Reflections on Monique Wittig's Les Guérillères (1969) 2: Fragments of Myth & Memory

Blazing genital / the eternal circle is your symbol [a] 

 

 

Opening Remarks 

 

Having explored part one of Monique Wittig's novel Les Guérillères (1969) [b] in twenty fragments from a lesbian utopia, here we are going to reflect on (and summarise) part two. 

 

Again, let me confess from the outset that as much as I admire this text, it's one that I find difficult to follow at times due to its rejection of a linear structure. But then, of course, it wasn't written for me - lacking as I do a vagina and preferring fact and forgetfulness over myth and memory. 

 

 

Twenty Fragments of Myth & Memory 

 

(i) 

 

Part two opens with a story told by someone called Sophie Ménade - which simply has to be a pseudonym [c]. Her tale is an imaginative retelling of several older myths, including the biblical story found in Genesis of Eve and the serpent, and is designed to subvert ancient wisdom (inherently phallogocentric as it is). 

 

In Sophie's version of events, a naked black woman with a beautiful, glistening body walks through a colourful, vibrant orchard. She possesses a "hortative head of hair" (32) made of thousands of musical snakes that give her advice. 

 

Her favourite snake, Orpheus, does not tempt her toward sin or downfall, instead, he encourages her to eat the fruit in the centre of the garden and persuades her that all things which sparkle are good (even if all that glitters is not gold). 

 

I guess the idea is that we can trust our senses and should judge by the immediate, visceral experience of beauty as it is communicated to us - something that D. H. Lawrence would approve of, even if he speaks of things that glow rather than sparkle [d]. 

 

Sophie Ménade closes her address to the women by promising that, one day, they will have a clear understanding of a solar myth that will instruct them how to walk the earth as sun-women: 

 

"At these words the women begin to dance, stamping the ground with their feet. They begin a round dance, clapping their hands, giving voice to a song from which no coherent phrase emerges." (32) [e] 

 

(ii) 

 

Although they lead quite a hippie-ish lifestyle, the women are first and foremost warriors and live to make war not love and to demonstrate "their strength and their courage" (32) on the battlefield. 

 

The clue, of course, is in the word guérillères. 

 

(iii) 

 

Literacy is something else that matters greatly to these women: not a moment passes without one of them writing something in a great public register, or else reading aloud some passage. Interestingly, this is one of the main differences between Wittig's text and William Burroughs's novel The Wild Boys (1971) [f]. 

 

For although both books function as speculative, mythic fiction that uses experimental prose to narrate the violent overthrow of global heteropatriarchy by armed, gender-segregated combatants - and both authors believe that traditional narrative structures are inherently tied to oppressive systems of thought, meaning that language itself must be fractured - Wittig views language as a contestable area that can be reclaimed and rewritten, whereas Burroughs sees it as an alien virus used by the state to programme human behaviour. 

 

Ultimately, his goal is not to write a queer new language, but to destroy language entirely so as to achieve absolute silent consciousness. 

 

(iv) 

 

One of the women - Phiomèle Sarte [g] - loves to sing while squatting on her heels and swinging her breasts from side to side. When she finally stops singing, she falls face down on the floor, spent with joy and exhaustion, and has to be carried home to her bed. That, or left on the grass to sleep in the sun. 

 

One critic explains that this is a primal, ritualistic act that is all about reclaiming bodily autonomy and experiencing the kind of pleasure that the French call jouissance. The fact that, after she has collapsed, she is cared for shows the sense of community and mutual support among the women. 

 

Of course, that's a reading that insists on the novel as a utopian work of allegorical fiction. More literal-minded readers might worry that the woman is mentally ill and clearly needs medical assistance rather than being left to lie on the grass or dumped back home to sleep it off (they might even call this neglectful behaviour). 

 

(v) 

 

It seems that the glenuri are not the only strange creatures found in Wittig's novel ... 

 

Meet the julep - an animal "without head or tail that [...] spins on itself without uttering a sound" (33), so named because of its "predilection for rosewater" (35). Sometimes it is covered with scales; "at others it is covered with feathers" (33). It can sometimes emit a faint but unpleasant odour (a bit like garlic). 

 

The little girls have tried to tame them: "They put them on a leash to drag them behind them. But even pulling with all their might they cannot succeed in making the juleps budge." (35) 

 

Again, all of this means nothing to me, I'm afraid: I don't even find it particularly whimsical. 

 

However, I've read that some feminist scholars think that the julep is an allegorical symbol for the clitoris: that by representing the latter as an independent creature Wittig isolates it from old ways of thinking and establishes it as an autonomous site of female pleasure [h]. 

 

I'm not entirely convinced by this, but, in the absence of any better theory, I'm happy to accept it. 

 

(vi) 

 

This made me smile: 

 

"The women say that they perceive their bodies in their entirety. They say that they do not favour any of its parts on the grounds that it was formerly a forbidden Object. They say that they do not want to become prisoners of their own ideology. [...] For example they do not [...] say that the vulvas are like black suns in the shining night." (35) 

 

And the reason it made me smile is because this is precisely what they do and say ...! [i] 

 

Obviously, as a novel, Les Guérillères has no index. But if it did, the word vulva would feature at least ten times more than any other term. For as I said in the first part of this post, this is a book of aggressive vulva activism and cunt awareness - a space in which philosophers and insects quickly lose their way. 

 

Having said that, see fragment (x) below. 

 

(vii) 

 

The women are warned: Beware of dispersal! Do not abandon the collectivity! If I were one of their number, it's precisely at this point I would scat like a cat and sever all ties. 

 

(viii) 

 

Considering the women are meant to be happy holding hands, drinking, laughing, playing, etc., an awful amount of weeping goes on in Wittig's book. Particularly in the winter months when they roll in the snow and "sobs rack their bodies" (37). 

 

Sometimes, it is so cold that "the frost solidifies their tears" until they "shine and sparkle on their cheeks" (37). Which is strange, because I thought they were living on tropical islands in the equatorial region, where it would normally snow on the highest mountain peaks. 

 

Or is this a memory of an earlier time and place? I feel a bit lost. And a bit confused. And, to be honest, a bit bored. 

 

(ix) 

 

I don't know why, but the story of Adèle Donge and the meticulous embalming of her corpse (described in some detail), reminded me of the scene in David Fincher's Fight Club (1999) when the dead body of Robert Paulson is laid on the table and everyone begins to chant his name (even though in Project Mayhem each member is stripped of their individual identity). 

 

Her name is Adèle Donge ... Her name is Adèle Donge ... 

 

And it's a name heavily layered with historical, literary, and thematic meaning. For her surname is a reference to Marie Donge, the protagonist of Georges Simenon's famous 1942 novel La Vérité sur Bébé Donge. 

 

In the book, Mme. Donge is a desperate housewife who cannot take it anymore and so quietly and meticulously poisons her unfaithful husband with arsenic. By taking the surname and placing it into a setting of free, armed warriors, Wittig liberates the figure of the oppressed wife, transforming her from a domestic victim into a venerated, legendary figure of a sovereign female collective. 

 

As for the first name, Adèle, this derives from the Germanic word for noble. Now, of course, in a traditional patriarchal context, nobility is tied to lineage and male inheritance. But in Les Guérillères, it is earned on the battlefield and comes with death and the quasi-sacred ritual of her embalming. 

 

Her body is preserved like that of an ancient Egyptian queen and revered by her sisters, just as Bob Paulson was turned into a martyr and accorded posthumous status by his brothers-in-arms. In other words, in both Wittig's novel and Fincher's film, we witness the creation of a new sovereign mythology achieved through mourning and remembrance. 

 

(x) 

 

To be fair to the women, they do, at some point, realise that it's just as silly to worship the cunt as it is the phallus and that they must "examine the principle that has guided them" (44) and not exhaust themselves in symbolism or become trapped by their own anatomy. 

 

If you really want to rediscover the body and what it can do, then one must listen to Artaud: lose the organs and reject the metaphysical overcoding and bio-functional organ-isation of the body into the organism [j]. 

 

(xi) 

 

The feminist rejection of the domestic life and of work which has traditionally been regarded as suitable for them is celebrated in a huge bonfire of various objects and machines, including sewing-machines, typewriters, knitting-needles, ironing-boards, saucepans, brooms of every bristle, vacuum cleaners, washing-machines, etc. 

 

"They heap them on to an immense pyre to which they set fire, blowing up everything that will not burn. Then, starting to dance round it, they clap their hands, they shout obscene phrases, they cut their hair or let it down." (45) 

 

While part of me smiles, the problem with this kind of action is that it's so easy to throw the baby out with the bathwater - but then, les guérillères probably don't care too much about that; they want to be Amazons, not mothers, and reject the biological and social reduction of women to mere reproductive vessels. 

 

If they do become pregnant and are obliged to eventually give birth, they view the latter as another kind of bloody battle and see the baby not so much as a bundle of joy but as something that has been captured. 

 

(xii) 

 

Torpedophiles will know that I have had a long interest in the strangely erotic relationship between women and snakes - see the post titled 'Ophidicism' (18 August 2013), for example. 

 

And so, I was happy to discover that some of Wittig's warrior women enjoy coiling snakes around their bodies and engaging in ancient pagan practices that involve putting lips to scales and ritually kissing serpents. 

 

(xiii) 

 

The women decide to produce a new (post-patriarchal) dictionary in which the word hate has been redefined as a form of vital energy. 

 

Now that's something I would support: for like William Hazlitt, I'm of the view that there's a real pleasure to be found in hating things - that hate is more than merely a reactive form of love and that, ultimately, it's hate, not love or truth, that will set you free [k]. 

 

(xiv) 

 

Great gatherings of uniformed women all marching in unison - possibly even more depressing than great gatherings of uniformed men all marching in unison. 

 

I hate great gatherings. I hate uniforms. And I hate the sight of people marching. 

 

And the sight of horses wounded and maimed by war is simply heartbreaking - far more so than the sight of human combatants bleeding or missing limbs. 

 

(xv) 

 

Les guérillères mourn all women who are victims of male violence and who have been hanged, beheaded, or "broken alive on the wheel in a public square" (50). 

 

As far as they are concerned, all these women are daughters of Eve and to the one who asks the nature of their crime they answer: "It was identical with that of the woman of whom it is written that she saw that the tree of the garden was good to eat [...] and that it was the tree requisite for gaining understanding" (50). 

 

(xvi) 

 

Flags are flown and trumpets sounded: let the war against men commence! The women laugh and shout and spit blood in the midst of battle, stepping over the bodies of fallen comrades: 

 

"The women say they have learned to rely on their own strength. They say they are aware of the force of their unity. They say, let those who call for a new language first learn violence. They say, let those who want to change the world first seize all the rifles. They say that they are starting from zero. They say that a new world is beginning." (52) 

 

They say a lot of things. But I say (after Foucault) that they should beware of the fascism ingrained in their own behaviour and idealism that causes the love of power and violence, the desire for Year Zero. 

 

(xvii) 

 

"They say that it is better to die than to live as slaves." (57) 

 

That's true, some famous figures (and former slaves) including Frederick Douglass, Samuel Sharpe, and Harriet Ann Jacobs have all agreed on this point, arguing that when a person is legally and economically reduced to the status of property or livestock, then the only way they can affirm their humanity is by consciously choosing their own death (the ultimate expression of free will). 

 

But I don't think this should be allowed to pass without at least some resistance. For such idealism - which often seems to equate death with a form of escape and freedom - very often has fatal consequences not just for those who subscribe to it [l]. 

 

Critics of this supposed noble truth - one that is ironically born of slave morality - point out that equating death with freedom is, at best, a logical fallacy and often betrays a religious mindset. For death is not the gateway to the freedom that awaits in the afterlife. Death is the stripping away of all essence and agency; a festive return to the material realm. 

 

Further, many historians point out that staying alive under oppression is its own form of defiance and that survival allows for the possibility of future rebellion, the preservation of culture, and to act as a historical witness. 

 

(xviii) 

 

A stylised performance that mimics combat movements, a war dance was traditionally used to prepare for battle, celebrate victory, or honour spiritual and tribal values. 

 

Wittig's warrior women begin their dance by stepping forward lightly, moving in a circle, holding hands and carefully observing the music. 

 

But, as they become more ecstatic, they leap about like young horses, stamping the ground and beating out the rhythm of a dance dedicated to the goddess Minerva: "Their violence is extreme. They crash into each other with bravura. No one can restrain them." (61)

 

(xix) 

 

This is the sort of paragraph that one might have expected to see Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood used on a shirt design for SEX or Seditionaries, or that Jamie Reid might have incorporated into a piece of artwork for The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle, describing the Sex Pistols: 

 

"They say that they foster disorder in all its forms. Confusion troubles violent debates disarray upsets disturbances incoherences irregularities divergences complications disagreements discords clashes polemics discussions contentions brawls disputes conflicts routs débâcles cataclysms disturbances quarrels agitation turbulence conflagrations chaos anarchy." (57) 

 

(xx) 

 

I'm not a pacifist. But I don't like those who glorify modern warfare and thrill to the thought of exterminating their enemy. And so, I don't much care for this from the very end of part two of Les Guérillères: 

 

"Their favourite weapons are portable. [...] There is every kind of rifle. There are machine guns and rocket-launchers. [...] The objective is not to gain ground but to destroy the greatest number of the enemy [...]" (58) 

 

I refer readers to the end of section (xvi) above re fascism and would remind them also of what Nietzsche says about honouring one's adversary - not seeking their annihilation. 

 

Having a worthy enemy should be a point of pride; their strength forces you to raise your own game and overcome your own weaknesses. Ultimately, it might be the case that not only does one find one's best enemy in one's best friend, but one locates one's best friend in one's best enemy. 

 

The true warrior does not seek to humiliate or crush an opponent, but happily engage in struggle with them. Unfortunately, it seems that in war as in love, woman is more barbarous than man ... [m] 

 

 

Notes 

 

[a] In her 1969 novel Les Guérillères, Monique Wittig uses the recurring letter 'O' as a powerful graphic and poetic device to primarily symbolise three things: female anatomy and sexuality (the vulval ring); a new point of origin free from old values that enables women to completely reinvent language, culture, and society (the mathematical zero); the unity of the lesbian sisterhood and community of warrior women (the circle of trust). 

 

[b] Considered a pivotal text by feminist and lesbian thinkers, Les Guérillères by Monique Wittig was originally published by Les Editions de Minuit (1969). David Le Vay's 1971 English translation has been used in numerous editions, including the Beacon Press edition (1985) and the University of Illinois Press edition (2007). 

      Here, I am using the /ubu Editions e-book (2007). This free digital publishing project - created as part of UbuWeb - is an online archive for avant-garde writing founded by the American poet and cultural provocateur Kenneth Goldsmith. 

 

[c] I say this because the name 'Sophie Ménade' is simply too good (too convenient) to be true; the forename being the French spelling of the Greek word for wisdom [σοφία] and the surname meaning a wildly excited (possibly violent) woman who is either divinely inspired or a little bit crazy. It comes from the Greek term μαίνομαι (maínomai), which is where the female followers of Dionysus took their name from. 

 

[d] See Lawrence's essay 'Introduction to These Paintings', in Late Essays and Articles ed. James T. Boulton (Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 192, where he rejects the folk wisdom of base-born proverbs that denigrate beauty and cause us to doubt our own senses. "If you can't trust the impression which things make on you", he writes, "you are a fool." 

      See also the article 'Sex Appeal' in the same volume, pp. 143-148, in which he writes of beauty as an experience. 

 

[e] Again, one can't help but be reminded of Lawrence who also speaks of women in a time to come who belong neither to men nor their children nor even themselves, but to the sun. See D. H. Lawrence. 'Sun-women', in The Poems Vol. 1, ed. Christopher Pollnitz (Cambridge University Press, 2013), p. 456. 

 

[f] I recently wrote a post titled 'Dancing in the Rain' (3 Sept 2016) which discusses Burroughs's Wild Boys novel in relation to the song by Duran Duran. 

      One day, I will write the comparative study I promised on Wittig's novel and Burroughs's book. While their violent revolutionary fantasies share much in common and both works read like ancient epic poetry or future tribal histories rather than traditional novels, their ultimate political destinations represent two entirely different poles of radical separatism. 

      In brief, Wittig celebrates the total destruction of phallocracy to liberate the female body and construct a world based on collective sisterhood (which eventually incorporates men who surrender their patriarchal power). Burroughs's utopia, on the other hand, is an exclusively male, homoerotic universe that eliminates women completely (his future world relies on cloning, not sexual reproduction). She wants an egalitarian society free of sex and class dynamics; Burroughs envisions his wild boys one day abandoning the Earth and mutating into alien space beings. 

 

[g] A name that playfully suggests this woman is a lover of songs with existential meaning. In Greek mythology, Philomela is an Athenian princess who after some great tragedy befalls her is transformed by the gods into a nightingale. And Sarte ... well, I probably don't need to explain the cultural and philosophical resonances of this name (even when missing an 'r'). 

 

[h] Feminist theorists have been keen to posit the clitoris as a highly sensitive and complex organ that challenges religious, social, medical, and literary frameworks that have traditionally ignored, denied, or downplayed female pleasure. 

      One might recall Lady Chatterley's lover, Oliver Mellors, raging about the clitoris (or what he calls the beak). In his phallocentric view, a mature woman should only achieve orgasm through vaginal penetration by the penis. Clitoral stimulation is, in his opinion, an immature, inferior, and even unnatural way for a woman to derive pleasure. See chapter 14 of Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928). 

 

[i] This claim that the women do not "say that vulvas with their elliptical shape are to be compared to suns, planets, innumerable galaxies" or that the cunt "is the primal form which as such describes the world in all its extent, in all its movement" is repeated on p. 37. But despite this insistence, I still think that this is what many of the women believe. 

 

[j] See Antonin Artaud's 1947 text (performed as a radio play) Pour en finir avec le jugement de dieu (To Have Done with the Judgment of God), in which he declares that there is 'nothing more useless than an organ' - even our sex organs. See also Deleuze and Guattari's development of Artaud's thinking in Anti-Oedipus (1972) and A Thousand Plateaus (1980). 

 

[k] See the post 'And Hate Shall Set You Free' (15 Aug 2025). And see also the much earlier post 'Torpedo the Ark Means: I Hate Everything' (15 Nov 2014). 

 

[l] Indeed, it might be argued that this is often a luxury belief; that romanticising death over slavery is often an attitude held by those who are not actually facing the immediate reality of being killed. 

      The American Founding Father, Patrick Henry, for example, did not die violently, nor did he ever have to choose between literal death or slavery. Instead, he lived a relatively long and prosperous life and died peacefully at home. When he delivered his famous 'Give me liberty, or give me death!' speech at the Second Virginia Convention in March 1775, he was speaking rhetorically and using slavery as a political metaphor (his actual objection was to British rule and the imposition of taxes by the Crown - and it might also be noted by those who appreciate a little irony that he himself was a major slaveholder). 

 

[m] I'm paraphrasing Nietzsche's line from Beyond Good and Evil (1886): "In revenge and in love woman is more barbarous than man." Trans. from the German by R. J. Hollingdale in the Penguin edition (1990), IV. 139, p. 101.

 

 

To read the third and final part of this post, please click here. 

 

 

Domestication Lost Overnight: Fun and Games with Killing Joke

Poster advertising the Killing Joke album  

Fire Dances (1983)

 

Get out my way - we go / Take back those ways you know 

Fun and games come out to play / Fun and games for unknown days [1]

 

I.

 

I've said it before and I'll doubtless say it again: Isn't it amazing how certain songs from one's youth continue to resonate in one's imagination? [1] 

 

Thus it was that, while reading for a possible future post discussing The Wild Boys (1971) in relation to Lord of the Flies (1954) [2], I couldn't help recalling the Killing Joke song 'Fun and Games' [3]. 

 

Like the above novels, this track also plays with ideas to do with feral youth and the breakdown of civilisation and I thought it might be amusing to write something about its lyrical content [4] in advance of the forthcoming Burroughs-Golding study as a kind of punk teaser.

 

 

II. 

 

Essentially, the lyrics to 'Fun and Games' - which can be found on genius.com - provide a brief exploration of subcultural atavism. But, interestingly - because the song establishes a moonlit setting - we are encouraged also to consider ideas to do with nocturnal liminality.

 

Atavism is an interesting term whose meaning within biology is fairly straightforward and fixed: the reappearance of an ancestral characteristic (or genetic trait) in an individual organism after several generations of absence; i.e., it's an evolutionary throwback caused by mutation - think of a baby born with a vestigial tail.    

 

But atavism is also used by those working in the social sciences, where it refers to the tendency for a people in times of social upheaval to revert to the ways of thinking and acting of a former (more primitive) age. And that's what excites Jaz Coleman and the other members of Killing Joke; the possibility that a people might discover its ancestral past and wilfully reject modernity.   

 

The album Fire Dances (1983), on which 'Fun and Games' features, is a call for the becoming-pagan of disaffected youth in the UK via a series of fun and games that lead participants from social enslavement and conventional models of maturity to anarchic autonomy and the cruel innocence of childhood. 

 

Killing Joke are not advocating merely for a lifestyle choice: one is being challenged to make a total commitment; to take back those ways long abandoned and step outside the gate. Whether this necessitates fleeing to Iceland or unto the ends of the earth, is debatable. 

 

III. 

 

The opening lines of 'Fun and Games' immediately establish a liminal setting: 

 

Twilight open and you're on your own 

Moon is shining, you want fun and games

 

Twilight represents a threshold state, mirroring the boundary between the rational, white-faced daytime self and the untamed, dark-bodied self that comes out to play at the witching hour and dances round bonfires, etc. 

 

During those hours that do not quite belong to one day or the other - the intermediate time when dreams seem real and reality but a dream - standard routines, social conventions, and normal expectations are all suspended. Bakhtin referred to this suspension or overturning of the established order through song, dance, comedy, and chaos as the carnivalesque. 

 

Now, while that sounds joyous and liberating, one should be aware that the carnivalesque has a dark and violent underbelly. For when you do away with law and order you don't just get harmless fun and games, you also open the way to savage and destructive desires - including the desire for torture and human sacrifice. 

 

Finally, it's interesting that the song indicates that one is very much alone at this time: awake, while the rest of the world sleeps blissfully in its bed. Such isolation enables introspection. And introspection often involves hearing the voice of a demon whispering inside your head that says: Let's play wild - volatile!

   

 

IV. 

The second verse of 'Fun and Games' is interesting in that it reveals that playmates - a word privileged by Arthur Askey and Hugh Hefner alike - belong to both sexes: All the boys and girls join together in the streets and have the same wild look in their eyes (domestication lost overnight).  

 

And the reason this interests is because it starkly contrasts with The Wild Boys and Lord of the Flies, both of which are concerned only with young males. There are no girls on Golding's unnamed island and, in Burroughs's novel, the Wild Boys are an armed group of militant homosexuals intent on destroying heteronormative civilisation [5]. 

 

As for Killing Joke, well, whilst 'Fun and Games' seems to accord boys and girls an equal right to play, sexual politics remains one of the most underdeveloped areas of their work. Indeed, we have to wait nearly three decades until the song 'Pole Shift' explicitly makes the connection between the overthrow of civilisation and libidinal liberation. 

 

In other words, it is only in 2012 that they finally set out their vision of a future wherein "the taboos of today are tomorrow's delights" and bourgeois sexual morality is swept away in "one great orgasm by the light of day" [6]. 

 

 

V. 

 

The third and final verse of 'Fun and Games' elevates the game from localised juvenile delinquency to an apocalyptic generational coup:  

 

Games get bigger all the time 

Because the playpen's falling - stakes are high 

And the child will conquer - step by step [7]

  

Literally speaking, a playpen is simply a small, portable enclosure with high sides made of mesh, plastic, or wood that keeps a child safe and contained so caregivers can get on with other tasks without constantly having to provide supervision.

 

But, here, it refers metaphorically to the restrictive institutions of childhood - such as the family unit, the nursery, the school ... Its falling thus suggests wider societal collapse. When the architectural boundaries of adult supervision crumble, the games lose their benign, recreational status and transform into existential events (stakes are high).

 

The declaration that the child will conquer subverts the traditional teleology of maturation. Instead of growing up to inherit the adult world, youth take over - step by step - through atavistic force. 

 

This mirrors the tragic climax of Lord of the Flies, where Jack and his followers smash the democratic rules established by Ralph and Piggy. However, whereas Golding introduces an adult authority figure (the naval officer) at the final moment to halt the slaughter, the Killing Joke lyrics offer no such restoration of order. 

 

Thus, in a sense, 'Fun and Games' is closer in spirit to The Wild Boys, which also ends with a dreamlike (or, if you prefer, nightmarish) vision of the traditional world collapsing as untamed youth achieves its global victory and the downfall of adult civilization. 

 

 

VI. 

  

The relentless, almost incantatory repetition of the refrain fun and games come out to play at the conclusion of the song strips these phrases of their innocent connotation. By juxtaposing the terminology of childhood with the vocabulary of political (and psychological) instability, the song is a strangely compelling hymn to youth gone wild.  

 

Killing Joke are, if you like, a punk version of Golding's choir boys - happy to paint their faces and summon their own atavistic demons during nocturnal rituals around the fire. Golding - like Freud [8] - might view this with despair but Jaz Coleman and his fellow discontents think this in terms of liberation. 

 

Notes

 

[1] Lyrics from 'Fun and Games', written by Killing Joke (Jaz Coleman, Paul Ferguson, Paul Raven, and Geordie Walker). See note [3] below for more details. 

 

[2] I discuss this phenomenon with reference to another Killing Joke track taken from the album Fire Dances and the concept of a reminiscence bump in a post titled 'Musical Memories' (30 Aug 2023). 

 

[3] 'Fun and Games' is on Fire Dances (E. G. Records, 1983) - the fourth studio album by Killing Joke and first to feature new bass player Paul Raven. It was critically well-received and reached number 29 in the UK Albums Chart.  

 

[4] Although I am not here going to discuss the music, it is certainly the case Paul Ferguson's tribal drum tracks, Raven's bass and Geordie's jagged guitar work provide the perfect sonic landscape for Jaz Coleman's call to come out and play.

 

[5] Golding excluded girls to focus exclusively on what we would now call toxic masculinity in relation to his own lifetime experiences, on the grounds that he simply didn't know enough about girls to feel qualified to write about them. 

      Burroughs, meanwhile, was openly and aggressively misogynistic, excluding female characters as a matter of principle - in his queer utopia, gay male liberation comes only after the complete erasure of any female presence. 

 

[6] Lyrics from the song 'Pole Shift', by Killing Joke (Jaz Coleman, Paul Ferguson, Geordie Walker, and Youth), the opening track on the album MMXII (Spinefarm Records, 2012) - their fourteenth studio album. The only other track I can think of that has a sexual edge (and some heavy breathing), is 'Lust Almighty', on Fire Dances (1983). 

[7] Lyrics from 'Fun and Games', written by Killing Joke. 

 

[8] For Freud, writing in Civilization and Its Discontents (1930) there is a permanent antagonism between the demands of instinct and the restrictions of a civilisation that is founded upon a repression of those instincts. 

      He argues that this repression is not only necessary, but a good and vital thing; that humanity is better off domesticated in the name of love. Yes, a loss of instinctive freedom can cause a certain amount of suffering and lead to guilt, but it's a price worth paying in Freud's view. For to give free expression to wild and dangerous desires is to surrender to the 'death drive'.   

 

 

Dancing in the Rain: Notes on The Wild Boys

Simon, John, Andy, Nick, and Roger - 

the (not so) Wild Boys of Duran Duran 

Photo by Mike Owen (1984)

 

I.

 

Just to be clear: I don't much like - and have never much cared for - Duran Duran [1].

 

Having said that, their single 'The Wild Boys', released in October 1984 [2], intrigues because of its controversial point of literary reference: namely, the novel of that title by cult American author William S. Burroughs.

  

 

II. 

 

The Wild Boys: A Book of the Dead (Grove Press, 1971) tells the story of a group of youths who, in a dystopian near-future, revolt against civilisation and embrace a life of savage violence, drug-fuelled hedonism, and sadistic homosexuality. 

 

As a piece of fiction, it isn't really my cup of tea: too experimental for my tastes [3].

 

Nevertheless, if one reads it as a work of radical (anti-assimilationist) queer theory akin to Monique Wittig's Les Guérillères (1969) [4], then it certainly has philosophical interest and it remains a favourite book among those who align themselves to the counterculture and wish to challenge heteronormative ideas and values.

 

 

III.

 

Apparently, the idea for the song came from the Australian director Russell Mulcahy, who wanted to make a full-length feature film based on Burroughs's surreal and sexually explicit novel. 

 

Mulcahy asked the band to produce a soundtrack and, excited by the proposal, Simon Le Bon immediately began writing some lyrics for a title track based on Mulcahy's brief synopsis of the book [5].  

 

Meanwhile, the rest of the group set about writing the music, taking inspiration less from Burroughs and more from Frankie Goes to Hollywood who had hit the number one spot in the UK charts earlier that year with their phenomenal debut single 'Relax' [6].    

 

'The Wild Boys' became one of the band's highest-charting singles, peaking at number two in the charts in both the UK and US. Naturally, Mulcahy directed the accompanying video which was filmed on the 007 Stage at Pinewood Studios and cost an outrageous sum for the time (over a million pounds).  

 

 

IV.  

 

Mulcahy originally intended his award-winning music video to act as a teaser for his proposed cinematic adaptation of Burroughs's novel. Unfortunately, however, this ambitious film project never came to fruition [7]. 

 

Well, I say unfortunately, but perhaps it's just as well ... 

 

For I worry, having seen how the Duran Duran video gives Burroughs's deliriously homoerotic vision a boring, hetero-masculine, Mad Max-style makeover, what else Mulcahy - despite being gay - would have done to straightwash [8] and tame the story of The Wild Boys.

 

Ultimately, despite his vulgar auteur tag, Mulcahy is very much a mainstream commercial director rather than an underground filmmaker and should probably be prevented from even considering certain projects. 

 

Any adaptation of The Wild Boys that stays even halfway true to the book is never going to be given the greenlight by a major studio, open in cinemas across the land, or find a wide audience - not even among Durannies and members of the MTV generation.      

Notes 

 

[1] When my girlfriend Gillian bought a copy of the Duran Duran single 'Save a Prayer' in August 1982 (taken from the album Rio) it caused a huge row. I regarded it as both a betrayal of everything punk stood for and a compromise with everything punk had sought to destroy. The fact that she was defended in her actions by my friend Kirk Field at the time - as he also liked this new wave ballad - is something I still haven't forgotten or quite forgiven to this day. 

 

[2] 'The Wild Boys' was the only studio track on the Duran Duran live album Arena (Parlophone, 1984), and was produced by Nile Rodgers, who gave it the same kind of energy as he had given 'The Reflex' - the number one single released by Duran Duran in April 1984, from the album Seven and the Ragged Tiger (EMI, 1984).   

 

[3] This is not to deny the writer's genius or the book's greatness. For an insightful (and appreciative) review of The Wild Boys by Alfred Kazin in The New York Times (12 Dec 1971), please click here. 

 

[4] For a discussion of Wittig's novel (and its influence on the thinking of Nick Land), see my post titled 'Fanged Noumena: On Nick Land and the New Amazons' (1 June 2026). 

      I'm aware that Burroughs wrote from a very different perspective to Wittig, but I think there's a similar political logic and an aesthetics of negation at play in their writings. For example, both authors reject notions of reform, explicitly calling for total revolution and the destruction of bourgeois institutions such as the family. They also both believe that this revolution against the straight mindset is something that must be fought at all levels - including (and not least of all) the level of language. 

 

[5] It might be noted at this point that Russell Mulcahy and the boys from Duran Duran weren't the first to be inspired by Burroughs's novel. Malcolm McLaren, for example, was a huge William Burroughs fan and before settling on the name Bow Wow Wow for the band he assembled and managed after the Sex Pistols, he considered calling them the Sex Gang Children - a phrase he coined based upon his reading of The Wild Boys. 

      And - predictably - David Bowie also credited The Wild Boys with aesthetically influencing the creation of his Ziggy Stardust persona, for which he thanked Burroughs when they met in person at an event in November 1973. This successful encounter, which was featured in Rolling Stone in February 1974, is recalled by Jon Savage in 'When Bowie met Burroughs', The Guardian (9 Mar 2013). 

 

[6] 'Relax', by Frankie Goes to Hollywood, was produced by Trevor Horn and released on ZTT Records in October 1983. It reached number one in the charts at the end of January 1984 and was one of the decade's most controversial records - far more so than Duran Duran's 'Wild Boys' - it was even subject to a BBC ban owing to the sexually explicit nature of the lyrics (and Mike Read's distaste for such). A different version of the song features on the Frankie Goes to Hollywood debut album Welcome to the Pleasuredome (ZTT, 1984). 

      The band were marketed by ZTT co-founder Paul Morley in direct opposition to their pop rivals; a quarter-page ad for the single appeared in the music press declaring that Frankie Goes to Hollywood were going to make Duran Duran 'lick the shit off their shoes'. 

      The original video for the song, directed by Bernard Rose, was set in an S&M themed gay nightclub and featured the band members interacting with several characters of the kind that one might expect to encounter in such a venue. Not surprisingly, this too was banned by both the BBC and MTV. I provide a link to it so that readers can compare and contrast it with the Wild Boys video made by Mulcahy (I think I know which Burroughs would have preferred). 

 

[7] Speaking of projects that never came to fruition ... Burroughs himself had, in fact, written a screenplay based on his novel, which he hoped to have produced as a low-budget, hardcore gay porn film. However, after negotiations with the notorious Fred Halsted came to nothing, Burroughs abandoned the idea. 

      On a happier note, in 2017 The Wild Boys was finally adapted into a full-length feature film titled Les garçons sauvages, directed by Bertrand Mandico. It's not what one would call a faithful adaptation - more a clever reimagining. Thus, while it adopts certain ideas and carries over a transgressive spirit from the novel, the film replaces Burroughs's fragmented, non-linear narrative with a continuous plot and introduces supernatural elements to do with gender metamorphosis that are entirely absent from the original work. However, while moving away from the sadistic cisgender male homosexual experience, it remains defiantly a queer, anti-heteronormative movie - just all a bit more dreamlike. Click on the link provided to watch the trailer.  

 

[8] Straightwashing refers to the manner in which fictional gay and queer characters are portrayed as straight in order to make their representation comply with heteronormativity. A common justification for such queer erasure includes a concern with mainstream audience reaction. 

 

 

Better to Be a Prosimian Than a Superhuman (Or Why I Prefer Lemurs to Lemurians)

A Lemurian in their cosmic-astral form dancing through the heavens [1] 

and a pair of lemurs in all their wet-nosed beauty ghosting in the forest

 

 

I.

 

Humanity is a species desperately insecure about its place in the universe. The Copernican revolution followed by the death of God hasn't helped matters. 

 

However, existential anxiety does in part explain the rise of numerous New Age mythologies which offer alternative histories of mankind based on pseudoarchaeology and various occult beliefs. 

 

The possibility that we are descended from superhuman - possibly alien - beings addresses the pathological need to feel not only exceptional but cosmically significant. We obsessively imagine ethereal ancestors to validate our uniqueness, while pushing the flesh-and-blood miracles staring back at us from the natural world to the edge of extinction. 

 

This is perfectly illustrated by the way in which a scientific hypothesis about a lost continent called Lemuria - intended to explain the presence of lemurs on Madagascar - was hijacked by theosophists in the late nineteenth century and transformed into a bizarre myth of a primal spiritually advanced species of man.  

 

In other words, humans decided that the evolutionary history of lemurs was of no great concern to them - even though, of course, their evolutionary history is our evolutionary history [2] - and that it was far more fascinating to invent a fictional race of giant, telepathic beings who once lived on a sunken continent: ladies and gentlemen, meet the Lemurians ... 

 

 

II.        

 

To understand how deeply this preference for conceited fantasy over objective scientific fact runs, we must look at how the myth of Lemuria developed. It did not begin with an esoteric vision; it began, rather, with a pile of bones and an attempt by British zoologist Philip Sclater in 1864 to solve a geographical puzzle [3].

 

Sclater noticed that fossilised remains of lemurs were found in both Madagascar and India, but, curiously, not in the landmasses between them. Before the mechanics of continental drift were understood, the only logical explanation Sclater could devise was a sunken land bridge beneath the Indian Ocean; a continent he named Lemuria, in honour of the primates whose ancient remains inspired him. 

 

Initially, then, Lemuria was a theory within respectable mainstream science. But after the famous German biologist Ernst Haeckel suggested in 1868 that Lemuria might also be the lost cradle of humanity, the idea was appropriated by thinkers outside the scientific community, including Helena Blavatsky and members of her Theosophical Society. 

 

They didn't give a shit about the evolution of lemurs or patterns of primate migration. They simply wanted a stage upon which they could play out their mad racial fantasies and conjure up visions of a lost world inhabited by a root-race of hermaphroditic superhumans channelling cosmic energy with sacred crystals [4].       

 

Theories about Lemuria were laid to rest when, in the 1960s, the scientific community finally accepted Alfred Wegener's theory of plate tectonics and continental drift, first proposed in 1912. However, the idea lived on in the popular imagination, especially among those prone to New Age beliefs, crackpot history, and pseudoarchaeology and there is now a vast body of fringe literature available for those with the time and patience [5]. 

  

It is now believed by those who like this sort of thing that the last of the Lemurians are holed up - literally - beneath Mount Shasta, in Northern California, in a hidden, jewel-encrusted city called Telos [6].   

 

 

III.  

 

Strip away all the comforting New Age delusions and a simple truth emerges: It is infinitely preferable to be a real wet-nosed prosimian than a mythical Lemurian. 

 

Certainly for my part, I have no desire to become spiritually superhuman. On the other hand, however, I would quite happily become-animal or reincarnate as any species [7] of forest-haunting lemur [8] subordinate to the alpha-female leading my troop.     

 

Being a lemur - i.e., an actual living creature - offers distinct advantages over being a Lemurian; i.e., a mythical being born of lost-continent lore. For one thing, you are actually alive - and that, as Lawrence says, is the most marvellous thing of all: "For man, as for flower and beast and bird, the supreme triumph is to be most vividly, most perfectly alive" [9].

 

Inhabiting a lush, tropical habitat, lemurs lead a relatively stress-free existence: foraging for food (which is plentiful and varied); sleeping, sunbathing, leaping from tree to tree, and cuddling up with other members of their tight-knit and highly cooperative family troops (a demokrasian'ny fikasihana as they say in Malagasy). 

 

Before the relatively recent arrival of man, lemurs enjoyed a safe and peaceful existence for tens of millions of years [10]. 

 

IV. 

 

So, we have to ask: Why do so many people find an imaginary humanoid more compelling than a biological organism, such as a strangely beautiful (and beautifully strange) lemur?

 

The answer is simple: myths flatter the human ego, whereas evolutionary reality demands humility. 

 

For the science reveals that our ancestors were not glowing, ethereal giants, but small, scurrying, bug-eating mammals that survived by clinging to branches in the dark. It demonstrates how we are intimately linked to the lemur through shared DNA, skeletal blueprints, and social impulses - and a lot of people find that disconcerting. 

 

In fact, those who subscribe to Idealism and myths of human exceptionalism despise all animals, including lemurs, because they remind us that we are fundamentally the same: eating, breathing, shitting, fucking, and dying just like them.  

 

To believe in Lemurians is to believe that we are the descendants of gods. It implies that the universe is a story centred entirely around the human potential to transcend our biology, our mortality, our terrestrial nature. It allows us to indulge in escapism, looking both backward and forward to a golden age of spiritual perfection while we busy ourselves actively destroying the Earth we live on.

 

The Lemurian is a sterile projection of Victorian and New Age anxieties: nothing more. The lemur is a miracle of evolution, perfectly adapted to an environment that they help maintain in one of the most biodiverse places on Earth [11]. 

 

When we trade the lemur for the Lemurian, we exchange a vital link to our own evolutionary history for a funfair mirror that reflects only our selves in a crazily distorted manner. Looking into the limpid amber eyes of a lemur [12] doesn't connect you to a fake spiritual hierarchy, but to the foundational elements of our own behaviour, including not only cognitive flexibility, but the need to be in touch - with other people, but also with plants and animals and inanimate objects [13].  

 

The next time you hear some idiot rambling on about the ancient wisdom of the lost continent of Lemuria or the spiritual aura of its fictional inhabitants, tell them to put down their crystals and go look at the vibrant chaos of the natural world unfolding in their own back garden. 

 

The phantom continent is exposed as a historical footnote born from a misunderstanding of what the fossil record was telling us. But the animals that inspired the myth are still there, clinging to survival in the forests of Madagascar. We don't need to invent a magical past to be a part of something wondrous. Reality is already spectacular enough. 

 

Stop looking for the Lemurian: celebrate the lemur!

 

Notes

 

[1] Artwork by Harry Rankin for the cover of the debut album by Sophia Space Agency, The Turning Blue, released on Lemurian Records (2026). For my thoughts on this dark ambient project by Melpomeni Kermanidou, please click here.   

 

[2] As primates, both humans and lemurs share a distant common ancestor. The split into two distinct suborders - humans belong to the Haplorhini along with other dry-nosed apes and monkeys; lemurs belong to the Strepsirrhini (wet-nosed primates) - occurred over sixty million years ago. 

      As those who have devoted their professional lives to studying lemurs will tell you, "both living species and their extinct relatives, are a crucial part of the human story", for despite millions of years separating us, "we still share genes, complex social lives, and many of the same susceptibilities to disease".  

      For more information, please visit the Duke Lemur Center, founded at Duke University (North Carolina) in 1966. The DLC is a world leader in the study, care, and protection of lemurs - Earth's most threatened group of mammals (although lemurs have thrived for tens of millions of years, human activity and climate change has now left many species either endangered or critically endangered).

 

[3] See Philip Lutley Sclater, 'The Mammals of Madagascar', in The Quarterly Journal of Science, Vol. 1, pp. 213-219.

 

[4] I really don't want to follow Blavatsky too far down the theosophical rabbit hole, but, in brief, she believed Lemurians to be the third of seven distinct root races from which modern humanity evolved. Exceedingly tall beings, Lemurians possessed a third eye via which they could perceive higher dimensions. Unfortunately, after discovering sex they began to mate with lower species. This led to their spiritual degeneration and eventual downfall (although, on the bright side for any primatologists reading, it did result in the creation of apes).

 

[5] See the work of James Churchward, for example, who developed the concept of Lemuria in several books published in the 1920s and '30s. He referred to it as the lost continent of Mu, however, and identified its location in the Pacific Ocean (also incorporating ideas to do with Atlantis into his work). 

      See also L. Sprague de Camp's classic study Lost Continents: The Atlantis Theme in History, Science, and Literature (Gnome Press, 1954). An updated version was published by Dover Press in 1970 and it remains one of the most reliable books on this subject.

 

[6] Mount Shasta - a potentially active volcano - has been the subject of a large number of myths and legends. In 1905, the American writer and mystic Frederick Spencer Oliver published his A Dweller on Two Planets which claimed that survivors from Lemuria had found refuge there after their own land sunk beneath the waves, building a complex system of tunnels and caves - carpeted with furs, apparently. 

      Later, Rosicrucian Harvey Spencer Lewis also wrote about the hidden Lemurians of Mount Shasta and his work - Lemuria: The Lost Continent of the Pacific (1931) - along with Oliver's, is largely responsible for the legend's widespread popularity. Predictably, belief in the US-based Lemurians has been incorporated into numerous new religious movements (or cults, as I think we might fairly call some of them) and today internet forums are still filled with people instructing you how to connect with your inner Lemurian.

 

[7] There are over a 120 recognised species of lemur divided across five main families. They are found exclusively in the wild on the island of Madagascar. Readers might be interested to know that with more than 200 animals across 13 species, the Duke Lemur Center (linked to above) houses the world's most diverse population of lemurs outside their native Madagascar.

      

[8] I say forest-haunting rather than simply forest-dwelling, as the name lemur comes from the Latin word lemures, meaning ghost. Carl Linnaeus chose this term in 1754 because of the nocturnal habits and slow movements of the animals and not, as is popularly believed, because of their large eyes that seem to glow in the dark and strange cries. 

 

[9] D. H. Lawrence, Apocalypse and the Writings on Revelation, ed. Mara Kalnins (Cambridge University Press, 1980), p. 149. 

 

[10] See Katherine Rundell, 'Consider the Lemur', in The London Review of Books, Vol. 40, No. 13 (5 July 2018), where she writes: "The early human arrivals on the island eradicated at least 15 species of lemur. Now, largely due to deforestation, 24 species are critically endangered, 49 are endangered and 94 per cent of all species are threatened." 

      Rundell also explains how until recently there was a strong taboo on hunting and eating lemurs, which were believed to be magical creatures (part cat, part monkey, part human, part demon) but this has now mostly been eroded: "So the myths have not saved the lemurs." 

  

[11] Madagascar scores exceptionally high for global biodiversity, ranking as a top megadiverse country with over 90% endemic species. The UK, by comparison, ranks in the bottom 10% worldwide for nature-depleted ecosystems, retaining only half of its original plant and animal life due to centuries of industrialisation and intensive land use.

 

[12] I'm thinking here of something written by William Burroughs in his short eco-surreal novel Ghost of Chance (1991), that was primarily set in Madagascar and addressed the subject of environmental destruction. Burroughs was particularly fond of lemurs and described them as having eyes like "limpid amber, in which the pupil floated like a glittering jewel, changing color with shifts of the light". The story ends with the author requesting readers donate to the Duke University Primate Center.

 

[13] Lawrence's democracy of touch - mentioned earlier in the post (in Malagasy) - is founded upon what he terms the mystery or inspiration of touch and by which he means: "The touch of the feet on the earth, the touch of the fingers on a tree, on a creature, the touch of hands and breasts, the touch of the whole body to body, and the interpenetration of passionate love." 

      See D. H. Lawrence, The First and Second Lady Chatterley Novels, ed. Dieter Mehl and Christa Jansohn, (Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 323  

  

 

This post is for Meni.  

 

 

It's Your Verses That We Want and Your Verses We Shall Have! Notes on Plagiarism, Piracy, and Found Poetry

 

'Immature poets imitate, mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, 

and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different.' [1] 

 

 

I. 

 

Coming as I do from a punk anarchist tradition [2], I'm pretty much of the view that all property - including intellectual property - is theft and that piracy is a swashbuckling method of redistributing gold and cultural capital.

 

And I have little sympathy when bourgeois poets complain about plagiarism, bleating that such an illicit compositional technique is an assault upon originality of expression and the authenticity of experience (i.e., their artistic integrity). 

 

I can see there's something slightly shameful about covert plagiarism, when an attempt is made to hide or disguise what one's doing; if you're going to steal, then do so like Willie Brodie for the sake of the danger and to liberate ideas, not merely so that you might pass off something taken as your own. 

But if you're upfront and open about what you're doing - if your plagiarism is overt and you make no secret of the fact that you located your materials here, there, and everywere - then that seems admirable to me. 

 

In fact, I'm something of a fan of so-called found poetry ...

 

 

II.

 

Found poetry is verse created by recontextualising words, lines, and even whole passages purloined from elsewhere and then making a number of crafty modifications to the text in order to give it fresh meaning or look. How and to what extent the poem is changed - or treated, as they say in the trade - is really up to the finder.    

 

In a sense, a found poem is the literary equivalent of the readymades that Duchamp and the Dadaists foisted on the art world over a century ago. I don't know if he was the first to hit on the technique, but the great American writer and artist Bern Porter famously published Found Poems with the Something Else Press in 1972 [3] and it's him that I initially think of whenever the subject comes up.   

 

 

III.

 

Having found a text to work on, there are several ways one might then begin to fuck with it, including  ...  

 

(i) Erasure

 

Poems produced by erasure have had words from an existing text redacted or blacked out, thereby producing a new work whilst at the the same time making us curious about what has been concealed.

 

Thus, whilst erasure may subvert the question of authorship, it nevertheless acknowledges (and draws attention to) an original text and perhaps raises political questions around censorship, secrecy, and the control of information. 

 

The name often associated with the technique is Doris Cross, who, in 1965, famously placed certain columns from a 1913 edition of Webster's Dictionary under erasure [4]. 

 

(ii) Patchworking

 

A cento is a poetical patchwork entirely composed of verses, passages, or simply short fragments taken from an author (or several authors), then stitched into a new body of text à la Dr. Frankenstein. 

 

It's a very old form, originating in the 3rd or 4th century (if not earlier), but it's one that is still explored and experimented with today by writers such as myself [5]. 

 

(iii) Découpé

 

This is what we call in English a cut-up technique; i.e., one that involves a lot of textual snipping and rearranging in order to create what is known as an aleatory narrative; i.e., a story that incorporates chance or randomness into its composition and/or structure. 

 

William Burroughs and his pal Brion Gysin popularized this technique in the 1950s and 1960s, although it can be traced back to the Dadaists of the 1920s (Tristan Tzara was a fan of such instant poetry). 

 

It has since been used by many scissor-wielding artists in a wide variety of contexts, though those who think that découpé might magically reveal a text's implicit content or true meaning are being ridiculous [6]. 

 

In closing, let me express my admiration for Deleuze's attempt to transform the cut-up into a rather more promiscuous (and less learned) pick-up technique. As he writes: 

 

"You should not try to find whether an idea is just or correct. You should look for a completely different idea, elsewhere, in another area, so that something passes between the two which is neither in one nor the other." 

 

Deleuze continues:  

 

"You don't have to be learned, to know or be familiar with a particular area, but to pick up this or that in areas which are very different. [...] Burroughs' cut-up is still a method of probabilities - at least linguistic ones - and not a procedure [...] which combines the heterogeneous elements" [7]. 

 

 

Notes

 

[1] T. S. Eliot, 'Philip Massinger', essay in The Sacred Wood, (Methuen and Co. Ltd., 1920), p. 114.

 

[2] That is to say, an anarchist tradition that owes more to Malcolm McLaren than it does to Proudhon. 

 

[3]   In 1972, Bern Porter published Found Poems via Something Else Press. It features hundreds of found poems selected from newspapers, ads and everyday printed matter, some involving collage techniques, others displayed as readymades. 

 

[4] For an interesting attempt to answer the question 'Who Is Doris Cross?' by Lynn Xu posted on the Poetry Foundation website (25 April 2014): click here. 

[5] See the post: 'My Name is Victor Frankenstein' (6 March, 2022): click here. 

[6] Burroughs was drawn towards the idea of a text being invested with unconscious meaning. He also suggested cut-ups may be effective as a form of divination: 'When you cut into the present, the future leaks out.' That seem's doubtful, although it's a nice thought. 

      I found this line from Burroughs in the 'Translator's Introduction' to Síomón Solomon's Hölderlin's Poltergeists (Peter Lang, 2020), p. 14.  

 

[7] Gilles Deleuze and Claire Parnet, Dialogues, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (The Athlone Press, 1987), p. 10.