Kathy Acker did not speak at the 1975 Schizo-Culture conference, but her “Persian Poems” did appear in the Schizo-Culture issue. The translated poems were later published in Blood and Guts in High School. And since the novel was not released until 1984, Schizo-Culture provided an early glimpse of the novel. The issue did not include the entire “Persian Poems,” but a line from Blood and Guts captures the oppositional aim of Acker's writing: “Culture stinks: books and great men and the fine arts.” For Acker, the writers and texts in the Schizo-Culture issue were directly political. As she explained in a 1989 interview with Ellen Friedman, Burroughs was an early influence on her work because he “considered how language is used and abused within a political context.” When Acker first read Deleuze and Guattari, she found that their work was concerned with politics. The artists and theorists who appeared in Schizo-Culture, then, were writing “about what was happening to the economy and about the changing political system.” Yet for Acker, the politics in these texts were ignored when academics began to bring them into universities. She accused academics of only using Deleuze and Guattari to build their careers. Semiotext(e), then, was interested in showing how the “American rhizome” expressed political critiques from Foucault, Lyotard or Deleuze and Guattari in their art. Acker frequently collaborated with artists from the Downtown scene. As she tells Lotringer, the conceptual artist Sol Lewitt “subsidized” much of her earlier work, and her first writings were distributed in the mail with other mail artists. Acker's early work first circulated in small DIY presses.

Acker discussed how critics often label these writings that traveled underground as experimental in order to “hide the radicalness of some writers.” Culture then “uphold[s] the postcapitalist [control] society, and the idea that art has nothing to do with politics is a wonderful construction in order to mask the deep political significance that art has.”