The following is excerpted from a conversation with Chris Kraus in Issue 101 of The Believer. Illustration by Charles Burns.
THE BELIEVER: What made you decide, with Summer of Hate, that this is the book I want to write? How did the writing of it begin?
CHRIS KRAUS: The book mirrors experiences I wrote about as they were happening. I was involved in a relationship with someone I met in Albuquerque, who’d spent time in prison for nonviolent, addiction-related offenses. Just like Paul Garcia in the book, he’d gone back to school, and was arrested in Arizona on a ten-year-old warrant while driving out to take summer classes at UCLA. This happened in 2006, and his arrest threw me into the thick of it. Of course it was upsetting, but it was also deeply interesting to me as a writer. Because even before meeting the person whose past Paul Garcia is based on, I’d felt profoundly uneasy about my life in the U.S. in the culture industry. Since ’02 or ’03, waking up in L.A., writing about art for a living, and teaching in MFA programs, I was fully aware of the horror going on just outside my bubble: the paramilitary atmosphere that arose with the “retaliation” to 9/11. The arrest brought me close to the hard version of this brutality. And I almost welcomed it. I’d wanted to talk about the soft, psychic forms of brutality we were experiencing, but that was almost impossible. Everything was already so fully entrenched. It was hard to find a way of addressing these topics without making oneself even more marginal. I really did feel as if I were living and participating in a police state.
BLVR: One of the things I found so compelling in Summer of Hate was the sense of injustice and anger you have—or that the Catt character has. It comes almost as new information to Catt.
CK: Yeah. If you open your eyes, the problems that concern us in our corner of the Western world, in the art and literary world, are like boom—so inconsequential and insular. You turn 180 degrees and a whole other set of problems emerges. It’s not as if Catt was unaware of what was going on in prisons, but engaging with it on a personal level, having it in your face, is another matter. You can read about prisons or genocide in Darfur; it’s not very real. It’s not part of your immediate world. Particularly in the United States, everything has conspired to make the prison experience as remote from the “general populace” as possible, to make the prisoners as completely an Other as possible. I don’t think that was always true. I think it goes together with the annihilation of working-class history in the United States. Historically, there would always be people among the general population who had family members, friends, cousins who’d done time or who’d been in prison.
BLVR: Did this dawning awareness make writing about art begin to feel sort of trivial?
CK: Yes. And it was even worse when—I guess after Abu Ghraib—the art world became engaged with “the political.” The insertion of the rendering it completely apolitical.
BLVR: How do you mean?
CK: As soon as we’re concerned with “the political” as opposed to “politics,” we’re dealing with an abstraction. Politics is topical—it’s what’s happening now, and we can either respond in the present or avoid it. I felt terrible writing for these magazines that had an “engagement with the political” but said nothing about the arrest, under the PATRIOT Act, of contemporary artists. It was considered so uncool, so obvious, and so kind of gross to talk about what was happening in front of our faces. Every day I woke up in a cloud, feeling a stone in my heart, and there was no way to break out of it, because there was this preemptive silencing. It’s like when everything is on the table and everything is so known, to even talk about it is so banal. You couldn’t talk about it.
BLVR: So when you became involved with this man and then everything happened to him—part of you thought, This is an opportunity to talk about politics?
CK: Right! It’s like, OK, I’m here now. I don’t have to look for a way. I’m here.
BLVR: In your years with Sylvère Lotringer, you were the wife of a man who everyone was interested in. He was who people wanted to talk to. I wonder what has changed in your writing or your place in the word now that you’re no longer with him.
CK: Oh, I nearly wept after I published my first book and started to give readings, and people wanted to talk to me—and they looked me in the eye and said my name! That was so wonderful.
BLVR: It’s interesting, because it’s sort of paradoxical. You might think that by attaching yourself to someone with power or influence, it’ll rub off. But the opposite happens if you’re—
CK: Right. But through no ill will of Sylvère or the people involved directly. There’s also this huge prejudice against the older man and the younger woman. So if you’re the younger woman in that equation, everyone is going to either treat you with contempt or see you as a puffball. That’s so screwed up, isn’t it? And now I’m sort of the older woman on the scene, and I have to really force myself not to look through those same jaundiced eyes. It’s unfair to just carte blanche see that. Everybody has their situation and their reasons.
BLVR: Can you speak about editing I Love Dick? You had two hundred letters to work from. What was the process?
CK: Well, I just went to the desert and I rented a cabin for a semester, and every day that I wasn’t teaching, I was at the cabin. And I was like, Right, I’m going to do five pages a day, here’s the pile of letters, there’s the pile of finished pages, and I got right to it. There was no angst.
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