Cut-up technique

For the decorative art, see decoupage.

The cut-up technique is an aleatory literary technique in which a text is cut up and rearranged to create a new text. Most commonly, cut-ups are used to offer a non-linear alternative to traditional reading and writing.^{[citation needed]}

The concept can be traced to at least the Dadaists of the 1920s, but was popularized in the late 1950s and early 1960s by writer William S. Burroughs, and has since been used in a wide variety of contexts.

Technique

The cut-up and the closely associated fold-in are the two main techniques:

• Cut-up is performed by taking a finished and fully linear text and cutting it in pieces with a few or single words on each piece. The resulting pieces are then rearranged into a new text.
• Fold-in is the technique of taking two sheets of linear text (with the same linespacing), folding each sheet in half vertically and combining with the other, then reading across the resulting page.

History in literature

A precedent of the technique occurred during a Dadaist rally in the 1920s in which Tristan Tzara offered to create a poem on the spot by pulling words at random from a hat. Collage, which was popularized roughly contemporaneously with the Surrealist movement, sometimes incorporated texts such as newspapers or brochures. Prior to this event, the technique had been published in an issue of 391 with in the poem by Tzara, dada manifesto on feeble love and bitter love under the sub-title, TO MAKE A DADAIST POEM ^[1]

Burroughs cited T. S. Eliot's poem, The Waste Land (1922) and John Dos Passos' U.S.A. trilogy, which incorporated newspaper clippings, as early examples of the cut ups he popularized.

Gil J. Wolman developed cut-up techniques as part of his lettrist practice in the early 1950s.

Also in the 1950s, painter and writer Brion Gysin more fully developed the cut-up method after accidentally re-discovering it. He had placed layers of newspapers as a mat to protect a tabletop from being scratched while he cut papers with a razor blade. Upon cutting through the newspapers, Gysin noticed that the sliced layers offered interesting juxtapositions of text and image. He began deliberately cutting newspaper articles into sections, which he randomly rearranged. The book Minutes to Go resulted from his initial cut-up experiment: unedited and unchanged cut-ups which emerged as coherent and meaningful prose. South African poet Sinclair Beiles also used this technique and co-authored Minutes To Go.

Gysin introduced Burroughs to the technique at the Beat Hotel. The pair later applied the technique to printed media and audio recordings in an effort to decode the material's implicit content, hypothesizing that such a technique could be used to discover the true meaning of a given text. Burroughs also suggested cut-ups may be effective as a form of divination saying, "When you cut into the present the future leaks out."^[2] Burroughs also further developed the "fold-in" technique. In 1977, Burroughs and Gysin published The Third Mind, a collection of cut-up writings and essays on the form. Jeff Nuttall's publications "My Own Mag", was another important outlet for the then-radical technique.

Argentine writer Julio Cortázar often used cut ups in his 1963 novel Hopscotch.

Since the 1990s, Jeff Noon uses a similar remixing technique in his writing based on practices prevalent in Dub music. He expanded upon this with his Cobralingus system, which breaks down a piece of writing, going as far as turning individual words into anagrams, then melding the results into a narrative.

Musical influence

From the early 1970s, David Bowie has used cut-ups to create some of his lyrics. This technique influenced Kurt Cobain's songwriting.^[3] Thom Yorke applied a similar method in Radiohead's Kid A (2000) album, writing single lines, putting them into a hat, and drawing them out at random while the band rehearsed the songs.

William S. Burroughs taught the cut-up technique to musician Genesis P-Orridge in 1971 as a method for "altering reality". His explanation was that everything is recorded, and if it is recorded, then it can be edited (P-Orridge, 2003).

Stephen Mallinder of Cabaret Voltaire reported to Inpress magazine's Andrez Bergen that "I do think the manipulation of sound in our early days - the physical act of cutting up tapes, creating tape loops and all that - has a strong reference to Burroughs and Gysin...."^[4]

See also

• Dissociated press
• Plunderphonics
• Surrealist techniques
• Assemblage (composition)

References

1. ^ "manifestos: dada manifesto on feeble love and bitter love by tristan tzara, 12th december 1920". 391. 1920-12-12. http://www.391.org/manifestos/19201212tristantzara_dmonflabl.htm. Retrieved 2011-06-27. 
2. ^ Break Through in Grey Room
3. ^ See the notes for The "Priest" They Called Him, a 1993 collaboration between Burroughs and Cobain, released by Tim/Kerr records.
4. ^ "Vintage Cab Sav," Andrez Bergen. Inpress, 1996.

External links

• UbuWeb: William S. Burroughs featuring a cut-up, K-9 Was in Combat with the Alien Mind-Screens (1965), made with Ian Sommerville
• Public assemblage a free digital version of the cut-up technique