I became absorbed in the written work of William S. Burroughs. I first read Exterminator!, Naked Lunch, and then Cities of the Red Night, The Place of Dead Roads, and The Western Lands, then Interzone, Junkie, The Job, and other various writings, also biographical material. Something sharp and unique stirs in those works, and I was drawn into it by both the rhythm of the language and the absurd incidents disclosed. The struggle with control, whether it be by political systems, intoxicating substances, language, or biology itself, which runs through these works in many forms, and the various explored methods to counter this control and push toward states of freedom, were particularly fascinating for me.
I was quite struck by many of the ideas presented in these works. The one, for instance, that language is a virus, connected to the Right virus—disease that causes infected party to believe s/he is right and others are wrong—which has evolved into binary logic systems, working by either/or, right/wrong constructs, and the kind of “rational” thought that has brought us through complexes of enslavement and death to weapons of mass destruction and the brink of extinction, and the connection between this virus and white people, who became infected and contracted it after barely surviving some kind of atomic or nuclear explosion some 30,000 years ago in the Gobi desert, which forced them westward to undergo genetic mutation in the darkness of caves…
There is a magical aspect to much of the writing of Burroughs, especially in the techniques he considers for liberation. (Sex magic, cutting up the Word to rewrite Reality, etc.) His literary works create a sci-fi, carnivalesque, kaleidoscopic, mythological realm, where the concern to break free of binary oppositions, and the limitations of Word and Flesh, are expressed in a variety of permutations. There is a general outlandishness in these due to the working through of his objectives: deconstruct binary oppositions by distortion, displacement, and satirical methods, and then cultivate the emerging eruption of a new term that cannot be absorbed into the traditional binary structure and that works further to confound such structures. Though the characterizations and scenarios are not always to my liking—there is an awful lot of sex and violence, and I cannot concur with his general attitude toward women—they are always smart and creative, and worthy of some consideration.
Consider the meaning and function of the logocentric body, the methods, and by what forces, it is artificially constructed, and how, contrary to this fact, it is passed off as something natural.
Consider methods and reasons for transgressing the limits of this artificially constructed logocentric body.