TECHNOLOGIES OF SELF – WILLIAM BURROUGHS

Time-Binding and Time-Scrambling

|...| NOTE

The E Meter was one of a series of psychophysical machines that Burroughs adopted. These were technologies that reprocessed, edited, re-edited, and played back the material of subjectivity. Burroughs’ catalogue of devices included: Burroughs and Gysin’s The Dream Machine, an adaptation of British cybernetician Grey Walter’s Flicker, a system of flickering lights originally designed to monitor the production of Alpha Waves in psychiatric patients; the cut up-tape-technique aimed to cause temporal disturbance through feeding noise back through a looping circuit of playback and record – a technique explained as a tactical media in Burroughs’ two key media essays Invisible Generation (1962) and Electronic Revolution (C.1971)

In addition to the list of apparatus of self, Burroughs, over the years, had participated in and practiced a series of programs of self, which required programmatic methods: General Semantics, Scientology, EST, ESP, psychoanalysis, vegiotherepy, the Alexander posture technique, Konstantin Raudive’s paranormal tape experiments, Major Bruce MacManaway’s Pillar of Light, along with machines that organized the bedrock of the unconscious – in the manner of the SeeR computer developed by Shannon & Hagelbarger –: “the Psionic Wishing Machine.. and the “control” computer, which answered questions for sixpence a time.” […] Along with this array of technologies of behaviour, narcotics was a technology through which to scramble and unscramble the code of language. These various psychic machines and techniques allow for inscription of the self, machines and methods which rewrite the psyche and reprogram the nervous system.

These apparatus of self can be divided into two categories:

1. machines which directly affected brain function and which were developed by a generation of cyberneticians directly involved in neuropsychology – ECG, ECT, Flicker

and

2. machines which, in their autonomy and alterity, questioned the limits and constitution of the self – Ashby’s Homeostat, Gray Walter's Tortoise, Shannon’s SEER.

The first directly effects the function of brain and the second blurs the distinction between environment and organism. In Electronic Revolution, Burroughs, who argues against a clear distinction between mind and environment, plays these different functions against each other.

The e-meter also resembles the EEG (electroencephalography) which since the 1930s had been researched by W. Grey Walter. The EEG recorded scanned brain activity on to a roll of paper with a recorder-pen (which the e-meter did not). Grey Walter’s book The Living Brain includes numerous images which record the various waves caused in response to different stimulus. Through the use of EEG Grey Walter developed flicker – a stroboscopic machine flickering at specific frequencies, producing alpha waves which were recorded on an EEG. This opened up further research into “photic driving” which scanned brain activity at different frequencies.| With flicker, the signal produced by the subject’s brain activity was fed back into the source and subsequent flashes were produced by the brain rhythms of the subject. The peaks and troughs drawn by a pen-recorder are, therefore, a staple graphic feature of any number of texts involving stimulus and response experiments.

These machine drawings record difference over time and isolate data from the timeline. This data can be comprehended instantaneously. It represents an abstraction of information that can be further abstracted into another symbolic form (0s and 1s, for instance). Such images were the starting point for Wiener when he arrived at a formula for negative entropy. Imagine a set of data running through such a device, a polygraph or an EEG machine, for instance. Such devices record and transmit information, they record the choice between two equally probable alternatives and record which of the alternatives was bound to happen. These choices can be given a binary value, just as the choice in a game of matching pennies can be valued as 0 and 1. Wiener derived a “general formula to measure the amount of information in a time series [and ] noted that this quantity was the “negative of the quantity usually defined as entropy in similar situations.”

The peaks and troughs drawn by the recorder pen provided the signature of any number of psychic-machines, they provide the data flow which can be recorded as a series of pulses. These pulses can be transferred to a strip of magnetic tape and fed through a computer, or encoded as a series of 0s and 1s and fed through a similar machine.