Introduction
Stephen Greenblatt in his essay “Towards a Poetics of Culture” explains the disagreement between Jameson and Lyotard on the function of capitalism. Jameson, as Greenblatt mentions, distinguishes between ‘individual’ and ‘individual subject’. Before capitalism we were individual subjects, “whole, agile, integrated … we had no psychology distinct from the shared life of the society” (Veeser 3). This benign and illuminous totality was shattered when capitalism arose. So, Greenblatt continues that according to Jameson, the evil function of capitalism was that it shattered integrity and homogeneity and instead, brought about differentiation and heterogeneity. This utopian and paradisal view is challenged by Lyotard who, as Greenblatt quotes, enunciates that “capital is that which wants a single language and a single network, and it never stops trying to present them” (Veeser 4).
The Beats knew that in America individuality was in jeopardy and the establishment espoused and inspired conformity, obedience, and compliance. American society, in actuality, suppressed individuality, repressed natural desires, and forced everybody, instead of shaping a personal consciousness or subjectivity, to admit the social consciousness given or imposed by the establishment.
1. Illusion
The Beats cultivated illusions or, as Ginsberg called them, visions in themselves because they were highly personal and gave them a different personality and opened to them a new horizon which was closed to others. To help them have illusions, as it is true for Coleridge and De Quincey, they consumed different kinds of drugs. Naked Lunch is a book of illusions. In a famous excerpt, William Lee, the addicted protagonist, retails in detail the story of his arrest by the detectives Hauser and O’Brien.
2. Marginalized Groups
To induce differentiation and heterogeneity in American society that had put the white majority on a pedestal and marginalized others and to prevent capitalism from bringing about sameness and homogeneity and to resist America’s unerring talent for blandness, the Beats mixed with the African-Americans, Mexicans, and other minorities. Sal in On the Road is fed up with his own dreary life and deeply wants difference. The Beats desired such a society in which they could enjoy, just as Lyotard demands, wide variety and complete freedom.
3. Bureaus and Democracy
Burroughs was dead set against unity, sameness, and homogeneity. In Naked Lunch, he blames bureaus because they sometimes grow and bring about unity and therefore democracy, which is made of bureaus, is to blame: “Democracy is cancerous, and bureaus are its cancer.”
4. Homosexuality
Although a homosexual, Burroughs never contributed to the gay rights movement and was never subsumed under the category of a ‘gay’ writer because he was a different homosexual. He distinguished between ‘fag’, a feminine homosexual, and ‘queer’, a masculine one. In fact, the sexual identity that Burroughs had adopted was different from both homosexual and heterosexual cultures established at that time.
5. Conclusion
The Beats really panicked at the mechanical consciousness, bogus rationality, and social conformity that the capitalist establishment was going to impose on every individual. They could not envisage a country in which everybody thought and did the same and so, wished to have their own unique consciousness, visions, illusions, and in general ‘inner freedom’. They were fed up with ‘organization man’ devoid of individuality and subjectivity and with a bland America whose people ran a mundane bourgeois life. Cold war and McCarthyism propagated a discourse according to which homogeneity and conformity to American values were regarded normal and acceptable and acting or thinking outside the confines of those values was considered as abnormal and un-American. The Beats, on the other hand, resisting this discourse and contributing to the counterculture of the 1950s and ’60s, created a counter discourse according to which everybody living in America had to be respected regardless of whether they are different.
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