Informational Inheritance in Kathy Acker's Empire of The Senseless

R I C H A R D H O U S E
Informational Inheritance in Kathy Acker’s

Empire of the Senseless
“Collaborating . . . with Those I Hated”: A Career in Plagiarism
K
athy Acker’s practice of so-called plagiarism, producing
novels that bear titles like Don Quixote and Great
Expectations, places her work within the avant-garde tra-
dition of William Burroughs’s “cut-up method.” At the
same time, the promiscuous citation of inherited text perhaps
reflects more widespread features of contemporary cultural pro-
duction. Acker’s texts constitute a channel of intertextual trans-
mission and reproduction of information, and a source of “noise,”
akin to those postulated by such information theorists as Claude
Shannon and Norbert Wiener and realized in discursive forms
such as electronic networks. In analyzing Acker’s Empire of the
Senseless here, I argue that her texts’ strategy of repetition with
difference can be usefully modeled with an unlikely tool from
biology, the theory of “memetic” cultural evolution initiated by
Richard Dawkins. The operations enacted upon inherited text in
Acker’s fiction, however, point to something rather different from
the steady, adaptive process of cultural progress outlined by
Dawkins: instead, Acker uses randomness to create openings to
otherness and novelty.
Dawkins’s 1976 classic of sociobiology, The Selfish Gene, is often
assailed for its reductionism, and these charges are not without
merit. Dawkins characterizes humans and other organisms as
“lumbering robots” designed by, and existing for, the genes that
specify them. In one controversial chapter, though, Dawkins sur-
Contemporary Literature XLVI, 3 0010-7484; E-ISSN 1548-9949/05/0003-0450

© 2005 by the Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System
H O U S E • 451
prisingly declares much in human society irreducibly cultural while

retaining the fundamental axiom of his Darwinian metanarrative,
that “all life evolves by the differential survival of replicating enti-
ties” (192). In the case of human cultural life, Dawkins proposes a
new replicator, analogous to the gene, called the meme (an abbrevi-
ation for “mimeme,” or unit of imitation):
Examples of memes are tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes fashions,

ways of making pots or of building arches. Just as genes propagate them-
selves in the gene pool by leaping from body to body via sperms or eggs,
so memes propagate themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brain
to brain via a process which, in the broad sense, can be called imitation. . . .
When you plant a fertile meme in my mind you literally parasitize my
brain, turning it into a vehicle for the meme’s propagation in just the way
that a virus may parasitize the genetic mechanism of a host cell.
(192)
Enthusiasts of this theory reflexively apply it to the concept of the

meme itself (the “meme meme” or “metameme”), which has repli-
cated and mutated through the work of the philosopher Daniel
Dennett, the psychologist Susan Blackmore, and the Journal of
Memetics.
The theory of memetics is both promising and disquieting. The
hypothesis of cultural “replicators” provides an account of culture
that is continuous with natural history without attributing all cul-
tural phenomena to genetic determinism, as sociobiology and evo-
lutionary psychology have tended to do. Memetic discourse is
consistent with cultural constructivist epistemology and theories of
ideology, sharing their emphasis on the construction of human sub-
jects by cultural forces rather than treating subjectivity as an
unproblematic origin. Nevertheless, memetic explanations have
often risked recapitulating the failures of the original social
Darwinists. It is easy to explain any instance of cultural imperialism
as a case in which a dominant culture’s “fitter” memes have tri-
umphed at the expense of rivals whose extinction demonstrates
their inferiority. Moreover, the entire memetic narrative has typi-
cally been cast in the most problematic terms of Whig history, treat-
ing cultural history, like its biological counterpart, as inevitably and
perpetually progressive. It is important to note, however, that
452 • C O N T E M P O R A R Y L I T E R A T U R E
nothing in memetic theory demands that it be placed within such a

narrative. Stephen Jay Gould, Richard Lewontin, and other critics
within biology have charged that the “adaptationist program” asso-
ciated with Dawkins distorts evolutionary change by inscribing the
contingent and even the random in an overarching narrative of
progress, within which every event is characterized as part of a
purposive or teleological trend. Gould and Lewontin have
attempted to supply theoretical tools for an understanding of evo-
lutionary change without falling into the error of teleology, and this
seems equally possible for any application of evolutionary thought
to cultural change.
Evaluating the nascent theory of memetics is a project of consid-
erable scope for anthropologists, psychologists, and philosophers
of mind. What makes the theory a useful tool for literary studies,
however, is its ability to account for experimental fiction like
Acker’s, which instantiates the transmission and mutation of cul-
tural information described by memetic theory. The metonymic
accumulation of information is as obvious in Acker’s texts as the
fact that this accumulation derives from intertextual citation rather
than imitating the details of a pretextual world. Her writing thus
occupies an important place in the novel’s odyssey from mimesis
to what we might now call “memesis,” from realist portraiture of
the world to an intertextual engagement with its informational
environment and its literary-cultural heritage. Whatever sense can
be made of Acker’s writing is dependent on a genealogical process
of reading in which any bit of text or potential information—
always presumed to be a meme with its origins elsewhere—is
traced through the historical process by which it came to its current
position.
The interest of Acker’s work for a theory of memetic literary pro-
duction, though, far exceeds its use as an example of formal fea-
tures. Rather, Acker’s work is valuable to memetic theory because
it presents a profound challenge which that theory must attempt to
answer. Namely, it strives to make precisely the kind of difference
with which memetic theory has the most trouble, a political differ-
ence. While Acker’s novels depend vitally on their replication of
past texts, this dependence is actually at odds with their polemical
and political orientation. However much Acker parasitizes other
H O U S E • 453
writing, her goal is not to perpetuate the past’s cultural relics but to
attack them: her aim is to interfere with the continuous reproduction
of present institutions, not to facilitate it.
This apparent contradiction brings us face to face with the prob-
lem of posthuman agency. That memetics may be singularly able to
describe historical transformation without recourse to humanist
frameworks of directed teleological change is a limitation as often
as it is a strength. We have good reason to be suspicious of anthro-
pocentric, narcissistic narratives of history in which all credit goes
to autonomous human agents. Still, when a literary text is consid-
ered as the product of memes’ differential survival and reproduc-
tion, then a political task like the one Acker sets for herself—a
literary performance which is also an intervention into beliefs and
practices—may be doomed from the start. Acker recognizes a need
to rethink subjectivity to avoid recapitulating various myths
underpinning present structures of domination, including the pre-
sumed autonomy of the liberal, bourgeois individual subject and
the natural necessity of sexual difference. At the same time, the
reversal of causality necessary to undermine these myths—the
view of subjects as consequences, not causes, of cultural institu-
tions and practices—effaces the very agent who intends or strives
to realize that reversal.
Acker’s aesthetic of plagiarism offers a way out of this dilemma.
Intentional critique gives way here to practices that open such
inherited discourses to noise. That is, Acker mutates and resituates
such discourses without placing them in the service of a compre-
hensive new narrative; in doing so, she explores the political possi-
bilities of aleatory change and the potential for an altered
intertextual environment to transform and reinvent the functions of
the memes that populate it. Memetic citation and iteration are con-
ceived here as intervening in conceptual and material realities, not
just expressing ideational content. Accordingly, reading must be
redirected from the deduction of meanings toward the genealogy of
functions: the receiver of Acker’s plagiarized “messages” must ask
not what those messages mean, but how their effects and conse-
quences have changed in the mutations and intertextual interac-
tions that distinguish them from the plagiarized sources in which
they have their origins.
On the Pointlessness of Genealogical Reading

Such a transition can be illustrated with an example that introduces
both Acker’s thematic concerns and her intertextual mechanisms.
One section of Empire of the Senseless, entitled “Let the Algerians
Take Over Paris,” transports the Algerian rebellion against the
French to the home, rather than the colonial outposts, of the impe-
rialist power. The revolt, initiated by a leader named Mackandal, is
described in an account that includes the following three passages:
Mackandal was an orator, in the opinion even of Mitterand, equal in his
eloquence to the French politicians and intellectuals, and different only in
superior vigour. Though one-armed from the childhood accident, he was
fearless and had a fortitude which he had and could preserve in the midst
of the cruellest tortures.
(74)
From 1981 to 1985, for four years, Mackandal built up his organization.
But revolutions usually begin by terrorism. His followers poisoned both
whites and their own disobedient members. But this wasn’t enough ter-
ror to start a revolution in such a bourgeois city.
(75)
One day Mackandal arranged for the poisoning of every upper-middle

and upper-class apartment in Paris. The old man didn’t need to suicide.
While, due to their beloved, almost worshipped, victuals, the white
Parisians writhed around, bands of Algerians and other blacks appeared
out of their shadows and alleyways.
(77)
The source of this material is C. L. R. James’s The Black Jacobins, a

history of Haitian revolutionary struggle including a brief narrative
of the exploits of the historical Mackandal, a houngan who
attempted a mass homicide of white colonists in the mid eighteenth
century:
Mackandal was an orator, in the opinion even of a white contemporary
equal in his eloquence to the European orators of the day, and different
only in his superior strength and vigour. He was fearless and, though
one-armed from an accident, had a fortitude which he knew how to pre-
serve in the midst of the most cruel tortures. . . . An uninstructed mass,
feeling its way to revolution, usually begins by terrorism, and Mackandal
aimed at delivering people by means of poison. For six years he built up
H O U S E • 455
his organization, he and his followers poisoning not only whites but dis-
obedient members of their own band. Then he arranged that on a partic-
ular day the water of every house in the capital of the province was to be
poisoned, and the general attack on the whites made while they were in
the convulsions and anguish of death.
(21)
The match between these sections of text, and the historical con-
text acquired when Acker’s prose is located in its original source,
produces for the reader a paradoxical effect in which meaning is
both acquired and denied. At the level of plot and theme, Acker’s
conflation of Haitian and Algerian colonial struggles comes into
view, and some of the similarities suggested by this conflation of
periods and places become legible. Western fears of terrorism in the
late twentieth century are juxtaposed with the rather different sta-
tus of “terrorism” as a description of revolts against slavery and
colonialism. The success of the Algerian struggle for freedom is
called into question (for it is made analogous to the failed attempt
of Mackandal, not the eventual success of Toussaint-Louverture).
Most importantly, the sinister citation of the rebels’ murder of “dis-
obedient members of their own band” alongside their adversaries
stresses the reproduction of repressive structures in revolutionary
organizations.
If the memes of The Black Jacobins adumbrate the novel’s plot and
themes, however, the actual sentences and phrases taken up and
“mutated” by Acker are hardly made more “fit” in their adaptation
to this new textual environment. In fact, the analogy with biological
mutation holds largely because the differences introduced into this
text seem random and unmotivated. By almost any aesthetic stan-
dard, Acker’s modifications are degradations of James’s prose, ren-
dering it awkward and inefficient (Mackandal “had a fortitude
which he had”). Brian McHale has rightly noted that Acker’s ver-
sions tend to translate source texts “into her own characteristic anti-
craftsmanlike register of deliberately ‘bad’ writing” (235), and the
sentence-level functioning of the excerpts from James fall comfort-
ably into this category. In the terms of information theory, Acker’s
interjections are easily viewed as pure noise.
McHale follows Fredric Jameson’s characterization of postmod-
ern pastiche as “blank parody” in complaining that “Acker’s
rewrite has no discernible purpose aside from that of producing the

‘sampling’ effect itself” (234).1 He concedes that “there are certain
postmodern works and techniques which undertake to reflect on,
and not merely passively reflect, late capitalism, seeking to tran-
scend the merely symptomatic and become diagnostic” (177), but Acker
is clearly excluded from this elite company. This is typical of the
Jamesonian critique of postmodernism—the promiscuous citation of
various historical sources is precisely what is taken to preclude a coher-
ent vision of historicity—but the application of that rule here is telling.
Acker’s novels may speak violently against contemporary oppres-
sions; nevertheless, what McHale calls the “‘sampling’ effect”—engag-
ing the past through citation and mutation of its memetic relics—is
construed as an abdication of the writer’s responsibility to incorporate
those relics within a coherent metacommentary. The critic awaiting
sense is greeted with the admonition “GET RID OF MEANING” (38).
This does not mean, however, that the text is simply acquiescing to
nihilism or to passive reflection of its environment. Rather than a con-
trast between the symptomatic and the diagnostic, McHale’s critique
of Acker can more profitably be viewed as a confrontation between
two conceptions of literary intertextuality. The critic expects a
cited text to serve as the object of the new work’s commentary or
parody; the novelist’s practice of plagiarism, in which a text is writ-
ten by other texts, poses the same challenge to this expectation as the
theory of memetics. The two entities traditionally credited with
autonomous critical force, the literary text and the authorial mind
behind it, are reconceptualized as the products of other texts, which
in turn become not independent objects available for reflection but
constitutive forces determining the identities of the writer and text
who take them up. Acker hesitates to deliver traditional parody or
explicit commentary because her writing practice, always parasitic
on other texts, problematizes the very notion that the “writer” and
1. Victoria de Zwaan answers McHale’s charge by arguing: “Acker’s use of Gibson

deconstructs, quite literally, the conventions and principles that make Neuromancer a
cyberpunk sf [science fiction] novel that ‘makes sense.’ In so doing, she reveals the sta-
ble and realist nature of those conventions” (464). De Zwaan—one of the very few critics
who actually reads Acker’s intertexts carefully alongside her novels—analyzes these
conventions compellingly, and my own treatments of Acker’s intertextual borrowings
are indebted to her insights.
H O U S E • 457
“her” text are sufficiently distinct from their discursive progenitors to

critique them successfully. If one takes seriously the notion that sub-
jects and cultural productions like literary texts are constructed by
social institutions and practices, freedom from such discourses must
be achieved and not simply presupposed.2
This dispute is characteristic of the argument between materialist
and constructivist approaches to history: critics of postmodernism
tend to denigrate the postmodern text’s effacement of the real in its
concern with textuality.3 If historical change and liberatory struggle
are understood to reside in an underlying real opposed to the imag-
inary or the symbolic, then the text obsessed with language can eas-
ily be dismissed as trapped in “merely symptomatic” navel-gazing.
If, on the other hand, the importance of particular material entities
is ascribed to their roles in processes of signification or information,
such as genetic and cultural codes, then the sphere of language or
of information is no longer a second-order matter of re-presentation
or mediation but is itself a proper venue for historical change.
It is in this view of underlying cultural information as the sub-
strate of historical change that Acker’s engagement with other texts
can be understood as an evolutionary, memetic project without
thereby losing its political dimension. Friedrich Nietzsche, recasting
evolutionary thought in his own vocabulary, describes the problem
in On the Genealogy of Morals:
[T]he cause of the origin of a thing and its eventual utility, its actual
employment and place in a system of purposes, lie worlds apart; whatever
exists, having somehow come into being, is again and again reinterpreted
to new ends, taken over, transformed, and redirected by some power
2. Acker’s best readers have long recognized this problem: Kathleen Hulley, for
instance, notes that “even ‘Acker’ becomes merely the nomenclature of a constituted
boundary between ideology and text. . . . The flickering subject dreams the cultural fic-
tion that she can live outside the discourse she mimics” (174).
3. The materialist critic’s discomfort with such intertextuality can be shown in a locus
classicus of this position, Jameson’s critique of Bob Perelman’s poem “China” in
Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Perelman’s poem is, like Acker’s
novels, based on a “ready-made”—here a photo album found in Chinatown—and
Jameson responds, “The sentences of the poem . . . are then Perelman’s own captions to
those pictures, their referents another image, another absent text; and the unity of the
poem is no longer to be found in its language but outside itself, in the bound unity of
another, absent book” (30).
superior to it; all events in the organic world are a subduing, a becoming
master, and all subduing and becoming master involves a fresh interpreta-
tion, an adaptation through which any previous “meaning” and “purpose”
are necessarily obscured or even obliterated.
(77)
Nietzsche’s remark highlights both the project and the problem

undertaken by Acker’s writing. On the one hand, the project of sub-
versive “reinterpretations” that would “obliterate” a meme’s previous
significance—or, in Acker’s phrase, would “GET RID OF MEANING”—
perfectly describes her desire to wrest the memes she cites away
from their places in capitalist, patriarchal culture. On the other, this
act of reinterpreting a meme must be undertaken by “some power
superior to it,” and if the human subject is as much a creation of
memetic evolution as the literary text, the only powers capable of
such work are impersonal, seemingly uncontrollable agencies like
natural or cultural forces of selection and drift.
Daniel Dennett provides memetics’ canonical formulation of this
problem when he argues that “the human mind is itself an artifact cre-
ated when memes restructure a human brain” (365); Acker’s characters
make the same point in a more humorous way. Empire’s protagonists,
Abhor and Thivai, convey their author’s skepticism about the success
of their attempts at revolutionary change. “I remembered that Abhor
was a construct” (34), Thivai says, and concludes the same of himself:
“I, whoever I was, was going to be a construct” (33). The joke is that
Abhor and Thivai truly are constructs, textual amalgamations of fig-
ures from Acker’s various source texts (most prominently William
Gibson’s Neuromancer, Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, and Sigmund
Freud’s case histories), a convention extended when the author or con-
trolling intelligence is accorded the same constructed status:
“Somebody knows something. Whoever he is, the knower, must be the
big boss.”
“Look.” Abhor raised herself up on one arm. . . . “All I know is that we
have to reach this construct. And her name’s Kathy.”
(34)
The author’s constructedness signals that “Kathy”—like any writer

aspiring to an evolutionary “subduing” or “becoming master” over
discursive systems—faces a profound challenge because she is her-
self a product of those systems.
H O U S E • 459
This difficulty explains many features of Acker’s writing. In par-

ticular, it explains her reluctance to make sense of stolen or inher-
ited text by subjecting it to writerly manipulation, and the resulting
prevalence of “anti-craftsmanlike” writing with “no discernible
purpose.” For Acker, there is an important difference between rein-
terpretation accomplished by conscious artifice—which always
risks recapitulating the conventions and limitations inherited from
her predecessors—and that which truly opens the text to new pos-
sibilities by eschewing such devices of authorial control. Kathleen
Hulley has made this point most effectively, identifying the most
critical feature of Acker’s practice of plagiarism in arguing
that “Acker’s stilted, formulaic language is crucial to her displace-
ment of authority, not simply as an anti-aesthetic strategy, but as the
insistent erasure of her own discursive mastery” (175).
Like most other texts that evade easy classification, Acker’s are
often called “experimental,” but this term may be unusually apt for
her work. The philosopher of science Isabelle Stengers has distin-
guished between research experiments designed to confirm a
hypothesis or prediction and those that make possible an opening
to the Other. Such scientific projects as “artificial life”—computer
environments in which bits of code are allowed to evolve into new
forms without the programmer’s intervention—represent a signifi-
cant break with standard practice in science. Ordinarily, an experi-
ment or model is successful if it behaves in a manner consistent
with the designer’s predictions or intentions; artificial life is often
judged on other grounds, constituting a success insofar as it devel-
ops emergent behaviors or properties that the designer could not
have predicted.4 Stengers compares the digital “organisms” of arti-
ficial life with the balls that Galileo rolled down an inclined plane
in what is often described as the first experiment of modern science.
4. While it is (perhaps deliberately) difficult to integrate her various pronouncements

into a coherent statement of aesthetic vision, Acker sometimes comes quite close to
describing a process of memetic rearrangement in the service of unforeseen, emergent
results. In an interview with Sylvère Lotringer, she describes her experiments with texts
and contexts (or memes and environments): “You just take other texts and put them in
different contexts to see how they work. . . . Once I saw a James Bond film on TV—this
is in the Pasolini book [My Death My Life by Pier Paolo Pasolini]—and I copied the film,
just 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” (14).
“Galileo’s polished spheres testified in favor of Galileo’s theory

through their obedience to this theory, through the way this the-
ory gave the power to predict and anticipate their behaviour.
However, this is not exactly what an artificial living system should
do,” she argues. “We all know that in one way or another it should
surprise us” (97). A strong analogy may be made with Acker’s aes-
thetic: her texts work if their effects exceed or avoid predetermined
ways of functioning, arriving at results not already inscribed within
the cultural or textual fields from which they came.5
This model of emergent textual functions, grounded in the inter-
actions among the juxtaposed memes of Acker’s text, needs to be
clarified in two respects. First, there is no way to distinguish deci-
sively between a linguistic meaning or function employed as part of
a purposive strategy and one that emerges independently of such
strategies. (The model of emergence does, however, have the virtue
of explaining the seeming randomness or superfluity of many of
the elements found in Acker’s text: they are regarded as unavoid-
able remainders which have yet to acquire a function.) Second, the
model must be distinguished from the most influential theories
privileging noise. Henri Atlan, Michel Serres, Humberto Maturana,
and Francisco Varela emphasize the robustness or plasticity of
organic structures, describing the stabilizing role of self-monitoring
or self-correcting mechanisms that allow a system to incorporate
and even benefit from occurrences of noise or error. For such theo-
rists, replication and redundancy serve to tame or obviate the cata-
strophic potential of noise. Acker’s practice of opening her texts to
the possibility of unintended effects is based instead on the hope
5. This “arrival” echoes Derrida’s concept of l’arrivant, which encompasses the other
as both a “newcomer” and an “event.” The distinguishing feature of the experiments
privileged by Stengers is precisely their openness to such an event or arrival. Though
their ethical and epistemological projects are developed in very different contexts,
Stengers and Derrida agree on the conditions under which a happening can be consid-
ered as such an “event”: it must be something not previously incorporated in the struc-
ture, system, or theory from which it arises. Derrida has gone so far as to argue (in
“Psyche: Inventions of the Other”) that the event must strictly speaking be impossible:
were it recognized as “possible,” an occurrence would thereby be inscribed within the
structure from which it emerged, the revelation of an already present element rather than
the arrival of the truly new.
H O U S E • 461
that cultural structures are sufficiently sensitive to mutations that

such catastrophes might be induced after all.
“Without You I Am Nothing”:

Memetic Subversion from Evolution to Epidemiology
In interviews and discussions surrounding the 1988 publication of
Empire of the Senseless, Acker expressed reservations about the mode
in which her earlier texts had operated (“[d]econstruction is always
a reactive thing [in which] you’re really reinforcing the society that
you hate” [“Devoured by Myths” 17]) and announced her conver-
sion to a new aesthetic in which political change is to be sought
through writing directed by deliberate, positive aims. In spite of its
apparent continuity with the methods involved in constructing her
earlier texts, Empire includes an emphatic statement of those meth-
ods’ inadequacy:
That part of our being (mentality, feeling, physicality) which is free of
all control let’s call our “unconscious.” Since it’s free of control, it’s our
only defence against institutionalized meaning, institutionalized lan-
guage, control, fixation, judgement, prison.
Ten years ago it seemed possible to destroy language through lan-
guage: to destroy language which normalizes or controls by cutting that
language. Nonsense would attack the empire-making (empirical) empire
of language, the prisons of meaning.
But this nonsense, since it depended on sense, simply pointed back to
the normalizing institutions.
What is the language of the “unconscious”? (If this ideal unconscious
or freedom doesn’t exist: pretend it does, use fiction, for the sake of sur-
vival, all of our survival.) Its primary language must be taboo, all that is
forbidden. Thus, an attack on the institutions of prison via language
would demand the use of a language or languages which aren’t accept-
able, which are forbidden. Language, on one level, constitutes a set of
codes and social and historical agreements. Nonsense doesn’t per se
break down the codes; speaking precisely that which the codes forbid
breaks down the codes.
(133–34)
The psychoanalytic concepts invoked here are important; before

I address them, however, it is crucial to confront the single sentence
in which Acker disavows the liberatory potential of nonsense or

noise, positing a dialectical or mutually defining relationship
between information and noise. Presumably nonsense “depend[s]
on sense” insofar as the two concepts are defined by their mutual
opposition; noise is, after all, ordinarily identified by a receiver’s
inability to make sense of it. Such an opposition does not yet
explain, though, Acker’s apparent concern that her linguistic “cut-
ting” has merely been co-opted by the “normalizing institutions” to
which it “point[s] back.” Every revolution must have some rela-
tionship to the institutions which it seeks to displace or negate, and
if this is the issue, it is difficult to see how the new strategy (“speak-
ing precisely that which the codes forbid”) is to be any more suc-
cessful. If anything, taboo violations seem even more dependent on
the institutions which they threaten, their force defined solely in
terms of their opposition to the “codes” that they transgress.
The concern about the political impotence of noise, though, can-
not be dismissed as a questionable aside: it is important enough in
Empire that it is figured in a number of different ways. Most notably,
one of Acker’s borrowings from Gibson’s Neuromancer translates
the point into the context of electronic media. In Gibson’s text, a ter-
rorist group called the Panther Moderns is employed to create an
extravagant multimedia distraction from the burglary conducted
by the protagonists, Case and Molly. Empire has the same group—
now simply called the Moderns, associating them with Acker’s
predecessors in the literary avant-garde—perform the same insur-
gent acts, but it divorces these acts from their diversionary purpose
and assigns them a new target. Rather than the headquarters of
Gibson’s Sense/Net, Acker’s Moderns attack a library called MAIN-
LINE, described as “the American Intelligence’s central control net-
work, its memory, what constituted its perception and
understanding” (36). The Moderns’ attack, based on the injection of
noise into MAINLINE, is interestingly ambiguous in both its methods
and its results. Thivai, here playing the role of Gibson’s “console
cowboy” Case, describes it:
Being a bit behind their times the Moderns only wanted to destruct. On
the other hand my construct (a cunt) and I had to find the code. The
Modernists planned to shoot misinformation into MAINLINE’s internal video.
Due to the misinformation each video screen would strobe for twenty
H O U S E • 463
seconds in a frequency that would cause the constructs and other robot
viewers to have seizures. . . . Simultaneously the audio portion of MAINLINE’s
internal video, speeding double, would inform its listeners about the army’s
use of a certain endomorphin, at this moment being tested, to throw human
skeletal growth into one thousand per cent overkill. . . .
The Terrorists would be happy when two minutes later their infiltrated
message ended with the main system’s end in white noise.
The Terrorists were happy.
In the white noise the cops arrived so that they could kill everybody.
(36–37)6
The introduction of noise into the “system” accomplishes what it

is meant to, apparently ending the control network of “American
Intelligence,” except that the system’s boundaries are instantly rein-
stituted when the police arrive.7 The system is more resistant to the
Moderns’ “misinformation” than they had imagined; in the terms
of Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela, they had counted on
noise serving as a “destructive perturbation,” when the system in
fact has enough plasticity to withstand the attack. As a result of this
inefficacy, Thivai complains that “the Moderns talked too much”
6. Gibson’s text provides many of the elements modified by Acker:
The Panther Moderns . . . injected a second carefully prepared dose of misinfor-

mation. This time, they shot it directly into the Sense/Net building’s internal video
system.
At 12:04:03, every screen in the building strobed for eighteen seconds in
a frequency that produced seizures in a susceptible segment of Sense/Net
employees. . . . The audio track, its pitch adjusted to run at just less than twice the
standard playback speed, was part of a month-old newscast detailing potential
military uses of a substance known as HsG, a biochemical governing the human
skeletal growth factor. Overdoses of HsG threw certain bone cells into overdrive,
accelerating growth by factors as high as one thousand percent.
. . . [A]s the Moderns’ message ended in a flare of white screen, the Sense/Net
pyramid screamed.
Half a dozen NYPD Tactical hovercraft, responding to the possibility of Blue Nine
in the building’s ventilation system, were converging on the Sense/Net Pyramid.
(62–63)
7. The familiar acronym AI (artificial intelligence) refers to “American Intelligence” in

Acker’s version. De Zwaan argues that this is part of an overall strategy in which
Gibson’s science-fiction conventions are deprived of their futuristic or technological ori-
entation, allowing Acker to show that Gibson’s text obeys the conventions of realism
despite its innovations in content (464).
and that “their talk, or rhetoric, was blab” (36). The primary problem
illustrated by this passage, though, has less to do with any particu-
lar method of resistance than with the strength attributed to its tar-
get. At least in Acker’s portrayal of it, the channels through which
“American Intelligence” is disseminated are indeed vulnerable to
disruptions or reorganizations of its content; its constitutive
borders, however, are established by a policing so thorough that
such disruptions are rendered more or less immaterial.
Acker’s critique of her own past practice thus poses a substantial
challenge to my characterization of that practice as an opening to
otherness in which memetic elements are redeployed within a new
environment in the hope that they will be liberated from their past
functions. The facile response to this challenge would be to assert that
such authorial commentaries—and even statements of political
intention—are irrelevant to the actual operations of the text. Given
the fact that memetics extends the formalist suspicion of authorial
intent, it would be easy enough to argue that the construct “Kathy”’s
opinions about the ways in which her texts operate should be given
no special privilege. This strategy would receive ample support from
the apparent technical continuity of Empire of the Senseless with other
Acker novels: if Acker has come to second-guess the political results
of her methods, this skepticism has not kept her from continuing
experiments with plagiarism and textual mutation. Following this
line of reasoning, however, would prevent me from engaging one of
the most important challenges to both the critical discourse and the
textual artifact I am studying: are memetic theory and Acker’s
memetic method in fact incapable of making significant differences in
the cultural environment which they engage? In order to answer
such a query, we must first move from interpreting the passages that
question the efficacy of memetic intertextuality to testing that query
against the technique’s actual practice. Acker claims that the aleatory
nonsense to which she subjects memetic material “depend[s] on
sense” and therefore “point[s] back to the normalizing institutions,”
and she allegorizes the persistence of these institutions in the crush-
ing containment of modernist terrorism by the police. To respond to
this concern effectively, we must begin by testing it against passages
that transmit and mutate the memes of older texts to see whether
those transmissions in fact result in such a state of affairs. Because
H O U S E • 465
Acker discusses the efficacy of resistance to “normalizing institu-

tions” in the psychoanalytic parlance of taboo and its transgression,
it is fitting to pursue this investigation through psychoanalysis.
Like Abhor and Thivai, who have to “find the code,” many read-
ers have used Freudian concepts as a code according to which
Acker’s texts can be deciphered. The role of the psychoanalytic fam-
ily romance is a favorite topic for critics, who tend to view her
obsessions with incest and sadomasochism as keys to her novels’
thematic functioning, with two good reasons. First, psychoanalysis
provides the canonical formulations of the “normalizing institu-
tions”—the centrality of the phallus, the Law of the Father, and the
sublimation of threatening desires—that Acker has expressed inter-
est in combating. Second, Acker follows Gilles Deleuze and Félix
Guattari in using psychological pathologies to explore “deterritori-
alization,” in which desire has managed to avoid containment and
thus becomes a possible revolutionary weapon. The primal scenes
and psychotic symptoms that populate Acker’s plots thus reflect
both phallocentric civilization and her own discontent, diagnosing
territories policed by psychosocial mechanisms as well as finding
instructive value in outlying spaces where those mechanisms fail to
take hold.
Insights gained through psychoanalytic interpretation demon-
strate the degree to which Acker’s texts support exegetical reading
despite her admonitions that “meaning” is not the point.
Nevertheless, critics often lose sight of the fact that psychoanalysis
is itself a discursive and textual field in which memes are propa-
gated and mutated, problematizing its special status as a concep-
tual apparatus capable of making sense of all of Empire’s other
discourses. Even Victoria de Zwaan, who acknowledges that the
Freudian family romance is merely “another ‘ready-made’” (463),
lends its core concepts a more privileged status in reading the
“Nightmare City” section of Empire in its differences from the
“Night City” of Gibson’s Neuromancer:
The most significant of [Acker’s changes] is that Thivai has not been inca-
pacitated by neural circuitry damage. Instead, he has developed an inca-
pacitating psychosis since contracting gonorrhea: “I’m . . . physically and
mentally damaged because my only desire is to suicide” (27). With this
move, Acker diagnoses Thivai/Case’s problem, not so much as an
objective medical-health issue, whether that be neurological or sexual, but

rather as the psychotic death-wish that is a feature of the male protago-
nist of both Neuromancer and Senseless. The other implication of this
change is that the obsession with cyberspace is, like gonorrhea, a disease.
Moreover, it may be a sexual disease.
(463)
While Freud might be chagrined to find that his explanatory nar-

rative has become one “ready-made” among others, he would
likely approve of the diagnostic power accorded to it here. Thivai’s
death wish, which de Zwaan goes on to cite as the cause of his
sadism, is given its due, and its destructive manifestations are as-
sociated with sexual history in compliance with psychoanalytic
custom.
I am not disputing the claim that Acker’s “Nightmare City” real-
izes more fully the psychosexual dimensions of Neuromancer (itself
highly aware of psychological issues: its protagonist is named
“Case” for a reason). Yet Thivai’s history is even more of a “ready-
made” than de Zwaan’s insightful reading acknowledges: it reca-
pitulates not only the generic features of the case history but the
particular details of the Wolf Man’s case as revealed in Freud’s
“From the History of an Infantile Neurosis,” beginning with gon-
orrhea’s role in engendering the adult neurosis of Freud’s patient.
His mother’s illness, his seduction by a sister who subsequently
commits suicide, and his ambivalent reaction to that suicide are all
rendered faithfully in Empire,8 which reproduces even brief asides
in Freud’s account of the patient’s childhood (“I felt very happy
when my sister’s huge hat, while we were both in an auto, flew
away” [30]).9 Using Freudian categories to diagnose Thivai’s (and
Case’s) symptoms is surely called into question by the fact that
8. For Freud, “ambivalence” denotes the coexistence of libidinal attachment and

unconscious hostility. The death of a loved one often occasions an ambivalent response
because this hostility is satisfied even as the loss is mourned. See chapter 2 of Totem and
Taboo, “Taboo and the Ambivalence of Emotions” (789–832).
9. “[O]n a drive, her hat flew away, to the two children’s great satisfaction” (Freud,
“History” 175). Freud mentions this as an occurrence which “pointed to the castration
complex,” along with the sister’s fantasized “little tail,” also cited by Acker. The second
subsection of Empire’s “Nightmare City,” entitled “Suicide” (29–31), is basically a con-
densed version of Freud’s chapter “The Seduction and Its Immediate Consequences”
(175–85).
H O U S E • 467
those symptoms are themselves plagiarized from the precedent-

setting case itself. (Any diagnostic effort would be further under-
cut by Acker’s caricature of Freud’s confidence in his therapeutic
skill: “I shall now by means of my profound rational processes find
the explanation for my madness, and human socially unacceptable
behavior” [30].)
In short, the juxtaposition of Neuromancer with Freud’s “Infantile
Neurosis”—which, in memetic terms, places each of these two texts
in a new environment defined largely through their interactions
with one another—both invites and frustrates the use of the psy-
choanalytic material as an explanatory narrative. Whether we read
Thivai’s life history as a naturalistic chronicle or as an exercise in
textual amalgamation, we are drawn to the same conclusion:
because the childhood traumas of Freud’s patient are constitutive of
the character, and because the character exhibits the same sadistic
symptoms, we are tempted to make the usual inferences about the
traumas’ role in the etiology of the symptoms. Moreover, it is easy
to view Thivai as a vehicle for commentary on the psychological
profile of Case (and later of Huck Finn, whose abuses of the impris-
oned Jim are reenacted upon Abhor in the last section of Empire). Yet
to interpret the juxtaposition in this way introduces a troubling
asymmetry into the reading of plagiarized texts. Gibson’s novel
becomes a kind of palimpsest, with the erasures and additions of
Acker’s rewriting making crucial differences in its signification;
Freud’s case history, however, seems to retain all of its explanatory
power rather than being itself subject to memetic mutation.10
This detour through Acker’s plagiarism of Gibson and Freud
enables a more satisfactory reading of her concern that the “non-
sense” or noise to which she subjects such texts nevertheless
10. In fact, a closer reading of the differences between Freud’s text and Acker’s ver-
sion reveals significant alterations, particularly in their accounts of the suicide of the
patient’s sister. Freud notes that her “brilliant intellectual development” was followed by
complaints “that she was not good-looking enough” (177), but he then proceeds to the
clinician’s diagnosis—“[h]er disorder is probably to be regarded as the beginning of a
dementia praecox”—and mentions it only as “one of the proofs of the conspicuously
neuropathic heredity in her family” (178). Acker’s Thivai, on the other hand, recognizes
the role played by gender politics in her demise: “Even though her IQ was high, she
couldn’t understand how a high IQ and the desire to be loved as a female could exist
together in one body. . . . [S]ince she was a freak, she was unlovable” (31).
“depend[s] on sense” and thus “point[s] back to the normalizing

institutions.” If the psychoanalytic material is used as a key for
understanding Thivai’s character, or for making “sense” of the
changes to which Neuromancer is subjected, then the definitively
“normalizing” discourse of Freud reasserts itself in all of its institu-
tional power. More subtly, though, even if Freud’s text is read as a
text, “another ‘ready-made’” discourse or source of memes with
which Acker’s noise is to interfere, its persistence remains a prob-
lem. For these interferences or reconfigurations appear as such only
insofar as the “History of an Infantile Neurosis” is conserved as the
background against which Acker’s version can be measured and its
differences noticed. Simply put, Acker’s novel retelling of the Wolf
Man’s childhood cannot be recognized except by a reader who
knows the original version, and the reconfigured version thus does
not supplant the original but is parasitic upon it. The possibility of
“breaking down” Freudian discourse is at best qualified by the
necessity of reading Acker’s version against the original, which
must continue to be transmitted if the mutations of Empire are to
have any effect. Acker’s mutations will thus affect only those read-
ers who are “carriers” of certain Freudian memes.
The memetic analogy with biological evolution suggests a chan-
nel of transmission in which “mutations” are substitutions compara-
ble to that of one genetic allele for another. Yet this model is
misleading, since the significance of such changes is evident only in
the genealogical reading that compares the mutated text to the orig-
inal. The effect of the changes in fact requires a redundant double
channel, in which the reader receives both versions of the “mes-
sage”; accordingly, Acker’s rewritings must be reconceived as addi-
tions to the original. If the psychoanalytic family narrative of Empire
of the Senseless is a mutated variant capable of competing with its
progenitor, the mode of reading that it demands nevertheless
requires that progenitor’s conservation. While Acker suggests that
psychoanalysis is, like other meaning-making discourses, a “virus
that has been eating you,” the alterations she introduces into it do
not eradicate, but exist alongside of, the memetic material responsi-
ble for its pathogenic effects.
In this reading, Freud’s text is a complex of memes providing a
contextual environment necessary for Acker’s mutated versions to
H O U S E • 469
acquire significance, a source of redundancy without which the

noise of Acker’s rewriting cannot be mobilized for critical or con-
structive force. If this persistent proliferation of inherited memetic
material is what Acker recognizes in fearing that her practices of
textual mutation are merely “reactive,” it is tempting to introduce
one of the most common forms of the meme/gene analogy, in
which the contagious potential of the meme is likened to the partic-
ularly rapid and widespread replication of viruses. If we find per-
nicious elements of misogyny and patriarchy in Freud’s text, the
mutations introduced in a treatment like Acker’s might usefully be
understood as an effort to evolve an immune response to such
memetic particles.
Communication, Performance, and the Challenges of Context

In Empire of the Senseless, nonsensical “cutting” of language is no
longer regarded as an adequate strategy, but Acker continues to
appropriate other writers’ textual material, to interject her own
characteristic noise into that material, and to insist that the value of
these appropriations and interjections is not to be found in their
meaning. The difference between the older “reactive” mode and the
new one is established in the claim that what had originally been
intended as “cutting” (in the style of Burroughs) retains value inso-
far as it “speak[s] precisely what the codes forbid” and thus liber-
ates “languages which aren’t acceptable, which are forbidden.”
Acker’s assertion that these languages express the desires of an
unconscious “free of all control” is at best deserving of considerable
suspicion. Freud indeed teaches that taboos and other civilized pro-
hibitions provide reliable indications of unconscious urges, but it
does not follow that the psychic territory in which those urges
inhere is immune to the policing functions of the superego.
Moreover, if “the unconscious is structured like a language”—and
Acker’s account of language’s role in subject formation suggests
that she concurs with at least this much of Lacanian orthodoxy—
then it is all the more difficult to separate that unconscious from the
linguistic functions associated with “control, fixation, judgement,
prison” (134). Acker may be conflating the distinction between con-
sciousness and the unconscious with that between ego and id, or
drawing overly optimistic conclusions from the doctrine that

desires exist in the unconscious without negation. Regardless, the
notion of an uncontrolled unconscious does little to advance the
cause of politically efficacious writing. It may provide an account of
Acker’s authorial practice, suggesting that refusing to subject her
materials to conscious writerly artifice might make her texts into a
vehicle for desires that elude control; it can do little, though, to
account for what happens to those materials in their subsequent
transmission and reception.
However ill-founded Acker’s optimism about the unconscious
may be, her translation of her concerns about social “codes” into the
idiom of taboo does accomplish something important. My discus-
sion of Empire thus far has concerned questions of sense and non-
sense, meaning and its absence. Taboos, however, are by definition
not concerned with questions of meaning. They are “differentiated
from moral prohibitions,” Freud writes, “by failing to be included
in a system which declares abstinences in general to be necessary
and gives reasons for this necessity. The taboo prohibitions lack all
justification and are of unknown origin” (Totem 789). Taboos define
cultural formations not by their meaning but by their prescriptive
and performative functions. A taboo does not signify a message with
descriptive or referential content; it assigns a status to actions and
agents. Freud does investigate the “meaning” of taboo—to say that
an object or person is taboo indicates that she or it is forbidden or
untouchable, simultaneously “sacred” and “unclean” (789)—but
the constitutive role of taboo in culture has less to do with the
term’s signification than with its performance. The taboo confers an
untouchable status on uniquely valued persons and objects without
describing or characterizing a referent in a particular way; rather,
such descriptions are secondary results of the status which the
“code” has effected upon its object.11 At one point, Acker may have
intended slogans like “GET RID OF MEANING” to advocate the annihi-
11. It may be objected that the value of taboos for Freud’s own investigations lies in
the fact of their referential meaning rather than their performative function, and he
indeed treats each taboo prohibition as a sign referring to an unconscious drive: “every
prohibition must conceal a desire” (829). Even Freud, however, accounts for the survival
of taboos through their functional utility in preventing incest, regicide, and other expres-
sions of desire with potentially catastrophic effects for the cultures that they constitute.
H O U S E • 471
lation of meaning with noise; from this perspective, however, such

statements might be read instead as announcements that the
semantic dimension of language is no longer the one deserving of
political attention.
This privileging of performative effect above referential value is
crucial in assessing both Acker’s writing practices and the theory of
memetic transmission. As a commentary on Acker’s own texts, it can
be understood as a corrective to those who would define a text’s
political efficacy by whether it generates meaningful commentary on
the objects of its scrutiny. In invoking taboo, Acker implies that a
statement’s political effects are located within its performative func-
tion and not its meaning. For example, the opening episode of Empire
ends with a trial in which the opacity of the juridical code, and the
irrelevance of meaning to its performative function, is highlighted:
The whole thing, case, took exactly five minutes: the judge said numbers
to the prosecution; the prosecution said numbers to the judge; back and
forth for five minutes. Finally the judge said some numbers. A man who
should have been more than an extra in a monster movie ushered, to put
it politely, Alexander through several doors and into an empty prison cell.
(5)
To the initiated, these “numbers” presumably have some signifi-

cance, requiring a certain familiarity with legal argument and
precedent. The reader here, though, encounters the pronounce-
ments of judge and prosecutor as indecipherable strings of num-
bers, enacting the unintelligible state that they might have for the
defendant Alexander. Such meaninglessness, however, exists in
utterances that nevertheless produce a clear and unambiguous
result, the defendant’s incarceration and subsequent execution.
According to J. L. Austin’s canonical formulations of speech-act
theory, the pure performativity of these utterances may be question-
able: the judge’s final utterance is certainly an illocutionary act by
which the defendant is pronounced guilty and condemned, but it
does not actually carry out the sentence that it imposes. The purity
of such categories, however, is contested by many of the poststruc-
turalists who have influenced Acker, in particular by Deleuze and
Guattari, who suggest that speech-act theory “has made it impossi-
ble to define semantics, syntactics, or even phonematics as scientific
zones of language independent of pragmatics. Pragmatics . . .

becomes the presupposition behind all of the other dimensions and
insinuates itself into everything” (77–78). Deleuze and Guattari
reject the conception of “language as a code” (77) as implying the
primacy of communicated meaning, but their examples suggest
utterances very much like Acker’s performative and prescriptive
“codes” that establish prohibitions:
When the schoolmistress instructs her students on a rule of grammar or
arithmetic, she is not informing them, any more than she is informing her-
self when she questions a student. She does not so much instruct as
“insign,” give orders or commands. A teacher’s commands are not exter-
nal or additional to what he or she teaches us. They do not flow from pri-
mary significations or result from information: an order always and
already concerns prior orders, which is why ordering is redundancy. The
compulsory education machine does not communicate information; it
imposes upon the child semiotic coordinates possessing all of the dual
foundations of grammar (masculine-feminine, singular-plural, noun-
verb, . . . etc.) The elementary unit of language—the statement—is the
order-word [mot d’ordre].
(75–76)
This account both provides a perfect description of the operation

performed by a taboo—a member of a tribe becomes taboo pre-
cisely because particular “semiotic coordinates” have been
imposed upon her—and raises the question of such operations’
intelligibility in memetic terms. Anticipating Acker’s own unease
with the vocabulary of “sense” and “meaning,” Deleuze and
Guattari state flatly that “[t]he compulsory education machine
does not communicate information.” If Acker’s texts are to be
understood memetically, then, memes cannot be understood as bits
of meaning or nonmeaning, their historical role consisting in their
specification of one idea rather than another. Interestingly, this
means that they must be understood in a more genelike way, as
actors that produce consequences well beyond the communication
of messages. Thus we might understand Acker’s new project not as
the opening of a more complete, less repressed channel of commu-
nication, but as the production of performative effects foreclosed
or prohibited by the cultural environment in which her language
must be received.
H O U S E • 473
Once again, the evolutionary experiments of artificial life provide

an apt analogy. One of the field’s most famous experiments is
Thomas S. Ray’s Tierra, a computer program that contains self-
replicating segments of code and routines that furnish the variation
and selection required if these units are to exhibit Darwinian
change. Replication is exposed to aleatory mutation, so that bits
of code can evolve new properties and functions, while a routine
called the “reaper” introduces death into the population by remov-
ing its oldest and most defective members. Tierra has evolved many
clever mechanisms, perhaps the most startling of which were bits of
code able to alter the function of the “reaper” and thus cheat death
in a way that no biological organism ever has. What Ray had
intended to be a constant external constraint on his “life forms”
became a mutable force that was itself subject to change by the envi-
ronment it had governed. The memes of Acker’s “forbidden lan-
guage” would have to have a similar effect on the conventions
constitutive of her cultural environment. They must “cheat”: if they
diverge so far from constitutive rules that they fall outside of con-
vention altogether, any possible performative force is necessarily
lost. Yet if they conform to such conventions perfectly, any perfor-
mative effect will simply exist within the parameters of the targeted
institutions.
This, of course, is the now familiar point made by Derrida in
“Signature Event Context”: “Could a performative utterance suc-
ceed if its formulation did not repeat a ‘coded’ or iterable utterance,
or in other words, if the formula I pronounce in order to open a
meeting, launch a ship or a marriage were not identifiable as con-
forming with an iterable model, if it were not then identifiable in
some way as a ‘citation’?” (18). Thus just as modifications to a “pla-
giarized” text only appear as such against the background provided
by the original text, variations within performative acts are defined
by the degree of their conformity to normative conventions. Such
acts of textual repetition with difference operate in distinct ways,
though, in their constative and performative dimensions. When the
effect of alterations is sought in terms of meaning—or of informa-
tion in the classical sense, the specification of one “message” among
others—questions about the fate of a particular meme can be
answered only in terms of whether a specific message or idea
survives. Viewing such matters pragmatically, though, emphasizes

the fact that the importance of such alterations is ultimately estab-
lished in their reception and application in a sociohistorical context.
In Austin’s classic terminology, some utterances will be accepted as
“felicitous” despite their divergence from traditional practice, while
other divergences will disqualify the utterance altogether.
Such questions are important to address if memetics is to be an
effective theory of cultural history. Within evolutionary thought
itself, for example, memetics would need to be able to account for
such cases of persistence as that of Lamarckian theory, which
accounted for evolutionary change by arguing for the inheritance of
organisms’ acquired characteristics. Jean-Baptiste Lamarck’s
memes are highly successful in terms of continued transmission—
he is still frequently cited, if only as the source of errors corrected
by Darwin—but the context in which that transmission occurs
ensures that the effect of such memes is limited. Darwinian memes
have not extinguished their Lamarckian predecessors but have
made certain that they do not govern such institutions as research
programs. This pragmatic perspective is crucial for textual practices
like Acker’s, concerned with the disruption of inherited discourses.
If the interjection of noise into discourses like psychoanalysis is not
enough to prevent their further transmission, it may nevertheless
impact the environment of reception and interpretation which pro-
vides their power.
This strategic consideration may explain one of the most surpris-
ing innovations of Empire of the Senseless, the movement of the
novel’s last pages away from the usual literary sources to a highly
unlikely target for plagiarism, which Acker calls The Highway Code.
Abhor and Thivai finally acquire the powerful “code” that they had
hoped to steal from American Intelligence, and its contents might
be disappointing to readers who had hoped for state secrets. The
Code, as it turns out, is nothing but a Rules of the Road manual, one
of the publications in which U.S. states disseminate traffic laws and
safety guidelines to drivers. While such laws and injunctions as
those establishing speed limits and proper stopping distances may
be trivial compared to many others, they do exhibit the important
features of what Acker likes to call “prison language,” the textually
transmitted institutions by which individuals are made answerable
H O U S E • 475
to structures of authority. (Traffic violations are no doubt the most

common occasions for the “hailing” of the individual by the police,
as in Louis Althusser’s famous example; they also frequently serve
to justify the arbitrary exercise of police power against such tar-
geted groups as African Americans. The latter point may be espe-
cially relevant, since the Highway Code section of Acker’s text
follows her version of Jim’s imprisonment—this time imposed on
the “part robot and part black” Abhor—in Huckleberry Finn.)
Abhor takes to the highway on a motorcycle, dutifully citing the
Code to bring her driving into comically literal conformity with its
rules:
Rule 55.
b) Don’t hang on to someone’s tail lights; it gives a false sense of
security. . . .
Rule 55.
c) Watch your speed; you may be going faster than you think.
I switched gears twice and revved up even more so I was sure to not be
going faster than I thought.
Rule 55.
f) See and be seen.
This was it. I switched into fifth and revved up to 120, then stared down at
the speedometer so I exactly knew my own speed. As I was driving cor-
rectly by staring down at the speedometer, naturally I did another correct
thing. This shows how good a driver I had become. I did not hang on to the
truck’s tail lights. I smashed into them. I looked up. I saw and was seen.
(218)
Strictly speaking, Abhor’s dangerously nonsensical behavior is as

“dependent on sense” as any of Acker’s other textual mutations; the
important difference is that this dependence no longer appears as a
liability. In fact, the licensing of Abhor’s antics—at least theoretically,
she could demonstrate that she conformed to the Code regardless of
the obvious danger she posed to its order—requires the precise coin-
cidence of the cited text with the authoritative one. That is, the space
of freedom enjoyed here by Abhor comes not in an ability to change
the Code, but in her ability to conform perversely to it. The subversive
appropriation of textual material has destructive possibility not
because of the potential for mutation, but because even in the absence
of changes, such material—as Nietzsche recognized—is not restricted
to its original uses and does not a priori yield its intended prohibitive
effect. The reliance of Acker’s text on Freud and other sources
demonstrates that established canons and conventions provide a nec-
essary ground without which the potential meanings of Acker’s
mutated versions cannot be deciphered. Such conventions as those of
The Highway Code, enforced as they are by the state, would seem to be
especially insidious, as every citation of them would seem to rein-
voke and reinforce not only beliefs and ideas but the institutions gov-
erning the field of permissible behaviors. Nevertheless, the cited
memes of the Code reflect comedy rather than terror: their replication
may unavoidably reproduce the terms and conventions of existing
structures of power, but the consequences ordinarily associated with
those terms are revealed to be contingent and mutable.
Totem and Tattoo: Hopeful Monstrosity

This interpretation of Abhor’s highway adventures may conform to
the insights of Nietzsche’s genealogy, but it flies in the face of the
rhetoric of directed personal agency that Abhor herself employs
when she finally dismisses the prescriptions of the Code altogether:
The problem with following rules is that, if you follow rules, you don’t
follow yourself. Therefore, rules prevent, dement, and even kill the peo-
ple who follow them. To ride a dangerous machine, or an animal or
human, by following rules, is suicidal. Disobeying rules is the same as fol-
lowing rules cause it’s necessary to listen to your own heart.
(219)
I might well argue that Abhor does not speak for Acker here—it
seems unlikely that the author shares the character’s faith in her
ability to act independently of social conventions—except that
Abhor’s affirmation of individual agency comes at the end of the
book and seems to be part of the transition that leads to the promo-
tion of the tattoo as the transgressive art form par excellence. Abhor
copies a few more memes from the Code—diamond-shaped signs
which label both the dangerous contents of trucks and the charac-
ter’s own qualities (such as being “spontaneously combustible” and
H O U S E • 477
“corrosive”)—but then draws “a final picture which sum[s] up all

the other pictures” (221), this time not a traffic sign but a tattoo-style
sketch of a dagger penetrating a rose, adorned with drops of blood
and banners reading “DISCIPLINE AND ANARCHY.”
Written before the resurgence of tattoos’ popularity in the 1990s,
Empire seems to reflect the view that as an illicit, socially unaccept-
able signifying practice common only among outcast populations,
tattooing is immune to the restrictive norms of the polite societies
that forbid or marginalize it. It is the medium in which Abhor is
able to articulate her personal credo (a coexistence of “discipline
and anarchy” which would presumably avoid the pitfalls of either
obedience to rules or ignorance of them) and thus can easily be read
as the expressive act adequate to an unconscious “free of all con-
trol.” (Abhor certainly believes so: “All of this came to me for no
reason at all,” she says, “and so it all had to be true” [221].)
The experience of the reader encountering such a tattoo, how-
ever, suggests a much less special status for it. Abhor’s tattoo may
recommend discipline and anarchy, but any anarchic effect of the
image itself is at best highly qualified. The various elements that
compose it—knife, rose, blood, and caption-bearing banner—are
recognizable as belonging to the most venerable traditions of anti-
social tattoo art, and the novel’s obsessive concern with tradition-
breaking is pronounced enough that any such allegedly antisocial
tradition must be read as an oxymoron. If Abhor is to “follow
[her]self” without regard to “rules,” it is telling that the image
meant to serve as her most personal expression is composed of a
knife’s bloody penetration of a rose: not only the individual ele-
ments, but their combination in a familiar iconography of sexual-
ized violence, are at best conventional and at worst clichéd. The
image is recognizable as an expression of Abhor’s often-stated
desire to flee social control by belonging to an illicit collective like a
biker gang, but only because it resembles other biker tattoos so
closely. Moreover, this resemblance is less a sign of insufficient cre-
ativity on Abhor’s or Acker’s part than a reasonably accurate reflec-
tion of the mass-produced character of tattoos in general.
If the practice of tattooing is thus every bit as reliant on citation or
plagiarism as any of Acker’s own novelistic techniques, and the rhet-
oric of unmediated personal expression thus amounts to a red
herring, the importance of Empire of the Senseless in Acker’s oeuvre

might well be downplayed. If the novel privileges the transgressive
potential of tattooing only to discover that tattooed signs differ in few
significant ways from those of other discourses Acker has explored,
then it seems necessary to ask whether it amounts to more than a
failed experiment. Such a question is especially relevant given Acker’s
own insistence on the difference of Empire from her earlier efforts.
Certainly there is little in this text to suggest that it arrives at any fun-
damentally new ways of signifying, even if it reflects a more thorough
consideration of the subtle politics of citation. It is easy for readers to
become suspicious that, in searching for “a myth to live by”
(“Conversation” 17), Acker may have been seduced by exorbitant
claims for the power of exotic signs like tattoos despite her general
skepticism.
The text provides ample fuel for such suspicions. Acker’s well-
known enthusiasm for tattoos suggests that she may want them to
have inherently exceptional properties, and Empire contains several
passages that seem surprisingly credulous in their willingness to
subscribe to various myths about tattooing:
The tattoo is primal parent to the visual arts. Beginning as abstract
maps of spiritual visions, records of the “other” world, tattoos were orig-
inally icons of power and mystery designating realms beyond normal
land-dwellers’ experience.
The extra-ordinary qualities of the tattoo’s magic-religious origin
remain constant even today, transferring to the bearer some sense of exist-
ing outside the conventions of normal society.
(140)
Assuming that actual “magic-religious” powers are absent, how-

ever, there is little to suggest that this sense of existing apart from
social conventions has any potential to produce effective resistance.
There may nevertheless be a way in which Acker’s privileging of the
tattoo might be read with something other than skepticism. “Magic-
religious” powers are certainly not a factor on which to rely in pro-
grams for political change, but the existence or nonexistence of such
powers is the issue only if we read Acker’s arguments as claims about
which properties of tattoos actually obtain—that is, if we read such
passages as constative truth-claims to be evaluated as meaningful or
H O U S E • 479
meaningless, accurate or inaccurate. To read them in this way—in

Abhor’s words, as something which “ha[s] to be true”—may actually
be to miss what is most remarkable about them, the effects that they
may have regardless of their truth or falsity. This basic lesson of
memetics and of speech-act theory is clearly relevant to Acker’s proj-
ect: if truth were the criterion for evaluating Abhor’s claims of being “a
good driver,” for example, we would miss the important possibility
that her driving actualizes, that one can conform to the Code without
following the prescriptions it was designed to impose. Instead of ask-
ing whether tattoos possess the properties attributed to them, then, it
may be more profitable to speculate about what ends might be served,
or what differences might be made, by the attributions themselves.
This is to say that we might read Acker’s advocacy of the tattoo
genealogically rather than referentially, asking not whether the
beliefs it describes are true, but whether those beliefs can be mobi-
lized in the service of an unforeseen function or result. In fact,
Acker’s overview of the history of tattooing includes an account of
just such an unforeseen effect:
Cruel Romans had used tattoos to mark and identify mercenaries, slaves,
criminals, and heretics. . . . Among the early Christians, tattoos, stigmata
indicating exile, which at first had been forced on their flesh, finally actu-
ally served to enforce their group solidarity. The Christians began volun-
tarily to acquire these indications of tribal identity. Tattooing continued to
have ambiguous social value; today a tattoo is considered both a defam-
atory brand and a symbol of a tribe or of a dream.
(130)
The change in function that occurs here—a sign marking exclusion

from a social formation evolving a contrary function as it becomes
instead a symbol of community—reflects a principle of political
change through memetic evolution. The narrative of early
Christians coming to power as the signs of subjugation and abjec-
tion acquire new significations and new social effects echoes
Nietzsche’s own most famous just-so story, his Genealogy of Morals.
Like Nietzsche’s own narrative, then, we might ascribe to Acker’s a
double value. The historical event described has instructive or
exemplary value, demonstrating the possibility of a “transvaluation
of values.” The reinterpretation of history that Nietzsche unfolds is
not merely, however, a descriptive account of such possibilities. In

transforming the unlikely emergence of Christian political power
from a sign of providential fortune into an instance of evolutionary
transformation, the Nietzschean narrative also enacts what it
describes, accomplishing a historiographic feat nearly as impressive
as the ascent of “slave morality” itself.
In a genealogical context, Acker’s hopes that the tattoo will occa-
sion a similar transvaluation in the present might not reflect a
merely naive faith in its magical power; rather, its historical associ-
ation with such power lends it an “ambiguous social value” which
suggests that it could qualify as the “forbidden” or “taboo” lan-
guage that she seeks. Acker exploits not only its Roman role in
marking criminality or heresy, but also its Polynesian origins. “In
Tahitian, writing is ‘ta-tau,’” she tells us, and “the Tahitians write
directly on human flesh” (130). The systems of totemism in which
such writing originated are, of course, governed by the taboos
whose properties Acker seeks to emulate in her own writing. The
“ambiguous social value” possessed by those who bear tattoos is
akin to those who are marked as taboo in such societies; it is again
worth recalling Freud’s definition of taboo as simultaneously signi-
fying “sacred, consecrated” and “uncanny, dangerous, forbidden,
and unclean” (Totem 789). Acker reasons that since tattoo art carries a
similar social stigma, it may be susceptible to a transfiguration in
which its conventional significations—marking the bearer as unclean
or violent—are inverted to mark instead a sacred status. The marks
that signaled Christians’ abjection in Roman society came to reflect
their own community; similarly, the violation that made a member of
a Polynesian tribe “taboo” served both to render her untouchable
and to mark her as the carrier of a magical energy normally pos-
sessed only by chiefs, priests, and other sacred individuals.12 In both
12. In Totem and Taboo, Freud quotes an Encyclopaedia Britannica entry by Northcote
W. Thomas: “Persons or things which are regarded as taboo may be compared to objects
charged with electricity; they are the seat of tremendous power which is transmissible by
contact, and may be liberated with destructive effect if the organisms which provoke its dis-
charge are too weak to resist it. . . . Thus, kings and chiefs are possessed of great power, and
it is death for their subjects to address them directly” (791). Such a status, then, is strangely
empowering to trangressors: their violations of social codes remove them from social inter-
course but also establish their direct equivalence to the tribe’s most powerful members.
H O U S E • 481
cases, the power wielded by the signs of abjection might be subject to

appropriation; moreover, this appropriation is possible not because
such individuals are removed from the constitutive rules of social
formations, but because ambiguous and potentially unpredictable
consequences are exposed and exploited within these rules.
I remain skeptical of Acker’s optimism about tattoos as a trans-
gressive practice. If tattoos fall short of the emancipatory potential
Acker sees in them, however, it does not follow that we should dis-
miss the theoretical logic underlying her optimism—that social
practices, texts, and other cultural phenomena with ambiguous
effects and significations may, when experimentally placed in new
contexts, acquire new functions and produce significant changes in
their cultural environment regardless of their dependence upon it.
Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology
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Informational Inheritance in Kathy Acker's Empire of The Senseless

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R I C H A R D H O U S E

Informational Inheritance in Kathy Acker’s

“Collaborating . . . with Those I Hated”: A Career in Plagiarism

Contemporary Literature XLVI, 3 0010-7484; E-ISSN 1548-9949/05/0003-0450

prisingly declares much in human society irreducibly cultural while

Examples of memes are tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes fashions,

Enthusiasts of this theory reflexively apply it to the concept of the

nothing in memetic theory demands that it be placed within such a

On the Pointlessness of Genealogical Reading

One day Mackandal arranged for the poisoning of every upper-middle

The source of this material is C. L. R. James’s The Black Jacobins, a

rewrite has no discernible purpose aside from that of producing the

1. Victoria de Zwaan answers McHale’s charge by arguing: “Acker’s use of Gibson

“her” text are sufficiently distinct from their discursive progenitors to

Nietzsche’s remark highlights both the project and the problem

The author’s constructedness signals that “Kathy”—like any writer

This difficulty explains many features of Acker’s writing. In par-

4. While it is (perhaps deliberately) difficult to integrate her various pronouncements

“Galileo’s polished spheres testified in favor of Galileo’s theory

that cultural structures are sufficiently sensitive to mutations that

“Without You I Am Nothing”:

The psychoanalytic concepts invoked here are important; before

in which Acker disavows the liberatory potential of nonsense or

The introduction of noise into the “system” accomplishes what it

6. Gibson’s text provides many of the elements modified by Acker:

The Panther Moderns . . . injected a second carefully prepared dose of misinfor-

7. The familiar acronym AI (artificial intelligence) refers to “American Intelligence” in

Acker discusses the efficacy of resistance to “normalizing institu-

objective medical-health issue, whether that be neurological or sexual, but

While Freud might be chagrined to find that his explanatory nar-

8. For Freud, “ambivalence” denotes the coexistence of libidinal attachment and

those symptoms are themselves plagiarized from the precedent-

“depend[s] on sense” and thus “point[s] back to the normalizing

acquire significance, a source of redundancy without which the

Communication, Performance, and the Challenges of Context

drawing overly optimistic conclusions from the doctrine that

lation of meaning with noise; from this perspective, however, such

To the initiated, these “numbers” presumably have some signifi-

zones of language independent of pragmatics. Pragmatics . . .

This account both provides a perfect description of the operation

Once again, the evolutionary experiments of artificial life provide

survives. Viewing such matters pragmatically, though, emphasizes

to structures of authority. (Traffic violations are no doubt the most

Strictly speaking, Abhor’s dangerously nonsensical behavior is as

Totem and Tattoo: Hopeful Monstrosity

“corrosive”)—but then draws “a final picture which sum[s] up all

herring, the importance of Empire of the Senseless in Acker’s oeuvre

Assuming that actual “magic-religious” powers are absent, how-

meaningless, accurate or inaccurate. To read them in this way—in

The change in function that occurs here—a sign marking exclusion

not merely, however, a descriptive account of such possibilities. In

cases, the power wielded by the signs of abjection might be subject to

de Zwaan, Victoria. “Rethinking the Slipstream: Kathy Acker Reads Neuromancer.”

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