Cutting Up Existing Texts

Tree of Codes takes a text and die-cuts so the text at each page turn has some of the pages before and after. It’s by Visual Editions
It nests nicely against what derek beaulieu posted, “Bibliocidal Tendencies”: British Publisher Information as Material Tears Into Literature for Art’s Sake by Ross Simonini at ArtInfo.com. When a text doesn’t read linearly, sensibly, when the works jumble against syntax, when the emjambments leap about, is it a dog’s breakfast that any old randomness can do or is it doing something else? Ross said,

We would agree with William Burroughs and Brion Gysin that “cut-ups establish new connections between images, and one’s range of vision consequently expands.”[1] They allow one to find new poetic connections in an existing text.
But, it’s not a particularly current technique, you could trace it all the way back to Tristan Tzara and his infamous cut-up poem in 1927

Doing an exquisite corpse could get at the same sort of part of the brain. Chopping up one’s own text or a newspaper clipping and pulling parts randomly to assemble could do the same, although one might be tempted to make a narrative on top of randomness derived from the component materials. Stacey Wilson uses old texts, chopped up but is pillaging to make new unrelated texts with the constraint of that vocabulary, subverting the original context. It is use of cut-up and constraint of another pre-existing text but it isn’t working to see what randomness creates or to counter the idea of linear narrative stories.
Cut ups can also move against sense and be about the words as material. No amount of knowing about the author, no amount of squinting or suffering or study will make a pattern of covert meaning, illuminating details appear. It is the text itself doing what it will unconsciously.
Page two gets into how to understand such work which transcribe another work without comment, the act being an art of attentiveness.

These books are not necessarily meant to be read at all in the conventional sense. We know people do read them and seem to get something from that experience, but it is not essential to their function. Like any other traditional artwork they are propositions to be engaged with and thought about.

More than hitching your wagon to a brand in a symbiotic sales act of quoting/promoting, it seems on a different page. It feels comparable to me to haiku where the motivation is not literary, not artifice nor art primarily, but the process of meditative opening, paying attention. The “product” is a residual by-product. The real composition is the time spent and how that cognitively, chemically changes the doer.
The brain, the relentless pattern maker will try to bridge just about anything. It will try to write stories and read between lines no matter how widely or tightly leaded. Rather than work with that desire for meaning and lead someone down a narrow chute, make it more difficult to see what the intention is, by a mechanical process that has no hidden intention, by a group that has no common mind, try to cobble the story and the mind will still leap, but may leap new places. The brain needs very little to go on to build a whole structure of implications. The reader is then reading self like tea leaves of type.
What is the role of the person who scrambles and presents it? Only to play and let the wind of the readers do what they will? Or must there be a moral principle guiding the selection and preventing certain directions that would lead to readings that would make a case for the writers intending some particular pattern?
That idea of trying to do poetry as oratory, as trying to convince of a truth is still within the structure that there must be a persuasive act by the writer, in opposition to or cooperation with the reader to make something sway. It is within the idea that there should be an emotional payoff, some emotional junkie rewarded with a hormonal tilt thru the mechanism of the text which is not proprietary product but stuff to toy with that has no mystique and hierarchical controlled access of power. What if the game is not that and not so complex as that? What if writing is an act of exploring where it doesn’t matter where text comes from or where it is going? That doesn’t make it static but to a degree takes off some of the harnesses and reins and carriage and becomes more of a free animal. It gives more respect to the reader as a free agent to make what they will rather than sit, reading waiting to be told what to observe next and how to judge what next. It opens it up to the body and the head rather than words for head as tunnels to heartstrings.
So far as using and remixing text, such as that “Pride and Prejudice and Zombies”, the take in the article was this:

zombies are a clever way of aggravating the romantic, idyllic world that Jane Austen has been made to represent by the literary canon. What is interesting is the reaction of the literary industry to the book’s gesture of appropriation: applauded as a new, naughty maneuver, and represented as a game that can be accepted; subsumed, contained, and put to work against the strong challenges posed to the industry’s principles by other more radically appropriative writing acts.

That seems astute, to call the remix as “naughty”. By sticking that label and call it a radical outer limit of remix, it excludes further radical acts/arts that are outside the game rules, the (yech, but what term fits better) paradigm and does not acknowledge they exist.