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Subject: <nettime> Goodbye Kathy Acker
From: McKenzie Wark <mwark@laurel.ocs.mq.edu.au>
Date: 16 Dec 1997 00:59:52 +0100

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Goodbye Kathy Acker
McKenzie Wark

Kathy Acker believed in freedom, and she believed
that writing was the closest thing to a space in which
one could be free, but free only at the price of the
dissolution of every aspect of the self that wasn't
compatible with this pure, open space of creation.

Kathy was a perennial outsider. She always took
steps to distance herself from capture -- by
compromise, by half measures, by bad faith. Which
is to say, she was an artist.

I watched her at work once. She mesmerised me
with the meticulous slowness with which she
printed each neat letter in her absolutely distinctive
handwriting. She had access to parts of the mind
where language flows without the censorship of
power.

Escape from the functionaries of language -- that is
how she understood the literature of the avant
garde. She was familiar with all of the great avant
garde work, in English and French, from Rimbaud to
Burroughs. One day she will be recognised as a
marvellous addition to the escape routes pioneered
by Duras and Blanchot and Bataille. Her writing
didn't owe much to Woolf or Stein, but like them,
she wrote as a woman, inventing what that might be
as she went along.

Being Kathy Acker was, I suspect, not an easy thing.
Like Burroughs, she discovered that when you set
writing free, you become even more aware of every
little subtle fascism at work in the world. Like
Burroughs, she was a visionary writer. Her books
always describe the nightmare to come. But they also
chart the escape routes out of the nightmare.

I spent some time with Kathy, in Sydney and New
York and London and San Francisco. Like most of
the people I've met who hung around with her, I
learned a lot from the experience. The very fact that
she existed gave people courage -- with her absolute
refusal to play the bourgeois idea of the 'writer'.

But while Kathy could be couragous, she could also
be vulnerable. Always also a wide-eyed child,
fascinated by the flicker of identity and its other,
captivated by the body and its senses, willing to pass
through pain in order to know what is beyond its
limits. She died as she lived, outside the norm. Still
refusing to acquiese to the idea that things must be as
they are.

Kathy drew me one of her maps once, so I will
always know where to find her. But all of her books
are maps too. Maps to unknown pleasures.


[ABC Radio National in Australia asked me for a
short obituary, and with very little time, this is what
I wrote, on the back of an envelope. It was broadcast
on 5th December. Others will have more to say about
her life and work. I just wanted to circulate this note
as the mark, the scar perhaps, of my personal sense
of loss. Mckenzie.Wark@mq.edu.au]

----- End of forwarded message from McKenzie Wark -----

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