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collage is as old as writing is. everything you see is a collage. everything you say is a collage.
the illusion, which came later, is that of pure form, creation in a void without reference to what precedes it, what conditions it.
then comes capitalism which confused a romantic mythology of creativity--the Genius who is the Recepticle for the Breath of some God, a demiurge which enables the Emergence of Absolute Novelty because he is a conduction device for the Emanations of the Beyond. this gets mixed with the equally bizarre notion of private property and voila, a notion of ownership of cultural work is born that's entirely at cross purposes with the way in which it actually does work.
as the material basis for wealth generation slipped away from the metropole, new and improved extensions of this basically ridiculous notion of ownership began to develop--intellectual property law they called this new mutant.
internalized, the property-centered norms which inform all this lead you to see things upside-down. now collage becomes transgressive.
i liked the idea of this book for a few minutes. then i lost interest.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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