"Black magic operates most effectively in preconscious, marginal areas. Casual curses are the most effective"
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Burroughs points to the threshold zones where attention loosens and habit takes over. He spent much of his career showing how language functions like a spell: a system of cues that bypass conscious scrutiny and install programs. The preconscious is the layer just beneath deliberate thought, where priming, framing, and association do their work. Marginal areas are the edges of perception and culture, the background noise, the offhand remark, the aside that escapes our filters. That is where influence sticks.
Casual curses are potent because they do not announce themselves as rituals. An offhand put-down, a rumor, a sarcastic label, a headline tailor-made to inflame, a meme that slips past resistance with a joke: these are vectors that seed the preconscious. Psychology has names for related effects: the nocebo, stereotype threat, the power of suggestion. A stray remark can become an inner script that reroutes behavior. Conversely, overt incantations and explicit propaganda invite counter-arguments. The throwaway line does not.
Across Naked Lunch, The Ticket That Exploded, and later essays like The Electronic Revolution, Burroughs treats black magic less as supernatural spectacle than as a technology of control operating through words, images, and routines. He calls language a virus not to shock but to diagnose its contagious, self-replicating character. Advertising slogans, political dog whistles, bureaucratic jargon, and gossip all work by exploiting the minds gray zones, where repetition and emotion outrun analysis. Power often lives at the margins: in the sidebar, the footnote, the algorithmic nudge, the ambient soundtrack.
He also experimented with defenses. The cut-up technique, sensory derangement, and deliberate disruptions of routine aim to break the spells of received language and expose their seams. The warning is double-edged: beware the unnoticed channels through which you are programmed, and beware your own casual speech, which can impose fates on others. For Burroughs, magic is a study of attention. Control enters where attention is thin, and liberation begins where attention returns.
Casual curses are potent because they do not announce themselves as rituals. An offhand put-down, a rumor, a sarcastic label, a headline tailor-made to inflame, a meme that slips past resistance with a joke: these are vectors that seed the preconscious. Psychology has names for related effects: the nocebo, stereotype threat, the power of suggestion. A stray remark can become an inner script that reroutes behavior. Conversely, overt incantations and explicit propaganda invite counter-arguments. The throwaway line does not.
Across Naked Lunch, The Ticket That Exploded, and later essays like The Electronic Revolution, Burroughs treats black magic less as supernatural spectacle than as a technology of control operating through words, images, and routines. He calls language a virus not to shock but to diagnose its contagious, self-replicating character. Advertising slogans, political dog whistles, bureaucratic jargon, and gossip all work by exploiting the minds gray zones, where repetition and emotion outrun analysis. Power often lives at the margins: in the sidebar, the footnote, the algorithmic nudge, the ambient soundtrack.
He also experimented with defenses. The cut-up technique, sensory derangement, and deliberate disruptions of routine aim to break the spells of received language and expose their seams. The warning is double-edged: beware the unnoticed channels through which you are programmed, and beware your own casual speech, which can impose fates on others. For Burroughs, magic is a study of attention. Control enters where attention is thin, and liberation begins where attention returns.
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| Topic | Deep |
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