The Arab woman: Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an Original Essay Physical and mental lust were eating away at my body at the same time I knew there was only loneliness. The CIA had cured loneliness in that city and turned the sun into a piece of ice. I decided that either I can die or I have to find the emotion again. . .I left New York City like you leave a lover's bed when you don't give a damn about the person you just fucked and it's 5:00 in the morning and the sidewalk is crawling like a dead cat.The Male Arab:The USA has destroyed everything we call human life and replaced religion. This religion is the worship of money and blind faith in stupidity. . . The United States has replaced mastery learning and rote memorization of facts with any education in life. Every aspect of life in the United States is now ready for death. Fucking only leads to disease. The United States is a cancer in the flesh of reality. All Americans are born sick and live writhing. The Arab woman: peace to the dead and those who bring death. Peace to my sick home, city of AIDS or the death of love. (Empire 168) As highlighted in 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 of angry desperation. In “Some Notes on Two of My Books,” Acker states that he writes with a sense of “immediacy” in an attempt to “present the human heart naked so that our world, for a second bursts into flames” (117). Acker's novel launches an angry terrorist attack against the senseless “bourgeois-patriarchal world of our fathers” to illuminate a dark and marginal edge of society that she argues is not so marginal (Empire 2). Acker employs bisexual terrorists Abhor and Thivai – part robot, part black woman and white pirate – to weave a discursive narrative through a near-future Parisian dystopia in which Algerians are waging a revolution "of the non-existents against their controllers economics” (Empire 6). .Empire emerged from an America in the early stages of the AIDS pandemic. Published in 1988, it followed President Reagan's first public mention of HIV, but the disease had attracted the world's attention. over 7 years (Global). By 1988, the virus had killed thousands and infected millions worldwide and was rapidly breaking its initial definition as a disease of gay men, but 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” (Global). Acker's voice resonates with the fear of a government controlling, directly or indirectly, through unnatural selection, a homophobic government that controls people's blood flow through the use of a viral agent (Clune 2). In the artist communities of San Francisco and New York City, friends were being killed by a disease that infected through love but conveyed economic segregation and social alienation, leaving lives shattered and fragmented: meaningless. Written in fragmentary, almost prosaic language, full of backstory. noise andForegrounded violence that makes conventional reading impossible, Empire of the Senseless conveys to the reader a frantic 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 ghostly presence of a shattered indefinable, almost intangible but definite meaning: the ghost of meaning. Essentially, the text presents a corporeal presence of meaninglessness (Glotfelty 250). This requires the reader to reject the notion of an autonomous work and to engage the text in historical context and theory in order to create meaning from the fragments (House 460). While elements of Empire can be seen to support and attack the tenets of each theoretical approach, Acker's sense of urgency suggests a framework with a practical and political objective. 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, of course, 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 work's urgent anti-capitalist message and clearly reveal strong support for Marxist philosophy. However, observing the failure of the framework shaken by individual desire and unconventional language, one can understand Acker's rejection of traditional theory even if it carries with it a complementary message that gives voice to the same exiled masses that she speaks of. By understanding the failure of Marxism in this novel, one can reshape Marxist theory into something that will accept the individuality called for by Acker and fit with the elasticity of this novel and postmodern culture. Many Marxist theorists believe that postmodern texts work against Marxism by being too difficult to follow to stage an effective attack on the subversion of ideologies, but others argue that the fragmented presentation of the postmodern text accurately reflects the violated and alienated characteristics of the oppressed and supports Marxist readings more appropriately than traditional works (Tyson 63). At the 1999 MLA conference in Chicago, 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 whatever and whoever they want, however they have to. One would expect the disenfranchised to rebel against the rich and the bosses. Those who have not should know that they do not have, that there are those who do and that those who have control them. Safe. No man wants to be a worm. Have a boss. But it was precisely the miserable German masses. . . who helped bring fascism to power. And it was that class in the United States that is moving from middle-class splendor toward lower-class stagnation or, rather, classlessness, that put Reagan, for example, in power and gave way to multinational corporations. (Empire 124) Abhor and Thivai explain the plight of the masses as trapped 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 in some way exemplify the exploited masses. Karl Marx defined capitalism as “exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions” (Marx 127). On capitalist exploitation, Marx and Acker are congruent. Through Abhor, Acker explains capitalismas “an accurate image of God: a despot who needs a constant increase in his power to survive. God equals capitalism. Therefore God grants a modicum of happiness to human beings. His victims. Because he needs their love. Human beings who do not love (God) suffer” (Empire 46). For Acker and Marx, capitalism is a dangerous religion that blinds the masses to their situation and leaves them exploited and victimized in its wake. However, in apparent contradiction, Acker explains God as both an ideological farce and a cruel dictator. It is precisely this contradiction that signals his deliberate turning point and the beginning of his shaking of the Marxist framework. Acker's disagreement with desire theory becomes strikingly clear through a return to his treatment of religion: I have wondered to the point of obsession whether other human beings are naturally evil, and if so why. Unable to answer this question, I prayed to the God they told me about. God is He who is unknowable. My sister was so evil and my nightmares were so violent that I knew every Creator had to be a sick pig. I called God "Sick Pig" and "Shit". Every time I saw dog poop on the street, I thought of God. (Empire 30) Marxist theory coincides in a certain sense with Acker's theory on religion. Terry Eagleton calls religion an “immensely powerful ideological form. . . capable of operating at every social level” (Eagleton 2244). However, Acker diverges from Marxism in recognizing God as a possibility rather than just an ideological fabrication. Acker's desire to target a cruel deity surpasses not only his concern for self-contradictions within the novel, but also his allegiance to Marxist precepts. Desire takes over. The Empire of the Senseless becomes truly problematic for a Marxist reading as 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, rules prevent, destabilize, and even kill the people who follow them” (Empire 219). In contemporary economic theory, the individual is interpreted as an “agent who chooses or maximizes utility” (Hodgson 364). In the Marxist view, desire fuels the oppressive ideology of the American Dream by keeping the individual occupied with acquiring and attempting to satisfy limited material desires (Tyson 53). Therefore, Marxist theory leaves little room for individual desire. It is a dangerous tool that shifts the focus onto the self and away from the individual's relationship with society. But for Acker, desire “is limited neither by an exclusively material reality nor by an exclusively 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 became an impossible situation, as reflected in Empire. Fear strengthened bourgeois taboos, resulting in 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 suicide and, in fact, physically damaged” (Empire 31). Yet Acker explains “masochism [as] merely 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 by rejecting social control. Acker's contradictory desires reflect his elevation of desire above all else. For Acker the desire isfundamental and it is “like having an infinite orgasm. Go and go and go” (Interview). Rather than reject or suppress desire, Acker chooses to attack the constructed patriarchal-bourgeois perception of desire. But to do so, he must attack the structure on which they rest: language. In addressing language, Acker blends together the context of the author and the world of the characters. Thivai protests, “All I know is that we have to achieve this construct. And her name is Kathy” (Empire 34). By inserting himself to bridge the traditional gap between the imaginary world and the author's reality, Acker pushes the reader to connect their context with the world of the text. To achieve this goal comprehensively, Acker rejects traditional narrative guidelines that define Wolfgang Iser's separation “between the explicit and the implicit, between revelation and concealment” (Iser 1676). Meaningless background noise thus proves to be an essential element of Acker's method. Iser elaborates on this loss of meaning by saying: “the lack of a common situation and a common frame of reference corresponds to 'nothingness', which determines the interaction between people” (Iser 1676). By embodying this relationship, Acker completely removes any hope of a common frame of reference and leaves it to 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 that echoes Karl Marx to "let our madness turn from madness to anger " (Empire 169). Acker recognizes the patriarchal literary tradition as key to the social perception of desire and, consequently, the destructive destabilization of bourgeois control. Thivai states that “the library was the central control network of American intelligence, its memory, what constituted its perception and understanding. (A hypothesis about the political uses of culture.)” (Empire 36). In a now familiar use of contradiction, Acker announces literature as his weapon against the oppressive system since “literature is that which denounces and tears apart the repressive machine at the level of meaning” (Empire 12). Acker prophesies that overcoming alienation means attacking the dominant linguistic system and the resulting bourgeois literary memory or tradition. Through Abhor, he says, ten years ago it seemed possible to destroy language through language: to destroy the language that normalizes and controls by cutting that language. Absurdity 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, on the one hand, constitutes a set of social and historical codes and agreements. Nonsense in itself doesn't break codes; by speaking exactly what the codes forbid, the codes are broken. (134) Acker seeks to replace patriarchal language with a forbidden and reciprocal language and a resulting new literature. Eagleton writes that literature itself “is an ideology” (Eagleton 2243). By inverting the rules of the dominant language and the resulting literary ideological system, Acker breaks convention and destabilizes reason because “in an unreasonable world, reason is not reasonable” (Empire 169). By replacing language with the socially unacceptable and rewriting literature with the voices of the alienated, 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 takes the reader on the journey. As Acker says, “when two peoplethey fuck, the whole world fucks" (A Few Notes 120). The traditional Marxist framework can explain the alienation and oppression experienced by Acker's characters, but it fails to incorporate the complexities of desire that create individuality. The frame seeks to criticize on the assumption that the means of communication through which the message is transmitted is sufficient. Since all acts are interdependent, heaven cannot be an absolute. theory does not work” (Empire 113). Yet, just as Acker builds his novels on the remnants of those novels that his attack on language discards, the Marxist framework can be used to reconstruct. again by looking at the structure and weak joints where it has been shaken by desire and language, it is possible to see it again and renew it together with Acker's revised reality. The breadth of Acker's anti-heterocentric, linguistic and classist attacks demonstrates the inability of a traditional Marxist frame to view the text, but by replacing the fixed and static points where desire and language push against the frame with a flexible and dynamic ideology, the frame can be made usable with postmodern text. The common, contemporary use of the term “anarchism” is that of a philosophical system free from law or accountability and plagued by violence and destruction (“anarchism,” def. 1). But this definition is woefully short-sighted. 20The Italian revolutionary of the century Errico Malatesta wrote extensively on anarchism and described the anarchist spirit as a “profoundly human feeling, which aims at the good of all, at freedom and justice for all, at solidarity and love between people; which is not an exclusive characteristic of self-declared anarchists but inspires all men” (Malatesta). Employing this Malatesta vision of anarchy in a literary sense offers a new perception as conventional conceptions of fixed personal truth fall into a flexible sense of individual choice. In this realization of human truth as an ever-evolving construction of desire rather than law, readers can erase the ideological fallacy that the human element is natural and redefine the ideological structure (Quigley 307). Applied to Marxist theory this expresses the relativity of human experience and human desire and the need for a change in dynamics. To accommodate this flexibility, the theoretical structure must be transformed from a rickety, nailed wooden form into an almost amoebic, flattened bicycle tire. Echoing Marx's transformation of socialism from an abstract concept into a detailed blueprint for revolution, Acker allows for a practical redesign of the theory and its application (Postgate 124). However, unlike Marx, Acker recognizes that people without individual desires – without individual hopes or dreams – are easy to control. So the question becomes: Is it more appropriate to employ a shaky structure that purports to undermine authority but exposes the individual to its own rigid control, or to adapt the rigid points of the structure to flex with the individuality of desire and the ambiguity of language? mind: this is just an example. Get a custom article from our expert writers now. Get a custom essay The necessary adaptation of the Marxist framework must allow the elimination of alienation even from itself. Functional portions of the Marxist perspective, such as the recognition of ideologies and socioeconomic forces underlying social change, can be extracted from the rigid framework and merged with the dynamic vision of individual truth and.", 1999.