Cut-up technique
Encyclopedia
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.
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.
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
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." 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.
has used cut-ups to create some of his lyrics. This technique influenced Kurt Cobain
's songwriting. 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...."
Aleatory
Aleatoricism is the incorporation of chance into the process of creation, especially the creation of art or media. The word derives from the Latin word alea, the rolling of dice...
literary technique
Literary technique
A literary technique is any element or the entirety of elements a writer intentionally uses in the structure of their work...
in which a text
Writing
Writing is the representation of language in a textual medium through the use of a set of signs or symbols . It is distinguished from illustration, such as cave drawing and painting, and non-symbolic preservation of language via non-textual media, such as magnetic tape audio.Writing most likely...
is cut up and rearranged to create a new text. Most commonly, cut-ups are used to offer a non-linear
Nonlinear (arts)
Nonlinear narrative, disjointed narrative or disrupted narrative is a narrative technique, sometimes used in literature, film, hypertext websites and other narratives, wherein events are portrayed out of chronological order...
alternative to traditional reading and writing.
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
William S. Burroughs
William Seward Burroughs II was an American novelist, poet, essayist and spoken word performer. A primary figure of the Beat Generation and a major postmodernist author, he is considered to be "one of the most politically trenchant, culturally influential, and innovative artists of the 20th...
, 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 TzaraTristan Tzara
Tristan Tzara was a Romanian and French avant-garde poet, essayist and performance artist. Also active as a journalist, playwright, literary and art critic, composer and film director, he was known best for being one of the founders and central figures of the anti-establishment Dada movement...
offered to create a poem on the spot by pulling words at random from a hat. Collage
Collage
A collage is a work of formal art, primarily in the visual arts, made from an assemblage of different forms, thus creating a new whole....
, 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
Burroughs cited T. S. Eliot
T. S. Eliot
Thomas Stearns "T. S." Eliot OM was a playwright, literary critic, and arguably the most important English-language poet of the 20th century. Although he was born an American he moved to the United Kingdom in 1914 and was naturalised as a British subject in 1927 at age 39.The poem that made his...
's poem, The Waste Land
The Waste Land
The Waste Land[A] is a 434-line[B] modernist poem by T. S. Eliot published in 1922. It has been called "one of the most important poems of the 20th century." Despite the poem's obscurity—its shifts between satire and prophecy, its abrupt and unannounced changes of speaker, location and time, its...
(1922) and John Dos Passos
John Dos Passos
John Roderigo Dos Passos was an American novelist and artist.-Early life:Born in Chicago, Illinois, Dos Passos was the illegitimate son of John Randolph Dos Passos , a distinguished lawyer of Madeiran Portuguese descent, and Lucy Addison Sprigg Madison of Petersburg, Virginia. The elder Dos Passos...
' U.S.A. trilogy
U.S.A. trilogy
The U.S.A. Trilogy is a major work of American writer John Dos Passos, comprising the novels The 42nd Parallel ; 1919, also known as Nineteen Nineteen ; and The Big Money . The three books were first published together in a single volume titled U.S.A by Harcourt Brace in January, 1938...
, which incorporated newspaper clippings, as early examples of the cut ups he popularized.
Gil J. Wolman
Gil J. Wolman
Gil Joseph Wolman was a French artist, born in Paris in 1929 and dying there in 1995. His work encompassed painting, poetry and film-making. He was a member of Isidore Isou's avant garde Letterist movement in the early 1950s, then becoming a central figure in the Letterist International, the group...
developed cut-up techniques as part of his lettrist
Lettrism
Lettrism is a French avant-garde movement, established in Paris in the mid-1940s by Romanian immigrant Isidore Isou. In a body of work totaling hundreds of volumes, Isou and the Lettrists have applied their theories to all areas of art and culture, most notably in poetry, film, painting and...
practice in the early 1950s.
Also in the 1950s, painter and writer Brion Gysin
Brion Gysin
Brion Gysin was a painter, writer, sound poet, and performance artist born in Taplow, Buckinghamshire.He is best known for his discovery of the cut-up technique, used by his friend, the novelist William S. Burroughs...
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
Razor blade
Razor blade may refer to* A razor* The Razor Blade, a 1920s racing car* Razor blade steel, a type of steel originally designed specifically for razor blades...
. 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
Sinclair Beiles
Sinclair Beiles - was a South African beat poet and editor for Maurice Girodias at the Olympia Press in Paris. He developed along with William S...
also used this technique and co-authored Minutes To Go.
Gysin introduced Burroughs to the technique at the Beat Hotel
Beat Hotel
The Beat Hotel was a small, run-down hotel of 42 rooms at 9 Rue Gît-le-Cœur in the Latin Quarter of Paris, notable chiefly as a residence for members of the Beat poetry movement of the mid-20th century -Overview:...
. The pair later applied the technique to printed media and audio recordings in an effort to decode the material's implicit content, hypothesizing
Hypothesis
A hypothesis is a proposed explanation for a phenomenon. The term derives from the Greek, ὑποτιθέναι – hypotithenai meaning "to put under" or "to suppose". For a hypothesis to be put forward as a scientific hypothesis, the scientific method requires that one can test it...
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
Divination
Divination is the attempt to gain insight into a question or situation by way of an occultic standardized process or ritual...
saying, "When you cut into the present the future leaks out." Burroughs also further developed the "fold-in" technique. In 1977, Burroughs and Gysin published The Third Mind
The Third Mind
The Third Mind is a book by Beat Generation novelist William S. Burroughs and artist/poet/novelist Brion Gysin. First published in a French-language edition in 1977, it was first published in English in 1978....
, a collection of cut-up writings and essays on the form. Jeff Nuttall's publications "My Own Mag
My Own Mag
My Own Mag was an independent publication, or zine, published by Jeff Nuttall from 1960 to 1967.The influential, but rather unknown, publication is in retrospect most heralded for being a platform for William S...
",
was another important outlet for the then-radical technique.
Argentine writer Julio Cortázar
Julio Cortázar
Julio Cortázar, born Jules Florencio Cortázar, was an Argentine writer. Cortázar, known as one of the founders of the Latin American Boom, influenced an entire generation of Spanish speaking readers and writers in the Americas and Europe.-Early life:Cortázar's parents, Julio José Cortázar and...
often used cut ups in his 1963 novel Hopscotch.
Since the 1990s, Jeff Noon
Jeff Noon
Jeff Noon is a novelist, short story writer and playwright whose works make extensive use of word play and fantasy. Noon's speculative fiction books have ties to the works of writers such as Lewis Carroll and Jorge Luis Borges...
uses a similar remixing technique in his writing based on practices prevalent in Dub music
Dub music
Dub is a genre of music which grew out of reggae music in the 1960s, and is commonly considered a subgenre, though it has developed to extend beyond the scope of reggae...
. 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 BowieDavid Bowie
David Bowie is an English musician, actor, record producer and arranger. A major figure for over four decades in the world of popular music, Bowie is widely regarded as an innovator, particularly for his work in the 1970s...
has used cut-ups to create some of his lyrics. This technique influenced Kurt Cobain
Kurt Cobain
Kurt Donald Cobain was an American singer-songwriter, musician and artist, best known as the lead singer and guitarist of the grunge band Nirvana...
's songwriting. Thom Yorke
Thom Yorke
Thomas "Thom" Edward Yorke is an English musician who is the lead vocalist and principal songwriter for Radiohead. He mainly plays guitar and piano, but he has also played drums and bass guitar...
applied a similar method in Radiohead
Radiohead
Radiohead are an English rock band from Abingdon, Oxfordshire, formed in 1985. The band consists of Thom Yorke , Jonny Greenwood , Ed O'Brien , Colin Greenwood and Phil Selway .Radiohead released their debut single "Creep" in 1992...
's Kid A
Kid A
Kid A is the fourth studio album by the English rock band Radiohead, released in October 2000 by the Parlophone label. A commercial success worldwide, Kid A went platinum in its first week of release in the United Kingdom. Despite the lack of an official single or music video as publicity, 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
Genesis P-Orridge
Genesis Breyer P-Orridge is an English singer-songwriter, musician, writer and artist. P-Orridge's early confrontational performance work in COUM Transmissions in the late 1960s and early 1970s along with the industrial band Throbbing Gristle, which dealt with subjects such as prostitution,...
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
Stephen Mallinder
Stephen William Mallinder was a founding member of Cabaret Voltaire, Sassi and Loco and the Ku-Ling Bros. While in Cabaret Voltaire he contributed lead vocals, bass and occasional keyboards.-Biography:...
of Cabaret Voltaire
Cabaret Voltaire (band)
Cabaret Voltaire were a British music group from Sheffield, England.Initially composed of Stephen Mallinder, Richard H. Kirk and Chris Watson, the group was named after the Cabaret Voltaire, a nightclub in Zürich, Switzerland that was a centre for the early Dada movement.Their earliest performances...
reported to Inpress
Inpress
Inpress is a free weekly tabloid-sized music magazine that is released in Melbourne, Geelong and Mornington Peninsula areas of Victoria, Australia...
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...."
See also
- Dissociated pressDissociated pressDissociated press is an algorithm for generating text based on another text. It is intended for transforming any text into potentially humorous garbage. The name is a play on "Associated Press".An implementation of the algorithm is available in Emacs....
- PlunderphonicsPlunderphonicsPlunderphonics is a term coined by composer John Oswald in 1985 in his essay Plunderphonics, or Audio Piracy as a Compositional Prerogative. It has since been applied to any music made by taking one or more existing audio recordings and altering them in some way to make a new composition...
- Surrealist techniquesSurrealist techniquesSurrealism in art, poetry, and literature uses numerous techniques and games to provide inspiration. Many of these are said to free imagination by producing a creative process free of conscious control. The importance of the unconscious as a source of inspiration is central to the nature of...
- Assemblage (composition)Assemblage (composition)Assemblage refers to a text "built primarily and explicitly from existing texts in order to solve a writing or communication problem in a new context". The concept was first proposed by Johndan Johnson-Eilola and Stuart Selber in the journal, Computers & Composition, in 2007...
External links
- UbuWeb: William S. Burroughs featuring a cut-up, K-9 Was in Combat with the Alien Mind-Screens (1965), made with Ian SommervilleIan Sommerville (technician)Ian Sommerville was an electronics technician and computer programmer. He is primarily known through his association with William S. Burroughs's circle of Beat Generation figures, and lived at Paris's so-called "Beat Hotel" by 1960, when they were regulars there, becoming Burroughs's lover and...
- Public assemblage a free digital version of the cut-up technique