INTRODUCTION by John Balance
William S. Burroughs has become part of the establishment - a kindly if rather eccentric old uncle, that your parents view with tolerance. But his benign exterior is deliberately misleading, It is a disguise.
Like the Shaman, he is a seasoned traveller, fluent in the languages of the dead. A psychic explorer, he sallies forth (with the minimum of luggage) into the Deadzone, the Space Between, mapping out forbidden territories, coded terrains, and the realms beyond demarcation.
Out of bounds.
Operating at the interface of the “impossible” and the “inevitable”.
Logic is simply not applicable in these areas. Employing a skilled scientific approach to areas of non-scientific interest, he factualises fictions, collecting, processing and piecing together with a necessary obsessiveness and attention to detail.
Bringing back information, data, and raw material, like an anthropologist smuggling back valuable artifacts, he returns, a spy clutching pages of Forbidden Texts, torn from the Akashic Record, (surely not located in any afterlife, but written into the human genetic code - the DNA script itself, that original pre-historic Survivalist text).
Nothing is taken at face value. Every phenomenon observed, every word recorded, is a trap to be sprung, a code to be broken, revealing the meaning, the latent within the apparent.
Sabotaging natural conclusions, logical and neurological responses and conditioned reflexes, he forces the facts out into the open, exposing each time, a little more of the truth about the human condition.
The Electronic Revolution was written in the Sixties, when scientists shared their discoveries with high-school kids as well as with the CIA.
Every day brought a new drug, a new device, a new social freedom - anything could happen and frequently did. In this context, the tape recorder experiments of William Burroughs, Brion Gysin and Ian Sommerville, described in this book seemed not only reasonable but very likely to succeed.
Since then attitudes have changed. Cynicism has replaced optimism as the style of the times.
In a recent magazine article, Burroughs told of the reaction he received when he offered a group of students he was lecturing, plans for what he describedfs “a wishing machine”. It was a device that, through massed concentration, might dramatically increase the chance of a wish coming true. To Burrough’'s obvious dismay, there were no takers.
Despite the fact that various parties, both in government and from the ranks of avant-garde music have repeated the experiments in this book and found them to work, they have for the most part been ignored, their latent potential untapped.
(Perhaps in a way, this is a good thing. Eccentric Uncles need to be thought of as harmless. That way no one will worry when they stay up late with the kids, opening minds, suggesting things parents would never dream of ...)
Ideas need maximum circulation and maximum application to evolve. What you don't know may be kept secret, and used against you.
This book is the original Dictionary of Possibilities. It is both “user” and “abuser” friendly. The real danger lies in neglect. It needs to be used, to be made to work, to be applied. Interaction is vital. To quote from the book itself:
“This certainly is a matter for further research.”
John Balance
London 1988 ev.
Dutch translation of William S. Burroughs essay 'Electronic Revolution' published by Uitgeverij Maldoror in 1988. Paperback, sixty pages. Cover design by Peter Christopherson. 500 copies were made, I still have about 15 copies left. Price Eu 14,50 (postage not included). Contact / order: anthonyblokdijk [at] hotmail dot com
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