"Naked Life: William S. Burroughs, BioScientist?"

This is Not a Writer?

"This is Revelation and Prophecy of what I can pick up without FM on my 1920 crystal set with antennae of jissom...The way OUT is the way IN...." ( Naked Lunch, p. 229)

It is perhaps true that one cannot, as Burroughs taught us, fake good writing anymore than you can fake a good meal. As such, most readers who come with an open mind and, yes, read Naked Lunch - Burroughs' early (1959) effervescent novel of experimental verve and poetic genuis - recognize, however begrudgingly, the work of a master chef. The cuisine may not be to everyone's taste, this Naked Lunch, but it is a work of such stunning novelty and comic timing that the patient and open minded reader must, finally, laugh.

A friend of mine found himself naked in a Marrakech hotel room second floor.......pieces of murder falling slow as opal chips through glycerine....Slower animal reactions allow him a full second to decide: Straight through the window and down into the crowded street like a falling star his wake of glass glittering in the sun....clad in a diaphonous pink curtain, with a curtain-rod staff, hobbled away to the Commissariat de Police.... (NL, p. 222, additional ellispses)

It is perhaps an only slightly lesser challenge to fake good science, an inquiry that demands the discipline of open mind and the clear, immersive observation that can result. Indeed, robust scientific inquiry would seem to demand what Burroughs dubbed, following Korzbynksi, the "extermination of verbal thought." Asymptotically, investigators must approach zero attachment to any belief or concept, however cherished it may be,and the first practice of such detachment is to recognize, wherever possible, the slippage between our linguistic models of reality and reality itself. The most replicable form of this thought from Korzbski's enormous opus was simply "The Map is not the territory", and Burroughs might add: "The map is not the territory. And neither is the territory!" By approaching the Burroughs was able to notice aspects of living systems that were not on the radar of mainstream life science. By offering recipes for making life "naked", Burroughs taches readers to engage the complex world of our perceptions with what the buddhist tradition dubs "diamond mind".

And Naked Lunch is, if we are to believe an Atrophied Preface on a work of fiction, a set of recipes:

The Anglo-Saxon to depict a phenomenon will first be engrossed in making a model, and he will

make it with common materials, such as our crude, unaided senses show us them.... He concludes
from the body to the atom.

Both therefore make hypotheses, and this indeed is necessary, since no scientist has ever been able

to get on without them. The essential thing is never to make them unconsciously. (417) H. POINCARÉ

Heterodox biologist and Nobel Prize winner Barbara McClintock, whose work on genetic transposon was ill understood by her colleagues and yet uncannily resonant with Burroughs' practice of cut up, described this capacity to be affected by a living system as "feeling for the organism."

With its emphasis on "feeling", Keller's account of McClintock's mode of investigation

We call it Maize

Transposition as Cut Up?

Auyahuasca and the Invention of the cut up?

And while high quality hoaxes are a veritable tradition in physics, these exceptions prove the rule that "normal" science resists challenges to the status of truth itself, a challenge often posed by the mere existence of compelling, immersive fiction. Perhaps Burroughs was the greatest fake writer ever, a confidence man crossed with an Intelligence Agent. I call Burroughs a "fake" writer not because his writing lacks authenticity or rhetorical effect, both of which it exudes with intensity and quantity. Instead, Burroughs Simulated the Writer Archetype as cutting up the obsessive figure of the writer itself, a shamanic dismemberment and not death of the Author. This map of the territory "William S. BUrroughs" or "Bill Lee" as a "fake writer" will suggest that Burroughs' acivities as a writer provided the armature for a thorough going investigation into a concept - yet another map, and yet not one among others - "life." By focusing on the innovative and pathbreaking understanding of "life" in Burroughs's work, insights that anticipate and often overtake paradigm breaking research in the biosciences over the past 50 years, Burroughs demonstrated that for the sake of scientific inquiry, it is sometimes necessary to pretend to be something other than a Scientist, if only because that archetype, even into the present, demands a separation of the observer from the observed, a separation Burroughs, I will argue, consistently dismembered in his fictional and non fictional writings. Beginning with Burroughs' experimental ingestion of yage and use of DMT in the 1950's and continuing up to his investigation of dreaming in __My Education__, Burroughs' investigations into the biological aspects of consciousness were involutionary and "metabolic"; they began with experimentation on and with the self. Science from the inside, Burroughs's work fits the criteria embryologist and theoretical biologist Stanley Salthe calls internalism:

From his practices with orgone to his vision of the control society and artificial life forms, Burroughs' investigation of "life" offers a conceptual framework resonant with and complementary to recent calls for "First Person Science", a mode of scientific description that integrates an observer into a participatory universe where living systems and their investigators cannot be neatly separated. In what follows I will articulate Burropughs' contributions to the life sciences as part of an account of my recent work as a participant observer with international organizations in the field of biometrics, where Burroughs and his creations become a practical and useful guide for anticipating the likely effects of any given (bio)technology.

  • Larval Entities Waiting for a Live One: The Recombinant Life of Yage
  • Shutting Up Long Enough to Mutate: Naked Wyrd
  • We Interrupt this Vampire: Burroughs and Ecocosmic Extraction Schemes ( The Western Lands)
  • Outro: My Education in Biometrics


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