Recipes for Disaster: an anarchist cookbook

That's where behavioral cut-ups come in. A behavioral cut-up is a method for making the familiar unfamiliar, and thus jerking yourself out of the grip of inertia. In contrast to product-oriented activity, the practice of behavioral cut-ups implies that it could be important to achieve something you can't anticipate. Unlike most of the recipes in this book, behavioral cut-ups are not usefiil for achieving specific ends, but rather for establishing perspectives that can indicate new beginnings. Behavioral cut-ups offer a way to uncover the adventure and potential hidden within activities that are normally shrouded in habit.

Behavioral cut-ups are comparable to literary and artistic cut-ups, in which existing texts and materials are disassembled and reconstructed in new ways. Dadaists used to cut up newspapers and books of poetry, and generate new poems by drawing the pieces out of a hat at random; likewise, the behavioral cut-up artist applies scissors and glue to personal or social text, reconfiguring commonplace aspects of life in extraordinary ways.

Instructions

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For a new listening experience, you can play your favorite music backwards by taking a cassette apart with a screwdriver and putting the tape reels in backwards. Better, record it onto another tape on the third or fourth channel of a four-track recorder, then listen to the other side of the second tape.

Behai^ioral Cut-ups 86

A behavioral cut-up is not a randomization of life so much as a means of departure for unexplored territory; as such, it can require careful deliberation. Choosing the most promising adjustments to make is a rigorous science, if not an exact one.

In the most basic form of behavioral cut-up, you attach a stipulation to some formerly mundane aspect of life: for example, you decide not to pay for food for a full month, or dedicate yourself to climbing every single oak tree in the county, or commit to sending your family one postcard every day for a year. Such stipulations focus fresh attention on matters you had taken for granted, sharpening your awareness, limbering up your sense of self, and revealing new possibilities. Venturing outside the circuit of your daily life, you temporarily enter a parallel world in which you are a different person, and learn all the things that are banal to that person but brand new to you.

Behavioral cut-ups are not as unusual as their esoteric name makes them sound. In traditions stretching back to the davm of civilization, warriors and shamans have practiced them as a form of vision quest: mimicry of animals, ritual use of intoxicants, ecstatic dancing, public nudity and other taboo acts, rituals of exhaustion, deprivation, and pain?these are time-honored techniques for psychic and social experimentation. Even in our prosaic age, people engage in similar activities, to varying degrees: fasting during the month of Ramadan, building a fort out of cushions in the living room and refusing to come out all evening, going to a Halloween party dressed up as Fidel Castro and spending the whole night in character, all these are cut-ups, however unconscious or unoriginal. Many people have first-hand experience with simple food cut-ups: becoming vegan, for example, focuses new attention on food, transforming social interactions and often resulting in increased interest in cooking or gardening. It only remains for us to develop a deliberate practice of behavioral cut-ups for their own sake, as tools for education, inspiration, and liberation.

Behavioral cut-ups need not be grandiose; indeed, the most powerful ones rarely sound good on paper. It may not seem like a big life change to commit to something

trivial like initiating a conversation with a stranger every morning, but the cumulative effects can be startling. More extireme behavioral cut-ups can bring you into conflict with your fellow citizens?indeed, the other meaning of "cut up" is misbehave ?but in the long run, such conflict serves to keep life interesting for everyone.

Behavioral cut-ups may sound like the province of performance artists and others of the privileged class, but it is a mistake to write them off as such. Taken seriously, the behavioral cut-up is an exercise in self-expansion, a practice as essential for revolutionaries as mutual aid or self-defense.

Make two lists: things that bore you, and things that are terrifying to you. The former should be easy to compile, while the latter may be difficult even to admit to yourself Randomly select an item from each list. Invent a practice that combines them: for example, if you picked "commuting" from your boring list, and "public speaking" from your frightening list, you might dare yourself to deliver an oration every morning on the subway. Keep a journal of your experiences and interactions.