Most of the world’s problems can be traced back directly to the first old white male sociopath. – Barker Ajax
By Faena Aleph
This surrealist method was the creative vehicle for some of the most brilliant creative figures of the 20th century.
Just as Picasso’s collage paintings and Duchamp’s ready-made sculptures became decisive techniques to present a reality analogous to dreams, writing also had its encounter with ‘pure automaton thinking of the mind,’ surrealism, through the cut-up technique.
Created by the poet Tristan Tzara, ‘cut up’ is the deconstruction of a primary text using the random cutting up of words and phrases to form new sentences and thus a new piece of writing. It is a process of extraction and reconstruction of a new meaning of language, based on chaotic intuition and the free creative flow.
The rediscovery of the technique is thanks to Brion Gysin, who showed the method to William Burroughs and he, in turn, spread it among dozens of musicians and artists under his influence. Originally the technique consisted of cutting out one or several words from a printed work and then sticking them randomly onto another piece of paper. However, Gysin modernized the idea by using a random sequence generator with a computer, with which he wrote his famous poems of permutation and, together with Burroughs created, using this method, a long series of writings and recordings.
Burroughs defined the cut-up method as an art for filtering out the future between the lines. He said that everything recorded could be edited, including reality itself. In this sense, it is a method for reimagining the reality from the random deconstruction of its semantics.
When Genesis P-Orridge and David Bowie began using the technique, cut up went from being a purely literary instrument to permeating the music scene. Bowie called it a kind of “Western Tarot” both as a tool for composing as a means of seeking inspiration. Many of his songs were written using the technique, which allowed him to be able to create “a kind of ‘story ingredients’ list, I suppose…”
Another of the great figures who used the method was Bob Dylan, who harnessed it to mine his frankly literary vein. “The ghost of electricity howls in the bones of her face” was written using the technique. Iggy Pop, Joy Division and even The Beatles (who used it to cut up the tapes of an orchestra recording and put it back together) are examples of those who used it to make subconscious chance rebel against the conscious order within the creative process.
But the breach that opened up in those years was continued decades later. Kurt Cobain, who had the opportunity to meet and collaborate with Burroughs, was one of the maximum exponents in the 1990s of cut-up literature, declaring that his lyrics were the result of his cut up poems. Later, Thom Yorke would imitate the form that was supposedly first used by the surrealists, pulling cut up words out of a hat to write the entire Kid A album.
Although it is hard to imagine that written language doesn’t require reason or a logical syntax to reach an understanding of ideas, each of these musical references showed the fruitful relationship between the random, the authentic and the literary. And in that same sense the cut-up technique showed itself to be a creative vehicle to modify the codes of a reality molded to linear reasoning.
The (surprisingly long) history of the cut-up technique
By Austin Kleon. September 18, 2018.
William Burroughs’ cut-up technique has directly influenced so much of contemporary culture that it’s hard imagine that there was long a history of literary cut-ups before him. (It reminds me of Brian Eno’s line: “Naming something is the same as inventing it.”) Here’s how Burroughs explained it:
The method is simple. Here is one way to do it. Take a page. Like this page. Now cut down the middle and cross the middle. You have four sections: 1 2 3 4 … one two three four. Now rearrange the sections placing section four with section one and section two with section three. And you have a new page. Sometimes it says much the same thing. Sometimes something quite different–(cutting up political speeches is an interesting exercise) — in any case you will find that it says something and something quite definite. Take any poet or writer you fancy. Heresay, or poems you have read over many times. The words have lost meaning and life through years of repetition. Now take the poem and type out selected passages. Fill a page with excerpts. Now cut the page. You have a new poem. As many poems as you like.
I remember reading Burroughs’ (amazing) Paris Review interview, and discovering that he actually found out about the technique from his pal Brion Gysin. It sent me on a search for other precursors, which I detailed in the history section of Newspaper Blackout. Here’s the excerpt on Tristan Tzara, who was making cut-ups 30 years before Gysin:
I kept digging, and upon reading Paul Collins’ 2004 Believer piece “The Lost Symphony,” I found out about Caleb Whitefoord, a neighbor and best friend of Benjamin Franklin, who was doing a form of cut-ups in the late eighteenth century:
It was Whitefoord’s genius to notice that when you took a broadsheet newspaper of tightly set columns, and started reading across the paper’s columns—rather than reading down to the column’s next line—you could achieve what he described as “coupled persons and things most heterogeneous, things so opposite in the nature and qualities, that no man alive would ever have thought of joining them together.” Whitefoord called this cross-reading, and he was so amused by it that he would publish sheets of his favorite specimens and hand them out to friends in Fleet Street coffeehouses:
Dr. Salamander will, by her Majesty’s command, undertake a voyage round—
The head-dress of the present month.Wanted to take care of an elderly gentlewoman—
An active young man just come from the country.Yesterday the new Lord Mayor was sworn in,
and afterwards toss’d and gored several Persons.Removed to Marylebone, for the benefit of the air—
The City and Liberties of Westminster.Notice is hereby given—
And no notice taken.
It seems like I keep filling in little bits here and there over time. Just this week I learned about Lewis Carroll’s “Poeta Fit, Non Nascitur” (a reversal of the Latin adage, poeta nascitur non fit, or, “a poet is born, not made”) which answered the question of “How do I be a poet?” in 1883:
For first you write a sentence,
And then you chop it small;
Then mix the bits, and sort them out
Just as they chance to fall:
The order of the phrases makes
No difference at all.