Conclusion—
Burroughs's Fin de Siècle:
Listen to My Last Words Everywhere

Generally, the writing we call "literary" is an activity carried on in private, in offices, libraries, apartments, and homes. The "literary" writer works, for the most part, in social, if not imaginary, solitude. The few chances the writer gets to perform in public, before a mass of people, are limited to polite readings at colleges, bookstores, and "cultural centers," or critical discussions at more or less academic conferences. If a contemporary literary writer is particularly renowned or influential, she may be the subject of a documentary film shot on a shoestring budget for screening at a few "art" cinemas in the major cities, or perhaps broadcast on public television. Rarely, a literary writer may sell one or more of her books to movie producers and allow them to create film versions of her writing, but this usually happens only after the writer's death and is negotiated by her estate. In the U.S., the writer and the other mass media intersect fleetingly, tangentially, because the media have their own privileged aesthetic creators; in smaller cultural "markets" like France,^[1] it has been easier for literary writers to gain wide access to the media, but the audience they reach is also commensurately smaller. This chasm between the writer and the media is both the cause and the result of the mutual hostility with which they often regard one another: the technological media strive to efface the traces of text—scripts or lyrics—that provide them with narrative motion and closure, while "Most serious writers refuse to make themselves available to the things that technology is doing."^[2]

In light of this near-total separation, what are we to make of William S. Burroughs's ubiquity in the mass media? For if his imperative, in the overture to Nova Express, to "Listen to my last words anywhere" (NE 11) once partook of the black irony of a lost revolutionary slogan buried under centuries of ideology, it now appears to be a quite adequate description of a very real cultural conjunction. Burroughs may still be an interloper in the academy, but he has become a crucial figure on the popular scene. Readers familiar with Burroughs's "media presence" may wish to skip ahead a few pages; the list that follows is intended merely to document the extent of that "presence." I have already discussed David Cronenberg's film version of Naked Lunch, released by Twentieth-Century Fox in 1991. Burroughs has been the subject of at least two documentary films, Howard Brookner's 1980 Burroughs and Klaus Maeck's 1991 Commissioner of Sewers . He has also acted in narrative films, both successful (Gus Van Sant's 1989 Drugstore Cowboy ) and unsuccessful (Conrad Rooks's 1966 Chappaqua ), as well as several cult films and videos (Michael Almereyda's 1989 Twister, David Blair's 1993 Wax, or the Discovery of Television Among the Bees ). Burroughs has also made films himself, in collaboration with the late British director Antony Balch; they produced five important short experimental films in the mid-sixties, Towers Open Fire, The Cut-Ups, Ghosts at No. 9, Bill and Tony, and William Buys a Parrot, as well as a strange "reconstruction" of an old Swedish film on witchcraft, Witchcraft through the Ages (Häxan) . During the same period, Burroughs was also experimenting with the cut-up potential of tape recording, and he subsequently released albums of such experiments (Nothing Here Now But the Recordings, Break Through in Grey Room ).^[3]Break Through in Grey Room also contains Burroughs's tapes of renowned free jazz saxophonist Ornette Coleman improvising with the Master Musicians of Jajouka in Morocco during a visit there; Coleman would later provide some of the music for the Naked Lunch film.^[4]

Like many writers in this century, Burroughs has released sound recordings of his readings (Call Me Burroughs, Ali's Smile, and The Doctor is on the Market, as well as tracks on many of John Giorno's "Giorno Poetry Systems" records through the eighties),^[5] but he has also collaborated with contemporary musicians from a variety of idioms on what we might call "text settings," musical compositions built around Burroughs's readings or conversations. His collaborators in these settings constitute a virtual Who's Who of the contemporary popular avantgarde: Laurie Anderson (songs and videos from Mister Heartbreak and

Home of the Brave ); Gus Van Sant (The Elvis of Letters ); Bill Laswell and Material (Seven Souls and Hallucination Engine ); Hal Willner, Donald Fagen, John Cale, and Sonic Youth (Dead City Radio ); Ministry (the single and video Just One Fix ); Willner and the Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy (Spare Ass Annie and Other Tales ); the late Kurt Cobain of Nirvana (The "Priest" They Called Him ); and R.E.M. (a version of the band's "Star Me Kitten" on the compilation Songs in the Key of X ). Burroughs also provided "texts" for director Robert Wilson (of Einstein on the Beach fame) and singer Tom Waits to use in their a stage version of Der Freischütz (the folktale rather than the Carl Maria von Weber opera).^[6] We should also recall Burroughs's contribution of texts and images to a collaboration with the late Keith Haring, as well as his own successful exhibitions of abstract painting, starting with a 1987 show at the Tony Shafrazi Gallery in New York and culminating in a major retrospective show at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 1996.^[7]

If we expand our horizon to include popular works directly influenced by Burroughs's ideas or techniques, we can survey an even broader range of artifacts. Gus Van Sant's follow-up to Drugstore Cowboy, the film My Own Private Idaho (1991), was scripted by using the cut-up technique to incorporate scenes from Shakespeare's Henry IV into a Burroughsian drama of young male hustlers. Mick Jagger used similar techniques to write the words to "Memo from Turner."^[8] Laurie Anderson has appropriated Burroughs's claim that "Language is a virus from outer space" and turned it into a song (in her performance piece United States, 1979–1983). Three important rock bands of the late sixties and seventies, linked otherwise only by their common reliance on improvisation, are named in homage to Burroughs: Donald Fagen's urbane jazz-rock assemblage Steely Dan, named after a memorable series of dildoes in Naked Lunch (NL 91), and Robert Wyatt's two art-rock ensembles, Soft Machine and Matching Mole (a pun on the French for "Soft Machine," machine molle ), named after the first volume of the Nova trilogy. The almost-forgotten Insect Trust and Grant Hart's not-yet-successful band Nova Mob are also named for villains in that trilogy. Some critics even trace the origin of the term "heavy metal," originally a chemical term for radioactive elements but now most often used to describe heavily amplified blues-based rock that generally relies on fantastic or surrealistic imagery, to Burroughs's metaphorical usage of the phrase in the Nova trilogy.^[9]

Then there are the homages, the testimonials both direct and indirect to Burroughs's influence. The late British filmmaker Derek Jarman made

Pirate Tape (1982), a slight, gentle film documenting one of Burroughs's reading trips to England, and The Dream Machine (1984), a strikingly graphic realization of the ideas and techniques of Burroughs and Brion Gysin; both films feature Burroughs voice-overs. The Velvet Underground's Lou Reed, who said that he "had gone out and bought Naked Lunch as soon as it was published" and that he "felt that Junky was [Burroughs'] most important book because of the way it says something that hadn't been said before so straightforwardly," composed the tongue-in-cheek "Lonesome Cowboy Bill" in Burroughs's honor,^[10] while 10,000 Maniacs presented a bittersweet (and rather pretentious) homage to Burroughs and Ginsberg as well as Kerouac in their song "Hey Jack Kerouac" (on In My Tribe ). Bob Dylan has also paid tribute to Burroughs and Ginsberg as two of his own literary antecedents. Clearly, the range of Burroughs's influence is vast, even if we confine ourselves, as we have here, to nontextual media.

Is this ubiquity really, as Burroughs ironically suggests, just one of "the things that can happen if you live long enough"?^[11] If he's right, why haven't other "old writers," like Saul Bellow, Norman Mailer, or Doris Lessing (to pick names more or less at random), benefited from this perk of longevity? On the other hand, could this ubiquity be completely anomalous, something that has accrued to Burroughs by virtue of some singular aspect of his work or public persona? This explanation doesn't appear to be adequate, either, because other writers, like Allen Ginsberg, Ishmael Reed, and Alice Walker, have achieved some degree of presence in the popular media,^[12] though not as broad-based a presence as Burroughs has. The schism would appear to be generational if we left Burroughs out of it: in direct opposition to his ironic suggestion, we might guess that older writers, with the exception of Burroughs, have not forged relations to other media, while slightly younger ones have. Stylistic maturity is a better measure, though: writers who came to prominence from the late fifties through the early seventies have built connections to other media, while writers who matured earlier have remained for the most part tied to the more traditional forms of media intervention (journal and newspaper articles, printed interviews).

To suggest that Burroughs's career presents a new paradigm for the writer's active, shaping involvement with other mass media (as opposed to the passive, constrained involvement characteristic of older writers) would be premature, but to offer a detailed analysis of his own involvement is, if anything, long overdue. A discussion of Burroughs's influence on other artists with whom he has not actually worked is beyond the

scope of the present study, as is a comprehensive analysis of the cameo appearances he has made in others' works (though I will address perhaps his strangest appearance at the end of this conclusion), but I can consider in detail the media projects that represent active collaborations between Burroughs and his admirers in the two extratextual domains on which he has focused: film and sound (comprising both music and speech). Collaboration has long served Burroughs as a method of escaping from the tyranny of the individual subject, a way to create a "third mind" superior to the minds of the collaborators.^[13] The considerations that follow will demonstrate that Burroughs's collaborative work in extratextual forms is not peripheral or tangential to his long-standing literary concerns, but is rather both the necessary condition and the consequence of those concerns. Burroughs's filmic and musical works articulate a radical theory of deixis that remains implicit in his literary works, and in so doing they reveal the nontextual ground of his critiques of language and society at the same time as they carry out the imperatives of those critiques.

As I have noted at intervals throughout this study, film has been a controlling concept and metaphor in Burroughs's writing from the very beginning. From the equivocal morphine "scripts" of Junky through the Reality Studio of The Soft Machine to the Ren Film Director of The Western Lands, Burroughs has relied upon the immense figurative potential of film; indeed, he wrote two books labeled explicitly (perhaps ironically) as screenplays: The Last Words of Dutch Schultz: A Fiction in the Form of a Film Script and Blade Runner, a Movie .^[14] Nevertheless, Burroughs's literal ventures into filmmaking have never been given serious consideration by film critics or theorists, even though these films were often shown at the very same festivals that brought the works of other contemporary experimental filmmakers—including lyrical autobiographer Stan Brakhage and hermetic animator Harry Smith—to a relatively wide audience. For example, P. Adams Sitney's classic study Visionary Film contains no reference to or analysis of Burroughs's films, though it does quote Smith, who credits Burroughs with the realization that chance composition, like the cut-up and Smith's own permutational technique, "wasn't just chance . . . something was directing it."^[15] Because it was so directed, Burroughs's use of chance in the making of these films was, in his own words, "experimental in the sense of being something to do . . . . Not something to talk and argue about."^[16]

The composition of the films was not only "directed" by this "something," but also directed in a different sense: the late English director Antony Balch directed and photographed all of Burroughs's film collaborations. In the discussions that follow, we will analyze these collaborations in terms of Burroughs's contemporaneous theoretical concerns, rather than in terms of Balch's contributions to the enterprise, for two reasons. First, these films fit quite neatly into the categories and concepts that Burroughs was articulating in his other work (unlike Cronenberg's film of Naked Lunch, whose distortions of Burroughs's ideas can only be attributed to the director's dubious interpretive moves); therefore, the Balch films represent a closely convergent or sympathetic collaboration. Second, Balch does not seem to have produced any significant films on his own, beyond the Witchcraft reconstruction, which might have allowed us to judge the precise extent of his contribution to the Burroughs films (at least, none that are readily available for comparison). In short, the following discussion of Burroughs's collaborations with Balch will be necessarily reductive in that it will not be able to account in detail for Balch's contributions beyond the purely technical ones of shooting and editing. Burroughs's precise contributions to the collaborative film projects are therefore somewhat uncertain as well, though some points can be documented with precision.

Sitney's omission of Burroughs's and Balch's films from his survey may indicate simply his ignorance of them, but it is more probably the result of the structure of Sitney's argument: drawing on the phenomenological criticism of Paul de Man, Harold Bloom, and Annette Michelson, Sitney explicates the contours of a Romantic, "mythopoeic" American experimental cinema obsessed with self (and) perception, a cinematic tradition which is quite alien to Burroughs's enterprise, whether in literature or film. Burroughs and Balch are much closer to the "objective," nonphenomenological experimental cinema of the dadaists than to the lyrical subjectivity of Maya Deren or Brakhage. Indeed, Burroughs credits Zurich dadaist Tristan Tzara, among others, with the original invention of the cut-up technique.^[17] The absurdist juxtapositions and montage effects used by Burroughs and Balch to "cut word lines" in Towers Open Fire (1963) can be traced directly to Hans Richter's acausal flying derbies and self-serving tea sets in Vormittagsspuk (1927)—and perhaps ultimately to Georges Méliès's original discontinuity effects. Moreover, the permutation- and pattern-generating techniques that they employ in The Cut-Ups and Bill and Tony extend arguments on the relation of image to word first explored by Mar-

cel Duchamp—one of Burroughs's acknowledged aesthetic ancestors—in his Rousselian Anémic-Cinéma (1926).^[18]

Paradoxically, Burroughs's two last and shortest films with Balch, Bill and Tony and William Buys a Parrot (both 1963), are actually his simplest exercises in word-image manipulation, and each one constitutes a tidy little experiment with a single aspect of filmic material. The last and shortest, at ninety seconds, is William Buys a Parrot, which is simply a silent encounter between Burroughs and a young man who shows him a caged parrot (actually a cockatoo, I believe). The bird becomes agitated because of Burroughs's attention and the intrusion of the camera, at which point the film abruptly ends. There are no titles or credits. The film consists entirely of medium-length fixed camera shots (of Burroughs approaching a door and knocking on it, then chatting briefly with the young man who answers) and short, mobile hand-held camera shots (of Burroughs entering the garden where the bird is, for a drink, and of the bird becoming agitated). The film is in color, which, along with the unobtrusive editing, gives the same impression of "natural" narrative motion that commercial film and television montage do. The only aspect missing is the sound, which is precisely the point; this is Burroughs's and Balch's only soundless film. Sound, and more specifically speech, is the-matized, not only in the silent conversations that advance the "action" but in the bird's soundless agitation: the parrot is the bird that can speak like a human being. In this way, the film is drained of its expected content: we do not hear Burroughs converse with the parrot. In purely structural terms, the minimal narrative moves along quite well without words, however—as it would, Burroughs claims, with completely unrelated words dubbed in. The greetings and small talk that would move the film along are generic and can easily be provided by the viewer. This silent narrative's success depends, however, on the last unspoken words left in the film: the title. Though the title seems descriptive, it is not: Burroughs merely observes the parrot during the brief film; he does not purchase it. No money changes hands, and the parrot's cage remains on the garden table throughout. Its purchase, the purpose and implied narrative resolution of the film, must be inferred from or perhaps projected onto the film, but cannot be observed in it.

William Buys a Parrot demonstrates that even when silence eliminates the specific word—the external word of mundane narrative interaction that is susceptible to technical reproduction and animal mimicry—it leaves intact the general, generic, internal Word—the structural Word of addictive subjectivity that allows the viewer to provide her own

narration for this film. Bill and Tony demonstrates that deixis offers an even more useful weapon than silence against this tyranny of language.

Deixis is a "major site of subjectivity in language. . . . [D]eictic signs are created in and by an act of énonciation [utterance], as they exist only in relation to the 'here' and 'now' of the speaker/writer. . . . [D]eictics are double referential, indicating simultaneously the act of énonciation in which they were produced and the designated object(s), the nature of which can solely be determined within the context of the particular instance of discourse containing the deictic expression" (entry on "Énonciation/énoncé" in Makaryk, 541). Deictic signs include personal pronouns ("I," "you"), demonstratives ("here," "this"), adverbs of time ("now"), present-tense verbs, and even the definite article "the."^[19]Bill and Tony examines deixis just as simply and just as effectively as William Buys a Parrot examines silence: by reducing to a minimum the other aspects of film construction in order to isolate and exhaust the issue under consideration. Bill and Tony is shot in color, but there isn't much of it: Balch, in black turtleneck, and Burroughs, in brown suit alternating with black shirt, stand side by side against a flat black background. Only their heads and shoulders are visible. Neither man moves. Both stare fixedly at the camera while crisply enunciating their lines. After each recital, the film cuts immediately. This extreme restriction of visual images throws speech into high relief, and indeed it is speech that is the object of investigation here, as it was in William Buys a Parrot . The film is the only one by Burroughs and Balch shot in synchronous sound, though the synchronization is inconsistent. The opening shot finds Burroughs and Balch speaking in their own voices but swapping proper names: Bill says "I'm Tony," who is in London, while Tony says "I'm Bill," who is "in a 1920 movie," thereby thematizing the temporal disjunction implicit in representation. The second shot is a close-up on Burroughs's face as he recites, in his own voice, a section of a Church of Scientology training exercise about extricating one's "self" from one's head. The third shot returns to the two men side by side, who repeat their original greetings but reclaim their own names: Bill claims to be Bill, and Tony claims to be Tony. Shot four is a close-up on Balch's face as he recites, in his own voice, a carnival barker's routine about circus freaks. Shot five returns to the two men, who this time swap voices and names: Bill claims to be Tony using Tony's dubbed voice, while Tony claims to be Bill using Bill's. The sixth shot returns to the close-up on Burroughs, reciting the same Scientology text, but this time in Balch's dubbed voice. Shot seven finds the two men again greeting one another, using their own names, but each

other's dubbed voices. The final shot returns to the close-up on Balch reciting the same carnival routine, but this time in Burroughs's dubbed voice. The entire film lasts five minutes and twenty seconds, and has no titles or credits.

Clearly, the film is a combinatory apparatus for permuting its three variable elements to exhaustion: faces, voices, and names. It shares this permutational method, as well as its basic concern with image-word relations, with Duchamp's Anémic-Cinéma . In Duchamp's silent film, shots of rotating disks emblazoned with decentered patterns of nested circles (which give false impressions of depth) are intercut with shots of other disks on which are printed, in spiraling sentences of raised letters, sequences of French puns. These puns themselves are self-similar permutations, decentered linguistic circles doubling the visual ones; for example, the seventh sequence, "Avez vous déjà mis la moëlle de l'épée dans la poële de l'aimée? " ("Have you already put the sword's marrow in the lover's oven?"), shifts the consonants within the object noun phrases from "moëlle/épée " to "poële/aimée ." Another sequence, "Esquivons les ecchymoses des esquimaux aux mots exquis " ("Let us avoid the Eskimos' welts with exquisite words"), contains four permutations of its basic phonetic elements "es," "qui," and "mo ." The sounds, which cannot enter the film's silent world, can only be given different physical shapes (spellings) and changes in word order to produce statements that defy reference; one can treat them as sexual metaphors, as Sitney does, and then read them psychoanalytically, of course, but not all of the permuted phrases are as clearly symbolic as our first example. In any case, the unifying or centering element of each sentence, its sound, is excluded from the film just as the apparent visual depth of the other disks is necessarily excluded by the flatness of the screen.

The structure of Burroughs's and Balch's film is also double, though in a different way. First, with regard to the formal arrangement of shots, it falls into two parallel halves, each of which is composed of four shots: A1 B1 A1' C1 and A2 B2 A2' C2. A1 and A1' represent the two versions of the two-man shots in the first half, and A2 and A2' the two versions in the second half. Each shot is precisely the same length as its counterpart in the other half of the film (i.e., A1=A2, B1=B2, etc.), so the two halves are exactly the same length, two minutes and forty seconds. The break into halves is marked by the only singular, unrepeated event in the film: Balch's exaggerated pronunciation of the word "Cut!" at the end of shot C1, which is not repeated when Balch recites the same speech using Burroughs's dubbed voice in C2. This statement starts the procession

of shots over again. The second, superimposed structure arises from the differences between the content of the two halves rather than from their formal similarities. In the first half of the film, all of the voices are attached to the right faces, even though the names are swapped in the opening scene; in the second half, all of the voices are swapped and are never associated with the right faces, though again in the final two-man scene (shot seven), the names are correctly attributed. This second structure is symmetrical, specular rather than parallel like the first. The first structure is the structure of the face, the visual image of physical identity that remains the same, while the second is the structure of the word, as both voice and proper name, which is subject to displacement through quotation, alias, impersonation, and the editor's "cut." Recording technology makes the voice and the proper name as shifting—as deictic—as the personal pronoun "I"; in so doing, technology also sets the identity of the face adrift among conflicting names and voices. This is, of course, one of the central themes of Burroughs's writing as well. If Duchamp's film set meaning adrift by positing sound and depth of field as the unrepresentable meanings, the absent grounds of the silent film, then Burroughs and Balch have extended this drift by demonstrating that sound and depth—in this case, the voice and the subjective identity guaranteed by the proper name—are themselves as shifting and uncertain as words on a page or optical illusions.

Now that we understand that the basic issues involved in Burroughs's film collaborations are the same issues involved in his writing, but transposed into a different medium which extends his means of treating those issues, we can turn back to his earlier, more complex, and more ambitious films. Towers Open Fire (1963) is Burroughs's and Balch's earliest and best-known film, probably because of all his films it's the closest to a recognizably straightforward narrative. Burroughs composed the script for Towers Open Fire alone (and published it shortly after the film was completed), and his circle of friends constituted the entire cast and crew. Balch not only shot the film but appears briefly in it, as do Burroughs's sometime lover Ian Sommerville, the writer Alex Trocchi, and Burroughs's first "groupie," Michael Portman, who portrays the young man at the conclusion of the film. Though the narrative is obscured in a number of ways, it is an overstatement to claim, as Anne Friedberg does, that "There is no discernible structure—the shots are spliced together to follow the 'cut-up' strategy of disjunction."^[20] In broad outline, Towers Open Fire is actually a fairly simple story of a commando raid carried out by resistance fighters against the syndicates of verbal and image con-

trol. Truly disjunctive cut-ups are used more sparingly than relatively standard montage techniques. After the opening titles and credits (the only ones attached to any of these films), Burroughs's immobile face appears in close-up, as his voice recites a vicious and insinuating proposition: "Kid, what are you doing over there with the niggers and the apes? Why don't you straighten out and act like a white man? After all, they're only human cattle."^[21] Burroughs's face does not speak the words, but it is not until the next shot, of Burroughs dressed differently and standing at a conference table surrounded by blank-faced bureaucrats and hieroglyphic books and paintings, that we realize that the first Burroughs, the immobile face, was being addressed by the second, bureaucratic Burroughs.^[22] The first Burroughs is the resistance leader, like Hassan i Sabbah from the Nova trilogy, while the second is the syndicate chief, a version of Uranian Willy or Mr Bradly Mr Martin; this distinction is unclear during the first part of the film, but emerges at the climax.

Syndicate chief Burroughs describes resistance leader Burroughs as a telepathic "medium"—in other words, a writer, someone who can escape the prison of his addictive self through telepathic identification with others, as we discovered in Queer . This power allows him to descend into the material substratum of Towers Open Fire: the next shot shows Burroughs's hands conjuring over film canisters as his voice intones a spell to lock out the syndicates and send their curse back doubled. More footage of this conjuring is then intercut with shots of Gysin's projection of images onto human faces, shots of Balch masturbating, interference and noise bands on TV screens, and finally print pages being cut up as the out-of-sync soundtrack itself begins to break up: "Shift—cut—tangle—word lines." Newspaper headlines announcing the 1929 stock market crash appear, intercut with shots of milling crowds over which Burroughs, briefly seen talking on the phone, orders his minions to "sell fifty thousand units at arbitrary intervals." This is probably Burroughs the syndicate chief rather than the medium/resistance leader. Shots of Burroughs walking the streets, standing by a river, and visiting a zoo follow, including one shot which fakes a sound sync to the words "Dramatic relief from anxiety." As Burroughs's voice claims that "Anything that can be done chemically can be done in other ways," shots of Gysin's "dream machines," whirling columns that give off hypnotically shifting patterns of light, appear on screen. The dream machines recur at irregular intervals for the next several minutes, intercut with Burroughs's face and ruined buildings, as resistance leader Burroughs's voice-over insists that "I wrote your fading movie—feed in all the words you think

developed, pouring in the resistance message, handcutting dirty films here. . . ." As Burroughs injects himself with heroin on screen, his voice promises to "shatter the theatre—the ovens—your two-bit narrative line from Wallgreens."

The climax of the narrative nears as resistance leader Burroughs appears in camouflaged combat fatigues with a radio transmitter to his mouth. Another camouflaged commando (also Burroughs) who is carrying a toy rifle enters a room in the next shot, where he finds an alcove full of family photos arranged on shelves. The commando fires Ping-Pong balls from his rifle at the photos, scattering them. A very brief scene of people disappearing out of their clothes, which collapse to the ground (this episode is reminiscent of Richter's animated hats), leads back to Burroughs with the transmitter ordering "TOWERS OPEN FIRE!" Quick shots of microwave relay towers accompanied by "laser" sound effects follow; the towers' fire shatters the image continuities underlying the film, resulting in a six-second sequence of high-speed visual cut-ups. After another brief shot of Burroughs with his transmitter and another of TV interference, the conference table surrounded by bureaucrats reappears. One by one, syndicate chief Burroughs and his staff members are erased from the scene by interference and noise, leaving their hieroglyphic books and paintings to be blown off the table, out into the street, and into the mud and water by a whistling wind. After a brief moment of blank screen, a street scene appears: a young man dances a quick, goofy Charleston to some old jazz, then sits on the curb to smoke. He looks up and notices that the sky is filled with jagged blotches, hand-painted on the film. Middle Eastern music plays as we get a slow-motion mirror-image glimpse of the gun-toting commando. END appears; the total elapsed time is nine minutes, forty-eight seconds.

Clearly, Towers Open Fire is a libertarian science-fiction movie, a fairly simple morality play complicated by imaginary weapons, terroristic linguistic theories, and the doubling (or tripling) of the protagonist in the villain. Towers Open Fire is a condensed retelling of the Nova trilogy, in which cut-ups appear only at precise moments, such as the instant when the towers actually open fire. The resistance fighters, "breaking bounds by flicker" of dream machines rather than by chemical means, appear to prevail, destroying the "two-bit narrative line from Wall-greens" that creates despotic subjectivity and control, and in the process eliminating the syndicate controllers themselves. The young man dances in the streets in joy after the conflict, but the jagged blotches he sees in the sky imply that the victory may be short-lived. Indeed, the doubling

of Burroughs the resistance leader and Burroughs the syndicate chief implied as much from the very beginning: oppositional forces defined by binary conflict are liable to turn into each other, according to the dialectic of treason. As Bill and Tony demonstrates, the self is a manipulable surface effect of deeper conflicts and control structures, and has no more essential meaning than a deictic pronoun does. The mirrored doubling of the commando at the very end confirms this reversibility. Similarly, the shots of Burroughs conjuring the film canisters and "handcutting dirty films" reflexively reveal the film's central paradox: Towers Open Fire narrates the destruction of narrative as a form of control, but in so doing at least partially restores that defeated and dismembered narrative, as so many of Burroughs's earlier and later fictions do.

Burroughs's other two collaborations with Balch attempt to escape from that metanarrative impasse. Both The Cut-Ups and Ghosts at No. 9 (both made in 1963) extend the disjunctive cut-up technique, used sparingly in Towers Open Fire, to the entire film. Anne Friedberg succinctly describes the principles of The Cut-Ups' construction:

Cut-Ups has a more precisely planned structure [than Towers Open Fire ] for the cinematic transposition of the "cut-up" technique. Balch cut the original film into four pieces and hired an editor to perform the mechanical task of taking one foot of film from each roll (1—2—3—4). The one-foot segments were joined in consecutive and repeated 1—2—3—4 fashion. The only variation in shot length occurs when there is a shot change within the foot-long section.

The soundtrack, made by [Ian] Sommerville, Gysin, and Burroughs to the twenty-minute and four-second length, consists of four phrase units, read at different speeds, but always in the same order:

Yes. Hello.
Look at this picture.
Does it seem to be persisting?
Good. Thank you.^[23]

This strict avoidance of planned juxtaposition is very different from standard film montage techniques, which are generally guided at all times by the narrative in which they appear, or at least by recognizable principles of similarity or metonymy. Because of this strict structural approach, The Cut-Ups (and the quite similar Ghosts at No. 9 , constructed out of the same body of material but according to somewhat different constraints) has no definable narrative structure. Many micronarrative strands—such as the recurring scenes of Burroughs packing his bags to leave his apartment, Burroughs as doctor examining a young man, or Gysin producing a hieroglyphic painting—can be followed for a time, but

ultimately fail to connect in any simple way either with the shots that are "cut up" into them or with the shots that follow them.

The soundtrack offers us the only direct clue to an understanding of the film's specific details. Like the image track, the soundtrack is quadripartite and arranged in a fixed, repetitive order; two voices, Burroughs's and Gysin's, alternate in reciting the short phrases, sometimes so quickly that the recitations almost overlap. This soundtrack is a continuous cyclic address to the viewer. The first phrase of any cycle is the greeting "Yes. Hello," which signifies a new beginning that is simultaneously a repetition. Likewise, the fourth phrase concludes the four-phrase structure with an implicit farewell: "Good. Thank you." As Friedberg notes, these two verbal markers, along with the four-shot cycle of images, define the basic structural unit of the film, although sound and image are in no way synchronized. Each such unit is distinct in the particular content of its visual images and in the precise intonation of its voice-over, even as it is identical to the others in montage (i.e., order of numbered film sections) and in scripted words. The two middle phrases, however, provide us with a single interpretive clue, which, though small, can open up the specific meaning of The Cut-Ups . The second phrase is the imperative to "Look at this picture," in which the demonstrative (and deictic) adjective "this" draws the viewer's attention to the coincident visual image, whatever its specific content, as an image or "picture" in general . The imperative is followed by the interrogative statement "Does it seem to be persisting?" in which the pronoun "it" appears to refer back to the deictic "this picture" in the previous command. If the imperative has not sufficiently distanced the viewer from the flow of images, the question—with its veiled allusion to the "persistence of vision" that makes cinema possible—pushes reflexivity even further in an attempt to make the viewer recognize her own perceptive and associative processes.

Any specific answer to a specific instance of this question is more or less irrelevant because the purpose of the question is both diagnostic and didactic. This is why it is a yes/no question, and why it is invariably followed by the phrase "Good. Thank you" so often used by doctors, teachers, and other people who administer diagnostic (rather than evaluative) tests: every answer, regardless of its specific content, is a good answer because it reveals something about the test-taker, who is in this case the viewer. The question is didactic because it is intended to make the viewer ask, in turn, why a particular "picture" persists (an answer of "yes") while a different one fails to persist ("no"). What causes a particular picture to stay in the mind and influence later perceptions, while other pic-

tures are almost immediately forgotten? In other words, what kinds of connection (if any) can be established between randomly juxtaposed images? The whole labor of the cut-up method—the key to its success or failure both in writing and in film—is contained in this question. Meaning does not reside in the images and words themselves, as the infinitely repeatable deictic imperative shows; the viewer must actively participate in the construction of meaning using the raw materials of the indexical signs provided by Burroughs and Balch. The associations that occur to the viewers (or readers), including the cutter himself, will create the meaning of the cut-up artifact spontaneously and idiosyncratically, but most definitely not subjectively: "Cutups [sic] establish new connections between images, and one's range of vision consequently expands ."^[24] In this the film differs from the conventional Rorschach ink blot test of subjective associations, to which cut-ups are often compared. It is not a question of revealing a preestablished identification of images, even an unconscious one, but of extending the internal difference revealed by the deixis of voice and word: connecting established associations with other, novel points of view to form a new and disjunct set of perspectives. Cut-ups are objective art. The cut-up is an objective form of what Burroughs called "telepathy" in Queer, and The Cut-Ups is a lesson in such telepathy that would be learned by many filmmakers later. Indeed, the entire MTV video aesthetic of rapid, narratively discontinuous cuts synchronized to an apparently unrelated soundtrack is prefigured in Burroughs's and Balch's film, though very few performers (with the exception of Sonic Youth and perhaps Ministry's Alain Jourgensen) seem to recognize this relation.

In The Third Mind (1978), the belated manifesto and theorization of the cut-up named for the idea that "when you put two minds together . . . there is always a third mind . . . as an unseen collaborator," Burroughs claims that "Cutting and rearranging a page of written words introduces a new dimension into writing enabling the writer to turn images in cinematic variation."^[25] Cinema, conceived in Burroughs's idiosyncratic way, is thus the theoretical foundation of textual cut-ups, rather than the reverse, and as such offers Burroughs an immediately accessible form through which to lead his audience to an understanding of his textual innovations. In 1965, when Conrad Knickerbocker asked Burroughs if he believed "that an audience can be eventually trained to respond to cutups," Burroughs replied, "Of course, because cutups make explicit a psychological process that is going on all the time anyway."^[26]The Cut-Ups, like The Job and the Mayfair "Academy" essay series of the early

seventies, acts as an overtly didactic exercise for such training in the cut-up method, and as such provides a good introduction to Burroughs's literary experiments. Barry Miles claims that "Ideally one would read the cut-up trilogy with Burroughs's cut-up tapes playing in the background, taking time off occasionally to examine a photo-collage or play Towers Open Fire or The Cut-Ups on the VCR" (Miles 157).

A brief look at Burroughs's tape-recorder experiments, on which he collaborated with Brion Gysin and Ian Sommerville at the same time as he was making films with Balch, can serve as a transition from his work in film to his musical collaborations. These experiments have been released on albums entitled Nothing Here Now But the Recordings and Break Through in Grey Room, the latter a cut-up phrase that recurs throughout Nova Express . Burroughs offers his own gloss on this phrase in his Paris Review interview:

I see that as very much like the photographic darkroom where the reality photographs are actually produced. Implicit in Nova Express is a theory that what we call reality is actually a movie. It's a film—what I call a biologic film. What has happened is that the underground and also the nova police have made a break-through past the guards and gotten into the darkroom where the films are processed, where they're in a position to expose negatives and prevent events from occurring.^[27]

This "break-through" takes several forms, including the cut-up method of literary and filmic composition that I have just discussed. Burroughs's tape recorder experiments are given this group title to emphasize their importance in his own "break-through past the guards" to the apparatus of control, the "word-and-image banks" of the mass media that preprogram the future according to the past. The experimental tapes are the results of several different techniques: the drop-in method, in which new sounds are recorded—"dropped in"—over sections of an already existing recording, creating new juxtapositions; permutation, in which a phrase composed of discrete words is rearranged to exhaust all the possible orders of terms; "inching," in which the tape is moved manually, and thus irregularly, across the head of the recorder while an audible signal is being recorded; and the simultaneous recording of several sources, generally broadcast media. Some of these techniques, like permutation and "inching," parallel the contemporary work of electronic music pioneers such as Karlheinz Stockhausen (in "Gesang der Junglinge," a manipulation of synthetic sounds and children's voices

reciting passages from Daniel 3:21–27), Luciano Berio (in "Thema," a permutation of the overture to "Sirens" from Joyce's Ulysses ), or Milton Babbitt (in "Philomel," the transformation of a female voice into a synthetic sound and vice versa), and of musique concrète composers such as Pierre Schaeffer and Pierre Henry (in "Variations pour une Porte et un Soupir," the orchestration and manipulation of two nonmusical sounds).^[28] The first technique, the "drop-in," and the last one, overlapping sources, like the cut-up writing method from which they derive, provide an important precursor to the kind of sampling that would become ubiquitous in the eighties and nineties.

"Silver Smoke of Dreams" on Break Through in Grey Room shows how the drop-in method can produce quite lyrical effects, similar to that of the children's voices in Stockhausen's "Gesang," even though it does not always produce intelligible phrases. Burroughs's and Ian Sommerville's voices, reciting imagistic passages from the last pages of The Ticket That Exploded, interrupt each other at short and irregular intervals, often in the middle of words. The interruption usually results in a rapid modulation of timbre as Burroughs's sharp tenor gives way to Sommerville's more diffuse one; when the drop-in occurs in the middle of a word, it often creates an unarticulable phonetic sound reminiscent of dadaist Kurt Schwitter's phonetic symphony, the Ursonate, and of Berio's technically demanding "Sequenza" for solo voice. "Sound Piece," constructed by Sommerville with Burroughs's theoretical guidance, makes use of the inching technique to produce a sonic assemblage that also sounds, in places at least, very much like some of the electronic work of Stockhausen and Babbitt. Sommerville's manual movement of the tape over the recording head shortens, elongates, and distorts the vocal sounds that are being recorded, at some points shortening or lengthening them beyond recognition. The human voices are transformed into rapid electronic vibratos, quavering up and down in pitch much like Babbitt's Philomel as she turns into an electronic nightingale. Brion Gysin's piece "Recalling All Active Agents," produced in the BBC's London studios, runs through all the intelligible permutations of the order of its five component words ("Recalling" is divided in two, "re" and "calling"): "Calling all reactive agents," "Calling all active reagents," "Calling re: all active agents," and so on. Though it does not attempt to blur the distinction between speech, song, and electronic tone as Berio's "Thema" does, Gysin's piece does work from the same principles of permuted repetition.

Burroughs's objectives in his collaborative sound experiments are quite different from the objectives of the post-serial composers, however,

and closer to those of at least some of the guerrilla samplers brought to prominence in the wake of rap music's accession to the mainstream. Both Stockhausen and Babbitt found in the use of electronically generated and manipulated sounds a way for the composer to exert total control over his sonic material, to achieve a level of precision in the generation of tonal intervals and rhythmic patterns that would have been impossible to reach (or at least to maintain) with human players. From this point of view, electronic composition was an extension of the experiments in "total serialism" undertaken by Olivier Messiaen, Pierre Boulez, Babbitt, and others in the forties that sought to bring all the aspects of music under the direct (i.e., unmediated by the rules of tonal harmony or classical motivic development) control of the composer. Likewise, Henry and other advocates of musique concrète sought to reconstitute, on the basis of recorded natural sounds that could be manipulated electronically, the timbral variety and tonal harmony of the traditional human ensemble.^[29] Even Berio's work, which relies much more on the resources of traditional tonal constraints, calls for great virtuosity and technical control on the part of the performer. Burroughs, on the other hand, was working with the potential of tape recording to minimize or even eliminate conscious control over his material, as well as to prove that "Cut-ups are for everyone."^[30] His work is thus much closer to John Cage's Zen-inspired attempts to eliminate personality and intention from music by reducing the "composition" to a set of parameters that could be permuted in a large number of ways according to the whim of the performer. Indeed, Burroughs claims that "John Cage and Earle Brown have carried the cut-up method much further in music than I have in writing" (Burroughs and Odier 33). He differs from Cage primarily in his belief that the elimination of conscious intention gives access to unconscious knowledge and intent, the things "that we don't consciously know that we know," rather than the total elimination of the "I" or "we."^[31] The "I" is a deictic term, without essential meaning but given momentary meaning by its context; thus, it floats on a vast multiplicity of meanings contained within the words. These momentary meanings are freed by cut-ups and drop-ins. Burroughs's method is a fragmentation, extension, or multiplication, rather than a suppression, of the self.

This fragmentation/extension is quite clear in the extended tape cut-up "K-9 Was in Combat with the Alien Mind Screens" (1965), the first track on Break Through in Grey Room . With Sommerville's help, Burroughs recorded himself reading and also taped several radio and television news broadcasts (in those days, before inexpensive video record-

ing technology, media broadcasts were not specifically copyrighted, as they are now) and cut them into each other at random, producing in the process juxtapositions that have the continuous rhythm of actual sentences but which "refer" to events that never took place. An example that Burroughs often "quotes" elsewhere is the following, spoken in the generic voice of a television announcer: "Johnson, addressing a meeting of editorial cartoonists at the White House, held three maids at gunpoint, and proceeded to ransack the apartment." This sentence is the result of the chance juxtaposition of two separate source sentences, one of which provided the "Johnson . . . White House" phrase and the other of which provided the "held . . . apartment" phrase, yet thanks to the intentionally generic quality of the announcers' voices, the parts flow together perfectly to form a new sentence that was never actually spoken. Moreover, the new sentence is not simply a neutral description but, as Burroughs insists, a prediction or prophecy: "If you cut into the present, the future leaks out."^[32] Since the future lies in the present control over time and events maintained by the mass media, cutting the present media word-line will reveal the future. In this case, Lyndon Johnson's responsibility for the imperialist violence of the Vietnam War appears figured in his acts of robbery and the taking of working-class hostages. Similar effects dominate most of the other pieces on Break Through in Grey Room, especially "Present Time Exercises" and "Working with the Popular Forces."

According to Deleuze and Guattari (and other critics), this preprogrammed, mediatic future is in the subject but more than the subject—in other words, constitutive of the subject but beyond that subject's control. In trying to reveal this future, Burroughs's work becomes relevant to discussions of the metaphysics of sampling in dub, rap, and other forms of urban dance music of the late twentieth century. Burroughs's and Sommerville's "Sound Piece" not only hearkens back to the electronic works of Stockhausen and Babbitt, but also looks forward to the "scratch" techniques popularized by hip-hop deejays and rap technicians in the eighties. These techniques called for the deejay to spin records manually on turntables to repeat or "scratch" the sound, often so quickly that the original recorded sound became unrecognizable; this produces almost exactly the same effect that inching does, though the latter lacks the noise of record grooves that gives the former its name. Likewise, the drop-in technique used in "K-9" and elsewhere anticipates the practice of digital sampling and permutation that has become ubiquitous in rap production. When Burroughs advises artists to "steal freely" because "Words, colors, light,

sounds, stone, wood, bronze . . . belong to anyone who can use them" (Burroughs, Adding Machine 20–21), he denounces not only private property but the Romantic ideal of the artist as a creator of something "original," whose genius (unlike the labor power of the worker) cannot be alienated. The artist has always been a thief, a bricoleur, and never a creator ex nihilo. Burroughs practices such theft himself, in his writing and especially in his tape experiments, just as contemporary musicians practice sampling. Sampling dramatizes the highly unstable nature of cultural production in the present period: the system of copyrights and royalty payments that both supports and constrains the composer/musician is fundamentally threatened by the advent of sampling technology that allows others to "cite" and use the composer/musician's performance directly from any recording of that performance. This system is caught in a double bind, in that it depends on the mass reproduction of performances to extract profit, but it must restrict this constitutive reproducibility in order to protect that profit. This is the same situation Deleuze denounced in Platonism, the judgment in favor of the pious copy and against the simulacrum—such as the sample (Deleuze, Logic of Sense 253–66). Reproduction must be legitimated; copies must clearly pay their respects (and their royalties) to the original.

Perhaps the clearest statement of this central issue has been made by the rap group Public Enemy in their piece entitled "Caught, Can We Get a Witness?"^[33] The conceit, inspired by the group's run-ins with producers and performers whose works the group sampled, is that Public Enemy's leader Chuck D. has been "Caught, now in court 'cause I stole a beat." Accused of violating copyright, D.'s partner Flavor Flav insists that "beats"—that is, sampled sounds—are natural resources, not subject to private ownership, just as Burroughs claimed that artistic materials belong to anyone who can use them: "I found this mineral that I call a beat/I paid zero." The rappers recognize that this conflict, between their sampling and the fundamental property rights of other performers, calls into question the very existence of the court that claims to judge them:

Now, what in the heaven does a jury know about hell
If I took it, but they just look at me
Like, Hey I'm on a mission
I'm talkin' 'bout conditions
Ain't right sittin' like dynamite
Gonna blow you up and it just might
Blow up the bench and
Judge, the courtroom plus I gotta mention
This court is dismissed when I grab the mike^[34]

Of course, the very concept of private property, over which the court claims jurisdiction, is one of the court's own "conditions" of existence, as Chuck D says; thus the court can do nothing but uphold that concept against the rappers' challenge. The situation is what Deleuze would call a paradox, or what Jean-Franqois Lyotard would call a "differend," and thus the court is biased, not by virtue of any individual corruption but because of its founding premises.^[35] The court's decision is necessarily premised, not on rational argument, but on the violence of private appropriation. Public Enemy's practice of sampling demands a total rejection of this conception, and thus of the legal system premised upon it, as the group realizes. The issue here is not the dialectical transgression of theft, which would simply reinscribe the conception of property underlying American copyright law; rather, Public Enemy suggests that theft exists as such only within that dialectical horizon, so if the concept of property could be abolished, so would its transgression. They could actually "blow up the bench and judge the courtroom." One "steals" food in order to eat, not to reinforce the concept of private property; likewise, one "steals" words or beats in order to write or sing, not to replace another's ownership by one's own. Burroughs foresaw this development and its political ramifications thirty years ago, and would certainly endorse Public Enemy's perspective.

Conversely, Public Enemy would probably endorse the threat implicit in Burroughs's claim that "Sound can act as a painkiller. To date we do not have music sufficiently powerful to act as a practical weapon" (WL 136).^[36] This deficiency is not for want of trying, at least on Burroughs's part. Like film, music has often been a controlling figure in Burroughs's most powerful and aggressive writing; Port of Saints, in particular, is "structured like a musical composition, in fact, there are musical leads for every chapter" (Burroughs, "Interview with Allen Ginsberg"). As befits an avantgardist at the tail end of this most eclectic of centuries, Burroughs uses all types of music as figures in his writing, from the American national anthem through Jelly Roll Morton's "Dead Man Blues" to the Sex Pistols' "God Save the Queen." Moreover, he has also performed and collaborated with musicians from every progressive idiom. Without hoping to do full justice to all these collaborations, I will now outline the most significant features of Burroughs's forays into musical creation, as they relate to his overriding concerns.

Like most writers of his generation, Burroughs was exposed simultaneously to the established tradition of European concert music (already a marker of class distinction), the centrist popular songs of the early days of radio, and the culturally marginal improvisations of jazz during his years at Harvard in the early thirties; indeed, jazz figures in many of Burroughs's works as the accompaniment to his attacks on authority, while snatches of popular song—as well as parodies thereof—occupy the much less stable, ironic position of mediators between reversible social roles (like junky and narcotics agent). Nevertheless, Burroughs does not seem to have had a profound experience of or relation to music until the late fifties, when Brion Gysin introduced him to the music of the Master Musicians of Jajouka (a farming village in the Rif Mountains of northern Morocco), who would become the musical counterparts to the Wild Boys of Burroughs's literary mythology.

I first heard the music of the Master Musicians of Jajouka in Tangier in Brion Gysin's restaurant, "The 1001 Nights," in late 1957. . . . Just as I did not at first appreciate Brion's extraordinary personality, the music of Jajouka was lost on me at first hearing, in 1957. But in Paris a year later, Brion played me his tapes of the music and explained [Edward] Westermar[c]k's theory that the annual festival at Jajouka coinciding with the Moslem lunar calendar feast of Aid el Kebir was in fact a reenactment of the ancient Roman Rites of Pan, the Lupercalia, ensuring fertility and maintaining the age-old balance of power between men and women. And then at last I could hear the music, and understand. (Burroughs, Liner notes)

The Master Musicians are members of a "special caste exempt from farm work" who trace their lineage back thousands of years.^[37] Their music unrolls like an irregularly knotted rope of overlapping harmonies, dissonances, and rhythms, improvised on native wind, string, and percussion instruments. It conforms to no structure given in advance, but only to the momentary impulses of the performers. This freely structured music sounds utterly unlike most music of European descent, and its immediate use-value in the fertility rituals of Bou Jeloud marks its difference from generic, commodified Western musical forms. For Burroughs, it was a confirmation of his belief that order and form could arise spontaneously from the articulation of aesthetic material rather than being imposed on the material preemptively—in other words, that cut-ups could be a way of living for common people rather than just another class marker for a hermetic group of aesthetes. Thus, he often invokes the Master Musicians in contexts of revolutionary change, as he does in "Apocalypse," for example.

Not only did the Master Musicians provide Burroughs with an image of music freed from the binarism of European art music and African American folk music (and the hybrid popular songs that mediated this opposition)—and therefore with a conception of a culture freed from the parallel binarisms of control and "dogmatic verbal systems"—but they also provided him with the opportunity to make contact with some of the most influential musicians of his day. In 1970 Brion Gysin took Brian Jones of the Rolling Stones to hear the Master Musicians; Jones returned to record them shortly before his death, and Burroughs provided the liner notes to the resulting record. Later, in 1973, free jazz saxophonist Ornette Coleman traveled to Morocco to study with the Master Musicians during the festival of Bou Jeloud, in the same year that Burroughs accepted a magazine assignment to cover the festival (Morgan 457, Litweiler 150–53). Burroughs taped many of the performances and used them, as he had used Gysin's earlier recordings, in his own tape experiments. Fragments of these original recordings included on Coleman's album Dancing in Your Head^[38] and on Burroughs's album Break Through in Grey Room demonstrate that Coleman's music, "harmolodic" free jazz, is one of the few Western musical forms that bears a close resemblance to the Master Musicians' work. As John Litweiler notes, "Ornette's sound fits the context [of the Master Musicians' playing] perfectly, and his lines appear to be a broken commentary on the raitas' [Moroccan oboes'] melodies. The effect is of constant movement, and, on Ornette's part, continual response to the Master Musicians" (Litweiler 161). Coleman's performance with the Master Musicians seemed to Burroughs like "a 2000-year-old rock 'n' roll band. When the two forms met, this music from Punic times and modern jazz, it created a new frontier of sound" (Morgan 457–58), if not quite a practical weapon.

Coleman's innovations in jazz are analogous to Burroughs's innovations in writing, and occurred during the same period, the Cold War fifties. While Burroughs was challenging the parallel control structures of the State and syntax as well as the essentialist logic of the verb "to be" with discontinuous routines and cut-ups, Coleman was quietly but openly dismantling the rules of tonal harmony and chord changes that had dictated the entire prior development of jazz, from Scott Joplin's ragtime to Charlie Parker's bebop. In this, Coleman was playing the same role as Arnold Schönberg played in the history of European concert music, though without retreating from his own insight, as Schönberg had, to the ossified forms of that tradition.^[39] Echoing Burroughs's claim that "Nothing is true, everything is permitted," Coleman claims that "There

is a law in what I'm playing, but that law is a law that when you get tired of it you can change it."^[40] Coleman's work in free jazz corresponds to Schönberg's period of free atonality (or "pantonality," as Schönberg preferred to call it) preceding his discovery of twelve-tone composition. Out of this radical dismantling arose Coleman's own compositional principle, "harmolodics," succinctly described by Coleman's longtime colleague Don Cherry as "a profound system based on developing your ear along with your technical proficiency on your instrument. . . . We have to know the chord structure perfectly, all the possible intervals, and then play around it. . . . If I play a C and have it in my mind as the tonic, that's what it will become. If I want it to be a minor third or a major seventh that had a tendency to resolve upward, then the quality of the note will change" (Cherry quoted in Litweiler, 148). Each musician plays his own unconstrained, constantly mutating line, but in relation to the lines of the other players. Free jazz is not formless; rather, it generates many instantaneous forms, but "none of these forms existed before their relation to each other" (Coleman, Liner notes). Harmolodics, then, is a way for musicians and listeners to escape the restrictive demands of musical orthodoxy while remaining part of a performing and listening community, just as Burroughs's cut-ups are a way for readers and writers to escape from linguistic control into a shared radical fantasy. And just as Burroughs considered cut-ups "a psychological process that is going on all the time anyway," Coleman insists that harmolodics is "not supposed to be a secret; it's supposed to be something that anyone should be able to do" (Coleman quoted in Litweiler, 150).

The Master Musicians of Jajouka and Ornette Coleman are relevant to this study for other reasons than just because they provide suggestive analogies to Burroughs's literary work, however. The "new frontier of sound" evident in their music also forms the basis, at least indirectly, of the music on Burroughs's first (and still his most successful) collaborative musical recording. Before his work with Bill Laswell and Laswell's group Material, all of Burroughs's recordings were either unaccompanied readings of written texts or private tape recorder experiments; Seven Souls (1989), his first album with Material, represents his first full performance collaboration with musicians of any sort.^[41] The album's music is a particularly aggressive example of an increasingly popular style called, rather imprecisely, "world music." World music is the "frontier of sound," the bridge between European and non-European—especially Middle Eastern, African, and Latin American—musical forms, prefigured in Ornette Coleman's performances with the Master Musicians of

Jajouka, among others. Indeed, Laswell returned to Jajouka in 1991 to rerecord the Master Musicians for a sequel to the Brian Jones project. Combining European song structures and ensemble dynamics with Middle Eastern modal harmonies and instrumentation, Material's music provides an appropriate multicultural context for Burroughs's words.

The album consists of seven tracks, of which five contain vocals by Burroughs drawn from his 1987 novel The Western Lands . Admittedly, Burroughs does not sing, attempt Sprechgesang, or even chant the words; nevertheless, his inimitable voice, reminiscent of both Jack Webb's affectless drone and George Bush's strained whinny, gives the songs a good part of their power, and he is given songwriting credit on the five tracks. The album's overture, "Ineffect," begins with a wailing vocal in the Middle Eastern style and scales of the Master Musicians, followed by Burroughs's lament that "we do not have music sufficiently powerful to act as a practical weapon"; both vocal parts are supported by a heavy bass beat that is interrupted by sitars and electric guitars. Burroughs speaks of a revolutionary "musical intelligence" operating in secret around the world as the song fades into the title track (which is built around Burroughs's text on the seven component souls in Egyptian mythology), a series of minimalist bass and percussion lines alternating with synthesized fortissimo polyrhythms. "Soul Killers," the third track, is composed of string, keyboard, and wind discords sounding in irregular rhythms behind Burroughs's ominous warnings against nuclear weapons and the state: "only those who can leave behind everything they have ever believed in can hope to escape" this impasse. Against this image of despair, the mid-tempo track "The Western Lands" offers an image of hope, of the "gift that supersedes all other gifts, immortality," tempered with the warning that "the road to the Western Lands is by definition the most dangerous road in the world." This song unites passages from all parts of Burroughs's novel, from this early warning to the penultimate "flashes of serene timeless joy, a joy as old as suffering and despair," and is followed by the aggressive African chant "Deliver," sung by Foday Musa Suso of Gambia. The hypermetallic "Equation," juxtaposing cut-up news reports on the Palestinian Intifada with American fundamentalist broadcasts and rap, leads into "The End of Words," the album's (and the novel's) conclusion. "The End of Words" combines Middle Eastern scales and overdubbed chants, which gradually fade as Burroughs recites the closing words of The Western Lands, which cite and displace T. S. Eliot: "The old writer couldn't write anymore because he had reached the

end of words, of what can be done with words. And then? . . . Hurry up please, it's time" (WL 258).

Since this initial musical effort, recordings of Burroughs in collaboration with contemporary musicians have flooded the market; there have been so many that Burroughs has launched his own music publishing company, Nova Lark Music (administered by the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers [ASCAP]), to handle the copyrights. Unfortunately, most of these collaborations are less effective than Seven Souls, primarily because the musical structures they contain are conceived simply as text settings and thus efface themselves as music rather than engaging with Burroughs's vocal performances on more equal terms. This is true of both of Burroughs's "solo albums," Dead City Radio (1990) and Spare Ass Annie (1993); nonetheless, they contain some wonderful performances by Burroughs, including his reading of "Thanksgiving Prayer," which Gus Van Sant has made into a short film. Burroughs does actually sing a rather hammy and off-key version of "Ich bin von Kopf bis Fuss auf Liebe eingestellt," the German translation of "Falling in Love Again," at the conclusion of Dead City Radio . The two albums do demonstrate the wide variety of musicians who have been attracted to Burroughs's work recently, from Hollywood producer/arranger Hal Willner, who sets Burroughs's performances to orchestral music from the NBC Symphony archives, to Michael Franti and Rono Tse of the Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy, who set Burroughs against rumbling "scratch" beats.

The industrial rock band Ministry, whose leader, Alain Jourgensen, has clearly taken Burroughs as a role model in a number of questionable ways, provides a much more aggressive and interactive musical setting for Burroughs's words than Willner or the Disposable Heroes do. But Jourgensen, like many of the performers in all media who refer to Burroughs, ultimately values the writer primarily as an agent provocateur. On the Just One Fix CD single, Burroughs's demand to "Smash the control structures, smash the control machine" leads into an extended remix of the song that includes other Burroughs voice-overs; in the "Just One Fix" video, which resurrects many of the images used in Burroughs's films with Balch, Burroughs appears as a withdrawal vision, an apocalyptic figure surrounded by tornadoes, who blasts signs that read "Control," "History," "Language" and "Reality" with a double-barrel shotgun. These elements, no doubt, explain why this video was featured prominently in the "Tornado" episode of the obnoxious but amusing MTV animated program Beavis and Butthead in 1993. Impressed by the

metallic, industrial sound of the band and convinced that "tornadoes are cool," the spectacularly inarticulate protagonists predictably decide that "even the old dude is cool." "Quick Fix," the second track on the single, however, appears to be an original though typically apocalyptic Burroughs text, and its musical arrangement compares favorably with those on the Material album, although it is by no means a world music setting. The minimalist approach of the single-track CD The "Priest" They Called Him, recorded in collaboration with Nirvana's late guitarist Kurt Cobain, is also more successful in its spare and lyrical presentation of an otherwise quite ironic narrative variation on a well-known short story by O. Henry: a junky priest, having scored for heroin on Christmas Eve, gives the drug instead to a young man with kidney stones and is rewarded with the "immaculate fix" of death. Cobain improvises freely on the chords to "Silent Night," providing an eerie, distortion-laced backdrop to Burroughs's deadpan narration.

The penultimate piece of evidence in the case for Burroughs's "media presence" does not fit precisely into any of the categories we have investigated so far: his collaboration with director Robert Wilson (who staged The Civil Wars and Philip Glass's Einstein on the Beach ) and singer/songwriter Tom Waits on a stage piece entitled The Black Rider: The Casting of the Magic Bullets, which is based on the German "folk tale." "Der Freischütz." (actually written by August Apel and Friedrich Laun, after a story by Thomas de Quincey, Burroughs's acknowledged forebear in the literature of addiction). The Black Rider premiered at the Thalia Theater in Hamburg in 1990 and has been staged in several other cities; an album of Tom Waits' songs from the production, three of them cowritten with Burroughs—along with a classic vaudeville song from the thirties, "T'ain't No Sin," sung by Burroughs—was released in 1993. Burroughs's exact contribution to this project is unclear, at least on the basis of the album. He is credited with "texts," and Waits writes that Burroughs's "cut up text and open process of finding a language for this story became a river of words for me to draw from in the lyrics for the songs. He brought a wisdom and a voice to the piece that is [sic] woven throughout."^[42] If Waits' description is accurate, then Burroughs has simply put his cut-up procedures in another writer's service and we should be leery of making any detailed claims of continuity with his other, more personally involved works. Some points seem clear enough, however: the show's theme, a version of the "devil's bargain," has clear affinities with Burroughs's constant preoccupation, the reversibility of oppositional social relations—like the junky-narcotics agent, criminal-cop,

or revolutionary-capitalist binarisms—and the metaphor of the devil's bullets must surely appeal to Burroughs's long-standing mania for firearms.

While harder to insert into my critical narrative of the elaboration of his theory of deixis, Burroughs's musical collaborations do illuminate that aspect of his work in a number of indirect ways. The settings have the potential to extend the range of meanings available to his texts, just as the cut-ups revealed new dimensions within his very writing. The active collaborations—the Wilson/Waits stage show and the Material records—go further in desubjectifying Burroughs's work through collaboration and the concomitant production of ever more "third minds" between subjects. Most importantly, in entering the media of "mechanical reproduction" (as Walter Benjamin would have it), Burroughs's work becomes available for citation, for sampling, read in his "own" voice and accompanied by his "own" face. As he and Balch showed in Bill and Tony, the voice and face themselves, in their reproducibility, are deictic signs that can move from context to context without ever exhausting their potential for new meaning; likewise, Burroughs's recordings give the new generations of samplers an inexhaustible resource for the creation of indirectly collaborative works—that is, collaborations between the present and the future.

In July of 1994 Nike, the Seattle-based manufacturer of sports shoes, began to run a series of television, billboard, and print advertisements around the entire U.S. to promote its new "Air Max² " shoe line. The television ads contain much of the standard imagery that has come to be associated with sports-related advertising: muscular athletes—mostly African American males (including NBA stars Charles Barkley and Michael Jordan)—dressed in form-fitting workout gear; funky rhythm and blues musical accompaniment; rapid, MTV-style editing; and semi-reflexive images of television screens within television screens. But they also contain something quite alien to the clichés of sports ads: the face and voice of William S. Burroughs. Burroughs speaks the advertising slogans written by Jean Rhode, the copywriter for the campaign: "The purpose of technology is not to confuse the mind but to serve the body"; "The basic unit of technology is not the bit but the body"; and "What is technology but mind pushing the limits of muscle?" This is one of the first television ads to use a literary figure for purposes of promotion (a Gap poster series featuring Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg ran a few years

earlier), and as such is worth investigating. Generally, of course, such ads use media or sports figures, who do not normally have antagonistic perspectives on the media and on corporate control, as Burroughs does. So why Burroughs?

The ads were designed and constructed by the Wieden and Kennedy Agency of Portland in order to exploit precisely those factors of defamiliarization that Burroughs would embody. For one thing, as an elderly white man, he is symbolically antithetical to the young black and Latino athletes who otherwise populate the ads, and thus he would catch the attention of viewers tired of advertising clichés—even viewers who do not recognize Burroughs (who is not identified in the ads). This antithesis is reinforced by the contrasting presentations of Burroughs, who appears as an artificial pixelated image on video screens in the manner of Max Headroom, and of the athletes, who appear "realistically" in both grainy pseudodocumentary footage and "artistic" picture-postcard landscape shots. In addition, Burroughs's growing presence in other media as an icon of "authentic" rebellion and subversion (for example, his collaboration with Cobain and his appearances in Ministry's "Just One Fix" video, in Van Sant's film Drugstore Cowboy . and elsewhere) grants a hip legitimacy to the commercial "art" of television advertising design and to the company for whom he agrees to work; these ads represent the apotheosis of Burroughs's iconic cameo appearances. Burroughs has come to symbolize a certain popular avant-garde—if such a concept can be thought without self-contradiction—to the hip audience that can recognize him.

These are probably Nike's intended meanings for this series of ads. But are these the only meanings they can have? Let's consider the erotics of sports advertising, to which Nike has contributed many tropes over the last decade. The television ads present Burroughs both as a source of privileged information about Nike's commodities and as a spectator of the young athletes in the ads. Several shots show Burroughs on his own screen reacting to movements the athletes make on other screens. What would William S. Burroughs, queer revolutionary and literary innovator, see in the montage of sweating, seminude, mostly male bodies that fill each ad? It seems unlikely that he would see the athletes as successful role models or "heroes," as perhaps many "innocent" middle-class urban/suburban boys (a clearly privileged sector of Nike's audience) and even some adults would; rather, Burroughs would probably see the bodies of these athletes as objects of erotic fantasy, and see their exertions and perspiration as emblems of the physicality simultaneously

offered and foreclosed by the medium of television. He would see it as a kind of elaborately choreographed soft-core pornography. This is not a new development, as Horkheimer and Adorno already knew in the forties; all sports ads, like virtually all ads tout court, rely on such scarcely concealed, perpetually unconsummated eroticism. What is novel here is the fact that this is an overtly homosexual eroticism, a male gaze unabashedly objectifying (mostly) male bodies. Through this parallel voyeurism, Burroughs becomes a stand-in or metonymy for the audience, a situation which retrospectively reveals the homosocial desire underpinning even the supposedly "innocent "—that is, acceptably competitive and heterosexual—adoration middle-class boys have for sports stars. Burroughs's perspective on and in the ads brings to the surface the disavowed desire from which sports industries profit even as they and many of their customers deny it.

Burroughs, as a spectator of and commentator on the athletes within the ads, is offered thus as a new trope, a reflexive figure for the viewing audience itself. He begins several of the ads, however, with a direct address to the viewer: "Hey! I'm talking to you!" This specification of roles (speaker and addressee) serves to establish his authority, to give notice of his privileged knowledge of both the products and the consumer desires they are intended to fulfill. "What we have done," Burroughs later says, referring to the corporate first person plural made up of himself as speaker and Nike as institutional agent, "is square the air." The process of pluralization or schizophrenization appears even more clearly in the print/billboard ads, which juxtapose the left half of Burroughs's face with the right halves of several African American athletes' faces (including Barkley and baseball player Ken Griffey Jr.), all within larger images of the Air Max² shoes. The structure of this schizoid verbal and visual incorporation brings to mind Burroughs's description of the controlling Nova Mobsters and their modus operandi—controlling the human coordinate points (TE 57–58)—as well as the benign form of pluralization Burroughs calls "the third mind," but it is also a dramatization of the issue of deixis around which Burroughs's other media interventions cluster. The commercial situation of endorsement replicates the shifting subjectivities of the film Bill and Tony . In a single statement with multiple implications, Burroughs, the subject or speaker of the enunciation, says "we" but actually refers to the faceless corporation, the subject of the statement, and, by extension, to its otherwise unmentioned workers, the ones who have actually "squared the air" if anybody has. In parallel fashion, Burroughs both embodies his own subjective viewpoint as specta-

tor and also offers the mass audience an explicitly queer perspective to adopt or admit as its own. By permutation he occupies and renders ambiguous all subject positions.

We might be tempted to ask, as a follow-up to this analysis of the ads, if Nike would endorse such an extended reading. If I am right that they chose Burroughs in part because of his iconic status, then perhaps they did so under the impression that in order to become an icon one must be neutralized, separated from the specifics of one's own history and works, as Michael Jackson has allowed himself, in large measure, to be neutralized through choice of material (which serves to distance him from the aggressively gendered and politicized urban rhythm and blues scene out of which he first appeared), cosmetic surgery (which distances him from his African American physical heritage), and personal secrecy (which minimizes possible scandal from his ambiguous sexuality). Spokespeople for large corporations must generally avoid even the appearance of impropriety; they must appear neutral, without desires or drives that deviate from the popular norm, in order to remain iconic. Jackson has recently failed to maintain such an appearance, but he may be able to reneutralize himself as he has in the past. Burroughs, on the other hand, has never attempted to neutralize himself or his work; he has been so open for so long about his addictions, his shooting of his wife, his political radicalism, and his homosexuality that no "unauthorized" biography or media exposé could possibly reveal anything "negative" about him that hasn't been known for decades already. Indeed, most members of Burroughs's audience, whether casual or committed, know far more about the extraordinary events of his life than they do about its "normal" side. Since he hides nothing, he has no secrets which can be revealed, no confidences which can be betrayed; he knows those dialectics too well. It may be, however, that Nike executives had hoped that Burroughs's unneutralized position would generate controversy and publicity when its significance was perceived by the watchdogs of media morality. If that had happened, what appeared at first to be Burroughs's accession to the American cultural mainstream (or what some might call his "sell-out") might have turned out to be his most influential subversive act. Surprisingly or not, the only controversy the Nike ads generated concerned Burroughs's apparent opportunism, his willingness to take money from the very corporations and media he had spent so many years satirizing, which troubled readers who failed to appreciate the paradoxical nature of his celebrity. Burroughs himself has acknowledged the irony of his situation, in which "There's no

contradiction to subverting something and profiting from it at the same time," since the subversion has not been compromised in order to get at the profits.^[43]

At the conclusion of The Western Lands, Burroughs offered an apparently elegiac farewell to writing: "The old writer couldn't write anymore because he had reached the end of words, of what can be done with words. And then?" (WL 258). It should be clear that, in reaching the end of words—that is, the end of writing—himself, Burroughs has not necessarily reached the end of art, of the world, or of living, as critics who overemphasize his ironic allusions to T. S. Eliot might be tempted to think (in fact he still writes, and has recently published a new book of dream fragments, My Education ). The matter of this chapter has, I hope, gone some way toward proving that point by showing how, exactly, Burroughs has managed to go beyond that ambiguous open question in the collaborative media works that both precede and succeed his last novel to date. If one were to object, justly, that this "beyond" still seems to contain a surprisingly large number of words, and thus appears to consign itself to interminable deconstruction, I can only reply that if it still contains words, it also contains far more than that: mobile visual images, asignifying sounds, musical tones and rhythms, and even (if I am allowed to refer to the paintings I have not discussed) abstract patterns of color. Moreover, this "beyond" exists outside William S. Burroughs the subject, outside Burroughs the author or agent provocateur or éminence grise, and even outside "Burroughs" the text and commodity, in a space and a time that have imperceptibly become coterminous with our media culture. This is the final implication of Burroughs's radical extension of deixis: not merely an intertextuality that escapes covertly from the constraints of fully self-present meaning, but an explosive intermediation or scrambling of all the codes faster than capital, subjectivity, or language can resituate them. In this way Burroughs's work is nomadological, or schizoanalytic. Deleuze and Guattari would say that "Burroughs" is no longer just the name of an author, a celebrity, or an artist; it is the name, rather, of a set of potentials, an effect that propagates itself from medium to medium by the force of its difference, bringing into contact incompatible functions, incommensurable concepts, and unrelated materials.^[44] Even when Burroughs is no longer able to serve as the focus for this force, it will continue to reverberate, indefatigably sounding its critical imperative: listen to my last words everywhere.