Fashioning the Body: Versions of the Citizen, the Self, and the Subject

In high school, I went through a particularly pretentious phase where I convinced myself that I understood Kathy Acker, though I eventually had to admit that I had no idea what she was doing. She’s a writer who plays with other texts (which has gotten her criticism for “plagiarizing”) and questions the idea of a central subject. I recently was reading about post-structuralism on Wikipedia and it mentioned her. Suddenly, her work made a lot more sense to me, especially in light of our cut-up writing exercises in week four. Perhaps her work would be of interest to some of the people who are doing experimental writing for their winter quarter projects?

Here are some quotes from a 1989 interview with Sylvere Lotringer reprinted in her book Hannibal Lecter, My Father:

“I became very interested in the model of schizophrenia. I wanted to explore the use of the word I, that’s the only thing I wanted to do. So I placed very direct autobiographical, just diary material, right next to fake diary material. I tried to figure out who I wasn’t and I went to texts of murderesses. I just changed them into the first person, really not caring if the writing was good or bad, and put the fake first person next to the true first person … I was experimenting about identity in terms of language … You create identity, you’re not given identity per se. What became more interesting to me wasn’t the I, it was text because it’s texts that create the identity.”

“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.”

“I don’t use the bourgeois story-line because the real content of that novel is the property structure of reality. It’s about ownership. That isn’t my world-reality. My world isn’t about ownership. In my world people don’t even remember their names, they aren’t sure of their sexuality, they aren’t sure if they can define their genders.”