Burroughs' Naked Lunch and Deleuze and Guattari's Body without Organs

The Bodies without Organs in The Naked Lunch

 

In an attempt to have our discussion float around in a larger realm, I have decided to detail the co-incision of Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of the Body without Organs and William S. Burroughs’ novel The Naked Lunch. If I were to write an academic piece, its journey would end with the eyes of the grader but this way, it is realized in a place with open accessibility to the general public.

Deleuze and Guattari quote The Naked Lunch in their work (Burroughs 9, 112), using Burroughs’ own words to describe the shifting of organs, and while they only directly reference him twice, the two texts align in a way that screams out for attention as they clarify each complex vision. I will give a brief synopsis of each work (for readers unfamiliar with either) and then illustrate the connections between the two in detail. The chapter from A Thousand Plateaus considering the BwO is available online here and is worth a read in full. < www.generation-online.org/p/fpdeleuze2.htm>

The Naked Lunch  is a spliced narrative of vignettes told from the perspective of a heroin addict and is considered a groundbreaking work of American Literature. Burroughs toys with the reader’s mental associations by combining (often grotesque) uncanny words and images to produce a text with unmatched resonance. Due to its controversial content, the book was the subject of the last censorship battle in the United States and reader discretion is advised. Reading this book was an experience like none other for me. Its intense imagery evokes uncontrollable mental associations, some bizarre, some horrific.

In A Thousand Plateaus, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari describe “set[s] of practices” from which a version of a Body without Organs [BwO] emerges. Across the blob that is the BwO, different “intensities pass and circulate.” It “is the field of immanence of desire, the plane of consistency specific to desire (with desire defined as a process of production […] whether it be a lack that hollows it or a pleasure that fills it).” There are three basic types of these bodies: cancerous, full, and empty. The cancerous body is stuck in a state of replication; its production is malignant. The full body is healthy, and healthily productive, and the empty one does not produce anything as a result of its blocking of desires and intensities (with heavy drug addiction for example). They say “for each BwO, we must ask 1) what type is it, how is it fabricated, by what procedures and means (predetermining what will come to pass)? 2) What are its modes, what comes to pass, and with what variants and what surprises, what is unexpected and what expected?”

Within The Naked Lunch appears each type of these Bodies without Organs, the first of the empty heroin addict, secondly, the cancerous control addict or agent of the state and bureaucracy, and finally the full BwO of the text itself, which produces uncontrollable cognitive associations through language, in what Burroughs describes as the “Human Virus”. The cut-up narrative creates a full BwO, forcing the reader to relinquish control of images, in turn producing a space in which a critical analysis of the systems described can take place. Although the images are often obscene or perverse, there are countless inclusions of individuals who are acting upon their desires and taking pleasure without “anxiety, shame, and guilt” (ATP). This joy experienced through the playing out of their desires fills their BwO with intensities that are neither empty, nor cancerous. Through Burroughs’ descriptions of their desires, the characters become a body without organs that is penetrated, defecating, and discharging in pursuit of pleasure. 

Very early in the text, on a hunt for “C” (presumably cocaine) in Mexico, narrator William Lee describes that “This is a yen of the brain alone, a need without feeling and without body, earthbound ghost need, rancid ectoplasm swept out by an old junky coughing and spitting in the sick morning” (Burroughs 17). The addict character can be virtually superimposed over the one illustrated in A Thousand Plateaus. Deleuze and Guattari describe the drugged body “with its production of specific intensities based on absolute Cold =0 [0 = no state of intoxication]” (ATP). Burroughs’ addict has a need with no organs, constantly struggling to derive intensities from the drug itself.  However, the drug cannot produce enough intensity to fill or pass over the BwO, rendering it empty and unproductive.

 After Miguel, an addict who has been clean, relapses, Lee describes the bodily metamorphosis as, “He stood there in a misshapen overcoat of flesh that turned from brown to green and then colorless in the morning light, fell off in globs onto the floor” (59). This is quite literally an account by Burroughs of the change of bodily state once the force of desire has been actualized in a medium that halts production, including the production of other desires. Miguel’s body deflates and goops as it changes from a full BwO, to an empty one again.

Another passage that highlights the similarity between Burroughs addict and the empty BwO reads, “The days glide by strung on a syringe with a long thread of blood. I am forgetting sex and all long pleasures of the body – a grey, junk – bound body. The Spanish boys call me El Hombre Invisible, The Invisible Man” (Burroughs 56).  The effects of the drugs drain the life and desire from the junky, which is unable to desire anything more than another hit. Also, “the addict can spend eight hours looking at a wall. He is conscious of his surroundings, but they have no emotional connotation and in consequence no interest” (Burroughs 30). Nothing is produced, and consequently, nothing is desired. Junk use becomes a need, rather than a desire, and their BwO remains empty, experiencing no intensities.

The addict is not the only BwO in The Naked Lunch. The cancerous BwO is present in many passages taking a variety of forms from control addicts to (although similar to control addicts) agents of the state and bureaucracy, and those who maintain global control through business in suits.

In the opening scene of the book, a “Young, good looking, crew cut, Ivy League, advertising exec type fruit holds the door back for me. I am evidently his idea of a character.  You know the type […] A real asshole” (Burroughs 3). The businessman is described negatively by the addict, and while the addict does not desire anything, the exec desires control through money and power.

Deleuze and Guattari’s explanation of the cancerous includes the description of “A BwO of money (inflation), but also a BwO of the State, army, factory, city, Party, etc”(ATP).  The business exec becomes this BwO as money fills his plane of intensity. One never has enough money, and thus works to perpetuate a system that can produce it. But like cancer, its growth is malignant and the effects of the execs decisions are, for example, felt by underpaid factory workers in developing nations, whose means of production simultaneously pollute the drinking water.

Working for Islam Inc. Lee consults Dr. Benway, who is described as “a manipulator and coordinator of symbol systems, an expert on all phases of interrogation, brainwashing and control” (Burroughs 19). Assuming this is true, Benway does not utilize his expertise to heal or aid individuals, and instead conducts experiments that deepen his understanding of human control.

Benway describes that “The naked need of the control addicts must be decently covered by an arbitrary and intricate bureaucracy so that the subject cannot contact his enemy directly” (Burroughs 19). It is as though through the guise of a professional scientist, Benway has become the control addict that he describes.

Later in the text, Dr. Benway discusses with Schafer what the result of a more efficient body with less organs would be, and Benway offers an example of an anus that was taught to talk and subsequently took over its host. The anus’ significance is in the fact that it grew and grew until the original body could no longer function, it had evolved into a cancerous BwO by eliminating the other organs.

During the same conversation, Benway states, “The end result of complete cellular representation is cancer. Democracy is cancerous, and bureaus are its cancer. A bureau takes root anywhere in the state, turns malignant like the Narcotic Bureau, and grows and grows, always reproducing more of its own kind, until it chokes the host if not controlled or excised” (Burroughs 112).  The proximity of the story about the unruly anus to the description of bureaucracy as cancer cannot be overlooked. If the anus takes over its body, as does a bureau of its host, is bureaucracy not the anus of the social structure? Both are Bodies without Organs, and both are cancerous forms of that Body.

The final aspects of The Naked Lunch that should be analyzed in relation to the BwO, are the political parties of the interzone. There are four parties: the Liquefactionists, who indulge in all perversions (136) and experience a “relaxed depravity”  (140), the Divisionists, who replicate like cancer, the Factualists, who are “Anti-Liquefactionist, Anti-Divisionist, and above all, Anti-Sender”  (140), and finally the Senders, who are the “Human Virus,” (141) utilizing one-way telepathy to control the masses.

If each of these parties represent a political Body without Organs: the Divisionists are cancerous; the Liquefactionists are either full, or empty, depending on how destructive their perversions; the Factualists desire truth and diversity, working toward a full body; and the Senders are control addicts, who are also cancerous.

Burroughs inclusion of the Sender is particularly relevant to the discussion of the BwO because it is through the “Human Virus” of language that he utilizes his own one-way telepathy on the reading audience. The reader cannot be a control addict while engaged with The Naked Lunch. The language Burroughs uses jolts mental associations beyond where one might feel comfortable, and yet it is Burroughs’ own commentary on the systems of control and desire that permeate the text.  Ultimately, through the text, Burroughs himself becomes a Sender. He recognizes the control that he possesses over the audience, and toys with the mental imagery and cognitive associations by painting the grotesque.

One must flow with Burroughs (but parallel to Deleuze and Guattari) through the realms of the addict, the control addict, and the perverse fantasies in order to gain a better understanding of the Bodies without Organs present in the unusual world of William Lee. By coupling Deleuze and Guattari to Burroughs and analyzing their texts side by side, it becomes apparent that Bodies without Organs are not limited to the realms of fiction and philosophy, but rather ever present in our struggle to fulfill desire with intensity.

 

 

Works Cited

Burroughs, William S. The Naked Lunch. 2001: New York. Grove Press.

Deleuze, Gilles, and Guattari, Felix. A Thousand Plateaus. 1987: Minneapolis. University of Minnesota Press.