A Heuristics of Reading the William S. Burroughs Archive: The W.S.B Papers as a Visual Heuristic of Time and Space of the Cut-Up Methods, Employed Throughout Mediums

The archive has always been a central piece to William S. Burroughs’ generative legacy. I argue that the William S. Burroughs Papers accentuate the cut-up/fold-in as contingent on perception and a product of being-in-the-world, as described in The Third Mind and in interview. These experimentalist forms are noticeably replicated throughout the W.S.B Papers, and are a heuristic to his literary oeuvre: specifically, the relationship between word and image, and entering the “image” within his word. The cut-up/fold in methods are more than a literary device. They are captured throughout the archive as a rhetorical tool. As curator Robert Sobieszek observes that Burroughs introduced a new dimension into the field of writing (1996), this paper displays the visual overture of this new dimension accentuated via an interdisciplinary approach: Burroughs utilizes the fields of visual culture (with collaborator Brion Gysin) and photography to apply a replication of the cut-up (a literary form) to the image, illuminating newfound, semiotic pathways of visual communication. Through evidence of cut daily news, plural grids, and pantropic street photography, Burroughs’ new dimension germinates visually, and is a reflection of how and what Burroughs, one of the most profound authors of the 20th century, keeps in his field of view. In the W.S.B Papers at Arizona State University, the cut-up pattern, if cut and shot appropriately, is applicable to both word and image.