Counter-fiction: cut-ups and simulacra

“In Burroughs’s view, Control is thus inseparable from language (...). Control is ‘biopolitics’ in the strong sense of the term. A universal biological substrate whose project is to colonize the totality of the body politic by means of images and words. That which one holds to be reality consists in complex interweaving patterns of ‘word lines’.”(6)  Burroughs imagines the world as pre-recorded, like a film on a spool or a reel of magnetic audio tape. “Control is a kind of pre-written script that continuously plays out in our consciousness.” (7) One means of attaining exteriority once again, or subjectivation, is cutting up texts.

Cut-up means cutting an existing text into pieces and then rearranging the pieces in a recomposition. For example, if I number the lines on a page and then change the order of the lines. Or I might split a text into four and lay out the blocks differently. Cutting the associations of words in order to generate new ones – leaving the world or, to extend the metaphor, the movie theatre, in order to enter the editing booth. For the writer, “the only thing that is not pre-recorded in a pre-recorded universe is the pre-recording itself.” (8) In this way, by touching the script of reality, of control, one may exercise a metaleptic leap in narration, and write something else, turning the weapon of Control against itself, thus escaping the control of the scenarios prepared for us. 

Another means of escaping the immanence of the controlled world is via the simulacrum. “(Control through language is) a control of consciousness (...) through the interiorisation of injunctions which the subject will take to be his or her own desires, freely formulated. In such a universe ruled by a principle of voluntary servitude, the only possibility of getting free would come, according to Burroughs, from reappropriation, for diametrically opposed ends, of techniques of oppression and manipulation. By speaking the language of the target, by reproducing its functioning, by turning its own weapons against it, we can reconquer a form of autonomy. (...) Mimetism and simulations play such a fundamental role here, in fictional constructs that are so original, that it has seemed appropriate to us to give them a particular name, that of simulacrum.” (9) By analogy, Burroughs managed to get free from heroin by using a substitute, apomorphine, which was supposed to be chemically similar to heroin but without the effects. So he used a simulacrum, “an agent that resembles the agent that is doing harm in order to get out of its control,” as Claisse explains. In a certain way, if cut up helps one get out of language in order to take it all back, hitting it with its own pre-recorded codes, managing to get outside the sphere of its control, this is already a form of the simulacrum (plural simulacra) in the sense of Burroughs. A “future past” of the Bye Bye Belgium type has points in common with the simulacrum. A simulacrum of codes of information and a simulacrum of a future we would like to ignore, but which is shown to us so we will be forced to take a position. This offers us a new degree of knowledge about the world by fighting the system with its own weapons.
 
The simulacrum and the ‘future anterior’ explore possibilities through fiction in order to offer a new set of reading categories to individuals, to shatter their cognitive inertia with regard to their place within society and its codes. That these considerations depict a fantasmatic vision of power, or an over-deterministic vision, is not the problem, at the end of the day. What is at stake in this fiction is creating another angle of vision, another level, another field of vision in order to dispel our relegation to servitude, to provide new ideas for stealing a march on the system once again. “Simulacra and future anterior intensify cognitive and pragmatic properties that are present in kernel form in every fictional arrangement. Both represent modalities of the capacity that fiction has to empower the reader and configure his or her representations , (the faculty of stimulating the action of awakening to consciousness and the reaction of a reader). That a great number of actors use such strategies in order to influence their political and social environment is nothing surprising in itself.” (10)

(6) Ibid, p. 201.
(7) Ibid, p. 201.
(8) Ibid, p. 165.
(9) Ibid, p. 14.
(10) Ibid, p. 15.