Conclusion

Reflecting in 1990 on her early adult years immersed in the New York art world, Acker remembered ‘being taught that it’s not an art work’s content, surface content, that matters, but the process of making art. That only process matters.’1 Attention to the manuscript practice and compositional processes of Acker’s works, alongside the question of experimental practice and meaning, brings to light the new forms of creative practice that Acker’s works embody. This book opened with Acker’s declaration ‘FORM HAS MEANING’ and the importance of the imbrication of form with content to modernist and late modernist experimental writers. Acker’s experimental practices – exercises in writing asystematically, collage, topological intertextuality, montage, ekphrasis, and literary calisthenics – reveal a body of compositional strategies that continue to uphold this distinctive feature of early twentieth-century experiment and preserve the radical force of her writings....

Collage and the Anxiety of Self-description: Blood and Guts in High School

Chapter 2 addresses Acker’s practice of collage, and the anxiety of self-description. Blood and Guts in High School is positioned in relation to both the Dadaist collage and montage practices of artists such as Hannah Höch at the beginning of the twentieth century, and the subversive publications of the 1960s and 1970s: mimeographed magazines, and the punk and post-punk medium of Xeroxed publications. The original manuscript of Blood and Guts in High School housed in the archive possesses a different materiality to the published version of the novel. The materiality of the text in its collage and typographic experimentation is situated in a counter position to the language and hegemonic discourses within which Janey, the voice of the text, is imprisoned. Drawing on Acker’s practices of illegibility, and Denise Riley’s work on language and affect, the chapter argues that Blood and Guts in High School, through its experimental form, reveals the anxiety of self-description that Janey experiences within conventional language structures. Illustration, experimental typography, non-referential language, and the use of the poetic, function in Blood and Guts in High School as sites of an alternate language that emerges through compositional form and experimental forms of iteration.

Writing Asystematically: Early Experimental Writings 1970–1979

Chapter One examines Acker’s early experiments, written between 1970 and 1979, through the prism of the concerns of the poets associated with L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E. The poets’ collective vision of the social, political, and aesthetic transformative capacities of poetry clearly informed Acker’s practices. Key issues foregrounded in the opening chapter reverberate across Acker’s works: the crisis of the referent; the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets’ attack on the instrumental value of grammatically-centred language under capitalism; and their subsequent understanding of language-centred writing as a poetics of subversion. In its evaluation of Acker’s early writing experiments, ‘Murderer Criminals Join Sunlight’ (1972), ‘Homage to LeRoi Jones’ (1972), ‘Entrance Into Dwelling in Paradise’ (1972), ‘Working Set’ (1972), and ‘Journal Black Cats, Black Jewels’ (1972), the chapter makes a claim for the emergence of perceiver-centred spaces in Acker’s early experiments. The work of Jackson Mac Low is read as an important early influence on Acker. Her early procedural practices of writing through and typographical experimentation are early experiments that are formative to the complex writing practices found in her later works. In this way, Acker’s poetic juvenilia emerge as possessing important co-ordinates for an understanding of her later writing experiments.

Montage and Creative Cutting: My Mother: Demonology

Acker’s practice of cutting and montage is the focus of the fifth chapter. A close analysis of Acker’s notebooks, the preliminary materials for My Mother: Demonology housed in the Kathy Acker Papers, reveals a compositional process comparable to Maya Deren’s practice of creative cutting in her late modernist experimental film montage. In My Mother: Demonology, Acker explicitly engages with film. Like Luis Buñuel, Acker views desire as having a revolutionary capacity. My Mother: Demonology, in its indeterminacy, sites of condensation, and displacement, embodies the structures of desire. It also marks Acker’s turn to the image. Chapter 5 argues for the primacy of the image in Acker’s experimental montage as a continuation of a modernist aesthetic legacy. The chapter suggests that the work possesses what Deren understands to be a ‘vertical axis’ in poetry that is able to create ‘visible and auditory forms for something that is invisible, which is the feeling, the emotion, or the metaphysical content of the movement.’ This vertical axis is present both in the text’s movement from the quotidian to the poetic, and the cutting in of excerpts from the works of Paul Celan and Ingeborg Bachmann.

Ekphrasis, Abstraction, and Myth: ‘From Psyche’s Journal’, Eurydice in the Underworld, ‘Requiem’

The final chapter of the study examines Acker’s practices of ekphrasis and reappropriation of mythology in her final works. Chapter six offers a close reading of ‘From Psyche’s Journal’, Acker’s creative critical piece on Cathy de Monchaux’s sculptural work, examining the ekphrastic impulse of the work. Ekphrasis is read as enabling Acker to access the materiality of sculpture in her writing. Acker’s writing practices are placed within the context of postwar abstract sculpture by women, with a particular focus on Eva Hesse’s idea of absurdity that ‘is not a “thing” but, “the sensation of the thing.”’ Acker’s ekphrastic practice is brought into dialogue with her practice of the reappropriation of mythology, and the conceptual practice that is termed here ‘literary calisthenics’, which arises from her experiments with language and bodybuilding. Acker’s two later texts, Eurydice in the Underworld (1997) and Electra (1997) are addressed in light of Elaine Scarry’s work on the difficulty of expressing physical pain. Acker’s experiments that move towards a non-verbal language against ordinary language, and the silent languages of the body, facilitate the voicing of pain, and in particular the relation between physical pain and imagining.

Writing-through: Don Quixote: Which Was a Dream

Chapter 3 reads Acker’s Don Quixote: Which Was a Dream as a form of non-procedural ‘writing-through’, a term that has its roots in the procedural practices of John Cage and Jackson Mac Low, discussed in chapter one. Acker’s literary experiment in Don Quixote is related to abortion as a literary trope, and is positioned in contrast to models of male-to-male literary insemination and canon formation. The chapter draws on the contemporary scholarship surrounding conceptual practice, such as the work of Caroline Bergvall, and addresses the tendency of critical studies on Acker’s work to use the term ‘appropriation’ as a blanket term. Acker’s experimental practices in Don Quixote are readdressed, paying attention to the complexity of those strategies. Reading the work with attention to Acker’s practice of abstraction, experimentation with translation, paragrammatic play, and the protosemantic, a method of writing through emerges whereby voice is imbricated with the negation of language. In Don Quixote experimental practice displaces centralized narrative and offers a new feminist temporality.

Intertextuality and Constructive Non-identity: In Memoriam to Identity

In Memoriam To Identity is apprehended in chapter four as an experiment with the récit form. Acker’s compositional practice in In Memoriam to Identity is distinguished from that at work in Don Quixote through the topological form of the text, which folds in intersecting narratives and creates a fluid textual space, rather than a space characterised by disjunction. These topological revolutions have a counterpart in the radical politics of the text. Returning to Denise Riley’s work, I argue that through intertextuality, In Memoriam To Identity offers a site for that which Riley understands as constructive non-identity. The political and social negation of the voices of the narratives is positioned in contrast to the fictional site that offers the voices of the text a site of existence. The text points to the tensions surrounding the avant-garde idea of the sublation of art and life. In its inclusive and reintegrative form, the experimental text is apprehended as a site for community, solidarity, and intimacy.

Introduction: Kathy Acker and the Avant-Garde

‘TO SHOW: DIVERGENCE FROM STANDARD FORM OF STRUCTURE; FORM HAS MEANING’1 Kathy Acker writes in bold capitals in an unpublished notebook. The alignment of form and content is the starting point of this book. It brings together two interrelated axes of Acker’s practice: her continuation of radical modernism’s preoccupation with the crisis of language, and the avant-garde concern for producing art orientated towards the transformation of society. For early twentieth-century modernist writers the imbrication of form with content was a hallmark of their literary practice. The commitment to experimentation in form and language, upheld by writers such as Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, H.D., and James Joyce, is integral to the challenge modernist writers sought to pose to nineteenth-century realism. It was a key characteristic of their larger concern with the medium of writing. The precise nature of that concern with the medium of writing is crucial. Theorists of the avant-garde have attempted to draw a distinction between modernism and the avant-garde on the issue of aesthetic autonomy. Peter Bürger’s now classic work ...