Burroughs rejected the possibility of pure or total resistance.

Evidence

When asked directly, he says he does not believe in the possibility of pure or total resistance, and this statement accords with many of his fictional representations of compromised modes of resistance. As he says in the introduction to Nova Express, ”to speak is to lie, to live is to collaborate” (14). This is a quintessential postmodern position, rejecting the utopian hope of modernity for total liberation, a position outside or beyond the history of social-political determinations. — Marianne DeKoven, Utopia Limited, 588

Categorization

• XREF: Directly extends the chapter’s thesis that sixties texts straddle modern and postmodern; this is DeKoven’s complicitous critique, also tracked in ch6 on Adorno.