Cultures of Addiction By Jason Lee

in drug literature, can be analogous to agency itself. The addict’s desire for drugs can be likened to individual agency in that both threaten the control society has over its subjects. As a symbol of individual agency, addiction works in drug literature to more sharply outline the oppressive relationship between society and the individual.

Indeed, addiction has been attributed to what Timothy Melley termed “agency panic”—that is, “serious anxiety about the autonomy and individuality of persons.”⁷ And it is William Burroughs’s writing, Melley asserted, that most “obsessively” links the concepts of addiction and agency:

Burroughs not only writes about his lifelong preoccupation with drug addiction, but also uses the concept of addiction to represent other postindustrial conspiracies against human agency and uniqueneness. The characters of his fiction are usually addicted to junk, but as early as Naked Lunch (1959) they are also addicted to commodities, images, words, human contact, and even control itself. They are also the subjects of sadistic forms of mass control, Pavlovian conditioning, and medical or psychological torture. In short, their existence represents a terminal case of agency-in-crisis.⁸

Burroughs’s “world” is one that Melley suggested is “a hostile place full of controlling agents.”⁹ Melley further asserted that in his writing, Burroughs sustained “a panic-stricken vision of the individual as a total addict.”¹⁰ The representation of the panicked individual and the concept of “agency-in-crisis” are perpetuated by other male drug writers. Cannon Schmitt alluded to Thomas De Quincey’s “sense of human life as fundamentally catastrophic” in De Quincey’s 1856 Confessions of an English Opium-Eater¹¹; the addict-protagonist of Luke Davies’s novel Candy states, “I feel I am nothing but a dividing line. I don’t know who I am”¹²; and agency is all but destroyed in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, “impelled by that habit of co-operation, that desire for unanimity and atonement, which…conditioning had so ineradicably implanted.”¹³