[In the following essay, Foster examines Burroughs's rejection of the values of Western civilization.]

Shortly before the suicide of Kurt Cobain, lead singer for the group Nirvana, I heard a cultural commentator say that if you find a kid who listens to Cobain and reads W. S. Burroughs, chances are he also uses heroin. A recent television advertisement for workout shoes featured Burroughs extolling the virtues of technology, his familiar image (black suit and hat, gaunt face) on a micro TV that lies like junk in a wet alley while a high-tech-shod urban youth runs past. In the film Drugstore Cowboy (1989), Burroughs appears briefly as the priest-turned-junkie who had introduced the protagonist (Matt Dillon) to drugs and who unrepentantly explains that only squares do not understand that the pleasures of drugs are necessary in a world devoid of delight. Burroughs has become an icon that illuminates the obsessions of American culture where the hopes for ageless bodies and technological fixes are inseparable from the self-destructive fixes of drugs and despair. Whatever Burroughs's conscious critique of the Western world might be, his position as a switchpoint between fixations of perverse longing and healthy aspiration provides a way of examining the currents that underlie the westward path, the American destiny.

Burroughs's writing, with its mockery and disparagement of almost all Western values, looks as if it aims at some subversion of those values, perhaps even at some alternative vision. We might, that is, see him as a political writer aspiring to produce social change, an aspiration like those that animate much post-structuralist writing. But if we do, we are certain to find his critique to be at best secretly conservative, at worst suicidal,¹ which would make him no worse than most ostensible subversives. The failure of subversion seems to be built into most modern political critiques. Baudrillard, for example, shows that Marx's categories of exchange and use value imply his already accepting a capitalist understanding of value (1975: 22-5), freeing Baudrillard himself to pursue a love affair with the very mechanisms of consumption he challenges. Roberto Calasso hears “Marx's secret heart beating” with a pervert's excitement over the possibilities of the “total dominion” of his ideas over the world (227). Kristeva brilliantly demonstrates the ways in which patriarchal forces create a structural cage for women but is unable to articulate a nonparadoxical alternative to the psychosis that comes with any rejection of the symbolic law.² Foucault thoroughly explores the institutional forces that constitute the individual within every social context, a critique that has the disadvantage of being unable to suggest methods of resistance beyond the “micro.” Butler in Gender Trouble attempts to provide a subversive alternative to complement her Foucauldian analysis of gender and produces an ethic of “drag,” something unlikely either to worry the repressive forces of gender or to console those most deeply troubled by gender; meanwhile, drag becomes fashion. These examples stand for a theme in critical discourses, both of “subversives” who fail to subvert and of critics who point these failures out.

The reason for failure, however, remains constant throughout the range of texts. Frederick Dolan, arguing Burroughs's entanglement with the culture he attacks, puts Burroughs's argument this way: Burroughs's “central quarrel with Western civilization” centers on the inaccuracy of the “Aristotelian construct”:

“Reality” just is synchronous and unpredictable, whereas the declarative sentence moving ahead determinably through time makes it appear as if one event follows another in an orderly manner. Burroughs might attempt to write in ways that undermine the Aristotelian construct, but not without declaring something, and finally, as we have seen, not without becoming inveigled in this construct's seductive images of lucidity, order, control, and a plenitude beyond mere writing as fiction.

(1991: 549)

Like Poe's perverse universe in Eureka, Burroughs's universe does not function according to the rules of logical discourse, of cause and effect. But criticizing Aristotelian reason is easier than escaping it, perhaps because the structure of rational thought always steps in as the judge, converting every voice into its own. Any voice that is not complicit with reason becomes, inevitably, unreasonable. As in capitalism, every challenge to the market (the “green” revolution, for example) becomes a marketing opportunity, the challenger just one more player on the field. The subversive assumes that once the foundations have been exposed to be fictive, have been deconstructed, the structure can be reshaped or replaced to function according to new rules, even rules that ignore the Aristotelian construct. The process of exposure itself, however, seems to transform the subversives, drawing them into the ancient dialectic that ties systematic thinkers to their detractors, that ties “abnormal” sexuality to the “normal,” to use Rorty's Freudian metaphor for the relation between Derrida and post-Kantian philosophers (106).

To view Burroughs as part of this failure to subvert the dominance of reason is, at best, to find him to be one more symptom of a general malady, another sad example of Marcuse's one-dimensional man, caught up in “sweeping rationality, which propels efficiency and growth, [that] is itself irrational” (xii). But the readiness to which Burroughs's work opens itself to the charge of failure should be a warning. His contradictions, his reversals of sign and referent (is space conceived of as timeless synchronicity a metaphor for outer space or vice versa?), his general longing for a beyond, and other refusals of logical form betray less a failure within symbolic mastery than an excessive purposeless delight in manipulating the very forms of mastery. Certainly, he feels a deep hatred for what he refers to in his later writings as the “Ugly Spirit.” His biographer Barry Miles defines this spirit as “the Ugly American, [driven by] forces of greed and corruption, selfishness and stupidity, of Homo sapiens [sic] arrogance” (253-4). And though Burroughs derides the manifestations of this spirit, what remains compelling about him is how he represents the sources of control and how he evokes a sublime dimension to life, a real not subject to symbolic strictures.

Rather than reading Burroughs the symptom, then, I want to read Burroughs the sinthome, whose writing stages enjoyment.³ If Burroughs's iconic doubleness does serve as the switch between health and perversity, it is because the world he represents also stages sublime enjoyment within the contradictions and inverted metaphors of social normalcy. Burroughs fascinates, despite his failures of rational criticism and his at times repellent aesthetics, because he so clearly delights in the violence, sexuality, and bodily luxuriances of disease, beauty, intoxication, and excess that attend the “Ugly Spirit.” His subscriptions to Gun World, American Survival Guide, and Soldier of Fortune (Miles 2-3), for example, flaunt an enjoyment of violent technologies that finds its expression in the various gun-toting figures of his fiction and in his own love of weapons. His misogyny includes an appreciation of homosexual eroticism so boisterous that it leaves no room for women. We might ask with Dolan whether Burroughs's ultimate love of narrative inevitably entangles him in the longings and delusions of the Aristotelian construct, but the political question is whether such conformity with the ugly spirit of the West implies his unwitting accord with that spirit.

When Slavoj Žižek adopts the term “cynical reasoning” to describe much contemporary thought, both popular and professional, he moves a step beyond the stoical position of “suspicion,” the resistance of those who would not be duped by delusions of authority.⁴ The cynic, by contrast, while not duped, lives as if he were: “I know very well, but all the same. …” He stops doubting and resigns himself to living under demands he can never hope to fulfill.⁵ He sees the cultural superego's injunctions to be honest, generous, and dutiful as a fool's game, but one he continues to play without being tormented by an awareness of its falsity. As discouraging as it is to deal with such cynics in daily life—it is futile to argue with someone holding this view—an avowed cynicism has the advantage of clarifying the subject's motives: just follow the stupid rules as if they were real, and you get real rewards. Women's magazines have long given a version of such advice to women, telling them that men care only for the appearance of virtue. Marabel Morgan goes so far as to suggest to women that if they merely tell their men that they admire them (even though they do not deserve admiration), they can make their husbands love them (64). Cynical reasoning has been easily adopted by popular culture for men as well: “My father always said, ‘Buy the best and you'll never be disappointed,’” says the son of wealth in an advertisement for high-end commodities, repeating a claim that is effective despite its obvious fraudulence. He might as well say, “I know very well that cost is no reliable guarantee of quality; nevertheless, when I spend more I feel as if I have the best.” Although the consumer is bound to be disappointed (since consumption never removes desire), the advertisement helps transform the commodity into a fetish—that is, into a thing that can provide a perverse enjoyment, despite the lack of satisfaction.

Cynical reason returns the reasoner, surprisingly, to the Cartesian position of stupid obedience: in the absence of certainty, it is better to follow the rules. However, where Descartes gave his obedience to the laws of the kingdom, contemporary ideology dictates that reason guide one to pursue wealth and self-interest. The tremendous appeal of such a position is that merely by following duty, reason, and common sense, one incidentally accrues not only wealth and position but also the special rewards that come to those who adhere most strictly to duty. Those fortunate enough to escape poverty, for example, often find themselves, as a matter of civic duty, in the position of disciplining the poor. Their methods may be doomed to fail (choosing not to feed the children of the poor does not usually make such children into productive members of society), but the experience of inflicting suffering on others can still make the job rewarding. It is difficult to subvert those systems (such as the prison system or the campaigns against imported drugs) that seem to accept as a working principle that they will be ineffective. Burroughs's work seems, rather, to celebrate aspects of modern culture that are often acknowledged (sadly, hostilely, sardonically) to fail. However, he takes as the motive of cultural activity not its intentions to improve life, but its capacity to produce enjoyment. The evil of the Ugly Spirit does not lie in its capacity to produce perverse enjoyment but in its failure to recognize that perversity is what sustains it. Burroughs's achievement is to invert the terms of Western history, imagining a culture developing not out of its impulses toward spirit or wealth but out of the impulse toward enjoyment and a denial of the legitimacy of all authority.

RETROSPECTIVE UTOPIA

Cities of the Red Night imagines an alternative history of the Western world beginning one hundred thousand years ago, developing out of the Eurasian plains and reaching into the Americas. This history gives no sense of a utopian past, however, no moment when life was sweet and from which humankind has fallen. The distant past of the Cities of the Red Night was as corrupt as any modern time in its greed, racism, and violence. Nor, on the level of individual history, is childhood a place of innocence: at the conclusion of Cities, the narrator recalls a dream:

I remember a dream of my childhood. I am in a beautiful garden. As I reach out to touch the flowers they wither under my hands. A nightmare feeling of foreboding and desolation comes over me as a great mushroom-shaped cloud darkens the earth. A few may get through the gate in time. Like Spain, I am bound to the past.

(332)

An ambiguity in the first line leaves us uncertain whether he dreamed about his childhood or during his childhood, diminishing the difference between ordinary time and the timeless space of dreams. Within this dream he dreams a second dream, a nightmare of the future. Something happened, we feel, to cast us from the garden into the realm of time and death, into reality. Dreams “[blow] a hole in time” (332), leading us to imagine when we awaken that a timeless, deathless realm must once have existed, before or beyond the trauma, the fall from infant bliss, that marks all historical life. But at no time, even in the dream of a garden, can we touch the flower.

Sublime America, the edenic garden, was from the beginning a denial of every constraint of European history. This founding fantasy imagined America as a land without difference, a fresh green mother's breast of a land, as The Great Gatsby describes it, where every child is whole and not riven by fantasies of race, religion, wealth, and class. False from the start, the fantasy has nevertheless found embodiment in numerous icons of American life. The astonishing thing about the people of this land is how readily an image of ourselves as uncorrupted can be evoked in us. Despite the venal motives behind almost all of America's founding adventures that led to the decimation of native populations and the importation of African slaves, we repeatedly affirm our commitment to the propositions of nondifference: that Americans aspire to a color-blind, classless, pluralistic society with many religions, but one god.

Burroughs opens Cities with a version of the American story, wherein piracy is neither the nascent form of early capitalism nor, in a perversion of big business, the eventual outcome of wild capital's pillaging every weak spot in the financial field. Rather, it is an originating impulse of liberty. Piracy, rejecting the cover of a national flag, declares the absence of limiting, castrating authority, claiming the right to take all wealth for its own.⁶ It expresses, that is, the dream that it is possible to win absolute, stable command of the world's wealth. But wealth under capital is wealth only when it is fluid, endlessly circulated and allowed to function as a signifier. All modern capitalists must, consequently, work with a double consciousness: they recognize that capital, as a signifier, is empty despite its profound effects; at the same time they derive the meaningless enjoyment from money that only a fetish can command, even though the fetishized object is often no more than a fleeting electronic transaction. Piracy, then, embodies the enjoyment of a monetary fetish that legitimate capitalism takes as the incidental consequence of its enterprise, but which is in fact a primary inducement for its labors.

Don C. Seitz, whose story of the pirate Captain Mission Burroughs quotes, recognizes an ambiguity of motivations in idealists: Mission's “career was based upon an initial desire to better adjust the affairs of mankind, which ended as is quite usual in the more liberal adjustment of his own fortunes” (xi). The problem with such a desire to elevate others, as Conrad displayed in Heart of Darkness's fortune-hunting “gang of virtue,” is that in remaining ignorant of whence they derive their enjoyment, the “benefactors” of humankind need not question what they attain merely in passing. In saving the less fortunate peoples of the world, the powerful stage master-servant/sadomasochist fantasies that “incidentally” exploit and destroy those who come into contact with them. Burroughs seizes this story of the pirate Mission for its sublime potential, seeing in it an American liberty that might have effectively put an end to the history of industry and capitalism by eliminating need, wealth, and class. But unlike the young Marx, who imagines that the elimination of “exchange value” will produce some authentic existence, Burroughs's imagined community evades the tyranny of authenticity by producing a deliberately and literally staged enjoyment.

Burroughs's characters parody our activities, showing how social, economic, and political motives conceal some more fundamental need. Farnsworth, for example, is the District Health Officer, but he is uninterested in typical ideas of health: he has “very little use for doctors” because they interfere with the function of his office, which is to alleviate suffering, whether it arises from illness or desire:

The treatment for cholera was simple: each patient was assigned to a straw pallet on arrival and given a gallon of rice water and half a gram of opium. If he was still alive twelve hours later, the dose of opium was repeated. The survival rate was about twenty percent.

(4)

The opium cure also works well to relieve Farnsworth of his erections. The conventional medical professionals' fight against the enemy Death all too frequently works counter to their aspirations to relieve suffering. We suffer, quite literally, from life and its ally, desire, both of which project us into a future where we will have evaded death. The wealth we accumulate, like the children we have (“money in the bank,” one new parent said of her recent acquisition), stands as a symbolic screen against the Real, an investment in the promise that with time we will increase and not simply waste away. But of course, in the long run, the survival rate is zero percent, a point worth forgetting. Farnsworth's goal is to find what gives pleasure to the body independent of the anxieties of the individual subject about death and failure: he tries to relieve the patient of the fantasy that anyone is capable of any action that will evade death, that consciousness might transcend the body. Opium is, in part at least, sometimes the mechanism, sometimes the metaphor, for this condition—sometimes it is merely a drug to suppress desire, sometimes it represents a state free of time and hence of desire. Through Farnsworth, Burroughs both mocks the medical establishment and suggests an alternative orientation for the practice.

At the heart of all social practices in this book is the stage. When Farnsworth's opium is gone and he is recovering with his boy Ali, this other alternative to reality appears. In this theatrical performance, he becomes aroused in a sexual “dream tension,” during which he smells “a strange smell unlike anything he had ever smelled before, but familiar as smell itself” (11). He awakes to find that he is becoming an alligator whose head is “squeezing the smell out from inside.” Burroughs alludes here to the idea that the human brain contains the “reptile brain,” a formation that recalls and preserves our reptilian origins. The reptile brain is rich in serotonin, opiate receptors, and dopamine, “a neural sap of vital importance for bringing the total energies of the organism into play” (MacLean 406). For Farnsworth, this brain emerges as a smell connected to some ancient, reptilian sense of the Real that displaces all human consciousness. Farnsworth the alligator, whose body pops, boils, and scalds, ejaculates in an agony of enjoyment. But this apparent metamorphosis and literalization of the lizard brain turns out in the next paragraph to have been merely a theatrical production, the alligator a costume and the jungle a backdrop on stage. So, we are left asking, is there actually some access to the lizard brain, and, through it, some immediate access to total bodily enjoyment, or is the passage only a metaphor for a kind of experience Burroughs hopes might be possible? We seem to be caught in a familiar Burroughs contradiction, such as we just saw with the opium, where the literal and the metaphoric are interchangeable. However, the enjoyment is real (Farnsworth is fucked by Ali in both situations, though we might ask whether fucking is literal or metaphoric), and Farnsworth's enjoyment connects the two worlds, acting as a switchpoint between reality and the stage. The Real question—both the question I want to pursue and the question of the Real—is what might squeeze the “smell,” so intimately strange, out of your own brain and thereby give you access to that ancient sense?

Perhaps the contradiction is more accurately an opposition between delusion and illusion, hallucination and artifice (what we mistake as truth versus what we recognize as constructed) and not between what is real and what is merely staged. The Real by definition is not open to perception, not directly available to the mind operating in the symbolic realm. We respond to representations, whether we understand them to be true or fictive. Although enjoyment may once have been evoked by the direct experience of stimulation that presumably floods the infant body, for the speaking person it is mediated by repetition: each subject is constructed by events that must be symbolically restaged as fantasy in order to create enjoyment.⁷ Reality, in this context, refers merely to those experiences of the world that we fail to notice as staged. That is, we hallucinate a Real based on the images we perceive, as the suckling child hallucinates “milk” at the sight of a breast. Those who would kick a stone and say “there is reality” betray a desire for a Real as immediate as a rock.

When we seek some experience of sublimity, we look to extremity, whether outward to the grandeur of the natural world or inward to the raw passion of, say, sexuality; but neither the Grand Canyon nor the most intimate sexual acts occur for us unconditioned by previous expectation, imagers, stories—by theater. If we still derive the sublime thrill, it is because we forget the staging or because, like perverts, we give ourselves over to the fantasy. Too much or too little, as I write above—that is always the problem of pleasure. The Aristotelian construct may stand like a firewall between the subject and enjoyment, but the perverse subject can use it as a backdrop against which to stage a fantasy.

VIRUS AND VAMPIRE

Viruses and vampires exert a fascination in contemporary imagination for similar but opposing reasons. Viruses, intruding invisibly on the level of DNA, remind us as their progeny emerge within our own cells that our bodies are not our own.⁸ These secret guests arouse in us an abjection that holds the consumer's attention through popular magazines, books, television, and film, as demonstrated by the wealth of stories about ebola, a virus exotic in America, that liquefies the internal organs so that they pour out of any orifice. Viruses illuminate the silent interior of the body, a flesh that is close, vital, and familiarly strange as only our mothers' has been to us. The vampire's appeal, however, is sublime: flesh that refutes time and mortality, that limits its knowledge of the body's interior to blood sucked from another as a baby sucks the breast, preserving beauty, longing, and passion.

At the heart of our interest in both viruses and vampires, however, is the recognition that “life” does not favor the living organic body but the “undead” core of memory. Bodies live to reproduce DNA, which is itself non-organic and immortal and which would happily have us bite off the heads of our mates during intercourse if that would favor successful reproduction. Viruses are simple replicating nucleic acids, DNA packages that appropriate the liquid interior of cells for their own ends. In the virus we see the hopeless insufficiency of our bodily selves, our submission to an inhuman process even when that process is our own DNA's survival. The vampire, however, although it also appropriates our liquid interior, represents a fantasy through which we can identify with the inorganic force of replication. The appeal and the horror of both are related to their disregard for the rational subject and its autonomy: something in you exceeds the limits of you, something you do not identify with as you and which follows a path that is not yours. Burroughs's well-established hatred of “control”—the insidious compulsions of sex and drugs as they are tied to corporate interests—finds its expression in the ways the viral/vampiric human can be appropriated by social forces and turned to other ends.

Burroughs does not suggest, however, that we might evade such social subjection by “curing” the virus: as one character suggests, “‘any attempts to contain Virus B-23 will turn out to be ineffectual because we carry this virus with us. … Because it is the human virus’” (25). The virus's symptoms (such as uncontrollable sexual desire) are those of “love”: the human virus (“known as ‘the other half’”) constitutes our knowledge of our inadequacy, our mortality. We are double, and yet that part of ourselves with which we identify will vanish while the undead within us continues.⁹ Conventionally, we deny this knowledge when we speak of the soul as the immortal part of each person. The idea of the soul inverts the relation between body and mind, claiming that the physical vanishes while the soul, a representation of consciousness as unembodied spirit, lives on, untouched by time. In fact, the opposite is more likely true, since consciousness is usually the first thing to go. The account of the Cities of the Red Night retells the story of the immortal soul, stripping it of its sublime dimension and linking it to a history of social power, a practice by which the strong reproduce their kind at the expense of the weak.

The Cities' most distinctive practice involves their refusal of sexual reproduction, of bodies and mortality. The chapter entitled “Cities of the Red Night” lays out the system of “transmigration” of spirit, displaying the interdependence of two classes, Transmigrants and Receptacles:

To show the system in operation: Here is an old Transmigrant on his deathbed. He has selected his future Receptacle parents, who are summoned to the death chamber. The parents then copulate, achieving orgasm just as the old Transmigrant dies so that his spirit enters the womb to be reborn.

(154)

The denial of death by elite Transmigrants—those who consider the perpetuation of their spirits more valuable than that of their mere bodies—leads them to appropriate not just the sexuality of others but the orgasm itself, the males' at least, for the purpose of cultural reproduction. This system leads inevitably to “mutters of revolt” by the women, who see most directly how their enjoyment has been channeled for social designs: women produce children for the pleasure of others (155). In addition, the practice produces “a basic conflict of interest between host child and Transmigrant” (158) since the point of being born is to serve for a few years as the vessel for another's spirit, at the end of which the host submits his body to orgasmic death, again all in the interest of maintaining the Cities' power structure. The solution to this conflict is to “reduce the Receptacle class to a condition of virtual idiocy”: that is, children must find their body's enjoyment only through service to the City. One of the inadvertent outcomes of this practice is that the Council of the Cities “produced … races of ravening vampire idiots” (157).

The denial of mortal limitation, as the story represents it, leads the elite to abuse power and turn away from the thought that derives from recognizing death. As sublime as the concept of soul may be, it is easily adapted to a system that perpetuates those who are spiritually deserving, which the powerful always consider themselves to be. Perhaps history could have developed otherwise. Cities locates the “basic error of the Transmigrants” in their desire to bypass the “basic trauma” of conception. Conception, after all, requires the most fundamental loss of integrity in the splitting of DNA and a rejoining of sexually halved chromosomes. The particular result of conception is fundamentally uncontrollable, subject to the chaotic slippage of dynamic systems and tending toward a purposeless complexity. Evolution—viable genetic mutation—proceeds for the good of neither the individual parent nor the species but, like an artist of serendipity, will try anything, even though a stray “success” (it lives!) may destroy everything that came before.

The Transmigrants, then, are justified in fearing conception, as should all cultures that exalt stability over change. The ultimate collapse of the Cities during the radioactive period of the Red Night (“a time of great disorder and chaos”) resulted from the introduction of mutation—change, complexity, and diversity—into a culture devoted to exact replication. Conception, that is, is at odds with “spirit,” the reputed essence of an individual ego. Something else within you, something in-you-more-than-you, works silently toward a future. Call it DNA, the Drives, the Human Virus: components of the body work without regard for the spirit, soul, or individual body. But they are represented through the individual body as horrible and thrilling enjoyment, depicted in this story as orgasm; and enjoyment, unless it is channeled by culture, undermines all practices that depend on control—and what social practices do not?

Burroughs suggests that one way of distinguishing cultures is by the way they control enjoyment. In a series of statements about the relationship between what is true and what is permitted, the following claim is associated with America: “Everything is true and everything is permitted” (158). The genius of America is to pretend that despite the absence of limits, the structure of symbolic meaning remains intact, able to guarantee truth: enjoyment is not only possible and good, it is obligatory. The pretense is what enables large parts of American culture to channel enjoyment so effectively—through advertising, entrepreneurial business (as in evangelical meetings of Mary Kay Cosmetics distributors), patriotism, and ecstatic religions—without the disillusionment that characterizes most other, older cultures. Everything is true!

Such is the interpretation the most American of the Cities of the Red Night gave the “last words of Hassan I Sabbah, Old Man of the Mountain”: “Nothing is true. Everything is permitted” (158). The words are obscure, at best. It would take a culture such as that which introduced the zero into Western mathematics to recognize both that nothing is true (more true than something) and that everything is permitted (“whatever is, is,” as Parmenides put it).¹⁰ Each of the Cities gives its own interpretation of the sentences,¹¹ inserting its own fantasy into the tautological emptiness of the juxtaposed claims. In the statement “Everything is true,” Burroughs suggests that in a contemplation of Nothing, the American fantasy is to see a hint of the sublime, of a totality beyond expression.

Many of the sequences in Cities parody conventional attempts to reach beyond the linguistic medium. In sexuality, for example, we imagine that we move through ecstasy toward freedom: in sex, we seem to transgress the human realm of law, convention, and restraint and to approach a reality that is fully physical, bodily. For Burroughs, however, no activity is more clearly bound to the stage. We see this staging in the passages involving Port Roger, the pirate's home base. The port is itself a set that Burroughs compares to Prospero's enchanted island, and the pirate's main weapon for establishing an alternative society is magic—that is, staged illusion: “It is our policy to encourage the practice of magic and to introduce alternative religious beliefs to break the Christian monopoly” (105). Christianity, in this vision, works by the same rules as other magical productions, so one has only to perform the part of a devout believer to undermine Christianity's status as truth: a ceremony is above all a performance, transcendence an effect.

Recognizing the family to be one of the fundamental institutions of Christian control, the pirates exploit the performance aspect of family: they enlist members of their community to become “families to operate as intelligence agents in areas controlled by the enemy” (106). For families to operate, they must have children. To this end, the pirates gather all the young men and women for a mass dance and insemination:

Juanito announces: “Rabbit men and rabbit women, prepare to meet your makers.” He leads the way into a locker room opening off the east wall. The boys strip off their clothes, giggling and comparing erections, and they dance out into the courtyard in a naked snake-line. The women are also naked now. What follows is not an unconstrained orgy but rather a series of theatrical performances.

(108)

The more orgiastic and unconstrained sex appears to be, the more it requires the careful preparation and control of the governors. What Burroughs displays is not a more authentic vision of family and sexuality than exists in conventional life, of course, but a parody that reveals how readily sexuality can be turned to the service of a state, the pirates' state in this case. As Don DeLillo reveals in his account of the mass wedding staged by the Reverend Sun Myung Moon in Yankee Stadium, the most sublime, mystical events can derive their power from showmanship.

Unlike Marxist critics of such cultural issues, Burroughs is less interested in how institutional power shapes its subjects by instilling an ideology than in how the staging of enjoyment serves as a means of social control. Even when Burroughs seems most intent on imagining a way to escape the forces of social control, for example, he tells us more about how those forces work than about possibilities for actual liberation. Dink Rivers, one pirate character, demonstrates the utility of staging enjoyment when he explains the way a “magical brotherhood” achieves total bodily control, the ultimate aim of which is to escape all unconscious symbolic determinants:

“At the age of fourteen, when I began to have dreams that culminated in ejaculation, I decided to learn control of the sexual energy. If I could achieve orgasm at will in the waking state, I could do the same in dreams and control my dreams instead of being controlled by them.”

(127)

The technique requires him deliberately to relive a wet dream. “‘I ran through a sex dream like reciting my ABCs’” (128). His model for “reliving” is the recitation of his ABCs, by which he exploits a symbolic form to get at its presymbolic ground¹²:

“I used the same method of projecting myself into a time when my mind seemed empty of words … [producing] a vertiginous sensation of being sucked into a vast empty space where words do not exist.”

(128)

In projecting himself backward to that originating moment, he finds that his mind seems empty of words. However, that moment is always a nachträglich construction, an illusion of wordlessness constructed out of the limitations we experience within language, an illusion of freedom made from the constraints of subjectivity. The “dying feeling” Dink describes is a momentary lapse of subjectivity, a feeling many long for (and pursue in drugs, alcohol, sex, and religion) and one they misconstrue as death.

Dink's control of orgasm is based on Zen traditions of bodily control and tantric sexuality, practices that, despite the regular supply of sex manuals they inspire, remain exotic for Americans. However, American institutions employ recitations little more complex than the ABCs to bring crowds of people to this extremity of deathly, linguistic oblivion, a circumstance DeLillo dwells on in The Names. We see such practices in religion and political assembly, in action on the stock exchange floor, and in other events that are socially useful yet inspire a sublime thrill. But when someone stages such enjoyment for himself, we know him to be perverse rather than admirable.

The difference between the pervert and a futures trader sweating and screaming like any Pentecostal is that the pervert knows what he wants while the other comes to it inadvertently in the course of his duties. This power of the word to produce ecstasy finds expression in one of Burroughs's dream images: the dreamer sees a body spattered with “a shower of red sparks” that create “burning erogenous zones that twist and writhe into diseased lips whispering the sweet rotten fever words” (277). In Burroughs's imagination, every part of the body can be eroticized by a tongue of flame, but the forms those parts take are likely to be abject. The vampire's kiss may look like love, but its aim is blood. The vampire, the ad man, and the evangelical fundraiser on television will, if they know their jobs as well as Poe's diddler, drain you and leave you wanting to give more. The most reasonable language carries something ancient within it that can give speech an elemental power.

THE ONE GOD UNIVERSE CON

Dolan points out that Burroughs's valuing of space over time, of an escape from time's compulsion, allies him with a romantic strain, a gnosticism in American thought, as Bloom refers to it.¹³ His writing implies a desire to evade the constraints of the individual psyche in favor of something larger and more persistent. We see this impulse played out repeatedly: in the preference Burroughs shows for polytheism over the “OGU,” the soul-mastering, thermodynamically fading One God Universe (1987: 113); in his disregard for chronology in Cities, which allows the same character to appear anywhere within a 300-year period; in his preference for the cut-in in the investigative work of Clem Snide and in his own writing.¹⁴ In a world so insistently governed by the ideals of progress and accumulation that make a capitalist economy possible, such a dream of timelessness inevitably looks like nostalgia. The desire that drives capitalism depends on notions of a need that can be remedied through production and consumption. The resulting velocity of cultural change produces a “complexity” that we come to depend on for survival, and it cannot be undone. But as Burroughs implies, the past persists, encrypted in complexity, and we would be as foolish to ignore it as we would be to attempt to return to it. Within the progress of civilization and the entropic waste of time lie generative, productive patterns that endure and return.

The model of memory that Freud presented in Civilization and Its Discontents places memory outside of time, with the implication that past events are never recovered as separable, independently standing moments but are imbricated in foundational patterns of mind. Philip Kuberski's Persistence of Memory draws out the correspondences between Freud's layered cities, our timeless unconscious, and the compacted history of life contained in DNA. We achieve our sense of linear movement through time only by denying the evidence that time is less an arrow than a tangled vine. The temporal development of dynamic systems tends to produce not unique forms but spatially transformed replications of the same. One implication of this view of temporal development is that the production of constantly varying elements leads not to wholly original forms but to the same on a different scale.

Although he is working from a different model, Burroughs seems to take the implication literally: he disregards the idea that character is located in a unique and perishable individual, seeing instead that a character can arise repeatedly from given circumstances. Consequently, he “reincarnates” characters from century to century as easily as he carries his characters from book to book. Vampires create the vampire anew over generations; viruses transform diverse organisms into replications of the same disease; and language, for all its subtlety, transforms lumps of human infancy into subjects as alike as a patch of cats. But while the human subject develops out of a specific linguistic culture, the body is nearly eternal and governed even more strongly by ancient patterns. More than 90 percent of all human DNA is identical. If an individual wished to evade the determinations of cultural power, the trick would be to get at that common flesh that links one to the eternal, to something older than this culture.

In Burroughs, one of those tricks, “sex magic,” employs a ritual that divorces sex from its functioning within a social practice and provokes something ancient and non-individualized in the body. Preparing for a performance, one character says, “According to psychic dogma, sex itself is incidental and should be subordinated to the intent of the ritual. But I don't believe in rules. What happens, happens” (1981: 76). And what happens is that “pictures and tapes swirl in my brain” as the many gods appear and The Smell (that primordial essence of the lizard brain I mention above) surrounds the performers (77). Sex magic, it seems, provides access to knowledge and power that does not derive from the individual subject's reasoning intelligence or talents. Clearly, most sex is not magic: the magic requires one to turn over evolution's gift of orgasm to the proper staging. The ritual requires the performer to submit to the pleasure of some Other, forgoing his or her own desires in order to approach the ancient, the Real: earth knowledge. But in Burroughs's world, the ritual is important because there is no alternative source of power and knowledge.

In earlier chapters, I have considered what happens when authority fails, and the father, the state, the phallus, or whatever we would call the figure that holds the symbolic world in place is unable to promise enjoyment at the end of a long life of repression and self-denial. Burroughs addresses a world in which all authority has revealed itself to be a con game, where the Aristotelian construct that Dolan refers to has shown its hand. But since you cannot, apparently, ignore or directly challenge the construct, you beat a con with another con. Burroughs's image of one con that can resist is the NO:

natural outlaws dedicated to breaking the so-called natural laws of the universe foisted upon us by physicists, chemists, mathematicians, biologists and, above all, the monumental fraud of cause and effect, to be replaced by the more pregnant concept of synchronicity.

(1987: 30)

Burroughs connects this NO figure in The Western Lands to Poe's diddler (31), the grinning figure who takes his pleasure in providing people with the illusion they desire, and who also takes their money. … This con, like others, depends on the illusion that the diddler can deny limits, deny death. That is, the NO's breaking of natural laws mimics the perverse wish implicit in phallic authority—enjoyment will one day be yours—except that he offers the reward now. The NO challenges two biologic laws: against crossbreeding between unrelated species and against evolutionary reversibility. Both say that each individual's pleasure is limited, that each of us is on a narrow track to personal extinction, a mere tool of evolution. And what is the God of the “OGU,” the One God Universe, but a promise that despite the inevitability of thermodynamic decline, despite “sickness, famine, war, old age and Death” (1213), you, personally, are immortal. The NO plays the same con, offering the perverse where the sad mortal longs for the sublime.

The contradictions that mark Burroughs's writings as argument are demonstrated nowhere more clearly than in the doubling that occurs between the outlaws he values and the figures he most despises. For example, Burroughs seems to promise that those with courage and dedication might travel to the Western Lands, a trip “beyond Death, beyond the basic God standard of fear and danger” where one gains access to “Immortality” (124). But every guide to the lands, from those of the Egyptians and Tibetans to the Messiah, is simply working a con on those desiring eternal life:

Messiahs on every street corner transfix one with a confront stare:

“Your life is a ruin.”

“We have the only road to personal immortality.”

(126)

If you turn over your life, they will provide you with a way of evading the biologic imperative of death. It is an unlikely story, but Burroughs does not provide the true pilgrim with an alternative, a true road. These obvious cons, however, mimic the offers made by legitimate religions, advertisers, and the other operators that inhabit our real western lands. Burroughs cannot subvert these assurances of future happiness except by pointing out the way rational culture has always been perverted, has always linked reason to an unreasonable expectation of enjoyment.

We should not be surprised that Burroughs's attention to divine vampires has coincided with an explosion of popular interest in this figure, ranging from Anne Rice's soft-porn romances to Hollywood's productions. One big-budget film, for example, seems to have been written by a Burroughs fan. Stargate explicitly links the Egyptian origins of monotheism to an intergalactic, time-traveling vampire who passes himself off as the One God to ensure a steady supply of victims. What is particularly surprising is that the utterly blasphemous nature of this film went unnoticed: its claim that the bloody God of Judeo-Christian religions is merely a cover story for the vampire has, apparently, already been too fully accepted by popular culture to be worth mentioning. Burroughs, the pop icon, may be so readily accepted by youth because he comes out of the perverse yet familiar heart of the West.

The sustaining delusion in the Western world is what Burroughs calls the “fixed image,” which he associates with the “basic mortality error” (158). This fixed image—God, Truth, the Phallus, or any other figure that says, like Parmenides, whatever is, is; whatever is not, is not—is behind the monotheistic promise of the individual soul's survival. It suggests permanence—even beyond death—when there is always change. The error allows us easily to link sexuality to reproduction: our longings for immortality are so strong that we have no trouble taking sexual appetite to imply a drive to make copies of ourselves, as if the vast liquidity of the bodily Real manifested an unchanging purpose. The romance of the fixed image is allied to perverse fixations, but it provides the perverse the guise of an economic, social, and spiritual good. Economically, this romance implies the reproduction of the means of production by means of an infinitely replicating ideology; biologically, the immortal extension of oneself through children; spiritually, the immortality of one's double, the soul. The fantasy of the fixed image denies temporality—at least when time is conceived of as the wasting stream of entropic decay—by positing a self not subject to degeneration. Burroughs's undermining of this “mortality error” also helps explain his attack on “sex” (“Sex is the basis of fear, how we got caught in the first place and reduced to the almost hopeless human condition” [201]), as well as his rejection of the female (the god Ka “is the only defender against the female goddesses of sexual destruction and orgasm death” [103]). These attacks represent his refusal of the tendencies to use sex and women as defenses against human mortality. The “human covenant” (180) that keeps humans bound to the fixed image is a version of the oedipal contract that we make with the One God: limit your desire, and you will be immortal.

The fixed image, of course, is incompatible with the reality of reproduction. After all, in reproduction the image is subject to chaotic fluctuation as genes err, language slips, and time and accident happen. The “biologic revolution” Burroughs imagines would cause “unimaginable chaos, horror, joy and terror, unknown fears and ecstasies, wild vertigos of extreme experience, immeasurable gain and loss, hideous dead ends” (112). Sounding like Nietzsche here, Burroughs mixes perspectives, giving us both the danger such a step would pose to the rational world and the ecstasy it could bring. But the chaos he describes is no longer just a paradoxical problem leading to a cultural impasse; rather, it has emerged as a solution within contemporary chaos theory. The apparently romantic step that Burroughs proposes—“from word into silence. From Time into Space” (115)—gestures toward the sublime (“awakened pilgrims catch hungry flashes of vast areas beyond Death to be created and discovered and charted”). But it also suggests that one might let go of the commitment the West holds to linear trajectories of meaning and motion that culminate in the presence of Voice and Truth. Burroughs writes, “imagine you are dead and see your whole life spread out in a spatial panorama, a vast maze of rooms, streets, landscapes, not sequential but arranged in shifting associational patterns” (138). That is, to imagine your “self” dead means to imagine that the parts of your life are not fixed by sequence, but by shifting patterns of connection: “This happens in dreams of course.” Dreams tell us something about a condition of our lives that we call being dead or, rather, beyond dead. By comparison with the linear path of life, this image of death is vividly dynamic. Chaos does not refute the necessity of temporality—dynamic change, whether in physical systems or in dreams, is irreversible—but the fixed intention, the target of time's arrow, vanishes. In “chaos,” one loses the delusion of individual purpose, direction, control, which was why the One God put an end to it. The image that chaos and the theory of complexity substitute for control is the dynamic order of the developing image, of the fractal patterns generated by nonlinear equations, where scale replaces time as complex development replaces purposeful growth.

Burroughs's curious preoccupation with the figure of Hassan I Sabbah, Imam of the Assassins, corresponds to his disregard for the significance of the individual subject: not only do his effective assassins kill individual political figures without remorse, but they willingly accept their own deaths. If one's enjoyment is in submission, the persistence of a personal soul or image might be less important than it would be to one committed to individuality. Burroughs quotes Hassan I Sabbah:

“It is fleeting: if you see something beautiful, don't cling to it; if you see something horrible, don't shrink from it, counsels the Tantric sage. However obtained, the glimpses are rare, so how do we live through the dreary years of deadwood, lumbering our aging flesh from here to there? By knowing that you are my agent, not the doorman, gardener, shopkeeper, carpenter, pharmacist, doctor you seem to be.” … So acting out a banal role becomes an exquisite pleasure.

(200)

In his identification with the figure of HIS, as he calls him, Burroughs finds a way of placing himself outside of any political or economic order, precisely because the “concept of salvation through assassination” (202) is ultimately a parody of the social forces he detests, made perverse in his case by its deliberate exploitation of the enjoyment one can derive from being the agent of another.

The idea of the Western Lands reaches back to Egypt and into a version of America, to the land of the dead and beyond death, to the dream of Hassan I Sabbah and that of Captain Mission. There is a fatality in Burroughs's vision of history, and consequently his critique never develops a clearly external position, never offers an alternative that does not fall into the same history he mocks. This mockery, this con, this clowning queer vision shows that the American sublime shares its soul with the perverse. But I hesitate to call this writing subversive. Burroughs comments on the Arab world's having led civilization to become what it is, in part, by “introducing such essential factors as distillation for drunkenness, and the zero for business. What would Burroughs and IBM do without it?” (198). Alcohol, pathway to both the sublime and the abject. The zero that enables us to signify the Nothing, the Real that defines us, and that made double-entry bookkeeping possible; the zero that made the Burroughs Adding Machine Company and IBM, but that also made W. S. Burroughs. The inseparability of the two aspects of transcendence—below and beyond—suggests less subversion than contamination. Burroughs with his black suit and his dead, knowing eyes brings both the vampire's glamorous seduction and the virus's infection to our vision of American culture, adding a touch of abject enjoyment to the icons of the West.

Can anyone doubt that Burroughs did the athletic-shoe commercial for any reason other than money? But given that motive, could anyone who has read Burroughs, who has seen Burroughs in Drugstore Cowboy, who even got a good look at the pale face and hooded eyes on the tiny TV screen, watch the commercial without deriving a peculiar enjoyment inappropriate to simple consumption? What kinds of enjoyment does Burroughs add to the enactment of a ritual purchase that improves the body and drives the economy?

Notes

1. Frederick Dolan convincingly demolishes any hope that Burroughs would lead us out of the wilderness, demonstrating how clearly Burroughs remains within a Romantic metaphysics.

2. See for example “Women's Time,” 187-213. Kristeva argues that a rejection of the symbolic is “lived as the rejection of the paternal function and ultimately generat[es] psychoses” (199), but by the end of even this early essay, she is proposing the highly suspect category of “guiltless maternity” (206) as a way of evading the impasse of the law. If there is a solution to the problem of patriarchy here, she does not find it through the Aristotelian construct.

3. For a discussion of sinthome, see the discussion in Chapter 1.

4. “Stoicism” is a position Hegel describes dialectically, wherein one has moved beyond a slavish belief in authority but has achieved freedom by becoming “indifferent to natural existence …, lacking the fullness of life” (122). For Lacan, this faith in the power of the individual mind, the cogito, to think itself to the truth becomes the delusion of those whose faith in the “name of the father,” the “nom du pêre,” displays how the “non-duped err.” The cynical reasoner accepts the contradictions implicit in his position and yet continues to assert its validity.

5. See Zižek, 1989: 29-33. Zižek develops this formulation out of Peter Sloterdijk's book Critique of Cynical Reason (1983).

6. Chomsky recounts St. Augustine's story of a pirate, putting it in the context of international terrorism by the democratic Western nations:

   [A] pirate [was] captured by Alexander the Great, who asked him “how he dares molest the sea.” “How dare you molest the whole world?” the pirate replied: “because I do it with a little ship only, I am called a thief; you, doing it with a great navy, are called an Emperor.”

   (1)

7. For a good summary of the relation of fantasy to sexuality, see Teresa de Lauretis, 81-5.

8. Philip Kuberski's “Hardcopy” has developed the metaphor of viral information in the late twentieth century to speculate on the relation between computers, ideology, and subjectivity. Commenting on the film Blade Runner, he notes the murderous rage of one replicant who destroys his creator:

   This scene dramatizes the film's major concern: what precisely does a man do when he learns, as has postmodern man, that his subjectivity is an artefact of society, and that his body is the accidental product of mutation and the manifestation, like a computer or a television, of Information.

   (70)

   The dilemma is that this man, constituted of information, should be both superior to “natural” men and yet inhumanly, abjectly inferior.

9. Lacan introduces the “lamella” to identify “the relation between the living subject and that which he loses by having to pass, for his reproduction, through the sexual cycle” (1978: 199). Sexual reproduction means that there is something in us that is not us, that is unconcerned with the fate of the individual subject. The mortal subject lives with the undead of replication.

10. Compare with Wallace Stevens's “Snowman,” who “nothing himself, beholds / Nothing that is not there, and the nothing that is.” See also Brian Rotman's brilliant analysis of nothing, Signifying Nothing: The Semiotics of Zero. In this book, he traces various ways in which nothing has served both a productive and disturbing function in the Western world.

11. The interpretations other Cities of the Red Night gave to the words are:

    The city of partisans: “Here, everything is as true as you think it is and everything you can get away with is permitted.”

    The university city: “Complete permission derives from complete understanding.”

    The cities of illusion: “Nothing is true and therefore everything is permitted.” (158-9)

12. This is an idea I develop in Chapter 5.

13. See “Introduction” (this volume).

14. The “cut-in” or “cut-up” in Burroughs's own work and in that of his character Clem Snide involves assembling information (taped sounds, news clippings, etc.) cut at random from some source. Burroughs describes it:

    The cut-up method brings to writers the collage, which has been used by painters for fifty years. And used by the moving and still camera. In fact all street shots from movie or still cameras are by the unpredictable factors of passersby and juxtaposition cut-ups. And photographers will tell you that often their best shots are accidents … writers will tell you the same. The best writing seems to be done almost by accident but writers until the cut-up method was made explicit—all writing is in fact cut-ups …—had no way to produce the accident of spontaneity. You cannot will spontaneity. But you can introduce the unpredictable spontaneous factor with a pair of scissors.

    (1982: 35)