“Disorientations,” my long poem-in-progress, collages together and so “disorients” two postmodern Orientalist texts: Kent Johnson’s Doubled Flowering: From the Notebooks of Araki Yasusada and Roland Barthes’ Empire of Signs (translated into English by Richard Howard).

 

I have known Empire of Signs and Doubled Flowering for years, and they have simultaneously intrigued and bothered me, eliciting a strange mix of fascination and distaste. How could I reconcile my abiding interests in post-structural thought and a tradition of metafictional poetics . . . with a need to resist hegemonic and racialized discourses? My hope is that collaging Barthes’ and Johnson’s texts together, using their language as a basis for re-articulation, will act as an immanent critique, a reckoning of these two works quite literally on, and with, their own terms. 

 

My attempt to give collage, or montage, a “facelift”—a “yellowfacelift,” so to speak—is to cut and further fragment it, to atomize it into even more minute particulates. Elsewhere, I have described my technique as “micro-mashup” or “micro-montage,” a practice that engages and intervenes within found text at a very fine level of granularity: in essence, I extract individual words and phrases from the two source texts and slowly accrete them into an assemblage of verbal tesserae. To quote Marcus Boon’s In Praise of Copying, I want to “reach a place where montage itself is cut into so many pieces that it no longer makes sense to call it montage.” Indeed, it turns out that collage—taken to the extreme—is just another term for “writing.” As Jacques Derrida succinctly states, “To write means to graft. It’s the same word.” 

 

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