Burroughs on How to Escape the Society of Control

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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