“Capitalism needs new territory or fresh blood.' 4 It has colonized all of the domains of the sacred and subordinated them to itself. Viewed as organisms, they’ve attained immortality via biochips.' 3 Commodification as control seizes hold not just of labor but of everything. “The multinationals and along with their computers have changed and are changing reality. Sometimes it is in its own self-identity eternal, but with new qualities. Ackers witnessed a quiet but violent transition: “my reality, between post-industrial and computerization.' 2 “You never recognize an end when it’s happening.' 1 But from the vantage point of New York, London, and San Francisco, Ackers witnessed this strange post-capitalism emerge as it extended the commodity form into aesthetics and information, but in the process modified the commodity form itself. This might then still be a world with a ruling class extracting a surplus from dominated classes, including labor as traditionally understood, but which might also have added some other means of domination to its arsenal. One is the revolutionary possibility of life without exploitation, but the other is that exploitation itself might have changed form. Post-capitalism has two senses in the Acker-web. Leaning heavily on her own sentences, I want to rip off and copy out for you what the Acker-web has for us on the current topics of post-capitalism, agency in the world, revolution, and aesthetics. From the vantage points of New York, San Francisco, and London, these Ackers saw the political economy of the old overdeveloped world die, and something else bubble up through the cracks. A low theory of feminist revolution, but where “feminist” and “revolution” come to mean other things. There was, I think, an Acker or series of Ackers in the Acker-web who were not writers of fiction but of theory. And not all of her identities, in life or art, were female. There was always an Acker-field or Acker-text or Acker-web in which lots of Kathys pulsed and ebbed in and out of identity, alongside plenty of Janeys and Lulus. And nor do I want to write as if there is only one Acker. The Acker I want to write into existence is not a literary one. It is that their writing contains still pertinent possibilities. It is that their writing can be made into all sorts of different writing afterwards. What makes a writer live on after their own life and fame is nothing particular. Some most excellent writing has made for us Ackers who speak a literary language for our time. There are many ways in which Kathy Acker remains our contemporary.

Kathy acker great expectations