The History and Practice of Cut-Ups

Writers have always used materials that were not their own inventions. Oral epics and folktales depend on stock phrases and narratives, and poets have always made use of complex and subtle allusions. The novel, big enough to contain just about anything, might repeat well-known stories, jokes, and received ideas, and often in a parody of styles. Cut-ups, however, are not just a difference in the degree to which a writer depends on readymade materials but a difference in kind. Making a subtle allusion with another poet’s phrase or retelling a well-worn chestnut is hardly like taking two completely different texts, slicing into them with a blade, and rearranging the fragments to produce a new text. Introducing the play of chance and sometimes made of entirely found material, cut-ups do conceptual, aesthetic, and quite literal violence to ideas of writing. In his new book, Shift Linguals, Edward S. Robinson gives a remarkable history of how this technique evolved, while recent work by Amira Hanafi and David Lespiau remind us that writers are still taking cut-up techniques in new directions.

For Robinson, to understand the cut-up is to understand the work of William S. Burroughs and his influence on two generations of writers. In Nova Express (1964), Burroughs writes, “Shift linguals—Free doorways—Cut word lines—Photo falling—Word falling—Break Through in Grey Room.” Burroughs saw cut-ups as a political intervention. If language created habits of thought, expectations, essentially an entire horizon of ideology, violently cutting into controlling texts undoes their influence, reveals hidden agendas, and opens unforeseeable possibilities for thought and action. As Robinson puts it, “Integral to the nature of breaking down the control system were the random and collaborative aspects of the approach to the [cut-up] experiments. The random factor meant that not only was the control language held over the writer being broken down, but also the control the writer has over the words is diminished.”

Though Burroughs has written the most ideologically critical and, remarkably, aesthetically successful cut-ups, he did not invent the technique. His collaborator Brion Gysin discovered them by chance cutting through several newspapers, finding that by rearranging fragments, he could generate comic and often shocking results. Moreover, it seemed that time itself could be rearranged, “By cutting and splicing the various texts at random, the timings and locations are altered, on a galactic scale.” Though Gysin would continue to be interested in cut-ups and develop other techniques to physically manipulate words, for himself he “considered the power of these collage texts to be limited and short lived.”

To understand the cut-up is to understand the work of William S. Burroughs and his influence on two generations of writers.

Gysin’s observation in the face of Burroughs’s staggering achievement is a problem that haunts Robinson’s book. Arguably, cut-ups often present an aesthetic dead end, since the application of the technique tends to produce a kind of white noise that finally becomes merely neutral, without critical insight or beauty. Robinson presents the little-known work of Claude Pélieu and Carl Weissner, along with the far more famous John Giorno as the first generation of Burroughs’s successors. Giorno’s work depends far less on cut-ups than found phrases and permutation techniques, one of the same escape routes from the aesthetic dead end that Gysin took. Robinson’s account of the work of Pélieu and Weissner is fascinating, showing the deep influence of Burroughs, and looking at the importance of small-press publishers for radical forms of postmodernism. Their work itself, though, most often outstrips either the frames of narrative or the constraints of something like...