Nasty Things at the Dinner Table: Kathy Acker and McKenzie Wark

In the nineties, I was hearing quite a lot – mostly from men – about how the aims of feminism had all been achieved, that women ‘are equal now’ and we should shut up with the whingeing; indeed, that the middle-class white man was some kind of threatened species. David Williamson was moved to write the play Dead White Males to make the case. Meanwhile, I didn’t seem to be able to go anywhere without being sexually harassed; in addition to the usual crime of ‘walking while female’, it appeared that men could extract sexual meaning and cause for harassment from anything; I was leered at, threatened and catcalled for walking barefoot, having a shaved head and eating in public, among other things. I would catch men looking at me as I spoke and see an expression that soon became familiar: a mixture of disgust, amusement and contempt-filled arousal. Time and again I came up against people who needed me to be one-dimensional, their need manifesting in efforts to control my behaviour, my speech, and even – most galling of all – my writing. Confronted with evidence that there was more going on beneath the surface than they’d like, they felt obliged to try to flatten out that surface. If we were all ‘equal’ now, the message did not seem to have filtered through to everyone.

In this perilous landscape, in which every journey outside required a certain armouring-up process, the experimental novelist Kathy Acker’s writing crossed my radar via a class on queer literature taught by Kate Lilley at the University of Sydney. The short story ‘A Young Girl’ in the anthology High Risk published by Serpent’s Tail, and an interview between Acker and Andrea Juno in the RE/Search publication Angry Women were my first encounters with this extraordinary writer. It was the interview, with accompanying pictures, that hit home. This tough-looking chick with her muscles, tattoos, piercings and spiky hair who spoke directly of female desire, masochism, power relationships and butch/femme dynamics stared defiantly from the page. Acker’s punk image was an important part of her literary persona, although she would come to find it confining; we are all, for better or worse, programmed to respond to imagery of women and in this case, her photos worked as a kind of bait, leading me to first to the short story, and then to her books.

Her conversation with Juno struck a nerve: ‘I dislike the fact that because you’re a woman, you can’t do things…that the word “NO!” is the very first word you learn and it’s burnt in your flesh.’ I had been hearing ‘no’ all my life: women can’t drive, women can’t do maths, women can’t write literature, women shouldn’t lift weights because it makes them look ‘hard’. Femininity is weak and frivolous. Women shouldn’t have or want sex and if they do, they deserve whatever happens to them. Kathy Acker, in books that collide philosophy, pornography, memoir and the literary canon, wrote a world that both mirrors these crazy distortions and shows her heroines navigating the treacherous terrain of gender, love, desire and art. Her re-visions of Dickens, Cervantes, Robert Louis Stevenson and so on  are never simplified into tales of ‘triumph over adversity’ but rather present female experience — particularly her preoccupation with the tensions between sexual desire, masochism and the need for independence — in all its complexity.

The short story ‘A Young Girl’ is a horrifying tale in which an artist in gentrifying New York accepts a commission from the art-loving Mayor and tries to arrange for his daughter’s genitals to be set on fire by a group of men so he can paint the scene. He argues, ‘In order for me to paint horror, I have to see the horror in myself.’ Money, his art and impressing the mayor were what mattered and to hell with girls – including your own daughter. It resonated with me; here was a far more honest depiction of the nightmare territory young women often inhabit than anything I’d read up to that point; a world in which the question posed in the short early novel Rip-Off Red, ‘Why should I believe what a cunt tells me?’ is as often as not the response any woman who wants to make her opinion heard can expect.

In Lust for Life, an anthology of essays on Acker’s work, Leslie Dick says Acker’s writing ‘like punk rock [...] smashed things wide open and left room for other people (me) to do very different things’. I was writing experimental prose poems about fucked-up girls myself while despairing that this was not literature, as the experience of girls didn’t count as a Grand Universal Theme. Acker, among others, served as a permissive influence; her work allowed me to approach writing about sex, pain, abuse and power via experimental techniques rather than trying to force those themes into a realist narrative that ‘made sense’. The way the world treats women often does not make sense.

*

In 1995, around the same time as I read ‘A Young Girl’, Acker visited Australia on a book tour, where she met and had a brief fling with the cultural theorist McKenzie Wark, whose early work considered the ‘third space’ of new media enabled by developing technology; he had published Virtual Geography, which looked at how our increased access to information made global events part of everyday experience, and was writing The Virtual Republic, which analysed connections between the various fronts of the Australian ‘culture wars’, at the time. When Acker returned to San Francisco, these two pioneers of their respective media began a fervid email exchange that mostly took place over a few weeks, sometimes emailing several times a day, in a wide-ranging conversation that took in art, theory, philosophy, literature, sex and gossip. Two years later, by the end of 1997, Acker was dead from breast cancer. Now, eighteen years after her death and nearly 20 years after the emails were written, Matias Viegener, Acker’s friend and the executor of her estate, has, with Wark’s consent for his half of the correspondence, collected and published these emails as a book, I’m Very Into You.  Viegener’s introduction pre-empts some questions about why the letters were published:

Perhaps we will know her differently now, and him as well. A dead writer can only exist in words, and I publish these letters less in the spirit of total revelation than total text: everything in Acker’s life was text, including her death. [...] And so dear reader, though these words were not addressed to you, I hope you now find them in your lap with at least some of the electricity with which they were generated.

The straightforward description of I’m Very Into You as a book of collected emails does nothing at all to convey the remarkable nature of what was happening. By the mid-90s email was becoming generally available and popular; essentially it was a new medium, infinitely elastic in scope, allowing for both the intimacy of a long personal letter and briefer, more businesslike communications. There was a magical thrill about being able to communicate without picking up a phone, allowing for new kinds of friendships to be built. There was an excitement to the immediacy of it; knowing that the other person could, potentially, read your message in real time, made it addictive, made it tempting to hit ‘Reply’ the moment you’d read theirs. (There were pleasures too for the masochist or the connoisseur of delayed gratification — having to wait for a response renders it much sweeter.) Email programs did not then have the ability to convey italics, bold type and so on, so certain conventions arose such as using the underline before and after the title of a work to indicate italics, or asterisks around a word to embolden it and so on. Wark, particularly, is scrupulous to observe these conventions. There’s something delightful about this. In I’m Very Into You, it’s a reminder of the new and different nature of the medium.

To see these two fascinating minds communicating here in a kind of cyber-enabled telepathy is a privilege indeed. Their emails often cross in the ether, so we read answers to questions that only become apparent later; Wark refers to their ‘asynchronous conversation’, and in some ways the disorderly sequence is like reading a Kathy Acker novel, in which narratives proceed with the logic of a dream (or nightmare), nothing is stable and identity is not fixed. There are multiple ways of reading I’m Very Into You; you can try to piece together a linear narrative, or go straight through, allowing the emails to come at you out of sequence, which produces its own moments of interest.

His are the first words we read, and he writes to say ‘there are no words’. He’s rendered speechless, ‘displaced’ by the encounter with Acker — but of course there are words, quite a lot of them, to come. They are both writers, they need time to sort themselves out, to find the right words. It’s interesting that some readers have interpreted Wark’s more reserved, edited email style as an indication of greater coolness on his part, categorising Acker as the more emotional, more smitten of the two. This interpretation is gendered: her needy, expressive, messy; him rational, cool, controlled. But there are other ways of reading the difference in tone: she feels safe with him, enough to write in a looser, more relaxed style; he takes more care, is perhaps keener to impress. The real question, is, I think: why consider this at all? Why the need to assign greater emotional investment to one of them? Who wins that game? Acker offers some kind of answer in her novel, Empire of the Senseless:

I had a nightmare: that the world is full of people who no longer feel. They are carrying on their business as usual, in fact better than usual, because they no longer feel.

In fact, they continually discuss and analyse the power dynamics between them, with Wark describing the process at one point as a waltz – ‘Only who’s gonna lead?’ – the figure evoking an entertaining vision of these two queer outsiders (although they both resist that description; Acker imagines responding to her critics, ‘I am society as much as you’ and Wark replies, ‘I like this idea of a refusal to be called other’) dancing their way through the ballrooms of European culture, exchanging genders, butch/femme and top/bottom roles as they go. That is the value of these emails, I think, as they open the way to looking at some of Acker’s work, occupied as it is with examining every possible permutation of power dynamics, especially as they show up in family, romantic and sexual relationships. Wark has expressed a wish that the emails will lead readers back to her books, so I’d like this essay to serve as something of an idiosyncratic, personal explorer’s guide. Or perhaps a raider’s guide, to borrow a term from Michael Farrell, to the treasure ship of Acker’s pirate plunder.

*

Along with her contemporaries Chris Kraus and Dodie Bellamy, Acker has had a profound influence on the experimental writers who’ve followed, particularly those working with the more painful aspects of female experience. Her tentacles extended far: she encouraged Kathleen Hanna to start the riot grrl band Bikini Kill; Jeanette Winterson (who wrote the introduction to Essential Acker, a good collection of samples from all her published work edited by her friends Amy Scholder and Dennis Cooper) cites her as one of the few female writers she could look to as an example of someone who used herself as a character in work that was aiming at metanarrative (and in whom this strategy was interpreted as autobiography, which Winterson notes with characteristic fieriness tends to happen to women writers more than men). The experimental writer Sapphire, the author of Push (made into the film Precious a few years ago), a contemporary of Acker’s, spoke of her with admiration and provided the blurb for Essential Acker. Quotations from her work pop up as epigraphs to the books of Ali Smith, and I see her influence in the fragmentary approach of Kate Zambreno, whose work combines literary critique with examinations of her own experience, and perhaps too in Coral Hull’s Work the Sex, a book-length prose poem created from the first-person narratives of sex workers (a strategy Acker also employed, drawing on a mix of her own experiences and stories told to her by her colleagues when she worked as a stripper).

Over the past ten years I’ve also observed a steady trickle of critical studies devoted to Acker (such as Lust for Life: On the Writings of Kathy Acker, edited by Amy Scholder, Carla Harryman and Avital Ronnell), online essays, an upcoming biography. It’s good to see her significance recognised, if only posthumously. Acker got into all the messy stuff: ‘Don’t talk about nasty things at the dinner table’ says one of the terrible fathers who inhabit her books, here In Memoriam to Identity. All the nasty things that are excluded from the polite dinner table conversation of the bourgeois nuclear family (and the literature that deals with it) come to the fore in her work: rape, incest, murder, power games, poverty, racism, female desire. The willingness to examine these things clearly draws Wark and Acker together — in a moment that elicits a chuckle of recognition, he exclaims that in Sydney, ‘even the *artists* come to dinner and talk about real estate’.

Real estate in Acker is a site of anxiety: her emails refer several times to her worry about becoming homeless. ‘A Young Girl’ describes the process by which working-class people of colour were pushed out of New York to make room for the middle class (who are in turn pushed out to make room for the ultra-wealthy), with the complicity of artists:

As soon as white artistic gentrification was established, the real-estate moguls sold these spaces for fortunes. The white artists had to become more interested in profit than in art to hold on to the spaces they had gentrified and from which they had excluded the poor, not poverty. Never poverty.

I appreciate this in her, this willingness to engage with the question of the part white artists — by extension, herself — might play in perpetuating hierarchical injustice, even as people who are marginalised to some extent themselves.

The best parts of nineties postmodernism, with its emphasis on plurality, laid the groundwork for today’s intersectional thinking, in which race, class, gender and sexuality are all considered together in the analysis of systemic inequality. Both Acker and Wark were interested in non-white, non-Western perspectives: Wark’s book The Virtual Republic, written around the same time as he met Acker, opens with a discussion of two popular songs about Aboriginal land rights: Yothu Yindi’s ‘Treaty’ and Paul Kelly’s ‘From Little Things, Big Things Grow’. He describes the excitement of hearing ‘an Aboriginal voice, singing in its own language’ and in the emails, he draws on Indigenous Australian concepts of the desert:

All it’s good for is making epic poetry. Apart from that it should be left alone...It belongs to the rainbow serpent. There is no frontier in this culture. Just the desert. Death and desert. The black hole of the real at the heart of the sign.

Acker returns from a screening of Shekhar Kapur’s film Bandit Queen, abuzz with excitement: ‘now I have to find out all that happens with women not just in white European countries’. Acker also observes to Wark that America ‘hate[s] the Arabs ‘cause the Arabs are cultured’. In an environment in which anti-Muslim propaganda was rife — even among lefty feminists, I remember Islam being talked about as something from which ‘we’ had to ‘free’ ‘them’, the prospect that Muslim women might have perspectives of their own a dim glimmer on the horizon — such an attitude was, to say the least, unusual. These are, of course, tiny steps towards dismantling inequality, but both of these writers display an openness to other cultures that is less about appropriation, more about opening the door to mutual understanding.

*

I sometimes use the word ‘realistic’ to describe how Acker’s work strikes me, but that’s quite distinct from the tradition of the tradition of the realist novel, into which it certainly does not fit. Her novels generally force the reader to abandon expectations of a straightforward narrative, to read in a way that is not comfortable. You have to concentrate and ask: just why am I being told this particular repulsive and/or erotic thing? But her descriptions of nuclear families as a site of pain, and of power games and masochism, can perhaps only be got at via a more fragmented approach. Just dealing with the assault course that is the world when you are a woman, a person of colour, a poor person, a queer person, can shake you up so that you literally cannot ‘think straight’. A linear narrative must exclude a great deal to allow it to proceed smoothly (no nasty things at the dinner table); an Acker ‘narrative’ is what oozes up out of the cracks.

Acker pointed to the deep vein of misogyny, warped power and sexual violence that runs through so many human societies, so deeply ingrained that its victims are often blind to it and take the blame upon themselves. In her books, nothing is sacred: fathers and mothers fuck their children, siblings are lovers or sexually abuse each other. Even where the relationships are not incestuous, the mothers are manipulative and narcissistic; the fathers find some way of absenting themselves. Families are not a place of safety but the heart of darkness. The systemic tactics abusers use to keep their victims in thrall are graphically described and analysed.

There is in fact nothing outlandish about Acker’s worlds, in which boundaries are constantly transgressed. She writes about the confused pleasures of interiorised pain, and of female emotional masochism as its foreseeable result, without judging it; her anger is reserved for the perpetrators of abuse, violence and war. The reader generally has to abandon her expectations of continuity — that dead characters will stay dead, that people will retain their ‘original’ gender or name, that effect will follow cause. Some of her books, such as the early detective story Rip-Off Red: Girl Detective, Kathy Goes to Haiti and Empire of the Senseless do feature relatively straightforward narratives – although it’s Rip-Off Red who says ‘Narratives you know are purely for shit. Here’s the information go fuck yourself.’ It’s a deliberate strategy to shake the reader out of comfort, as well as to convey some of the complexity that is existing as a conscious entity. ‘I slip and slide’, she writes to Wark. She resisted essentialism and the emails are full of her vigilance against it. We are all always multiple and shifting selves, and Acker is keen to capture what she can of that complexity, and especially to restore it to women characters, all too often merely a cipher in the canonical texts of male authors:

I’m telling you right now burn the schools. They teach you about good writing. That’s a way of keeping you from writing what you want to [...] Each of you must use writing to do exactly what you want. Myself or any occurrence is a city through which I can wander if I stop judging. (Acker, Pasolini: My Death My Life.)

Dismantling expectations of narrative has been a powerful tool for many experimental writers; in Ellen G. Friedman and Miriam Fuchs’ Breaking the Sequence: Women’s Experimental Fiction, Acker is placed within a tradition of female experimentalists, from Virginia Woolf and Dorothy Richardson to Christine Brooke-Rose, who use non-standard ‘narrative’ techniques to convey otherwise unexplored aspects of women’s experience and consciousness. This dialogue in Blood and Guts in High School elucidates clearly enough the need for rebel writers such as Acker to reappropriate the language:

Mr Fuckface: You see, we own the language. Language must be used clearly and precisely to reveal our universe.
Mr Blowjob: Those rebels are never clear. What they say doesn’t make sense.

Or not the kind of sense Mr Blowjob prefers, in any case. Mr Fuckface’s universe can be revealed in clear and precise language – but the universes of the more marginalised need a different approach.

Acker said that she didn’t expect people to start at the beginnings of her books and read all the way through; it works just as well to use the same aleatory approach to reading them as she did to writing them. Among other techniques, she was fond of the ‘cut-up’ approach, which she borrowed from William Burroughs, using both her own texts and sampling and remixing those of others – a female pirate ransacking the ship of the canon. Opening her books at random and seeing what leaps out is as good a way of reading her as any – and indeed in one message Wark mentions that he has done this just before writing to her.

I see parallels not only between Acker’s literary technique and her ‘asynchronous’ conversation with Wark, but in the mutual interest of the correspondents in a non-linear, queered approach to sex. Wark writes:

Cocks. Yeah, well there have been times when I’d rather not have one. Irigary was right. They take over, they *centralise*. [...] And they are designed to squirt sperm and then curl up and go home. So to have any real fun, if you have one, involves circumventing these two tendencies, to centralising in space and localising in time.

Later on he remarks that ‘Sometimes the flirting is as good as it gets. The sheer unlimited possibility of it...’ Read that line against this from Acker’s Don Quixote: ‘Our desires, repeating each other to infinity like the mirrors in Renaissance paintings, want to keep evolving, rather than die in one orgasm’. Acker and Wark’s mutual, playful resistance to closure and goal-oriented sex or narrative, the willingness to dwell in possibility can be seen to serve a political purpose as well as an aesthetic one. Take away the goal ¬– of orgasm or narrative closure – and approach the process of sex or text as meaningful in itself, and suddenly there is room for hitherto unexplored aspects of experience. It would have been interesting to see what Acker might have made of the increasing sophistication of e-publishing – no doubt the non-linear nature of her work could have been expressed through digital publishing tools. And with her commitment to disclosure and the multiple self, it is tempting too to imagine her in the era of Facebook and Google, with the self-surveillance that those all-seeing entities necessarily bring about.

The correspondence between Wark and Acker is incomplete; this is fitting. What we know of people is always incomplete. Her friend Avital Ronell wrote in Lust for Life:

It is imperative that good friendship be unbound from the yoke of understanding – who would be so deluded as to claim to understand the friend? Who would demean the beloved friend by finding her transparent or readily intelligible?

It’s impressive how openly Acker and Wark navigate their friendship, given the potential pitfalls desire can introduce. Leslie Dick writes that Acker had a tendency to go for men who treated her badly, and from what Acker tells Wark of her other relationships, and extrapolating from the books, it’s reassuring – just on a human level, as a reader who loves her – to have this tender, playful, egalitarian correspondence to indicate that it was not always so. He refuses opportunities to take advantage of her expressions of anxiety and is straightforwardly reassuring: ‘Hey it’s all right. Hey it’s all right,’ he responds to one particularly vulnerable email. Perhaps it’s this kindness that queers him the most.

They have a small misunderstanding about what will happen when he comes to San Francisco (he says ‘If you’re busy I can look after myself but if you have time I’d like to spend time with you’; she takes some offence, but it’s sorted fairly quickly); some reviewers have read his phrasing as ambivalent and reserved, but to me it reads as care and respect; he explains that he doesn’t want to  ‘compromise [her] autonomy’. (Compare this to: ‘I saw myself as split between two desperations: to be loved by a man and to be alone so I could begin to be’ in Demonology: My Mother.) This is a tension that arises consistently in her work; an unacknowledged dominant/submissive dynamic is such a consistent part of social conditioning (often though not always inflected by gender), it takes active effort to resist a loss of the self in relationships:

B immediately saw me as I saw myself, I saw in B a friend and one who wouldn’t try, since he was married, to stop me from becoming a person, rather than wild. (Demonology: My Mother).

And being able to be one’s own person and do one’s own creative work are of course interconnected. In the early story ‘The Adult Life of Toulouse-Lautrec’, Veronique expresses the frustration of being a woman in the art world:

This life’s keeping us lonely, Giannina. What these artists really want are pillows. Nice soft sweet female pillows. We can’t be that way. We’ve got our own work. We’re waitresses.

A waitress is a step up from a pillow, at any rate. Acker is anxious to assert to Wark that she won’t be engaging in any ‘het shit’, that ‘outside the bed, I do my work and you do yours’. He doesn’t come across as being particularly invested in ‘het shit’, but the price of female independence is eternal vigilance. She’s profoundly conscious of how vulnerable even tough-minded, intellectually sophisticated women can be to the destabilising power relations of heterosexuality — even though neither of them identify as heterosexual, she’s aware of the possibility that his male and her female body could potentially get in the way of the equal relationship they’ve established.

*

These emails give a little insight into the friendships that sustained Kathy Acker and a glimpse of a life that had much human connection and richness in it. Despite her difficult childhood, tumultuous relationships and early death from breast cancer, I don’t want to see her as a tragic figure; there are already too many tragic stories about women writers. There’s a fight for life, a celebration of pleasure and vitality going on in all her writing and in these emails too. Acker’s feminist anger went beyond rage at the patriarchy and on towards all systems of abuse and violence. She recognised that the roots of oppression lie in the human addiction to creating and perpetuating hierarchies, and that calling kindness and gentleness ‘feminine’ and crushing it out of men damages men as well as women. Her feminist interest is in dismantling all systems of oppression. (See, for example, her short story ‘Hansel and Gretel’: ‘Witch replied that it was no longer cool for women to be weak. Frightened all the time. “C’mon, sister. Get into the fuckin’ oven.” Gretel sensed that there was something wrong with this argument.’ If we just ‘lean in’ and get into the oven, we make no advances.) Her work captures very well what it is to be the broken product of those systems, both in form and content, and to be a woman finding and expressing joy in her own sexuality amidst the struggle.

Acker’s writing is not nice. It is not polite. It takes abuse and the abject, rape and violence, suffering and rot – and shoves it right in your face. For all that, though, she’s not a nihilist. Her aim is speak the unspeakable, to make room for and to honour the pain of oppressed people so we can begin to make reparations. There are outbreaks of poetry, and many moments of joyous celebration of sexuality, usually from a woman’s point of view. The fly that appears on the front cover – a ring that Acker gave Wark – might not, at first, seem to be the most attractive or romantic symbolic animal, dwelling as it does in manure, garbage and compost, but the fly, along with its fellow scavenger animals – the rats, dogs and cockroaches who crawl or run throughout through many of her books and, we learn, inhabit her bedroom in the form of stuffed animals – is vital to the work of decomposition and recomposition in which Acker was so intimately engaged. The fly is, in fact, a good metaphor for Acker herself – light-footed, iridescent-winged, multi-eyed, crawling across the refuse and monuments of high culture, scanning centuries of literature, able to see and sense the reverberations others could not.

References

Kathy Acker, Literal Madness: Kathy Goes to Haiti; My Death My Life By Pier Paolo Pasolini; Florida (Grove, 1987).
– My Mother: Demonology (Grove, 1994)
– Rip-Off Red, Girl Detective and The Burning Bombing of America (Grove, 2002).
– Empire of the Senseless (Grove, 1994).
– Blood and Guts in High School (Grove, 1994).
– Don Quixote (Grove, 1994).
Kathy Acker and McKenzie Wark, I’m Very Into You (semiotext(e), 2015).
Andrea Juno, Angry Women (Juno Books, 1999).
Amy Scholder, Carla Harryman and Avital Ronnell (eds.), Lust for Life (Verso, 2006).
Amy Scholder and Dennis Cooper (eds.), Essential Acker: The Selected Writings of Kathy Acker.(Grove, 2002).
Amy Scholder and Ira Silverman (eds.), High Risk: An Anthology of Forbidden Writings (Plume, 1991).
McKenzie Wark, The Virtual Republic (Allen and Unwin, 1997).