A
prose that is altogether alive demands something of the reader that the
ordinary novel-reader is not prepared to give.
~T.S.
Eliot
Death
Kathy Acker died in room 101 of a
hospital in Tijuana. Author Alan Moore
reportedly commented on this fact: “There’s nothing that woman can’t turn into
a literary reference.”
She was born on April 18, 1947, around
the time George Orwell began writing 1984.
She published her best-known work, Blood and Guts in High School, in
1984—the same year that William Gibson published his seminal cyberpunk novel, Neuromancer.
She plagiarized Neuromancer for her 1988 novel, Empire
of the Senseless.
Kathy Acker’s world was a world of
words, and she made it so in the circuits she wrote, the connections she
wrought, the passages she tattooed in print between the worlds that came to
her: “For the poet, the world is word.
Words. Not that precisely. Precisely: the world and words fuck each
other.”
Life
I’ve not read as much Kathy Acker as I
would have liked to by this age (I’m thirty-one; by the time she was thirty-one
she had already published several works).
Her style is one of targeted plagiarism, a strategy of smash and grab
appropriation, stealing everything from passages to plots. Writing of Acker’s style in a marketplace of
postwar masculinity (driven by names such as Saul Bellow, John Updike, Don
DeLillo, Philip Roth, and Cormac McCarthy), Martina Sciolino asks “How can a
woman be heard in this noise? From what
position can a woman write and claim her experience when authority is under
erasure? Acker responds to this
contemporary positioning of the woman writer through a technique of plagiarism/autoplagiarism.” Acker reclaims women’s literary power through
an irreverent betrayal of authorial sanctity.
She lyrically activates the impropriety of language itself, its
ownership by no official. The social regulation
of language gives rise to the Beat writer’s speed, the black writer’s “lower
frequencies,” the punk writer’s profanity, the queer writer’s desiring, the
woman writer’s “languages of the body”—all
rhetorics of piracy, of quiet rebellion.
“‘Marginal,’ ‘experimental,’ and
‘avant-garde’ are often used to describe texts in this other tradition. Not because writing such as Burroughs’s or
Genet’s is marginal, but because our society, through the voice of its literary
society, cannot bear immediacy, the truth, especially the political truth.” Acker’s prose is a scalpel that exposes the
indifference beneath the skin. Language
doesn’t care what race you are, what gender.
Language reveals what those in power already know but don’t want to know
they already know: that it—that language—is always beyond their control. It obeys their commands only insofar as it
abides in the possibility of disobeying them.
Language’s being is not in the regularity of socially acceptable speech,
but in the intractable contingency of the unspeakable: “I was unspeakable,”
Acker writes, “so I ran into the language of others.” Her prose is the prose of piracy, of stolen
phrases, coopted vernacular.
Contemplating her childhood fantasy
of being a pirate, Acker writes “When I was a child, I knew that the separation
between me and piracy had something to do with being a girl. With gender.
With being in a dead world. So
gender had something to do with death.
And not with sight, for to see was
to be other than dead. To see was to be an eye, not an I.” Acker’s words radiate meaning but not
transparency. They shine a light that is
blinding. If we can say that ideas in
Acker’s work are seen (idea, from weid,
“to see”—to see eidos, the form of
something, its contours), then her prose stabs at the cornea of thought:
“Literature,” she writes, “is that which denounces and slashes apart the
repressing machine at the level of the signified.” Her novel Empire
of the Senseless is not a vision of the dystopian future, but of the
utopian present, of insurrection through words: “GET RID OF MEANING. YOUR MIND
IS A NIGHTMARE THAT HAS BEEN EATING YOU: NOW EAT YOUR MIND.”
Get rid of meaning? In her stylish challenge, Acker calls our
attention to the politics of reading. To
what we, as readers, do when we read. As
a man, I am constantly wary of imposing my perspective onto her worlds, onto
her words. It is easy to look for
waystations of meaning, for places where the white male tradition of Western theory
rears its head: Derrida, Baudrillard, Deleuze, Foucault. Yes,
I think, over and over again, Acker
speaks this language. And yes, she
does—but this is not where the power of her prose resides. That power begins where theory ends, where
even those who sought to criticize cultural hierarchies could not help but
perpetuate them. In their effort to
dismantle the systems by which the West established its superiority, these
theorists denied the power of mythic creation to all—the entitled and the
marginal, the ruling and the ruled.
Acker’s fiction rises from the ashes of what is known in academia as deconstruction, in whose wake women’s
voices could only predicate themselves on a radical silence. Acker writes to fill this silence with new
noises:
When
I wrote my first book, Politics, I
was living in a society that was politically and socially hypocritical. According to the media back then, politicians
were men who said sweet things to babies and neither adultery nor drug abuse
ever came near a middle-class white American home.
Perhaps
our society is now in a “post-cynical” phase.
Certainly, I thought as I started Empire,
there’s no more need to deconstruct, to take apart perceptual habits, to reveal
the frauds on which our society’s living.
We now have to find somewhere to go, a belief, a myth. Somewhere real.
I
wonder if she would say the same thing today, knowing what we know, what Acker
also knew but no doubt dreamed of surpassing: that gender sanctions sexism,
that color sanctions violence. I wonder
if she would say we no longer need to deconstruct when we’re building
ideologies on the foundations of white nationalism, directed against the
perceived threats of anti-religious feminism and unpatriotic intellectualism,
and with the tactical weaponry of fake news.
I believe I know her answer, and it’s an
answer that academics are grappling with—to deconstruct, yes; but to
reconstruct as well. “Alternative facts”
are the harvest of what critical theory has sown. Without “somewhere to go” we are now going
everywhere. Acker voiced what academics
in the 1990s already knew but had failed to communicate. That language, cunningly and skillfully—lyrically—directed, can resist the
machinations imposed upon it by those who seek to control what can be said; but
language turned loose, language carelessly deployed, collapses back into its
old patterns, the easiest inclinations of human degeneracy:
·
“When Mexico sends
its people, they’re not sending their best.
They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing
those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re
rapists.”
·
“You have a bunch
of bad hombres down there.”
·
“Our great
African-American President hasn’t exactly had a positive impact on the thugs
who are so happily and openly destroying Baltimore.”
·
“If I were running
The
View, I’d fire Rosie O’Donnell. I mean,
I’d look at her right in that fat, ugly face of hers, I’d say ‘Rosie, you’re
fired.’”
·
“It’s freezing and
snowing in New York – we need global warming!”
·
“I’ve said if
Ivanka weren’t my daughter, perhaps I’d be dating her.”
·
“I think the only
difference between me and the other candidates is that I’m more honest and my
women are more beautiful.”
·
“You know, it
really doesn’t matter what the media write as long as you’ve got a young, and
beautiful, piece of ass.”
·
“You could see
there was blood coming out of her eyes, blood coming out of her wherever.”
·
“Such a nasty
woman.”
Kathy
Acker’s power lies not in her refusal to use such language (I shiver to think
what she would have done with Trump’s rhetoric), but in her sheer shamelessness
at doing so—at picking up the words of her oppressors and slapping them against
her own skin, feeling their weight like actual garments, their scrape like
cheap fabric. She takes what is not hers
because she knows it’s no one’s. But
unlike the men before her, those theorists who sent language to the limits of
its dis-ownership, she holds onto it tightly, embraces it, shapes it, turns to
it not for its power to degrade those around her, but for its power to lift her
beyond their vitriol: “I have become interested in languages which I cannot make up, which I cannot create or even create in: I have become interested in languages which I can only
come upon (as I disappear), a pirate upon buried treasure. The dreamer, the dreaming, the dream.
“I call these languages, languages of the body.”
Birth
I wish Kathy Acker was still alive. She would be seventy-one today, and sharp as
ever, devoted to the refashioning of order into what makes us feel electric—not
merely surviving, but alive. Even now, her prose has more life than the
living man who speaks. It breathes a
deeper rhythm. It vibrates along a more
profound existence. It was always going
to outlive her. It was always going to
outlive us (yes, even you).
Kathy Acker died in room 101 on
November 30, 1997. She was born on April
18, 1947. And she is reborn every
day—because the world and words fuck each other.
