Acker produced a number of notebooks as preliminary materials for My Mother: Demonology (1993). In one, a note reads: ‘Cut into very short beautiful sections.’ Acker's textual instruction to herself reveals the significance of the cutting technique to the production of literary aesthetics in the work. Acker programmatically adopts montage composition as the apparatus of My Mother: Demonology, as both a continuation of her experimentation with producing indeterminacy, and, related to this literary experiment, as a form of aesthetic resistance to the climate of cultural censorship in the US that was brought about by the Bush administration from 1991 to 1993. As Chapter 2 observed, cutting and montage are crucial to modernism. For Walter Benjamin, montage, in particular the ‘epic’ theatre of Bertolt Brecht, was testament to the avant-garde work of art's capacity to use fragmentation and the discontinuous form for progressive means. In montage, Benjamin states, ‘the superimposed element disrupts the context in which it is inserted’. Benjamin explains that montage: ‘emerged around the end of the war, when it became clear to the avant-garde that reality could no longer be mastered’. For Benjamin montage enabled ‘reality to have its say – in its own right, disordered and anarchic if necessary’. The importance of montage for Benjamin was, as I stated at the outset of this book, its ability to preserve, through discontinuous form, the progressive elements of the avant-garde work of art. ‘The Author as Producer’, given as an Address at the Institute for the Study of Fascism in 1934, has a political urgency. Benjamin believed that the organic work of art posed a risk in instating a false illusion of reality and of a harmonious social whole. In the early decades of the twentieth century, film emerged as the quintessential medium of montage practice, most notably in the work of the Soviet avant-garde filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein. In film montage, Benjamin understood the juxtaposition of elements to have the capacity to meet ‘a new and urgent need for stimuli’. The radical juxtaposition of elements in film was able to establish ‘perception conditioned by shock [chockförmige Wahrnehmung]’ as a formal principle.