Informational Inheritance in Kathy Acker's Empire of the Senseless

"Collaborating . . . with Those I Hated": A Career in Plagiarism

Kathy 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 tradition 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 production. Acker's texts constitute a channel of intertextual transmission 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 surprisingly 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 entities" (192). In the case of human cultural life, Dawkins proposes a new replicator, analogous to the gene, called the meme (an abbreviation 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 themselves 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 replicated 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 cultural phenomena to genetic determinism, as sociobiology and evolutionary 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 subjects 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 triumphed at the expense of rivals whose extinction demonstrates their inferiority. Moreover, the entire memetic narrative has typically been cast in the most problematic terms of Whig history, treating cultural history, like its biological counterpart, as inevitably and perpetually progressive. It is important to note, however, that 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" associated 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...