Perversion the Social Relation

Fatal West 17Like Poe's perverse universe in Eureka, Burroughs's universe does notfunction according to the rules of logical discourse, cause and effect. Butcriticizing Aristotelian reason is easier than escaping it, perhaps becausethe structure of rational thought always steps in as the judge, convertingevery voice into its own. Any voice that is not complicit with reasonbecomes, inevitably, unreasonable. As in capitalism, every challenge tothe market (the "green" revolution, for example) becomes a marketingopportunity, the challenger just one more player on the field. The subversiveassumes that once the foundations have been exposed to be fictive,have been deconstructed, the structure can be reshaped or replaced tofunction according to new rules, even rules that ignore the Aristotelianconstruct. The process of exposure itself, however, seems to transformthe subversives, drawing them into the ancient dialectic that ties systematicthinkers to their detractors, that ties "abnormal" sexuality to the"normal," to use Rorty's Freudian metaphor for the relation betweenDerrida and post-Kantian philosophers (1982:106).To view Burroughs as part of this failure to subvert the dominanceof reason is, at best, to find him to be one more symptom of a generalmalady, another sad example of Marcuse's one dimensional man, caughtup in "sweeping rationality, which propels efficiency and growth, [that]is itself irrational" (xii). But the readiness to which Burroughs's workopens itself to the charge of failure should be a warning. His contradictions,his reversals of sign and referent (is space conceived of as timelesssynchronicity a metaphor for outer space or vice versa?), his generallonging for a beyond, and other refusals of logical form betray less afailure within symbolic mastery than an excessive purposeless delightin manipulating the very forms of mastery. Certainly, he feels a deephatred for what he refers to in his later writings as the "Ugly Spirit."His biographer Barry Miles defines this spirit as "the Ugly American,[driven by] forces of greed and corruption, selfishness and stupidity, ofHomo sapiens [sic] arrogance" (253-54). And though Burroughs deridesthe manifestations of this spirit, what remains compelling about him ishow he represents the sources of control and how he evokes a sublimedimension to life, a real not subject to symbolic strictures.Rather than reading Burroughs the symptom, then, I want to readBurroughs the sinthome, whose writing stages enjoyment. 3 If Burroughs'siconic doubleness does serve as the switch between health and perver-