Merry Xmas from Jack Kimball (thanks to Jim Andrews & Ron Padgett)

The cutup involves a media artist's or painter's sense of the writer's 'material'. Usually when a writer speaks of 'the material' of his or her writing, what's referred to is the subject matter and the little sub-stories or central metaphors, that sort of thing, not the media. Practice in other arts is generally more familiar with the energies and methodologies of the cut. Partially because the grammars of image and sound are not associated with so many rules and expectations. The structures of sentences are predicated on scads of grammar rules. Whereas when images are created, the rules are not so strong. To break the rules of grammar is something that is seemingly more involved in breaking useful rules about how we make sense to one another than the same sorts of operations in the visual or sonic. The constraints upon the syntax of sentences are more deeply structural than the constraints in visual art or sound art or even film. We spend years learning the rules of grammar and how to write coherent sentences, paragraphs, etc, and it's hard-won, a 'triumph into literacy'. To then start working with cutups involves a radically different branching out into language. It's more a 'branching out' than simply a 'different step'. It's multiple, combinatorial. So part of the answer to Ron's question of 'why this moment in history for the cutup?' must surely be that the technique has been cultivated in many other arts over the last hundred years. Even if the technique is more problematical in writing, the adoption in literary practice has clearly followed from practice in other arts. But why has this technique come to be more or less commonly practiced in so many arts over the last century? Partly because when working with media such as film or audio tape, cutting apart/together is necessary in even modest journalistic compositions, never mind getting fancy with the razor blade and getting a feel for it as a stroke of art. The materiality of film and recorded sound has been crucial, I suspect. But even in modernism, there's collaging in things like Pound's Cantos and widespread experimentation with juxtaposition in, say, surrealism. Or the visual publications of Dada and Futurism. But it's less developed as part of a world view. What distinguishes Burroughs in his work with the audio and written cutup is not only that disturbing brilliant trilogy and his influential audio cutups, but the world view he wrote about and developed both in the work and in fascinating writings about the method and its relations to cognition, addiction, originality, intention, goverance, language as virus... It's not simply the work itself but the world view etched into the work and life. Burroughs developed a whole poetics or philosophy of the cutup. The cutup is not simply a technique of novelty for him. It's a technique to help alter one's own programming as a writer. It also involves questioning conscious intention as the only way to worthwhile, consequential, even 'authentic' writing. "When you cut audio tape, the future leaks out." The future of writing, for instance. One can look at the cutup as a consequence of explorations, as above, of the materiality of media, whether the medium is visual or sonic or textual. I would ask you to also look at the following and its relations with the growing emphasis throughout the twentieth century on materiality. Concerning the language machine, I gotta say--with great enthusiasm--go out and buy Martin Davis's book "The Universal Computer: From Leibniz to Turing" (the softcover version is called "Engines of Logic"). That book gives a better sense than any other I've encountered of the proximity of things like the development of the computer to our whole sense of language. Davis traces the development of the computer from "Leibniz's dream" of basically a language of symbolic logic and a machine capable of generating true propositions in that language. I suggest that the cutup technique is part of a whole change in our perspectives on language and machines--and ourselves. In the theory of computation, language is one of the central subjects of study--in the same sort of way that billiard-ball-like-objects are a central concern of physics. In the theory of computation, language is studied as strings of letters that can be generated, parsed, recognized, etc. The theory looks at the *mathematical* properties of such collections of strings, or languages. This isn't quite the same as an emphasis on the materiality of language, but it's obviously related in that it involves operations on strings of symbols, operations more or less independent of the 'meaning' of the symbols. In the literary and general art history of the twentieth century, we see a growing concern with and practice involving cutups and their related techniques of collage and juxtaposition. Involving what were unusual operations on language and image, tape, film, etc. And we also see the rise of the theory of computation in which language is crucial. Language is crucial to programmability and the whole idea of the computer, going all the way back to Leibniz. It has often been said that language draws a magic circle round the realm of the thinkable. And the programmable. Our thoughts and images on what a human being is have changed in the twentieth century, have expanded to include the notion that we are soft machines. Just as Darwin gave us the conceptual framework to imagine humanity proceeding from the evolution of the most primitive of life-forms, so too has the theory of computation and its consequences given us the conceptual tools to imagine the mind as a soft computing machine--that wildly exceeds, at the moment, the capacities of all modern computers. Still, there is no accepted proof that there exist thought processes of which humans are capable and computers are not, in theory and eventual practice. So that the fusion of language and logic, in the realization of Leibniz's dream, results in machines and languages capable of thought itself. That is what thought is. And the cutup becomes a type of operation on language involved in our growing awareness of the poetential fecundity of dynamic process in language. The cutup lets us peek into the interzones of texts, the nether-worlds between the lines where the cyborg emerges.