The Arab woman: say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get the original essay Physical and mental lust consumed my body at the same time I knew there was only loneliness. The CIA had treated the loneliness in this city and turned the sun into a piece of ice. I decided that either I could die or I had to get my emotions back. . .I left New York the way you leave a lover's bed when you don't care about the person you just fucked and it's 5 a.m. and the sidewalk is crawling like a dead cat. destroyed everything we call human life and replaced it with religion. This religion is the worship of money and blind faith in stupidity. . . The United States has replaced learning to control and rote memorization of facts for all education for life. Every aspect of American life is now ready to die. Fucking only leads to illness. The United States is a cancer in the flesh of reality. All Americans are born sick and live writhing lives. The Arab woman: Peace to the dead and to those who carry death. Peace to my sick house, city of AIDS or the death of love. (Empire 168) As evidenced by this selection, Kathy Acker's Empire of the Senseless screams postmodernism with a blatant rejection of grammatical conventions and linear tradition and a passionate engagement with contemporary political issues. But more importantly, he screams in angry despair. Acker says in "Some Notes on Two of My Books" that she writes with a sense of "immediacy" in an attempt to "present the naked human heart so that our world, for a second, explodes in flames" (117). . Acker's novel launches a furious terrorist attack against the insane bourgeois-patriarchal "world" of our fathers to shine a light on a dark and marginal fringe of society which, she believes, is not so marginal (Empire 2). Acker employs bisexual terrorists Abhor and Thivai – part robot, part black woman, part white hacker – to weave a discursive narrative through a near-future Parisian dystopia where Algerians lead a revolution of “non-respect.” -existing against their economic controllers” (Empire 6). They navigate through a society of brutal violence and forbidden sex in an openly satirical model of contemporary America and the conundrum of the alienated masses trying to live under a government and in a society that makes life impossible. The Empire emerged from an America in the early stages of the AIDS pandemic. Published in 1988, it followed a few months after President Reagan's first public mention of HIV, after the disease had captured the world's attention for more than 7 years (Global). By 1988, the virus had killed thousands and infected millions worldwide and was rapidly shattering its initial definition as a disease of gay men. Yet in 1987, at the urging of the White House, Congress passed the Helms Amendment “prohibiting the use of federal funds.” for AIDS education that promotes, directly or indirectly, homosexual activities” (Mondial). Acker's voice rings with the fear of a government controlling, directly or indirectly, through unnatural selection – a homophobic government controlling people's blood through the use of a viral agent (Clune 2). In the artist communities of San Francisco and New York, friends were being killed by a disease that infected love but transmitted economic segregation and social alienation, leaving lives broken and fragmented: meaningless. Written in a fragmentary, almost prosaic language,filled with context. noise and violence in the foreground which make conventional reading impossible, Empire of the Senseless imposes on the reader a frenzied loss of meaning through two dramatic sensations. The first is a feeling of absence where the expected but absent meaning has left a void or negative space. The second is the spectral presence of an indefinable being, almost intangible but definitively broken. meaning, the ghost of meaning. Essentially, the text presents a bodily presence of an absence of meaning (Glotfelty 250). This requires the reader to reject the notion of a self-contained work and engage the text with historical context and theory in order to create meaning from the fragments (House 460). While elements of Empire appear to both support and attack the tenets of each theoretical approach, Acker's sense of urgency suggests a framework with a practical and political purpose. Thivai highlights the value of Marxist theory as an illuminating agent for Acker's work with his statement that "The ideological structures of the dominated classes obviously determine whether or not they will continue to be dominated" (Empire 125). By applying traditional Marxist theory and its focus on ideology as a framework, one can recognize the urgent anti-capitalist message of the work and clearly reveal strong support for Marxist philosophy. However, looking at the failure of the framework, undermined by individual desire and unconventional language, one can understand Acker's rejection of traditional theory, even as it carries a complementary message giving voice to the same exiled masses for whom she speak. By understanding the failure of Marxism in this novel, one can reshape Marxist theory into something that will accept the individuality Acker demands and accommodate the elasticity of this novel and postmodern culture. Many Marxist theorists believe that postmodern texts run counter to Marxism by being too difficult to follow to mount an effective attack on subverting ideologies; still others argue that the fragmentary presentation of the postmodern text accurately reflects the violated characteristics and alienated the oppressed and supports Marxist readings more appropriately than traditional works (Tyson 63). At the 1999 Chicago MLA Conference, Andrew Hoberek of Columbia University defined postmodernism as “the incomplete and deeply contested globalization and digitalization of capitalism” (Hoberek 32). Acker's narrators illustrate exactly this deep resentment at the global explosion of capitalism: The nature of bosses is to get what and who they want, as they must. We might expect the excluded to revolt against the rich and the bosses. Those who don't have should know that they don't have, that there are those who have, and those who have control them. Of course. No man wants to be a worm. Have a boss. But it was precisely about the miserable masses in Germany. . . who helped bring fascism to power. And it is this class in the United States that moves from middle-class splendor to lower-class stagnation or rather classlessness that put Reagan, for example, in power and gave way to the multinationals. (Empire 124) Abhor and Thivai explain the plight of the masses as being caught between a worm-like self-image and classless alienation. Blinded and oppressed by ideological programming, Acker's characters and their story support the Marxist interpretation of ideology and illustrate, in a way, the exploited masses. Karl Marx defined capitalism as “exploitation veiled by religious and political illusions” (Marx 127). On exploitationcapitalist, Marx and Acker agree. Through Abhor, Acker explains capitalism as an “accurate image of God: a despot who requires a constant increase in his power to survive. God is equal to capitalism. Thus, God grants some happiness to humans. His victims. Because He needs their love. Humans who do not love (God) suffer” (Empire 46). For Acker and for Marx, capitalism is a dangerous religion that blinds the masses to their fate and leaves them exploited and victimized in its wake. However, in an apparent contradiction, Acker explains God as both an ideological charade and a cruel dictator. It is precisely this contradiction that marks his deliberate turning point and the beginning of his undermining of the Marxist framework. Acker's disagreement with desire theory becomes surprisingly clear through a return to his treatment of religion: I wondered to the point of obsession whether other humans are naturally evil, and if so, why. Unable to answer this question, I prayed to the God I had been told about. God is the One who is unknowable. My sister was so mean and my nightmares so violent that I knew every Creator must be a sick pig. I named God “sick pig” and “Turdshit”. Every time I saw dog poop in the street, I thought of God. (Empire 30) Marxist theory coincides to a certain extent with Acker's theory of religion. Terry Eagleton calls religion “an extremely powerful ideological form…”. . . capable of operating at all social levels” (Eagleton 2244). Yet Acker departs from Marxism by recognizing God as a possibility rather than a mere ideological fabrication. Acker's desire to target a cruel deity overrides not only the concern for self-contradiction in the novel, but also his allegiance to Marxist precept. Desire takes over. The Empire of the Insane becomes truly problematic for a Marxist reading because it deals with individual desire. For Acker, the problem with following theory or “following the rules” is that if you follow the rules, you are not following yourself. Therefore, the rules prevent, deny, and even kill the people who follow them” (Empire 219). In contemporary economic theory, the individual is interpreted as an “agent who chooses or who maximizes his utility” (Hodgson 364). From a Marxist perspective, desire fuels the oppressive ideology of the American dream by keeping the individual busy in acquiring and attempting to satisfy limited material desires (Tyson 53). Thus, Marxist theory gives little place to individual desire. It is a dangerous tool that distracts the individual from his relationship with society. But for Acker, desire is “limited neither by a solely material reality nor by a solely mental reality” (Empire 65). Desire is everything. With the horror of AIDS raging in San Francisco, unchecked by medical science and unrecognized by the government, sex and sexuality have become an impossible situation, as reflected in Empire. Fear reinforced bourgeois taboos, leading to even more invasive control. As a result, Abhor and Thivai violate social taboos against homosexuality, bisexuality, sadomasochism, and incest with regularity and familiarity. Abhor describes herself as “masochistic to the point of suicidal and, in fact, physically damaged” (Empire 31). However, Acker explains “masochism [as] only a political rebellion” (Empire 58). This presents a problematic dichotomy between the desire to control and the desire to be controlled, as Abhor uses physical control through masochism to challenge social mores in a rejection of societal control. Acker's conflicting desires reflect hiselevation of desire above all else. For Acker, desire is everything and it's "like having an endless orgasm." Go ahead, go ahead, go ahead” (Interview). Rather than rejecting or suppressing desire, Acker chooses to attack patriarchal-bourgeois perceptions of desire. But to do this, it must attack the framework on which they are based: language. In dealing with language, Acker merges the author's context and the world of the characters. Thivai protests, “All I know is that we have to reach this construct. And her name is Kathy” (Empire 34). By inserting himself to bridge the traditional gap between the fictional world and the author's reality, Acker encourages the reader to associate his own context with the world of the text. To achieve this in depth, Acker rejects the traditional narrative guidelines that define Wolfgang Iser's separation “between the explicit and the implicit, between revelation and concealment” (Iser 1676). Thus, meaningless background noise turns out to be an essential element of Acker's method. Iser develops this loss of meaning by saying that “the absence of a common situation and a common frame of reference corresponds to the “nothing” which provokes interaction between people” (Iser 1676). Embodying this relationship, Acker completely removes any hope of a common frame of reference and leaves the reader to fill in the gaps with contextual information. With this fusion of text and context, author and audience, Acker can fully engage the reader in his rejection of patriarchal language and alienation with a call echoing Karl Marx to "let our madness transform from angry madness” (Empire 169). Acker recognizes the patriarchal literary tradition as key to societal perceptions of desire and, therefore, the destructive destabilization of bourgeois control. Thivai says: “The library was the central control network of American intelligence, its memory, that which constituted its perception and understanding. (A hypothesis of the political uses of culture.)” (Empire 36). In a now familiar use of contradiction, Acker presents literature as his weapon against the oppressive system, because “literature is that which denounces and tears apart the repressive machine at the level of the signified” (Empire 12). Acker prophesies that overcoming alienation means attacking the dominant linguistic system and the resulting bourgeois memory or literary tradition. Thanks to Abhor, she says, “Ten years ago, it seemed possible to destroy language with language: to destroy the language that normalizes and controls by cutting off that language. Nonsense would attack the (empirical) empire of language, the prisons of meaning. But this nonsense, since it depended on meaning, simply referred to normalizing institutions. . Language, at a certain level, constitutes a set of social and historical codes and agreements. Nonsense does not in itself break the codes; by talking precisely about what the codes prohibit, they break the codes. (134) Acker seeks to replace patriarchal language with forbidden and reciprocal language and, therefore, a new literature. Eagleton writes that literature itself “is an ideology” (Eagleton 2243). By overturning the rules of dominant language and the resulting literary ideological system, Acker breaks conventions and destabilizes reason because “in an unreasonable world, reason is not reasonable” (Empire 169). By replacing language with socially unacceptable language and rewriting literature with the voice of the insane, Acker replaces the meaning on which modern literature was founded. In a philosophical chain reaction, ideology, perception, desire, knowledge, and experience are continually deconstructed and reconstructed as Acker drives thereader in the journey. As Acker says, “when two people fuck, the whole world fucks” (A Few Notes 120). The traditional Marxist framework can account for the alienation and oppression experienced by Acker's characters, but it falls far short of incorporating the subtleties of desire that create individuality. The framework seeks to criticize on the assumption that the means of communication through which the message is transmitted is sufficient. Acker proves that in the current system and current code, “the requirement for an adequate mode of expression is insane. . . . Since all acts are interdependent, heaven cannot be an absolute. The theory doesn’t work” (Empire 113). Yet just as Acker builds his novels on the remains of those novels that his attack on language rejects, the Marxist framework can be used to reconstruct. By examining the framework and the weak joints where it has been shaken by desire and language, it can be revised and renewed alongside Acker's revised reality. The extent of Acker's anti-heterocentric, linguocentric and classist attacks proves the inability of a traditional frame Marxist to visualize the text, but replacing the fixed, static points where desire and language push against the frame with a flexible and dynamic ideology, the framework can be made usable with the postmodern text. The common, contemporary usage of the term "anarchism" is that of a philosophical system free from law or accountability and prey to violence and destruction ("anarchism", def. 1). But this definition is sorely lacking in vision. 20th century Italian revolutionary Errico Malatesta wrote extensively about anarchism and described the anarchist spirit as a "profoundly human feeling, which aims at the good of all, freedom and justice for all, solidarity and love among the people; which is not an exclusive characteristic of self-proclaimed anarchists but which inspires everyone” (Malatesta). Using this Malatestian view of anarchy in a literary sense offers a new perception as conventional conceptions of a fixed personal truth fall into a flexible sense of individual choice. In this awareness of human truth as an ever-changing construct of desire rather than law, readers can erase the ideological error that the human element is natural and redefine the ideological framework (Quigley 307). Applied to Marxist theory, this expresses the relativity of human experience and human desire and the need for dynamic change. To accommodate this flexibility, the theoretical framework must shift from a nailed, trembling form of wood to a flattened, almost amoebic bicycle tire. Echoing Marx's transformation of socialism from an abstract concept to a detailed plan for revolution, Acker allows for a practical rethinking. of theory and its application (Postgate 124). However, unlike Marx, Acker recognizes that people without individual desires – without individual hopes and dreams – are easy to control. The question then arises: is it more appropriate to employ a flimsy framework that purports to undermine authority but exposes the individual to their own rigid control or to adapt the rigid points of the framework to accommodate individuality of desire and the ambiguity of language? mind: This is just a sample. Get a personalized article from our expert writers now. Get a Custom Essay The necessary adaptation of the Marxist framework must enable the elimination of alienation even from itself. Functional parts of the Marxist perspective, such as the recognition of ideologies and socio-economic forces underlying societal changes, can be extracted from the rigid framework and merged.», 1999.