FEEDBACK FROM THE IDEA TO THE GARDEN OF DESTRUCTION
Pedro Lagoa & Sara Orsi
From the text «FEEDBACK FROM WATERGATE TO THE GARDEN OF EDEN» by William Burroughs, in The Electronic Revolution, The Expanded Media Editions, 1998
[Sara]
Dear Pedro,
as you know I’m working on a given subject, «False», for Wrong Wrong [online magazine] and I’d like to develop something with you, taking this excerpt of your interview with Elisa Adami as a starting point:
«The possibility of smashing the archive raises also a few questions on what kind of destruction we are speaking of, since as I said, the archive exists both as a physical entity and as an idea. And one thing is to destroy the physical materialization of an idea, while to destroy the idea itself is quite another.»
All best
[Pedro]
Dear Sara,
regarding your question, I’d say there is a diversity of ways in which an idea can be destroyed, some not even involving the need of any sort of external intervention.
I’ll leave you here a very brief – and surely incomplete – list of possible ways in which an idea can be destroyed:
1. when a new idea renders another obsolete, or proves it false (this happens frequently in sciences, for example)
2. repetition or trivialization
3. appropriation or instrumentalization
4. derision, defamation
5. by reaching the end of the idea’s ‘life span’ (this, if we regard ideas as something that shares some characteristics with living entities...)
