DO_EASY

The Discipline of D.E. (Do Easy)

William Burroughs / Gus van Sant

ALCHIMIE_DISCURSIVE_OU_NÉCRO_ÉTHIQUE<>? _THÉORIE_DU_DRONE

« On peut y voir l’aboutissement d’un désir ancien, qui anime toute l’histoire des armes balistiques : accroître son allonge de sorte de pouvoir atteindre l’ennemi à distance, avant que celui-ci ne soit en mesure de le faire. Mais la spécificité du drone tient à ce qu’il joue sur un autre segment de distance. Entre la gâchette, sur laquelle on a le doigt, et le canon, d’où la balle va sortir, s’intercalent désormais des milliers de kilomètres. A la distance de la portée – distance de l’arme à sa cible – s’ajoute celle de la télécommande – distance de l’opérateur à son arme ». (p. 23)

« Cette tentative d’éradication de toute réciprocité dans l’exposition à la violence dans l’hostilité reconfigure non seulement la conduite matérielle de la violence armée, techniquement, tactiquement, psychiquement, mais aussi les principes traditionnels d’un ethos militaire officiellement fondé sur la bravoure et l’esprit de sacrifice. À l’aune des catégories classiques, le drone apparaît comme l’arme du lâche ». (p. 30)

« Cela n’empêche pas ses partisans de la proclamer être l’arme la plus éthique que l’humanité ait jamais connue. Opérer cette conversion morale, cette transmutation des valeurs est la tâche à laquelle s’attellent aujourd’hui des philosophes qui oeuvrent dans le petit champ de l’éthique militaire. Le drone, disent-ils, est l’arme humanitaire par excellence. Leur travail discursif est essentiel pour assurer l’acceptabilité sociale et politique de cette arme. Dans ces discours de légitimation, les « éléments de langage » de marchands d’armes et de porte-parole des forces armées se trouvent recyclés, par de grossiers processus d’alchimie discursive, en principes directeurs d’une philosophie éthique de nouveau genre – une « nécro-éthique », dont il est urgent de faire la critique ». (pp. 30-31)

IMAGES : 

« The Magician », Martin Sharp Tarot (1967)

« The Queen of Swords », Hexen 2.0 Tarot de Suzanne Treister (2009-2011)

« The flow of energy through a system acts to organise that system », Whole Earth Catalog, Stewart Brand et al., citation de Norbert Wiener (1968)

« Untitled (p. 180) », Brion Gysin,  William S. Burroughs, (circa 1965)

TEXT :

Grégoire Chamayou, Théorie du drone, Paris : La Fabrique (2013)

ECUSSONS :

Les écussons de l'USAF Pararescue et de l'USAF MQ-9 Reaper drone (la faucheuse)

your voice house

It might be inferred, from what I’ve said, that any old remix will do. Not so: there are good and bad ones. Tristan Tzara cutting Shakespeare sonnets up and pulling their words from hats is an exercise in randomizing. William Burroughs and Brion Gysin mixing poems in with sliced-up pages of The New York Times is quite another matter: it is assiduous composition—composition understood in all its secondary nature: as reading, tracing, reconfiguring. Using the same technique, Gysin comes up with a few clumsy permutations along the lines of “Rub the Word Right Out . . . Word Right Rub the Out” and so on—whereas Burroughs generates such gorgeous sequences as:

Visit of memories. Only your dance and your voice house. On the suburban air improbable desertions . . . all harmonic pine for strife.

or

The great skies are open. Supreme bugle burning flesh children to mist. 

Why does Burroughs conjure so much more richness from the same source material? Because (unlike the painter Gysin, whose skill lies primarily in the domain of images), he has uploaded the right verbal remix software. He has read and memorized his Dante, his Shakespeare, his Eliot—to such an extent that his activity as a composer consists of giving himself over to their cadences and echoes, their pulses, codas, loops, the better that these may work their way, through him, The New York Times and any other body thrown into the mix, into an audibility that, booming and echoing in the here-and-now, transforms all the mix’s elements, and time itself.This is what all good writers are doing, and always have been.

Tom McCarthy on Burroughs

time piece

mussolini's timepiece

vanitas and freeform nothing

I think we are in rats’ alley 
Where the dead men lost their bones. 

“What is that noise?” 
                      The wind under the door. 
“What is that noise now? What is the wind doing?” 
                      Nothing again nothing. 
                                              “Do 
You know nothing? Do you see nothing? Do you remember 
Nothing?” 
        I remember 
                Those are pearls that were his eyes. 
“Are you alive, or not? Is there nothing in your head?” 
                                                         But 
O O O O that Shakespeherian Rag— 
It’s so elegant 
So intelligent

Is whispering nothing?
Is leaning cheek to cheek? is meeting noses?
Kissing with inside lip? stopping the career
Of laughing with a sigh?--a note infallible
Of breaking honesty--horsing foot on foot?
Skulking in corners? wishing clocks more swift?
Hours, minutes? noon, midnight? and all eyes
Blind with the pin and web but theirs, theirs only,
That would unseen be wicked? is this nothing?
Why, then the world and all that's in't is nothing;
The covering sky is nothing; Bohemia nothing;
My wife is nothing; nor nothing have these nothings,
If this be nothing.

"On Margate Sands. 
I can connect 
Nothing with nothing. 
The broken finger-nails of dirty hands. 
My people humble people who expect 
Nothing.” 

      la la 

To Carthage then I came 

Burning burning burning burning 
O Lord Thou pluckest me out 
O Lord Thou pluckest 

burning

You are the last I recognize; return,
pain beyond help that sears the body’s cells:
as I burnt in the spirit, see, I burn
in you; the wood, that for so long rebels
against the flame you kindle, comes of age;
behold, I nourish you and burn in you.
My earthly mildness changes in your rage
into a rage of hell I never knew.

Quite pure, quite planless, of all future free,
I climbed the stake of suffering, resolute
not to acquire what is still to be
to clad this heart whose stores had become mute.
Is it still I that burns there all alone?
Unrecognizable? memories denied?

O life, o life: being outside.
And I in flames—no one is left—unknown.

Vanitas still life with portrait; David Bailly (1650), Naked Lunch, Wasteland, Winter's Tale, Wasteland, Komm du, du Letzter; Rilke.