“I was kind of conscious”: Queering the Neoliberal Body

Résumé 0

Two important essays by Acker, bookmarking “Against Ordinary Language: The Language of the Body” (on bodybuilding, among other things) and “The Language of the Body” (on masturbation, among other things) challenge the Cartesian binary between mind and body, self and flesh, that Acker rightfully identified as a historical legacy and oppressive mechanism of patriarchy. Yet these pieces, while explicitly rejecting eschewal of the body as a source of knowledge, reaffirm a sense not merely of connection with but even explicitly ownership of the body. In these pieces, Acker presents the body as a possession of the individual, one that can be controlled and enhanced, advanced along a trajectory of perfectibility. This myth—of the autonomous capitalist individual who owns his or her own body, who invests in it, measures its development, understands flesh not as self but as another part of the quantitative matrix of a world in which the self is sovereign as an agent capable of acquisition and exchange—is one of the central pillars of neoliberalism, too often unexamined even today. In “I was kind of conscious,” I analyze Acker’s experimental theorizing of the body with a critical eye, while returning to her earliest work on identity (such as the novel collection, Portrait of an Eye, too often dismissed by scholars as merely of a “postmodern” moment) to show how Acker’s oeuvre offers the possibility of queering the very notion of the body and the bodily that her later work (deeply influenced by her own concerns about health and mortality) reiterated. What Acker termed the “gift of disease” was, in fact, Gift (poison), prompting her to cling to and canonize an understanding of the body as possession that is inextricably bound to capitalism, a manifestation of what Wendy Brown calls capitalism’s “saturation of every part of existence.” Reading early Acker as a resource against this later Acker, I conclude with a hope for new (queer) artistic and intellectual ventures focused on breaking away from the capitalism mindset, capitalism’s colonization of our very sense of being.