Abstract

As an heir to the twentieth-century avant-garde, William S. Burroughs articulates a critique of political and aesthetic representation, which is central to both modernism and postmodernism, while maintaining a paradoxical commitment to social revolution that has been abandoned by many postmodernists. This combination of postmodern suspicion and modernist engagement requires a method of analysis which would be "amodern" in its avoidance both of the constitutive impasses of modernism and of the dead-end postmodern critique of modernism ; such a method, which seeks to derive theoretical tools from cultural works and movements and put those tools to use for aesthetic and political change, is articulated in the philosophical work of Gilles Deleuze, who shares with Burroughs a continued commitment to writing as a catalyst and intensifier of mass action. ;In Junky , Burroughs addresses the accelerating dialectic of capitalist control of American society, control that functions by transforming the individual into the "addict agent" who is the mirror image of the controller. He offers an abortive alternative to control in Queer, the suppressed sequel to Junky, then finds solace in the "telepathic" power of writing, through which he can contribute to the creation of a new community. In Naked Lunch , Burroughs articulates a critique of the "administered life" that parallels Horkheimer and Adorno's Dialectic of Enlightenment. He examines the reversibility of hostile social relations and the symmetry of opposed political factions, and also articulates his theory that language, which is a virus that uses the human body as a host, constitutes the most powerful form of control. Burroughs cannot yet imagine a form of revolutionary practice to counter the forms of control that had begun to invade everyday life. In the aleatory Nova trilogy , this negativity spawns the central figure of Burroughs' work, Hassan i Sabbah, who escapes the sterile dialectics of postmodernity by destroying the control system of syntax and simultaneously abolishing the dialectical form of the Law. These experiments lead him out of the cynicism of postmodernism toward a renewed commitment to social change; in The Wild Boys and his recent works, Burroughs seeks ways to organize resistance to the new forms of control in the construction of revolutionary fantasies that can produce new social groups. In The Wild Boys , these fantasies are still conceived as dialectically destructive forces, incapable of inspiring new forms of social organization. The trilogy Cities of the Red Night, The Place of Dead Roads and The Western Lands continues this task, but it also investigates ways to re-organize society in order to avoid social and linguistic control. The conclusion of the dissertation examines Burroughs' works in film and music to determine the range of his ideas