Politics & Power Quote by William S. Burroughs

Burroughs isn’t praising artists as nicer politicians; he’s demoting politics to clerical work. In his framing, legislators don’t originate change so much as notarize it, stamping into law shifts that have already happened in the culture’s nervous system. The provocation is the word “real”: power doesn’t live where civics textbooks say it does. It lives where perception gets rewired.

That’s classic Burroughs: suspicious of official narratives, allergic to institutional self-mythology, and convinced that control is exerted through language. If the state governs by naming, categorizing, and scripting behavior, then artists fight upstream by breaking those scripts. His own cut-up experiments weren’t aesthetic parlor tricks; they were a theory of counter-propaganda. Fragment the sentence, fracture the spell. Change, in this worldview, begins as a new way of seeing and speaking before it ever becomes a policy memo.

The subtext is also a warning to artists who want to be merely decorative. Burroughs implies that art’s political force is indirect and therefore easy to underestimate, even by artists themselves. Culture moves first: taboo loosens, identities become legible, new desires and solidarities take shape. Only then do legislators arrive to translate a lived reality into statutes, often claiming authorship as they do it.

Context matters: a mid-century writer shaped by censorship battles, the Cold War’s paranoia, and the growing machinery of mass media. Burroughs is staking a claim that the front line isn’t the legislature; it’s the imagination, where the future gets drafted before anyone votes on it.