Word Virus: The William S. Burroughs Reader

by William S. Burroughs

  The Oriental Exclusion Acts blocked a dangerous influx and laid the ground for future conflicts. The program calls for a series of such conflicts to point up the need for a continual escalation of control measures.

  Income-tax Laws: These laws benefit those who are already rich. The richer you are the easier it is to minimize taxes. In effect the rich have closed the doors to extreme wealth. This is necessary to insure that no one acquires wealth who might use it to subvert the interests of wealth and monopoly. There is no tighter hierarchy than extreme wealth, and no one gets in who is not devoted to the interests of money.

  Passport and customs controls after World War I: The basic formula on which the control plan depends is unilateral communication. Everyone must be forced to receive communications from the control machine. It will readily be seen that any control measure expands the range of enforced communication. Your passport or visa is not quite in order? You have lost your currency control slip? How many times will you compulsively repeat the explanation you have prepared in case the customs official starts asking questions. So control measures conjure up phantom interrogators who invade and destroy your inner freedom.

  By far the most crucial milestone in the non-dream plan was the Harrison Narcotics Act.

  INSTITUTE OF ADVANCED SEXUAL STUDIES: ACADEMY BULLETIN NO. 18

  The uh aim of the institute is to examine uh sexual manifestations with the same objective and uh experimental operations as have yielded such marked results in the uh physical sciences. We cannot but be impressed by the inefficiency of the present arrangement, the long period of helpless infancy during which the child is exposed to every variety of physical and psychic illness, every unwholesome influence on set. It is precisely our aim to create children at a reasonable age with some immunity against the unfortunate influences that we cannot immediately control. Meanwhile, every effort must be made to crack the biologic family unit. It is no exaggeration to say that the family unit, with its drearily predictable yield of infantile trauma, the quite unnecessary tensions of modern life superimposed on these quite unnecessary wounds, is the most crippling basic factor in modern life. How many potentially talented and useful citizens do nothing throughout a lifetime but protest against early conditioning? It has frequently been proposed that children be brought up by the state. And what is the state but a simple extension of the tribe which in turn is an extension of the family? To shift the care of children from the private family to the state family is nothing to the purpose. This means that our children will surface in a straitjacket of dogmatic verbal formulation as is now imposed by the biologic family. One of the most promising suggestions for the long-term liquidation of the family problem has been proposed by Mr Brion Gysin. He suggests that children be paid to go to school; the allowance increasing as they advance in training, they progressively achieve economic freedom from the family. The solution of the family problem must be termed a prerequisite for any objective approach to sexual manifestations and phenomena. Our work has been hamstrung by the antisex monopolist power, because this might lead to a basic understanding of the mechanisms involved with concomitant freedom from early conditioning. The doctor asked his subjects to wear transparent plastic suits, and observed whether dreaming was overtly sexual or not. One wonders to what extent the content of dreams could be dictated by cutting in at very short intervals certain words and images? Since the results of this experiment are well known to all of us, suffice it to say such experiments have been carried out, relative to such basic and uh predictable factors. . . . I refer to experiments that did not uh pan out as we had anticipated. Science, pure science. You learn to take what comes in this business.

  “How’s that couple coming along in double immersion tank No. 187?”

  “Don’t look at it, boss, it’s too horrible. They’re melting together, and one is eating the other inside.”

  “Selbstverständlich,” snapped the Herr Doktor. “And vat did you think would happen, so stupid American swine?”

  At this point, a most regrettable brawl broke out in the operation room, overturning nutrient tanks, jars, aquariums, sloshing monstrous larval being across the floor the scientists slip about slashing at each other with scalpels and bone saws screaming.

  “Well, we got the orders, and I done the job, wife and kids on my back.”

  “Look what a dummheit.”

  “Smells through the outhouse, doctor.”

  “Run for it, chaps. They’re actives.” Last seen swimming desperately in erogenous sewage.

  The entire project was lost. Who is the manager here? You see what I mean? . . . Such knowledge in the wrong hands could be quite unfortunate!

  ELECTRONIC REVOLUTION

  In “The Invisible Generation” first published in IT and in the Los Angeles Free Press in 1966,1 consider the potential of thousands of people with recorders, portable and stationary, messages passed along like signal drums, a parody of the President’s speech up and down the balconies, in and out open windows, through walls, over courtyards, taken up by barking dogs, muttering bums, music, traffic down windy streets, across parks and soccer fields. Illusion is a revolutionary weapon. To point out some specific uses of prerecorded cut/up tapes played back in the streets as a revolutionary weapon:

  To spread rumors

  Put ten operators with carefully prepared recordings out at the rush hour and see how quick the word gets around. People don’t know where they heard it but they heard it.

  To discredit opponents

  Take a recorded Wallace speech, cut in stammering coughs sneezes hiccoughs snarls pain screams fear whimperings apoplectic sputterings slobbering drooling idiot noises sex and animal sound effects and play it back in the streets subways stations parks political rallies.

  As a front line weapon to produce and escalate riots

  There is nothing mystical about this operation. Riot sound effects can produce an actual riot in a riot situation. Recorded police whistles will draw cops. Recorded gunshots, and their guns are out.

  “MY GOD, THEY’RE KILLING US.”

  A guardsman said later: “I heard the shots and saw my buddy go down, his face covered in blood (turned out he’d been hit by a stone from a sling shot) and I thought, well this is it.” BLOODY WEDNESDAY. A DAZED AMERICA COUNTED 23 DEAD AND 32 WOUNDED, 6 CRITICALLY.

  Here is a run of the mill, pre-riot situation. Protestors have been urged to demonstrate peacefully, police and guardsmen to exercise restraint. Ten tape recorders strapped under their coats, play back and record controlled from lapel buttons. They have prerecorded riot sound effects from Chicago, Paris, Mexico City, Kent, Ohio. If they adjust sound level of recordings to surrounding sound levels, they will not be detected. Police scuffle with the demonstrators. The operators converge. Turn on Chicago record, play back, move on to the next scuffles, record, play back, keep moving. Things are hotting up, a cop is down groaning. Shrill chorus of recorded pig squeals and parody groans.

  Could you cool a riot recording the calmest cop and the most reasonable demonstrators? Maybe! However, it’s a lot easier to start trouble than stop it. Just pointing out that cut/ups on the tape recorder can be used as a weapon. You’ll observe that the operators are making a cut/up as they go. They are cutting in Chicago, Paris, Mexico City, Kent, Ohio, with the present sound effects at random, and that is a cut/up.

  As a long range weapon to scramble and nullify associational lines put down by mass media

  The control of the mass media depends on laying down lines of association. When the lines are cut the associational connections are broken.

  President Johnson burst into a swank apartment, held three maids at gunpoint, 26 miles north of Saigon yesterday.

  You can cut the mutter line of the mass media and put the altered mutter line out in the streets with a tape recorder. Consider the mutter line of the daily press. It goes up with the morning papers, millions of people reading the same words, belching chewing swearing chuckling reacting to the same words. In dif
ferent ways, of course. A motion praising Mr. Callaghan’s action in banning the South African Cricket Tour has spoiled the colonel’s breakfast. All reacting one way or another to the paper world of unseen events which becomes an integral part of your reality. You will notice that this process is continually subject to random juxtaposition. Just what sign did you see in the Green Park station as you glanced up from the People) Just who called as you were reading your letter in the Times) What were you reading when your wife broke a dish in the kitchen? An unreal paper world and yet completely real because it is actually happening. Mutter line of the Evening News, TV. Fix yourself on millions of people all watching Jesse James or the Virginian at the same time. International mutter line of the weekly news magazine always dated a week ahead. Have you noticed it’s the kiss of death to be on the front cover of Time. Madam Nhu was there when her husband was killed and her government fell. Verwoerd was on the front cover of Time when a demon tapeworm gave the order for his death through a messenger of the same. Read the Bible, kept to himself, no bad habits, you know the type. Old reliable, read all about it.

  So stir in news stories, TV plays, stock market quotations, adverts and put the altered mutter line out in the streets.

  The underground press serves as the only effective counter to a growing power and more sophisticated techniques used by establishment mass media to falsify, misrepresent, misquote, rule out of consideration as a priori ridiculous or simply ignore and blot out of existence: data, books, discoveries that they consider prejudicial to establishment interest.

  I suggest that the underground press could perform this function much more effectively by the use of cut/up techniques. For example, prepare cut/ups of the ugliest reactionary statements you can find and surround them with the ugliest pictures. Now give it the drool, slobber, animal-noise treatment and put it out on the mutter line with recorders. Run a scramble page in every issue of a transcribed tape recorded cut/up of news, radio, and TV. Put the recordings out on the mutter line before the paper hits the stand. It gives you a funny feeling to see a headline that’s been going round and round in your head. The underground press could add a mutter line to their adverts and provide a unique advertising service. Cut the product in with pop tunes, cut the product in with advertising slogans and jingles of other products and syphon off the sales. Anybody who doubts that these techniques work has only to put them to the test. The techniques here described are in use by the CIA and agents of other countries. Ten years ago they were making systematic street recordings in every district of Paris. I recall the Voice of America man in Tangier and a room full of tape recorders and you could hear some strange sounds through the wall. Kept to himself, hello in the hall. Nobody was ever allowed in that room, not even a fatima. Of course, there are many technical elaborations like long-range directional mikes. When cutting the prayer call in with hog grunts it doesn’t pay to be walking around the market place with a portable tape recorder.

  An article in New Scientist June 4, 1970, page 470, entitled “Electronic Arts of Noncommunication” by Richard C. French gives the clue for more precise technical instructions.

  In 1968, with the help of Ian Sommerville and Antony Balch, I took a short passage of my recorded voice and cut it into intervals of one twenty-fourth of a second on movie tape—(movie tape is larger and easier to splice)—and rearranged the order of the 24th-second intervals of recorded speech. The original words are quite unintelligible but new words emerge. The voice is still there and you can immediately recognize the speaker. Also the tone of voice remains. If the tone is friendly, hostile, sexual, poetic, sarcastic, lifeless, despairing, this will be apparent in the altered sequence.

  I did not realize at the time that I was using a technique that has been in existence since 1881. . . . I quote from Mr. French’s article . . . “Designs for speech scramblers go back to 1881 and the desire to make telephone and radio communications unintelligible to third parties has been with us ever since.” . . . The message is scrambled in transmission and then unscrambled at the other end. There are many of these speech scrambling devices that work on different principles . . . “Another device which saw service during the war was the time division scrambler. The signal is chopped up into elements .005cm long. These elements are taken in groups or frames and rearranged in a new sequence. Imagine that the speech recorded is recorded on magnetic tape which is cut into pieces .02 cm long and the pieces rearranged into a new sequence. This can actually be done and gives a good idea what speech sounds like when scrambled in this way.”

  This I had done in 1968. And this is an extension of the cut/up method. The simplest cut/up cuts a page down the middle into four sections. Section 1 is then placed with section 4 and section 3 with section 2 in a new sequence. Carried further we can break the page down into smaller and smaller units in altered sequences.

  The original purpose of scrambling devices was to make the message unintelligible without the unscrambling code. Another use for speech scramblers could be to impose thought control on a mass scale. Consider the human body and nervous system as unscrambling devices. A common virus like the cold sore could sensitize the subject to unscramble messages. Drugs like LSD and Dim-N could also act as unscrambling devices. Moreover, the mass media could sensitize millions of people to receive scrambled versions of the same set of data. Remember that when the human nervous system unscrambles a scrambled message this will seem to the subject like his very own ideas which just occurred to him, which indeed it did.

  Take a card, any card. In most cases he will not suspect its extraneous origin. That is the run of the mill newspaper reader who receives the scrambled message uncritically and assumes that it reflects his own opinions independently arrived at. On the other hand, the subject may recognize or suspect the extraneous origin of voices that are literally hatching out in his head. Then we have the classic syndrome of paranoid psychosis. Subject hears voices. Anyone can be made to hear voices with scrambling techniques. It is not difficult to expose him to the actual scrambled message, any part of which can be made intelligible. This can be done with street recorders, recorders in cars, doctored radio and TV sets. In his own flat if possible, if not in some bar or restaurant he frequents. If he doesn’t talk to himself, he soon will do. You bug his flat. Now he is really round the bend hearing his own voice out of radio and TV broadcasts and the conversation of passing strangers. See how easy it is? Remember the scrambled message is partially unintelligible and in any case he gets the tone. Hostile white voices unscrambled by a Negro will also activate by association every occasion on which he has been threatened or humiliated by whites. To carry it further you can use recordings of voices known to him. You can turn him against his friends by hostile scrambled messages in a friend’s voice. This will activate all his disagreements with that friend. You can condition him to like his enemies by friendly scrambled messages in enemy voices.

  On the other hand the voices can be friendly and reassuring. He is now working for the CIA, the GPU, or whatever, and these are his orders. They now have an agent who has no information to give away and who doesn’t have to be paid. And he is now completely under control. If he doesn’t obey orders they can give him the hostile voice treatment. No, “They” are not God or super technicians from outer space. Just technicians operating with well-known equipment and using techniques that can be duplicated by anybody else who can buy and operate this equipment.

  To see how scrambling technique could work on a mass media scale, imagine that a news magazine like Time got out a whole issue a week before publication and filled it with news based on predictions following a certain line, without attempting the impossible, giving our boys a boost in every story and the Commies as many defeats and casualties as possible, a whole issue of Time formed from slanted prediction of future news. Now imagine this scrambled out through the mass media.

  With minimal equipment you can do the same thing on a smaller scale. You need a scrambling device, TV, radio, two video cameras, a
ham radio station and a simple photo studio with a few props and actors. For a start you scramble the news all together and spit it out every which way on ham radio and street recorders. You construct fake news broadcasts on video camera. For the pictures you can use mostly old footage. Mexico City will do for a riot in Saigon and vice versa. For a riot in Santiago, Chile, you can use the Londonderry pictures. Nobody knows the difference. Fires, earthquakes, plane crashes can be moved around. For example, here is a plane crash, 112 dead north of Barcelona and here is a plane crash in Toronto 108 dead. So move the picture of the Barcelona plane crash over to Toronto and Toronto to Barcelona. And you scramble your fabricated news in with actual news broadcasts.

  You have an advantage which your opposing player does not have. He must conceal his manipulations. You are under no such necessity. In fact you can advertise the fact that you are writing news in advance and trying to make it happen by techniques which anybody can use. And that makes you NEWS. And a TV personality as well, if you play it right. You want the widest possible circulation for your cut/up video tapes. Cut/up techniques could swamp the mass media with total illusion.

  Fictional dailies retroactively cancelled the San Francisco earthquake and the Halifax explosion as journalistic hoaxes, and doubt released from the skin law extendable and ravenous, consumed all the facts of history.