Novelty is defined by the individual. While something may not be new to one person, it could be new to another person. Our past experiences and knowledge allow us to define if something is new. Taking a previous work, cutting it up, and re-arranging the pieces creates a new version of that previous work. We now might experience that work in a new way. And as authors, we create our work based on our previous experiences to create a new way of looking at something. However, unlike the random choices of a literature machine, authors make their choices based on exigence, audience, and context. Words do not come together through spontaneity. Authors make meaningful choices to communicate, persuade, and connect with their audience to both address the needs of their audience and to convey their purpose and themes. Those choices bring meaning and resonance to our work; our experiences define how we tell, read, and feel a story.
Therefore, every reader’s experience is unique in some way to that individual; no one has the exact same experience. Thus, every reader constructs his/her own reading in a unique way. Italo Calvino writes that even if a computer randomly puts together words to make a poem, the meaning of this poem is defined by the active reader: “The literature machine can perform all the permutations possible on a given material, but the poetic result will be the particular effect of one of these on a man endowed with consciousness and an unconscious, that is, an empirical and historical man.” Words thrown together at random do not hold much meaning on their own, but when taken in the context of the attitudes, experiences, and perspectives of the audience, the words transform into literature with a deeper meaning. And if people do the cutting up without the random ability of the computer, then we make purposeful decisions based on our experiences. For example, if you are sad when you read a story, you may read it differently than if you are happy. Also, the themes may come across differently or have new implications that you did not see when you read the story in a happy mood. Your own story and your own life experiences change the reading/construction of a story.
Borrowing from Wardrip-Fruin’s use of the terms, I wonder if we can think of cut-ups as either data intensive or process intensive. What you describe at the end of your post about life experiences changing a story’s meaning (or at least, its relevance) might be a kind of data-intensive cut-up. What Gysin, Burroughs, and other artists seem to be more interested in, though, is process-intensive cut-ups, where the procedure of cutting up and recombining is just as important as the data being cut up.