Perversion the Social Relation

30 Dennis Fostercism in American thought, as Bloom refers to it. 13 His writing implies adesire to evade the constraints of the individual psyche in favor of somethinglarger and more persistent. We see this impulse played out repeatedly:in the preference Burroughs shows for polytheism, over the "OGU,"the soul mastering, thermodynamically fading One God Universe (1987:113); in his disregard for chronology in Cities, which allows the samecharacter to appear anywhere within a three-hundred-year period; in hispreference for the cut-in in the investigative work of Clem Snide andin his own writing. 14 In a world so insistently governed by the idealsof progress and accumulation that make a capitalist economy possible,such a dream of timelessness inevitably looks like nostalgia. The desirethat drives capitalism depends on notions of a need that can be remediedthrough production and consumption. The resulting velocity of culturalchange produces a "complexity" that we come to depend on for survival,and it cannot be undone. But as Burroughs implies, the past persists,encrypted in complexity, and we would be as foolish to ignore it as wewould be to attempt to return to it. Within the progress of civilizationand the entropie waste of time lie generative, productive patterns thatendure and return.The model of memory that Freud presents in Civilization and Its Discontentsplaces memory outside of time, with the implication that pastevents are never recovered as separable, independently standing momentsbut are imbricated in foundational patterns of mind. Philip Kuberski'sThe Persistence of Memory draws out the correspondences betweenFreud's layered cities, our timeless unconscious, and the compacted historyof life contained in DNA. We achieve our sense of linear movementthrough time only by denying the evidence that time is less an arrow thana tangled vine. The temporal development of dynamic systems tends notto produce unique forms but spatially transformed replications of thesame. One implication of this view of temporal development is that theproduction of constantly varying elements leads not to wholly originalforms but to the same on a different scale.Although he is working from a different model, Burroughs seems totake the implication literally: he disregards the idea that character islocated in a unique and perishable individual, seeing instead that a charactercan arise repeatedly from given circumstances. Consequently, he"reincarnates" characters from century to century as easily as he carries