Creating a catalogue through writing made me aware of the dangers of the ‘author’ identity. When I look back at the process of writing these essays, I realise that what I have done can be reduced to two verbs: delete and reorder, which give me the supreme power to interpret and invoke the contents of these ten books as I please. For example, the two books Graphic Design Is (…) Not Innocent and 1, 2, 3 Colour Graphics. Looking at their names, aren’t these two books unrelated? But, as the author, I said yes, I allowed this connection to happen, to whatever extent it reasonable: ‘These two books discuss seemingly “difficult” and “simple” issues in graphic design, respectively, and this subconscious feeling of “seemingly complex or simple” when faced with the issues discussed in the books links them.’ – I explained.

So, the question is, what is a good relationship? What is a bad relationship? What are the ‘dangers’ that the author’s identity brings to writing? Taking a passage from the original text and adding the author’s name at the end, is the passage what he said?

The method I have chosen is Inventory, and I want to answer these by showing the most dangerous situation in Hijacking, the cataloguing method I use. I constitute a new article (or, a list) by deleting and reordering, in the opposite meaning of the original, using the original text of The Order of Things (Foucault, 1989).

When ‘Hijacking’ is applied to a paragraph, the largest unit in which it occurs is the sentence, while the smallest unit is a full stop. In the process, the original order of sentence to sentence and word to word is disregarded; they are deleted and quoted from each other, and ultimately reassembled by me into a completely new interpretation – even if that interpretation is contrary to the original author’s original intent. The endnotes then become an indexed list (as if those ten books were the contents of my essay and my essay were the catalogue). This is precisely why I chose this paragraph in the book because it is about the order of things, but what I have done is to emphasise the dangers posed by the supremacy of the author’s editorial rights by breaking that order. Finally, I have added the author’s name at the end of the passage. Note that the author’s name is not used here as a reference, but because, conventionally, we use the original author’s name to identify that all of the above is quoted from the original text, because every word in this reorganised passage comes from the book by Camus.

If we view cataloguing as systematically establishing connections between things, then perhaps the danger is essentially a matter of the scale in using the verbs delete and reorder. For example, the method Borges uses for cataloguing (Book of Imaginary Beings, 2006) shows us the danger of using too much ‘delete’. He deletes elements such as geographical location, species, and so on that imply ‘the mute ground upon which it is possible for entities to be juxtaposed’ (Foucault, 1989). The result is that, in this book, the only link between species is the abcd in the catalogue. Things are tied together by a single thread (instead of a web), and we read them as if we were walking a tightrope of thought and could fall off at any moment.

Perhaps what we are looking for is a balance between these two verbs. ‘But in order to speak about all and to all, one has to speak of what all know and of the reality common to us all. The sea, rains, necessity, desire, the struggle against death—these are the things that unite us all.’ Camus (1957) says, ‘We resemble one another in what we see together, in what we suffer together.’

References

Foucault, M. (1989) The Order of Things. London: Routledge.

Borges, J. (2006) Book of Imaginary Beings. London: Penguin Books.

Camus, A. (1957) Create Dangerously [Speech]. Sweden.