In a bourgeois narrative the text is supposedly a mirror of that which is outside the text, so the reason that you identify with the character is that you believe the character goes in this mirror version of your life, and comes out with some bit of knowledge. This idea, which is basically impossible after Roland Barthes, is that you can know, that you can read a text, that you can learn something, that you can in a way possess knowledge: you are a centralized identity, and you as this centralized "I" are capable of knowing it. I mean it's based on Descartes. I don't live in that kind of world, so I would never go to a piece of art thinking that I can get a moral message from it, and that I'm in that much control. I think the real relations are very different.

and

We don't live in a culture where everyone has the same culture. When I teach a class, my students come in and I don't think there's one single book that I can pick that every student has read. We don't have a common culture anymore.

- From a rad interview with Kathy Acker before she died in 1997. Radical yes.  .

Tweet

Pin It