1. Constructions of Addiction
1. 1
Addiction and the Ends of Desire
Stacey Margolis
The striking thing about Miss Penelosa, the mesmerist in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's short story "The Parasite" (1894), is not that she can make her subjects perform certain actions, but that she can make them, against their will, experience certain desires. Engaged in a series of mesmeric experiments with Miss Penelosa, Professor Paul Gilroy discovers to his horror that she has made him fall in love with her: "Again, tonight, I awoke from the mesmeric trance to Wnd my hand in hers, and to suffer that odious feeling which urges me to throw away my honour, my career, everything, for the sake of this creature who, as I can plainly see when I am away from her influence, possesses no single charm upon earth."[1] But to suggest that the problem of mesmerism is that it both enables and enforces an unaccountable desire in the victim only raises a more fundamental question about the nature of desire in this text. For the threat that Doyle illustrates here—that one could Wnd oneself ("in a moment of reasonless passion" [124]) desiring something one wants not to desire—is not so much a frightening exception to the logic of desire as it is the fulfillment of that logic. As this story makes clear, one cannot decide whether to be passionate. Even before he meets Miss Penelosa, Gilroy acknowledges the fact that desire is, by definition, involuntary; confronted with "rich, silent forces of nature" he experiences an echoing "ferment in [his] blood" that makes him, despite his position as a staid and respectable man of science, want to "dance about" in the sunshine "like a gnat" (111).
What is truly striking, then, about Miss Penelosa is not that she can make her subjects feel desire against their will, but that she can make the ordinary mechanisms of desire seem like the terrifying effects of magic. Gilroy explains this magic as a kind of monstrous "influence," a condition he compares to being helplessly under the influence of a drug: "Perhaps," he
THE RISE OF ADDICTION
At the turn of the century, the term "addiction" actually encompassed both of these forms of desire, the desire ascribed to the victim and the desire ascribed to the drug itself. Our own notion of addiction as unbridled consumption is indebted to the Wrst model, in which the user is imagined to suffer from an uncontrollable desire. This kind of excessive desire became known as a disease because the user was believed to be unable to act freely against his urges; the addict feels a desire so strong and has a will so weak that he is literally forced to continue using the drug: he is "a victim to it." As early as 1829 one temperance advocate argued that "drunkenness is itself a disease.… When the taste is formed, and the habit established, no man is his own master," and by the late nineteenth century addiction-as-disease had become the dominant paradigm.[5] As Virginia Berridge and Griffith Edwards have argued in their influential book, Opium and the People, by the last quarter of the nineteenth century the medical profession had successfully transformed habitual drug use into a disease "defined in terms of ‘moral bankruptcy ’ " and "a paralyzed control over a craving for drink, or opium, or cocaine."[6] Although it is true that "moral bankruptcy" looks more like a version of sin than a version of disease, this idea worked at the time to highlight the unhealthy imbalance between the user's will and her desires. The turn
For most contemporary critics, this rhetoric of addiction-as-desire becomes especially relevant for turn-of-the-century culture because it perfectly emblematizes the workings of consumerism.[7] Just as the addict is enslaved to his endless desire for the drug, they argue, the consumer is enslaved to a system of advertising and merchandising that creates an endless desire to consume. According to Harry Gene Levine, for example, it is no accident that addiction was "discovered" and popularized as a disease at a time of unprecedented market expansion; drawing an explicit analogy between the excesses of the addict and the everyday experience of the consumer, he claims that "the idea of addiction ‘made sense’ not only to drunkards, who came to understand themselves as individuals with overwhelming desires they could not control, but also to great numbers of middle-class people who were struggling to keep their desires in check—desires which at times seemed ‘irresistible.’[8] Mark Seltzer attempts to complicate this easy connection between consumerism and addiction by stressing the horrifying "permeability" of the addict's self: "From the turn of the century on, the living dead subject … is at once generalized and pathologized. And it is generalized and pathologized precisely as the subject, or quasi-subject, of addiction." But if Seltzer shifts the focus of analysis from the addict's excessive desire to his excessive drive for a kind of mindless repetition and substitution, he nevertheless concludes that the "substitution mania" that grips the addict is "epitomized in … exchanges of money."[9]
Yet there was a powerful, competing model of addiction at work at the turn of the century, one that cannot be understood in terms of the competition between the individual's desires and her will, one that in fact helped to create an identity that cannot be understood in terms of the subject-centered discourse of the market at all. Indeed, according to a common description of inebriety, alcohol, once ingested, does not evoke a monstrous desire in the drinker so much as replace the individual agent with its own monstrous agency. Benjamin Ward Richardson, speaking at the 1893 World's Temperance Conference in Chicago, compares alcohol with Wre in its ability to devour the drinker: "But here is the difference. A man cannot swallow Wre, and he can swallow alcohol, which latter being swallowed, he does cry out for more, until he is slowly or quickly consumed."[10] The substitution of desiring object for desiring subject is made even more explicit in Henry Cole's Confessions of an American Opium Eater (1895), in a passage in which the newly recovered Cole casts a critical eye on a confirmed opium user, a person who seems to him to have become merely the phantasmatic body of the drug itself:
A lean, wan face, belonging to a creature who is just arousing himself from his long drugged sleep, stares out upon us with terrible eyes.… This is the gaze of what is called an ‘opium devil’one who is supremely possessed by the power of the deadly narcotic on which he has leaned so long. Without opium he cannot live; though human blood runs in his veins, it is little better than poppy juice; he is no longer really a man, but a malignant essence in forming a cadaverous human shape.[11]
From this perspective, the problem with the addict is not that he desires too much or too freely, but that he stops desiring altogether. Since the user is actually replaced by the drug, addiction here is constituted not by the self that wants the drug, but by the drug that wants itself.
It is this model of addiction-as-substitution that Doyle takes up in "The Parasite." Like the addict whose desire has been replaced by the stronger desire of the drug for itself, Gilroy discovers that what he took to be his own love for Miss Penelosa was actually her own love acting through him: "It was your own voice which spoke, and not mine." What this discovery makes visible is the fact that this kind of substitution does not represent the horror of desire so much as it represents an escape from desire. Since what frightens Gilroy about his desires is that they create a "hideous" self—so that when he claims that his feelings for Miss Penelosa stem from "something evil in me," he in fact means some evil part of himself—this displacement of his desires turns out to be a boon rather than a curse. In other words, if Miss Penelosa's presence evokes the problem of desire, her ability to "[creep] into [his] frame as the hermit crab does into the whelk's shell" (127) effectively solves it, transferring the "hideous" responsibility from Gilroy to the mesmeric "parasite" and rewriting "something evil in me" as "something evil that has possessed me." Through the mechanism of Miss Penelosa's mesmerism, he becomes free—not free to indulge in his dangerous or forbidden desires, but free not to have any desires of his own. As Gilroy admits, "There is some consolation in the thought, then, that those odious impulses for which I have blamed myself do not really come from me at all. They are all transferred from her, little as I could have guessed it at the time. I feel cleaner and lighter for the thought" (127). Thus, when Gilroy imagines that "a peculiar double consciousness possessed me," he describes not a single consciousness divided but a literal doubling: "There was the predominant alien will, which was bent upon drawing me to the side of its owner, and there was the feebler protesting personality, which I recognized as being myself" (131). Of course, this reading denies the possibility that Doyle's tale allegorizes the unconscious, representing a form of disavowal in which these alien desires turn out to be Gilroy's own hidden desires after all. In the context of the turn-of-the-century obsession with addiction, however, Doyle makes a much more radical assertion about the self: not that it can have unconscious desires (and thus a more complicated
Elaborating on the logic of substitution being worked out in the rhetoric of addiction, "The Parasite" transforms a social crisis into a cultural fantasy. For, revising my earlier formulation, addiction in this text doesn't create a new form of desire so much as it creates selves that are free of the burden of having any desires of their own. Rather than emblematizing the way that the subject is constituted in consumer culture, addiction becomes a way of exploding the subject of desire, a way of imagining modes of desire that neither require nor sustain subjectivity. If the ability to replace one's own desires is exemplified in stark terms by the addict, however, this logic of substitution is certainly not limited to the world of drug addiction. Indeed, as "The Parasite" suggests, this logic Wnds one of its most perfect expressions in the "possession" narrative, a genre that reached the height of its popularity during the period and that comprised a wide range of Anglo-American Wction from George Du Maurier's wildly popular Trilby (1894) and Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897) to tales by Frank Norris and Pauline Hopkins. Moreover, by giving the role of the drug to a person with designs of her own—an evil mesmerist, a vampire—the possession narrative actually literalizes the mechanism of addiction, exploring what it would mean for an object of desire to enact the desire for itself. Representing desire as a circuit that bypasses the subject completely, the possession story creates a world in which it is possible to have a desire outside the organizing framework of the self, to experience a self without the burden of desire.
In emphasizing both the rise of dynamic psychology (the growing belief that individuals were motivated by unconscious desires) and, especially in the American context, the consolidation of a national market (in which selfhood was established through the mechanism of contract), critics have made desire the constitutive feature of modern subjectivity. It is not surprising then that the addict, who is defined by his endless and exaggerated desires, has become emblematic not only of the consumer but of the modern subject in general. My point in examining a competing model of addiction is not to dispute the fact that turn-of-the-century Anglo-American culture created psychological and contractual subjects, individuals who thought of themselves as having wants and who thought of the social realm as the place where these wants could be fulfilled. Instead, I am arguing that there was, during this period, a significant discourse of desire that not only dismantled these modes of subjectivity, but that enabled individuals to invent forms of identity that had nothing to do with their desires and to imagine social relations that had nothing to do with contract. Thus the possession narrative not only reveals the limits of desire but also suggests how this nonpsychological, noncontractual way of thinking about the self became an important social technology in its own right. Imagining individuals
In examining both British and American versions of the possession narrative, we Wnd that the British version reveals the commitment to replacing the individual's desire with an alien desire, while the American version's commitment to ancestry translates this form of self-erasure into a way of creating new social formations. In this regard, Pauline Hopkins's fantasy of racial identity in Of One Blood; or, The Hidden Self (1902–1903) is the most striking example of the American possession narrative, for the novel's insistence on replacing the individual's desires with collective memory ultimately produces the modern racial subject. It is the path that leads from the British model of "possession" as supernatural fantasy to the American model of "possession" as social technology that the rest of this chapter explores.
VAMPIRES IN LONDON
Like the addict, the vampire has typically been understood as a product of consumer culture. Of course, the reading of the vampire as capitalist goes back, at least, to Marx, and Wnds one of its most powerful expressions in Franco Moretti's well-known reading of Dracula.[13] But the real evidence of Dracula's modernity, according to a number of recent readings, is not that he represents the capitalist (or even capital), but that he represents the system of consumer culture itself. From this perspective, the vampire stands in for the "cultural technologies" of desire encountered "in the department store, on the billboard, in the nickelodeon parlor, at the newsstand or the telegraph office"; he "consumes but thereby turns his victims into consumers" "directed by invisible longings and compelled by ghostly commands to absorb everything in sight."[14] George Du Maurier's Trilby, another popular tale of "psychic vampirism," would seem to take the vampiric construction of consumerist desire one step further. For this novel about a mesmerist who creates a desire for himself in his helpless victim became a remarkably effective advertisement for itself. Indeed, the novel proved so popular when it was Wnally released in book form that it sparked its own "craze" in the United States—Trilby mania"that lasted until Du Maurier's death in 1896. The Wrst modern "best-seller," Trilby unleashed an unprecedented wave of merchandising; fans of the novel saw productions of Trilby on the stage, bought ice-cream and brooches in the shape of Trilby's famous foot, sang songs based on the novel, read parodies like Thrilby and Drilby Re-Versed, and participated in countless other Trilby-related activities.[15] What the novel seems to make visible, then, is the truth of the vampiric metaphor found on its pages; in creating and perpetuating an insatiable desire for
At the level of the narrative, however, Trilby seems to have quite a different investment in the technologies of psychic vampirism. For it is not the job of the mesmerist/vampire Svengali to evoke Trilby's desires, but rather to save her from them. Accordingly, the bohemian Trilby, an artists’ model in the Latin Quarter of Paris, begins with a miraculous "unconsciousness" of desire, an unconsciousness that makes it possible for her to pose naked in front of an audience of men and still maintain her innocence. In the end, the party responsible for bringing her hidden desires to consciousness is the band of bourgeois artists led by Little Billee. It is, after all, only when she witnesses Little Billee's horrified reaction to seeing her in the "altogether" that Trilby begins to imagine intention where there had been none ("I never thought anything about sitting [for the Wgure] before") and to imagine a desire for Little Billee where there had been only a kind of unthinking affection for everyone ("In the caressing, demonstrative tenderness of her friendship she ‘made the soft eyes’ at all three indiscriminately").[16] Furthermore, if Little Billee and his friends rebuild Trilby on the model of the consumer, they also insist on the immutability of this desiring self; Trilby Wnds that she is imprisoned in a self made legible by desire. Thus every transformation she undergoes is read as "a new incarnation of Trilbyness"; every action, no matter how uncharacteristic, becomes evidence of her "irrepressible Trilbyness" (62–63). The central problem of the novel, then, is that Trilby's newfound desires at once require her to change ("to live straight for the future" [82]) and make it impossible for her to change (she is, after all, "irrepressible"). No wonder that Trilby, forced to leave Little Billee, complains that her character "can't be righted!": "Of course I could never be a lady—how could I? though I ought to have been one, I suppose" (128).
If Trilby can only dream of becoming another person, however, it is Svengali who transforms this metaphor into reality. A practiced mesmerist, Svengali at Wrst seems to be working squarely within the consumerist model. As the Laird warns Trilby, mesmerists can "get you into their power, and just make you do any blessed thing they please—lie, murder, steal—anything!" (50). But what gives Svengali (like Miss Penelosa) his real power over his subject is that he has no interest in "making" her do anything; he neither convinces his victim to act against her desires nor evokes her own hidden desires, but makes her desires irrelevant by acting through her. To hear Trilby "sing the ‘Nussbaum,’ the ‘Impromptu,’ was actually to hear "Svengali singing with her voice" (288). Thus the mesmerized Trilby becomes "the unconscious voice that Svengali sang with" (288). If this possession is at Wrst understood to create a kind of doubling, so that "there were two Trilbys" (287), the one who sings and the one who cannot, Du Maurier's account of mesmerism ends up describing not the multiplication
Far from creating the ideal modern consumer, Svengali here instigates an opposing model of subjectivity, for insofar as the mesmerized Trilby becomes a desiring subject, she can only be understood as the subject— rather than the object—of Svengali's desire. Transformed into Svengali's "instrument," Trilby is not only able to sing without actually singing, but to love without actually loving:
He had but to say ‘Dors! ’ and she suddenly became an unconscious Trilby of marble, who could produce wonderful sounds—just the sounds he wanted, and nothing else—and think his thoughts and wish his wishes—and love him at his bidding with a strange, unreal, factitious love … just his own love for himself turned inside out— a l'envers —and reflected back on him, as from a mirror … un écho, un simulacre, quoi! par autre chose! … It was not worth having! (288)
Whether or not Svengali loves Trilby, the fact that he has literally replaced her means that there can be no answering desire on her part. If their relationship is the most sexually charged in the novel, the charge is clearly autoerotic; Trilby is reduced to a mirror, one component of the circuit of desire that begins and ends with Svengali. Trilby ultimately creates a fantasy world in which the subject/object relation is elided in favor of an object/object relation—the relation of an object to itself. Vampirism, then, cannot be understood to evoke the subject's own desires (or even to create a desiring subject); instead it creates a hollow subject, a subject without desire. And thus the competition between Little Billee and Svengali over Trilby—one wins her love and loses her, the other replaces her love and keeps her—enacts in miniature the competition between the consumerist subject created by the novel as cultural artifact and the vampiric subject created by the narrative. Whereas one creates a version of market subjectivity by making the object irresistible to consumers, the other elides subjectivity altogether by making the object irresistible to itself.
At the same time, however, one might argue that Little Billee's "panic" when Trilby leaves him, far from merely representing the consumerist model of desire, seems to be motivated by the Trilby-like desire to get rid of his desires. His panic grows out of his discovery that, after suffering a terrible shock, he no longer feels anything for anyone: "For some mysterious cause his power of loving had not come back with his wandering wits," a
Against such a reading stands the fact that Trilby is not exactly a "nonobject" to Little Billee. Indeed, he spends quite a bit of time in fetishistic admiration of her feet; at one point he notes, "with a curious conscious thrill that was only half-aesthetic," that their perfect form has "ennobled" her "shapeless" slippers "into everlasting classic shapeliness" (30). Thus, "reversing the usual process," Little Billee proceeds to "[idealize] from the base upward" (34). And yet this fetishistic desire for Trilby does not necessarily invalidate Sedgwick's claim about the novel's investment in homosexual panic since Trilby is meant to be, at the very least, androgynous—she has "a portentious voice of great volume and that might almost have belonged to any sex"and at times, unmistakably masculine—wearing "the gray overcoat of a French infantry soldier" and "a huge pair of male slippers," she, according to the narrator, "would have made a singularly handsome boy … and one felt instinctively that it was a real pity she wasn't a boy, she would have made such a jolly one" (12–13). In fact, given Little Billee's infatuation, it is more likely that what provokes the real sexual "panic" in the text is not that he discovers that he feels nothing for Trilby, but that he feels too much for the boy-Trilby. His hysterical reaction when he sees her posing naked in an artist's studio—I saw her, I tell you! The sight of her was like a blow between the eyes, and I bolted! I shall never go back to that beastly hole again!" (76)—seems to suggest that he is not, as his friends imagine, shocked by the impropriety of her action so much as he is shocked by the fact that she is not a boy after all. Attempting to idealize "from the base upward," Little Billee suddenly discovers the ghastly truth of Trilby's anatomy—a "beastly hole." In light of such a shock, it seems more likely that his "sexual anesthesia" serves as one possible antidote to his sexual panic than it serves as evidence of that panic. Little Billee, then, mirrors Trilby's problematic relation to desire as much as he counters it.
If in Trilby the vampire enacts a reflexive desire, in Dracula the vampire seems to have no reflection at all. In one famous scene, Jonathan Harker looks into his shaving glass, expecting to see Dracula standing behind him: "But there was no reflection of him in the mirror! The whole room behind me was displayed; but there was no sign of a man in it, except myself."[18] Critics have repeatedly turned to this scene, in which Dracula's reflection seems to take on the form of his victim, to argue that what the victim really fears in the monster are his own hidden desires; what the mirror reflects is not so much an absence as the presence of a "repressed" desire that "returns … disguised as a monster."[19] Following this line of reasoning, an amazing number of critics have read this novel as an explicit fable of sexual repression, an attempt to come to terms with desires that lurk beneath Victorian proprieties. In these readings, scenes of vampires draining and sucking blood become "masked and symbolic" representations of, among other things, sexually predatory women, homosexuality, rape, group sex, forced fellatio, and incest. More generally, critics claim that these "emanations of irresistible sexuality" that "break through into consciousness in fantastic and grotesque forms" perform a kind of cultural work in the late nineteenth century by creating "a fantasy world that would have provided escape from many of the sexual and psychic restraints prevalent in Victorian culture."[20]
If these readings have been set in opposition to the consumerist model (indeed Moretti, unable to reconcile the sexual reading and the economic reading, calls them "different signifieds"), from the perspective of Trilby they look exactly the same.[21] For, in terms of Du Maurier's vampiric subject, what counts in such readings is not the conscious or unconscious nature of the subject's desires, but only that the desires are imagined to define the subject. To this way of thinking, the fact that Lucy Westenra's chaste exterior seems to hide a dangerous sexuality ("Why can't they let a girl marry three men, or as many as want her?" [76]) suggests that her emergence as a "wanton" and "voluptuous" vampire represents the monstrous truth of Lucy's self. But this kind of commitment to desire as the foundation of the self— the representation of Lucy's truth—cannot account for the radical mobility of desire in this novel, the fact that selves do not seem to produce desire so much as they come into relation with desire. Desire, in other words, comes from outside the self.[22]
Although the novel from the very beginning suggests that Lucy is not as demure as she appears to be, that she feels desires that are barely containable, Dracula's arrival does not liberate Lucy's desires so much as herald a series of strange absences: her fall into her "old habit" (91) of sleepwalking, the beginning of her mysterious "long spells of oblivion" (at one point she describes "the harsh sounds that came from I know not where and commanded me to do I know not what" [164]). Indeed, when she Wnally confronts
Dracula uses blood as a metaphor for desire precisely because of blood's mobility. Circulating from one body to another (from Lucy's suitors to Lucy, from Lucy to Dracula, from Dracula to Mina) and animating these bodies, blood marks the difference between the self and what is imagined to constitute it. Nowhere in the novel is this bloodlike mobility of desire made more explicit than in Dr. Seward's accounts of his mental patient Renfield: "My homicidal maniac is of a peculiar kind. I shall have to invent a new classification for him, and call him a zoophagous (life-eating) maniac; what he desires is to absorb as many lives as he can, and he has laid himself out to achieve it in a cumulative way" (90). Renfield defends his unusual practice of collecting, documenting, and eating the small creatures that populate his cell at the asylum (flies, spiders, even sparrows) by claiming that each one "was life, strong life, and gave life to him" (88). Yet Renfield's habit is not, as Jennifer Wicke would have it, simply "a pun on the tremors of consumption," a desire to consume for its own sake.[23] Instead, according to Seward it follows a curious pattern, "some scheme of his own" (87). That Renfield not only keeps meticulous records of the tiny ecosystem he has established (the flies eat the sugar, the spiders eat the flies), but is more concerned with creating the system than with eating any one individual within the system, suggests that he doesn't want the flies or the spiders or the sparrows for themselves, for the "life" they offer; he wants them for their relation
AMERICAN GENEALOGIES
American writers were just as interested as their British counterparts in writing tales of possession, investigating the ways in which one could experience a feeling or an impulse that seemed to originate outside the self. What they were not interested in, however, was writing vampire stories. Although this distinction might seem to be purely thematic, it actually signals a profound difference in the way that these structures of displacement were used in the American context. For when American authors from Henry James to Pauline Hopkins imagined possession, they did not imagine a self invaded by something as exotic as a vampire, but rather by something much closer to home. Indeed, if in British vampire stories the individual is replaced by a lover, in the American possession story the individual is, more often than not, imagined to be replaced by her grandfather. This insistence on the "sameness" of the possessor and the possessed (Wgured as the claims of ancestry) marks the crucial difference between American and British versions of the addiction allegory. When blood emerges in the British tales, it is not as a way of characterizing an individual's identity so much as it is a way of disrupting identity, a way of insisting on the difference between the individual and her desires. Thus whereas "The Parasite," Trilby, and Dracula all feature vampires who are racially "tainted"Miss Penelosa is West Indian, Svengali is (in Taffy's words) "a Wlthy black Hebrew sweep" (46), and Dracula is not only Eastern European but also "of criminal type" according to the classifications of "Nordau and Lombroso" (406)—their victims are unmistakably English. Or, to revise the point slightly, they are unmistakably white. The fact that Trilby seems to be as much French as she is English highlights the insignificance of actual ancestry in these tales—what counts about Trilby is not the fact that her father was Irish (and a drunk) but that her "delicate, privet-like whiteness" (13) could never be confused with Svengali's "Wlthy" blackness. These contrasts between black and white certainly can (and often have) been read in terms of England's own racial conflicts and the dynamics of empire.[24] But in terms of the problematics of desire traced here, this contrast between black and white in the British version of the possession tale works as a purely formal difference, as a way of highlighting the noncoincidence of the self and the desire it embodies. Race is crucial here because the force of "possession"
In "A Reversion to Type," a story published in the San Francisco Wave in 1897, Frank Norris tells a version of the possession story. "Two months and a day after his forty-Wrst birthday," a respectably employed man named Paul Schuster experiences an "unfamiliar" desire that "came upon him with the quickness of a cataclysm, like the sudden, abrupt development of latent mania."[25] Submitting to this impulse to "get drunk," to "bolt," the respectable Schuster is soon performing actions that are "counter to every habit, to every trait of character and every rule of conduct he has been believed to possess" (44). Acting out this unfamiliar desire gives Schuster a new identity housed in a new, phantasmatic body: "At the beginning of that evening he belonged to that class whom policemen are paid to protect. When he walked out of the Cliff House he was a free-booter, seven feet tall, with a chest expansion of Wfty inches" (46).[26] Yet unlike Lucy or Trilby, Schuster's actions actually reveal (as the title suggests) a continuity that runs even deeper than "character" or "habit"the continuity of blood (44). As the narrator is quick to note, "Schuster, like all the rest of us, was not merely himself. He was his ancestors as well. In him, as in you and me, were generations—countless generations—of forefathers. Schuster had in him the characteristics of his father, the Palace Hotel barber, but also he had the unknown characteristics of his grandfather, of whom he had never heard, and his great-grandfather, likewise ignored" (45).
Taking on the phantasmatic body of his outlaw grandfather, Schuster cannot really be understood as acting, since he only "[comes] to himself" (49) after robbing the superintendent of the Little Bear mine. But unlike the vampire's relation to his victim, the consciousness that possesses Schuster, that performs the robbery through him, cannot really be understood as another person's. His grandfather, though not exactly Schuster, is quite clearly imagined to be an integral part of him, both someone who helped create him and someone who is still alive in him. Thus the kind of heredity argument made by Norris's story is only partially assimilable to the logic of substitution articulated by writers such as Stoker and Du Maurier. Although it is true that in the model of heredity endorsed by Norris the victim experiences someone else's desire, the fact that this "someone else" is imagined to have produced the victim means, in "Reversion to Type" at least, that the alien desire is not entirely alien after all. The desire, in other words, can be attributed not to the vampire that invades the self, but to the grandparent who forms a part of the self.
From the perspective of the vampire story, then, the American version of possession (in which the victim is replaced, but only by a version of himself) looks like a failed attempt to displace desire. This failure to get out of oneself seems to be the point of Henry James's unfinished novel, The Sense of the Past (begun in 1900), in which Ralph Pendrel exchanges identities with one of his ancestors. He begins this adventure into the past by confidently claiming, "I'm not myself … I'm somebody else."[27] At Wrst it does appear that taking on another identity might save him from his own failed relationship with Aurora Coyne by enabling him to live out his ancestor's successful courtship of Molly Midmore. What James ends up stressing, however, is not the difference between the living man and the dead ancestor that makes this exchange worthwhile—Pendrel's desire for the Past, his ancestor's desire for the Future—but the sameness that makes it possible; the ancestral portrait that sets this interaction in motion presents Pendrel with a face that "miracle of miracles, yes—confounded him as his own" (88). If the problem that James was working on at his death, then, was not how to get Pendrel back into his own identity but how to get him back to his "native temporal conditions," it is perhaps because Pendrel, in becoming his ancestor, had not completely ceased to be himself. Indeed, in this novel the ancestor is so much a part of the self that they are virtually indistinguishable. Thus when Pendrel ventures back into the past, it is not as if "he had lost himself, as he might have done in a deeper abyss, but much rather as if in respect to what he most cared for he had never found himself till now" (66). As Pendrel concedes, his ancestor is in his own right "just exactly by the amazing chance, what I was myself—and what I am still, for that matter," so that "the strangest part of all" is that becoming his ancestor "doesn't interfere nearly as much as you might suppose" (99) with being himself. So long as becoming "somebody else" means becoming your ancestor, you are, as Pendrel discovers, "in fact not nearly so different" (99).
When possession moves from the exotic world of the vampire to the domestic realm of the family, then, it does not explode the subject-of-desire, but reproduces it. In other words, if the vampire stories use blood to replace an individual's desires, the American possession tales use blood to recuperate them. In terms of Norris's project, this insistence on the sameness of the possessed self makes sense, since he was not setting out to replace the self but to define it, not trying to displace desire, but to explain it. To the question, How can one account for Schuster's unaccountable desires? Norris answers that he has those desires because he was born with them. But the American investment in blood as a form of possession did not necessarily lead to the continual reproduction of the desiring self. In Of One Blood, for example, Pauline Hopkins, unlike Norris, recognizes that the power of the possession model lies not in its ability to explain the self, but in its ability to produce a new kind of self.
In this novel, blood counts not because it connects you to your ancestors, but because it makes possible a peculiar kind of collective memory. Thus Reuel Briggs, visiting Africa on an anthropological expedition, suddenly discovers that he can remember things he's never experienced: listening to the "musical language" of the people of Telassar, Reuel Wnds "to his own great surprise and delight" that he can speak their language "with ease." Looking out on the "hidden city" he claims, "I am surprised to Wnd that it all seems familiar to me, as if somewhere in the past I had known just such a city as this."[28] Unlike "Reversion," these memories do not repeat the experiences of his grandparents; instead, they connect him to a whole racial community that comprises past and present, America and Africa. Indeed, every character of African ancestry in this novel is marked by a kind of impossible familiarity; the Wrst time Reuel sees Dianthe Lusk—she is singing in a public concert—he realizes that it is not the Wrst time he's seen her. Having appeared to him as a vision in his solitary room, Dianthe is familiar to him at the very moment that he meets her. And if Dianthe feels only a "slight, cold affection" (492) for Reuel after he befriends her, her attachment to him is based on the same kind of familiarity: "Oh, it is you; I dreamed of you while I slept" (470), she claims at their Wrst meeting. Accordingly, whereas Reuel's relation to Dianthe—she is both his sister and his wife—underscores the power of family bonds by doubling them, this tie to Dianthe is Wnally (and, in the logic of the novel, inevitably) replaced by his tie to Candace, the Queen of Telassar, a woman to whom he is not related but whom he also seems to remember. That she appears to be the incarnation of Dianthe ("She reminded him strongly of his beautiful Dianthe; in face, the resemblance was so striking that it was painful" [568])—rather than, as Norris might have imagined, the reincarnation of her own grandmother—only emphasizes the way that in Of One Blood the sentimental bonds of family are systematically replaced by the mystical bonds of race. Inheritance, in other words, does not move diachronically from parents to children, but synchronically among the members of a group that it defines as racial.
This insistence throughout the novel on blood as the creator of collective memory works against Hopkins's ostensible purpose, to demonstrate the irrelevance of blood to questions of identity and the injustice of the "one-drop rule": "Who is clear enough in vision to decide who hath black blood and who hath it not? Can any one tell? No, not one; for in His own
Two compelling readings of Of One Blood acknowledge that Hopkins is working with notions of blood that were most often used in the racialist literature of the period. Susan Gillman argues that, by making the characteristics evoked by black blood positive, by "recovering the hidden self and history of the race, that is, both the kinship relations obscured by American slavery and an African ancestral spirit or race soul," Hopkins actually works against a racist American culture. In other words, "To make ‘blood’ thus speak out of school is to deconstruct an idiom by exposing the competing contexts and conflicting narratives, in which the term was regularly used."[30] Along the same lines, Thomas J. Otten claims that the "hidden racial self" Hopkins describes enables "the self to move outside the bounds of its own consciousness and its own history," describing "a hidden ‘power’ that hearkens back to ancient Africa and to a moment in African history centrally formative of Western culture," a power that "is here substituted for the savagery and degeneracy that many whites saw as the hidden self of the black personality."[31] And yet, while it is true that Hopkins makes African-American identity into a positive force in this novel, she neither "deconstructs" the idea of blood that she shared with her racist adversaries, nor does she imagine that she is freeing the self from its
Indeed, this claim that blood has the power to enforce racial identity, that blood carries certain racial "markers" (like memory) that work within a self that takes shape prior to intentionality also grounds the overt racism of Benjamin Rush Davenport's Blood Will Tell: The Strange Story of a Son of Ham (1902). In this novel, Walter Burton's "drop" of "negro blood" (one of his grandparents is black) eventually makes itself known as a kind of vampiric presence:
Sometimes there seems to come a strange, inexplicable spell over my spirit— a something that is beyond my control. A madness seems to possess my very soul. Involuntarily I say and do that, during the time that this mysterious influence holds me powerless in its grasp, that is so foreign to my natural self that I shudder and grow sick at heart at the thought of the end to which it may lead me.
But by the end, Davenport makes clear that it is this "mysterious influence" rather than the repulsion it provokes that reveals Burton's "natural self":
I have abandoned useless effort to rehabilitate myself in the misfit garments of a civilization and culture for which the configuration of my mental structure, by nature, renders me unsuited.… My conduct, following natural inclinations, since my return to Boston, has demonstrated how little control civilization, morality, or pity have over my inherent savage nature.
The point of the novel, then, is to get Burton to admit to himself (and to the reader) that he "really" is, and has always been, "a negro."[32] The fact that this book was published in the same year that Hopkins began serializing Of One Blood thus seems to indicate more than just "how prevalent the matter of African cultural origins was in writing about race at the time," as Otten points out; it reveals that both Hopkins's positive and Davenport's negative attitudes toward African-American identity depended on the same structure of "possession."[33] Although it is true that Davenport's model of blood, unlike Hopkins's, does not produce racial memory, it nonetheless insists that racial identity is a "natural inclination," an inherited quality that counts as more truly "you" than any experience you have actually had.
Despite the fact that imagining blood as a carrier of memory is in direct opposition to the vampiric model (in which blood, Wgured as a kind of mobile, alien desire, replaces memory), it nevertheless ends up serving as an equally powerful displacement of desire. It is, after all, Reuel's blood ties to both Dianthe and Candace that make his desires irrelevant; one woman can easily replace the other because it does not matter, in the end, which one he loves. By displacing desire with memory in this way, Hopkins produces a model of racial identity and racial experience that rivals the notion
It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one's self through the eyes of others.… One ever feels his two-ness,— an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder. [34]
In DuBois's account, what marks the racialized subject is a sense of conflicted desire ("two unreconciled strivings"), the belief that race provides one self with "two souls." Of One Blood begins with a similar premise, with the suggestion that race constitutes the individual's "hidden self." Indeed, as the novel opens, Reuel is reading an article on the "new discoveries in psychology" called "The Unclassified Residuum" (442) (he attributes the article to Binet, known at the time for his important work on the unconscious and multiple personality; the actual quotations are taken from William James's essay, "The Hidden Self," which Hopkins uses as her subtitle). In the end, however, what distinguishes Hopkins's model from DuBois's is that the hidden self of race is, in her account, not established through desires that divide the individual, but rather through memories that transcend him. If almost everyone in this novel experiences a kind of double consciousness, then, it is not because they are also their ancestors, but because they are also part of the racial self. Thus the racial group emerges as a powerful organizing principle in Hopkins's novel precisely because it has nothing to do with what one wants or rejects; it replaces the burden of conflicted desires with the truth of memory.
Race, as Hopkins depicts it, reveals not only how "possession" works, but more importantly, what it can do; it can connect seemingly unrelated persons into a collectivity by inventing an identity that both transcends and defines them. Like addiction, which imagines a desire that originates outside the self, the racial collectivity that Hopkins imagines depends on a subject who cannot be understood in terms of what he wants. That this kind of noncontractual subject played a crucial role in turn-of-the-century American culture seems clear not only because both race and addiction were powerful ways of organizing experience, but because of the variety of different contexts in which this model of subjectivity emerges. In the realm of the law, for example, the "right to privacy" was (according to one influential version of the argument) imagined to protect an aspect of the self that one could not, in principle, own or sell. It was, as Samuel Warren and Louis Brandeis claimed, the privilege of the "inviolable personality."[35] In the realm of medicine, the expansion of the therapeutic model of self maintained that what was important about one's deepest desires was not that they be fulfilled, but that they be cured. Rather than describing an escape from the world constructed
2. 2
A Terminal Cas
William Burroughs and the Logic of Addiction
Timothy Melley
The panic of the alcoholic who has hit bottom is the panic of the man who thought he had control over a vehicle but suddenly Wnds that the vehicle can run away with him. Suddenly, pressure on what he knows is the brake seems to make the vehicle go faster. It is the panic of discovering that it (the system, self plus vehicle) is bigger than he is.… He has bankrupted the epistemology of "self-control."
— Gregory Bateson, "The Cybernetics of ‘Self’ "
BAD HABITS
"Addiction," remarked social psychologist Stanton Peele in 1975, "is not, as we like to think, an aberration from our way of life. Addiction is our way of life."[1] By all accounts, this view has gained remarkable popularity in America. Not only are estimates of traditional substance abuse significantly higher, despite declining narcotic and alcohol consumption, but treatment is being mandated for, and sought by, dramatically larger numbers of Americans. More significantly, medical institutions have adopted increasingly flexible definitions of addiction, creating vast numbers of new addicts and whole new categories of addiction.[2] The most striking feature of America's general discourse on addiction, in other words, is just how general it has become: Americans now account for all sorts of ordinary human behavior through the concept of addiction.
In part, this impulse stems from the work of addiction specialists such as Peele, whose Love and Addiction advanced the thesis that "addiction is not a special reaction to a drug, but a primary and universal form of motivation" and that "there are addictive … ways of doing anything" (59). The increasing popularity of this view would be unremarkable if it signaled merely a growing belief that the compulsion to repeat certain behaviors is a normal human tendency, rather than a sign of disease. But many Americans seem to have adopted Peele's thesis while also retaining the idea that any habit, drive, or compulsion indicates a lack of self-control so dangerous it merits
That sleeping can be a form of emotional escape and can with sustained effort be abused.… That purposeful sleep-deprivation can also be an abusable escape. That gambling can be an abusable escape, too, and work, shopping, and shoplifting, and sex, and abstention, and masturbation, and food, and exercise, and meditation/prayer.… That most Substance-addicted people are also addicted to thinking, meaning they have a compulsive and unhealthy relationship with their own thinking.… That it is possible to abuse OTC cold and allergy remedies in an addictive manner.… That anonymous generosity, too, can be abused.[4]
The bizarre logic of this view—the contradictory sense that addiction is utterly normal and dangerously pathological—explains why so many Americans now claim to be addicted to behaviors that once epitomized individual autonomy. As Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick has suggested, the relatively new illnesses known as "exercise addiction," "workaholism," "shopaholism," "sexual compulsiveness," and "codependency" or "relationship addiction" all stem from a sense of insufficient free will. "Under the searching rays of this new addiction-attribution," she observes, "the assertion of will itself has come to appear addictive."[5] Paradoxically, the compulsion to sort addictions from freely willed acts increasingly erodes the distinction between those terms; this erosion, meanwhile, feeds the frenzy to separate will and compulsion once and for all. To put the same thing another way, the national tendency toward addiction-attribution stems from what I call "agency panic," serious anxiety about the autonomy and individuality of persons.
The question, then, is not just how to account for the growth of addiction as an explanatory concept in America, but how to account for the more pervasive anxieties about agency and personhood that encourage its growth. To begin, it is worth observing that basic human activities such as shopping, sex, and work, can only appear to be unwanted "addictions" if one makes several assumptions about persons. First, one must believe individuals ought to be rational, motivated agents in full control of themselves. This assumption, in turn, entails a strict metaphysics of inside and outside; that is, the self must be a clearly bounded entity, with an interior core of unique beliefs, memories, and desires easily distinguished from the external influences and controls that are presumed to be the sources of addiction. Finally, one must view control as an indivisible property, something that is possessed either by the individual or by external influences.
Only in the context of these assumptions—all of which undergird long-standing American models of self-reliant or "possessive" individualism—can any less than perfectly willed behavior seem to be the product of dangerous
Anxiety about such powerful external controls and diminished individual autonomy extends well beyond the substances popularly viewed as "drugs." It is not hard to locate this sense. Narratives depicting individuals in the grip of powerful technologies and social controls have been a staple feature of postwar American culture. Numerous sociologies of the American character, such as David Reisman's Lonely Crowd (1950) and William Whyte's Organization Man (1956), to name just two, argued that Americans are no longer as autonomous as they once were. Prominent texts by Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo, Margaret Atwood, Norman Mailer, Joan Didion, Philip K. Dick, William Gibson, Kathy Acker, Kurt Vonnegut, Joseph Heller, Ken Kesey, and William Burroughs have focused on individuals who are intensely nervous—or paranoid—about their capacity for autonomous action. These characters often suspect that their bodily responses are being governed by someone or something else—usually a large social organization. Some believe that their most individuating traits and desires have been socially constructed and "implanted" in them. The organizations they suspect are sometimes concrete agencies, such as the CIA, but they are more often vague entities, such as Pynchon's "Them," Burroughs's "junk virus," or the general "system" of postwar political rhetoric.[8]
This pervasive sense of agency panic—with its fear of communication systems and technologies in general—is inextricably linked to contemporary discourse on addiction, particularly the sense that addiction has itself become epidemic. Americans, Peele observes in his more recent Diseasing of America, "seem to feel that they are more out of control of their lives than they have felt in the past.… The addiction industry expresses the sense of loss of control we have developed as a society."[9]Diseasing of America rails against the growth of the "addiction treatment industry" and its disease-based concept of addiction, yet ironically it was Peele's earlier hypothesis ("anything can be addictive") that helped to legitimate the growth of an addiction culture. After all, Love and Addiction argues that we live in an
And addiction literature is not the only source of anxieties about the American tendency toward addiction, for the latter has epitomized waning individuality in an array of cultural criticism. It is instructive to see, for instance, how readily the Unabomber's narrative of dwindling human autonomy—itself a recapitulation of popular critiques of "postindustrial society"invokes models of addiction to account for the dangers of technological rationality:
Imagine an alcoholic sitting with a barrel of wine in front of him. Suppose he starts saying to himself, "Wine isn't bad for you if used in moderation. Why, they say small amounts of wine are even good for you! It won't do me any harm if I take just one little drink.… " Well you know what is going to happen. Never forget that the human race with technology is just like an alcoholic with a barrel of wine.[11]
Such warnings help to explain the all-or-nothing logic that leads the author to recommend a regimen of total abstinence from advanced technology—a remedy that, in his view, would require a strict diet of masculinist self-reliance, a return to the individualist frontier, and (of course) "regeneration through violence."[12]
It would be possible to cite any number of links between addiction and more pervasive anxieties about agency, but I want to focus my attention on the postwar American writer whose work most obsessively draws such connections—William Burroughs. Burroughs not only writes about his lifelong preoccupation with drug addiction, but also uses the concept of addiction to represent other postindustrial conspiracies against human agency and uniqueness. The characters of his Wction are usually addicted to junk, but as early as Naked Lunch (1959) they are also addicted to commodities, images, words, human contact, and even control itself. They are also the subjects of sadistic forms of mass control, Pavlovian conditioning, and medical or psychological torture. In short, their existence represents a terminal case of agency-in-crisis.[13] Although these characters and scenes have often been read as representations, or products, of an intoxicated imagination, I will show that they have widespread cultural roots. Indeed, some of the most bizarre control scenarios in Burroughs are taken, virtually unmodified, from more sober and popular nonfiction texts. My intention in these pages, then, is not so much to illuminate Burroughs himself as to unravel the mystery
I want to begin this task by examining the problems of subjectivity created by Burroughs's disease-based model of addiction—his view of addiction as "virus." According to this model, addictive substances are agents powerful enough to erode human subjectivity. Not only do they exhaust the addict's will, but they also become "characters" of a sort, part of a phantasmagorical landscape where it is difficult to tell one person from another and even harder to tell persons from nonpersons. The fluid and uncertain subjects of these scenes are often labeled "schizophrenic" and "postmodern," but they are a direct result of attempts to conserve a traditional model of individualism. Burroughs's nervousness about the erosion of individual autonomy stems from the same contradictions that have produced the contemporary culture of addiction: only by assuming that individuals should owe nothing to the "outside" for their actions and identity can Burroughs sustain a panic-stricken vision of the individual as a total addict and the world as a hostile place full of controlling agents.
CONTROL ADDICTS
In the preface to Naked Lunch, Burroughs claims that his novel is a study of the "junk virus"though it is never quite clear whether this term refers to addictive drugs themselves or the larger drug economy in which they move.[14] A 1957 letter to Allen Ginsberg explains further that the "real theme of the novel is Desecration of the Human Image by the control addicts who are putting out the … addicting virus."[15] Neither of these remarks gives an accurate description of Naked Lunch, but both hint at the anxiety about agency that runs through it. First, Burroughs views junk less as an inert commodity (something that must be bought and consumed by active agents) than as a parasitic organism (something that invades and controls the bodies of unwitting individuals). Second, while he imagines a worldwide conspiracy producing the junk virus, he views the conspirators themselves as "control addicts." This tautological concept—the "control addict"embodies precisely the tendency identified by Sedgwick, in which assertions of will or control are understood as addictions. But it extends the general implications of that tendency even further. The more radical idea of an addiction to control itself liquidates the concept of control altogether—at least insofar as control is a capacity of human beings.
For Burroughs, this sort of thinking leads to a series of novels in which ideas of control are at once absolutely central and, at the same time, utterly vexed. In 1955, he explained to Ginsberg that in the "vast Kafkian conspiracies" of Naked Lunch, "agents continually infiltrate to work on other side [sic] …; more accurately, agents rarely know which side they are working
Junk, by contrast, is something like a person in Burroughs's work. One reason junk addiction is dehumanizing, for example, is that in the junk-junkie relationship only junk retains human attributes. The addict, says Burroughs, "needs more and more junk to maintain a human form" (Naked Lunch, vi)—as if junk were an injection of humanity itself. "Junk is the ideal product," he adds, because "the junk merchant does not sell his product to the consumer, he sells the consumer to his product" (Naked Lunch, vii). This passage relies on the same reversal of human agency found in Marx's discussion of commodity fetishism: junk merchants are instruments of their powerful commodity and junkies are merely objects to be sold. As long as a product "is a value in use, there is nothing mysterious about it," says Marx. "But, so soon as it steps forth as a commodity, it is changed into something transcendent.… It stands on its head, and evolves out of its wooden braingrotesque ideas."[18] In Burroughs's junk economy, junk takes on human qualities for two reasons: Wrst, because it "steps forth" into something like pure exchange-value—it is "quantitative and accurately measurable … like money" (Naked Lunch, vii); and second, because although it has no productive use (it is junk), its use-value to the addicted consumer is almost infinite. It is "the mold of monopoly and possession," says Burroughs, because it reduces the body to a single and "total need," which "knows absolutely no limit or control" (Naked Lunch, vii, emphasis added). In Burroughs's world, junk produces a terminal capitalist subject, a "grotesque" consumer whose needs and desires have all been replaced by one simple but overpowering bodily need. As the narrator of Junky puts it, "Life telescopes down to junk, one Wx and looking forward to the next."[19]
Burroughs represents the telescoping effect of junk in shocking bodily terms. His addicts literally have "grotesque" bodies and "wooden brains" body parts that have mutated so as to do nothing but detect and consume junk. Willy the Disk, for instance, has "a round, disk mouth lined with sensitive, erectile black hairs. He is blind from shooting in the eyeball, his nose and palate eaten away sniffing H, his body a mass of scar tissue hard and dry
Why does Burroughs represent the addict in this way? Within the discourse of possessive individualism, addicts do not meet the criteria for personhood because they are not wholly autonomous, rational agents. In representing the addict, Burroughs merely literalizes this notion. Not only do his addicts’ desires telescope down to the solitary desire for junk, but their bodies follow suit. As William Lee, the sometimes narrator of Naked Lunch, puts it, "The addict regards his body impersonally as an instrument to absorb the medium in which he lives" (67). This view of the body as a technology for Wnding and consuming junk helps account for Burroughs's phantasmagorical representations of addicts as limited insectoid creatures with special sensory organs for detecting junk:
"You know how old people lose all shame about eating …?" asks Lee. "Old junkies are the same about junk … all their guts grind in peristalsis while they cook up, dissolving the body's decent skin, you expect any moment a great blob of protoplasm will flop right out and surround the junk." (Naked Lunch, 5)
This Wnal suggestion is not just a Wgure of speech; in Burroughs's bodily economy of addiction, junkies do extrude protoplasm, because they are simpler life-forms—usually single-celled organisms and insects. Junk, in other words, makes the human body unnecessary—except as an increasingly efficient (and grotesque) tool for locating junk.
To be more precise, junk consumption generates a dynamic of embodiment and disembodiment in Burroughs. Grotesque embodiment only occurs when junkies become sober and desire more junk. When high, by contrast, the addict is virtually disembodied and lacking in desire. As Burroughs explains, the intoxicated junky is a "terminal" subject, with "metabolism approaching absolute ZERO" (Naked Lunch, xiv) and "flesh that fades at the Wrst silent touch of junk" (Naked Lunch, 8). Again, Burroughs renders these notions bodily. Lee, for instance, lives in "varying degrees of transparency" (Naked Lunch, 71) and (like Burroughs himself) becomes known in Tangier as "The Invisible Man." On a three-day high, his flesh becomes "so soft that he [is] cut to the bone by dust particles" (Naked Lunch, 70). Like other junkies, he often has an "anonymous, grey and spectral" (Naked Lunch, 15) look about him. When he shoots heroin into a
This strategy of literalization helps to explain the phantasmagoria of Burroughs's surreal junk universe. It also depicts, in a graphic way, the paradox of bodily control inherent to addiction. The addict, in Burroughs, is always taking junk to resist reembodiment and the problems it brings. When Lee senses his own impending incarnation, for instance, he shoots up again in order to "refuel the Wres that burned through his yellow-pink-brown gelatinous substance and kept off the hovering flesh" (Naked Lunch, 70). The reason Lee and others want to prevent the return of their "hovering flesh" is not that they don't want bodies. In fact, the opposite seems true. As one addict says, "I am a ghost wanting what every ghost wants—a body" (Naked Lunch, 8). Yet, the problem is that the body of the addicted junky can only return in an undesirable form, since (in Burroughs's bodily economy) addiction means possession of a grotesque and uncontrollable body. In the junk-starved addict, Lee observes, "viscera and cells, galvanized into a loathsome insect-like activity, seemed on the point of breaking through the surface" (Junky, 58). Oddly enough, then, while junk creates the initial problem, junk is also the antidote to it. "The pharmakon" (drug, poison, magic charm), notes Jacques Derrida, "will always be understood both as antidote and as poison."[20] For Burroughs, junk intoxication is the only way the junky can avoid hideous reembodiment.
Addiction thus emerges as a paradox of embodiment: addicts who wish to have a functional and controllable body must kick the junk habit, yet, in going off junk, they Wnd themselves imprisoned in a grotesque and uncontrollable body. They can only ward off this obscene instrument of consumption by staying high, yet staying high means surrendering the body to junk—which then intensifies the initial problem. The addict's dilemma, in other words, is whether to risk a struggle with his or her own body in order to regain control of it. Crucially, then, Burroughs's representation of the addict's dilemma presumes a Cartesian dualism in which the "self" or spirit remains the site of identity, while the body is external to the self—mere matter controlled from without. As Jean Cocteau puts it in Opium: The Diary of a Cure, "It is not I who become addicted, it is my body."[21] In this view, addiction results in "smaller" subjects who are embattled, struggling against a controlling environment that includes even their own bodies. This is not the only way to theorize addiction, and thus its central feature is quite telling: it willingly splinters the subject to retain the idea that control is a property, parceled out either to oneself or to one's environment but never a mixture of the two.
THE JUNK VIRUS
If addiction offers a radical challenge to personhood—a challenge Burroughs envisions at the most basic, bodily level—this challenge is all the more severe given its pervasiveness. As is the case in contemporary America, narcotics are not the only kind of debilitating addiction in Burroughs's Wction. The junk economy operates because of a complex system of mutually reinforcing addictions. "Selling is more of a habit than using," admits one dealer. "Nonusing pushers have a contact habit, and that's one you can't kick. Agents get it too" (Naked Lunch, 15). The narcotics agent in Naked Lunch who gets this "contact habit" is Bradley the Buyer. Bradley is famous for being the "best agent in the industry," but the better he gets the more he comes to look like a junky: "He can't drink. He can't get it up. His teeth fall out.… The Buyer takes on an ominous grey-green color" (Naked Lunch, 15). Before long, he assumes the familiar protoplasmic form of the addict and his unruly amoebalike body engulfs the district supervisor of narcotics (Naked Lunch, 18). Eventually, when he is caught "digesting the Narcotics Commissioner," a court rules that he has "lost his human citizenship" and condemns him for being "a creature without species" (Naked Lunch, 18). Here again, Burroughs specifically represents the addict as a nonperson. Even more significant, however, is that "addiction" of Bradley's sort afflicts individuals at every level of the junk economy—including makers, sellers, and even law enforcement "agents."
This representation has a good deal in common with the concept of addiction currently popular in America. Bradley the Buyer, moreover, possesses a personal quality that more clearly reveals the implications of popular views of addiction. "Fact is," says the narrator, Bradley's "body is making its own junk or equivalent. The Buyer has a steady connection. A Man Within" (Naked Lunch, 15). This notion—that Bradley is producing an addictive substance within his own body—troubles the idea of addiction, which suggests that an external substance has taken control of the subject. In order to understand Bradley's situation, we must resort to one of two alternative explanations. The Wrst would require us to view his body as wholly external to (or separate from) his "self," the sort of Cartesian dualism mentioned earlier. This solution would retain a traditional concept of addiction—the all-or-nothing logic that locates control either in the self or in a source outside the self—but it would do so only by redrawing the line between self and world so that the body is no longer considered a part of the self. The second type of explanation, by contrast, would understand the tendency toward addiction as internal to the subject. This explanation would jettison traditional notions of addiction and, in doing so, would challenge liberal individualism by viewing dependencies as an essential part of subjectivity. That Bradley's body produces an addictive substance, in other
The rivalry between these two ways of accounting for less-than-clearly-willed behavior has troubled many accounts of subjectivity. As Avital Ronell observes, addiction is one of the human tendencies most disruptive to Heidegger's ontology of Being.[22] The problem with addiction, for Heidegger, is that it is neither clearly internal nor external to Being. On the one hand, it seems to transfer the essential qualities of Being to external sources. The addict, says Heidegger, is "lived’ by the world." On the other hand, Heidegger concedes that addiction is internal to Being—so close in nature to other essential drives (like the urge to live) that it "is not to be rooted out."[23] This is precisely the problem that governs the contemporary rhetoric of addiction, which seeks endlessly to "root out" addictions—only to discover that they have grown, multiplied, changed shape, and taken root everywhere.
It is also the problem at work in Burroughs's Wction, which insistently represents addiction as virus and parasite, entities that can be viewed as both internal and external to the self. "Like any good parasite," remarks Derrida, the pharmakon "is at once inside and outside—the outside feeding on the inside. And with this model of feeding we are very close to what in the modern sense of the word we call drugs, which are usually to be ‘consumed’."[24] In fact, the problem I have been tracing here may be reformulated as a difficulty in conceptualizing parasitism. If one accepts the assumptions of liberal humanism, the parasite must be regarded as an external invader of an integral self. By contrast, poststructuralist approaches—particularly deconstruction ("a discourse ‘on parasite’ and in the logic of the ‘superparasite’ ["Rhetoric," 6])—have held that parasites occupy a complex position between inside and out, neither wholly supplementary nor essential to the subject. In this view, technologies (including drugs) cannot simply be viewed as hostile invaders of a clearly bounded self. The "natural, originary body does not exist," says Derrida, "technology has not simply added itself, from outside or after the fact, as a foreign body," but "is ‘originarily’ at work and in place in the supposedly ideal interiority of the ‘body and soul’ " ("Rhetoric," 15).
Burroughs frequently presents scenarios that demonstrate this view. A tape recorder, he once wrote, "is an externalized section of the human nervous system you can Wnd out more about the nervous system and gain more control over your reactions by using the tape recorder than you could Wnd out sitting twenty years in the lotus posture."[25] In moments like this, Burroughs pressures traditional assumptions about the person in the most radical fashion imaginable. Yet he often does so in the mode of panic—and
Like Derrida, Burroughs explicitly views writing as an "organism" and a pharmakon—a technology that supplements human memory. Yet, Derrida and Burroughs understand the implications of this view quite differently. Derrida's account of the druglike quality of writing comes in his analysis of Plato's Phaedrus. In Plato's text, writing is presented to the king as a way of extending the human capacity to remember events. The king, however, rejects this offering on the grounds that writing will act as a "drug" of sorts, a technological supplement making human memory unnecessary. One of the many problems with the king's position, according to Derrida, is that it "implies that the living being is Wnite" and projects a fantasy in which the "perfection of a living being would consist in its having no relation at all with any outside."[26] This fantasy—the dream of a self hermetically sealed from the external world—is central to the contemporary American logic of addiction. In fact, Derrida has recently connected it to both prohibitionist and liberationist rhetorics of drugs.[27] What is significant for our purposes, then, is the extreme way in which Burroughs embraces this view. Like Plato's king, he views writing and other forms of communication as dangerous supplements to human memory and self-control. "The word is now a virus," warns the narrator of The Ticket that Exploded: "The word may once have been a healthy neural cell. It is now a parasitic organism that invades and damages the central nervous system" (Ticket, 49). This panic-stricken account of control suggests that, like drugs, communications are enemies of the self. Like other postwar treatments of agency, this one has a historical component: although language was once part of our internal control system (a "neural cell"), it is now a threatening competitor, an alien presence that damages our capacity for self-control.
The most notable feature of this view is its melodramatic rendering of the idea that communications can influence human identity and action. No doubt, ideological effects can be disturbing when revealed, yet the general effectivity of messages, covert and overt, should hardly come as a surprise. Social relations would be impossible if communications did not influence human behavior. Indeed, communications can only seem dangerously parasitic if one has an exceptionally romantic ideal of selfhood—an expectation of radical human autonomy and a nostalgia for the days when messages
This ideal governs much of Burroughs's writing. And because it is made impossible by basic social activities, it continually leads to expressions of agency panic. How else, for instance, can we explain the famous "cut-up technique," the strategy of arbitrarily chopping up and reassembling written and spoken passages by which Burroughs sought to break the controlling power "the word"? This method of resistance—which Burroughs developed into a full political program in his essay "The Invisible Generation"presumes that any text (even one's own) can be a dangerous instrument of control. The point of using cut-ups is to reintroduce the accidental into what appears determined and determining, thereby short-circuiting the power of social messages.[28] When hearing a cut-up, Burroughs explains, it is "as if the words themselves had been interrogated and forced to reveal their hidden meanings" ("Invisible Generation," 206). Broadly employed, this technique could no doubt disable all kinds of external influences. Yet, if we follow the idea to its logical conclusion and keep in mind that all messages are suspect, then it is clear that a successful program of cut-ups would effectively isolate the individual from communications and thus social relations in general. The cut-up promotes a form of hyperindividualism—a defense of atomistic selfhood against a "penetrating" and controlling social order. If the technique's fundamental exhortation—everybody splice himself in with everybody else" ("Invisible Generation," 212)—seems to generate a fragmented, postmodern subjectivity, it does so only to defend the individual (and individualism itself) from social systems that humans have "no control over."[29] In this world of powerful control technologies, everyone is an addict, "lived by the world," because messages of any sort constitute mind-altering drugs that undermine the individual's self-control. The "subject," a doctor tells Lee, "is riddled with parasites."[30] The goal, for Burroughs, is to exterminate them. "When it comes to bedbugs," writes the one-time exterminator, the "only thing is to fumigate."[31]
CELLULAR PANIC
Here, then, is the problem confronting Burroughs. When he attempts to understand addiction or control on the model of the parasite, he generates an uncontrollable proliferation of agency problems. His response to these problems is agency panic. Rather than accepting the less strictly bordered, and less rationally centered, subject implied by his own representations, he worries in hysterical terms about external invasion and control of the self. At the same time, he attributes agency to nonhuman entities and depletes it from humans until it is no longer clear who, or what, counts as an agent.
The soft machine is the human body under constant siege from a vast hungry host of parasites.… What Freud calls the "id" is a parasitic invasion of the hypothalamus.… What Freud calls the "super ego" is probably a parasitic occupation of the mid-brain where the "rightness" centres may be located and by "rightness" I mean where "you" and "I" used to live before this "super ego" moved in.[32]
What might once have been considered components of the self are here regarded as independent agents, parasitic entities no longer integral to the subject. This view imagines something like the decentered, fragmented subject of postmodern theory, the vision of "deterritorialized" schizophrenic desiring machines advanced by Deleuze and Guattari. Yet, Burroughs's view does not really do away with centered subjectivity. Rather, it leaves intact a smaller core of rationality (or "rightness") by way of what I earlier called a Cartesian splitting of the subject. Burroughs thus salvages a vestige of autonomous subjectivity, removing from it both that which is determined (the superego or conscience) and that which is irrational (the id).
But this view has a second effect: it populates the world with entities that once constituted the self but are now autonomous. In one sense, this newly spawned hoard of "parasites" presents a major challenge to individualism. Yet it also depends on that concept since these entities themselves behave as if they were rational, autonomous, bounded individuals. Consider, for example, Burroughs's belief that "kicking a habit involves the death of junk-dependent cells and their replacement with cells that do not need junk" (Junky, 23). In this "cellular equation," each cell of the body is imagined as a tiny addict or nonaddict, and addiction becomes a matter of "cellular decision" (Junky, 151) and "cellular panic" (Naked Lunch, 57). At the same time, the individual addict becomes a sort of social body, a miniature version of the junk economy. What might once have been called the addict's attributes—qualities like decision making and emotion (panic)— have been transferred to his or her component parts. Addiction thus occurs not at the level of the human being, but at the level of the cells, which are themselves miniature individuals. This bizarre view epitomizes the logic of addiction, which has always personated the world with powerful substances (for example, "the demon rum") while construing humans as powerless.
Because this view also has much in common with posthumanist models of the subject, it is important to see precisely where Burroughs departs from posthumanism. Postmodern biology provides a good example of the latter because, as Donna Haraway has shown, it privileges "biotic components"
When this postmodern view is coupled with a vestigial form of possessive individualism, the result is agency panic. In Richard Dawkins's version of evolutionary theory, for instance, "selfish" genes are privileged over whole organisms, which Dawkins describes as "partially bounded local concentration[s]" and "machines for the production of single-celled propagules." Since the "parasite genes" have their own "selfish" desires (for example, they would "like’ to reduce capital investment" in the total organism), Dawkins foresees an "evolutionary ‘arms race.’[38] What is most striking about this theory is that its conservation of intentionality—albeit at the level of the gene—generates a rhetoric of invasion and self-defense, an anxious sense that the individual is under attack and needs protection. In Dawkins's scheme, Haraway notes, "We’ can only aim for a defended self.… Within‘us’ is the most threatening other—the propagules, whose phenotype we, temporarily, are."[39]
This is just the sort of biotic struggle Burroughs imagines. But we can now specify the conflict that animates it. On the one hand, Burroughs exhibits a radical, posthumanist tendency to question whether humans are self-governing agents. On the other hand, he exhibits a humanist refusal to modify the traditional model of the agent, which he applies to other, nonhuman entities. The result is a defensive—or paranoid—conception of the world as a place full of motivated, parasitic entities whose capacity to control individuals, should they gain entry, is total and complete. "I live," Burroughs admits, "with the constant threat of possession, and a constant need to escape from possession, from Control."[40] In such a world, individuals are not responsible for their actions, which can always be traced to a larger entity. Thus, to explain the 1951 "accident" in which he put on a "William Tell act" with his wife and shot her in the head, killing her instantly, Burroughs claims he was possessed by an evil entity.[41]
My concept of possession is closer to the medieval model than to modern psychological explanations, with their dogmatic insistence that such manifestations must come from within and never, never, never from without. (As if there were some clear-cut difference between inner and outer). I mean a definite possessing entity. And indeed, the psychological concept might well have been devised by the possessing entities, since nothing is more dangerous to a possessor than being seen as a separate invading creature by the host it has invaded. (Queer, xix-xx)
In this passage, Burroughs suggests that the difference between the inside and outside of persons is not clear cut, but then he goes on to insist vigorously that he was subject to invasion and external control. It is no accident that this contradiction arises as he accounts for the act that epitomizes the misogyny running through his writings, since the very terms of the description are already gendered.[42] Nothing worries Burroughs so much as relinquishing an atomistic masculinity for a more fluid, socially connected subjectivity. It is as if, once employed, the logic of parasitism becomes immediately intolerable and induces a state of panic in which any sign of diminished voluntarity seems to indicate a complete transfer of agency from self to social order.
Burroughs so needs to believe this transfer is real that he deems psychology itself a trick of the "possessing entities." Psychology, of course, has always taken the opposite route, deeming possessing entities a trick of the psyche. "When human beings began to think," writes Freud,
they were, as is well known, forced to explain the external world anthropomorphically by means of a multitude of personalities in their own image; chance events, which they interpreted superstitiously, were thus actions and manifestations of persons. They behaved, therefore, just like paranoiacs, who draw conclusions from insignificant signs given them by other people.[43]
On the surface, this account diametrically opposes the one offered by Burroughs. Freud explains compulsion and coincidence via the paranoid mechanism of projection, while Burroughs explains these events via the introjection of external agents. On a deeper level, however, these accounts are similar. Both posit a core of rational will that is subject to a determining agency. They disagree only about the location of that agency. As Freud puts it, anthropomorphism "is nothing but psychology projected into the external world."[44] And if Freud believes that there are no accidents in the unconscious, Burroughs believes that "there are no accidents in the junk world" (Naked Lunch, x) and, more dramatically, that "there is no such thing as a coincidence."[45]
Ultimately, however, Burroughs so radically projects psychology into the outer world that the world in general seems to possess a psyche—a psyche whose most consistent quality is malice. He believes in magic, and magic, he
Come back and write down precisely what happened with particular attention to what you were thinking when you noticed a street sign, a passing car or stranger or whatever caught your attention. You will observe that what you were thinking just before you saw the sign relates to the sign. The sign may even complete a sentence in your mind. You are getting messages. Everything is talking to you. ("On Coincidence," 103–4)
If a sign can complete one's thoughts, and thinking is something done only by persons, then the "person" having thoughts in the passage is not a human individual. It is a much larger communication system, extending well beyond the individual's borders. This radical conception of subjectivity, however, cannot last for long. Soon enough, it induces the familiar panic response ("the students become paranoid" [104]), which is a defensive attempt to consolidate the self by separating it from external "messages."
The pattern I have been describing—in which a radical challenge to individualism elicits an anxious defense of individualism—typifies the paradoxical logic of addiction. By some accounts, in fact, addiction is sustained by this habit of mind and can be cured if the addict learns to accept a feeling of compromised autonomy rather than retreating into hyperindividualism. The notion that a larger system is controlling one's actions, for instance, is essential to twelve-step programs, which function in part by converting the source of the addict's paranoia into the very gateway to recovery. In his "cybernetic" theory of addiction, anthropologist Gregory Bateson suggests that the Alcoholics Anonymous program works because it correctly understands the self as part of a larger system, which the alcoholic is "powerless" to control. Indeed, Bateson argues, the reason alcoholics drink in the Wrst place is to surrender to such a "systems view" of themselves, thus giving up the more popular but "absurd" idea that they are autonomous agents with the capacity for self-control. In a state of intoxication, the addict's "entire epistemology changes." "His self-control is lessened" and he is able to "see himself as and act as a part of the group."[46] Unfortunately, drinking only provides this feeling temporarily. To overcome the need for alcohol, the addict needs to develop a "systems-based" or "cybernetic" view on a more permanent basis. Here, as in postmodern biology,
the "self" as ordinarily understood is only a small part of a much larger trial-and-error system which does the thinking, acting, and deciding. This system includes all the informational pathways which are relevant at any given moment to any given decision. The "self" is a false reification of an improperly delimited part of this much larger Weld of interlocking processes.[47]
A person, in other words, is not a material individual, but a socially dispersed system of communications.
A similar conclusion might be drawn from the writing exercise Burroughs gives his students. Yet, Burroughs cannot simply stop there. Like Bateson's alcoholic, he relinquishes this postmodern or "cybernetic" epistemology for the "epistemology of self-control." And he does so, I believe, because he does not share Bateson's positive view of communicative systems. For Bateson, such systems are akin to the "higher spiritual power" of Alcoholics Anonymous. "There is," he writes, "a larger Mind of which the individual mind is only a sub-system. This larger Mind is comparable to God and is perhaps what some people mean by ‘God,’ but it is still immanent in the total interconnected social system and planetary ecology."[48] For Burroughs, by contrast, social systems are a continual source of terror: "Brainwashing, psychotropic drugs, lobotomy and other more subtle forms of psychosurgery; the technocratic control apparatus of the United States has at its Wngertips new techniques which if fully exploited could make Orwell's 1984 seem like a benevolent utopia."[49] In a world where the "higher powers" are in the business of mass-producing mindless, pliant subjects, a surrender to external control seems less like a cure to addiction than the cause of it.
RECONDITIONING CENTERS
Nothing makes Burroughs's view of technological systems more clear than the "control addicts" who populate his novels. These individuals are usually scientists with a strictly instrumental view of persons, and they are often in the employ of shadowy states who want to use postindustrial technologies for purposes of mass social and political control. The most famous control addict, Dr. Benway, operates a "Reconditioning Center" for the Freeland Republic. His center uses sadistic techniques—including drug "therapy," compulsory psychoanalysis, and torture—to restructure the identities of his subjects. One of his more telling products, for instance, is the "latah," an individual who compulsively imitates human actions on command and thus exhibits the "Automatic Obedience Processing" Benway's scientists seek to perfect (Naked Lunch, 28).
The most telling feature of these reconditioning "routines" in Burroughs's writing is how many of them concern sexual identity. Benway frequently uses violent psychotherapy to redirect human sexual desires.
"You can make a square heterosex citizen queer with this angle," he says (Naked Lunch, 27). Burroughs's interest in Pavlovian "sexual conditioning," like Pynchon's, lies partly in its depiction of a subject whose "deepest" self and "most personal" desires are open to external control—a subject epitomized by the addict. "Admittedly," he writes, "a homosexual can be conditioned to react sexually to a woman, or to an old boot for that matter. In fact, both homo- and heterosexual experimental subjects have been conditioned to react sexually to an old boot, and you can save a lot of money that way."[50] The humor of this remark belies Burroughs's other interest in the nightmare of sexual conditioning: his own experience during psychoanalytic treatment. Like his friend Ginsberg, he was treated for homosexuality, was "cured," and turned, however briefly, to a heterosexual lifestyle.[51]
An uneasy connection between addiction and homosexuality haunts Burroughs's work. These two identities—addict and homosexual—have long been associated with one another, not only because they emerged at the same historical moment, but because they have historically been viewed as expressions of "unnaturalness." As Sedgwick notes, that the two are now associated with HIV seems horribly to have "ratified" the connection between them and marked them "as unnatural, as unsuited for survival, as the appropriate objects of neglect."[52] It is all the more uncanny, then, that Burroughs should bring together the categories of homosexuality, addict, and "virus" so forcefully. Consider, for instance, the explanation he gives for his Wrst two novels, the very titles of which evoke the twin identities he struggled with throughout his career: Junky and Queer. In the retrospective preface to Queer, he explains how junk addiction functions as a "cure" for homosexual desire:
Lee on junk is covered, protected and also severely limited. Not only does junk short-circuit the sex drive, it also blunts emotional reactions to the vanishing point, depending on the dosage.… When the cover is removed, everything that has been held in check by junk spills out.… And the sex drive returns in full force." (xii-xiii)
The opening lines of the novel clarify this relation between junk and homosexuality in stark economic terms. "The Wrst time he saw Carl, Lee thought, ‘I could use that, if the family jewels weren't in pawn to Uncle Junk’ " (Queer, 1).
This dynamic explains more fully why Burroughs views addiction as a way of "keeping off the flesh" and its (homosexual) desires. What is odd about this view, however, is that it associates junk not with the lost autonomy of addiction, but with a newfound self-control. "While it was I who wrote Junky," Burroughs explains,
I feel that I was being written in Queer. I was also taking pains to ensure further writing, so as to set the record straight: writing as inoculation. As soon as something is written, it loses the power of surprise, just as a virus loses its advantage
Both writing and junk use offer Burroughs a paradoxical form of self-control: they ward off uncontrollable sexual urges, which are here conceptualized as an invading virus. As a result, Lee in Junky is "integrated and self-contained" while in Queer he is "disintegrated" and "unsure of himself" (Queer, xii)—or, to put it differently, in Junky he is a liberal subject, while in Queer he is a "postmodern" or decentered subject. Junk use appears then to be a self-defeating method for preserving a liberal selfhood against an enervating and penetrating homosexuality—a conception that only underscores the masculinist biases of liberal individualism. We may now further specify the paradoxical logic of addiction as Burroughs experiences it: not only is junk an evil addicting substance but it is also a welcome relief because it short circuits the internal virus of "uncontrollable" sexual desire. Like any good pharmakon, it is both poison and antidote. The paradox is that Burroughs cannot become an "integrated and self-contained" self without the use of an external technology. We have thus arrived at another conundrum of selfhood, a splintering of the addict into a host of smaller components, each of which may be called on to regulate the crises of self-control generated by the others.
It is within the context of this ever-receding and ever-embattled internality that Burroughs understands mass cultural technologies and psychiatric "cures" as the ultimate invaders of the self. In one scene from Naked Lunch, a doctor claims to have turned a former homosexual into a "healthy" subject. His lab technician, however, challenges this claim. "What I'm getting at, Doc," says the technician, "is how can you expect a body to be healthy with its brains washed out? … Or put it another way. Can a subject be healthy in absentia by proxy already?" (139). To the technician, the idea of health is incompatible with the normalizing efforts of techno-medicine. What Burroughs suggests, in other words, is that reconditioning cannot produce a healthy subject—not only because its violent methods and normalizing ideology are unhealthy, but also because there will literally be no subject left when the process is complete. "It is highly questionable," he writes, "whether a human organism could survive complete control. There would be nothing there. No persons there. Life is will (motivation) and the workers would no longer be alive, perhaps literally" ("Limits of Control," 118).
One version of the subject whose brains have been washed out—who is "in absentia by proxy," so to speak—is the addict. Indeed, for Burroughs, nothing captures the effects of postwar technocracy so well as the addict. This is why drug addiction and other technological controls are intertwined throughout his writing. As Benway remarks wistfully, "Pending more precise
Given such connections, it should come as no surprise that Burroughs represents the effects of mass culture in a bodily fashion because this is also how he represents addiction. Consider his description of the "political parties of Interzone," the global village he modeled on Tangier. Each of these "political parties" represents a radically reimagined idea of individuality, and except for "Factualism"the party Burroughs aligns himself with—all of them are hostile to liberal selfhood. The "Liquefactionist" party, for instance, favors "the eventual merging of everyone into One Man by a process of protoplasmic absorption" (Naked Lunch, 146). The "Divisionists," by contrast, "cut off tiny bits of their flesh and grow exact replicas of themselves in embryo jelly" (Naked Lunch, 164). While these practices are diametrically opposed, their effects would be largely the same: they would destabilize the traditional self in the same way as posthuman biology and Burroughs's animistic theory of addiction.
Yet, the "Senders" party offers the clearest index of how Burroughs feels about mass culture and technology. According to Lee, they are the most dangerous party. Their goal, as one Sender proclaims, is to reestablish a Mayan form of telepathic control. Their system, however, will draw on new technologies to achieve "control of physical movement, mental processes, emotional reactions and apparent sensory impressions" of persons "by means of bioelectric signals injected into the nervous system of the subject" (Naked Lunch, 162). "Shortly after birth," the Sender explains,
a surgeon could install connections in the brain. A miniature radio receiver could be plugged in and the subject controlled from State-controlled transmitters.… The biocontrol apparatus is prototype of one-way telepathic control [sic]. The subject could be rendered susceptible to the transmitter by drugs or other processing without installing any apparatus.… Now one sender could control the planet. (Naked Lunch, 163–64)
Here, the link between drugs and electronic culture is made rather explicit, much as it was in popular postwar descriptions of television as "the plug-in drug." The Senders’ bizarre human engineering project is designed to produce an entire population of addict-subjects.
But what is most bizarre about this fantasy of control is that it was presented as a serious possibility at the 1956 National Electronics Conference in Chicago. The speaker was an electrical engineer named Curtiss R. Schafer, of the Norden-Ketay Corporation. His subject was "biocontrol" the great achievement of which, according to Schafer, would be "the control of unruly humans" through electronics—an idea Schafer based on the (cybernetic) premise that since "planes, missiles, and machine tools already are guided by electronics, … the human brain—being essentially a digital
The ultimate achievement of biocontrol may be the control of man himself.… The controlled subjects would never be permitted to think as individuals. A few months after birth, a surgeon would equip each child with a socket mounted under the scalp and electrodes reaching selected areas of brain tissue.… The child's sensory perceptions and muscular activity could be either modified or completely controlled by bioelectric signals radiating from state-controlled transmitters.[54]
Schafer ended, Packard observes dryly, with "the reassuring thought that the electrodes ‘cause no discomfort.’[55]
It is no accident that Packard's central claim is that psychologically savvy advertisers had begun to turn consumers into addicts of a sort—an association already implicit in the historical concept of the consumer. He describes the "hooks" of the admen as "prescriptions for our secret distresses" and "cures for our hidden aversions," and he views hapless consumers as "adult-children," highly susceptible to what Riesman terms "other-direction" and what Jacques Ellul calls "involuntary psychological collectivization."[56] In one description of a typical motivational experiment, Packard argues that even product labels can tranquilize shoppers, stripping them of self-control. As shoppers walked by a surreptitiously videotaped supermarket display, he explains,
Their eye-blink rate, instead of going up to indicate mounting tension, went down and down, to a very subnormal fourteen blinks a minute. The ladies fell into what Mr. Vicary calls a hypnoidal trance.… Interestingly many of these women were in such a trance that they passed by neighbors and old friends without noticing or greeting them. Some had a sort of glassy stare. They were so entranced as they wandered about the store plucking things off shelves at random that they would bump into boxes without seeing them and did not even notice the camera.[57]
Confronted by the magically intoxicating packages, these consumers become something less than willful agents ("in this generation," says one adman, echoing Marx's account of commodity fetishism, "the products say ‘buy me, buy me’ ").[58] The subliminal seduction is so powerful that when these tranquilized "babes in consumerland" sober up, they often Wnd they do "not have enough money to pay for all the nice things they [have] put in the cart."[59]
No doubt, then, one reason Burroughs found The Hidden Persuaders so attractive was that it implied the connection between mass psychology and drugs central to his own writing. Burroughs strengthens this connection when he turns the real electrical engineer and biocontrol advocate, Curtiss R. Schafer, into Naked Lunch's Dr. Curt "Fingers" Schafer, the Lobotomy Kid.
To Dr. Schafer, "The human body is scandalously inefficient. Instead of a mouth and an anus," he asks, "why not have one all-purpose hole to eat and eliminate?" (Naked Lunch, 131). "Why not one all-purpose blob?" replies Dr. Benway (Naked Lunch, 131). This brings us back to where we began, because the all-purpose blob is the model of the junkie, the Wgure whose protoplasmic body has been rationalized so as to have but one purpose—the consumption of junk. Dr. Schafer is busy producing just such a subject. His self-described "Master Work" is "The Complete All American Deanxietized Man" (Naked Lunch, 103), an individual whose nervous system has been "reduced" to relieve him of human feelings such as angst. To his horror, however, just as Schafer unveils this new and improved individual for his colleagues it turns into a "monster black centipede" (Naked Lunch, 104)—again solidifying the link between the insectoid subjects of junk addiction and the similarly "empty" subjects of mass culture.
These scenarios, Wnally, explain why Burroughs chooses the single-celled organism and the insect as the models for the addicted subject. Tony Tanner has suggested that "matter returning to lower forms of organization" is Burroughs's "version of that entropy which is such a common dread among American writers."[60] This interpretation is helpful if we recall that the postwar literary interest in entropy stemmed from the writings of Norbert Wiener, which characterized entropy as an "evil" tendency, because it moves us "from a state of organization and differentiation in which distinctions and forms exist, to a state of chaos and sameness."[61] Wiener, moreover, explicitly associates insects with fascism and mass culture. Like the totally "conditioned" (51) subjects of fascism, he claims, the insect is a "cheap, mass-produced article, of no more individual value than a paper pie plate to be thrown away after it is once used" (51). This is what Burroughs suggests about the addict-subjects of postwar technocracy. Indeed, what could describe Burroughs's work better than Wiener's argument that while we have the technical capacity to "organize the fascist ant-state with human material," to do so would mean "a degradation of man's very nature" (52)? Wiener develops this defense of human uniqueness for the same reason that Burroughs so often defends the "Human Image": his central thesis casts such doubt on human uniqueness and autonomy that it quickly becomes intolerable and must be counteracted by an impassioned humanism. The larger point of Wiener's text, after all, is that "if we could build a machine whose mechanical structure duplicated human physiology, then we could have a machine whose intellectual capacities would duplicate those of human beings" (57). Only in the context of this daring, materialist thesis does Wiener feel compelled to prove, at considerable length, the rather absurd point that "the human individual … is physically equipped, as the ant is not for … the most noble flights" (51–52).
Such a humanist retreat repeats the gesture I have been tracing here. In