William Burroughs Invented Nothing — He Just Cut and Rearranged

In 1959, the painter Brion Gysin was cutting paper mats with a razor blade in a Paris hotel room he shared with William Burroughs. He sliced through newspapers by accident and noticed that the strips, laid in random order, produced accidental sentences that were more interesting than the originals. He showed Burroughs. Burroughs immediately understood what he had.

The technique became known as the cut-up: take a text — a newspaper column, your own draft, a letter from a friend — cut it into strips, rearrange the strips at random, and copy out whatever new syntax emerges. Burroughs argued that language was a control system, that the fixed order of words was itself a kind of colonization. Cutting scrambled the signal. What survived the scramble, he thought, was truer than the planned draft.

Naked Lunch, published the same year, was not written by this method from scratch. Burroughs had been accumulating journals, letters, and fragments for years in Tangier; Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac had helped sort the mass of paper into something approaching order during a visit in 1957. The cut-up deepened after publication, running through the Nova trilogy — The Soft Machine, The Ticket That Exploded, Nova Express — where the technique is visible on the page.

David Bowie adopted cut-up for lyric-writing during the Berlin period of the late 1970s; Thom Yorke has cited it as a method for Kid A-era lyrics. The technique migrated into music because it does the same thing in both forms: it breaks the writer's own habit of sense.