Burroughs treated word-and-image combinations as literally addictive like drugs.

Evidence

Burroughs rails regularly against the forces of control, of which the most important and pervasive is language: ”The word of course is one of the most powerful instruments of control as exercised by the newspaper and images as well… . Now if you start cutting these up and rearranging them you are breaking down the control system” (Job 33). … Again, this is a classic modernist/avant-garde position, in which conventional language is seen as the tool of the bankrupt, oppressive status quo, the mass-culture industry. Experimental writing is its antidote, bringing the possibility of freedom, authenticity, truth. Burroughs differs from these avant-garde, experimentalist language theories (of which language poetry is the most recent incarnation) only through the extreme literalness of his view of linguistic mechanisms of control, in which certain word-and-image combinations exert the same sort of direct biological power as addictive drugs, holding the word junkie (all of us) in the same sort of absolute vise/vice. — Marianne DeKoven, Utopia Limited, 590

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines Burroughs’s distinctive contribution to avant-garde language theory — his literal, quasi-biological view of linguistic control, distinct from symbolic or ideological accounts.
• SEED: Angle: A piece on language addiction — how information environments exert ‘the same sort of direct biological power as addictive drugs’ — pairing Burroughs with modern feed/social-media design.
• XREF: connects to: Burroughs equated overcoming heroin addiction with liberating language — Marianne DeKoven, Utopia Limited: The Sixties and the…, 623