Kasper Opstrup

William Seward Burroughs (1914-1997) is today mainly remembered as a beat writer but he was also a caller of spirits and a multimedia magician who weaponized myth and magic(k) for the Space Age. Throughout his life, Burroughs was engaged in a semiotic guerilla warfare against what he called ‘control’. Control rules through words and images that structure behavioral conditioning and limit our form of thoughts. The battle against control thus involves another way of thinking and a sort of myth-building that wants to seize the narratives we navigate by.

This lecture introduces what Burroughs referred to as the One-God Universe and investigates how Burroughs and some of his fellow co-conspirators such as the painter Brion Gysin (1916-1986) wanted to break free from this universe by developing methods such as playback, cut-up and the third mind. By examining Burroughs’ new “myth for the space age,” the role of magic in it as well as his vision of an Academy 23, I will disentangle some of the specific threads of art, politics and occulture that run through his project for ‘storming the citadels of enlightenment’ and, ultimately, taking over the world by cultural means. What sort of world is it that Burroughs imagined would replace the current One-God Universe dominated by control and what is the electronic revolution?

Kasper Opstrup is a writer and researcher specialising in weird entanglements of art, politics, and occulture. He is currently the Primary Investigator on a 4-year research project at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark, entitled ”Twisting the Fabric of Space: the Art and Politics of the Hidden”.

https://artsandculturalstudies.ku.dk/research/twisting-the-fabric-of-space/