The Ticket That Exploded

Hard to follow the cut up sequence, you’re in the moment once and then, as if a cruel joke befalls you, bam you don’t understand what is happening because the cut up is so re-organized that you cannot make sense of it. It turns out that Burroughs wanted to use the cut up to make the case that the human animal is limited by speech and sound. Like a revolver will not surpass its limits because it has certain physical features that prevent it from lets say shooting faster (or doing its inherent purpose better) so too humans have trouble surpassing their limits because language is something of a set back because we can only accept the meaning we receive from it if it is palatable to us. I am left with a belief that Burroughs wants us to move on to bigger and better things, but aren’t our limitations what give us reason to move on? Are we not more human because of our limitations? Are we killing our humanity by altering our human conditions or are we improving upon them? I am still trying to make sense of the nudity and graphic homosexuality of the book. It seems like from class we came to an interesting question. Are we grossed out by the book because we have bodies and we are shy, bashful, embarrassed (human) about them, or are we offended because our bodies have us? I thought in some detail about this question and decided that we do in fact have bodies, and are not merely their slaves. I don’t have a particularly negative response to the nudity or sexuality of the book because I don’t fear that the book will upload some crazy world into my brain where I (or rather my body) need rectal mucus and sex skins to be happy, functional, and normal. I’m not convinced that the world will one day look like this because this is Burroughs perverted fantasy not the result of guided and unguided collective action. If this book has anything to say about the human condition it is that we revere it and defend it from the attack of others because we choose the way we want it to present itself, we are not fond of one pervert writing a book in cut up fashion about it, probably because his dreams do not equate our experience. On the issue of the recordings we have yet more difficult questions. So Burroughs asks why not record ourselves and then let the recordings do the difficult part of life for us, communicating with our enemies, our annoying roommates, whoever. Is letting a recording play out your ideas and hates as cathartic as actually doing it? In both cases we could say that we do speak what is on our mind and actually let it out, but to speak it into a recorder doesn’t teach us anything. I say the best part of confronting your adversaries is the lessons you can draw from the actual experience, far superior to the lessons drawn from the recording because interaction with man is what humans do, interactions with machines is what machines do. This is all well and fine in a post human world but whilst we are still humans we should interact with humans the way humans do, a sort of techno-segregation. I am on the side of actually doing things and interacting with people not machines. Then some may say wait isn’t interacting with machines what we do also? Like this computer blog? Didn’t you interact with the machine to do the blog? My answer is that I don’t interact with a hammer to build a fence; the computer is a tool I USE, not interact with for the purpose of interacting with other humans. In every case where humans are mechanizing we are not interacting with the machines we are using them for human ends and often to satisfy the human condition, or to improve it. Even a case like videogames, we are still interacting with humans. The program, storyline, and events where all derived from human activity. A videogame is like a book in a sense that it connects people more quickly than direct interaction and sometimes even transcends the lines of time because I can see what was going on in the past by reading a book or (this is a stretch) playing a videogame. Burroughs asks some interesting questions and makes us think about the way we interact and what are limitations are. I think that the value of his book is in its attention to the mechanism that allows us to experience each others humanity, or rather the overt violation of that mechanism and the constant pull push the book has on the reader with regards to the material. This book really has more to offer with the way in which it is written than the words that are actually in it.