My Cunstruct (A Cunt) and I Had to Find the Code

1820 1821 1822 1823 1824 1825 1818—2018 1826 1827 1828 1829 1830 1831 1832 1833 1834 1835 1836 1837 1838 1839 1840 1841 200 JAHRE 1842 1843 1844 1845 1846 1847 1848 1849 1850 1851 1852 1853 1854 1855 1856 1857 1858 1818—2018 KATHY ACKER 200 JAHRE GET RID OF MEANING 200 JAHRE 200 JAHRE 200 JAHRE 1818—2018 1818—2018 22. — 24. November 2018 SYMPOSIUM Badischer Kunstverein 1818—2018 200 JAHRE 1818—2018 1918 1919 1920 1921 1922 1923 1924 1925 1926 1927 1928 1929 1930 1931 1932 1933 1934 1935 1936 1937 1938 1939 1940 1941 1942 1943 1944 1945 1946 1947 1948 1949 1950 1951 1952 1953 1954 1955 1956 1957 1958 1959 1960 1961 1962 1963 1964 1965 1966 1967 1968 1969 1970 1971 1972 1973 1974 1975 1976 1977 1978 1979 1980 1981 1982 1983 1984 1985 1986 1987 1988 1989 1990 1991 1992 1993 1994 1995 1996 1997 1998 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014 2015 2016 2017 2018 1819 1859 1860 1861 1862 1863 1864 1865 1866 1867 1868 1869 1870 1871 1872 1873 1874 1875 1876 1877 1878 1879 1880 1881 1882 1883 1884 1885 1886 1887 1888 1889 1890 1891 1892 1893 1894 1895 1896 1897 1898 1899 1900 1901 1902 1903 1904 1905 1906 1907 1908 1909 1910 1911 1912 1913 1914 1915 1916 1917 1818 Grafik: Hammer, Zürich / Druck: Lézard Graphique, Brumath KATHY ACKER SYMPOSIUM NOVEMBER 22–24, 2018 200 JAHRE BADISCHER KUNSTVEREIN No. 2018 / 08 ENGLISH VERSION in language. She read Wittgenstein, practiced bodybuilding, and returned to Hannah Arendt. Kirschner bases her contribution on Acker’s groundbreaking text Writing, Identity, and Copyright in the Net Age (1995). SYMPOSIUM PROGRAM 3 pm Thu, November 22 Dodie Bellamy, Hanjo Berressem, Ruth Buchanan, Georgina Colby, Leslie Dick & Audrey Wollen, Claire Finch, Talk by Douglas A. Martin Johnny Golding, Anja Kirschner, Douglas A. Martin, Jason 6 pm In Memoriam to Acker’s Biography McBride, Karolin Meunier & Kerstin Stakemeier, Daniel Schulz, McKenzie Wark At one point in her artistic practice, Kathy Acker considered writing a biography, but life intervened. Martin will examThe American author Kathy Acker (1947 – 1997) was one ine what arose instead: specifically poetic and authorial of the most influential writers of the 20th century. Work- legend, translation, and other travails in the constitution ing through an experimental and avant-garde tradition, of the novel In Memoriam to Identity. she wrote numerous novels, essays, poems and novellas from the beginning of the 1970s to late 90s. As a post- 7 pm Reading by Karolin Meunier modernist, plagiarist and post-punk feminist, her work has “Let’s pretend history of the future is autobiinfluenced two generations of writers, philosophers, and ography of the present” many artists. In the first large-scale exhibition on Kathy Relating to Kathy Acker by tracing the notes in the books Acker, Badischer Kunstverein invites international artists, of her library archived at the University of Cologne, Karolin writers, and scholars to discuss Acker’s oeuvre through a Meunier and Kerstin Stakemeier started a dialogue on ownwide range of events including talks, readings, and perfor- ership and self-expropriation. Karolin Meunier presents mances during a three-day symposium. Acker’s practice their findings and limits. was itself originally eclectic and channeled through art, literature, philosophy, film, and music. Subjects and fig- 8 pm Performance by Johnny Golding ures of her work spring forth — from pirates, spiders, girls, Pussy, King of the Feminists (Pirate Version) and misfits to gender plasticity, from formal stylistics to Given Acker’s typically brazen, erotic virtuosity, Golding performativity, archives, ownership, and expropriation, as presents Acker’s Pussy as the autobiography of our world, well as from the web of embodied thoughts to the passion of misfits, monsters, radical fairies, amazons: the odd of thinking bodies. pussy creatures Acker observed as castaway pirate-sailors on the high seas of imagination and gutter ground grit. Concept & Moderation: Matias Viegener and Anja Casser Fri, November 23 Coordination: Didem Yazıcı Public Relations: Lisa-Kathrin Welzel 5 pm Talk by Claire Finch “My construct (a cunt) and I had to find The symposium is held in the conjunction with the exhibitithe code”: Kathy Acker and the search on Kathy Acker GET RID OF MEANING (05. 12. – 02. 12. 2018) for queer experimental futures in French at Badischer Kunstverein. feminist legacies Focusing on Kathy Acker’s interaction with French feminist thought and experimental writing, Finch examines the writer’s texts to bridge seemingly conflictual branches of feminist thought in order to position Acker in an ongoing genealogy of queer experimental literature. Presentation by Jason McBride What it Means to Be Avant-Garde: How the Art World Created Kathy Acker While Acker famously plundered literature for her source material, the various art worlds of 1970s New York, Toronto, and California gave her the methodology, community and financial wherewithal to create her early, groundbreaking books. Talk by Georgina Colby Avant-textes: Kathy Acker’s Manuscript Practices Colby addresses the relation between experimental composition, materiality, intention, and the emergence of new forms of non-conventional meaning in Kathy Acker’s manuscripts. A close reading of Acker’s archival works, in particular the works displayed in the exhibition. 4 pm Thoughts by Dodie Bellamy Gut Brain: the Peristaltic Logic of Kathy Acker Dodie Bellamy will explore Acker’s strategies of jumbling the invented, the remembered, the seen and the stolen, in order to unmask the hoax of Western rationality. Further, she will discuss the profound impact Acker’s wild rigor had on her own writing. 5 pm Break 6 pm Reading by Ruth Buchanan All at the same time All at the same time is a text that departs from Buchanan’s close reading of Against Ordinary Language: Language of the Body by Kathy Acker, expanding this into an inquiry into the relationship between the body, the archive, and power. 7 pm Talk by McKenzie Wark Philosophy for Spiders Examining Kathy Acker less as a writer and more as a philosopher, McKenzie Wark extracts a consistent philosophical low theory practice from her work. What were all those writerly tactics actually for? She was perhaps doing low rather than high theory, a kind of “spidering.” 8 pm Open Discussion Speakers from the symposium and all audience members are invited to join the discussion based on observations and remaining questions from the symposium. All events will be in English. 6 pm Talk by Hanjo Berressem Kathy Acker: Writing Affect Berressem investigates Kathy Acker’s writing as producing “landscapes of affect” that ask for a new way of reading. Rather than a hermeneutic reading, her writing invites what might be termed an “inherently affective reading” that aims to be adequate to Acker’s “affective writing.” Die deutschen Informationen zum Symposium finden Sie auf der Website des Badischen Kunstvereins. 7 pm Dialogue by Leslie Dick & Audrey Wollen Extended Families Prince sings: if we cannot make babies, maybe we can make some time. Books are both and neither, embodied objects that swarm and disperse. Like lovers, and children, their drama is one of abandonment: can we sustain this intimacy (reading, fucking, suckling) forever? With kind support of The jubilee is supported by 8 pm Stiftung Hirsch Graphics after Jill Kroesen’s cover of The Childlike Life of the Black Tarantula. TVRT / Viper’s Tongue Books, 1975. Graphic design: Hammer, Zürich und Erik Schöfer Print: Stober Eggenstein Badischer Kunstverein, Waldstraße 3, 76133 Karlsruhe T +49 [0]721 282 26 , F +49 [0]721 297 73 badischer-kunstverein.de 2 pm Talk by Anja Kirschner Di. – Fr. 11 – 19 Uhr, Sa./So./Feiertage 11 – 17 Uhr, MY A-C-K-E-R. DEMONOLOGY. In the post-apocalyptic times of the Reagan and Thatcher Mo. geschlossen; Tue – Fri from 11 am – 7 pm, Sat/Sun/ years, Kathy Acker wondered what possibilities still resided holidays from 11 am – 5 pm, closed on Mon. Sat, November 24 MY CONSTRUCT (A CUNT) AND I HAD TO FIND THE CODE CLAIRE FINCH - UNIVERSITÉ PARIS 8-VINCENNES-SAINT DENIS, FRANCE BADISCHER KUNSTVEREIN, KATHY ACKER SYMPOSIUM, KARLSRUHE 23 NOVEMBER 2018 “So it’s the body which finally can’t be touched by all our skepticism and ambiguous systems of belief. The body is the only place where any basis for real value exists anymore.” (Kathy Acker interview with Larry McCaffery, Some Other Frequency, p. 21 1996) “Lulu and Ange decided to masturbate so they could find a reason to live.” (Kathy Acker, Pussy King of the Pirates, 31) 1. ENTER THE CONSTRUCT (A CUNT) I want to start with the cunt in this paper’s title, which comes from Empire of the Senseless. The character Thivai has a degenerative disease, he’ll become a walking lobotomy without the code that will lead him to the disease’s antidote. The construct is Abhor, hybrid human-machine, coded female and so “cunt” – although of course the cunt’s meaning here is multiple, we’ll get back to that. Thivai says, “On the other hand my construct (a cunt) and I had to find the code.” The referential other hand is a terrorism plot by a group called the modernists, which of course also has multiple meanings. The entire setting is this: “Being a bit behind the times, the Moderns only wanted to destruct. On the other hand my construct (a cunt) and I had to find the code.” (Empire 36-37). Place and thought are the same thing: the physical setting is 1 knowledge and literary history and the plot begins with outdated modernists literally waging war on culture via information overload and material interference. We’re in a description of so-called deconstructive methods, and they’re in crisis. The construct in question is part robot, unlike the analog modernists: the construct is the antidote to the zombie-world of literary deconstruction. But, not any construct: the cuntconstruct. I wanted to start with this cunt-construct because this is where I want to bring us in the end, suggesting that reading Kathy Acker in parallel with some of the French feminists who influenced her work, as well as a couple of more contemporary queer writers, allows us to update this cunt, drag it out of outdated modernism. Specifically, I want to move toward reading this construct-cunt-feminism, which I’ll locate in a lineage of queer experimental writing technologies, as the non-essentialized feminine, the fem excess not permanently annexed into radical feminism. This desire buys into and tries to continue the generative project that Acker starts after she writes Don Quixote – not exactly a “constructive” project, but a “nondeconstructive” project anyway, one made of language which seems to have its own agency. As Acker describes in the 1995 essay “Seeing Gender”: “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 […] I shall call such languages, languages of the body.” (167) Which versions of French feminisms and queerfeminisms am I talking about? Like French Theory, French Feminism is a term that few francophone feminists will agree on, although everyone mostly agrees that it’s an Anglophone construction, that normally refers to a group of female francophone writers who were translated into English at around the same time. The core ones are Hélène Cixous, Luce Irigaray, and Julia Kristeva. The 1980 book New French Feminisms: An Anthology, is a good archival example: it made it possible to read disparate texts by forty different French-speaking women, all together. In the 80s, this is where a lot of Anglophones got their first exposure to what became known as French feminist thought. Kathy Acker explicitly writes or talks about being into the theorists Luce Irigaray, Hélène Cixous, Julia Kristeva, Catherine Clement, Elisabeth Roudinesco, and in one interview, “the early Monique Wittig.” In Acker’s essay collection Bodies of Work, the philosopher Luce Irigaray is everywhere, and we can feel the influence of Irigaray in any attempt to resignify female desire as something that exists, maybe even something we could “come upon” to repeat Acker. But today I’m going to focus on some feminists other than Irigaray, specifically Hélène Cixous, Monique Wittig, and Paul Preciado. Hélène Cixous is maybe not such a surprising choice, as Cixous, after Luce Irigaray, is one of the more commonly appearing references in the essays. Douglas Martin writes that Acker copied a Cixous quote, from Three Steps on the Ladder to Writing, at the beginning of one of her compositional notebooks for Pussy, King of the Pirates. Georgina Colby locates Cixous as a key early influence for what eventually becomes Acker’s totally explicit feminist project: that of locating an embodied writing outside of patriarchal forms. But the experimental writer and theorist Monique Wittig is more abstractly related, and the philosopher and art critic Paul Preciado is from a whole different generation and country, because technically he’s Spanish, but I want to talk about one of his 2 early texts, which appeared first in France as part of a wave of queer writing in the early 2000s. In adition to these geographic and generational differences, there is also a huge problem from a French perspective in reading these four thinkers together, because each of them represents a heavily policed coordinate in the battleground known as feminist epistemology. To define them caricaturally: Hélène Cixous, famous for The Laugh of the Medusa and her theorization of “écriture féminine” or what is often translated as “women’s” or “feminine” writing, is considered irrecuperable essentialist ‘70s feminism, while Monique Wittig, author of The Lesbian Body and The Straight Mind, is considered recuperable queer-leaning possibly new-materialist ‘70s feminism. Preciado is categorized in queer theory or transfeminism, but definitely never hard materialism, like Wittig’s, or “difference” feminism, like Cixous’s. In France today, Acker is read by third wave queerfeminists even though she references thinkers like Cixous and Irigaray, who most queerfeminists won’t go near because they’ve been so thoroughly shelved in the totally untouchable zone of essentialism. The point of linking all of these four authors and their texts together, Kathy Acker plus Hélène Cixous plus Monique Wittig plus Paul Preciado, is that it lets us access a weird hybrid theory that would otherwise never exist, the monstrous kind that comes only from unexpected or accidental chemistry. As Georgina Colby writes, “In Acker’s œuvre a feminist politics of literature emerges that is able to bridge continental and American threads of discourse” (Colby, 85). So what politics of literature emerges, exactly? Why bother looking at what this bridge leaves us with? I’ll argue that this analysis is worth doing because what we get is a lineage of experimental writing practices that anticipate a certain nonheterocisnormative body, the body that emerges from the stacked up texts of Audre Lorde and Donna Haraway and Rosi Braidotti and José Muñoz and Teresa de Lauretis and Sara Ahmed: a desiring solidification that is more accumulated residue of repeated experience than any biological or human destiny. I’m going to start with how Acker writes about Paris, and use this to get to our specific French feminists – bringing us through Hélène Cixous’s laughing Medusa, Monique Wittig’s physics of language and Paul Preciado’s dildoed body. The key, or code, that I’ll follow throughout this talk, the technology that I’ll draw from a study of Acker’s texts and will put into conversation with these other writers is one I’m calling “radical accumulation.” Put another way, following this thread of radical accumulation in Acker’s writing allows me to locate a queer experimental writing practice as having roots in literary feminism. Which brings us back to the cuntconstruct. The female body is hard to recuperate. We need to pry it out of text. It dislodges with a sucking sound: this isn’t easy. But through this literary technology of radical accumulation, Acker writes a nonreductive cunt, the pirate pussy who’s also a masturbating body builder, a textual body that does have a strong stake in flesh but refuses to be reduced to any specific organ. 3 2. IT IS A VERY PARISIAN GARDEN IN WHICH I AM GOING TO HIDE MYSELF … is a line that we see twice, slightly modified, in two texts published ten years apart: First, in 1983’s The Diary of Laure the Schoolgirl, then again when Laure is resurrected in 1993’s My Mother: Demonology. Literally, this Parisian garden probably comes from the actual writing of Laure, or the real-life Colette Peignot. But this recurrent Parisian garden lets us touch on two things: Acker and Paris, and Acker and location, more generally. Paris is the first element that will help us think about Acker’s engagement with French feminist thought, which is actually an engagement with the body oriented in space and in language. First, Acker and place. Let’s look closer at the symbiosis of body, location, and concept. The city stands in for orientation. Each of Acker’s books takes place somewhere very specific. Even in Pussy King of the Pirates, which by the end abandons known geography, the earlier parts are full of references to San Francisco, London, an abstracted China. The artist exists only in metabolic relation to the city, a digestive process that goes both ways. In My Life My Death by Pier Paolo Pasolini : “To substitute space for time. […] Myself or any occurrence is a city through which I can wander if I stop judging” (196) or again, “Wandering through the streets and creating a city […]” (196) Sexual desire turns the entire city into a fuckable surface, a libidinous strip, where human-scale cocks stalk like aggressive flaneurs and are inseparable from characteristic architecture. In The Adult Life of Toulouse Lautrec: “I can see his cock following me everywhere: through the Champs-Elysées, Montmartre, The Seine. A huge golden cock at least 70 inches long. Five feet; no, six feet.” (Portrait of an Eye, 192). Both the body and the text are generated by movement through a place. But place is not just location. About Empire of the Sensless, Acker writes that it was “my first attempt to find a myth, a place, not the myth, the place” (“On two of my texts,” Bodies of Work, p. 11). The spatialization of myth is what pulls the writing out of mere deconstruction, what makes it powerful. Acker writes, “We now have to find somewhere to go, a belief, a myth. Somewhere real.” (ibid.) Acker is giving us a new map. Because logic in Acker is always oriented, occurring either east or west, below or above. A new geography means a new way of thinking, means an attempt to break out of one system of logic (empiricism, the Empire’s project), and into another. Oriented logic looks like a compass rose. A compass rose is also the metaphysical cross, where mind bisects body. Evidence from 4 Empire of the Senseless: “The physical (in reference to a human, the body) an axis, crosses the other axis, mentality (in a human, the mind). A cross: a crossroads; the problem of human identity.” (Empire of the Senseless, 64-65). Movement and speed are the way out of this Cartesian gridlock: the mind-body cross mutates into the cross-roads, the highway, and instead of being stuck in any one place we end, at the end of Empire, in perpetual movement. Senselessness, a positive thing on the same level as dreams, thus means a kind of physical disorientation, an unmooring from your typical mind-body configuration, and perhaps – we can suggest – from the entire heteronormative organization of the body and its pleasures, more broadly. We’ll come back to this. What is the significance of being oriented in Paris, specifically? If the city means place-specific knowledge, then the French city means structuralism, deconstruction, the French ex-boyfriend. Occasionally a French father appears (in Implosion). And, to return to the image of the compass rose, France represents the very particular stabilization of a precise hierarchy: the movement of resources from the periphery to the center, the orientation of ownership and property that characterizes European colonialism and, as if often the case in Acker, its bizarro mirror, American imperialism. We see this sensitivity to empire, and to empire that works by reorienting resources, as early as The Adult Life of Toulouse Lautrec, where Paris is both the filthy city that provides the material necessary for Toulouse to become an artist, and a diffuse center in a colonial project that generates value through exploitation and fixes the coordinates of the “normal.” It makes sense then that the movement from the phallocentric “world of the fathers,” through deconstruction, and on to the generative failure of language that is Acker’s later cunt-construct feminism plays out in a fictional Paris in revolt. It’s the perfect setting for a joke about the shortcomings of French theory. Why am I focusing on French feminist writing and not just French theory more generally? Because we could just as easily make the argument that Acker’s return to a fictionalized Pairs is not just about her feminism, but also or instead about all of her other French characters and references: Bataille, Sade, Rimbaud, Verlaine, Artaud, Gerard de Nerval, Jean Genet, Toulouse Lautrec, etc. But that would gloss over 5 what was a core impulse, and an explicitly feminist impulse, especially in her later work, in the nondeconstructive era. Whereas the relationship between Acker’s early work and feminism may have been complicated, or at least her reception as a feminist was complicated, her later essays are much clearer. Here I’m thinking of her 1995 essay, “Moving into Wonder.” Here she writes that art, or conventional narrative time, as represented through her recurring motif of the labyrinth, depends on an exclusion of women. “The word art began to be used as soon as there was separation between imagination and state. / Prior to Apollo’s rape of Daphne and to Apollo’s reign, there was no such division. […] The labyrinth, that construction of Daedalus’s, covered up the origin of art. Covered up the knowledge that art was, and so is, born out of rape or the denial or women and born out of political hegemony.[…] let us, by changing the linearity of time, deconstruct the labyrinth and see what the women who are in its center are doing. Let us see what is now central.” (97) This is a pretty radical feminist claim on Acker’s part. And this is also what makes her work exceptional in the context of a lineage of queer feminist experimental writing. The Frenchness is always more than just an interest in the body’s excess as delivered through fiction. It reaches toward what Acker refers to in an interview with Larry McCaffery as “a deeply sexual perspective which insists on the connections between power and sexuality”-- not in spite of her interest in feminist thought, but because of it. Acker’s cuntconstruct feminism comes from this line that includes Sade, Bataille, Rimbaud, Genet, definitely. But it really takes shape at its point of intersection, another compass rose, cut through obliquely by Cixous, Irigaray, Kristeva, Clement. I’ve read Paris as the hub in which art, empire, and revolution all take place, and as a geographical coordinate in a critique against Western reason and the spatial relations such reason stabilizes. Paris as an ambiguous city, full of productive dirt, is the petri-dish in which cunt-construct feminism takes shape. And it is in leaving this city, setting sail, riding a motorcycle, dreaming, that fem characters and cunts more generally shed their essentialism. This speed, as a means of departure, is an “additive, not subtractive approach,” to borrow Carla Harryman’s categorization of Acker’s methods. Which brings us to radical accumulation, the literary technology that positions Acker within the same queer experimental writing lineage as Hélène Cixous, Monique Wittig, and Paul Preciado. 3. RADICAL ACCUMULATION OR RATS WILL EAT ANYTHING 6 My use of the word “accumulation” comes from my reading of Carla Harryman’s essay “Acker UnFormed,” although Harryman doesn’t actually use this word. It’s the word I’ve been using to organize my notes on Acker for months, referring to the common factor in environmental writing, reappropriated text, the multiplication of the I, and the repetitive movement of weight-lifting. When I returned to the Harryman essay I realized my error. The words that Harryman actually does use are “additive,” and “multieverything.” She describes Acker’s work as full of “impossible all-over spaces” and an “open desiring system.” Under the influence of Harryman’s description the closed-seeming Ackerian labyrinth expands and touches itself, becomes more of a Mobius strip than a series of disorienting walls. Even though accumulation isn’t Harryman’s word it succeeds in encompassing these multiple images, giving us a digestive form of addition that not only keeps layering on the “multi-everything” but also incorporates it. Accumulation becomes a mutation, not only adding to, but also gradually altering the whole, over a series of reps. For another example of this digestive aspect of accumulation, we can look at Acker’s rats. In My Mother Demonology, our rats are French. Acker writes, in the voice of President Bush’s secretary, “‘Prisons breed rats and rats live forever. We know that rats live forever from art rat examples such as de Sade and Genet. […] The reason that rats live forever is that they’ll eat anything yet not eat them except for their cousins-by-language who’re always playing.’ / ‘That’s exactly My point,’ Bush announced. ‘We must purify the language.’” (187) We know from this example that if we need to choose sides, we are definitely on the side of the rats. And that accumulation here has to do with how meaning, textual meaning, doesn’t fade over time but piles on, staining language with potential, inoculating dirty language from political mis-use spun as purification and straight-talking clarity. We get rat digestion again in Pussy, King of the Pirates: “… humans, scared out of 7 their minds, gather whatever intelligence they can put their hands on and put it all in a central penitentiary named facts, whereas rats eat everything whether or not they’re hungry. Rats: pleasure rules their world.” (254) Reading this technology of accumulation through rat digestion allows us to connect the rat appetite, a process of additive, voracious physical pleasure that runs counter to sense and facts, to one of Acker’s other major recurring forms: the labyrinth. As Harryman points out in the essay that I’ve already mentioned, Kathy’s labyrinth is many things. But following the rats, I’ll focus on two: the labyrinth as colon, site of shit, accumulated meaning, and digestive elimination, and the labyrinth as masturbation, site of accumulative sensation that breaks us out of empirical language and puts us in the register of Acker’s “language of the body.” 4. THE LABYRINTH’S COLLAPSED COLON-CUNT Acker writes in her 1990 essay “Critical Languages”: “When the colon or labyrinth is center, our center, we, human, learn how little, if anything, we know and can know.” Mirrored in Pussy King of the Pirates, where Lulu teaches the other girls to masturbate, “thus entering the labyrinth,” and we exit reason in order to enter into sensation, into a place (oriented body) organized by rhythm and vibration, the haptic abandon of the clear and the visible. The labyrinth as both digestion and masturbation conflates colon and cunt, collapsing one onto the other or, maybe, refiguring both as multi-everything zones: we start to break free of the normatively sexed and gendered body. Here is where I’ll bring in my other French feminist thinkers, whose own accumulative writing helps us with this task of documenting cunt-construct feminism. I’ll start with Paul Preciado, who as I mentioned is Spanish, but who published one of his texts in French before the Spanish version. The text is called The Countersexual Manifesto or Le Manifeste contrasexuel, and it’s from 2000, and has been a queer cult text in France basically since then. As of today it’s still not translated into English, but the English translation is apparently coming out in December (so, next week). It’s a humorous text that mixes essays with exercises. It gives us protocols for “countersexual reprogramming” which consists of short-circuiting our bodies’ organization, reconceptualizing the body as a mutable collection of dildos held together by an attempt to rewrite the social contract. 8 As he writes, “Counter-sexuality names dildo-tectonics as the counter-science that locates resistance technologies within both heterosexual and homosexual cultures, technologies we will rename ‘dildos’ by extension.”1 (42) Acker’s work anticipates Preciado’s dildoed body. Both authors are engaged with reason, with how modernity uses reason to pin the body onto a precise cross-section, the static version of the compass rose’s X. “Counter-sexuality isn’t about the world to come; on the contrary, it reads the traces of what is already the end of the body, as it’s been defined by modernity,” writes Preciado. Preciado may be classified as a curator and philosopher or theorist now, but his countersexuality is totally a fictional project, rooted in a literary approach to text, to how text has a unique relation to excess, to repetition, to modification that looks, at first, like citation. Preciado writes, “The body is a socially constructed text, an organic archive of human history in which history is the sexual production-reproduction by which certain codes are naturalized, others are forgotten, and still others are systematically eliminated or barred.” (25) And in his overthrow of empire he recuperates two codes, the anus and the dildo, returning us to the labyrinth as both digestion and masturbation, “The recuperation of the anus as the center of counter-sexual pleasure is similar to the logic of the dildo in that it figures each part of the body not only as a surface which can potentially be translated into a dildo, but also as an entrance-orifice, an escape route, a potential electric shock, a virtual 1 Translated from the French Le Manifeste contrasexuel. All Preciado translations are my own. 9 axis of passion-action” (28). Crucially, and here again Preciado’s project matches up with Acker’s, the dildo isn’t a phallus, just like Acker’s language of the body isn’t a female-specific centrality that replaces the father at the center of language with an omnipresent cunt. Instead if we read them together, both projects displace this center entirely. Preciado writes, “The de-centering that the dildo provokes is not the same as filling a center, even an empty one, with an imitation of an original model. It is the conversion of every space into possible center that betrays the concept of the origin. Everything is dildo. Everything becomes hole and clit” (70). Acker’s cunt-construct feminism gives us this: the ubiquitous pussy that decenters the entire model, beginning the process of cutting the signifying threads that normatively gender the body, so that we can go somewhere else. 5. THE PHYSICS OF LANGUAGE AS LIGHT So where do we go? Both Hélène Cixous and Monique Wittig call us back to the text. We’re going toward Acker’s languages of the body, her unfinished project of finding and representing a language that reaches meaning through controlled failure, through generative breakdown, that proposes a construct to orient us after deconstruction. Here I’m working with Acker’s essay “Bodies of Work,” in which she writes about weight lifting as a generative textual practice. “I want to break muscle so that it can grow back larger, but I do not want to destroy muscle so that growth is prevented. In order to avoid injury, I first warm up the muscular group, then carefully bring it up to failure.” (146) The result of this process is a “shock” that forces the muscle to grow. We can hear the echo of Preciado’s dildo as “electric shock,” and make a connection between the repetitive action of weight lifting and Preciado’s analogy of the body as textual citation, an ongoing and repetitive process by which the body comes to mean and, potentially, to produce a countermeaning. But I also want to bring us to Monique Wittig, whose theory of the physics of language parallels Acker’s efforts to describe the connection between weight-lifting and generative failure. This connection helps us make this link between body and writing even more explicit, locating Acker’s language of the body within an ongoing system of literary experimentation. Monique Wittig was a French author of both experimental literary texts and essays. Her fiction work explores the lesbian body as an accumulative residue of myth, text and canonical knowledge. Her essays take on the knowledge system, seeking ways to produce sense outside of heterosexuality or straight thought. In her essay “The Trojan Horse” she writes, “In literature words are given to be read in their materiality. But one must understand that to attain this result a writer must first reduce language to be as meaningless as possible in order to turn it in to a neutral 10 material—that is, a raw material.” (72) Wittig suggests a transformation of experimental language that travels through its total reduction and takes us all the way to meaninglessness, a place that is similar to Acker’s muscle failure. It is from this place that something new can happen, this place after the breakdown of sense, after the breakdown of muscle, after words are reduced entirely to their materiality. In her mostly untranslated book The Literary Workshop, Wittig writes a physics of language, claiming a textual materiality that basically exceeds our scientific understanding. “The nature of language is comparable to the nature of light. The matter of light is invisible. Some people thought that this matter belonged to the category of waves, and others believed that it belonged to the particulate until we discovered that it belongs to both, that it is simultaneously wave and particle.”2 (45) We’re in the space of the breakdown, the generative unknown, what Acker calls wonder. Acker and Wittig are connected by this immense faith in the metaphysical power of language. In both, words are not just text but are particles, cells, acting on and shaping bodies. This is what Acker’s essays “Critical languages” and “Bodies of Work” do, giving us a list of ways to access this place where language becomes cellular, including laughter, scatology, movement, masturbation, weight-lifting. All accumulative practices. We’re approaching the end now, moving through Wittig’s particulate physics and Acker’s list of material language exercises to return to the body, to the cunt-construct. We’ll do this with help from Hélène Cixous. 6. LET THE CUNT COME OUTSIDE YOUR BODY AND 2 Translated from the French Le Chantier littéraire. All Wittig translations from Le Chantier littéraire are my own. 11 CRAWL, LIKE A SNAIL, ALONG THE FLESH. The French writer Hélène Cixous is probably best known for her term “écriture féminine” or feminine writing. This is often read as a desire to bring the female body into writing, and associated with a biologically determinate project, one that aims to define the female as a reduction to specific coded organs, the womb, the breasts, and to attribute value to writing that comes from this sexually differentiated position. But I want to read Cixous, with Acker, otherwise. In Cixous feminine writing has less to do with who’s writing than how they’re writing, and her main organ isn’t the womb but the mouth. In her Laugh of the Medusa she uses the figure of the Medusa laughing to give a face to the unrepresentable, the senseless space outside of normative reason. The “feminine” as represented by the Medusa is this unknown zone after the breakdown of language, into Acker’s space of wonder. We get there by laughing and it’s not incidental that Acker includes laughter on her list of languages of the body, again reorienting the body by layering mouth and colon. Number 8 on her list, “Scatology: That laughter.” Cixous’ Medusa counters empirical sense, a “what we see is what we know” logic, with laughter. Laughter is also vibration and we’ve seen this before, when Acker describes ongoing accumulative vibration as the language of masturbation. Vibration is also attached to speed, to the feeling of going fast on a motorcycle. Speed and movement return us to the Cartesian mind-body cross but convert that cross to a cross-roads, to a highway, and racing down this highway we outrun reason, we go faster than the essentializing logic that orients and sexes the body. At the end of Empire of the Senseless the cunt-construct Abhor says, “I have to find a motorcycle,’ I explained so that he could understand me even if he was mad, […] so that I can move so swiftly, even when I’m not dreaming, that I fly everywhere anytime and I escape all cops forever’” (211). Acker gives us accumulative movement as constructive escape. She gives us motorcycles, then she gives us piracy. The cunt-construct leaves radical feminism and becomes a sailor. “Let your cunt come outside your body and crawl, like a snail, along the flesh. Slither down your legs until there are trails of blood over the skin. Blood has this unmistakeable smell. Then the cunt will travel, a sailor, to foreign lands. Will rub itself like a dog, smell, and be fucked.” Between this quote, from My Mother Demonlogy, and Pussy King of the Pirates, this escape-act gets literal, mutates into narrative. The king of the pirates is a runaway cunt named Pussy. Reading Acker with these French writers lets us investigate the spatial aspect of her writing, how “sense” is always a question of orientation, of mapping gendered logic across the place where mind and body intersect. The cunt-construct feminism that we get through Acker’s interaction with French feminist 12 thought leaves us with a literary technology of movement, of escape, of kinetic words which give us the velocity necessary to “come upon” or to discover, as pirates, a non-essential language of the body. WORKS CITED ACKER Kathy, — “The Adult Life of Toulouse Lautrec by Toulouse Lautrec,” The Essential Acker, New York, Grove Press, 2002 [1975]. — Bodies of Work: Collected Essays, London, Serpent’s Tail, 1997. — Empire of the Senseless, New York, Grove, 1988. — “Implosion”, The Essential Acker, New York, Grove Press, 2002 [1983]. — “My Life, My Death by Pier Paolo Pasolini,” The Essential Acker, New York, Grove Press, 2002 [1984]. — My Mother: Demonology, New York, Grove, 1993. — Pussy, King of the Pirates, New York, Grove, 1996. CIXOUS Hélène, “Le rire de la Méduse”, L’Arc, n. 61, 1975. PRECIADO Paul B., Le Manifeste contrasexuel, Paris, Balland, 2000. WITTIG Monique, Le Chantier littéraire, Lyon, Editions iXe, 2010. 13