Burroughs's virology - mixed media, William Burroughs, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, California

I don't mean to imply here that all of these alternate visions of Burroughs's significance to the present can or should be synthesized. Rather I feel that each could have been more rigorously explored and thoughtfully juxtaposed than was the case in "Ports of Entry." Instead of provocative contradiction, the effect in these galleries is more like bland pluralism.

The disproportionate attention to Burroughs's artistic legacy is especially frustrating because it is unnecessary. Despite their visual modesty, his works, and especially the photographic experiments, have much to say to a contemporary audience. Burroughs's repeated likening of the cultural circulation of words and images to the progress of viruses is a metaphor with uncanny relevance both to the age of AIDS and the era of computers and genetic engineering. In 1973 Burroughs wrote: "I advance the theory that in the electronic revolution a virus is a very small unit of word and image."(7) Genetic science has since borne out Burroughs's trope: viruses are information. But his use of the term is more complex than a simple application of information theory to medicine. For him, the virus is both a form of imposing control--the viral intruder takes over the biological systems of its host--as well as, ultimately, an agent of chaotic loss of control: the success of the virus may lead to its own failure if the imperative to reproduce causes the death of the organism it invades.

It is precisely such a dynamic of excess and implosion, of plenitude and apocalyptic collapse, which underlies Burroughs's practice of photography. He operates on the assumption that once an image is put into circulation it is impossible to anticipate or control its path: the image may be cropped, reproduced or reframed at will in order to substantiate any number of textual claims. Proclaiming the susceptibility of all photographic representations to his and Gysin's processes, he says of the images in The Third Mind that "you can do the same, of course, with any photo proliferating virus-wise."(8)

In the early 1960s, Burroughs's attention to the sinister fecundity of the mass media led him to produce a simulated edition of Time magazine which was published in 1965 by a small New York press. "Ports of Entry" includes several of the original collages in which Time editorial pages are combined with Burroughs's own texts. In others, drawings by Gysin are slipped into Time layouts. Throughout the work, the ostensibly neutral voice of the media is interrupted by the urgent rush of Burroughs's prose, while Burroughs's own writing, hardly controlled by traditional conventions of punctuation and syntax, is disciplined into the columnar layout of Time.(9)

Although Burroughs maintains the "ridded format of the news magazine, his text does not always coherently run from column to column. In contrast to the prose of the corporate journalist, Burroughs's voice, suffused with eroticism and broken up like poetry, undermines the rational order from within: "Day after/day I watched the old/flickering back to silen/ce: unknown evenings and/strange memories cigarett/e smoke curling in black/pubic hairs piples [sic] of li/ght along naked thighs." In Burroughs's version of Time, measured reportorial prose is redeemed or disfigured (depending upon one's point of view) by runaway associations and dislocated desire.