kathy acker blood money sovereignty and exchange

M I C H A E L C L U N E

Blood Money: Sovereignty and Exchangein Kathy Acker

I thought that, one day, maybe, thereld be a human society in a worldwhich is beautiful, a society which wasnt just disgust.

Kathy Acker, Empire of the Senseless

1

n 1989, as the institutions of an earlier radicalism began tocrumble in Eastern Europe, Kathy Acker reflected on hersense of the possibility of a new radical literature: Perhapsour society is now in a post-cynical phase. Certainly, I

thought as I started Empire, theres no more need to deconstruct, totake apart perceptual habits, to reveal the frauds on which our soci-etys living. We now have to find somewhere to go, a belief, a myth.Somewhere real (Notes 11). In that novel, Acker represents thismovement from no to yes as the transformation of terrorists intopirates. The scene of this transformation is a multinational, post-historical Paris, a city where forms of domination and oppressionfrom every time, from slavery to a futuristic form of mind control,are wielded by shadowy masters against the alienated and dispos-sessed multitude. This is a world where the right-wing owns val-ues and meanings (Empire 73), where every aspect of society, everyform of social relation, has been infiltrated and thoroughly pollutedby a malevolent, multiform sovereignty. The oppressed masses,represented by Acker as the postcolonial Algerians, turn to terror-ism in protest against these conditions and arranged for the

Contemporary Literature XLV, 3 0010-7484/04/0003-0486 2004 by the Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System

I

Sherry Massoninewlogo

poisoning of every upper-middle and upper-class apartment inParis (77). The blank nihilism of these terrorists, who advance nopositive program but seek only to kill the city of perfection, antic-ipates Michael Hardt and Antonio Negris description of contem-porary Islamic terrorism not as the re-creation of a premodernworld, but rather as a powerful refusal of sovereignty (14647).The Algerians goal is not to re-form society, but to enact a totalrefusal of the social order: law, family, religion, even language. Butunlike Hardt and Negris fundamentalist bombers, for AckersAlgerians, this is only the beginning; revolutions usually begin byterrorism (Empire 75). Once the social norms and rules that hostedan oppressive sovereignty have broken down, no new structuresare proposed; instead, the Algerians revolution rapidly assumesthe character of a corporation engaged in an anarchic version ofcapitalist competition, a pure war for ownership. Nihilistic refusalcedes to a new, positive motive: The Algerians had taken overParis so they would own something (83). In a radical inversion ofthe socialist vision, Ackers Paris is reborn not as a society withouta market but as a market without a society.

At first, this doesnt look like a happy ending. But throughoutAckers late work, free-market profiteers, operating outside and indefiance of society, appear as the specters of a radical liberationfrom a postmodern society of control: As soon . . . as sovereignty,be it reigning or revolutionary, disappeared, . . . all my dreams . . .would be shattered. And then, the fortune-teller said, youll findyourself on a pirate ship (Pussy 10). For Acker, the pirate is therevolutionary subject of an entirely economic social world, with thefree market imagined as the open sea, the horizon of the possible.Subjective desire is freed from any limit but the economic, and allinterpersonal relations become market relations: Theyre on themarch; as much as they ever do anything together; theyre afterbooty. Ownership (112). Ackers vision of a pirate ship as themyth and the place of a new radical literature reflects her realiza-tion, as I put these texts together, . . . that the hippies had beenmistaken: they had thought that they could successfully opposeAmerican postcapitalism by a lie, by creating a utopian society(Notes 13). By 1989, the sad failures of the hippies, from her oldteacher Marcuse to the elderly children in the Kremlin, prove that

C L U N E 487

[I]t is impossible . . . to live in a hypothetical . . . society if one doesnot actually inhabit such a world. One must be where one is (12).Early in Empire of the Senseless, Acker develops a creation myth forpiracy that reveals her sense of where we are, and where we can go.In the sixteenth century, she writes, there was a halt to all nationalwars, and when the soldiers of the various nations turned to piracy,the modern economic world began (26).1 Being free of bothnationalistic and religious concerns and restrictions, privateeringsonly limitation was economic. Piracy was the most anarchic form ofprivate enterprise (26). The end of national wars also brought anend to the credo of those who are liberals, that Human beings aregood by nature, and allowed the vast private and anarchic war ofthe market to begin, the hope of all begetting and pleasures. Forthe rich and especially for the poor. . . . [the] mirror of our sexual-ity (26). In the context of the novel, this story tells the charactersboth where they are and how they can get there. The free marketwith its fabulous possibilities already exists, but it is covered overby the tentacles of the society of control, the concerns and restric-tions of a sinister sovereignty that has penetrated and polluted allsocial relations. The hippies had failed to see that sovereignty,whether it be reigning or revolutionary, is the real threat to free-dom; they had also failed to see the possibilities of an alternative toany form of sovereignty. A world that is the mirror of our sexual-ity, where there is no limit but the economic, remains just belowthe surface.

Ackers vision of the market as the myth and the place of anew American literature emerged at a time when the resurgentfree-market discourse in the West received what appeared to be its

488 C O N T E M P O R A R Y L I T E R A T U R E

1. Compare Ackers treatment of pirates with that of William Burroughs, an oftencited influence on her work. In his introduction to Cities of the Red Night, Burroughswrites that the pirate communes of the seventeenth century represent an example ofUtopia as it actually could have happened (xiv). But where Burroughss pirate com-munes are animated by the liberal principles of the French and American revolutionsand constitute a kind of ideal democracy, Ackers piracy is hostile to all forms of politi-cal organization. Her piracy myth envisions a radically free market as the utopianreplacement for democracy, liberal principles, and all other modes of organizingsocial life.

ultimate vindication, with the worldwide collapse of the alterna-tive of state communism. Some of the tenets of what MiltonFriedman calls true radicalism resonate with Ackers fable: thefree market is the best of possible worlds, the space of real individ-ual freedom and happiness, and it must be protected from totalitar-ian impulses of all kinds. However, the new laissez-faire movementalso embraced a range of commitmentsfrom the statism and tra-ditionalism that famously accompanied the Adam Smith neckties ofthe Reagan revolution to the Enlightenment model of the individ-ual subject characteristic of its libertarian wingwhich Acker seesas extensions of the multiform sovereignty opposing freedom. Hercommitment to the most anarchic form of private enterprise istotal, unlike partisans of the new right for whom fundamental val-ues are not subject to the market but are guaranteed by a variety ofautonomous social spaces, such as religion, the family, and the state.At stake in these differences are opposing conceptions of the mar-ket itself. On one hand is an image of the market subordinated toand restrained by various noneconomic rules and values; on theother is the vision of a radically free market. After 1989, right ver-sus left becomes, in Ackers terms, sovereignty versus piracy. Thisopposition emerges most clearly as two ways of thinking aboutmoney.

If at one time everyone was a Keynesian, by 1989 it seemed as ifeveryone was a monetarist. This shift from an emphasis on fiscalpolicy to the scientific manipulation of interest rates as a meansof imposing balance on market fluctuations was accompanied byrhetoric proclaiming a return to the free market and the final victoryof the invisible hand over the meddling fingers of social planners.But the claim of a radical change amounting to the abandonment ofpolitical control over the market was challenged by those who sawit as merely a change in the form of state control and accused itssponsors of a false and dangerous understanding of the nature ofmoney in capitalist society. The most prominent of these critics ofmonetarism was the Nobelprize-winning philosopher and econo-mist Friedrich Hayek, for whom money is the loose joint in con-temporary economics. In 1978, a year before the monetarist policieshe despised were officially adopted by the Federal Reserve, Hayekfamously proposed that government should be deprived of its

C L U N E 489

monopoly of the issue of money, and that money creation shouldbe opened to the free market by allowing the circulation of privatecurrencies (Denationalization 128).2 As John Gray notes in hisauthoritative study of Hayeks thought, this radical proposal fol-lows directly from Hayeks belief that money is not the sort ofsocial object that we can define precisely or control comprehen-sively (90). For Hayek, the only basis for value is the subjectivepreferences of market actors. The attempt to abstract macroeco-nomic processes from their microeconomic foundations in actualexchanges between individuals, epitomized by the monetaristsattempt to stabilize the economy by controlling the creation ofmoney, is fraught with methodological and epistemological dan-gers. He draws a distinction between the concept of an economy,such as the finances of an individual organization, and the catal-laxy, the aggregate of all the exchanges across a society. For Hayek,as Gray writes, The demand that the domain of human exchange. . . should be subject to purposive planning is, therefore, thedemand that social life be reconstructed in the character . . . of anauthoritarian organization (3536). It is impossible to achieve thekind of rational control imagined by both the monetarists and theKeynesians they replace, since the tacit knowledge embodied in


2. Hayeks article is written partly in response to Milton Friedmans criticism of anearlier version of his call for private money. Hayek provides a concise statement of thedistinction between his position and that of the monetarists when he writes, monetarymanagement cannot aim at a particular predetermined volume of circulation, since noauthority can beforehand ascertain, and only the market can discover, the optimal quan-tity of money (183). To this criticism of the possibility of establishing the necessaryquantity of money, Hayek adds his doubt that there is a necessary quality, or form, ofmoney: Although we usually assume there is a sharp line of distinction between whatis money and what is notand the law generally tries to make such a distinctionso faras the causal effects of monetary events are concerned, there is no such clear difference(161). Friedmans reply to Hayek argues that the latters monetary theory is inconsistentwith Hayeks own anti-interventionist bias, in that the proposal to free money from thegovernment is itself a constructionist attempt to destroy the natural and evolvedassociation of money and state. Friedman appears unwilling even to contemplate theimmense political and social dislocations entailed by Hayeks proposal (46) and situatesthe latters demand for private money in an unexplored terrain suffused with an airof unreality and paradox (59). Ackers myth occupies this same terrain, rendering invivid detail the radical, brutal, and liberatory dislocation Friedman responds to, andrecoils from, in Hayeks modest proposal.

actual microeconomic choices is of a different kind from the sys-tematic knowledge derived from these choices. In fact, for Hayek, itis the governments control of money creation that prevents thespontaneous order that would otherwise obtain across the catal-laxy by alienating money from the market, from the actual prefer-ences of and exchanges between individuals.

This sense of money as the loose joint, the alien and alienatingfactor in the economy, is also central to contemporary leftist cri-tiques of the new free-market ideology. In Empire, Hardt and Negriadvance the paradoxical concept of capitalist sovereignty againstclaims that the rise of globalism and the decline of fiscal interven-tion by governments herald a world market truly free of the con-straints of sovereignty. No longer taking the form of a transcendentpower that rules from above and is localized in the institutions ofthe nation-state, postmodern sovereignty has become immanent tothe processes and exchanges of contemporary life. It rules fromwithin and is more oppressive and omnipresent than ever before.For Hardt and Negri, the monetary regime is a prime example ofcapitalist sovereignty: Money is the second global means ofabsolute control. . . . Monetary mechanisms are the primary meansto control the market (346).3 Here it is not the market itself that isthe problem, but the control of the market secured by control ofthe money. Importantly, exchange value in itself is not implicated incapitalist sovereignty; the authors argue that the disappearance ofthe use-value/exchange-value opposition is an inescapable and

C L U N E 491

3. The authors analysis of capitalist sovereignty is partly derived from GillesDeleuze and Flix Guattaris account of capitalism in Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism andSchizophrenia, which also exerts an important influence on Acker. Market circulation, inthis text, is a decoded flow, the revolutionary potential of which is continuallyrecoded, managed, and administered by various state controls and regulations (253).Thus a progressive revolutionary potential is located in market circulation, while thecountertendency belongs to the state controls extrinsic to a system of exchange thatnow appears as pure flow. This stance is as far from Marxism as it is close to Hayeksposition. (See especially Hayeks implicit celebration of the radical and destabilizingcharacter of market exchange versus the retarding and preservative tendencies of stateaction in Why I Am Not a Conservative.) For Deleuze and Guattari, writing in 1972while Keynesian policy remained ascendant, the identification of monetary controls asthe paradigmatic instance of the recoding of circulation would naturally have beensomewhat obscure. Empire rectifies this.

politically neutral fact of postmodernism.4 Sovereignty enters intomarket processes through the imprisonment of exchange value inthe form of legal tender. The global monetary regime arises not inresponse to the markets needs, as the monetarists claim, but as itsruler: the new monetary construction [is] based purely on thepolitical necessities of Empire (346). In a situation where oppres-sive power is defined by the new immanence of sovereignty to eco-nomic life, their separation begins to look like a revolutionary goal,leading Hardt and Negri to reverse the traditional leftist stance andask, Why should that slogan [big government is over] be theexclusive property of the conservatives? Where would capital bewithout a big government capable of printing money to produceand reproduce a global order that guarantees capitalist power andwealth? (349). For the new revolutionaries, unlike the old social-ists, the source of the oppressive global order is not in marketprocesses per se, but in the pollution and corruption of thoseprocesses by sovereignty.

Michael Shapiro, in his book Reading Adam Smith, is even moreexplicit in taking money, as opposed to the market exchanges itmediates, as the real problem. He celebrates the progressive andliberated character of [t]he Smithian individual, who is not thesovereign, self-contained owner or author of actions but, rather,a dynamic, reflective, immanently social system of symbolicexchanges (9). This individual is poisoned not by the exploitativecharacter of the system of exchanges but by the money that regu-lates it from within. Shapiro focuses on moneys abstract character,citing Don DeLillos description of the paring away of moneysaccidental properties, of moneys touch as a metaphor for howAdam Smiths vision of an immanently social system of symbolic


4. In declaring the classical use-value/exchange-value dyad obsolete, Hardt andNegri are in good post-Marxist company, despite their insistence to the contrary. Thesense that there is no longer a real value that is obscured by market price disables ananalysis of exploitation by making the mystified difference between two forms ofvalueMarxs surplus valuevanish. Erik Olin Wright argues that this shift from ananalytic centered on exploitation to an analytic centered on domination makes any oppo-sition to the capitalist market as such problematic. The issue for the postmodern left,exemplified here by Hardt and Negri, is the domination of market processes by sover-eign power. (For the classic post-Marxist argument, see Laclau and Mouffe. For a criticalaccount of this position, see McGee.)

exchange is transformed into an alienating code (18). QuotingJean-Joseph Goux, Shapiro describes money as depersonaliz[ing]exchange and transforming intersubjective relations into ratherabstract relations between positions (17).5 In a telling moment,Shapiro contrasts this process to tribal exchange relations thatwere connected so closely with intersubjectivities that there wereactual exchanges of body substances accompanying the exchange ofgoods. Individuals in this model do not have their reciprocitydeferred through money, which . . . depersonalizes exchange. Thissense of the abstraction of money from actual intersubjectiveexchange and its identification with shadowy agents of control isprecisely what Hayek wishes to overcome with his radical call forthe replacement of legal tender by privately printed money. Byremoving the loose joint in the system, we fold the monetaristseconomy back into the catallaxy, revealing a whole society that ismore like a forest than it is like any organization (Gray 125).Hayek, as Gray notes, in no way claims to be able to predict theforms in which private money creation will develop, confidentthat its result will surpass anything that conscious contrivance ofsocial life can achieve (94).

Kathy Ackers mythic revision of the marketplace of Americancapitalism imagines this form as blood money. The trading arena,the market, is my blood. My body is open to all people: this is dem-ocratic capitalism. Today pleasure lies in the flow of blood (Empire55). Thinking of blood as money erases Shapiros distinction

C L U N E 493

5. For Shapiro, the alienation of interpersonal exchange is relative, dependent on theform of the mediation. Thus he thinks that if the mediation takes a form that minimizesabstraction, such as bodily fluids, alienation can be banished. Shapiros (mis)appropria-tion of Gouxs analysis of exchange is instructive here. For Goux, exchange value isabsolutely alienating, regardless of the concrete form it takes, because of a tyrant, . . . afrozen mediation, the third entity in the [exchange] relation, which alienates subjects asit dominates relations (163). In a familiar poststructuralist move, Goux argues that thecoherence of the universal value form is governed by an excluded other, a controllingtrope that is able to guarantee the consistency of the system only by remaining outsideits substitutive logic. The commitment underlying Shapiros claim that alienation is alocal and relative effect of a particular form of exchange valuelegal tenderrather thana property of exchange itself, is articulated by Hayek, for whom the equilibrium of thecatallaxy is an emergent property of exchange not given in advance. Gouxs structuralthird entity governing exchange corresponds, in Hayek, to an actual governor, theFederal Reserve.

between the immediacy of tribal exchange and the universalvalue form of free market exchange, enabling Acker to imagine thesocial world as a market without an outside, organized solely by thedesire of individuals. For Acker, as for Hayek, value is alwaysentirely subjective, attaining stability through the spontaneousorder of the catallaxy, which both writers describe in metaphorsdrawn from nature and biology. Individual exchanges are themicroeconomic cells of the catallaxy; the subjects desire funds thevast war of private enterprise, the mirror of our sexuality (26).Interference with the functioning of this market, any attempt toinstitute an outside to administer market relations, is for Acker, asit is for Hayek, a transparent effort to transform social life into anauthoritarian organization (Gray 36). The authoritarian impulsetakes many forms in her late novels: traditional morality, thenuclear family, gender identity, the police. But the form of controlmost feared by Acker, and most revealing of her commitments, isrepresented as the attempt of a government agency to pollute thebloodstream and disrupt the exchange and flow of blood by intro-ducing an alien code, a virus, into it. In Empire of the Senseless, oncethe Algerians turn themselves into pirates, establishing a societywhere there is no limit but the economic, they tell the deposedrulers, no longer will you work . . . creating AIDS, by doing so con-trolling all union (71). Of course, in the real world, AIDS can beseen as corrupting or preventing union, but the special horror of thevirus as a governmental instrument of controlling union depends ona fictional context where blood is money. In this image of legal ten-der as conspiracy, Hayeks concern with private money is repro-duced by Ackers concern with pure blood. What is at stake is thepossibility of a radically free market, the anarchy of private enter-prise, where universal values and undistorted forms of exchangeare founded within rather than without the body, and where freeindividuals encounter no limit but the economic.

2

In In Memoriam to Identity, Acker writes, People either do whattheyre told or they go outside the law, find something else, maybethemselves (155). Transgression is central to Ackers work and


operates at all levels of her novels, from the trademark obscenity ofher style to the criminality of her characters. Ackers critics havenoticed the rigorous consistency of this transgression, directed, asin the quotation above, at law rather than specific laws, at societyrather than certain social norms. Larry McCaffery, for example,argues that her texts are designed to force a confrontation betweenreaders and all conventions (218). But reading her work in this waysuggests a liberal project of reform and reevaluation in which oneconfronts various conventions in order to accept, reject, or refinethem. Ackers own description is more radical: she conceives themythic project of her late novels as an attempt to find a way tolive in taboo, to imagine a social space without any conventions atall (Conversation 18). Fredric Jamesons description of utopicnovels as imagining a mechanism . . . that neutralize[s] whatblocks freedom is more appropriate to the scope of transgressionin Ackers late work (57). The novels are an assemblage of trans-gressive gestures; various, disjunctive scenarios set up norms sothey can be immediately violated, and the repetition of these ges-tures across the text constitutes a method, a way to live in taboo,and a means of rejecting every form of sovereignty, every limit andcontrol imposed on human life. Like Hayek, who imagines that thedestruction of artificial controls over the market will reveal awhole society that is more like a forest than any organization(Gray 125), Acker represents living in taboo as a way of recuper-ating a repressed nature. In escaping from the law, you find some-thing else, maybe [yourself]; when every form of sovereigntydisappears, youll find yourself on a pirate ship. Sovereignty con-stitutes alienated relations; it blocks natural relations. In these nov-els, revolt is consistently figured as a purification, as a return, arediscovery of nature as a spontaneous system of exchanges andflows between individuals. Two related themes, Ackers treatmentof the incest taboo and her celebration of masochism, show hertransgressive machine in action, cutting away the malignant appa-ratus of sovereignty and revealing the positive and natural freedomof the market underneath.

The taboo on sex with ones relatives is the mark of the alienatedsociety for Acker, the original prohibition from which the socialsystems of a sovereign culture develop. In a late essay, Acker

C L U N E 495

underlined the importance of incest to the central event in Empire:When the Algerians take over Paris, I have a society not defined bythe oedipal taboo (Notes 12). Acker thinks of her myth as repre-senting a world where the incest taboo does not exist, and much ofthe sexuality in the novels is incestuous. Abhors most importantsexual relationship is with her father, while Capitol (the transla-tion of Faulkners Caddy) has her only fulfilling sex with herbrother Quentin. Though Abhor at times deeply resents and fleesfrom her fathers advances, while Capitol actively pursues Quentin,the absence of the incest taboo is constitutive of both charactersview of the world. Ackers sense that incest constitutes a radicalmove outside law derives from an anthropological discourse thatsees the incest taboo as central to the formation of society itself. InClaude Lvi-Strausss famous formulation, the incest taboo is thefundamental step because of which, by which, but above all inwhich, the transition from nature to culture is accomplished (24).In his account, a mans desire for the closest woman is tempered bythe groups refusal to sanction the natural inequality of the distri-bution of the sexes within the family (42). Society emerges withthis appropriation of a valuable and scarce resource for the commongood; the circumscribing of the individuals desire forms the basisfor a system of reciprocity Lvi-Strauss sees as fundamental todeveloping social ties: The woman whom one does not take . . . is,for that very reason, offered up. . . . [T]he prohibition . . . is insti-tuted only in order to guarantee and establish, directly or indirectly,. . . an exchange (51). Thus in limiting the range of possible part-ners, the use value of a woman as natural stimulant is trans-formed into a sign in general circulation, and this process definesthe transformation from nature to culture (6263). Lvi-Straussgoes on to claim that [i]t is thus the same with women as withthe currency, which resembles the action of the needle weav-ing the disparate closed systems of family groups into a socialfabric (479).

Feminist anthropologists have criticized this view of the incesttaboo as initiating exchange by transforming women into the firstlegal tender. Gayle Rubin, a member of the SAMOIS group withwhich Acker was affiliated earlier in her career, attempts a feministrevision of Lvi-Strauss in her influential essay The Traffic in


Women.6 For Rubin, it would be a dubious proposition at best toargue that if there were no exchange of women there would be noculture, no exchange of any kind (176). Rather, what is importantabout Lvi-Strausss analysis of the incest taboo is that it enablesus to isolate sex and gender from mode of production, and tocounter a certain tendency to explain sex oppression as a reflex ofeconomic forces (203). The incest taboo demonstrates the separa-bility of exchange from what Rubin calls (interchangeably) the sex-gender system or the kinship system, which has no economicfunction and can therefore be dispensed with independently. Thecrucial difference between Lvi-Strauss and Rubin is that Lvi-Strauss understands taboo as the necessary precondition for eco-nomic relations, while Rubin sees the incest prohibition, and thecomplex social systems deriving from it, as fundamentally extrinsicto exchange. For Rubin, as for Acker, the sex-gender system is inau-gurated by a taboo, while the market is not. When she describesherself as representing a society not bound by taboo, Acker opposesthe artificial limitations of the social world to the free marketpiracywhere there is no limit but the economic. Economic lim-itations are of a different kind than social limitations; the latter arethe arbitrary distinctions of a nightmarish sovereignty, whereas theformer define the space of relationality itself, and the borders ofhuman reality.

We can observe the distance of Ackers view of nature from tra-ditional, conservative conceptions in the force of her insistence thatthe family structure comes after the market and constitutes a kindof regulation imposed on it. In removing the incest taboo from hermythic society, Acker imagines that the weeds of sovereignty can bepulled out by their roots. By representing an exchange economythat continues to function in the absence of the original sovereigncommand, her novels naturalize the exchange process. Thus inPussy incest marks the beginning of the world of pirates (68).Incest begins this world by separating exchange from thesex/gender system and inaugurating the entirely economic world

C L U N E 497

6. SAMOIS, a lesbian S/M collective, originated in San Francisco in the late seventies.The group took its name from the estate of Anne-Marie, the lesbian dominatrix in TheStory of O. (See Califa 24580.)

of piracy. For Acker, we dont need to prevent incest in order tohave currency; in fact, we dont need to do anything at all. Theprocess of transforming nature into currency has always alreadytaken place, and a circuit of exchange flows between people with-out the mediation of limits, disciplines, and rules.

This impulse to remove artificial regulations and systemizationsfrom a free and natural, spontaneous system of exchange informsAckers understanding of the individual. In In Memoriam to Identity,one of the characters, a prostitute, dismally reflects on her prospectsfor a new life in terms that illuminate Ackers reworking of the cat-egories of purity and impurity: Perhaps I had become too pol-luted, not down there [sexually], but socially, . . . to be pure evendown there in the blood (133). Images of the bloodstream infiltratedand polluted by social codes haunt Ackers late work; liberationfrom the insidious web of social control is figured as a purificationof the blood and the restoration of a natural, true self. But if Ackersemphasis on the purity of blood implies an authentic identity thattranscends the social order, her equation of blood with money situ-ates this identity within the flux and continuous circulation of themarket. Although blood is who I am, my blood is never reallymine. Acker wants an authentic identity that makes potent claimsagainst alienation and assimilation and works as a site of resistanceto social disciplines. However, her commitment to the market as anatural social order based on universal and uninhibited exchangeinspires a fear of any identity that might limit the kinds ofexchanges available to the subject. The ideal qualities of the marketactorfreedom of choice, the ability to keep all options open, andunfettered desirecome into conflict with the structuring limita-tions of stable identities. Acker writes of individualism as the clos-ing down of energy, while celebrating radical individual freedomfrom social norms (Writing 104). She seems to endorse a biologi-cal essentialism (blood is who I am), even as she suggests that therelevant body is the social body of the market (the market is myblood) ( Empire 55).

A passage early in Empire of the Senseless illustrates this dynamictension between authentic identity and exchangeable blood. A cer-tain Dr. Schreber analyzes the protagonist, Thivai, who listensintently, thinking, Finally perhaps Id go learn something about


myself (31). The good doctor points to the subjects evidentmasochism as the key to his true identity, when Thivai interruptshim: I dont give a damn . . . about psychology. About myself. . . .Psychology and my psychologys a dead issue. . . . All I want toknow from you is what you want from me. . . . Because, for me,desire and painre the same (32). Thivais desire to learn some-thing about myself is replaced by the desire to know from you . . .what you want from me. Knowledge about himself and his psy-chology is a dead issue, [b]ecause, for me, desire and painre thesame. The doctor is mistaken in thinking of his masochism as thekey to a deep, static identity. Masochism as a mode of interaction, away of relating to oneself and others, substitutes for an identityclaim: I dont know who I am, but I know what I want. The phras-ing of the passage actually suggests a stronger claim: I know whatI want because I dont know who I am. Desire, the subjective pref-erence of market actors, is here, as in Hayek, the reality underly-ing and funding the catallaxy, which must not be confused witha genuine hierarchical economysuch as that of an army (Gray35). Pain enables the subject to be sure that her desire is really hers,and it does this, as Acker writes in her article on de Sade, by over-throwing our very Cartesian selves pawned off on us as the gen-uine article (Reading 71). In Ackers myth, pain legitimates andauthenticates the subjects desire, and masochism emerges as thecentral modality of liberated subjects who choose a market thatlooks like a war over a society that looks like an army.

In the Algerians revolution, as throughout Ackers work, an idealof liberty is the primary, often the solitary, value. In a section titledFreedom in Empire of the Senseless, Acker writes: Liberty, shit. Theliberty to starve. The liberty to speak words to which no one listens(163). These statements at first read like an attack on a liberal conceptof negative liberties: liberty means starvation and isolation, aban-donment to an unfair, unequal social world. But unexpected associ-ations between Ackers view of liberty and some of her deepestcommitments emerge in the same section: Libertys a nail whichwas thrust into my head. Its also a nail they stuck into my cunt.Only I know my cunt is my diseased heart (163). Liberty as a nailpiercing her heart, opening her body, and releasing her blood takeson the positive value with which wounds are generally endowed in

C L U N E 499

Ackers work. Indeed, it turns out that the liberty to starve is val-ued by Acker not as an unfortunate consequence of the free marketper the usual conservative apologies, but as a sign of the vulnera-bility to reality and to real experience that gives liberty itself itsvalue. To be vulnerable is to have no false security in the world, noneof the deadening alienation from the risk of desire that results fromentombment in ones social identity. This celebration of liberty as anail . . . thrust into my head, of freedom as a state of both psychicand physical vulnerability, is an aspect of Ackers general celebra-tion of masochism in the process of divesting the self of its socialskin. Acker consistently presents participation in the market as aform of masochism. Arthur Redding observes that Ackersmasochism seems to derive much of its force from literalizing andembodying contract. He argues that in Ackers novels masochisticpain emerges out of contractual relationships between consentingpartners, thus imitating the defining exploitative relationships ofcapitalism and problematizing what he calls her emancipatorypolitics (284). While Redding is right to note the way Ackersmasochism is modeled on the contract, for her there is no contradic-tion between the masochistic contract and a sublime emancipation.In fact, masochism for Acker is a means of guaranteeing the legiti-macy of freedom of choice and consent in the absence of a model ofsovereign, self-identical individuality that gives freedom of contractmeaning and defensibility in the liberal tradition.

Ackers interest in masochism dates from her involvement inthe radical lesbian collective SAMOIS in the late seventies. SAMOISdefends the ability of the subject to know what she wants despitethe judgment of external observers that masochists have false con-sciousness in consenting to acts that appear to exploit or harmthem. SAMOIS rejects the Marxist critiques of bourgeois contracttheory, the argument that just because someone voluntarily entersinto an agreement to do something, does not mean that they havenot been coerced by forces impinging on the decision (224). Thefact that no one has the full ability to choose without other pres-sures or limitations, that the autonomous, Enlightenment model ofthe individual doesnt correspond to a reality of interpenetratingand flexible identities, does not vitiate free choice. Masochism


demonstrates the legitimacy of subjective desire despite the inco-herence of the subject. For Acker, as for SAMOIS, it is not the possi-bility that someone might desire something not in their interest thatis the real threat, but the attempt to define those interests objectivelyand to outlaw some desires as false consciousness. The enemy ispeople who want to protect me from them (223), the attempt bysociety or the government to limit freedom of choice by defining theinterests of real individuals according to a rational, coherent, andimaginary subject. When Thivai, in Empire of the Senseless, proclaimshis indifference to the doctors attempt to explain his masochisticpsychologyBecause, for me, desire and painre the samehe isasserting the authenticity and legitimacy of his conscious desires,his choices, against the doctors idea of who he really is and whathe really wants. The subject who desires pain performs the lib-erty to starve; [t]he liberty to speak words to which no onelistens Acker celebrates, rescuing the subjective preference ofmarket actors from the wreck of enlightened self-interest.

If masochism for Acker is about the separability of consent andfreedom of choice from an ideal of full, rational, autonomous indi-viduality, the equation of desire with pain also plays an ethical roleas a kind of hygiene, purifying the individual of social pollution.Acker extends her representation of masochism in a curious pas-sage that occurs nearly halfway through In Memoriam to Identity. Ina chapter translated from The Sound and the Fury, Acker reflects onthe despairing, self-obsessed Quentin and his flirtation with a liter-ary career. Writing is one method of dealing with being human orwanting to suicide cause in order to write you kill yourself at thesame time while remaining alive (174). To this, I would juxtaposea related moment: When a humans dying, the human sometimesrealizes that his belief in justice and society is ungrounded and thatthis death, and this life, is meaningless (145). If death reveals thefinal insubstantiality of society, then to suicide . . . while remainingalive is a technology for stripping the individual of his oppressivesocial identity and beliefs, drawing him into a meaningless,mythic relationship to a subjectivity at once entirely personal andshareable with every human. The practice of committing suicidewithout dying is paradigmatically achieved in real writing for

C L U N E 501

Acker, which is not to record or represent a given action . . . I losemyself, . . . but I dont escape the fatality of the events, their weightand their irreversibility, merely because I cannot claim them formyself (256; emphasis added). The realization that this death, andthis life, is meaningless resonates with a number of similar pas-sages not only in its insistence on the desperation of disciplinedsocial existence, but also in expressing a more elusive theme closeto the heart of Ackers project.

The only event which any human can know is the one event heor she cant perceive, that he or she must die (Empire 55). With atypically Ackeresque logic, the passage continues, If the only eventI can know is death, that is dream or myth, dream and myth mustbe the only knowing I have. For Acker, one can have knowledge orexperience, but not knowledge of experience. Life is meaningless,and knowledge hovers mysteriously above experience as dream ormyth. Reason is always in the service of the masters, and anyattempt to abstract from experience, to generalize and categorize, isalways the attempt to institute a malevolent social discipline. Thisinability to know is compensated for by the ability to exchange:Ive always wondered how some people teach other people. . . .blood transfusions teach (180). Exchangeable blood substitutesfor corrupt knowledge. This formulation is not simply an anti-epistemology, the anarchic skepticism usually attributed to Acker.Her insistence that knowledge cannot be extricated from experienceis consistent with a commitment to market exchange as a sponta-neous order threatened by attempts to impose a rational order onit. Her distinction between the inability to know and the ability toexchange reproduces Hayeks categorical distinction between sys-tematic, objective knowledge of the market and the practical,embodied, and subjective knowledge at work in the market. ForHayek, it is not the complexity of the economy that makes abstractknowledge of it impossible, nor is it the fact that it is continually inmotion; rather, the knowledge embodied in the choices of individ-uals faced with certain options is of a different kind from the sys-tematic knowledge available at the macro level. As Gray writes, forHayek the impossibility of central social planning rests, firstly, onthe primordially practical character of most of the knowledge on


which social life depends (25). The knowledge of market actors isso irreducibly specific, so contingent on subjective preference andimmediate circumstance, that it is primordial, inarticulate; it isunknowable but embodied in the actual exchanges constituting thespontaneous order of the catallaxy. When I make a choiceto buyor sell something, to employ or work for someoneI do so basedon my inarticulate understanding of the best way to satisfy mydesires in a concrete situation. However, as my action is assimilatedinto the aggregate of market exchanges across society, it has a ben-eficial effect on a smoothly functioning and complex whole withoutmyself or anyone else knowing or intending so.

Ackers writing stresses exactly this difference between abstractknowledge and the primordial knowledge enabling exchange. Atthe end of Empire of the Senseless, Abhor wants to learn how to drive,so she gets a copy of The Highway Code and goes to work. Theabsurdity of trying to learn how to behave from rules of behaviorbecomes apparent when she reads, Watch your speed; you may begoing faster than you think and pushes the pedal to the floor soI was sure to not be going faster than I thought (218). She decidesthat if the only valuable rules are those that simply express com-monsense, she can throw away the rule book, cause I knew whatcommonsense is cause thats what commonsense is (214). Thivaimarks the distinction between these two kinds of knowledge whenhe declares the doctors analysis of his masochism a dead issueand instead want[s] to know from you . . . what you want fromme. Ackers subject, like the Smithian individual, is immanentlysocial (Shapiro 9); her desires, and her ability to satisfy them inrelation to others, involve her with everyone else in a way thatdoesnt need to be taught, administered, or argued. From this per-spective, the artificial, systematized, and disciplinary social worldlooks as if it could simply be swept away from a natural market.

3

Throughout her novels, Acker often refers to real writing, truewriting, pure writing. Writing is defined, thematized, and paro-died to an extent that justifies the authors frequent claim that the

C L U N E 503

real subject of her books is writing itself. Taking their cue from thesestatements, Ackers critics have approached her idiosyncratic styleas a polemical manifestation of her political, social, and literarycommitments; understand how she writes, and you will under-stand what shes trying to say. This criticism divides into two neatlyopposed responses. Arthur Redding speaks for the more commonview, arguing that she out-Burroughs Burroughs (287), referringto his famous cut-up method, and suggesting that Ackers reduc-tive and often hilarious versions of Faulkner and Twain savage[ ]the lives and legends which might once have served . . . as narra-tives capable of defining . . . selfhood (284). Martina Sciolino alsofocuses on Ackers characteristic method of plagiarism as partic-ipating in the quintessentially postmodern project of dismantlingthe self. She argues that Acker typically includes the debris of aninformation age in [a] montage that forces associations betweenmaterial culled from radically different registers (qtd. in Redding287). Sciolinos observation suggests a pronounced element ofabstraction in Ackers writing; reading her work as a montagestresses the works status as representation. The project of disman-tling the self is expressed in language that floats free of sovereignsubjects, circulates between individuals, and is available to every-body because it is not identified with anybody. Kathryn Humeexpresses the diametrically opposite view when she finds in Ackera remarkably consistent voice that unifies disparate sources inthe authors powerfully individual idiom. This Acker is an old-fashioned humanist, fundamentally committed to a passionatedefense of a remarkably stable core [of the individual] against thedemands of society (489). The abundant evidence from the novelssupplied by both schools suggests that they are both half right.Acker is explicit in expressing her belief that the truth about truewriting is both that it is blood, the inalienable property of particu-lar individuals, and that it is money, the infinitely exchangeablemedium of relative and subjective values.

Ive always wondered how some people teach other people.Death and blood transfusions teach (In Memoriam 180). The ques-tion of communication is a major problem for Acker. In a worldwhere the codes mediating between individuals have either brokendown or must be broken down, and in which linguistic expression


is affirmed to be (literally) a matter that the speaker cant control,characters have a difficult time getting others to understand them.One chapter is devoted to Abhors search for a crucial code,which when retrieved reads: Get rid of meaning. Your mind is anightmare that has been eating you: Now eat your mind (38).Acker elaborates this imperative to [g]et rid of meaning in anoften-quoted passage on literature as the demystification ofReason: Reason is always in the service of the political and eco-nomic masters. It is here that literature strikes, at this base, wherethe concepts and actings of order impose themselves (Empire 12).Thus Ackers literariness, her idiosyncratic style, has a partiallynegative project: writing here functions not only as expression butas a process of robbing the speech of the masters of its illusory uni-versality, dismantling the linguistic and logical structures thatshield a condition of tyranny from sight. This project is manifest ina Nietzschean assault on the fundamental arbitrariness of causality:Acker routinely replaces the word and with because andshamelessly abuses if x then y chains. (Mark knew everythingcause he was gay [Empire 197]. If you dont go anywhere, youdont go anywhere [217].) Ackers style is characterized by sweep-ing reductions, nihilistic sarcasm, and a generally bad attitude.Persons become gulags (Empire 40) or shriveled cashew nuts(49); statements such as You dont matter and reality doesnt mat-ter (34) are randomly distributed throughout the text; and obscen-ities are tacked onto the end of the rare innocuous sentence, in anexcess of nausea. (Climatically Algeria is a sluggish country andcunt [48].)

The characters themselves are often unable to understand thesimplest speech-acts, while at another level they are utterly inca-pable of comprehending or responding to each others needs forlove and comfort. A tale of unrequited love is Ackers characteristicplot, and it dominates the intertwining stories of Empire of theSenseless and In Memoriam to Identity. Human relationships in thesestories constitute a violent sentimental education for the protago-nists, who are rejected, abused, and violated by virtually everyonethey meet, until they arrive at a version of the resolution spoken byCap: Nothing made sense but feeling. . . . I . . . dont need to sayanything to anyone (In Memoriam 158). The primary function of

C L U N E 505

interpersonal contact for Ackers characters is to receive woundsfrom others. When Cap declares in retrospect, rejection in love cre-ates a real and permanent wound in and below the flesh (81), sheis relating a deeply satisfying experience, in many ways the con-summation of her relationship with other people in general. Thiswounding functions as a consummation because trauma is cen-tral to Ackers understanding of the word as blood; in opening thebody, the wound opens the possibility of a new and undistortedcommunication between individuals. If language as code ormeaning is a mystified form of control by shadowy masters,Acker suggests the possibility that writing, under certain condi-tions, performs an authentic reference to the underlying reality ofthe subject. All my senses touch words. Words touch the senses.Language isnt only translation, for the word is blood (InMemoriam 90). In general, for Acker, [i]dentities are holes (115),meaningless categorizations of individuals according to obsoleteand oppressive social conventions. As I noted in the previous sec-tion, however, she affirms the existence of a (true) selfhood that isnatural to the subject; free of the taint of convention and before lan-guage, it cant be directly expressed in words. When a character inIn Memoriam to Identity remembers that [e]ven then, I sensed thatblood is who I am, she echoes a number of similar statementsthroughout the novels (117). But what is the significance of an iden-tity predicated so exclusively on blood? If your blood is who youare, how does your writing reveal you? What exactly is the relationbetween writing and the wound that exposes the body?

Over the last decade, a body of criticism has developed thatseeks, like Acker, to move past the need to deconstruct, by exam-ining the relation between wounding and representation. Traumatheory has attempted to derive a theory of language from this rela-tion, developing a logic parallel to Ackers own view of the word asblood as articulated in the novels. In Unclaimed Experience, CathyCaruth argues that engaging with the experience of trauma, thepuzzling, repetitive return of the catastrophic event to the mind ofthe survivor, carries an imperative to develop a new mode of read-ing (9). This new orientation to texts reconfigures our sense of ref-erence and representation in an attempt to grasp the truth of ashadowy reality that somehow resists direct understanding. In


taking a form of de Manian deconstruction as the model for a kindof reading that offers access to this reality, Caruth takes issue withthe familiar claim that poststructuralism disables historical refer-ence. She argues that its ability to locate languages resistance tosimple and direct referentiality exposes the fact that the extractionof clear meanings from texts always conceals the violent erasure orbetrayal of an event that cannot be understood and so clears aspace for the authentic witnessing of an unsettling reality. In heraccount, the meaning of a text is produced by neither the author northe code, but rather by a traumatic event that remains unassimi-lated, and unassimilable, both to the authors experience and to theapparent meaning that is mechanically generated by the function-ing of the texts grammar. Caruth imagines the pure literalness of anevent as embodying an integrity that is destroyed by situating itwithin a history, a conceptual or figural framework. She thus dis-tinguishes direct or simple reference, which is always a self-deceivingfiction about the effect of a mechanical system, from a kind of sig-nification that in its brute, literal materiality bears the trace of therepressed event. Acker, in claiming the word is blood, marks thisdistinction between ordinary reference and writing where lan-guage and the flesh are not separate. In both authors, the unas-similated matter of the event produces a disruption in the figuralsystem, and it is by attentiveness to this break or gap in the textsmeaning that something like authentic reference becomes legible.

The model of interpretation offered by Caruth is most clearlyexpressed in her chapter on Paul de Man, whom she reads as bothpresenting a theory of reading and as performing the fundamentalinsight of a theory that does not eliminate reference but preciselyregisters, in language, the impact of an event (74). For de Man, lan-guage is a coded set of differences not based on any extralinguisticreality (82). But reference inevitably reasserts itself in these texts asa disruption that resists the systems workings by introducingbreaks and discontinuities into its figurations. This reference is notidentified with the authors intention, but rather with the unre-deemable literality of events that escapes the control of both theauthor and the system. Thus de Man, in Caruths reading, succeedsin the paradoxical evocation of a referential reality neither fictional-ized by direct reference nor formalized into a theoretical abstraction

C L U N E 507

(89). What is at stake for Caruth in de Mans theory of the return ofreference as a break in figural meaning is the way an event that iserased or covered over, fictionalized by understanding, touches usin the moment when understanding fails.

Caruths argument that meaning is reducible to the impact of anevent is identical to Ackers claim that words touch my senses,and the critique of representation in her fiction is directed againstwhat Acker describes as the repressive conventions that distancemeaning from experience. The conventional belief that one canacquire an understanding of a text that is independent of onesexperience of it is precisely what must be overcome in order for lan-guage to function as transmission instead of as the site of oppres-sion. In In Memoriam to Identity Acker writes that [t]he flesh mustbe the mind, and that understanding cant be verbal (118).Experience and language are of different orders, and the break-down of cognitive understanding not only threatens the repressiveauthority legislating rational interpretation, but as in Caruthopens a gap in which a persons true, defining experiences mightappear in her discourse in all their opaque and uncompromisedmateriality. Thus the word becomes blood through the alchemy ofthe failure of conventional interpretive strategies. The accidental,the unredeemably literal, and the materiality of overdeterminedsignifiers are represented here not as mere static to be tuned out inthe reception of an authors intention, nor as the structural elementthat produces an infinity of meanings. Rather, they constitute a kindof voice privileged over the authors conscious intention, a voicethat demands our misunderstanding as an act of witnessing anevent that will not go away, and that cannot be translated into otherterms or assimilated to a system without being violated. Thus, asAcker writes, stressing the transcendence of the social selfthrough trauma, To write is not to record or represent a givenaction . . . I lose myself . . . in writing, but I dont escape the fatalityof events (In Memoriam 256).

For the figures in Caruths text, there is nothing shareable ortranslatable about the private, unassimilable, and unintelligibleexperiences that define them. Similarly, for the readers Caruth pre-sents, the encounter with the text of another either amounts to amute witnessing of private events we cant know or talk about or


represents an opportunity to engage with our own pasts, to piercetheir superficial intelligibility and uncover the persistence of ourown repressed events. Caruths representation of texts that are dis-rupted by events that can be owned by or identified with individu-als but that cant be understood by anyone suggests that what isultimately at stake in the version of de Manian deconstruction shetakes as a model of interpretation is the protection of intensely indi-vidualized identities from the eliding violence of understanding.The new mode of reading her book articulates thus producestexts that always refer, in spite of their meaning, to singular experi-ences as the principle of true identity and authentic difference.I linger over Caruth not to provide terms for reading Acker, but todemonstrate that the novelists insistence that understanding cantbe verbal is identical to the theorists claim that texts demand ourmisunderstanding. Here I want to stress the commensurability ofCaruths claims with such statements in Acker as It is possible toname everything and to destroy the world (In Memoriam 123). ToAcker, the mediation of ordinary linguistic reference is endlesslydestructive, bound up with obsolete and oppressive forms of socialorganization that violate the purity of individual experience. Thewound pierces the epidermis and opens the body, the locus ofauthentic and natural experience prior to language and to the accre-tion of the social. The bodyand particularly the body that hasbeen opened, wounded in intense, unsettling experiencesstainsand distorts the subjects discourse, which spills into public spaceswith the defiant, vivid, and disturbingly intimate quality of blood.This invasion of shared language by the incomprehensible andunassimilable truth about the self both violates the integrity of thepublic sphere and clears the way for what Acker imagines as a new,radically innocent community.

In attempting to demonstrate the identity of Ackers andCaruths understanding of language, I would also like to examinethe distinctiveness of the relation of this understanding to Ackersoverall project by marking a characteristic difference between thetwo writers sense of the value of traumatic experience. Caruthascribes to a version of the psychoanalytic belief that the maturepersonality is built up around a repressed event, like a pearl arounda grain of sand. Her theory is partially invested in a generally

C L U N E 509

therapeutic project, helping victims to rebuild their lives, to trustothers again, and so forth. In addition, her discussion is committedto grounding group identities in historical events: the Japanese inHiroshima, the Jews in the Holocaust, and so on. Acker, on the otherhand, is utterly uninterested in maintaining the holes of socialidentities of any kind and manifests a sarcastic disdain for both psy-choanalysis and the mature personality. Whereas in Caruth, as inthe postmodern context in general, the commitment to an identitybased on blood is associated with the articulation of new versionsof old group identities, Ackers aim is to rescue the individual fromwhat she sees as the oppressive, deadening effects of society andconvention. Trauma does not represent an epistemological key tothe authentic difference between various groups and types of indi-viduals; her theory of the wound is more radical in that it definesthe ontological priority of individual experience over all social andconventional mediation. In these novels the metaphysical appara-tus required to sustain racial or cultural identity is displaced infavor of the barest registration of subject position: You are wher-ever you are (Empire 58). A stark analytic of class, of ones place onthe owner/owned divide, substitutes for subjectively richer formsof identification. Even the term class is perhaps too loaded withthe implication of broad social configurations to capture Ackerssense that the amount of money a person happens to have in herpocket can place her as definitely and as meaninglessly as herlatitude and longitude.7 Thus being an American designates thelack of national identification: Money is a kind of citizenship.Americans are world citizens (Empire 39). The people who comeclosest to having a cultural identity in Empire of the Senseless are theAlgerians, the oppressed migrant workers in Ackers revolutionaryParis. The revolutionary Algerian community is defined by the useof Arabic, a language that strikes Abhor as full of mysterious poten-tial until the translation of characters spray-painted against a wallrobs it of the cloak of exotic otherness: Ali is pretty, but Anarchyalways kills a kid off (54). Thus even the Algerians are ultimatelydefined by the common possession of a language that is affirmed to


7. I am indebted to Frances Ferguson for this formulation.

be meaningless even when translated: it was a sign of nothing(53). Racial identity, and the cultural identity derived from it, isanother hole for Acker: like everyone else, the Algerians haveliterally nothing in common.

Ultimately, for Acker, all authentic experience is traumaticbecause it removes the comfortable, numbing shield of prescribedidentities and exposes the person to real contact with the world.Thus while their commitments share a basic logic, Acker is rela-tively unconcerned with the specific character of the trauma: anywound will suffice to bleed through the subjects language and per-form an authentic reference, and the more the better. I make thisdistinction between Caruth and Acker not simply to reward the lat-ter for carrying the logic of identity to its anti-essentialist limit bygrounding it in the contingencies of individual experience. InAcker, the force of this move is to render an identitarian logic of dif-ference compatible with an ideology of the market. Thus she isopposed to giving an identity a name, to creating group identities,since she is ultimately committed to a radical individual differencethat is compatible with a no less radical sameness.

In In Memoriam to Identity, Acker uses the figure of the poet R., hertranslation of the symbolist writer Arthur Rimbaud, to expressher concept of the word as blood:

Language is alive in the land of childhood. Since language and the fleshare not separate here, language being real, every vowel has a color. . . . Allmy senses touch words. Words touch the senses. Language isnt onlytranslation, for the word is blood.

(8990)

Later in the novel R. expresses the other half of Ackers theory: theword as money. The historical Rimbaud famously abandonedpoetry at the age of twenty-three when at the height of his literarypowers to pursue a life of adventure in Africa. In the penultimatechapter of In Memoriam to Identity, Capitol reflects on R. after hislapse into silence: Were all how this society makes us. R., in hisway, was still pure, a poet. He didnt give a damn about God. Aboutwhat people thought about him. All he cared about was money. Hewas the only one of us fit to live in this world (206). The possibil-ity of this merely being another of the cheap, disposable jokes so

C L U N E 511

characteristic of Ackers aesthetic is foreclosed by a passage later inthe chapter in which R. pores over his business books . . . figuresaccounts savings, every penny . . . counted again and again, some-times he would fall asleep over what he called real poetry (211).These characterizations are striking in that rather than representingR.s move from poetry to business as a basic shift on the order ofturning from art to life, an interpretation offered by Rimbaud him-self in his last works, Acker suggests that figures and accountsare simply a better kind of poetry, a code superior in its expressiveand communicative potential to the language of his poems. To thisI would juxtapose a passage from Empire of the Senseless, in whichAbhor claims, Being a whore means you separate sex and feeling.Sex is an activity as meaningless as is money (92). This equation ofsex without feeling with the senselessness of money implies analternative to the various broken-down codes littering the novel,from Arabic as the sign of nothing to the official gibberish of agovernment-issued driving manual. Money can become a privi-leged form of representation because it doesnt refer to anything; itis senseless, unable to carry the subtle psychological or cognitivedistinctions of the interpellated subject. To articulate sex as adesired good apart from its entanglement with law and morality,Abhor, like the pure poet R., turns to money, which expressesvalue in degrees and quantities and is therefore able to circulate asthe only language minimal enough to be adequate to a social worldwhere the only limit is economic.

For Acker, real poetry is a mythic alternative to language (InMemoriam 211). Language is saturated with the virus of sovereignty,with social codes of all kinds, but if it could be replaced by a sub-stance which has a more direct, a more visceral capacity for expres-sion, then all the weight that the current social, political, andreligious hegemonic forms of expression carry will . . . become . . .lost (Pussy 31). Her thematization of writing is less an attempt todescribe her own style than it is the project of her fiction, part of theeffort to imagine a myth, a place we can believe in. Writing is notlike writing in these novels, but it is like blood and like money.Ackers double assault on representation, with language givingway to blood on the one hand and to money on the other, seems toreduce to a contradiction between an entirely private, subjective


form of reference and a mathematical notation of general socialvalue. But in her fictions imaginary, the process of transformingnature into currency has always already taken place. Throughouther late novels, blood is equated with value and becomes themedium for exchanges between individuals. Blood is like light;through its agency objects are translated into values, changedthrough that beauty which is blood into beauty (Empire 221). Theidea that the market, free of the attempt to control or impose reasonon it, is a kind of nature that exhibits a spontaneous orderthrough the agency of an invisible hand is a persistent theme infree-market ideology from Adam Smith to Milton Friedman.Ackers blood money, like Hayeks radical proposal to abolish legaltender, takes this vision of the market as catallaxy to its limit. Themyth of sovereignty, what Hayek calls the mystique of legal ten-der, the false idea that the state . . . somehow confers value onmoney it otherwise would not possess (Denationalization 145),is confronted by an alternative myth. The idea of blood moneyexpresses the belief that social value emerges directly from subjec-tive preferences and individual exchanges; the attempt to controlthe rate of money creation or to guarantee moneys value throughgovernment power produces disequilibrium for Hayek, and forAcker, dystopia.

If the logic of the word as blood represents the purification ofcommunication by eradicating the nightmare of meaning, thelogic of money as blood represents the purification of social valueby consigning the flimsy paper of government money to thegarbage can of history (Empire 32). Ackers fusion of blood andmoney encloses all human relations within a natural market with-out history, ideology, or code. The trading arena, the market, ismy blood, and there will be no outside (Empire 55). Ackersmythmaking project reaches its culmination in this move wherebythe social order is displaced by an organic market, and the rela-tions between sovereign individuals are replaced by an image ofrelations within a singular subject, such that contact with the otheris achieved not by moving across bodies but by going beneath theskin.

Johns Hopkins University

C L U N E 513

W O R K S C I T E D

Acker, Kathy. Bodies of Work. New York: Grove, 1997.. A Conversation with Kathy Acker. Interview conducted by Ellen G.

Friedman. Review of Contemporary Fiction 9.3 (1989): 1222.. Empire of the Senseless. New York: Grove, 1988.. A Few Notes on Two of My Books. 1989. Bodies 613.. In Memoriam to Identity. New York: Grove, 1990.. Pussy, King of the Pirates. New York: Grove, 1996.. Reading the Lack of the Body: The Writing of the Marquis De Sade.

1996. Bodies 6680.. Writing, Identity, and Copyright in the Net Age. 1995. Bodies 98105.Burroughs, William S. Cities of the Red Night. 1981. New York: Picador, 2001.Califa, Pat. Community and Movement in San Francisco. SAMOIS 24583.Caruth, Cathy. Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History. Baltimore,

MD: Johns Hopkins UP, 1996.Deleuze, Gilles, and Flix Guattari. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia.

1972. Trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane. Minneapolis:U of Minnesota P, 1983.

DeLillo, Don. Players. New York: Knopf, 1977.Friedman, Milton, and Anna Schwartz. Has the Government Any Role in

Money? Journal of Monetary Economics 17 (1986): 3762.Goux, Jean-Joseph. Symbolic Economies: After Marx and Freud. Trans. Jennifer

Curtiss Gage. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1990.Gray, John. Hayek on Liberty. New York: Routledge, 1998.Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri. Empire. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP,

2000.Hayek, F. A. The Denationalization of Money: An Analysis of the Theory and

Practice of Concurrent Currencies. 1978. The Collected Works of F. A. Hayek.Vol. 6. Ed Stephen Kresge. London: Routledge, 1999. 128229.

. Why I Am Not a Conservative. 1960. The Essence of Hayek. Ed. ChiakiNishiyama and Kurt R. Leube. Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution P, 1984.28198.

Hume, Kathryn. Voice in Kathy Ackers Fiction. Contemporary Literature 42(2001): 485513.

Hunt, Margaret. Report of a Conference on Feminism, Sexuality and Power:The Elect Clash with the Perverse. SAMOIS 8189.

Jameson, Fredric. The Seeds of Time New York: Columbia UP, 1994.Laclau, Ernesto, and Chantal Mouffe. Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a

Radical Democratic Politics. Trans. Winston Moore and Paul Cammack.London: Routledge, 1985.

Lvi-Strauss, Claude. The Elementary Structures of Kinship. Trans. James HarleBell, John Richard von Sturmer, and Rodney Needham. London:Cambridge UP, 1969.


McCaffery, Larry. The Artists of Hell: Kathy Acker and Punk Aesthetics.Breaking the Sequence: Womens Experimental Fiction. Ed. Ellen G. Friedmanand Miriam Fuchs. New York: Routledge, 1994. 21530.

McGee, Daniel. Post-Marxism: The Opiate of the Intellectuals. MLQ 58(1997): 20125.

Redding, Arthur. Bruises, Roses: Masochism and the Writing of Kathy Acker.Contemporary Literature 35 (1994): 281304.

Rubin, Gayle. The Leather Menace: Comments on Politics and S/M.SAMOIS 194229.

. The Traffic in Women: Notes on the Political Economy of Sex.Toward an Anthropology of Women. Ed Rayna Reiter. New York: MonthlyReview P, 1975. 157210.

SAMOIS. Coming to Power: Writings and Graphics on Lesbian S/M. Boston:Alyson, 1987.

Sciolino, Martina. Kathy Acker and the Postmodern Subject of Feminism.College English 52 (1995): 43745.

Shapiro, Michael. Reading Adam Smith: Desire, History, and Value. NewburyPark: Sage, 1993.

Wright, Erik Olin. Classes. London: Routledge, 1985.

C L U N E 515

kathy acker blood money sovereignty and exchange

Documents