The Cut-up Method of Thinking

"Words don't have brands on them the way cattle do" said Burroughs as he sipped his Martini. Beckett scoffed as Burroughs went on, "Shakespeare, Rimbaud, newspapers, magazines, conversations, letters..." He rambled on in his slow drawn out way: "I've used them all."

Tristan Tzara was expelled from the Surrealists after he made a poem from words pulled from scraps of paper in a hat. Brion Gysin was the first to really develop the technique of cut-ups. He saw it as a way of writing with no need for rearranging what was scrambled.

Burroughs was greatly influenced by Gysin but he was able to take it one step further: He considered it only one of his writing tools along with newspaper articles, his dreams, seemingly random thoughts and any kind of word in his immediate vicinity. He took the scrambled text and reworked it until he felt it said something. Burroughs believed that he was not the writer but a transcriber of what was already written. It was no trouble if the words he wrote weren't his, since no words belonged to any writer, just like colours don't belong to painters.

There are people who would disagree. There are people who would think Klein Blue is not an obsurd concept. We already have trademarked phrases like "Do it" and songs we cannot sing without paying royalties like "Happy Birthday." We accept our limits in human expression to protect profits and keep society under control. The cut-up, fold-in or any form of scrambling these and other words destroys their ownership and any conscious intent from the "writer". This is not a modernist idea.

This is an idea from people who wanted to destroy the agents of control. Burroughs called the word a virus, something which infects us and duplicates itself. Certain words have strong effects on us. These are either seen as holy or obscene. Other words can change our consciousness like a chant or song. By cutting these words up Burroughs believed that he could become free from their effects.

Fold-in: taking the text of one page and cutting it into quarters -The quarters are switched around to combine columns in a new order. For example q.1 switched with q. 4. This method was used by Burroughs.

Cut-up: a general term for scrambled writing - A technique invented by Brion Gysin in the 1950s but also used before this time as an experimental method.