1,283 words
The most striking, and significant resemblance between all three is not the level of fame and influence they achieved in life, but their electronic or digital immortality: “Nothing Here Now But The Recordings.”[1]
For Burroughs, Control is manifested by bits of word or image, which implant themselves in our consciousness like viruses. Cutting up words and images breaks lines of control, and “the future leaks out.” Unsurprisingly, then, Burroughs is always contemporary; he’s all over the fabric of internet culture:
When a “small unit of information” captures our collective attention – however briefly – we say it ‘went viral’: Burroughs parlance has become everyday slang.
With sampling, any snippet of text, sound, image or video can be ripped from its source and altered or juxtaposed however the user sees fit. Sampling started with audio – first with tape-based experiments and later with digital devices…When the internet arrived, the floodgates opened. Borrow a lyric from a song for a Facebook post? You just sampled. Use a picture of that Game of Thrones character in a meme? You just sampled…. Such activities technically make users copyright criminals, not that it’s much of a deterrent. At least two generations have grown up remixing and sharing content on the Internet, and many of their favorite artists have built their careers by sampling.[2]
Oliver Harris, editor of the “restored editions” of Burroughs’ major books, adds more:
“What? Does it really say “Lens googles stuttering light flak”? And Uranian Willy[3] “heard the twittering supersonic threats through antennae embedded in his translucent skull”? Google and Twitter?”[4]
The Old Writer, as Burroughs calls himself in his last book, The Western Lands, who “had come to the end of words, of what can be done with words,” may have not so much predicted as pre-embodied the Internet, yet his reputation still rests squarely on his own books. Not so Bowden – if not for the largely serendipitous audio and visual recordings of his speeches, he would probably be nearly forgotten if his legacy rested on what Dutton admits are ugly paintings and unreadable books.[5]
Bowden himself recognized the potential; Dutton notes that “In 2009, in his interview Why I Am Not a Liberal” – the book we earlier found Bowden expounding on New Thought – he “correctly prophesied that the internet, which gradually began to take-off from about the year 2000, would gradually subvert the leftist Establishment’s cultural control,” just as Burroughs thought that the Word, being the instrument of Control, could be cut-up and turned against it.
The internet is the way to combat it, because the internet will gradually eat all those structures, and they will have to go on it in order to survive. So, the internet which couldn’t be stopped and is based on American military technology from yesteryear, is that which will come to eat the controlling methodology which now superintends media. I think there was a pop band in the 1980s called Pop Will Eat Itself, and the internet is sort of the media devouring itself and becoming something different. Under 30 years of age, the only media they look at is the internet, because they can see all the old media on the internet anyway, so they just go to the net. And you can have obscure meetings with people, and it can be seen millions of times on the internet, if you have something that is regarded as worth listening to . . . So, the internet will break it and has largely done already. It’s uncontrollable, even though the authorities can come down, and they can look at what’s on your hard drive even when you don’t know they’re doing it, even when you’re on the computer. Because there are no secrets in that world, you see. But at the same time it’s completely broken liberal propaganda, and in the end they know that, and they all look at it as well. [6]
Dutton had earlier enumerated some of the ways the Internet has kept Bowden alive:
As of December 2024, on YouTube alone, there exist the channels “The Jonathan Bowden Archive” of his recorded and filmed speeches[7] and “Jonathan Bowden” which includes its subject’s stirring reading of Beowulf. There are numerous sites with clips or out-takes from his orations. In some cases, such as “Enoch Powell and Jonathan Bowden: I Have No Regrets,” these have been set to awe-inspiring electronic music, or, as with “English Nationalism,” there is patriotic Classical music playing as a background to Bowden’s voice. “Bowden Vanguardism” is one of many videos which have not only set parts of Bowden’s speeches to music but place relevant stock footage on the screen. In a sense, such videos make Bowden a central component to a form of outsider video art. “Jonathan Bowden–We Want Our Country Back” combines his oration, poignant Classical music and colour video of English rural life from the 1950s; walks in sixteenth century villages, country fairs and evocative seaside holidays. [8]
Indeed, on Twitter, “Jonathan Bowden Quotes,” which regularly tweets out exactly what its name implies, has almost 9000 followers at the time of writing. They include a well-known conservative comedian and two prominent young conservative journalists. Bowden quotes and clips of his speeches are tweeted by accounts with many thousands of followers, such as “Mark W. @DurhamWasp,” “miss white @cinecitta2030,” and “Raw Egg Nationalist @Babygravy9.” Such is some people’s adoration of Bowden that one woman’s Twitter account is entitled “Jonathan Bowden’s Love Child @JoBoIsMyDad.” This account, as well as her other account “Ylass14 @Yorkshirelas141,” concentrates almost exclusively on Bowden memes and videos. [9]
Once again, Neville seems to occupy a place between the two others; as noted above, he, like Bowden, allowed his lectures to be freely taped and distributed by fans; while, like Burroughs, his main mode of communication was through books, which he self-published (like Bowden). Moreover, things really took off in the internet age, with several online archives of his books and lectures, as well as extensive republication of both in Amazon’s kindle format, and the same kind of quote of the day emailing lists. Neville, like Bowden, is arguably more read and listened to, and influential, than ever.
Notes
[1] “Nothing Here Now But The Recordings” is a collection of William S. Burroughs’ tape experiments, originally compiled by Genesis P-Orridge and Peter “Sleazy” Christopherson of Throbbing Gristle in 1980 from Burroughs’ personal archive. The recordings feature Burroughs’ spoken word “cut-ups,” collaged field recordings from his travels, and his flirtations with EVP recording techniques.
[2] Rae, p.244, 267.
[3] Who already gave us “heavy metal” music.
[4] “. . . it’s hard to say what is or isn’t a ‘reference,’ since the text’s viral signifiers find their signifieds not only in the past but in the future. Faced with cut-up passages, the reader can only learn to wait for the ‘original’ words, at which point they take on meaning by discovering new referents….” William Burroughs, Nova Express: The Restored Text, ed. Oliver Harris (New York: Grove / London: Penguin Modern Classics, 2013), p. xiv.
[5] Dutton qualifies this by rightly praising Bowden’s willingness to take chances, and this emphasis on chance is exactly what Burroughs “aimed at” in his books as well as the shotgun paintings. Dutton pulls out Beckett, of all people, and particularly Not I (1972) as an analogy to Bowden’s fiction, which is interesting since Beckett and Burroughs at least share the same publishers, Grove Press (USA) and John Calder (UK). And after all, the ugly and unreadable are a substantial part of our culture, but the producers tend to be of or promoting the Left side of things; not that the Right hasn’t had its own share, but they tend to be ignored or left behind by the dominant culturati.
[6] Dutton, pp. 181-82.
[7] Not to be confused with the Jonathan Bowden Archive maintained by Greg Johnson here.
[8] Dutton, pp. 6-7
[9] Dutton, pp. 8-9