Perversion the Social Relation

Fatal West 31his characters from book to book. Vampires create the vampire anewover generations; viruses transform diverse organisms into replicationsof the same disease; and language, for all its subtlety, transforms lumpsof human infancy into subjects as alike as a patch of cats. But whilethe human subject develops out of a specific linguistic culture, the bodyis nearly eternal and governed even more strongly by ancient patterns.Over 90 percent of all human DNA is identical. If an individual wishedto evade the determinations of cultural power, the trick would be to getat that common flesh that links one to the eternal, to something olderthan this culture.In Burroughs, one of those tricks, "sex magic," employs a ritual thatdivorces sex from its functioning within a social practice and provokessomething ancient and non-individualized in the body. Preparing fora performance, one character says, "According to psychic dogma, sexitself is incidental and should be subordinated to the intent of the ritual.But I don't believe in rules. What happens, happens" (1981: 76). Andwhat happens is that "pictures and tapes swirl in my brain" as the manygods appear and The Smell (that primordial essence of the lizard brain)surrounds the performers (JJ). Sex magic, it seems, provides access toknowledge and power that does not derive from the individual subject'sreasoning intelligence or talents. Clearly, most sex is not magic: themagic requires one to turn over evolution's gift of orgasm to the properstaging. The ritual requires the performer to submit to the pleasure ofsome Other, foregoing his or her own desires in order to approach theancient, the Real: earth knowledge. But in Burroughs's world, the ritualis important because there is no alternative source of power and knowledge.Elsewhere, I have considered what happens when authority fails, andthe father, the state, the phallus, or whatever we would call the figurethat holds the symbolic world in place is unable to promise enjoymentat the end of a long life of repression and self-denial. 15 Burroughs addressesa world in which all authority has revealed itself to be a congame, where the Aristotelian construct to which Dolan refers has shownits hand. But since you cannot, apparently, ignore or directly challengethe construct, you beat a con with another con. Burroughs's image ofone con that can resist authority is the NO: "Natural outlaws dedicatedto breaking the so-called natural laws of the universe foisted upon us