Burroughs & The State of Decay

In The New Media Reader, Noah Wardrip-Fruin declares that "there is nothing new under the sun." While this may sound like a sentimental artistic recycling notion, it also holds true in the realm of physics. The law of conservation of mass states the mass of an isolated system will remain constant over time. If this is true, than every artistic endeavor ever attempted is a part of an immense recycling system. However, this idea only holds true to domain of mass, right? Perhaps, but the idea of reusing information and ideas, not just physical material, has been a debate amongst philosophers for years. Most people believe that everything someone acquires, be that knowledge or matter, is due in some part to the preexisting world around you. And in that sense, there is nothing new under the sun.


Additionally, in the New Media Reader, Wardrip-Fruin states that "the surrealists were uninterested in tossing dice unless the throw might help to coax something up from the unconsciousness". This echos the ideas brought up in the article "the Cut-Up Method of Brion Gysin" by William S. Burroughs, in which Burroughs adamantly attests that "poetry is for everyone" and that the act of "cutting up" words in order to create a new dialogue is a true form of art. Wardrip-Fruin and Burroughs I believe, would both support this notion of the need for human interaction or editing during the process of "cutting up" words, because of this necessity for the words to be able to speak to the human unconscious. If this is true, than the use of a computer for editing processes would eliminate this connection with the unconcious. The human unconscious was explored in depth by the psychologist Carl Jung, and proposes to express inhumanity and all life forms with nervous systems, and describes how the structure of the psyche autonomously organizes experience. A personal unconscious differs from a collective unconscious in that the collective unconscious collects and organizes those personal experiences in a similar way with each member of a particular species. And so, to Burroughs point, any form of cutting up words or objects and edited by human hands should in some way speak to our collective unconscious.

William S. Burroughs

Carl Jung

I believe that the idea of speaking to our collective unconscious is what the "cutting up" of works relies upon in order to be relevant to society. Unless of course, the aim is to be as intelligible as possible (which, to be fair, some people would consider this an art form). Perhaps one of the earliest popular "cut-ups" or "mash-ups" in human literature was the novel Finnegan's Wake, by James Joyce. This book is in an experimental style that includes a mash up of linguistic items and the abandonment of conventional plot and character developments, which makes it one of the most difficult to read novels in the English language. I feel as though my initial stance on being introduced to the cutting up style of poetry or art is not to be inclined to it, because I think that while it's fun and experimental, it lacks a purposeful drive and intention. And for me, those are the things that I most admire in artistic talent, rather than the happy accidents that Burroughs exalts. Here's a short clip of the author James Joyce reading from Finnegan's Wake:




In continuation of this idea of an artistic collage, the 2002 found footage film Decasia explores the medium by considering old and decaying silent film footage. Created by Bill Morrison, the film was constructed by using found snippets of decaying film footage. The film evokes a sense of loss, due to the obvious deterioration of the film used. Morrison enhances this idea of the loss of something that can never be recaptured by the compilation of decaying images set to a dramatic (and purposefully out of tune) soundtrack. Morrison's use of technology transforms these found footage reels from singular, perhaps sentimental remnants of life, to a collective pool of decaying pieces from a lost world. And in that sense, I believe that Morrison made use of Carl Jung's idea of a collective unconscious, in that this film definitely speaks to us as human beings by being a world in which all that we know was previously a part of.