1. See Latour, chapter 5.

2. See especially Negri, "Spinoza's Anti-Modernity." See also Negri, The Politics of Subversion: A Manifesto for the Twenty-First Century , and Negri's book with Michael Hardt, Labor of Dionysus: A Critique of the State-Form .

3. See Saussure 65-70. By "negative definition" I mean the principle that linguistic signs acquire meaning only through their difference from other equally arbitrary signs. The tendency to homogenize all differences into this single form is most evident in Jean Baudrillard's work, especially For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign , chapters 6-8.

4. See Bérubé's Marginal Forces/Cultural Centers .

5. This is especially true in light of the fact that Ellison himself apparently gave up the attempt (he was unable to complete the "sequel" to Invisible Man ) or perhaps even reneged on its most basic terms: see the narrative of Ellison's behavior during the awarding of the American Academy's Gold Medal for Fiction to Bernard Malamud, which took place on the day Burroughs was inducted into the Academy, in Morgan 10-13.

6. On the development of Deleuze's systematic anti-Hegelianism and evasion of the dialectic, see Hardt's Gilles Deleuze: An Apprenticeship in Philosophy .

7. Deleuze, Foucault 131, my emphasis. Deleuze is generally uninterested in the problematics of modernism and postmodernism; given its context, his usage of the term "modern" here is less an intervention in the struggle to define (post)modernism than a marker to distinguish this literature from "classical" (i.e., pre-Cartesian) writing in Foucault's sense.

8. Deleuze has written essays on Herman Melville, Wait Whitman ("Bartleby, ou la formule" and "Whitman," both in Critique et clinique ), Henry James, and F. Scott Fitzgerald (''Three Novellas" in Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand

Plateaus ); he also refers often to Stephen Crane, Edgar Allan Poe, Henry Miller, Jack Kerouac, and Burroughs. In addition to these canonical and semicanonical figures, Deleuze is familiar with a wide range of American popular writers, including H. P. Lovecraft, Raymond Chandler, and Chester Himes; see his essay "Philosophie de la Série noire" on the very popular series of French pulp novels and translations from American pulp literature, in which he also articulates his theory of the "powers of the false" (45).

9. Deleuze, letter to the author, 26 Mar. 1991. My translation.

10. The term fantasmatic is my adjectival derivation from Deleuze's substantive phantasm , which he defines as follows: "The phantasm has three main characteristics. (1) It represents neither an action nor a passion, but a result of action and passion, that is, a pure event. The question of whether particular events are real or imaginary is poorly posed. The distinction is not between the imaginary and the real, but between the event as such and the corporeal state of affairs which incites it about [ sic ] or in which it is actualized" (Deleuze, Logic of Sense 210 ). The pure event is the thing, occurrence, or encounter prior to its recognition and categorization as an object by subjective representational thought. He continues: "(2) The second characteristic of the phantasm is its position in relation to the ego, or rather the situation of the ego in the phantasm itself. . . . What appears in the phantasm is the movement by which the ego opens itself to the surface and liberates the a-cosmic, impersonal, and pre-individual singularities which it had imprisoned" (212-13). The phantasm is thus not a narcissistic fantasy of individual satisfaction but a flight beyond the fixed boundaries of the self or ego, a dissolution of the self into its repressed libidinal components. "(3) It is not an accident that the development inherent in the phantasm is expressed in a play of grammatical transformations. . . . The phantasm is inseparable from the infinitive mode of the verb and bears witness thereby to the pure event. . . . From this pure and undetermined infinitive, voices, moods, tenses and persons will be engendered" (214-15). Therefore the phantasm is a virtuality, a generator of new relationships within language, within the individual subject, and in the broader social world. By changing the spelling to fantasmatic , I intend to establish a relation between Deleuze's term and the "fantasies" that Burroughs provides through his writing. I argue in chapters 5 and 6 that Burroughs's goal as a writer is to produce such phantasms or fantasies as a way of rewriting the oppressive structure of contemporary capitalism.

11. The original subtitle of Burroughs's first novel, Junky , is Confessions of an Unredeemed Drug Addict .

12. For Mailer and Ginsberg, see " Naked Lunch on Trial" in NL ; for Lodge, see his "Objections to Burroughs" in Skerl and Lydenberg; for Fiedler, see his essay "The New Mutants." Robin Lydenberg discusses many of these "moral" accounts of Burroughs in Word Cultures: Radical Theory and Practice in William S. Burroughs' Fiction 3-8.

13. See Lydenberg, Word Cultures , and Skerl, William S. Burroughs .

14. On the shooting of Joan Vollmer Burroughs, see Miles 53 and Morgan 193-96. Morgan in particular offers three different eyewitness narratives of the shooting, none of which suggests murderous intent.

15. Finley's work consists of a selection of art books and magazines, arranged on a wooden table under plate glass, on which Finley has recorded her reactions to the texts and artworks in red grease pencil. The original work was assembled in 1994 and recreated in 1996 for the show "Sexual Politics: Judy Chicago's Dinner Party in Feminist Art History" at the UCLA/Armand Hammer Museum of Art in Los Angeles.

16. Pound's relationship to Mussolini and Italian Fascism is well known, but Stein's interest in Marshal Pétain is not; on both writers' politics, see Luke Carson, The Public Trust: Consumption and Depression in Gertrude Stein, Louis Zukofsky and Ezra Pound .

17. Ginsberg, describing Burroughs's project of the sixties in Burroughs, "Interview with Allen Ginsberg," no pagination.

18. The most extensive and sophisticated discussion I know of Burroughs's theoretical relation to feminism is Lydenberg 167-73.

19. Unsurprisingly, Andrea Dworkin concurred in this linkage of Sade and Burroughs, though she denounced rather than celebrated what she saw as its pernicious effects on women: "Sade is precursor to Artaud's theater of cruelty, Nietzsche's will to power, and the rapist frenzy of William Burroughs" (Dworkin 71). She does not specify that the rape scenes so common in Burroughs's works rarely involve women, nor does she seem to realize that such scenes are included as examples of the dangers of control and repression and not as a transgressive metaphysics, as they are in Sade.

1. See Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition and, with Jean-Loup Thébaud, Just Gaming .

2. See Baudrillard, The Mirror of Production and For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign .

3. See Adams, especially chapter 25, "The Dynamo and the Virgin" (379-90).

4. Compare this statement of intent of Ellison's narrator with Stephen Dedalus's more ambitious claim in James Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: "I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race" ( Portable Joyce 526).

5. A similar critique of anthropology's asymmetrical treatment of cultures is articulated in Johannes Fabian's Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object , but Fabian concentrates on the temporal disjunction between the "here and now" of our culture and the "there and then" of primitive cultures rather than on the "continuity "—or what we might call the "totalizability"—of these opposed cultures. Fabian is primarily concerned with the coexistence of advanced and primitive cultures at the same historical moment, which he calls "coevalness,'' and not with modernism and postmodernism, as is Latour (and this study).

6. Barth's LETTERS is the most extreme example of this rococo effect, though the works that follow it, such as Sabbatical , are only slightly less elaborate in their reflexive structuring.

7. Greil Marcus, "Anarchy in the U.K." in Jim Miller, ed., The Rolling Stone Illustrated History of Rock & Roll 456. I would argue that punk rock, Marcus' subject in this essay, represents an alternative to postmodernism that is similar in some ways to the amodernism I will sketch in this essay. Indeed, the final essay in William Burroughs's The Adding Machine: Selected Essays , titled "Bugger the Queen," begins as an hommage to the Sex Pistols.

8. See, for example, Habermas's essay "Modernity—An Incomplete Project" and Luhmann's Essays on Self-Reference . My gestures here are completely inadequate as criticism of Habermas and Luhmann, but I hope to extend my remarks in the future. For now, I would direct the interested reader to the more detailed analysis undertaken by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri in Labor of Dionysus: A Critique of the State-Form , especially chapter 6, "Postmodern Law and the Withering of Civil Society."

9. This, it seems to me, is the fundamental difference between my argument and that advanced by Hal Foster in his preface to The Anti-Aesthetic . Foster argues for a distinction between a "postmodernism of resistance," which "seeks to deconstruct modernism and resist the status quo," and a ''postmodernism of reaction," which "repudiates the former [modernism] to celebrate the latter [the status quo]" (Foster xii). Let's take him literally: if "resistance" means first and foremost the "deconstruction of modernism," does this not imply that, like deconstruction, this resistance will remain suspended within the modernist determinations it reverses and reinscribes, since deconstruction (at least in its most rigorous forms, like Derrida's work) perpetually defers any specification of alternatives to the metaphysics it interrogates? To "question rather than exploit cultural codes, to explore rather than conceal social and political affiliations" (Foster xii) is not to offer alternatives to those codes and affiliations. The offering of such alternatives, both Marx and Jean-Paul Sartre would agree, is the specific precondition of social change—which the predominantly negative critique of the status quo cannot provide. This invention of alternatives is the project of amodernism.

10. See also Martin Jay's important comparative study of the category of totality, Marxism and Totality: The Adventures of a Concept from Lukács to Habermas .

11. See Jameson xvii.

12. See Popper's The Open Society and Martin Jay's chapter on Habermas in Marxism and Totality 462-509.

13. See the final selection in Baudrillard's Selected Writings , as well as his In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities, or The End of the Social .

14. On Islamic fundamentalist revolutions, see Michel Foucault, "Iran: The Spirit of a World Without Spirit" in Politics, Philosophy, Culture: Interviews and Other Writings 1977-1984, 211-24. On the social potentialities of gang organization, see Mike Davis, City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles , especially chapter 5, "The Hammer and the Rock"; see also Michael Hardt's analysis of Davis in "Los Angeles Novos" 22-26.

15. On Autonomia, see the documentary anthology Working-Class Autonomy and the Crisis and the special issue of Semiotext(e) devoted to Italy: Autonomia—Post-Political Politics (1980), edited by Sylvère Lotringer. On the

Makhnovshchina, see Arshinov, History of the Makhnovist Movement 1918-1921.

16. Paul Feyerabend articulated a position very similar to Latour's for nearly twenty years, from the publication of his influential polemic Against Method (1975) to his death. In later editions of the text he makes a compelling argument for the subordination of science, and of the dominant influence of rigid disciplinary competence, to democracy. Feyerabend makes this argument from the perspective of analytical philosophy, however, rather than from the theory of modernity, as Latour does, so his version is less useful to my argument here.

17. See Negri, Politics 203, and his "On Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus. " See also Ronald Bogue's essay "Gilles Deleuze: Postmodern Philosopher?" for a cautious and interesting but ultimately inconclusive argument, which claims merely that "Deleuze is postmodern in that he is a post-Enlightenment, post-Hegelian philosopher" (404). Deleuze's frequent collaborator, the late Félix Guattari, addresses the question of postmodernism quite polemically in ''The Postmodern Dead End."

18. See Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, chapter 3, section 9, "The Civilized Capitalist Machine" (222-40). Marx's analysis of this tendency appears in Capital, volume 3, section 1, part 3, "The Law of the Tendency of the Rate of Profit to Fall" 211-66.

19. Perhaps the context of this quotation can clarify the point: "the two sexes imply a multiplicity of molecular combinations bringing into play not only the man in the woman and the woman in the man, but the relation of each to the animal, the plant, etc.: a thousand tiny sexes" (Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia 213). For considerations of this suggestion from a feminist perspective, see Rosi Braidotti, Patterns of Dissonance, and Elizabeth Grosz, "A Thousand Tiny Sexes: Feminism and Rhizomatics" in Constantin V. Boundas and Dorothea Olkowski, eds., Gilles Deleuze and the Theater of Philosophy 187-210.

20. See Bataille, The Accursed Share: An Essay on General Economy, volume 1. Deleuze and Guattari reject, however, the dialectical notion, which Bataille borrows from Hegel, of a transgression that reinscribes the law it breaks.

21. The text continues with an example: "The great socialist utopias of the nineteenth century function, for example, not as ideal models but as group fantasies—that is, as agents of the real productivity of desire, making it possible to disinvest the current social field, to 'deinstitutionalize' it, to further the revolutionary institution of desire itself" (Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus 30-31n).

22. This theory of fantasy allows me to hazard an answer to those who would dismiss Anti-Oedipus as naïvely antitextualist, like Vincent B. Leitch, who insists that "representation remains for schizoanalysis the essential means to its ends. Yet the problematics of (mis)reading through representations elicit little response from Deleuze and Guattari. The rhetoricity and materiality of representational language, its stickiness and liquefaction, receive hardly any attention. In renouncing the signifier for the schiz-flow, schizoanalysis circumvents textuality and its enigmas, but they return, doglike, to pester and threaten the enterprise" (Leitch 222). In fact, Deleuze and Guattari are perfectly aware of the materiality of their own discourse, as well as its

potential for what Leitch calls "(mis)readings," but this objection functions only under the aegis of referentiality. Rhetoricity and materiality can only undermine a discourse which makes claims to truth content, that is, to "adequacy to the facts"; within a discourse whose mark is usefulness, these may be amusing questions but they can hardly be called criticisms. This text, like all of Deleuze's texts, is not a set of signifiers looking for signifieds but a ''box of tools," as he put it in a discussion with Foucault. Anti-Oedipus , like any good subject-group fantasy, strives to be useful for the creation of desire rather than true in some hermeneutical way.

23. See Derrida's "Plato's Pharmacy" in Dissemination 137-39. See also Paul Patton's analysis of the difference between Deleuze's and Derrida's accounts of simulation in "Anti-Platonism and Art" in Boundas and Olkowski, eds., Gilles Deleuze and the Theater of Philosophy 148-53.

24. Deleuze calls this function "fiction" in Empiricism and Subjectivity: An Essay on Hume's Theory of Human Nature 131-33 and " la fonction fabulatrice" —which I would render "fabulation" rather than "story-telling function," as the translators do—in Bergsonism 108-111.

25. Don Cherry, quoted in John Litweiler, Ornette Coleman: A Harmolodic Life 148.

1. This introductory text, "Deposition: Testimony concerning a Sickness," was originally published in Evergreen Review 4.11 (Jan./Feb. 1960) and was included with the Grove Press edition (1962 and later) of the novel; the original Olympia Press edition of the novel did not contain an introduction.

2. See Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, chapter 3.

3. On the modernization of urban space, particularly New York City, see Marshall Berman's All That Is Solid Melts Into Air: The Experience of Modernity , chapter 5.

4. On Burroughs's use of his mother's maiden name, see Lydenberg, Word Cultures 167-72.

5. As Burroughs notes in the glossary, "M.S." is morphine sulphate, a "croaker" is a doctor, and a "script" is a prescription for regulated drugs. "Script" in particular enters Burroughs's textual economy; we will trace some of its vicissitudes in the chapters that follow.

6. Even Foucault's Benthamesque panoptic disciplinary society is discontinuous in this sense: the "guards" cannot watch all of the "prisoners" all of the time, though the "prisoners" cannot know exactly when they are under direct observation. See Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison , part 3, chapter 3. If one were to imagine a form of police control that was not rhythmic, not pulsed, but continuous, one would have to pattern it along the lines laid down by George Orwell in 1984.

7. Burroughs comments extensively on these laws in Burroughs and Odier, The Job 147-49, as well as in Burroughs and Bockris, With William Burroughs: A Report from the Bunker , and returns to the subject in light of the "War on

Drugs" in "Afterthoughts on a Deposition," the new (1992) introduction to Naked Lunch , 15.

8. For examples of the characterization of drug addicts in the contemporary mass media, see Harry J. Anslinger and William F. Tompkins, The Traffic in Narcotics. The title of one of Anslinger's later books gives a good indication of his perspective on addiction: The Protectors: The Heroic Story of the Narcotics Agents, Citizens, and Officials in Their Unending, Unsung Battles against Organized Crime in America and Abroad. Most historians and police officials believe now that traditional organized crime (i.e., the Mafia) did not become involved in drug trafficking until the late sixties or early seventies. Anslinger, the U.S. Commissioner of Narcotics in the fifties and sixties, came to represent the inhuman face of control to Burroughs, who often quotes Anslinger's dictum that "the laws must reflect society's disapproval of the addict" (in The Ticket That Exploded 216 and elsewhere).

9. In this, Burroughs marks a temporary disagreement with Samuel Beckett, for whom the relation is exactly the opposite: the long-sought sequel to speech, for Beckett, is silence, though it is a silence that, in pure form, may be impossible to achieve. Later in his career, Burroughs will reverse himself on this issue and claim that the silence that comes after words is "The most desirable state" (Burroughs, "Interview" in Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews 150). This is not to say that one of these perspectives on the relation of speech and silence is radical and the other conservative, but rather that this relation itself is crucial to the work of important contemporary writers other than Burroughs. Burroughs reflects on Beckett's work and declares himself closer to Proust than to Beckett in ''Beckett and Proust," in The Adding Machine: Selected Essays 182-86.

10. Deleuze, preface to Guy Hocquenghem, L'Après-mai des faunes: Volutions 10. My translation.

11. Recall that "connection" is another term for "pusher," although it is not included in Burroughs's glossary at the end of Junky.

12. "Confessions" of this kind are scattered throughout contemporary texts on psychopathology, civil rights, and religious tolerance. A number of them are collected in the volume edited by A. M. Krich, The Homosexuals As Seen by Themselves and Thirty Authorities; see Part 1, "As Seen by Themselves," particularly the first-person narratives "Autobiography of a Homosexual Writer" (70-74) and "Crisis in the Life of a Homosexual" (80-84). This volume also reprints texts on homosexuality (understood throughout as referring to both male and female homosexuality) by Freud, Jung, Sandor Ferenczi, and others. Burroughs does not cite Krich's volume to my knowledge, but he does refer, quite disparagingly, to Donald W. Cory's The Homosexual in America in a letter to Ginsberg: the book is "Enough to turn a man's gut. This citizen says a queer learns humility, learns to turn the other cheek, and returns love for hate. Let him learn that sort of thing if he wants to. I never swallowed the other cheek routine, and I hate the stupid bastards who won't mind their own business. They can die in agony for all I care. . . . I could never be a liberal except in a situation where the majority was made up of people I like" (Burroughs, Letters 1945-1959 105-6).

13. No less an authority than Norman Mailer has said, apropos of Burroughs's aggressively uneffeminate homosexuality, that "Burroughs is a real

man. . . . I remember when we read the first sections of Naked Lunch we felt so relieved. We knew a great man had spoken" (quoted in Burroughs and Bockris, With William Burroughs , xix).

14. When Burroughs recycles this routine in his later works, he attributes very different words of wisdom to Bobo: "as a wise old black faggot said to me years ago: 'Some people are shits, darling.'" See "My Own Business," among other texts, in The Adding Machine , 15-18.

15. See Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet , especially her comparative analysis of Racine's Esther in chapter 1. George Chauncey claims that "Originally, the concept of gay coming out spoofed the debutante's; coming out didn't mean disclosing one's homosexuality to straights, but rather, it meant initiation into gay networks" (Wayne Koestenbaum's paraphrase from his review of Chauncey's Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture and the Making of the Gay Male World 1890-1940 in the Los Angeles Time Book Review 7 Aug. 1994: 2). This would be closer to Burroughs's experience as it appears in Queer. Chauncey also examines the liminal spaces of the prewar gay world: the bathhouses, parks, and bars that paralleled the underdetermined spaces of the junky that I examined above.

16. Burroughs, "Letter from a Master Addict to Dangerous Drugs," originally published in the British Journal of Addiction 53 (1957): 2 and reprinted as an appendix to the Grove Press edition of Naked Lunch , 253.

17. Burroughs has often said of his writing, "Every word is autobiographical, and every word is fiction." See, for example, Burroughs and Bockris, With William Burroughs 28.

18. Burroughs, statement included in the catalogue of his painting exhibition at Cleto Polcina (Rome, 1989), quoted in Barry Miles, William Burroughs, El Hombre Invisible: A Portrait 241. "Nagual" is Carlos Castaneda's term for the unpredictable, magical universe that coexists with the "tonal," or causal and predictable, universe of science.

1. These trials took place in 1965 and 1966 respectively. See the prefatory material included in the Black Cat edition of Naked Lunch (New York: Grove Press, 1966). Earlier, in 1959, when sections of Naked Lunch were to be published in the University of Chicago's literary magazine, Chicago Review , the faculty advisors suppressed the forthcoming issue; the student editors resigned and founded the independent magazine Big Table , which was prosecuted on and cleared of obscenity charges for publishing excerpts from Naked Lunch. See Michael B. Goodman, Contemporary Literary Censorship: The Case History of Burroughs' Naked Lunch , and Ted Morgan, Literary Outlaw 295-98.

2. See the prefatory material included in the 1961 edition of Ulysses (New York: Vintage, 1961), in which Joyce's lawyer Morris L. Ernst claims that the Ulysses case "marks a turning point. It is a body blow for the censors. . . . Writers . . . may now describe basic human functions without fear of the law . . . [and] it should henceforth be impossible for the censors legally to sustain an attack

against any book of artistic integrity, no matter how frank and forthright it may be" (v-vi). The difficulty, of course, lies in the phrase "artistic integrity." Ernst also draws a parallel between the Ulysses decision and the repeal of Prohibition: "Perhaps the intolerance which closed our distilleries was the intolerance which decreed that basic human functions had to be treated in books in a furtive, leering, roundabout manner'' (vi). If he's right, then the legal opposition Burroughs faced in the late fifties and the sixties constituted the literary incarnation of the legislative anti-drug hysteria Burroughs chronicled in Junky .

3. See Elaine Dutka's article on Chernin, "The Lunches Won't Be Naked."

4. Cronenberg quoted in Ira Silverberg, ed., Everything is Permitted: The Making of Naked Lunch (London: Grafton, 1992), 61; see also 13 and 57.

5. The script has been published in France: David Cronenberg, Le Scénario du "Festin Nu ." It gives no writing credit to Burroughs, and therefore the Cronenberg film cannot be treated as a collaboration. Brion Gysin wrote a different screenplay for a Naked Lunch film, with Burroughs's help, in the early seventies; a small section of it is published in Burroughs and Gysin, The Third Mind 150-58, and another section in Gysin and Terry Wilson's Here to Go: Planet R-101 131-57.

6. See also Cronenberg, Scénario du "Festin Nu" 102-3.

7. The quotation is taken from the novel ( NL 216), but it is taken completely out of context.

8. Cronenberg, Scénario du "Festin Nu" 114, my translation.

9. Cronenberg, Scénario du "Festin Nu" 11, my translation.

10. Naked Lunch was not composed using the strict cut-up method, which functions at the level of syntax; instead, it was composed by juxtaposing separate, self-contained routines, according to a kind of narrative-level cut-up.

11. A similar formalist neutralization has allowed Robert Mapplethorpe's photographs to be defended within the very academy that they were, at least in part, meant to mock and disturb. A "formal" portrait of Burroughs in black tie and tails, taken by Mapplethorpe, faces the title page of Burroughs and Bockris's With William Burroughs, a collection of interviews.

12. See, for example, Julia Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language 17: "The text is a practice that could be compared to political revolution: the one brings about in the subject what the other introduces into society."

13. Burroughs, Introduction to Silverberg, ed., Everything is Permitted: The Making of Naked Lunch 15.

14. The first quote is from Burroughs and Odier, 69; the second from Burroughs, "My Purpose is to Write for the Space Age" in Skerl and Lydenberg, eds., William S. Burroughs at the Front, 268.

15. This citation is actually a free rendering of proposition 3.328 of Wittgenstein's Logisch-Philosophische Abhandlung [Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus] 56-57: "Wird ein Zeichen nicht gebraucht, so ist es bedeutungslos. Das ist der Sinn der Devise Occams" ("If a sign is not necessary then it is meaningless. That is the meaning of Occam's razor").

16. Burroughs uses ellipses quite often in Naked Lunch and later works, as Pynchon does in Gravity's Rainbow . Burroughs's ellipses consist of three or four periods separated by spaces. To avoid confusion, I will keep ellipses added to

quotations to a minimum. When added ellipses are unavoidable, they will appear in brackets to distinguish them from Burroughs's own ellipses. Burroughs also imitates various dialects in print, often through conscious misspelling or distortion of syntax that anticipates his cut-up work of the sixties; all of the quotations in this book have been carefully checked against their sources in Burroughs's novel and the spelling and syntactic "errors" that remain are in the original text.

17. This point on Burroughs's trajectory can be fruitfully compared to Joyce's strategy of "silence, exile and cunning." Joyce went into continental exile in protest against the parochial philistinism of Irish culture that threatened to constrain his literary experiments (and, to a lesser extent, against the legal sanctions that threatened to constrain his unorthodox living arrangements with his "wife," Nora); see Richard Ellmann's James Joyce, revised edition 109-10. He was never explicitly threatened with violence or incarceration, as Burroughs often was.

18. Actually, there is a third alternative: to remain within the superficially fragmentary aesthetic of modernity, which is the course Adorno himself took.

19. On this organization of the subject and its vicissitudes through recorded history, see the three volumes of Foucault's History of Sexuality, as well as The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences and Discipline and Punish . Louis Althusser's "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses" in Lenin and Philosophy also discusses the interpellation of the subject as the image of the capitalist social structure.

20. Horkheimer and Adorno have a significantly different idea of addiction than Burroughs does, however, as their discussion of the "Lotus Eaters" episode of the Odyssey demonstrates: "This kind of idyll, which recalls the happiness of narcotic drug addicts reduced to the lowest level in obdurate social orders, who use their drugs to help them endure the unendurable, is impermissible for the adherents of the rationale of self-preservation. . . . [T]he tempting power ascribed to [the drug] is none other than that of regression to the phase of collecting the fruits of the earth and of the sea—a stage more ancient . . . than all production . . . a state in which the reproduction of life is independent of conscious self-preservation, and the bliss of the fully contented is detached from the advantages of rationally planned nutrition" ( DE 62-64). Burroughs would perhaps accept the idea of addiction as regression, even to a vegetative, precapitalist state, but hardly to a primitive state of ''bliss." On the contrary, in his experience the addict's life is much closer to the mechanization Horkheimer and Adorno discern in the reproduction of labor: the addict, particularly the heroin or morphine addict, has no affective existence whatsoever and is virtually indistinguishable from a corpse: "Morphine have depressed my hypothalamus, seat of libido and emotion, and since the front brain acts only at second hand with back-brain titillation, being a vicarious type citizen can only get his kicks from behind, I must report virtual absence of cerebral event. I am aware of your presence, but since it has for me no affective connotation, my affect having been disconnect by the junk man for nonpayment, I am not innarested in your doings. Go or come . . . but the Dead and the Junky don't care" ( NL 231).

21. See Lukács, "Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat" in History and Class Consciousness, especially section 3, "The Standpoint of the Proletariat."

22. See Foucault, Discipline and Punish, especially parts 2 and 3.

23. Burroughs dabbled in anthropology while a student at Harvard and knew enough about the field to make inside jokes about it. For example, in the midst of a passage on the fatalism of South American Brujos, a parenthesis demands a "straightjacket for Herr [Franz] Boas [one of the founding fathers of modern anthropology]—trade Joke—nothing so maddens an anthropologist as Primitive Man" ( NL 110). Naked Lunch also contains many parenthetical asides that purport to explain, objectively, obscure social practices; for example, "smother parties" are "a rural English custom designed to eliminate aged and bedfast dependents," and ''leading out" is "an African practice[ . . . ]of taking old characters out into the jungle and leaving them there" ( NL 10). These asides take the place of the futile glossary with which Junky concluded.

24. The resemblances between the critiques of Reason by Sade and Burroughs extend beyond their approaches to criminality; a common point of interest, which I cannot address here, is their shared belief that "We have just as good grounds for denying woman a title to be part of our race as we have for refusing to acknowledge the ape as our brother" (Sade, cited in DE 110). If Burroughs is less inclined to deny humanity's kinship with apes (see for example NL 86-87 and elsewhere), he is no less inclined to view women as a separate species.

25. Coleridge's Mariner is a figure recurring throughout Naked Lunch who seems to exemplify what Burroughs sees as the relation between writer and reader; consider this passage, from the "Campus of Interzone University" routine:

consider the Ancient Mariner without curare, lasso, bulbocapnine or straightjacket, albeit able to capture and hold a live audience. . . . What is his hurmp gimmick? [. . . ]He does not, like so-called artists at this time, stop just anybody thereby inflicting unsent for boredom and working random hardship. . . . He stops those who cannot choose but hear owing to already existing relation between the Mariner (however ancient) and the uh Wedding Guest. . . .

"What the Mariner actually says is not important. . . . He may be rambling, irrelevant, even crude and rampant senile. But something happens to the Wedding Guest like happens in psychoanalysis when it happens if it happens[. . . . ]an analyst of my acquaintance does all the talking—patients listen patiently or not[. . . ]He is illustrating at some length that nothing can ever be accomplished on the verbal level[. . . .] You can find out more about someone by talking than by listening ." (NL 87-88)

This passage implies that Naked Lunch, itself apparently rambling and crude, may be intended to reveal more about its readers in their various reactions to it than about its writer in his construction of it. See Anthony Channell Hilfer, "Mariner and Wedding Guest in William Burroughs' Naked Lunch ."

26. Horkheimer and Adorno's (implicit) attitude toward homosexuality diverges rather sharply from Burroughs's. Whereas for Burroughs, at this point in his career, homosexuality is capable of being both radical (in its challenge to the sexual division of labor on which capitalism is founded) and reactionary (in its continued resemblance to heterosexual norms of subjectivity and interpersonal control), in Horkheimer and Adorno's view homosexuality remains within a horizon of pure reactionary psychopathology, as a characteristic of Fascism. Consider this remark, from the "Notes and Drafts" section of Dialectic of Enlightenment:

This hostility—which was once carefully fostered by the worldly and spiritual rulers—felt by the lowly against the life which held out nothing for them and with which they

could establish a homosexual and paranoiac relationship by murdering, was always an essential instrument of the art of government. (234)

And this description:

Man surrenders to man, cold, bleak and unyielding, as woman did before him. Man turns into woman gazing up at her master. In the Fascist collective with its teams and labor camps, everyone spends his days from the tenderest years in solitary confinement. The seed of homosexuality is sown. (252)

Further study is necessary to determine to what extent this attitude problematizes Horkheimer and Adorno's analysis of the sexual division of labor articulated elsewhere in Dialectic of Enlightenment .

27. U.S. Supreme Court, A Book Named "John Cleland's Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure" v. Attorney Gen. of Mass., cited in the decision by the Massachusetts Supreme Court in its decision deeming Naked Lunch not obscene (NL viii).

28. See Lydenberg, chapter 2, "Notes from the Orifice: Language and the Body in Naked Lunch ."

29. Deleuze, Francis Bacon: Logique de la sensation 34-35. Translation by Daniel W. Smith forthcoming. These two passages also appear, in a very similar context, in A Thousand Plateaus 150, 153.

30. This "point of intersection" is narrated in Burroughs's short autobiographical text "Exterminator!" (1966), included in the 1973 collection of the same title.

1. See Gysin, "Cut Me Up * Brion Gysin . . ." in Burroughs, Gysin, Beiles, and Corso, Minutes to Go 42-43, and Burroughs, "The Cut-Up Method of Brion Gysin" 29. See also Hans Richter, Dada: Art and Anti-Art 54.

2. Burroughs, "Origin and Theory of the Tape Cut-Ups" on the compact disk Break Through in Grey Room .

3. Here again we see Burroughs's dissent from Beckett's position on language. As noted in chapter 2, for Burroughs the silence of solitary addiction comes before the speech of community, while for Beckett the speech of community comes before the silence of solitude. Likewise, for Burroughs the words contain not only past and present time, in which we are controlled, but also the future, in which we can be free; Beckett, on the other hand, admits that "All I know is what the words know," which is only "a handsome little sum, with a beginning, a middle and an end as in the well-built phrase and the long sonata of the dead" ( Molloy 31); this seems to rule out any novelty or freedom that the words might contain.

4. This source text by Monroe is, unfortunately, too long to quote; Burroughs's published cut-up utilizes only short random sections of it.

5. Burroughs, "Interview with Allen Ginsberg," no pagination. This interview contains what appears at first to be a contradiction: although The Ticket That Exploded is only the second book of the trilogy, both Ginsberg and Burroughs agree that it actually "brought it all to a climax" through "the action of the Nova

or of the explosion itself, by dissolving everything into a vibrating, soundless hum." We will return to this apparent contradiction later.

6. Burroughs, "Appendix to The Soft Machine," quoted in Barry Miles, William Burroughs, El Hombre Invisible 120-121. This text was included in the third British edition of The Soft Machine (1968), but not in any other editions. We should also recall that the concept of "right" is intimately related to that of the Law, both in Burroughs's writing and in the German philosophical tradition that forms the basis of most modern discussion of Law. In the latter, the term Recht refers to "right," "state,'' and "law." See Hegel's Philosophy of Right and Marx's "Critique of Hegel's Doctrine of the State [ Recht ]" in Early Writings .

7. Burroughs," Interview with Allen Ginsberg."

8. The cited passage on "Willy the Rat" recurs in identical form in Nova Express 56, and in cut-up form in many places throughout the trilogy.

9. On Burroughs's album of tape recorder experiments from the mid-sixties, Break Through in Grey Room .

10. See also Jameson, Marxism and Form 255-57.

11. See the documents assembled by Robert V. Daniels in A Documentary History of Communism, 2: 54-67.

12. On McCarthy, see David M. Oshinsky, A Conspiracy So Immense: The World of Joe McCarthy . On the general development of American anticommunist movements, see David Caute, The Great Fear: The Anti-Communist Purge under Truman and Eisenhower .

13. Burroughs subjects this opposition to a reductio ad absurdam in his most concentrated work on gangsters, The Last Words of Dutch Schultz . Schultz's last delirious monologue, recorded by a police stenographer after Schultz has been shot, provides Burroughs with a natural cut-up, which he uses to construct a hallucinatory "film" of Schultz's criminal career.

14. On Valachi's testimony and its ramifications, see Peter Maas, The Valachi Papers .

15. See Burroughs, Naked Scientology 83. This volume consists of texts reprinted from the LA Free Press, The East Village Other, and Rolling Stone .

16. The passage as a whole is a striking prophecy of the Watergate cover-up, particularly in its appeal to executive privilege and its reference to secret tape recordings.

17. Here Burroughs is citing Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus 56-57.

18. The Latin goes like this: "Frustra fit per plura quod potest fieri per pauciora."

19. Gysin, "Cut-Ups: A Project for Disastrous Success" in Burroughs and Gysin, The Third Mind 43-44.

20. Eric Mottram claims, and Gysin seems to confirm, that Burroughs's "immediate source of information [on Hassan i Sabbah] was Betty Bouttel's Le Vieux de la Montagne, 1924" (Mottram, William Burroughs: The Algebra of Need 61). Mottram probably got this information from Burroughs in conversation or correspondence; he does not seem to have inspected the novel himself. Marshall Hodgson, in his history of the Ismâ`îlîs, Hassan i Sabbah's Islamic sect, refers to a "historical novel" entitled Grand Maître des Assassins by B. Bouthoul, pub-

lished in 1936, which "held the field alone" (Hodgson 27n). I have not been able to locate a copy of the novel, whatever its title, for analysis, but it seems fair to assume that Burroughs would have learned more about Hassan i Sabbah from his friend Gysin than from an obscure French novel.

21. Gysin was also familiar with the most important Ismâ`îlî publications, including the thirteenth-century Persian historian Juwayni's hostile contemporary account of their doctrines and the translations of Henry Corbin; see Gysin and Wilson xiii-xiv, 64-65. Hodgson reports virtually the same story of Hassan i Sabbah and Nizâm al-Mulk, with less emphasis on the method by which the manuscripts were "jumbled"; see Hodgson 137-38.

22. This recurrent phrase, like the "Razor" discussed above, may derive from the novel that Mottram claims was Burroughs's source for information on Hassan i Sabbah, or it may simply be Burroughs's combination of Gysin's Ismâ`lîlî anecdotes, Dostoyevsky's assertion that "If God is dead, everything is permitted" (from The Brothers Karamazov ), and his own antiauthoritarianism.

23. In the transliteration of Arabic and Persian spelling, I will follow the source of the moment. Please note that some authors add a terminal "t" to words ending in vowels; thus sharî`a and sharî`at refer to the same object, as do haqîqa and haqiqat .

24. More recent works on Ismailism, including Henry Corbin's History of Islamic Philosophy and Farhad Daftary's The Ismî`lîs: Their History and Doctrines, do not in general contradict Hodgson's claims, so I have used his volume as my primary source because it could well have been known to Gysin or Burroughs, as the more recent works could not.

25. This emphasis on the external nature of the law, and its ultimate transitoriness, shows that the sharî`a was a pre-Kantian form of law. Deleuze defines this generally heteronomous pre-Kantian law as follows: "If men knew what good was, and knew how to conform to it, they would not need laws. Laws, or the law, are only a 'second resort,' a representative of the Good in a world deserted by the gods. When the true politics is absent, it leaves general directives according to which men must conduct themselves. Laws are therefore, as it were, the imitation of the Good which serves as their highest principle. They derive from the Good under certain conditions." This is clearly the function of the sharî`a . Kantian law, on the other hand, is defined by its internal characteristics, its formal autonomy, rather than its content or its relation to human behavior in the material world: "Kant reverses the relationship of the law and the Good. . . . It is the Good which depends on the law, and not vice-versa. . . . The law can have no content other than itself, since all content of the law would lead it back to a Good whose imitation it would be. In other words, the law is pure form and has no object: neither sensible nor intelligible. It does not tell us what we must do, but to what (subjective) rule we must conform, whatever our action. Any action is moral if its maxim can be thought without contradiction as universal, and if its motive has no other object than this maxim. . . . The moral law is thus defined as the pure form of universality" (Deleuze, "On Four Poetic Formulas Which Might Summarize the Kantian Philosophy,'' preface to Kant's Critical Philosophy, x). This distinction is theoretically important, but it has little direct relevance to Burroughs's project; indeed, Burroughs seldom if ever refers to Kant, and never to his formal definition of the law.

26. Brion Gysin visited Alamout in 1973 and wrote an unpublished report on it; see Gysin and Wilson xii-xiv, 64, 96-100.

27. Gysin in fact refers to all of the leaders of Alamout, including Hassan i Sabbah and his successors, as "Old Men of the Mountain"; see Gysin and Wilson xiii. This may be the source of Burroughs's fusion of the historically distinct figures.

28. This abolition of the law that entails the resurrection of the dead will provide the rationale for Burroughs's next major work, The Wild Boys: A Book of the Dead .

29. This proclamation implied that, given the necessary order of appearance of prophets and hujjas dictated by the Ismâ`îlî faith, if Hasan II was Qâ'im, then Hassan i Sabbah, as Hasan II's hujja, occupied a role parallel to Christ; indeed, Hassan i Sabbah would be the Second Coming of Christ before the final Judgment. See Hodgson 154 and WL 195.

30. For example, there are laws on food in the sura (chapter of the Koran) on "The Table"; on familial and sexual relations in the sura "Women"; on the obligation to make the pilgrimage to Mecca in the sura "Pilgrimage," and many others. See The Koran 386-400, 366-84 and 401-7.

31. Burroughs, "Apocalypse" on the compact disk Dead City Radio . Text published as introduction to Keith Haring, Apocalypse (New York: George Mulder Fine Arts, 1989).

32. Kalâm-i Pir, cited in Buckley 146.

33. TE 49-50. In this statement, Burroughs's attitude toward the speech/silence relation appears to be shifting to one of agreement with Samuel Beckett, for whom the compulsion to speak is the most tenacious element in the structure of the self.

34. See Plato, the Republic 5: 474-80, in Collected Dialogues .

35. In The Western Lands, where he takes up the implications of Hassan i Sabbah's work again in detail, Burroughs suggests that this is the reason "the Ismailians were singled out for special persecution, since they commit the blackest heresy in Islamic books, assuming the prerogatives of the Creator" (WL 198).

36. Burroughs, "Interview" in Writers at Work 159-60. Burroughs adds, provocatively, that the reader may, "For 'nova police,' read 'technology,' if you wish" (160); despite its undeniable interest, this point is beyond the scope of the present study.

37. Nietzsche warned his readers to "beware of speaking of chemical 'laws': that savors of morality." Consider, for example, his insistence that in the physical sciences,

"Regularity" in succession is only a metaphorical expression, as if a rule were being followed here; not a fact. In the same way "conformity with a law." We discover a formula by which to express an ever-recurring kind of result: we have therewith discovered no "law," even less a force that is the cause of the recurrence of a succession of results. That something always happens thus and thus is here interpreted as if a creature always acted thus and thus as a result of obedience to a law or a lawgiver, while it would be free to act otherwise were it not for the "law.'' But precisely this thus-and-not-otherwise might be inherent in the creature, which might behave thus and thus, not in response to a law, but because it is constituted thus and thus. All it would mean is: something cannot also be something else, cannot do now this and now something

else, is neither free nor unfree but simply thus and thus. The mistake lies in the fictitious insertion of a subject .

And also the next fragment:

Two successive states, the "cause," the other "effect": this is false. The first has nothing to effect, the second has been effected by nothing. It is a question of a struggle between two elements of unequal power: a new arrangement of forces is achieved according to the measure of power of each of them. The second condition is something fundamentally different from the first (not its effect): the essential thing is that the factions in struggle emerge with different quanta of power. (Nietzsche, The Will to Power, fragments 630, 632, and 633, pp. 336-37)

Compare Nietzsche's critique to Burroughs's fullest formulation of the problematic of biologic law, from The Western Lands:

NOs, natural outlaws [are] 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[. . . . ] To an ordinary criminal, breaking a law is a means to an end: obtaining money, removing a source of danger or annoyance. To the NO, breaking a natural law is an end in itself: the end of that law. ( WL 30)

The Law, whether social or natural, is nothing other than a power structure used to impose predictable uniformity—generally in the form of an intentional, speaking human subject—on the multiplicity of relations that constitute the chaotic universe. For Burroughs as for Nietzsche, unpredictable and unprecedented hybrids are the substance of the world.

38. Compare Marx's similar perspective on historical repetition and novelty: "Hegel remarks somewhere that all facts and personages of great importance in world history occur, as it were, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce" ( The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte in Marx and Engels 1: 247).

39. Burroughs, "Interview" in Writers at Work 159.

40. In "Cut-Ups: A Project for Disastrous Success," Gysin writes that "The Divine Tautology came up at me off a page one day: I AM THAT I AM, and I saw that it was lopsided. I switched the last two words to get better architectural balance around the big THAT. There was a little click as I read from right to left and then permutated the other end. AM I THAT AM I? 'It' asked a question. My ear ran away down the first one hundred and twenty simple permutations and I heard, I think, what Newton said he heard: a sort of wild pealing inside my head, like an ether experience, and I fell down. Burroughs looked grave. 'Unfortunately, the means are at hand for disastrous success.' . . . You can't call me the author of those poems, now, can you? I merely undid the word combination, like the letter lock on a piece of good luggage, and the poem made itself" (Burroughs and Gysin 45).

41. For a more detailed explication of these syntheses, see Murphy, "The Theater of (the Philosophy of) Cruelty in Gilles Deleuze's Difference and Repetition ."

42. Burroughs, "Origin and Theory of the Tape Cut-Ups" on the compact disk Break Through in Grey Room .

43. Tom Phillips, "Notes on A Humument, " included as an appendix to A Humument, revised edition, unpaginated.

44. See "The Mayan Caper" in The Soft Machine .

45. See chapter 1, above, on the relation of the law of value to postmodernism.

46. See "The Coming of the Purple Better One" in Exterminator!

47. On such total, nonconserving aggression, see Hardt, Gilles Deleuze 52-53.

1. Alfred Kazin, Bright Book of Life: American Novelists and Storytellers from Hemingway to Mailer 269. Much of Kazin's discussion of Burroughs in this volume is a revision of his review of The Wild Boys (from The New York Times Book Review 12 Dec. 1971: 4, 22).

2. Consider, for example, Louis Althusser's "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses" in Lenin and Philosophy and Slavoj Zizek's[Žižek's] The Sublime Object of Ideology, among others.

3. See Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man and Adorno, Minima Moralia, and Negative Dialectics .

4. See Derrida, "Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences" in Writing and Difference, 278-93.

5. This does not mean that hermeneutic studies have no use, but the status of their inquiry must be conceived differently; in the model I am articulating, hermeneutics must be approached as a form of fantasmatic invention rather than as the revelation of obscured truth.

6. Allen Ginsberg, in his introduction to Burroughs, Letters to Allen Ginsberg 1953-1957 6. Ginsberg notes that "schlupp" means "to devour a soul parasitically."

7. Marshall McLuhan, "Notes on Burroughs" from The Nation 28 Dec. 1964: 519, reprinted in Skerl and Lydenberg 73.

8. This refers to the 1968 Democratic National Convention; see Mailer's Miami and the Siege of Chicago . For a good general overview of the events to which Burroughs responded, often directly, see David Caute, The Year of the Barricades: A Journey through 1968; Caute mentions Burroughs's presence in Chicago on 315.

9. I will occasionally cite Port of Saints without additional comment because, as Burroughs admits, it is not strictly distinct from The Wild Boys: "There isn't very much difference [between The Wild Boys, Exterminator! and Port of Saints ]. I found the material for Wild Boys when I had to make, at some point, a more or less arbitrary choice . . . sometimes you realize that the things you left out are better than what you've put in. So three books came from that block of material" (Burroughs, "Interview with Allen Ginsberg").

10. Ginsberg in Burroughs, "An Interview with Allen Ginsberg." On the question of Burroughs's misogyny, see Lydenberg 167-74.

11. On Burroughs's anthropological studies in Mexico, see Letters 1945-1959 69 and Morgan 173. He refers frequently to the Egyptian Book of the Dead and to the Maya codices, but rarely to the Tibetan Book.

12. Jewish and Christian doctrines of resurrection also contain elements of this posthumous corporeality in the theme of the "resurrection of the flesh," but such doctrines do not generally share the Egyptian concern with the danger and uncertainty of the afterlife.

13. Budge defines the khu as the "spiritual soul . . . which under no circumstances could die" ( Book of the Dead lxviii).

14. The text continues with an example: "The great socialist utopias of the nineteenth century function, for example, not as ideal models but as group fantasies—that is, as agents of the real productivity of desire, making it possible to disinvest the current social field, to 'deinstitutionalize' it, to further the revolutionary institution of desire itself" (Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus 30-3 in).

15. For Sartre, subject-group fantasy is dialectical in that it affirms an alternative social relation only by negating the negation of that alternative. In the Bastille example, it is only because the negative (defensive) and affirmative (offensive) moments of the fantasy coincide in the same object that the group can form. For Deleuze and Guattari, these moments are separate and bear on distinct objects; therefore they cannot be reduced to a synthesis.

16. Burroughs's interpretation of the Maya hieroglyphs is consistent with the dominant interpretation of the forties, when he studied the hieroglyphs in Mexico, but this account is no longer accepted among archaeologists. Peter Mathews reports that "there was a rather serious mind set switch that went on. You start to see coming into the literature in the 1940's that [sic] the Maya were worshipping time" ( Proceedings of the Maya Hieroglyphic Weekend 118).

17. Burroughs is also skeptical of countercultural claims about the liberational potential of drugs: "It seems to me that drugs are one of the ideal power devices. The so-called drug problem is a pretext—thin, and getting thinner—to extend police power over areas of actual or potential opposition. In Western countries, opposition is concentrated in the 18-to-25 age group. So, make more drug laws, publicize all drug news, and a good percentage of the opposition is criminal by legal definition . . . [the police] can keep young people under continual threat of police search or action, at the same time divert rebellion into the dead-end channels of addiction and criminality" (Burroughs and Odier 127-28).

18. In fact, the two other famous books of the dead, the Tibetan and the Egyptian, are not actually entitled "Book of the Dead"; the Tibetan Bardo Thödol translates literally as "Liberation by Hearing on the After-Death Plane," and the Egyptian Pert em hru means "Coming forth from (or by) day." See W. Y. Evans-Wentz, ed., The Tibetan Book of the Dead xvi, and Budge, Egyptian Book xxx.

19. Such phallic glyphs are common throughout the Book of the Dead, appearing as early as the twenty-third line of the very first plate in the papyrus of Ani (Budge, Egyptian Book 4). The phallus-glyph, as Burroughs acknowledges, is also part of the Egyptian pictograph for "absence."

20. Both texts are published in Burroughs, Ah Pook Is Here and Other Texts . They both suggest a hieroglyphic method of reading Burroughs's works: "Models can pose the glyphs and act them out in charades. It's the great work of making words into pictures into so called real people and places. . . . Transposing these stylized glyphs into photos and drawings we find that there can be any number of representations of any glyph" (68-69). Of course, the glyphs can also be

transposed into narrative descriptions of the sort I have just mentioned; this would mean that the scenes could be read as glyphs, and their arrangement as sentences. I regret that I am unable to undertake such a novel and difficult reading of Burroughs's novels at present.

21. In The Job, written contemporaneously with The Wild Boys, Burroughs explains this form of Control: "The goal to submit was implanted by a threat so horrible that he could not confront it, and the Mayan secret books obviously consisted of such horrific pictures. The few that have survived bear witness to this. Men are depicted turning into centipedes, crabs, plants" (42). This explanation also accounts for the "Garden of Flesh" sequence in The Wild Boys 44-46.

22. This escapist aspect of the book has led Burroughs to claim, disingenuously, that " The Wild Boys could be considered a kind of homosexual Peter Pan " (Burroughs, "My Purpose Is to Write for the Space Age" in Skerl and Lydenberg 266).

23. See Deleuze and Guattari, "Plateau 10. 1730: Becoming-Intense, Becoming-Animal, Becoming-Imperceptible, " 232-309 in A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia .

24. Pages 80-89 of Port of Saints specify even more "adaptive" types.

25. The Wild Boys are all made of blue material because, as creatures constructed of desire, they must be the color of desire: "Doctor Wilhelm Reich has isolated and concentrated a unit that he calls 'the orgone'—Orgones, according to W. Reich, are the units of life—They have been photographed and the color is blue" ( NE 16n). The reference is to Reich 384.

26. The "silver spots" that mark the burnout of the reality film are prefigured in the "silver spots" of orgasm, WB 107.

27. Ginsberg in Burroughs, "Interview with Allen Ginsberg."

1. Queer also escapes from this assumption to some extent through its gestures toward revolutionary community, but it remained unfinished and unpublished until after the publication of Cities of the Red Night and The Place of Dead Roads .

2. On Sartre's privileged preservation of the categories of right and Law, see Foucault's implicit response in "On Popular Justice" in Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972-1977 1-36.

3. Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus 318, 322. Translation slightly modified.

4. Snide is first introduced in the routine entitled "The Market" in NL 119-21. Recall also that Queer ends with a first-person narrative by Lee's "Skip Tracer" persona, another seeker of missing persons.

5. I have not been able to examine Seitz's Under the Black Flag .

6. See Burroughs's foreword to the reissue of Black's work, You Can't Win, v-viii.

7. Burroughs, "Interview" in Writers at Work 163-65.

8. See Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin (1915) and Balestrini's Vogliamo tutto, as well as Michael Hardt's discussion of the latter in Gilles Deleuze, 45-47.

9. Burroughs has always said that he is "very much concerned with the creation of character. In fact I can say that it is my principal preoccupation. If I am remembered for anything, it will be for my characters" (Burroughs, "Beckett and Proust" in The Adding Machine 183).

10. On this division of souls, see also Budge's chapter on "The Doctrine of Eternal Life" in his introduction to The Egyptian Book of the Dead, lv-lxxxi. Burroughs's reading of this passage has been set to music by Bill Laswell and his compatriots in the group Material, and it forms the title track of their album Seven Souls . Five of the album's seven tracks are constructed around Burroughs's readings from The Western Lands .

11. This is reflected in Burroughs's opposition between the Manichean "Magical Universe[. . .]of many gods[. . .]in conflict," where even Osiris must hustle for a living, and the "One God Universe," whose all-powerful deity can "do nothing, since the act of doing demands opposition" and who "can't go anywhere, since He is already fucking everywhere" ( WL 113). The opposition is grounded finally in Burroughs's despotic theory of language: "The One God is Time . And in Time, any being that is spontaneous and alive will wither and die like an old joke. And what makes an old joke old and dead? Verbal repetition'' ( WL 111).

12. Obviously, the fact that "Hassan i Sabbah" can be abbreviated "HIS," the masculine possessive pronoun, is not irrelevant to Burroughs's enterprise. Throughout The Western Lands he couches the struggle for immortality in terms of a struggle of men and masculine principles, figured in HIS and disembodied immortality, against women and feminine principles, which literally embody mortality; see particularly WL 74-75 and 200-201.

13. Michel Foucault, Preface to Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus xiv.

14. Remember the other last words:

Listen to my last word anywhere. Listen to my last words any world. Listen all you boards syndicates and governments of the earth. And you powers behind what filth deals consummated in what lavatory to take what is not yours. To sell the ground from unborn feet forever . . .

Listen: I call you all. Show your cards all players. Pay it all pay it all pay it all back. Play it all play it all play it all back. For all to see[. . . .] ( NE 11).

15. The first quotation is a famous graffito from the May 1968 student riots in the Latin Quarter in Paris: "Beneath the paving stones, the beach." The second is Brion Gysin's answer, enthusiastically endorsed and quoted by Burroughs, to the question that constitutes the "great metaphysical nut": "What are we here for?" (Gysin, jacket note to Gysin and Wilson, and Burroughs, "William's Welcome" on Dead City Radio ).

1. I am thinking of the late, lamented French literary talk show Apostrophes, hosted by Bernard Pivot. Even it, however, became accessible to writers only on the basis of their proven or anticipated market "muscle"; see the analyses in Debray.

2. Burroughs, "Interview" in Writers at Work 153.

3. Nothing Here Now But the Recordings was released by Industrial Records, Throbbing Gristle's label, and is no longer available.

4. See Howard Shore and Ornette Coleman, Naked Lunch: Music from the Original Soundtrack .

5. Both Call Me Burroughs (English Bookshop, 1965) and Ali's Smile (Unicorn Press, 1971) have been reissued on a single compact disc, under the title Vaudeville Voices . A more complete list of Burroughs's recorded readings is included in Christian Vilà's unsympathetic William S. Burroughs: Le génie empoisonné .

6. Burroughs's texts for Wilson's production have not yet been published, but he did write lyrics and sing on Tom Waits's recording of the score for The Black Rider .

7. See Robert Sobieszek's Ports of Entry: William S. Burroughs and the Arts and James Grauerholz's essay "On Burroughs' Art," as well as the other specific gallery catalogs.

8. Jagger, "Memo from Turner,"on the soundtrack to the film Performance .

9. For example, Geoffrey Stokes, on page 399 of Ward, Stokes, and Tucker's Rock of Ages: The Rolling Stone History of Rock and Roll, claims that the radical American band Steppenwolf took the line "heavy metal thunder" in their 1967 hit "Born to be Wild" (the first usage of the term "heavy metal" in popular music) from Naked Lunch . Unfortunately, that phrase does not appear as such in any of Burroughs's texts, though "heavy metal" appears as an adjective throughout the Nova trilogy.

10. Reed's statement is reported in Burroughs and Bockris, With William Burroughs 18-19; the song is on the Velvet Underground, Loaded .

11. Burroughs, Introduction to Silverberg, ed., Everything is Permitted 13.

12. Ginsberg has released many recordings, including his performance of Blake's Songs of Innocence and Experience and an album of performances and text "settings," similar to Burroughs's, called The Lion for Real . Recently, Rhino Records released a four-CD set of Ginsberg readings and performances entitled Holy Soul Jelly Roll . He has also provided the libretto to Philip Glass's recent mini-opera Hydrogen Jukebox . Ishmael Reed has long run his own communications consulting firm (Reed, Cannon and Johnson) and has also collaborated with noted jazz musicians like Taj Mahal, Carla Bley, and Allen Toussaint ( Conjure: Music for the Texts of Ishmael Reed, American Clavé 1006). Since the success of The Color Purple as novel and film, Alice Walker has become a public spokesperson for a certain kind of African-American feminism; this has brought her into conflict in the media with, among others, Ishmael Reed. Most recently, Walker has used her visibility to galvanize opposition to the practice of female genital mutilation in Africa.

13. Hence the title of Burroughs's collaborative manifesto of the cut-up method and its variants, The Third Mind, written with Brion Gysin.

14. Burroughs's Blade Runner is based on Alan Nourse's novel of the same name, which is also the source of the title only of Ridley Scott's 1984 film Blade Runner, itself based on Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Burroughs's book has no other relation to Scott's film.

15. Smith quoted in Sitney, Visionary Film: The American Avant-Garde 1943-1978 256.

16. Burroughs in Burroughs and Gysin, The Third Mind 31.

17. Burroughs, "Interview" in Writers at Work 153. He also gives credit to T. S. Eliot and John Dos Passos.

18. Sitney discusses these dadaist films briefly in Visionary Film, presenting them in his first version of the book as the precursors of structural film-making, the sixties' reaction against the dominant subjective aesthetic of avantgarde cinema that is nevertheless "dialectically related" to subjective cinema (369); see Sitney 228-29. In the revised edition of Visionary Film, Sitney grants more significance, especially to Duchamp's film, but still treats it within a dialectical horizon that returns to the primacy of subjective experience; see 399-401. For an interpretation of Duchamp and Richter (apparently) more in line with Burroughs's own cinematic intentions, see Richter's Dada: Art and Anti-Art, especially 94, 221-22.

19. The standard references on deixis are Roman Jakobson, "Shifters, Verbal Categories and the Russian Verb" in Selected Writings vol. 2, and Émile Benveniste, Problems in General Linguistics .

20. Friedberg, "'Cut-Ups': A Syn ema of the text " in Skerl and Lydenberg, 172. Originally published in Downtown Review 1.1 (1979). Barry Miles makes the same claim in William Burroughs, El Hombre Invisible: A Portrait, 154.

21. Script for Towers Open Fire, from IT: International Times 31 Oct.-13 Nov. 1966: 8. Unattributed citations in the next three paragraphs come from this text.

22. Friedberg points out the irony of this scene: it was shot in "the boardroom of the British Film Institute, the major organ of censorship and control of film in Britain" (Skerl and Lydenberg 173).

23. Friedberg in Skerl and Lydenberg 173. Miles confirms this procedure on 155.

24. Burroughs, "Interview" in Writers at Work 154. My emphasis.

25. Burroughs in Burroughs and Gysin, 19, 32. The second citation is from the essay "The Cut-Up Method of Brion Gysin," originally published in T. Parkinson, ed., A Casebook on the Beat (1961).

26. Burroughs, "Interview" in Writers at Work 154-56.

27. Burroughs, "Interview" in Writers at Work 159.

28. On these trends in music, see Griffiths, chapter 11.

29. See Griffiths 142-50, 158-63.

30. Burroughs in Burroughs and Gysin, 31.

31. Burroughs, "Origin and Theory of the Tape Cut-Ups" on Break Through in Grey Room . I should make the comparison between Burroughs and Cage a bit more specific. Burroughs's cut-ups are similar in formal structure to Cage's early aleatory compositions such as "Music of Changes," which, like a cut-up text, is a piece that was composed using chance operations (in Cage's case, consultation of the I Ching), but which, once composed, gives no further place to chance. "Music of Changes" must be performed according to its written score, just like any Beethoven piano sonata, and Burroughs's cut-up texts must be read in linear order, like any Dickens novel, though of course the experiences of the respective audiences will differ. In intent, however, Burroughs's cut-ups share with Cage's later "parametric" works an imperative di-

rected at the performer and the audience to take active part in the production of music and writing.

32. Burroughs, "Origin and Theory of the Tape Cut-Ups" on Break Through in Grey Room .

33. Public Enemy, on their album It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back .

34. Lyrics contained in liner notes to Public Enemy, It Takes a Nation of Millions .

35. For a full theoretical explanation of this kind of antagonism, see Jean-François Lyotard's The Differend: Phrases in Dispute, 10, 12-13.

36. This line opens "Ineffect," the overture to Material's album Seven Souls .

37. Burroughs, "Face to Face with the Goat God" from Oui 2.8 (August 1973), quoted in Burroughs, liner notes to Apocalypse Across the Sky .

38. The track "Midnight Sunrise" on Dancing in Your Head is the only piece Coleman's record companies have seen fit to release of his three-day session with the Master Musicians.

39. On Schönberg's retreat, see Pierre Boulez, "Schönberg is Dead" in Stock-takings from an Apprenticeship, 209-14.

40. Ornette Coleman quoted in Robert Palmer et al., liner notes to Beauty is a Rare Thing: Ornette Coleman—The Complete Atlantic Recordings, 49.

41. The recording and release of The Elvis of Letters, Gus Van Sant's EP of songs constructed around looped samples of Burroughs's readings, predates Seven Souls, but Elvis is less than a direct collaboration because Van Sant used previously recorded readings as the source of his samples, while Laswell recorded Burroughs specifically for the Material album. Seven Souls, released internationally by Virgin Records, also reached a much wider audience than Elvis, on Portland-based T.K. Records, did.

42. Tom Waits, liner notes to The Black Rider .

43. Burroughs, "Grandpa from Hell" interview in the LA Weekly 19-25 July 1996: 24.

44. See Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus 244-47, 251-255.