Why Grey Room

Abstract

Photo falling—Word falling—Break through in grey room—Towers, open fireWhen Branden Joseph, Reinhold Martin, and Felicity Scott founded Grey Room twenty-five years ago, they borrowed its title from a passage in William S. Burroughs's novel The Ticket That Exploded (1962). As a new editorial group takes the helm, we revisit this foundational part of the journal's identity to think about what it means to “break through in grey room” today.Burroughs wrote these lines amid a period of postwar, Atomic Age tumult. For a number of years he resided in the so-called International Zone of Tangier, Morocco—a semi-lawless place where sovereign state power was indefinite, a city on the cusp of decolonial revolution. In Burroughs's writings, it was fictionalized as the Interzone, “a place where the unknown past and the emergent future meet in a vibrating soundless hum.”1 No single national authority controlled the International Zone; its interstitial status was poised between a waning colonial Europe and the waxing Pax Americana, of which Burroughs was a certain sort of privileged scion. For decades, the Burroughs Corporation, a manufacturer of adding machines founded by the author's grandfather, acted as a significant rival to (and occasional collaborator with) IBM. In the first half of the twentieth century, its computers aided astronomical calculations that guided U.S. sailors on the open sea and provided numerical and visual aids to bombing runs. Later on, in the second half of the twentieth century, it became a partner in the design of the U.S. military's burgeoning command and control systems, including the spectacular multimedia SAGE (Surface to Air Ground Environment) aerial defense system and its successor, the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD). The Burroughs Corporation's business also thrived in the Global South, most notably under the patronage of the South African apartheid state. In this context, Burroughs's invocation to “break through in grey room” perhaps envisioned the possibility of passing beyond the programmed and planetary control that made up his real and imagined inheritance.