POEMS
Anti-Barthes
A few
years ago, perhaps more recently than a few years, I caught myself thinking,
something casually observational, but serious enough. I heard myself saying,
“Derrida that, Deleuze, this…Barthes, what.” It was then
that I realized that much of the way I make sense of my world had been
conditioned by my training, and that my internal software was coded by
Continental thinking. But it goes further back than that. Some twenty years
ago, when I first read Barthes’ Empire of Signs, I did make a small
mental remark to myself, “what authority does this French man (a tourist) have
in waxing on about the lack of a transcendental signifier in Japan?” But, I
remember, my query, though only silently spoken to myself, was eventually muted
entirely through a self-deprecating act of deference to the intellectual
prestige of the great Frenchman. My current self wants to go back in time to
debate him, face-to-face.
I have so much to unlearn. Or, rather, counterbalance. I now feel that thoughts happen in the locus of the body, and the impetus to decouple thoughts from the body is questionable. The way Barthes’ prestige redacted my small, muted, protest, is a form of what I call corseting.
Poetry can also be made from the affordances of failure. In converting an article by Roland Barthes from PDF to Word format for a lecture, I discovered the move created artifacts. I decided that the artifacts were more beautiful than the original. I had serendipitously discovered a new weapon, a technologically mediated revolutionary act against the neocolonizing legacy of continental philosophies. Drawing the bow of my new poetic practice, I collected/curated just the mistranslated fragments into an assemblage:
_identitY..
..._....., ...... ,.,.~ .. , .. ... ' . ... . ·-· ..
Death: ~!:_ is_ the eid_q_L_2f_tll~LPhotograph.
is the sou~~- ~<?.f
ca~er~:
but ~ .§i_!!·i~~te~
. t" ~-t?_i~. !s _~h_a_t_~~~~~~s _e~ery adventur~.
-~anted to e~lo_:~
it not as a question (a theme) but a~a--~~;. I .. S.~~. I
feel:henc~T;oti~~. -i ~b~~~~~:~~JI thi~k.
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I have so much to unlearn. Or, rather, counterbalance. I now feel that thoughts happen in the locus of the body, and the impetus to decouple thoughts from the body is questionable. The way Barthes’ prestige redacted my small, muted, protest, is a form of what I call corseting.
Poetry can also be made from the affordances of failure. In converting an article by Roland Barthes from PDF to Word format for a lecture, I discovered the move created artifacts. I decided that the artifacts were more beautiful than the original. I had serendipitously discovered a new weapon, a technologically mediated revolutionary act against the neocolonizing legacy of continental philosophies. Drawing the bow of my new poetic practice, I collected/curated just the mistranslated fragments into an assemblage:
_identitY..
..._....., ...... ,.,.~ .. , .. ... ' . ... . ·-· ..
Death: ~!:_ is_ the eid_q_L_2f_tll~LPhotograph.
is the sou~~- ~<?.f
ca~er~:
but ~ .§i_!!·i~~te~
. t" ~-t?_i~. !s _~h_a_t_~~~~~~s _e~ery adventur~.
-~anted to e~lo_:~
it not as a question (a theme) but a~a--~~;. I .. S.~~. I
feel:henc~T;oti~~. -i ~b~~~~~:~~JI thi~k.
