William S. Burroughs
The Electronic Revolution
FEEDBACK FROM WATERGATE TO THE GARDEN OF EDEN
In the beginning was the word and the word was god and has
remained one of the mysteries ever since. The word was God and
the word was flesh we are told. In the beginning of what exactly
was this beginning word? In the beginning of WRITTEN history. It
is generally assumed that spoken word came before the written
word. I suggest that the spoken word as we know it came after
the written word. In the beginning was the word and the word was
God and the word was flesh ... human flesh ... In the beginning
of WRITING. Animals talk and convey information but they do not
write. They cannot make information available to future
generations or to animals outside the range of their
communication system. This is the crucial distinction between
men and other animals. WRITING. Korzybski, who developed the
concept of General Semantics, the meaning of meaning, has
pointed out this human distinction and described man as 'the
time binding animal'. He can make information to other men over
a length of time through writing. Animals talk. They dont write.
Now a wise old rat may know a lot about traps and poison but he
cannot write a text book on DEATH TRAPS IN YOUR WAREHOUSE for
the Reader's Digest with tactics for ganging up on digs and
ferrets and taking care of wise guys who stuff steel wool up our
holes. It is doubtful if the spoke word would have ever evolved
beyond the animal stage without the written word. The written
word ist inferential in HUMAN speech. It would not occur to our
wise old rat to assemble the young rats and pass his knowledge
along in an aural tradition BECAUSE THE WHOLE CONCEPT OF TIME
BINDING COULD NOT OCCUR WITHOUT THE WRITTEN WORD.
The writtenword is of course a symbol for something and in the case of
hieroglyphic language writing like Egyptian it may be a symbol
for itself that is a picture of what it represents. This is not
true of an alphabet language like English. The word leg has no
pictorial resemblance to a leg. It refers to the SPOKEN word
leg. so we may forget that a written word IS AN IMAGE and that
written words are images in sequence that is to say MOVING
PICTURES. So any hieroglyphic sequence gives us an immediate
working definition for spoken words. Spoken words are verbal
units that refer to this pictorial sequence. And what then is
the written word? My basis theory is that the written word was
literally a virus that made spoken word possible. The word has
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