Deleuze and Psychic TV: Musical Sigils for Short-Circuiting Control Society

William S. Burroughs's concept of control acts as a key influence on Gilles Deleuze's control society, a contemporary power arrangement in which conduct is manipulated through direct, non-localised modulations. Deleuze says resisting control society requires finding new weapons against it. This task of armament is epitomised in the artistry of non-binary musician, occultist and multimedia artist Genesis Breyer P-Orridge. Also influenced by Burroughs, and having personal ties to the author, P-Orridge devoted h/er 50-plus years of creative output to projects aimed at control's short-circuiting. Among P-Orridge's most prominent projects was Psychic TV (PTV), a sonic outfit that incorporated performance art, improvisation and ecstatic rituals across an eclectic range of music genres to attack sites of control. PTV also inspired and networked with P-Orridge's political art collective and magick organisation ‘Thee Temple ov Psychic Youth’ (TOPY). PTV's principal weapon for undermining control was the musical sigil, aural vacuoles of non-communication created from ritualised desire designed to be deployed into the world as affective agents. Working through the Deleuzian philosophical framework of concept creation, this article draws inspiration from the weaponised artistry of PTV to formulate two novel concepts of the musical sigil: the ‘virus sigil’ and the ‘key sigil’. Two corresponding tracks serve as focal points for illustrating each concept's short-circuit tactics. Virus sigils, exemplified by the track ‘Roman P.’ as used in a television advertisement, act a contaminating agents that short-circuit control directly. They infiltrate control-serving media to disrupt its transmissions of socially conditioning information from within. Key sigils, exemplified by ‘Message From The Temple’, act as a recruitment agent that short-circuit control indirectly. Functioning themselves like an advertisement for TOPY, this type of sigil disseminates counter-information that proliferates TOPY as a nomadic war machine, opening passages therethrough to becomings of an alternative space-time deterritorialised from control's manipulations.