Perhaps the most famous drug-using prose writer in history, William Burroughs gained popularity in the 1950s just as the Cold War was beginning. In such a transitional and tumultuous historical moment, Burroughs dubbed himself “a Beat” and spearheaded a countercultural artistic and political movement. A 1959 Life article by Paul O’Neil summarizes the Beats as simply being “against virtually every aspect of current American society” (114). At a historical and artistic crossroads, the Beats were in the unique position to critique the turbulent midcentury sociopolitical reality and experiment with different forms of expression outside of any one tradition. Scholarship around the Beats attempts to align them with modernism, Dadaism, Romanticism, postmodernism, war literature, and more—yet the Beats were distinctly the Beats. This was in large part due to their association with drug use and addiction.
Drugs were more than an eye-catching artistic accessory for the Beats. Association with drug use and addiction was generative for these writers, allowing them to inhabit and explore different mental states, identify themselves and each other, interact with marginalized communities, and express their own artistic and political ideals. Burroughs used drugs to navigate his evaluation of and emergence into the sociopolitical scene. While gaining eminence as a writer, he employed discourses of drug use and addiction to shape the literary movement he led, and in turn allowed these discourses to shape his own sense of self and position amongst peers and rivals alike.
During the Beats’ zenith, the definition of addiction was murky. It was not yet federally protected as an identity or even recognized as one. Its first legal recognition (and alliance with other disabilities) came with the passing of the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 (ADA). Even now, the criteria of what constitutes an addict, and which addicts can receive workplace protections and other rights against discrimination, intentionally restricts who qualifies as an addict. The ADA only qualifies individuals “who have been successfully rehabilitated and who are no longer engaged in the illegal use of drugs; are currently participating in a rehabilitation program and are no longer engaging in the legal use of drugs.” Further, “a former casual drug user is not protected” (Foreman et al). No guidance is provided for determining what qualifies as successful rehabilitation, what time frame determines drug use as current or past, or what differentiates casual drug use from addiction. Even more arbitrary and divisive, since alcohol consumption is legal for individuals over the age of 21 in the US, those above the legal age who are currently addicted to alcohol do legally qualify under the umbrella of disabled. While the legal definitions and parameters surrounding addiction are tenuous, they reflect an ever-evolving cultural and sociopolitical scene that has been trying to elucidate the heterogenous category and meaning of the “disabled” for centuries. Burroughs grappled with these conditions in his writing, in many cases using these points of contention or uncertainty as openings through which to play with the meaning of drug use and addiction in the middle of the century.
While the American legal framework only recognized addiction as a disability within the last few decades, examining the historical, social, and rhetorical uses of addiction and drug use through a disability studies lens illuminates the Beats as participating in a much longer historical tradition of encounters between disabled bodyminds and their surrounding sociopolitical contexts, however unstable.1 Avital Ronell suggests that “the body seems destined to experimentation… when some bodies introduce drugs, every body is on the line: tampering with and engineering, rebuilding and demolition, self-medication and vitamins become the occupations of every singularity. Sometimes the state has a hand in it” (6.7). Burroughs was interested in this idea of drugs as a tool to render the bodymind a site of experimentation, exploration, and identity formation, especially in relation to the post-World War II American state. During a critical juncture in American history, the Beats used addiction and drug use as the means of artistic creation and political action through their own bodyminds, tampering and rebuilding American literature in the process.
Before analyzing this literature, it is critically important to distinguish between drug use and addiction, as there are legal, physiological, and cultural distinctions between them. I define drug use as a behavior: the consumption of a regulated substance. Addiction refers to physiological dependency on a foreign substance. Addiction also functions as a sociopolitical identity, one that provides the rationale for stigmatization, criminalization, and institutionalization. Drug use does not necessarily lead to addiction—the former does not automatically beget the latter, as the ADA reminds us. However, the two are sometimes conflated both legally and culturally. In the context of the Beats, I examine both drug use and addiction for this very reason: drug use as a criminalized behavior has contributed to the negative cultural understanding of addiction and the figure of the addict. Drug use also complicates sociopolitical perceptions of addiction as a disability, as addiction is linked to an illegal or deviant behavior that is, for some, understood as a conscious choice instead of a physiological, disabling dependence on a substance. For the Beats, drug use was sometimes a conscious choice, and not all Beat drug users were addicts. For instance, peer novelist Jack Kerouac did not self-identify as an addict despite admitting the debilitating effects of his habitual alcohol and amphetamine use, while William Burroughs did identify as an addict (or, in his words, a junkie) prior to this term’s legal recognition as a disability (Charters). Despite these semantic differences, both men understood that addiction and drug use were linked to politicized, marginal identities, and therefore could be used to innovate the content and form of their writing. Disability studies allows us to analyze the techniques and effects of Beat literature insofar as they reimagine the possibilities of addicted identities and bodyminds in a time of ambiguity.
Burroughs was particularly invested in writing that reflected the material realities of the midcentury United States, a reality he understood as cracked, fragmented, and distorted. In his 1959 novel, Naked Lunch, Burroughs pioneered the “cut-up,” inspired by modernist collecting and montage.2 A cut-up, at its simplest, is a technique that describes many often-disjointed fragments or pieces. As Jeremy Braddock argues, collected writing like that of Burroughs, Ezra Pound, and T.S. Eliot are influenced by “the collage aesthetics of futurist painting, synthetic cubism, and Dada” (1). Braddock connects the abstract visual arts to literature, further explaining that “material collections of art and literature were advanced as means not simply (or even primarily) of institutional consecration but of cultural and social intervention (2, emphasis in original). This manner of collecting was a way to gather and present previously unrelated works of art together. This collection offered new, artist-selected associations to the viewing public. The collected aesthetic resulted in museums for visual art, and anthologies for literature. It allowed modernists (or modernist-inspired) artists to not only create art but to control the setting of the art’s reception.
For Burroughs, this meant writing various scenes with common themes and letting a random mix-up determine how they would finally appear between the covers of a book. He would quite literally cut his manuscripts into pieces and shuffle the pieces of paper like you might shuffle a deck of cards (Miles). Burroughs’s cut-up can be understood as a type of anthology: a collection of different, seemingly disconnected scenes revolving around the central themes of his choosing. However, instead of organizing an anthology chronologically or with another intentional order in mind, Burroughs assembled these pieces of writing together randomly to create the final novel. The fragments may have common undertones, but their final sequence is a product of pure chance. Burroughs used the cut-up as a way of exploring fragmentation, chance, collection, and mediated reception as the modernists did. However, Burroughs’s addition of chance and randomness into his writing was a departure from the traditional modernist practice of collection and mediated display.
Naked Lunch is a collection of scenes that gives the reader little sense of direction beyond common themes of sex, drug use, medicine, and psychoanalysis, and a few recurring characters. “Hospital” is perhaps the most identifiably cut-up chapter. Thoughts, sense impressions, and associations appear in sentences and sentence fragments separated by ellipses and paragraph breaks, meandering around the broader theme of drug detoxification, but without a guiding organizational principle. One section floatingly reads, “Willy The Agent taking the cure in Hassan’s Hospital… Hassan’s Hospital adjoining cemetery… Cremations on the patio… Professional mourners solicit relatives in the waiting rooms and corridors… Disintoxication Notes. Paranoia of early withdrawal… Everything looks blue… Flesh dead, doughy, toneless. Withdrawal Nightmares. A mirror-lined café. Empty…” (47). Vivid and highly detailed scenes were critical to Burroughs’s portrayals of his experiences with drugs and addiction. Willy The Agent (a thinly veiled alias for William Burroughs) is presumably receiving medical treatment for opioid addiction, experiencing nightmares and paranoia. We receive Willy’s fragmented sights, feelings, and associations just as they might appear to him in the throes of withdrawal, in fragmented bursts without a cohesive throughline or direction but confronted with uneasy proximities between hospitals and cemeteries, mourning and labor, cure and death. This collection of scenes portrays how state entities (agents, hospitals, cemeteries) impose upon one’s experience with drug withdrawal. Paranoia, nightmares, and visions of dead flesh that come with disintoxication are interspersed with a note on the state’s efficiency in placing a hospital directly next to a cemetery. Here, Burroughs’s cut-up mimics how the mind (especially in a state of withdrawal) processes external stimuli and internal thought in a nonlinear order. To Burroughs, the element of nonlinear randomness in a cut-up mimics the way he believes the mind receives stimuli and processes information. Burroughs brings the bodymind’s relationship with drugs to the forefront, letting bodily sense impressions conjure memories and allowing the mind to wander to other, perhaps unrelated topics. The cut-up attempts to represent the mind as it withdraws from drugs.
The cut-up that Burroughs adapted, like other modernist techniques and aesthetics, was in part a response to eugenic and Nazi art and ideology. Nazi art of the early twentieth century reproduced a homogenous, “ideal” race and appearance of human beings that was redundant to the point of appearing kitsch, as it required no artistic creativity or variation. In response, some modernist artists used disability themes and aesthetics to explore, represent, and celebrate the emotional, mental, and physical differences that occur in the current world composed of wide-ranging, diversely embodied and enminded human beings. On opposite ends of the eugenic spectrum, the Nazis outright banned modernist art in their museums, making a statement about which bodies and minds were worthy of display and celebration, and by exclusion, which were not. This aesthetic policy reflected their ideology of eugenics and reinforcement of an able-bodied ideal. Disability scholar Tobin Siebers, however, claims that “disability aesthetics embraces beauty that seems by traditional standards to be broken, and yet it is not less beautiful, but more so, as a result” (3). By using disability to create “broken” art that rejected the standards of traditional or Nazi beauty standards, a camp of modernists created both new types of art as well as new standards with which to judge art. For the modernists, embracing bodymind variations allowed for more accurate and varied representations of the multifaceted human condition and a new framework for defining artistic beauty.
This insistence on brokenness, both in content and form, still asserts itself in Burroughs’s prose decades after his modernist predecessors. In a cut-up aside about surgical procedures, Burroughs notes, “The Stomach Tuck is surgical intervention to remove stomach fat at the same time making a tuck in the abdominal wall, thus creating a flesh corset, which is, however, subject to break and spirt (sic) your horrible old guts across the floor” (97). The stomach fat, the abdominal wall, the guts, are all fragmented pieces of a human body that make up a “flesh corset,” as if this manipulation of the parts make them wearable, distinct from the body itself. Burroughs’s novel is filled with bodies in pain, in pieces, fragile, permeable bodies prone to breaking, exposed to medical intervention, injury, and death (the presumed outcome of gut spurting). Later, in another randomly placed vignette of a medical examination by Dr. Berger, a “cured homosexual” is brought in: “He sits in front of the camera and starts arranging his body in a countrified sprawl. Muscles move into place like autonomous parts of a severed insect. Blank stupidity blurs and softens his face” (115). This patient’s body is “severed,” its muscles moving mechanically of their own volition, detached from the brain and one another. The bodies in Burroughs’s novel everywhere resist visions of unified bodies or attempts at harmonious beauty, prioritizing the cut-up aesthetic at every level.
The fragmentation or brokenness of modernist literature that so inspired Burroughs was often concerned with reflecting the alienation that man experiences from himself, his labor, and his community under the pressures of an industrialized, capitalist world. To reflect these themes through form, modernist artists often turned to fragmentation, distortion, and machine-like repetition to emphasize the state of humanity under late capitalism. Siebers conceives of the modernist aesthetic as primarily a disabled aesthetic. Modernism, he claims, incorporates disability as “an aesthetic value in itself” especially as it “enlarge[s] our vision of human variation and difference” (3). Siebers asserts that “if modern art has had such enormous success, it is because of its embrace of disability as a distinct version of the beautiful… the very features that give it such remarkable imaginative power to represent the human condition—be it the capacity to claim through formal experiments and new content a vast array of human emotions, thoughts, and physical appearances or be it the confidence to leave behind the imitation of nature and to represent what nature might reject or fail to conceive” (35). Modern art moved away from previous traditions that attempted to recreate an ideal of the healthy body and criticize art through an objective, disinterested lens.
In this sense, Burroughs’s broken bodies and fragmented novel invoke the modernist disabled aesthetic. Maren Tova Linett argues that disability is often central to nonconformist creative experiments: “in an era that valued certain kinds of bodily conformity so highly, it is no surprise that modernist writers—who often positioned themselves as rejecting conformity—would reconsider disability as one angle from which to approach the role of the body within literature that revolved around consciousness” (14). An artistic movement like modernism, known for its nonconformity, then, is a prime candidate to take up nonconforming bodyminds as its tools of representation. It then comes as no surprise that the Beats, influenced by the modernists and their rebellious artistic practices, would then recognize use disability to achieve an aesthetic of nonconformity.
Despite some of his literary inspirations, Burroughs was not a modernist. His cut-up was also influenced by a later postwar phenomenon that had implications for his understanding of bodyminds: the golden age of psychoanalysis. By the 1950s, psychoanalysis was the dominant framework for understanding the human psyche. The aspects of chance and randomness in the cut-up, then, served a specific purpose for Burroughs: they allow him to replicate the fragmented, nonlinear processes of the human mind. According to Allen Thiher, literature dating back to the Romantic period aimed to understand the soul or psyche through “a science of the inner space of the self” (167). Focus was turned towards interactions between human interiority and the outside or objective world. “The realm of subjectivity—psyche—finds itself walled off, and in this disjuncture inner and outer forces can besiege the inner self” (171).
Burroughs turned to his Romantic literary predecessors, rather than contemporary medicine, to find answers to the questions of inner spaces and the human psyche posed by psychoanalysis. Romantic literature foregrounded the subjective individual experience, the natural and supernatural worlds, and emotional or sensory knowledge. In his literary history of drug-using writers, Marcus Boon defines the Romantics as “focusing on the self as creative source,” rather than consulting scientific or industrial innovations (31). Opium, popularized with global trade and common in England during the Romantic period, offered a way to alter and explore the creative potential of an individual bodymind. Boon provides a list of Romantic authors who used drugs as a way to explore the individual self as a site of creativity: to varying extents, Sir Walter Scott, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Keats, Mary Shelley, Lord Byron, and Burroughs’s oft-cited literary influence Thomas De Quincey, each documented their experiences using opium and how it affected their creative process or understanding of their subjective selfhood (31). Burroughs used opioids (primarily heroin) in his creative production and exploration, just as his literary influences had been doing for centuries.
Burroughs was especially interested in ideas of the mad genius. In the Romantic context, the mad genius was an individual capable of transcending rational existence, a subject containing creativity and knowledge that did not rely on logic or an objective, external world. Thiher describes the use of madness by the Romantics as “a key area of experience that allowed them to… find a privileged realm of experience that is larger than the one delimited by critical reason” (169). The mad genius was someone who could glean knowledge and creativity from the inner self and subjective experience. Further, madness has distinct literary power because “madness is representation” (172). Madness, for Burroughs, represented a mind disconnected from rational lines of thinking, abstracted from reason, widening the possibilities for artistic representation. Burroughs used drugs directly to this purpose: by using opium and altering his mental state, he could play the Romantic mad genius. The psychosomatic alterations that occur during opium use allowed Burroughs to reflect on his subjective selfhood and experience illogical sensory phenomena and mental states that he could write about. Burroughs used opioids throughout the entire writing and editorial process of Naked Lunch. This state of being on drugs is meant to mimic “madness,” which is uniquely capable of drawing attention to the oppressive conditions of life and the internal psyche through representations of the body and mind. In his work on disability studies, illness, and life writing, Thomas Couser argues that mental disability can bring the internal psyche to the forefront by “heightening one’s awareness of one’s mortality, threatening one’s sense of identity, and disrupting the apparent plot of one’s life. Whatever form it takes, bodily dysfunction tends to heighten consciousness of self and of contingency” (5). Addiction, read as physiological dysfunction, has both physical and mental representations. The “cracked” mind is represented through a book that is visibly cracked, made up of a collage of various, disconnected parts. Addiction allowed Burroughs to reach a state of mind in which unplanned, dribbling, cracked, disabled language was deployed as a powerful form of innovation, creativity, and sociopolitical resistance. Drug use, disability, and cracked language directly contradicted American capitalist ideals of productivity, standardization, and efficiency. By taking drugs to write his books, Burroughs once again found a way to go against the mainstream, aligning himself with the “mad,” rather than the medical field, to explore the inner machinations of the human mind.
Burroughs explored this internal/external work of the “psycho-sensory processes” through his language and the way his characters’ bodyminds interact with the external world around them. The dialogue between Shafer and Dr. Benway in the vignette entitled “Ordinary Men and Women” exemplifies, at the level of language, the mind’s wandering that the cut-up technique aims to show at the level of form. Shafer complains, “I can’t get that stench out of my lungs,” to which Benway replies, “None of us can… Never smelled anything remotely like it… where was I? Oh yes, what would be result of administering curare plus iron lung during acute mania? Possibly the subject, unable to discharge his tensions in motor activity, would succumb on the spot like a jungle rat.” The scene continues with the narrator stating that “Shafer is not listening. ‘You know,’ he says impulsively, ‘I think I’ll go back to plain old-fashioned surgery. The human body is scandalously inefficient. Instead of a mouth and an anus to get out of order why not have one all-purpose hole to eat and eliminate?’” (110). Benway responds to Shafer’s complaint, but the mention of lungs causes his mind to wander to a potential treatment of acute mania with an iron lung that he has been toying with. Shafer is not interested in the topic of mania but continues pondering the thread of toxins in his body, leading him to an entirely new idea of redesigning the human body to make processing nutrients more efficient. This conversation does not advance any sort of linear plot, but comedically portrays how the human mind tends to wander. Shafer and Benway are both focused on their own ideas, responding to the other’s comments only insofar as it relates to their own interests, or ignoring the irrelevant information altogether. This scene is farcical in its disjointedness but does similar work to that of the cut-up at the level of language, moving through the mind’s sometimes random or nonlinear processes of impressions and thoughts. Burroughs’s organizational cut-up technique and flow of language both aim to mimic the mind’s way of collecting, pondering, and finally expressing sensory information, often fragmented, jumbled, or nonsensical.
The fragmented, random quality of Burroughs’s writing also poses questions of authorial intention. The question of intentionality is one that Tobin Siebers posits as a place where disabled art breaks from traditional evaluations of artistic value: “The long-standing belief that pronouncements of taste depend on a form of human intelligence as autonomous and imaginative as the art object itself. Artistic production also seems to reflect a limited and well-defined range of mental actions. Traditionally, we understand that art originates in genius, but genius is really at a minimum only the name for an intelligence large enough to plan and execute a work of art—an intelligence that usually goes by the name of ‘intention’” (15). Burroughs’s cut-up was criticized for precisely this reason: chance and randomness remove his ability to execute a work of art according to a planned, intentional, “genius” level of intelligence. The final presentation of art (in this case, the cut-up book) is attributed to no one’s intelligence or genius vision. Burroughs leaned into his aphasia, doing drugs and mixing around his words, creating art that was not entirely a result of his intention. Critics are left without a sense of the artist’s supposed autonomy and imagination that creates the conditions for an objective, disinterested taste and proclamation of genius. Shortly after its initial publication, literary critic John Willett condemned Naked Lunch in the same manner that Siebers describes visual art critics condemning “unintentional” art (i.e., Jackson Pollock’s use of the drip technique to create paintings). Willett described the book as “montage, piecing a book together from disjointed chunks that can be satire or parody or else like the unplanned dribbling and splashing of the action painter” (43).
Burroughs, however, found purpose in the “unplanned dribbling and splashing” through its anti-materialist rejection of conformity. The lack of intentionality itself possesses the potential for creating an aesthetic representation of modernism and the mental or “psychic” processes. Everyday human thought and sensory processing do not follow a tidy, genius, or pre-planned intention. In an interview with the New York School poet Ted Berrigan, fellow Beat writer Jack Kerouac says of Burroughs’s cut-up technique, “It's just an old Dada trick, and a kind of literary collage. He comes out with some great effects though. I like him to be elegant and logical and that's why I don't like the cut-up which is supposed to teach us that the mind is cracked. Sure the mind's cracked… but how about an explanation of the crackedness that can be understood in a workaday moment?” (134). Kerouac admits that Burroughs’s cut-up is not “eloquent or logical,” but a modern era-inspired mechanism for showing the mind’s fragmentation. Under disabling state oppression, the mind resists ideals of logical, capitalist productivity and conformity. For the Beats, distorting and experimenting with language to create art and literature opposes the productive and conformist formalities of state-sanctioned language. The cut-up’s organizational principle (or lack thereof) produces a resistant, disjointed, reactionary affect—the meandering language of Benway and Shafer resist conformity and productivity.
In both organization and language, Burroughs attempts to recreate a process that occurs in the “cracked” human mind under the conditions of capitalist life. This mental condition is now “workaday,” the effect of a disabling political system that uses biopower to “crack” the body and mind until crackedness becomes a condition of modern life. Drugs are an apt tool for representing this crackedness as they produce effects, like in the cut-up, that do not appear as whole or linear. Burroughs wants to criticize the damaging effects of exploitative production under capitalism through a narrative style that is just as disjointed and muddled as modern life. Drugs act on the state’s most valuable productive tool, the bodymind, and distort it until it mimics the larger political and economic mechanisms in play. Drugs metaphorically crack the individual bodymind in a similar fashion to the state’s exploitative cracking of the broader human condition under capitalism. Drugs, then, are a way to live within, expose, and push against oppressive confines of the state.
Avital Ronell goes so far as to argue that literature itself can act as a type of drug, and can itself push against the state’s operating forces. She locates the danger of drugs and literature to the state as a produce of the state of “‘Being-on-drugs’: it is only about producing a need for itself.” On the contrary, “to get off drugs… the addict has to shift dependency to a person, an ideal, or to the procedure itself of the cure” (25). Drug dependency does not involve allegiance to any person, country, or ideal, but simply reaffirms a dependence on the drug. Need is situated outside of state mechanisms of control and productivity, circling endlessly on itself if the addict never turns towards cure. Citing court cases that sought to ban Naked Lunch as obscene, Ronell argues that literature similarly poses a threat “once it stops representing… when it ceases veiling itself with the excess that we commonly call meaning” (57). Literature, like drugs, can pose a threat once it ceases to engage with larger meanings and sociopolitical ideas. A book like Naked Lunch that is not “about” any one subject in particular does nothing but create another unproductive cycle of desire, this time for more literature. Ronell theorizes that drugs and literature are precisely dangerous for their ability to transcend state operations and norms. The oppressive conditions of the state are challenged through drugs for the sake of drugs and literature for the sake of literature.
Naked Lunch offers a bleak picture of the oppressive conditions of the midcentury state, and the human bodymind within it. As he declares in the “Atrophied Preface” to Naked Lunch, “There is only one thing a writer can write about: what is in front of his senses at the moment of writing… I do not presume to impose ‘story’ ‘plot’ ‘continuity’… Insofar as I succeed in Direct recording of certain areas of psychic process I may have limited function” (184, emphases in original). Already conjuring images of bodily decay by declaring the preface (which comes after, not before, the text of Naked Lunch) to be “atrophied,” Burroughs’s collection is rife with scenes of bodies and minds, often disabled ones. “A.J.’s Annual Party” depicts several violent and sexually explicit screams, with visceral descriptions of injuries to human bodies. After being assaulted by Mary and Mark for several pages, hanged, and finally covered in gasoline and set on fire, “Johnny leaps about the room in agony. With a scream that shatters the glass wall he stands spread-eagle to the rising sun, blood spurting out his cock… he plummets through epileptic explosions… under a sun that scars and grabs the flesh into goose pimples” (83). Burroughs’s scenes are often hard to read—the imagery in his writing is intensely descriptive of violent and disabling events happening to a body.
While narrative instead of visual, these extreme bodily situations and conditions use drugs and the body to shock and disturb. He does not stop at describing physical bodies, however, but also includes references to mental disability. In “Benway,” the doctor laments, “Eventual result of junk use… is permanent back-brain depression and a state much like terminal schizophrenia: complete lack of affect, autism, virtual absence of cerebral event… Junk affords relief from the whole life process, in disconnecting the hypothalamus, which is the center of psychic energy and libido” (30). True to the disclaimer in the “Atrophied Preface,” Naked Lunch is devoid of “plot” and “continuity,” instead creating scenes describing bodies and actions as they appear “in front of the senses” as well as “psychic processes.” Burroughs rejects representations of the healthy ideal and attempts to evoke an emotional, affected reaction from the reader to drive home his portrait of modern man. Disability—mental, drug-induced, and physical—is key to this Beat aesthetic.
For Burroughs, the disabled body and mind presents a prime metaphor for the paranoid, conformist post-war culture. In this distorted world, bodyminds are depicted as widely variable and rarely, if ever, an idealized picture of health and ability. Burroughs links the disabled bodies and minds in Naked Lunch directly to the disabled, sick image of mankind that modernism aims to expose: “All viruses are deteriorated cells leading a parasitic existence… The broken image of Man moves in minute by minute and cell by cell… Poverty, hatred, war, police-criminals, bureaucracy, insanity, all symptoms of The Human Virus” (141). Themes of illness and deterioration created by capitalism appear as images of sick and broken bodies and minds, culminating in a declaration that all manmade evil is a result of a singular illness, the Human Virus. Burroughs relies on a disabled aesthetic via his own drug use and addiction to make a statement about larger political frameworks by describing the facets of society that he disproves of through physical, bodily metaphors like disease and brokenness. Burroughs views the state as a disabling condition and manipulates his own addiction as a tool to create broken, disabled literature that mimics the effects of the state on the human condition. Both his vivid descriptions of disabled bodyminds and his use of the cut-up technique to recreate the psychic processes of the brain expose Burroughs’s reliance on the disabled aesthetic. Burroughs falls into the trap of using disability as what Sharon Snyder and David Mitchell identify as a cheap narrative supplement: “disability as a device of characterization in narrative art,” rather than as standing for or meaning itself (9). Burroughs’s relationship to his own addiction is fraught: while he does identify as a junkie and reflects on his own queer and addicted subjectivity in his writing, he also often reduces and stereotypes his disabled bodymind as a metaphor for a broader, “disabled” state system.
Not only was Burroughs interested in representing the cracked state and bodyminds he saw around him, but he also explored the power in identifying these bodyminds. After World War II, eugenics and statistics were in use to measure human bodies, their ability, and their productivity in labor. Lennard Davis argues that that our idea of “normal” is inextricably linked with ideals of capitalist production, as “the ideal of ranked order is powered by the imperative of the norm, and then is supplemented by the notion of progress, human perfectibility, and the elimination of deviance, to create a dominating, hegemonic vision of what the human body should be” (35). Normality was a virtue in the midcentury United States insofar as it prioritized human standardization and optimization in a late capitalist economy. In this context, Burroughs was intentionally disabling his bodymind through drug use, and while he was technically “producing” literature, the product of his labor was far from glorifying an optimized human ideal. The cracked, fragmented form of his writing, the explicit scenes of sexual deviancy and broken or diseased bodies, the erratic mental states produced by opium depicted in words did not the align with emergent national goals of normalcy and efficient production.
Drugs, for Burroughs, served as a catalyst of nonnormative identity formation. Before the late nineteenth century, behaviors like drug use and homosexual sexual practices were simply just those: behaviors. However, with the emergence of biopower as a method of state control, these behaviors were categorized into identities to wield political power. As Foucault notes, “Sodomy was a category of forbidden acts; their perpetrator was nothing more than the juridical subject of them. The nineteenth-century homosexual became a personage, a past, a case history, and a childhood, in addition to being a type of life form… Nothing that went into his total composition was unaffected by his sexuality” (History of Sexuality 43). This meant that the state could now pathologize individual consumer and sexual practices into entire identities and character types. For the state, behavior that deviated from an ideal of health and normalcy eclipsed all facets of an individual’s life. The state further blamed an individual’s inner psychology or choices for these identities—an individual who engaged in sodomy or drug use became a homosexual or addict, subjected to identification, stigmatization, medical intervention, and criminalization. Queer sexuality and drug use were both viewed as perversions constituting an entire identity. For Burroughs, then, the cut-up process was his attempt at portraying the interaction between individual, personal behaviors and bodyminds and the external, biopolitical state that seeks to create knowledge and make these identities “real” to justify their control.
In ruminating on what biopower has contributed to disability studies, Bill Hughes reminds us that, “When Foucault asks how the modern clinic is born, he addresses the historical moment at which medical language—by way of the medical gaze—passes from a conflation of ‘seeing’ and ‘saying’ to a form of ‘rational discourse’… It is only in this moment that medicine acquires the clarity and power that is necessary to make disease (and, by implication, impairment) knowable” (82). For bodyminds to be identified or diagnosed as disabled, they must first be gazed upon, seen and said by the medical eye. Knowledge making regarding disability can only happen when medical language evolves to describe the sight of these deviant bodyminds. It follows that diagnosis and identification are primarily aesthetic knowledges acquired primarily by looking, observing, witnessing. It is no wonder, then, that the Nazis banned disabled art in their museums, for it reveals knowledge of the bodyminds the movement sought to eliminate.
Burroughs’s addicted identity was highly visible in his writing and therefore politicized, just as his queer identity was. Building on Foucault’s historical observation of behaviors and visible bodies concretizing into identities in the late nineteenth century, self-proclaimed trans and junkie memoirist Paul Preciado expands upon the idea that the political identities of “addict” and “homosexual” are not concrete, biological truths, but appear under conditions of presentation, personal decision-making, and navigating current legal frameworks. Preciado likens the political power of synthetic testosterone to that of heroin. The two drugs are not chemically similar and do not produce similar somatic or psychological effects, but the state regards both drugs’ users as pathological, subject to regulation. He argues, “The two drugs are politically dangerous and can lead to exclusion, marginalization, desocialization” (237). The marginalized political and social status of a testosterone user, whether identified as a trans person (pathologized gender) or as a testosterone addict (pathologized drug user), is strikingly similar to those of the pathologized opioid addict. In both cases, the state identifies and criminalizes an individual based on their behavior (ingestion of a substance). Both the testosterone and the opioid user can be forcibly institutionalized because of their identity-forming behaviors and deviant bodies, whether in prisons, rehabilitation facilities, or other mental health institutions. Both must make a choice between their internal, lived experiences and realities, and the categorical frameworks given to them by the state. Identities formed around queer and drug using behaviors are both faced with the choice to assimilate back into the normative or accept a completely new identity and sociopolitical status.
But what allies addiction and queer sexuality more intensely than other pathologized identities? In her essay, “Epidemics of the Will,” Eve Sedgwick claims that drug use and sexuality are intertwined both in their historical trajectory as well as their political status as deviant or outsider identities. Sedgwick argues that “the new taxonomies of the addict and the homosexual condenses many of the same issues for late-nineteenth-century culture… distinguishing desires themselves between those considered natural, called ‘needs,’ and those considered artificial, called ‘addictions’” (136). Ingestion and sexual practices outside of nourishment and heterosexual marriage were both deemed unnatural, artificial, excessive—beyond the needs of sustenance and reproduction. Like Foucault, Sedgwick notes these two groups “coincided both structurally and temporally” in their literary representations. The emergent cultural taboo of homosexuality and addiction were both reflected in nineteenth-century literature as they became understood as formers of identity rather than mere behaviors. Sedgwick attends to the ways that these two identities are sometimes even conflated, homosexuality represented as an addiction to the sexual act, other men, or a fixation on reliving a past trauma. Addiction can act as a “camouflage and an expression for the dynamics of male same-sex desire” (135). Foucault and Sedgwick both track the cultural understanding of drug use and homosexual practice as overindulgent or deviant behaviors that concretized into politicized identities in the same moment, both understood as artificial and unnatural.
However, both groups have gained success by working within the state’s system of identifying and stigmatizing bodies. The sociocultural process of stigmatization is described by Erving Goffman by “society establish[ing] the means of categorizing persons and the complement of attributes felt to be ordinary and natural for members of each of these categories… While the stranger is present before us, evidence can arise of his possessing an attribute that makes him different from others in the category of persons available for him to be, and of a less desirable kind… He is thus reduced in our minds from a whole and usual person to a tainted, discounted one… The term stigma, then, will be used to refer to an attribute that is deeply discrediting, but it should be seen that a language of relationships, not attributes, is really needed” (2-3). Identities are extremely useful in their ability to form social and political groups. As Sedgwick explains, only “by a willingness to stigmatize themselves further by making common cause with the most disempowered of social groups” could these groups “paradoxically empower themselves in legal, economic, and ideological contestation” (141). Goffman likewise notes that “the stigmatized individual is likely to use his stigma for ‘secondary gains,’” in this case, finding solidarity and political organization amongst other stigmatized individuals suffering from social ostracization (10). Just as embracing a disabled, modernist distortion created the grounds for an entire generation of artists, embracing stigma can create unification between marginalized groups. By singling out individuals with pathologized identities, the state creates an opportunity for those groups to embrace their identities, form communities, and work together to fight for common political interests. In a sort of counter to the state’s use of biopower, the state-defined and -regulated identity itself can become a common ground for resistance amongst outsider groups. By identifying and labelling a group in order to oppress it, the oppressed can more easily find commonalities with others’ experiences and create sociopolitical allies.
Male homosexuality and drug use were so powerful in their ability to antagonize the state because of their media and cultural connection to communism. As the Cold War began and communist Russia was perceived as the antithesis to everything American, alignment with communist ideals was the ultimate taboo. As Barbara Ehrenreich argues in The Hearts of Men, the Beats were transformed into “beatniks” by popular media that linked them to communists because both groups rejected “the pact that the family wage system rested on” (53). The Beats wrote novels about men who indulged in drug use, did not contribute to the consumer economy or strive towards the emerging middle class, declined to marry and provide financially for a wife and child, and socialized with poor, Black, and queer groups. The Beats rejected the consumer economy, and even if they did not propose an alternative economic model, their rejection of American cultural values was perceived as communist. Drug use that interfered with production, and sex that was outside of the heterosexual family wage pact, were both part of the Beat rejection of capitalism. Through media dramatization and American fear of Russia, these behaviors signaled the ultimate deviant and pathological identity: the communist. The twentieth century solidified the relationship between queer and addicted populations, both as targets of state control, but also as marginalized groups with shared histories, experiences, and goals.
Queer and disability activism and scholarship remain strongly connected today, highlighting both groups’ expansiveness, permeability, and efforts towards solidarity. Self-proclaimed feminist queer crip, Alison Kafer even goes so far as to claim that disability theory contains queer properties. Both are marked by “talk of fluidity, ever-changing horizons, and paradoxical treatments of identity as kin to queer projects… ‘Queer’ also remains contested terrain, with theorists and activists continuing to debate what (and whom) the term encompasses or excludes; it is this kind of contestation I welcome for disability” (16). Queer and disabled3 communities share a history of contentious qualifications for membership, some self-imposed, others enforced by the state. These groups often contain shared members who, like Burroughs, embody multiple pathologized positions, but also contain multiple opportunities to complicate and empathize with other marginalized identities.
Burroughs understood the sociopolitical impacts of his identities as an addict and gay man to directly resist the state’s enforcement of biopower to pathologize his queer, junky self. The titles of his most semi-autobiographical novels are simply: Junky and Queer. Junky explicitly recounts his experiences navigating the political mechanisms in place to regulate his pathologized behaviors. In the prologue, he describes the US Army’s desperate attempts to categorize him before finally kicking him out. He states, “they put me down for schizophrenia, adding paranoid type to explain the upsetting fact that I knew where I was and who was the President of the US” (4). While he scoffs at the state’s tactics, he proudly claims that he is an addict. Burroughs understands addiction not as a behavior, but as a totalizing identity: “Junk is not, like alcohol or weed, a means to increased enjoyment of life. Junk is not a kick. It is a way of life” (6). At this moment in US drug law, drugs were being classified into different schedules and categories based on their chemical makeup, medical use, and likelihood of dependency. Burroughs was aware that his opioid use singled him out as a junky, and that the junky is pathologized as a radically deviant identity in a way that alcohol and marijuana users were not.
Burroughs was deeply critical of how the state sought to categorize and prosecute certain identity groups as a general category. In Junky, Burroughs discusses a new and ludicrous law in New York City, “making it a crime to be a drug addict. They did not specify where or when or what they meant by drug addict. The cops began stopping addicts on the street and examining their arms for needle marks. If they found marks, they pressured the addict to sign a statement admitting his condition so he could be charged under the ‘drug addicts law’” (80). Burroughs here points out the fallacy in criminalizing an entire identity. When criminalized behaviors become conflated with identities, law enforcement then must regulate and penalize the vague concept of an entire group of people. Burroughs, views his illicit drug use as a site of resistance against the state. Heroin and testosterone do function similarly in this sense as their use both helps create their outsider identity and resist the state’s attempt at controlling their bodies.
The “drug addicts law” described in Junky echoes the logic of nineteenth-century US Ugly Laws. The Ugly Laws were one of the first and most glaringly obvious legislative decisions regarding biopower that emerged in growing cities around the US, especially San Francisco and Chicago, attempting to ban certain individuals and behaviors from appearing in public. Disability studies scholar Susan Schweik, like Burroughs, recognizes the “inevitable ambiguity of the category of ‘disability,’” in this case, addiction (11). The police officers of Junky struggle to visually identify addicts and prosecute them based on an appearance and identity than a criminal act. Schweik argues that laws aiming to identify and condemn a person based on a disability or perceived disability requires “a judgment about bodily aesthetics and the use of law to repress the visibility of human diversity in social contexts associated with disability and poverty” (3). Further, the work of these laws was “effectively imaginary” as it condemned entire categories of people based on aesthetic judgments of unsightliness or perceived identity versus actual criminal act (12). These laws lumped together addicts, other physically and mentally disabled individuals, beggars, and those who simply appeared, to a law officer, to be “unsightly.” These laws attempted to criminalize disability and poverty under an umbrella of public disturbance, denying the influences of urban aesthetic ideals and discrimination. The “drug addicts law” that Burroughs criticized is a post-World War II iteration of these legal attempts to classify and condemn those in politically resistant, outsider positions.
While the Beats may have generated political resistance and solidarity and produced innovative literature through their drug use, Burroughs is guilty of ignoring or even spreading misinformation about the dangerous realities of drug use and addiction. Burroughs did identify as a “junky,” and wrote many nonfictional essays on heroin, yet did little to provide other addicts with helpful resources. In his “Deposition: Testimony Concerning a Sickness” at the end of Naked Lunch, he moralizes addiction simply as an “Algebra of Need,” declaring that “the face of ‘evil’ is always the face of total need” (201). He suggests turning oneself over to the police in order to be sent to Riker’s Island for the “thirty-day cure,” revealing his privileged position as a white man who does not live in fear of law enforcement (Junky 29). He also falsely claims that a new drug, apomorphine, can completely cure addiction. His own son was also addicted to opioids, published books about his time in the US Narcotics Farm, and died of liver failure almost two decades before Burroughs did. His deeply problematic writings about addiction are both dangerous and totally ideological. Burroughs is almost only capable of understanding addiction in its political implications, glossing over his more personal and painful individual experiences. He can proudly proclaim that “anti-drug hysteria… poses a deadly threat to personal freedoms and due-process protections of the law everywhere,” while touting dangerous, medically unfounded treatments and watching his own son become addicted and die (Naked Lunch 212).
What can we learn from the Beats, and what should we challenge? Disability studies frameworks can make sense of how the Beats mobilized drug use and drug culture to “disable” both their own bodyminds and novels to achieve solidarity amongst other marginalized groups and resist state control. Through drugs and their sociopolitical identities (or lack thereof), the Beats sought community formation and political organization, using their bodymind experiences as a site of production, celebrating lived experience and human variety. While Kerouac used stereotypes for his own gain, Burroughs pushed back against totalizing visions of addicts as deviant, criminal, or useless. He created art that insisted upon addiction and drug use to exist. His novels exemplify how lived experiences with using drugs can bring people with similar experiences together to better their quality of life against a system that would otherwise discipline them. While speaking from the position of white men and minimizing some of the less pleasant realities of addiction, Burroughs successfully resisted state mechanisms that would try to control and condemn drug users and addicts as wholly worthless. Perhaps for the first time in American literature, the figure of the addict was embraced as a human variation, an identity worthy of existing, just as other disabled writers have done. Just like contemporary disability theorists, Burroughs celebrated his identity as opening new and vibrant social, political, and artistic realms. Contemporary addiction writing can and should keep these same principles in mind.
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