Positive Surrender: An Interview with BREYER P-ORRIDGE

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Notes

For a detailed analysis of this project, see Dominic Johnson, ‘Psychic Weight: The Pleasures and Pains of Performance’, in ORLAN: A Hybrid Body of Art Works, ed. by Simon Donger with Simon Shepherd and ORLAN (Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2010), pp. 84–99.

Gérard Georges-Lemaire, ‘23 Stitches Taken’, in William S. Burroughs and Brion Gysin, The Third Mind (London: John Calder, 1979), pp. 9–24 (p. 18).

BREYER P-ORRIDGE, ‘Excerpts from a Dialogue with Dominic Johnson’, Everything You Know About Sex Is Wrong: Extremes of Human Sexuality (and Everything in between), ed. by Russ Kick (New York: Disinformation Press, 2005), pp. 345–48 (p. 345).

Genesis BREYER P-ORRIDGE, interview with the author, New York, April 2007.

After CBGB: Gender, Sexuality and the Future of Subculture took place at New York University on 13 April 2007, and was organised by the Centre for the Study of Gender and Sexuality. I am grateful to Tavia Nyong'o and Robert D. Campbell for permission to publish an edited transcript of the dialogue. The transcript has been amended and extended in correspondence since 2007, including a prologue added by Genesis BREYER P-ORRIDGE in 2011.

Peter Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde trans. by Michael Shaw (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984).

See Brian Cogan, ‘“Do They Owe Us a Living? Of Course They Do!”: Crass, Throbbing Gristle, and Anarchy and Radicalism in Early English Punk Rock’, Journal for the Study of Radicalism, 1 (2008), 77–90; Drew Daniel, Throbbing Gristle's 20 Jazz Funk Greats (London: 33 1/3, 2008); Richard Metzger, Book of Lies: The Disinformation Guide to Magick and the Occult (New York: Disinformation, 2003); Genesis P-Orridge, Painful but Fabulous: The Life and Art of Genesis P-Orridge (New York: Soft Skull, 2002); Simon Reynolds, Rip It Up and Start Again: Postpunk, 1978–1984 (London: Faber and Faber, 2006); Modern Primitives: Investigations of Contemporary Adornment Rituals, ed. by V. Vale and Andrea Juno (San Francisco: Re/Search, 1997).

Genesis BREYER P-ORRIDGE, interview with the author, New York, April 2007.

Ibid.

Cited in Ted Morgan, Literary Outlaw: The Life and Times of William S. Burroughs (London: Pimlico, 1991), p. 352.

Ibid.

William S. Burroughs, Cities of the Red Night (London: Penguin, 1981), p. xviii.

Genesis BREYER P-ORRIDGE added this paragraph as a prologue in 2011 during the collaborative editing of the interview from the transcript into a publishable form.

For a detailed history of this period, see Simon Ford, Wreckers of Civilisation: The Story of COUM Transmissions and Throbbing Gristle (London: Black Dog, 1999), pp. 1.11–2.10.

This section was also added in 2011, hence the shift from ‘I’ to ‘we’ in the use of personal pronoun.

See Stephanie Dalley, Myths from Mesopotamia: Creation, the Flood, Gilgamesh, and Others (Oxford: Oxford Paperbacks, 2008).