Cut-up as Method for an Urban Commons: A Conversation with Tommy Cowan

JM: Tommy, thank you for coming and sharing your research around the cut-up qua William Burroughs with us! For the benefit of the reader unfamiliar with the cut-up, it might be helpful if you can first describe a bit about what a “cut-up” is.

TC: A "cut-up" as Burroughs defines it would be made by taking a pre-composed text and dividing it into many different sections so those sections can be shuffled around. You can do it with one text or use this technique to blend multiple texts. It's essentially a way to apply collage theories to pure literature; however, Burroughs also believes that the intuitive grammars produced through cut-up, though unusual and sometimes happenstance, are far from nonsensical. The novel sentences and statements produced by cut-up processes communicate our deeper connections to an invisible reality and can therefore be used for things like divination and magic. Artistic processes, especially automatist processes, are thus seen as ways of mapping the future.

JM: I’d like to turn to the idea proposed by Burroughs that the cut-up interferes with linear temporality, and can reveal - as a consequence, future events. This suggests intuitive, nonrational processes are, or can be, a mode of interrupting linear temporality. I think of this as germane to the notion of worlding (the subject of the teens’ first workshop), in that to make a world - or rather to make a world with intention, one must have a vision, a ‘future-sense’ about what one would like to create, even if the how, the details and process, are yet to be known. The intuition, however, seems to operate along a certain sensitivity, a receptivity, to what would reveal itself as already-actually existing, alongside what is desired. It is a slippery phenomenon that strikes me as going both inward and outward, backward and forward at the same time. The cut-up fascinates me as a device for the worlding process because it requires both a strategy for letting go and for organization that leads to knowledge production. Can you speak a bit about intuition as a device for eliciting that transtemporal knowledge in the cut-up?

TC: Intuition as I see it is a way of knowing that somewhat bypasses the conscious manipulation of cause-and-effect narrative that our brain uses to make linear time; intuition does not require a story, as logic does. Of course, the word logic is related to Logos, which means Word. This is an important observation because Burroughs believes that language, vocal language specifically, is a form of degenerate psychic virus that traps humanity in the realm of Time. If we reverse-engineer that thought, it would imply that any attempt to escape Time on a metaphysical level requires a solution that somehow destroys both language and logic. Thus, since cut-up is inherently a challenge to ingrained conceptions of language, logic, and Word, (and Word is a virus that feeds on us), it must by reflex have a palliative consequence, an antiviral effect revealing a truer version of ourselves, a sort of atemporal vision or mindset that reproduces the primordial goodness before the virus of language destroyed the truth.

Aside from the sort of Gnostic apocalypse at the heart of cut-up, the philosophical manifestations of Burroughs that emerge in writers like Foucault and Deleuze often focus on the role of language in controlling thought and enforcing social compliance. If we think of intuition as a process of receptivity in order to achieve an acausal resonance, what Burroughs suggests is that society's control of language, time, and space blocks us from receiving. To rectify the obstruction, artistic processes help by unlocking parts of the psyche.

Worlding in Burroughs certainly partakes of this collage theory; the utopian communes he depicts throughout the 1970s and 80s have no deep reverence for tradition, but rather are assemblage of various cultural elements whose culmination was designed to resist state authority. Yet even at his most spiritual moments Burroughs' priority of receptivity seems to dominate; worlding for Burroughs could also include the writing out of his own afterlife journeys, and even here he refuses to confine his eternity to one identity, every

manifestation of him becomes a world unto itself that refragments, becoming a nexus leading to endless other beings and worlds that exist everywhere at all moments.

JM: That’s interesting. Similarly, I have been thinking about New York’s ability to generate this sort of transcendence of the self (as in a “one identity” self) through its mass cut-up of individuals, cultures, and ideas in the spatial context of a city. The proliferating abundance here, arranging and rearranging itself in new and open-ended worlds, appears to have an eventual stilling effect on the ego, or, what I might call the ego-virus (I am collapsing here the notion of the ego as a virus, manufactured and held in place by the word; that traps the true Self in time by masquerading as the true Self).

This is paradoxical because in the first instance, much like cutting up a text and rearranging it again, the cut-up and constantly rearranging sociospatial experience of New York, lends itself to the cut-up and rearrangement of the self, aided by a more or less severing from the historical/cultural binds of one’s homeland. While the ease of these cuts and rearrangements make possible new and enhanced ego inventions, I have observed that, over time, the sheer vastness of arrangements and possible worlds in and of New York reveals the changeless dimension. And that eventually egos must bow to this recognition; a recognition induced by exposure, and re/minding the self of its true Self identity in stillness, or put another way, Oneness. Burroughs seemed to understand this and voluntarily relinquish the small “i” through his voracious use of the cut-up.
Following this resonance between personal and spatial contexts to induce/reveal cut-ups, in the HUB project, I am exploring the cut-up with teens from the inner realms of feeling as they co-create with the outer realms of space, and degrees of exposure within those spaces. Purposeful engagement with the inner cuts and two-way tensions with the outer cuts form two co-creative directionalities that make the whole anew. Can you speak a bit on the relation of feeling as a device for spatial design - the stages of cutting, arranging, and then reading?

TC: The geometry engine in the brain is considered to be located primarily in a more primitive neurological structure than higher order cognitions like language, rationality, etc. That is to say, sight and sound are more biologically ancient priorities than language per se;

they're embedded in our DNA at a deeper level, and so they become primary ways of accessing that intuitive center at the heart of nonrational knowledge. As these biological priorities are encoded in the body, the body then gets encoded into the social and architectural human environment as mediated by contingent culture and economy. But then this obviously has a reflexivity with our brain's notion of space as our mind trains and learns its unique environment.

How people have manipulated our environments in the past has a direct lineage in our physical perceptions. What Burroughs insists through cut-up is the things which get encoded into our environment, like our biological priorities of geometry and sight, which then limit our epistemology through their viral cultural transmission, can be unseen by merely rearranging the various components of anything. Furthermore, Burroughs always said, "You know where to make the cuts." He had faith in the average human's ability to achieve alterations of consciousness through an art of rearrangement, but also had faith in the goodness of chaos, so to speak. As one loosens their mind with cut-up processes (whether we're cutting up photo, audio, or text) the knowledge hidden by space and time must necessarily reveal itself and prompt a reaction.

For example, Burroughs thought one could perceive not only Interzonic realms, but also would see language as an evil alien consciousness within the self if enough alteration through cut-up was achieved. But this was far from the only use; it could reveal unconscious truth, predict the future, or even be used as a curse spell. The meaning of a cut-up as a prediction of the future would be determined well after the cut-up was made, implying the cut-up is retroactively assigned a prophetic power that it decodes from a "natural" text. But if the cut-up is used as a curse (as in the early cut-up manifestos), or a spell for the worlding of afterlife paradise (as in The Wild Boys, 1971), then there's a preconceived intention that greatly affects the cutting and arranging process. In each case, the cut-up serves as a prediction of the Real, except intuitive cuts made without explicit intention receive retroactive meaning, and cuts made under explicit intention project a meaning.

In the case of retroactive meaning, this can be seen that the metaphysical legitimation of cut-up as an altered state of consciousness; alteration of consciousness can thus yield visions of the future in a two-phase process of automatist construction and synchronistic

receptivity, automatism (cuts and rearrangements) being the exploration of mysterious feeling, receptivity (reading cut-ups into the environment) being the attainment of empowerment or contentment. In the case of projected meaning, the cuts and arrangements are not an exploration of feeling but have been pre-read into the text, and the receptivity is pre-positioned to see a specific kind of synchronicity which allows the feeling of empowerment to not only be bigger but to precede the initial assignation of meaning. The versatility offered by these two ways of doing cut-up allow it to be a self- palliative process in which art as construction of knowledge is not limited to just the reading/reflection of signs imposed on the individual, but also directly modifies the world through the communication of its reading as an iteration of personal will.

JM: Reading visual works across each other present different challenges than reading across textual cut-ups, in which symbols (letters) are already organized with ascribed meaning when arranged in certain patterns (words). Symbols, in image form, seem to have a certain chaotic nature, inviting the reader to begin at the so-called primordial beginning of the journey toward knowledge; even when they represent certain themes, such as the caduceus - they “point” rather than deliver. They require a certain labor on the part of the reader. For Carl Jung - who you mentioned was an inspiration for Burroughs, opposites - in this case chaos and synthesis, are closest in proximity due to their dual nature - which is thought as One. Jung recalls that ancient Chinese spiritual paths, for example, as communicated by the I Ching, held these dual aspects together in one consciousness, believing that doing so would paradoxically free the practitioner from the conflict of duality.

Following this, cutting up images, or reading chaos against synthesis / synthesis against chaos, would collapse into Oneness and reveal a whole. A move that is then transtemporal through the fusion of opposites, and in a perpetual state of becoming. Quite like what you describe Burroughs doing as he continually re-fragments the texts and allows new worlds to proliferate; the whole being constant change which is at the same time changeless. This seems to invoke the threshold between what you referred to as projected and retroactive meaning. With images, the ambiguity of any given “reading” is amplified and thus more difficult to predetermine or read retroactively; they seem to lead the reader toward silence,

perhaps the “truest” reading - sort of like the haven found under an imposing, cresting wave.
This leads me to another question, in fact many more - but I’d like to ask you here if you would speak on the various media that Burroughs used, and in particular those that dealt with images, but also with space as image-in-motion. For example, how Burroughs approached these alternative cut-ups, and maybe how they differed for him from textual ones in terms of access to knowledge, Oneness, and perhaps silence - or the apocalypse of the virus-word.

TC: Certainly there seems to be a difference between words and pure images. All words are images to some extent, but images don't necessarily have to be words, to be assigned names and/or explicit meanings. Yet, despite the fact that images don't require words, they still contain and posit information, and as well posit many points of information at the same time, unlike vocal language. So, because the visual image imposes many points simultaneously, it can more easily overwhelm the mind's rational faculty in stressful situations and thus elicit intuitive responses.
For example, if you use facial morphing software to merge many different species of turtle into one average turtle face, your brain would probably recognize it as a turtle even though it's technically a nonexistent creature. And if you showed a photo of that nonexistent creature's face to a cockroach or hermit crab, they would likely respond to it as though it were a turtle. These intuitive calculations are not always correct, but they allow us to make decisions and construct knowledge in rapid fashion.
Burroughs believes that images are thus less bound by time; and that was part of cut-up's whole theory from the beginning, by attempting to translate Gysin's writing-paintings into literature that could be read (though not only read to convey explicit meaning but to evoke mysterious affect and chaotic visions), was to treat words in a more visual and hence more atemporal way. In this way, Burroughs is one of the most important twentieth-century figures in terms of exploring the connections between reading, writing, and altered states of consciousness. What's interesting is that Burroughs' experiences with ayahuasca in 1953 were influential to the seminal ideas of cut-up and using language to affect consciousness.

These ayahuasca experiences led to his creation of the Interzone, a sort of psychic commons where many times and realities exist alongside and intersecting with each other like a multiversal nexus allowing myriad forms of time travel and identity transfer. When Gysin and Burroughs developed cut-up in 1960 as a translation of Gysin's geometrical writing-painting praxis into a multimodal literary form, they made explicit connections between cut-up reading and writing and L. Ron Hubbard's dianetics, stressing the ability of words and phrases at key moments to cause permanent trauma. But this trauma can be ameliorated through manipulations of various word-speech exercises, and these ideas underpin much of the early cut-ups, though Burroughs eventually rejected Scientology later on in the early 1970s. When Burroughs decided to turn his back on psychedelic substances in the early 1960s, he thought cut-up could serve as a substitute for the psychedelic's ability to access the visions of multitemporal psychic commons like the Interzone. In a letter to Tim Leary, Burroughs once wrote, "I have produced pure cut-up highs."
He really did have a strong belief that our entire grasp of reality, including the "sober" perception of space and time, is quite often arbitrarily constructed or selected rather than reflecting immutable truth. To escape the prison of the normative Real, mindbending exploration is necessary, for which cut-up is a much safer and more methodical option than drugs, Burroughs would argue. Using the artistic process for explicit attainment of an altered state offers the individual more control over how the mind gets bent.

JM: The process of the cut-up, as mentioned earlier, seems to invoke the alchemical stages. I’d like to talk about the alchemical stages being activated through heat - something Jung, Sufi poet Rumi, and many other mystic thinkers have spoken about in terms of spiritual evolution. For Jung, like Rumi, the chaotic origin that is the unrefined self, must be activated by heat - a fire within, to blossom into its true itself; to “realize” the self. Thinking of the process of the cut-up, the chaotic possibility of the image is cut, and heat introduced through the cut. I wonder if you can speak to the role of heat, emotion - being of course, energy-in-motion, as a device for the cutting stage. This is what gives, in Baradian terms, agency to the cut, where the emergence of symbols - or re/arrangement of forms, can be “read”.

The cut-up method here evokes ruth weiss’ Desert Journal, which engages spiritual transformation as a distinctly female ontology. The heat that Rumi, Jung and others, refer to recalls a fetus in a womb. As it is cut, and cuts its way into being, arranging its genetic material while simultaneously being arranged by the conditions in which it finds itself, the cuts are in an ongoing state of activation through heat/energy going in two directions. The co-creative conditions of the fetus and its environment are essential to its deliverance - denoting then, a spatial, architectural context that is both shaped and shaping.
I am compelled to think the cut-up as a method for spatial design activated by energy flows, and wonder whether architectural considerations of the cut-up had an influence in the cut-ups of Burroughs or others to your knowledge.

TC: The alchemy angle is interesting because it does specifically present itself in certain Burroughs texts like Ah Pook is Here (1979). If we think of life as an alchemical process, then the body and its environment both act as a sort of laboratory setup designed to direct and store the various forces/materials emerging from chemical and physical reaction, an alembic. To think of a text as an alembic, it implies that the base meaning of the text, the language in its "natural" state, is not the final desire. The alchemicalization of the text through reading, cutting, rearranging, and rereading distills a truer, purer meaning that can only be revealed rather than stated; hence, the distillation of written language into an occult manifestation of will transmutes the language into non- or pre-linguistic information that offers different ways of being and seeing. The heat, or the cuts, is not so much the unified vision the cut-up later takes, but is a desire rooted in the realization of how illusory one's current situation really is, thus driving us to want to see things differently and spurring the need for artistic activity and creation through destruction. To unmask the Real, one must start taking apart the film set that surrounds them and start looking for the crew and the fire exits.

I do not know about Burroughs' potential influence on architecture; seems possible given the pastiche excesses of postmodernist architecture; however, Charles Jencks explicitly denies any connection between his usage of "post-modernism" and the theories of William Burroughs, and even insists that Burroughsian post-modernism and architectural post-modernism are opposed. When I think about the alchemical process of cut-up as

information for architectural space, I'm struck by the difference Burroughs makes between Space and Time: Time is an external alien; but, Space is an internal, primordial truth not imprisoned by Time.
Empirical studies verify that perceptions of time indoors are somewhat different from our outdoor perceptions; if we stick with the idea of cut-up as a manipulation of time (a distillation of Time), the design potentials I see relate to how architects can use juxtapositional montages of visual and sonic information embedded in building interiors to affect perceptions of time, particularly how artificial or Euclidean manipulations of space can present the brain with an overwhelming amount of data that not only kickstarts intuitive engines but may slow down or speed up the flow of time, something which can likely be used both for and against powerful agents of social control in the fight for autonomy within public space.

JM: Taking this further - to the architecture of the urban, I am fascinated by the emergence of cut-ups in the Beat arsenal and its relation to the city. Beat writers are well- known for expressing the roaming, American spirit of personal transformation, what is epitomized, distilled, especially in NYC - what many consider the transformational stomping ground for the world at large. I reflect here that it is not just the cut-up that is a cut-up. The genre that is known as Beat is itself “cut-up” and pieced together in profoundly personal ways, which itself becomes the defining glue of a movement that otherwise eluded categorization. From this view, the importance of the cut-up becomes a testament to a worlding: to the already occurring phenomenon of the cut-up-as-urban jungle, and the process of transformation from chaos. The transformative propulsion emerges from within and also from without; through one’s art toward spiritual transformation/gnosis, formed, heated, activated by the constant and proliferating diversity of the city.
Can you speak a bit to the influence of New York on Burroughs and entanglements of the urban to the cut-up’s evolution?

TC: The most marked import of NYC on Beat literature would be the wartime culture of 1940s Columbia University. Columbia is where the early Beat circle emerged from, and many of the scholars and courses they encountered there (e.g., Lionel Trilling) had a

formative influence on their intellectual concerns. In terms of the emergence of cut-up, it wasn't initially related to New York in any direct way, but we should note that it did develop in the heart of Paris. And the psychic commons of the Interzone that Burroughs first discovered through ayahuasca was greatly influenced by his experiences in Tangier. Despite the fact that by the 1970s Burroughs was advocating sex-separatist anarchist communes as the utopias of the future, he nevertheless seemed always bound to a city at that time, having lived in London for most of the 1960s and then moving back to Manhattan in the mid 1970s, staying there until his retirement to Kansas in the early 1980s. And although he continued to write in Kansas, the vast bulk of his most innovative achievements occurred within an urban environment, and his most famous book, The Naked Lunch (1959) is in many a reflection on urban anxieties, alienation, and institutional control. In many ways, I interpret Burroughs' reflections on the urban as a mission to mystify or sacralize the mundanity of "civilized" experience; that is, the chaotic montages of data that present to one in urban spaces can be reduced/calculated into meaningful signs from the universe. For example, if you bump into someone you know on the street, Burroughs would argue that it isn't random, you were meant to meet them, and the surrounding environment of the meeting contains coded messages about this encounter's nature and purpose. Using cut-up in this sense, these notes of juxtaposition held in the mind, can transform the urban mundane into sinister or sacred intersections of the esoteric.

JM: Hmmm. One could say that this global influence on the formation of the cut-up already pre/figures the cut-up that is New York itself. What Burroughs is both drawn to and repulsed by, much like his obsession with words and conviction of their viral nature, New York is famous for its tendency to make whoever lives there, love and hate it in equal measure. I speculate that the only real escape - escape from New York, escape from the cut-up, is to let it dissolve you, dissolve your seeking, dissolve “you”, to surrender to the endless cuts and find the stillness behind it. To let the heat of this absolute, endless cut, unify you finally with the one true reality, with the Real. Something that the nature of New York so uniquely animates as a montage of the world.

TC: My Korean friend is an amateur saju-ist. She once gave me an informal saju reading, using my date and time of birth to calculate the elemental and alchemical makeup of my fate. I was strong in earth, but weak in fire. Without this fire, the circulation and mobility of my earth elements is hindered, and it is now my duty to surround myself with symbols of fire, to entertain meditations on fire as a counterbalance to my base existence. I am a planet with a cold center looking toward the sun. And why would a planet need a core of fire? Perhaps it has something to do with projecting an aura that shields us from radiation, making the surface inhabitable. Inner turmoil to achieve outer tranquility.

Consider the material requisites for fire: not only heat, but also access to oxygen. If you seal a cigar in a jar, it goes out. To burn is to be entangled with something, and entanglement immediately challenges the very reality of distinct identity and complete autonomy.

Fire is the garbling of names. The cthulhugraphic distillations of cut-up are an exploration and mapping of entanglements, the making and filming of a fire whose shadows project the beckoning nexus of infinite futures that seems to always be at the back of our minds. Producing fire requires cleaving the cosmic the egg so that the organic and the elemental begin their entangling reaction. It is a painful and terrifying vulnerability that ultimately kindles our existence. In a way, to cause entanglement for purposes of production, artistic or otherwise, is predicated on the recognition and undoing of "seals", as it were, that insulate us from the vitality of the elemental. Every cut outward is an opening inward. Ironically, fire in the center of a planet is an entanglement within the planet itself, an unsealing of its innards, in order to produce another electromagnetic seal atop itself that insulates us from radiation.

But is this the end? Burroughs always thought we should be trying to cause genetic alterations that allow us to be naturally interstellar, flowing freely through outer space with no ship. The fire in our belly that seals us from the bigger spaces that we're not ready for, it too then becomes an impediment to a different kind of fire, a limitation of itself. The next stage is the death of the center, complete loss of all heat. Entropy as a rekindling. By implication this entropy must drain the apotropaic aura of fire and force all life into an evolutionary leap in which radiation as the fire inherent to space becomes like oxygen, and we strike new blazes deep across the galaxies, all thoughts so cut up from the beginning

that no one could ever enslave us. The point of all that in a practical sense is about learning to see fire even in cold places. It's always on the other side of vulnerability, something we're traversing every moment by necessity.