I.
AS A SCHOOLCHILD, I had to learn collective nouns for animals: a murder of crows, a bask of crocodiles, a quiver of cobras, an intrusion of cockroaches, and so on. Jellyfish, for some reason, get two of these: bloom and smack. The first—flowery, Joycean—seems to convey the languid beauty of the seaborne creature whose transparency, paradoxically, enhances rather than diminishes its mystery. The second, guttural and onomatopoeic, instantly conjures up the state in which most humans (those of us who aren’t marine biologists) actually encounter these cnidarians: as mucilaginous patches splatted on the beach alongside other refuse; frayed smudges marking the sea’s fringe hem; lumpen offerings for cruel children to poke and pick up at the end of sticks before, curiosity sated, flinging against rocks.
Dickens’s Thames may not have any jellyfish in it, but Kathy Acker’s “plagiarized” Great Expectations is awash with them. “My mother,” writes its narrator O, “is a dummy and a piece of jellyfish. The most disgusting thing in this world is her. My worst nightmare is that I’ll have some of that jellyfish in me.” A few pages later, we are told that “the jellyfish is the rapist”; later still, we get an actual nightmare in which “a huge jellyfish glop who’s shaped into an-at-least-six-story worm is chasing her down the main sand-filled cowboy street. All of her WANTS to get away, but her body isn’t obeying her mind.” Yet later, O’s body “becomes” her father’s (that is, the rapist’s) desire, and jellyfish, collectively, express their own desire to become O; which leads, by a process of psycho-gelatinous osmosis, to O contracting an ovarian infection.
Acker—like Joyce, like Kafka—is a hardcore materialist. “One could say,” she writes in My Death My Life by Pier Paolo Pasolini, plagiarizing the magnificent climax of Flaubert’s The Temptation of Saint Anthony, “that he seeks to merge with unnameable nature, fleeing the weight of nomination in the unnameable texture of things, I want people to treat me as an animal, in the irregular indefinable movements of the foliage, of the waves. To be matter.” In Empire of the Senseless, as Freud’s case-histories receive her plagiarism treatment (which in fact is very singular: an Acker plagiarism is instantly distinguishable from one by, say, her early mentor Burroughs or her younger admirer Stewart Home), she zooms in on The Wolf Man’s mental reduction of God to piles of feces lying in the street, and sees in Schreber’s psychosis “the enzyme that could change all my blood.” Elsewhere in the same novel, contemplating the back-flow of blood into the syringe of her junky boyfriend, she declares: “My body is open to all people: this is democratic capitalism”; from Pierre Guyotat’s Eden Eden Eden she steals scenes of soldiers’ bodies tearing and entering wounds in those of their colonial victims. In The Childlike Life of the Black Tarantula by The Black Tarantula she tells us: “I look at my body as though it were a web, solely a way of asking people to touch me.” Open, morphing, endlessly penetrating or being penetrated by the scenes around them, Acker’s bodies channel and act as hubs or mainstays in a world of viscerally networked continuity—like jellyfish quivering as pulse-signals reach them through a viscous sea. Or, rather (lest we start getting holistic), they both anchor this world and serve as its disjecta: more smack than bloom. Janey, the protagonist of Blood and Guts in High School, contrasts her body with the “fresh meat” one young girls are meant to have: “Even though I’m younger, I’m tough, rotted, putrid beef. My cunt red ugh.” We get a drawing of this organ on the next page, then an account of its growing infected. Abortions crop up frequently throughout the books, semi-repeated in the name of Empire’s heroine’s companion, Abhor—which taken as a whole, of course, denotes repulsion. Great Expectations sees a man invite two friends to have dinner with O “so they could do whatever they want with her in no uncertain terms because she’s the most unnameable unthinkable spit spit. She realizes that she is at the same time a little girl absolutely pure nothing wrong just what she wants, and this unnameable dirt this thing. This is not a possible situation. This identity doesn’t exist.”
Acker might be the first significant novelist to have come of age during the rise within American humanities programs of the set of discourses the latter still rather reductively label “theory.” While many of her literary heroes, from Artaud right back to Catullus, furnish ample precedents for the aesthetic of abjection that pervades her writing, its most lucid analytical formulation is found in the work of the critic Julia Kristeva. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection received its English publication in 1982, a year before Great Expectations, and Acker’s indebtedness to Kristeva’s thinking has been noted by many critics, and acknowledged by Acker herself. For Kristeva, that which is abjected, thrown away, purged or let drop as waste presents, to the body or system that has ejected it, “one of those violent, dark revolts of being,” speaks of an order “beyond the scope of the possible, the tolerable, the thinkable” that “cannot be assimilated.” The abject doesn’t simply provide an “alternative” point of psychological identification; rather, it “draws me towards a place where meaning collapses,” where “consciousness has not assumed its rights and transformed into signifiers those fluid demarcations of yet unstable territories where an ‘I’ that is taking shape is ceaselessly straying.”
This is precisely the quandary, or “impossible situation,” Acker’s work negotiates: that of identifying with non-identity. Writing under these conditions means foregoing all recourse to “authenticity” or “self-expression” and instead treating any type of subjective iteration—any iteration that affirms or presupposes subjectivity—as provisional, strategic, like a rebel camp to be set up in enemy territory then quickly struck before the powers that be get proper bearings on it. It means accepting (as she writes in Empire) that “I, whoever I was going to be, would be a construct”; and accepting exile (as she also states in that book) as a “permanent condition . . . in terms of relationships and language./ In terms of identity.” Reading Kristeva may have helped bring this condition into focus, but it was governing Acker’s work right from the off: we see it already in The Childlike Life, published almost a decade before Powers of Horror, the name and very nature of whose main “character” morph through centuries and across continents, in and out of source texts. “I can see everything in a set of shifting frameworks. I’m interested solely in getting into someone else,” this figure tells us. Abjection, claims Kristeva, takes place “when an Other . . . precedes and possesses me, and through such possessions causes me to be.” As the critic Alex Houen points out, for Acker autobiography can only ever be allobiography. While Rimbaud may tell Georges Izambard “Je est un autre,” and Proust may reverize his way into the books he reads at bedtime, Acker hammers and hacks her way down to a kind of baseline of self-substitution, finishing The Childlike Life’s chapters with the words: “All the above events are taken from myself, ENTER MURDERERS! by E. H. Bierstadt, MURDER FOR PROFIT by W. Boitho, BLOOD IN THE PARLOR by D. Dunbar, ROGUES AND ADVENTURESSES by C. Kingston,” or beginning them: “I MOVE TO SAN FRANCISCO. I BEGIN TO COPY MY FAVOURITE PORNOGRAPHY BOOKS AND BECOME THE MAIN PERSON IN EACH OF THEM.”
Kristeva’s thought is topographic, almost cartographic, full of territories, frontiers, limits. Drawing from anthropologist Mary Douglas, she claims that “filth is not a quality in itself, but it applies only to what relates to a boundary and, more particularly, represents the object jettisoned out of the boundary, its other side, a margin.” She suggests of abjection that “we may call it a border”; and she pays careful attention to material micro-borders, membranes such as the shudder-inducing skin that sits atop the surface of a cup of hot milk. What interests her most is when inside and outside start getting confused. Pondering Freud’s notion of a “beginning” to mental life that precedes the advent of the word, she writes: “In that anteriority to language, the outside is elaborated by means of a projection from within. . . . An outside in the image of the inside, made of pleasure and pain.” At a certain point in childhood, language, the symbolic order, comes along and differentiates inside and outside; yet, Kristeva adds, “there would be witnesses to the perviousness of the limit, artisans after a fashion who would try to tap that pre-verbal “beginning” within a word that is flush with pleasure and pain.” When she names two archetypal artisans of this sort—the primitive and the poet, the latter of whom renders the border permeable through “a recasting of language”—she could more or less be naming Acker’s entire project. For Acker, as for Douglas, disgustingness has no aesthetic value of its own. “I’m not trying to tell you about the rotgut weird parts of my life,” she writes in Blood and Guts. “Abortions are the symbol, the outer image, of sexual relations in the world. Describing my abortions is the only real way I can tell you about pain and fear . . . my unstoppable drive for sexual love made me know.” The body’s castaway, an unformed fetus, held up to the light by the act of being narrated, reveals the leakiness of the border between inside and outside, public and private, morality and law and the host of other categories that make up the social order. Or, to be precise, the sexual body’s castaway brings this about. Sex is the prime zone where these things overlap, where limits might be crossed, through excess and perversion. As Empire, breaking into verse, states: “Sex is public: the streets made themselves for us to walk naked down them take out your cock and piss over me. / The threshold is there. . . . Go over this threshold with me.”
II.
A recurrent motif in Acker’s novels is that of the prisoner—a figure whom the outside world keeps locked away “inside.” If Acker has read her Kristeva, she has also read her Foucault, for whom prison—in its architecture, codes and rituals—serves as a perfect model for the overall regimes of power and control governing “free” society. “We live in prison,” Acker writes in Blood and Guts. “Most of us don’t know we live in prison.” But even closer to her thinking on this theme than Foucault’s is that of Giorgio Agamben, the Italian philosopher most of whose work (or its translation into English) Acker’s writing, far from plagiarizing, uncannily and almost to a t anticipates. Agamben, too, is fascinated by borders and thresholds, by the liminal experience of “being-within and outside,” by the abjection of the things held in the no-man’s-land of limbo. These “things” include, historically, deceased unbaptized children (the abortion’s close relation), refugees held in transit zones and prisoners. Digging up an ancient Roman statute that designated a certain class of criminal as homo sacer—“sacred man” whom, being beyond the law, it was perfectly legal for anyone to kill but who, being sacred, could not be used in ceremonial or ritual sacrifice—Agamben sees in the “living dead man” that this double-or counter-law (a law through which law itself is suspended) produced a precedent for subjects living under the “state of exception” in which modern tyrannies (which, for him, would already include the hyper-securitized neoliberalism we’ve lived through for the last few decades, never mind the quasi-fascist order we appear to currently be entering) are grounded. Acker’s prisoners are exact embodiments of homo sacer: “The fact is,” she writes in Empire, “that all prisoners should be killed by the state and, since they haven’t been, they’re in actuality beyond death./ Thus, prisoners are sacred. Their lives are imaginary, imaginary as in “imaginary number,” not rationally possible.”
What’s most interesting from a literary point of view is that this slippery limit, this porous limbo-zone in which inside and outside, law and lawlessness, life and death all hang suspended, is the very territory Acker designates as the place where writing, as a material act, originates. What, she asks, customarily marks out prisoners even—especially—when they’ve stripped their uniforms off ? Tattoos. (An observation that dates her: tattoos have now become so thoroughly middle-and even upper-class that the Canadian prime minister and the wife of a recent British one sport them.) Tattoos not only (traditionally) proliferate on the social threshold that is prison; they also flood and impregnate the corporal threshold, the shuddery top-film, of human skin. Acker, herself extensively tattooed, devotes whole passages of Empire (a book she dedicates “to my tattooist”) to describing how the surface of the skin is raised to make tattoos. She also points out that, in Tahitian, “ta-tau” means, simply, “writing.” The passage in which her character Agone receives his prison-tattoo is uncharacteristically subtle in its plagiarism; but one source, lurking behind references to Pacific island customs, must surely be Melville’s Queequeg, Moby-Dick’s harpoonist whose own Polynesian body is entirely covered in tattoos that map the earth and heavens, the horizons round which life and death are hinged. Agone’s tattoo depicts a ship:
The first color was red. The first color was blood. The ship’s sails were crimson. Blood makes the body move. Blood made the ship’s body move. Blood changed the inhuman winds into human breath. Agone sang with the pain. The crimson streams of the winds were the roses surrounding the ship.
The second color was brown. Brown is the color of excreted blood or shit. The ship was flying on its human-made wings in harmony with the elements: blue sea, blue sky. The earth, home, nations are the sailor’s enemy, end to his journey, his death. The brown of the ship’s body reminds the sailor that his journey must end in death.
Queequeg’s death, we should recall, is both imprecise and substituted: having first contracted a fever that convinces him he’ll die, and had a coffin built for him by the ship’s carpenter, he makes a complete recovery; after which he whiles away the time transcribing his tattoos from his body to the outer surface of the coffin which is—for now and for him at least—redundant. When the Pequod sinks and he does die, it’s Ishmael who’ll float on the coffin back to safety: the crafted box becomes the craft, or life raft, that conveys the narrative to us. In both Moby-Dick and Empire, the tattoo, its crafting, serves as miniature or mise-en-abîme of the book itself, and of the practice of text-generation. “The most positive thing in the book,” claims Acker in an interview, “is the tattoo. It concerns taking over, doing your own sign-making.”
If, Queequeg aside, Acker wears her influences not so much on her sleeve as scrawled over her skin, then there’s one prisoner who occupies a prime spot on her literary corpus: Sade. History’s most famous, or infamous, prison-writer, imprisoned for the act of writing on a body (he’d scored marks in the flesh of a prostitute and poured wax—another writing-surface or substance—into these), Sade wrote at the very spot where tyranny, revolution and terror came to share a border: the Bastille. One version of the prison sacking holds that it was Sade himself who sparked it, by using his open ended (and presumably feces-stained) chamber pot as a trumpet and announcing to the crowds massed outside that the warders had begun executing prisoners (which they hadn’t). Another tells that the leaders of the mob who sacked the Bastille, searching for instruments of torture to display as evidence of the ancien regime’s cruelty, found only a confiscated printing press—and, figuring that the largely illiterate crowd wouldn’t know any different, held it up on view as just one such contraption. Sade provides Acker with her greatest and most monumental template for the interiorization of a political exterior, and vice versa: “I’ve remade the outside prison inside me,” she has him (or is it the other way round?) say in The Childlike Life, “because there’s no difference between outside and inside my mind: they release me from prison and I’m still in prison.” This ventriloquized statement is swiftly followed by a kind of literary manifesto: “I’m trying to get away from self-expression but not from personal life. I hate creativity. I’m simply exploring other ways of dealing with events than ways my lousy habits—mainly installed by parents and institutions—have forced me to act.”
The conjunction of these passages is telling. One might think that the obvious point of overlap between Acker and Sade lies in the erotic excess both their writing enacts—and, to be sure, that’s there. But, while his name has lent itself to a whole personality-type, very few people have actually read Sade. The directory-size One Hundred and Twenty Days of Sodom strikes me, above all, as a giant manual not so much of sex as of a certain mode of narrative. The set-up for the extended program of depravities in which Sade’s four libertine protagonists engage involves a modification of the Chateau de Silling’s hall into a “salon” with a main floor and four corner-niches (“recesses,” Sade calls them). In the center of the floor, four seasoned prostitutes hold forth in relay, one at time, recounting their most lewd and debauched sexual escapades to the libertines, while a pool of sixteen kidnapped children (eight of each gender) on the cusp of puberty sit at their feet. The libertines occupy the salon’s corners, one in each niche. The “game-rules” stipulate that, at any point, the libertines (and only they) may interrupt the prostitutes’ stories in order to reenact and (through a set of almost algorithmic corporeal variations) modify them, using the teens as “extras” to this end. Sade is very dogmatic about this governing commandment; he even writes a note reminding himself of it: “Never have the four friends do anything until it has first been recounted.” What’s being dramatized here, then, is what we might call a “space of narrative.” The prostitutes’ second-hand tales provide this space’s starting content; while the space’s terms or “settings” afford (to some) the option of switching from being a passive listener (or “reader”) into an active doer (or re-doer)—which switch, in turn, involves an act of violence.
This narrative regime—we could say, this regime of narrative—is structurally similar to the one within which Acker’s violence-saturated retellings take place. The plagiarism in which she sets so much stock isn’t just a style or gimmick. In its systematic assault on originality, that sacred fetish to which (alongside authenticity and self-expression) middlebrow fiction and its teaching still pay constant homage; in its induction of a mode of “second-hand-ness” no less pervasive than Sade’s; its obedience to a dictum of never having anything enacted that is not a reenactment, remix or permutation of a source found in some other archive—it affirms at every level a belief that the artist (poet, novelist) is operating with materials and within frames that are neither of her own making, nor politically neutral; ones that require aggressive—that is, violent—reconfiguration. Sitting (as friends describe) cross-legged on the floor each time she first reads a text by one of the “greats,” furiously hammering at her typewriter to rework it, is for Acker not simply a form of apprenticeship, but rather a strategy unleashed both with and against an entire cultural edifice. The great paradox is that while middlebrow fiction, endlessly recycling tired humanist clichés under the guise of originality, is in truth profoundly unoriginal, Acker’s unabashed re-working of old stock—like the appropriations and détournements carried out by Lettrists and Situationists two decades before her, or the pictorial and sculptural reproductions of her contemporary Sherrie Levine (an artist for whom she expressed much admiration)—genuinely unleashes fresh, dynamic cultural potential.
III.
These practices—citation, reenactment, repetitio and modification-through-repetition—already of course, in one way or other, have their place right at the heart of the Western canon (there’d be no Shakespeare without them). But intriguingly, Acker finds her most important precedent for them not in the European but rather in the Arabic toolbox. “Arabs (in their culture) have no (concept of ) originality,” she tells us in Don Quixote. “They write by cutting chunks out of all-ready written texts and in other ways defacing traditions: changing important names into silly ones, making dirty jokes out of matters that should be of the utmost importance to us such as nuclear warfare.” Accordingly, her rewrites are earnest in their frivolousness and vice versa. “What time tomorrow will we be able to fuck?” asks the Juliet of My Death My Life. “As soon as the morning sun has shot its sperm over all blackness and the Wall Street lawyer is masturbating in his office,” replies Romeo. The Arabic, or rather Arabian, influence is written all over Empire too. “This is true. Oh Sultan of Reality,” the narrative voice interjects at one point, invoking Scheherazade, that figure for whom violence and recounting are most intimately conjoined (if she stops narrating she’ll be beheaded). In Blood and Guts Janey learns Persian writing, a “language/to get rid of language”; she is also “formed” or educated by a Persian slave-trader, before attaching herself in Tangier to her near namesake Jean Genet, Sade’s twentieth-century prison-writer counterpart, himself politically and personally invested in the Arabic world, who makes a cameo appearance in the book. Empire, which contains sections titled “In Honor of the Arabs,” “Let the Algerians Take Over Paris” and “On Becoming Algerian,” is also steeped in direct references to Arab uprisings against European masters, and subsequent brutal police clampdowns. If Arabic or Middle Eastern culture provides a signpost pointing to a form of writing that avoids or negates the “creativity” she so despises, the Arabic human figure, especially in its role of colonial subject who’s become rebellious, furnishes Acker with, if not a straightforward point of identification, then a multifaceted cluster whose collective outline suggests possibilities of subversive agency. Inspired by their Arab counterparts, Empire’s American rebels, the “modern Terrorists,” launch an all-out assault on the techno-capitalist “central control network,” ringed with satellite and radio connections, known as MAINLINE, into whose internal video-feed they “shoot misinformation” in a (classically Burroughsian) attempt to bring the whole caboodle—corporate power, the state, media, the entire symbolic order—crashing down.
If empire is technocratic, then colonial bodies (that is, all bodies, since empire is a general condition) are a space of technological mastery, like robots operated by remote control. Not for nothing is Abhor described in Empire’s first sentence as “part robot, and part black.” In Acker’s general mythography, wetware and software merge: the body, as a site of power, is de facto a site of systematic and machinic intervention—or, to give such intervention its late-twentieth-century name, code. It’s code the modern Terrorists have raided MAINLINE for, and coded subprograms they use to raid it. Code is not only what’s written on the body: it’s what writes the body in the first place. We are all robots. The revolutionary act would not be to “rescue” an imagined “natural” body from technology, but rather to take over the technology itself, remake its program. Here, Acker’s thought dovetails with that of Donna Haraway, who writes in “A Cyborg Manifesto” (first published in 1985, three years before Empire) that “communications sciences and modern biologies are constructed by a common move—the translation of the world into a problem of coding, a search for a common language in which all resistance to instrumental control disappears.” Against this specter Haraway proposes not a luddite but a “cyborg politics,” which would be a “struggle for language and the struggle against perfect communication, against the one code that translates all meaning perfectly, the central dogma of phallogocentrism.” For Haraway as for Acker, rebellion, as a techno-linguistic act, is inseparable from the understanding of gender as a means of coding and controlling bodies. A cyborg uprising would involve bodies entering (to borrow Ovid’s phrase) “a state of mutation” in order to subvert their codings, write themselves anew. Citing salamanders who grow duplicated, if deformed, new limbs where old ones have been amputated, Haraway claims: “We have all been injured, profoundly. We require regeneration, not rebirth, and the possibilities for our reconstitution include the utopian dream of the hope for a monstrous world without gender.” The “cyborg imagery” that would help generate this regenerated, monstrous world, she argues (turning, like Acker, to terminology that carries strong Arabic or Islamic overtones), “is a dream not of a common language, but of a powerful infidel heteroglossia.” Those last four words (librarians take note) would constitute a fitting catalog description of Acker’s oeuvre.
When Janey’s learning Persian writing, she immerses herself simultaneously in The Scarlet Letter, Hawthorne’s landmark parable of gender politics and bodies with inscriptions on them. “At this point in The Scarlet Letter and in my life,” she writes, “politics don’t disappear but take place inside my body.” For Kristeva, the abject is not only (to use a term she shares with Haraway) monstrous, but also delirious, rhapsodic, “something added that expands us, over-strains us, and causes us to be both here, as dejects, and there, as others and sparkling. A divergence, an impossible bounding. Everything missed, joy—fascination.” Acker, whose life was cut short by her own body’s mutation in the form of breast cancer (coupled with a techno-capitalist regime that meant her health insurance didn’t meet the cost of treatment that would have saved her), seemed to share Kristeva’s sentiment—and to sense that it would (as befits the allobiographical logic running through her work) be someone else, or several someone elses, not she, who saw this divergent fascination through. Janey, speaking as Hawthorne’s Hester for Acker—or Hester speaking as Hawthorne’s Acker for Janey, or any combination of the above—speculates: “There’s going to be a world where the imagination is created by joy not suffering, a man and a woman can love each other again they can kiss and fuck again (a woman’s going to come along and make this world for me even though I’m not alive anymore).” It might just be that the final measure of a writer is not so much what they achieve themselves as what they render possible for others.
2016