Fact-checked by Grok 2 weeks ago

Cut-up technique

The cut-up technique is a literary and artistic method involving the physical cutting and random rearrangement of written text fragments to create novel compositions that disrupt linear narratives and reveal subconscious associations.^[1] Developed primarily by the artist Brion Gysin and writer William S. Burroughs in the late 1950s, it draws from collage practices in visual art and aims to liberate language from predetermined meanings, often producing surreal or prophetic effects.^[2] The technique's core process entails selecting a page of text, slicing it into sections such as quadrants, and shuffling the pieces to form unexpected juxtapositions.^[1] Rooted in avant-garde precedents like Dada and surrealism, the cut-up method has been applied in literature, music, film, and digital media to deconstruct language and challenge perceptual norms. Burroughs and Gysin extended it through variations like the fold-in and collaborations such as The Third Mind (1977), influencing postmodern aesthetics and cultural recycling.^[1]

Origins

Invention by Brion Gysin

Brion Gysin (1916–1986) was a British-Canadian painter, writer, sound poet, and performance artist whose multifaceted career spanned visual arts, literature, and experimental forms.^[3] After early travels and studies in painting under figures like Leonor Fini, Gysin settled in Tangier, Morocco, in the 1950s, where he operated the 1001 Nights restaurant and engaged with expatriate literary circles, including encounters with Beat writers.^[4] By 1958, he had relocated to Paris's Beat Hotel at 9 Rue Gît-le-Coeur, a hub for avant-garde experimentation that fostered his interdisciplinary pursuits.^[5] The cut-up technique emerged from an accidental discovery in the summer of 1959 at the Beat Hotel, when Gysin sliced through layers of newspapers spread on a table to protect its surface during a creative task, inadvertently cutting articles into sections.^[1] Rearranging these fragments at random, he observed how the recombination produced novel, coherent phrases that disrupted conventional syntax and revealed unexpected connections, prompting him to conceptualize non-linear text manipulation as a deliberate artistic method.^[6] This incident marked the technique's modern reinvention, distinct from earlier precedents, and Gysin immediately recognized its potential to generate fresh narratives from existing material.^[7] Gysin's early experiments applied the method to his own poetry and prose, transforming linear writing into fragmented, associative compositions that emphasized chance and juxtaposition.^[8] A key outcome was the 1960 publication Minutes to Go, co-authored with William S. Burroughs and others, which featured unedited cut-ups from newspapers like the London Observer and Daily Mail, demonstrating the technique's capacity to yield meaningful, prophetic-like prose without authorial intervention.^[9] These initial works showcased Gysin's application to short poetic forms, where rearranged snippets evoked surreal imagery and linguistic surprises. The technique drew direct inspiration from surrealist practices such as automatic writing, which sought to access unconscious content, and Dadaist collage methods that prioritized randomness over rational composition.^[10] Gysin explicitly acknowledged Tristan Tzara's 1920s Dada experiments, including a infamous rally where Tzara proposed generating poetry by drawing words from a hat, as a foundational precursor that validated cut-up's disruptive ethos.^[1] He promoted the method as a means to circumvent the constraints of linear narrative, arguing that it exposed hidden subconscious truths and linguistic "word lines" imposed by societal control, thereby liberating creative expression.^[11] Through such advocacy, Gysin positioned cut-up not merely as a gimmick but as a revelatory tool akin to psychic surgery on language.^[12]

Adoption and Refinement by William S. Burroughs

William S. Burroughs first encountered the cut-up technique through Brion Gysin at the Beat Hotel in Paris during late 1959 or early 1960.^[13]^[14] Immediately inspired, Burroughs experimented by applying the method to the final assembly of his then-forthcoming novel Naked Lunch (published 1959), juxtaposing disparate sections to create nonlinear narratives.^[15] In his 1961 essay "The Cut-Up Method of Brion Gysin," Burroughs elaborated on the technique's theoretical implications, portraying it as a tool to disrupt societal control systems by introducing randomness that counters predictable linguistic and political manipulations.^[6] He described language itself as a virus that propagates through association and habit, arguing that cut-ups expose this viral quality by rearranging words to reveal hidden meanings, coded messages, and subconscious connections otherwise obscured by conventional syntax.^[6] Burroughs posited that such rearrangements could shift sensory perceptions—transforming auditory elements into visual or olfactory ones—and liberate expression from imposed structures, drawing parallels to scientific strategies like game theory's use of unpredictability.^[6] Burroughs and Gysin collaborated on early publications showcasing cut-up texts, including Minutes to Go (1960), a slim volume co-authored with Sinclair Beiles and Gregory Corso that featured experimental prose fragments generated through the method.^[16] They followed this with The Exterminator (1960), another joint effort published by Auerhahn Press, containing Burroughs' cut-up compositions alongside Gysin's calligraphic designs, which further propagated the technique within avant-garde circles.^[17] Burroughs refined the cut-up process beyond Gysin's initial newspaper clippings, developing the "fold-in" technique, where two pages of text are folded vertically and superimposed to produce new juxtapositions along the central crease, often yielding surreal hybrids of meaning.^[18] He expanded source materials to include not only newspapers and novels but also personal letters, dream journals, and taped recordings, using scissors to dissect and reassemble them into multifaceted collages that emphasized multiplicity over linear authorship.^[19] Within the 1960s Beat scene, Burroughs' adoption of cut-ups garnered early critical attention through lectures and demonstrations, such as those documented in his archived materials from the era, where he illustrated the method's subversive potential to audiences in academic and literary settings.^[20] These presentations positioned cut-ups as a radical antidote to linguistic conformity, influencing fellow Beats and sparking debates on experimental writing's role in cultural disruption.^[21]

Methodology

Core Cut-up Process

The core cut-up process involves selecting diverse source texts, such as novels, newspapers, letters, or any printed material, to serve as the raw input for manipulation. These texts are then physically divided into smaller fragments—ranging from individual words and sentences to entire paragraphs—using simple tools like scissors or a razor blade. The fragments are shuffled or rearranged at random, often by tossing them into a container and drawing them out haphazardly, before being reassembled into a new, coherent or incoherent composition. This method, as described by Brion Gysin, can begin with a single page: cut it down the middle and across the middle to yield four sections, then recombine them by pairing opposites, such as section 1 with 4 and section 2 with 3, to generate unexpected juxtapositions.^[6]^[22] Central to the technique is the incorporation of chance and randomness, which disrupts the author's conscious control and contrasts sharply with conventional linear writing that follows deliberate narrative progression. Gysin emphasized that "you cannot will spontaneity, but you can introduce the unpredictable spontaneous factor with a pair of scissors," positioning the cut-up as a mechanical intervention to bypass habitual thought patterns and uncover latent meanings in language. William S. Burroughs extended this by advocating for the random rearrangement to expose "the hidden content" in everyday texts, such as political speeches or advertisements, arguing that it reveals underlying control mechanisms or prophetic elements otherwise obscured by standard composition.^[6]^[22] Similarly, fragments from Naked Lunch (1959), such as descriptions of urban decay and addiction, when sliced and reordered, produce hallucinatory narratives like merging "blue movie" scenes with "junkie" dialogues into unforeseen satirical critiques. These recombinations highlight how the technique transforms familiar prose into novel forms without requiring advanced skills.^[23]^[22] The process's accessibility is one of its defining strengths, demanding only everyday items like scissors, paper, and adhesive, thereby democratizing creative expression and making it available to anyone regardless of formal training. Gysin and Burroughs promoted it as a "writing machine for everybody—do it yourself," encouraging experimentation with personal or found texts to foster immediate, inclusive innovation in literature.^[22] Intended outcomes include the generation of surreal narratives that mimic subconscious flows, pointed political satire through ironic juxtapositions, and even prophetic insights, as the originators believed random cuts could divine hidden truths or future events embedded in existing language. For example, cutting and rearranging newspaper headlines or official statements often produced eerily prescient or subversive commentaries, aligning with the technique's aim to liberate language from authoritarian structures.^[6]^[22]

Variations and Tools

One prominent variation of the cut-up technique is the fold-in method, developed by William S. Burroughs, which involves folding a page of text down the middle and superimposing it over another page to create a hybrid composite read across both halves.^[18] This approach superimposes disparate sources to generate novel juxtapositions without physical cutting, allowing for fluid integration of linguistic elements from multiple texts.^[18] Extensions of the cut-up technique into scrapbooks and collages incorporate non-textual elements such as images, maps, and clippings to produce multimedia compositions. Burroughs maintained extensive scrapbooks from the early 1960s onward, blending textual fragments with visual materials to expand the method beyond pure prose into hybrid artistic forms. These collages treat visual and verbal components as interchangeable, rearranging them to disrupt linear narratives and evoke associative meanings. Specialized tools facilitate precise execution of cut-ups, including razor blades for slicing text into sections and adhesive tape or glue for reassembly. In the 1960s, early mechanical aids like permutation machines, inspired by Brion Gysin's permutation poetry experiments, automated random rearrangements of words or phrases, offering a computational alternative to manual cutting.^[1]^[24] Time-based variations, such as the "cut-up of time," fragment and reorder temporal elements like dated newspaper pages or personal memories to create nonlinear montages that collapse past and present. Burroughs described folding contemporary and historical texts together to form "time section montages," effectively moving across chronological boundaries.^[18] Executing cut-ups presents challenges in balancing intentional structure with emergent chaos, as random rearrangements can yield incoherent results that practitioners must edit for accessibility while preserving disruptive potential. To navigate this, Burroughs recommended starting with small sections and iteratively refining composites to harness subconscious insights without imposing excessive control.^[18]

Literary Applications

In Burroughs' Works

William S. Burroughs first extensively applied the cut-up technique in his 1961 novel The Soft Machine, the inaugural volume of what became known as the Nova Trilogy, where fragmented texts produce a disjointed narrative exploring themes of control and addiction. By slicing and reassembling passages from his own manuscripts and external sources, Burroughs created a non-linear structure that mirrors the addictive "junk virus" and mechanisms of societal and bodily control, extending the "Algebra of Need" introduced in Naked Lunch.^[25]^[26] In The Ticket That Exploded (1962) and Nova Express (1964), Burroughs further refined the method, constructing a mosaic of fragmented scenes and multiple voices that interweave cosmic battles against viral control systems. These works employ fold-ins—overlapping cut-up sections—to generate associative leaps between interdimensional agents, Nova criminals, and hallucinatory interrogations, disrupting conventional plot progression.^[11]^[27] Collectively termed the "cut-up trilogy," The Soft Machine, The Ticket That Exploded, and Nova Express form a cohesive project in which Burroughs recombined diverse source materials, including dream records, travel notes from locales like Tangier and Paris, and newspaper clippings, to forge prophetic and surreal composites. For instance, fold-ins in Nova Express merge Shakespearean excerpts with news reports of disasters and personal travel vignettes, such as train journeys yielding juxtaposed images of Gibraltar, to simulate non-linear time and déjà vu effects.^[28] Thematically, the cut-up technique in these novels subverts authority by rearranging political speeches and official texts into absurd or revelatory forms, exposes language as a manipulative virus that locks perception, and evokes hallucinatory states akin to mescaline-induced sensory derangements, where sounds become visible and forms audible.^[18]^[19] In 1970s reflections, such as a 1976 discussion, Burroughs acknowledged the technique's limitations, including its labor-intensive nature—particularly when extended to tape recordings requiring manual splicing—and questioned the illusion of pure randomness, noting subconscious influences in selections. He described evolutions from paper cut-ups to audio experiments, where scrambled voices and reversed reels produced emergent prophecies, like a 1964 collage foretelling a 1973 event, signaling a shift toward multimedia applications.^[29]

In Other Authors' Works

One of the earliest adopters of the cut-up technique beyond its originators was South African poet Sinclair Beiles, who contributed experimental cut-up poems to the 1960 collaborative manifesto Minutes to Go, co-authored with Brion Gysin, William S. Burroughs, and Gregory Corso; this slim volume presented unedited cut-ups as a revolutionary form of poetry that disrupted linear narrative and revealed subconscious associations. His contributions helped propagate cut-ups within Beat and international avant-garde circles, emphasizing the technique's potential for political subversion in non-Western contexts.^[21]^[2]^[30] In the postmodern fiction of the 1970s, Kathy Acker adapted cut-ups for feminist deconstruction, drawing directly from Burroughs' influence to dismantle patriarchal narratives in novels like Blood and Guts in High School (1978). Acker's method involved plagiarizing and slicing canonical texts—such as Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter—then reassembling them with pornographic, confessional, and dream-like fragments to expose gendered power structures and bodily fragmentation. This approach transformed cut-ups into a tool for critiquing identity and authority, aligning with her punk ethos of "stealing" language to empower marginalized voices.^[31]^[32]^[33] The cut-up technique exerted a subtle influence on the French Oulipo group, whose constrained writing experiments paralleled its randomization through recombinant forms; Oulipo's mathematical constraints extended principles of aleatory creation over authorial control, as seen in procedural literature.^[34]^[35] Later literary applications emerged in the lyrics of David Bowie, who employed cut-ups during the 1970s to generate surreal, non-linear phrases in works like "Diamond Dogs" (1974), treating the method as a literary oracle for exploring alienation and futurism. In contemporary fiction, Jonathan Lethem advocated plagiarism as creative recombination in his essay "The Ecstasy of Influence" (2007), a principle reflected in the fragmented, citational satire of Chronic City (2009), where Manhattan's cultural detritus critiques consumerism and media illusion.^[36]^[37] Critically, cut-ups permeated countercultural and experimental fiction from the 1980s to 1990s, fueling zine culture's DIY ethos where punk and riot grrrl publishers used scissors-and-paste collages to subvert mainstream discourse, mixing manifestos, rants, and appropriated texts for anarchist agitation. This era's adoption highlighted cut-ups' role in fostering ephemeral, anti-hierarchical narratives that resisted commodification, influencing riot grrrl literature and underground novels by authors like Dennis Cooper, who fragmented queer experiences to confront societal taboos. Earlier precursors include T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land (1922), which used collage-like juxtaposition of voices and texts, anticipating cut-up fragmentation. More recent examples include Mark Z. Danielewski's House of Leaves (2000), employing non-linear, layered text to disrupt narrative conventions.^[38]^[39]^[40]

Applications in Other Media

In Music

The cut-up technique found early adoption in music through sound poetry and spoken-word recordings, notably by John Giorno, who incorporated cut-up methods inspired by William S. Burroughs and Brion Gysin into his performances. In 1969, Giorno launched Dial-A-Poem, an interactive telephone hotline featuring randomized spoken-word pieces derived from cut-up scripts, blending poetry with conceptual art to democratize access to experimental verse. This project marked one of the first instances of cut-ups in auditory media, emphasizing fragmentation and recombination to disrupt linear narrative in sound. In October 2025, the project was digitized and made available online, allowing global access to these cut-up-derived recordings.^[41]^[42]^[43] In the 1970s, David Bowie adapted the cut-up method for lyric writing on his album Diamond Dogs (1974), slicing phrases from news stories to generate surreal, disjointed narratives that evoked dystopian themes. Bowie credited the technique, learned from Burroughs, with unlocking subconscious creativity, resulting in tracks like "Future Legend" and "Diamond Dogs" that layered fragmented imagery for a prophetic, apocalyptic tone. This approach extended literary cut-ups into popular music, influencing glam rock's experimental edge.^[44]^[45] Industrial music pioneers Throbbing Gristle further evolved cut-ups into tape manipulation during the 1970s, splicing audio recordings to form noise collages that mirrored Burroughs' textual disruptions. Led by Genesis P-Orridge, the group used physical tape cuts and loops on albums like 20 Jazz Funk Greats (1979), creating abrasive soundscapes from found sources such as radio broadcasts and field recordings to challenge conventional composition. This auditory splicing became a cornerstone of the industrial genre, emphasizing deconstruction and chance operations in performance.^[46]^[47] Hip-hop's sampling practices emerged as a digital analog to cut-ups in the 1980s, with Public Enemy layering fragmented audio clips to build dense, politically charged tracks. Producer Hank Shocklee and the Bomb Squad drew implicit parallels to Burroughs' remixing ethos on albums like It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back (1988), stacking hundreds of samples from funk, newsreels, and speeches into chaotic sonic assaults that critiqued media and power structures. This method transformed sampling into a tool for cultural recombination, echoing cut-up's subversive potential in rhythm and rhetoric.^[48]^[49] In the 2000s, electronic artist DJ Spooky (Paul D. Miller) incorporated cut-up principles into multimedia compositions, treating sampling as a form of auditory collage akin to Burroughs' experiments. His album Optometry (2002) fused jazz improvisation with fragmented loops and remixes, exploring "optophonetic" intersections of sound and vision through spliced field recordings and beats. Spooky's work extended cut-ups into digital realms, using software to remix global audio sources for immersive, non-linear listening experiences.^[50]^[51]

In Film and Visual Arts

The cut-up technique found early application in experimental cinema through collaborations between filmmaker Antony Balch and writer William S. Burroughs. In the short film The Cut Ups (1966), Balch spliced footage of Burroughs and Brion Gysin into randomized, repetitive sequences filmed across locations like Tangier, Paris, and London, mirroring the literary method's disruption of linear narrative to explore image-reality deconstruction.^[52] This work, with principal photography starting in 1961, premiered in London in 1967 and emphasized precise splicing lengths over conventional continuity.^[1] Bruce Conner's Report (1967) extended cut-up principles to found-footage montage in avant-garde film. The 13-minute piece recontextualizes newsreels of the John F. Kennedy assassination through rapid cuts, repetitions, reversals, and superimpositions, transforming archival material into a fragmented anti-war critique that highlights cinema's manipulative potential.^[53] Conner's approach treated film as an art of combination, cutting disparate elements to evoke the medium's artificiality and political undertones.^[54] In visual arts, pop art collages during the 1960s employed techniques similar to the cut-up method, particularly in Richard Hamilton's works that layered magazine cut-outs with text overlays to satirize consumer culture. Hamilton's technique combined cut-paper elements with printing processes like offset lithography and screenprinting, creating recomposed images that fragmented and reassembled media icons for conceptual commentary. His iconic 1956 collage Just what is it that makes today's homes so different, so appealing?—revisited in later series—exemplified this by integrating disparate clippings into a cluttered domestic scene, prefiguring pop's embrace of collage as cultural dissection.^[55] Video art in the 1980s and 1990s adapted cut-up fragmentation through electronic manipulation, as seen in Nam June Paik's tape-based experiments. Paik distorted video signals using magnets, synthesizers, and feedback loops to break and recombine imagery, producing works like altered broadcasts that revealed television's inherent manipulability as an "electronic cut-up."^[56] These interventions, often involving physical tape interventions and custom hardware, positioned video as a dynamic collage medium akin to Fluxus Dada influences.^[57] Contemporary applications in glitch art and VJing digitize the cut-up process for moving images. Glitch artists intentionally corrupt digital files to generate fragmented visuals, reassembling errors into aesthetic compositions that critique technological perfection, as in data-bending techniques that slice and remix pixel data.^[58] In VJing, performers live-slice and blend footage from films and animations into evolving montages synchronized with music, creating real-time digital cut-ups for immersive events.^[59]

Theoretical Foundations

Philosophical and Conceptual Basis

The cut-up technique emerged from a philosophical framework that viewed language as a pervasive mechanism of social and perceptual control, imposing predetermined associations and narratives on human consciousness. William S. Burroughs, in essays such as those collected in The Adding Machine (1985), described language as a "virus" that infects thought, locking individuals into reactive patterns by associating words with fixed images and meanings, thereby restricting access to unmediated experience.^[60] The cut-up method, by physically dissecting and reassembling text, aimed to "unsay" this control, disrupting linear word-image associations to reveal pre-conscious connections and latent meanings that exist beyond imposed structures.^[27] This process was intended to liberate perception, allowing writers and readers to encounter reality as a fragmented, associative field rather than a coherent, controlled narrative. The technique's conceptual basis also intersects with semiotics, particularly in exposing the arbitrariness of linguistic signs as theorized by Ferdinand de Saussure, where meaning arises not from inherent links between signifier and signified but from differential relations within a system. Burroughs' cut-ups deconstruct this system by random juxtaposition, highlighting how meanings are constructed and manipulated, much like a viral topology that propagates control through associative chains. By scrambling syntax and semantics, the method reveals language's instability, challenging the illusion of stable reference and inviting a reevaluation of how signs enforce cultural and ideological dominance. Influences from Eastern thought further shaped the technique's emphasis on non-linear perception, notably through Brion Gysin's engagement with Sufism, an Islamic mystical tradition that prioritizes intuitive, fragmented insights over sequential reasoning. Gysin's interest in Sufi practices, which disrupt ego-bound linear thinking to access higher awareness, informed his adaptation of cut-ups as a tool for breaking chronological narrative constraints and fostering multidimensional consciousness.^[61] At its core, the cut-up technique critiqued Western culture's reliance on causality and rationalist narratives, which Burroughs saw as tools for maintaining authority by enforcing sequential logic and deterministic outcomes. In The Electronic Revolution (1970), he advocated cut-ups for political subversion, such as splicing audio recordings of speeches to scramble messages and incite unrest, thereby undermining the causal chains of propaganda and narrative control.^[62] This positioned the method as a counter-rationalist practice, fragmenting time and causality to expose the constructed nature of historical and social "truths."^[63]

Relation to Postmodernism and Deconstruction

The cut-up technique embodies core postmodern principles of fragmentation and intertextuality, disrupting linear narratives and challenging the coherence of meaning in ways that resonate with Jean-François Lyotard's critique of grand narratives in The Postmodern Condition (1979) and Jean Baudrillard's theories of simulation and hyperreality in Simulacra and Simulation (1981). By physically or conceptually slicing texts and reassembling them, the method mirrors postmodern literature's rejection of unified authorship and stable realities, as exemplified in William S. Burroughs' application of cut-ups to create collage-like narratives that blend disparate sources into new, unstable forms. This practical embodiment of fragmentation prefigures postmodernism's emphasis on multiplicity, where texts become sites of endless recombination rather than fixed transmissions of truth. The technique also ties closely to Jacques Derrida's deconstruction, serving as a literary method to destabilize binary oppositions and logocentrism—the privileging of speech and presence over writing and absence. In Burroughs' novels, cut-ups expose the constructed nature of language, much like Derrida's différance, by revealing how meaning is deferred and multiplied through juxtaposition, undermining hierarchical structures such as subject/object or reality/illusion. For instance, the rearrangement of textual fragments erodes the illusion of a centered, authoritative voice, aligning with deconstruction's goal of tracing the traces of suppressed elements within discourse.^[64]^[65] Furthermore, the cut-up technique influenced hypertext theory in the 1980s and 1990s, prefiguring digital non-linearity through its non-sequential recombination of elements, akin to Ted Nelson's concepts in Project Xanadu, which envisioned interconnected, branching texts accessible via links. Burroughs' experimental shuffling of narrative paths anticipated hypertext's rejection of linear reading, bridging analog collage to digital interactivity and informing early theorists' ideas on reader-driven meaning-making.^[66] Academic reception from the 1970s onward has framed cut-ups as an anti-authorial strategy, with analyses in journals like SubStance highlighting its role in deconstructing contextual stability and temporal linearity in Burroughs' oeuvre, positioning it as a radical intervention against conventional narrative authority.^[64] However, literary theory debates have criticized the method as potentially gimmicky, arguing that its reliance on chance can prioritize superficial novelty over substantive innovation, limiting its depth as a sustained artistic process.^[67]

Legacy

Cultural and Artistic Impact

The cut-up technique, developed by William S. Burroughs and Brion Gysin in the late 1950s, became integral to the Beat Generation's legacy, extending its experimental ethos into the 1960s counterculture by encouraging nonlinear, fragmented expressions that critiqued societal norms and inspired communal creativity.^[68] This influence manifested in countercultural practices like psychedelic experimentation and anti-establishment art, where the technique's emphasis on chance and recombination echoed the Beats' rejection of linear authority.^[68] The technique further inspired happenings and Fluxus performances, with Gysin and Burroughs participating in Fluxus events in the early 1960s, such as a 1963 Düsseldorf festival, where cut-up principles informed interdisciplinary actions blending text, sound, and visuals to disrupt conventional art forms.^[69] In the 1970s and 1980s, cut-up methods permeated punk and zine culture, fueling DIY aesthetics through collage and ransom-note lettering that subverted mainstream imagery, as seen in Jamie Reid's designs for the Sex Pistols and zines like Sniffin' Glue, which embodied implicit manifestos of self-production and rebellion.^[70] The technique gained institutional recognition in the 1970s via major museum exhibits on experimental art, including MoMA's 1970 "Information" show, which highlighted conceptual works involving recombination and chance akin to cut-up processes.^[71] Globally, the cut-up technique influenced the French Situationist International, where Guy Debord's détournement adapted it visually by repurposing media fragments into subversive collages, such as metagraphs combining ads and text to critique capitalism.^[72] The cut-up technique's subversive potential has inspired extensive academic analysis, with its applications in literature and art explored in scholarly papers on themes of disruption and recombination.^[2]

Modern and Digital Adaptations

In the digital era, the cut-up technique has evolved through software implementations that automate the physical process of slicing and rearranging text. Pioneering tools emerged in the early 2000s, such as the Cut-Up Machine, which allows users to input text and randomly rearrange words or phrases via algorithmic shuffling inspired by Burroughs and Gysin.^[73] Similarly, Brian Kim Stefans, a key figure in electronic literature, created digital poetry works that extend cut-up principles computationally, fragmenting and recombining textual elements to explore themes of delusion and media saturation, as seen in his interactive pieces from the 2000s.^[74] By the 2010s, mobile applications like Cut-Up Engineer further democratized the method, enabling users to cut and remix sentences from pasted texts on smartphones, facilitating creative experimentation for writers and musicians.^[75] Advancements in artificial intelligence have introduced algorithmic cut-ups, where machine learning models generate recombinant texts by probabilistically remixing linguistic patterns from vast datasets. Post-2010 developments, particularly with large language models like GPT series introduced by OpenAI in 2018, allow for automated creation of cut-up-style outputs; for instance, prompting these systems to fragment and reassemble source texts produces surreal, non-linear narratives that mimic traditional cut-ups but at scale. More recent models, such as GPT-4 released by OpenAI in 2023, have further enabled scalable cut-up generations through advanced prompting techniques.^[76] Experiments in the 2020s have demonstrated how such AI tools can slice input texts into phrases and recombine them randomly, yielding results that challenge linear authorship while raising questions about originality in generated content.^[76] On social media platforms, the cut-up technique manifested in the 2010s through Twitter bots that fragmented and remixed content to produce viral, absurd posts, aligning with the era's meme culture of rapid remixing and decontextualization. These bots, often employing combinatorial poetics similar to cut-ups, generated humorous or satirical tweets by shuffling phrases from news, literature, or user inputs, influencing the fragmented discourse of platforms like Twitter (now X).^[77] Examples include experimental accounts that echoed Dadaist randomization, contributing to the 2010s surge in automated content creation and meme evolution.^[77] In contemporary literature, digital adaptations of cut-ups appear in the 2010s Alt Lit movement, where authors like Tao Lin incorporated online-sourced fragments to reflect fragmented digital lives; Lin's 2013 novel Taipei, for instance, employs repetitive, disjointed prose in its portrayal of mediated experiences and emotional detachment.^[78] This approach draws on web searches and social media snippets, applying cut-up-like techniques to critique millennial disconnection.^[78] Ethical debates in the 2020s, particularly within digital humanities, have intensified around authorship and plagiarism in automated cut-ups, as AI recombinations often derive from uncredited training data, blurring lines between inspiration and infringement. Scholars argue that such practices challenge traditional notions of originality, prompting calls for new frameworks like "postplagiarism," which redefines integrity in AI-assisted creation to emphasize transparency over prohibition.^[79] Organizations such as the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) highlight risks of undetected plagiarism in AI-generated texts, urging disclosure of tools to preserve academic trust.^[80] These concerns underscore the need for guidelines in digital recombination to safeguard intellectual property while fostering innovation.^[79]

References

[1]
Cut ups - Brion Gysin
The cut-up method is best-known as a literary technique in which a written text is cut up and rearranged to create a new text.Missing: scholarly | Show results with:scholarly
[2]
The Glorious Plagiarism, Trash Aesthetics, and Ecological Entropy ...
Jun 21, 2019 · This paper examines some of the many ways in which example early cut-ups from Minutes to Go recall canonical literary forms, revive the revolutionary ...Missing: definition | Show results with:definition
[3]
Cutting Up - The Smart Set
Apr 8, 2024 · Burroughs told The Paris Review about painter, writer and performance artist Brion Gysin in 1966 about Burroughs' use of cutting up various ...
[4]
About Brion Gysin
Jan 13, 2025 · Brion Gysin was a British-Canadian painter, writer, sound poet, performance artist, and inventor. He played a significant role in the development of the cut-up ...Missing: background | Show results with:background
[5]
Brion Gysin | Research Starters - EBSCO
Brion Gysin was a British-born artist and writer ... He first encountered William Burroughs in Tangier in 1953 and later moved into the Beat Hotel in Paris near ...Missing: background | Show results with:background
[6]
Brion Gysin - The Beat Hotel
From Wikipedia: Brion Gysin (January 19, 1916 – July 13, 1986) was a painter, writer, sound poet, and performance artist born in Taplow, Buckinghamshire.Missing: background | Show results with:background
[7]
[PDF] The Cut-Up Method of Brion Gysin - Robert Spahr
In the summer of 1959 Brion Gysin painter and writer cut newspaper articles into sec- tions and rearranged the sections at random.Missing: invention | Show results with:invention
[8]
https://www.languageisavirus.com/creative-writing-techniques/the-cut-up-method-of-brion-gysin.php
[9]
Brion Gysin Cut Up Method - Language is a Virus
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.Missing: sources | Show results with:sources<|control11|><|separator|>
[10]
Minutes to Go.,1960,Signed by Gysin - Peter Harrington Rare Books
This was the first book of cut-up poetry published by Burroughs, Gysin, and their collaborators: "the original manifesto and manual of the method" (Harris), and ...
[11]
Literary Cut-Ups - remixthebook
The roots of the literary cut-up technique can be found in Dadaist chance operations where a text is literally cut up with scissors and rearranged to create ...
[12]
https://www.soulcruzer.com/brion-gysin-the-magician-of-the-mind/
[13]
Brion Gysin: The Magician of the Mind - soulcruzer
In 1959, while slicing through a stack of newspapers with a razor blade at the Beat Hotel in Paris, he accidentally created what would become known as the cut- ...<|separator|>
[14]
William Burroughs and Brion Gysin writings, 1997, 1963-1973
Gysin taught the cut-up technique to Burroughs at the Beat Hotel in Paris, France around 1959, and Burroughs implemented the technique to create his third novel ...
[15]
The Evolution of the Cut-Up Technique in My Own Mag - RealityStudio
Mar 6, 2007 · The Beat Hotel and Brion Gysin introduced Burroughs to the cut-up in the late summer of 1959 and his work and working methods would never be the same.
[16]
William Burroughs, Brion Gysin, and the Beat Hotel - Culturedarm
Depicting the Beat Hotel, in Paris in the late 50s, through the recollections of Burroughs and Gysin; and viewing Gysin's series of Naked Lunch photographs.Missing: background Tangier
[17]
File:Beiles Burroughs Corso Gysin Minutes to Go 1968.pdf - Monoskop
Feb 20, 2019 · The following 2 pages uses this file: File:Gysin Brion Burroughs William Gregory Corso Sinclair Beils Minutes To Go 1960.pdf (file redirect) ...
[18]
The Exterminator - RealityStudio
Apr 5, 2008 · Published by Auerhahn Press in 1960, The Exterminator is one of the forgotten texts of Burroughs' bibliography. Roughly 1000 copies were printed in the first ...
[19]
The Cut Up Method
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 ...
[20]
William S Burroughs Cut Up Method - Language is a Virus
The cut up is a mechanical method of juxtaposition in which Burroughs literally cuts up passages of prose by himself and other writers and then pastes them ...Missing: Hotel | Show results with:Hotel<|separator|>
[21]
Finding Aid, William S. Burroughs (SPEC.CMS.87) - Rare Books and ...
JWG's inventory identifies these as "60s materials, cut-ups". Each sheet ... lecture notes, and some student comments on cut-up techniques. Also a copy ...
[22]
“Burroughs Is a Poet Too, Really”: The Poetics of Minutes to Go
Likewise in “The Cut Up Method of Brion Gysin,” Burroughs invokes Rimbaud's “colour vowels” (which he would use later in 1960 as the structural principle for ...
[23]
[PDF] Cut-Ups, Composition, and the Inoculation of Student Writers
Jun 23, 2016 · The cut-up method of Burroughs and Gysin appears to be influenced by a number of methods, primarily those found in the Romantic and surrealist ...
[24]
The Art of Rearrangement: Burroughs' Cut-Up Technique
Jul 25, 2024 · Originating in the early 1960s, this innovative approach involves taking a written text, cutting it into pieces, and then rearranging these ...
[25]
The Permutated Poems of Brion Gysin - David Pocknee
In 1960, Gysin was asked to create a radio programme for the BBC, in which he recorded some of his permutation poems. This was due to a BBC producer reading ...
[26]
Analysis of William S. Burroughs's Novels
May 12, 2018 · Burroughs sees The Soft Machine as “a sequel to Naked Lunch, a mathematical extension of the Algebra of Need beyond the Junk virus.” Here, the ...
[27]
OLM Favorites: The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit
Dec 1, 2017 · The Soft Machine introduces the themes of viral influence and control in regards to language and sexuality, and the disruption of “word and ...
[28]
'Paper Reality': William S. Burroughs and the Cut-Up Method ...
Having severed the 'word line', reducing written language to decaying units, Burroughs insists that the only way to take a final step (back) towards ...
[29]
[PDF] burroughs_gysin_third_mind.pdf - Lab404
Burroughs, William S 1914-. The third mind. "A Seaver book." I. Gysin ... the printer," he writes in "The Cut-Up Method of Brion Gysin" in A Casebook ...
[30]
William Burroughs - 1976 - 1 - The Allen Ginsberg Project
Jul 2, 2016 · Now this cut-up was made by Brion Gysin and there's not a word of his own in it. It comes entirely from the source material: “It is impossible ...
[31]
Sinclair Beiles: A Man Apart - Empty Mirror
Mar 17, 2015 · Sinclair Beiles was a South African writer associated with the Beat movement of the late 50s and early 60s.
[32]
[PDF] Eat your Heart Out: the Life Work of Kathy Acker - HAL
Feb 29, 2024 · One may wonder, though, with Ralph Clare in his 2018 review of the new edition of Blood and Guts in High School for the Los Angeles Review of.
[33]
Kathy Acker and the Ethics of Frivolity - jstor
Acker was drawn to William Burroughs, whose cut-up method could be ... Acker's Blood and Guts in High School." Narrative 19.1 (2011):. 86-106. Print ...
[34]
[PDF] Deconstructing the gendered body: Fragmentation and - CORE
... Acker's Blood and Guts in High School examines, the body as a locus for and indicator of the human subject emerges fractured, disabled, and finally ...
[35]
Oulipo - Remixing the Humanities
May 10, 2013 · As Georges Perec notes in his Afterword to A Void, citational art, i.e. texts under constraint that contain intertextual allusions, honor and ...<|separator|>
[36]
[PDF] Oulipo: A Primer of Potential Literature - Monoskop
in these theories there always remained a void that no. ,one knew how to fill ... Within the OUlipo, it is Georges Perec who has furnished the most lucid.
[37]
How David Bowie, Kurt Cobain & Thom Yorke Write Songs With ...
Feb 4, 2015 · Burroughs' surrealist cut-up technique, which he developed with artist Brion Gysin. Just above, you can hear Burroughs explain cut-up writing as ...<|control11|><|separator|>
[38]
The Ecstasy of Influence, by Jonathan Lethem - Harper's Magazine
By then I knew that this “cut-up method,” as Burroughs called it, was ... By Jonathan Lethem, from “More Little Tales of the Internet,” published in ...
[39]
[PDF] Scissors and Glue: Punk Fanzines and the Creation of a DIY Aesthetic
Punk fanzines used DIY techniques like cut-n-paste, photocopied images, and hand-scrawled text, creating a unique visual style with chaotic design and 'unruly ...
[40]
[PDF] Margins in Motion: Towards a Political History of Zine Culture
Dec 6, 2023 · This thesis is a problem-based history of zine culture, spanning a century, from science fiction fanzines to punk and post-punk zines, to more ...
[41]
Make Each of You a Superstar | The Poetry Foundation
Aug 3, 2020 · ... cut-up techniques he learned from Gysin and Burroughs. Long ... In this sense, Dial-a-Poem is a synecdoche for all of Giorno's innovations.
[42]
The Life and Death Of A Poet: Penny Arcade on John Giorno
Inspired by a phone conversation with William Burroughs, Giorno created, Dial-A-Poem, 1969-1971. Dial-A-Poem was the freshest presentation of poetry in ...Missing: technique | Show results with:technique
[43]
When Bowie met Burroughs | David Bowie | The Guardian
Mar 9, 2013 · ... Diamond Dogs – a fusion of Burroughs and George Orwell. The cut-up, as he admitted later, perfectly suited his own fragmented consciousness ...Missing: Koestler | Show results with:Koestler
[44]
100 Books Beloved by David Bowie - Radical Reads
Feb 21, 2018 · And influenced by William Burroughs, Bowie used the surrealist author's cut-up technique (cutting words and phrases from newspapers and ...
[45]
Nothing Here Now But the Lost Recordings - RealityStudio
May 9, 2011 · Along with Cabaret Voltaire and Coil, Throbbing Gristle were among the first to explore the possibilities of using tape loops, cut-ups, samples ...
[46]
Rise of the machines: how industrial music took over the world
Apr 16, 2020 · I'd take things that were in the same BPM, and splice it all together. It was very similar to my hero William Burroughs' cut-up method. We ...
[47]
Nothing Here Now But The Recordings - The White Review
Burroughs' tape experiments were disseminated by Genesis P-Orridge, leader of the infamous 'wreckers of civilization', Throbbing Gristle, and the word virus, ...
[48]
The Production of Public Enemy: Gear, Sampling and | Reverb News
Mar 1, 2016 · Public Enemy's “Fight the Power” was a quantum leap for rap music. In the late '80s, hip hop songs used only a few samples each, with the beat ...
[49]
The Rebirth of DJ Spooky - The Brooklyn Rail
Sampling itself draws its roots from two distinct camps: the original musical cut-ups of the experimental writers William S. Burroughs and Bryon Gysin, and ...
[50]
[PDF] Ghosts in the Music Machine of Paul D. Miller (AKA DJ Spooky)
Miller's own music is cut-up art that uses sounds as images to create travelogues of the virtual. Spooky is not trying to make us dance, at least not physically ...
[51]
An Appraisal of the Films of William Burroughs, Brion Gysin, and ...
Feb 1, 2003 · The following section will describe the techniques of Burroughs' cut-up model, and introduce the films made with Anthony Balch, providing a ...
[52]
Shooting the President: Bruce Conner's Report - Senses of Cinema
Apr 14, 2009 · The deathly nature of the cinematic image is evoked by Conner's use of repetition, reversal and the manipulation of the forward and backward ...Missing: cut- | Show results with:cut-
[53]
A Movie/Report - Only the Cinema
Aug 28, 2008 · Conner claims the cinema as essentially an art of montage, of combination, cutting together disparate materials from Hollywood epics, car and ...
[54]
Richard Hamilton: Cut, Paste, Print | Art Gallery of Ontario
Hamilton was a committed printmaker who embraced new technologies, often combining cut-paper collage with offset lithography, screen printing and photography.Missing: text | Show results with:text
[55]
Richard Hamilton, Just What is It That Makes Today's Homes So ...
Dec 6, 2021 · In this iconic collage by the British artist Richard Hamilton, created in 1956, a midcentury living room is filled to the brim with logos and cut-out images of ...Missing: text | Show results with:text
[56]
Nam June Paik - Tate
Oct 17, 2019 · Many of his works demonstrate how TVs could be turned against themselves, using magnets to distort their images and reveal their manipulative ...
[57]
“It's Making a Little Noise”: Video Art, A Radical Mess - Panorama
The nexus of influence between Nam June Paik, video, and the anti-art aesthetics of Dada and its reprisal by Fluxus artists is ubiquitous in the literature.
[58]
It's not a bug, it's a feature: the rise of glitch art | Art - The Guardian
Oct 25, 2013 · Glitch art takes temporary pixelations, interruptions and glitches and turns them into visually arresting pieces, questioning the forms and traditions of art ...<|separator|>
[59]
VJing & AV - Fyodor Krasniy
Adapting and slicing pieces of animation and movies from different eras and application into a fast paced blend of seemingly related snippets of one evolving ...
[60]
Apomorphine Silence: Cutting-up Burroughs' Theory of Language ...
Burroughs' theory posits language as a 'word-virus' that shapes human subjectivity and control. The cut-up method disrupts conventional narrative flow, ...
[61]
Nova Law: William S. Burroughs and the Logic of Control
Sep 12, 2007 · Burroughs uses the “cut-up technique” to dismember these relations, while Deleuze seeks to short-circuit them in lines of flight, becomings, and ...
[62]
[PDF] “Shift Linguals – Cut Word Lines” Viral Topology and the Cut-Ups of ...
Abstract: William Burroughs perceived the method of collage as a way towards a rebel- lion – an insurrection against the system of control inherent in ...
[63]
Semiotics for Beginners: Signs - cs.Princeton
The Saussurean legacy of the arbitrariness of signs leads semioticians to stress that the relationship between the signifier and the signified is conventional - ...
[64]
[PDF] The Electronic Revolution - Swiss Institute
burroughs. 15 recorded cut/up of news, radio and TV. Put the recordings out on the mutter line before the paper hits the stand. It gives you a funny feeling to ...
[65]
[PDF] Postmodern Narrative Logic in William S. Burroughs' Naked Lunch ...
What breaks down the chains of causality and disorients readers in the narrative of Naked Lunch is the great difficulty of identifying each narrative fragment ...Missing: critique | Show results with:critique
[66]
Deconstructing Context in the Novels of William S. Burroughs - jstor
Burroughs demonstrates the way in which the cut-up method shatters time in a passage from Ticket. That's the clock if you set it two hours in advance the ...
[67]
Fifty thousand years is not very long»: The Tribal and the Information ...
... Cut-Up Trilogy by Burroughs, derives its power from many sources. Among ... Ted Nelson, founder of Project Xanadu, an extensive hypertext project28 ...
[68]
[PDF] TECHNOLOGIES OF THE SELF IN THE WRITINGS OF WILLIAM S ...
Harris examines the limitations of the ,cut-up technique as an artistic process and relates these limitations to Burroughs's move towards conventional narrative ...
[69]
[PDF] The beat generation's influence on the hippie movement and ...
Oct 8, 2024 · The Beats' style, both in their earliest phase and later phases, was unconventional, and these writers often employed a stream-of-consciousness ...<|control11|><|separator|>
[70]
Simon Collings on Mr Fluxus - The Fortnightly Review
Nov 12, 2019 · Fluxus practice overlapped with conceptual art, with much of the impact of the work residing in the idea, and skill in execution being secondary ...
[71]
Punk and Post-Punk Art Movement Overview - The Art Story
Jun 23, 2023 · Like Dada, punk and post-punk art incorporates a myriad of visual, literary, and sound media, such as collage, sound poetry, cut-up writing, and ...
[72]
[PDF] Information - MoMA
The Museum of Modern Art's exhibition history— from our founding in 1929 to the present—is available online. It includes exhibition catalogues, primary ...<|control11|><|separator|>
[73]
A User's Guide to Detournement (Debord & Wolman)
The French word détournement means deflection, diversion, rerouting, distortion, misuse, misappropriation, hijacking, or otherwise turning something aside from ...
[74]
The Cut-Up Machine - Language is a Virus
A precedent of the technique occurred during a Dadaist rally in the 1920s in which Tristan Tzara offered to create a poem on the spot by pulling words at random ...
[75]
Tag: brian kim stefans - I ❤️ E-Poetry
Jan 11, 2013 · This “page space” is a computational upgrade to the cut-up, because in addition to randomly joining lines of verse, it cuts them further and ...Missing: digital | Show results with:digital<|control11|><|separator|>
[76]
Cut-up Engineer - Gyokov Solutions
1. Input or copy and paste some text inside the input boxes · 2. Select which input to use · 3. Select how to use the cut-up (based on words or sentences) an how ...
[77]
Experiments in Generating Cut-up texts with Commercial AI | ebr
Jun 9, 2024 · Since a cut-up text is by its nature at least partly mechanical, it would be trivially easy to program a computer to simply slice up texts into ...Missing: 2010 | Show results with:2010
[78]
Twitter: The Best of Bot Worlds for Automated Wit - ResearchGate
Aug 7, 2025 · According to them, Twitterbots run on the same random methods and combinatorial poetics, such as those popularised by the early surrealists and ...
[79]
Your Pocket Guide to 10 Literary Movements
Apr 5, 2018 · It often made use of Google searches, applying cut-up techniques to ... What to say at your next literary dinner party: Did you hear Tao Lin has a ...
[80]
Postplagiarism: transdisciplinary ethics and integrity in the age of ...
Oct 12, 2023 · Postplagiarism heralds a new era of intellectual engagement in the age of advanced technology. Although the concept of plagiarism dates back ...Missing: authorship | Show results with:authorship
[81]
Artificial intelligence and authorship | COPE
Feb 27, 2023 · ... plagiarism. On the other hand, as it learns on more refined sets of data it may become more creative: COPE Council member Matt Hodgkinson ...Missing: digital cut-