Kathy Acker — "Against Ordinary Language: The Language of the Body" (1992) §1 · "Zero Kerning" —…

read Kathy Acker — "Against Ordinary Language: The Language of the Body" (1992) §1 · "Zero Kerning" — Craig Dworkin §3

Acker's failure to write about bodybuilding by writing about the failure to write about it — the essay eating its own tail, forgetting each time as the material condition of the account. Not repetition-as-stagnation but repetition-as-method: the sets, the reps, the seconds counted between, an entire vocabulary reduced to numbers because number is what survives when meaning is broken down like muscle tissue, broken down in a controlled fashion so it can grow back larger. Failure isn't the opposite of the practice, it's the engine of it. You fail on purpose, calibrated, into growth. I think of Krauss's grid recurring decade after decade without maturing, and wonder if that's not failure exactly but the same operation — the antinarrative loop that doesn't fail to develop so much as declines the offer, works instead toward its own kind of muscular density, growing thicker through iteration rather than taller through argument.

Dworkin's Goldsmith holds one variable constant — the interval, the kerning set to zero — and lets everything else reel free. That's the gym's logic too: fix the counting, fix the numeric scaffold, and let the muscle group tear and rebuild inside that fixed cage of reps. A monument made out of intervals rather than content. Day is twice removed from its source the way a bodybuilder's language is removed from ordinary syntax — not poorer for the removal but purer, closer to some threshold where the sentence becomes almost senseless, almost a grunt, almost just "do" or "fail." Both texts distrust the sentence that flows. Both replace flow with count.

Canetti's man with the jackknife pressed to the tongue, every day, the same threat withdrawn at the last second — that's a metronome too, a spacing regulated so precisely it becomes ritual rather than trauma, repeated until repetition itself is the content. The tongue that isn't cut. The muscle that isn't destroyed. The interval that holds the two apart and calls that holding a rhythm, a language, a body.