On the Cut-Up

Hans Arp tore up his drawings, threw them up in the air and glued the fragments on a piece of paper in the order they hit the floor. Fellow dadaist Tristan Tzara composed poems by picking words from a hat. Brion Gysin and William S. Burroughs invented the cut-up technique: the random rearrangement of text in order to decode it's hidden meaning. But the randomness of Burroughs is one with a very limited definition: the cut-up is random ONLY as far as it's results are unintended. "From my point of view there is no such thing as a coincidence".

The cut-up renders the subliminal flows of information, information hidden from our conscious modes of perception, visible. The same peripheral senses mass-media seek to manipulate are guiding the process of the cut-up. In a cut-up these unacknowledged windows are allowed to take over. Ultimately, still according to Burroughs, the cut-up disturbs space-time causality and the future leaks into the present. The cut-up becomes the Delphic exercise of the interpretation of signals adrift in time.

One of the first lessons Burroughs learnt about writing, he tells us somewhere, is that a writer should always stick to what he knows best. In the case of life-long junkie Burroughs, this meant writing about addiction. The genius of Burroughs as a writer is his ability to turn this personal struggle with drugs into a metaphor for power. Not just for political power, but for power constantly attempting to invades us from all corners of the universe. In Burroughs mythology for the space-age, the word is a virus from outer space; an intergalactic agent that has infected us with the word in order to poison our brain. The irony is that it takes a writer to kick us from the habit of the word. By juxtaposing words into sentences, strings of words not represented in our brains, the words become meaningless and its control over us is rendered harmless. The cut-up is a method for direct action against mind control.

Burroughs preferred to keep to himself. Burroughs hated people who talked too much. Burroughs advocated MOBism: Mind your Own Business-ism. Consequently much of his works are elaborate exercises of sardonic revenge on those two agents of control whose prime business it is, to do mind other peoples business: politics and religion. In the same vain the cut-up is a survivalist tactic against forces keeping us away from the 'Naked Lunch', that moment everybody sees what's at the end of every fork: control. In this wor(l)dwide conspiracy, writing reclaims possession of the word while the cut-up redefines the words from the bottom-up.

But Burroughs didn't stop with text, together with Gysin and Ian Sommerville, a BBC sound-engineer, they experimented with tape-recorders. Recording sounds on top of each other, splicing them, combining them with sounds from other sources. From here Burroughs postulated the next step: "Riot sounds produce riots". Cut-ups as engineered distortions of causality in actual physic spaces. Sounds recorded during one riot can, when played elsewhere, recreate this earlier event. Information, with tape-recorders added to background noise, can be subliminally imprinted on the brain; gossip thus spread, will be on everybody's mind, nobody knows how they know it or where they heard it first. Here, at the height of his argument while the seventies passed into the eighties, Burroughs abandoned further cut-up experiments. Former dreams of cut-up militia's made way for a persistent study into immortality (and cats). The possibility of DNA cut-ups, unless by atom bomb, seem to be too sophisticated for Burroughs. Surgical transplantation of heads of people killed during hanging (but only if this hanging led to wild orgasm), as is the mean theme in the 'Cities of the Red Night', could be regarded as a last remnant of the cut-up in Burroughs evolved thinking about systems of control.