William Seward Burroughs wrote some of the most brutal and hilarious texts of the 20th century, novels, stories, essays and paintings that sought to shatter what he perceived to be the monotonous "control" of the egoic mind through what he called a “blast of silence.” This talk will seek to explore Burroughs’ literary technique of the “blast of silence” as a direct operation of the artist on the conscious mind of a willing reader, whose “narrative mind” is usually consumed by the malware of the internal monologue - what Burroughs called the “word virus” that is hosted by the subject/ object mind. Through his collaboration with Brion Gysin and Ian Sommerville, Burroughs worked with sound and word as information, creating recombinant art through the operation of chance operations that momentarily empty the semantic register and allow pure sound to occur, as in mantra. As in the epigraph above, Burroughs conceived his own writing as a kind of anti-viral program for humans captured by the allure of control through continuous surveillance and biotechnology and technoscientific control. Through this alarm and blast of silence, Burroughs's texts can momentarily empty a reader or a listener’s mind of its incessant verbal content. Here Burroughs achieves a kind of “naked lunch” with the reader, the space of consciousness beyond word Burroughs called the Third Mind.
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