The Electronic Revolution

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The Electronic Revolution
ElectronicRevolution.jpg
1971 Blackmoor Press paperback edition.
Author William S. Burroughs
CountryUnited Kingdom, West Germany
LanguageEnglish
Genre Essay collection
Publisher Expanded Media Editions
Publication date
1970
Media typePrint (Paperback)

The Electronic Revolution is an essay collection by William S. Burroughs that was first published in 1970 by Expanded Media Editions in West Germany. A second edition, published in 1971 in Cambridge, England, contained additional French translation by Henri Chopin.

Contents

The book is available in its entirety in later editions of The Job , a book of interviews conducted by Daniel Odier that elaborate on the topics contained therein, and was also published by online services. [1]

The book

The book is divided into two parts.

Part one, entitled "The Feedback from Watergate to the Garden of Eden" invokes Alfred Korzybski’s views characterising man as "the time binding machine" due to his ability to write. Burroughs sees the significance of a written word as a distinguishing feature of human beings which enables them to transform and convey information to future generations. He proposes the theory of "the unrecognised virus" present in the language, suggesting that, "the word has not been recognised as a virus because it has achieved a state of stable symbiosis with the host."

Part two, "Electronic Revolution" concerns the power of alphabetic non-pictorial languages to control people. It draws attention to the subversive influence of the word virus on humans and dangerous possibilities of using human voice as a weapon. Recording words on tape recorders and employing the Cut-up technique can easily lead to the false news broadcasts or garbled political speeches causing confusion and psychic control over individuals.

The basic idea of language as a virus has been widely used and quoted from several of Burroughs' interviews. Here is a passage from the text:

I suggest that the spoken word as we know it came after the written word. (...) we may forget that a written word is an image and that written words are images in sequence that is to say moving pictures. (...) My basis theory is that the written word was literally a virus that made the spoken word possible. Doktor Kurt Unruh von Steinplatz has put forward an interesting theory as to the origins and history of this word virus. He postulates that the word was a virus of what he calls biologic mutation effecting a biologic change in its host which was then genetically conveyed. One reason that apes cannot talk is because the structure of their inner throats is simply not designed to formulate words. He postulates that alteration in inner throat structure were occasioned by a virus illness ....

The referred German Doktor Kurt Unruh von Steinplatz is another of Burroughs' inventions.

Influence

The book influenced numerous musicians in the industrial music scene of the 1970s. Richard H. Kirk, of Cabaret Voltaire, employed many ideas and methods from the book, saying, “A lot of what we did, especially in the early days, was a direct application of his ideas to sound and music.” [2] He described it as "a handbook of how to use tape recorders in a crowd … to promote a sense of unease or unrest by playback of riot noises cut in with random recordings of the crowd itself." [2]

Related Research Articles

The cut-up technique is an aleatory literary technique in which a written text is cut up and rearranged to create a new text. The concept can be traced to at least the Dadaists of the 1920s, but was popularized in the late 1950s and early 1960s by writer William S. Burroughs, and has since been used in a wide variety of contexts.

Henri Chopin was an avant-garde poet and musician.

A meme is an idea, behavior, or style that spreads by means of imitation from person to person within a culture—often with the aim of conveying a particular phenomenon, theme, or meaning represented by the meme. A meme acts as a unit for carrying cultural ideas, symbols, or practices, that can be transmitted from one mind to another through writing, speech, gestures, rituals, or other imitable phenomena with a mimicked theme. Supporters of the concept regard memes as cultural analogues to genes in that they self-replicate, mutate, and respond to selective pressures.

Memetics is the study of information and culture based on an analogy with Darwinian evolution. Proponents describe memetics as an approach to evolutionary models of cultural information transfer. Memetics describes how an idea can propagate successfully, but doesn't necessarily imply a concept is factual. Critics contend the theory is "untested, unsupported or incorrect".

Whole language

Whole language is a defunct philosophy of reading that is based upon the premise that learning to read English, especially for young children, comes naturally to humans in the same way that learning to speak develops naturally. Whole Language approaches to reading instruction are typically contrasted with phonics based methods of teaching reading and writing.

Guarani language Tupian language spoken in Paraguay, Argentina, Brazil, and Bolivia

Guarani specifically the primary variety known as Paraguayan Guarani, is an indigenous language of South America that belongs to the Tupi–Guarani family of the Tupian languages. It is one of the official languages of Paraguay, where it is spoken by the majority of the population, and where half of the rural population is monolingual. It is spoken by communities in neighboring countries, including parts of northeastern Argentina, southeastern Bolivia and southwestern Brazil, and is a second official language of the Argentine province of Corrientes since 2004; it is also an official language of Mercosur.

Noise music is a category of music that is characterised by the expressive use of noise within a musical context. This type of music tends to challenge the distinction that is made in conventional musical practices between musical and non-musical sound. Noise music includes a wide range of musical styles and sound-based creative practices that feature noise as a primary aspect.

Sound poetry is an artistic form bridging literary and musical composition, in which the phonetic aspects of human speech are foregrounded instead of more conventional semantic and syntactic values; "verse without words". By definition, sound poetry is intended primarily for performance.

Dual-coding theory, a theory of cognition, was hypothesized by Allan Paivio of the University of Western Ontario in 1971. In developing this theory, Paivio used the idea that the formation of mental images aids in learning. According to Paivio, there are two ways a person could expand on learned material: verbal associations and visual imagery. Dual-coding theory postulates that both visual and verbal information is used to represent information. Visual and verbal information are processed differently and along distinct channels in the human mind, creating separate representations for information processed in each channel. The mental codes corresponding to these representations are used to organize incoming information that can be acted upon, stored, and retrieved for subsequent use. Both visual and verbal codes can be used when recalling information. For example, say a person has stored the stimulus concept "dog" as both the word 'dog' and as the image of a dog. When asked to recall the stimulus, the person can retrieve either the word or the image individually, or both simultaneously. If the word is recalled, the image of the dog is not lost and can still be retrieved at a later point in time. The ability to code a stimulus two different ways increases the chance of remembering that item compared to if the stimulus was only coded one way.

<i>The "Priest" They Called Him</i> extended play by William S. Burroughs

The "Priest" They Called Him is a collaboration between the American novelist William S. Burroughs and musician Kurt Cobain. On the piece, Cobain provides noisy, discordant guitar backing based on "Silent Night" and "To Anacreon in Heaven" to Burroughs' deadpan reading. Originally released as a limited edition 10-inch picture disc on Tim/Kerr Records in 1993, it was subsequently re-released on CD and 10-inch vinyl.

<i>Exterminator!</i> book by William S. Burroughs II

Exterminator! is a short story collection written by William S. Burroughs and first published in 1973. Early editions label the book a novel. It is not to be confused with The Exterminator, another collection of stories Burroughs published in 1960 in collaboration with Brion Gysin.

In generative linguistics, a lexis or lexicon is the complete set of all possible words in a language (vocabulary). In this sense, child, children, child's and children's are four different words in the English lexicon. In systemic-functional linguistics, a lexis or lexical item is the way one calls a particular thing or a type of phenomenon. Since a lexis from a systemic-functional perspective is a way of calling, it can be realised by multiple grammatical words such as "The White House", "New York City" or "heart attack". Moreover, since a lexis is a way of calling, different words such as child, children, child's and children's may realise the same lexical item.

The Nova Trilogy or The Cut-up Trilogy is a name commonly given by critics to a series of three experimental novels by William S. Burroughs.

In philosophy, the computational theory of mind (CTM) refers to a family of views that hold that the human mind is an information processing system and that cognition and consciousness together are a form of computation. Warren McCulloch and Walter Pitts (1943) were the first to suggest that neural activity is computational. They argued that neural computations explain cognition. The theory was proposed in its modern form by Hilary Putnam in 1967, and developed by his PhD student, philosopher and cognitive scientist Jerry Fodor in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s. Despite being vigorously disputed in analytic philosophy in the 1990s due to work by Putnam himself, John Searle, and others, the view is common in modern cognitive psychology and is presumed by many theorists of evolutionary psychology. In the 2000s and 2010s the view has resurfaced in analytic philosophy.

Stone Tape theory about ghosts

The Stone Tape theory is the speculation that ghosts and hauntings are analogous to tape recordings, and that mental impressions during emotional or traumatic events can be projected in the form of energy, "recorded" onto rocks and other items and "replayed" under certain conditions. The idea draws inspiration and shares similarities with views of 19th-century intellectualists and psychic researchers, such as Charles Babbage, Eleonor Sidgwick and Edmund Gurney. Contemporarily, the concept was popularized by a 1972 Christmas ghost story called The Stone Tape, produced by the BBC. Following the play's popularity, the idea and the term "stone tape" were retrospectively and inaccurately attributed to the British archaeologist turned parapsychologist T. C. Lethbridge, who believed that ghosts were not spirits of the deceased, but were simply non-interactive recordings similar to a movie.

In philosophical discourse, lexis is a complete group of words in a language, vocabulary, the total set of all words in a language, and all words that have meaning or a function in grammar.

This is a bibliography of the works of William S. Burroughs.

Linguistics is the scientific study of language. It involves analysing language form, language meaning, and language in context. Linguists traditionally analyse human language by observing an interplay between sound and meaning. Linguistics also deals with the social, cultural, historical and political factors that influence language, through which linguistic and language-based context is often determined. Research on language through the sub-branches of historical and evolutionary linguistics also focuses on how languages change and grow, particularly over an extended period of time.

<i>Call Me Burroughs</i> 1965 studio album by William S. Burroughs

Call Me Burroughs is a spoken word album by Beat Generation author William S. Burroughs, which was released on LP by The English Bookshop, Paris, in June 1965, and then issued in the United States by ESP-Disk, New York, in 1966. Rhino Word Beat reissued the album on Compact Disc in 1995, the company's first ever reissue.

Barsoomian is the constructed language of the fictional Barsoomians, the sapient humanoid inhabitants of Mars in the Barsoom series of novels by Edgar Rice Burroughs. It was developed from Burroughs' examples and descriptions by Paul Frommer for the 2012 film John Carter of Mars; Frommer also created the Na’vi language for Avatar.

References

  1. ubu.com: UbuWeb Historical: William S. Burroughs, obtained May 21, 2019
  2. 1 2 Robinson, Edward S. (9 May 2011). "Nothing Here Now But the Lost Recordings". Reality Studio. Retrieved 26 February 2012.