‘TO SHOW: DIVERGENCE FROM STANDARD FORM OF STRUCTURE; FORM HAS MEANING’ Kathy Acker writes in bold capitals in an unpublished notebook. The alignment of form and content is the starting point of this book. It brings together two interrelated axes of Acker's practice: her continuation of radical modernism's preoccupation with the crisis of language, and the avant-garde concern for producing art orientated towards the transformation of society. For early twentieth-century modernist writers the imbrication of form with content was a hallmark of their literary practice. The commitment to experimentation in form and language, upheld by writers such as Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, H.D., and James Joyce, is integral to the challenge modernist writers sought to pose to nineteenth-century realism. It was a key characteristic of their larger concern with the medium of writing. The precise nature of that concern with the medium of writing is crucial. Theorists of the avant-garde have attempted to draw a distinction between modernism and the avant-garde on the issue of aesthetic autonomy. Peter Bürger's now classic work Theory of the Avant-Garde (1974) has been read widely by scholars as distinguishing modernism and avantgardism specifically with regards to the issue of aesthetic autonomy. For Bürger, modernism strives for aesthetic autonomy, and in doing so falls victim to the insularity and elitism characteristic of artfor- art's sake aestheticism. The avant-garde, on the other hand, in Bürger's view, has the sublation of art and life as its central goal. Richard Murphy makes a more subtle distinction between modernism and the avant-garde:

Acker echoes this critical distance in 1979 when she states: ‘The difference between a writer and its world gives the reason for writing.’ For Bürger, avant-gardism was possible only at the start of the twentieth century, since after World War II the avant-garde's critique of art as an institution is reabsorbed by the art institution itself or is reasetheticised.