In the early 1970s, William S. Burroughs was mostly writing articles for underground newspapers and pornographic magazines like Mayfair. The hippie scene was winding down and urban guerilla movements like the Symbionese Liberation Army, the Weather Underground, the Black Panthers, the Angry Brigade, and the Red Army Faction were springing up all over the place. Burroughs had just voluntarily left the Church of Scientology because of their authoritarian and potentially fascist overtones and was trying to maintain his status as a writer and counter-cultural icon. He began work on a manifesto to explain his unorthodox world viewto the younger generation. He never completed the project but parts of it were sold as spoken word pieces on cassettes and other fragments were published in scattered places. These pieces were put together as The Revised Boy Scout Manual: An Electronic Revolution and recently published in paperback. The finished product serves as a good, but incomplete, overview of his ideas.
The opening sections of this short work lay out strategies for overthrowing the established order and explain a variety of weapons, both conventional and unconventional, that can be used in the pursuit of building a free society. These passages are seasoned with little bits of Burroughs’ acerbic humor and eventually make a transition into fantasy vignettes that read like the fiction Burroughs is famous for. A smooth transition is made from realistic-sounding essay writing to the gallows humor of his dark scenarios. Readers who are less experienced with Burroughs’ writing style may get disoriented and wonder whether they should even take this prose seriously. The answer is both yes and no or at least the intent of his writing is serious while the realized result is fiction. But that is how Burroughs always operated. He melted the boundaries of reality like hot candle wax dripping into a pool of molten lava. He didn’t merely think outside the box; he did everything he could to destroy whatever box it is you are in when you think.
There are key ideas to this revolution. One is that ten percent of the human race has to be killed but it has to be the ten percent that is responsible for controlling and oppressing everybody else. His idea that ten percent of the population controls ninety percent of society prefigures, by forty years, the contention of the failed Occupy Wall Street movement that one percent of the population controls ninety percent of the wealth. Political activists of our day should take note because they are not as unique or original as they think they are. To add to this idea, Burroughs points out that genocides and mass murders have historically been acts of violence perpetrated by the powerful elite against the masses of common people. Another component of this revolution is M.O.B. which means “mind own business”. When governments and police do not allow people to live freely then they are not doing as such; M.O.B. is to be the cornerstone law of a newly liberated humanity. The result of the revolution will be communal societies, some of which will be located on the beaches of Ecuador or in the dense jungles of the Amazon River basin. It is not surprising that Burroughs’ preoccupation with power, domination, and control made an impression on the mind of a young Michel Foucault who cited him as an influence on his philosophy of biopolitics.
The rest of the book suggests ideas for experiments using film and audio. By the 1970s, Burroughs wished to expand on his practice of cut-ups to apply it to other, more current forms of media. A lot of the tape splicing he describes are now common practices in editing sound, music, and video. Some people have claimed his hypotheses are silly, ridiculous, and impossible but they may be misunderstanding the concept of experimentation. That particular word means to try something new and see what happens. The outcome may or may not be predictable but you really can not know until it is tried. Most experiments fail. Sometimes the intend outcome is not realized but serendipity occurs and a new method of doing things is accidentally discovered. In the end these tape recorder experiments had a profound influence on music and other arts. Burroughs used tape loops and sampling long before hip hop artists did and his philosophical ideas had a directed impact on industrial and punk music in the 1970s.
Another aspect of revolution Burroughs explores is the presence of language. He briefly explains how language can be used as a mechanism of control. He also writes about the encoding of meaning in words by the speaker and the decoding of its meaning by the listener; he makes suggestions for experiments with language scramblers to determine if a listener can unscramble distorted messages subconsciously. This is a crude take on semiotics but it explains some passages from his novels that read like disorientating gibberish; some of his texts were scrambled using cut-ups and montage and it is up to you to decide if you can derive some meaning from it. Burroughs also suggest eliminating the words “the”, “either/or”, and “is” from the English language. He describes the way “is” causes distortions in our perceptions of reality. This sounds like an idea lifted from Martin Heidegger’s An Introduction to Metaphysics but actually it is inspired by the General Semantics theory developed by the linguist Alfred Korzybski in the 190s. In any case, these ideas anticipate the philosophies of poststructuralism and deconstruction by at least a few years.
A lot of people have criticized William S. Burroughs for believing in things that are simply not true. They also overlook the fact that he was primarily a writer of fiction and fiction, by definition, is not true. But good fiction makes statements about truth. The Revised Boy Scout Manual should be read as a fictional document, maybe even as comedy or satire, but keep in mind what it actually says about the world we live in. It is some of Burroughs’ most clear and direct writing and does a good job of explaining his theories in a way that can clarify some of the confusing and opaque passages of his difficult prose.
Burroughs, William S. Revised Boy Scout Manual: An Electronic Revolution. The Ohio State University Press, Columbus: 2018.
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