Philosophy for Spiders: On the Low Theory of Kathy Acker by McKenzie Wark (review)

Philosophy for Spiders: On the Low Theory of Kathy Acker, McKenzie Wark's new book on the late author, appears to break with the telegraphic intimacy of their published email correspondence, I'm Very into You (2015). In the first part of Philosophy for Spiders, Wark visits Acker in San Francisco, where they eat, ride a motorcycle, and fuck. Yet the book is not a literary biography like Chris Kraus's After Kathy Acker (2017). Wark instead aims for "a writing-and-reading between bodies rather than subjects." Philosophy for Spiders shows how bodies create concepts; or as Wark later explains: "the critical theory here is bottom theory." When Acker fucks Wark with one of her dildos, static gendered pronouns become inadequate to describe the experience. "He (her) fucks him (her) while her (him) fucks her (him)." The sex Wark remembers with Acker reads a lot like one of her own texts. As Acker tells Sylvère Lotringer, "in my world people don't even remember their names, they aren't sure of their sexuality, they aren't sure if they can define their genders." Wark takes this radical project seriously in Philosophy for Spiders, which she describes as a "revolution to unleash the generative, generous capacity of non-identity-for anyone and everyone." Her new book on Acker resists a complete portrait of the late author and her work. Yet any serious engagement with Acker will do just this, as it is the incompleteness of identity that makes her writing revolutionary.

How should we read the I in Kathy Acker? In I Dreamt I Was a Nymphomaniac (1974), one I answers that she "means an unknown number of individuals," where "each individual exists for a present duration and exemplifies one or more characters." Wark describes the I in Acker's work as an act of "selving," which creates "a philosophy not of subjectivity and its pet projects but of selves as things that happen to be wild in the world." The individual character we might expect to find in the (bourgeois) novel does not last long in an Acker text. At the end of Blood and Guts in High School (1984) Janey Smith dies, but "soon other Janeys are born, and these Janeys covered the Earth." When Janey begins to write her book report on The Scarlet Letter, she takes on the identity of Hester: "I, Hester, am a red house lost in the thickening mist." Hester is one of the Janeys, and the men who "own the language" note how the rebels in Blood and Guts "are all Janeys. They're all perverts, transsexuals, criminals, and women." Wark will later add that this act of "selving" is also a "philosophy for brutes: women, slaves, beasts … whose skill is threading words together as its own kind of more carnal love." In Acker's work, individual characters are not overly concerned with self-expression. A character in an Acker text instead speaks in a kind of collective enunciation that expresses selves over a self. As Wark reminds us, Acker appears more interested in "eyes rather than an I. The compound eyes of spiders." This is the first philosophy in the Acker-web.

Acker, then, writes in what Deleuze and Guattari call a minor literature. She might say, with them, that what matters is not so much the "I" but that "we are no longer ourselves … we have been aided, inspired, multiplied." Such literature "selves" the subject in order to find this more collective expression. Wark too wants to "push [Acker] back in the direction of, in every sense, a minor literature," especially since her posthumous reception has made her more of a canonical figure. She specifically wants to see Acker as a writer of trans lit, and Wark concludes Philosophy for Spiders with a summary of the Trans | Acker symposium that she organized at The New School. Wark does not want to...