WRAP THESIS Land 2004

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Technologies, Texts and Subjects: William S. Burroughs and Post-Humanism by Chris Land A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree in Doctor Philosophy Industrial of of and Business Studies University of Warwick, Warwick Business School January, 2004 I

Table of Contents Acknowledgments 6 Declaration 8 Abstract 9 Introduction 10 Taking Technology in Two Hands II Outline of the Thesis 17 22 Chapter 1- Technology and Organization Introduction 22 Technological Determinism 25 Strategic Choice 34 Labour Process Theory 37 Social Constructivism 43 Actor-Network Theory 47 Technology as Text 50 Facts or Interpretation? 56 The Problem of Agency 58 Chapter 2- 'After' the Human 62 Are We Coming or Going? 62 Did We Miss a Slip-Road Back and the Textual Turn? 65 Subjects and Objects 66 2

Can We Doubt Too Much? 68 It's Machines All the Way Down... 70 A Cooperian Revolution 73 Deleuze and Guattari on the Anthropomorphic Stratum 76 What is Stratification 76 Key Featuresof the Anthropomorphic Stratum 81 Technology and Language, Content and Expression 82 Text(iles): Words and Things 85 Human Being or Becoming-Cyborg? 90 Cyborgs and Acting Human(ely) 93 A Taxonomy for Human Beings? 96 Pause - Borrowing Burroughs' Burrows 103 The Burrow 106 On the Subject of Control 108 Three Systemsof Control: Capital, Language, Subjectivity III Chapter 3- Language and The Word Virus 116 Technologies of Linguistic Transformation and Resistance 119 Word-Virus and Order-Word 120 Cutting-Up Control 127 All Out of Time... 133 The Naked Astronaut 134 Immaterialism and the Informatic Post-Human 138 (Re)embodying Information 143 3

One or Several Bodies? 145 Incorporation and the New-Technology 148 Tape Recording Voice 155 Subject/Meat/Mutation 159 'Long live the new flesh! ' 161 Breaking Out of the Text 164 Chapter 4- Subjectivity after the human 167 Subjectivization and Subjugation 170 The Wild Boys' Nomadic War Machine 177 Apocalypse Now 180 Willard Becoming-Kurtz 186 A Queer Turn in the River 192 Quien Es? 194 The Johnson Family 212 Escape Attempts 221 A New 'Soul Hypothesis'? 228 Hybridisation, Mutation and Multiplicity 241 After the Human 243 Chapter 5- Post-Humanism and the Ethics of Immanence 246 Post/Humanism 247 Interfaces 249 Oh Christ... Year Zero 250 Faciality 253 4

Probe-Heads 259 Animalisms 261 Alternatives 264 In-Conclusion - Post-Apocalyptic Visions: Deviations on a Theme Directions for Future Research 270 277 Utopia: Alternative Forms of Organization 278 Identities: Micro-Sociology of the Workplace 281 Narrative: Method, Politics and Epistemology 284 The Body at Work: Mutation and Embodiment 286 Ethics: Humanism and Difference 288 Notes 268 Appendix - Experimental Forms of Writing: A Cut-Up 294 Bibliography 273 5

Acknowledgments I would like to recognise the support and advice that both Martin Corbett and Gibson Burrell have given me on this dissertation. Their inspiration and faith both it, this thesis to to even when it was and continue with encouraged me undertake February. I also have to acknowledge the unswerving friendship of Steffen Bbhm, both for his emotional support and continued political and intellectual engagements. lain Munro (not forgetting Arthur Street) also has my thanks, both for rekindling my interest in William Burroughs and for moving to Scotland, thereby saving my liver. During the first year of this thesis lain was really my third supervisor and without him I -would have been introduced to few of the writers and ideas informing this work. Singular recognition must also go to Campbell Jones whose rigour, energy and breadth of knowledge have been an inspiration over the four years I have known him. I would also like to recognise the many people who have had engaged with, last five helped the to, these over and shape years, whether through responded ideas informal chat over a drink or in response to more formal seminar and conference Christian De Cock, Wood, Martin Martin Brigham, Torkild Thanem, papers, notably Donncha Kavanagh, Carmen Kuhling and Bent Mair Sorensen. Thanks must also go to Stephen Linstead and Peter Case for kindly agreeing to examine this thesis. Their final draft improved but helped the this to clarify why I of comments not only work had undertaken this study in the first place. Their encouragement to continue invaluable. list issues To I Karen Legge this these should was working on also add for acting as internal referee in the examination process. 6

The lion's share of my gratitude, however, has to go to RebeccaDale, for more than I down in writing, and Nikolas and Benedict -a pack of little nomadic could ever put war machines ripping up the strata with becomings-animal. 7

Declaration This thesis is entirely the author's own work and has not been submitted for a degree at another university.

Abstract This thesis addresses the twin questions of technology and the human, ultimately dissolution the their toward in questioning validity of either category and pointing transhumanism. Starting with a discussion of the question of technology in organization studies, the thesis takes issue with the way in which discussion has focused on the technology-object pole of a dualism at the neglect of the humanfor Following that the subject occupies opposing pole. a methodological call human light its the thesis the technology other symmetry of reconsiders question of in Deleuze Working ideas Friedrich Nietzsche the and and visa versa. of and with Guattari, the thesis suggeststhat there is a problem with maintaining a distinct human, from the conception of separated a priori questions of technology and language. In seeking to avoid an essentialism either of the (technological) object, or the (human) subject, the thesis reconsiders the question of the human, language and technics through an examination of the work of William S. Burroughs. Combining Burroughs' ideas with those of Deleuze and Guattari, a conception of the 'transhuman' is developed which, in opposition to a transcendentalhumanism, immanent implication language the technology articulates of and in the production of figuring in to the technology subjectivity, and points more radical potentials of new alternative modes of subjectivization and social organization. 9

Introduction after Napoleon the machine-technicsof Western Europe grew gigantic and, with its manufacturing towns, its railways, its steamships,it has forced us in the end to face the problem squarely and seriously. What is the significance of technics? What meaning within history, what value within life, does it possess,where - socially and does it metaphysically stand? (Spengler, 1932: 4) Within organization studies, the question of technology has been an issue from the Whether discipline the the outset. origins of are traced through the management theory of Frederick Taylor (1967), the political economy of Karl Marx (1976) or the sociology of Max Weber (1978), the question of technology, or more broadly, the been heart both has technics, the of industrial organization, and of the question of at theories put forward to explain and understandit. Nevertheless, it is the argument of this thesis that this question of technology has yet to be effectively addressed; in 'what life' (Spengler, 1932: 4) it possesseshas the question of particular value within been all but ignored by theorists of organization, a somewhat surprising neglect given the often taken for granted assumption, in more managerial texts, that technology can indeed produce value and enhance life, or in more critical texts, that technology is a dehumanising force that works against life. In either case, the relationship between human and technology is non-nally conceived dualistically. reflecting a more human least technology and in philosophy, at since Descartes, widespread splitting of 10

I- and more recently perpetuated in the philosophy of mind as it attempts to grapple with issues like Artificial Intelligence and cybernetics (Searle, 1984; Weizenbaum, 1984). The main question that this thesis considers is the relationship between the human and technics as it has been conceived in organization studies, in philosophy and in literature. In this it pays particular attention to the promise held out by Information and communication technologies to transcend the human condition and usher in the era of posthumanism. Whilst this has implications for political economy (Hardt and Negri, 1994; 2000; Gorz, 1999) the main focus of the thesis is on the ways in which technology and language interact in the production of subjectivity and how that may be changing in the contemporary era of information and communication technologies (ICT). Through the work of Deleuze and Guattari, and William Burroughs the human its the and post-human alternatives are considered with particular politics of for hold different forms to the they attention potential radically of social organization. In this sensethe thesis might be said to partake in the neo-discipline of managementscience-fiction. Such a light hearted tag is perhaps necessarywhen dealing with the human face death in the the the of of race of encroaching apocalyptic vision technology. Taking Technology in Two Hands Writing in the early part of the last century, Spengler's (1932) vision of technics was On hand he the and apocalyptic. one celebratory recognised the simultaneously 11

centrality of technics, in particular the weapon, to the constitution of what we today call the human. On the other hand, his morphological view of culture saw the inevitability of the decline of Western civilisation as it slipped into its old age. Although his politics and conclusions are a long way from those of Marcuse, in some he he Man One Dimensional technology as respects shares a similar analysis of as saw the West becoming prey to the very technical rationality that had previously is it (Marcuse, heart 1991). At this technical the rationality made so powerful of organization: All things organic are dying in the grip of organization. An artificial world is itself become Civilization has The the a machine permeating and poisoning natural. that does, or tries to do, everything in a mechanical fashion. We think only in horseit into look turning at a waterfall without mentally electric power now; we cannot its thinking survey a countryside of pasturing cattle without of power; we cannot look beautiful handwork the at old exploitation as a sourceof meat-supply; we cannot it by to replace a modern technical of an unspoilt primitive people without wishing process. (Spengler, 1932: 94) For Spengler, the very idea of technics is a development of the organic will to power, he in Nietzsche (e. 1968), the rather simple to token conceives g. nod which, with a domination drive to and possessionin the mode of capitalist ownership. a manner of In this light, Western civilisation, conceived as an organism in its own right, has it has developed high bargain Faustian technics to whereby such a power that struck a 12

it is able to dominate the whole of nature and become almost god-like in its powers. The counterpoint of this bargain however, is that 'Man' is no longer free to grow organically. The technical -rational form of organization is rigid and constraining to the degree that the organic will to power is stifled and dies. Human artifice, once an extension of natural power, has now come to dominate the artificer. Locked into this horse-power degrees mechanistic world view, seeing only and of efficiency, technics has come to enframe human perception of nature so that it is only perceptible in such terrns -a by Heidegger when comparing the technical to that similar point made by dam lyrical Rhine hydro-electric Holderin's the enframing of celebrations a with bind. (Heidegger, 1993; Spicer, 2002). Spengler this the of same sees no way out of The best we can hope for is, like Achilles, to live "a short life, full of deeds and glory" (Spengler, 1932: 103). Regardless of our individual heroics, society is doomed to an increasingly self-destructive, technical rationality in which life itself is annihilated in a paradoxical race toward control that destroys controlled and controller alike (Spengler, 1932: 66). In reviewing previous attempts to address the question of technics, Spengler idealists, The two traditions: and materialism. main idealism exemplified recognises by Goethe and Humboldt, denigrate the technical, economics and merely material as being beneath real 'culture' and therefore less than worthy of serious study. Such detract from human the temporal concerns real value of cultural and artistic mundane, be back tradition that traced to the ancient thereby can continuing a endeavours, Greeks who left the world of economics (derived from household management) and 13

commerce to the lower social orders so that the citizens could get on with the important business of philosophy, politics and culture (Anthony, 1976). In contrast, materialism, encompassing Jeremy Bentham, John Stuart Mill and Karl Marx, valorises the world of the technical, rational, economic - in a word, the world of work nil auOve Given likes Mill Marx's the and culture. of often vitriolic attacks upon Bentham, their conjunction here might seem rather surprising at first but, like Anthony after him, Spengler points to the ways in which both parties, regardless of their apparent politics, see the world of economics and work as the basis of society life. Indeed, Marx's labour theory of value suggestsan entire system of valuation and based upon the foundation of the labouring human body. Against the material world little labour, bodies the culture more than of and machinery, sphere of is ideology. For both life driven Marx, superstructure or as usually read, society and are by the material elements of production and the same can be said of the utilitarians with their entirely economic calculus and focus on work (Anthony, 1976). For Spengler, both of these traditions were flawed, their essential error being to for broader technics the narrow question of the machine. For the question of mistake this reason he traces the origins of the human in the pursuit of technics, from its first development language hand to the of and complex social and weapon, mutation of he doing, In so opens up the tripartite problem of technics, language organization. heart human the that the of this thesis, and underpinning them all the are at and life itself. Spengler little Perhaps hasty too of a and valuation was question of value to dismiss materialism however. As Mark Fisher has recently put it, the philosophical 14

canon has been entirely dominated by idealism - Plato, Kant, Hegel - whilst philosophers of a more materialist bent have been marginalized by the 'bureaucrats of academia' (Fisher, 2001). For example, Marx is usually relegated to the less rarefied heights intellectual of economics and the social sciences, whilst other thinkers are simply ignored. For Fisher this neglected materialism has been revived in recent by Gilles by increasing interest in this tradition, years an most notably philosophical Deleuze, a tradition which, after Nietzsche (1994; 1997), places the twin questions of heart life the of all intellectual endeavour. valuation and at A second development of materialism that Spengler was unable to foresee was cybernetics. In what can be seen as a radical extension of the utilitarian project, been has cybernetics simultaneously an invaluable ideological and technical support for the state and its military industrial complex, and one of the most potentially forces Whilst these to extending the technical subversive come out of structures. increasing industrial efficiency control of machines and organisms, through increasing automation, and reducing thought to a simple matter of calculation and foundations has both the threatened also many of upon which cognition, cybernetics idealism and materialism, as Spengler conceived them, are based. Both have been human, 'humanism' the to the that the of extent question is a centrally concerned with foundation for both traditions. Whether in the form of 'the humanities' and human in labour the the or material world, whether guise of a culture as elevated above theory of value where human labour is the ontological source of all value, in both heart is human the the of social theory and ontology. at cases 15 By insisting upon a

direct equivalence between the machine and the organism, including the human organism, and between thought and cognition, cybernetics problematises any a priori has human Indeed, if the privileging of subject. sufficiently radicalised, cybernetics the potential to scupper the very idea of the human subject. In doing so, the ground of what we call organization studies is shifted. Of course, the gurus of cybernetics, most famously Norbert Wiener, could be quite conservative in their ideas and may not have followed through on some of these implications (Hayles, 1999). Indeed, one of the most powerful ideas to develop out of cybernetics - the cyborg - originates in the depths of the military-industrial complex with a NASA funded project aiming to make the human domination of alien and hostile environments viable without changing the essence of the liberal-human subject of north-westem democratic capitalism (Gray, 1995; 2002). Nevertheless, as these ideas have traversed the disciplines of philosophy and the social sciences,they have been translated into a potentially revolutionary force that threatens to destroy the humanist foundation of both the humanities and the social sciences. This threat, however apocalyptic, creates the potential for an ontological revaluation of the language human. The by technics, the and question of question addressed this thesis is the importance of this revaluation for the study of organization and technology. Against Spengler, the thesis will argue that whilst cybernetic-capitalist forms of life in death-grip, dissolution throttling their the organization are almost certainly and heterogenisation of 'the human' in its becomings-cyborg opens up new spaces in flourish. life Ultimately forms this raises and social organization can of which new 16

once again the utopian prospect of living otherwise and overthrowing the hylopmorphic restrictions placed on desire and life as they are caught in the form to axiomatics of cybernetic-capitalism of society and produce a new organization. Outline of the Thesis The first chapter of the thesis is a review of the ways in which technology has been theorised in relation to organization. From a supposed starting point of technological determinism, a theory that is paradoxically quite difficult to find outside the realm of culture, several approaches to technology are traced, including John Child's (1972; 1997) strategic choice; the labour process perspective inspired by Harry Braverman (1974) and continued through the work of David Noble (1999); more general approachesto the social construction, social shaping, or social and economic shaping (MacKenzie Wajcman, 1999; Bijker 1989; McLoughlin, technology of and et al, 1999); actor-network theory, as developed by Bruno Latour (1987) and Michel Callon (1986a and b), but largely brought to the attention of organization studies by the likes finally John Law (1987; 1992); idea the and of of technology as text as exemplified in the work of Keith Grint and Steve Woolgar (1997). The argument of this thesis is that, like the two responsesto the challenge to thought Spengler identified, by that technics each of these approaches, with the presented possible exception of certain versions of actor-network theory, end up repeating a theoretical dichotomy between the human and technics, thereby simultaneously 17

ignonng the originary technics implied by definitions of the human and reinscribing that dependency by insisting upon a dialectical exclusion of self (human) and other (technology) such that one cannot be articulated without reference to the other. This is the case even in radical theories like Grint and Woolgar's (1997) technology as text By from technology. traces technicism their where all of are obliterated account of insufficient paying attention to the symmetry of object and subject they neglect to apply their radical scepticism to the figure of the human subject assumed as an interpreter of texts in their model. The second chapter of the thesis picks up this radical scepticism by asl,--ingwho it is that interprets? Following Friedrich Nietzsche's (1968) objection to the Cartesian icogito ergo sum' - 'I think therefore I am' - chapter two offers a symmetrically antiessentialist reading of the human/technology, subject/object dichotomy that works through their mutual self-definition, and recognises that texts are as much technologies as technologies are texts. In attempting to develop a symmetrical, nondualistic alternative to such thinking, one that doesn't place 'the human' at the pole of dualism, this chapter works through some of Deleuze and Guattari's an oppositional (1987) ideas on the constitution of the human on the anthropomorphic stratum. Ultimately, however, even this approach,itself a radical decentring of the subject, still raises the question of why we would want to go after the human at all. Of course, the question of the 'after' comes in at least two parts (Jones and Surman, 2002). There is the idea of 'going after' the human, as in a search to define the 18

essence of the human subject or seek out his origins amidst discarded tools, as followed through in Chapter Two. But there is also the question of what 'comes human. In a series of apocalyptic visions that span sciencethe the after' end of fiction cinema and literature, contemporary music, post-structural philosophy and human intelligence, the the theory, social end of artificial robotics and cybernetics, has variously been prophesised, heralded and announced as accomplished fact (Dery, 1996; 1999; Bukatman, 1993; Hayles, 1999; Pepperell, 1997). After a brief intermezzo pause then, Chapter Three explores the issue of the post- human, and the difficulties of representing such a figure, through the writing of William S. Burroughs. Picking up on the specific question of language and its (1986; Burroughs Odier, Burroughs' technics, this relations with and chapter outlines 1989) theory of the word virus alongside Deleuze and Guattari's (1987) notion of the 'order word'. Making the argument that the human subject is the product of a linguistic control system that operates virally, Burroughs sets himself the challenge of from linguistic his this control: of writing escaping way out of the human condition (Burroughs and Odier, 1989; Burroughs, 1966; 1967; 1992a). In doing so he takes an Grint Woolgar (1997). Rather to than seeking an answer to and opposite approach the problem of technology through reference to texts, Burroughs seeks a solution to the problems of writing and textuality through the use of new technology, in (Hayles, 1999; Burroughs, 1984; 1979). Reasserting tape-recorders the particular materiality of discourse and textuality, Bur-roughs' work rejects a normalizing diversity body by the the enabling a recognition of of embodiment. Reemphasis on 19

embodying the word through magnetic tape, and rearranging the material page through the use of scalpel and scissors, Burroughs sought to cut his way free from control and find an alternative to linear, narrative subjectivization in space travel (Burroughs, 1992a). Although Burroughs follows posthumanist concems with transcending the human condition by escaping from the flesh insofar as he borrows is his for his that tropes this approach science-fictional chapter argues writing, different, ultimately quite emphasising the immanence of embodiment rather than a transcendenceof mind. Nevertheless, Burroughs project is ultimately problematic as he seeks to overcome the problems of language through words (Burroughs and Odier, 1989). In his written leads formal his him this to the of midrecognition abandon experimentalism work, for last his to to three novels period work and move on more conventional narratives (Burroughs, 1982; 1983; 1987). It is in these novels, which take centre stage in Chapter Four of the thesis, that Burroughs turns his attention to the specific question of subjectivity and social organization. Recognising that representing alternative formations social and subjectivities tends to reinscribe them within already compromised regimes of control, Burroughs' final trilogy of novels operates through fantasies disinvestment desire from the to the status quo, counter-factual enable of desire in becomings the to of and enable revolutionary investments autonomous of the subject group. Again developing ideas from Deleuze and Guattari (1983), this chapter develops the concept of the subject group as an alternative mode of immanent rather than transcendental group organization with revolutionary potential. 20 The key

point of intervention here is a critique of representation. Operating strictly on a nondirectly his last Burroughs' in trilogy representational place of immanence, writing intervenes in the production of new subjectivities, rather than representing the form which new subjects must occupy. As such Burroughs' work offers a radically different way of thinking textuality, technology, representation and subjectivity from that conventionally found in organizational theories of technology. Having argued for the need to rethink the relations of texts, technologies and human becomings, the conclusion asks a final question of where this leaves humanism? In taking an anti-humanist stance in relation to our treatment of technics, are we not in danger of becoming dehumanized or even inhumane? Addressing complaints to this humanism, the effect, conclusion suggests another version of grounded more in a radical scepticism and hostility to idealist transcendence. In this version, the position in life from which technics can be evaluated is not that of the legislated human, but of life itself: a heterogeneous becoming other. Within this immanent production of life formations legislative, the are possible outside subjugated and subjectivity, new social law language. In this sense the final conclusion of the the and subjectivization of thesis offers an answer to Spengler's (1932) question of the value of technics by from be finds, in this the which question can asked and position a strictly reframing binary from bind he the that an answer avoids materialism, which could see immanent no escape. 21

Chapter 1- Technology and Organization Is not everything interwoven with everything? Is not machinery linked with animal life in an infinite variety of ways? The shell of a hen's egg is made of a delicate white is holding is is; device for the the shell a ware and a machine as much as an egg-cup egg as much as the egg-cup is for holding the shell: both are phases of the same function; the hen makesthe shell in her inside, but it is pure pottery. (Butler, 1932: 191) Introduction The question of technology has been a concern of organization studies since its inception. If we look to the managerial origins of the discipline with Frederick Taylor and Henry Ford we are faced with the stop-watch and the production line, both characteristic of modern industrial organization (Taylor, 1967; Rose, 1988). If we seek a more sociological foundation for the discipline, we usually find Max Weber flavour his bureaucracy (Weber, Here is 1978). technological again a and writing on from bureau, desk, bureaucracy is taken the the term or a technology that writing as form Weber fact In the of rational organization on which was writing. was central of the term bureaucracy, can be traced back further to the Old French burel from which bureau derives and which referred to the hessiancloth placed on top of a writing desk in order to soak up ink spills. Of course, as a way of hiding the messiness and inscription, burel/bureaucracy is the of organization and an unparalleled materiality innovation and points to a important function of technology, tidying things up, or as 22

Geoff Bowker and Susan Leigh Star have put it, 'sorting things out' (Bowker and Star, 2000). Despite this centrality of technology within our discipline, there is as yet little agreementon what technology is and how it is related to organization. If we consider the example of the production line, to what extent is this a form of organization and to what extent is it a technology? We might say that it is a technologically enabled, or form mediated, of organization it think or we might of as a technology form necessitates a specific of organization. Alternatively that we can think of it as a hybrid: a form of organization that is part technical and part social. In each case however the natural fault line seemsto be the distinction between the social and the technical. In the first two examples the social is the privileged subject of organization forms is technology of social and an adjunct, enabling or necessitating changing hybrid itself In the third the made organization. case organization is considered as a forin both together technical of social and elements which what we usually call up 'the organization', now conceived as some kind of a socio-technical system. Most traditional accounts of the organization/technology relationship fall into the first find is determinism In that technology technological offered up as an we camp. (Scarbrough Corbett, 1992). In labour the or organizational and explanation of social hand, determinate, it the the social on other is and process perspectives, is social forms be factors determme by technology that of will adopted which an structural forms lead those technologies to of social re-organization will and what organization 23

(McLoughlin, 1999). Other perspectives, like the social shaping of technology (SST) and the social construction of technology (SCOT), see specific technologies as the factors (MacKenzie and Wajcman, 1999). In this sense these product of social kind perspectives suggesta of social deterrmnism (Law, 1987). In addition to the social-technical axis already discussed, there is the connected question at what level social analysis should be conducted? In labour process theory, level is the explanation at of the social structure and is primarily concerned with class (e. relations g. Braverman, 1974). The social shaping perspective extends this analysis to include factors such as gender or, more rarely, race (McKenzie Wajcman, 1999). Social constructivism tends to emphasise interest and groups influencing technological change, rather than more structural factors. At the extreme find this end of scale, we perspectives like strategic choice, that focus on key individuals decisions (Child, technology make concerning who and reorganization 1972; 1997). At the social end of the social-technical axis then, we find the further distinction between macro and micro levels of social analysis, between structure and agency. It is the argument of this thesis that both distinctions, between society and technology and between structure and agency, are false (Callon and Latour, 1981). Central to this confusion and the creation of these false dualisms is a humanism that insists upon distinct from the technological objects and social an essentialism of subject as however much these may then impact upon that subject. As we shall see structures, 24

in this section, even the most radical accounts of the organization-technology relationship ultimately depend upon a conception of the human subject that tends to Before distinction it the reinforce social-technical even whilst proclairn-Ing untenable. developing these points, however, this chapter provides an overview of the main theories dealing with the organization-technology relationship and the ways in which these various distinctions have been cast. Technological Determinism Technological determinism provides the starting point for most analyses of the technology/organization relationship. In these analyses it rarely fairs well. As Ian McLoughlin notes: from around the start of the 1970s it has been almost obligatory for academic between begin technology to the and studies of relationship organisations with a determinism'. 'technological refutation of (McLoughlin, 1999:11) Indeed, so few theorists would want to be associatedwith technological determinism that one is hard pushed to find anyone openly claiming to be a technological determinist. Despite this, writers on the technology-organization relationship never determinist the technologically to tire assumptions underlying even seem of exposing the most enlightened of approaches. Of course, they are never far behind with their has been rigorously purged of any such taint. In these own, novel approach, which 25

accounts technological determinism is usually charactensed by two main features: a belief in the independence of technological development, and the belief that, once developed, these technologies proceed to impact upon society as an external cause. The two main characteristics of technological determinism then are independence and agency: the independence of technological development from human interests, and the belief that technology has an agency independent of human action (Smith and Marx, 1994). The position can be neatly summed up by Karl Marx's famous comment that: The hand-mill gives you society with the feudal lord; the steam-mill society with the industrial capitalist. (Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy, cited in Cohen, 1978: 144) Taken out of context, this seems to be saying that the development of particular forms of power generating technologies lead inevitably and immediately to particular forms of social organization. This thesis that the means of production determine, in the last instance, the mode or social relations of production has indeed been defended within certain strands of analytical Marxism, most notably by Gerry Cohen (1978) and Alan Carling (1993) though it is worth noting that even these models ultimately depend upon an assumption of social evolutionism and selection based in a kind of survival of the fittest that only obtains within capitalist societies, what Deleuze and Guattari by 'selective to the refer as pressures' exerted alliance capital (Deleuze and Guattari, 1983: 234). Perhaps more importantly, Marx wrote rather more on the subject of 26

social and technical change than this one sentence. The suggestion that this single quote successfully Capturesthe essenceof his thinking falls rather short of the mark' Indeed, in some respects, a primacy of the social can be said to be inevitable in any explicitly Marxist approach to the question of technology, such as labour process theory for example (Braverman, 1974; Thompson, 1989). If we accept Marx's (1976; 1985) labour theory of surplus value then technology is always marginalized in economic analysis, either as a means for cheapening labour, for work intensification, for extending the working day or simply for employing cheaper labour. In each case the possibility of a machinic surplus value is ignored because technology (as capital) is only ever considered as dead labour power (Marx, 1976). In other words, the only for implications is its analytic value of machinery political economy value or for labour and capital's continued attempts to extract a surplus value from labour-power. All of these points suggest a fundamental problem with technological determinism: it is not so much a serious theoretical position as a caricature of one. Indeed, it is find full-blown to theorist technology a contemporary of impossible professing a technological determinism. The criticisms of this perspective are numerous, but few far between. Amongst theory the most commonly are and proponents of such a determinists Woodward (1958; 1980), Blauner (1964), technological are cited Heilbroner (1972) and White (1962) yet even these writers would not subscribe to the kind of textbook characterisation of technological determinism outlined above. Blauner and Woodward, despite considering technology to be the most important it organizational change, still consider as only one amongst variable associated with 27

many. Heilbroner suggests that technology is a mediating factor rather than the determinant cause of social change (Grint and Woolgar, 1997: 12). Even Lynn White, who has suggestedthat the development of the stirrup led directly to western European Feudalism, qualifies his thesis by noting that: As our understanding of the history of technology increases,it becomes clear that a device new merely opens a door; it does not compel one to enter. The acceptanceor is invention, if it its implications the to rejection of an are realized or extent which accepted, depends quite as much on the conditions of a society, and upon the imagination of its leaders,as upon the nature of the technological item itself. (White, 1962: 28) Although the invention of a new technology still has a certain independencehere, its impact upon society is entirely dependentupon social and human factors. There is no has independent humans that technology suggestion an agency of and their society. With these kind of qualifications being made by even hardcore technological determinists, one is left questioning whether technological determinism has ever existed as a serious theoretical proposition. Smith and Marx distinguish between hard and soft approaches to technological determinism (1994). Using this distinction, the comments I have made so far relate determinist 'hard' they the to only call position. what Soft determinism, on the other hand, recognises the importance of technology whilst also acknowledging that technology is the product of human action. It asks questions such as 'why this 28

technology in this place, at this time, by these peopleT It seesthat technology is just one part of a complex web of social, cultural, economic and political factors and looks to these factors to explain technological change. Once a technology has developed, it can still have the power to drive history but this power is not entirely independent of society. The soft detenninist position is quite in line with the popular conception of technological change. For example, in her best-selling book Longitude Dava Sobel suggeststhat accurate maritime navigation was impossible for a long time becauseof the problem of measuring longitude (Sobel, 1996). Sobel traces several alternative solutions to this problem before describing its final resolution through the invention of an accurate,maritime chronograph. This timepiece required many factors before it There initial the was realised. was genius of the clockmaker John Harrison who first made an accurate clock capable of withstanding the rigours of sea-travel. Harrison's motivation to give so much of his life to this work came from the cash prize being offered by the government for the solution of the longitude problem, suggesting that the need for this solution was widely recognised before the invention came into being. On the other hand Harrison only succeededin making four accurate timepieces in this life. whole The longitude problem was not overcome by the use of maritime chronographs until John Arnold had worked out a way to manufacture them cheaply and quickly without sacrificing their accuracy. Interestingly, Arnold's solution was to break the clock-making process down into a number of discrete functions, enabling the construction of individual components to be out-sourced to specialists. This 29

meant that the clocks only came together in the final assembly workshop. As well as prefiguring the popularity of outsourcing in the late twentieth century, this division of labour demonstrates the difficulty of separating social organization from specific technological artefacts. Sobel's suggestion is that the maritime chronometer would have been longitude never a viable measureof without Arnold's reorganization of the labour process involved in clock-making. Despite this complex constellation of factors, individual be before had in the maritime to social and all of which place chronograph could take shape, once the solution was in place it was taken up almost Accurate universally. navigation at sea was now possible and this opened up a whole for long distance trade and travel. new potential A similarly loosely determinist perspective is also reflected in much of the writing on the information revolution, particularly in populist futurology and management texts such as Alvin Toffler's Future Shock (1970) or Bill Gates' Business @ the Speed of Thought (2000) but also in more conventionally academic texts such as Daniel Bell's The Coming of the Post-Industrial Society (1974; cf. Bell, 1980). If we consider the latter of these, then it is not hard to find parallels with the quote from The Poverty of Philosophy cited above: in Western society we are in the middle of a vast historical change in which social relations (which were property-bound), existing power structures (centred on narrow elites) and bourgeois culture (based on notions of restraint and delayed gratification) being The eroded. sources of the upheaval are scientific and are rapidly technological. 30

(Bell, 1974: 37) But Bell quickly acts to prevent his ideas being read as deternunist, by insisting upon the centrality of the polity in determining the outcomes of social change, even where initially triggered by technological change (Bell, 1974: 13). In the same way, Bill Gates' thesis may be determinist at the macro-social level: in the aggregate level but the technology that the of at information we organize, will revolutionise way the individual organization he is quite insistent upon the importance of managerial decision making. If managers don't adopt the new technologies then they will be left behind and go out of business. The end result is that Gates' analysis is, buy Microsoft or go out a marketing gimmick either a new system unsurprisingly, business. he is in Nevertheless, of not alone attesting to the importance of new technology as even a quick glance at the business section of almost any bookshop will demonstrate. The sheer volume of popular managerial publications on IT and its importance for revolutionising organization through e-commerce and the like is truly staggering. Of course, these ideas are nothing new in themselves. Tom Standage has suggested that the invention of the private telegraph line revolutionised work organization, bureaucracies large have been that scale would previously making possible inconceivable: began in large 1870s to lease private the companies several offices with starting lines for internal communication between different sites, since internal messages 31

could be centrally controlled from a head office. This led to the rise of large, hierarchical companies and financial organisations it big business know as we - today. (Standage,1998: 162) Standage's account of what he calls The Victorian Internet, like Sobel's account of the solution of the longitude problem or Bill Gates' prophesying on the impact of computers on work organization, suggest that technological determinism is pretty close to the truth. in the popular conception, Technological change leads inevitably to social change. At the close of his book, however, Standagepoints us in a somewhat different direction. By drawing comparisons between the Victorian telegraph and the intemet, he is able to point to the gap between the 'technological utopian' rhetoric contemporary with both inventions and the failure of the former to realise its promise of world peace and revolutionary change. At least since the telegraph, people have been pinning their hopes for 'progress' on new technology. This suggests that the popularity of technological determ-inism more of a social or cultural phenomenon than a serious theory of socio-technical change. 2 This last point is born out by Merrit Roe Smith and Leo Marx's (1994) thesis that technological determinism, even if it is a discredited theoretical position, nevertheless holds sway in the popular imagination. Smith (1994) gives examples from cultural fields as diverse as advertising, political thought, art, literature and journalism that have all contributed to the widespread belief that technology shapes society rather than the other way around. This is particularly noticeable in the assumption that 32

technological progress can be equated with social progress, a point that has so thoroughly permeated our cultural consciousness that a recent article in The Economist was able, without a trace of irony, to attack the critics of globalisation as neo-luddites comparable in their irrational desire to stop 6progress' (in this case increased flows of foreign direct investment and the spread of multi-national corporations) to the frame-breakers who sought to prevent the spread of rational technology at the height of the industrial revolution (Economist, 2001). In this article the idea of the objective march of scientific and technological progress is so selfevident that it can be used as a comparative rhetorical device to serve other ends. Of in doing course so the writers of The Economist actually highlight the political former. the specificities of If we accept this thesis then technological determinism needs to be redefined as "the human tendency to create the kind of society that invests technologies with enough power to drive history" (Smith and Marx, 1994: xiv). In other words, even technological determinism is socially constructed. Although I do not intend to examine this cultural important point account of technological determinism for this thesis is that the only currently in detail here, the form acceptable of technological determinism has reduced this position to a social construction and rehuman the at the centre of the question of technology. positioned In even this, the between the social and the technical, it becomes the relationship simplest account of impossible to clearly maintain the distinction between the two. Perhaps more importantly, this cultural move in technological determinism further sidelines the 33

question of technology itself, turning it into a subject for cultural studies and changing the question to one of human understanding and sense-making rather than taking non-human technology seriously in itself. These soft-determinist positions are a long way from the hard technological determinism with which we started this section. Leaving aside the cultural issues for a moment, and returning to the question of technology, once we acknowledge that factors influence the development of technology, the task of a researcher social can It is longer changes. no a case of describing technological effects, but of asking why particular technologies developed in particular places at particular times and what the altematives might have been. Strategic Choice The most simple, and one of the most widespread, responses to criticisms of technological determinism is to oppose it with some conception of strategic or favoured by (Huczynski In choice. such accounts, undergraduate and managerial Buchanan, 2001) and MBA (Scarbrough and Corbett, 1992) textbooks alike, theories between dualism laid in two technology poles of a out a continuum of are with technological determinism at one extreme and strategic/managerial choice at the 'choice' is have basic The the that technology approach can never contention of other. Management, especially senior, strategic management, are an independent effect. decisions faced about what technologies to adopt, how to use always with choices and them, where they will be implemented, who will have access to or be affected by them etc. Although no one would subscribe to an extreme choice perspective, as the 34

inherent limits of technology are usually accepted in such approaches as placing constraints upon possible choices, greater or lesser degrees of freedom are offered either by the flexibility of technologies, the adaptability of the organization, or the simple option of not adopting a particular innovation (Scarbrough and Corbett, 1992). The strategic choice perspective is usually attributed to John Child (1972; 1997) who initially developed the approach to counter contingency theory in general rather than technological determinism specifically. Of course, technology is often seen as a major contingency in such approaches (Woodward, 1958) but Child was also concerned with the organization's environment and markets more generally. More recently the approach has been utilised in the study of information technology by Buchanan and Boddy (1983). In general, the determinism/choice dualism reflects the more widespread philosophical debate - found in any philosophy primer (e.g. Warburton, 1992) - concerning the question of human freewill. In such debates, which whilst they have a long philosophical heritage have increased dawn fundamental the the since of mechanisation, questions are both philosophical freely humans is If hold to then to able act and are choose and ethical. it reasonable them responsible for their actions and choices. In this sense,contemporary juridical theory, to say nothing of organizational theory, is entirely dependent upon the concept of human freedom. On the other hand, if human choice and action is externally or is then a meaningless term. Leaving aside the pubresponsibility pre-determined, being determined if to treat others as they were free, philosophy paradox of people 35

both perspectives have interesting ideological implications. If technology is an job losses, independent force, in has then external, management no culpability deskilling and dehumanisation arising from the implementation of new technology. Here the parallels between the rhetoric of globalisation as a force beyond the control of either management or the national state economy are instructive (Bradley et al, 2000). On the other hand, if management is free to make choices about new technology and determine the outcome of implementation, then their role is assured. Managerial expertise is indispensable and management education has a role in teaching students how to think strategically about the question of new technology (Daniels, 1994). Of course, which of these legitimation techniques is employed depends upon the specific situation and the level of analysis so that in many ways, determinism and choice are not as far apart as they may at first seem. For Bill Gates, for example, managers are free to ignore his advice and wisdom but should they do bankruptcy in increasingly to they so and ruin an choose risk competitive forces determine fittest that the the marketplace where of natural selection only deployed by Here technological the change management survive. explanations of developed by Marxists the those analytical run close. gurus, and One reason why the freewill/determinism debate remains unresolved within does have What it its themselves to terms that are problematic. mean philosophy is determinant freedom? freewill? Is In have to a a or an example of reason choice, been debate have themselves the the challenged as a 'false philosophy, grounds of dualism' (Deleuze, 1991; Bergson, 1910), but leaving this issue aside for the moment, 36

it should already be clear that this dichotomy is largely redundant for the social scientist. As soon as the question of choice is raised, we want to know why a certain in heavily Why did invest the choice was made. so mobile-phone companies bandwidth they knew they couldn't use for years to come? The demands of investors that companies stay at the cutting edge of technology is at least one explanation. Personal aggrandisement from being associated with a successful system implementation might be another. In a case study of an ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) system implementation in an oil refinery in the North of England I found that one reason for middle managementbeing so gung ho about the system was the firms it leave IT them to the consultancy opportunities gave company and set up Leaving former (Land, 1998). to to ten times their aside going on earn up salaries has for let that turn to the moment, us one approach personal political explanations tried to develop a consistent and coherent explanation of technological change at the labour level of analysis: process theory. societal Labour Process Theory Whilst the soft technological determinist positions outlined in the last section place technology itself at the heart socio-technical change, other perspectives build upon the insight that technology, however it is generated, is not always taken up by influencing disappears One society at all. without ever organizations and sometimes first formulated by from labour Harry theory, process such approach comes Braverman to develop Marx's thinking on the relations between capital and labour (Braverman, 1974). For Braverman the defining feature of technological machinery but by it, by it is those that operate a separateclass of capitalists who not owned is 37

who seek to use it, not only to increaseproductivity, but to ensure greater control over workers' labour power: Machinery comes into the world not as the servant of 'humanity, ' but as the instrument of those to whom the accumulation of capital gives the ownership of the machines. The capacity of humansto control the labor processthrough machinery is seized upon by managementfrom the beginning of capitalism as the prime means but by be by direct the owners the whereby production may controlled not producer and representatives of capital. Thus, in addition to its technical function of increasing the productivity of labor which would be a mark of machinery under any social system - machinery also has in the capitalist system the function of divesting the massof workers of their control over their own labor. (Braverman, 1974: 193, emphasisin original) For Braverman, then, technology does have some intrinsic features, such as the tendency to improve productivity labour the and enable greater control of process. These features are only abstract however, and are always made concrete under specific conditions within a specific social system. In the capitalist social system, introduced technology primarily to increase managers' control over the new is The labour more that managers can use technology to automate process. workers' labour deskill labour, they the the can regulate expenditure of more easily and power detennine have In less to their the own work. short, technology and scope workers becomes a means for managementto resolve the inherent indeterminacy of the wagelabour bargain within the capitalist mode of production (cf. Marx, 1976: 492-553). 38

It is important to note that from their roots in Braverman's work, labour process perspectives do not insist that everything revolves around profitability. The simple increase of control over workers' activities is sufficient to recommend a technology to Already then, the social factors shaping technological development are management. They determined factors like increased by quite complex. are not solely economic productivity or profit, but by the existence of a subordinate working class and a managerial class who exist only to serve the interests of capital. Given these social however, the tendency of new technology to enable increased managerial conditions, control will be realised through the deskilling of work. Braverman's main conclusion from that takes technology, the worker and is autonomy away under capitalism, it in hands forever forward boundaries the the places of management, pushing of Taylorism. Indeed, for Braverman, Taylorism is the paradigmatic capitalist technology as its fundamental premise is the separation of conception and execution former latter by the the the making a strictly managerial prerogative. and control of The idea that Taylorism is a technology points toward the difficulty defining technology. Taylorism is more commonly of clearly thought of as a form of (re)organization than as a technology as such. Although it might be characterised by the technology of the stop-watch, it is not a clearly definable machine, or technological artefact itself. Instead it is primarily a set of principles to guide difficulty This (Taylor, 1967). of clearly separating the social managerial practice later. be to technical the returned and will 39

In essencethen, labour process theory replaces a strictly technological determinism form 58). Despite determinism (McLoughlin, 1999: with a of social and economic this, the theory holds on to an element of technological determinism insofar as it talks of the intrinsic potential and tendency of technology. David Noble has developed this (Noble, in his America in tools perspective study of automated machine post-war 1999). In this account Noble extends the insights of labour process theory to examine the actual design and development, as well as implementation, of new technology. Not only is the application of new technology indicative of management's distrust of labour but this ethic works its way into the design of new technology: The distrust of human beings by engineersis a manifestation of capital's distrust of labor. The elimination of human error and uncertainty is the engineering expression of capital's attempt to minimize its dependenceupon labor by increasing its control over production. The ideology of engineering, in short, mirrors the antagonistic design Insofar like the of capitalist production. as of machinery, social relations ideology, it is informed by tools, this reflects the social relations of machine production. (Noble, 1999: 168) Here the statement is clear: technology reflects the social relations of production. This is only insofar as it is informed by ideology, however. Rather than get into the is I Noble is ideology, that, to although all want note sometimes whole question of he (e. McLoughlin, 1999), is labour theorist g. also quite aware process classified as a in he For issues this technology. that example, case points not only to shape of other 40

the vertical relations of production, as realised in the managerial control of workers, but also to the horizontal relations of production where large producers vie for lucrative contracts from the airforce. The protection given during new technology development by the existence of large military contracts, led companies to develop complex production systems which put technical specification before return on 3. investment This led to increasingly expensive technologies which in turn excluded smaller producers from adopting the technology once it had been developed. In this sense, the existence of the military contracts, combined with the large manufacturers' desire to keep the lion's share of the market, led to the development of highly technical, specialised and expensive machine tools, rather than simpler, cheaper and flexible more ones. More recently, Alan Bryman has developed elements of labour process theory in his American industry in the the early twentieth century case study analysis of animation (Bryman, 2000). Bryman's study of the development and diffusion of cel animation techniques raises several questions both pertinent to definitions of technology and to labour process perspectives on socio-technical change. 11In the first instance, the technology that Bryman considers is more a set of techniques than a specific technological artefact like an industrial machine. Although it was patented by its Bray, Randolph the technique uses only the relatively simple and widely inventor, in technology sheet order to superimpose animated characters of acetate available Across fixed background. led this technique the once industry, was adopted over a it to a division of labour on the animation production line and the separation and 41

deskilling of many of the tasks previously undertaken by a single artist. In each case this change in the production process followed Taylorist principles and brought animation closer to the production line. This seems to support the labour process belief that new technologies will always be developed with a view to increased control of labour. Indeed, this very principle was written into the patents taken out on cel animation and was seen from the outset as its main advantage over alternative animation systems: The key point that emergesfrom this discussionis that the early animation techniques were designed not just with labour-saving in mind but also with the application of scientific management and Fordist ideas. The mode of organization that Bray developed was incorporated and enhancedby one studio after another. As a result, Bray's practices becameinstitutionalized. (Bryman, 2000: 462) Bryman goes beyond labour process theory, however, as he asks exactly how it was that this particular technology became adopted and led to the almost universal imposition of deskilling. In the first instance he notes that not all studios followed the in Although tasks the mundane were rationalised each case, the most same path. differed from the production process studio to group who maintained control of kept directorial in it In the power writer whilst others storyboard studio. some cases was the animators. 42

Borrowing from institutional theory, Bryman suggests that the adoption of a technology lending itself to Taylorism was not just a rational decision based on profit projection but also depended upon the need for legitimacy. At the time when cel technology was developed, the animation industry was still in its infancy, so the need to be perceived as a legitimate organization was high. One way to do this was to keep up with the cutting edge of technological development within the industry as a whole. Once the cel system was adopted as the industry standard, it would be hard for any serioUSIY4. it be to taken animation company not use and still Like David Noble's study of machine tool development, Bryman's account of the industry's animation adoption of the cel system suggeststhat whilst the control of the labour process is clearly a major factor in the design, development and adoption of factor it is technology, new only one amongst many. By moving beyond the simple increase of control on the line, both Noble and Bryman extend the labour process perspective to a more thoroughgoing form of the social shaping of technology. It is to this perspective that we now turn. Social Constructivism Once technological determinism or pure choice have been rejected, the theorist of technology has to start asking questions about the other forces that shape and developments As influenced by labour technological change. influence process theory have shown, however, it is inadequateto simply reduce these other forces to a single factor like cost, class or managerial control. Instead there are a variety of factors that affect technology and technological social and organizational 43 change.

Broadly speaking, approaches that recognise the influence of social factors in this (Grint be 'social together the term way can grouped constructivism' general of under and Woolgar, 1997; McLoughlin, 1999). Social constructivism is a rather vague term that has gained an increasingly has it 1960s the the often where widespread acceptancewithin social sciences since been taken as a response to the limitations of traditional, positivist organization theory. In relation to technology, the general term 'social constructivism' covers a number of specific, as well as a more general approach to studying technology. In general, it is simply the recognition that the social in some way influences In this sense it is simply technological change. determinism. Once this general proposition a rejection of technological is accepted, however, rather more both in theoretical and methodological, arise relation to the study specific questions, have In to technology technology. a number of quite specific approaches of relation been developed within this general rubric, including the social and economic shaping of technology (SEST) (McLoughlin, 1999; Heap et al, 1995) and the social (SCOT) (Bijker technology of construction et al, 1987). Off the back of these latter, the more radical perspectives such as actorapproaches and particularly Law, (Latour, 1987; 1992) (TAT) (ANT) technology text theory and as network (Grint and Woolgar, 1997; Joerges and Czarniawska, 1998; Hutchby, 2001) have been developed. We will return to consider these last in more detail shortly, but before that we need to address the first two, arguably more popular, approaches in more detail. 44

In its broad sense, social constructivism can go one of two ways. One direction based labour beyond theory's effectively extends a simple class process insight analysis to consider gender (Cockburn, 1983; 1985; Webster, 1996), race (Dyer, 1997) and other social factors that influence the development of technology. In this sense, social structural factors determine which technologies are adopted and how they are used. As in the above example from David Noble however, social factors not only select compatible technologies but give rise to an ethos of engineering and design that follows this same logic by designing specific technologies that reflect these social structural biases. As such, the operation of these biases might be quite for those perpetuating them. unconscious Such approaches start from a set of follow factors the then these assumptions about society and social structure, as they influence the development of technology and are built into specific systems or artefacts. In this sense, they follow the social construction of artefacts from the outside in (i. e. from society into the technological artefact). Technology in this view, develops within a society that already exists and has determinant structures. In general we can call such an approach the social shaping of technology (SST) (MacKenzie and Wajcman, 1999) or the social and economic shaping of technology (SEST) (McLoughlin, 1999). The alternative is to start with a specific artefact and then ask what factors influenced its construction. Whereas the first direction is oriented to macro-social, structural phenomena such as class and gender, this second approach adopts a more micro- 45

social perspective. Rather than starting with social groupings given by the social structure, as with management and workers, this second approach takes a more ethnomethodological view and looks at the social groupings that arise out of negotiations around the new technology. If these groups happen to reflect the same divisions as more macro-social explanations, then this is something to be explained rather than an explanation itself. Structure in this view, is always a precarious result of interaction, never the determinant cause of interaction. This perspective we can give the general name of the social construction of technology (SCOT) (Bijker, Hughes, and Pinch, 1987). In contrast to SST, SCOT follows the social construction from technology the inside out (i. e. from the technological artefact out to the social of groupings and organizations that develop around it and thereby contribute to its formation) (McLoughlin, 1999). Both SST and SCOT extend and develop the insights raised by labour process perspectives on technology. In a sense SST emphasises the macro-structural dynamics influencing technological change, whilst SCOT starts from a more microsocial perspective to extrapolate to more macro-scale features from the ground up. Both approaches raise certain questions however. On the one hand John Law has determinism, tends to that suggested repeat a social constructivism generally not a technological determinism certainly, but rather a social determinism (Law, 1987). More recently this point has been picked up by Keith Grint and Steve Woolgar, who (Grint for Woolgar, 1997). In technicism these and a residual criticise perspectives effect, although both approaches acknowledge that technological artefacts are 46

constructed in a thoroughly social manner they are happy to then accept that these artefacts can go on to have a relatively definite effect. Whilst this criticism is more applicable to SST, SCOT raises its own questions. If we different that accept social groupings emergeto appropriate and interpret technologies in a way that suits their own interests then we have to ask the question of what limits there are on such an interpretation. If we accept the idea of interpretative flexibility (Pinch and Bijker, 1987), then we are also accepting that there are limits on how far a flex. kind (1997), Grint is Woolgar For technology this a of specific and again can technicism creeping into what should properly be a social explanation. Before we go on to consider Grint and Woolgar's response to these issues, and their interpretivist perspective of 'thoroughgoing constructivism' or 'technology as text', it is worth considering one of this approach's predecessors. Actor-Network Theory Actor-network theory (ANT) addresses the issues raised above in two ways. In the first instance, it responds to the SST/SCOT distinction by refusing to differentiate dimension In their pioneering paper, where many of the analysis along a of scale. first Michel Callon Bruno Latour ANT suggested, and explicitly principles of were develop the to an approach to the study of society that would be made attempt On (Callon hand Latour, 198 1). in the this meant one and analysis symmetrical its developing a set of tools that could be used at both the macro and the micro level of for integrated On hand, the they thereby analysis. a more other analysis, allowing distinction dualism by the as an suggesting that, as a priori refused social/technical 47

Bruno Latour would later put it, 'technology is society made durable' (Latour, 1991: 103). Both of these points are suggestive of a concept that Latour calls the principle of be (Latour, 1987). Not symmetry only should accounts of socio-technical change symmetrical in relation to the levels of analysis that they are treating, but also to the distinction between the non-human and the human in social organization. The first of these elements is spelled out most explicitly in Callon and Latour's early 'Unscrewing develop Big Leviathan' the they collaboration a set of where methodological tools for studying society regardless of the apparent scale of the being Using Hobbes' Leviathan, they the phenomenon considered. example of suggest that the head of state is able to operate as a social actor because he can 'black-box' all of the interests that are represented by him (i. e. his subjects) into a set laws (Callon Latour, 198 1). of codified and rules of government etc and The most important point that Callon and Latour make in this paper however is the formation in large human to technology the they central role of accord scale, society: the Leviathan. Taking issue with ethnomethodology, they suggest that the society of micro interactionist studies pays insufficient attention to the technological materiality daily life. By of emphasising the contestation and negotiation of order within social interaction, ethnomethodology comes closer to studying baboons than humans. In a baboon troop, the social order and troop hierarchy is constantly contested and subject to challenge at almost any time. Nevertheless,the troop is not a chaotic, fluid mess. It 48

does have an order with a degree of stability that inheres over time. This partial Callon is distinct from however. For human the and stability quite stability of society Latour, the distinctive feature of human society is that it is made up of more than human beings. As homofaber, the tool using, tool making animal, humans are able to 'black-box' elements of the negotiated order with a degree of enduring stability. Hierarchy is reinforced by uniforms and weapons to present a material and symbolic likely, less for further in that the challenge order stands negotiated order, making though certainly not impossible. Codes of law are written down to create an object that stands in for local contestations, effectively foreclosing debate. The black-boxes that are thereby created, however leaky they may ultimately be, provide a degree of stability such that they can be added together as the building blocks of a more complex social organization than baboons could hope to develop. That language and fundamental is tools this writing are within procedure a point that we shall return to later in this thesis, but for now it is only important to note that Callon and Latour develop the social constructivist insight that society is an achievement, and combine it with the realisation that non-human technologies and inscriptions are as important in this achievement as human beings (Latour, 1987). Although ANT has received increasing attention within organization studies recently (Hassard and Law, 1999; Bloomfield, 1995; Hassard, Law and Lee, 1999), in (Brigham the to study of complex particularly relation information systems and Corbett, 1997; Walsham, 1997; Bloomfield et al, 1992; Doolin and Lowe, 2002; Lilley, 1998), its reception within the study of technology has not gone unchallenged. 49

By insisting upon the principle of symmetry in the analysis of social organization ANT has gone the furthest in unsettling the conventionally assumed dichotomy between the social and the technical of all the approaches addressedin this review. Before considering these points in more detail however, we need to address the levelled criticisms against the approach in what is undoubtedly the most sustained criticism of technological determinism to date: Grint and Woolgar's Technology as Text. Technology As Text Keith Grint and Steve Woolgar's (1997) book The Machine At Work is important for it, Not is a number of reasons. only as we shall see, the most systematic and sustained been determinism date but it has the subject of technological to criticism of also significant discussion within the social sciences. In part this is due to the energy and I books Grint framework Keith the to support activity of authors, with using a similar his influential analysis of 'the arts of leadership' (Grint, 2000) and Steve Woolgar fraine ideas their to the research conducted within the ESRC's 'Virtual using SocietyT project, of which he was the director (Woolgar, 2002). In their book, Grint linear development Woolgar the narrative of of theories of technology and set up a that stretches from a simplistic technological determinism, through various kinds of inevitably, to terminate, social constructivism perhaps with their own perspective: technology as text. At each step of the way, according to these writers, theoretical but 'residual is technicism' remains to contaminate even the most a progress made, for Actor-network thinking technology. theory, on seemingly radical example. in their 50

account is ultimately dependent upon technical facts when explaining technological developments (1997: 30-3 1). Taking issue with Michel Callon's account of the attempted development of an Woolgar by de Grint Electricite France (EDF) (Callon, 1986b), and electrical car his finally dependent failure that the suggest upon a explanation of project's is technical fact about the chemistry of voltaic cells. In this study, Callon brings together a complex web, or network, of 'actors' that include the former automanufacturing giant Renault, now reduced to the role of car-body manufacturer; the social theory of Alain Touraine who predicted the rise of a post-consumer society less large, the where people would put emphasis on ownership of expensive and driven diminishing the wasteful status symbols such as petrol cars; seemingly ever looked likely dry to supply of oil, which run at any moment; the government, who be interested in improving to the environment of cities; the were presumed hypothesised customers who would choose to buy these new vehicles; and the fuel both distance in the terms that the performance, of cells would provide and speed for that these to the the project's car, potential available electric users would require Callon's beauty The and power of analysis of this case is the emphasis that viability. he places on the importance of EDF's ability to enrol each of these key actors, and hold them in place as a fragile network of aligned interests in order to bring their into Unfortunately, the existence. of course, the network did project electrical car Callon's hold despite acknowledgement that a number of issues contributed not and to this failure - the discovery of new oil fields, the production of more efficient and 51

environmentally friendly combustion engines, the reluctance of Renault to accept its reduced role as a mere body manufacturer and the successof Bourdieu's sociology is Touraine his Grint Woolgar that that over ultimately of explanation and suggest dependent upon one factor: the failure of the catalysts in the batteries that were to do (Grint failed Woolgar, 31). Once 1997: to the job the the power car catalysts and failure. doomed to to them the the ascribed as a part of network, whole network was Without them, the power supply would neither be reliable enough, nor supply sufficient power and longevity to meet the needs and expectations of customers used to the convenience of petrol driven vehicles. Renault then seized upon this and the aforementioned factors to reassert their importance as a major vehicle manufacturer and the network that was the electric car unravelled. For Grint and Woolgar, this dependenceupon a technical fact is a perfect example of 'residual they to the technicism' what as refer (Grint and Woolgar, haunting even this most progressive of theories of technology. 1997: 31) Callon, and ANT in technical to effectively explain change a more generally, remains unable thoroughly anti-essentialist manner because their explanations of innovation and facts deus brought in, dependent technical the of as upon ex machina change remains it were, from outside the social stage to explain social change (Grint and Woolgar, 1997: 2-3). Instead of asking questions about the limits of the technological Grint Woolgar that the the electric car, and suggest was actor-network components of that Callon should have treated the car, or at least the batteries and catalyst, as a text 52

which was read, or interpreted, in quite specific ways by the human actors involved in constructing the network: Who says catalysts had this unfortunate tendency, how and why did they say so, and does this particular version prevail? why (Grint and Woolgar, 1997: 3 1) The effect of this shift of emphasis is what Grint and Woolgar call a thoroughgoing constructivism, facts All the to of a or anti -essentialism. an essence or appeals technological artefact are vetoed. Instead the black-box of technology has to be it. have to the that opened congealed within expose always social relations Technological facts then must always be explained by reference to human interpretations, social interests and political agendas. This is all well and good and durable' Latour's 'technology is that to even remains close notion society made (Latour, 1991). Indeed, the idea that technology can be conceived as a black-box fundamental is itself be to this approach which can opened up and understood (Kendall and Wickham, 1999). Nevertheless, where Grint and Woolgar depart from the ANT perspective of Callon and Latour is that they do not fully apply the principle in (Latour, 1987) their analysis. of symmetry As noted above, in their seminal paper of 1981, Callon and Latour insist that the baboons better human to the than suited study of methods of ethnomethodology are human is for society as much composed of the nonsociety one very simple reason: human (for short hand let us use 'technology) as it is of the human. This is not a 53

minor point in their paper, but perhaps its most fundamental. The process of blackboxing social interaction in the non-human is what enables the qualitative shift to a different type of social organization. Indeed, this form of social organization is quite what enables the appearance of the phenomenon of the organization, traditionally taken as the subject of organization studies (Cooper and Law, 1995). It is this shift in the ontology of the social, as we move from baboon troops to human society, that means the human is always more than human: By the term 'actor' we mean, from now on, the serniotic definition by iýý Greimas in Dictionnaire de simiotique (Paris: Hachette, 1979): "whatever unit of discourse is invested of a role', like the notion of force, it is in no way limited to 'human'. (Callon and Latour, 1981: 301-302, n.8) This has a number of implications, not least amongst which is the question of the (human) subject. Traditionally, both in liberal humanist approaches to the social sciencesand within organizational studies, the subject of these disciplines is assumed to be the individual human being (Hayles, 1999; Parker, 1998; 2000a; Willmott, 1998). In Organizational Behaviour, this is reflected in the individual psychological idea 'organizational behaviour': the very of assumptionsunderpinning Organizations of course do not 'behave'. Only people can be said to behave. The term organizational behaviour is a verbal shorthandwhich refers to the activities and interactions of people in organizational settings like factories, schools, hospitals and banks. 54

(Huczynski and Buchanan, 1991: 2- emphasisadded) In Callon and Latour's thinking, and as this thesis will argue, taking the question of technology seriously problematises this conception of the human so thoroughly that this 'subject' of the discipline disappears. This decentring of the human subject raises other issueshowever. As Michel Foucault has famously noted, the human subject is the product of disciplinary apparatuses that simultaneously form the academic disciplines of the humanities (Foucault, 1977: 141). In decentring, or at least questioning, this figure we necessarily challenge the formations of the academic disciplines as we understandthem. Not only was Foucault uncomfortably situated in relation to the disciplines, rejected by historians and philosophers alike for his perceived lack of proper methodological rigour, but Callon and Latour insist upon a necessarily transdisciplinary approach to the study of social both Interestingly, in Foucault Callon to this phenomenon. relation question and and Latour cite Deleuze and Guattari's Anti-Oedipus as a key inspiration for their study (Deleuze and Guattari, 1983; Callon and Latour, 1981: 302 n.9; Foucault, 1977: 309, Deleuze Guattari's 2). Callon Latour, is For the of and and upshot argument that we n. can no longer clearly separate the spheres of psychology and economics, a point that for insistence both in their the study of a common upon methodology is reflected 4micro' and 'macro' scale social phenomenon, and in Latour's later insistence upon the impossibility of separating the social and political representation of subjects in the laboratory (Latour, from 1993). the the polity scientific representationof objects in 55

For organization studies, which has itself been proclaimed a trans-, inter-, or neodisciplinary area of study (Burrell et al, 1994) this is an important point 5. Are we to focus on the micro-level of the individual borrowing from psychology and social bounded) (clearly human is the the object of our studies? subject psychology where Should we look instead to the macro-social, and borrow our analyses from sociology humanities from Or leaf the take and consider the and political economy? should we a loop? hen-neneutic Fundamental interpretation kind to text, to a of open social as a in these questions are what we think the human is, a point that we shall return to later in this thesis through the work of Deleuze and Guattari. But first we must return to the 'technology Grint Woolgar's technology as text', an approach question of and and last that adopts of these three options. which Facts or Interpretation? To Grint and Woolgar (1997), ANT's dependenceupon technical facts is entirely unacceptable. Going beyond a simple rejection of technological explanation to disavow any appeal to external facts, whether social or technical, they effectively reframe the question of technology within a dualism of positivism versus interpretivism. Where both psychological and sociological explanations usually depend upon some kind of facts, either about 'the social' or 'the mind', Grint and Woolgar suggest that we can never know the external world in itself - including and especially technology. The best that the social sciences can hope for is to understand the ways in which people read, or interpret, events and actions to generate a narrative Grint As to the technology, study of and Woolgar dub this of explanation. applied approach 'radical' or 'thoroughgoing constructivism', 56 or more specifically

'technology as text' (Grint and Woolgar, 1997). By tuming seemingly hard facts and objects into texts, and focusing attention upon the ways in which these texts are read, Grint and Woolgar perform a textual turn that shifts analyses of technology away from 'the facts' and onto issuesof interpretation. The value of this textual approach to the study of technology has been questioned by some theorists who are concerned that, in seeking to remedy the worst excessesof determinism, anti-essentialism pushes things too far in the opposite direction. In a in lines, has Ian Hutchby (2001) that these rejecting suggested recent critique along technicism in all its fonns, Grint and Woolgar pay inadequate attention to the materiality of technology which, even if it is not determinate, nevertheless has an independent reality that Hutchby characterises as 'affordances'. Although they are know impossible to perhaps with any certainty, these affordances still act to constrain limit be interpretations the that and may given to specific technologies. In this sense Hutchby shares with critical realism a concern that constructivism in general is disappear (Ackroyd that the engaged in a conjuring act makes real world and Fleetwood, 2000). This disappearanceleads to an impoverished account of social leverage from Archimedian is point of critical phenomenon where no available which to prise apart rhetoric and reality (Thompson and Ackroyd, 1995). A similar line of criticism is pursued by Bernward Joergesand Barbara Czamiawska, by to the who suggest a softer approach question of material reality proposing the metaphor of the palimsest when thinking about texts (Joerges and Czar-mawska, 57

1998). Borrowing from Freud, Czarniawska and Joerges develop his idea of the magical writing pad, on which children can inscribe and reinscribe on a piece of Of by lifting the paper over a wax pad, erasing simply paper and starting again. in inscription It the course, previous is never entirely removed. remains embedded the beneath wax so that previous inscriptions can be uncovered. It is this sense of a in fills Czamiawska Joerges that trace the a permanent suggest role of materiality and textual approach to technology and delimits the possibility for open and free rewriting interpretation. and In this thesis I want to pursue a rather different line however, and suggest that rather than going too far, the 'thoroughgoing' textual approach to technology organization needs to go even further. In their work, Grint and Woolgar and are questioning the nature of agency and causation itself. Their concerns extend beyond whether technology is autonomous to ask whether it is even useful to think in terms facts, determinate of concrete external causation and agencies. The Problem of Agency The question of technology and the relation between the social and the technical in the social scienceshinges upon the question of agency. What causes socio-technical change? Does technology have agency as the technological determinists would have it? If so, then what causes technology? Can social interests or structures explain the content of a technological artefact as the labour process and social shaping perspectives suggest? Or is it rather a matter of individual human agency as the strategic choice theorists would have it? As we saw, the main criticism levelled 58

against technological determinism is that it attributes agency to technological First, issues. This idea technology two what are the artefacts. of as agent raises main Second, that these at what assumptions concepts of causation and agency? underlie level if any can technology be a self-acting, self-motivating cause independent of human action? The second of these, technological artefact as autonomous actor, has only recently become a seriously pressing concern. If we think of technology in terms of inanimate tools then it seems fairly obvious that technology is not self-acting. We would not think of charging a gun or a knife with murder, however convincing the pleas of a modem day Bill Sykes. As industrial technologies developed and were no longer dependentupon human power for their motivation the question became a little more confused. Even clockwork automata gave Descartes pause to question what difference there was between an animal body and a machine (Descartes, 1986). In Fritz Lang's film, Metropolis, the scientist Rotwang creates a life-like robot that seemsto act of her own volition, even if she ultimately only carries out her creator's orders. Frankenstein gives a slightly different twist and the creation learns to think for himself (Shelley, 1994). More and act recently, the advent of cybernetics has led to the development of self-regulating mechanisms that can continue to carry out a programme of quite simple tasks without any external intervention from humans (Wiener, 1961; Heims, 1993). In the extreme, this idea is taken up in Philip K. Dick's short story 'The Gun' (Dick, 1999). In this tale a space craft is exploring an uninhabited planet when it is shot down from the surface. The craft crash lands and 59

the occupants search out the source of the attack, an enormously powerful gun, predismantle incoming The the gun, the to ship crew of programmed attack any craft. repair their ship and fly back to bring more people to explore this new city now that however, leave, defences have been dismantled. As the robot they soon as safely its big, just is itself The life the to one city gun. and set about repairing mechanics come humans from The defending itself invasion. who originally cybernetic system set on its irrelevant it to this programme. carry out set system up are now as continues Perhaps more pressing is the question of bio-technology. With the prospect of just human beings genetically engineered seemingly around the comer, we can no longer assume that technology is necessarily inanimate (Gray, 2002; Haraway, 1997). The boundaries between technology and technologist are far from clear cut if we bio-tech consider as the paradigmatic technology rather than the industrial machine. The first question, that of the nature of agency and causation itself, is more fundamental. The question is not whether technology has become autonomous but whether it is even useful to think in terms of external causation and self-contained idea have This is brought us the technology the text to agency. of as seems where furthest. Grint and Woolgar (1997) reject all previous accounts of technology and socio-technical change as containing a kernel of technicism. Such accounts appeal to some concrete, objective fact about the external world, whether technology itself or social factors made objective through technology, in order to explain change. Instead, Grint and Woolgar insist that everything is interpretation. To understand 60

socio-technical change we have to look at how users and designers of technology interpret what an artefact is and what it can do. The danger with this approach then, is not that technology disappears from the account, but that without care and be in. What to the attention, an essentialism of considered subject may sneak needs further is the question of human agency and the nature of those assumed to be interpreting, the technological text. To consider this question, the next reading, or chapter goes 'after' this elusive human subject. 61

Chapter 2- 'After'the Human Man is neither a natural fact nor a product of his own creativity, but a cyborg even then, an android straight off the production lines of modernity's disciplines. What believe is he has been figure to tragic the to this programmed makes so extent which in his own autonomy. Marked by the "meticulous observation of detail, and at the for the control and use of these things, time small same a political awarenessof bom. humanism " doubt, from the trifles, was no man of modern men... such (Sadie Plant, 1997: 99 - citing Nfichel Foucault, 1977: 141) Are we coming or going? Although there are significant differences between competing approaches to the have technology the social as seen, what most question of within sciences, we theorists of technology will agree on is that technological theoretically impoverished and politically determinism is a doctrine has long that and conservative justifiably been discredited. Nevertheless, almost all new theories of technology feel the need to position themselves against technological determinism, an opposition that reached what is perhaps its apogee with the publication of Grint and Woolgar's (1997) The Machine at Work. Emblematic of a more generalised 'textual turn' in book this organization studies, raised questions about the possibility of pursuing a thoroughgoing and symmetrical anti-essentialism through text/reader based versions however, After this turn, of social constructivism. considering we were left initially less the technology that about question of wondering opened this investigation, and more about the seemingly elusive figure of the human who is behind it. In this section of the thesis we technology, to and simultaneously opposed 62

continue to go 'after' this human subject in a number of ways. In the first instance we just human in the to what 'the continue will our pursuit of ascertain an attempt human' might be. Going back to Descartes (1986) and the schism between subjects and objects that Bruno Latour (1993) has suggestedis fundamentally characteristic of modemity (though working with different thinkers), this chapter will consider again the limits of the radical doubt that characterise Grint and Woolgar's (1997) textual turn. Finding that simply doubting the existence or truth of objects is insufficient if by to the chapter continues we are retain an element of symmetry within our analysis, tuming to Nietzsche (1968; 1989; 1994) to develop a more symmetrical antifacts both that the of and the essentialist scepticism objective world questions knowing subject of epistemology. So why would we, like Descartes, assume that there is a relatively centred subject T knows (Descartes, For Nietzsche 1986)? thinks the answer to this question who and lies in the grammatical structures of language itself (Nietzsche, 1989; 1994). Considering these ideas further leads to an inversion of the textual turn so that rather than 'technology as text' we have 'texts as technologies'. This approach, I argue, is Hayles (1999) language in line Katherine 'primary conception very much of as a with human to the and yet intrinsic to it. pros(e)thesis': something simultaneously external If we pursue this logic however, then we can no longer talk of a relationship between the human and technology (including language) as there is no longer a pretechnological human subject to be placed into a relationship with a textual/technological outside. Also, as useful as it may be, this inversion continues to 63

If latter. former the than technology text the simply equate and rather only privileging language to the to and technology then we want maintain what is specific spheresof Guattari's (1987) from Deleuze Borrowing perhaps another approach is required? and reading of anthropology, the relationship between language and technology is between in distinction technology to the reworked such a way as maintain essential and language by using them as the two poles of a dualism with no reference to a human subject per se. This development of what Deleuze and Guattari call the anthropomorphic stratum (1987: 60) unfortunately raises other questions, primarily relating to the issue of representation and the distinction of words and things, but also fundamentally human in this to the and after perhaps more why we would want go - 'after' As Deleuze Guattari the to of way at all. such, and point an alternative reading human. Acknowledging their debt to Nietzsche we should recognise that Just as his, and Zarathustra's, regular announcementof the death of God actually pointed to the more disturbing death of man and the need to 'overcome' humanity (Nietzsche, 1969), so Deleuze and Guattari's question 'Who does the earth think it isT (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 39) prefigures their questioning of anthropocentric arrogance: 'Who does man think he isT (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 63). This question points to the following 'after' the the the sections and question of what M-Ight come importance of human: the post-human or trans-human after-man. Bringing together these two leads in the questions of representation and post-human us to the next chapter and the be S. William Burroughs seen as a continued and whose work can writing of 64

least human, from limits both to the the at concerted effort escape of writing and partly through the use of technology (Hayles, 1999). Did we miss a slip-road back at the textual turn? What I have been calling the textual turn is essentially a rejection of any appeal to 'the facts' as a source of external explanation for organizational or social how In discussion however, this idea was technology phenomenon. our of we saw premised upon a narrow conception of the social that ultimately rejected the human/non-human symmetry of actor-network theory in favour of a text based social This long takes ontology. approach us a way as a critique of more positivist strands within organization theory and represents a seemingly extreme version of the social constructivist approaches that now dominate critical perspectives on organization studies. Opposed to positivism (and the technologically determinist variant thereof) the textual approach occupies the subjective pole of an objective/subjective dualism. This recognition of subjectivity has been widely discussed within the literature on methodology, focusing on questions of reflexivity, distorting whether as a potentially factor to be minimised or something to be recognised as an inevitable feature of any academic inquiry and therefore to be embraced. In relation to our concerns in this thesis however, this subjectivity raises the question of what this 'subject' is. It is my argument that whilst Grint and Woolgar successfully critique the positivistic assumptions underlying appeals to an external technological essence, a deus ex it (Grint Woolgar, 1997: 4), they and a truly thoroughgoing antimachina as put essentialism also needs to engagereflexively with the counter-assumptions of agency 65

Nietzsche As interpretation. interpreter the mobilised when positing an as source of Grint Woolgar: it, hundred before and put writing over one years Against positivism, which halts at phenomena- "There are onlyfacts" -I would say: No, facts is precisely what there is not, only interpretations. We cannot establish any fact "in itself': perhapsit is folly to want to do such a thing. "Everything is subjective," you say; but even this is interpretation. The "subject" is behind invented it is what and projected not something given, something added and there is. - Finally, is it necessaryto posit an interpreter behind the interpretation? Even this is invention, hypothesis. (Nietzsche, 1968: 267, emphasisin original) From scientistic positivism (technological determinism) theorists have moved to a interpretivism position of radical (the textual turn). They have argued against an but doing falling back "the facts", in they acceptance of so risk upon an all uncritical too human agency that lies behind the process of interpretation. Before a concern with the objective world of technology can be replaced with an exclusive focus on the subjective dimensions of interpretation, a more rigorous analysis of the subject is it required, and with a reappraisal of agency and social change. Subjects and Objects As is often the case, the most interesting question when faced with philosophical dualisms such as determinism versus freedom or positivism versus interpretivism is to I do By lies between it is this two. the that not mean searching for a kind of ask what happy medium, a 'third way' compromise taking a bit from each. 66 Nor am I

higher into dualism the the that two a suggesting a synthesis sides of would subsume unity. Rather, following Robert Cooper (1998) and Gilles Deleuze (Deleuze and Pamet, 1987) this examination of the between seeksto examine the ways in which the two sides of a dualism are interdependent, each upon the other for its definition, and to explore the common perspective that their mutual articulation assumes. In this both case, what sides of the debate assume, the common ground upon which the dualism is articulated, is that of a centred and relatively stable human subject who knows This in to perceives and remains the case even an external world. relation knowing the the when relationship of subject to the external world of objects is one of separation. The simple difference is that whilst positivism assumesthat this world is knowable, subjectivism assumes that it reflects the internal organization of the 6. Both if perceiver paradigms, we can use that word in this context, share a set of human the underlying assumptions about subject that we might characterise as an anthropocentric epistemology. Their theories of knowledge assume a knowing subject, whose knowledge is a representationof an object external to it. This relation in disciplines like of externality obtains even psychology where the object of study is the human subject, taken outside of itself and viewed object-ively. In object-oriented, approaches to social science, it is the knowing subject that is at the heart of is interpretivism. The Regardless true epistemology. same of of the subject's ability to accessthe external object, or the mediations through which this accesshas to pass, the knowing human subject remains the focus (and locus) of epistemology. Even radical interpretivists risk perpetuating this epistemological anthropocentrism if, as Nietzsche puts it, they posit an interpreter behind every interpretation. 67

Can We Doubt Too Much? There are two key points arising from this, one relating to the question of symmetry (1997) Woolgar Grint In the to their and and other relating scepticism. approach, insist that one should always be sceptical about the facts that are mobilised to explain 'failure' Callon's As Nfichel the they of example of specific events. an example cite the catalysts for the power source of an electric car (Callon, 1986b). The use of this fact as a component of explanation is, they suggest, a kind of technicism. The had Callon have 'Who this that says catalysts question should properly asked was does how did this particular tendency, they unfortunate and why say so, and why 3 demonstrates (Grint Woolgar, 1997: 1). This a scepticism version prevailT and radical doubt reminiscent of Descartes' philosophical method which led him 'Cogito (Descartes, 1986: to eventually proclaim with victorious certainty: ergo sum' 17; 68). Once again, however, Nietzsche is there to put an end to premature certainty 24). by doubting (1989: Wherefore 'I' this that thinks? The and celebration even an subject, he suggests,is merely a prejudice of grammar. Faced with a verb, we assume that it must have a subject. 'Thinking' grammatically implies a subject who thinks, but this does not mean that such is either necessary or true. Nietzsche offers the (Nietzsche, 1994: 28). "lightning lightning When example of a strike we say strikes," little lightning is imply to the that we more that a prejudice carried over an agency from a primitive anthropomorphism: 68

is doer' it; 'the becomes is its 'being' behind deed, there no the of effect and what invented as an afterthought, - the doing is everything. (Nietzsche, 1994: 28) Few people today would really believe that there is a subject 'lightning' who 'strikes' like an angry god, yet we have no better reason for assuming the existence of a little Indeed, introspection suggeststhat thoughts are anything thought. subject of a but consciously willed: is it "I" "It" that thought a a comes when wish, so wishes, and not when falsification of the facts of the caseto say that the subject "I" is the condition of the predicate "think". It thinks; but that this "it" is precisely the famous old "ego" is, to put it mildly, only a supposition, an assertion, and assuredly not an "immediate has " After certainty. all, one even gone too far with this "it thinks" - even the "it" contains an interpretation of the process, and does not belong to the process itself. One infers here according to the grammatical habit: "Thinking is an activity; every activity requires an agent; consequently-" (Nietzsche, 1989: 24, emphasisin original) This points to the danger of an asymmetrical approach to the study of organization and technology. One of the great contributions of actor-network theory is an insistence upon a principle of symmetry (Latour, 1987). In Science in Action, Latour suggests that the human and non-human actors that comprise an actor-network, or social hybrid, should be accorded equivalent importance in explanations of sociotechnical change. If this is taken as meaning that objects should be given the same 69

weight as subjects in social explanations, then Grint and Woolgar's accusation of 'residual technicism' may be justified. Indeed, the assertion that we pay equal in to tune with the common-sense technical attention objects seems entirely in limits importance the the technological approaches artefacts of of reassertion of such as Hutchby's (2001). The principle of symmetry can also be read the other way however. If we insist upon a methodological symmetry of treatment of human and Grint Latour (1987: it 144), that then and seems clear suggests non-human, as Woolgar's radical scepticism should equally be extended to include human subjects. In the final question then, can we take scepticism so seriously that we doubt the existence of a subject of interpretation, conceiving instead of a process without Such immanent to external agency: an agency a concept process, as it were? 'it' the of agency or the subject of process. necessitatesa reworking of It's machines all the way down 7 In the first part of Beyond Good and Evil, 'On the Prejudices of Philosophers', Nietzsche questions whether the "it" that thinks is the 'famous old "ego"' (Nietzsche, 1989: 24). The question of what "it" might be is also taken up by Deleuze and Guattari at the start of Anti-Oedipus, when they write: It is at work everywhere, functioning smoothly at times, at other times in fits and it it breathes, heats, It fucks. It What a mistake to have ever eats. shits starts. and said the id. Everywhere it is machines - real ones, not figurative ones: machines driving other machines, machines being driven by other machines, with all the necessarycouplings and connections. 70

(Deleuze and Guattari, 1983: 1) In a critique that thoroughly decentres the Cartesian ego, and coming after Freud, Deleuze and Guattari privilege the "it" - closer to I& than 'ego' - as the site of human actions and drives. If there is no coherent, unified ego, then what is 'it'? What is a subject? In a move that gives new meaning to the phrase 'the machine at work', Deleuze and Guattari suggest that it is machines. Far from 'the machine' being a question of textual interpretation by a reading subject however, the subject is itself a question of machines and their connections and breaks. Like Nietzsche, and against Freud's drive to contain subjectivization within an Oedipal id-entity, Deleuze Guattari 'It' "the is As that they and recognise not even singular. put it elsewhere, brain is a population" (1987: 64). We should not assume that Deleuze and Guattari's machines are simple extensions of the mechanical metaphor, however. If we read these ideas in the light of Nietzsche's critique of atomism, we might rather consider Deleuze and Guattari's ideas as a tongue-in-cheek rejection of mechanism, and a development of what Nietzsche called 4anew soul -hypothesis': the way is open for new versions and refinements of the soul-hypothesis; and such conceptions as "mortal soul," and "soul as subjective multiplicity, " and "soul as social structure of the drives and affects," (Nietzsche, 1989: 20)8 71

This multiplicity cannot be simply located as it is not singular. It is not even made up of discrete objects. As Deleuze and Guattari note, the machines of which they speak flows in that the to the are part-objects and only make sense relation connections and they simultaneously interrupt and produce (1983: 5-6). In this sense they are also heterogeneous.They always connect to an outside of social relations, bureaucratic hierarchies and technical machines so that they are never self contained. Subjects are constantly spilling distinction into the over objects and visa versa, if is even meaningful anymore. As Callon and Latour interpret this point: We should miss the point completely, if we distinguish between 'individuals' and 'institutions'; if we supposed that the first fell within the sphere of psychology, and the second of economic history. (Callon and Latour, 1981: 279-280)9 Elsewhere, Latour has suggested that modemity is characterised by a labour of division which attempts to separate subject and object, consigning each to a distinct and separate sphere of representation (political representation for subjects and for laboratory (Latour, 1993). In the this respect, scientific representation in objects) Nietzsche's assault on the human subject was precociously post-modemlo, but more paradigmatic of the 'post-modem' today, however, is the science-fictional trope of the cyborg, popularised in the social sciences by Donna Haraway in the late 1980s (Haraway, 1990; Gray, 1995; Kirkup et al, 2000). In relation to the questions pursued feature interesting this the of the cyborg is its material heterogeneity. in paper, most Unlike the traditional humanist subject, the cyborg is comprised of both technology 72

and flesh. In this simple, foundational point the cyborg upsets the whole epistemological apple-cart that dependsupon the continued separation of humans and technologies, of subjects and objects. Paraphrasing Latour - we have never been human. Or perhaps more properly, we have always been cyborgs (Davies, 1998: 10). A Cooperian Revolution Cyborg theory and post-structuralism suggest that technology and subjectivity are immanent within one another. technologies In this respect, Robert Cooper's idea that our are also components of our sense perception apparatus - e.g. Renaissance art, perspectivism and the point of view, the camera etc. - is important as it demonstratesthat apparently external artefacts stand in a complex relationship of becoming with the human subject (Cooper, 2001; Chia, 1998). In Deleuze and Guattari's terms, this becoming is not one of imitation - the eye becoming exactly like a camera - but one of mutual co-adaptation. As they put it in relation to the question of the orchid and the bee: the orchid seems to reproduce an image of the bee but in a deeper way deterritorializes into it, at the same time that the bee in turn deterritorializes by joining with the orchid: the capture of the code, and not the reproduction of an image. (Deleuze and Guattari, 1986: 14)" In this way, we have to understandthat the development and use of a new technology by human is that technology, and in being the that captured means an element of literal in is translated sense: it is transformed, not simply captured a quite 73

transplanted. Even this translation is not one way however as the human is also translated in this process. Within the context of a continually changing technological environment then, to talk of a stable human subject at one end of an oppositional binarism with 'technology' is not only overly simplistic, it also has important political jokingly have for I It is this that and axiological ramifications. somewhat reason entitled this section 'a Cooperian revolution'. Just as Copernicus' scientific from de-centre by human in to the the the a revolution was moving place of universe heliocentric decentring (Kuhn, Mazlish, 1993), 1970; to the geocentric a world view .of a pretechnological, subject, explored in the work of Robert Cooper and his colleagues, suggests that the anthropocentric world view is grounded in an essentialist, all too human arrogance. If we return to our earlier discussion of language, we can see that what Nietzsche (1989) called a 'grammatical prejudice' is precisely a component of such a becoming. Conditioned by the linguistic norms that in part comprise consciousness,the mind is 12, locate, to the subject as and thereby speak of able a seat of understanding and knowledge. Indeed it does so 'naturally', as it were, because of the ways in which this 13 component of the sensing and conceptual apparatusis structured . What is important is to not confuse this location, a product of the mind, with the mind itself: the mind is not a place - it doesn't have a specific location. Places and locations is The the the of mind's work... conscious mind are an active field of products it literally puts things in the the matter of cognitive strategies which orders world order 74

(Chia and Kallinikos, 1998: 131, emphasisin original) What should be clear is that language, its grammar and conceptual categories, is itself a part of this mind that orders and structures. A point that complicates the subsumption of technology under the linguistic rubric of 'text'. If we recognise that the mind is a kind of ecology (Bateson, 1973; Guattari, 2000) that is characterisedby be becomings in terms considered a number of would with what, more conventional external objects, tools or technologies - particularly technologies of representation then we can appreciate that language is itself one such technology, albeit one that has influence a major on perception and cognition. If we follow this strategy then we invert Grint Woolgar's effectively and approach as texts are themselves technologies. The idea is similar to Katherine Hayles' discussion of language as a primary pros(e)thesis (Hayles, 1999). Language is simultaneously something external to the 14 human subject and a distinguishing feature of the human This is one respect in . have been it to that always cyborgs or, put another way, that which we can claim we the human has always been post-human. The human mind and its perceptive becoming by its is a relationship of with prosthetic apparatus constituted technologies, primary amongst which is language. There is a danger however that adhering to a prosthetic logic will keep technology, so to speak, at arms length (Plant, 1997). It is almost too easy, with this formulation, to fall back into thinking about technologies of representation as external to a prehave human been human (the that always subject pure existent, pre-technological we Ipost'). To consider this relationship of externality further, we need to look at the later 75

15 Deleuze Guattari that refuses to this a way work of and question in who address , Perhaps linguistics, the technology to either reduce question of or vice versa. one of human jettison dualisms the to this time subject yet again we need rethink our and altogether. Deleuze and Guattari on the Anthropomorphic Stratum In the third of their Thousand Plateaus - '10,000 B. C: The Geology of Morals (Who Does the Earth Think It Is? )' - Deleuze and Guattari inform us, in the guise of ConanDoyle's Professor Challenger, that the Earth, despite being a body without organs, is 40). Guattari, 1987: (Deleuze to and nevertheless subject a process of stratification Indeed, what we usually call reality is made up of a series of strata. The most obvious of these is the physico-chemical stratum, which includes those strata more traditionally studied by geologists. A second stratum is the organic stratum, which includes embryology and genetic code. Of more interest to us here however is the third stratum that Deleuze and Guattari discuss in detail: the anthropomorphic details Before the of this stratum, and the significance of this stratum. we consider however is briefly for Deleuze this the approach subject of paper it worth introducing 16 in little detail Guattari's idea more and of stratification a What is stratification? Deleuze and Guattari start from the premise that the Earth is a body without organs, a comparatively dedifferentiated plane which, through processes of coding and territorialisation, is organized into a series of strata. The strata, which they refer to as 'judgements of God', are not fixed and permanent, however, as the Earth constantly 76

lines decoding deterritorializing these of escapes judgements, and itself along various flight (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 40). Nevertheless, as impermanent as the strata be, fact the to the that the time-scales within may geological metaphor should alert us be huge, beyond immediate stratification which occurs can perception. and often This gives the strata a semblance of permanence that justifies our calling them 4reality'. Stratification, as befits the judgements of a God who Deleuze and Guattari characteriseas "a Lobster, or a double pincer, a double bind" (1987: 40), takes place by a process of double articulation that turns our attention back to the dualisms that have been surfacing throughout this paper. Deleuze and Guattari complicate simple dualisms, however, in two ways. On the one hand they consider the question of the between. As Deleuze has acknowledged elsewhere,writing with Claire Parnet: We may be criticized for not escapingfrom dualism... But what defines dualism is not the number of terms, any more than one escapesfrom dualism by adding other terms (x2). You only escapedualisms effectively by shifting them like a load, and when you find between the terms, whether they are two or more, a narrow gorge like border into independently frontier turn the a or a which will set a multiplicity, of the number of parts. What we call an assemblageis, precisely, a multiplicity. (Deleuze and Parnet, 1987: 132) This machinic assemblageis what lies between, but remains distinct from, the strata: the surface of stratification as it were. The second complication of simple dualism is 77

to double it so that, like a lobster with two claws on each of its two pincers, each part double double. is itself On the physico-chemical stratum, an example of a articulation first Substances flysch is the the through of articulation production of sedimentation. from are selected unstable particle flows which also gives them a 'statistical order of Where the first articulation goes from connections and successions,' or form. by form, direction in to the the and proceeds substance second operates other in forms, establishing stable structures or which are simultaneously actualised molar compounds, or substances. An example of this would be the folding that produces sedimentary rock. In this way, the articulations both have substance and form, territoriality and code (1987: 41). Rather than corresponding to forms and substances then, Deleuze and Guattari suggest that the two articulations correspond more closely to Louis Hjelmslev's 17 has its forms content and expression, each of which own and substances . For below. in these table clarity, relationships are represented a Matter The plane of consistency or body without organs: "... the unformed, unorganized, nonstratified, or destratified body and flows: its all subatomic and submolecular particles, pure intensities, free prevital and prephysical singularities" (1987: 43) Content Formed matter; considered from 2 perspectives: "insofar substance as these matters are "chosen.... 78

substanceof content - articulation 1, part I form - "insofar as they are chosenin a certain order" form of content - articulation 1, part 2 Expression Functional structures; considered from 2 perspectives: substance - "the organization of their own specific forms" 18 2, I articulation part substanceof expression _ form - "substancesinsofar as they form compounds" form of expression- articulation 2, part 2 The relationship of expression and content is quite distinct from the semiotic relationship of signifier and signified however. In appropriating Hjelmlev's linguistic net, we should not see Deleuze and Guattari as following other writers around the textual turn and reducing all of reality to a question of signifier and signified. Their utilisation of Hjelmslev's net is neither linguistic in scope nor origin (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 43). As Ronald Bogue puts it, "The end result of Deleuze and Guattari's analysis of the content and expression of the strata of reality is not to convert the world into signs, but to situate material signs within a substrate of matter" 79

(Bogue, 1989: 126). An important correlation of this difference, is that unlike signifier and signified, there is no hierarchical relationship between content and expression. Indeed, Deleuze and Guattari note that the plane of content and the plane of expression are arbitrary designations that cannot be determined by their respective functionings. Rather content and expression are mutually defined by their opposition. Their respective determination is simply a question of habit. Citing Hjelmslev: [Content and expression] are defined only oppositively and relatively, as mutually opposedfunctives of one and the samefunction. (Hjelmslev, 1969: 60, cited in Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 45) The parallels between this approach and elements of Robert Cooper's work on assemblageare clear. What is important is not so much the fact of a dualism, as the relationship between the two sides, and the common ground upon which this is articulated: what Deleuze and Pamet referred to as 'a border' or 'frontier' and Cooper refers to as 'the seam' (Cooper, 1998). This leaves us with the question of what is the relationship between the two articulations of content and expression, and what lies betweeii them? There is no general answer to this question as it varies from stratum to stratum, so to make this discussion relevant to our study of language and technology we will now turn our attention to the specificities of the anthropomorphic stratum. 80

Key features of the anthropomorphic stratum Deleuze and Guattari do not begin with an a priori human subject that is separable from technology or the external world of objects. Instead they start by considering human) (or distributions, the that characterise the relationships, or anthropomorphic key Following Andr6 Leroi-Gourhan, the the they ways in which consider stratum. free hand language, human-beings, "technology tool and symbol, and properties of distribution" [a] fact larynx, in "gesture new properties of and speech" are and supple (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 60). For Leroi-Gourhan, human evolution has been the have hands the that the enabled tool mouth and result of complementary changes in begin language When in to move in a more upright to parallel. men use and emerge from functioning hands freed locomotive the their are position, to take on other functions, such as making and using tools. With free hands and tools, the mouth is freed from those functions where it has to act on the external world, for example to food. deterritorialization frees This the things, to tear carry or and grind of mouth it for language de(Bogue, 1989: 128-9). These and up other purposes, such as parallel re-territorializations of the hand and tool, mouth and language are what the human is. From this perspective then, there is no human subject outside language and technology, no clear separation of subject and object. Rather, it is a specific stratification, the result of shifting territorializations and codings on the strata, that produces the distribution we usually call 'human'. Further, such shifts do not occur isolation: in 81

Not only is the hand a cleterritorialized front paw; the hand thus freed is itself deterritorialized in relation to the grasping and locomotive hand of the monkey. The be foot) (for deterritorializations the the must example, other organs of synergistic taken into account. So must correlative deterritorializations of the milieu: the steppe forest, deterritorialized than the exerting a selective as an associated milieu more (it deterritorialization body the technology was on the steppe, and of pressure upon fire free form, in hand forest, to the that the as a and appear as a not was able be formable Finally, technologically compensatoryreterritorializations must matter). taken into account (the foot as a compensatoryreterritorialization for the hand, also occuffing on the steppe). (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 61) Neither can they be separated. The supple larynx, lips, and the flattening and 'motricity of the face' could not come about without changesin the hands and tools. Technology and language.,content and expression If we impose the Hjelmslevian net developed above onto this distribution, then hand-tool face-language linked is to the the content couple, and expression with couple (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 60). But as we have seen, this is no simple relationship. It spirals out to connect with associatedand compensatory territor, ali ties and codings, so that content and expression cannot be reduced simply to tools and language: 82

Content should be understood not simply as the hand and tools but as a technical social machine that preexists them and constitutes states of force or formations of language, face be Expression the or and power. should understood not simply as individual languages,but as a serniotic collective machine that preexists them and is formation A constitutes a regime of signs. of power much more than a tool; a regime of signs is much more than a language. (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 63) If we go back to Lynn White's example of the stirrup and Feudal society, then we can it horses, iron into that ask what was put men and such a specific relationship: The history of technology shows us that a tool is nothing without the variable machine assemblage which gives it a certain relationship of vicinity with man, animals and things: ... the stirrup is a different tool depending upon whether it is it has been the taken up to or on contrary, related a nomadic war-machine, whether, in the context of the feudal machine. It is the machine that makes the tool and not vice versa. (Deleuze and Parnet, 1987: 104-105) So once again, it is the relationship between things that is primary. As we know, this 19 distributed is the that machinic assemblage surface of stratification content and The between in technology their expression precise relationship specific relationship. and language as the content and expression of the anthropomorphic stratum, is not yet between have however. We clear, expression rejected a regular one way relationship and content, like that between signifier and signified for example, and noted that the 83

relationship varies from stratum to stratum. On the anthropomorphic stratum, Deleuze and Guattari suggestthat the relationship is both real and essential: And the distinction is not simply real, as between molecules, things, or subjects; it has become essential (as they used to say in the Middle Ages), as between attributes, genresof being, or irreducible categories:things and words. (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 64) This 'real and essential' difference suggestsa further complication of the approaches discussedearlier. We are neither warranted to reduce things to words (technology to text), nor words to things (text to technology) so if we want to understand technology, language and their interrelations then we need to keep this essential distinction between words and things in mind. It is just that this relationship is never simple. As double, is there are relative contents within expression each and every articulation forin (i. hands have their that own e. and vice versa, so a gestural of expression of linear language (comprised in of strings of monemes) phonemes within content) and themselvesbecome a relative content within expression. A contemporary example of one such relative expression within content would be Sadie Plant's example of the ways in which the mobile phone has de- and reterritorialized the thumb so that a generation of 'texters', those who use their mobile dominant device, have digit (Plant, the thumb their text as phone as a now messaging 2001). In this example, a new relationship between hand and technology has given hand-tool Of form the that to subsists within couple. rise a new course, of expression 84

for has knock digit is increasingly this the that the thumb even of choice on effects, so other activities such as ringing door-bells (Plant, 2001). Text(iles): words and things Deleuze and Guattari do not assumean a-priori human subject that is separablefrom technology or the external world of objects. Rather they employ the concept of 'folding' to describe a relationship between inside and outside, so that the subject is logic (Wise, 60). Cartesian 1997: By the the thus of an enfolding of external rejecting separate subjects and objects, Deleuze and Guattari have developed a thoroughly antiessentialist starting point for their exploration of 'the human' and the relationships between language, technology, epistemology and subjectivity. Instead of starting begin human by they with a pre-given subject, considering the relationships, or distributions, that characterisethe anthropomorphic (or human) stratum. But when we turn to consider these relationships in more detail we seem to run into difficulties. Can we really insist upon a real and essential distinction between words and things? In the text of A Thousand Plateaus, the word 'word' appears as a collection of print ink particles, adhering to the wood-pulp paper of the page. It appears as a thing. Similarly, the word 'thing' is just that: a word. This simple paradox, coupled with the relative contents that appear within expression and expressionsthat appear within content, suggestthat the relationship between language and tools, expression and content, text and technology, is anything but clear and simple. As Robert Cooper has suggested, following Foucault and Magritte, 'words 85

burrow into things' and visa versa so that their relationship is a complex affair that has nothing to do with traditional conceptions of representation (Cooper, 2001: 343). This interrelation if anything is further complicated by the advent of information technology as the relationship between the written word of software and technology but disappears. As Robert has Horvitz all suggested: There's a traditional distinction between words - expressions of opinions, beliefs, information " from deeds. You "Revolution! the all you and rooftops and can shout for But deliver the nitroglycerin. want, and post office will obligingly your recipes acting on all that information exposes you to criminal prosecution. The philosophical problem posed by [outlaw] hacking is that computer programs transcend this distinction: They are pure languagethat dictates action when read by the device being Actions from the machine reading the word. addressed.... result automatically (Horvitz, cited in Dery, 1996: 66) This lack of distinction between words and deeds reachesright into the heart of text based,virtual communities and computer mediated communications: language's ability to act on the virtual world inside the computer via operating interaction, in human description is is code echoed computer-mediated where indistinguishable from action. For example, sexually harassing messages on electronic bulletin boards are experienced by some on-line recipients as "verbal, " in hurtful RL less ("Real Life") "physical" the than same actions even assaults,no (Dery, 1996: 68) 86

In a sense, then, the very idea of computer software and computer mediated by binary further the text/technology making objective communications problematise Words the that those the and texts are actions conjure up actions. same as words material tools. This insight is similar to Sadie Plant's notion that software between like destroys distinction the product and engineering, weaving, conventional (Plant, 1995; 1997). When process weaving softwares - whether textile or code/text the pattern that is programmed is the program and setting it up is everything, after that, you just run it on the hardware of the loom/computer. There is no real separation for Plant. As she puts it: If the conventions of the visual arts had activated artists and their tools and divided them from pacified matrices, digitisation interweaves these elements again. On the computer monitor, any changeto the image is also a changeto the program (Plant, 1997: 189) Using the example of digital art, Plant suggeststhat there is no longer a distinction between product/image and program/process.A change in the one means a change in the other. In our terminology this suggests that, at least with computers, there is no clear distinction between the world of technologies and texts. Software seamlessly flickers from one to the other regardless of imposed distinctions and along the way suggestsan alternative to the metaphor of the text - the textile. 87

If computers are the power looms of the modem industrial revolution, software is by in digital like knitting. Programmers toil more sweatshopscoding software still hand, writing and re-writing one tangled line after another. Not surprisingly, they sometimesdrop a stitch, which later unravels as a bug in the program. (The Economist, 29thOct. 1994, cited in Plant, 1997: 127) Unlike the text, the textile suggestsan interweaving of words and things such that its but base (content) (expression) be distinguished from pattern cannot its material burrowings finished the texts seeksto gloss that to an emphasis on rather is attentive over or bury (Cooper, 2001; Cooper and Fox, 1990). This weaving of coded expression and material action takes on a particular significance in the context of the increasingly automated and computerised production systems of late capitalism. As by dependent 'machinic increasingly the capital is surplus value' enabled upon a communicative labour of techno-science (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 458), Plant's is 'power loom industrial that the the the notion computer of modern revolution' (1997: 127) opens new spaces both for analysing the contemporary production of value, and for theorising new spaces of resistance within the circuits of cybernetic (Dyer-Witheford, 1999). capitalism To return to our current, more ontological and epistemological, concerns however, Cooper and Fox see two possible uses of the idea of the text. The first assumesthat the text is a finished and completed product that is to be consumed through reading what they refer to as glossing the text. The second pays attention to what Cooper 88

develop later discuss burrowing in to to the would crossword as relation and refigure idea an of the text as a weaving: implicit the tendency of texture to transgress socially weaving recognizes be in the text can only contrived meaning; opens out a centrifugal way and woven is in the experienced as an activity of creative production, agentPreader' which caught up as an active element in the ongoing, unfinished movement of the text. (Cooper and Fox, 1990: 578) For Cooper, this has important implications for the notion of human subjectivity. Just as Plant has suggested that in weaving, the weaver as subject becomes wrapped up in, by, the processesof weaving (Plant, 1995) so Cooper recognises perhapseven woven that the ideas of weaving and burrowing have serious implications for the human: In analysing the non-representational play in Magritte's work, Foucault used the expression 'burrowing words' to indicate the artist's preoccupation with the strange relationship between words and things. Language was not just a tool for expressing ourselvesor helping us to cope with the world. As with Heidegger, Magritte saw that languageactually constitutes us as human beings. What's more, languagehas a life of its own; it melds together words and images of objects, so that it's not possible to separatethem. Where representational thinking presents its objects as finite, finished products for the convenienceof our mental consumption, burrowing brings out their partial, lateral and transient character; burrowing shows human being as a process that Bersani has 89

described as "multiple, indeterminate, undecidable, mobile, intervallic", forever refinding and recreating itself from the unfoundednessof non-presenceand negation. (Cooper, 2001: 343-344, emphasisin original) In other words, once we acknowledge that words and things burrow into one another, the 'real and essential' distinction that holds the anthropomorphic stratum together human it being and unravels, with as such. Human-being or becoming-cyborg? This idea that there is no real and essential distinction between words and things does Guattari's Rather, Deleuze the not go against and anthropomorphic stratum. ideas on for by human best to that the a an effect realised a while was at it should point out us false distinction. The situation is very similar this rigorous and rigid maintenance of to Bruno Latour's analysis of the great divide that produced modernity by separating distinct into two off subjects and objects spheresof representation: parliament and the laboratory (Latour, 1993). The end result of Latour's study is to demonstrate that these lines of division could never be seriously maintained except by illusion, or have been delusion, that perhaps modernity never was: we never modern. In a so similar way, Deleuze and Guattari's complicated and twisting discussion of the human have been (cf. Davis, 1998: that anthropomorphic stratum suggest never we 10). This realisation is played out at the end of plateau 3, when Deleuze and Guattari's character professor challenger finds that in light of his ruminations, his human form can no longer be maintained. As their text merges from its initial 90

borrowings from Conan Doyle to the horror/sci-fi of H. P. Lovecraft, the difficulties of textually representing that which comes after the human are made abundantly clear. To quote the final sections of this plateau at some length: It was over. Only later would any of this take on concrete meaning. The doublearticulated mask had come undone, and so had the gloves and the tunic, from which liquids escaped.As they streamedaway they seemedto eat at the strata of the lecture hall, which was filled with the fumes of olibanurn and "hung with strangely figured arras." Disarticulated, deterritorialized, Challenger muttered that he was taking the him, He he leaving his for that the earth with mysterious world, poison garden. was whispered something else: it is by headlong flight that things progress and signs is her Panic A face "convulsed with a proliferate. creation. young woman cried out, wilder, deeper, and more hideous epilepsy of stark panic than they had seen on human countenancebefore." No one had heard the summary, and no one tried to keep Challenger from leaving. Challenger, or what remained of him, slowly hurried toward the plane of consistency, following a bizarre trajectory with nothing relative left about it. He tried to slip into a drum-gate, the particle Clock with its intensive clicking and conjugated rhythms hammering out the absolute: "The figure slumped oddly into a posture scarcely human, and began a curious, fascinated sort of shuffle toward the coffin-shaped clock.... The figure had now reached the abnormal clock, and the watchers saw through the dense fumes a blurred black claw fumbling with the tall, hieroglyphed door. The fumbling made a queer, clicking sound. Then the figure entered the coffin-shaped case and pulled the door shut after it.... The beating dark, the on, out cosmic rhythm which underlies all abnormal clicking went 19 Mechanosphere, the or rhizosphere. mystical gate-openings - 91

(Deleuze and Guattari, 1988: 73-74) The final inhuman figure of Professor Challenger as he deterritorializes off into the fixed issues. If texts and rhizosphere raises a number of we reject glossy technological objects in favour of the woven textile, then the complex becornýingsof the human on the anthropomorphic stratum ultimately lead away from that stratum becominginto by human being is the and rhizosphere where a rhizomatic, replaced dealt The figure be this the text cyborg. question of representing with more in will thoroughly in chapters three and four where we will look at some of the strategies that William Burroughs has engaged in to point away from the text to an outside of language whilst, as a writer, necessarily remaining within the confines of the written word. Once we have raised the question of representation, and with it the question of knowledge and epistemology - how can we know something and represent that knowledge? - parallel questions of evaluation and life are raised. In short, what happensto human-being, when we have argued that even the grounds upon which an based is In Creative Evolution, epistemology of extreme subjectivism are shaky? Henri Bergson shows that epistemology is inexorably linked with bio-philosophy (Bergson, 1911/1998: xiii). In a similar vein, Nietzsche remarks that: After having looked long enough between the philosopher's lines and fingers, I say to be included by far thinking the greater part of conscious must still myself: among instinctive activities, and that goes even for philosophical thinking... Behind all logic 92

and its seeming sovereignty of movement, too, there stand valuations or, more clearly, physiological demandsfor the preservationof a certain type of life. (Nietzsche, 1989: 11) Behind the apparently 'sovereign logic' of independent truths and certainty is the distinctly human Nietzsche life: type that sought to valuation of a of precisely which overcome (Nietzsche, 1969). As the questions that this thesis has raised touch on both knowledge forms this the can count of what as and on related question of valuation of life implicit in questions of epistemology, it is worth ending this chapter by considering the implications of rejecting human-being and the possibility of figuring becoming-cyborg it. to a replace Cyborgs and acting human(ely) Most people will doubtless feel some qualms about rejecting humanism, as for example Martin Parker or Rene ten Bos and Ruud Kaulingfreks who suggest that Deleuze and Guattari's alternatives to the human are 'cold' and in some sensesinhuman (Parker, 2000a; ten Bos and Kaulingfreks, 2002). For many people, the idea of the human and humanity is connected to a moral and political tradition of liberalism for, difference. human' To 'the tolerance and of, even respect reject is to reject these values in favour of a monstrously in-human, unfeeling and uncaring, almost mechanical rationality. Again the opposition between human and machine is evoked so that if we drop the emotional, warm heart of the one, the only option left to us is the cold, unfeeling and mechanical other. When we speak of terminating our 93

in James figure 'the human' it is the the obsession with cyborg of precisely Cameron's Terminator that comes to mind - unfeeling, unthinking, unblinking it cannot be reasonedwith and will never stop until it has competed its pre-programmed mission. If we accept this binary, then rejecting the human leads us inevitably into the realm of dehumanisation. Images of bureaucracy and Fordist production lines spring to mind being living, breathing, feeling human the thinking is reduced to a where and for day-out flipping burgers bolt day-in, tightening the or same mindless automaton fifty years. Of course, it is now a commonplace that this rationality of objectified dehumanisation is central both to the logic of modernity, bureaucracy and the horrors of the Nazi prison-camps (Bauman, 1989): Historically, objectification is often a prerequisite to repression or worse. In Nazi Germany, deporteesarriving at Auschwitz were shorn and tattoed with ID numbers whose true purpose was an open secret: And as they gave me my tattoo number, B-4990, the SS man came to me, and he says to me, "Do you know what this number's all about?" I said, "No, sir. " "Okay, let me tell you now, You are being dehumanized." (Dery, 1996: 311, citing Berenbaurn,1993: 147) But is this the only option? As this section has argued, the imposition of a simple binary that opposes humans and machines is based on a fundamental human Indeed, being through considering the entails. misunderstanding of what 94

interrelations between humans and machines, the very boundary that separatesthem has been thrown into doubt, but if we accept this, what can it mean to be a human, and conversely, to be dehumanized? In a letter that he wrote to the poet Alan Ginsberg on the I't May, 1950, William Burroughs makes a relevant point when he suggeststhat the basic problem is that of treating 'human' as a noun: You say that you have found out that you are just a human like other humans. Human, Alan, is an adjective, and its use as a noun is in itself regrettable. Besides, the statement is so general that it has no meaning. Of course human beings share infinite for The they the certain similarities as capacity are of same species. differentiation is to my mind a hugely important attribute of the human speciesand one frequently overlooked by social planners. (Burroughs, in Harris, 1993: 68) For Burroughs, then, human is an adjective that applies to specific beings, partly as a result of their being a part of the species, but more importantly in this context, as the result of exhibiting 'human' behaviour. In be types this specific of sense one can dehumanisedby having all the markings and signifiers of humanity removed, such as name, clothes, hair etc. Indeed, all of these seemingly external and separatefactors, be is human fact irrelevant in to which should whether one a or not, precisely constitute one's humanity as they enable the kind of differentiation that Burroughs is drive human The to singularise what the human the suggesting characterises species. here by limiting human the and now or constraining and I.s, whether in what a might become, is one of the fundamental points of Burroughs' early political critique 95

(Murphy, 1997). For now, however, I want to focus on the ways in which an emphasis on the human as a noun, actually means that humanism has for a long time been an essential component of social control and has served to limit the potential of difference in favour of reiterating a white, male, bourgeois norm as the benchmark against which one's humanity should be tested. taxonomyfor human beings? In her essay 'Taxonomy for Human Beings', Londa Schiebinger traces the development of the modern categories into which human beings fall (Schiebinger, 2000; Schiebinger, 1993). Returning to the natural taxonomies that Carolus Linnaeus developed in the mid 18th century, Schiebinger notes that most historians of science have tended to situate the Systemanaturae within a line of intellectual development, but have ignored the gender politics surrounding and informing his system. The ways Linnaeus humans his to in which chose situate system is quite informative in this in however. In for taking the respect as separate name our species 'homo sapi.ens P, Linnaeus adopted a nomenclature that served to emphasise the rational, thinking side of human beings: characteristics traditionally associatedwith the male of the species. When it came to connecting humans to the animal realm, however, Linnaeus chose to emphasisea distinctively female feature, the mammary gland, which gave rise to the term 'mammals'. As Schiebinger notes, this was a rather strange choice and a distinct break from Linnaeus' usual methods of categorisation: Although Linnaeus had based important aspects of plant taxonomy on sexual dimorphism, the term Mammalia was the only one of his major zoological divisions 96

to focus on reproductive organs and the only ten-nto highlight a character associated primarily with the female. (Schiebinger, 2000: 12) By choosing the term Mammalia, meaning 'of the breast', Linnaeus was intervening in a political movement against wet-nursing which pointed to the importance and breast-feeding. In doing so, however, he chose a term that really only naturalnessof applied to half of the species, and even them for only a short period of their lives (if at all): during lactation. Neither was this the only possible choice. Linnaeus could have features to that all members of the mammals exhibit, adopt chosen any of a number of hair, three-boned, hollow ears, or a four-chambered heart (Schiebinger, 2000: such as 11). Even if the act of breast-feeding was indispensable, then Linnaeus could have both 'the Lactentia Sugentia term chosen a such as or mean which suckling ones', a least have both that to point would at applied sexes of the species included in the category (Schiebinger, 2000: 15). For Schiebinger, Linnaeus' choice of ten-ninology can only be explained in relation to the broader cultural and political trends that he is simultaneously a part of and subject to. Of particular significance was pressure from fellow naturalists and the church, both humans his who considered characterization of as animals to be heretical, or even blasphemous. After all, the Bible suggeststhat man was made in God's image, so by rights he should not have any meaningful association with the lowly, Earth bound creatures. 97

When Linnaeus identified human beings with animals it is no coincidence that he chose to use a decidedly female characteristic associated with reproduction, whilst he when chose to separate'man' from the animals, he chose homo sapiens: within Linnaean terminology, a female characteristic (the lactating mamma) ties humans to brutes, while a traditionally male characteristic (reason) marks our separateness. (Schiebinger, 2000: 16) In a sense then, the act of separation that divides humans from their other this in - case 'brute' animals - is also an act that valorises specific human characteristics at the expense of others. As Schiebinger suggests, the end result of going after the human as Linnaeus did, is to exclude or marginalize vast swathes of humanity. In this example, by being women, associated primarily with their animal body and reproductive functions, are excluded from the full society of humans, with its rational discourse, and productivist (rather than reproductive) bias. The effect is to return to us a Cartesian schism, where the rational, thinking male is privileged over the irrational (even hysterical) and animal, female body. By associating women so closely with breasts and beasts the Enlightenment also separatedthem from civil society, seeking to restore them to their natural place in the social hierarchy: It is remarkable that in the heady days of the French Revolution, when behind the martial and bare-breastedLiberty, the maternal revolutionaries marched breast became nature's sign that women belonged only in the home. Delegates to the 98

French National Convention used the breast as a natural sign that women should be barred from citizenship and the wielding of public power. (Schiebinger, 2000: 23) By disassociating the rational world of public politics and citizenship from the irrational, lactating, animal body, truly human being is limited to man, but it is not only gender that is used as a criteria for dividing the human from its other. Schiebinger further extends her analysis by considering the question of race. For European colonials in the 18th century, African men were usually considered to be childish, sensuous and primitivej and therefore not as fully developed as white, European males and incapable of self-governance. Indeed, in many ways this association of the black man with the animal body is a continuing feature of contemporary culture in which the 'superior' black is the physique of male both black intellect is terms the emphasised of sporting and sexual prowess, and in denigrated by psychologists because of the supposedly poor performance of racial minorities in IQ tests (Hermstein and Murray, 1994; Kohn, 1995). This almost exclusive emphasis on the body, and particularly its sexual characteristics, was even more pronounced in studies of African women, a trend that is exemplified by the interest in the Hottentot, whose large, 'pendulous' breasts and extended labia were the source of much excitement and speculation amongst the European intelligentsia: 99

Though naturalists has a good deal to say about breasts when considering racial characteristics among females, nothing excited these men more than the elongation of the labia minora, or inner vaginal lips, among the Hottentot. This "Hottetot apron" became the subject of countless books and articles, and much prurient popular and Hottentot Linnaeus this taken supposedaspect of scientific speculation. was so with "African" it he (quite that the entire anatomy mistakenly) made a characteristic of race. (Schiebinger, 2000: 26) Schiebinger recounts the story of one of these women who became known as the 'Hottentot Venus' and was exhibited throughout Europe as a public spectacle for its dissected displayed her life before being piecemeal in much of short adult and museums. All of these examples highlight the ways in which the construction of the human is, has been, 'other' human 'self'. The the to the and articulation of an premised upon intelligent use of language and creation of technology separates man from the animals and from machines. But within the bounds of the human species,divisions are created dividing line falls lines, that too all often along similar along the old rearticulating a fault lines of the Cartesian schism of mind and body. A similar point is made by Mark Dery, albeit in a more contemporary context, who, following Andrew Ross's (1991a) discussion of the 'cyberbole' of the teleologically inclined posthumanists like RU Sirius and QueenMu, suggests: 100

Mu and Sirius's new dawn looks like the same old, hallowed humanism that has historically concealed its Western, white, increasingly technocratic interests behind high-minded rhetoric about what is best for "mankind. " Humanism laid the philosophical groundwork... for European civilization's shameful dealings with the natural environment and the animal kingdom... Thus we are drawn to the inescapable conclusion that much of what passesfor posthumanism is in fact egoism leavened with a dash of technocratic elitism, whether it is Mondo 2000's dictatorship of the neurotariat - the "sharpies, mutants and superbrights" in whom we must place our "faith" and "power" - or the Extropian triumph of the overman. The Mondo editorial and Extropy manifestos reverberate with what Ross calls "a voice that appears to speakthe languageof unfettered development,heedlessof any concern for those who cannot keep up or who are subordinated as a result of the logic of underdevelopment." (Dery, 1996: 306, citing Andrew Ross, 1991a: 163) Just like the colonial apologists that Schiebinger discusses, the new generation of posthumanists and Extropians emphasise an quantitative evolutionary logic of development where one can be 'more' or 'less' evolved, wedding neo-Darwinism with the more familiar Cartesian dualism and Judeo-Christian, even Gnostic, ideals of transcendencebeyond the physical (Davis, 1998). Along the way, the material world and the body are left behind, both in the senseof being denigrated as less important or more base, and in the sensethat the body is a burden to be escapedfrom or evolved beyond. But we are perhaps getting ahead of ourselves. This chapter has served to problematise 'the human' and question why theory would want to go 'after' it in the senseof defining and normalizing a fixed and singular human identity, treating the 101

human as a noun and reified object. The second point of departure to which this chapter has led us involves thinking about what might come 'after' the human once this singularising and rather imperial logic has been rejected. To consider these issues more thoroughly the thesis now turns to William Burroughs and, through an examination of his major works of fiction, seeks to develop an impersonal, deindividualized account of this supplementary after-human. In seeking to push anti-essentialist scepticism to a limit, the remainder of the thesis found for human trajectory that to explores a rejects a return a safe, centre, as is in Martin Parker's (Parker, 2000a), humanist example accounts of cyborg-humanism new technology, organization and knowledge management (cf. Land and Corbett, 2001) and some Marxist theories of the labour process (Braverman, 1974). Instead, the following follow Deleuze Guattari William chapters and and developing a response to the problems of S. Burroughs in humanism that pushes the deterritorialization of the human subject beyond the limits of representation and recuperation within the productive circuits of cybernetic capitalism. Problernatising hylomorphically function representation as a of power, operating to prescribe a limited set of forms and norms within which the human must fit, there is an obvious difficulty associated with attempts to represent the post-human. Representation both serves and operates through networks of power/knowledge in which the human can be caught and put to work, a process that underlies the three interlinked control systems that occupied much of Burroughs' writing: capital, language and subjectivity (Murphy, 1997). 102

Pause - Borrowing Burroughs' Burrows The shift from time to spacemay involve mutations as drastic and irreversible as the shift from water to land. In the beginning was the word and the word was God. And what does that make us? Ventriloquist's dummies. Time to leave the Word-God behind. "He atrophied and fell like horrible off me old gills" a survivor reported. "And I feel ever so much better.1ý (Burroughs, 1986: 105) Deleuze and Guattari have made the observation that Kafka's writing operates as a kind of burrow, with multiple entry points but no single, clear line of approach provided by the texts themselves (Deleuze and Guattari, 1986). In this they compare Kafka's writings with the images of architecture found in his novels, for example in Amerika where the hotel itself is a kind of rhizornatic burrow that can be approached from a multitude of entry points (Deleuze and Guattari, 1986: 3). Another example of this burrowing can be found in The Castle where the eponymous building is impossible to approach directly (Kafka, 1992). When the land-surveyor first arrives in town, he tries to reach the castle on foot, but somehow never quite manages to get there. The roads all turn away just before the final approach so that the town's roads and pathways act as a kind of labyrinth. Instead of marching straight up to the gate, the land-surveyor has to approach the castle, and his supposedemployers there, via a variety of unofficial In instances these take the form of soliciting approaches. some the official hierarchy of the castle through the unofficial, and even illicit means of the 103

sexual exploitation of women who K. believes can aid his cause, as for example with Frieda and Pepi, the two bar-maids from The Herrenhof, an inn frequented by the lords of the castle. At other times K. tries to approach the castle officials directly, but do burrow-like the only can so within confines of the passages and small rooms underneath the inn, where administrative underlings both hold office and sleep. Ultimately, the apparently arborescent hierarchy of bureaucratic organization at the castle is itself shown to be rhizomatic and less than conventionally rational, as for example in the depiction of bureaucratic functioning described by Kafka on pages 5876. In a similar way, Burroughs' writing can also be approached as a burrow. The points of entry are manifold and lead in different directions, with different results dependent how far upon and in which direction they are followed. Perhaps more importantly, the method of the cut-up that Burroughs uses extensively in his writing breaks down a sinýple linear or arborescent logic of narrative and either/or binary oppositions in favour of intentionallY random and chance conjunctions that produce novel breaks and linkages. The critical question is not 'what does this meanT - the search for a signifier - but rather 'what connectsT As Deleuze and Guattari put it: We will be trying only to discover what other points our entrance connects to, what crossroadsand galleries one passesthrough to link two points... Only the principle of multiple entrances prevents the introduction of the enemy, the Signifier and those attempts to interpret a work that is actually only open to experimentation (Deleuze and Guattan, 1986: 3) 104

In the most literal sensethis means that, with a text like Naked Lunch, the reader can enter the text pretty much anywhere. Although Naked Lunch is not strictly a cut-up, its routines and performances have no clear order or progression in which they must be read to make sense or have their meaning revealed. The various sections were during Burroughs' in written stay Tangier in the 1950s and much of this material was not even intended as a single book -a complete work - but rather was taken from love letters written to Alan Ginsberg and various other sources (Harris, 1993). Even the final arrangement of Naked Lunch was not entirely Burroughs' own work but was had Ginsberg, both Kerouac the rather result of a collaboration with and of whom come to Tangier to visit Burroughs with the express intention of helping him to get the manuscript into publishable shape.In this sense,there is another link with some of Kafka's work, such as The Trial, in which the final order of the sections was more down to Max Brod's editorial decisions after Kafka's death, than any original authorial intention. Interestingly, it was The Trial, along with several other texts, that Burroughs later cut-up with his own writing from this time: a trunk full of disordered horde' he 'the to pieces collectively referred as word and which formed the basis for both Naked Lunch and the Nova trilogy. In its potential for multiple entry-points and pathways, Naked Lunch is also similar to Deleuze and Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus in which "[e]ach plateau can be read be (Deleuze to starting anywhere and can related any other plateau" and Guattari, 1987: 22)20 This is not only becausethey stand relatively independently, each being . but because between in the them can only be their also connections useful own right, 105

explored through experiment. In this sense the book is more like a toolbox than a traditional text. It can do an awful lot, but pinning down its meaning is a rather more (as Signifier We to the the problematic endeavour. will return specific question of both God and Word) and its status within Burroughs' work in chapter four. For now the point is simply that this notion of Burroughs' work, like Kafka's and Deleuze and Guattari's, being a kind of rhizomatic, animal burrow, provides both a justification for the seemingly gratuitous use of homophonous punning in the title of this section, and also points to a reworking of the relationship between author, reader, text, meaning and reference. The Burrow In a recent interview, Robert Cooper has noted that the idea of the burrow connects to the basic question of language and reference, words and things (Cooper, 2001). Borrowing from Foucault's analysis of the paintings of Rene Magritte in 'This is Not Pipe' (Foucault, a 21), '2000 Cooper notes that: Foucault used the expression 'burrowing words' to indicate the artist's preoccupation with the strangerelationship between words and things. Language was not just a tool for expressing ourselves or helping us to cope with the world. As with Heidegger, Magritte saw that language actually constitutes us as human beings. What's more, languagehas a life of its own; it melds together words and images of objects, so that it's not possible to separatethem. The word burrows into the object just as the object burrows into the word. In this process,the burrow buries the conventional distinction between language and its referents... Magritte's approach underlines the intense interdependencebetween human life and its objects to the extent that an individual 106

life cannot be understood as being separate from the objects that support its existence. The life and the objects borrow their existencesfrom each other. (Cooper, 2001: 343-344, emphasisin original) When we consider the relationship between the human, technological objects and language, the idea of the burrow and burrowing draws out the ways in which these implicate themselves into one another. Human life, language and objects conceptions are all interdependent in the sense that we can never clearly delineate them, or left be literally Bereft their them. there of of separate connections would no-thing which to speak. This point, as Cooper, Magritte and Foucault make clear, creates a for language To the serious problem whole project of conceiving as representation. this list I would add William Burroughs. With the possible exception of his first novel, Burroughs' writing invariably deals with language itself in a complex and complicating way. He does not fall easily into the simple literary categories with which people have tried to pigeonhole him: satirist (Eric Mottram (1977) and Burroughs himself (1986)), pornographer (David Lodge (1991)), nihilist (Ihab Hassan (1963)), proto-cyberpunk (Larry McCaffery (1991)) or (1987)). (Robin Lydenberg As his postmodemist an author relationship to words was also difficult. Given that amongst Burroughs' central themes control, language and identity figure large, it is important to recognise that his writing was simultaneously an attempt to escape from control by the word, and an exploration of systems of control (including language) through words. At times this brought him to the he that recognition was as much written as writing (Burroughs, 1985: as an author, 107

12). Exploring this question of writing, subjectivity, language and control, Burroughs' projects variously exhorted the need to 'rub out the word', and yet this is It is proclamation precisely these paradoxes, and necessarily made using words. Burroughs' attempts to overcome them, sometimes using quite material technologies, that make his work so interesting. As these issues will be returned to during the burrowing, following less I the to turn to and more a course of chapters, want now distinct, but interconnected, Burroughs' three through structured reading of work systems of control. On the subject of control In strictly literary terms the strength of Burroughs's writing is to be found in its many it is his is If then throughout there surely the one constant running work paradoxes. fear of control. IFEsnovels display an almost psychotic vigilance for imprisoning language. Yet drugs desire from they also through to and religion and systems, by bliss being the the of enslaved addiction, masochistic capture allure of control, sexuality and narrative. (Caveney, 1998: 19-22) Without a doubt, control is the central problematic in Burroughs' writing. Similarly discipline's has been the central theme arguably within organization studies control it from This its inception. true approaches of mainstream, managerialist as right is as find On the a preoccupation with mainstream side, we is of critical perspectives. in the control of production process the writings of classical management theorists 108

like Chandler, Fayol and Taylor (Thompson and McHugh, 1995: 103-4). On the critical side, we have the more recent preoccupations of the labour-process theorists developing Braverman's Marxist account of the labour process, consider the who, control of an essentially indeterminate wage-labour bargain as the paradigmatic function of modern management (Thompson, 1989; Marglin, 2001). Nevertheless, these studies have tended to emphasise control by management over human labour and other resources or inputs to the production process and, by treating management as an empty category that simply functions as an agent of capital, tends to leave the question of self-control unasked. Like Foucault, Burroughs pushes the question of control to the point where, rather than asking how an individual self is subjected to control, he can explore the ways in by In the through this respect Burroughs shares which self is produced and control. concerns with French post-structuralists like Foucault or Deleuze and Guattari who similarly show the productive nature of power and the ways in which it actually is that the shapes subject subject, even when resistant. As Foucault puts it when for his investigating power: the third articulating of methodological principles The individual is not to be conceived as a sort of elementary nucleus, a primitive atom, a multiple and inert material on which power comes to fasten or against which it happens to strike, and in so doing subdues or crushes individuals. In fact, it is already one of the prime effects of power that certain bodies, certain gestures,certain discourses,certain desires, come to be identified and constituted as individuals. The individual, that is, is not the vis-cý-visof power; it is, I believe, one of its prime 109

effects. The individual is an effect of power, and at the sametime, or precisely to the extent to which it is that effect, it is the element of its articulation. The individual which power has constituted is at the sametime its vehicle. (Foucault, 1980: 98) Similarly, in The Order of Things, Foucault considers the emergence of Man as a specific subject of study within the human sciences(Foucault, 1970). Altematively in the more widely cited (at least in organizational studies) Discipline Punish, and Foucault (1977) shows the ways in which quite specific, subjugated subjectivities are by disciplinary Sewell (Zuboff, 1988; the the and produced architecture of panopticon Wilkinson, 1992), dressage (Jackson and Carter, 1998), the timetable and the functions (Townley, 1998). These examination of power serve not only to produce the docile and obedient body of the prisoner/worker/student, but also a specific between body the relationship and a sense of self. This subjectivization is perhaps most dramatically captured by the hierarchical observation of the central tower in the As inhabit lit Jeremy Bentham's the the panopticon, model prison. cells prisoners are from the tower the prisoner cannot seeinto that tower and so never knows whether or not he or she is actually being observed. This uncertainty, coupled with the ever present possibility of observation and evaluation, produces a senseof self-awareness her bodily his the as or every movement, thereby effectively prisoner monitors internalising the gaze of the authority (Foucault, 1977: 195-228; Sewell and Wilkinson, 1992). 110

This question of the individual, of the human subject, is of paramount importance for for theories of organization. As Foucault puts it in the preface to the politics and English translation of Deleuze and Guattari's Anti-Oedipus: Do not demand of politics that it restore the "rights" of the individual, as philosophy has defined them. The individual is the product of power. What is needed is to "deindividualize" by means of multiplication and displacement, diverse combination. The group must not be the organic bond uniting hierarchized individuals, but a constant generatorof de-individualization. (Foucault, 1983: xiv) Equally suspicious of the individual subject and the discourses of humanism, much of Burroughs' writing 'de-individualize', to precisely such an attempt is whether through writing the group as a pack, as in Ae Wild Boys, and the Cities o!f the Red Night trilogy, or through the displaced, heterogeneousand diverse combinations of the cut-ups. The implications of this politics of de-individualization, and particularly the processesof de-individualization developed through the cut-up method, will be returned to shortly, but before moving on to these questions of resistance I first want to further delineate Burroughs' general theories of control. Three systemsof Control: Capital, Language, Subjectivity Burroughs's literary career is defined by the central challenge he setshimself: to find an escaperoute from the linked control systemsof capital, subjectivity, and language. III

(Murphy, 1997: 4) In his outstanding, book length study of Burroughs' writing, Timothy Murphy distinguishes three basic control systems in his work: capital, language and subjectivity. Although the three are thematically linked, they also correspond to different periods that can be discerned in Burroughs' work. The interest in capital begins with the early novels Junky and Queer and continues through Naked Lunch, a collection of writings that Murphy suggests corresponds roughly to a modernist in Nova Burroughs' Language trilogy the takes centre stage period in writing. really Burroughs' which comprise most complete experiments with the cut-up method and includes The Soft Machine (1961), The Ticket that Exploded (1962) and Nova Express (1964)22. In many ways, these novels give up on the conception of critique, broadly similar to that developed within the critical theory of the Frankfurt school (Murphy, 1997), developed in Burroughs' earlier work, and represent a kind of post-modern turn in his writing (Lydenberg, 1987). This is also perhaps Burroughs' most focus his is the pessimistic period as critique not so much to challenge and change of is his final but It Burroughs to trilogy, only in power, only and always escape. when returns to a more conventional writing style and gives up on some of the formal experimentation that characteriseshis mid-period that he is able to articulate a more positive critique (Murphy, 1997). By turning his attention to the question of subjectivity in his last novels, Murphy suggeststhat Burroughs finally finds the space to write the future in a positive mode, overcoming his post-modern nihilism to develop what Murphy refers to as an a-modem form of writing. 112

Although Murphy's typology suggests a linear developmentalism, Burroughs' interests and the foci of his writing are hard to clearly separate.Indeed, his interests in language and subjectivity are undoubtedly there throughout his work, from the first his final begin: last to the autobiographical novels words of novel which The old writer couldn't write any more becausehe had reachedthe end of words, the end of what can be done with words. (Burroughs, 1987: 258) But Murphy is referring more to the conjunction of Burroughs' developing ideas he the that about writing and shifting emphasis places on specific control systems is his final Burroughs From it is the trilogy that this work. perspective only in within really able to develop and work through his ideas on subjectivity in a way that, whilst linguistic informed by his of and control systems, opens still understandings capitalist onto a new space of subjectivization outside these control systems. These works, Cities of the Red Night, The Place of Dead Roads, and The Western Lands are Burroughs' most optimistic as they feature an almost utopian impulse to envisage an by dominated linear-linguistic alternative social world not capitalist, subjectivization. Rather than being representations or models of a utopia yet to come, however, these texts function as desiring machines that seeks to break with the old, tired lines of human identities for to the the subjugated, normalised, and create potential form actualisation of a new of subject group. 113

For Murphy, it is these later writings that finally realise Burroughs' 'amodemism'. As an amodern writer, Burroughs has recourse neither to the reunifying myths of the found failure like Pound, Joyce Elliot, to the of critique modernists and nor absolute in postmodern authors such as Nabokov or theorists like Baudrillard and Lyotard. Instead, Burroughs develops a literary line that starts with Ralph Ellison's The Invisible Man, and connects to the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze, the political 2). (Murphy, 1997: Antonio Latour Negri Bruno the philosophy of and sociology of This amodem line of thought recognises the failure of modemist projects based on a humanism, higher based difference of a unity of class or gender into resolution is following There disavowal postmodernism's subsequent of mass politics. without still a possibility, be difference to that the resolutely refuses even necessity, of a but difference into homogeneous, as mass or simulation, subsumed a undifferentiated this needn't necessitate the pessimistic, a-political relativism that is so often (Plant, 2000) literature 1992; Lambert, theory associatedwith postmodern and As the quote at the start of this section suggests, Burroughs' primary concerns were always with the possibility of escapefrom control systems. Without this emphasis on becoming his focus defeatist; the resistanceand escape, on control would run risk of a kind of self-fulfilling prophesy. Nevertheless,control and resistancecannot be wholly follow Timothy Murphy's model but following I in the separated,so chapters will focussing specifically on the two systems of control most central to this thesis: language and subjectiVity23 Along the way there will be numerous deviations but . through these a reconsideration of the twin questions of the human and technology at 114

the heart of this thesis is enabled. With this in place we will be in a better position to consider what 'the human' means in light of Burroughs' work; how the human might be overcome; and why doing so is such a critical project. This conception of what human, the might come after as will be clear, is quite distinct from the cyborgs that populate so many of our cinema screens, sci-fi novels and organization theory texts (Parker, 1998; Parker and Cooper, 1998; Rushing and Frentz, 1995). In following Burroughs as he seeks a time and space that comes after the human, we will be in a position to reconsider the whole question of (post)humanism, anti-humanism, and the possibility of reconfiguring a trans-human, revolutionary studies. 115 subject in organization

Chapter 3- Language and the Word Virus My general theory since 1971 has been that the Word is literally a virus, and that it has not been recognized as such becauseit has achieved a state of relatively stable symbiosis with its human host; that is to say, the Word Virus (the Other Half) has establisheditself so firmly as an acceptedpart of the human organism that it can now sneer at gangster viruses like smallpox and turn them in to the Pasteur Institute. But the Word clearly bears the single identifying feature of virus: it is an organism with no internal function other than to replicate itself. (Burroughs, 1986: 47) For Burroughs, language is a virus (Burroughs and Odier, 1989: 12). This 'word- has into human the virus' entered a relatively stable state of symbiosis with organism to the extent that, as we have already seen, it is impossible to clearly differentiate the human from language or, to take matters further, that the human is constituted by a specific distribution of, or relationship between, language and technology (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987). As suggestedearlier, the attribution of agency is a grammatical habit or prejudice, often running directly contrary to both common sense and everyday experience (Nietzsche, 1989; Sotto, 1998). It is language that produces the "I" that Descartes assumedwas doing all that thinking (Descartes, 1986). Burroughs' ideas follow a similar line to those of Nietzsche. The word-virus is the non-human behind the incessant sub-vocalizations that Zen and yogic meditation seeks to agency silence. 116

It is this internal monologue, all but impossible to shut off and expressly non-human, that produces an all-too-human sense of identity and self-continuity by generating a linear, narrative time 24 along which experience is distributed and through which is identity assured. Just as a child has its sense of identity enforced through the imposition of oedipal identification with the triangular 'mommy-daddy-me' (itself by the word (and name) of the father) so the "I" and our internal monologue enforced for "Oh, the an anchor provide production of identity: it was me" -a conjunctive synthesis (Deleuze and Guattari, 1983). Indeed, for the virus to truly take hold, the body itself must be weakened and disciplined. Where Foucault has shown us the discipline necessary to produce a docile subject and subjectivity (1977), Nietzsche body itself has be disciplined in order to accept the that the to argues made sick and language (Nietzsche, 2001). 1994; Munro, If this sickness produces a imprint of finds hold. In immune it then the to take the system, word-virus easier weakening of this respect, human identity is a symptom of infection: the product of parasitic and non-human forces that develop specific, pre-formed lines of subjectivization. This account of language provides a radical alternative to that which is more commonly found in organizational studies, and related disciplines like information systems. Most accounts of organizational communication will press the need for clear communication, free from distortion and polluting noise (e.g. Dixon, 1976). This is true both of mainstream functionalist discourses, where the clear communication of be is instructions to the goal of communication, to managerial subordinates assumed or within more critical accounts of communication, such as those grounded in the 117

work of Habermas and where an ideal speechsituation is sought in order to enable the open sharing of ideas and equal debate free from the distortions of power and hierarchy (Lyytinen, 1992; Outhwaite, 1996). In either case, communication is supposedto be between two relatively autonomous individuals. For Burroughs on the other hand, language has its own agenda.Far from being a (potentially) neutral tool of human identity it is that the communication, a virulent virus actually creates senseof language it. In in that this and subjectivity respect, we normally suppose is control of is a fundamental aspect of control and Burroughs makes it his paradoxical project to try and write his way out from its grasp. This raises important questions about what might resist and escapethis control. As well as providing an insight into the often disjointed, difficult and decidedly nonlinear prose that Burroughs writes, this relationship between language, control and the forces human. light heterogeneity In that the the subject casts of make up on privileging the rational mind as the seat of consciousness, Cartesian metaphysics situates a viral infection as the human essence: T is a word; a virus; a disease. Indeed, rather than providing a stable basis for secure and certain knowledge, the self is premised upon a fundamental dis-ease. As Burroughs MIght put it, we are not 'other half' them comfortable with our selves as we are sharing with a parasitic (Burroughs and Odier, 1989: 114). The neurotic verbalisation of the human, is dis-eased the to this manifested as a compulsion perfect symptom of subvocalize, subject and one perfectly suited to a world in which the incitement to discourse is a part of the everyday operation of power (Munro, 2001; Foucault, 1976). 118

Despite appearancesthen, this relationship is not benign. Nor is it stable and through the extemalisation and materialisation of voice through information and diverse (ICT) technologies communication as as the tape-recorder and the computer, be Odier, 12). (Burroughs 1989: currently may undergoing a radical change and Technologies of linguistic transformation and resistance In this section I want to consider the question of control and resistance in the light of Burroughs' thesis and its relationship to power, control and subjectivity. In doing so I will focus on Burroughs' mid-period, Nova trilogy: The Soft Machine, The Ticket That Exploded, and Nova Express. All three of these texts utilise the cut-up technique that Burroughs developed in conjunction with Brion Gysin and which was explicitly an attempt to escape from control by language. Paradoxically, this escape was attempted through the use of language, or rather words, an encleavour that Burroughs found (Burroughs Odier, 1989). Indeed, by the end of ultimately self-defeating and the 1980s, Burroughs had "reached the end of words" as he put it (Burroughs, 1987: 258) and increasingly turned his attention to the visual arts, though often maintaining his insistence upon chance events, as for example in his 'shotgun art, where he literally front blow in would paint cans away with a shotgun of a piece of wood or other 'canvas' (Sobieszek, 1996). Whatever Burroughs' own, and his critic's, ultimate evaluation of the successof the cut-up, it is instructive to follow these moves as they point to the limits of 119

in importance the technologies representation and resisting control and of material In linguistic, this the to reconstituting subject as resistant communicative control. distinct Burroughs' ideas the way of thinking sense, on post-human offer a quite between the text and technology, subject and object, when about relationship in discussed the the turn the theories textual technology of and compared with film By tape to the with which and materials paying attention previous chapters. Burroughs was experimenting at the time he produced the cut-ups, and which provide language focus, the the texts is analysis of an some of material on which written from does itself technology, and thereby reiterate a off not separate possible which language dualism is the correct sphere of mind, and the material where mind/body body and technology are deemedderivative or even irrelevant. Word-virus and Order-word The word-virus simultaneously produces the individual subject as an identity and be be to to that controlled through a productive member of society, subject enables language, 'one' identity, Without image. this quite simply isn't and without word and by is T does that the of preour characterisation reinforced point exist not -a linguistic children as 'infants, ' a word that derives from the Latin infans, or 'not is 34). It 1999: (Easthope, that produces communication simply not verbal speaking' form have Most however. this viral sense of self, of communication, some animals For Burroughs, in to them that some sense. communicate enable cries and shouts following Korzybski, what is unique about human language is that it is written. In a Burroughs (1978) Derrida's the recognises supplement, notion of move that parallels 120

that the advent of writing also changesthe nature of the spoken word upon which it is purportedly based: In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was God flesh the and word was - human flesh... in the beginning of writing. (Burroughs and Odier, 1989: 11) The most important point about the advent of writing is that the durability of the written word enablespeople to 'bind-time'. With a clear concept of linear, spatialised time laid out by narratives and writing, humans are able to organize in ways that other animals cannot: Korzybski has pointed out this human distinction and described man as 'the timebinding animal'. He can make information available over any length of time to other don't Animals They through talk. men writing. write. Now a wise old rat may know a lot about traps and poison but he cannot write an article on Death Traps in Your Warehouse for the Reader's Digest translated into 17 rat languages with tactics for ganging up on dogs and ferrets and taking care of wise guys who stuff steel wool up our holes. If he could rats might well take over the earth with all its food stocks human and otherwise. (Burroughs, 1979: 66) Of course, this doesn't mean that time can only be bound by writing itself. Many oral traditions live on and thrive after the advent of writing, but perhaps there is a sensein which even the passing on of oral narratives and stories is a kind of writing. 121 As

Deleuze and Guattari note, following Benveniste, although bees can clearly communicate, and even use tropes in doing so, they can only ever report upon what they have seen for themselves - direct discourse - whilst the proper movement of language is indirect discourse: the passing on of what one has heard, or read, rather than experienced directly; a kind of viral self-reproduction or autopoeisis: Language is not content to go from a first party to a secondparty, from one who has seen to one who has not, but necessarily goes from a second party to a third party, neither of whom has seen. It is in this sense that language is the transmission of the word as an order-word, not the communication of a sign as information. (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 77) This idea of the order word raises two points. Directly translated from the French mot d'ordre it means slogan, or military password, but as Brian Massumi, translator of A Thousand Plateaus, suggests: "Deleuze and Guattari are also using the term literally: "word of order," in the double senseof a word or phrase constituting a command and 521 Guattari, (in Deleuze 1987: and n. 1). The a word or phrase creative of order" second of these sensesrelates to the general question of organization, and raises the from be language the social and political that point completely separated can never flows (cf. Guattari, 15-23). first it 1996: The and works organization within which senseresonateswith Burroughs' more general notion of the word virus as a means of telepathic control. Language does not inform subjects, or even communicate between su ects. It orders and comman st em. entirely separable however. ese wo tran. sote or er-wor are not The organization of language produces the subject 122

positions that are thereby controlled, and distributes them in a specific social organization, one that is notably characterisedby dualism. As Deleuze and Guattari put it in relation to education, usually assumedto be a process of informing pupils: The compulsory education machine does not communicate information; it imposes upon the child serniotic coordinates possessing all of the dual foundations of grammar (masculine-fen-tinine, singular-plural, noun-verb, subject of the statement - subject of enunciation, etc.). The elementaryunit of language- the statement- is the order-word. Rather than common sense, a faculty for the centralization of information, we must define an abominable faculty consisting in emitting, receiving, and transmitting order-words. Language is made not to be believed but to be obeyed, and to compel obedience. (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 75-76; cf. Guattari, 1996: 22) As well as the clear links that these ideas have with the work of Michel Foucault on the school as a system that distributes individuals along hierarchical arrays, simultaneously normalizing and differentiating within certain parameters and along specific dimensions (Foucault, 1977), this idea of language suggests that even the idea of direct discourse - the simple reporting of what one sees - is not possible becauseof the nature of language. Language is fundamentally indirect discourse. This means that even the '1' that sees,never seesoutside of language, its association blocks, and the position ascribed to it as an T through linguistic ordering: I is an order-word. A schizophrenic said: I heard voices say: he is conscious of life. " In this sense,there is indeed a schizophrenic cogito, but it is a cogito that makes self- 123

consciousnessthe incorporeal transformation of an order-word, or a result of indirect discourse. My direct discourse is still the free indirect discourse running though me, coming from other worlds or other planets. (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 84) Rather than the direct perception of existence and thought - "I think therefore I am" he indirect discourse, hearsay: "I heard the cogito even is a product of of voices say: is conscious of life. " Not only does language produce the T, but the simple fact that the subject is produced by the operations of an alien, indirect discourse flowing through 'it', implies that Burroughs' early goal of reporting a 'naked lunch' - revealing life as it is, fork, kind ideological that the their really so everyone sees what is on end of a of unveiling - is immediately made problematic. There is no possibility of a direct discourse outside the operations of language, at least not if one is a writer. If, as Timothy Murphy has suggested, Burroughs' ideas in Naked Lunch are a kind of ideology critique (Murphy, 1997: 77), it can be no simple idea of revelation of 'truth' from a neutral, God's-eye, perspective. Certainly ideology can be critiqued, and a position can be generated outside of specific ideologies, but not outside of ideology altogether. As Murphy puts it: The various critiques of demystification leave us, then, without accessto a privileged level of reality that would allow us to determine the adequacyof any representation longer be truth to that the can no conceived as this adequacy, and world; of world 124

therefore no traditional hermeneutic approachwill be able to provide the grounds for the transformation of existing practices of exploitation and domination by simply unmasking the statusquo. (Murphy, 1997: 143) A similar recognition leads Deleuze and Guattari into a full blown criticism of both subjectivism and structuralism: the former because,as we have seen, subject positions are themselves produced and ordered by language; the latter precisely because of its is base, immaterial independent that there the assumption a material superstructure of of language and ideology, and that it is the task of a true science to reveal this structure. Rather, by noting the independenceof content and expression, and yet their k n, influence 'burrowing' to to each other what was earlier referred as a ability - - Deleuze and Guattari recognise that neither stands alone. Ideology has real, that is material, effects. Language, for all that its transformations may be incorporeal, still effects bodies, in the broadest senseof that term (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 80). In short, language is not a question of representation, but of intervention (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 86). It never simply represents or stands in for an external and independent,material reality, but always effects and is a part of that reality. For Burroughs, these points raise several questions about writing which he takes up in the Nova trilogy, not least the notion that: "my direct discourse is still the free indirect discourse running though me, coming from other worlds or other planets" (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 84). Indeed, in combination with the idea of external control, Burroughs takes this idea quite literally, adopting the genre of science fiction to 125

position these cut-ups as part of an interplanetary battle of control between several alien life-forms, all working to control the human race so as to extract from it the things they need to survive (reflecting a kind of Marxist analysis of the extraction of from living labour (Marx, 1976: 342)). At the centre of this is the surplus-value destructive Nova Mob who, like a malignant virus, are threatening to make conditions for life on Earth intolerable (Burroughs, 1992a). The problem for Burroughs as a is he is in that this control by the word. Fortunately, this also means writer complicit that he is an insider and so has the power to blow the whole Nova scam wide open. So it is that 'Willy the Rat' calls in the Nova Police, grasses up the Nova Mob and 4wisesup the marks' (Burroughs, 1992a:58). The main action of the trilogy, but particularly Nova Express, details the ongoing battle between the Nova Mob and the Nova Police, and the trial of the Mob in the biologic courts. Although this content is of interest in its own right, in cannot be separatedfrom the form that the novels of the trilogy take. Unhappy with simply linguistic the perpetuating control of the word-virus through the creation of a straight narrative (albeit science-fictional) Burroughs attempts to cut the control ties of word lines and association blocks that make up language and, in doing so, disrupt the functioning of the order-word and the production of identity and fixed subjects. His aim is to thereby open up the possibility of escaping from time (seen by Burroughs as a prison created by the word) into space. Although this idea of space exploration from his from these the comespartly of novels and setting criticisms science-fictional of the organizations of the military- indu stri al complex trying to extend their control 126

beyond the 'final frontier' (e.g. through NASA (Nelson, 1991)), Burroughs' conception of space is quite complex. As he put it, primarily he was "a cosmonaut of inner space" (Douglas, 1998: xxvin). The method that he uses to achieve these ends is the cut-up, the theory and development of which will be considered in more detail in the following sections. Cutting-Up Control Language - words and images - are about control. The word of course is one of the most powerful instruments of control as exercised by the newspaper and images as well, there are both words and images in newspapers... Now if you start cutting these up and rearranging them you are breaking down the control system. (Burroughs and Odier, 1989: 33) In light of the word-virus thesis, 'free speech' may be an illusion, but resistanceis far from futile. Whilst living at the 'Beat Hotel' in Paris during the 1960s, Burroughs formed a lifelong friendship, and important collaborative partnership, with the artist Brion Gysin. Suggesting that writing was at least 50 years behind painting, Gysin stumbled across the literary equivalent of a painterýs collage, or a film-maker's montage, when, whilst cutting a mount to frame a picture, he sliced through the board into the newspapers protecting the table below. As the two halves of the paper brought the moved, into novel, sometimes strange, amusing, or even words were Gysin What to prescient conjunctions. appeared as a slightly amusing diversion was 127

taken rather more seriously by Burroughs who immediately saw the potential of this cut-up method for severing the lines of linguistic control he had been busy analysing. The result was a series of books, the most famous of which are the Nova Trilogy The Soft Machine, The Ticket That Exploded, and Nova Express - each of which uses the technique of the cut-up, or Burroughs' derivation, the fold-in. With these techniques, a page of text is taken, and sliced or folded down the middle then placed with half of another page. The pieces are then moved around until they line up, and the results are typed onto a fresh page which, depending upon the results, may then be combined with further pages to produce yet more cut-ups. In a sense, the is be like into to turn the thing the idea manipulated work a material which can film celluloid on the cutting-room table, a photo-collage, or the paints on an artist's palette. By careful processes of selection and combination, something genuinely be is dominated by logic language the that novel can produced, which not narrative of dictates the words that come to an author when he writes. The effect is to otherwise use language, or rather words, to say something outside, or beyond, language. In a sense,and relating back to the idea of a 'naked lunch', Burroughs' use of the cut-up is bypass language indirect, the to that passes"from perhapsan attempt viral nature of a a second party to a third party, neither of whom has seen" (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 77) and instead to allow the direct perception of the world, unmediated by indirect chatter and image. This would mean that Burroughs is actually engaged in the basic project at the heart of the Enlightenment - the drive to see more clearly and decentring directly 2000). By (Dale, the seeing self, however, more simultaneously 128

Burroughs refuses to sign up to a simplistic objectivism, or to privilege the ego as the locus of knowledge. Perhaps it is better then, to think of Burroughs' project as an by different imposed to think to to that attempt otherwise: perceive in a upon us way language and words. Before considering this in detail however, we first need to consider what the cut-up is. In many ways, Burroughs is inconsistent in his use of the cut-up. At times he seems to suggest that, like Cubism, the cut-up is simply a way of more accurately reflecting the essentially cut-up nature of lived experience (Mottram, McLuhan, 1991). 1977, Lodge, 1991; When walking down the street, the internal monologue, and juxtapositions. interruptions itself, is and random experience realised as a series of From this perspective, the cut-up provides a more realistic representation of an essentially cut-up phenomenological world. If we accept this line, then Burroughs clearly remains wedded to a distinctly modernist logic of representation, as Deleuze and Guattari suggest in A Thousand Plateaus when they draw parallels between Burroughs and Joyce (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 6). At other times, however, Burroughs suggests that the random element of chance that the cut-up allows into the process of writing can serve to break the lines of narrative conditioning that subjectify and subjugate us, enabling a breaking-away from, and breaking-up of, the order of identity thereby produced (Hassan, 1963; Caveney, 1997). This idea has much in common with Burroughs' interest in scientology's use of repetition as a means of breaking down linguistic association blocks, thereby 129

freeing the individual from unconscious controls (Russell, 2001). This use of the cutfor up purposes of deconditioning the subject by severing linguistic control lines is it is but important the the perhaps most within context of resistance and control, worth noting that the role and function of the cut-up varies within and across Burroughs' writing. Even if the cut-up is a process of deconditioning, however, it clearly produces a new relationship with language, raising the question of what is. that precisely new relationship In some places, Burroughs seems to suggest that there is nothing random whatsoever about the cut-up. Instead the method simply enablesus to accessknowledge of which he discusses latter An the magneticthis when example of we were unconscious. is tape based cut-ups he experimented with in collaboration with Ian Sommerville. In these experiments, the new technology of the tape recorder was used to record a particular message,which would then be rewound and forwarded to an arbitrary point from the radio, music or street of speech, noise when something else, a snippet white sounds, would be layered over the original recording. This layering and cutting-in days, be times, might over a period of several or even weeks, as repeated a number of 56). (Burroughs, 'Palm Sunday Tape' 1984: In the the such cases in example of Burroughs was insistent that the 'author' of these experiments was aware, on some level, of the contents of the tape, and so could be said to be producing the tape in a way that precluded the truly random event (Burroughs, 1979). 130

At yet other times, Burroughs built on this last notion to suggestthat the cut-up was a deliberate intentional quite and operation, with no chance or unconscious content whatsoever, but rather a careful and quite deliberate attentivenessto the materiality of the texts with which he was working: I follow the channels opened by the rearrangement of the text. This is the most important function of the cut-up. I may take a page, cut it up, and get a whole new idea for straight narrative, and not use any of the cut-up material at all, or I may use a sentenceor two out of the actual cut-up. It's not unconsciousat all, it's a very objective operation (Burroughs and Odier, 1989: 29) This is perhaps where Burroughs' use of the cut-up comes closest to the materiality of a painter's relationship to her materials - paints, canvass and brushes - or perhaps the woodworker or sculptor who works with the gain of her materials rather than hylomorphically form imposing an external onto an empty content (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987; Massurni, 1992; Thanem, 2001). Of course, this could also be an attempt to defend his work against accusations that it simply isn't art, a suggestion that is supported by his claim that the cut-up has its origins in the radical surrealism of Tristan Tzara: At the surrealist rally in the 1920s,Tristan Tzara the man from nowhere proposed to by hat. A the spot pulling words out of a create a poem on riot ensued wrecked the theatre. Andr6 Breton expelled Tristan Tzara from the movement and grounded the Freudian the couch. cut up on 131

(Burroughs, cited in Mottram, 1977: 37) As well as laying claim to culturally important precursors to his and Gysin's development of the cut-up, and supporting a 'random element' reading of the cut-up though now validated by reference to Dada, this also raises the important point of the technique's essential antagonism to psychoanalysis. This antagonism has similarities to the idea of working with materiality. Rather than stamping a hylomorphic triangle of daddy-mommy-me be that the onto every experience so normallsed subject can into a fixed mold from which every deviation is deviance, the cut-up breaks the imposed lines of control and meaning (from a stable signifier, such as the name of the father, that can anchor meaning) to follow the text-ures of a writer's raw material. Whatever the final result of Burroughs' cut-up experiments - and they are often difficult to listen to/read, or even repetitive and dull - the underlying ideas are important. If the word is a virus, and the human is a ventriloquist's puppet, spoken through more than speaking, then the only way to resist and escape control is to silence the tyrannical logic of narrative and put an end to compulsive subvocalisation. Just as the narratives of the realist novel and criticism are bourgeois, humanist conceptions, reflecting a set of assumptions about subjectivity, identity, morality, Burroughs' the reality and anti-nwTatives perform an antisocio-political order, so humanist subversion of those orders (Lydenberg, 1987). With the cut-up, Burroughs tries to silence the Word/virus/God/hu-Man/I and usher in a world of silence and space-travel. 132

All Out of Time 'Time does not exist for those who are absolutely without anxiety' (Kierkegaard) I don't think of silence as being a device of terror at all. In fact, quite the contrary. Silence is only frightening to people who are compulsively verbalizing. (Burroughs and Odier, 1989: 37) Compulsive verbalization or subvocalization suggestsa certain neuroticism: the fate of the perfectly Oedipalized subject (Deleuze and Guattari, 1983). Caught in the triangle of familial relations - daddy, mommy, me - the subject compulsively reworks these relations, not least on the analyst's couch but also more generally. The Guattari Deleuze 'So that to operation is one and refer as a conjunctive synthesis ' (Deleuze Guattari, 1983: 20). it's me! and Flows, breaks and connections are fixed compulsively and singularised onto the relative security, and docility, of a fixed and centred.self, caught in the structural engineer's symbol of strength and certainty, the triangle. Without the compulsive verbalising of the neurotic subject, constantly 'finding themselves' in their linguistic stream of consciousness,there would be no identity, no stable subjects stretched out along a spatialised time-line. If 'time does not for those who are absolutely without anxiety', then in Burroughs' work we can exist see the explicit relation of the production of anxiety and time through the drive to verbalise. Of course, this incessantbabble and compulsive activity is Just what drives the engines of busy-ness (Cooper, 2001). Whether we are talking about the driven 133

activities of management consultants, career academics, derivative traders, or the 'copper-tops' of The Matrix, it is busy-nessand anxiety that keep the flows of capital moving. The anxiety system aims at creating perpetually distorted sexual pleasure is, that - pleasure only within a pattern of domination and subordination, from infant to adult sexual life. The family becomes the preparatory instrument for the authoritarian society and its ideology of suppression and manipulation. The child grows up in inhibition anxiety and and is therefore the ripening object of manipulatory forces. He will fear freedom until his death. He will welcome structure of domination and submission from the beginning of his life. He will equate - especially if he is rich and/or white - suppressed classes and races as alien inferiors with whom miscegenationis criminal in public but pleasurablydirty in private. (Mottram, 1977: 124) The relations between libidinal and political economy cannot be easily severed. The Naked Astronaut In a move that appearsto invert the Bergsonian notion that we should reject space in favour of time, Burroughs wants to escape from time and into space. But the inversion is only apparent. Bergson's object of critique is spatialised time, geometrically laid out as a line composed of discrete points (Bergson, 1910). In a sense,Burroughs extends this rejection, by expanding upon the ways in which this conception of linear time is produced through the operations of language. Where 134

Bergson sought a non-spatial conception of time as duration, however, Burroughs idea the rejects of time entirely and turns his attention to a rethinking of space,not in terms of geometry, but as outer-space:the final frontier. If it is the word-image lines that lock us into identity and tie us to the ground, then cutting these lines can let us bounds the escape of the Earth - most primitive of the three socluses (Deleuze and Guattari, 1983) - and move into space. It is this drive to escape a logic of identity, control and limitation that led to Burroughs' oft-quoted catch phrase "Here to go" (e.g. Burroughs, 1990). But Burroughs' conceptions of space travel are about as far from NASA as you can hope to get and he railed against such governmental attempts at space travel for trying to take the Earth into space. Indeed, at times when he is discussing space travel, Burroughs seems to be talking about a more abstract conception of space that extends to include the inner-space achieved through meditation. At other times however he literal, it is literal insistence has led this that seems more and upon escape many critics to count Burroughs along with the posthumanists like Hans Morovec or the Extropians, who seek to escape the bounds of the Earth through a disembodied downloading of consciousness into technologically advanced robots and computer basedcommunication systems (Dery, 1996; Davies, 1998). These ideas of the posthuman owe much to Clynes and Kline's groundbreaking, NASA funded, researchinto cyborgs (Clynes and Kline, 1995). Although it only ever basic behind the this research was to the progressed idea experimental stage with rats, 135

to overcome the limits placed on space-exploration by mankind's need to take a little bit of the Earth's environment with him into space as, for example, in a pressurised space-suit with oxygen supply. As Clynes and Kline put it: The environment with which man is now concerned is that of space. Biologically, what are the changes necessary to allow man to live adequately in the space environment? Artificial in some sort of enclosure atmospheres encapsulated constitute only temporizing, and dangerous temporizing at that, since we place in ourselves the same position as a fish taking a small quantity of water along with him to live on land. The bubble all too easily bursts. (Clynes and Kline, 1995: 30) The parallels with the epigram at the start of this chapter are clear. Both the dream becoming Burroughs' ideas posthuman of cyborg, and on space-travel, share a beyond forced human itself. Where the two the the common interest in evolution of visions differ, perhaps, is that for NASA, and Clynes and Kline, there was an biological Cartesian dualism, that the mindibody so any uncritical acceptance of his better him human to to the modification of suit space-travel, would not effect essence (Hayles, 1999), a belief that Frederick Pohl parodied beautifully in Man Plus (Pohl, 2000). In a direct extension of Clynes and Kline's 'cyborg' project, Man Plus concerns the first experimental applications of these technologies to a human being. Despite the promise that at the end of the experiment he will be returned to his human form so 136

that he can be reunited with his wife and family, as the protagonist of this tale becomes more and more suited to space his sense of self changes such that he becomes less and less recognisably human. Ultimately the prospect of a return is not impossible, fear but Whilst Pohl only undesirable. clearly views such changes with or even horror, Burroughs is rather more positive, perhaps not least because his conception of 'the naked astronaut' is one of liberation, rather than servitude to governmental organizations like NASA. For Burroughs the shift into space is ultimately a metaphoric reworking of ideas of resistance and escape, which he explicitly opposes to the family-man astronauts,or 'cool-dads' as he calls them, that dominate the space scene at NASA: To his own vision of infinite space, Burroughs deliberately opposes the need to enclose radical experience in protective frames. He himself prefers an image of the astronaut's vulnerable body about to explode into the universe. The "space-suitsand masturbating rockets," traditional technological images of the human body, are for him overburdenedcontainers of aggressiveenergy: "'All out of time and into space' [] 'the naked astronaut.' And the idiot irresponsibles rush in with space-suitsand masturbatingrockets spatterthe city with jissom. " (Nelson, 1991: 131) Rather than the programs and organizations complex - of the military-politico-industrial 'looking off into space as if seeking new frontiers of depravity' (Burroughs and Ginsberg, 1975: 39) - Burroughs' ideas on space-exploration centre upon the idea of difference. The goal is not to take the Earth with you into space,but 137

to overcome, perhaps go beyond, the human condition itself. This is not a reassuring, humanist vision of self-development. The 'self' is almost certainly the first thing to go, hence the metaphor of the naked astronaut,prepared to explode into spacewithout the protective covering of a space-suit, a stand-in for the Reichian character- armour that the defensive self erects as protection against any potential confrontation with anything Other. But Burroughs is far from pessimistic about this potential dissolution. Self-identity is nothing to be defended. Immaterialism And The Informatic Post-Human As suggested,for some commentators, Burroughs' proclamation that we are "here to his desire links him into in to to a tradition of posthumanism go" and escape space that is characterized by an unhealthy disregard for 'the body', and an almost Gnostic belief that some kind of mental/spiritual transcendence will be found through technology (Dery, 1996: 313). Indeed, Burroughs' sound-bite usually appears in the full context of "This is the space age, and we are all here to go" (Burroughs, 1990, track 1). Contrary to Dery's reading of Burroughs, which seemsto be entirely based on one track, 'Dinosaurs', from a compilation LP releasedby Giorno Poetry Systems (but from introduction to the not the text of) Naked Lunch (Dery, and a minor aside 1996: 298; 253), this does not suggest an individual transcendence but rather a human This idea the collective overcoming of existence. constraints of normalised that Burroughs' insistence upon the collective nature of escape opens a space for his later is in rethinking social organization, which picked up work with its more explicit focus of the autonomous production of collective subjectivities 138 discussed

below. For now, however, I want to focus on the question of materiality and the body within Burroughs' work, and the relationship between the material body, technology. language and the subject. In Escape Velocity, Mark Dery quite correctly points to the limitations of a 'theology (Dery, 1996: 306). In what is perhapsthe most thoroughgoing and the of ejector seat' explicitly critical of a rash of studies of cyberculture that appearedtoward the end of the last millennium, Dery's explorations cover performance art, body modification and tattooing, avant-garde robotics, techno-Industrial music, cyberpunk sciencefiction and virtual sex. Along the way he reappraises such cyberculture luminaries b; Extropians, Stelarc (cf. Stelarc, 1997a the the and prophets of posthuman as and Ansell-Pearson, 1997a and b), Mark Pauline, Hans Morovec, Bruce Sterling, Douglas Rushkoff, RU Sirius and Queen MU, finding that they all share a common desire to transcend the human condition and escape from the body - usually referred to in hacker jargon as 'the meat' (Sobchack, 1995). Behind the posthuman rhetoric of transcendence, liberation, anti-authoritarianism and difference, lies the same old humanist disregard of the other, whether that other is the body, the environment and be (opposed the to technics socially excluded nature and culture), or poor, who will left behind in the technologically mediated (and no doubt very expensive) transcendenceto post-humanity. In the race to transcend our depraved, all-too-human condition, these posthumanists come full circle to be caught again in a Cartesian dualism that rejects and denigrates the materiality of existence in favour of an incorporeal 'life' as information. The material base upon which that information is 139

realised is irrelevant. For a style of thinking that is heavily influenced by Marshall McLuhan, the conclusion is surprising is is the the medium message everything, - irrelevant. The libertarian ideology of the posthuman contemptuously disregards the body (meat) in favour of a valorisation of the powers of the mind. It is not a simple, god-given, human mind that is thus privileged however. In the posthuman utopia, mind and its products - technology - meld in a homogeneousnew unity of information that puts a scienceffictional) gloss on age-old dreams of mind over matter, transcendence and immortality. Through science and technology (both products of the mind) mind can control the material world. The only thing that remains in its way is the rotting old flesh that quite literally brings dreams of transcendenceback down to Earth. By brain however, in the the as a general computer, refiguring a classic move development of cybernetics where it was heralded by McCulloch and Pitts' reconception of the neuron as a kind of logic gate (Hayles, 1999; Heims, 1993), mind into From it that the this this transformed and self are software computer runs. point fantastic downloading follow into dreams Extropians the their too to of is all easy limits flesh into the the or robot, overcoming of and intelligence/self a computer body Whether is figured the achieving omnipotence and immortality. posthuman as flow freely, diffuse, like internet the the abstract and along whose pathways rrund can Robocop, hard like Hollywood Terminator or as solid and or an augmentation of a fantasies. is to power central such 140

Dery's protestations to the contrary aside, Burroughs makes several clear breaks with such post, or neo-humanist, thinking. In the first instance, his figuration of space travel has little to do with the hard-bodies of robotics, space-ships and the more conventional cyborgs developed in support of the state military and explored in much of the science-fiction dealing with the question of the cyborg. Also, and despite his hostile often relationship with the body, Burroughs is quite critical of any move that privileges disembodied mind over material existence. In all of his work the transformations that he writes about involve a physical mutation, not always desirable and certainly not pretty, but definitely visceral and material. In this senseBurroughs offers a quite distinct line down which to trace the possibility of coming 'after' the human, one in which the materiality of embodiment is not neglected in the race to rehuman information but the text, takes centre stage, and in which the write as pure or human is not augmented,but is itself overcome. The distinction between these two approachescan perhaps best be characterised by reference to Deleuze's distinction between combat-against and combat-between. The post-human caricatures of Hollywood cinema and the Extropians are oriented always toward an external other against which they must struggle even if that other is a technological threat which they overcome by taking it into themselves, as Kevin Warwick has suggested for example (Warwick, 1997). In contrast to this combatagainst, which seeks to annihilate a threat to the self so as to secure that self, the combat-betweenis always already a self-destruction. As Deleuze puts it: 141

The combat against the Other must be distinguished from the combat between Oneself The combat-againsttries to destroy or repel a force (to struggle against "the diabolical powers of the future") but the combat-between,by contrast, tries to take hold of a force in order to make it one's own. The combat-between is the process through which a force enriches itself by seizing hold of other forces and joining itself to them in a new ensemble:a becoming. (Deleuze, 1998: 132) Where a combat-against tries to destroy Other forces include - amongst which we can technology, one of the most 'diabolical powers of the future' (cf. Land and Corbett, 2001) -a combat-between destroys the self by entering into a becoming which by its very nature changes both parties in their new assemblage. As Keith Ansell-Pearson describesit: a becoming works not via filiation but rather through a novel alliance. A line of becoming... is not defined in terms of connectable points, or by the points which compose it, since it has only a 'middle'. -- Thus a 'becoming is neither one nor two, is inbetween, fine it border the two; the the the or of flight' that runs nor relation of is line block becoming brings into both... It this to or of which perpendicular deterritorialization. the the orchid and producesa shared wasp and symbiotic play (Ansell- Pearson,1997a: 225) In this relationship, this combat-between, there are no pre-existing, stable beings into into the other. then a relationship whereby one simply changes which enter There is nothing but the meeting of forces, through which both are deterritorialized. 142

In this sense, the engagement of what is usually referred to as the human is entirely transfigured by its relations with technics, which are always ongoing. approach stands in direct contradiction both to the Hollywood/NASA Such an ideal of the cyborg as enhanced (and unchanged) Man (still in God's image), and the various attempts to reinscribe technology back into a safe, humanist frame (L and and Corbett, 2001). Also, as Ansell-Pearson (1997a) recognises, a process philosophy of becoming is necessarily a materialist philosophy. The Extropian ideology of disembodied transcendence is only possible because 'the human' has already been inscribed as an immaterial cogito - the ego Other body. its As is to - which opposed the technological couplings of the post-human body can only ever change, or even finally make redundant, the physical body, then there is no need for the eternal ego, the human essence, to ever change. (Re)embodying Information Like Mark Dery, Katherine Hayles has considered the relationships between (dis)embodiment and cyberculture. Whereas Dery's study focuses on millenarian cyberculture, mostly on the West coast of the United States, Hayles considers the parallel developments of cybernetics and science-fiction writing from the late 1940s through to the 1990s. Their conclusions are often quite similar however: One contemporary belief likely to stupefy future generations is the postmodern if body is linguistic discursive that the entirely, a primarily, not and orthodoxy construction... Although in researchers 143 the physical and human sciences

acknowledged the importance of materialism in different ways, they nevertheless is in ideology body's the that the collaborated materiality creating postmodern secondaryto the logical or serniotic structuresit encodes. (Hayles, 1999: 192) Hayles finds Foucault, especially in The Archaeology of Knowledge but also in later like Discipline works and Punish, paradigmatic of this reduction of the material world to abstract discourse. For example, whilst the Panopticon gains its universality and analytic efficacy from abstracting power to a generalised diagram (cf. Deleuze, 1988), this turn away from the material bodies in which this diagram is realised leads Foucault to overemphasise the operations of power, at the expense of analysing the bodies (Hayles, Of have 1999: 194). those resistance of course similar criticisms been made of Foucault within organization studies (Ackroyd and Thompson, 1999; Thompson and Ackroyd, 1995; Gabriel, 1999), but rather than therefore turning her back on the postmodern or posthuman, Hayles works through them. Using Burroughs' The Ticket That Exploded (Burroughs, 1967), she pays careful attention to the materiality of the language and words that shapeboth the form and content of this focus is The this that: novel. end result of Burroughs turns the table on those who advocate disembodiment. Instead of dernaterializing the body, in Ticket the body materializes discourse. (Hayles, 1999: 194) 144

As we saw in chapter two, this is also precisely the function ascribed by Ronald Bogue to Deleuze and Guattari's application of a Hjelmslevian serniotic net to their conception of stratification and the anthropomorphic stratum (Bogue, 1989: 126). One or several bodies? For Hayles, the very idea of the body is an example of disembodied thinking and discursive abstraction. In this she is close to Burroughs' criticism of the is of identity. The use of 'the' reifies and naturalises a single, normalised version of the body, ignores body heterogeneity diversity The the which material and of embodiment. runs parallel to the self; it is a safe and stable location where we can fixed a coherent and but in is Following Varela, Thompson Rosch stable subject, and such not necessary. The Embodied Mind, Hayles suggests that: is a coherent, continuous, essential self neither necessarynor sufficient to explain flux The to the of embodiment... the more one closer one comes embodied existence. is aware that the coherent self is a fiction invented out of panic and fear. In this view it. than reinforces embodiment subversively undercutsessentialismrather (Hayles, 1999: 201) Looking at the body therefore reiterates the kind of essentialism such as that rejected Grint Woolgar's (1997) As first then, thesis. this the two and we saw in chapters of in dependent the subject order to of upon an essentialism anti-essentialism is actually hold the whole interpretative system together. Like Hayles' abstract body, GrInt and Woolgar's approach is dependent upon an abstract reader/interpreter and an equally 145

abstract notion of inscription and reading. In fact, Hayles pairs 'Inscription' with 'the body' on the abstract pole of a dualism with 'incorporation' and 'embodiment' at the other, more material end. The latter, by emphasising process, multiplicity and heterogeneity, avoid the essentialist trap that studies of 'the body' and Grint and Woolgar fall into. Whilst inscription emphasises some abstract notion of text, independent of its material instantiations, incorporation foregrounds the corps which realises that abstraction, not as a hylomorphic, external form stamped upon it, but as an immanent production of its materiality. Following Deleuze and Guattari we could be but form has that that say not only expression, also content, so expression cannot the same as a signifier, or abstract text, that stands above and outside its instantiations. Where Cooper would perhaps characterise this interaction as a burrowing, Hayles speaks of a collaboration, contrasting the two modes of thought such that: Incorporation emerges from the collaboration between the body and embodiment, between the abstract model and the specific contexts in which the model is instantiated. In contrast to inscription, which can be transported from context to incorporation be it free from has been cut entirely can never context once performed, its context. (Hayles, 1999: 200) 146

In such a situation, it becomes virtually meaningless to speak of a context outside the text. We must be careful, however, not to let this privileging of materiality develop into another, albeit inverted, essentialism: Just as incorporating practices are not necessarily more "natural" than inscribing practices, so embodiment is not more essentialistthan the body. Indeed, it is difficult to see what essentialism would mean in the context of embodiment. Essentialism is normative in its impulse, denoting qualities or attributes sharedby all human beings. (Hayles, 1999: 201) It is in this sensethat an anti-essentialism is necessarily anti- or post-humanist. This does not, of course, mean an opposition to human beings but rather a rejection and hostility to an abstract, normative and legislating conceptions of humanism and the, human. The move is similar to that described by Martin Brigham as thee or perhaps an 'ontological turn' (Brigham, 2001). Rather than focusing upon the question of knowledge what of technology is possible - epistemology - the emphasis shifts to the materiality that underpins that knowledge. The effect is again to invert the Cartesian dualism that privileges the knowing subject above all else, most importantly, above the material. Rather than going from an abstract, disembodied, cogitating mind, as Descartesdid, Hayles is suggesting that a material body, in a specific space and time, "conscious basis In thought the effect, provides upon which cognition is possible. becomes an epiphenomenon corresponding to the phenomenal base the body provides" (Hayles, 1999: 203). 147

Incorporation And New-Technology By shifting attention away from abstract, disembodied subjects, busily interpreting their incorporeal texts, toward the materiality of language and the bodies through flows it which and mutates, our analysis is inevitably drawn back to the question of technology which opened this thesis. Instead of turning technology into a text, we are forced to consider the technological materiality of language and text. As noted, Burroughs suggested that the word-virus was relatively benign: it had achieved a symbiotic relationship with its 'human' host that had been stable for some time. With changes in technology, however, that relationship was again becoming contested and open to challenge. The potential outcomes were either Nova - the destruction of the entire planet - or escapeand liberation. Although not hugely optimistic, Burroughs at least held out the possibility that 'wising up the marks' would enable them to resist local level had been forced the the that and re-write control at reality-script on them by language for so long: Plan D called for Total Exposure. Wise up all the marks everywhere. Show them the Storm Life-Time-Fortune. The Reality Studio. And rigged wheel of retake the in his from The Plan as shifted and reformed reports came electric patrols universe. sniffing quivering down streetsand mind screensof the earth. "Area mined - Guards everywhere- Can't quite get through-" "Order total weapons- ReleaseSilence Virus-" "Board books have fallen - Word falling - Break Through in Grey Room - Use Partisans of all nations - Towers, openfire-" (Burroughs, 1992a:59) 148

The mass-media - the books and texts written by the boards, governments and cartels Nova Mob - disintegrate and fall, taking the Word with them. The partisans of the of the earth are encouraged to 'storm the reality studio' and take back control. Throughout the Nova trilogy, this notion of the reality studio and of a pre-recorded both to Burroughs' general theory of language as a virus, producing world connect specifically formed subjects and ordering social reality through dualism, and to the technologies of film and audio tape with which he was experimenting in conjunction with Anthony Balch and Ian Sommerville. Indeed, throughout the texts of this period Burroughs conceives of reality itself as a kind of 'biologic film' (Burroughs, 1984: 65). As much as these works foreground Burroughs' working through of issues of language, materiality and it is also worth that they never stop also containing an fact importance The the that explicit recognition of of capital as a system of control. the reality studio operates on the basis of codes laid down in the 'board books,' boards directors, to and the not incidental references to those referring corporate of pillars of capitalist media, Time, Life, and Fortune, point to a continued attempt in Burroughs work to appreciate the connections between language, capital and very specific modes of subjectivization. The importance of the technologies that Burroughs was experimenting with at the time of the cut-ups should not be underestimated, both in developing Burroughs' ideas of control and resistance, and in intervening in, and changing control. Following a combination of Wittgenstein and G6del, Burroughs recognised that the in thing a pre-recorded world, were the pre-recordings not pre-recorded only 149

(Murphy, 1997). It was these pre-recordings, the board-books and film scripts produced in the capitalist reality studio, that were God, language, word and image: control. To link back to the discussion of double-articulation earlier in the thesis, the stratifications laid down by the double-articul ations of Deleuze and Guattari's lobster/god are precisely these pre-recordings. With the appearance of geological strata, these recordings/judgements appear to be permanent and unchanging, but they are not forever. Neither are they neutral and beyond challenge. The cut-ups, particularly tape-based cut-ups, enabled the intervention of chance to disrupt the pre-recordings and produce something different: a script that wasn't laid out in advance and so could hardly even be called a script, or inscription. It was this possibility of change, mutation and difference at a corporeal level that Burroughs incorporation the equated with escape, and materiality of was central to these changes. Left to themselves, abstract inscriptions are unchanging. Regardless of Burroughs the the medium, same. message remains recognised that change at the level of inscription was never a real change as it depended on language, but by for incorporation, the changing new possibilities change emerged: materiality of When changesin incorporating practices take place, they are often linked with new technologies that affect how people use their bodies and experience spaceand time. Formed by technology at the same time that it creates technology, embodiment discourse by frameworks between technology creating new experiential and mediates that serve as boundary markers for the creation of corresponding discursive systems. 150

In the feedback between technological innovations and discursive practices, incorporation is a crucial link. (Hayles, 1999: 205) Paying close attention to the specificities of embodiment goes some way towards correcting the neglects of the discursive and textual turns, both of which tend toward disembodied a subject at the heart of their discursive, or textual reality - an abstract reading subject, occupying a disembodied point of view. Such a model is quite a long from be body the traditional the that way understanding of as something can simply added to pre-existing, disembodied social analyses (Dale, 2000). In some senseswe can even invert this prioritisation to suggest that the body writes discourse, a point that Hayles makes with reference to Mark Johnson's The Body in the Mind (1987). Whilst "it is a truism in contemporary theory that discourse writes the body," she how body discourse" 205). "Johnson illustrates (Hayles, 1999: the writes, writes Whilst after the linguistic turn, it is a commonplace to recognise that the body itself is written, notably through inscriptions such as gender and sexuality, the conflation of for homosexual in 1950s America, Burroughs Hayles as a which were so problematic and Johnson's point is that language is itself formed by metaphoric associations that fact The from that people usually move simple grow our experiencesof embodiment. around upright, for example, is reflected in the prevalence of certain linguistic down', bit 'higher' 'being 'feeling the a or privileging of or metaphors such as up' life. forms 'lower' of ideals over Indeed, these metaphoric networks and their denigrate do those that that often we will creatures strong associated valuations are so 151

not walk upright, whether the lowest worm, the biblical snake or Shakespeare's twisted hunchback, Richard 111.Even within organization studies, with the separation of conception and execution into the head and the hands, we refer to the 'head' as being at the top of the organization, and the 'hands', low down on the shop-floor, a point that Tolliver and Coleman relate to the science-fictional architecture of Fritz Lang's Metropolis where the rulers of the city live above ground, in fresh air and clean surroundings, whilst below the surface of the city, the workers labour in dark, grime and heat (Tolliver and Coleman, 2001). Equally ren-Liniscentof H. G. Wells' The Time Machine, and the Christian association of a heaven above and hell below, following Johnson, these allusions are reflections of the ways in which the human body itself is organized. Of course these ideas are also quite commensurate with Deleuze and Guattarl's treatment of the development of the anthropomorphic stratum, discussed in chapter two. The upright posture that develops on the steppe allow the hands to be deterritorialized from their locomotive functioning and then reterritorialized by tool use and manipulation. This in turn allows the freeing up of the mouth, deterritori ali zing it from a muzzle function to be reterritorialized by language, and so on. What Johnson's ideas suggest is that the upright posture thereby developed simultaneously becomes a relative form of content within expression by becoming a language. structuring metaphor of Language is not only enabled by the deterritorializations that the human animal undergoes on the steppe, it is also shaped by the physical results of those changes. 152

Of course, as was noted in chapter two, there is a problem with this kind of analysis. In asking the question of human origins, there is a tendency to naturalise these evolutionary and anthropological developments and normalise a particular version of the human, a move that has been problematised throughout this thesis. For similar reasonsHayles is wary of Johnson's use of the body as a metaphor: it is ironic that [Johnson] reinscribes objectivist presuppositions in positing a universal body unmarked by gender, ethnicity, physical disability, or culture. Insisting that the body is an important part of the context from which language emerges,he erasesthe specific context provided by embodiment. (Hayles, 1999: 206) As Deleuze and Guattari put it - "Who does Man think he is?" (1987: 63). For Hayles, this essentialism that sneaks into Johnson's analysis is not necessary however. By considering the diversity of 'embodiment' as opposed to 'the body', a set of metaphors and schema may be possible that would "vary in response to different experiences of embodiment created by historically positioned and culturally constructed bodies" (Hayles, 1999: 206). As well as allowing a recognition of the incorporating inscribing interdependence of and practices as they work together producing bodies and language, such an understanding would also foreground the development to the technology that question of is so central and experience of embodiment and subjectivity. Without an appreciation of this interdependency, not it is is Johnson's only also incapable of physiological essentialism normalising, 153

coping with physical diversity and the technological and cultural changes that effect embodiment. As an example of these changes, Hayles considers the advent of postmodernity with its cyborganic technologies of virtual reality and text basedmodes of communication, a perfect example of which is Sadie Plant's recent study of the mobile phone in which she suggests that the thumb is becoming de- and reterritorialized through the use of the mobile phone and specifically the practice of text-messaging or 'texting' (Plant, 2001). According to Plant, those who are most adept at using this technology tend to does lead hand Not thumb to new the this to text-messages. of one only use send becomes lines being frequently, but itself the thumb muscles and nerve used more doorbell in the a used range of other communications, such as pointing or ringing (Plant, 2001: 53). From its development in conjunction with tool use, the opposable thumb has again been de- and reterritorialized through the combination of technoforces be daily to that text-messaging a activity. cultural enable The result is yet kind form Deleuze the that another relative and of expression within content, of Guattari discuss in relation to sign-languageand gesture. It is important not to simply privilege one aspect of these movements. Like Deleuze inscription incorporation distinct Guattari's and are quite and content and expression, and yet are in a relationship of reciprocal co-determination. bodies in begin different their significantly using ways, either when people becauseof technological innovations or other cultural shifts, changing experiencesof 154

embodiment bubble up into language, affecting the metaphoric networks at play within the culture. At the sametime, discursive constructions affect how bodies move through space and time, influence what technologies are developed, and help to structure the interfaces betweenbodies and technologies. (Hayles, 1999: 206-207) In light of these points it is clear that technology is itself central to the constitution of discourse, as well as discursive constructions effecting the material constructions of technology. As such, the combination of Deleuze and Guattari's ideas on content and expression with Hayles specific interests in the relations of cybernetic technologies and the body enable an alternative, and thoroughly symmetrical, understanding of technology and textuality that does not simple privilege one in terms of the other, or oppose them in a hierarchically ordered binary. To further develop these ideas, Hayles considers Burroughs' cut-up experiments with tape-recorders as an example of a new technology that both effects the operations of language, the human body, and the social order. Tape Recording Voice Often histories of technology and literature treat technology as a theme or subject to be represented within the world of the text. I want to take a different approach, focusing on the technical qualities of audiotapethat changedthe relation of voice and body, a change Burroughs associatesin Ticket with the production of a new kind of bodies Ticket, In the and metamorphosing of mutating we can see a subjectivity. harbinger of the posthumanbody. 155

(Hayles, 1999: 208) As discussed earlier, Burroughs' thesis that the word is a virus leads him to suggest that identity is a product of this infection and its main symptom: an almost obsessive need to subvocalize. Hayles draws on Garret Stewart's work, Reading Voices (1990) to ask "not how we read, or why we read, but where we read," and concludes that, "we read in the body, particularly in the vocal apparatus that produces subvocalization during silent reading" (Hayles, 1999: 207). Rather than assuming that reading is a disembodied, purely mental activity much like Descartes' version of cognition, Stewart's analysis looks to the material body that he it As the text incorporates as a subvocalization as reads. such, recognises that least because is literature, to the subvocalization essential production of not it is the homophonous resonations that specific words produce in the reading body that gives be by if Specific its literary ten-ns analogous may writing qualities. words replaceable informational the content of a specific semantic or we are only concerned with documents have driest literary but its the of scientific a effects - and even message, literary effect, however soporific - are dependentupon the homophonous associations that specific words trigger. As well as being crucial for the study of literature, the for language important the of points study more question of subvocalization raises his history has in Manguel As Alberto of reading, the early suggested generally. libraries were filled with a cacophony of voices as all reading was done out loud (Manguel, 1997). Before the advent of silent reading, the act of reading was a body The by in the the the act of reader. of reading, author's voice reincorporation of 156

materialising an author's words, brought the original speakerof those words back into the present, thereby providing them with a ghostly presence. As such, reading was a literal form of re-present-ation. Authority was validated by the presence of voice, albeit in a different body. Writing was a way to literally 'speak' to future generations. It is only with the advent of 'silent' reading, where vocalization is suppressedto a sub-audible level, that the direct line of association between authority and voice is questioned. Even then however, the subvocalizations of the reader act to perpetuatethis authorisation. For Hayles, the basic insight that Burroughs came to with his tape-recorder between that technologies the experiments was audio severed association voice and differed Where from previous technologies like the tape-recorder authorial presence. radio and the phonograph however, was in finally allowing the masses to produce listening However them. recordings, as well as consume active our and consumption, this production affords a fundamental shift in people's relationship to the recordings: Long after writing dissociated presencefrom inscription, voice continued to imply a in in flesh... Like the the the phonograph, moment and subject who was present inscription, but difference it the technology that crucial of with a audiotape was permitted erasure and rewriting ... Whereas the phonograph produced objects that in form, be their manufactured magnetic tape allowed the only consumed could The be to switches activating the powerful and as well. a producer consumer paradoxical technoconceptual actors of repetition and mutation, presence and absence,were in the handsof the masseswho could afford the technology. 157

(Hayles, 1999: 208-210) Connecting to Burroughs' critique of the mass media and mass culture, both of which identity mass produce so serve the circuits of capital, the tape-recorder offers a chance to take the very production of social reality out of the hands of the boards, hands film' in human 'biologic the the of the and place it editors and scriptwriters of masses. Of course, such a rhetoric of emancipation and democratisation is commonplace today amongst internet evangelists, e.com-munistas and cyber-gurus, but it is rare for such theorists to consider the question of access to new technology and social exlusion. Mark Dery has levelled this criticism at the likes of Hans Morovec, the Extroplans and the editors of Mondo 2000, who are quite dismissive of those who fail to take the next evolutionary leap into the shiny, high-tech world of "sharpies, mutants and superbrights" (Dery, 1996: 305). Burroughs' concerns are low however, he is less the that cost of mass produced clear and considerably elitist, tape-recorder equipment places their power in the hands of the masses (Burroughs, 1979). Developing these themes in the aftermath of the May 1968 uprisings, for example in 'Electronic Revolution' and The Wild Boys he is also clear that this technology can and should be used to explicitly political ends (Burroughs, 1979; 1992b). In effect, his is a Marxist call for the masses to lay their hands on the technologies of mass production - both in the sense of the mass production of in but the sense of the production of the masses: the commodities, more crucially, As Walter deindividuated, consumers and producers of mass society. normalised, Benjamin put it: 158

Mass reproduction is aided especially by the reproduction of masses. (Benjamin, cited in Dery, 1996: 142) The central role played in this production of mass by the mass media is also brought into focus when Burroughs suggests that the mass media are the central control literate mechanism of a society (Burroughs and Odier, 1989). In pre-literate, agrarian societies, such as the Mayan civilisation, the ruling, priestly classes are dependent illiteracy the upon universal of the massesfor their power. As the massesare unable to read, the priests are placed in the privileged position of being able to interpret the for determine that the time the arcane codices and calendars correct of year land through slash and bum, the sowing and reaping of crops, and the preparation of celebrations and religious rites that will ensure a good harvest (cf. Land and Munro, 2000). Unable to read for themselves,the massesare in no position to challenge this hand, In industrial the the control system of society on other authority. contemporary the mass media is entirely dependent upon mass literacy so as to infect as many as possible with its viral communications and order-words. In light of this it is perhaps from first As the that the slicing of no surprise cut-ups came newspapers. well as a for held the a wooden surface, newspapers convenient and cheap protector out the lines the of contemporary society. promise of slicing into main control Subject/Meat/Mutation If language is control then "Burroughs proposes to stop the interior monologue by it it onto tape and subjecting the recording recording making external and mechanical, to various manipulations" (Hayles, 1999: 211). This technique is similar in effect to 159

the literary cut-ups already discussedand the result of both procedures is to break the pre-sent communications of the word-virus and biologic film repeating the same old human narratives, to enable something new to come into existence. The shift is from human being, to a post-human becoming via the means of mutating inscriptions and incorporations through the cut-up. This is no simple post-humanist transcendenceof the flesh, however. Instead the question is one of getting outside the images and words that organize and order the body in specific ways - of producing a bodyDeleuze Guattari, Guattari it (Deleuze 1987). without-organs as and and would put Indeed, Burroughs is quite clear that just trying to 'beat the meat', as Vivian Sobchack has put it (Sobchack, 1995) is entirely self-defeating, or rather, stands no defeating 'the chance whatsoever of self': Question: "Mr. Martin, you say 'give me a wall and a garbagecan and I can sit there forever. ' Almost in the next sentence you say 'All I want is out of here. ' Aren't you contradicting yourselr" "You are confused about the word 'self' I could by God sit there forever if I had it. in for I don't. As soon as I move in on any self all that to a self sit would sit still that self wants is to be somewhereelse. Anywhere else. Now there you sit in your so incidentally. Some ' Suppose I 'self. that could out of self. can you walk people called don't encouragethis but it happensand threatensto become pandemic. So you walk body Now form being the the that and stand across room. what would out of you it have body have? Obviously form. So precisely would your all walks out of your you have done is take the sameform from one place to another. You have taken great trouble and pain (believe me there is no pain like flesh withdrawal consciously back have To leave gotten precisely where and you you started. really experienced) 160

human form you would have to leave the human form that is leave the whole concept of word and image. You cannot leave the human image in the human image. You cannot leave human form in the human form. And you cannot think or conceive in non-image terms by mathematical definition of a being in my biologic film which is a seriesof images. Does that answer your question?I thought not." (Burroughs, 1984: 64-65) Escaping control by image and word requires a complete, and thoroughly embodied, transformation of the subject. Any attempt to transcend the body whilst retaining human form is quite impossible precisely becauseit remains entirely dependent upon a pre-given human form that is itself generatedby embodied patterns deriving from language, language. become By to viral, visceral seeking pure communication, pure the post-humanists condemn themselves to being perpetually in-formation: organized by the regimes of capitalist subjectification that operate through linear, narrative, viral language (cf. Guattari, 1996: 18-21). 'Long live the new fiesh! ' These themes of embodiment, communication, language, media and control are film date, Croneberg's Burroughsian is David in to most picked up perhaps what 25 Videodrome In this film the action centres on James Woods' character Max Rehn, . in Tiring budget TV that who runs a specialises soft-core porn. of seeing channel 'erotic' versions of Greek and Roman classics, Max is on the lookout for something harder when his technician draws his attention to Videodrome: a strange satellite broadcast that seems to contain only images of sexualised torture and violence. 161

Entirely devoid of plot and narrative, the channel intrigues and excites both Rehn and his lover Nicki Brand. As the film progresses however, it is revealed that Max's technician is an employee of Spectacular Optical, a large corporation that is developing Videodrome as a means of mind control. The Videodrome signal triggers responsesin the brain of those who watch it which in turn produce a brain turnour. This turnour causeshallucinations so that the viewer finds it increasingly difficult to differentiate reality from hallucination and video, and is made increasingly subject to control. As Max descendsinto this confused realm, Spectacular Optical are able to control him by means of a videotape carrying their commands. As hallucination and blur, huge, reality a vertical wound opens in Max's stomach and his new masters can him by literally inserting a videotape into his body, viscerally illustrating programme Hayles ideas on incorporation. Reflecting Burroughs' thematic interests in control, resistance and double-agency, Max's quest to discover the truth about his situation, and about Spectacular Optical, bring him into contact with Professor Brian O'Blivion, Videodrome the creator of kind first O'Blivion, its signal and one of a of pastiche of McLuhan and victims. Baudrillard, will only appear on television if he is 'on television', so that in a chat show early in the film, in which he is participating with Brand and Rehn, he does not in discussants. but in the television appear person circle of other on a screenincluded A master of the simulacra and hyperreality, we eventually find that the good Professor has been dead for quite some time. His public appearancesare staged from he has left in hands huge his library that the capable a of recordings of videotape 162

daughter Bianca. Opposed to Spectacular Optical, Bianca is one of Rehn's intended targets now that he is a programmed assassin, reminiscent of The Manchurian Candidate, working for the sinister organization. However, she is able to prevent him from killing her long enough to remove the control tape and offer him a new one. With this tape inserted, Rehn is either operating as a double agent, now working for Bianca O'Blivion, or a rogue agent seeking revenge. Either way (and the film is ultimately undecidable) he breaks into Spectacular Optical's show, where they are previewing a new range of eyewear, and kills the CEO, his chief controller. As he flees from the scene of the shooting he hides out in an abandoned ship down on the dockyards. Inside is a room with an old television screen on which the image/hallucination of Brand's face appears. Brand herself has long since gone missing, presumed killed on Videodrome to give Spectacular Optical the final image that enables them to control Rehn. Now on screen, her voice whispers to him that it is time to give up the old flesh, that he is now 'the video-word made flesh'. On screen,the image of Rehn, in the old boat, shooting himself in the head appearsas he "Long live flesh! " This is immediately the the utters words new scene repeated, framing battered "Long live flesh! " TV the the only without set it new - at which film the point ends. The difficulties with reading a clear narrative into Cronenberg's film are numerous, differentiation between least to not offer a clear reality, its absolute refusal hallucination and video, but in a sense that confusion is one of the film's main blur, film As the the and and reality merge subjects of messages. and representation 163

their desires are increasingly constituted by image and word in striking similarity to Burroughs' 'biologic film'. At the end the viewer is left wondering what Max's fate has been. Depicted in muted colours, the rusting hulk of the disused boat and the dockyard that provide the setting for the final scene push the physical abandoned materiality of Rehn's position into the background. In contrast, the vibrant image of Brand on the broken television screen seem more focused, more real, than this fate backdrop. Rehn's But the mundane material actually question remains of what is. On one reading his control tape played itself out so that now, an unwitting he kills him his himself he that those assassin, orders. so who gave can't implicate On another reading however, he is now so thoroughly suffused with the video-word that he is literally 'the video-word made flesh', and so has to leave his old selfbehind. With his new-found ability to rewrite the control script, Rehn is on the way to becoming something other, quite different from either the old flesh of the body, or the all-too-human face of control. In a sense then, Rehn's undecidable 'suicide' is both a final severing of word/image control lines, and the start of something else - the dilemma faced Cronenberg is flesh. Ultimately the same as with new of course, Burroughs. It is impossible to represent a becoming beyond word and image, whilst still bound by word and image. Breaking out of the text Hayles suggeststhat Burroughs finds his way out of this bind, by pointing outside the homophonic drawing to the text, resonancesof embodiment: attention written and 164

Where hope exists in Ticket, it appears as posthuman mutations like the fish boy, whose fluidity perhaps figures a type of subjectivity attuned to the froth of noise rather than the stability of a false self, living an embodied life beyond human consciousnessas we know it. But this is mere conjecture, for any representation of the internal life of the fish boy could be done only in words, which would infect and destroy exactly the transformation they were attempting to describe. For Burroughs, the emphasisremains on subversionand disruption rather than creative rearticulation. Even subversion risks being co-opted and taken over by the viral word; it can succeedonly by continuing to disrupt everything, including its own prior writing. (Hayles, 1999: 220) It is this continual drive to mutate and disrupt control that gives Burroughs' cut-ups their power and energy, enabling them to produce something 'Other' that lies outside the pre-recorded world of word and image. It also points to the limits of these works however. Like Videodrome, the cut-ups can only ever point outside of themselves and can never represent the post-human within their text. As Burroughs put it in an don't books, because Odier: "Free in Daniel they men exist anyone's interview with (Burroughs Odier, 1989: 37). the are and author's creations" But is this really a problem? If we accept Burroughs' problernatisation of into dualistic its separation of reality world and word, reality and representation, and future. Indeed, if it to then text shouldn't need represent a possible representation, a did so it would become yet another control book, trying to write and delimit future 26. function Instead by becoming the teleological cut-up should evolution and 165

connection, disrupting and breaking association blocks to sever narrative lines of control. Burroughs' aim is to produce disruption, not to offer alternatives, so a text can only ever point outside itself, indicating a possible line of flight. Rather than evaluating these texts in relation to representation, we can only really evaluate them in relation to production: What do they do? What effects do they have? If they help to break down linguistic control lines, then they have done their job. Rather than holding up an image to the reader, saying "this is what you could become," reading and writing are themselves part of a process of becoming otherwise. Whilst the first version of a text assumesthat change moves from one state of being to another, both of which are susceptible to representation, this second model partakes in the flux of change and transformation. As such, the humanists' critical criteria of metaphor and do representation not apply to Burroughs' texts, a point that must go at least some way to explaining the hostility of much of his critical reception (Lydenberg, 1987; Skerl and Lydenberg, 1991). Nevertheless, in Burroughs later writing - the Cities trilogy comprising Cities of the Red Night, The Place of Dead Roads and The Western Lands - Burroughs does go some way toward articulating an alternative form of social organization, one based on the criminal underworld of the Johnsons,outlaw gangs of Wild-Western shootists and all male, pirate communes. Within these new organizational forms, a new type of subjectivity is suggested, or at least indicated, even if its final form lies beyond the spacesof representation in text. It is to this possibility that the next chapter turns. 166

Chapter 4- Subjectivity After the Human As I have tried to indicate in the previous chapter, the question of subjectivity is present throughout Burroughs' work and can be found in both the shifting expressions of autobiography in his first two novels and in the mid-period attempts to cut free from linguistically imposed lines of subjectivization. Throughout his work it is impossible to separatethe question of subjectivity from Burroughs' other literary and theoretical concerns. In this chapter I want to briefly review and tie these ideas together whilst also considering the question of Burroughs' own subjectivity queer writer. as a This will set the scene for a discussion of debates over Burroughs' formulate later drawing in his to attempt a more radical model of subjectivity work, on Deleuze and Guattari's distinction between the subject-group and the subjugatedhave (Deleuze Guattari, 1983; Murphy, 1997). Whilst group and some commentators judged Burroughs' attempts in this direction to be ultimately unsuccessful (Russell, 2001), the grounds upon which this failure is articulated is itself quite informative and fundamental between for the to the relationship reconsideration of a points need writing, representation and subjectivity. Acknowledging the limitations of Burroughs' attempt to rethink subjectivity and social organization opens the spacefor 'meaning' the of the trans-human without recourse to of a more general consideration 1997a). Paradoxically (An hylomorphism logic sell a of representation and -Pearson, the text of Burroughs most able to point toward this transhumanism does not employ the science-fictional tropes of the Nova trilogy or Hollywood's cyborg dead books its Egyptian back looks but the to the of attempt to representations, 167

reconstitute what Nietzsche called a new "soul hypothesis" (Burroughs, 1987; Nietszche, 1989: 20). For Burroughs, the word is a virus which over the years has entered into a symbiotic relationship with the human, to produce him/her as a relatively 'domesticated' Language Guattari be from just Deleuze animal. cannot separated and control and as discuss the centrality of the order-word in the constitution of language, Burroughs places the question of control at the centre of his theory of language. through the interior consciousness. T monologue of Language, authority, produces subjects and self- becomes an identity that Burroughs critiques through the Korzybskian notion of the 'Is' of identity. When one can say that one is something, a process of reification has taken place that conceals certain relationships of power. Burroughs clarifies by relating the way that 'servant' is represented in Egyptian hieroglyphics: The is of identity is rarely used in Egyptian pictorial writing. Instead of saying he is my servant they say he (is omitted) as my servant: a statement of relationship not identity. (Burroughs, 1979: 65) Through the is of identity the word-virus produces essential, fixed, individual, is In Burroughs identities. suggesting that this one sense, measurableand controllable but there is nothing strictly to relationality, reification serves conceal an underlying 'false' about this process, as in the notion of 'false consciousness'. The linguistic 168

operation has very real effect. It produces those identities by corralling and confining the multiplicity of subjectivity into a singular entity: the id-entity. Burroughs had a good reason to be suspicious of identity. As his first two, and most blatantly autobiographical, novels suggest, Burroughs was simultaneously a Junkie 27 and a Queer . The difficulty of living with these identities in 1950s USA eventually drove Burroughs into an exile that lasted until the 1960s. Indeed, it was only in the 1970s that Burroughs finally returned to take up permanent residence in the United States. Among the reasons for this were the Harrison Narcotics act and State level anti-drugs legislation that effectively made the state of being a junkie a criminal (Murphy, 1997). offence Not only could someone be arrested, prosecuted and imprisoned for possessionof a banned substance,but not they could be charged with having taken a drug, or being an addict. Track-marks would be sufficient evidence for arrest. A similar argument can be made concerning Burroughs' homosexuality. As Foucault has suggested, the necessary association of a deviant act with the idea of a deviant individual is a comparatively recent invention (Foucault, 2002). By relating homosexual acts to a specific type of person - the homosexual - discourses such as logic, is identity. As logic this the the of well as parodying of psychiatry perpetuate as for example when the infamous Dr. Benway concocts a programme to make (1991: 35), in Naked Lunch individuals 'normal', queer much of perfectly straight Burroughs' work can be seen as a rejection of a simple, fixed, homosexual identity. 169

In an extended study of Burroughs as a queer writer, Jamie Russell has recently suggestedthat the central drive of Burroughs' work up to and including Naked Lunch was to problematise and reject the 'effeminate paradigm' that dominated contemporary discourses on homosexuality (Russell, 2001). Within this discourse, the homosexual is characterised as an invert. By layering this inversion with binary. hierarchical conceptions of gender and sexuality, the homosexual is assumed to be less than a real man: an effeminate man. Sex is assumed to take place between a dominant male partner, and a submissive, female partner and within such a binary logic, it is impossible to conceive of a truly homosexual relationship as at least one of the participants must adopt a passive, ferninised role. By relating Burroughs' writing to the socio-political and clinical contexts of 1950s USA, Russell alerts us to the importance of Burroughs' desire to escape this simple binary, oppositional logic and, by escaping, to create a new space within which homosexual relations can take place binary to an other, conceived as a opposite. without reference Subjectivization and Subjugation Burroughs' writing up to and including the Nova trilogy, was largely a response to these issues of social and linguistic control relating to the production of pre-formed dependent identity, by imposed or upon a controlling authority as an subjectivities, the exclusion of an other, which Burroughs recognised was itself a kind of dependency. The student uprisings during May 1968 opened up new possibilities for Burroughs' writing, however. In the work that immediately followed these events, 170

particularly The Wild Boys and The Job, there is a new, more positive register language: distinct from his operating, quite earlier, negative critiques of capital and According to Burroughs, speaking in 1969, "Authority in the West has never been more threatened than it is right now" [Burroughs and Odier, 1989: 128], precisely because this new body of radicals supplanted the accommodated and quiescent just A to a working class. positive or affirmative alternative capitalist society, and not negative critique of it, seemedconceivable: a utopian fantasy not bounded by the by linguistic foreclosed terms terms of the mythological of modernism or postmodemism. (Murphy, 1997: 146-7) Just as many writers have seen the events of May 1968 as a turning point in break it Burroughs theory, that represented a revolutionary politics and recognised been forms Wbilst had traditional of resistance. previous revolts primarily with aimed at the overthrow and take-over of power in the name of a specific group or set diffuse 1968 in in ideals, May their the the were unclear of objectives and revolts of identification of their objects of critique. This was not necessarily the result of incoherence or ignorance however. In many ways it was the inevitable consequence of the scale and integration of the rebels' ideas. They were not simply opposed to a (Hobsbawrn, but 'the 1998: 294-5). to as a system' whole monarchy or government As Eric Hobsbawm has suggested, this was in part why the revolution 'failed'. Although there were at least a couple of days during the uprising when the communist failed France, led have the taken to take government of over it a coup and party could 171

the initiative (Hobsbawm, 1998: 289-90). On the other hand, there is every indication that had they done so, they would have failed to be truly revolutionary. By simply taking over the governmental systems, so much of the bureaucracy that the students were opposed to would have remained in place. The paradox set out by these events is that for a movement to be really revolutionary, simply wresting power from the hands of one elite and giving it to another will not suffice. A similar lesson was learned following the Russian revolution, when Lenin was as keen as any capitalist to Frederick Taylor's embrace system of scientific management(Braverman, 1974: 12). Although the means of production was now nominally in the hands of the workers, the reality was that they were subordinated to even more intense managerial control and authority. For an effective revolution to occur, much would have to change; just than the ownership of capital, or the people occupying the posts of certainly more It would need to challenge the whole capitalist organization of government. production and desire, including the relationships of representation and both language. implied Burroughs' subjectification in understandingsof capital and These complexities still effect the anti-capitalist movement today, with protesters at Genoa and Seattle etc. being accused by their critics of not having a coherent (cf. failing Hislop, 2001), to to offer a viable alternative capitalism programme and but as we shall see this critique is only valid if we accept the assumption that the be in form given advance and correct of social organization can, and should, hylomorphically 'the by the their matter of masses' undifferentiated stamped upon leaders or by an ideology. As there is already a set of power relations and a whole 172

politics implicit in such a model of change, the challenge of thinking revolution after May 1968 is not simply a reactive one, but a proactive opening up onto new possibilities. For Murphy, the key to understanding Burroughs' work after '68 is the DeleuzoGuattarian distinction between a subject group and a subjugated group (Deleuze and Guattari, 1983: 348-9), an idea that they derive from Sartre's distinction between the series and the (fused) group (Murphy, 1997: 150; Deleuze and Guattari, 1983: 256-7). Quite simply the distinction hinges upon the nature of the organization and associated processes of subjectivization occurring within a group. In a subjugated group (or series), the group's social organization exists prior to the individual members of that joining it and taking up their (pre-ordained) place, as it were. This is, of group course, the dominant understanding that we have of organization within the disciplines of management and organization particularly if it uses a case study method, there is an assumption that some studies. In almost any textbook, combination of finding the right people for the right job (recruitment and selection), changing the structure of the organization in some way (organizational design, structure), or finding a way to make sure that people do the right job in the right way (motivation, leadership, culture etc.), can solve an organization's problems28 If we . from down, that the top accept such changescan come e.g. by consultants (a favoured role to be played by students analysing a case study) or management,then the idea of the organization precedesits material instantiation in the composition of its members. The model is entirely hylomorphic with form determining, and dominating, content. 173

For this model to apply, there is no need for the people to actually conform perfectly. The main point is that the attempt to control in this way is made, and some degree of be conformity will necessaryif the organization is to function. The intent is entirely descriptive despite being in theory normative, such couched apparently neutral, tenninology (cf. Willmott, 1993; 1998). The idea of organizational functioning is important here. In the model suggested be the to above, role played by a group is predetermined and given by the 'needs' of the organization, suggesting a deterministic, organic metaphor of the kind taken up by both (e. Wilson, in in thinkers, theory g. neo-Darwinist evolutionary and sociobiology 2000). Indeed, once the idea of an organism is accepted, then the suggestion that have determinate roles to play within that organism, and the organism specific organs itself within its wider milieu, follow naturally. In short, the defining feature of the imposed is its to an externally of subjectivization subjugated group subordination order. As Murphy puts it: [An individual] belatedly joins an already existing social complex embodied in devices (aspects Marx of what and management combining, mechanical sorting, her in him "a These labour"... ). "dead place give or a prefabricated machines called seriality" by reducing the subject's choices to the array of preestablishedalternatives they offer. (Murphy, 1997: 150) 174

As well as making clear the direct links between seriality and management techniques and technologies, this quote is interesting because it raises the spectre of Marx's labour theory of value (Marx, 1976; Marx, 1985; Elson, 1979). All the elements of the organization are in place to ensure that the worker takes their allotted position within the production process. The reasons for this, as writers like Stephen Marglin have suggested, is not so much to facilitate effective organization in some abstract sense, but to extract surplus-value: profit (Marglin, 2001). Indeed, the idea of effectiveness in the abstract is an absurdity, but Marglin's point is that management from labour the the serves strict purpose of realising, or extracting, a profit of an body, the source of all value within Marx's theory, and thereby organized working contribute to the accumulation of capital (Marglin, 2001: 27). Again the metaphor of the organism springs to mind, only the purpose of the organism is determined in this instance by the need to realise a profit in a competitive capitalist economy. Through this example it is easy to see how the shifting levels of control in Burroughs' work are simultaneously theoretical developments, and extensions which work together and In the model of the subjugated group, subjectivity is complement one another. by, (pre-sent to terminology) the to, use our earlier subordinated and pre-determined least in that the realised at socius; an organization is part organization of capitalist through the operations of language producing coherent individual identities and distributing them through the operations of the order-word. Both Sartre and Deleuze and Guattari oppose the series/subjugated group with the fused group, or subject group, though they differ importantly in how this opposition is 175

conceived. For both, whilst the first (subjugated group) is realised as a subject in relation to an external other (for example management - itself a subjugated group) which has predetermined its organization and lines of subjectivization, with the second (the subject group) the group is its own other, that is it relates to itself as both subject and object. The shift hinges upon the group' perception of its external determination, and active responseto this: The fused group negates the series by the force of its collision with material circumstances (including, in some cases, machines, legal penalties, sanctioned violence, and other forces) that are the products of other series of individuals who treat the proto-fused group as their object and thus threaten it. We might say that the threat wakes the subjugatedgroup to its dilemma, at which point it becomesa fused group. (Murphy, 1997: 151) Once it has awoken to its condition in this way, the newly fused (or subject) group has become its own object through a recognition of the group as a group, and therefore through the eyes of the other members of the group. The effect of this is to directed, for the produce a new, self-determined and social organization of the space dissolution fresh lines It is develop, it, this that to group of subjectivization. and with it so crucial to Deleuze and Guattari's critique of organic organization and their body-without-organs (cf. Guattari, Deleuze the positive idea of and underdetermined 1987). 176

The wild boys'nomadic war machine If Burroughs began his project of disrupting, dissolving, or even destroying preformed linguistic identities with the cut-ups of the Nova Trilogy, in The Wild Boys he both continues this project (though with The Wild Boys it is only the narrative, rather than syntax, that is cut-up (Murphy, 1997: 157)) and tries to take it further. As the figures of the Wild Boys themselves begin to appear later in the novel, Burroughs fantasy articulates a of a different type of social group, independent of the external formations imposed upon them by the stratified socius of capitalist society. Unlike symbolism and myth, which operate hierarchically, and therefore support the formation of subjugated groups, the investments of fantasy have the potential to become revolutionary by creating lines of subjectivization that cut-across lines filiation descent to produce new and novel alliances authoritative of and transversally. The family of man always rejects the transversal, forming itself as a line of descent and seeking continuity between the now of humanity and Adam (and just behind him, God). This filial descent of the human is guaranteed by the myth of creation and origin. When myth, and particularly originary myth, is employed by Burroughs it is used ironically, idea the to and structure of mythology and a joke unsettle very as in kind descent. A The Port Saints, this example of appears phylogenetic a perfect of dog-like Wild is Wild 2, Burroughs Boys the the about origins of of writing part when Boys: 177

According to the legend an evil old doctor, who called himself God and us dogs, created the first boy in his adolescentimage. The boy peopled the garden with male phantoms that rose from his ejaculations. This angered God, who was getting on in years. He decided it endangeredhis position as CREATOR. So he crept upon the boy and anesthetized him and made Eve from his rib. But some of Adam's phantoms refused to let God near them under any pretext. After millenia these cool remote in breathe the wild boys. spirits (Burroughs, 1980: 97, cited in Murphy, 1997: 167) This subversive counter-mythology operates to delegitimise the Christian myth of by inversion. Not only is the first man a dog ('god' backwards) but genesis playful the traditional lines of descent from Adam and Eve are set against an alternative line descent Oedipal/nuclear family. the of operating outside of Indeed, in many ways this alternative line is not a descent at all, but an alliance not legitimated by patriarchal/matriarchal structures of identity: "these cool remote spirits breathe in the force. literally boys" like They wild an alien are an otherness within, realised through a fantasy that works in a quite different way to myth. Rather than unifying in some dimension, fantasy Wild Boy this supplementary counter-mythical, serves to unsettle unity and point to a multiplicity that cannot be totallsed. As opposed to myth, fantasy always operates heterogeneously, cutting across familial descent in becoming lines to modes of phylogenetic of invest other. Such investments can include cybernetic connections to technological 178 contraptions, as

witnessed in The Wild Boys when they enter into a series of animal and technological becomings: The Wild Boys manifest what Deleuze and Guattari would call "becomings-animal" in their escapefrom the constituted social order. They do not become animals, as if "boys" and "animals" were two statesthat could be occupied essentially; rather, they deterritorialize, or dismantle their bodies' social representations, by adopting or "reterritorializing" on effective, nonrepresentationalanimal functions. They do not imitate animals, but rather they adopt the animals' defensemechanisms."Each group developed special skills and knowledge until it evolved into humanoid subspecies" (WB 147), like the Warrior Ants, handlessboys who screw steel implants into their stumps; cat boys who wear poison-clawed gloves; Snakeboys, who handle (and even become) venomous reptiles; and lycanthropic wolf boys. Other boys deterritorialize themselves through technology, attaching themselves to gliders, roller-skates, and in other weaponssystems order to battle the stateapparatus. (Murphy, 1997: 165) Whilst myth partakes in a unity of origin, the transversal fantasies of the Wild Boys heterogeneity invest that the weaponry and are always concerned with a material cyborganization already a part of the social field with a perverse and revolutionary desire, effectively turning these forces against the socius that appears to miraculously spawn them. Capitalism really has produced its own gravediggers as the confrontation of these proto-subject groups with their subjugating organization, and the subjugated groups imposing this seriality, has given rise to a direct confrontation is The that of changing the revolutionary potential with that social organization. 179

organization of the socius itself; the very forms of (serial) sociality that are capitalism. Apocalypse Now The question remains as to whether the Wild Boys' violent opposition to their bring subjugation can about this revolution. For Murphy the Wild Boys, like the students who inspired them, cannot help but fail to realise their revolutionary because their vision is limited to an apocalyptic negation. The Wild Boys is potential subtitled 'A Book of the Dead', reflecting both the death of the old social order which the boys seek to overthrow, but also the death of the subjugated subject. Indeed, throughout the book, and Burroughs' later work, death and rebirth figure prominently, but if subjugation is to be killed, what will take its place? Throughout his mid-period Nova trilogy and the Wild Boys texts, Burroughs' idea of from It through and representation, operates negation. is control revolution, of escape have the the that self as we come to understand it end of an apocalyptic vision spells is liberation have that oppression smashed, will subjugating and assumes once liberated from independent of existence occurred, without articulating a conception the struggle against oppression. When discussing Burroughs' reception by the humanist mainstream of literary criticism in the 1960s, Richard Dellamora notes that hostile Burroughs' in Naked Kermode like Frank to methods quite were critics 29 Lunch precisely becausethe text representedan attack both on the humanist values , The themselves. the traditional main accusations were critics writing, and on of more 180

that Burroughs' writing was apocalyptic and nihilistic, that is they debased and traduced the human in a purely destructive impulse without offering anything positive in its place. For Dellamora, this rejection is based on Kermode's hornophobia, which cannot see homosexual relations as anything but nihilistic. Separated from the productive/reproductive fiunction of heterosexual intercourse, the act of gay sex is fruitless dissipation 'queer In this pointless; a apocalypse' of energy. exploring 30 Dellamora turns his attention towards Burroughs' earlier and more autobiographical Queer, he work, of which notes: Narrative structure in Queer... takes the particular form of a queer apocalypse, in which an errant "I" stumbles to exotic locales in search of an elusive, ultimate intoxication. The subject is condemnedto psychic and physical disintegration since, disidentified from the Oedipal contract, he lacks as well any alternative psychological or social structure in relation to which he might constitute himself. (Dellamora, 1995: 137) The parallels between Richard Dellamora's reading of Burroughs' Queer and Nick Land's reading of Francis Ford-Coppola's Apocalypse Now are both striking and informative. Where Burroughs' alter ego Bill Lee, stumbles around the jungles of South America in pursuit of both sexual gratification with his travelling companion, Willard Martin Sheen's in Now drug Yage, Apocalypse the character and shamanic travels up-river, through the jungles of Vietnam and Cambodia to reach the elusive Colonel Kurtz and along the way find out something more about himself. In neither hippy find for lost identity: is the trip however, to the almost cliched a search case, 181

one's self. Rather the journeys involve the travellers in a process of self- disidentification or deindividualization (cf. Foucault, 1983: xiv): the dissolution of a legitimated favour identity in socially anchored and of an experimental connection disrupted, is 'other': becoming. Oedipal both In the with something a contract cases either through a process of addition that multiplies the terms of the Oedipus to a point where the triangle can no longer contain them (Deleuze and Guattari, 1986) or simply by making alternative investments that simply have nothing to do with 'daddymommy-me9 any more. This joumey is quite literally heart into trip the of a darkness, beyond the pale of socially legitimated human identity into the an-Oedipal; inhave an a space where previous reference points simply no meaning any more; human world beyond any humanist morality. In Apocalypse Now, Marlon Brando's Kurtz writes in a letter to his son, "I am beyond their lying morality". As Willard physically follows the Colonel up-nver, he also follows him psychologically, retracing the decisions and operations that Kurtz was involved in through the documentation provided him as intelligence for this mission. Of course, the final goal of his mission is to terminate the Colonel's command "with finally "You he Willard Kurtz As and meet are an puts it when extreme prejudice". bill. " In Nick Land's boy, by to terms, collect an unpaid errand grocery clerks sent "command and control want him dead. They transmit a terminator machine into Cambodia, jacking it into a river that winds through the war like a main circuit cable 202). At 1995: (Land, into Kurtz" the end of this process/journey, and plugs straight the senseof apocalypse and disintegration is strong: 182

Evening at the end of the river: thick tropical heat, an airstrike coming in, and Morrison is sliding through oedipal murder and incest into the occult sonics of matricide. Kurtz waits in the foetid gloom, ready to die. His guerrillas are preparing to slaughter a water-buffalo below, laughing and clapping among torches, automatic rifles and shrunken heads. You have a 28-centimetre serrated combat knife in your left hand. The Willard skin is coming away in ragged scraps, exposing something beyond masculinity, beyond humanity, beyond life. Patches of mottled technoderm woven with electronics are emerging. Daddy and mum-mymeans nothing anymore. You scrapeaway your face and stepinto the dark.... (Land, 1995: 203-204) Although Nick Land's account of Willard's process" as he follows Kurtz into the heart of darkness has been contested", it does provide a sustained attempt at following the deterritorialization of an oedipal subjectivity, situated within the specific socio-econornic and political context of advanced, high-technology heterogeneous the toward subject as and quite capitalism, a cybernetic conception of literally monstrous. In light of the political questions raised by attempts to defend the human and its specifically oedipal subjectivity in the face of technological threat, Nick Land's attempt has obvious relevance for attempts to rethink cyborg or posthuman subjectivities. Perhaps most importantly, like Burroughs, his analysis is always concrete, despite its use of science-fictional tropes and almost cut-up writing he discourse Anti-Oedipus Apocalypse Now his Throughout and continually on style. high-tech, to the these situation of contemporary cybernetic connects materials flows information its of and capital through capitalism with increasingly abstracted 183

the circuits of cyberspace and desire. In this way he is able to produce a kind of time travel that links mercantile capitalism, Dutch colonialism and the ivory trade; the Vietnam war and the American military's inauguration as an international police force; the increasingly deterritorialized flows of cybernetic capitalism; and the cyborganic dissolution of oedipal 'self' identity through the circuits of simulation, 33 The intelligence 'machinic the process of artificial and matrix' of cyberspace . in Ford-Coppola's is like Burroughs the time-travel that much recognises writing juxtaposition of the Vietnam war with Conrad's The Heart of Darkness: Conrad's Heart of Darkness becomes Apocalypse Now. In the early days of the Vietnam conflict CIA agents set up their Ops in remote outposts, requisitioned private armies, overawed the superstitious natives and achieved the status of white Gods. So the context of 19"-century colonialism was briefly duplicated. That is what is about: time travel. writing (Burroughs, 1986: 42; cf Land, 1995: 191) Where Burroughs uses a similar technique in his own writings, for example in 'The Mayan Caper' where his character travels back to the Mayan era to disrupt the control into future/present, by fast-forwards Nick Land (1966: 81-93), the this machines science-fictionally satirising the now of advanced, cybernetic capitalism where the two main parties of American politics have been replaced by Coke and Pepsi and feedback loop into been have transformed a continuous of political elections popularity polling through soft-drink sales. The parallels with New Labour's direct. Capitalism focus election strategies are group obsessed consumer oriented, 184

has deterritorialized the state to the point where politics is the advertising industry. The needs of capital are put before all else "All immigration restrictions, subsidies, tariffs and narcotics legislation have been scrapped" (Land, 1995: 201) - in a policy "social dumping" much like that currently underway in the UK, that puts the multiof 34. in head left leadership All is the that nationals charge of government of political of state - is a simulacra of the entertainment industry: "A laundered Michael Jackson facsimile is in the White House" (Land, 1995: 201). As bad as it gets though, there is always something that escapescontrol: a surplus value that capital cannot appropriate, at least not immediately. The uncertainty of its cYborganizing processes produce more than an automated, docile Deterritorialization workforce. pushed to an extreme logic by capital and no longer safeguarded by state legislation or the institutionalisation of conflict through unionised collective bargaining (Dubin, 1954) produces ever more flows that resist or escape: America's social fabric has entirely rotted away, along with welfare, public .. fringe the criminalized of ghetto enterprise (Phillip Morris sells cheap medicine and clean crack). Violence is out of control. Neo-rap lyrics are getting angrier. With all in buried forever, brews biotechtrue the revolution up prospectsof moderate reform mutant underclass. Viruses are getting creepier, and no one really knows what is TO KAPITAL UTOPIA dead WELCOME to. the aerosoled on cyberspace up heart of the near future. (Land, 1995: 201) 185

Capitalism may after all 'produce its own gravediggers' (Marx and Engels, 1967: 94), but rather than an emancipated,human proletariat, they will be cyborg. Willard-becoming-Kurtz In his journey up-river Willard has undergone a transformation, though perhaps it is a trajectory on which he was already travelling? As he suggests in the opening moments of the film "everyone gets everything they want. " At the end however, all traces of humanity are gone and the apocalypse heralds... what? This is perhaps the key problem of the post-human. Ford-Coppola's film ends in a chaotic scene of primal patricide, sacrifice and destruction, a scene which, in conjunction with Morrison singing 'The End' as the musical backdrop, can hardly fail to evoke Oedipal archetypes (French, 2000: 84). Contrary to expectations, however, Willard does not take up Kurtz's mantle, becoming the new priest/king/father to his tribe. Rather he leaves,back down-river. But to what? It is at this point that Charles Stivale questions Land's interpretation of the action of Apocalypse Now in a move that recentres the material conditions of production of the film, and the role of Francis Ford-Coppola and his wife Eleanor, as they reproduce the conditions of Vietnam on their Philippine film set (Stivale, 1998: 57). Like the it Apocalypse by Now military organization upon which comments, was produced a hierarchical command and control structure with Ford-Coppola at the top of the In in traditionally relation to the patriarchal position of autocratic power. pyramid a text of the film, Stivale also takes issue with Land's reading. Before he is killed, 186

Kurtz asks Willard to carry out one final mission for him: to carry his letters and story back to his son in the States. For Stivale this effects a surrogate standing in by Willard for the absent son. Willard becomes the carrier of his father/Kurtz's line by his carrying words back down-river to civilization: As Willard admits in the reflections that immediately follow Kurtz's request, "They were going to make me a major for this, and I wasn't even in their fuckin' army any his filial " We duty fulfilling that then, that the more. can surmise, prevails, and statement at the start of the tale - "Everyone gets everything they want" - was finally him direction his and apocryphal since provides with ultimate mission familiar Oedipalization, the son triangulated the purpose, and reconstitutes processof within predictable parameters. (Stivale, 1998: 68) This relationship of surrogate filiality reintegrates Willard back into the oedipal triangle so that, although he may not adopt the mantle of Kurtz's rule in the jungle, following the myth of the Fire King that inspired much of Ford-Coppola's script (Stivale, 1998: 48; Frazer, 1998), Willard is nevertheless brought back into the familial fold. The discrepancy between these two readings raises an important question concerning the relationship between text and interpretation. Just as psychoanalysis seesOedipus finally in behind father that the of produces reinterpretation and everything, a process the effect of oedipalisation, so does Stivale's reading. Whilst Land actively 187

experiments with the two texts - Anti-Oedipus and Apocalypse Now - to develop a line of flight along which Willard's human identity deterritorializes and which find in Stivale to the the text text, ultimately points outside order only ever escapes out what the author's intentions were, and to reinscribe, through reference to this legitimising authority, the oedipal triangle at the heart of the text. The question Oedipus As is interpretation. in to this is the text the remains as whether or in really ultimately an undecidable question, it remains only to return to Deleuze and Guattari (1986) and their point that literature is a kind of experimentation - both in reading and writing. It is entirely possible to search for an ultimate signifier - what does this mean? - and find, unsurprisingly, Oedipus/daddy, but an alternative is to experiment and see what the machine/text will plug into and what connections it might make Nick Land It is latter, that the employs, possible. more revolutionary mode of reading with the aim of pointing outside the Oedipal triangle to something that escapes becoming-cyborg in The Willard the representation word/text. cleterritorializing of is, Challenger deterritorialization Professor to the this at the end of of in respect, similar Plateau 3 in A Thousand Plateaus (Deleuze and Guattari, body/organization/corps the ultimately escapes -I 1987: 73). Willard fuckin' in their army wasn't even himself he Stivale to that recognised points when notes that: anymore" -a point French "comment Rapaport Herman the out quite pertinently, expression points se as faire un corps sans organes?" (how can one makes oneself a body without organs?) how is "reinterpreted be one to produce a corps without organs, as, strategically may does disatriculate, dematerialize, How like 'I 'unit' the an corps'? a military corps frag?" 188

(Stivale, 1998: 62) Whatever has happenedto Willard, he has transformed and is not simply going back. Like his predecessor Captain Richard Colby, Willard realised long ago that 'home' doesn't even exist for him anymore. In the voice-over that accompanies the opening Willard be back he finally home, he that to scenes, recalls all when went wanted was in the jungle. His wife eventually asked for a divorce, so he came back to Saigon to ask for a new mission. In a note from Colby to his wife, included in the file that Willard reads on the boat on the way up river Colby writes: "Sell the house. Sell the Sell kids. Find someone else. I am never coming heme back. Forget ifl!! " the car. 'Home' is crossed out, suggesting that the very concept of home is no longer relevant as the coordinates of the socius have been completely altered. Also of interest is the from house break the traditional slide selling and car, a with the past and slavery to debt, the job and the circuits of capital, to selling the kids. The juxtaposition of these is both shocking to conventional morality - 'how could heT - and simultaneously family family The is literally his, the to the and capitalism. points close association of in the sense that the deterritoriali zing forces of capitalism have also reterritorialized back everything onto the nexus of capital - everything is commodity and 35 As he isn't back, "isn't Willard's that going and recognition even such, possession . in their fuckin' army any more" suggestsboth a rejection of Oedipal overcoding and his back downstream, Willard Whatever mission new as capitalist reterritorialization. 3CI. has He longer is the military command of scrambled under cyborg/terminator no 189

the codes and thereby escaped a reterritorialization into the state apparatus: as a war he is becoming machine nomadic. Rather than being reinscribed within the patriarchal social organization of the army as a major, we might playfully Willard is becoming that suggest minor-Willard. Certainly he cannot just step outside of, and oppose the major organization of the army and capitalism. Indeed, the very fact that he carries out his mission and can't find an easy way out is suggestive of the impossibility of binary opposition. Rather, Willard finds a way to create a minor within the major; following through within the dominant forms of military organization, but making it alien to itself. As Deleuze and Guattari suggestof Kafka's creation of a minor literature: minor no longer designatesspecific literatures but the revolutionary conditions for is literature heart the every within of what called great (or established) literature. Even he who has the misfortune of being born in the country of a great literature must write in its language,just as a Czech Jew writes in German (Deleuze and Guattari, 1986: 18) In other words, the minor is always a process of deterritorialization within a major, a interpret Willard's Stivale it That to actions within the minorization as were. chooses framework of the major, oedipal and military organizations (daddy has sent him off he has Willard's the that missed minorization of on yet another mission) suggests becoming-Kurtz. 190

This 'becoming-Kurtz' should not be understood as a simple replication, however. Just as organizational change is often conceived as one fixed structure or culture, being un-frozen and changed into some other fixed, and pre-given, structure or (Lewin, 1951), so it seemsnatural to think of this 'becoming' as a movement culture from one state to another. Thinking movement and change in this way, however, is always to think of movement in terms of the static, rather than in terms of itself (Bergson, 1910; Chia, 1999; Wood, 2002). The image of what exists is extracted from the ontological flux of change-in-itself, and fixed as a (mentally) spatialized representation.The assumption in such a model of change is that this representation is fixed it be to the therefore adequate reality and represents, which must itself unchanging. Without such a model, there is no need to think of de-freezing as the dynamics of change are such to ensure that nothing is constant (Chia, 1999: 211). As discussed above in relation to the becomings -animal of the Wild Boys, there is no between 'boy' 'animal' two assumption of pre-given states and which one moves; the movement itself is everything. What is important is the transversality of these becomings. They are not a hierarchically legitimated, pre-given imposition of form, but a mutual deterritorialization into one another. For Deleuze and Guattari, this potential to deterritorialize the major and create lines beyond is flight text, the the the of and reproduction representation image, of outside Contrasting French literature. Anglo-American this to the tradition: main strength of The Anglo-American novel is totally different. "To get away. To get away, out! ... To from Lawrence, Melville Miller, From Hardy " horizon... to to the same cry cross a 191

rings out: Go across, get out, break through, make a beeline, don't get stuck on a That Find line follow it it, treachery. the to the of point. of separation, or create point is why their relationship to other civilizations, to the Orient or South America, and They French. drugs in is different from the to that also and voyages place, entirely of know how difficult it is to get out of the black hole of subjectivity, of consciousness it is let How the tempting to and memory, of yourself get couple and conjugality. caught, to lull yourself into it, to latch onto aface. (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 186-7) This list of Anglo-American Not Burroughs. include only writers could easily because of the attempts at escape from linguistic control through the cut-up, and from his fantasy, but because through earlier also even mass subjugated group seriality Other drugs interest like Queer the the in and an plays on registers of voyage, work Richard in America. Indeed is South that this the earlier work context of it space of Dellamora discusses Burroughs' vision of homosexual identity as apocalyptic. A Queer Turn in the River Dellamora's account of Burroughs' autobiographical work Queer as a kind of from Nick divergent Land's both to cyborganic and parallel personal apocalypse runs jungle involve Both Now. Apocalypse the and a retrograde primordiality reading of More importantly, (1999). World G. The Drowned Ballard's J. they reminiscent of both focus on the dissolution of oedipally validated identities. The key difference is departure Willard into leads Whilst Land the the to the two of us papers end. where Dellamora Bill becoming-imperceptible, that suggests shadows and a cyborganic 192

Lee's disintegration is the result of his inability to accessa minority identity - that of being gay. The solution to this apocalyptic disintegration, here construed as a desire. is development identity the that can validate same-sex problem, politics of an Disintegration is quite clearly not something to be celebrated: Burroughs was a queer without benefit of knowledge of what a sexual minority might be. For him, the consequencesof this absencewere apocalyptic. The subject is condemned to psychic and physical disintegration since, disidentified from the Oedipal contract, he lacks as well any alternative psychological or social structure in relation to which he might constitute himself. (Dellamora, 1995: 137) Interestingly, the majority of Dellamora's analysis does not deal with Queer at all, except for the preface written at the time of the novel's publication in 1985. Most of the rest of the paper then addressesthe various hornophobic critical responses to Burroughs' work, and the ways in which the Bill Lee character was effectively heterosexualisedback into the role of the heroic, male artist in Cronenberg's film of Naked Lunch, which is not a 36 film of the book at al, but rather a combination of themes from the book - notably the Mugwumps and interzone - and autobiographic Working from including Queer Junkie. from and various sources, material gathered these texts, Dellamora entirely ignores the more positive attempts that Burroughs made in his later work to refigure a possible mode of existence that might seem more Dellamora himself theory, an approach which consonant with contemporary queer from both disidentification "is normalcy and minority predicated on recognises, 193

Queer despite fact identities" This is (Dellamora, 1995: 137). that the was not sexual Burroughs these that still saw published until works were well under way, suggesting this book as having something to offer even in this later context. Instead, Dellamora fixates upon the destructive, and negative aspectsof Burroughs' 'queer apocalypse'. By little is in disintegrating, disidentifying its that reading subject. positive seeing these themes through his final trilogy of novels, however, we can begin to point to Burroughs' positive contributions to the reconstruction of a revolutionary subject, and the possibility for alternative social formations based upon multiplicity rather than individual identity. Quienes? Aside from a few collected readers, a novella and some published notebooks last Burroughs' dreams major works and associatedmusings, containing recollected Roads The Place Dead Cities Red Night, The fiction the trilogy the and of of of were WesternLands. The two main themes connecting these books are their concern with the after-life and the possibility of radicalised forms of social organization. The first in The interest, Wild Burroughs' the these of themes subtitle indicated continues of Boys, in the books of the dead and points to the prospects for navigating in a world beyond human his drive In the to these this condition go works one. after the end of It just individual death is than also refers to the ending that ending. an more suggests forms transformation where capitalist of of a world; to an apocalyptic vision of social books dead In the these this of are also sense subjugated social organization end. Burroughs that the through to sees as changes revolutionary steer us guidebooks 194

both be distinctions (if indeed these necessary socially and subjectively can maintained) if control is to be overcome. This theme comes to particular prominence in the last of these three final novels, Ae WesternLands, but before discussing this in detail it is worth considering the figurations of alternative modes of social more organization that predominate in the first two books as these two themes cannot easily be separated. New forms of social organization threaten existent forms of domination, whilst simultaneously making possible new forms. If anything, this is the fundamental problematic that Burroughs' later work addresses. ne Cities of the Red Nights opens with a description the formation of pirate communes in the early 18th Century based on the codification of the "liberal principles embodied in the French and American revolutions and later in the liberal (Burroughs, 1848" 1982: 9). The first page of the book opens with a revolutions of long quote from Don Carlos Seitz's (2002) history of piracy, Under the Black Flag, in which he describes the principles of one of these associations- opposition to slavery and an insistence on communal property - as it was organized under the auspices of one, Captain Mission. Burroughs continues to describe the organization of these communes, with particular attention to the 'articles' under which they lived: democratic, vote based decision making, the abolition of slavery, the end of the death sentence, and religious freedom (Burroughs, 1982: 10). From this historical basis Burroughs starts to fantasise about the revolutionary potential of these 'articulated' historical instance In the recorded was wiped out by attacks communes. only reality, from the natives of the area in which they set up base, but if they had survived and 195

in Burroughs then? prospered, what paints a picture which such communes spring up join South in Africa, East Indies, America, the the all over articulated and which forces with the natives to fend off the attacks of the colonisers. Drawing parallels he Cong, highly Viet the tactics the considers the potential successful guerrilla with of for the combination of the pirates' fortified positions and the natives' resistance to prevent the spread of colonisation: Consider the difficulties an invading army would face: continual harassmentfrom the guerrillas, a totally hostile population always ready with poison, misdirection, snakes and spiders in the general's bed, armadillos carrying the deadly earth-eating disease rooting under the barracks and adopted as mascotsby the regiment as dysentery and malaria take their toll. The siegescould not but present a series of military disasters. There is no stopping the Articulated. The white man is retroactively relieved of his burden. (Burroughs, 1982: 11) Not only do the communes prosper, but the actualisation of liberal values espousedby the American and French revolutionaries forces those countries to stand by these principles. The mass relocations, population growth and urban concentration that made possible, and were promoted by, the industrial revolution are halted. With the prospect of an articulated life in the offing, who would choose to move to the cities and work in polluted factories? There is a freedom of movement for people which operates as the inverse of today's drive toward social dumping, and restriction of migration (Plant and Land, 2003). 196

For Burroughs this 'retroactive utopia' was a real possibility, but the opportunity was lost and revolution was sold out. Industrialisation and bureaucratisation ran on apace and the control machines of contemporary society were set in motion. In the life, interdependencies industrial the possibilities of complex, of and post-industrial living dead: communal are There is simply no room left for "freedom from the tyranny of government" since dwellers depend it city on for food, power, water, transportation, protection, and Your live to welfare. right where you want, with companions of your own choosing, in laws dies to the eighteenth century with Captain Mission. under which you agree, Only a miracle or a disaster could restore it. (Burroughs, 1982: 12 - emphasisadded) These words end the first chapter of Cities of the Red Night, and the book continues by interweaving stories of one such imaginary pirate commune with a detective story set in the present. The pirate tale is narrated through the journal of one Noah Blake, a Captain Opium be Jones, the to gunsmith who signs on a ship under aegis of only boarded by transvestite, homosexual pirates from the heavily armed ship ne Siren. Now with the pirates, he tells the story of life under the articles. This tale runs in parallel with that of Clem Williamson Snide, a private investigator, or 'private dick'). 'private Snide (an the asshole' euphemism, of usual uses somewhat inversion intuition, including techniques, unconventional psychic sex magick, and tapehis drop-ins in investigations. recorded cut-ups or 197 His speciality is finding M. P.s:

missing persons. While Noah's almost idyllic life under the articles unfolds Burroughs' retroactive utopia, reincarnating it in the text, Snide's story soon has him investigating a ritualistic hanging and decapitation. Spliced into these two narratives are discussions of medical experiments involving virus B-23, a radioactively mutated virus of uncertain origins which Doctors Pierson and Peterson have been involved with. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Burroughs' theories of the viral origins of the human species resurface as precisely the 'disaster' (no miracles here) that offers the potential to restore 'the chance' that was last held out by Captain Mission. As Doctor Peterson discourses languidly, whilst smoking a Joint at a medical conference where virus 1323 is on the agenda: "... And I would suggestfurther that any attempts to contain virus B-23 will turn out to be ineffectual becausewe carry this virus with us," said Peterson. "Really, Doctor, aren't you letting fantasy run away with you? After all, other have been brought under control. Why should this virus be an exception?" viruses "Because it is the human virus. After many thousandsof years of more or less benign coexistence, it is now once again on the verge of malignant mutation.. what Doctor Steinplatz calls a virgin soil epidemic. This could result from the radiation already releasedin atomic testing.... " "What is your point, Doctor?" Pierson snapped. "My point is very simple. The whole human position is no longer tenable... " (Burroughs, 1982:36, emphasisin original) 198

It is worth quoting this section at length as it raises several issues from our earlier discussion of Burroughs' work. First there is the idea that 'the human' is viral, and increasingly unstable under technological pressures,albeit from atomic testing in this instance, rather than the communication technologies that Burroughs focused on in the earlier Nova trilogy. Second, there is the attempt by the bureaucratic Pierson to bring virus B-23 under control, prevent it from mutating and to ensure that the human form remains stable (precisely by denying its viral foundations). The third point, Murphy's distinction between these later works and Burroughs' earlier which raises novels, is Pierson's accusation to Peterson that he is 'letting his fantasy run away with him. ' For Murphy, it is precisely this kind of runaway fantasy, like the retroactive figured in Bur-roughs' the the that utopia pirate strand of novel, enables writing to desire field. Of for the produce revolutionary investments of course, within social there to be a chance of revolution, for change to be possible, some form of ending or death is necessary: what I have been calling an apocalypse. In Cities, this apocalypse comes in the form of the virus B-23 which, following its mutation by radiation, brings death death is literal in its This in the nýfiddlesections of the plague and made wake. book when the plague cities first appear and it is through this death - the end of the human as it has been sustained by viral symbiosis - that the chance of revolutionary human The the and of (post)industrial capitalist change comes around again. end of society are entirely bound up with one another. Both are figured as apocalypse. The literal apocalypse of Cities of the Red Night is introduced along with the first appearanceof the eponymous cities at the start of 'Book Two' (in total Cities of the 199

Red Night comprises three books). In this section, Burroughs introduces us to the six cities - Tarnaghis, Ba'dan, Yass-Wadah, Waghdas, Naufana and Ghadis - as well as their social organization, which is based upon a quite fluid hierarchy of immortal Transmigrants, who move from body to body, thereby extending their lives, and the Receptacles, who provide the bodies that the Transmigrants will inhabit. Of course, as with all immortality tricks, there is a catch. To transmigrate, the Transmigrant has to die at the same moment that a Receptacle couple achieve orgasm. The child thereby conceived will act as host for the TransMigrant's spirit. The Transmigrants are only able to postpone their mortality at the expense of the host child, thereby leading to a basic conflict of interests functionally equivalent to that identified by Marx: There was a basic conflict of interest between host child and Transmigrant. So the Transmigrants reduced the Receptacle class to a condition of virtual idiocy. Otherwise they would have reneged on a bargain from which they stood to gain nothing but death. (Burroughs, 1982: 145) The parallel with Marx's characterisations of the vampiric existence of capital, thriving on the ignorance and life-blood of the working classes, returns to the foreground in Burroughs' critique of these fictional societies, but to fully appreciate their importance we need to understandhow they come into the plot. 200

At the end of the first Book of Cities Clem Snide realises that his case is not a simple missing person. After transmuting into a ritual murder case, and becoming complicated by a series of other deaths, and another disappearance,Clem realises that he is actually working for the Iguana twins, a pair of identical twins who also appear incarnation Captain Strobe, the second in command of the pirate ship as another of The Siren. Snide's real task is then revealed as recovering the original versions of a books series of of which, The Cities of the Red Night, is one (Burroughs, 1982: 137). The Iguana's are in possession only of copies, and yet they seek the originals in order to realise a change in the script: "Changes, Mr. Snide, can only be effected by alterations in the original. The only thing not prerecorded in a prerecorded universe are the prerecordings themselves. The copies can only repeat themselves word for word. A virus is a copy. You can pretty it up, cut it up, scramble it - it will reassemble in the same form. (Burroughs, 1982: 151, emphasisin original) A Murphy notes, Burroughs is explicitly recognising the limits of the cut-up. It is ultimately unable to do more than repeat the form of language (Murphy, 1997: 175; Burroughs and Odier, 1989: 51). But this doesn't mean that Burroughs is simply returning to some kind of Platonic idealism. As Snide searches for the missing originals, he realises that he has actually been employed to produce those originals: I had already decided to fabricate the complete books if I could find the right paper. In fact, I felt sure that this was exactly what I was being paid to do. 201

(Burroughs, 1982: 154) In these sections Burroughs effectively repudiates the power of an original as a Platonic ideal (Murphy, 1997: 176). A Platonic original, or any transcendent figure, loses power the moment that it is instantiated as a real, immanent object. A transcendentlaw always has to be applied and realised in an immanent reality. In the terminology of Burroughs' biologic reality films, developed in the Nova novels, but Cities both idea in Wild Boys The the through the the continued and of screenplay trilogy: The power of such transcendent laws remains precarious, since they can only enter into the flat film in immanent form, in which form they become subject to the immanent desire they seek to master. Any script, like any fantasy, is just such an immanent structure of desire, so the "transcendent" script of the law can only dominate by claiming to represent the outside of the film while remaining an immanent script, susceptibleto editing and rewriting. (Murphy, 1997: 176-7) For anyone seeking to effect a change in the reality script, the interventions must be immanent. An idealism founded in transcendentlegislation is doomed to failure as it desire it For Murphy, following to the the seeks confront. encounters immanence of Deleuze, the only way to get around this is by refusing to privilege the authenticity of the original, precisely what happens when Snide is recruited to forge the original books by Iguana twins: the control 202

Burroughs's forgers, who play the parts of criminals, cowboys, and the rest, are like Deleuze's forger in that they all work to produce this indiscernibility of imaginary and real in order to break the control of truth and law over time, to break the determinism of repressivehistory. (Murphy, 1997: 177) 'Indiscemibility' is a recurrent feature of Burroughs' writing, but in Cities it builds up throughout the novel as the books that Snide seemsto be writing become the focus of the text, and Snide is doubled with several characters,including Noah Blake, Audrey Carsons and Toby. As the books, the detective and pirate plots, dreams and theatre blurred book it is inconclusive the towards are and confused, moves an ending where impossible to separatethe reality that the novel is supposed to be representing from the dreams and hallucinations within that reality. The power of truth, including the broken down fantasy's is that veracity of representation, challenged and so powers however, be As indiscernibility kicks in, this can it is more crucial than unleashed. ever to focus on the role of the writers within the novel and, most importantly, what it is that Snide has been employed to forge? There are two main writers in Cities, Noah Blake and Clem Snide. Initially we assume that Blake is the author of the pirate story which runs alongside Snide's missing-personsenquiry. Indeed, the importance of Blake's writing is highlighted by he Blake: from Strobe's Captain a quote notebook, when ponders over 203

What does he think is expectedfrom him? The role of gunsmith and inventor, which is partially true. I must not underestimatehim Noah writes that I am interested in printing his diaries "for some reason." Does he have any inkling what reason?He must be kept a very busy gunsmith lest he realize his primary role. (Burroughs, 1982: 90) Whilst Blake is kept busy making bombs and new guns for the pirates, the focus on Snide, is to the author of the pirate stories as writing shifts who we eventually realise books his Iguana's 'original' that the the are after of control part simulation of (Burroughs, 1982: 157). But is this what Snide is supposedto be producing? As the figures Book Cities that there thickens throughout the are second of we realise plot behind even the Iguana twins. As the pirate plot starts to merge with a new plot concerning Captain Nordenholtz's (also captain of The Siren) takeover of the US Navy and its attempt to conquer the final frontier of space, science-fictional themes from the Nova trilogy come back into play, particularly the conflict over space and the future/end of the human race. Now working for Blum and Krup, Snide is sent to a Navy installation that is a launch pad for some kind of communication satellite, in fact a weapon of mass destruction. The plan, or so it seems, is to launch a virus from space which will wipe out the white race. Why? "... So we would then be justified in using any biologic and/or chemical weapon in " we not? retaliation would 204

"You would do it justified or not. But the plague might well decimate the white race... destroy them as a genetic entity." "We would have the fever sperm stocks. We could rebuild the white race to our specifications, after we... " The table of thirty boys flashed in front of my eyes. "Pretty neat. And you want me to write the scenario." (Burroughs, 1982: 181) The real reason that Snide has been employed is to write the next apocalypse, but first the unlike one, a seemingly 'natural' disaster, resulting in a proliferation of diversity and difference, this one will reinstate an entirely artificial, fascistic homogeneity. The drive is for normalisation and control. Snide is clearly an unwilling employee with respect to this augmentation of fascistic both he is doubled Noah Audrey, the are particularly and control and characters with, fantasy world of revolutionary representatives of an alternative, anti- authoritarian desire. But the complexities of plot and counter plot, both of and within the novel, discern is is is it impossible traducing to selling out and who, who who make who defect', had 'all Naked Lunch for It is that agents as it not so much working who. (Burroughs, 1986: 163; Murphy, 1997), as that the logic of resistance, however into holds the right-wing radical, always out possibility of recuperation either ideology of capitalism. or as yet another axiomatic As Sadie Plant put it, de 11 Situationniste: Internationale the n'est pas geste si radical que paraphrasing l'ideologie n'essaie de recuperer" (Plant, 188)37. 1992: 205 Indeed, even the face and

voice of Burroughs - so often redolent of rebellion and perversity - has been recuperated into the capitalist mainstream in this respect, as when he featured in a series of adverts for Nike in the mid 1990s. The problem for Snide et al is that they be can never sure whose side they are on. In this respect, Murphy is perhaps too quick to take the Iguana's comments on the failure of the cut-up at face value. The ambivalent position of the Iguanas within the text of Cities suggests that their pronouncements cannot be taken as any kind of authoritative statement. This is born by the reappearanceof cut-up sections in the later parts of the suggestion out is involved (e. time-travel especially novel, where g. Burroughs, 1982: 215). As well as adding to the overall sense of confusion, there is a suggestion that this cutting-up of reality and narrative, as in the Nova Trilogy, enables a mode of resistance that refuses a simple dialectic of opposition which can always be recuperated back into his it As Burroughs the elsewhere, citing authority of one of what opposes. wrote Steinplatz: Herr Doktor Kurt Urruh own creations, a certain von He who opposesforce with counterforce alone forms that which he opposesand is formed by it. History shows that when a system of government is overthrown by force a system in many respectssimilar will take its place. On the other hand he who does not resist force that enslaves and exterminates will be enslaved and in basic For to existing conditions three effect changes revolution exterminated. tactics are required: 1. Disrupt. 2. Attack. 3. Disappear. Look away. Ignore. Forget. These three tactics to be employed altematively. (Burroughs and Odier, 1989: 101, emphasisin original) 206

The downside of simple opposition has already been alluded to with respect to the wresting of power in the Russian revolution. In the pirate story, Burroughs makes quite explicit the problems of taking control in this way, as when Noah becomes enamoured of his new found power. Having taken the city of Panama from the Spanish using the combined power of his newly developed artillery and subterfuge, he proceeds to destroy the powers of the Spanish inquisition by executing their main representativesin the town: The summary dispatching of the two inquisitors was basedon a precept long usedby the Inquisition itself, which is in fact the way they were able to maintain their power despite widespread opposition and hatred. Brutal sanctions against a minority from is in but which one generically exempt cannot produce a measure of satisfaction those who are spared such treatment... "This won't happen to me. " To turn this mechanism back on the inquisitors themselvesgives me a feeling of taking over the office of fate. I am become the bad karma of the Inquisition. I am allowing myself derives hypocrisy, like from the that the slow a measure of also satisfaction rather digestion of a good meal. (Burroughs, 1982: 169-70). This represents what is perhaps the end of the dream of the pirates' alterity, and by the end of the novel the failure is complete. The final section, 'Return to Port Roger' seessomeone,who the reader assumesis Noah, returning to the pirate enclave at Port Roger. Now overgrown and abandoned following the failed insurrections in the Cities of the Red Night where the real battles were fought, Noah sits on the beach and 207

reads the last of his journal entries. The Spanish conung to retake Panama, but the setup is a trap and they are doomed. Noah wants to scream out to them to go back to Spain. They have no idea what they are up against, and are unable to do anything but continue their old military strategies, now destined to fail in light of the pirates' fire superior power: "Paco... Joselito... Enrique. " Father Kelley is giving them absolution. There is pain in his voice. It is too easy. A few still take cover and return fire. Paco catches a bullet in the chest. Sad shrinking face. He pulls my head down as the gray lips whisper -I want the priest. " The easiestvictories are the most costly in the end. (Burroughs, 1982: 286-7) Although again it is unclear as to who is on which side, as the names are all those of for last is The involved Noah the the wish still and pirates, no one wins. people with immortality. The last the the and church and a promise of salvation priest, authority of desires are subjugated back into dreams of the ultimate series: we are all God's last know desire the the church so we can at our place. children and authority of Despite this poignant note of sadness at its conclusion, the last words of Cities suggestother possibilities: I have blown a hole in time with a firecracker. Let others step through. Into what bigger and bigger firecrackers? Better weapons lead to better and better weapons, burning. fuse is the the a grenade with earth until 208

I remember a dream of my childhood. I am in a beautiful garden. As I reach out to touch the flowers they wither under my hands.A nightmare feeling of foreboding and desolation comes over me as a great mushroom-shapedcloud darkens the earth. A few may get through the gate in time. Like Spain, I am bound to the past. (Burroughs, 1982: 287) Linking back to Burroughs' earlier theorisation of the links between time and control, there is a positive potential in the idea of blowing a hole in time. That this hole is made with a firecracker points back to Noah's invention of the exploding projectiles that enabled the pirates to defeat the Spanish, based on the observation of a child playing with a firecracker and a cap-gun, and suggests a wilful innocence and ignorance of consequences. But fighting fire with fire dooms the planet. An arms race escalates assuring mutual destruction of adversaries: the powerful and the dialectical Locked resistance. into a struggle over power, neither side can survive. Written in the early 80s at the height of the cold war, the invocation of the mushroom cloud that we were all living under at that time is particularly evocative of Burroughs' apocalyptic visions. This, in combination with the space-travel theme suggests that anyone remaining human will, like Noah Blake, remain bound to their past. Although he has blown a 'hole in time', he cannot himself step through. Indeed, only a 'few both in ' 'a (the hole) in time', and 'a the time, through may get suggesting gate gate have 'in (an that they to through time' (to avoid the gate' get escape portal) will is Ultimately this the apocalypse). even power of escape questioned however: 'Into what bigger and bigger firecrackersT 209

Throughout Cities' sub-theme of space travel, ambiguity has been unavoidable. In his dual role as head of the pirates and the new space navy, Captain Nordenholz has been a shadowy figure, doubled by Opium Jones, whose crew are opium addicts or the idealised youths of Gennan fascism. Ultimately, the opposition seemsas corrupt as those already in power. But perhaps this is the wrong approach. Despite the failures of the resistance in Cities, they are not supposed to provide a model that can be simply replicated. Indeed, this very idea raises the problem of representation that both in those plagues power, who want Snide to write the control books so that they can maintain power, and the revolutionaries like Snide/Noah/Audrey, who want to from their write way out control. If textual representation, and even language itself, in (re)production human identities, always the same,then the is implicated of pre-sent a radical textual practice must always be apocalyptic. It is not just time that a hole is blown in, but the narrative structures of language and sub-vocalisation that produce linear time: the human/word virus. In this we are returned to the mythical Cities of the Red Night, with their originary apocalypse, and the virus B-23. In the middle of the novel we discover how the cities got their red nights. At some falling black hole point an unspecified event occurred, perhaps a meteor or a opening, that left a twenty mile crater in the desert North of Tamaghis: After this occurrence the whole northern sky lit up red at night, like the reflection from a vast furnace. Those in the immediate vicinity of the crater were the first to be being hair the observed, were commonest mutations altered and affected and various 210

first for Red hair, the skin color. and yellow and white, yellow, and red skin appeared time. Slowly the whole area was similarly affected until the mutants outnumberedthe original inhabitants, who were as all human beings were at the time: black. (Burroughs, 1982: 143) It is at this point that the various intrigues of the Cities, their power plays and factions, know little Prior to this competing parties and of come into existence. we the Cities. It seems unlikely that they had any meaningful existence prior to this highly Babel the the tower mutation, itself reminiscent of of apocalyptic collapse of and the subsequent explosion of (linguistic) diversity unsettling a presupposed homogeneousunity. So what is the solution? Burroughs' parodic use of myth makes it clear that a return to unity is impossible, and at any rate undesirable. Ultimately this is the problem of representing an idyllic, unified alternative. Instead his texts employ the device of apocalypse, so that after having achieved a period of symbiosis human becoming its hosts, is The in the with virus again virulent. mutations realised it through atomic testing have led to a reappearanceof the virus that decimates the Earth's population until it is approximately what it was 300 years ago, at the time of the last 'chance' and Captain Mission's founding of the real-life Port Roger (Burroughs, 1982: 279). The suggestion is that once again, because of this apocalyptic situation, a real change is possible. Whatever the machinations of the battles their the the powerful and result of is to produce the apocalypse resistance, (rather than a miracle) that brings again 'the chance'. But the question remains as to failure formulate With in 'step the to time' the through gate an who can - quien es? 211

answer to this question in the pirate script, Burroughs takes it up again in the second novel of the Cities trilogy: The Place of Dead Roads. The Johnson Family "The Johnson family" was a turn-of-the-century expression to designate good bums and thieves. It was elaborated into a code of conduct. A Johnson honors his obligations. His word is good and he is a good man to do business with. A Johnson minds his own business.He is not a snoopy, self-righteous, trouble-making person. A Johnson will give help when help is needed.He will not stand by while someoneis drowning or trapped under a burning car. The only thing that could unite the planet is a united spaceprogram... the earth becomesa spacestation and war is simply out, irrelevant, flatly insane in a context of research centers, spaceports,and the exhilaration of working with people you like and respect toward an agreed-uponobjective, an objective from which all workers will gain. Happiness is a by product offunction. The planetary space station will give all participants an opportunity to function. (Burroughs, 1983: 1, emphasisin original) Formula of my happiness:a Yes, a No, a straight line, a goal (Nietzsche, 1990: 37) Flee, but while fleeing, pick up a weapon (Deleuze and Guattari, cited in Plant, 1992: 203) 212

Whilst the pirates' articles provided the basis for utopian hope and revolutionary investments of desire in The Cities of the Red Night, in The Place of the Dead Roads, this role is taken by the Johnson family's 'code of conduct.' Again, it is worth noting that both of these ideals centre upon the textual model of a code, and in both books the question of writing is central to Burroughs' concerns. The Johnson family and MOB (Mind Own Business) replace the pirates. By the end of Cities Clem Snide has into Audrey Carsons, another of Burroughs' alter egos (Burroughs, already mutated 1982: 284). Carsons is also the central figure in Place, only this tImes the character is Kim Carsons, head of a group of Wild Western outlaws: The Wild Fruits. Not only does this provide another great, male dominated environment in which Burroughs can write his homosexual fantasies, thereby subverting the heterosexual myth of the Wild West (cf. Russell, 2001: 219, n. 106), but it also means that he is able to continue the frontier theme, paralleling the potentialities of the Western frontier days for actualising, or fantasising, alternative social formations with his own science-fictional final frontier. the concerns with space: From the outset, however, we are given to realise that Kim is a character. In fact, Carsonsis the pen name of on William Seward Hall, a writer of 'western stories' and 4real-estatespeculator' who is killed in a gunfight with Mike Chase on the first page few diversions 3). After 1983: Roads (Burroughs, through the newspaperreports a of drew Chase Hall 'gunfight', their guns, our the that this nor of realisation neither and drawn is to the existence of a third party, probably using a silenced rifle. attention This third figure powerfully demonstratesthe inability of writing to control the future 213

as we are told that Hall had already written the gunfight into one of his novels, only with Kim as the victor. The title of this book, 'Quien Es?' opens up again the question posed in Cities - who is it? In particular, who is actually writing these stories? Carsons is both the main character and nominal author of these tales, but behind him is the obvious nom de plume of Burroughs himself. When Hall surfaces in the gunfight that both opens and closes this novel, however, the existence of a third figure, working behind or to the side of Hall is posited. Between these two accounts fight, book desire introduces Carsons from his Kim the the to of gun early childhood his write, experiments with magic and his rejection by mainstream society. When his father dies, he decides to up sticks, move to their country place out West and become a 'shootist': a gunfighter. The majority of the early sections of the novel focus on Carsons learning to shoot a gun, interspersed with stories of his eventual fame as a from like Garrett like Pat shootist, complete with cameos characters and stage scenes Dodge City. Interestingly, it turns out that the shack on the river that Carsons he house is the same place as that occupies as a summer when moves out west occupied by Noah Blake in the 'I can take the hut set anywhere' section of Cities (Burroughs, 1982: 223). Indeed, the pages detailing Carsons' arrival in Saint Albans (where the shack is) echo and repeat many details of the earlier book, including sensations of deja vu and even a ghost-shadow sex scene involving the earlier Kim Guy in Noah their the new equivalents, and shack and incarnations of and Denton Brady. 214

After a number of scenesoutlining Carsons' shootist exploits, he is introduced to the photographer Tom Dark who wants to take 'sex pictures of a real gunman' for a rich (Burroughs, 1982: 83). As Carsonshas been fantasising about appearing in just client such a series of photos, he willingly accedesto the request. After taking him to a clearing to camp, Dark discusses the art of photography in an interesting aside. Pointing to a tree, Dark tells of a Mexican kid who was hung from its branches by a lynching mob. At the time they thought the kid had stolen a horse, the very horse they dropped him from, but it was later revealed that he had bought the horse fair and square. Dark continues: "You may have read about it... made quite a stir... federal antilynching bill in Congressand the Abolitionists took some northern states.... All the papers wanted a picture of the hanging and I gave them one... fake, of course.... How did I get away with it? Well there isn't any lin-ýt to what you can get away with in this business. Faked pictures are more convincing than real pictures becauseyou can set them up to look real. Understand this: All pictures are faked. As soon as you have the concept of a picture there is no limit to falsification. (Burroughs, 1983: 84) Indeed, it turns out that Dark faked the whole hanging, death certificate and all, in the employ of an Abolitionist 'incident' to an generate who wanted momentum behind the movement. 215 to get some

When discussing this episode, Timothy Murphy refers back to his discussion of Deleuze and the simulacra. Just as the original control books in Cities were actually simulations produced by Clem Snide and his assistants, thereby avoiding the problematic use of a transcendent law to control the immanence of life, so here we realise that there is no appeal to the facts in politics and the media. The advent of the image, representation itself even, is always already an act of simulation without an original. For Murphy, "Carsons and Dark each incarnate the warrior as writer-forger, fighting with false images against the image as such" (Murphy, 1997: 178). As we have seen, the image, and particularly the image of the human, is a constraining and heterogeneous forces life. Just as the strata of A the normalising straitjacket on of Thousand Plateaus are the 'judgements of God' (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 40), so the images that are a part of stratification, at least on the anthropomorphic stratum, are also associated with judgement. The basic problem here is the ideal model of truth, necessarily implicated in the idea of representation,but destroyed by the idea of the simulacra: Truthful narration is developed organically, according to legal connections in space in time.... and chronological connections [N]arration implies an inquiry or testimonies which connect it to the true... [and it] always refers to a system of judgement.... Falsifying narration, by contrast, frees itself from this system; it judgements because false (not doubt) the the the of of power error or system shatters investigator the and witness as much as the person presumed guilty.... affects Narration is constantly being completely modified, in each of its episodes, not 216

according to subjective variations, but as a consequenceof disconnected places and de-chronologized moments. (Deleuze, cited in Murphy, 1997: 177, emphasisin original) Not only does this simulation, these 'powers of the false' shatter the system of judgements, but they also explain the confusion of character, place and time travel that characterise the later parts of Cities once Snide has given up on uncovering the truth (finding the originals in his role as Private investigator) and turned his attention to falsification, simulation and forgery (Murphy, 1997: 177). Indeed, it is perhapsnot from dick. Snide that the than coincidental outset a was a private asshole, rather Rejecting the phallus as a symbol of patriarchal authority, judgement and truth - of structure - in favour of an asshole,Snide links into a model for simulation that recurs throughout Burroughs' work, whether in the 'talking asshole' routine of Naked Lunch or the asshole-becoming-apocalyptic-blackhole in the later sections of Cities (Burroughs, 1982: 284). The asshole is a figure that appears in Burroughs' work as delimited by function Its an underdetermined space of simulation. uses are not (shitting, the expulsion of waste), but opened up as potential sources of pleasure (sodomy being a dominant theme) and power (as in the inclusion of sodomy in many Wild in Boys' the the the offspringof of mutating weaponry sex-magic scenes or sexual engagements). By shattering the systems of judgement that depend upon God the father and holy dick for the word that is truth (in the beginning down the ground of the stable identity: 217 ... ), the powers of the false break

in truthful narration, the protagonist has a stable, preestablishedidentity (ego=ego) so that action always has a subject, while in forged, falsifying narration, action is impersonal and event-ual becauseI is another" (Murphy 1997: 177) The subject of narration, assumed also in Nietzsche's 'grammatical prejudice, ' is disrupted by forgery and exposed as a product of narrative language. It is a circle of interdependencethat forgery breaks: narrative depends upon a concept of truth and a coherent subject for it to function, but that subject and the possibility of bearing truthful witness is the product of the narrative forms of language. Already then, the subject is a product of something beyond itself, the discoursesthat flow through it, I " but " is I an is other, also something added is another. Of course, this also has implications for the question of who it is that is writing. Building upon the insight that language is essentially an indirect discourse that passes be forger from there the to third can no always a second a party, is pure simulation, original forgery: There is no unique forger, and, if the forger reveals something, it is the existence behind him of another forger.... And the only content of narration will be the from forgers, their these one to the other, their metamorphoses sliding presentation of into each other (Deleuze, cited in Murphy, 1997: 177-8) 218

Not only does this explain the series of forger/writers that appear throughout these texts, confusing and unsettling the search for the 'real writer', the source of agency and action, but it also unsettles any appeals to a final authority in the form of Burroughs, assumed to be behind all of these forgers, not least because he wilfully quotes from other writers without reference, thereby pointing to the indirect flows of language and writing that forge him as a writer. Further, there can be no appeal to the authority of God. Christian mythology claims that man was formed in the image of God so that God is the original but this fantastic, wri ting- as-forgery precludes the idea(l) of an original, whether it is the word of God or his image. For the very fantastic forger there can be no claim of origin: 'In the beginning... ' This dual rejection of authority as control and judgement, and of the model of truthful, narrative representationthat it dependsupon, involves both a rejection of the forgery), (rather it the to the truth than authority of author reveal producing as and a rejection of more conventional models of authority that claim to represent transcendental s: the word of God, and The Law. These two modes of control are consistently attacked in Roads through the dual control/authority figures of priests fantasises for Carsons himself down lawmen, the about splitting and as example when middle, one half shooting an Inquisition priest and the other a "nigger-killing sheriff' (Burroughs, 1983: 68-9), or in his father's deathbedadvice to his son: "Stay out of churches, son. And don't ever let a priest near you when you're dying. All they got a key to is the shit house.And swearto me you'll never wear a lawman's badge." 219

(Burroughs, 1983: 45) Rather than holding the keys to the transcendent realm of truth, the priest can only ever offer further falsification, only dressedup in the guise of truth. The notion that "all they got a key to is the shit house" again reflects the shift from God the father's dick as a symbolic anchor point for truth, to the asshole as an absence: pure simulation and forgery. So what does this mean for the status of Burroughs' pirate and wild-west fantasies? Are they literal representations of utopian dreams? Are they an image of a future man and society which Burroughs is suggesting would be preferable to our current human form and society? They are certainly these, but they are also knowingly counterfactual. They are deliberately set in historical situations, rather than the futuristic science-fictional highlighting Nova the thereby settings of cut-ups, their fantastic natures. They are attempts to re-write history, thereby realising an alteration in it and influencing the future. In this respect the books are like Snide's forgeries of the pirate fables in Cities. Their fantasies are interventions in the present and attempts to produces changes in subjectivity that will open the future to difference, human identity. By than the thus seeking to intervene the rather same repetition of directly in processes of subjectivization trilogy. these books are not so far from the Nova They are deliberate, material interventions in reality, designed to produce designed disrupt linear, Just the to very concrete effects. as cut-ups were narrative later for these offer alternative novels possibilities processesof subjectivization, so libidinal investments. As in Murphy's analysis, they offer an alternative model of 220

subjectivization based on the subject-group, rather than the subj ugated-group. But the danger in this approach is clearly that, by virtue of being written representations, they could come to operate as subjugating images. There is a sensein which Burroughs recognises this danger in both Cities and Roads. The pirate communes in Cities end in the disaster of dialectical opposition, and Noah Blake is too tied to the past to break completely with narrative subjectivization. In Roads, the dualistic game of the gunfight is disrupted by the introduction of an invisible third player, and the ideals of the wild west are returned to dust. For some however, this recognition is not enough and Burroughs' use of the all male, critics, homosexual commune based on a strong version of masculinity centred around break destruction fundamental failure to suggests a offer a genuine weapons of more dualism, dialectical ideal independent, the the self-goveming, opposition, and of with subject. EscapeAttempts In his recent book length study of Burroughs as a queer writer, Jamie Russell is highly doubtful of the efficacy of Burroughs' attempts to escapecontrol and its flipform Burroughs' is The dialectical take which utopias side of opposition. liberated, homosexually that and outlaw gang. oriented predominantly of an all male, Indeed, Burroughs often lays the blame for society's ills at the feet of women, as for do feel "How " he in to the about you women? question example when, response replies: 221

In the words of one of a great misogynist's plain Mr Jones, in Conrad's Victory: "Women are a perfect curse." I think that they were a basic mistake, and the whole dualistic universe evolved from this error. (Burroughs and Odier, 1989: 116) Although undeniably misogynistic 38 this should also be seen as part of Burroughs' , attempt to overcome dualism. In this senseit is no mere slip of the pen when he refers to the word-virus as the 'other half', a well known slang term for a sexual partner, especially when referring to a man's wife. In both cases, for Burroughs, the problem dualism is that of a splitting. This is the main point of Russell's critique of of Burroughs. In attempting to overcome dualism, Burroughs simply denies the importance of the Other pole and over-identifies with the traditionally male independence, characteristics and unernotionality This is in the way that the outlaw and cold calculation. reflected virtues, of physical strength, rationality, in both draw Cities Red Night The Place Dead Roads the groupings and on the of of Boys Own adventure stories or the very masculine genres of piracy, the wild-west and hard-boiled detectives. Indeed, from this point of view, even his earlier Nova trilogy builds on the classically adolescent male genre of science-fiction. As well as perpetuating the myth of a strong, self-sufficient male, more reminiscent of (cf. Rushing Frentz, fascistic 1995), Burroughs and mainstream cyborg imagery also limits the space of sexual engagement. In these latter novels, depictions of sex are almost exclusively focused on the conjunction of penis and anus. As Russell puts it: 222

Unlike the Foucauldian interest in clegenitalizing gay male sex by opening up new sexual planes on the body, Burroughs presents the queer orgasm as a technique of regenitalizing the body; the Wild Boys' orgasms allow them to focus solely on the phallic signifier of their masculinity while the rest of the body is disregarded. (Russell, 2001: 175) Whist Foucault, in his later work, was concerned to radicalise the potential of gay sex, particularly through the practices of sadomasochism, as a disinvestment of the direct association of all male sexual pleasure with the penetrative orgasm, for Burroughs this is the ultimate sign of masculinity. As such, rather than escaping from dualism Russell suggeststhat Burroughs remains entirely wedded to its logic through a denial of Otherness which must be exorcised at all costs. The final result of this is that the body itself is reterritorialised by the dominant signifier of the phallus to such it is dernaterialised. liberating Rather that than an extent paradoxically sexuality, Burroughs constrains it to such an extent that his later work ends up performing his hard kind immaterialism that to the earlier writing worked so of precisely disappearance leads At this to the the counteract. extreme, actual of embodiment, with its indeterminacy, all messy and a return to some kind immaterial of transcendenceof the body and a post-humanist escapefrom the complexities of 'the meat'. Whilst I do not want to challenge the legitimacy of Russell's reading of Burroughs' work, indeed his study is an important one and raises some serious limitations of Burroughs' work that do need to be addressed,he is perhaps expecting rather a lot. 223

Burroughs was, as we all are, a product of his own time and experiences and there are a number of ways to read his work. We can, like Russell, look to the limits of his strategies to formulate a positive gay, male identity, and criticise his monocentric response to the problem of dualism. On the other hand, we can look to the ways in he formulated those problems and worked through them. From this point of which view, the limits of his solutions and responses to those problems are themselves highly informative and worthy of serious attention. In this respect, the problems that Russell identifies with Burroughs' project go right to the heart of queer theory. There is little doubt that Burroughs was overly hasty to reject Otherness and to embrace the self-same of male-male identification, but this does not mean that his work has nothing to teach us. Indeed, as I have argued, these later texts are precisely a working through of these problems, as witnessedby the failure of both the pirates and the Wild Fruits. If we assume that Burroughs was trying to create a model for alternative forms of social organization then we arejustified in problematising them as images of future a possible society, but given Burroughs' critique of representation and the image discussedearlier, such a responsemight be a little hasty. As suggestedabove, the Utopian drives of Burroughs' later work can be read not as a for but focus the production of to as a representation of an ideal society yet come, desire, an image to mobilise a becoming-Other and a rejection of, and escapefrom, the current, overly stratified social organization that imposes binary hierarchies on everything, even sexual relationships (Lydenberg, 1987). The problems that Russell identifies with Burroughs' utopian fantasies are in themselves limitations of writing 224

and image. By creating a linguistic representation of alternative social formations, Burroughs was inevitably running the risk of reterritorializing the forces that he was releasing back into an image of male sexual identity and a model of the human that would limit the revolutionary potential of this release of forces. This problem of limits the representation and of writing was something that Burroughs was quite aware of. As early as the 1960s, in interview with Daniel Odier, Burroughs recognised the possible limitations of writing that he would have to face in his project to critique, and overcome, the word-virus: Q: What did you mean when you wrote: "A certain use of words and images can lead to silence"? A: I think I was being over-optimistic. I doubt if the whole problem of words can be in itself. terms ever solved of (Burroughs and Odier, 1989: 5 1) Rather than being able to silence language and escapefrom the tyranny of the image he Burroughs is in that the the into silence of space, recognises as a writer caught bind of having to use language to overcome itself. In a sense,the contradictions and difficulties that arise in the later works are also a part of this problem and it is no his from Burroughs trilogy turned the this that coincidence attention away at end of last instead. Indeed, the and art very words of writing and concentrated on painting The Western Lands suggest that he realised that his writing could progress no further in the direction he wanted to pursue: 225

The old writer couldn't write anymore becausehe had reached the end of words, the end of what can be done with words. (Burroughs, 1987: 258) This idea of the end, however, can also provide an opening, as in the model of discussed apocalypse earlier. Indeed, Apocalypse Now, Cities, and Roads all start with the end. In Apocalypse Now, the music 'The End' plays over both the start and finish of the film. The images at the start are of the airstrike destroying Kurtz's compound are a precursor of a scene that, in terms of the film's narrative, comes at the end while Willard heading back down river. In Cities of the Red Night the discusses Captain Mission's attempt to set up a pirate commune, and the opening book ends with 'Return to Port Roger' and Noah Blakes reflections upon the failure of this idealistic project. In The Place of Dead Roads both start and end of the novel feature the gunfight and dual slaying of Mike Chase, the lawman, and Hall/Carsons, the outlaw. In each case, the dialectic of law and resistance is highlighted. As the from destroys Kurtz, in HQ the the compound of renegade napalm strike called Willard reflects that 'they were going to make me a major for this, and I wasn't even by fucking Blake the the their reflects on common ground shared army any more'. in fighting. Spanish they the pirates and colonists were outlaw are killed by a third. In Roads both lawman and Does this third, Joe the Dead, offer a dialectical synthesis of lawman and outlaw? Or does he offer something altogether outside this dialectic? 226

For Russell, Burroughs is unable to escapedualism and dialectical opposition because he insists upon a masculine individualism that rejects its dependenceupon an other in favour of the self-contained phallus. As I have argued, however, this is a rather disinguenous reading of Burroughs, as it fails to recognise the importance of the asshole, rather than the phallus, in his conception of otherness, and its negative false. the powers of Rather than trying to regain some original, mythical unity of (Adam before he lost his masculinity rib), Burroughs' apocalyptic visions suggestthe destruction of myth, and of all drives to hierarchical integration and unification. Instead his work opens the subject up to multiplicity. This multiplicity is figured in last his (Burroughs, The Western Lands than the nowhere more strongly of novels, 1987). Whilst Russell reads this text as the continuation of a male identified dissociation of the subject from the body and into a transcendent 'body of light', a dream independent 'the the parallel of cyborganic of immortality of meat', a more productive reading might focus on the twin themes of apocalypse/death, figured in the shape of Joe the Dead and the afterlife that is the focus of this book, and the dead, from book Burroughs Egyptian the takes the of and multiplicity of souls which ideas 'new hypothesis'. Whilst Russell's Nietzsche's of a soul which opens onto league Burroughs to the same conservative as the postreading would relegate humanists (a reading paralleled by Mark Dery (1996)), the alternative suggests a continued radicalism and progress in Burroughs' writing as he works through the problems of representation and reaches 'the end of words'. apocalypsethat we now turn. 227 It is to this positive

A New 'Soul Hypothesis ý'? Like Cities and Roads, The Western Lands opens and closes with parallel scenes. All the 'action' of the novel occurs between them. The Western Lands starts with another description of the place down by the river, occupied by the two main writer characters Noah the other novels, in and Kim. In this instance, however, the shack has transformed into a boxcar and is occupied by 'the old writer' William Seward Hall. Again there is a repetition and reproduction of yet another writer/forger. This time however, the writing is blocked. Indeed, the novel opens with a discussion of Hall's block, which he has suffered since the successesof his famous first novel. In trying to write his way out of this he starts to record the words he seesin his dreams, putting 39 down on paper the few snippets he can catch and recal, Again, the writing is a . forgery, but for copy or one which there is no original. By the end of the novel, we are given to understand that the problem of writing goes beyond a mere blockage. Even when they flow fast and furious, words inevitably come to an end: The old writer couldn't write any more becausehe had reached the end of words. And then? "British we are, British we stay." How long can one hang on in Gibraltar, ivory hunt balls the tigers, the tapestries where mustachedriders with scimitars with both long bare inside the tearoom the with mirrors on seams showing, other, one English fuchsia the tired the shops selling marmalade and rubber plants, sides and like Rock & Mason's the rock apes, clinging Fortnum to their tea... clinging and less. less to and always 228

(Burroughs, 1987: 258) This is the limit of language that has been an issue throughout this thesis and points to the mutual implications of words and (subjugated) subjectification. By picking up on the national identity 'British', its reflections of imperial excess and a still colonial attitude, Burroughs reflects his earlier insistence that the nation and the family are the basic formulae at the heart of control: What it amounts to is breaking down the basic formulas: one is the formula of a is You draw line this nation. a around a piece of ground and say a nation. Then you have to have police, customs control, armies, and eventually trouble with the people is is formula line. formula; That the the that on other side of one and any variation of going to come to the same thing. The UN is going to get nowhere... The next formula is of course the family. And nations are simply an extension of the family. (Burroughs and Odier, 1989: 50-51) In this Burroughs recognises the point made by Deleuze and Guattari in Anti-Oedipus that the sovereignty of the father and of the national (or even organizational) leader Families, by Oedipal triangle. the nations, are parallel power relations epitomised implicated forms of work organization are all mutually psychoanalysis and capitalist (Deleuze and Guattari, 1983). By adding language itself to this, Burroughs realises language lines break he the to trying of narrative control what earlier suspectedwhen be in its language the own terms could not overcome with the cut-up: that problem of (Burroughs and Odier, 1989: 5 1). But perhaps this is a preemptive defeatism. After 229

the end of The Western Lands, which is the only one of Burroughs' novels to actually "THE END", bold he did in (Burroughs, 1987: 258), go on end with capitalised and his dreams writing, publishing recollected amongst other work, though this was the last of his serious works of fiction. Before we give up on language entirely then, and (perhaps including it Burroughs' this thesis and all of own writing with presumably his discussions of language that led us to this conclusion?), it is worth examining the block between The Western Lands the the and the end of words. middle of and spaces Immediately following the preliminary introduction to Hall, The Western Lands based Norman Mailer's ideas discussion Egyptian the on soul, of of continues with a (1984) Ancient Evenings, the third textual inspiration, alongside Black (2000) (The Johnsons in Roads) and Seitz (2002) (the articulated pirates in Cities), for Burroughs' trilogy. Drawing parallels with his own earlier film based metaphors, Burroughs introduces the seven souls postulated by the ancient Egyptians: Ren, Sekern, Khu, Ba, Ka, Khaibit and Sekhu (Burroughs, 1987: 4-5). In a sense there is a hierarchy of Burroughs' bottom. Ren Sekhu Ren to the top corresponds at and at the souls, with director, the one who controls your biologic film. He is also the first to leave at the he is Burroughs' the death. Sekern technician, to one who corresponds moment of keeps buttons the machinery running and the show on the road. the and presses Without him there is no film. Sekem is secondin the hierarchy, as in "second one off last, The 4). 1987: (Burroughs, the sinking ship" and the one to remain at the end of 5). (ibid.: "the Remains" body: day, Sekhu, is the the 230

Of these souls, Ren, Sekem and Khu are "relatively immortal" (ibid.: 7). They can be injured but on death they usually head back to Heaven and move into another vessel. The remaining four souls have to "take their chances with the subject in the Land of the Dead" (ibid.: 5). But who is this 'subject' who has all these souls? Mr. EightBall: "They don't exist without him, and he gets the dirty end of every stick" (ibid.: 7). Whilst there is a kind of hierarchy of abandonment, there is no unifying, ontological principle to which the souls are subordinated. As Burroughs notes, the film important Sekhu, less than the whole wouldn't exist without so remains are no the director. Indeed, there is an intimation of inversion in this system, as when Burroughs again paraphrases Marx and his placing of analytical primacy on the dry by labour life-force the capitalist sucked and was varnpirically proletariat, whose boss: "Eights of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose but your dirty rotten Rather Eight Marx, 1976). (ibid-: 7; the the than seven souls, unifying cf. vampires" he is either subordinated to, or simply set alongside, them. As Murphy puts it, linking Burroughs model with Deleuze and Guattari's non-totalisable part-objects (Deleuze have different, Eight-Ball Mr. Guattari, 42), 1983: these and often all souls and and divergent, interests and cannot be unified within a single subject. In this model, is fragmented decentred the the eight, subject, and and subjectivity is radically (Murphy, 1997: 1). 19 its "as seven component parts" produced another part alongside Not only are the souls not hierarchically totalizable, but at least some of them are from first is three souls, the others Burroughs the Although that apart clear mortal. book dead, land in the there are throughout the the of must take their chancestogether 231

suggestions that even the supposedly immortal souls may be vulnerable to the influence of new technology, notably the atom bomb and radiation, which feature prominently alongside mutation: "Can any soul survive the searing fireball of an atomic blast?" (Burroughs, 1987: 7). This loss of souls is also what we discover to be key driver for Joe the Dead. Doubling Joe with Oppenheimer's assistant who a buttons the pushes at the testing of the first atom bomb at Los AlamoS40, Burroughs links the blast from this explosion, with the blast that caught Joe the Dead when blowing a safe in Roads: So when it got too hot for Renny he took off, leaving Joe there. That's one reasonJoe hates all Rens. His souls were hideously burned in the blast. fEs destiny burned off, in terrible pain from the phantom souls searedby the fires of hell, pulled back to making slingshots and scout knives (Burroughs, 1987: 10) With his Ren gone, and therefore no director, Joe has lost his destiny and script. He has literally lost the plot. He is running around without clear direction and in serious hurts however it But there is a sense in Burroughs' writing that this is a pain. much more positive existence than a directed and prescribed life. In light of his objections to pre-scripted power and control, Joe, the technician without director, opens new possibilities for space travel. Compared with Kim the vision is quite optimistic. Reflecting upon the naivety of his (or Hall's) utopian dreams of Kim and his rogue bandsof homosexual anarchists, Burroughs notes: 232

Radiant Kim, the fearless ostrich, escapechild of a frightened old man. Anybody isn't frightened now simply lacks imagination. Is there any escape?Of course. A miracle. Leave the details to Joe. (Burroughs, 1987: 13) While the earlier books resurrected 'the chance' through apocalypse and disaster, the final book of the trilogy offers a miracle instead. Although much of 77zeWestern Lands remains apocalyptic, and still brings about the end of the human, this new vision is rather more positive and less focused on the escapism, reflected in Kim's figuration as 'a fearless ostrich', that characterisedthe earlier novels. Nevertheless, escape from control and a positive exploration of space are still the goals of Burroughs' writing. After the counterfactual utopianism of the pirates and the Johnsons, The Western Lands features a third alternative form of social (Burroughs, 'secret Margaras UnlirMted, a service without a country' organization: 1987: 24). Following his rejection of the nation state and family as repressive social forms, Burroughs returns to something like the Nova Police from his middle period, to model an organization defined negatively, by what it won't do and what it is further by to to, spaceexploration, this time explicitly opposed and a positive project conceived as 'inner space': And that is what we did, move a phantom organization to Asunci6n. No KGB to pull is how back Home Center back Home to, that to and to center get pulled and no us is Its Unlimited, Margaras a policy a secret service without country. we conceived 233

determined by the jobs it won't take. Come level on average, MU takes the usual incitement, revolutions, collapses of assignments: assassinations, riot secret service currencies, collection and sale of information Our policy is SPACE. Anything that favors or enhancesspace programs, space exploration, simulation of inner spaceconditions, explorations of space,expanding awareness,we will support. Anything going in the other direction we will extirpate. The espionageworld now has a new frontier. (Burroughs, 1987: 24-5) Of course, this is not a national frontier as MU is entirely opposed to the domination frontier, final it is by Instead that can the a nation state. of space exploration frontier West Wild liberatory the the moments of potentially reproduce some of human. frontier? The lies beyond And in Roads. the this end of explored what Again recalling the Wild West, we discover that Joe is an outlaw, but rather than law, laws, Joe the the even whole idea of refutes simply operating outside society's laws: natural or physical Joe the Dead belongs to a select breed of outlaws known as the Nos, natural outlaws dedicated to breaking the so-called natural laws of the universe foisted upon us by fraud biologists the monumental and, above all, physicists, chemists, mathematicians, by be to replaced the more pregnant concept of synchronicity. of causeand effect, (Burroughs, 1987: 30) 234

It is precisely this opposition to all laws, not only social and cultural, but even following Mark Andrew Ross, has identified as a problem with Dery, that physical, laws Whilst Dery is that the rhetoric of natural post-humanism. well aware and inherent limits is often mobilised in defence of specific, sometimes oppressive, social formations, what he objects to is the ways in which limits per se are rejected by libertarianism the seemingly radical of the postwholesale as oppressive humanists: A healthy skepticism about limits, "natural" as well as social, is a necessary justified individual by liberty. But limits social safeguard against encroachmentson imposed by limits the artificially created scarcity are not synonymous with natural biosphere's interaction with the technosphere. (Dery, 1996: 313) In the context of the post-humanist rejection of the Earth itself, in favour of a transcendence above all limits, beyond the final frontier, Dery sounds a warning for itself. liberation the the this about planet cost of After all, if there is something dreams human immaterial then these than to the of transcendence may mind more Earth Earth, back be brought that is now even more polluted to an only well crashing industrial damaged by the the technological societies advanced excesses of and seekingto escapeit. This raises two points about Burroughs work. In the first instance he is not, as Dery implies (ibid.: 313), entirely unconcerned with limits. When outlining the ways in 235

which industrialism destroyed the opportunity for forming radically democratic, industrial keep inability to the society population and pollution pirate communes, of limits his importantly, Perhaps of criticisms. more within sustainable was one main Burroughs is not simply trying to safeguard individual human rights. Indeed, as I have been arguing throughout, Burroughs is more concerned with the potentialities of inhuman-becomings than he is with human-being. For this reason, his be in Joe Dead the read the context of as a natural outlaw, must characterisation of HassanI Sabbah's proclamation "Nothing is true, everything is permitted." In Hassan I Sabbah's statement, everything is permitted, because nothing is true. As Murphy puts it: It is a question of causality and condition: if something is true, then something else is if is false, but by law true be the nothing as must maligned and prohibited - which to say if there is no such thing as essentialtruth - then there can be no prohibition, no Law, and everything is permitted. And it is permitted precisely in the form of creative is itself. art, whose only condition and referent (Murphy, 1997: 6) But what is truth? For Burroughs, like Bergson, the whole question of epistemology is connected to biophilosophy (Bergson, 1910). Knowledge and truth are not abstract dependent types but of and concrete valuations a specific, upon categories are always life for their truth or falsity. Like good and evil, truth and falsity are dependentupon (Burroughs to do a specific organism what they can and only make sensein relation 236

in his famous Nietzsche Odier, 1989: 75), that essay 'On point also and a recognised the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life' (Nietzsche, 1997). Burroughs however is aiming for a biologic revolution, which will change the very basis of be falsity have transition truth quite will and and, as seen, such a measuring we it has for 'the human. ' basis This the of epistemology as changes whole apocalyptic been debated in the courtroom of reason: It is not necessaryto prove anything, simply to state.This is a biologic revolution, fought with new species and new ways of thinking and feeling, a war where the bullet may take millenia to hit. Like the old joke about the executioner makes a swipe just But try and shake your time. that the samurai sword... well, missed me with head three hundred years from now. At the end of the human line everything is permitted. All is in the not done, the diffidence thatfaltered. Let others quaver out: I dare do all that may become a man, who daresdo more is none." Not so, says Joe. He who dares at all, must dare all. (Burroughs, 1987:34) Without such a risk, ushering in the end of the human, there will be no real change; no revolution. And for Burroughs, as for Joe, social revolution and biologic revolution are inseparable. The goal is to break down conventional lines of favour in descent of mutation. and purity patriarchally validated phylogenetic 237

transversal becomings and hybridity. For this reason, the first of the natural 'laws' for Joe to break is that reflected in Linnaeus' taxonomies: Rule One: Hybrids are permitted only between closely related species and then grudgingly, the hybrids produced being always sterile. The Biologic Police bluntly warn: "To break down the lines that Mother Nature, in her ripe wisdom, has establishedbetween speciesis to invite biologic and social chaos. Joe says,"What do you think I am doing here?Let it come down." (Burroughs, 1987: 32) As noted in chapter two, there is an important connection between the taxonomies imposed on speciesby the natural sciencesand the social order. There is no neutral Burroughs' is knowledge, the this natural outlaw. sources of one of and scientific Importantly, however, Burroughs is not arguing that these outlaws ignore natural laws in favour of a dream of transcendent emancipation. He is saying that they need to be broken. Of course, as a good Popperian, he accepts the basic principle falsifiability, of even if he recognises that the scientific authorities would always ignore 33): (ibid. : any counter evidence is law breaking law To break the a a ordinary criminal, once. a natural you only danger To or annoyance. means to an end: obtaining money, removing a source of law. in itself: is law that breaking the NO, end of the an end a (ibid.: 30) 238

In other words, not only is there no end to justify these means, such as the liberation higher being, but of a we must also pay attention to the specific laws that are being broken, in this case the hierarchical lines of species and types, separated by a gulf never to be breached and with Man at the top, closest to God. In fact, Burroughs explicitly recognises the continuation of the hierarchy of godliness in natural damage done taxonomies, the thereby to animals when Man places scientific and himself at the top of the evolutionary pyramid: For Man is indeed the final product. Not because horno sap is the apogee of perfection, before which God himself gaspsin awe -I can do nothing more!" - but because Man is an unsuccessful experiment, caught in a biologic dead end and inexorably headedfor extinction. "All right, boys, let's cut our way to freedom. " The hybrid concept underlies all relations between man and other animals, since both between being two species. man and animal can mediate only a partaking of These are blueprint hybrids, potentials rather than actual separatebeings, capable of reproduction. (Burroughs, 1987: 41-42) This idea of a failed experiment, or 'biologic dead end' recalls Burroughs discussion from is the the step evolutionary water of salamander who incapable of quite making to land. Unable to get rid of its gills alone, along comes a scientist with a hormone breathing. it For Burroughs, fall to the air makes off: salamander injection and gills humanist hylomorphism dead Caught in the end of man man is in a similar position. 239

needs blueprints, not as a map to use as a model for reproduction, but more as a guidebook to aid escape. Burroughs' use of the metaphor of cutting also reflects Foucault's well known "knowledge is not made for understanding; it is made for cutting" (Foucault, 1984: 88) in the sensethat it points to a cutting of control ties. It also recalls the surgical scalpel, however, and perhaps more crucially, the idea of a genetic splice. Discussedby N. Katherine Hayles (1999) the idea of the splice replaces the hyphen as a basic approach to dualism that recalls both the labours of division necessaryto keep the two sides apart, and also their mutual interdependence.For Haraway (1997) the genetic splice heralds, or makes visible, the dissolution of the old natural order by breaking down the 'natural' categories separating animal and vegetable, organism and machine. The cyborganic hybrids that this biologic revolution ushers in, cuts across the lines of kinship and separation that, for the modems at least, prohibited the crossing of culture and nature, subject and object (cf. Latour, 1993). Burroughs' natural outlaws transgress these well policed boundaries, recalling the technical and animal becomings set in motion by the revolutionary Wild Boys. If this new transgression,this hybridisation, is also revolutionary in its potential, it is becausethe dissolution of traditional boundaries upon which it is premised also breaks down the basis upon which traditional authority held sway. As subjects and objects cross over bearing the the of scientist witness to, or and cyborganize, objective expertise lines based down, it, breaks facts' 'the of authority and with on also representing, Latour, 1993; Myerson, 2001). (Haraway, 1997; political representation, or expertise 240

Hybridisation, Mutation and Multiplicity Between ourselves, it is not at all necessaryto get rid of "the soul"... and thus to renounce one of the most ancient and venerable hypotheses- as happensfrequently to clumsy naturalists that can hardly touch on "the soul" without immediately losing it. But the way is open for new versions and refinements of the soul-hypothesis;and such conceptions as "mortal soul," and "soul as subjective multiplicity, " and "soul as in drives henceforth have " the to social structure of and affects, want citizens' rights science. (Nietzsche, 1989: 20, § 12) By refusing a reduction to a singular subject, The Western Lands performs a kind of schizophrenic multiplication image finally that the transcendent the escapes of subject find death drive immortality human, that toward the the we in the subjugated of and 'subjective As Nietzsche, the multiplicity' group. with of souls kick up a clamour longer No in demand 'citizens' can the priest, or even the science'. and rights from delineate a privileged position of expertise and scientist, and singularise have been God those to conceptions very or objective reality, as authority, closer laws The but transgressed. natural crossed over or crossed: not simply crossed out, have been broken distinct the along with of representation realms separating political knowledge disciplinarity that the and power are now nation state so and concept of both necessarily trans-disciplinary. Organization, no longer coming from above, is formed between the grass-roots like a rhizome, always multiple and polyvocal, even 241

in the case of the subject. This is the meaning of the subject-group: multiplicity and contestation across and between parts not unified to a whole that can subordinate. This is perhaps the closest that Burroughs can come to articulating, within the remit of words and scope of representation, a radical image of hybrid organization. Crossed with animal and machine, the human dissolves as its borders can no longer be policed. Without this disciplinary policing, there is a real chance for change, even if it is only the 'ghost of a chance' (Burroughs, 2002). This is surely the meaning of Burroughs' vision of the post-human as it escapes Earth, Despot and Capital, deterritori A zing into the rhizosphere in a becoming-cyborg, escaping time/death/control and entering the space-age: "I'll make the cocksuckersglad to mutate," he would say, looking off into spaceas if seeking new frontiers of depravity. (Burroughs and Ginsberg, 1975: 39) But if there are limits to the extent to which a post-human future can be articulated final do 'blueprints' Burroughs' language, offer some and representedwithin works (Murphy, 1997) for navigating, just not legislating, this 'after' world. The main ways in which these blueprints operate is by providing a deliberately counter-factual fantasy world through which desire can disinvest the status quo and reinvest in a becomings. inhuman decidedly senesof 242

After the human There is clearly an ambivalence at the heart of Burroughs' vision of the post-human. At times it can seem to celebrate transcendence,whether through Extropian disembodiment and spacetravel (Dery, 1996) or through a transcendentovercoding of the body by the phallus (Russell, 2001). At other times Burroughs seemsto emphasisethe immanence of embodiment and reject the transcendenceof language, body (Hayles, 1999). This immanence also features in the representationand Burroughs' rejection of the representational logic of hylomorphic social organization in his later work, where the operations of fantasy and forgery are used to enable immediately immanent investments of desire without reference to transcendent myths (Murphy, 1997). As these last two chapters have argued, this ambivalence of origin is perhapsinevitable given the complex array of issues at stake in Burroughs' work: desire, language, control, power, resistance, capital, subjectivity, mutation, technology, animalism, sexuality, apocalypse, utopia and religion to name but a few. It has also been the argument of these chapters that Burroughs' thereby offers, if not a looking least then resolution, at a new way of at the complex triangle of relations with which this thesis started: technology, language and the human. Rejecting an essence forces language, human-being the of of alien, viral as simultaneously a product of Burroughs' work provides another way of thinking through anti-essentialism without recourseto an essentialism of the subject. In working through the relations of control and resistanceoperating through such however, Burroughs' work also takes anti-essentialism processesof subjectivization, 243

beyond the narrow limits of epistemology by opening directly onto the political. For Burroughs representation is a transcendentallogic of social organization that works to trammel potential in-human becomings into human being and the is of identity. Identity and human being are both products of, and serve the interests of, control. Identity enablesidentification and location and ensuresthat an individual can be found responsible and kept in their place (Foucault, 2002; 1982). Against this kind of simple location (Cooper, 2001) Burroughs offers a radically decentred subject who is always located in the group or pack. Examples of such feature throughout his work, from the animalistic Wild Boys (Burroughs, 1992b) to the pirates (Burroughs, 1982), Wild Fruits (Burroughs, 1983) and Margaras Unlimited (Burroughs, 1987) but are never intended as a model, simply a fantasy through which the investments of desire can be revolutionised. In this senseall of Burroughs' texts operate as immanent desiring machines rather than as representations. Instead of offering a utopian representationof a better state to come, they intervene directly in the production of the subjectivity of the reader and author. Importantly, and against some of Burroughs' critics, in all of theseexamples whilst desire is primarily homosexual, it is nevertheless radically heterogeneous. It operates through connection to new technologies and weapons and to spaceexploration. In all casesit actively resists norinalisation within pre-given and authoritatively legitimated identities: difference seemsto be its organizing principle. This decentring of the subject extends Grint and Woolgar's (1997) anti-essentiali sm, discussedin chapters one and two, by applying its radical scepticism symmetrically. 244

Where Grint and Woolgar sought only subjective interpretations, Burroughs points to the ways in which flows we would usually treat as objects - animals and machines are themselves the very stuff of the process of subjectivization. Going beyond a simple recognition that subjectivization is a process however, Burroughs' work be that these to appraised accordingly. processesare political and need recognises The argument of this thesis then has been that thoroughgoing anti-essentialism needs to recognise the centrality of technical 'objects' in the constitution of the subject ontologically, epistemologically and politically. There are two issues left to be discussedhowever. Although this thesis has primarily been concerned with the relations between technology, language and the human subject, animals have never been far from the discussion. As the two exemplary Others to the human, animals and machines go hand in hand as it were but so far the question of the animal has been left to one side. The other issue that needs addressing is that of ethics. If humanism and human being are rejected in favour of animal and degree does in becomings this then a of the inhumane? machinic also usher certain Thesetwo questions are briefly considered in the final chapter of this thesis. 245

Chapter 5- Post-Humanism and the Ethics of Immanence Do not demand of politics that it restore the "rights" of the individual, as philosophy has defined them. The individual is the product of power. What is neededis to "deindividualize" by means of multiplication and displacement, diverse combinations. The group must not be the organic bond uniting hierarchized individuals, but a constant generatorof de-individualization. (Foucault, 1983: xiv) By dismantling the anthropomorphic stratum and cutting-up language, this thesis has attempted precisely the kind of deindividualization that Foucault argues for in his preface to Deleuze and Guattari's Anti-Oedipus (1983). From an initial starting point in theories of technology and organization, the thesis broadenedits concern to include textuality, subjectivity and difference. Focused upon the binary between the identity of the human and the difference of its others, whether in terms of material (silicon versus carbon), race, gender or sexual orientation, the thesis has made the argument that humanism in general, and specifically within organization theory, is premised upon a specific politically set of ontological imperialist. conservative and and epistemological commitments that are Central to this imperialism is the logic of transcendenceand representation. By focusing on a transcendent conception of the human inherited from a Judeo-Christian theological tradition and its emphasis on the from Descartes humanist to contemporary texttradition the running written word, based theories of organizational constructivism have focused on the subject as an 246

individual, knowing human, albeit with differing degreesof sophistication. To break down the individual as Foucault suggests is to create a space for a new form of based difference epistemology and a new ethics, one on rather than identity. Such has the that this thesis traced through the work of Nietzsche, Deleuze and project was Guattari and William Burroughs. What these writers share is a rejection of the rule of transcendenceand idealism in favour of an always immanent materialism. As the last chapter argued, for Burroughs this meant a rejection of the logic of representation and for favour in forgery. a search origins, of a celebration of Having considered these final knowledge form life in in the to this to the of post-human, and of issues relation chapter I want to focus explicitly on the question of ethics. As the preceding chapters have discussed the ethics of transcendental humanism, this chapter considers the have been looks the the the altematives and at ethics of post-human ways in which treated in organization studies as a kind of anti-humanism, before outlining an alternative conception through the immanent idea of the trans-human. Post / Humanism In his opposition to transcendence,Burroughs departs radically from the normative idealisms of both humanism and posthumanism so how should we situate his work, humanism have As I in these to argued, is positions? and this thesis, relation dependentupon a transcendent figure 'Man', the rational, thinking being who can be his by least in from distinguished ability to use part animals and machines at clearly human keeps Posthumanism language. this subject intact gendered and understand whilst questioning the necessity of its specific mode of embodiment. 247 In effect,

its is in immanence thorough posthumanism even more rejection of material as, whilst it plays with a conception of material heterogeneity through notions like the cyborg, it keeps the form of the human subject intact. For Burroughs however, any hybridity material changes the very nature of the subject. Like Deleuze and Guattari (1987) he resolutely refused to separateform and content so that the human form can be maintained whilst changing its material manifestation. Indeed, this notion that a transcendentform is merely manifested in immanent reality is precisely at the heart of Burroughs' and Deleuze and Guattari's critique of transcendenceand humanism. So clearly both humanism and posthumanism are problematic terms. Humanism deviant This to entirely suggests a norm which all others are and sub-human. Him displaced God humanism to replace religious, albeit secular, version of simply into Man. This the transcendentalism that posthumanism carried is with is precisely In dream Extropian transcendence. the seeking to escape embodiment, they of with is form human This to them. the to take a race perfection with nevertheless want direct parallel of the worst excesses of violence in the twentieth century with the dissent Germany in Nazi human 'perfect' to the to any eliminate or race attempts from the proletariat through the Gulags of Stalinist Russia (Finkielkraut, 2001). As we move into the twenty-first Bush logic to the prevail, with seems century same dissent is freedom', the 'haters name of crushed in any wherein of all ranting against humanity with quite inhumane results. This is the humanism that this thes's has individuals humanity The to as a goal which elevation of suggesteda need to oppose. has long festering God's Man be corpse where can readily sacrificed simply reinserts 41). 1969: (Nietzsche, lain since rotting It is for this reason that an Anti-Christ 248

necessarily calls forth an Anti-Oedipus, to disassemble humanism as a hierarchical structure of subjugation and control in the name of liberation, humanity, the greater good or 'human rights. ' But if the human is so inhumane, what are the alternatives? Isn't there a perversity to ditching humanism entirely? Isn't there a danger that a full blown anti-humanism will be quite inhumane? This has certainly been the fear of some organizational theorists. Interfaces When considering the ethics of humanism and post-human, there is a danger that figures like the cyborg can appearrather 'cold', with little hope or humanity left. Facedwith cyborgs, mutating fish-boys, insects and reptiles, anti-narrative cut-ups and apocalyptic terminators it is perhapsnatural to hark back to a period of more is humanism. Central idea it is in this to the that authentic only nostalgia unmediated, face-to-face communication that we achieve our true expression as humans (Parker, 2000a; ten Bos and Kaulingfreks, 2002). Although some feminist theorists of technology have suggestedthat this face-to-face dialogue is in fact a typically male form of discoursing (Plant, 1997), there is certainly something to be said for the dehumanising (Gross, 1997; kind that effect of notion mediation can produce a Bauman, 1989). For example, it would seemmuch easier for someoneto press the button and release an atomic payload than it would be to kill thousandsof people 249

face looking lose faces. So does that to the through the their this whilst mean into humanity? lose inter-face is is in To the to that prevalence of mediated positive all human this the the consider question concerning ethics and sociality after end of we Deleuze Guattari. to turn to and need once again Oh Christ... Year Zero In the seventh of their Thousand Plateus, 'Year Zero: Faciality', Deleuze and Guattari consider the importance of the face to the idea of the human. When discussing the human we have spoken of the mind/body dualism, but to speak face human doesn't have body, just face. Recalling the the a and a correctly, a mind Guattan, (Deleuze God in Turin the the the shroud and of clouds, or shadows on 1987: 167), it is this face of the father that overcodes primitive heads and bodies to becomefaces: The head, even the human head, is not necessarilya face. The face is produced only it be by body, be head the to the to the coded ceases a part of when ceases when body, when it ceasesto have a multidimensional, polyvocal corporeal code - when the body, head included, has been decodedand has to be overcodedby something we Face. the shall call (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 170) So what is the human face-to-face, the authenticity of unmediated communication or back harks humanist faces between to? that romanticism a communion, 250

I too would like to know the warm heart beating at the centre of all human activity I want to have my finger on its pulse, its hand in mine and our eyes meeting. (Parker, 2000a: 84) Certainly, "the face is produced in humanity" (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987), and yet: The inhuman in human beings: that is what the face is from the start. It is by nature a close-up with its inanimate white surfaces,its shining black holes, its emptinessand boredom. Bunker-face. To the point that if human beings have a destiny, it is rather to escapethe face, to dismantethe face and facializations (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 171) Whilst a centrepoint of humanist sentimentality, the face, and what ten Bos and Kaulingfreks (2002) have called the 'interfacial hothouse', the heat between faces of an authentic human encounter like the idealised one alluded to by Parker, cannot help but point to an inhuman in the human. Like the stony faces and impenetrable gaze of the Nazi prison camp administrator discussedby Finkelkraut (2001: 1) the overcoding of the human face is always colonial. It measure and compares to a transcendent finds face human has judging, The humanity in the the model of of and wanting. inhuman, the horrors of the inquisition and the holocaust as its counterpoint. It is Janusfaced and like a mask, inanimate. Fixed by ideals and the purity of separationit hasno movement, just a fixed gaze staring blankly. 251

But even with this overcoding, the human is already departing from the hand Whilst deterritorialization the anthropomorphic stratum. was a relative of the locomotive hand, in association with a tool (for example a club as a deterritorialized branch) the face is an absolute deterritorialization that rises up along with language and signifiance, to connect to all of the other strata: the face representsa far more intense, if slower, deterritorialization. We could say that it is an absolute deterritorialization: it is no longer relative becauseit removes the head from the stratum of the organism, human or animal, and connectsit to other strata, such as signifiance and subjectification. (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 172) Of course, it is not just technology, but language which is central to these overcodings bulimic food in deterritorializations. The is movement, and a and mouth emptied of fills itself with words to vomit out. In this sense the movement of faciality, and the blackhole of the mouth, has always already departed from the organic and language There is spreads out to effectuate no purity and anthopornorphic strata. linguistic) (genetic, technical, on the other strata: other codings The abstract machine begins to unfold, to stand to full height, producing an illusion determinate itself belongs to the though a still machine exceeding all strata, even he does illusion (who is, think This the man constitutive of man obviously, stratum. is?). This illusion derives from the overcoding immanent to languageitself. But what is not illusory between distributions the content and expression: new are deeper level, hand-tool by the relation and, at a technological content characterized 252

tied to a social Machine and formations of power; symbolic expressioncharacterized by face-language relations and, at a deeper level, tied to a serniotic Machine and regimes of signs. (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 63) Man is constituted by an illusion, by the purity of separation,but the abstract machine illusion, that producing and by extension Man, is not illusory. The distributions of content and expression really are changing, and reaching out across the strata, man has always been trans-human. But with the deterritorializations capitalism this illusion itself starts to collapse. of cybernetic There is no longer a faciality to overcode language so the codes of cyberspace start to unravel this constitutive illusion as the distinctions that maintain the anthropomorphic stratum dissolve and erode. faciality If the face is an overcoding of the head and departure from the body, there can be no body to the as a source of coding. simple return Aside from the obvious discussed imperative the normalisation of in chapter three, there are also very real deterritorializations All form distributions the to strata. changes of and content across between becomings, but they so that a also occur are so are reterritorializations: "a is return to a primitive order or older territoriality" reterritorialization never (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 174). Discussing the relationship between the face, head and body, Deleuze and Guattari suggest that whilst 'primitives' may have the 253

human most of heads, they have no face (ibid.: 176). It is through the face of Christ that humanity is universalised and separatedfrom primitive tribes. Of course, such a 4universal' is anything but: The face is not a universal. It is not even that of the white man; it is White Man himself, with his broad white cheeks and the black hole of his eyes. The face is Chri st... Not a universal, but facies totius universi. Jesus Christ superstar: he invented the facialization of the entire body and spreadit everywhere (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 176) And like the cross, the face of Christ bifurcates producing binarization. Resembling a 2x2 matrix the face of Christ produces the human interface as a 'four eyed machine' following a logic of exclusive or (ibid.: 177). Either father or son, student or teacher, man or woman, worker or boss. On the second dimension, the vertical post of the cross, is a yes or a no. It judges the concrete faces produced on the horizontal dimension as either/or: given a concrete face, the machinejudges whether it passesor not, whether it goes or not, on the basis of elementary facial units. This time, the binary relation is of the 44yes-no"type... A given face is neither a man's nor a woman's... A ha! It's not a it be is it's The binary between transvestite: a relation a woman, so must man and not the "no" of the first category and the "yes" of the following category, which under indicate just be tolerance to mark an enemy as easily a as certain conditions may mowed down at all costs. (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 177) 254

In either case the binarism operates to separate but its grid is wide and inclusive Recalling Finkielkraut's discussion than exclusive. rather of racism and the Nazi's Guattari Deleuze European by that and anti-Semitism, racism proceeds recognise inclusion and annihilation, not by exclusion. Where the primitive society defines 'us' 'Other', Other, face Christ European literally the the and white, colonial of sees no just shadesof deviation from the norm that it is: From the viewpoint of racism, there is no exterior, there are no people on the outside. There are only people who should be like us and whose crime is not to be. (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 178) It is in this sense that the Nazi's sought to annihilate the Jews as the enemy: the deviant adversary holding back humanity from its true destiny. The battle here is faciality, Other in be human There internal the or can no race. always an politics of in humanism becauseto admit of a transgession and let in the outside: The mixed serniotic of signifiance and subjectification has an exceptional need to be be fact, In intrusion from from there the any exterior: not must outside. any protected their combinations spring up with must polyvocality primitive no machine, no nomad One heterogeneous can make subjective choices substances of expression... of between two chains or at each point in a chain only if no outside tempest sweeps is faciality The to the signifier annex an not machine the subjects chains and away ... is (connexe) is their to them condition of and the subjacent rather, subject; and possibility. 255

(Deleuze and Guattaii, 1987: 179-180) The abstract machine gains its power by becoming universal, through the face with its binarisms which support hierarchized binary subjectifications and significations. The language becomes becomes language, precisely becauseof this total, system of world faciality which supports it. Subjectification and signifiance, the production of subjects and meaning, depend in their turn upon the colonial totalization of faciality. But as we have seen, technology and cyborganization open up the window and let the in. It is breath fresh this outside of air that sweeps away the individualizations of Man and 'the human'. By opening onto a constitutive heterogeneity the transgression of the foundational boundaries between nature and culture, organism and technics, dissolve the imperialist formations of both language and the face, producing a longer deviation by degree from multiplicity no constrained as a totalising norm. x Indeed, the very recognition within the fascist model that a future mankind can be formed by annihilating or assimilating deviance, opens human nature onto artifice. Mankind, in this model, is a project for engineers. In short, there is nothing to be desired in the 'interfacial hothouses' of the 'authentic' human relationship. The very artificiality of cybernetic, heterogeneousinterfacing long But humanism in Other that to so as postnever can. opens up a way an humanism perpetuates a normalizing facialized. human form it will remain thoroughly For Deleuze and Guattari however there is an alternative. Whilst body'. 'the As do faciality, horrors to to they was not seek return of recognising the discussed in Chapter Three, the imperative 'the body' is as thoroughly hylomorphic 256

faces humanism. less Certainly its is less the totalizing, but it as of regime complete, is still brutal and grounded in series of codings based on pain and the literal inscription of the body through scarification and marking (Deleuze and Guattari, 1983). Instead of sliding back into the multiplicity of tribes and bodies with their logic exclusive of us and them, Deleuze and Guattari, like the post-humanists, suggest beyond the reactive and imperial formation of singular facial identities. Rather going than return, however, this involves opening up to a new multiplicity which proceeds by not addition - us, and them, and them, and them which recognises a foundational multiplicity but the tribal model, - as with which proceeds rhizomatically, operating and constituting parts from in between. In this rhizome the human form is no longer trapped in an Oedipal dream of patricide and incest, defined by strictly delineated lines of filliation and descent, but opens instead directly onto the other including technics - the relationship with which (becoming) is constitutive of the parts it connects. The Willard skin is coming away in ragged scraps, exposing something beyond masculinity, beyond humanity, beyond life. Patchesof mottled technoderm woven You Daddy anymore. emerging. and mummy means nothing with electronics are into dark.... the scrape away yourface and step (Land, 1995: 204 - emphasisadded) As the face is scraped away, something quite inhuman and machinic lies behind it. Cold perhaps, but certainly no colder that the interfaciality of Herr Doktor Pannwitz 2001: 1). desk 1993; Finkielkraut, his (Levi, 174517 Hdftling across appraising 257

Behind the seemingly human Willard skin of the face is a hybrid of genetically modified technoderm and electronic circuitry, the two paradigmatic technologies of hybridity and transgression (Haraway, 1997). This is a Willard becoming minor, not (he isn't in fucking their even major army anymore -a strictly organized corps), faciality blackthe their scraping away of military uniforms with white surfaces and hole buttons to open up a nomadic guerrilla insurgency (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 181). Deleuze and Guattari ask the question "How do you get out of the black hole? How do you break through the wall? How do you dismantle the face?" and find an answer Anglo-American the in novel which constructs lines of flight and positive deterritorializations (ibid.: 186). As this thesis has argued, the work of William S. Burroughs provides one such escape route through a particular version of the Anglo- American novel. In doing so the face of humanism is dismantled and the symmetry language his longer human No is is the subject and of subjects and objects restored. treated as the sole ontological ground of technics. Rather, a fundamentally heterogeneous ontology grounded only in its essential difference emerges. Within be for has to there this, as the thesis power and resistance are new spaces argued, language by flight lines to and cutting up escape control of played out, new dismantling the face. But, like Burroughs in his mid-period, Deleuze and Guattari are at best vague when it comes to representing the after-human. 258

probe-heads What is an animal at dawn, a human at noon, and a cyborg at dusk, passing through (base four) genetic wetware, (binary) techno-cultural software, and into the tertiary schizomachineprogram? (Land, 1995: 198) Constructing lines of flight, and escaping faciality, Burroughs refused the temptation to get caught and "latch back onto aface" (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 187). Instead he took the twinned issues of subjectification and signifiance and constructed a line of flight out of language. Nowhere is this more apparent than in his mid period cut-ups. With the cybernetic, animalistic becomings of the Wild Boys and the narrative disjunctions of the cut-ups, texts become artefacts and technologies, productive not of better, but deindividualization, or perhaps of signification or representation, 'defacialization', freeing "something like probe-heads (tetes chercheuses, guidance devices) that dismantle the strata in their wake, break through the walls of signifiance, favor fell in holes trees the of veritable rhizomes, and steer of subjectivity, pour out of the flows down lines of positive deterritorialization or creative flight" (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 190). This new abstract machine, with its positive deterritorialization, breaks out of, and breaks down, the strata, those judgements of God the doublearticulated lobster (subjectification and signifiance): Thus opens a rhizomatic realm of possibility effecting the potentialization of the impotence. possible, as opposedto arborescentpossibility, which marks a closure, an 259

(Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 190) And this is precisely the meaning of the transhuman that the second half of this thesis has tried to articulate in responseto the twin problems of technology and humanism: by that proceeds an opening way of transversal, subterraneanburrowings rather than arborescentbiunivocalization; a becoming rather than new forms of being. But most important of all, this opening onto the non-human has nothing to do with technology has (as if it from it to technical than were separable per se a social machine) any more do with a human subject interested in questions of signifiance, interpretation and (as if it from facial the reading were separable machine that produced the totalized space necessary for its imperialist pretensions). Instead it opens on to, and actively deterritorializations, life be its "non-human to through created" a quite produces (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 191). In answer to Spengler's question with which this thesis opened, and to the question and questing after technology with which it has be Probe-heads: is be this said. perhaps as much as can more generally concerned, devices: questing Beyond the face lies an altogether different inhumanity: no longer that of the deterritorialization here, but "probe-heads"; head, cutting edges of of primitive become operative and lines of deterritorialization positive and absolute, forming Become becomings, clandestine, make rhizome new polyvocalities. strange new love, life be Face, for to you the created. my wonder of a nonhuman everywhere, have finally become a probe-head... Year zen, year omega, year co... Must we leave it at that, three states,and no more: primitive heads,Christ-face, and probe-heads? 260

(Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 191, emphasisin original) It is with these enigmatic lines that Deleuze and Guattari themselves come to the end least for that plateau, as if recognising the impossibility of representing of words, at this transhumanfigure, an issue we have already discussedin relation to Burroughs' last the work in chapter. Recognising the co-implication of language,representation human Deleuze and Guattari are reluctant to offer a model of what might the and come after the human face. Instead they choosethe concept of probe-headsto suggest a multiple, always tentative, searching. The point here is that it is the process becoming of not the goal or the starting point that most fundamental. As Chapter Four suggested, Burroughs later work also develops a process orientated theory of social-organization and subjectivization after the human, one that also refusesreified representationsbut offers a positive alternative both to the imperialisms of humanism and post-humanism, and to the nihilism of post-modernism and pure escapology. Animalisms As the last few sections have tried to suggest,there is nothing essentially cold, sinister faciality, is lost human. Rather there than the the a or evil in mourning a end of by Deleuze Burroughs becomings in inhuman the and and explored positive potential Guattari. This is not to sidestepthe question of ethics, but rather to refuse an absolute Following Bergson, itself for problematic. ground all ethical engagements as Nietzsche and Spengler, the question of technics, as well as that of humanism and 261

be is that epistemology once it is recognised ethics, can only effectively addressed also a question of value and values (Bergson, 1998; Nietzsche, 1997; Spengler, 1932). This raises two final issues however. One is the question of other, non-human forms has been life, implicit The the throughout this thesis. animal, which of most notably is life itself is the question of and an ontology possible that would other whether vital flows life hylornorphic in the trap of not rigid, cages. The first of these, the animal, returns to the question of ethics but also suggestssome lines further of potential research. Throughout the thesis, and throughout writing on the post-human, references to animals are replete. Like Burroughs, philosophers of language have often sought to separate humans from animals with recourse to their lack of ability to use language (Burroughs, 1989; 1986; Deleuze and Guattari, 1987). As noted in Chapter Two, the animal has also been represented as an Other to the human for overtly political reasons as in Linnaeus' taxonomy (Schiebinger, 2000). In body, discourses is to the the or embodiment, associated such animal often closely is faculties. by his Where Man is the animal of nature, rational whilst separatedoff Man with his technics and knowledge has control over nature. Nowhere is this however theoretically the than rhetoric, separationmore in evidence with Oedipus Nick Land's Witness on play rhetorical sophisticated,of post-humanism. dawn, human "What Sphinx at a the the is an animal at quoted above: and riddle of becoming-cyborg In 1995: 198). (Land, dusk, this, the of noon, and a cyborg at between division, basic that animal and man, whilst posthumanism reinstates a more Not between distinction doubt into bringing the man and machine. simultaneously 262

in formulations is to of restricted posthumanism, a similar move performed early Michel Callon Bruno (ANT) Latour theory and when suggestthat actor-network baboon human have been troops than studying rather societies ethnomethodologists (Callon because have Latour, 198 1). technology they and overlooked precisely Strangely, the rabidly capitalist, neo-Darwinism that informs much posthuman ism (Dery, 1996) actually overlooks, or seeksto overcome, one of the great humans Darwinism: the that of recognition are part of a continuum with challenges does (Mazlish, 1993). Of it course, so whilst simultaneously other animals distinction between humans and machines. the challenging The role of the animal is much more ambivalent in the work of Burroughs and of Deleuze and Guattari however. In a short, and critically neglected, work that uses themes from his final trilogy, The Ghost of a Chance, Burroughs (2002) has Captain Mission, founder of the pirate communes of Cities of the Red Night, communing with lemurs in Madagascar. In this short, illustrated tale Burroughs seemsto suggestthat the lemurs and Mission's communes hold the key to breaking the mould of the human form, a threat that is successfully thwarted by agent of the board, Bradley-Martin (Burroughs, 2002). Once again ending in disaster,this short novella raises the figure in Western Dead The Joe by hybrid, the the the and natural outlaws of also picked up Lands (Burroughs, 1987). By transgressingthe laws of nature, the hybrids, forms both texts these of refuse all mutations, communists and natural outlaws of Instead, inhuman. impurity by these domination the transcendent and embracing hybrids play a role similar to Haraway's OncomouseTmand flounder-gene spliced 263

tomato (Haraway, 1997; Myerson, 2000). By transgressingthe natural order, they forms law. for image transcendent of refusing all offer a politically radical Altematives This brings us to the second issue raised by the question of value, epistemology and biophilosophy. If, as this thesis has argued, the problem with both humanism and is from dependent that they transcendental are a posthumanism subject separate upon the immanence of material life, then Deleuze and Guattari's rhizomatics and Burroughs' fantastic subject-groups go at least some way to reinserting the questions of evolution, life, technics and the human into the plane of immanence. Escaping the imperialist limitations of transcendenceis quite distinct from the Extropian refusal of limits lambastedby Andrew Ross and Mark Dery however (Ross, 1991a; Dery, 1996). Whilst the posthumanists sought to overcome all limits so as to transcendthe materiality of immanence and purify the human form of all its contaminants, Burroughs actively seeks out hybridity, mutation and a material heterogeneity in from free flourish immanently, for life to to the externally order open potential imposed restrictions, but within the flows of life. Politically too the two positions are form higher distinct. Whilst the of the quite posthumanistscelebrate a neo-Darwinian human that is profoundly inhumane and uncaring, both of other humans who may be left behind and of nature and animals who may not transcendtheir earthly existence (Dery, 1996), Burroughs' posthuman mutations are always visceral and material. They are concerned with mutating bodies, not transcending bodies; with the their than linguistic immaterial codes rather and symbols inaterialities of even 264

demonstrating As (Hayles, 1999). they end up such an ethical significations from Others, the socially excluded through to animals to commitment a wide range of hunted for game (Burroughs, 2002). In this sense,Burroughs' vision of what might human is the after more consciously political and committed to anarchistic, come democratic social transformation than the transcendenceof the radically be. posthumanistscould ever It is ultimately Burroughs, and Deleuze and Guattari's, rejection of representation that prevents them falling into the posthumanist trap. Posthumanismremains wedded to a logic of representationthat privileges transcendentform over material content denying limits is internal thereby shaped. that to the any whilst unformed matter Burroughs on the other hand, rejects the transcendenceof representationin favour of directly language it, His experimentation. cut-ups materialise and experiment with intervening in the material production of linguistic subjects. Later his fantasiesrefuse to representwhat comes after the human, preferring to operate immanently in desire (Murphy, investment immanent the through and of subjectivity production 1997). In both cases,the operations of the texts are strictly immanent and machinic, directly is Importantly, this political as critique of representation not representational. it refuses all kinds of political representation, especially by an elite vanguard. In this immanence Guattari's Deleuze Burroughs' of philosophy and sense materialism, and in its democratic, politics. is radically or perhaps anarchic, 265

As this politics suggestshowever, a rejection of representation does not mean getting humanism rid of altogether. Just as Scott Lash has argued that there are two modernities (Lash, 1999) so Hardt and Negri have suggestedthat there are two humanisms (2000). Whilst this thesis has emphasisedhumanism as a form of transcendentalism,there is another tradition, also arising in the Renaissance,more akin to the radical scepticism attributed to Nietzsche in Chapter Two. It is this 'other' humanism that Hardt and Negri rediscover in the late Foucault. Comparing his last focus works' on the care of the self with his early pronouncement of the death of Man, Hardt and Negri ask how Foucault maintains his anti-humanism whilst embarking upon what seems to be a quite humanist project. In response they suggest: this antihumanism follows directly on Renaissance humanism's secularizing project, or more precisely, its discovery of the plane of immanence. Both projects are founded on an attack on transcendence. There is a strict continuity between the religious thought that accords a power above nature to God and the modern itsecular" thought that accords that same power above nature to Man. The transcendenceof God is simply transferred to Man. Like God before it, this Man that from has stands separate and above nature no place in a philosophy of immanence. Like God, too, this transcendentfigure of Man leads quickly to the imposition of a social hierarchy and domination. Antihumanism, then, conceived as a refusal of anY transcendence,should in no way be confused with a negation of the vis viva, the lifeforce On the that the tradition. animates revolutionary stream modern of creative the contrary, the refusal of transcendenceis the condition of possibility of thinking this immanent power, an anarchic basis of philosophy: "Ni Dieu, ni maitre, ni 1'homme." 266

(Hardt and Negri, 2000: 91-92, italics in original) All of which raises the question of terminology. Where the idea of posthumanism is humanism because its is to of associations, returning similarly clearly unsatisfactory 'anti-humanism' Negri instead for Hardt term the and suggest as a problematic. (Hardt transcendence and Negri, 2000) ararchistic philosophical strategy of refusing but this has its own limits in that it conjures up shades of Althusserian structural Marxism (Althusser, 1969) and dialectical opposition that risks recuperation in that fails it (Burroughs Odier, 1989: 101). It to offer a precise and also which opposes epithet for the subject that might come after the human: the 'after-man' as it were. Instead then, perhaps the term 'transhuman' holds out more potential (AnsellPearson, 1997a). Whilst in a sense this term is limited by its association with transcendence, more important is its resonance with transgression: with the natural from human lack for laws for boundaries the the that separate outlaw's and of respect by human, from follow its Others. This the transhuman means of all on would not direct descent and lines of filiation, but cut across and cut up these lines through novel, hybrid associations. The political ramifications of this move have started to be sketched out by the likes of Hardt and Negri in relation to the mutations that the subject is undergoing in the face of the new information and communication technologies of post-modem capitalism (Hardt and Negri, 1994; 2000; Dyer-Witheford, 1999). In these works, the Autonomist Marxist position extends Burroughs' concerns with the materiality of 1960s from the tape-recorders the with which of communication technologies 267

Burroughs (1992b) armed his Wild Boys into the circuits of cybernetic capitalism and global networks of ICT (Dyer-Witheford, 1999). Central to this contention is the notion that the 'old' subject of capitalist production and radical organizational analysis - the proletariat - is undergoing a transformation from being an object, whether of analysis, an employment relation, or a series of Human Resource Management practices, to becoming a subject group: a working-class that is not defined or contained by its capacity or proclivity for 'work' (Cleaver, 1992). From this perspective, the anti-humanism of Hardt and Negri (1999), or what I am suggestingwe call trans-humanism, after Ansell-Pearson (1997a), embracesa critical politics of resistance, revolution and emancipation, without specifying a priori what is to be emancipated. Indeed, the process of radical engagement is more important here than the end goal. Rather than a stable point in which to ground a subjectivist epistemology, or a clear goal or emancipation, the subject in this sense is an always open, immanent process of becoming. Nevertheless, it does offer a focus for radical social theory that is quite distinct from the conventional subjects of humanist critical theory, where the politics of representation and knowledge production can become lead further disempowering, to profoundly patronising and and emancipation can suffering or even the Gulag (WOBS, 2001; Finkielkraut, 2001). Although some of these writers are now starting to receive serious academic attention has focused field this the on the work within attention of organization studies, most of Sorensen, 2003; Sotto, Day, 1998; 1998; 1998; Deleuze (Cooper, Guattari of and Linstead, 2000; Parker, 2000a) with much less attention given to the work of Hardt 268

Negri (Munro, less 2002) Burroughs (for notable exceptions see to and still and Gargett, 2002; Munro, 2001). Perhaps more importantly, where this work has been it if devoid often presented addressed, is as of political content, as for example when Robert Chia (1999) presents the idea of the rhizome as if it could be directly taken up for organizational creativity, thereby completely neglecting Deleuze and a model as Guattari's critique of capitalist reterritorializations of creativity (e.g. Deleuze and Guattari, 1983: 236). In this sense,the later chapters of this thesis, and this one in have sought to consider some of these political and ethical issues in light particular, of a thorough-going critique of humanism in social and organizational theory. By Guattari Deleuze and reading alongside William Burroughs, a political understanding of their critique of representation is made possible and, perhaps more importantly, lines flight brought light. In to some potential of are relation to the specific question for kind Burroughs' of mapping navigating the of organization, work offers a immanent organization of the subject group, without recourse to transcendent models and myths. In this respect, these writers can all contribute to a positive critique after the nihilism of the postmodern.turn in organization studies (Parker, 1995; Thompson, 1990; Plant, 1992). Going even further than many 'postmodern' theories of Burroughs William Hardt Negri, Guattari, Deleuze open and and organization, and by for directly reconnecting questions of new spaces political, critical engagement, biophilosophy. epistemology, value and Some possible directions for such future researchwill be considered in the conclusion to this thesis. 269

in Conclusion... Prospects for a Post-Humanist Organization Theory As soon as an article goesinto massproduction the company doesn't want to know if it is better basically different. So a simpler article, especially a number of about ý11 very good inventions are scrappedand forgotten. We can extrapolate that the same formula applies to living organismsonce we acceptthe supposition that organisms definite for are artefactscreated a purpose. Burroughs, 1983: 215) Starting with the question of technology and its relationship with organization and the human subject, this thesis has consideredthe epistemological, political and ethical implications of taking 'the human' as the basis for conducting organization studies. In Chapter One a fairly conventional review of organizational and sociological literatures on technology raised the twin questions of textuality and subjectivity. As become have have developed, technology theories increasingly they of organizational hostile to determinism to the extent that some form of social constructivism is now fairly broad Within 1999). (McLoughlin, field this in dominant the orthodoxy the determinism to its have technological also taken of underlying critique church, some forms logic Following 1987). (Law, determinism' this 'social of all apply to determinism are rejected along with any appeal to essential 'facts' that might explain determinism, Inplace 1997). Woolgar, this (Grint antiof and change socio-technical to technology pay more need that organizational of researchers essentialism suggests hence interpreted attention to the ways in which technological artefacts and events are 270

be (Grint treated texts that technologies analytically as and suggesting should Woolgar, 1997; Joergesand Czarniawska, 1998). Whilst this kind of radical scepticism is undoubtedly valuable, it was the argument of the thesis that it fails to go far enough. By insisting upon everything being subjective interpretation, a kind of essentialism of the subject sneaks in by the back door. Whilst Chapter One was primarily concerned with technological objects, Chapter Two reconsidered the relationship between language and technology by focussing on the human subject. In following various accounts of the tripartite relations between texts, technologies and subjects, Chapter Two suggesteda radical decentring of the subject through Deleuze and Guattarl's concept of the anthropomorphic stratum (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987). For Deleuze and Guattari there is no essence of the human subject. Rather it is a specific distribution, or stratification, of form and fact Considering language (Deleuze Guattari, 1987). the technology content; and and that the human - even as a stratified distribution - is a normative and normalizing 'judgement of God' (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 40) the question inevitably arose, depends So long human the on a normative version of the as it why go after at all? human, humanism marginalises its Others, whether machine, animal, or Other humans on grounds of gender or race, setting them below it on a hierarchy that (Schiebinger, God's being from Man derives image made in ultimately sanction 2000). In this light, there is a political issue at stake in putting the human subject at Other: know the to that heart the seeks of epistemology, particularly an epistemology 271

the machine or the object. The second half of the thesis therefore sought to go 'after' the human in quite a different way. Turning to the work of William S. Burroughs, the second half of the thesis took up the issue of the post-human and what might come after the end of the human. Caught fantasies in of technofetishism and immaterial transcendence,the post-human has up been often seen as a way of resolving the problematic relationship between the human and the machine by ever tighter coupling: by turning human beings into cyborgs (Warwick, 1997; Moravec, 1988; Dery, 1996). Ultimately however, this version of post-humanism is premised upon an extension of the kind of transcendent humanism that underpinned Descartes' (1986) schism and was problematised in the first half of the thesis. The body is reified and rejected as mere meat, whilst the essenceof the human is found in its thinking abilities, albeit reflected through a computer-based metaphor of cognition (Hayles, 1999). The idea that human consciousness is a communicative pattern that can be downloaded into machines and networks might be a reassuring fantasy when faced with ecological disaster, ever increasing entropy and the heat-deathof the solar system (AnselI -Pearson, 1997b), but it does little to resolve the problems of humanism already identified. Rather this version of post-humanism seeksto take the human essenceand extend it beyond the end of 'the body' (Hayles, 1999). Burroughs does something quite different however. In line with Deleuze and Guattan (1987) he recognises that the human form is itself a result of parasitic infestation with 272

the word-virus (Burroughs, 1986). Rather than being a fixed, stable entity that uses language to communicate its own thoughts, as assumed by the Cartesian 'I think therefore I am', Burroughs' theory of the word-virus suggests that language speaks through us, producing both a narrative senseof time and a parallel concept of identity Rather through time. than taking this narrative selfas continuity of consciousness identity for granted, or treating it as a human need (Giddens, 1991), Burroughs seeks to disrupt it, freeing whatever is left of the human body from its parasitic infection. In this sense,Burroughs reflects Foucault's (1980; 1983) notion that the individual is a product of control and needs to be problernatised and actively deindividuated. In the sphere of language, Burroughs upturns Grint and Woolgar's (1997) logic of textual constructivism by seeking to use material technologies like the tape-recorder, break 'cut-up' just the to word-virus, its grip of control and or paper and scissors, disrupt its production of the human identity. In effect, Burroughs materialises language and discourse by connecting them to new objects and technologies, rather than dernaterialising technological objects through a linguistic, textual metaphor. This escape from control, although quite successful, was strictly negative however. It identity human destroy to the without simultaneously working and sought word virus through a positive altemative. In Chapter Four therefore the thesis tumed to Burroughs' later work which, whilst continuing his apocalyptic visions of the end of his formal to human, largely work the mid-period of the experimentalism gave up on fictional in or mythical texts objective challenge could which concentrate on ways fiction last his is It 1997). (Murphy, three major works of in modesof representation 273

that Burroughs is most explicitly concerned with questions of social organization. In thesehe forsakes the science-fiction that led him to be considered as the godfather of favour deliberately in (McCaffery, 1991) of counterfactual reconstructive cyberpunk fantasiesof utopian organizations operating without hierarchically sanctioned, hylornorphic identities. These new 'subject groups' (Deleuze and Guattari, 1983; Murphy, 1997) are prefigured, still in a science-fictional mode, in The Wild Boys a kind of transitional text between the Nova trilogy and Burroughs' final works. In the Wild Boys, Burroughs combines radical, animal and technological becomings with a form Wild language (the Boys through a of communicate rejection of conventional hieroglyphic script (Burroughs, 1992b: 150-151)) and a focus on homosexual desire desire directly May 1968 link the the of in to production with student revolts of fantasy (Murphy, 1997; Burroughs and Odier, 1989). Throughout Burroughs' final fictional trilogy however, he develops these ideas through fantasiesbasedon actual historical situations such as Captain Mission's pirate commune founded in Madagascar at the start of the eighteenth-century (Burroughs, 1982; 2002; Seitz, 2002), outlaw gangs in the American wild-west and the hobos of the early twentiethMailer, 1987; (Burroughs, Egypt 2000) Black, 1983; (Burroughs, or ancient century is Burroughs' key texts these Four to 1984). As Chapter understanding argued, the ideal Idealism idealism. or origin an posits myth and transcendence and rejection of Burroughs' by. In judged be contrast, immanent should manifestations which actual, that forgery is alternative an Christian suggests of use and origin the myth of plays on law is transcendent In the actually this even sense, always already immanent. language, a materialism and the power immanently, of through operations produced 274

that is there in Burroughs' work from his early concerns with the word-virus. Indeed, this materialist immanence and rejection of transcendencecan be seenas providing a degreeof continuity to Burroughs' work. As Chapter Three argued, Burroughs' theory of the word virus and his experimental cut-ups provided a critique of the transcendentalismof post-humanism, language and 'the body' as well as an attempt to immanently disrupt the material actualisation of a transcendentform, whether law, languageor subject. This fundamentally negative critique and escapeattempt was Chapter by less in Four a albeit more positive, no apocalyptic, reading of augmented his final trilogy's concern with immanent social organization beyond the confines of idealist representation. In this senseBurroughs is part of a materialist undercurrent in thought that has opposed the academicprivilege accordedto idealism within the traditions of philosophy and which includes the likes of Marx, Spinoza, Nieszche and Deleuze and Guattari (Fisher, 2001). The ethical implications of this 'anarcho-materialism' (Hardt and Negri, 2000) were humanism Five Chapter that the necessarily rejecting accusation where picked up in leadsto an in-humane coldness in relation to others was considered (Parker, 2000a; (1987), Guattari following Deleuze Again this 2002). Bos Kaulingfreks, ten and and ism humani form for faciality, of time through their concept of a return to some calls found implications in light transcendence of of the conservative were rejected both humanism and post-humanism. Instead the 'trans-human' was held up as a more kind but human transcendence figure of as a the to not as after positive come 'trans' figuration this Burroughs' the as Following outlaws, of natural transgression. 275

humanist favour in is transcendence a crossing over an absolute rejection of of a hybridization language that the process of recognises materiality of messy, embodied heterogeneity final In this the the the of subject. sense chapter constitutive and Modernity is Bruno Latour's that paralleling argument premised upon a argued, denial of its own heterogeneity (the inseparability of political and scientific humanism by is in-human. When that the produced representation), we consider this becomings-cyborg it in to the the transhuman of is clear that new point relation technologies are reconfiguring the relations that produce 'the human' subject in such illusion longer In to this this sensethere constitutive no convincing. a way as render is an optimism in the transhuman that is quite distinct from the socially iniquitous because (Dery, Davis, 1998) 1996; the precisely it neo-Gnostics post-humanism of in inhuman-becomings immanent the materially production of recognises heterogeneous,but always embodied, networks of linguistic, technological, organic and political elements. Whilst the likes of the Extropians, or the editors of Mondo 2000 have celebrated the in done have they so a way that apparenttechnological overthrow of politics, (Dery, 1996) individualism dominant time their of neo-liberal precisely mirrors the has In thesis human this leaves the contrast, subject essentially intact. and which humanism both to changeit. order in to post-humanism and sought politically situate As has been argued throughout this thesis, and as Burroughs suggests in the epigraph is Of design. is this human-organism not course, to this conclusion, the a product of by long been has in recognised radical an entirely new idea organization studies and 276

social-psychologists and philosophers (Henriques et al, 1998). The human subject as it has been produced and consumed in theories of organization and in workplace psychology is the product of power, politically situated within capitalist relations of production as a productive worker who can be measured,monitored and non-nalised to serve the interests of the capitalist work-organization (Hollway, 1998). Where Burroughs offers the most to organization studies is in escaping from this humanist deterritori cage, ali sing the subject into new and politically subversive becomings in the rhizosphere (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987). In rejecting transcendence with the anti-humanist, anarcho-materialist cry of 'No God, no Master, no Man' (Hardt and Negri, 2000: 92) the dominant mass-production of the human41on the assemblylines of modernity has a spannerthrown into its works. As the linear logic of narrative and assembly-line is cut-up, hybridity and difference proliferate outside the confines of all-too-human identities. Directions for Future Research To summarise, it has been the argument of this thesis that the difficulties associated with radical scepticism and thoroughgoing social constructivist theories of technology open organization theory up to questions of language and subjectivity that ultimately serve to radically decentre the human subject. Politically and epistemologically suspect,the human subject that populates our organization theory textbooks is under radical attack from the incursion of new technologies, particularly those associated with information and communication, from new forms of theory and discourse on 'the subject' and from new forms of social organization. 277 Whilst the death of this

human subject is nothing to be mourned, care needs to be taken when dancing on its if be the transcendence to excesses of posthumanist are grave avoided. By following Burroughs' and Deleuze and Guattari's critique of representation a materialist model language is made possible that opens onto the technology and of subjectivization, heterogeneous, immanent, becomings always radically of the transhuman without Such to transcendent representation. recourse a model opens possibilities for a forin of anarchic, rhizomatic social organization and subjectivization that has, radical far, been not well conceptualised in organization studies. This suggests several so intervention forward ideas in have implications for, the this thesis points of where put and can be taken up by, future researchin organization studies. Utopia: Alternative Forms of Organization The first point of departure from this thesis is in the growing area of radical In forms theory a sense this of organization. organization concerned with alternative is not a new field. Since at least the 1960sthere has been a significant research looking industrial at workers' cooperatives and worker takeovers stream in sociology (Eccles, 1981; Vanek, 1975; Waddington et al, 1998; Cheney, 1999). More recently, in 'left' the protests against and particularly with re-emergenceof an anarchistic Watson, 2000; Negri, 2000; Hardt Klein, 2000; (Cockburn and et al, global capitalism 2003), there has been an increasing interest in the organization of alternatives to 2002). Reedy, 2002; (Fournier, its organizational structures global capitalism and Both theoretically and practically much of this revitalised interest in radical forms of 1968 May their delayed the be to and of events response organizing can seen as a 278

left (cf. Foucault, As 116). 1980: traditional the aftermath and the communist parties into in 1980s the a and neo-liberals pronounced the end of went period of crisis history in a neo-Hegelian resolution of all the old dialectical contradictions into a new hyper-capitalism (Fukiyama, 1993), of synthesis radical organization theory took its own post-modern turn in tune with the 'new times' (Parker, 1995; Chia, 1995; Cooper Burrell, 1988; Hancock Tyler, 2001; and and cf. Hall and Jacques,1989). Premised primarily upon a negative critique of the dominant order and a turn toward symbolism (with concomitant rejection of materialism), this postmodernism lent itself to intellectual and political passivity in the face of spectacular society (Debord, 1994; Plant, 1992; Parker, 1995) and a tendency amongst theorists of organization to overrate power and neglect resistance(Thompson and Acroyd, 1995; Ackroyd and Thompson, 1999). One reasonfor this apparentconservatism amongst radical theorists is certainly that the organization of production, and of society more generally, was undergoing significant shifts within this period and theory had not yet caught up with the new modesof power and resistancedeveloping around post-industrial, service-sector ICTs Indeed, the organizations. role of early accounts of in organizations emphasised their disciplinary tendencies in a way that translated writers like Foucault so that they (Sewell Weber traditional theorists and such as were not incompatible with more Wilkinson, 1993; Zuboff, 1988). Of course, it is well recognised that new forms of has forms bring control of resistanceand recent work in organizational studies new 2002; Fleming Sewell, Fleming (Ross, 1991b; demonstrated this and and clearly 279

Spicer, 2003; Ackroyd and Thompson, 1999). Aside from this recognition of resistancewithin the workplace, however, there has been relatively little researchinto forms alternative of organization developing outside the workplace. Within this emerging problematic the ideas worked through in this thesis suggest interventions. On the one hand the idea of the 'subject group' clearly somepossible has implications for the way in which radical, anarchistic alternatives to dominant forms of organization are conceptualised. The idea of utopia needsto be reconsidered as a more immanent phenomenonrelating directly to the investment of desire rather than as a normative, representationof the society yet to come. This would be in line discussion the with of social organization in Chapter Four of this thesis and relates directly to Burroughs' concerns with rethinking revolutionary activity and organization after 1968 through The Wild Boys and into the Cities trilogy. This would also contribute to the various studies of utopia and gardening (Burrell and Dale, 2002; Munro, 2002) where the metaphor of gardening has been associatedwith the specific form of humanism embodied in the holocaust (Bauman, 1989; Finkielkraut, 2001). It is perhapsno coincidence that some of the most virulent weeds in the gardensof latecapitalism are rhizomes. More generally the idea of the subject group has implications for the ways in which the more grand-scale stories of social theory are told. Rejecting the pre-given, economic determinants of the classical Marxist proletariat, Autonomist Marxists like Harry Cleaver have sought to theorise 'self-valorization' as a means of a class 280

being itself for itself pre-constituted as a class in itself by without recognising (Cleaver, determinant 1992). In this sensethe economic relations external, fundamentally collective nature of Burroughs' theory of subjectivization has both for the social organization of groups but also holds out a radical relevance for in the wider society. Writers like Nick Dyerclass rethinking relations potential Witheford (1999) have already sought to work through the implications of this processof self-valorization within the context of the changing technocultural landscape of late-capitalism and the social factory. Through work such as this, the ideas presented in this thesis have direct relevance for theorising contemporary founs of organization. Identities: Micro-sociology in the Workplace Perhaps the most obvious point of departure from this thesis is through theories of identity. Whilst the last section focused on collective processes of subjectivization briefly I in to this theory consider the and radical organization section want for Burroughs' this thesis, micro-sociological studies of work, implications of and of is issue identity the identities. As on established well and workplace a concept has Research 2001). McHugh, (Thompson and organizational research agenda identities in looking from derived the which ways at primarily ethnographic research interest 1995), Casey, 1990; (Kondo, an are constructed at work and through work that spills over into studies of corporate culture and attempts to manage Watson, 1991; Maanen, Van 1992; Kunda, 1999; (Casey, identities organizational 1994; Parker, 2000b; Du Gay, 1996). One of the main routes that identity travelled 281

labour is traditional through a critique of processtheory and into organization studies Braverman's failure to effectively theorise the subject (Knights and Willmott, 1985-, 1989). The main argument here seemsto be that in order to fully understand individuals behaviours to simple class positions in theorists cannot reduce workplace domination forces Rather, to the power, control, and of production. relation by identity individuals' work as they make senseout of all mediated resistanceare their working selves and their positions of relative subordination (Collinson, 1992; O'Doherty and Willmott, 200 1), affluence and privilege (Kunda, 1992; Kondo, 1991; Robertson and Swan, 2003) or authority (Watson, 1994). Within this research tradition one taken for granted assumption seems to be that it identity the against comes up when which, sense of a stable seek individuals lack is there that thwarted of an ongoing so realities of contemporary work, is his in For 1998). (Sennett, in study of masculine example, coherence the subject identities on the manufacturing shopfloor, David Collinson points to the ways in joke (Willis, identity take a as someone who can which the articulation of a masculine 1978) has a potentially radicalising effect in that it enables workers to resist the between difference fundamental by imposition of corporate culture reassertinga is This shopfloor of element one only the management. and shopfloor workers on 'breadfamily facet the Another however. role of revolves around masculmities leads bonus to one police workers schemes, with winner' which, when coupled Both bonus. these their of to another to make sure that they are able maximise identities serve to distance workers from them selves whilst at work so that even the 282

bread-winners don't identify themselvesprimarily as workers but rather as fathers, husbandsor hobbyists. Their 'real' identities lie outside the workplace but are by enabled the wages they earn at work. In part thesedisinvestments of their working selves are a survival strategy when faced with the realities of contemporary work (Noon and Blyton, 1997), but they also stem directly from the incompatibility of a masculine discourse of self-control and self-determination with the realities of subordination and control on the shopfloor. Drawing theoretically upon the work of Anthony Giddens (1991) this notion of the self is ultimately dependent upon a narrative version of self-identity as a series of stories that we tell ourselves about ourselves. The assumption for Giddens is that in the face of ontological uncertainly and existential anxiety humans try to ground themselves in a clear sense of narrative self-identity which is ultimately doomed to failure as it depends upon recognition by the other. Whilst this notion has a radical potential in that it enables studies of identity at work to recognise the subjective kind humanism it to of effects of particular modes of organization, remains wedded a insofar as it posits the drive to a narrative identity as fundamental to the constitution fully in been has What human the organization studies is considered not of subject. is it in from drive the premised the to narrate ways which and self comes where this in More the heterogeneity. foundational of influence of studies importantly, upon a fragmentation through the the the self, whether technology of new on self-identity, (Barglow, 1994) through information a more or the technologies revolution new of The is 1998), (Seltzer, labour division always problematic. traditional, industrial of 283

drive human is coherenceand stability no matter how self-defeating. the goal and of What Burroughs' work offers this stream of researchis a radical problematisation of the very idea of identity and a technique for escaping its confines through a processof deindividualization (Foucault, 1983). In this respect, the work covered in this thesis, Chapter Three, holds in particular out the prospect for further researchinto the between identities, relationship power and language. Some preliminary moves in this direction have already been made by lain Munro (2001). Narrative: Method, Politics and Epistemology Burroughs' concern to cut-up narratives also connects to the idea of narratives as a basis for organizational research. Coming from studies of organizational culture and symbolism, the use of narratives and story-telling have become increasingly popular as a method of studying organizations (Czamiawska, 1998; Gabriel, 2000). Whilst it is certainly true that close attention to the stories and narratives that are produced and consumed within organizations is an important part of a qualitative research agenda, form far is has been the the what so implicit power relations in very under-theorised of the narrative. If we take Czarniawska's (1998) call to break down the barriers between scienceand literature seriously then we need to not only recognise that scientific accounts are themselvesa genre of writing and to supplement these with other genres,but to in linear based narrative are inherently problematic the on recognise that all genres terins laid out in this thesis. Rather than reproducing organizational narratives then, 284

or perforrrung a literature of organization based on the realist novel (CzamiawskaJoergesand Guillet de Monthoux, 1994; Knights and Willmott, 1999), Burroughs' textual practice would suggestboth an analysis of the power relations behind the effects of these modes of textual performance on the organizational subject and a different form of textual practice based on the cut-up. radically No longer representational, such a mode of 'writing' organization would seekto materially effect the identity of both reader and researchsubjects through a forrn of anti-narrative. Of course this createsdifficulties for an academicpractice of commentary based upon interpretation and legislation of truth as there would be no space within such a form to give a supplementary interpretation of the meaning of the text thereby produced. Indeed, to do so would be to bring the material interventions in subjectivity performed by the cut-up back into the realm of conventional narrative, performing a kind of conjunctive-synthesis whereby the 'real' meaning of the text was revealed and identity reasserted. This certainly creates problems for academic writing as I have realised in my attempt to publish a paper that both commentated upon and performed a cut-up (included as a stand-aloneappendix to this thesis, without accompanying commentary). The problems raised are two-fold. As well as the difficulty of creating an aesthetically effective piece of writing there is also the needto justify this writing in terms of the conventional academicproduction of knowledge wherein one is called to account for what a text meansrather than for Its by independently its be determined (which of reception a reader). effects cannot Whilst the cut-up in the appendix to this thesis was basedentirely on theoretical texts 285

from philosophy and organization studies, another strategy for presenting research be juxtapose to theoretical commentary with materials from would combine and fieldwork, for example, by cutting-up a text on resistancewith interview transcripts, observation notes and articles from in-house magazines. In this sense,Burroughs' radical textual practice offers a deepening of the relationship between writing and has been that research already started by narrative approachesto research,and continues a tradition of performing alternative forms of academic discourse such as PeterCase's (1996) reflexive dramaturgical 'happenings', Robert Westwood's (1999) sampling as writing, or Steffen Bbhm's (2001) Benjaminesquemontagesas sociological commentary. The Body at Work: Mutation and Embodiment Another area for further researchis to extend the analysis of embodiment and the materiality of language in Chapter Three to contribute to recent work on the body in organization studies. Whilst it is now fairly well establishedthat the idea of the body carries certain normative connotations and excludes a diversity of bodily experiences (Hassardet al., 2000), work on the body has not widely addressedthe relationship betweenlanguage and embodiment (Hayles, 1999). In this senseit is clear that Burroughs' work has something to offer this area of research,particularly when it comes to understanding the ways in which identities are simultaneously discursively highlights Burroughs The the ways also work of performed and physically embodied. in which the materiality of bodies mutates through different corporeal and incorporeal transformations as bodies are disciplined and have their abilities produced and 286

for Once has theorising the prosthetic body of the this relevance controlled. again 'immaterial labourer' in the post-industrial organization working contemporary (Hardt and Negri, 1994). A secondpotential direction in which further researchcould be conducted in relation to embodiment is in the grounding of epistemology in the body. As noted in Chapter Three, the normative form of the body also prescribes a specific form of knowing. A similar point is made by StephenLinstead.(2000) when he notes the associationof the knowledge production of organizational with a particularly masculine, rational, knowing Contrasting leaky this to the model of and embodiment. phallogocentric bodies of women with their historically repressedsexuality, Linstead suggeststhat the female ejaculation might be a more bountiful, productive and egalitarian principle for 45). Whilst (Linstead, 2000: the male ejaculation embodies analysis organizational domination distance, that separation, quantification and principles of action at a female knowledge hierarchies, both the and of social organization, of reinforces dissolving "transgressive, subversive of patriarchy, ejaculation is undecidable, boundariesbetween binaries, refiguring our understandingsof bodily control, and 2000: (Linstead, its femininity to masculinity" polarized opposition out of rewriting 45). There is also a suggestion in Linstead's work, however, that the anus could fulfil "be it function, regarded as a universal erotogenetic zone, or even a similar as can In 35). 2000: (Linstead, this both by sexesand multi-functional" sexual organ, shared deflate desire Linstead's between the to direct is phallus as a there parallel sense a foundational sign for organizational analysis and Burroughs' valorization of the 287

imbued forgery false. immanent As the the powers with of as asshole a source of discussedin Chapter Four, Burroughs' characterisation of Clem Snide, the detective/forger in Cities of the Red Night, inverts the usual 'private dick' who develop 'private forger truth, to the transcendental asshole': a a who produces pursues truth through the immanent operations of simulation (Burroughs, 1982). In so doing, Burroughs simultaneously problematises the idea of a transcendentaltruth and offers dependent As like Linstead's that of not original. such, model simulation is upon an a female the of ejaculation, the privileging of the original, seminal male is model but by less is determinate in this and genderlesssexual organ: case replaced a rejected the asshole. This idea of the assholeas a symbol for knowledge production would for future bring be that together epistemology, politics would an area research again body. the and Ethics: Humanism and Difference Although the previous three lines for future researchhave all touched on the issue of difference, it is worth making one final comment on the specific question of ethics. Whilst Chapter Five made some preliminary investigations into the ethics of So long further is that as organization transhumanismthis an area research. needs its human figure the ontological transcendental as subject of studiesretains a foundation then the ethical problems accompanying humanism will remain. But figuring a transhuman alternative is not a simple task and dependsupon recognising the manifold ways in which the theory and practice of organizational studies is Of the tale of this of repression simple not a this course, subject. reproduces 288

difference. After Foucault (1980) we know that power is never simply repressivebut is always productive and the subject of organization has certainly been that (Hollway, 1998). However, this seemingly transcendentalsubject is produced immanently and the discourse of organization studies, both textual and as it is taught in our UltimatelY, is therefore, the the technologies of its reproduction. classrooms, one of for is the transhuman studies a radically political and ethical organization challenge of discipline by the the we ontological and epistemological ground of one: shifting just lines as the new subjects change this very ground of subjectivization produce new in their becomings-cyborg. 289

1In relation to milling technologies,Marc Bloch's work would suggestthat, if anything, the water-mill hand-mill. feudal In feudal landlord had a than the the society characteristic of places where more was hand-mill the the of grain, possession and operation of a on milling was an act of resistance monopoly to feudal sovereignty(Bloch, 1999). Bloch notesthat in someareasof Europe, the hand-mill was still in regular use right up until the end of the nineteenthcentury, well after the shift to steampower that characterisesMarx's analysisof industrial capitalism. 2No relations of Adam and Karl as far as I am aware. 3 Deleuze and Guattari make a related point in their discussionof capitalist antiproduction, when they note that the 'politico-military-economic complex' produces a sphere of antiproduction outside the normal logic of capitalist profitability where new technologiescan be developedindependentlyof their immediate ability to increaseprojected profits and thereby attract the investment of finance capital (Deleuzeand Guattari, 1983: 233-235). 4A similar explanation might be offered for the current popularity of large scale, integrative information systems like ERP (enterprise ResourcePlanning) systems despite the lack of concrete evidencethat they actually improve organizationalperformance(Davenport, 1998). 50n the question of terminology and the differencesbetweentrans, multi, and inter-disciplinarity, see Stainton Rogers and Stainton Rogers (1997) who take up this idea in relation to the formation of a critical social-psychology. 6 In this sensewe might reconsiderthe extent to which autopoiesiscan offer us a really radical foundationfor epistemology. Although autopoiesisgoessomeway towards developinga cybernetic basisfor subjectivity, its foundational insistenceupon the separationof perceiving subjectand perceivedobject remainsfim-fly within this dualism of inside/outside,and therebypreservesthe liberal humansubjectrelatively intact (Hayles, 1999). 7The referencehere is to the apocryphalstory, recountedin StephenHawkings' A Brief History of Time: He A well-knownscientist(somesayit wasBertrandRussell)oncegavea publiclectureon astronomy. described howtheearthorbitsaroundthesunandhowthesun,in turn,orbitsaroundthecentreof a vast collectionof starscalledour galaxy.At theendof thelecture,a little old ladyat thebackof theroomgot on thebackof a up andsaid:"whatyouhavetold usis rubbish.Theworldis reallya flat platesupported gianttortoise." Thescientistgavea superiorsmilebeforereply," whatis thetortoisestandingon?" "You'reveryclever,youngman,veryclever," saidtheold lady."But it's turtlesall thewaydown!" (Hawkings,1988:1) 8In this there is a striking similarity with William Burroughs' later work, particularly in The Western Lands,where he suggeststhat convincing peoplethat they had no soul was a gimrnick to makecontrol Burroughs By Christian in immortal that the the of contrast, way souls was. easier, much sameway builds on Egyptian mythology to suggesta hierarchyof souls-a social structure- many levels of Four. in Chapter is This 1987). (Burroughs, picked up point which are mortal 9 Interestingly, at this point in their paper Callon and Latour make one the of the few explicit into developed Guattari Deleuze thinking that the actor-network on and recognitionsof the influence of theory. In a short footnote they acknowledge the importance of Anti-Oedipus in noting the inseparabilityof the economic and psychological, of individuals and institutions. It is this recognition that leads them to develop a symmetrical methodology whereby micro and macro phenomenaare 8 19 1). Latour, (Callon distinct fundamentally and treatedwith the samemethodology,not as of a scale 10Of courseif, following Latour we have never beenmodem, then we should perhapsnot talk of postmodernity. Nevertheless,if we leave the impossibility of realising the modem project of purification least, for fact appearedsuccessful. at a while aside,the remainsthat this separationwas attempted,and At leastit was successfulenough,by Latour's own account,to allow hybridity to flourish uncheckedto the point where we find ourselvestoday. " Of course,this 'capture of code' should not be confusedwith a specifically linguistic code,as Deleuzeand Guattari make clear in their discussionof geneticcode, which is, contrary to many 62). (1987: language 1994), Jones, (e. at all not a popular accounts g. 290

12Cooper points to the etymological genealogyof 'locate' in the Latin 'loquor' to say, tell or indicate (Cooper, 1998:108), thereby highlighting the connectionsbetweenthe ability to nameand speakof field. in locate to that thing a conceptual and our ability something, 13This is not to say that such a structureis fixed, least of all by an external 'nature'. Indeed,the disruption of culturally specific modesof perceptionhasbeenactively pursuedin the arts by, for literary William Burroughs the the the cubists, of paintings of and cut-ups multi-perspectival example, (Miles, 1992). 14Indeed,languageuse is one of the key criteria by which philosophershave separatedhumansfrom 1984; (e. Searle, Fellows, 1995). from g. machines other animals and 15It is notablethat in work such as his 'AssemblageNotes' (1998), Cooper doesnot refer to the second instead Guattari's Capitalism Schizophrenia (1987), Deleuze to the project sticking and and of volume first volume, Anti-Oedipus (1983) and their intermezzocollaboration Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature (1986). This is despitetheir extensivediscussionof assemblagein the later book, and their discussion,in plateauthree, of double articulation that reflects many of Cooper's interestsand developsa similar terminology. It is this work that provides the basisfor the following section. 16It is unfortunatethat two significant commentatorson Deleuzeand Guattari's anthropomorphic it from language Bogue (1989) Ronald the of and serniotics,and approaches perspective who stratum, J. MacgregorWise (1997) who approachesit from the perspectiveof information technology,both fail to sufficiently contextualisetheir discussionof this stratumwithin a more detailed considerationof is for double One this undoubtedlythe as processes. reason and articulation generalised stratification sheercomplexity of Deleuze and Guattari's work. Attempting to unravel and provide a clear ideas their of almost invariably spirals out to connectwith other conceptsuntil the whole exposition in doing be have had follows I is included. In to therefore their and selective, also work what corpusof features be doubtless have to of stratification. consider crucial others would so ignored what 17In this respect,Hjelmslev breakswith the traditional distinction of form and contentasthere is "a form of contentno lessthan a form of expression"(Deleuzeand Guattari, 1987). 18It is worth noting that Brian Massumi's English translationof A ThousandPlateauscontainsa As he 43, 'form of expression'. and content writes potentially confusing mistake when, on page Deleuzeand Guattari go to great lengthsexplaining the relationshipsbetweencontentand expression, eachof which hasboth form and substance,this is clearly meantto read 'form and substanceof expression'. 19Translatedby Tomlinson and Habberjarnin the last quote as 'machine assemblage'and by others, (e.g. Bogue 1989:129) as 'machinic arrangement'. I am choosingto follow Brian Massurril'suseof Cooper's Robert far it is by use the coincides with most common version, and machinic assemblageas 1998). (Cooper, Guattari's from Deleuze 'assemblage', taken writing the term and of also 20This is not strictly the case,as Deleuze and Guattari do suggestthat the conclusion 'Concreterules Note' last 'Authors' be (see pagexx). andabstractmachines', should read 21It is worth noting that in the translation of 'This is not a pipe' referencedhere, Foucault does not burrowing Nevertheless 'burrows' the 'burrow', text. the of a sense even once in or mentionthe word from develops Cooper borrowing the essayremains. that and 22The datesin bracketsthat follow eachtitle refer here to the first date of publication of eachbook. As Burroughswrote eachof thesetexts, he also went back to revise the previously publishedworks so that That Exploded Ticket The Soft Machine The least two of and versions there were at three versions of eventuallypublished. 23The specific role of capitalism in Burroughs work, and in the general circuits of high technology for Indicative beyond such an thesis. this is starting points the scope of organization, unfortunately Murphy (1997), (1999); 2000); Dyer-Witheford, Negri (1994; Hardt include and engagementwould Ansell-Pearson,1997,Deleuze and Guattari (1987) and Nick Land (1998). 24Of course this raises the question of linear time that has itself been a concern to organizational Burroughs' 2000). If Munro, thesis the Land of 2002; Rehn, accept we 1992; (Burrell, and analysis fact but just embodied is a concrete and an abstract metaphor, not word virus, then linear time is itself human it language that necessarily product a is and the embodiment producedat interface of (or inscribed infected) i. and hybrid and heterogeneous, e. comprisedof phonemes,material inscriptions A linguistic their infection. symbiotic, bodies that have themselves adapted to accommodate definition the the linear word, written of product is of identity this to the extent which considerationof 291

as opposedto the strictly narrative spoken word we might associatewith a more cyclical version of time, is not clear. Nevertheless,this line of reasoning would suggestthat 'we', as social scientistsor philosophers,can not simply chooseto adopt a spiral metaphorfor time (as suggestedby eg. Burrell, 1992 and Blyton and Turnbull, 1998) as linear time is already implicated in the human constitution (a constitution effected by the word virus). This might explain the difficulty of developing an effective alternativeto time drawn as a line - whetherthat line is circular, straight or spiral. 25On the importanceof Burroughs' influence on Cronenberg,seeRodley, 1992. 26This is particularly so given the etymological root of teleology in logos, the word. 27Although Queer was not published until the 1980s,it was actually the secondnovel that Burroughs wrote, and effectively serves as a follow-up to his first novel Junkie. Indeed, Burroughs original intention was to publish both texts as part of a trilogy, with the third book being Yage,someof which went into Naked Lunch and some of which went on to become The Yage Letters (Burroughs and Ginsberg,I). 28Theold (e.g. the secondedition) cover of Huczynski and Buchanan'sOrganizational Behaviour:An Introductory Text is a perfect example of this. It portrays an enormous hand picking up a tiny man dressedin a suit and carrying a briefcase and moving to put him down somewherein a four-story office block. The realism of the hand in relation to the cartoon-like individuals in the offices seemsto suggestthat by reading this book you too will be able to design and model the perfect organization, with everyonein their correct place, as if playing with a little lego-set. 29Dellamoratakes Kermode to task for not even getting the title of Burroughs' book right. Kermode refers to The Naked Lunch, rather than Naked Lunch. Rather than providing Dellamora with a convenienterror upon which to dismiss Kermode as clearly not having read Burroughs (Dellamora, 1995: 145), this points instead to a gap in Dellamora's knowledge of the publication history of the book. In the version of the text printed in 1964 by Calders and Boyars of London in associationwith Olympia Press(the Parisian publishersof soft porn who first agreedto publish the book) the title was indeed The Naked Lunch, an epithet adopted by a number of critics who were Burroughs' contemporaries.Regardlessof this, I will stick to the now more conventional Naked Lunch as this is the title of the version that I own. 30Although both Junkie and Queer were written before NakedLunch, the latter was not publisheduntil 1985.Junkie, published in 1953 was Burroughs first published work, but it was really Naked Lunch that first attractedthe attention of the critics and the readingpublic when it first cameout in 1959. 31The readershould bear in mind the double senseof processhere - both a journey or movement(up the river), but alongsidethat movement,a transformation. This senseis reflected in the translationof Kafka's short story 'Der Process' into the English 'The Transformation'. 32For example, Charles Stivale (1998) devotes an entire chapter (chapter 3- 'The Rhizomatics of Cyberspace')to considering Land's reading of ApocalypseNow as indicative of a split that he sees betweenthe Warwickians and the Americans. The former grouping is most ably representedby Nick Land, then a lecturer in philosophy at Warwick University which hosted a major international conferenceon Deleuze and Guattari in 1994entited Virtual Futures. The lines of demarcationbetween thesegroupings are several,but mainly follow a preferencefor either Anti-Oedipus (the Warwickians) or A ThousandPlateaus (the Americans). This fault line has repurcussionsfor the extent to which the respectivewriters advocatea processof untrammeleddeterritorialization, or seekto limit and restrict this process in some way, recognising that all reterritorialisation is not necessarily bad and all deterritorialisation is not necessarily good. I will return to this debate, with referenceto Stivale's readingof ApocalypseNow later. 33And here it is no coincidencethat the etymology of 'matrix' is maternalrather than paternal-a point madeby SadiePlant in her considerationof the relationsof cyberspaceand gender(Plant, 1995). 34 In investment foreign direct incoming (FDI) UK increased for the share of competition an governmenthas resistedjoining the social chapter of the European Union's Maastricht Treaty. In a move known as 'social dumping' the UK governmenthas refusedto raise non-wage labour costs and increaseregulation of the labour market in the hope that this will make the UK a more attractive destination for FDI. The successor failure of this strategy is a matter for debate, witness Ford's decisionto abandonproduction at their Halewood plant in Mersyside in favour of locating production low decision key factor A German heavily this that the the in was in economy. more regulated 292

regulation in the UK labour market maderedundancieshere much easierpolitically and legally than in Germany. 35Of course,this was somethingthat Marx had recognisedlong before. Writing with Frederick Engels in The CommunistManifesto, he respondedto accusationsfrom the bourgeoisiethat the communists would instigate the communal ownership of women: "The bourgeoisseesin his wife a mere instrument of production. He hears that the instruments of production are to be exploited in common, and, naturally, can come to no other conclusion than that the lot of being common to all will likewise fall to the women" (Marx and Engels, 1967: 101). They go on to point out that the real objective of communismis to do away with the whole idea that women, as well as children and other men, should be treated as simple means of production at all. That Colby effectively sacks his wife and suggests selling the kids, reflects his recognition of the wholesale overcoding of sociality by the relations of capitalism. 36Indeed, it is hard to imagine how a film of the book could ever be made, a point that Cronenberg himself readily concedes(Rodley, 1992). 37It is worth noting that the Situationist International was also heavily involved in the uprisingsof May 1968 which triggered much of Burroughs' reflections upon the dialectics of resistance,though of course,what Murphy calls the 'dialectics of treason' had already been a dominant componentof his early work, especially Naked Lunch (Murphy, 1997). The influence of the SI on Cities is evinced by the repeatedappearanceof cobblestones,especiallylater in the book during the riot scenes,when there is an uprising and a revolutionary challenge to the powers that be in the Cities of the Red Night themselves(or at least in Tamaghis,Ba'dan and Yass-Waddah). This image resonatesboth with the addressof Burroughs parent at Cobble Stone Gardens,a place that appearsin many of his writings (e.g. Burroughs, 1984,211), and with the slogan of May '68, 'Sous le pav6, la plage' beneaththe cobblestones,the beach(Plant, 1992). The idea here is that the cobblestonesthat the studentsthrew at the police could, as they were turned into revolutionary weapons, help to realise a better world, epitomisedby the beach as a place of freedom and pleasure,in contradistinctionto the grey world of office blocks and rational town-planning that had lain thosecobblestoneroadsin the first place. 38In fact, Burroughs does deny this, when in 'Women: A biological mistakeT, he claims that the dictionary definition of a misogynist as "a woman hater" both mobilises a problematic generalisation of the category women ("what woman? Where and when?"), and implies too great a concern with women (Burroughs, 1986: 125). Rather, Burroughs suggeststhat he is quite happy to just ignore ideal is do As Russell however, them. this only of independent women and without suggests, not evolution problematic in many ways, but it also leavesBurroughsconceptionof masculinity dependent upon a too simplistic rejection of effeminacy (Russell,2001). 39In is interesting to note that Burroughs' writing after The WesternLands was also dominatedby the recordingof his dreams,notably in My Education: A Book of Dreams (1996). 40It is interesting to note that Burroughs actually went to school in Los Alamos somethinghe often saw as a rather fateful coincidence. 41Available in 'any colour, so long as it's white'. 293

Appendix - Experimental Forms of Writing: The real beauty of apomorphine Cut-Up a 1 The real beauty of apornorphine is that unlike 'who am I' was in a methadone programme context, it doesn't produce an entity clearly, with simple, single subject. Burroughs put it: "it just does its work then writing. " In recent times with the rising interest trilogy Nova Express, apornorphine is taken. Burroughs' preoccupation has been called into Earth to prevent 'My' in the clearly autobiographical Queer the complete annihilation of the planet. Using in the States, of a clear, queer identity for dependency,addiction and mind-control, her more sophisticated argument, Jamie and ' The following was an attempt to use Burroughs' cut-up method within the context of a paper on control, writing, language and organization studies. To produce this work I took several pages from books and papers dealing with these questions. These pages were then combined using a mixture of fold-ins and cut-ups. With the fold ins, one page was folded roughly down the middle and then placed over a second page. The text was then read off from the two pages and re-typed to produce a second page. With the cut ups, a penknife was taken to either two or four pages, which were then cut into either halves or quarters respectively, rearranged, read off and typed up to produce a new text. In either case, the resulting text was then either incorporated wholesale, or in part, into the final 'cut-up' or was subjected to further folds and cuts. In several cases quite disparate texts were cut into each other as, for example, when pages from F.W. Taylor's Principles of Scientific Management, an exemplary text on control if ever there was one, were folded into Deleuze and Guattari's Anti-Oedipus. The resultant texts were then cut-up with sections of Thompson and Ackroyd's critique of organizational theorists' tendency to overrate managerial power and control, and neglect worker resistance. All of the texts used in the cut-up are included in the bibliography, but for obvious reasons no attempt has been made to acknowledge their identity in the actual text. The title of the cut-up was taken from the first cut-up I produced for this project which was a but Burroughs from that to text: the were not sections related main combination of pages of out-takes sufficiently connected to the main theme of this paper to warrant direct inclusion. These pages were folded in with a copy of the original abstract for the paper which was submitted to a stream on silence at EGOS in 2002. As with all sections of this cut-up, I have retained a large part of the text completely final Similarly, been have but the text. the cut-up texts to produce the rearranged unchanged, selections in flows have in I the text this to the some of alter added were often typed up with no punctuation, so does breaking down Whilst the sense, allow new narrative it of this may go against ideal places. dictated by the pre-programmed narrative structure not to sense, combinations of words produce a new juxtapositions Indeed, 'self'. the were quite of resultant typing some of my subvocalizing and illuminating, though I have steered clear of offering a conventional commentary on the text as this form defeat of writing that escapes the non-linear a with the object of experimenting would rather usual conventions of meaning, representation and signification. 294

Willy identity the to a clear, rather queer are was when set set realise nova available favoured by is there an evident paradigm' contemporary. And at wide-open, although leave they really will when their combination of state sponsoredpsychiatry, whether legislative enforcers, they will remain, having sexuals characterised as inverts, who by (Murphy, 1997), there is a suggestion that object-choice identification were his first Queers, the possible exception with of novel wholesale. quite assumed language itself in weren't a complex and complicating real simply, misogynist literary have interesting this categories with which people effeminate rejection of is In his (and Burroughs himself), David early writing pornographer regulation. figured as possession. It is only a short cyberpunk (Larry McCaffery) or 'general semantics' that recognise that relationship to words was postmodernski's also difficult. Give control language and identity figures large. As Burroughs develops it is a dualism from to the to an attempt avoid critique of simultaneously an attempt escape for Bateson language) (including to theory. all end an called of systems of control 'slave' Burroughs he pick-up as was as much nouns; recognition that as an author, (ref. Book of ). Exploring this question of writing, subjectivity, slaves and masters ... Some 'rub the dualism to the people who then the ware. out need variously exhorted basically It this ate who are are slaves and some necessarily made using words. was for both in the led to a series of experiments in a simple male, and some who are Naked Lunch followed Nova that Korzybski trilogy ace Following the opposition. Nova (1962) Exploded Ticket The that he and slave performed nouns with adverbs - 295

language linked developed: had he Access to the is to control. cut-up utilised method the as a way of turning words into material thing to speak and be heard has long been decadesbehind painting. Gysin and Burroughs' language as a weapon of control has literary kind fiction The Orwell's four 1984, in a of a palate. result was such as used knife Then in the a or scissors. meaning of using words one of the main pieces in insight, juxtapositions together the such an combined with sentenceswere spliced have that could never of the advertising and marketing industry's methods. of words In some cases, and depending up and guide consumers' desire has been be cut into like Packard's The Hidden Persuaders (1957) to text another altogether, rather achieve a particular effect or texture. We shower. Rather than suggesting that language cut-up are entirely random, not only are the suggests that the subject is itself produced by the procedure of cutting and rearranging social control, Burroughs be if the thesis that to proposes a virus and text. cut-up and what materials are Burroughs was quite adamant about their, understandably interested in the, nature of its entirety. In this practice this was extremely generate phrase, or idea, that would provide these writers however. Burroughs thesis is even a more conventional has Burroughs for 47). This (Burroughs, 1986: add a new twist to narrative virus virus the Lacanian-biosis with the human organism to the extent labelled and stigmatised as language from its junkie, he-human or, to take encounters with these statea a queen, sanctionedby a specific distribution or relationship comparatively privileged position (1987). Guattari as an affluent and States. Within which this subject position Burroughs, each of which was considered deviant from up. Anyone capable of responding to the how it links in with the 296

Other. For id-entity, some commentators, this inability to by its question of always an is defining 'Who is feature to the control? ugly positionT a need of Burroughs in hand increasing self control??? With the theory and studies, some writers queer disintegration of the self, especially rest in the use of literature and other reflections lack, during Burroughs' time the study of organizations within the him to the of (Dellamora, 1995). In a rather conventional social sciences (e.g. Russell has embrace Guillet De Monthoux, 1994; Knights and that point), it that suggested recently while discipline to the that has long been dominated by the effeminate was confined (Russell, 2001). Indeed, the bourgeois managerial classes (Fournier) psychoanalysts and psychoanalysis meant that all homosexual men dominated by an exclusive focus on rejecting the correct, male pole of sexual novel (De Cock, 2000; 2001). This buy into the opposite gender identification means been has dominated by a studies forrn that me. However we evaluate Burroughs often, and the managerial revolution paradigm, his response to this attempted re-analytical mill, this emphasis on realism and this external control by the state machinery uprising. When we consider the debate idea Korzybski the then to this on parallel step with much of combine Ackroyd kind (ch. language itself 1999; and epistemology over as a of possession Fleetwood, 2000). At the heart of Korzybski's thinking, at least his imbalance by In 'is identity'Burroughs the a par of considering an author who what called Greg like logic, Korzybski: Aristotelian S. Burroughs William rather excellence, without a clear referent. (An example that artist was with control and ways to resist Breeething?). Once we accept that there are war environment, concern with social becomesself supporting and reified. There his thinking invariably turned toward the 297

role who are masters. Or, there are some peoples of control. An awarenessof the basically female. Self and other are related is nothing new of course. George Orwell's however, Burroughs suggests that 'we replace' has been influential within literary circle. It is perhaps not a revolutionary insight that goes much further than both of these being the word and privilege of written able to word (language) is quite literally a virus associated with power and control. The used into a relatively stable state of been popularised through dystopian. science is impossible to clearly symbiosis differentiate the which double-think and the ability to determine further, that the human is constituted by a tools of social control employed by the govern, language and technology. Deleuze and power of the image, has also been a staple whose language to produce the word virus and consider two of the troubling playful use of commentators at least since Vance control technology of language. The Burroughs be be further how the this, than used to goes most can minutes of silence may not language. forum. EGOS Because He the this, paper manipulate subjects. of suggests In a twist on the cybernetics of so near narratives and language: the cut-up. That language,or 'the word', is quite literally of Burroughs. The paper will perform as a Burroughs' William S. Burroughs control and subjectivity with writer was under language. Particular writings as well as other key theoretical Burroughs goes much further than both of Deleuze and Guattari's A Thousand. That the word (language) is both to into literally a relatively stable state of possible sense, referring quite entered is human Further, the that constituted postmodern organization poststructural matters. 298

theory, whether self-between, language and technology (Deleuze). This slippery ais feature of key points: time being. referentiality a The Struggle for initiative Not all theorists working in this tradition are, theoretically. Something is produced under cons and new managementpractices: the workman (that is, a schizophrenic out for a will - major theme of contemporary research analyst's couch). A deformity and to a greater O'Doherty (1994) and is part of himself closeted within his burdens, new duties though the influences, such as Giddens, are in the past to his father, to his mother (Willmott 1985,1989; Knights 1990). Willmott is in the mountains amid knowledge which, seen as a site of resistance, allowed for the workmen and with nature that? Impossible. At first the prospects do not look prorMsing. Machines, the formulae stars of which are trains individuals through their self-knowledge lost almost entirely upon getting machines. "He thought sovereignty as consumer or employee. " The contact with the profound life of initiative is prevalent relations of domination plants, to take the "initiative" element of nature. The current most likely vehicle for their good as one part among the other is programmes discussedearlier: individual in a mental addition to this improvement. He does organizational order. Are mutually constitutive managers assume 'new' is no such thing as either ports. Deetz's (1992) critique of the colonizing produces the one within the other and corporation, arguing that the creation of self and in the past has been possessed,have. totalitarianism, and finds little sign of classifying, tabulating look at this stroll of a But despite these self-disciplinary tendencies,laws and Beckett's charactersdecide to 299

helpful between the search for secure identity and the self-locomotion work, in developing deliver. Self-identity can there the management to the to attempts addition takes on three works: what struggle against the experience of tense and heavy motherWhat Knights and Vurdubakis (1994: 184). anusmachine? In add it works: Judge Schreber feels First. They that shape it are not static or onedimensional, explaining the process of a man's work, which capacity for human action, given that not in a mere thumb method. Second. They and multiple, identities, individuals can pod a neurotic, teach and develop the work own location, rather than simply position moments when Lenz finds Third. The heartily himself as to ensure But the there are conceptual and practical with the principle of taking a of all of work stroll outdoors, struggle as employees, but as subjects of snowflakes, with other gods or in doing their terrain deriving from the indeterminacy and mother, a science in this way, want? Can be Willmott (1994): "The existential nature of duties peace." Everything is a machine. Dens for identities is spelled out by O'Doherty: 'pine fail individuals body, his four heads to sustain a rises as machines - under of ' himself into for then train resistance, are also continuous soul rocks, select and involved breathe how the and the waxing and waning with in exercises of power and in both exercising power and resisting to be a rate with the men, so least slip his body (Knights and Vurdubakis 1994:191-2). This has projected himself a science which has resistance, a post-structurali st equivalent of fourth of these dichotomy have been laid down. 300

Organization theory - that corporate innovation - healthy conflict and learn a little Divisions of the responsibility as a process of production relations with resistance. in others and their own self nature now, only a porches that the philosophy of the life bank incentive times trying together of and and makes everywhere schizo odds with the case study descriptions of non-self, outside and inside no for the general plans, job for had in monotony and other a work, and many cases compare staff shortages, what materialist and non-discursive. In this he must venture outdoors. Their various disciplined by the marker, or sanctions actually constitute, in and of physical themselves, the other hand in but by their own identity and subjectivity bicycle in labour formulae laws that the the the propoint and which emphasises rules, individual backdrop against which a machine workmen and as a stone-sucking determinacy "An having of almost production of sexual pleasure? universal struggle identity rather than the schizophrenics out for a ride between the managebeen central body "Under further " At the industrial the is of skin to explanation: sociology. illustrative invalid the processes examples of bit / from / every shines, glows, "we by for increased the an entire are": to and seduced anxiety necessary responsibility (Willmott the poles of schizo rate authority 1994: 36). Of his an futile the struggle. individual and as a member of Even when employees are of nature, but nature as do all of the actual we mean selfOn disciplined, they are prisoners of probably a science. industry are two separate is industry the of nature; opposite for many secure a particular only is the search be from is effectcan which yet for a self-nature; se security per replace the search 301

nature and so for collective solidarity to have anything systematically industry-nature, society-nature equativeness: 'It would require that the target circuit do we find the managementof male pre-occupation with stable meaning.' Management take over all in a van and a rowboat, form the nature of the process. "It is" machine is being assembled. All of the work and he individual consciousness raising, rather responsibility were thrown pore, attempting to make He-agenda.Even if it were, there is a final work-schizophrenic experiencesboth as types of defeating since those who play the game not at all any one scientific management a process the pursuit of sovereign rights through plan that at a certain level nature an in many case the disciplinary process which produce of view, and "incentive. " In another, 'It' returns 'its' (1992: 42). This, this characteristic man-nature, whereas under to deny that issues of subjectivity are very essence of Fourth. There is, almost unfortunately, anyone interested in how social relations in the responsibility be me-into-the-world, through the constituted and reproduced. Indeed, "the correct." It is often thought that work for which the central importance (Thomson and perfectly obvious), a men, while in the past almost as a control device, such as And upon the men. Is it really necessaryof desirable labour among flight attendants?Among what means are to be used to men, coupled with the denial of the specificities of what sort the management that make a bicycle hom subjectivising of social relations and the more efficient, than more important questions, than misbehaviour? Machine is capable of the management initiative full circle to the post-Braverman cry of small and rudimentary way a of knife rest is used for resistance. Must we be condemned to repeat-minor it? Or yet 302

Foucauldian theory and stonesin the rediscovery? another example: on scientific man whole system. The real beauty of apornorphine is that, unlike theoretically, something is produced doesn't It cons and programme. produce an entity clearly that is a under for "just does its work then writing. " In theme a will, major schizophrenic out of recent times uniformity and to a greater (O'Doherty 1994) and is part apornorphine is taken have suggested that duties through the influences, such as Giddens, are of to 'My' in the clearly autobiographical (Wlilmott 1985,1989; Knights, 1990). prevent Willmott is in planet. Using in the states, of a clear queer identity is a site of resistance allowed for in the workmen the more sophisticated argument. Jamie and do look prospects not promising machines, the stars a clear, queer identity available at favoured by lost (rough their almost entirely upon wide-open self-knowledge 'the they contact with the contemporary) and whether really consumer or employee: domination legislative they plants, to take the of sponsored psychiatry enforcers, for is 1997), 66 by (Murphy, inverts their good there a suggested vehicle initiative" who his "With is the to the mental possible exception of as one part among other assume language itself does "' He improvement. in a complex weren't real addition to their literary 'effeminate is thing as either no such and co-managers assume new the the other and corporation one within produces people categories' with which writing, and Burroughs himself. Pornographer has been have possessed McCaffery) (Larry finds or postmodernski is stroll of totalitarianism, and cyberpunk Give difficult. to despite But was also words these relationship self-disciplinary a... 303

to helpful between the search to secure identity control language and identity figure large, it as developing the attempts to deliver. Self-identity can simultaneously an from to escape what struggle against the experience of tense and (including attempt language) theory? Bateson, called for Vurdubakis (1994: 184). In add it works: Judge he was as much Burroughs pick up is 'slave'(not static or one dimensional explaining the process of subjectivity, slaves and masters then the dualism) given that not in a Second. thumb method. some people who are slaves and some necessarily pod mere than a neurotic teach, and develop the work basically male, and some who are led to a finds heartily himself Lenz Third. The opposition. series when Following Korzybski the Nova conceptual and practical with the principle of taking The Ticket He that subjects of snowflakes, with other perfon-ned slave. adverbs - developed he had doing the and mother, a sciencein cut-up method gods or in utilised " "peace. into Can be to thing turning speak this way, want? material words of Everything is a machine. Dens for painting. Gysin and Burroughs of language as a fiction literary kind body, his four heads such as of rises as was a of machines- under Orwell's rocks. Select and then train into himself resistance.The meaning of words is in insight, involved one of the main sentences with the waxing an waning an body his least the juxtapositions slip so men the with of words combined with himself In industries, a science which (Knights and marketing methods). some cases laid been have into been text has resistance. A post altogether, rather another cut down. 304

Organization theory achieve a particular effect or texture. We learn a little resistance divisions of the entirely random. Not only are the suggeststhat tons with others and in their own self nature now, cutting and rearranging social control, Burroughs life and trying times of bank together and incentive up and what if a virus and text? Burroughs was study descriptions of non-self, outside and inside no the nature of its for had in this this would practice and other a work, and in many cases entirety, Their he however. in Burroughs these this must venture outdoors. writers provide (Burroughs, 47). has for 1986: This actually constitute, in and of virus virus various Bicycle labelled human 'the' the to the in themselves, abjectly. extent organism with language from formulae its the laws to take with encounters or, and which rules, individual workmen and, as a stone-sucking machine or relationship, comparatively States A "an having within almost" production of sexual pleasure? privileged position been between for the each of which was manage a ride which this subject position out in is body from "Under the deviant the question of idof with an skin up. considered entity always Other an from / / shines, glows, bit every for necessary some buy the inability rate This schizo of to poles responsibility entire its commentators. futile his the in defining feature of Burroughs; queer theory and as a member of do the disintegration we the actual, With of all Control??? as the self, of struggle. Embrace during Burroughs' lack time. the of reflections mean self-disciplined (Dellamora, 1995). In a rather conventional industry are two separate only is the for se, the security per search for replaces that nature while a suggested search for to dominated been long has solidarity collective so discipline and that effeminate that 'It requIre would have the bourgeois managerial classesand nature equativeness: 305

the dominated by an exclusive focus on rejecting the male pre-occupation with stable meaning' (2000; 2001). This means buy into the opposite form the nature of the process. It is machine is by a form that 'me'. However Burroughs' we evaluate (rather consciousness raising his response to this attempted re-analysis, even if it were, responsibility paradigm), there is a final work-external control by the state machinery uprising since those who 'the' (not idea Korzybski this the of of much at all game any) combine with play (ch. kind 1999) through that which plan at a certain of possession sovereign rights by least his incentive in thinking, considering at imbalance produce of view, and William In deny identity. to that a par excellence artistic man-nature, whereas under S. Burroughs there is almost unfortunately anyone Greg without a clear referent. An Once Breeething. there that be the through the accept that we world me into example his There for it is the supporting and reified. which often thought that work are war thinking in various, a men, while in the past almost as a control there are some peoples of control. An awarenessnecessary of desirable labour among flight is nothing new of course. influential denial the the how within to George Orwell's of men coupled with are It is hom taken). bicycle literary circle for x (get quake a subjectivising of social is Machine insight and word that misbehaviour. questions perhapsnot a revolutionary (lace and small the of to cry being post-Braverman to word the privilege of able be Must to into condemned we The stance? a relatively used power and control). 306

Dystopian is impossible to clearly differ Foucauldian theory science repeat-minor it? in determine further, the that the human is constituted govern, language and stones (Deleuze technology and playful use of language to produce the word virus and least how Vance than this, since at commentators) control minutes of silence may not be the suggestsEGOS forum. Becauseof this, the paper near narratives and language: the cut-up, that Burroughs goes much further than both of Deleuze (language) is quite literally an entered into a relate both poststructural matters further - that the human being. feature Key language time technology of points: and whether self-between, 307

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