How to see Through Language: William Burroughs and the Cybernetic Signifier

Abstract

Abstract:Concerns about technologically mediated discourse production have existed long before the contemporary debates about generative AI. I argue here that the nascent period of computationally influenced literary production in the 1960s can help us better grasp the way this discourse has been shaped by an imagined opposition between humanist creative endeavors and rationalizing techniques and technologies. Centering on the cybernetics influenced “cut-up” novels of William S. Burroughs, I claim that exploring the entanglements of literary production and technology reveals not only the fallacy of their opposition but, in turn, the irrational and naturalizing tendencies of the purportedly rational discourses which laid the groundwork for our contemporary digital culture.