Cutups Cutins Cutouts the Art of William S Burroughs Pdf

ane Introduction

At the end of the 1950 s, Brion Gysin unwittingly "reinvented" the cutting-upwardly method, a technique proposed past Tristan Tzara in the 1920 s. Counted equally Gysin's greatest creative innovation, the cutting-upward method is an aesthetic strategy aimed at composing of a work of fine art from fragments that were found or literally cut out of already existing texts or visuals. Gysin was a fountain of creativity in many fine art forms: painting, collage, music, sound poetry, performance, multimedia works. At the same time, he had experimented with, as Laura Hoptman (2010: 59) puts it, "something more ineffable that might exist called 'perception'". Gysin's "invention" of cut-ups, however, was quite in tune with gimmicky processes in literature. In the 1960 s, a type of prose that uses various forms of the cutting-up/montage technique that had appeared earlier in the 1920 s in the works of Dadaists emerged again. Surprisingly, such works appeared simultaneously in various cultures even without direct contact or influence between their authors. Many writers, such as Gysin'due south friend and collaborator William S. Burroughs, Alan Burns, Christine Brooke-Rose, and Samuel Beckett used the technique temporarily, from the 1960 due south to the get-go of the 1970 s equally experiments.

This paper explores Brion Gysin'due south cut-up writings of the early on 1960 south alongside his paintings. The art experiments of Brion Gysin are chosen equally a instance study because it was his reinvention of cut-ups in the 1960 due south that started the influential trend which can be traced in a broad diverseness of art forms and media (visual art and literary narrative for instance). This aspect emphasizes the specificity and universality of the method, that was to get of peachy importance in cultural product. I seek to demonstrate that although these cultural products used unlike codes, they take much in mutual in how they narrativize and brand sense of homo experience. H. Porter Abbott (2008: 13) defines narrative as "the representation of events or a series of events" as opposed to a description, exposition statement or lyric. "The capacity to represent an issue, either in words, or in some other style, is the key gift and it produces the building blocks out of which all the more complex forms are built." (my accent) Abbott (2008: 15) is of opinion that narrative is a mediated story — by a voice, a manner of writing, thespian'south representations — and is involved in re-presentation. So that what ane calls the story is something constructed. Johnathan Culler calls it the "double logic" of narrative, since at the same time story appears both to precede and to come later the narrative discourse. "Before the narrative discourse is expressed, there is no story" (cf. Culler 1981: 169–187) Ane may suggest that at that place are no pre-existing stories in cut-ups, that they evocate human experience/mental performance at the very moment they were produced. Merely at the same fourth dimension, as a reader sees them, every bit words on paper, she re-enacts what they may correspond. The specificity is, that what is represented hither is non a story but a discourse of human feel. The newspaper treats cut-ups writings every bit narratives of human experience, if past "narrative" to sympathize the "representation of mental operation" (Palmer 2004, Palmer 2010), or "quasi mimetic evocation of real life experience" (Fludernik 1996).

The paper describes cut-up experiments within their historical contexts and analyses their major features and functions past juxtaposing Gysin's and his colleagues' declarations and narrative strategies. I focus on interconnections between writing and painting and compare the means in which both practices make sense of feel. Only how practise these practices empathise human experience? And how does acknowledging that our minds are coupled with the environs, the body, and other minds enrich our agreement of experimental montage prose? These procedures and considerations grade the ground of my discussion of some cerebral narratological approaches to the study of fictional mental performance and philosophical reflections on how the mind works. To reassess these questions, I suggest correlating the radical thought of cognition without content (Hutto and Myin 2012, Hutto and Myin 2017) with the fact that cut-up narratives do not take content if by 'content' we sympathize a consistent 'story', a 'plot' derived from the piece of work of art. Because there isn't a coherent story in cut-ups, it could exist difficult for the reader to produce a clear epitome or mental representation of what is happening in the text. To achieve this goal, I volition establish demonstrable correlations between the cut-ups as object, or a outcome of the writing, and the cut-ups as device, that is, as a mode of writing which simultaneously reflects the writing procedure and its results equally a never-ending work-in-progress.

2 Representation of listen in experimental prose

Before accounts of experimental cut-up prose (e. chiliad. Lydenberg 1987; Fahrer 2009; Robertson 2011) analyzed history and theory of cut-ups putting them inside the frames of advanced and postmodernist paradigms, within historical contexts of their literary predecessors and their actual political connotations, their techniques of writing, modes of expression and advice. They studied the way cut-ups were used every bit narrative method, or a means of breaking narrative, undermining authority, alert the readers about the instability of words' meanings. Cut-ups were bailiwick to the thematical and intertextual analysis. I take the perspective of cognitive narratological studies. These studies do not build a unified theory or consistent approach within a unmarried framework, but rather, offer several areas of enquiry hypotheses about how real minds work support, enrich and help in understanding fictional minds (e. k. Palmer 2004; Zunshine 2006; Herman 2009, Herman 2010 and Herman 2011 a; Bernaerts et al 2013; Caracciolo 2014). My paper focuses on opportunities for narrative assay that provide enactivist approaches with the idea that cognition and mental functioning occur in the interaction with the body and its environments. In their seminal book, Varela, Rosch and Thompson (1991: 172–173) propose speaking almost the 'co-dependent arising' of the subject and object of cognition. Information technology is through the interaction between the individuals and the environment that the individuals and their surroundings found themselves every bit such. As they posit it: "by using the term embodied we hateful to highlight two points: showtime that cognition depends upon the kinds of feel that come from having a torso with various sensorimotor capacities, and second, that these private sensorimotor capacities are themselves embedded in a more encompassing biological, psychological and cultural context".

On the ane hand, in the scholarly literature, representations of the mind as a base for narrative structure are mainly studied with the aid of analysis of minds (thematically, the what of heed representation) of a graphic symbol or a narrator in prose (e. thou.: Alber 2002; Bernaerts 2014); alternatively, researchers have studied how representational narrative techniques modify historically (east. g. Herman 2011b). On the other hand, there are explorations of readers' perceptions and 'processings' of literary work that enquire into why and how people read fiction (Zunshine 2006; Caracciolo 2014). My suggestion is to analyse cutting-ups to show how such experimental texts may correspond mental operation on the level of discourse, rather than on a thematic one. The notion of 'narrative' is applied to the cutting-ups equally a typological, comparative concept intended to capture texts' structures, functions, etc., in contrast to a classifying concept explicating a kind of texts (for example, description). I proceed from the premise that the major feature of cut-ups is the representation of mind(s) embedded in and interacting with their environments. The cardinal-concept in narrative'due south definition of cut-ups is not issue, just feel as represented at that place. This opportunity is given within the framework of Monika Fludernik's conception of experientiality that presents text's functions rather than its features: "Narrativity tin can emerge from the experiential portrayal of dynamic event sequences which are already configured emotively and evaluatively, but information technology can also consist in the experiential delineation of human consciousness tout court." (Fludernik 1996: thirty)

I will describe the levels and principles of this representation. The respective question here is that of mimesis, or what exactly is represented? "Fictional mental functioning," equally Alan Palmer (2004) defines it, can be treated thematically on the level of the story and functionally on the discourse level. But what is to be done, if virtually of the narrative information is missed? How should one construct mental states in such cases? And whose mental states should they be? Should they be multiply embedded minds or a "complex amalgamation of dynamically interacting emotions and cognitions"? As Daniel Hutto and Erik Myin country in their book Radicalizing enactivism (2012), a philosophical manifesto of the radical form of embodied cognition, most humans' actions and experiences are to be understood as dynamic interactions within their environments. Nevertheless today, they continue, the mainstream in cognitive science is nonetheless committed to content-based information processing's account of heed, a representationalist view of the mind. These approaches suppose that the listen can exist reduced to disembodied mental representations which are detached from their environments. Mental representations might come in a broad diversity of forms: they might exist images, schemas, symbols, models, sentences, maps, etc. Enactive approaches in their turn question the dissever betwixt what is mindless, dispositional and behavioural, and what is properly mental, representational, intentional and phenomenal. Enactivism is inspired by the idea that the embodied activities of living beings provide the appropriate model for understanding minds (Hutto and Myin 2012: four). My proposition is to project this view on the interpretation of cut-upwards prose and visual experiments of Brion Gysin. And to analyse them as a representation of dynamic interactions of humans with their environments, rather than disembodied representations of any stories, images or situations. I would suggest that the object of representation is radically changed here (in comparison to the conventional prose): in cutting-ups we do not have events but experiences of events.

Furthermore, Hutto and Myin problematize the thesis that cognition involves content. They contend that there tin can be intentionally-directed noesis and fifty-fifty perceptual feel without content. The authors stress that not all activity requires individuals to construct representations of their worlds. This statement is based on the ideas claiming that the perceived world is constructed through complex patterns of sensorimotor activity (Varela et al, 1991: 164). Hutto and Myin (2012: 13) country that "our most elementary ways of engaging with the world and others – including our basic forms of perception and perceptual experience – are mindful in the sense of being phenomenally charged and intentionally directed, despite being non-representational and content-free". There are plenty of conceptions of what constitutes a mental representation. However, it is mainly characterized every bit a structure which possesses a property, or a combination of properties, and resembles some aspects of the environment. It is used in contemporary philosophy and cerebral science every bit an umbrella term to include not only pictures and maps but also words, sentences, concepts, indeed almost everything that is a vehicle for intentionality, i. due east. anything that stands for 'ways', 'refers to', or 'is almost' something (Rey 2015: 171). Radically enactive business relationship of cognition rejects the idea that representational content is an inherent feature of the intentional or phenomenal. Basic forms of cognition that lie at the roots of cognition might be intentional (targeted) but not intensional (every bit being specified under a descriptive manner of presentation). "Acts of perceptual, motor, or perceptuo-motor cognition – chasing and grasping a swirling leaf – are directed towards objects and states of affair [...] yet without representing them" (Hutto and Myin 2015: 62).

Information technology may seem that the most important and impressive characteristic of a cut-up work is its formal specifics; hence, it may be and oft is compared to abstract art. It may announced that these circuitous relationships of forms, lines and spots, equally in abstract painting, or of words, sentences and senses, as in abstract writing, motility to the background in meaning construction of cut-ups. What is crucial here, however, is the representation of the specifics of mental processes, such as perception and imagination. Literature is e'er nearly content because its medium is language, and language operates with contentful representations. According to Hutto and Myin, linguistic communication expressions that accept truth conditions in certain contexts of employ are clear cases of contentful representations. But what do nosotros take in cut-up prose? Perhaps the goal of cutting-ups is to represent the inconceivable, because the object of this representation does non have (representational) content? Information technology turns out that the goal of cut-ups may be to correspond a non-representational manner of grasping reality — perceiving reality, the processes of perception of an object rather than specific objects or subjects. This method of cultural production attempts to produce the concept, the paradigm, the narration of something without representational content.

Enactive approach to narrative in contrast to the text-centered approaches is concerned with interactions betwixt the organism and its surround, the embodied nature of such interactions (Caracciolo 2014: 16–20). Cognition therefore is inseparable from the subject's body and from the context in which information technology is situated. Enactivists have focused on activities similar perception and activeness, whose relationship with the body is obvious. Yet, even higher-order mental capacities such equally conceptualization and linguistic communication are now associated with apotheosis, often through the arbitration of perception. Marco Caracciolo (2014: 20) speaks on the role of the image schemata like "containment", "source – path – goal", "middle – periphery", "residuum", "link" which enable united states to handle abstract concepts. In relaying the narrative (events?) and shaping them in the process of reading, non-spatial, highly abstract compositions of textual fragments, random arrangements of words, meaningless to conventional readings, can be transformed into the spatial and actual activity. Relationships betwixt fragments may correlate to an implied subject area interacts with the environment.

3 Cut-ups as a literary form and device

Since their advent in the 1910-1920s, cut-ups (more often than not understood as fragmented and montage prose) take earned increasing popularity, but they still remain an experimental and marginal do. William Burroughs, renowned as a proponent of cut-ups in the 1960 s, supposed them to be "a weapon and a pre-existing condition" for the contemporary culture. Cut-ups are not always distinguished from other artistic techniques like collage for instance; nonetheless, cut-ups are specific in method (Run into Fahrer 2009: xviii). The accidental quality of the pick of unlike fragments and the randomness in their combination were the predominant compositional principles formulated by the Dadaists. Historically, the simultaneity of multiple impressions and experiences pelting and occupying the homo mind was one of the nigh important aspects of modern life as defined by Futurists, the forerunners of the Dadaists who "invented" the technique. The Futurists tried to stand for the simultaneity of feel, presenting all the sensations that tin be perceived or imagined at a given moment (Berghaus 2000: 280). The Dadaists, who did non believe in the stability of the universe, or in finding harmony behind chaos, attempted to free their creative production from the rules of reason by welcoming the random cistron into the creative act itself (Watt 1975: 5). In the year 1920, Tristan Tzara wrote downwardly a kind of recipe for making a Dada poem (Tzara 1978: 44). His idea was to grasp the moment when everything was untouched past the mind's inevitable imposition of order. These ideas of free creativity were evolved by Surrealists, with their group Gysin was associated in the 1930 s. Surrealists were interested in the unconscious and the irrational grounds of human activities, specially the role of automatic writing and dreaming in the creative practices aimed at the expansion of the reality as a substitute for the stardom between the real and the imaginary. The automatic writing was a technique used for spontaneous production of literary texts exploring the sub- or unconscious mind and playing with gratuitous associations of words and images, and emotional experiences suggested by them. Already the Dadaists performances in the Cabaret Voltaire in 1916 stressed the role of the coincidences of chance verbal conjunctions (Huelsenbeck 1920). Surrealists also wanted to free people from restrictive customs and structures. In his Manifesto of Surrealism (1924) Andre Breton defined it as "psychic automatism in its pure state, past which one proposes to limited – verbally, by means of the written give-and-take, or in any other manner – the actual functioning of idea." (Breton 1969: 27) Farther, Surrealist visual art stressed that the of import was not the objects themselves chosen for the pictures but the circumstances or their viewing and their positions in relation to other things (for example, in the fine art works of Salvador Dali, Giorgio de Chirico, or Joan Miro). As Peter Stockwell (2015: 49) puts it: "The writing, art, sculpture, pic, music, and other forms were all attempts at a method for accessing the true nature of human perception". In contrast to Dadaists with their anarchy and spontaneity as "regulating" principles, Surrealists were attended to detect unity in the universe, to the capacity of human mind for synthesis of dreams and reality. Gysin was rather closer to Dadaists in his initial presuppositions. In their manifesto book The Third Mind Gysin and Burroughs (1978: 11–12), aimed at advantages of collective creation drawing out the thought that verse belongs to everyone, were nonetheless critically enough to the surrealist practices of collectively assembled texts or images: "...[b]ut since the "exquisite corpses" did not depart from the existing laws they were meant to escape, they were rapidly abandoned – equally was automatic writing – in favour of a literary art that was individual and deliberate".

In 1959, Gysin assembled his commencement cut-ups from textual fragments taken from the London Observer, the Daily Mail, and the New York Gerald Tribune newspapers. Minutes to Go (1960) was i of the first cut-up collaborations Gysin did with Sinclair Beiles, Gregory Corso, and William Burroughs. In his own explanatory essay "Cut-Ups: A Projection for Disastrous Success" (1964) appeared originally in the Evergreen Review, Gysin reveals that, at first sight, the method brings nothing new. Rather, it draws attention to the fact that cutting-ups release the artist from the pre-given clichés in which his own consciousness, according to Gysin, operates:

I picked up the raw words and began to piece together texts that later appeared every bit First Cut-Ups in "Minutes to Get." [...] I can tell yous goose egg you exercise not know. I tin can evidence you zero you have not seen. Anything I may say near Cutting-Ups must audio like special pleading unless you try it for yourself. You cannot cut upwardly in your caput any more I can paint in my head. Whatsoever y'all do in your head bears the pre-recorded blueprint of your caput. Cutting through that blueprint and all patterns if y'all want something new. Take a letter you have written, or a alphabetic character written to you lot. Cut the page into four or into three columns—any way y'all may choose. Shuffle the pieces and put them together at random. Cut through the word lines to hear a new vocalization off the page. A dialogue frequently breaks out. "It" speaks (qtd. in Weiss 2001: 126–127).

The writer stresses several things here. Firstly, the most of import alleged aim of the new method was to free creativity from the rationality of the modern world, the thought-process which makes the heed to motion in the manner of dominant ideologies and clichés. To attain this goal, the artist should rearrange already existing texts, statements, and words in order to disassociate them from their received meanings and reveal new ones. Gysin'southward appetite was "to destroy the assumed natural links of linguistic communication, that in the cease are simply expressions of Power, the favourite weapon of control" (qtd. in Hoptman 2010: 76). Secondly, words were equivalent to brushstrokes for Gysin, and writing was only i medium among other available means of expression. Throughout his career, Gysin experimented not only with cut-ups merely also with the permutations of language, forms and sounds within an abstruse structure. William Burroughs observed that "these pamphlets are to be considered abstract literature observation and mapping of psychic areas. [...] Abstract literature. Not Personal Opinions. [...] Just writing what I see and hear in my imagination. Pure abstruse literature." (qtd. in Geiger 2005: 134). Thirdly, the new cut-up method operated in the realm of the bland within mutual-sense practices. For Gysin "Nobody owns words": at that place was zip sacred about them. Cut-ups bear witness cipher new. They larn their value not with the novelty, but with changing contexts (similar to the modern art practices, such as The Fountain past Marcel Duchamp). Therefore, on the one (critical) side, cutting-ups were an artful strategy to relinquish the convention of the novel with characters that follow a narrative line of events. On the other (constructive and creative) side, it was a new fashion to represent the perception, not the "what" of a story, simply the "how" of it.

In 1965, Gysin and Burroughs finished their next collaborative book consisting of fragmented texts and combinations of images and newspaper collages, laid over pages marked with Gysin's signature grid pattern, which he created using a pigment roller. The Third Heed was meant to be a manifesto of the cut-upwardly method, but due to the financial and technical difficulties with its production, it was published merely in 1975. Ane of the main ideas was that the visuals in the book were not illustrations for the texts. Writing and painting were fused into a multimodal system of sense-making with the co-being of different semiotic modes in ane text. Both words and images were text's constitutive parts, equally contributing to the structure of new meanings. The team declared that they did information technology to repossess consciousness from social control. Simply at the same time, The Third Mind was much more than than this.

Tristan Tzara, the homo who "invented" cut-ups, once said to Gysin: "Would yous be kind plenty to tell me just why your young friends insist of going back over the footing we covered in 1920s?" Gysin replied: "Possibly they feel you did not cover it thoroughly enough," (qtd. in Geiger 2005: 132). Their approaches differed profoundly. Gysin cutting and rearranged texts to destroy their mutual determined meanings and to reveal new ones. Unlike the Dadaists, he was not in a higher place all interested in the aesthetic outcomes of the adventure principle and chaos. As Laura Hoptman (2010: 77) notes: "phrases to be cut up were chosen with the utmost care, and no chance operations were involved, only considered re-matching". Gysin believed that such practice would open the way to a new consciousness. Maybe, it was more than about the representation of mental operation. A new vision and a method to express a new dimension of consciousness. Erasing, cutting and shuffling words liberates them from their cultural background, Gysin concluded. Information technology draws attention to their formal aspects and raises new nonlinear relationships in which the significant appears outside the subject, and outside his or her actions. The meaning appears accidentally, spontaneously simply as in the sporadic interactions of human beings with their environments.

Get-go Cutting-ups

/one/

It is impossible to estimate the damage. Anything put out up to now is like pulling a figure out of the air.

Vi distinguished British women said to united states of america afterwards, indicating the crowd of chic immature women who were fingering samples, "If our prices weren't as good or better, they wouldn't come. Eve is eternal."

(I'm going right dorsum to the Sheraton Carlton and call the Milwaukee Braves)

Miss Hannah Pugh the slim model – a member of the Diner's Society, the American Express Credit Cards, etc. – drew from a piggy bank a relent which is a very quintessence of the British female sex.

"People aren't crazy," she said. "At present that Hazard has banished my timidity I experience that I, too, can live on streams in the expanse where people are urged to be watchful."

A huge wave rolled in from the wake of Hurricane Gracie and bowled a married couple off a jetty. The wife's trunk was constitute – the husband was missing presumed drowned.

Tomorrow the moon volition be 228,400 miles from the earth and the lord's day almost 93,000,000 miles away (qtd. in Weiss 2001: lxx).

This first section of the 'Beginning Cut-ups' can be divided into 5 fragments. Events are described hither, just they are not the focus of the text. Instead, they marker the simultaneity of experiences in their many forms: a news report, a story, an accident description, a declarative judgement. What happens in this prose, if anything "happens" at all? The classical definition of an effect, a core-concept in plot-oriented narratology, does not seem to be applicable here: "A change of state manifested in discourse by a process statement, in the mode of exercise or happen. An event can be an activity, or act, or a happening" (Prince 2003: 28). On the ane hand, nosotros find here some event descriptions in the fragments that constitute the text. On the other mitt, they exercise not make a story that could exist deduced from the discourse. Their limerick instead discloses the performative aspect of narration. It provides the reader with various occurrences simultaneously, involving the reader in processes of interacting experiences and switching the frame of reference from the content to the means information technology is represented.

The standard conceptual framework for 'time' (based on Genette'due south concepts (1980) of lodge, duration and frequency) is too problematized here. Brian Richardson (2000: 28) points out that the "opposition between story-time and discourse-fourth dimension [...] presupposes that it is possible to deduce a consistent story from a text; in many recent works information technology is not the example". One tin hardly speak of order hither because the fragments are composed at random. They exercise not use any logical sequence, but rather a rhythmic one. Elapsing compared to the time of events in the story, with the time it takes to retell them in narrative soapbox, is also non-applicative: there is no single story to take out from the discourse in this text. When we speak of the category of phonation (who speaks?), or signal of view (who perceives?), more than problems occur. There is no narrator in the text and it does non fit any norm: with its cluttered composition, paradoxically connected fragments, random series of states of affairs which may only indicate some directions the significant-making of this writing might accept taken. I volition argue that such texts represent "fictional mental functioning". In other words, it narrates feel as it is being experienced (perceived, recalled, etc.) by the contemporary mind installed in various information streams, reading newspapers, receiving visual impressions, seeing advertisements, hearing conversations, feeling fear or anger, remembering something. And it conveys collective rather than individual experience. Cutting-up experiments conceive of these weather condition as structured anticipation of experientiality; they seek to come out of the constraints of reason imposing social club on the multiple projections of the different experiences. Is that what Brion Gysin achieves? He is supposed to offer "a way of breaking through a writer's ain controlling consciousness, to open one'due south patterns of thought to the subversive will of language". Whose consciousness is it? At the outset sight, information technology does non belong to anyone. Or, of someone estimating the impairment, of six British women, of miss Hannah Pugh, of a reporter, and of some other reporter. Information technology is the consciousness of no ane in particular, but at the same time, it is a commonage consciousness. Information technology is a gimmicky technological reality with informational streams. "It" may refer to collective consciousness, unobservable in single cases. Further, this fragment may operate as an impulse that not only illustrates, expresses (or represents) something, but evocates it. Acting every bit a way of transition from "what we see/read/perceive" to "how we experience", from the given of images, events or existents to the processes of their elaboration. It is non only the representation equally representational could words on paper be: they take meanings and their rhythmical and syntactic constructions bear definite semantic information. But abreast the given, it could be a style of experiencing fragments of outer's texts and cultural constructions, the way of production of presence, the way of being in the presence (cf. Gumbrecht 2003).

"The Verse form of Poems" (1961) is some other example which Gysin first produced on a tape recorder by way of the cut-upwards. Every bit he explained in an interview, cut-ups should employ but the best, high-charged material: King James' translation of the Vocal of Songs of Solomon, Eliot's translation of Anabasis by St. John Perse, Shakespeare'southward Sonnets and a few lines from the "Doors of Perception" by Aldous Huxley, nearly his experiences with mescaline-based hallucinogens.

Allow him osculation me,

The onlie begetter of these practiced ointments

All happinesse and that eternitie

(or practice the virgins love thee?)

Promised past our ever-living poet.

The king hath brought me into his chambers.

After iv and 40 winters the dominicus enters the sign of the

Allow the counterweight exist removed

As the curtains of salt after the fall of Rome.

O, the provinces accident many winds.

My mother'south child will be a tattered weed.

Tell me, O, one thousand that my soul loveth,

black because the sun hath looked upon thee –

Have I not kept thy livery?

Asked where all thy beauty lies I sing:

My beloved is the tallest tree of the yr.

His flocks are watered by the lakes of golden lotus.

He is herb with leaves the colour of lapis lazuli (Gysin quoted in Jason Weiss Reader 2001: 102).

This loftier-charged material seems to contradict Gysin's merits to free the mind from pre-given meanings and the impositions of rationality. Because each of the units of this cutting-upwards text bears the enormous train of meanings, connotations and reuses. But it may instantiate the contemporary mind and cultural practices which would become ubiquitous in the digital age. For Gysin, words were only 1 of many possible ways of artistic expression.

The question is how to represent something without representations, eastward. yard. perception of daily streams of impressions fraught with cultural interpretations. Should it be an abstruse prose? The fragment quoted above demonstrates non only a structure of patterns of mind-body-world interactions, interplay of visual and verbal stimuli, but also it uncouples them from their "normal" contexts and puts into them unusual disturbing connotations. It may be a translation/ transformation of inconceivable into a literary text or into a piece of visual art, a painting, in society to share, to evaluate it, to ascribe the cultural value for to approach the more thorough and detailed agreement of creative acts. Gysin suggests cutting-ups every bit they do not have evident content or story but includes all these diverse objects of the outer and inner reality, and the ways of interactions. I suppose Gysin's cutting-ups could grasp at what could not be told or retold, what could not be depicted in a detail, that instead of a story most something, you get a story of yours, someone's, any reaction and response on this something. That unconceivable too needs its own images, for to exist shared in cultural practices, which regulate, put in club and include this unconceivable on a human being calibration, put into language and make sense of it. A reading of such text is not a passive consumption of a given, it is an interaction of a reader with suggested fragments and their possible (and impossible) connections. One may heighten an objection that an experienced reader ever interacts with a literary work, tracing the intertextual allusions and drawing on his own imagination, recollections etc. Yep, indeed, but dealing with cut-up prose a reader gets almost cypher without agile participation. So, I suppose that Gysin's cut-ups reintegrated in a new frame of references may provide a kind of a model for the assay of processes widespread in contemporary civilization. Its implication for narratology seems to be the emphasis on the experimental realm of narrative, on the edge of literary text and visual art that gives a transmedial perspective in which something inconceivable in representations finds its meaning and can be shared and interpreted.

4 Cut-ups and contemporary painting

Let united states compare, therefore, what he did with words with his experiments in paintings. This comparing follows the trend started with the work of John Dewey Fine art as Experience (1934) where he speaks on the mutual patterns in various experiences: "[...] no matter, how unlike they are to one some other in the details of their discipline matter. There are atmospheric condition to exist met without which an experience cannot come to be" (Dewey 1980: 43). Dewey stresses that every experience is the effect of an interaction between a live beast and some aspects of its environs. An experience, says Dewey, has design and structure. It is not just doing and undergoing in alternation, only their relationship. The relationship is what gives pregnant. Gysin with his cut-ups, permutations of words, signatures and images in his paintings transformed the very principle of artwork, making language operate in a new way past replacing the grammatical constructions of a textual construction with the compositional principles of visual fine art.

In his painting experiments of the 1960 s, Gysin, who studied both Japanese and Arabic calligraphy, placed rhythmic calligraphic forms inside grids that he mechanically printed with carved roller. His non-representational "writing paintings" experimented with various forms of linguistic communication appearance, repetitions and permutations of forms. He pursued the same experiments in language.

Gysin'south permutation poem Exhale in the Words composed for The Third Mind (c.1965) consists of repeating 4 words ("breathe", "in", "the", "word") on a ready-made typographical grid which structures the whole composition. Similar experiences in painting fabricated him sensitive to the importance of gesture. "[...] Fine art, as we understand it today, lies in action and in gesture, and this was realised before the advent of activity painting". (qtd. in Hoptman 2010: 35). Burroughs observed that Gysin did in painting what he was trying to exercise in writing. He regarded his painting equally a pigsty in the texture of the and so-called "reality," through which he explored outer space. This meant possibly that painting itself was not so meaning. It was besides a vehicle to explore the way ane perceives, imagines or recalls something. He moved into the painting and through information technology. Through the gestural movements of ink on newspaper, Gysin sought to communicate the "vibrant immediacy of the thought expressed" (quoted in Geiger 2005: 69). Not the idea itself, but its qualities — the way information technology appears and exists.

In 1963, Brion Gysin took role in the exhibition La Lettre et le Signe dans la Peinture Contemporaine at the Galerie Valérie Schmidt in Paris. The show presented a mixture of texts, paintings, photography, collages, magazines, volume publications, jazz music, and films. Gysin'southward paintings were represented alongside with the works of Cy Twombly, Arman, and others. Gysin based his works on crossings of grid patterns, which incorporated letters and photos into the grids for multi-directional perception. He explored structural problems of perception and the random ordering of forms through the permutations of his personal calligraphic signature. Under the influence of Max Ernst's method, Gysin discovered that in that location were the same problems in painting equally in writing: "I saw that the idea was to forcefulness the painting to make itself." Think that William Burroughs once said the goal of writing is to make it happen (Burroughs 1993: 63). Gysin ended that: "It was certainly not a matter of applying yourself to making it, just of seizing the ways of production, finally some uncomplicated means, and combining them in such a way every bit to obtain a very immediate, very fresh result, equally those which arose in Max's frottages of wood, like Histoire naturelle." (qtd. in Hoptman 2010: 35). Gysin's Ecritures were not meant to betrayal readable words (in dissimilarity to Lettrists paintings), the repetitive signature of his name was meant to erase it. (Figure 1)

Effigy 1

Brion Gysin. Untitled. 1960. Drawing/ watercolour, Chinese ink, 34x26. Paris, Centre Pompidou-CNAC-MNAM. Copyright bpk / CNAC-MNAM / Georges Meguerditchian

This manipulation of multiple repetitions should defeat materiality, costless words, and images from their common meanings, or at to the lowest degree expel the authorial voice replacing it with rhythmical constructions and gesture every bit such. At the aforementioned period, Gysin together with Ian Sommerville invented the Dreamachine with flickering lights that were supposed to be perceived with closed eyes. This experience could trigger something budgeted hallucination. Gysin believed that this new form of artmaking, which results were non seen but perceived, could provide direct access to artistic consciousness, leaving aside the fabric world. It was less an artwork than a tool for creative production that did not necessitate painting or writing. Instead of a conventional way of seeing, the Dreamachine severed visuality from the materiality of the object. Similar observations may be found in the literary theories of Roland Barthes in his essay The Death of the Author (1967), or in Susan Sontag'due south essay The Aesthetic of Silence (1969). Both present ideas of the liberation the artist from himself, art from the artwork and history and of the heed from its perceptual or intellectual limitations.

In addition to this, Gysin's painting experiments may be fruitfully put in the context of Roland Barthes' analysis of Cy Twombly's drawings (Barthes 1985).

Effigy 2

Cy Twombly. Untitled (Rome). Painting / wall pigment, oil, lead and grease pencil on paper, mounted on sail. 152x247 cm. Düsseldorf, Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen Copyright bpk / Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf / Walter Klein

In his essay, Barthes explains the principle of Twombly'southward creative experiences rather than his works. Barthes draws attention to the fact that Twombly's works were a kind of writing, that they had some kind of relation to calligraphy. This relationship, however, was neither imitation, nor inspiration — Twombly merely alluded to writing. Every line in his drawings, notes Barthes, has nothing to illustrate. Rather, it is a perception of its ain realisation (Effigy 2). The essence of writing is neither a form nor a usage, but only a gesture (Barthes 1985: 158). Twombly retains writing's gesture, non its production. Even if it is possible to swallow the results of his work aesthetically and even if his productions link up with a history and theory of arts, observes Barthes, what is shown is a gesture. The specific feature of a gesture is that it is a surplus of an action. It surrounds the action with an temper. Whereas a message seeks to produce information, a gesture "produces all the rest without necessary seeking to produce anything" (Barthes 1985: 160). Words in Twombly'south works, in contrast to those on Gysin'due south whose repetitions should erase their initial meanings, not only call back the whole idea, they are a kind of citation, notes Barthes. Just Twombly'south canvases are every bit unreadable as the cutting-upwards prose. Something has been written and then unwritten, simply these two movements exist simultaneously, they remain superimposed, as diverse traces in a kind of a palimpsest. Drawing's materiality constitutes its meaning which appears in constant becoming, referring, alluding, questioning and reinterpreting. At that place is no production here. Instead, product and gesture draw attention to the artistic do every bit it appears.

These observations seem to signal a person's "internal" position in relation to the represented subjects and processes every bit an of import feature of cutting-ups. Cut-ups practice not illustrate or represent whatever observable reality. Instead, they artistically represent the processes of perceiving or imagining such a reality in new cultural conditions. The idea is that our attending should exist directed toward the earth every bit we experience (perceive, call back, or imagine) it. Nosotros should nourish to the modes, or ways in which things appear to united states of america. Gysin with his experiments is interested not in what things are, only rather in exactly how they are experienced. He appears preoccupied with the ways in which combinations of images, words, and sounds generate the very texture of meanings, in how word and image get effectually on very complex associations.

5 Conclusion

My assay proposes a new reading of texts that initially seem to be uncommunicative. By redefining narrativity in terms of experientiality, "natural" narratology provides a basis for an analysis of cut-ups. Gysin's writing experiments juxtapose and interweave fragments of discourses deprived of their initial contexts and evocating new meaningful configurations of retentivity, emotions, ideas. Such texts are unreachable for the plot-oriented narratology and may challenge narrativization on the textual level. It is difficult to invent a lot from the distorted information disseminated on the folio of a cutting-up work. There are no pre-given stories that could be derived from these texts. But if the reader turns to the adjacent level of ascertainment, i can narrativize the experiences which may engender such texts rather than the texts themselves. The reading can exist more convincing, therefore, when texts are analysed not but in terms of style, narrative modes etc., but besides with a discussion of cognitive modes. On the other hand, these cerebral modes may engender such compositions; on the other hand, readers bring these modes into them.

Enactivist approaches residual on the idea that the embedded and embodied activities of individuals underline their constantly interactive mental functioning. Instead of object-based descriptions of the minds (in the text, for instance) and their activities, this approach proposes a contextualised and an on-process-oriented agreement. Cutting-up assay would be enriched if put into the contexts of abstract painting and experiments with perception (such as Gysin's Dreamachine). At the same time, cutting-ups may be explored as visuals because the creative principle itself erases the distinction betwixt words and images. Furthermore, these "unreadable" texts may acquire new readings. They are read as a representation of the ways the homo mind may operate, rather than as a representation of characters and their actions or even as projections of the "narrator'south" mental functioning. This approach follows the ideas of radical enactivism and asserts that there tin be cognition and feel without content and without representations.

In addition to these observations, the assay of Gysin's experiments demonstrates how the narrative construction breaks apart, transforms and at the same time constitutes a kind of a visual structure. Cutting-ups human activity as abstruse forms in which sentences lose their grammatical structures and codes, transform syntax and semantics, erase any pre-given significant, and exit their author bated. They learn additional layers and form multidimensional space. Cut-ups operate in the realm of banal commonage clichés, shifting the focus of literary work from representing the individual experiences of a single author to nameless, infinite collective practices. They create a common full general cause. Finally, cut-ups represent something non-representational with projections in words, the way basic knowledge – perception and imagination – operates.

These practices marker a new cultural trend in the representation of human perception; cut-up technique can be regarded as a means of representing mental processes (unobservable directly), especially by mapping the simultaneity of external observations and internal reflections that exist in constant continuous relationships between minds and their environments. I have analysed Gysin's verbal and visual compositions and explored their structural and functional specificity in this regard. Cut-ups exist as sets of visual, verbal, perceptible and emotional fragments which each reader or viewer should construct, reconstruct and deconstruct as a new model each fourth dimension they encounter them. Cut-ups might appeal to the idea that the consciousness is cut past various random factors in contemporary culture. Cut-ups point to the inseparable tie between perceiving and thinking, acting and interacting.

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