Non-fiction: The Third Mind

Overview
The Third Mind (1978) is William S. Burroughs and Brion Gysin’s collaborative manifesto on artistic collaboration and media experimentation. Framed as a how-to manual, archive, and artwork, it argues that when two people work together intensively a composite intelligence emerges, the “third mind”, that exceeds either individual. The book distills a decade and a half of experiments with language, image, sound, and performance, using collage and montage not only as techniques but as a worldview that treats culture as material to be cut, rearranged, and redeployed.

Form and Structure
Refusing linear order, the book is assembled as a dossier: short essays, instructions, polemics, interviews, visual collages, calligraphic pages by Gysin, photographs, diagrams, and transcripts of tape experiments. Items recur and refract across the volume, encouraging readers to move non-sequentially and to treat the book as a toolkit. Some sections were originally published separately, manifestos on the cut-up method, tape-recorded interventions in public space, and media theory pamphlets, now recomposed within a single field of operations. The visual layout carries equal weight with the prose, underscoring the claim that the word and the image interpenetrate.

Methods and Practices
At the core is the cut-up, discovered by Gysin and developed with Burroughs: printed text is literally cut and rearranged to produce new juxtapositions. Burroughs’s “fold-in” adapts the technique by folding pages to overlay disparate passages, creating composite pages that generate unexpected narrative paths. Gysin’s permutation poems rotate words through all possible orders via tape loops and early programming, foregrounding rhythm and incantation over conventional meaning. The book extends cut-ups to audio and image: sliced magnetic tape spliced into novel sequences, “playback” interventions where recorded speech is played back into the environment to disrupt predictable behavior, and photo-text collages that scramble the hierarchy of caption and picture. Step-by-step notes invite readers to replicate and adapt the procedures with scissors, adhesive, tape recorders, and cameras.

Ideas and Arguments
Burroughs and Gysin treat language as a control technology embedded in mass media, bureaucracy, and habit. By cutting into prepackaged sequences, headlines, political speeches, advertising, artists can expose hidden directives, scramble feedback loops, and reassert agency. The techniques are both aesthetic and tactical: a poem becomes an operation; a recording becomes a device for disorienting power. The book’s media theory sections sketch a guerrilla toolkit for an electronic era, imagining small-scale interventions that shift attention, disrupt conditioning, and open spaces for alternative signals. Authorship is likewise demystified. The “third mind” recasts creativity as a circuit that includes collaborators, machines, and materials; the author is a node rather than a sovereign origin. Chance is not passivity but a method for surfacing structures the conscious mind suppresses. The volume insists that montage is not random but a way of perceiving causality across fragments, letting future possibilities leak into the present arrangement.

Tone and Style
The prose moves between dry instruction, speculative science, streetwise anecdote, and prophetic satire. Burroughs’s clipped, adversarial style collides with Gysin’s visual elegance and ritual cadence. That friction is itself the third mind at work: the book reads like a laboratory notebook crossed with a spellbook.

Legacy
The Third Mind consolidated practices that shaped postwar avant-garde writing, conceptual art, sound collage, and later sampling cultures. Its influence runs through postmodern fiction, punk and industrial music, performance art, and media activism. By turning cut-up from parlor trick into a comprehensive method and by redefining collaboration as a distinct intelligence, the book remains a touchstone for artists seeking to break narrative control and to treat media as plastic, hackable matter.