DEMONOLOGY
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refreshing and expanding consciousness. "Cut-ups establish new con–
nections between images, and one's range of vision consequently ex–
pands." Expands into what? One might have thought that a careful
reading of the original
Lord Jim
might do more for one's conscious–
ness than boggling away at a cut-up of it-but clearly Burroughs has
something different in mind. His attack is really on the whole method
of constructing meanings, particularly in the Western world. He
thinks that the "straight declarative sentence" has been a great
error in Western thought; he defines it as "the whole either-or proposi–
tion." "Either-or thinking is just not accurate thinking. That's not the
way things occur, and I feel the Aristotelian construct is one of the
great shackles of Western civilization. Cut-ups are a movement
toward breaking this down." Now as a matter of fact all "meanings"
work by exclusion: to make a proposition (and even the most primi–
tive language is so structured as to enable its speakers to make proposi–
tions) is precisely
not
to capitulate to "the way things occur" but to
isolate and identify single factors. Otherwise we can never emerge
from what William James called the great "booming chaos which
is the child's world." Perhaps we should look at it this way. For Bur–
roughs, cut-ups destroy old constructs of reality, but they also help
us to develop a new mode of consciousness, a way of responding
which has little to do with the causal unilinear structure of Western
thought, but which has more in common with "hieroglyph systems"
and "the Chinese ideographs" and, most revealingly, random photo–
graphs of street scenes. What Burroughs wants is "blocks of associa–
tions" rather than lines of thought (not so new at that, if you think
of Pound and FenelIosa). His battle, then, is mainly with the old use
of words. "Words, at least the way we use them, can stand in the
way of what I call non-body experience. It's time we thought about
leaving the body behind." Cut-ups can induce a resistant silence,
and then expedite a release into a totally new state of awareness which
presumably will make us invulnerable to the hostile forces with their
lumbering old-fashioned weapons for invading and subduing the
human consciousness.
The ideas are interesting enough, but the question remains: what
is the effect of the direct application of
his
theories, what does the
practice reveal? Is the demolition of meaning involved in the cut-up
method purposive and positive, or does it smack of the taste of a
