Cutting up / An Introduction

“What new possibilities for thinking and living might result from extending the notion of creativity beyond the human realm?” — Stuart McLean

This edited collection is the fruit of a day-long writing workshop, invited by the practice and prompts of Stuart McLean. I hosted this workshop part of the stretching senses school, a collective of anthropologists, artists, coders and designers that ran for a while after the stretching materialities exhibition at the Excellence Cluster “Matters of Activity” at Humboldt University in Berlin.1 The spacious “central laboratory” of the cluster, with its high windows and whitewashed picknick tables, was welcoming yet another interdisciplinary experiment. This time, we looked and sensed the inherent activities of fieldwork materials, as revealed by writing up and cutting up verses from them.

We engaged with the exercises at the end of the workshop. While the session was relatively short, we felt supercharged by the framework planted by Stuart. It would be reducing to say that a simple exposure to his approach sufficed; certainly some of it felt like mere energy transfer. After a thorough lecture introducing us to his views of the power of poetry in the light of an anthropology “at the edge of the human”, and to his field work in the British Isles, and a delightful lunch which must also be mentioned, we watched two uncut video sequences extracted from his material. Raw fragments. Indelible fieldwork impressions. The footage was drawn from his involvement in Papay Gyro Nights, a festival of experimental and multimedia arts held annually on the island of Papa Westray in Orkney, Scotland. As Stuart announced before by way of the blurb of the workshop: “The festival draws its name and inspiration from a giantess commemorated in North Atlantic storytelling and performance traditions, who is herself a hybrid figure combining a range of conventionally male and female, human and animal, marine and terrestrial attributes.” And what we could see from the videos was nothing short of that. Following Stuart’s impulse, we attended to the video material as a means to harness a different relation to the more-than-human entities that we could sense, sieving from the visual notes.

The prompts of Stuart are beautifully expounded and reflected on in the preface to this collection: We tried to write on an “epic” mode, as opposed to a “lyrical” one, as a way to relate to presences we perceived through the fieldwork material rather than to express our own subjective feelings. During the first segment of the writing session, we produced short accounts in prose. We wrote what we have seen in two video fragments.2 We wrote what we felt in it. Some of us wrote by hand, others typed it straight up on their laptops. After that, Stuart invited us to use “free verse” to invite the presences and spirits to our table: slashing our prose to pieces and bringing into it our bodily respirations, the words radiated with new auratic qualities. Reading them aloud in a final round was a brave, an emotional act for some of us, as the writing process and cut-up it induced brought into the room a wealth of other presences from our own, which lent substance and energy to those brought by Stuart. It felt as a gift to Stuart and to these beings that he pays respect to through the fieldwork, the living, the dead, and the spirits around the table; this wasn’t exempt of eery sensations, and yet, it was a moment full of warmth as we were giving each other access to personal haunted bouts of drafting and cutting, of whatever happened on the page. We were experiencing first-hand the redistribution of creativity to the multitude, something that Stuart announced in the invitation:

“The worlds that humans often pride themselves on creating are not and have never been exclusively human but are dependent upon and inflected by a multitude of other-than-human powers and presences, including animals, plants, geological formations, weather systems, and a range of humanly manufactured artifacts fashioned from a variety of materials.” (from the abstract of the workshop)

During the preambule lecture, along with the usual roster of writers we have learned to recognize as the sacred citation cluster when discussing the more than human in anthropology (Donna Haraway, Vinciane Despret, Isabelle Stengers, Anna Tsing, Karen Barad, Marisol de la Cadena, Philippe Descola, Emanuele Coccia, Eduardo Kohn, and Michel Serres), Stuart McLean came with an unusual and energetic reference. In the domain of poetic writing, Alice Oswald's practice has shined a new light on how writing can unfold into profound engagement with the more-than-human – reminiscent to some extent to the propositions of the philosopher David Abram in his seminal work The Spell of the sensuous.3 Drawing from the realm of nature, Oswald intricately weaves the nonhuman into her verses, offering it not just a space but a voice that reverberates with its own vitality.4 Her poems frequently collapse the boundaries between the human and the nonhuman, with an emphasis on rhythm, sound, and the kinetic energy of the natural world. Here from the final page of her book Dart, in which she investigates the soul of a river in Cornwall after doing her own kind of fieldwork:

“With their grandmother mouths, with their dog-soft eyes, asking

who's this moving in the dark? Me.

This is me, anonymous, water's soliloquy,

all names, all voices, Slip-Shape, this is Proteus,

whoever that is, the shepherd of the seals,

driving my many selves from cave to cave . . .”

This method is not about anthropomorphizing nature but rather engaging with it on its own terms, understanding its inherent rhythms, and unraveling its mysteries through language. Donna Haraway's concept of "staying with the trouble" and her advocacy for "making kin" with nonhuman entities provide a compelling lens to understand Oswald's approach.5 Both Oswald and Haraway resist reductive dualisms that place humans at the center, aiming to foster more responsible, multi-species collaborations. Oswald's verses, in their attunement to the nonhuman, can be seen as practicing Haraway's plea for a more sympoietic (collaboratively "making-with") form of engagement with the world. McLean again:

“If we accept that human lives and projects are inextricably intertwined with a host of other-than-human powers and presences (animal, vegetable, mineral, meteorological, etc.), how might we begin engage these in ways that do not reduce them to human-centered systems of explanation? Perhaps this demands a creative as much as an analytical or descriptive approach."

Stuart McLean studied literature before turning toward anthropology. In his anthropological pursuits, he often delved into the transformative potential of storytelling and fabulating.6 McLean's approach celebrates narratives not as mere reflections of the world but as generative entities that shape and re-shape realities. Similarly, Oswald's poetic method, in its own right, can be considered a generative force. It not only narrates the nonhuman but also allows it to emerge, to affect and to be affected, enacting a poetic ecology that echoes McLean's understanding of stories. Alice Oswald's poetic engagements with the more-than-human resonate deeply with Haraway's conceptual frameworks and McLean's storytelling ethos. Together, they challenge anthropocentrism, urging us to reimagine our narratives and relationships with the vast web of life. In an era marked by environmental crises and a desperate need for cross-species understanding, their convergences might just point the way toward more ethical, imaginative, and interconnected futures.

Other anthropologists have explored the power of writing to build bridges with other states and dimensions of the world. The mentor and once dissertation supervisor of Stuart McLean, Michael Taussig, wrote a strange book blending reflections on sketching, as a mode of seeing and knowing, with a more general introspection on the act of taking field notes and writing them up —in I Swear I Saw This: Drawings in Fieldwork Notebooks, Namely My Own, Taussig also sends us to the radical experiments of the beat poets.7 His approach to fieldwork and his emphasis on the interplay between reality and imagination is inspired, among many others sources, by the writer William S. Burroughs' own experimental narrative techniques. Both scholars and artists are concerned with how reality is represented, constructed, and understood, and the relations that can be weaved with other realms through these practices.

During the workshop led by Stuart McLean, these approaches were explored in two ways: first with the reactivation of fieldwork fragments, as a collective bout of “writing up”; and then again with the practice of slashing the prose into free verse to feel the liveliness of written words: “cutting up”. The "cut-up" method is a literary technique popularized by Burroughs in the late 1950s and 1960.8 The method involves taking a linear text (or multiple texts) and physically cutting it into pieces, then rearranging those pieces to create a new text. The resultant work often has a disjointed, nonlinear, and sometimes surreal quality, as unexpected juxtapositions emerge from the rearranged text fragments. The origins of the "cut-up" method can be traced back to Dadaists like Tristan Tzara, but it was Brion Gysin, a painter and friend of Burroughs, who introduced the technique to him during their time together in Paris. Gysin reportedly came upon the method accidentally while cutting out newspaper clippings.9 In the exploration of anthropological narrative techniques, the "cut-up" method can be a key to unlocking multi-dimensional understandings. When juxtaposed with Alice Oswald's poetic engagement with the more-than-human, fascinating palimpsests emerge that challenges traditional anthropological narratives and push for a more intertwined human-nonhuman discourse. McLean likes to speak about the “edge-of-the-human”: where we come close to the undefined and raw force of language beyond the agency of a (human) subject.

The “cut-up" technique collapses the boundaries between disparate textual and visual elements. Both methods challenge anthropocentrism in the creative writing process: Oswald, through her lyrical symbiosis with nature, and Burroughs, through the anarchic reconfiguration of language. Taussig's fieldwork, especially as articulated in I Swear I Saw This, exemplifies an anthropological cut-up. By incorporating drawings and nonlinear observations, he captures the dynamism of raw experience in ways traditional ethnographic methods most often miss. This could be compared to Oswald's effort to articulate the dynamic essence of the nonhuman, not through description but through embodied rhythm and sound. Drawing from the above, we can frame an emerging form of anthropological writing in Stuart McLean’s practice that borrows from Oswald's poetics, Burroughs' cut-up, and Taussig's fieldwork aesthetics. It's a form that is more attuned to the rhythms of the world, more open to unexpected connections, and more inclusive of diverse voices. Just as Donna Haraway champions multi-species collaborations and generative storytelling, this anthropological perspective seeks to understand the world in its rich, complex, and ever-evolving tapestry.

The online version of this book presents the written pieces along with intertwined with “cuts” of the footage of Stuart’s material, making use of the possibilities offered by digital publication to include the fragmentary format of the gif anime.10 Working through a free associative process, editing this little collection felt like delivering a multimodal remix of Stuart’s fieldwork. Thus, whether it's through poetic engagement, the radical open access publishing process, or fieldwork that blurs the lines between observer, the second order observer and the observed, a new frontier in anthropological writing beckons—one that makes space for stretching our senses, for the multifaceted ways of relate to the presences that populate our intertwined existences.