The 'cut-up' technique, From Gysin to Bowie to the IOI Options

Readers of Book of Lies from Disinfo.com will be aware of the 'cut-up' technique created by Brion Gysin. This technique was also used by David Bowie and no doubt many others for various purposes since.

"...while cutting out a mount for a drawing in room no.25; I sliced through a pile of old newspapers ...and thought of what I had said to Burroughs some six months earlier about turning painting into writing. I picked up the raw words and began to piece together texts which later appeared as the cut-ups in Minutes to Go." - Book of Lies, page 93.

"The cut-up technique was originally devised by the Surrealists, and most famously used in literature by William Burroughs: you take a text, cut it into pieces, reassemble these pieces haphazardly, and thus create something new.
Because Bowie used the cut-up technique to 'write' many of his lyrics there is not much sense in trying to analyse them as a whole or each lyric individually word by word: instead one has to focus on the recurring images and codes that appear in the entire "David Bowie" 'opus', which connote his kind of gnosticism. Bowie defined his use of the cut-up method as his way of discovering his own past and future. He himself became a cut-up himself too - at least for those who followed his career closely throug the years - these followers were (and still are) confronted by reflections of themselves in the splintered facettes that make up Bowie's often odd-sounding lyrics; in Bowie's ever-changing styles of fashion images; in Bowie's constant name-dropping of keywords of books whenever a micro or a pencil of a journalist was and is at hand. It's probably also worth pointing out that he talks in fractals." - The laughing Gnostic: David Bowie and the Occult.

This seems to be a potent magickal technique that is still very much in use today. Apart from cutting up and mixing magickal texts together to form rituals, and using this for divination as well, does anyone have any ideas/thoughts on this? I know the IOI mix cut-ups from magickal and non-magickal texts to create rituals but do any other groups?

It would seem an ideal tool for the chaos mage. Mix up bits from various texts (necronomicon, oven ready chaos, winnie the pooh) to create something that crosses the boundaries of chaos, ceremonial and poetry to become something greater than the sum of its parts. The very expression of our non-dogmatic approach to magick, using the essential chaotic nature of the random process, to go from order to chaos to reorder.

Does the cut-up technique reveal a more fundamental truth about the universe, concensus reality and our place in it?

There is a busker in the town where I work. He is more of a tramp really, he lives in a shack he built by the river, just him and his three legged dog. To make some money he plays the accordian in the high street. There is no tune, just a random series of notes, and yet if one stops and listens the mind will start to form this random noise in to a tune. I explained this to a work colleague, she looked at me as if I were mad, but after her lunch time trip in to town she came back and admitted I was right.

The mind does not seem to be able to abide randomness, it cannot engage with chaos, and so it imposes order. The cut-up technique uses this little mind-game to create something wonderful from the randomness of the source material. The same happens when using tv tuned to static as a scrying tool, or staring in to a dark mirror.

But why does the mind create such interesting order from chaos? The insights from cut-ups and static scrying are more than just mundane imposed order from the rational conscious mind...they seem to bridge to the sub-conscious or higher mind (or whatever you want to call it). Concensus reality appears to be the creation of the mundane conscious mind, and yet we can glimpse the essential chaos in the odd fortean events that arise. When we use cut-ups we are accessing chaos and seeing that the universe if much more interesting than mere consensus reality (IMG:style_emoticons/default/smile.gif)

Of course this is just a convenient theory that helps me in trying to make some sense of the things that I experience that are hard to make sense of (IMG:style_emoticons/default/fie.gif) Like all theories of magick it is useful only as long as it does not restrict my thinking, for then it becomes dogma and is a cage I must escape from.

EDIT - I was just about to say that mash-ups are another great example of the cut-up technique at work but then I heard the 'Crazy Frog - Axel F' mash-up and now want to drown myself in custard! (IMG:style_emoticons/default/fie.gif) (IMG:style_emoticons/default/shok.gif) (IMG:style_emoticons/default/banghead.gif)

This post has been edited by mediocracy: May 24 2005, 03:37 PM