William Burroughs in 1983. (Creative Commons photo, source.)
I don't actually think I'm going to link to all of Michael Johnson''s Substack newsletters if he keeps up his writing pace, but many of them are of interest to RAW fans! The newest one, for example, "Perception, Editing, Cut-Ups: A Glancing Take," looks at rapid shifts in film editing, to the cut-up prose technique popularized by William Burroughs, to RAW's use of the technique. Including in the post is a long, interesting letter from RAW to Kurt Smith that I don't remember seeing before. The comments also are interesting.
4 comments:
Had a very enjoyable time reading Michael's post and also the comments, which contain a lot of fascinating stuff, including some interesting details of the Kurt Smith correpondence (which I hope gets published).
One item I would highlight from the comments: a RAW quote from his correspondence with Bobby Campbell (which Bobby posted, although you may not see it, because of the way Substack seems to hide many comments):
"Cause and effect/noun and verb/actor and act
only exist in SOME languages.....Can't
find any of 'em in nonverbal world"
- Robert Anton Wilson
I've come across that line of thought before from RAW (that our fundamental dichotomies - mind/matter, subject/object, outside/inside, real/illusion, etc - arise conceptually/verbally, ie not present in preconceptual experience, or aconceptual qualia if you like!) but I love the concise form of expression here - late RAW style.
Too funny. I've been invoking Chalmers "Hard Problem" statement a lot this year in relation to the issues around so-called AI. I remember in the late 90s early 00s, we invoked Chalmers a lot, specifically his book, "The Conscious Mind" in the online forums devoted to AI, Bayesian logic, et. al. I just posted on Bluesky this morning invoking Chalmers and the Hard Problem, now this link. SYN-CHRO-NICITY I tell ya!
re: Bobby Campbell's RAW quote about "can't find any of 'em in nonverbal world": that's what Korzybski urged: learning how to do observation on the non-verbal level. And it takes work. RAW thought it easier to observe without words while on cannabis, but he also linked it to Zen. Einstein daydreamed and saw pictures and started from there.
re: Joseph on the Hard Problem: that was a meme by Chalmers that proved really sticky, eh? I'm not sure how to make it less "hard" and if it is a "problem" it's a very serious one indeed, I think. Why? Because it seems to settle at the feet of the Physicalist (roughly 1600-now) method of science - which has been spectacularly successful - but now we cannot get a unified field theory or explain consciousness, and I think it's because we leave out our own experience in doing science. It's as if we explain everything by a ThIrd Person God's eye view that leaves us out of the equations. That can't possibly be right. Our own loves and pains are merely neurobiological data or epiphenomena. Is that really where we want to end up?
This rationalist/physicalist POV seems at the heart of our near-runaway global warming: we are outside of Nature. Nature is outside us. But we are PART of Nature, and inextricably entwined with it. "It" "is" us.
Also: the Machine metaphor. We are NOT machines. We are unified self-organizing systems. Machines are NOT self-organizing. One AI guy said, Yea AI does't have a past, experience in the real world, nor relatives or loves...but that doesn't matter. If you believe that...
It's a Hard Problem (maybe) due to unconscious assumptions about ourselves and our own nature, which does not really end the boundaries of our own skin. Maybe? Is consciousness not really a noun, but a verb? Is it something we perform or enact? Rosch, Varela and Thompson think so, and if I'm on any team w/re/to "consciousness" it would be their take on it. As of today.
Thank you for sharing information about this terrific Substack.
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