An Essay on Kathy Acker & McKenzie Wark's I'm Very Into You

An essay about Kathy Acker and McKenzie Wark's correspondence is up at Full Stop. Just out, I'm Very Into You (Semiotext(e) 2015) tracks a "heated e-mail correspondence" between the two writers after they met on a trip to Australia in 1995. Hestia Peppe writes: "The first fragile emails are sent from the depth of “compound hangovers” and in Acker’s case, jetlag. From what follows emerges an ever-surprising epistolary interrogation of the possibility and recognition of the “radical difference” between one and other." More:

This work is not the outcome of a single will or intention but rather a discursive spiral, borne out of desire and loneliness. Reading it I encounter the products of collision and caress. I bask in the crossfire. Reluctant to 'identify' themselves by any means or terms, categories such as you and I, top and bottom, sub and Dom, man and woman, student and teacher, straight and queer are played with, turned inside out, discarded in the hope of achieving some kind of mutual recognition in the cracks between. Acker and Wark read each other, sometimes as if their lives depend on it and indeed, much of what common ground they have seems predicated upon a mutual passion for the practices of reading and the new ways of doing so afforded them by email. They crush on the medium as much as the message.

This little book might seem, from the outside, almost absurd in its arbitrariness, in the tininess of the time and space it describes and in the intimacy of what is bound within it. There’s a shamelessness here, a glorious exposure of the fragile email-space of a so clearly personal politics. The book must be read, not simply as the sum of its contents but also as a gesture, a choice. This is an offering but also a calculated spectacle; its publication is a framing that allows an opening up of a very specific kind. Whose gesture it is, ultimately, is obscured and presumably strategically so. Safe to say though, that everyone involved knows their Situationism.

The book is published by Semiotext(e) and begins with a foreword by Acker’s executor, and the book’s editor, Matias Viegener in which his own thinking behind the decision to publish is laid out plainly enough, though whose idea it was in the first place is not revealed. McKenzie Wark’s 'agreement' to the publication is made clear. Copyright is assigned to both Wark and The Kathy Acker Literary trust. Of how Acker would have felt about it, Viegener writes:

I’m sure Acker would never have agreed to [the emails’] publication were she alive but she is dead. What is it exactly that an executor does, other than answer queries and sign contracts? Perhaps we will know her differently now, and him as well. A dead writer can only exist in words and I publish these letters less in the spirit of total revelation than total text: everything in Acker’s life was text including her death.

Read the full piece at Full Stop.