Perversion the Social Relation

34 Dennis Fosteras defenses against human mortality. The "human covenant" (180) thatkeeps humans bound to the fixed image is a version of the oedipal contractthat we make with the One God: limit your desire, and you will beimmortal.The fixed image, of course, is incompatible with the reality of reproduction.After all, in reproduction the image is subject to chaotic fluctuationas genes err, language slips, and time and accident happen. The"biologic revolution" Burroughs imagines would cause "unimaginablechaos, horror, joy and terror, unknown fears and ecstasies, wild vertigosof extreme experience, immeasurable gain and loss, hideous deadends" (in). Sounding like Nietzsche here, Burroughs mixes perspectives,giving us both the danger such a step would pose to the rationalworld as well as the ecstasy it could bring. But the chaos he describesis no longer just a paradoxical problem leading to a cultural impasse;rather, it has emerged as a solution within contemporary chaos theory.The apparently romantic step that Burroughs proposes—"from wordinto silence. From Time into Space" (115)—gestures toward the sublime("awakened pilgrims catch hungry flashes of vast areas beyond Death tobe created and discovered and charted"). But it also suggests that onemight let go of the commitment the West holds to linear trajectories ofmeaning and motion that culminate in the presence of Voice and Truth.Burroughs writes, "Imagine you are dead and see your whole life spreadout in a spatial panorama, a vast maze of rooms, streets, landscapes, notsequential but arranged in shifting associational patterns" (138). That is,to imagine your "self" dead means to imagine that the parts of your lifeare not fixed by sequence, but by shifting patterns of connection: "Thishappens in dreams of course." Dreams tell us something about a conditionof our lives that we call being dead or, rather, beyond dead. Bycomparison with the linear path of life, this image of death is vividlydynamic. Chaos does not refute the necessity of temporality—dynamicchange, whether in physical systems or in dreams, is irreversible—butthe fixed intention, the target of time's arrow, vanishes. In "chaos," oneloses the delusion of individual purpose, direction, control, which waswhy the One God put an end to it. The image that chaos and the theoryof complexity substitute for control is the dynamic order of the developingimage, of the fractal patterns generated by non-linear equations,where scale replaces time as complex development replaces purposefulgrowth.