Calling All Agents

By slicing into messages of mass-dissemination from newspapers,
film or audio- tape, mind-bending coincidences emerge
that otherwise would have remained invisible.

The Cut-Up Method of Brion Gysin

At a surrealist rally in the 1920s Tristan Tzara the man from nowhere proposed to create a poem on the spot by pulling words out of a hat. A riot ensued wrecked the theater. André Breton expelled Tristan Tzara from the movement and grounded the cut-ups on the Freudian couch. 

In the summer of 1959 Brion Gysin painter and writer cut newspaper articles into sections and rearranged the sections at random. Minutes to Go resulted from this initial cut-up experiment. Minutes to Go contains unedited unchanged cut ups emerging as quite coherent and meaningful prose. The cut-up method brings to writers the collage, which has been used by painters for fifty years. And used by the moving and still camera. In fact all street shots from movie or still cameras are by the unpredictable factors of passers by and juxtaposition cut-ups. And photographers will tell you that often their best shots are accidents . . . writers will tell you the same. The best writing seems to be done almost by accident but writers until the cut-up method was made explicit— all writing is in fact cut ups. I will return to this point—had no way to produce the accident of spontaneity. You can not will spontaneity. But you can introduce the unpredictable spontaneous factor with a pair of scissors.

A WAY TO CUT THROUGH THE STRAITJACKET OF PERCEPTION
THE ART OF THE CUT UP

Cut-ups are the art of literally cutting up text and images in random fashion and then reassembling them to form new, unexpected patterns. From pasting together texts and images from differing contexts, cutting out and rearranging individual words, incorporating news articles with classic literature, and splicing together audio, by doing so, Burroughs felt that he could destabilize language and get closer to the truth. Burroughs saw the cut-up as a means of exposing the ideologies implicit in ordered narratives while offering insights into the mysterious. Burroughs stated that Gysin ‘the only man that I’ve ever respected in my life’.

In The Third Mind published in 1978, written in collaboration with Burroughs and Gysin shared the late evolution of Naked Lunch and the innovation of the cut-up technique used to construct the novel:

William Burroughs and I first went into techniques of writing, together, back in room #15 of the Beat Hotel during the cold Paris spring of 1958. Naked Lunch manuscript of every age and condition floated around the hermetically sealed room as Burroughs, thrashing about in an ectoplasmic cloud of smoke, ranted through the gargantuan roles of Doc Benway, A. J., Clem & Jody and hundreds of others he never had time to ram through the typewriter. “Am I an octopus?” he used to whine as he shuffled through shoals of typescript with all tentacles waving in the undersea atmosphere.

While cutting a mount for a drawing in room #15, I sliced through a pile of newspapers with my Stanley blade and thought of what I had said to Burroughs some six months earlier about he necessity for turning painters’ techniques directly into writing. I picked up the raw words and began to piece together texts that later appeared as “First Cut-Ups” in “Minutes to Go.” At the time I thought them hilariously funny and hysterically meaningful. I laughed so hard my neighbors thought I’d flipped. I hope you may discover this unusual pleasure for yourselves—this shortlived but unique intoxication. Cut up this page you are reading and see what happens. See what I say as well as hear it.’

Mind-bending coincidences CUT THROUGH
THE STRAITJACKET OF coincidences
A WAY TO emerge THROUGH visual LANGUAGE

Calling all reactive agents
Calling all digital agents
Calling all cosmic agents

I don't know about where fiction ordinarily directs itself, but I am quite deliberately addressing myself to the whole area of what we call dreams. Precisely what is a dream? A certain juxtaposition of word and image. I've recently done a lot of experiments with scrapbooks. I'll read in the newspaper something that reminds me of or has relation to something I've written. I'll cut out the picture or article and paste it in a scrapbook beside the words from my book. Or I'll be walking down the street and I'll suddenly see a scene from my book and I'll photograph it and put it in a scrapbook. I've found that when preparing a page, I'll almost invariably dream that night something relating to this juxtaposition of word and image. In other words, I've been interested in precisely how word and image get around on very, very complex association lines. I do a lot of exercises in what I call time travel, in taking coordinates, such as what I photographed on the train, what I was thinking about at the time, what I was reading and what I wrote; all of this to see how completely I can project myself back to that one point in time.

A WAY TO CUT THROUGH coincidences
By slicing THE STRAITJACKET OF LANGUAGE
mind-bending coincidences emerge

We Are the agents
I've come to free the perception

"Language," William S. Burroughs reminded us, "is a virus from outer space." Performance artist Laurie Anderson adds, "That's why I'd rather hear your name than see your face." This metaphor captures beautifully both the power and the danger presented by the task of communicating the "flux of wholeness," as Heather Raikes describes the rheomode. Raikes' use of the rheomode suggests that technology might be seen not just as a channel for communication and performance, but more radically as the environment in which subjects serve as conduits for experience. 

A virus operates autonomously, without human intervention. It attaches itself to a host and feeds off of it, growing and spreading from host to host. Language infects us; its power derives not from its straightforward ability to communicate or persuade but rather from this infectious nature, this power of bits of language to graft itself onto other bits of language, spreading and reproducing, using human beings as hosts. The notion of the meme -- coined in 1976 by Richard Dawkins to illustrate the field of memetics -- crystallizes this view of the communication process. Georges Bataille similarly argued that communication was best understood from the perspective of contagion. In Bataille any human being is no more than a conduit for communicative process, a channel for ideas which pass through him/her."If, as it appears to me, a book is communication, then the author is only a link among many readings."* The author is simply a node on a network, through which ideas pass. 

Come to free the images
To free the visions come
Free the dreams to come
The visions come to free
Images come to free thee!

In The Third Mind:

You and Brion have described your collaborations over the years as the products of a "third mind." What's the source of this concept?
BURROUGHS: A book called Think and Grow Rich.
GYSIN: It says that when you put two minds together. . .
BURROUGHS: . . . there is always a third mind ...
GYSIN : . . . a third and superior mind . . .
BURROUGHS: ... as an unseen collaborator.
GYSIN: That is where we picked up the title. Our book The Third Mind is about all the cut-up materials.
The book is a statement, in words and pictures, of what the two of you have achieved through your collaborations?
BURROUGHS: Yes, exactly that, from the very first cut-ups through elaboration into scrapbook layouts, cut texts and images.

THE STRAITJACKET OF coincidences
A WAY TO CUT THROUGH invisible
mind-bending reality emerge

I am reality and I am hooked, on, reality.
That is, I need a human host.

am quite deliberately addressing myself to the whole area of what we call dreams. Precisely what is a dream? A certain juxtaposition of word and image. I've recently done a lot of experiments with scrapbooks. I'll read in the newspaper something that reminds me of or has relation to something I've written. I'll cut out the picture or article and paste it in a scrapbook beside the words from my book. Or I'll be walking down the street and I'll suddenly see a scene from my book and I'll photograph it and put it in a scrapbook. I've found that when preparing a page, I'll almost invariably dream that night something relating to this juxtaposition of word and image. In other words, I've been interested in precisely how word and image get around on very, very complex association lines.

Words stand in the way of
nonbody experience
It's time we thought about 
leaving the body behind.

translating the connections
between words and images

time in images, 
with the inner voice silent

Extraordinary experience, and 
one that will carry over into dreams. 

When you start thinking in images, 
without words, you're well on the way

Carefully memorize the meaning of a passage, 
read it without the words' making 
any sound whatever in the mind's ear.

the wordless state, it's the evolutionary trend
think for any length of time in images, with the inner voice silent
the wordless state so desirable

Most serious writers refuse to make themselves available to the things that technology is doing. I've never been able to understand this sort of fear. Many of them are afraid of tape recorders and the idea of using any mechanical means for literary purposes seems to them some sort of a sacrilege. This is one objection to the cut-ups. There's been a lot of that, a sort of superstitious reverence for the word. My God, they say, you can't cut up these words. Why can't I?  I find it much easier to get interest in the cut-ups from people who are not writers— doctors, lawyers, or engineers, any open-minded, fairly intelligent person—than from those who are

Any narrative passage or any passage, say, of poetic images is subject to any number of variations, all of which may be interesting and valid in their own right. A page of Rim- baud cut up and rearranged will give you quite new images. Rimbaud images—real Rimbaud images—but new ones

Word falling. Photo falling. Breakthrough in grey room.
What to do with all this?
Stick it on the wall along with the photographs and see what it looks like
It’s just material, after all. There is nothing sacred about words

WELCOME TO CUT UP AT THE BEAT HOTEL

• Burroughs, W. S. & Gysin, B. The Third Mind (New York: Viking Press, 1978). Via Nikoskorpio.net.
• Miles, B. The Beat Hotel: Ginsberg, Burroughs, and Corso in Paris, 1958-1963 (Grove Press, 2001). Excerpt via The New York Times.
• Miles, B. William S. Burroughs: A Life (Hachette, 2014). Preview via Google Books.
• Photographs via October Gallery