Notes on Burroughs By Marshall McLuhan (1964). 1. Today mens nerves surround us; they have gone outside as electrical environment. The human nervous system itself can be reprogrammed biologically as readily as any radio network can alter its fare. Burroughs has dedicated Naked Lunch to the first proposition, and Nova Express (both Grove Press) to the second. Naked Lunch records private strategies of culture in the electric age. Nova Express indicates some of the corporate responses and adventures of the Subliminal Kid who is living in a universe which seems to be someone elses insides. Both books are a kind of engineers report of the terrain hazards and mandatory processes, which exist in the new electric environment.
2. Burroughs uses what he calls Brion Gysins cut-up method which I call the fold-in method. To read the daily newspaper in its entirety is to encounter the method in all its purity. Similarly, an evening watching television programs is an experience in a corporate form an endless succession of impressions and snatches of narrative. Burroughs is unique only in that he is attempting to reproduce in prose what we accommodate every day as a commonplace aspect of life in the electric age. If the corporate life is to be rendered on paper, the method of discontinuous nonstory must be employed. 3. That man provides the sexual organs of the technological world seems obvious enough to Burroughs, and such is the stage (or biological theatre as he calls it in Nova Express) for the series of social orgasms brought about by the evolutionary mutations of man and society. The logic, physical and emotional, of a world in which we have made our environment out of our own nervous systems, Burroughs follows everywhere to the peripheral orgasm of the cosmos. more... http://realitystudio.org/criticism/notes-on-burroughs/ -------------------------------------------------------------------- myhosting.com - Premium Microsoft® Windows® and Linux web and application hosting - http://link.myhosting.com/myhosting _______________________________________________ NetBehaviour mailing list [email protected] http://www.netbehaviour.org/mailman/listinfo/netbehaviour
