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    Review of:
    Schneiderman, Davis and Philip Walsh, Retaking the Universe: William S. Burroughs in the Age of Globalization. London: Pluto, 2004.

  1. Imagining the work of William S. Burroughs through emerging theories of globalization promises to keep an extraordinary and difficult body of multimedia excesses and provocations relevant for the new millennium. Davis Schneiderman and Philip Walsh have assembled an intriguing group of contributors, bringing together both established Burroughs scholars and many new voices, both critical and creative. In their introduction, Schneiderman and Walsh describe the aims and urgencies of this anthology:

    These authors attack their material with enough energy to infuse the cogent issue--literary explication that moves beyond its own rarefied limits--with vital connections that present Burroughs's work as a "blueprint" for identifying and resisting the immanent control mechanisms of global capital. Additionally, the editors come to this collection as children of Bretton Woods, of IMF and World Bank "structural adjustment" policies, of ballooning world debt, of globalizing "junk culture," of a rapidly unfolding new imperialism, and a symbolic culture dominated by the logic of the commercial logo. (2)

    Hinting at the theoretical investments of the contributors, Schneiderman and Davis argue that "a key debate within globalization theory concerns the connection between globalization and '(post)modernity'" (3).

  2. Jennie Skerl emphasizes the postmodern perspective in the "Forward." She offers a concise but compelling reception history of Burroughs criticism. While readers and critics in the 1950s saw Burroughs as "a spiritual hero of an underground movement," supporters and detractors of the 1960s argued the moral status of his work, yet both agreed that he was an apt reflection of a "sick society" (xi). After his popular reception by both academics and youth subcultures in the 1970s, the critics of the 1980s found in Burroughs a poststructuralist sensibility, for he seemed to be working through the same questions about language, power, and identity important to French theory. In the 1990s, critics Timothy S. Murphy and Jamie Russell "attempted comprehensive overviews" (xii) that situate Burroughs in the broad context of modernity. For Skerl, Retaking the Universe resolves at least one debate: "what is striking to this reader is the general agreement among authors in this collection that Burroughs's moral and political position is clear: he opposes the sociopolitical control systems of late capitalism in the era of globalization, and his writing is a form of resistance" (xiii). What is perhaps even more interesting is just what globalization seems to mean to these Burroughs scholars. Skerl offers a concise formulation: "The essays in this volume read Burroughs within the context of theories about globalization and resistance. This perspective emphasizes Burroughs's analysis of control systems, especially his theories of word and image control" (xiii). In essence, globalization means mediation. There are some interesting stakes in this perspective, for postmodern theory has been called into question often most adroitly by postcolonial critics who doubt its applicability to fraught questions of nation, gender, and capital. The Burroughs scholars in this collection seem poised to reanimate postmodern obsessions with media and representation in compelling ways made possible through the techniques and vocabularies of Burroughs, who always wrote from his global experience as an expatriate criminal.

  3. "Theoretical Dispositions" is the first of three sections in the book, and, as the editors explain, it links "Burroughs's articulation of global control systems that emerged in the post-World War II era with the dominant strands of twentieth century theory" (7). One might think that Burroughs's major reception has been by readers so deeply invested in theory that this should be taken for granted. In a sense, this section provides a strong overview of Burroughs's reception by academic critics of the past twenty years, especially in the first essay, "Shift Coordinate Points: William S. Burroughs and Contemporary Theory" by Allen Hibbard. As Hibbard notes, "Burroughs will continue to be a prime target of whatever new forms of the [theory] virus lie waiting to be born" (27). Timothy S. Murphy, perhaps the most influential of the newest generation of Burroughs scholars, contributes "Exposing the Reality Film: William S. Burroughs Among the Situationists." He has discovered documents that put Burroughs in touch with marginal Situationists and suggest that Burroughs may have been influenced by Situationist analysis and practice, especially in works like The Electronic Revolution. This is particularly telling, because one of the oddest facts about Burroughs is his seeming expatriate insulation from the intellectuals and artists of the countries he inhabited, aside from other expatriate Americans or anglophones of one stripe or another. Murphy, however, suggests that this picture of Burroughs might be wrong and that his connections, at least as a reader and correspondent, demand further investigation.

  4. Editor Philip Walsh's "Reactivating the Dialectic of Enlightenment: Burroughs as a Critical Theorist" examines the similarities between Burroughs and the Frankfurt School. Walsh situates Burroughs more centrally among twentieth-century critics of capital and power. He also carefully underscores how Burroughs is both critical of "the core elements of Western culture" (71) while remaining deeply entangled in them. Jason Morelyle's "Speculating Freedom: Addiction, Control and Rescriptive Subjectivity in the Work of William S. Burroughs" offers an interesting reading of Burroughs's addiction metaphors and their connections to the poststructuralist critique of control societies, especially in the work of Michel Foucault. Finally, Jon Longhi contexualizes Burroughs in the historical avant-garde, and he argues persuasively that we would do well to think of Burroughs as part of that tradition in this short but provocative essay.

  5. "Writing, Sign, Instrument: Language and Technology" is the heart of the book, both literally and figuratively. It is this group of essays that justifies the title of the anthology. These writers make a persuasive case that Burroughs offers a compelling account of globalization through his practice as a writer. The section begins with an essay by Anthony Enns entitled "Burroughs's Writing Machines," in which he makes fascinating connections between typewriters and globalization. For instance, writing about the Yage Letters he argues that Burroughs's obsession with world cultures from the ancient Maya to practicing shamans reveals a "desire to achieve a primitive, pre-literate state . . . [that] later manifested itself in his manipulations of media technology" (95). In "Totally Wired: Prepare Your Affidavits of Explanation," Edward Desautels provides a critical-creative investigation of web technologies and globalization in the style pioneered by Steven Shaviro's Doom Patrols. Here, a ghostly agent Burroughs transmits a faint signal from the other side, reporting on the dangers of an increasingly wired world. In "New World Ordure: Burroughs, Globalization, and the Grotesque," Dennis McDaniel makes a bold claim: "Burroughs, as well as other artists of the grotesque, challenge globalization by reducing or eliminating the exchange value of its commodities" (145). In essence, the clean, orderly world of commodity culture cannot tolerate the grotesque, making this an effective aesthetic of resistance. Editor Davis Schneiderman contributes "Nothing Hear Now but the Recordings: Burroughs's 'Double Resonance.'" He suggests that Burroughs's use of space, especially in his work with sound recording, "finds connection with the political struggles characterizing the emerging global economic order, where 'all nature has become capital, or at least has become subject to capital'" (147). Just as globalization has changed what space means, so Burroughs provides new ways to think about that space through his use of media technologies. While Schneiderman emphasizes recording technologies, Jamie Russell offers us "Guerilla Conditions: Burroughs, Gysin and Balch Go to the Movies." Here again, Burroughs as a media experimenter helps to develop critiques of globalizing media: "Burroughs, Gysin and Balch's experimental cinema outlined in the 1960s might well be more important than ever before in alerting us to the realities of the new global order and teaching us how to resist it" (163). The final essay of this section is Oliver Harris's "Cutting Up Politics." Harris provides a comprehensive overview of Burroughs's cut-up techniques and argues that Burroughs was unsure, in retrospect, if cut-ups were effective: "From first to last, there is standoff between the claims for the methods' prophetic and performative power, an equivocation about the productivity of cut-ups as tools of war in 'a deadly struggle' that may or may not have existed" (176). Harris argues that Burroughs was drawn to cut-ups because he could offer cutting-up as a technique to others. The success or failure of cut-up resistance depended not on Burroughs alone, but on others taking up the technique. However, as Harris goes on to point out, it may well be that like any other technique, cut-ups too require a master craftsman, and if so, they aren't the revolutionary weapons Burroughs hoped they would become. As the last essay in this section, it seems that Harris is challenging the other contributors, asking us to think about how these revolutionary claims might be realized as either aesthetic or practical political interventions.

  6. The final section, "Alternatives: Realities and Resistances," contains some of the most inventive writing in the book, but it doesn't offer the coherent perspective of the first two sections. Schneiderman and Walsh explain that these final essays "investigate the possibilities that arise from such combinations of production and theory--through magic, violence, laughter, and excess," which is to say they cover much diverse and interesting ground (8). The section begins with the welcome reprint of John Vernon's "The Map and the Machine," from his book The Garden and the Map. This erudite and comprehensive essay situates Burroughs in relation to the radical modernism of the historical avant-garde, and its arguments are grounded in the precise and exhaustive close reading that Burroughs's work demands and too seldom receives. Ron Roberts's "The High Priest and the Great Beast at The Place of Dead Roads makes interesting connections between Aleister Crowley and Burroughs. Out of this emerges one of the bolder positions on Burroughs articulated in the book: "both writers . . . play with rightist ideas--militarism, eugenics and genocide--as necessary steps in establishing an alternative future: that is, a society free of shits and control freaks and based on a respect for individual freedoms" (237). Yet Roberts isn't particularly troubled by this, ascribing it to just another aspect of "their outrageous lives and works" (238). Roberta Fornari provides a careful close reading of Burroughs's film script in "A Camera on Violence: Reality and Fiction in Blade Runner, a Movie." This article is particularly interesting for its careful history of the script's creation, and for a sensitive reading of its themes of terror and violence. Fornai makes the defensible claim that the clearer narrative of Blade Runner "provides an unusual showcasing of Burroughs's political engagements" (241). Katharine Streip mobilizes genre theory in "William S. Burroughs, Laughter and the Avant-Garde." Reading his texts in terms of classic comedy rather than satire or avant-garde experiment, she writes that "humor within Burroughs's work can be read as a social practice and as a formal and performative strategy, a way to explore boundaries" (259). The final piece, "Lemurian Time War," is a fictional pastiche of Burroughsian excess, paranoia, and lemur obsession, reminding us that Burroughs always invites his audience to take up his tools and give it a try themselves. The diverse viewpoints of these authors make this section of the anthology interesting, though they don't engage globalization as their primary theme.

  7. While Burroughs might be a bridge for media theorists to the global, this reader is left to wonder if this might not be a one-way street. One might well wish for a companion anthology of scholars with significant investments in the global geography and history that Burroughs inhabited as an expatriate in Morocco, Mexico, South America, and Europe. Does Burroughs speak to such scholars as a resistant, liberatory intellectual? For instance, is his obsession with figures such as Hassin i Sabbah relevant to these readers? In essence, are Burroughs's usefulness and reception largely limited to Anglophone, postmodernist insiders? Most troubling, while the authors in this collection, as Skerl notes, have few qualms about Burroughs's force as an author of liberation, one wonders if the a more diverse range of scholars would reach the same conclusion. In one respect, that is the real strength and challenge of this book, for its unabashed, polemical position demands a response, especially from those who might be thinking a great deal about globalization but not so much about the strange works of William S. Burroughs. This anthology argues that Burroughs provides critical vocabularies and perspectives on globalization, and thus we can hope that it will inaugurate new conversations with new readers of his singular works.

    8. Department of English & Journalism
    Western Illinois University
    D-Banash@wiu.edu

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