Violent Acts, Volatile Words: Kathy Acker's Terrorist Aesthetic
2004; University of North Texas Press; Volume: 36; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
1934-1512
Autores Tópico(s)Rhetoric and Communication Studies
ResumoA day is a blank sheet of paper. Bound up over a year, these sheets make a book which bears title The Past and contains no lessons for future. --Cedric von Halacz, explosive in a psychological test (1) Only process matters. --Acker, Critical Languages (83) the greatest work of The title of this article immediately puts into proximity terms that generated international scandal for musician Karlheinz Stockhausen when he referred to events of 9/11 as the greatest work of art. The moral outrage that suffused Western media from Stockhausen's analogue of catastrophic destruction with aesthetic innovation--a relation at heart of this inquiry--at once signals and yields insight into dimensions of a new sociocultural paradigm that has arisen since World Trade Center attacks: what Baudrillard in effect describes as a culture of terrorism. It also provides a useful lens through which critical questions about intersections of and power--specifically how Western hegemony is shaped and disseminated by normative narratives--can be refrained in a post 9/11 context. Indeed, while dispute about Stockhausen's statement continues to remain centered on questions of representation (i.e., what was said vs. what was meant), little consideration has been given to why an aesthetic evaluation of a act catapulted a musician into political limelight. Why and how did Stockhausen's statement create such an impact? What does public's reaction to his choice of reveal about normative interpretive models and discursive operations that are at work to corral them into shape? Kathy Acker is no stranger to stakes raised by these questions and potent reaction that can be provoked by intersection of art and violence. Her transgressive fictions--Blood and Guts in High School, My Mother: Demonology, Empire of Senseless and Pussy, King of Pirates (to name just a few)-in fact often deploy characters, themes, and what will argue is a prose style, in order to exacerbate and exploit just this relation. Indeed, where furor over Stockhausen implicates anecdotally power by which normative discourses constrain subjectivity, Acker's project is specifically designed to examine (and undermine) formidable processes that are at work maintaining discursive integrity. Why her project deploys terrorism as an essential mode of critique, however, requires specific attention to, as Judith Butler might say, how things with ... produce effects with and ... things to language, because is thing that we do (8, my italics). In this regard, Acker's interest appears to lie in how promotes as well as prevents access to power--how is done to marginalized subjects--and how shifts in power occur at all. When use any words, Acker writes, I am always taking part in constructing of political, economic, and moral community in which my discourse is taking place. All aspects of language--denotation, sound, style, syntax, grammar, etc-are politically, economically, and morally coded.... The only possible chance for change, for mobility, for political, economic, and moral flow lies in tactics of warfare, in use of fiction, of language (Postmodernism 4-5). Acker's guerilla or terrorist use of fictional takes on multiple forms throughout her prolific body of writing. Her renowned use of plagiarism, for instance, attacks fundamental precepts in tradition of humanities: specifically authority, if not originality, of artist. As Sylvere Lotringer notes in an interview with Acker regarding her use of Harold Robbins' The Pirate (and uproar that ensued), Hijacking a copyright, no wonder they got upset.... Terrorism in literature (Devoured by Myths 13). Yet it is Acker's use of explicit, often violent, sexual content to break, as she claims, the rational mind that has perhaps caused greatest shockwaves within system of literary discourse (Algeria 117). …
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