Burroughs on How to Escape the Society of Control

thanks to Sean Storm

Te Ipu Pakore: The Broken Vessel

In « Electronic Revolution, » whence Gilles Deleuze got his idea of the « control society, » William S. Burroughs writes about how we can scramble the control society grammatically (see Ubuweb for the essay in full):

The aim of this project is to build up a language in which certain falsifications inherit in all existing western languages will be made incapable of formulation. The follow-falsifications to be deleted from the proposed language. (« ER » 33)

Why? As he puts it elsewhere,

There are certain formulas, word-locks, which will lock up a whole civilisation for a thousand years. (The Job 49)

To unscramble control syntax, the DNA precode of the language virus,

1. delete the copula (is/are), i.e., disrupt fixed identities – YOU ARE WHAT YOU ARE NOT [Lacan]!
2. replace definite articles (the) with indefinite articles (a/an), i.e., avoid reification — THERE EXIST MULTIPLICITIES [Badiou]!

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