Kathy Acker

by Kathy Acker

  LOTRINGER: Why did you move to England in the first place?

  ACKER: I was looking for a change in my life. In New York there was nowhere to go, just to do art criticism. There was no way to make more money, no way to get more established as a writer. My work needed me to get out of the position I was in.

  LOTRINGER: Is that the time you wrote these pieces on art for Artforum?

  ACKER: Yeah, I was writing for Artforum, but you get almost no money. I mean the move to England, as far as things like career matter, which they do, was fabulous to me. I think it was very good to me as a writer too, because New York’s very enclosed, very much of a baby-crib and it meant I widened my scope. I was really able to question a lot of things that the art world had taught me. I was able to see them in a political context, which I never was before, and to realize what were the stakes among writers from many other countries. It forced me to grow some muscles basically. I had to explain why I wrote the way I wrote. I was shoved up against the wall and asked to explain why I do everything I do. So I had to come up with the goods. You know, I was forced to grow.

  LOTRINGER: Did you connect to the art scene in England too?

  ACKER: In England, art is not accepted really. It’s what you’re allowed to do if you’re rich, or if you’re upper middle class, but it’s not considered seriously. And since there’s no art scene there, I had to deal with other novelists. It’s just a different world. I didn’t know what England was. I thought it was like going to the suburbs in New York. It took me two years to see that I was really in a different country. Many friends were doing journalism, and for the last two years I’ve done probably a piece of journalism at least once a month. I had to learn, if nothing else, how to write a very straightforward coherent piece.

  LOTRINGER: Some of the pieces on art which are included in this volume [an earlier incarnation of her eventual Semiotext(e) title] were written for Artforum. That’s the first time you wrote about art. How did you handle that?

  ACKER: I didn’t know how to handle it. Basically, I wrote them as I wrote fiction. And yet put the subject of art in it. So it was a weird multiplication, or destruction, that occurred. I couldn’t get away with that in England.

  LOTRINGER: Did you choose to write about Goya?

  ACKER: Yeah. I could have done anything.

  LOTRINGER: Did they expect you to criticize it, to put it in context?

  ACKER: I was very free on that. Sometimes I’ve been told what to do.

  LOTRINGER: The piece on Joseph Kosuth and Larry Weiner has all these quotations interspersed throughout the text…

  ACKER: I had to do it that way. All the artists sat down at a table, and I was basically asked to transcribe their conversations to each other. So I just did what I was told. That was the first one I ever did.

  LOTRINGER: You weren’t that interested in doing this kind of work.

  ACKER: Oh, now I do interviews. I like it. I think it’s great. You know what? Because—I am telling you this—you go home with a tape, right, you get real chummy with the person, you buy him some wine, you know, you make him talk for hours, you go home with a tape and then you make a piece of fiction. And it’s so much fun. It taught me a lot. Because why is there always these little realms of handling language? I think it’s good to do all sorts of things with language.

  LOTRINGER: And people forget what they say.

  ACKER: Of course! And you get a great fictional character out of it.

  LOTRINGER: The interviews, or what other people say, its just text.

  ACKER: Yeah. But even when you’re doing art criticism, paintings are a text.

  LOTRINGER: It’s like plagiarism without plagiarism.

  ACKER: Exactly.

  4. PLAGIARISM

  LOTRINGER: Plagiarism, was that something that came out of your exploration of the I?

  ACKER: No, I was no longer interested in the I. Then “I” became a dead issue because I realized that you make the I, and what makes the I are texts. So it’s texts that are of interest.

  LOTRINGER: But the I never came on its own. It was always woven in a text, right?

  ACKER: Yeah. But it took me a while to realize that because I am a bit dumb, you know. [laughs hysterically] So I became interested in just text. Other people’s texts. If there’s no problem with the I, then in terms of text there was no self and other. So I could use everyone else’s writing. And then that’s fun! It’s like a kid, suddenly a toy shop opens up and the toy shop was called culture. But until I met you and got the language for it, I really didn’t know why I was having fun. I couldn’t figure out what I was doing. It seemed a bit mad, but I just knew I liked doing these things.

  LOTRINGER: I remember one morning you told me you were in seventh heaven. The night before you had found yourself in the company of the greatest writers. You had finally been admitted to their circle…

  ACKER: Yeah. [laughs]

  LOTRINGER: But then you’d been sneaking in there all along.

  ACKER: Oh yeah, I’d been doing it all the time, but suddenly I thought I don’t even have to pretend I’m interested in this problem about identity anymore, I could just bloody copy straight on.

  LOTRINGER: I doubt you ever copy straight on…

  ACKER: No, I don’t…I did it more in the early days, strangely enough. I don’t because it’s very boring, copying, you know. Your mind goes. What’s fun is what happens when you start playing with a text, it’s just like jazz riffs. And then you go back and forth and down and around, you’ve got the text in front of you, and you go here and there, everywhere…

  LOTRINGER: That’s also what musicians do. Lifting stuff.

  ACKER: Oh sure. Last night I was talking with a friend about appropriation in music, all these scratched records and things like that, and she was saying that her friend Karen Finley has been ripped off. And I told her: Listen, it’s not just that Karen is not getting the money that she should have for her work, I think it’s great! I use your work, you use my work, we use everyone’s work. I just love that idea, like you can dance.

  LOTRINGER: Property is robbery…

  ACKER: Yeah. I own this, I do this…If I had to be totally honest, I would say that what I’m doing is breach of copyright—it’s not, because I change words—but so what? I mean we’re always playing a game, we earn our money out of the stupid law, but we hate it because we know that’s a jive. And that’s because we live in a capitalistic system. What else can we do? That’s one of the basic contradictions of living in capitalism. I sell copyright, that’s how I make my money.

  LOTRINGER: You sell copyright?

  ACKER: That’s how writers make their money. Absolutely precisely. The work isn’t the property, it’s the copyright. Copyright’s renewed twenty-six years twice. I can do anything I want with material that’s fifty-two years old. So what’s property? The property dies in fifty-two years?

  LOTRINGER: Didn’t you get the rap for breaching copyright in England?

  ACKER: What had happened in England was that a journalist was gunning for me—well that’s my opinion. In June, a collection of my earliest work was published in England, including The Childlike Life of the Black Tarantula. And in the section about Toulouse Lautrec, there’s four pages which I took out of a Harold Robbins novel that had been published some years before, a bestselling book called The Pirate. I took the sex scene out of there, where a rich white woman walks into a disco and picks up a black boy and has sex with him. I changed it to be about Jacqueline Onassis and I entitled the piece “I Want to Be Raped Every Night. Story of a Rich Woman.” I think the joke’s quite obvious, but the journalist called my publisher and then she called Harold Robbins’s publisher, Eric Major, and their response was that, My God, we’ve got a plagiarist in our midst. So they made a deal, and the deal was that my book would be immediately withdrawn from publication and that I would sign a public apology to Harold Robbins for what I had done. You don’t take books off the market that easily. This is not standard literary
practice by any means. This in fact is banning. Now when I heard about this, I said, Well, you could do what you want with your edition of the book, but I’m certainly not signing a public apology for something I’m not guilty of. I’m not guilty of plagiarism.

  LOTRINGER: What do you mean by that?

  ACKER: To be guilty of plagiarism, according to the law, is to represent somebody else’s material as your material. I haven’t done that. I have been very clear that I use other people’s material. I haven’t quite listed sources in my later books, I didn’t want to sound like some sort of academic, but in many interviews, many theoretical texts, I said where each section came from. I’ve always told my publishers. There’s an introduction to this publication of my early work where I talk about my method of appropriation. I’ve always talked about it as a literary theory and as a literary method. I haven’t certainly hidden anything. Plagiarism is when you actually…

  LOTRINGER: It’s when you “kidnap” someone else’s text—well, that’s the etymology! Hijacking a copyright, so to speak. No wonder they got upset. It’s terrorism in literature…

  ACKER: You know, what a writer does, in nineteenth-century terms, is that he takes a certain amount of experience—you don’t just make things up, be it a story, or an autobiographical material, or be it social history, whatever—and he “represents” that material. Now what I’m doing is simply taking text to be the same as the world, to be equal to non-text, in fact to be more real than non-text, and start representing text. So it’s quite clear, I took the Harold Robbins and represented it. I didn’t copy it. I didn’t say it was mine.

  LOTRINGER: You used it as a material.

  ACKER: Right. And it seems to me quite a different procedure than the act of plagiarism. And I had changed words, I had changed intentionality. I wasn’t about to argue it out in a law court as it’s been done with visual arts and the recording industry. Obviously, appropriation has been some sort of postmodernist technique in the arts for a number of years, both in the visual arts and in the literary arts, but it’s very different cases. It’s a legal precedent. The main response from my publisher in England was, Oh Kathy, you’re making trouble again. Why are you always making trouble? When I said that to sign this apology was to apologize for twenty years of work, they did not understand.

  LOTRINGER: For your whole work?

  ACKER: I’m just talking about issues. Eventually I did sign the apology. It was a very specific statement and it was published in all the literary magazines.

  LOTRINGER: You said you changed the intentionality of Robbins’s text…

  ACKER: I was always interested in the real intentionality of texts as opposed to the surface intentionality. I was very aware of what the politics were in Robbins’s texts, but it was only underlined politics. Robbins is really soft-core porn, so I wanted to see what would happen if you changed contexts and just upped the sexuality of the language. It’s a very simplistic example of deconstruction.

  LOTRINGER: You’re interested in deconstruction?

  ACKER: Certainly when I played with James Bond films and Pasolini, especially in the Pasolini book. Oh yeah, I mean when I’m really plagiarizing…

  LOTRINGER: What do you mean by deconstruction then?

  ACKER: Oh just taking other texts and putting them in different contexts to see how they work. You know, deconstructing them.

  LOTRINGER: It’s not “deconstruction” in the Derridean sense at all.

  ACKER: No, it’s deconstruction as opposed to construction or reconstruction. If you take texts apart and look at the language that’s being used, the genre, the kind of sentence structure, there’s a lot of contents here that most readers don’t see.

  LOTRINGER: It’s some kind of active reading…

  ACKER: Yeah. And I’ve always loved doing that. Once I saw a James Bond film on TV—this is in Pasolini—and I copied the film, you know, just verbalized it. I did a plot summary and Jesus, the most obvious racism was apparent, which you wouldn’t really quite think of if you watched the film.

  LOTRINGER: You stopped exploring the I, but you became Pasolini…

  ACKER: Oh yeah, but that was just a way into the text. I never wanted to be a sociologist, I’ve always wanted to be present, to write in a way that’s most present. Do you know what I mean? The English view of the novel is that there should be irony. Irony is this distance, right, so you set up a very fine, cool style, a very conservative-style way of writing a novel. And I’ve always hated that. I never wanted that kind of distance.

  LOTRINGER: You do the reverse. You use humor, which is just as extreme but far more upsetting. No more cool; you collapse all distances. You adopt someone else’s opinion as if it was your very own, and you up the ante. Are you serious? Is it subservience or subversion? No way of telling at that point. If irony’s the master’s trade, humor’s the servant’s trick. Think of Swift’s “modest proposal” to eat the children of the poor. It would drive any master nuts.

  ACKER: You once said to me I’m the most perverse person you ever met. [both laugh]

  LOTRINGER: You want Harold Robbins’s kind of porn? Well have it, and more. And it’s devastating…Actually, I don’t use the word perverse the way Americans do. I remember Walter Abish was shocked when I called his writing perverse. I believe the word has a different meaning in Europe than it does here, he said after a while. In Europe, it can mean to defy or fly in the face of a certain order or a certain expectation.

  ACKER: Perverse in American means limited. That’s why I don’t like it when they put a sexual fetishism on certain activity.

  LOTRINGER: Here, perversion’s just closed off. It’s specialized, like S&M with its ritualized element; or it’s criminal, like a sexual offense. At bottom, it’s something sexual not political. It’s not a strategy, it’s destiny.

  ACKER: Yeah. You see limits. And you feel. They stick me in prison again! And I wouldn’t do that. I’m not closed off. I used “abjection” as a technique (I just love Kristeva’s business about abjection; I think it’s major), but it’s not a perversion in the American sense.

  LOTRINGER: Walter sets up his text like a trap. He’s perverse in that way. Everything is carefully calculated to create specific reactions in the reader. You’re a total barbarian compared to him. You don’t play the game at all.

  ACKER: Well, I don’t have the reader in mind in that way. I’m not writing for the reader. If you’re setting up a trap, you’re setting up a trap for the reader, which means you’re writing for the reader. Walter must see the text as a machine.

  LOTRINGER: Oh yeah, very delicate but very scathing—like a penal machine. There’s always a cutting-edge to it. Humor, but sharp, implacable, almost unhuman.

  ACKER: Oh, Walter has something very cool about him too.

  LOTRINGER: Very cool, but intensely so. The reader is a prey.

  ACKER: Yeah. Mine is very different, very hot. I guess because there’s no distance. If there’s this distance between the reader and the text, the reader doesn’t go anywhere, he’s just a distant observer. I want the reader to come right into the text because that’s the only way you can take the journey.

  LOTRINGER: So you care for the reader in some way.

  ACKER: In some way, yeah. [whispering] You have to. [laughs] What the reader wants—what the reader’s trained to want I should say—is to be at a distance and say, Look at all those weird people there, look what they do…My God, Victor’s having an adulterous affair—but it doesn’t concern me. The reader can read a book about S&M, disgusting subject; Oh but they do it over there! And I never wanted that “over there.”

  LOTRINGER: And one of the ways of getting him right here is to put yourself here first.

  ACKER: I have much more the sense of my own pleasure. I’m writing for my own sense of wonder. I’ve done so many readings—I still earn money that way—that I know how to make the reader at least come along on the journey and enter into the text. But the primary writing is not for a reader, it’s f
or me. And that’s really different from Walter. Probably it makes my texts a bit unreadable.

  LOTRINGER: It opens up other kinds of possibility for the reader. You can get in and out of the text. You don’t expect your readers to read your novels from beginning to end, do you?

  ACKER: No, I mean that might derange friends who’d manage any book from beginning to end, but no, on the whole they can read wherever they want, at least up through Don Quixote. Even in Empire of the Senses, which is the most narrative book—whereas Kathy Goes to Haiti was just one-off—you could read pretty much anywhere. After that it’s quite different because I’m not so interested in deconstruction anymore. I’m much more interested in narrative.