Disclaimer: This essay was planned and written in collaboration with ChatGPT 4o and Gemini Pro 2.5.
William S. Burroughs stood before an audience at the Naropa Institute in 1980 and spoke of space. His vision, however, had little to do with rocket fuel or metallic capsules. He spoke of a biological necessity, of dreams as a functional preparation for a post-terrestrial future. The human body, he declared, was far too dense for the conditions of space. A different model was required, one less dense, almost weightless. He called it the astral or dream body. This was his wager. A body remade, not of flesh, but of dream-stuff, a necessary mutation for a species poised on the brink of a new environment. Decades later, this peculiar prophecy resonates with an uncanny prescience. Burroughs, in his own way, foretold the distributed cognition and networked agency that N. Katherine Hayles would identify as the hallmarks of our digital existence. He gave us a language for a dis-located yet deeply experiential self that finds its contemporary expression not in the cosmos, but in cyberspace.
The dominant histories of the posthuman tend to trace a neat lineage from the cybernetic conferences of the mid-century to the theoretical explosions of the late twentieth. In this essay I challenge that clean timeline. I locate a crucial, and far more mystical, precursor in the counter-cultural experiments of Burroughs, whose own theories of control and consciousness have their deepest roots in the radical poetics of Walt Whitman. The journey from the material body to the astral body and finally to the digital body reveals a recursive transformation of a fundamentally monistic, experiential, and technologically mediated self. It is a spiraling trajectory, not a linear flight toward disembodiment. Each stage represents a new configuration of the body, a direct response to the affordances and control systems of its era. Through it all, a core Whitmanian insight persists: the body includes and is the soul. I emphasise the continuity of embodied experience across these radical shifts, arguing that the posthuman body is a reconfiguration of materiality, not a break from it. We begin with the ground zero of American embodiment, the poetic performance of a unified self that set the stage for all the fragmentation and reconstruction to come.
Walt Whitman’s poetry performs an ontology. In the pages of Leaves of Grass, he does not simply describe a union of body and soul; he enacts it, forging a monistic vision that would become the great, unrealised promise of American identity. His verse collapses the tired dualisms of Western thought. Body and soul, self and other, the individual and the cosmos are not opposing poles but nodes in a vibrant, flowing network of being. I Sing the Body Electric is his manifesto. Here, the body is not a vessel for a transient spirit but the very medium of existence, a democratic and porous interface with the world. He catalogues its parts with a lover’s intimacy and a physician’s precision, finding divinity not in an ethereal beyond but in the immanent fact of flesh, in the “action of my own hands,” the “full-spread pride of man,” and the “delicate round-faced infant.” This is not an abstracted body, but one grounded in sweat, muscle, and sensation. It is porous, absorbing and radiating the life of the nation, becoming one with the “journeyman,” the “prostitute” and the “President.” It is electric, charged with a vitality that is both sensual and spiritual, a force that connects every individual into a continental circuit. Whitman positions this body as the ideal against which all subsequent models of the self must be measured. It is a holistic, expansive, and deeply material foundation, a baseline of unity from which the fractures of modernity would later splinter.
The famous line from Song of Myself, that the body “includes and is the meaning, the main concern, and includes and is the soul,” is the cornerstone of the entire genealogy I trace in this essay. Whitman gives us a body that is not an object to be observed but a lived-through medium of encounter. It is a phenomenological body, one that perceives and acts in the world based on the affordances the environment offers. For Whitman, the American landscape itself, with its sprawling vistas and democratic energies, affords a new kind of expansive embodiment. His poetic persona is a performance of this possibility, a self that contains multitudes because it is materially and experientially connected to the multitudes. Of course, this universalism had its profound limits. The Whitmanian body, for all its democratic pronouncements, is implicitly white and male, its expansive energies often predicated on the erasure of other bodies. Acknowledging this does not invalidate the power of his monistic vision; it grounds it, reminding us that every model of embodiment, no matter how transcendent its claims, is forged within the specific material and political conditions of its time. It is this very tension, between the holistic ideal and the material realities of power, that sets the stage for the necessary mutations to come. Whitman gave us the dream of a unified body electric; Burroughs would give us the nightmare of its capture and the blueprint for its astral escape.
If Whitman’s body was a site of democratic expansion, the body in William S. Burroughs’s universe is a terminal, a colonised territory. The holistic self dissolves under the pressure of external systems of control that operate at a biological level. For Burroughs, the most insidious of these is language itself. In The Ticket That Exploded, he famously declares that “language is a virus from outer space.” This is no mere metaphor. It is a diagnosis of the human condition. The spoken and written word is an alien parasite that invaded the human host, reprogramming its nervous system, dictating its thoughts, and limiting its possibilities. The Whitmanian body, which sang itself into being, becomes a ventriloquist’s dummy for pre-recorded messages of conformity, desire, and fear. The body of Naked Lunch is the result of this viral colonisation. It is a grotesque spectacle of permeability and mutation, a body wracked by addiction, its boundaries constantly dissolving. We see it in the “talking asshole” that develops a life of its own, a literalisation of the body rebelling against the controlling mind, or in the liquefying forms of the Mugwumps. Junk is not just a substance; it is a totalising metabolic and political system. The addict’s body becomes an apparatus whose sole function is to score, its flesh a mere conduit for the demands of the drug. This is the Whitmanian body turned inside out, its porousness transformed from a source of connection into a fatal vulnerability. The self does not contain multitudes; it is simply a host for a singular, consuming need.
Burroughs’s great innovation was to develop a methodology for fighting the virus on its own terms. The cut-up and fold-in techniques are not simply literary experiments; they are acts of guerrilla warfare against the syntax of control. By taking a page of text, slicing it into pieces, and rearranging it, Burroughs reveals the arbitrary and manipulative nature of linear narrative. He demonstrates that reality, as presented through language, is a construct, a film that can be cut, spliced, and re-edited. The cut-up is a technology for de-programming the self. It short-circuits the associative lines of the language virus, creating unforeseen connections and liberating meaning from its intended channels. This act of textual violence is a necessary precursor to bodily liberation. It is a way of hacking the source code of consciousness. In The Electronic Revolution, Burroughs extends this practice to the tape recorder, imagining a legion of audio-activists splicing and replaying the recorded pronouncements of authority figures, turning their own words into weapons of confusion and dissent. These practices create new human-technology relations. The print, scissors, tape recorder and speakers are not just tools; they become extensions of the body, prosthetic organs for perceiving and manipulating the hidden frequencies of control. Technology becomes a transparent part of one’s own sensory experience, like a builder’s hammer or a blind person’s cane. Burroughs sought to embody his media, to feel the world through the cut-up page and the magnetic tape.
This re-engineering gives birth to the astral body. The astral body is what emerges from the wreckage of the controlled, linguistic self. It is not an escape from embodiment, but an escape into a different, more fluid mode of being. It is a phenomenological body, defined by its capacity for experience outside the rigid framework imposed by the language virus. It travels in dreams, in altered states, in the hallucinatory landscapes of Interzone. This is a body that has shed its density, its allegiance to the fixed coordinates of consensus reality. Yet, it is crucial to understand the profound ambivalence of this transformation. The astral plane, for Burroughs, is no peaceful utopia. It is a treacherous and volatile space, teeming with alien intelligences, psychic parasites, and viral contagions of its own. It is the landscape of paranoia made manifest. The liberation from one form of control opens the body to a thousand new vulnerabilities. The astral body is monstrous, mutable, and often horrifying. It is a body in a constant state of becoming, a site of grotesque transformations where flesh merges with machine, insect, or pure energy, as seen in the orgiastic, polymorphous violence of The Soft Machine. This is not a clean transcendence. It is a messy, dangerous, and necessary mutation. The astral body is not a perfected ideal but a strategic adaptation, a counter-body forged in the crucible of a universe defined by conflict. Its instability and its deep entanglement with technology, transgression, and media are precisely what make it such a powerful precursor to the digital posthuman. It represents a self that has been shattered and reassembled, a hybrid entity prepared for a world where the boundaries between inside and outside, organic and inorganic, have collapsed entirely.
It is this shattered, reassembled, and technologically mediated self that finds its theoretical apotheosis in the work of N. Katherine Hayles. If Burroughs provided the raw, prophetic vision of a transformed body, Hayles provides the critical framework for understanding its contemporary digital manifestation. Her entire project can be read as a sustained argument against the very dream of disembodiment that early cyber-utopians championed. In How We Became Posthuman, she meticulously dismantles the fantasy that information can be separated from its material substrate, the seductive but flawed idea that consciousness can simply be uploaded and leave the messy, mortal body behind. For Hayles, this is a dangerous repetition of Cartesian dualism dressed in new technological clothes. She insists that we are always, and have always been, embodied. The posthuman condition does not signal the end of the body, but rather the end of a certain conception of the liberal humanist subject: a stable, autonomous, and self-contained mind that happens to possess a body. In its place emerges a new kind of subject, one whose boundaries are porous and whose cognition is distributed across a network of biological and technological systems.
The most direct line from Burroughs to Hayles runs through the figure of the constructed, textual body. Burroughs’s cut-up method produced a body of text that was literally fragmented and reassembled, a collage of found phrases and dislocated meanings. This finds a powerful echo in Hayles’s analysis of Shelley Jackson’s hypertext novel, Patchwork Girl. Jackson’s work, a feminist reimagining of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, presents a female monster stitched together from disparate body parts, whose story is navigated by clicking on an anatomical chart of her textual body. The reader performs a kind of literary surgery, assembling a narrative from fragments. Hayles reads this as a quintessential posthuman text. The patchwork girl is a body that is written, coded, and multiply authored, her identity emerging from the dynamic interplay of text, image, and readerly choice. She is a literalisation of the posthuman subject as a hybrid construction. The resonance with Burroughs is unmistakable. Both the cut-up text and the patchwork girl represent bodies that are radically contingent, their forms dictated by the technologies of their creation and the choices of their users. They are bodies that wear their construction on their sleeves, rejecting any notion of natural or organic unity.
This constructed body is the vessel for a new kind of consciousness. Hayles’s concepts of distributed cognition and networked agency describe how thinking and acting are no longer confined to the individual skull. Our cognitive processes are offloaded onto our devices, our memories are stored in the cloud, our sense of self is shaped by the constant feedback loops of social media. We think with and through our technologies. Agency becomes a networked phenomenon, emerging from the complex interplay of human actors, intelligent algorithms, and vast data infrastructures. This is the contemporary actualisation of Burroughs’s astral body. The digital self, like the astral self, transcends the skin-bound ego. It travels through networks, its presence mediated by code and signal. It experiences the world through the extended sensorium of the internet. And just as the astral body was produced through the technologies of the cut-up and the tape recorder, the digital body is produced through the smartphone, the laptop, and the global telecommunications grid. Again, these technologies feel like part of us, we have learnt to read the world through their displays—interpreting a map, a notification, or a data visualisation. The smartphone is not merely a tool we hold; it is an extension of our memory, our social life, our perception of space and time. It becomes part of our embodied being-in-the-world.
Yet, a critical tension remains. Is the posthuman body described by Hayles a sanitised version of the chaotic entity Burroughs unleashed? The language of distributed cognition and networked systems, while analytically powerful, can sometimes smooth over the jagged edges of lived experience. Burroughs’s astral plane was a space of profound risk, a zone of contagion and psychic warfare. His transformations were violent, painful, and born of desperation. The digital networks we inhabit are hardly less dangerous. They are battlegrounds for disinformation, arenas of surveillance capitalism, and engines of algorithmic control that echo the viral systems Burroughs described. Hayles is acutely aware of these dynamics, yet the theoretical elegance of the posthuman risks domesticating the sheer weirdness and horror of the Burroughsian vision. The patchwork girl, for all her hybridity, remains a coherent literary subject. The astral body, by contrast, often dissolves into pure noise, its consciousness fracturing under the strain of its own mutations. Perhaps the digital posthuman is not the final stage, but a new kind of stabilisation, a temporary truce in the ongoing war for the territory of the self that Burroughs so vividly chronicled. The body has been reconstructed, yes, but the forces of fragmentation and control have simply adopted new and more insidious forms.
This brings us back to the beginning, to a spiraling trajectory rather than a triumphant endpoint. The evolution from material to astral to digital is not a story of progress. It is a story of continuous adaptation, a recursive loop of fragmentation and reconstruction. Whitman’s unified, electric body provided the thesis: a monistic ideal where body and soul are one. Burroughs provided the violent antithesis: this body, captured and colonised by the language virus, must shatter and mutate into the astral to survive. Hayles offers a contemporary synthesis: the digital posthuman, a networked and hybrid being that reclaims embodiment from the fantasies of pure information. But this synthesis is incomplete, haunted by the very Burroughsian chaos it seeks to order. The tensions between the coherent digital subject and the anarchic astral body reveal that the spiral is still turning. Each new technological affordance, from Whitman’s printing press to Burroughs’s tape recorder to Hayles’s internet, reconfigures our embodiment but does not solve its fundamental problems. The primacy of experience remains the constant thread. We are always bodies in technology, our perception of the world always mediated.
This genealogy, then, serves as a corrective to both techno-utopianism and its dystopian opposite. It suggests that our digital condition is not radically new, but a continuation of a long-running project of mediating and remaking the self. The anxieties surrounding digital surveillance, algorithmic control, and the fragmentation of identity are not unique to our era; they are echoes of the viral anxieties that possessed Burroughs decades ago. By the same token, the possibilities for new forms of connection, creativity, and agency in digital networks are extensions of the reconstructive impulse that drove his artistic and magical practices. The spiral continues to turn. As we move into an era defined by immersive virtual realities and disarmingly human artificial intelligences, the pressure on the body to mutate once more will only intensify. Will the next turn produce a body that is even more distributed, perhaps to the point of unrecognisability? Or will it provoke a reactionary retreat into a nostalgic, seemingly “natural" form of embodiment? The legacy of Whitman, Burroughs, and Hayles suggests that the future will be a messy negotiation between these poles. The final lesson is that the body, in whatever form it takes, persists. It remains the site of experience, the locus of political struggle, and the raw material for our ongoing becoming. Burroughs’s strange prophecy of going to space was, in the end, a deeply terrestrial one. It was about learning to navigate the new spaces we create for ourselves, whether they are the inner landscapes of the dream or the networked territories of the digital. It was never about leaving the body behind, but about learning, again and again, how to inhabit its ever-changing forms.
Burroughs, William S. The Electronic Revolution. Expanded Media Editions, 1970.
—. Lecture at the Naropa Institute, 1980, https://archive.org/details/naropa_william_s_burroughs_lecture_on.
—. Naked Lunch. Grove Press, 1959.
—. The Soft Machine. Grove Press, 1966.
—. The Ticket That Exploded. Grove Press, 1962.
Hayles, N. Katherine. How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics. University of Chicago Press, 1999.
Jackson, Shelley. Patchwork Girl. Eastgate Systems, 1995.
Whitman, Walt. Leaves of Grass. Edited by David S. Reynolds, Oxford University Press, 2005.