Naked Lunch Analysis

I. Burroughs’ model of control of the individual
Introduction
This chapter looks into the different aspects of the world Burroughs creates in Naked Lunch revolving around the idea of control of the individual by various social institutions and organisms. Burroughs’s program of social and political critique, although not contested, is however not the focus of this chapter, but rather bringing forward the notion that Burroughs’ model of individual control is foremost based on the body as the main medium of controlling the subject, that the body is crucial in the exercise of power. This notion is sustained by some of Foucault’s observations in relation to the body as a political tool and will be discussed in the second part of this chapter.
As

As seen in the previous part, while bureaus and party members work in obscure ways and their true intentions and identities are never fully and truthfully revealed, their controlling actions are obvious in the effects they have on people and their autonomy. The next section will explore the ways in which the body is used in order to control the individual. Secondly, Benway’s statement defines the principles and operations of their society as working parasitically and as viruses. What interests me in not showing that and how Burroughs attacks social institutions, but rather focusing on their particular and peculiar nature and what this says about the entire system of their society. This parasitic/virus-like sort of relationship existing between characters and circumscribing the way in which their society operates, will be considered in the last part of this

If in ‘Docile Bodies’ Foucault claims that an efficient body is a disciplined body, in Naked Lunch too the body is disciplined in order to become efficient in the preservation of control in the detriment of autonomy. The correlation with the French thinker is due to his understanding of the docile body as an object of power, an idea well illustrated in Naked Lunch, and presented as follows by Foucault:
‘The classical age discovered the body as object and target of power. It is easy enough to find signs of the attention then paid to the body – to the body that is manipulated, shaped, trained, which obeys, responds, becomes skillful and increases its forces… in every society, the body was the grip of very strict powers, which imposed on it constraints, prohibitions or obligations’ .
The body becomes an efficient tool of power when the body is being interfered with, controlled, in order to conform to a particular political mechanism and arrangement. The ‘formula of domination’ , as Foucault calls it, is defined by ‘a policy of coercions that act upon the body, a calculated manipulation of its elements, its gestures, it behavior. (…) a machinery of power that explores it, breaks it down and rearranges it’ . The body becomes a tool, a medium for control and thus no longer an autonomous human being, acting and functioning mechanically in predetermined systems of