Dead Fingers Talk and pages 134-135 in The Naked Lunch.

“MALE HUSTLER […] they wanta take over my past experience and leave old

memories that disgust me”: page 78 in Dead Fingers Talk and page 120 in The Naked Lunch.

112 It’s The Great Work

SLUNK traffickers tail a pregnant cow to her labor […] They really got relief”: page 79 in Dead Fingers Talk and page 121 in The Naked Lunch.

“Benway ‘camped’ in The Board of Health […] aquatic panther and other noxious creatures dreamed up by the lying explorers who infest bars marginal to the area”:

“BENWAY […] one all purpose blob”: page 81 in Dead Fingers Talk and page 126 in

The Naked Lunch.

“Dr. Berger’s Mental Health Hour […] I’m the oldest faggot in the Upper Baboon’s

Asshole”: pages 81- 84 in Dead Fingers Talk and pages 131-134 in The Naked Lunch.

That’s the Way I Like to See Them

“A funeral passes through the market […] a sound effect of distant train whistles”: pages

84-85 in Dead Fingers Talk and 104-105 in The Naked Lunch.

“The age of consent is when they learn to talk […] He does a hideous parody of twitching and drooling”: pages 85-86 in Dead Fingers Talk and pages 135-137 in The Naked Lunch.

“‘Fats’ Terminal has organized a purple-assed baboon stick from motorcycles […] the con man palpates the mark with fingers of rotten ectoplasm”: pages 86-87 in Dead Fingers Talk and pages 130-131 in The Naked Lunch.

The Parties of Interzone

“I was working for an outfit known as Islam Inc. […] However the parties are not in practice separate but blend in all combinations”: pages 88-105 in Dead Fingers Talk and 139-

160 in The Naked Lunch.

Save Proof Through the Night

113 “We are not unaware of the problem […] come to roost like a homing stool pigeon”: pages 105-106 in Dead Fingers Talk and 115-116 in The Naked Lunch.

“In fact a whole clan of Europeans has moved in next to me […] Dope peddlers from

Aleppo”: page 106 in Dead Fingers Talk and page 58 in The Naked Lunch.

“The lavatory has been locked […] the Invisible Man”: pages 107-112 in Dead Fingers

Talk and pages 61-67 in The Naked Lunch.

“More and more static at the Drug Store […] I have been years in a prison camp suffering

from malnutrition”: pages 113-114 in Dead Fingers Talk and 67-68 in The Naked Lunch.

“Reading the paper […] they separate in a meaningless mosaic”: page 114 in Dead

Fingers Talk and page 69 in The Naked Lunch.

Expense Account

“Fumbling through faded tape at the pick up frontier […] ‘Expense account,’ he smiles”: pages 114-117 in Dead Fingers Talk and 69-72 in The Naked Lunch.

“Luncheon of the Nationalist Party on balcony overlooking the Market […] No principles”: pages 117-119 in Dead Fingers Talk and 116-119 in The Naked Lunch.

“P.L. (mixing another scotch) […] I urge distraction”: page 119 in Dead Fingers Talk

and page 135 in The Naked Lunch.

I Urge Distraction

“Riot noises in the distance […] C’lom Fliday”: pages 119-120 in Dead Fingers Talk and

137-139 in The Naked Lunch.

“‘Fats Terminal’ came from The City Pressure Tanks where open life jets spurt a million

forms […] Cancer is at the door with a Singing Telegram”: pages 121-123 in Dead Fingers Talk

and pages 197-199 in The Naked Lunch.

114 “The perfect product, gentlemen, has precise molecular affinity for its client predilection

[…] Sometimes the Reservation is other persons and events in Trak guards”: page 123 in Dead

Fingers Talk. Note: While not in the first edition, this passage does appear in later editions of

The Soft Machine (pages 41-42).

The Black Fruit

“(Outskirts of Mexico City—Can’t quite make it with all the guards around […] Come in please with the images”: page 124 in Dead Fingers Talk and page 49 in The Soft Machine.

“The third keif pipe he went through the urinal sick and dizzy […] The Dog’s mirror”: page 124 in Dead Fingers Talk and page 25 in The Soft Machine.

“We friends yes […] A painted youth slithered in and seized one of the great black claws

sending the sweet, sick smell curling through the café”: pages 124-128 in Dead Fingers Talk and pages 52-57 in The Naked Lunch.

“He drew the black-berry smoke deep into his lungs […] They rolled on the flower bed crushing out clouds of odor”: pages 128-130 in Dead Fingers Talk and pages 82-86 in The Ticket

That Exploded.

“Hospital smells and the wooden numbness of anesthesia […] Sew him up nurse”: pages

130-131 in Dead Fingers Talk and page 79 in The Ticket That Exploded.

“Carl walked through a carnival city along canals where giant pink salamanders and goldfish stirred slowly […] The town crops up from the mud flats to the silent temple of high jungle streams of clear water cut deep clefts in yellow clay and falling orchids endanger the traveller”: page 131 in Dead Fingers Talk and page 87 in The Soft Machine.“

115 Carl’s outboard vibrated in a haze of rusty oil […] Documentes—Passaport”: page 131 in

Dead Fingers Talk and pages 84-85 in The Soft Machine. Note: The last sentence does not

appear in the 1961 edition.

“Bradly’s canoe of paper thin black wood grounded on an island of swamp cypress […]

Naked except for a quiver of silver arrows and a bow, he radiated a calm disdainful authority”: pages 131-132 in Dead Fingers Talk and pages 89-90 in The Ticket That Exploded.

“What is all this scandal […] One must pretend an interest”: pages 132-133 in Dead

Fingers Talk and pages 86-87 in The Soft Machine.

All Members Are Worst a Century

“Puerto Joselíto is located in a point of dead water at the confluence of two brown rivers

[…] Quote Green-Baum Early Explorer”: page 133 in Dead Fingers Talk and pages 83-84 in The

Soft Machine.

“Ward Island is afflicted by a disease so terrible that the entire ceremonial life of the

natives revolves around fear of the disease and precautions to avoid it […] bone wrenching

spasm that popped silver light in our eyes”: pages 133-136 in Dead Fingers Talk and pages 92-

96 in The Ticket That Exploded.

“Flash bulb monster crawling inexorably from Old Fred Flash […] Phosphorescent

centipede feeding on flesh strung together we are digested and become nothing here”: pages 136-

138 in Dead Fingers Talk. Note: In a note to The Restored Text, Harris explains how “almost

none of this derived from” the first edition of The Soft Machine (224).

“We are both emaciated now […] Wind of morning disintegrates Present Time”: pages

138-140 in Dead Fingers Talk and pages 97-100 in The Ticket That Exploded.

116 “Ghost of Panama clung to our bodies […] Hospital smell of backward countries”: pages

140-141 in Dead Fingers Talk. Note: This does not appear

Place of Burial

“And Joselito who wrote bad, class-conscious poetry began to cough […] The plaintive boy cries drift in on the warm night”: pages 142-146 in Dead Fingers Talk and pages 47-52 in

The Naked Lunch.

“Tentative half impressions that dissolve in light […] ‘Where Am I?’ cool it and look around and you will find out approximately”: pages 146-147 in Dead Fingers Talk and pages

210-211 in The Naked Lunch.

“The only native in Interzone who is neither queer nor available is Andrew Keif’s chauffeur […] Hand in hand they skip away into the mist that covers the Zone in the winter months like a cold Turkish bath”: pages 147-154 in Dead Fingers Talk and pages 170-178 in The

Naked Lunch.

Survivor Survivor

“New Orleans Jazz thin in The Northern Light […] I’m on now”: page 154 in Dead

Fingers Talk and page 111 in The Soft Machine.

“We could go on cutting my cleavage act, but genug basta assez dice fall hombre long

switch street […] One day I’ll stop talking and then”: page 155 in Dead Fingers Talk and pages

115-116 in The Soft Machine.

“Survivor. Survivor […] the cops say they never see anything so intense and it is a

special pass I must be carrying I wasn’t completely obliterated”: pages 155-157 in Dead Fingers

Talk and page 119-122 in The Soft Machine.

117 “I was more physical before my accident, you can see from this interesting picture […]

Next step with Benway”: pages 157-158 in Dead Fingers Talk and pages 131-132 in The Soft

Machine.

Páco, Joeslíto, Henrique

“Carl Peterson found a postcard in his box requesting him to report for a ten o’clock

meeting with Doctor Benway […] The whole room was exploding out into space”: pages 158-

167 in Dead Fingers Talk and 178-188 in The Naked Lunch.

“Carl descended a spiral iron stairwell […] Gathering blue torch flare-light the calm

intent young worker faces”: pages 167-168 in Dead Fingers Talk and pages 139-141 in The Soft

Machine.

“Locker room toilet on five levels seen from the ferris wheel […] Joselíto, Paco,

Henrique”: page 168 in Dead Fingers Talk and page 142 in The Soft Machine.

Combat Troops in the Area

“The room was full of white pillow flakes blowing out from a conical insect nest of plaster […] Towers, open fire”: pages 168-170 in Dead Fingers Talk and pages 106-110 in The

Ticket That Exploded.

“As the shot of apomorphine cut through poisons of Minraud he felt a tingling burning numbness […] Wind of the earth through archives of Time as film and newspapers shredded to dust in a tornado of years and centuries”: pages 170-171 in Dead Fingers Talk and pages 100-

102 in The Ticket That Exploded.

“Grey luminous flakes falling softly on Ewyork, Aris, Ome, Oston […] Paper moon and

muslin trees in the black silver sky great rents as the cover of the world rained down in luminous

film flakes”: pages 171-172 in Dead Fingers Talk and page 15 in The Ticket That Exploded.

118 The Board Books

“In three-dimensional terms The Board is a group representing international big money who intend to take over and monopolize space […] Traitors to all souls everywhere sold out to shit forever”: pages 172-173 in Dead Fingers Talk and pages 135-136 in The Ticket That

Exploded.

“Now rewrite Mr. Bradly Mr. Martin […] Mr. Bradly Mr. Martin now show blighted planet the dog tape empty of control”: pages 173-174 in Dead Fingers Talk and pages 128-130 in

The Ticket That Exploded.

“It’s the old junk gimmick […] Man, like good-bye”: pages 174-177 in Dead Fingers

Talk and pages 123-127 in The Ticket That Exploded.

Dead Fingers Talk

“Hello, Cash […] Cooks up”: page 178 in Dead Fingers Talk and page 219 in The Naked

Lunch.

“Clinic outside East St. Louis on stilts over the wide brown river took in a steady stream

of distant events […] Know the answer”: pages 178-179 in Dead Fingers Talk and pages 112-

114 in The Ticket That Exploded.

“I personally wish to terminate my services as of now in that I cannon continue to sell the

raw materials of death […] I don’t know how to return it to the white reader”: pages 179-180 in

Dead Fingers Talk and page 214 in The Naked Lunch.

“Around in vacant lot 1910 […] Important thing is always courage to pass without

stopping”: page 180 in Dead Fingers Talk and page 114 in The Ticket That Exploded.

“Young Dillinger walks straight out of the house and never looked back […] (vulture

wings husk in the dry air)”: page 180 in Dead Fingers Talk and page 218 in The Naked Lunch.

119 “Naked boy on association line […] Remember hints as we shifted commissions stranger like death in your throat”: pages 180-181 in Dead Fingers Talk and pages 114-115 in The Ticket

That Exploded.

“So where is the statuary and the percentage […] tortured in effigy of a thousand bums, slides down skid row to shit in the limestone ball court”: page 181 in Dead Fingers Talk and page 218 in The Naked Lunch.

“Soccer scores […] Expectancy growing in vaudeville voices”: page 181 in Dead Fingers

Talk and page s 115-116 in The Ticket That Exploded.

“Which the way down the aisle to the water closet […] ‘Have you seen Pantapon Rose?

said the old junky in the black overcoat”: page 181 in Dead Fingers Talk and page 222 in The

Naked Lunch.

“The aging playboy dons his 1920 autograph slicker […] ‘Yes sir, boys, the shit really hit

the fan in ’63,’ said the tiresome old prophet can bore the piss out of you in any space time

direction”: page 181 in Dead Fingers Talk and page 217 in The Naked Lunch.

“Totally green troops in the area […] When I left you hear little tune cut the image”: pages 181-182 in Dead Fingers Talk and pages 116-117 in The Ticket That Exploded.

“Man, like vaudeville voices under the story […] Silence to say ‘ebbing like carbon

dioxide’”: pages 182-183 in Dead Fingers Talk and pages 130-131 in The Ticket That Exploded.

“The old queen meets himself coming round the other way in burlesque of adolescence

[…] Lola La Chata, Mexico, DF”: page 183 in Dead Fingers Talk and pages 222-223 in The

Naked Lunch.

“Like good-bye, Johnny […] Pass without doing our ticket”: page 183 in Dead Fingers

Talk and page 132 in The Ticket That Exploded.

120 “Over the broken chair and out through the tool-house window whitewash whipping in a cold Spring wind on a limestone cliff over the river […] loneliness moans across the continent like fog horns over still oily water of tidal rivers”: page 184 in Dead Fingers Talk and page 216 in The Naked Lunch.

“Intervention overtakes Mr. Bradly Mr. Martin […] A great leisure in solitude of Saturn”: page 184 in Dead Fingers Talk and pages 132-133 in The Ticket That Exploded.

“But is all back seat dreaming since the hitch hiker with the chewed thumb and he said

[…] Since the series is soon ending are these experiments really necessary”: pages 184-186 in

Dead Fingers Talk and page 172 in The Soft Machine. Note: Harris’s notes in The Restored Text to The Soft Machine explain how Burroughs only rewrote this section in later editions (264).

Operation Rewrite

“The Venusian invasion was known as ‘Operation Other Half’ […] Proceed with the indicated alterations”: pages 186-194 in Dead Fingers Talk and pages 37-50 in The Ticket That

Exploded.

“Time to squeeze out the welchers, kid, who can’t cover their bets and never intended to cover […] Strictly from Moochville”: pages 194-195 in Dead Fingers Talk and page133 in The

Ticket That Exploded.

“Now some wise characters think they can call The Old Doctor twice […] A few more calls to make tonight”: page 195 in Dead Fingers Talk and page 139 in The Ticket That

Exploded.

“Take The Board Books and rewrite the cold deck […] Minutes to go”: page 195 in Dead

Fingers Talk and page 160 in The Ticket That Exploded.

The Subliminal Kid

121 “The Subliminal Kid is a charter defector from The Nova Mob […] Urine shadows in the gutter”: pages 195-204 in Dead Fingers Talk and pages 160-172 in The Ticket That Exploded.

“Sucking terror from needle scars […] blew the shot”: page 204 in Dead Fingers Talk

and pages 223-224 in The Naked Lunch.

Let Them See Us

“Now some words about the image track […] These our actors proffer the disaster accounts and show the method in operation”: pages 205-208 in Dead Fingers Talk and pages

174-178 in The Ticket That Exploded.

These Our Actors

“Thing Police keep all Board Room Reports […] Swedish River of Gothenberg”: pages

208-209 in Dead Fingers Talk. Note: While this passage does not derive from any of the three

texts, it does appear later in Nova Express.

“Get those fucking dirty pictures out of here […] No glot—C’lom Fliday”: pages 208-

210 in Dead Fingers Talk and pages 224-226 in The Naked Lunch.

“Man, like good-bye over The White Subway […] Sound of flute in empty room”: pages

210-212 in Dead Fingers Talk. Note: Cannot find bibliographical source for these passages.

“Under the story Mr. Bradly Mr. Martin […] Silence to say good-bye”: pages 212-215 in

Dead Fingers Talk and pages 178-183 in The Ticket That Exploded.

122 APPENDIX B

RUB OUT THE WORD

Figure 1. Mother

123

Figure 2. Empty Words

124

Figure 3. Semiotic of Janeys

125

Figure 4. The Freud Pack

126

Figure 5. Time Cut-up.

127

Figure 6. Semiotext(e) USA

128

Figure 7. Censored Page in Semiotext(e) USA

Figure 8. Censored Enclosure in Semiotext(e) USA

129

Figure 9. Genital Collage

Figure 10. Janey’s Ode to a Grecian Urn

130

Figure 11. Discipline and Anarchy

131

Figure 12. Writing for a Second Time Through Finnegans Wake

132

Figure 13. Mesostics re Merce Cunningham

133

Figure 14. Zen for TV

Figure 15. Merce Cunningham Dances With Himself

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141 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH

Raymond Blake Stricklin is currently at work on a book on postwar experimental writers

and media theory. Since 2012, he has worked on the William S. Burroughs archive at Florida

State University.

142