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2 A Terminal Case William Burroughs and the Logic of Addiction Timothy Melley The panic of the alcoholic who has hit bottom is the panic of the man who thought he had control over a vehicle but suddenly Wnds that the vehicle can run away with him. Suddenly, pressure on what he knows is the brake seems to make the vehicle go faster. It is the panic of discovering that it (the system, self plus vehicle) is bigger than he is. . . . He has bankrupted the epistemology of “self-control.” —Gregory Bateson, “The Cybernetics of ‘Self’” 38 BAD HABITS “Addiction,” remarked social psychologist Stanton Peele in 1975, “is not, as we like to think, an aberration from our way of life. Addiction is our way of life.”1 By all accounts, this view has gained remarkable popularity in America. Not only are estimates of traditional substance abuse signiWcantly higher, despite declining narcotic and alcohol consumption, but treatment is being mandated for, and sought by, dramatically larger numbers of Americans. More signiWcantly, medical institutions have adopted increasingly flexible deWnitions of addiction, creating vast numbers of new addicts and whole new categories of addiction.2 The most striking feature of America’s general discourse on addiction, in other words, is just how general it has become: Americans now account for all sorts of ordinary human behavior through the concept of addiction. In part, this impulse stems from the work of addiction specialists such as Peele, whose Love and Addiction advanced the thesis that “addiction is not a special reaction to a drug, but a primary and universal form of motivation” and that “there are addictive . . . ways of doing anything” (59). The increasing popularity of this view would be unremarkable if it signaled merely a growing belief that the compulsion to repeat certain behaviors is a normal human tendency, rather than a sign of disease. But many Americans seem to have adopted Peele’s thesis while also retaining the idea that any habit, drive, or compulsion indicates a lack of self-control so dangerous it merits medical attention.3 In his encyclopedic account of America’s addiction to addictions, InWnite Jest, David Foster Wallace catalogues some of these “exotic new” maladies. At a rehab center, his narrator explains, one learns: That sleeping can be a form of emotional escape and can with sustained effort be abused. . . . That purposeful sleep-deprivation can also be an abusable escape. That gambling can be an abusable escape, too, and work, shopping, and shoplifting, and sex, and abstention, and masturbation, and food, and exercise, and meditation/prayer. . . . That most Substance-addicted people are also addicted to thinking, meaning they have a compulsive and unhealthy relationship with their own thinking. . . . That it is possible to abuse OTC cold and allergy remedies in an addictive manner. . . . That anonymous generosity, too, can be abused.4 The bizarre logic of this view—the contradictory sense that addiction is utterly normal and dangerously pathological—explains why so many Americans now claim to be addicted to behaviors that once epitomized individual autonomy. As Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick has suggested, the relatively new illnesses known as “exercise addiction,” “workaholism,” “shopaholism,” “sexual compulsiveness,” and “codependency” or “relationship addiction” all stem from a sense of insufWcient free will. “Under the searching rays of this new addiction-attribution,” she observes, “the assertion of will itself has come to appear addictive.”5 Paradoxically, the compulsion to sort addictions from freely willed acts increasingly erodes the distinction between those terms; this erosion, meanwhile, feeds the frenzy to separate will and compulsion once and for all. To put the same thing another way, the national tendency toward addiction-attribution stems from what I call “agency panic,” serious anxiety about the autonomy and individuality of persons. The question, then, is not just how to account for the growth of addiction as an explanatory concept in America, but how to account for the more pervasive anxieties about agency and personhood that encourage its growth. To begin, it is worth observing that basic human activities such as shopping, sex, and work, can only appear to be unwanted “addictions” if one makes several assumptions about persons. First, one must believe individuals ought to be rational, motivated agents in full control of themselves. This assumption , in turn, entails a strict metaphysics of inside and outside; that is, the self must be a clearly bounded entity, with an interior core of unique beliefs, memories, and desires easily distinguished from the external influences and controls that are presumed to be...

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