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There have been, of course, various remnants of disciplinary societies for years, but we already know we are in societies of a different type that should be called, using Burroughs' term - and Foucault had a very deep admiration for Burroughs - control societies.
-Deleuze (2007, 326)
American outlier writer, Beat associate and sometime expatriate, William S. Burroughs, published a second article in the mainstream monthly, Harpers, in November of 1973 entitled "Playback from Eden to Watergate" (#1482; 84-6, 88).1 Its title suggested not only grand historic sweep with a focus on contemporary issues but a change in creative (and, as it turns out, destructive, or at least combative) strategies, a shift in communication technologies from print to magnetic tape, a medium that Burroughs had been experimenting with and manipulating since the 1960s, often as part of a melange of media: recording tape, celluloid, photo-collage and print. Burroughs had thought for a time that he might become a mainstream writer, as he wrote to Jack Kerouac on December 7, 1954: "I sat down seriously to write a best-seller Book of the Month Club job on Tangier," which he hoped would get "serialized in Cosmopolitan or Good Housekeeping." His writing and media experiments grew increasingly dissonant, however; such dissonance accelerated after his move to Paris through the meeting with French sound poet, performance artist and champagne scion, Bernard Heidsieck, who, with collaborator Henri Chopin, ran what they called Domaine Poétique. Soon after their meeting Burroughs and his collaborators, Brion Gysin and Ian Sommerville, participated in an event called La Boheme. When they met Heidsieck and Chopin, the poets had been doing what they called sound collages and assemblages, appropriating contemporary technology to their art and shifting their medium of expression from page to live body and so developing a separate, overlapping line of what became Fluxus in the U.S. and Britain. For Gysin their interests followed his in "sound being used as material"; as he described the encounter: "In La Boheme we had some very strange things that we did along that line [like] reading poems off shuffled cards, along with tapes running and stuff like that. And they said 'Wouldn't you like to join in with us' .. .and we did and said it's got...