Tripping up the syntax of the army is a needed counter-measure to fight the control master and destroy the word scripts via schizorevolutionaries.

This tripping-up of a syntactical order becomes an important counter-measure to an impulse of administering and managing information that Foucault, Deleuze, and Guattari underlined in 1975. In a 1990 interview with Antonio Negri, Deleuze notes that new weapons were needed to combat new forms of power under the “control society.” These new weapons, he tells Negri, will involve “hijacking speech” and creating “vacuoles of noncommunication [and] circuit breakers” (Negotiations 175). Donna Haraway reached a similar conclusion earlier in 1985 with “A Cyborg Manifesto.” If power in the control era relies on information that remains quantifiable and universal, then “the biggest threat to such power is [the] interruption of communication” (Haraway 34). Deleuze acknowledges that while Foucault is often “taken as a theorist on discipline” and confinement, he was also one of the first to notice that we were “moving toward control societies that no longer operate by confining people but through continuous control and instant communication” (Negotiations 174). Deleuze also credits Burroughs as “the first to address” and “characterize this new [control] monster” (Negotiations 178).

Burroughs delivered a lecture on this very subject at the Schizo-Culture conference. After Foucault introduced him, Burroughs described how institutions must disperse and regulate control over individuals to ensure that their power remains effective. “Successful control,” he posited, “means achieving a balance” (Schizo-Culture 40). For Burroughs, “modern control systems depend on a universal literacy since they operate through mass media” (Schizo-Culture 39). The cut-ups that Burroughs developed in the 1960s with Brion Gysin and Ian Sommerville were an attempt to short-circuit communication networks. With the cut-up method, “the writing arm is paralyzed” and there are “No more junk scripts—No more word scripts” (Nova Express 189). Burroughs and Cage were two artists who made the interruption of communication central to their compositional methods. Burroughs even associated Cage with the cut-ups on more than one occasion. In a response to a question on the novelty of the method, Burroughs acknowledged the “cut-ups have been in use for many years now. People like John Cage have been using them in music” (Burroughs Live 432). He noted elsewhere that “Cage and Earle Brown have carried [cut-ups] further in music than it’s ever been carried in writing” (Burroughs Live 119). Three years before the Schizo-Culture event, Deleuze and Guattari identified both Cage and Burroughs as experimenters in Anti-Oedipus. In their section that describes the “schizorevolutionary,” Deleuze and Guattari refer the reader to all of Cage’s music and his book Silence. The schizorevolutionary writes or composes with no intention or goal in mind. Deleuze and Guattari find that it is with this non-intentional writing where The experimentation Deleuze and Guattari associate with Cage and Burroughs concern a compositional method that has no intended object. As Cage explains, “the goal is / not to have a goal” (M 57). A writer without a goal or intention has “nothing to say.” Even while Cage speaks or writes, his words lack any goal or intention. This method of writing through a text, as Jackson Mac Low notes, similarly “involve[s] a large degree of non-intentionality” (226). The schizorevolutionary methods of the cut-ups and writings through are not intention in communicating anything, even if they are saying something. As Deleuze tells Negri: “Creating has always been something different than communication” (Negotiations 175).