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mamimitanaka's review against another edition
5.0
CW: everything
Closer to the beginning of my read of this, if initial impressions had continued, I would have no doubt started this review with one of my trite superlatives, like calling this "punk as fuck" or some such, and I'm very glad this book put me in my place before my dumb ass could go through with that, because such a careless shorthand would do a huge disservice to what this damn thing is to the point it'd be borderline insulting. "Empire of the Senseless" is at no point a piece that can be squared down into any one-size-fits-all peg, and no review of it should reflect it in such a misleading way. Because, holy shit, this is like nothing else I've ever read, and I'd like to think at this point I'm pretty accustomed to fiction that challenges me and propels my understanding of the medium [and storytelling as a whole] forward. "Empire of the Senseless" throws out any binaries I could reduce it to, and with it, my ability to talk about it without sounding like an asshat, because as a literary critic I suck, and Kathy Acker is vastly more adept at conveying this through its own existence as art that anything I could say would only be dim extrapolations from a text much superior to my ramblings. But this is the albatross that hangs over the neck of every reviewer of any work of media, so I will just have to swallow my pride and accept my infinite mediocrity in this regard.
So what is it [at least at my baseline acceptable level of describing it?] The closest thing I can think of that the general public would have at least some frame of reference for is Burroughs' "Naked Lunch", and indeed the cut-up fragmentary method of writing is there as well as a high abundance of page-by-page brutality and apocalyptic surrealism, but while literary threads undeniably link the two, Acker's approach is much different, and dare I say more successfully subversive. Her act of lifting text from other works entirely and incorporating it into the structure of her own has been long documented for its controversy, and is still pertinent in our world of increasingly suffocating IP laws and the devastating effects on art through as occurs when "stealing" is defined only with respect to its market value, but it's far from the only thing that makes this book such a radical text.
This novel is informed so boldly and inescapably from the political apparatus surrounding it that Kathy Acker's audacity in the places she goes here to paint this dystopic nightmare-adventure is remarkable by itself. People will tell you that unignorably political writing is a sign of poor writing, that political subjects should be left to the realm of news cycles and not the world of storytelling. Kathy Acker not only rejects this notion entirely, she spits on the very idea in a way bolder than any contemporary author I've read. Because for Acker, the personal, and thus the whole of human identity - in all its non-binary, ever-shifting, ever-expanding-and-contracting scope - is politics at its core. We cannot escape from "politics" anywhere, because the material world surrounding us and the ramifications of the societies we inhabit and consciously/unconsciously enable, structures that fuck with us down to a level that might as well be molecular, are everywhere, at all times, and we have to inhabit them no matter how hard we fight to make something better, while we die and bleed and suffer under the boots of an elite class who doesn't give a shit about us, especially the less white, able bodied and cishet you are. The oppressed fight boldly just to make it to the next day in the real world, so why the fuck should bold engagement with these "political" subjects be any different in fiction, in art? As exemplified through aforementioned IP laws whose manifestations under capitalism betray the thieving police state at its heart, art is among our cultural substructures most evidently wounded by this ouroboros of the profit incentive, so what else could there be but political art [even to creative cowards who try to claim their work as "apolitical", smugly thinking themselves above the very systems that inform their identities]? In the middle of the narrative, Acker stops to make the direct meta statement that language which shocks and offends the primary institutions of power is not only one of the most powerful tools that can be used within the framework of art and story, but a necessity for art as a whole if it is to be at all effective in combating the "normalizing institutions", as she says.
"What is the language of the 'unconscious'? (If this ideal unconscious or freedom doesn't exist: simply pretend that it does, use fiction, for the sake of survival, for 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 language or languages that aren't acceptable, which are forbidden. Language, on one level, constitutes a series of codes and social and historical agreements. Nonsense doesn't per se break down the codes; speaking precisely that which the codes forbid breaks the codes".
"Empire" is as clear a case for the necessity of subversion of the political apparatus through art as anything, it is a total triumph of successfully taking the world to task [of the Reagan era, and all of these deep-rooted institutions before and beyond] because of this precise way that Acker uses the medium of literature, whose substance is language. For me this book reaffirms that those who shame artists into avoiding engaging directly and bloodily with these topics are directly upholding a deeply fascist rhetoric of control, by telling those who exist inevitably under their traumatic systems that they are not allowed to strike back in a way that is among their most effective defenses against the daily insults and wounds they must contend with. I do not think that art can be Revolutionary in the sense that it can by itself enable radical change [nor do I think Acker believed this] on a collective scale, but I think the point being made is that art is a sword and shield, that it can push us through the fight and onward to something better - not the weaponry itself that cuts away the roots but the actual effort of the laborer, though the weaponry is by no means useless. We see this manifested in the novel itself - because this is shocking and truly countercultural art, it is alive and has weight, it effects and teaches and imparts meaning and raw feeling in a way only art is capable of. That's why art and fiction endures, and why works like this are timeless, because there is no other tool we can use to survive in this world that has remotely the same properties as art does, even if it might not effect direct change the most materially.
And so Acker is not afraid to plumb depths most writers would fear to tread, not only in subject matter and story but in the novel's very composition itself. It is postmodern, in the extreme in fact, if you think of something, especially the more fucked up it is, it's probably here somewhere. While there is a central plot framework to be found here, it's thrown into a whirling torrent of digressions, horrifyingly offensive language and hallucinatory flights of fancy and fucking [almost exclusively of the sort that would give the Marquis de Sade a run for his money], of words copied from other novels, of mutilated syntax and tortured typing errors, of heartbreaking forays into stories of broken homes and violent parents and examinations of the people at the margins; of philosophy and political theory, prose that reads like poetry, poetry that reads like prose; explorations of colonialism and religions destroyed by imperialism can be followed immediately by twisted indulgences of ostensibly genre-oriented fiction such as in the novel's approaches toward sci-fi, dystopian lit and adventure stories, before becoming hardcore pornography or just total schlock. And then some. Nothing is binary, nothing is fixed including gender or identity, characters in this novel seem to glide from body to body and mind to mind, they are man and woman at once and also neither, Abhor and Thivai and also everyone and no one. Because to fit anything in this book into a box would defeat the purpose, it is unbound and wild and free, no matter how dark it gets [and it goes blacker than pitch].
But the beating heart of Acker's novel is appropriately humanity, it is the burning drive for sheer, raw survival exemplified in Abhor and Thivai, that makes this book so engaging. If it were simply nightmarish nonsense, then its systemic approach wouldn't work nearly as well [as Acker is keen to point out], the impact would be diminished. People, and these characters, suffer, often for no reason, often because suffering is the order of the day in the world we live in, because the world is set up to destroy those who don't fit into the precise mold of the empowered orders. There is revolution and war, waste and senseless violence and disease and disability and addiction and the seemingly insurmountable gaps between men and women, the ill and the well, the poor and the privileged. But none of the struggling is ever worth nothing, no matter how entrenched these characters feel in the wasteful "nothing" surrounding them. The struggling, at this level, should not exist, but unfortunately for us, it does. But the characters here never back down or die, no matter how horrible things get, no matter the awful things people do to them and each other. Through the fluidity of identity, time and structure, and through the specifics of this time period it was written [the book very much feels primarily a statement on the evils of the Reagan era], this is a book that feels like a requiem for the disease of the world we live in and the lives of what could have been, but it also feels like a cry for life in the midst of all of that - there's this idea that humanity is disposed toward continuing and burning on and on no matter how bad things get. The world Acker paints is bleak, full of endless brutality and polluted, industrial waste, but as the ending statement shows us it's never one in which the fight, or not even the fight but just the sheer survival, is ever a hopeless task.
Can I recommend this? Not off the cuff, you really have to be in tune to what Acker is going for here to click with this, and some, maybe even most, people are just not going to be able to meet it on its level at all. And that's fine - no art has to be for everyone, which Acker no doubt understood given the extreme audacity of this work. But this is an extraordinary book, one remarkable both on its own merits and as an unbelievably valuable metatext that shows bare the near limitless potential of the power of art and language to give voice to the wounded; which, if there is such a thing as a primary function of art, it is not something nebulous like "beauty" but instead its capability of reaching out and establishing real connections between people who will never know one another directly, through nothing but the medium of fiction. I won't be forgetting this any time soon, and I'm very happy to know I live in a world where, for as horrible as so much of everything around us is, works like this can exist within it, unlimited and free and answering only to itself and those who will resonate with it.
Closer to the beginning of my read of this, if initial impressions had continued, I would have no doubt started this review with one of my trite superlatives, like calling this "punk as fuck" or some such, and I'm very glad this book put me in my place before my dumb ass could go through with that, because such a careless shorthand would do a huge disservice to what this damn thing is to the point it'd be borderline insulting. "Empire of the Senseless" is at no point a piece that can be squared down into any one-size-fits-all peg, and no review of it should reflect it in such a misleading way. Because, holy shit, this is like nothing else I've ever read, and I'd like to think at this point I'm pretty accustomed to fiction that challenges me and propels my understanding of the medium [and storytelling as a whole] forward. "Empire of the Senseless" throws out any binaries I could reduce it to, and with it, my ability to talk about it without sounding like an asshat, because as a literary critic I suck, and Kathy Acker is vastly more adept at conveying this through its own existence as art that anything I could say would only be dim extrapolations from a text much superior to my ramblings. But this is the albatross that hangs over the neck of every reviewer of any work of media, so I will just have to swallow my pride and accept my infinite mediocrity in this regard.
So what is it [at least at my baseline acceptable level of describing it?] The closest thing I can think of that the general public would have at least some frame of reference for is Burroughs' "Naked Lunch", and indeed the cut-up fragmentary method of writing is there as well as a high abundance of page-by-page brutality and apocalyptic surrealism, but while literary threads undeniably link the two, Acker's approach is much different, and dare I say more successfully subversive. Her act of lifting text from other works entirely and incorporating it into the structure of her own has been long documented for its controversy, and is still pertinent in our world of increasingly suffocating IP laws and the devastating effects on art through as occurs when "stealing" is defined only with respect to its market value, but it's far from the only thing that makes this book such a radical text.
This novel is informed so boldly and inescapably from the political apparatus surrounding it that Kathy Acker's audacity in the places she goes here to paint this dystopic nightmare-adventure is remarkable by itself. People will tell you that unignorably political writing is a sign of poor writing, that political subjects should be left to the realm of news cycles and not the world of storytelling. Kathy Acker not only rejects this notion entirely, she spits on the very idea in a way bolder than any contemporary author I've read. Because for Acker, the personal, and thus the whole of human identity - in all its non-binary, ever-shifting, ever-expanding-and-contracting scope - is politics at its core. We cannot escape from "politics" anywhere, because the material world surrounding us and the ramifications of the societies we inhabit and consciously/unconsciously enable, structures that fuck with us down to a level that might as well be molecular, are everywhere, at all times, and we have to inhabit them no matter how hard we fight to make something better, while we die and bleed and suffer under the boots of an elite class who doesn't give a shit about us, especially the less white, able bodied and cishet you are. The oppressed fight boldly just to make it to the next day in the real world, so why the fuck should bold engagement with these "political" subjects be any different in fiction, in art? As exemplified through aforementioned IP laws whose manifestations under capitalism betray the thieving police state at its heart, art is among our cultural substructures most evidently wounded by this ouroboros of the profit incentive, so what else could there be but political art [even to creative cowards who try to claim their work as "apolitical", smugly thinking themselves above the very systems that inform their identities]? In the middle of the narrative, Acker stops to make the direct meta statement that language which shocks and offends the primary institutions of power is not only one of the most powerful tools that can be used within the framework of art and story, but a necessity for art as a whole if it is to be at all effective in combating the "normalizing institutions", as she says.
"What is the language of the 'unconscious'? (If this ideal unconscious or freedom doesn't exist: simply pretend that it does, use fiction, for the sake of survival, for 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 language or languages that aren't acceptable, which are forbidden. Language, on one level, constitutes a series of codes and social and historical agreements. Nonsense doesn't per se break down the codes; speaking precisely that which the codes forbid breaks the codes".
"Empire" is as clear a case for the necessity of subversion of the political apparatus through art as anything, it is a total triumph of successfully taking the world to task [of the Reagan era, and all of these deep-rooted institutions before and beyond] because of this precise way that Acker uses the medium of literature, whose substance is language. For me this book reaffirms that those who shame artists into avoiding engaging directly and bloodily with these topics are directly upholding a deeply fascist rhetoric of control, by telling those who exist inevitably under their traumatic systems that they are not allowed to strike back in a way that is among their most effective defenses against the daily insults and wounds they must contend with. I do not think that art can be Revolutionary in the sense that it can by itself enable radical change [nor do I think Acker believed this] on a collective scale, but I think the point being made is that art is a sword and shield, that it can push us through the fight and onward to something better - not the weaponry itself that cuts away the roots but the actual effort of the laborer, though the weaponry is by no means useless. We see this manifested in the novel itself - because this is shocking and truly countercultural art, it is alive and has weight, it effects and teaches and imparts meaning and raw feeling in a way only art is capable of. That's why art and fiction endures, and why works like this are timeless, because there is no other tool we can use to survive in this world that has remotely the same properties as art does, even if it might not effect direct change the most materially.
And so Acker is not afraid to plumb depths most writers would fear to tread, not only in subject matter and story but in the novel's very composition itself. It is postmodern, in the extreme in fact, if you think of something, especially the more fucked up it is, it's probably here somewhere. While there is a central plot framework to be found here, it's thrown into a whirling torrent of digressions, horrifyingly offensive language and hallucinatory flights of fancy and fucking [almost exclusively of the sort that would give the Marquis de Sade a run for his money], of words copied from other novels, of mutilated syntax and tortured typing errors, of heartbreaking forays into stories of broken homes and violent parents and examinations of the people at the margins; of philosophy and political theory, prose that reads like poetry, poetry that reads like prose; explorations of colonialism and religions destroyed by imperialism can be followed immediately by twisted indulgences of ostensibly genre-oriented fiction such as in the novel's approaches toward sci-fi, dystopian lit and adventure stories, before becoming hardcore pornography or just total schlock. And then some. Nothing is binary, nothing is fixed including gender or identity, characters in this novel seem to glide from body to body and mind to mind, they are man and woman at once and also neither, Abhor and Thivai and also everyone and no one. Because to fit anything in this book into a box would defeat the purpose, it is unbound and wild and free, no matter how dark it gets [and it goes blacker than pitch].
But the beating heart of Acker's novel is appropriately humanity, it is the burning drive for sheer, raw survival exemplified in Abhor and Thivai, that makes this book so engaging. If it were simply nightmarish nonsense, then its systemic approach wouldn't work nearly as well [as Acker is keen to point out], the impact would be diminished. People, and these characters, suffer, often for no reason, often because suffering is the order of the day in the world we live in, because the world is set up to destroy those who don't fit into the precise mold of the empowered orders. There is revolution and war, waste and senseless violence and disease and disability and addiction and the seemingly insurmountable gaps between men and women, the ill and the well, the poor and the privileged. But none of the struggling is ever worth nothing, no matter how entrenched these characters feel in the wasteful "nothing" surrounding them. The struggling, at this level, should not exist, but unfortunately for us, it does. But the characters here never back down or die, no matter how horrible things get, no matter the awful things people do to them and each other. Through the fluidity of identity, time and structure, and through the specifics of this time period it was written [the book very much feels primarily a statement on the evils of the Reagan era], this is a book that feels like a requiem for the disease of the world we live in and the lives of what could have been, but it also feels like a cry for life in the midst of all of that - there's this idea that humanity is disposed toward continuing and burning on and on no matter how bad things get. The world Acker paints is bleak, full of endless brutality and polluted, industrial waste, but as the ending statement shows us it's never one in which the fight, or not even the fight but just the sheer survival, is ever a hopeless task.
Can I recommend this? Not off the cuff, you really have to be in tune to what Acker is going for here to click with this, and some, maybe even most, people are just not going to be able to meet it on its level at all. And that's fine - no art has to be for everyone, which Acker no doubt understood given the extreme audacity of this work. But this is an extraordinary book, one remarkable both on its own merits and as an unbelievably valuable metatext that shows bare the near limitless potential of the power of art and language to give voice to the wounded; which, if there is such a thing as a primary function of art, it is not something nebulous like "beauty" but instead its capability of reaching out and establishing real connections between people who will never know one another directly, through nothing but the medium of fiction. I won't be forgetting this any time soon, and I'm very happy to know I live in a world where, for as horrible as so much of everything around us is, works like this can exist within it, unlimited and free and answering only to itself and those who will resonate with it.
rocketiza's review against another edition
1.0
First chapter reminded me strongly of Henry Miller. I hate Henry Miller.
slothroptightpants's review against another edition
2.0
I dunno man. It just felt like a series of erudite one-liners connected via a tissue of intellectualized resentment and trauma.
If you're like me and at first expected a transgressive piece of hallucinatory sci-fi, you won't get that. Transgressive, sure I guess. Gross stuff does happen. Hallucinatory, yes. Sci-fi? Not really. Character descriptions and attributes and choices hold almost no weight within the editorializing Acker prefers to do. A character is not really a robot. Just like characters who are gay is not really gay. It be simplistic to merely call them symbols that would assume some sort of semiotic consistency.
It is a book that rejects logic and causation in a very boring and self involved way.
I dunno. I'm probably just stupid. But what a bore.
If you're like me and at first expected a transgressive piece of hallucinatory sci-fi, you won't get that. Transgressive, sure I guess. Gross stuff does happen. Hallucinatory, yes. Sci-fi? Not really. Character descriptions and attributes and choices hold almost no weight within the editorializing Acker prefers to do. A character is not really a robot. Just like characters who are gay is not really gay. It be simplistic to merely call them symbols that would assume some sort of semiotic consistency.
It is a book that rejects logic and causation in a very boring and self involved way.
I dunno. I'm probably just stupid. But what a bore.
avalin1's review against another edition
challenging
dark
funny
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.0
aspmax's review against another edition
challenging
sad
tense
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated
4.5
Content Warnings
Graphic: Suicide, Murder, Racial slurs, Incest, Blood, Misogyny, Physical abuse, Sexual assault, and War
beckyramone's review against another edition
challenging
dark
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated
3.0
navah_c's review against another edition
4.0
Acker does it again. I loved this one, but I had to make myself focus at some points which i’ve never had with her before. That’s probably more of a me problem than a her problem, though. It wasn’t my favorite Acker (but alas, still mindblowing) and I’m sure I’ll read it again in the future.
écriture féminine at its finest.
écriture féminine at its finest.