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Globalizing William S. Burroughs
*David Banash *
/ Western Illinois University/
D-Banash@wiu.edu
(c) 2006 David Banash.
All rights reserved.
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Review of:
Schneiderman, Davis and Philip Walsh, Retaking the Universe:
William S. Burroughs in the Age of Globalization. London: Pluto,
2004.
1. Imagining the work of William S. Burroughs through emerging
theories of globalization promises to keep an extraordinary and
difficult body of multimedia excesses and provocations relevant
for the new millennium. Davis Schneiderman and Philip Walsh have
assembled an intriguing group of contributors, bringing together
both established Burroughs scholars and many new voices, both
critical and creative. In their introduction, Schneiderman and
Walsh describe the aims and urgencies of this anthology:
These authors attack their material with enough energy to
infuse the cogent issue--literary explication that moves
beyond its own rarefied limits--with vital connections that
present Burroughs's work as a "blueprint" for identifying and
resisting the immanent control mechanisms of global capital.
Additionally, the editors come to this collection as children
of Bretton Woods, of IMF and World Bank "structural
adjustment" policies, of ballooning world debt, of globalizing
"junk culture," of a rapidly unfolding new imperialism, and a
symbolic culture dominated by the logic of the commercial
logo. (2)
Hinting at the theoretical investments of the contributors,
Schneiderman and Davis argue that "a key debate within
globalization theory concerns the connection between globalization
and '(post)modernity'" (3).
2. Jennie Skerl emphasizes the postmodern perspective in the
"Forward." She offers a concise but compelling reception history
of Burroughs criticism. While readers and critics in the 1950s saw
Burroughs as "a spiritual hero of an underground movement,"
supporters and detractors of the 1960s argued the moral status of
his work, yet both agreed that he was an apt reflection of a "sick
society" (xi). After his popular reception by both academics and
youth subcultures in the 1970s, the critics of the 1980s found in
Burroughs a poststructuralist sensibility, for he seemed to be
working through the same questions about language, power, and
identity important to French theory. In the 1990s, critics Timothy
S. Murphy and Jamie Russell "attempted comprehensive overviews"
(xii) that situate Burroughs in the broad context of modernity.
For Skerl, Retaking the Universe resolves at least one debate:
"what is striking to this reader is the general agreement among
authors in this collection that Burroughs's moral and political
position is clear: he opposes the sociopolitical control systems
of late capitalism in the era of globalization, and his writing is
a form of resistance" (xiii). What is perhaps even more
interesting is just what globalization seems to mean to these
Burroughs scholars. Skerl offers a concise formulation: "The
essays in this volume read Burroughs within the context of
theories about globalization and resistance. This perspective
emphasizes Burroughs's analysis of control systems, especially his
theories of word and image control" (xiii). In essence,
globalization means mediation. There are some interesting stakes
in this perspective, for postmodern theory has been called into
question often most adroitly by postcolonial critics who doubt its
applicability to fraught questions of nation, gender, and capital.
The Burroughs scholars in this collection seem poised to reanimate
postmodern obsessions with media and representation in compelling
ways made possible through the techniques and vocabularies of
Burroughs, who always wrote from his global experience as an
expatriate criminal.
3. "Theoretical Dispositions" is the first of three sections in the
book, and, as the editors explain, it links "Burroughs's
articulation of global control systems that emerged in the
post-World War II era with the dominant strands of twentieth
century theory" (7). One might think that Burroughs's major
reception has been by readers so deeply invested in theory that
this should be taken for granted. In a sense, this section
provides a strong overview of Burroughs's reception by academic
critics of the past twenty years, especially in the first essay,
"Shift Coordinate Points: William S. Burroughs and Contemporary
Theory" by Allen Hibbard. As Hibbard notes, "Burroughs will
continue to be a prime target of whatever new forms of the
[theory] virus lie waiting to be born" (27). Timothy S. Murphy,
perhaps the most influential of the newest generation of Burroughs
scholars, contributes "Exposing the Reality Film: William S.
Burroughs Among the Situationists." He has discovered documents
that put Burroughs in touch with marginal Situationists and
suggest that Burroughs may have been influenced by Situationist
analysis and practice, especially in works like The Electronic
Revolution. This is particularly telling, because one of the
oddest facts about Burroughs is his seeming expatriate insulation
from the intellectuals and artists of the countries he inhabited,
aside from other expatriate Americans or anglophones of one stripe
or another. Murphy, however, suggests that this picture of
Burroughs might be wrong and that his connections, at least as a
reader and correspondent, demand further investigation.
4. Editor Philip Walsh's "Reactivating the Dialectic of
Enlightenment: Burroughs as a Critical Theorist" examines the
similarities between Burroughs and the Frankfurt School. Walsh
situates Burroughs more centrally among twentieth-century critics
of capital and power. He also carefully underscores how Burroughs
is both critical of "the core elements of Western culture" (71)
while remaining deeply entangled in them. Jason Morelyle's
"Speculating Freedom: Addiction, Control and Rescriptive
Subjectivity in the Work of William S. Burroughs" offers an
interesting reading of Burroughs's addiction metaphors and their
connections to the poststructuralist critique of control
societies, especially in the work of Michel Foucault. Finally, Jon
Longhi contexualizes Burroughs in the historical avant-garde, and
he argues persuasively that we would do well to think of Burroughs
as part of that tradition in this short but provocative essay.
5. "Writing, Sign, Instrument: Language and Technology" is the heart
of the book, both literally and figuratively. It is this group of
essays that justifies the title of the anthology. These writers
make a persuasive case that Burroughs offers a compelling account
of globalization through his practice as a writer. The section
begins with an essay by Anthony Enns entitled "Burroughs's Writing
Machines," in which he makes fascinating connections between
typewriters and globalization. For instance, writing about the
Yage Letters he argues that Burroughs's obsession with world
cultures from the ancient Maya to practicing shamans reveals a
"desire to achieve a primitive, pre-literate state . . . [that]
later manifested itself in his manipulations of media technology"
(95). In "Totally Wired: Prepare Your Affidavits of Explanation,"
Edward Desautels provides a critical-creative investigation of web
technologies and globalization in the style pioneered by Steven
Shaviro's Doom Patrols. Here, a ghostly agent Burroughs transmits
a faint signal from the other side, reporting on the dangers of an
increasingly wired world. In "New World Ordure: Burroughs,
Globalization, and the Grotesque," Dennis McDaniel makes a bold
claim: "Burroughs, as well as other artists of the grotesque,
challenge globalization by reducing or eliminating the exchange
value of its commodities" (145). In essence, the clean, orderly
world of commodity culture cannot tolerate the grotesque, making
this an effective aesthetic of resistance. Editor Davis
Schneiderman contributes "Nothing /Hear/ Now but the Recordings:
Burroughs's 'Double Resonance.'" He suggests that Burroughs's use
of space, especially in his work with sound recording, "finds
connection with the political struggles characterizing the
emerging global economic order, where 'all nature has become
capital, or at least has become subject to capital'" (147). Just
as globalization has changed what space means, so Burroughs
provides new ways to think about that space through his use of
media technologies. While Schneiderman emphasizes recording
technologies, Jamie Russell offers us "Guerilla Conditions:
Burroughs, Gysin and Balch Go to the Movies." Here again,
Burroughs as a media experimenter helps to develop critiques of
globalizing media: "Burroughs, Gysin and Balch's experimental
cinema outlined in the 1960s might well be more important than
ever before in alerting us to the realities of the new global
order and teaching us how to resist it" (163). The final essay of
this section is Oliver Harris's "Cutting Up Politics." Harris
provides a comprehensive overview of Burroughs's cut-up techniques
and argues that Burroughs was unsure, in retrospect, if cut-ups
were effective: "From first to last, there is standoff between the
claims for the methods' prophetic and performative power, an
equivocation about the productivity of cut-ups as tools of war in
'a deadly struggle' that may or may not have existed" (176).
Harris argues that Burroughs was drawn to cut-ups because he could
offer cutting-up as a technique to others. The success or failure
of cut-up resistance depended not on Burroughs alone, but on
others taking up the technique. However, as Harris goes on to
point out, it may well be that like any other technique, cut-ups
too require a master craftsman, and if so, they aren't the
revolutionary weapons Burroughs hoped they would become. As the
last essay in this section, it seems that Harris is challenging
the other contributors, asking us to think about how these
revolutionary claims might be realized as either aesthetic or
practical political interventions.
6. The final section, "Alternatives: Realities and Resistances,"
contains some of the most inventive writing in the book, but it
doesn't offer the coherent perspective of the first two sections.
Schneiderman and Walsh explain that these final essays
"investigate the possibilities that arise from such combinations
of production and theory--through magic, violence, laughter, and
excess," which is to say they cover much diverse and interesting
ground (8). The section begins with the welcome reprint of John
Vernon's "The Map and the Machine," from his book The Garden and
the Map. This erudite and comprehensive essay situates Burroughs
in relation to the radical modernism of the historical
avant-garde, and its arguments are grounded in the precise and
exhaustive close reading that Burroughs's work demands and too
seldom receives. Ron Roberts's "The High Priest and the Great
Beast at The Place of Dead Roads makes interesting connections
between Aleister Crowley and Burroughs. Out of this emerges one of
the bolder positions on Burroughs articulated in the book: "both
writers . . . play with rightist ideas--militarism, eugenics and
genocide--as necessary steps in establishing an alternative
future: that is, a society free of shits and control freaks and
based on a respect for individual freedoms" (237). Yet Roberts
isn't particularly troubled by this, ascribing it to just another
aspect of "their outrageous lives and works" (238). Roberta
Fornari provides a careful close reading of Burroughs's film
script in "A Camera on Violence: Reality and Fiction in Blade
Runner, a Movie." This article is particularly interesting for its
careful history of the script's creation, and for a sensitive
reading of its themes of terror and violence. Fornai makes the
defensible claim that the clearer narrative of Blade Runner
"provides an unusual showcasing of Burroughs's political
engagements" (241). Katharine Streip mobilizes genre theory in
"William S. Burroughs, Laughter and the Avant-Garde." Reading his
texts in terms of classic comedy rather than satire or avant-garde
experiment, she writes that "humor within Burroughs's work can be
read as a social practice and as a formal and performative
strategy, a way to explore boundaries" (259). The final piece,
"Lemurian Time War," is a fictional pastiche of Burroughsian
excess, paranoia, and lemur obsession, reminding us that Burroughs
always invites his audience to take up his tools and give it a try
themselves. The diverse viewpoints of these authors make this
section of the anthology interesting, though they don't engage
globalization as their primary theme.
7. While Burroughs might be a bridge for media theorists to the
global, this reader is left to wonder if this might not be a
one-way street. One might well wish for a companion anthology of
scholars with significant investments in the global geography and
history that Burroughs inhabited as an expatriate in Morocco,
Mexico, South America, and Europe. Does Burroughs speak to such
scholars as a resistant, liberatory intellectual? For instance, is
his obsession with figures such as Hassin i Sabbah relevant to
these readers? In essence, are Burroughs's usefulness and
reception largely limited to Anglophone, postmodernist insiders?
Most troubling, while the authors in this collection, as Skerl
notes, have few qualms about Burroughs's force as an author of
liberation, one wonders if the a more diverse range of scholars
would reach the same conclusion. In one respect, that is the real
strength and challenge of this book, for its unabashed, polemical
position demands a response, especially from those who might be
thinking a great deal about globalization but not so much about
the strange works of William S. Burroughs. This anthology argues
that Burroughs provides critical vocabularies and perspectives on
globalization, and thus we can hope that it will inaugurate new
conversations with new readers of his singular works.
/ Department of English & Journalism
Western Illinois University
D-Banash@wiu.edu /
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