Divination with the “cut-up technique”

This technique was developed by William Burroughs. It’s a way of recomposing an existing text to reveal a new meaning.

The theory is something like this: When writing, we—sometimes only subconsciously, but usually also consciously—have a kind of point that we want to get to. We write with a purpose, and this purpose is a more or less logical purpose, and therefore limited in its reach. Now, a good writer will be able to incorporate elements of truth in their work,1 but the work will always be tainted by the words themselves and their logical order. And often, the text as a whole will usually remain trapped inside a rationalistic, merely-human understanding of the world. (This is certainly the case for most books I’ve read!)

On the other hand, in those modes of experience that are closer to dreaming,2 and therefore closer to reality as it is, writing is impractical. By repurposing pre-written snippets, it may be possible to enter a state of focus where we are attuned to the ambient dream-currents, thus enabling us to recompose the text into something better, closer to pure dreams, while still retaining the words themselves, whereby we retain the ability to produce a readable work (as opposed to a one-off, purely private experience that is gone as soon as it ends).

A consequence of this is that the oracle and the interpreter can become one person acting in different modes (when the one recomposing the new text from the old snippets is the same as the author of the source text), whereas more traditional forms of divination generally require multiple different people to collaborate.

(I haven’t done any real experimentation with this technique myself, so I can’t comment on its effectiveness in practice.)

  1. There is of course a great deal of variation in terms of how skillful different writers and other artists are at conveying something really meaningful. For example, David Lynch is noted for his exceptional ability to slice through all the linguistic layers and go straight into the dream. But this is rare, and even someone like Lynch is not able to do it all the time. ↩
  2. Including dreaming as such, but also free association, daydreaming or fantasizing, meditation and the like. ↩