Fanon's Cut-Up

At the beginning of "The Fact of Blackness," Fanon quotes a white person on the street: "Look, a Negro!" This phrase is repeated throughout the text and draws out multiple levels of commentary. Quotations of poets from the Negritude movement, well-meaning whites, Jean-Paul Sartre, among many others, seem to position Fanon's text as relational in the same sense as his body is defined in relation to white bodies. The citationality of the cut-up is a means of achieving revolutionary ends for Burroughs; for Fanon, it is an important technique in drawing out how the fact of  blackness is established, in academic and quotidian realms, among writers as well as drunks on the train, in language.

But while these texts point to a certain rupture inherent in borrowing language (the subject of Fanon's "The Negro and Language"), I would argue that Burroughs and Fanon differ on the value of the cut-up's ability to rupture ontology. For Burroughs, the cut-up is a strategy that can undermine "the IS of identity," that ontological rigidity which constrains subjects into automatic patterns of perception and behavior. Yet for Fanon, "every ontology is made unattainable in a colonized and civilized society" ("Fact", 109), a circumstance that operates more as an agent of oppression than as a liberating destabilization. It seems that Burroughs social position, which does not force him into "crushing objecthood" (Fact, 109) allows him to embrace an anti-ontology that cannot be revolutionary for Fanon precisely because it has already imposed upon the black subject.

Keeping these considerations in mind, I wonder: does the move in poststructuralist theory towards a liberating destabilization of identity wrongfully assume the stability of different subjects under different conditions? Is there a tension between Fanon's mobilization of cut-up and his search for identity (and, furthermore, does this tension undercut or strengthen his argument)? Is there a way in which both Burroughs, who frequently refers to the "will" of the subject & the desire to "consciously control" the language-virus, and Fanon, who desires to "help the back man to free himself of the arsenal of complexes that has been develped by the colonial environment" ("Language," 30), fail to account for the slipperiness of citationality? Might "Signature, Event, Context" help us to think through the cut-up in different terms?