Peter Orlovsky, Jack Keruac and William Burroughs in Morroco
I have never read William Burroughs though I have glanced at a passage or two of his and have seen a bit of Hollywood's pretentious version of one of his books. I am hardly qualified to pronounce sentence on him, but I will anyway.
Burroughs was American. This is important. Burroughs is a flag. Burroughs was supposed to have described what you would find if you stripped the bark off the trunk of American society. Underneath there would be termites. Burroughs was a writer, but also a killer, someone who inadvertently broke the deepest rule of human society.
He didn't kill an enemy in the second world war. he wasn't ordered to kill. Ordinary killers are rewarded with medals and processions. He was the executioner, his unconscious was the executioner and the same unconscious was the source of his literary output. He placed an object, drunk, onto his wife's head. He said he would shoot it off her head, lined her up, and then shot her between the eyes. Oh dear. An accident. A terrible mistake.
The literary dinner party mafia reaches bedrock when it reaches Burroughs. Added up and divided by the number of critics and authors you can think of, Burroughs is still a lode-star. If there was ever a Principia Literata then Burroughs would be one of its unprovable axioms. Value can only be assigned to him tautologically. His books were the witness statement of a murderer and a fantasist, but his fellow travellers thought that they were doing the world a favour by valuing the offal he produced.
He was creating value: Blue Velvet and American Beauty, Brit Shlock artists create value by ripping false value. There is a long tradition in western philosophy where both licensed and unlicensed thinkers speculate on the nature of value.
John Lennon after he met Yoko Ono, says in an interview that he climbed up to inspect her installation and saw the single word:
'Yes'
Burroughs and his friends have an installation too. And if you climb up to it on a white little ladder, and spy through a hole in a little white box placed in a white closet you will read the two little words:
'Fuck you.'
Try looking at Burroughs the right way round: he was a wife murderer who slept with underage boys and wrote. He did so in the Maghreb and in the process he cemented some of the worst cliche's of orientalism. He exoticised the experience. The most serious misdemeanor was to exoticise. Exoticising dehumanises people and turns them into potentially exploitable objects. When you exoticise you are untruthful.
The consequence of having a philosophy that exoticises is that you live anthropologising. Anyone who believes that other people are different in some essential way to him or her then begins to anthropologise them. When it comes down to it, anthropologising implies social Darwinism. It represents a failure of the imagination and understanding of what constitutes humanity; fat people, gypsies and all of Brucey Parry's tribes together are objectified and exploited. Oh yes they are, they are.
We should look at networks to explain people like William Burroughs and not his quality as a writer. The question might arise, for example, about how Dominique Strauss-Khan became head of the IMF? This was the sort of person who raped or seduced women and invoked the droit de seigneur - an apt metaphor for what the IMF did to whole countries. - How did he get into that position? How did he stay there?
The answer is, through support networks.
Equally, we can ask the question: How did Burroughs, the sort of person who killed his wife and exploited boys, and exoticised and dehumanised become so lauded as a writer - and by such conventional mainstream drones as well? How did he get into this position?
The answer is, through support networks .
Burroughs was American. This is important. Burroughs is a flag. Burroughs was supposed to have described what you would find if you stripped the bark off the trunk of American society. Underneath there would be termites. Burroughs was a writer, but also a killer, someone who inadvertently broke the deepest rule of human society.
He didn't kill an enemy in the second world war. he wasn't ordered to kill. Ordinary killers are rewarded with medals and processions. He was the executioner, his unconscious was the executioner and the same unconscious was the source of his literary output. He placed an object, drunk, onto his wife's head. He said he would shoot it off her head, lined her up, and then shot her between the eyes. Oh dear. An accident. A terrible mistake.
John Lennon after he met Yoko Ono, says in an interview that he climbed up to inspect her installation and saw the single word:
'Yes'
Burroughs and his friends have an installation too. And if you climb up to it on a white little ladder, and spy through a hole in a little white box placed in a white closet you will read the two little words:
'Fuck you.'
The consequence of having a philosophy that exoticises is that you live anthropologising. Anyone who believes that other people are different in some essential way to him or her then begins to anthropologise them. When it comes down to it, anthropologising implies social Darwinism. It represents a failure of the imagination and understanding of what constitutes humanity; fat people, gypsies and all of Brucey Parry's tribes together are objectified and exploited. Oh yes they are, they are.
We should look at networks to explain people like William Burroughs and not his quality as a writer. The question might arise, for example, about how Dominique Strauss-Khan became head of the IMF? This was the sort of person who raped or seduced women and invoked the droit de seigneur - an apt metaphor for what the IMF did to whole countries. - How did he get into that position? How did he stay there?
The answer is, through support networks.
Equally, we can ask the question: How did Burroughs, the sort of person who killed his wife and exploited boys, and exoticised and dehumanised become so lauded as a writer - and by such conventional mainstream drones as well? How did he get into this position?
The answer is, through support networks .