I feel the need to preface this blog by saying that William S. Burroughs drives me nuts. Just when I think I get him, I realize I have no clue what on earth he's talking about. This week, of course, was no different, so here are my two burning Burroughs questions.

Question 1: What exactly is Burroughs's goal with "The Electronic Revolution" (aside from being radical)?
At one point, I thought maybe he just wanted us to wake up and think critically about the mass media. He writes, "Remember that when the human nervous system unscrambles a scrambed message this will seem to the subject like his very own ideas which just occurred to him, which indeed it did. Take a card, any card. In most cases he will not suspect its extraneous origin. that [sic] is the run of the mill newspaper reader who receives the scrambled message uncritically and assumes that it reflects his own opinions independently arrived at" (16). So in short, he doesn't like people who approach things "uncritically." Okay, that makes sense. Take everything with a grain of salt.
At another point, though, he seems also to be doing nothing more than reiterating Foucault's ideas about the Panoptic society. First, when discussing the 3 tape recorders, he describes the function of playback in creating fear: "If sexual recordings and film are widespread, tolerated and publicaly [sic] shown tape recorder 3 losses ist [sic] power" (8). Then later, he describes the RM as "a built-in electronic police force armed with hideous threats. You don't want to be a cute little wolf cub? All right, cattle to the slaughter house meat on a hook" (31). Both of these issues are (unintentional?) restatements of Foucault's Panoptic society in which a figure of power (tape recorder 3, God, etc.) uses power to retain control of members of society. This also ties neatly back to the first point I mentioned--that we need to think critically. Maybe if we were thinking critically, we wouldn't get caught in this web of fear and shame that comes from the threat of playback publication of our "private" lives. (As a side note, I've got a million more things to say about the issues of public vs. private in Burroughs's essay, but I think I'm straying too far from my original question at the moment.)
But at the end of the essay, Burroughs says that he wants to rid the English language of "Is of Identity," "THE," and "Either/Or" (33-34). This in and of itself seems to contradict what I thought was Burroughs's point--that we need to be more individualistic and stop being swayed by the powers that be. If we cease to be "THE," and become "A" instead, aren't we just being lumped into another category, of which we can only be recognized as "A" part of a collection? In short, doesn't the restriction of using "THE" make us a part of a mass anyway?
So I repeat: What is Burroughs's goal with this essay? How can we be both individualistic AND relatively nondescript?

This leads me (sort of, ish) to my next question.

Question 2: Does playback create fear or does fear initiate playback? Burroughs seems to want to argue that playback has to occur in order for fear to be created. He writes, "I have said that the real scandal of Watergate is the use made of recordings. And what is this use? Having made the recordings as described what then do they do with them? ANSWER: THEY PLAY THEM BACK ON LOCATION.... PLAYBACK is the essential ingredient" (9). But then later, when he describes the scenario in which his recordings of the Moka Bar caused them to close from fear of exposure (11), the root of the problem seems to be that they're afraid and ashamed EVEN BEFORE PLAYBACK. So just the simple threat of public shaming is enough to cause private shamefulness. But THEN, Burroughs writes, "Tape recorder 3 is PLAYBACK. Adam eperiences shame when his DISCRACEFUL [sic] BEHAVIOR IS PLAYED BACK TO HIM BY tape recorder 3 which is God. By playing back my recordings to the Moka Bar when I want and with any changes I wish to make in the recordings, I become God for this local. I effect them. They cannot effect me" (11). So here, it's the playback itself (the act of it), rather than the threat of it (which would, in turn, create fear, which could, in turn, cause the act of playback or not) that's causing shamefulness.
Or is it the audience that really matters, rather than whether the fear and shame comes before or after the playback? Really, as Burroughs points out, "You may not experience shame during defecation and intercourse but you may well experience shame when these recordings are played back to a disapproving audience" (12). If the audience approved, there would be no shame, and so the fear comes from having a disapproving audience, not the act of playback itself. But there doesn't even need to be an audience in the first place, only the suggestion of one in order to create fear.