Allen Ginsberg, Howl (1956) and William S. Burroughs, The Job (1969)

Writing about the two texts and their authors, it is important to say a bit about their context. Both, Allen Ginsberg and William S. Burroughs were part of the Beat-generation, a group of writers and artist mainly active in the 1950s. The 1950s in the US were the good years of that country. Its economy was on the upswing and with the expansion of the city, the ideal of the suburban home came along. A middle class established itself, moving to the suburbs dreaming of a safe, not-urban and controlled environment. With the country`s modernization through mass-production came the cultural phenomena of materialism which the beat-movement heavily rejected. The beat-movement was strongly involved in criticizing that world and intended to find new ways of thinking, living and experiencing. Thus, many of the achievements in the spiritual, sexual, gay, race liberation were activated.

With Ginsbergs poem having been written in that context, it feels much like he is breaking free from the conservative American ideals and revolting against that environment. To do that, he uses the means of words and phrases to transport images and meanings which are immediately called into question for they do not make much grammatical or logical sense. Words and phrases of a certain social, cultural, ethnical or political meaning are almost randomly combined into new sentences and meanings. By doing so, Ginsberg gives a very strong and disturbing image of society.

William S. Burroughs was also part of the same movement. As a writer he experimented with new techniques of creative writing and in doing so revolted against the medium of the novel as it is an artificial reconstruction of reality which is carefully staged and written in order to conform to the preexisting social and political ideals. Essentially, Burroughs uses the technique of the collage of words as a tools to break free from such restricted media. What he calls the "cut-up technique", is basically taking narratives, contexts, scenarios, actions and literally cuts them up to mix them back together to create entirely new and unexpected meanings. Burroughs himself gives a great analogy to describe his way of working.

"For example you take a television set, shut off the sound track and put on any arbitrary sound track and it will seem to fit. You show a bunch of people running for a bus in Piccadilly and put in machine-gun sound effects and it will look like Petograd in 1917, people will assume that they are running because they`re being machine-gunned. (…) Or you take one politician and record his speech and substitute it for another`s. Of course no one knows the difference; the isn't much difference."

For Burroughs and also for Ginsberg, this technique is a very political one as it calls into question the notion of the ideal. By constantly cutting up and reconfiguring realities, there cannot be such a thing like an ideal because it is constantly being challenged by another reality. In that sence, we have less control over the storyline or the narrative but its essentially that what both writes are interested in. All the above named ideals of American society like the suburb and its context of mass-production have a lot to do with the concept of paranoia and the urge of people to be in control. And I would argue that it is precisely this hidden, psychological aspect of the American society which Burroughs and Ginsberg revolt against.

faust and the paradox of development

Modernization and its development projects have taken over our lives and the prospect of our society and anyone within it. The human has removed far from the primal status living in balance with nature. In the course of modernization we started sacrificing ourselves to production, the mass-production of goods that would make our lives easier and make us live in progress. Nower days, we are close to reaching the climax of globalization. Technological inventions have enabled us to produce without labour and thus, the masses of people now work in large corporations, financial services, distribution (the new labour). As modernization was a project giving a better life to the masses of people and therefore "freedom", we have now outgrown this concept. And as we can learn from Goethe`s Faust, we always will. There will always be a new invention or concept that brings us up, but over time, every such project will come to a climax and fall.

As we witness today, the capitalist project has come to this point, it now has a life of its own. When banks and whole countries have to be bailed out using tax money but the bankers get away with bonuses in the millions, something is wrong. As Marshall Berman puts it in his book All that's Solid Melts in to Air the challenge today is "to create new modes of modernity, in which man will not exist for the sake of development, but development for the sake of man." Here, Berman points out the true problem not only capitalism but generally, development projects themselves. Analyzing Goethe`s Faust, he describes how Faust lives through the scenario of development and finally, outgrows himself.

Faust, being the personification of humanity at the start of industrialization, finds himself trapped in his room which can be read as the larger context, a collection of all achievements of society. Having studied pretty much every important book or subject the world has to offer, Faust finds himself lost and depressed, still with no answers to life itself and where to go from now. What finally saves him from ending his miserable life is the devil Mephisto offering his help to Faust in order to start with him the project of modernization, a project in which Faust sees the possibility to develop a new society giving freedom and happiness to people.

However, we witness how Faust and his concept finally outgrow themselves and like in any development project. Berman argues:

"It appears that the very process of development, even as it transforms a wasteland into a thriving physical and social space, recreates the wasteland inside the developer himself. This is how the tragedy of development works. (…) Ironically, once this developer has destroyed the pre-modern world, he has destroyed his whole reason for being in the world. (…) Goethe shows us how the category of obsolete persons, so central to modernity, swallows up the man who gave it life and power."

Inevitably, the concept of a new modernity will always erase itself because it projects an ideal. And projecting an ideal always means the erasure of the old for the ideal to be complete. The recklessness of that ideal always implies a certain cruelty. When it might have started with good intentions, there will be a point where the development accumulates a dissonance with the previously existing and thus, comes to its turning point where it kills itself by denying any other previous concept.

This dissonance between a concept and the real is something Henri Lefebvre focusses on in his book The Production of Space. He critiques the cartesian model of thinking which starts with the ideal and projects it out into the real world (he calls that "abstract space"). Effectively, a new space emerges, which he refers to as "differential space" which describes the differences between the old and new, the boundary between them.

"From a less pessimistic standpoint, it can be shown that abstract space harbours specific contradictions. Such spatial contradictions derive in part from the old contradictions thrown up by historical time. These have undergone modifications, however: some are aggravated, others blunted. Amongst them, too, completely fresh contradictions have come into being which are liable eventually to precipitate the downfall of abstract space. The reproduction of the social relations of production within this space inevitably obeys two tendencies: the dissolution of old relations on the one hand and the generation of new relations on the other. Thus, despite—or rather because of—its negativity, abstract space carries within itself the seeds of a new kind of space. I shall call that new space ‘differential space’, because, inasmuch as abstract space tends towards homogeneity, towards the elimination of existing differences or peculiarities, a new space cannot be born (produced) unless it accentuates differences."

Locality and Power

What is the power that people have today? Do we still have any power to change our society? Terry Eagleton claims we don't. This is due to the fact that capital dominates our political and social world. He argues that the big theories initiated by thinkers like Karl Marx, Jurgen Habermas, Jaques Derrida, Michael Foucault used to be the very motivation for people to start a revolution and change societies. However, today, we do not have an up to date theory, no "fresh thinking", there is nothing to rebel against, nothing that creates a mass of people with the power to make a change. According to Eagleton, this is because of capitalism and globalization. You would think that through technology and new way of communicating, it is easier to organize something meaningful and to spread theories. But essentially, capitalism / money has become the norm which brings with it the decentralization of the world. People do not belong to a place anymore, they easily migrate, create new connections, always forced by the market to constantly reorientate:

"For a socialist, the true scandal of the present world is that almost everyone in it is banished to the margins. As far as the transnational corporations go, great masses of men and women are really neither here nor there. Whole nations are thrust to the periphery. Entire classes of people are deemed to be dysfunctional. Communities are uprooted and forced into migration." (Terry Eagleton, The Politics of Amnesia from the book After Theory)

In the past centuries, there used to be strict norms that one could rebel against. It was the fact that such a norm existed and that people were local to a place, meaning they don't move around so much. That locality easily creates a mass of people who relate to each other. The very trouble of today is the change in this concept. As we suddenly do move we lose that connection and therefore, whole communities are losing in power.

Essentially, Eagleton asks for "new forms of belonging". Since there is no one society we belong to but rather multiple, there can be no coming back to old ideas of collectivity. However, people do need locality and tradition, a sense of belonging to a place. What he is proposing is that we have to seek "to sketch out new relations between globally and locality, diversity and solidarity."