In considering a potential replacement for postmodernism, it’s important to acknowledge the failure of modernist goals, such as resolving conflicts related to gender, class, and ethnicity, and achieving spiritual unity within society. It’s also crucial to recognize that attempts to regenerate myth as a centering structure have been unsuccessful. However, it’s not enough to simply reject mass politics, as advocated by thinkers like Jean-François Lyotard and Jean Baudrillard, because this approach remains complicit with capitalist structures and fails to offer a way out of the existing social order.
Instead, we need to look for someone who can produce new cultural values to replace those that have been bankrupted by postmodernism. William S. Burroughs is a prime example of an artist who can anticipate and leverage the work of theorists like Deleuze to create something new. While other authors like Pynchon, Heller, and Vonnegut can also offer valuable insights, Burroughs stands out as a particularly compelling figure.
By engaging with Burroughs’s work, we can move beyond the liminal space of literature and begin to develop a “plan of living” that goes beyond mere games. Through his innovative approach to writing and his willingness to embrace new forms of cultural production, Burroughs can offer us a way to move beyond the failures of postmodernism and toward a more meaningful and sustainable future.
He does not fit into a tidy category already subordinated to the larger scheme of Game A/the Mayan Scheme because he’s trying to find an escape route from the control systems of capital, subjectivity and language transforming individuals into mirror image of their controllers. “He examines the reversibility of hostile social relations and the symmetry of opposed political factions, and he articulates his theory that language, which is a virus that uses the human body as a host, constitutes the most powerful form of control. Burroughs cannot see a form of revolutionary practice to counter Game A’s dialectic, which liquidates the singularity of the individual as well as the connections of community in order to produce the false universality of profit. “Money eats quality and shits out quantity” His attempts can be understood as a systematic and sophisticated attempt to evade this dialectic, resembling Deleuze and focusing on a language within language’ that tends towards a language that marks the end of language as such.
Burroughs was known for his avant-garde writing style, which often involved cut-up and fold-in techniques, a method of rearranging words and phrases to create new meaning. He saw language as a tool for control and manipulation, with the power to shape individuals and societies to fit the desires of those in power. In his book “The Ticket That Exploded,” he writes, “All control systems are based on communication, and no communication is possible without a language.”
Burroughs’ rejection of the dominant societal and cultural norms of his time led him to experiment with various forms of artistic expression, including literature, film, and visual art. His work often explored themes of sexuality, addiction, and the nature of power and control. He saw these as fundamental issues in modern society, ones that needed to be addressed in order for true social change to occur.
In his writings, Burroughs often criticized the commercialization of art and culture, seeing it as a form of control and manipulation by the capitalist elite. He believed that art and culture should be free from the constraints of profit and used to inspire and liberate individuals and communities.
Burroughs’ emphasis on the power of language and its role in control and manipulation can be seen as a precursor to the postmodern critique of language and its relationship to power. His rejection of the dominant cultural norms and his experimentation with various forms of artistic expression can also be seen as a rejection of the modernist belief in progress and the linear development of culture.
In conclusion, William Burroughs’ work can be seen as an attempt to find an escape route from the control systems of capital, subjectivity, and language. His rejection of the dominant societal and cultural norms of his time, his experimentation with various forms of artistic expression, and his emphasis on the power of language and its role in control and manipulation all contributed to his unique perspective and legacy as an artist and thinker. While he may not fit neatly into a specific category or movement, his ideas and writings continue to inspire and challenge readers to question the status quo and imagine new possibilities for social change.
As he attempts to find an escape from the control systems of capital, subjectivity, and language that transform individuals into mirror images of their controllers. He examines the reversibility of hostile social relations and the symmetry of opposed political factions and believes that language, which he calls a virus, uses the human body as a host and constitutes the most powerful form of control. Burroughs attempts to evade this dialectic by focusing on a “language within language” that tends towards a language that marks the end of language as such, similar to Deleuze.
According to Burroughs, “Nothing is True, Everything is Permitted.” This means that if something is true, then something else must be maligned and prohibited by the Law as false. But if there is no essential truth, then there can be no prohibition. Burroughs believes in the literal realization of art, which requires the destruction of art as a mirror to nature and life. Art is a potentiality because it does not find its proof outside itself through a process of truthful representation but within itself.
Burroughs uses the detective novel and science fiction to displace structures of thought and transcendent structures of power. His work, like Deleuze’s, is utopian, but not in the same way as modernists. They do not rely on the truth or modernist myth but on the fluid mechanisms of desire in fantasy for their utopian drive.
Criticism of Burroughs has been mainly moral criticism directed at his referents in “real life,” rather than his work as writing. His life and his work have been held up to explicit or implicit moral standards and judged wanting. Burroughs submits the stereotypes of patriarchy to direct satire by revealing their subordination to the system of modern capitalism and its tool, the state. He acknowledges the “incompatible conditions of existence” of men and women and envisions an evolutionary step that would involve changes inconceivable from our POV, involving sexes fusing into one organism.
Burroughs adopts various elements of modernism such as structural fragmentation, parody and pastiche, and the mixing of high and low culture. However, he does not aim to replace the lost orders of the past with new narratives or mythologies that emphasize progress, human potential, or the liberation of the oppressed. The tradition as an emancipatory project has lost its efficacy and can no longer legitimize the production of novelty.
This shift from traditional to technological culture is a logical substitution of structures. According to Bruno Latour, ethnographers can combine myths, genealogies, politics, techniques, religions, epics, and rites into a single monograph for non-modern cultures. However, this is impossible for modern cultures due to the lack of analytic continuity in our fragmented fabric.