Network(ed) confession: disidentification, digitality, and the politics of self-representation in the work of Kathy Acker and Joanna Walsh

This essay examines the intersection of life-writing, network systems, and literary experimentation. Confessional forms of literature have inevitably transformed with the proliferation of mass communications technologies and distributed computing networks. New media, particularly social media networks – as noted by Seb Franklin, Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, and others – overtly privilege the individual over forms of collectivity and solidarity. Tracing a lineage from the avant-garde writer Kathy Acker to the multimedia artist Joanna Walsh, this essay explores how the aesthetic politics of formal experimentation enables authors to bypass neoliberal society’s obsession with transparency and the ‘inner’ self. Building on the work of José Esteban Muñoz, I argue that, in their respective texts, Acker and Walsh present a counter- or non-confessional aesthetic mode underwritten by disidentificatory textual practice. Refuting both autobiographical genre conventions and the data capture systems of networks, Acker and Walsh model new forms of self-representation for the information age. Comparative close reading demonstrates the continuing significance of Acker’s work and the possibility of new networks of experimental writers and artists who challenge what is normative or ordinary.