Chris Kraus Sept/oct 2000

When Chris Kraus’ second novel, Aliens & Anorexia came out recently, it was greeted with some hostility.  Kraus is an easy target for critics, seemingly exposing herself, warts and all, through her writing.  Aliens & Anorexia details, among other things, the exquisite failure of her film, Gravity and Grace.  As with her first book, I Love Dick, the reader is presented with a very personal “I” narrator named Chris who struggles to come to grips with her world through philosophy, sex and despair.  In I Love Dick, the sex is dominant — Chris documents her sexual obsession with one of her husband’s associates. 

They are unsparing, provocative books, and, in their way, beautiful.  Both are part of the Native Agents fiction series — which Kraus herself also edits — published by the esteemed independent press Semiotext(e).  Established in the late 70’s as a series of contemporary philosophy and psychoanalytic theory, Semiotext(e) is the brainchild of Kraus’ husband, author and critic Sylvère Lotringer.  Since the inception of Native Agents five? years ago, the series has brought forward quite a few of the most interesting voices in contemporary fiction, people like Eileen Myles, Lynn Tillman and Michelle Tea. 

A nomad, Kraus now lives in LA.  We caught up with her there on a recent summer day. 

I:  Tell me, when that scathing review of Aliens and Anorexia came out, why do you think that that happened?  It was like it wasn't even talking about your books.

S:  Well, I think maybe in my books the thing that's so tricky -- I would say it's because I like to do things like use the word "cunt" and Kierkegard in the same sentence.  And people find that very confusing.  [BOTH LAUGH]

I:  Thank God you do, somebody does ...

S:  You can't do that.  You can do one and you can do the other, but not in the same sentence.

I:  Oh, please don't tell me you can't do something.

S:  People find that really, really disturbing. The personal experience part of my book is unprocessed and vulnerable and raw and out there.  But it's very much within a conceptual frame.  And then it's mixed in with all the philosophy and all the ideas.  They want to criticize the vulnerability of the personal stuff as being self-indulgent, narcissistic, etcetera, etcetera.

I: That’s what I found interesting in your books, particularly in I Love Dick, was the notion of failure as an effort towards a continuous destabilization.  You took that destabilized situation and you wouldn’t let go of it.

S:  And that’s an acting thing.  You take on a certain task as an actor and you see it through to its very end.  I grew up with all that.

I:  Did you?  Now where did you grow up?

S:  Well, I grew up as a sort of baby in the underground.  I left New Zealand when I was 21 to study Experimental Theater in New York.  And I worked with Mabou Mines and people from the Wooster Group, and I did all that for years.  But yeah, because I'd grown up with those acting games and exercises; when I finally started writing after all those years, I really felt the doing of the writing was like a performance task.

I:  That's exactly how I felt when I first read your books.

S:  And within that performance task you're both completely sincere and committed to what you're doing and feeling; and you're also apart from it and aware of how it's being presented to an audience.  You're not doing it alone.  And so that makes you be all kinds of things.  It makes you be [aggressive], funny, witty, entertaining, pathetic, mournful.  I mean, there's not enough entertainment in the avant garde, right?  [BOTH LAUGH]

I:  Right, obviously.  And did you meet Sylvère at the time you were doing the theater work?

S:  I met Sylvère in 1980, for the first time.  I met him because I invited 10 famous people to my first kind of big show in New York.  And he was the only one who showed up.  And so we got to be friends after that.  But that was when he was doing Schizo Culture, Anti-Oedipus, the [Autonomia] issue of Semiotext(e). These were like really massive issues that took 10 or 12 people working together maybe a year to produce them.  And the German Issue was the last major thing that Sylvère worked on.

I: I was looking at this whole list of the publishing history of Semiotext(e), and it has the Native Agents books, which we're going to talk about in a little bit.  But it also has the Foreign Agent series, the Double Agent series, the Journals; which is what I remember when I was a student --

S:  Right, the Journals.  That's what we're talking about.  So that stopped.  I mean, Sylvère's involvement in it and the kind of great big ones that everybody knew stopped around 1980.  And around that time, he of course had been in touch for years with Baudrillard, Gurillio (?), Foucault, Deleuze and Guardire (?) in France.  He had known these people since the late '60s, early '70s.

I:  So did he go to school with them?  How did he know them? 

S:  Partly he went to school or was around Paris at that time before leaving. And then he kept going back in the '70s and he would organize kind of summer things, like: "Let's all be in residence in a chateau and talk about ideas."  He had that with Deleuze and Guardire and Lyotard and other people one summer.  So anyway, these people were his pals and their work was coming out in France, but had really not come out at all in America.  And Sylvère I think saw bringing it out as a kind of intervention in the institutionalized American Left at that time, which still counted for something

     So Sylvère wanted to publish these little volumes. And his idea of it was to present the Theory Brute -- no introductions, no translator's preface, not the great big academic press version; but a tiny little fragment that could be carried around in your pocket and read by anyone on an as-needed basis.

I:  Which is how they definitely functioned.  Sort of primary text for every student in art school, every philosophy student.

S:  And they were the ones that people wanted to read.  They were the ones that would get passed from person to person to person.

I:  Because I was wondering, why was it that group? 

S:  Well, that was the group that he knew. And the one defining fact of all of those philosophers was that it was the psychoanalytic and socially based approach towards talking about things.  I always wondered why there were no women?  ... the Genesis of the Native Agents series, I mean, after a point it just appalled me that there could be 30 volumes and all of them were by middle aged European men.

I: In some ways the Native Agents series was exactly what was missing from Semiotext(e).

S:  Yeah.

I: Were they a way of thinking about subjectivity beyond the notions of psychoanalysis, gender politics?

S:  Exactly.  A way of thinking about subjectivity outside of psychoanalysis, outside of narrow gender politics.  And so the Native Agents books were really like a radical practice of subjectivity.

I:  Because the writing is of a personal "I" nature.  Not that it's necessarily diaristic or journalistic, but that it's an "I" speaking.

S:  Right.  And that's so easily and still so often misread. The whole idea that it could really be conceptual, that the "I" could appear in many ways through different masks is lost on a lot of people.  It's read as true confessions.

What groups our books together is that it's a very polemical "I" and the outcome of the narrator isn't necessarily central to the action of the book.  They're very robust adventures and funny books.  I don't think that we've ever published anybody who's been through a creative writing program.  [LAUGHS]  They're very aggressive and funny and extroverted.

I:  They're action books.

S:  They're adventure books, which is also so still lacking from female writing.  Female writing is still kind of small, closed, domestic; such a macro macro picture.  And these are kind of great big adventure books.

I:  One of the things that I admired so much in your books was that ability to take to task what I refer to as an academy of the boy dominant theory; actually both in I Love Dick and in Aliens and Anorexia.  Was that something that was particularly important to you?

S:  Part of what I've hoped to do with the series was to help create a girl underground culture.  My generation…growing up around the underground, it's so hard to find your place in it as a girl, because nearly everybody you admire is a boy.  And where does that leave you?

I:  Longing for daddy still.  [BOTH LAUGH]

S:  So I see all the books that I publish, except for the boys, and there are a few boys in there; but I definitely see it as presenting this underground female adventure hero.  I really want a female adventure hero.  And in my own books, because I've been so close to this male avant garde theory and rhetoric, and it's so much a part of who I am and how I see the world, I need to work through it and find a way of claiming bits of it as mine and rejecting and redefining other bits of it.  Like talking about chance in Aliens—is there a female Chance and how would the female Chance be different from the male?  I did the Chance Event in '96.  I spent a year organizing this big philosophy ... in the desert with Baudrillard and D.J. Spooky and like a million people.  The theme Chance was so compelling to people.  And Chance is such a great trope of the avant garde of the last hundred years. 

     But it started seeming to me, just from my own experience and little stories that I tell in the book, the female Chance is so much more defenseless and wild.  Male Chance somehow has to be engineered and arrived it.  But for a female to cut herself loose in the world is to open yourself up to chance. And how is that different? 

I: I was very interested in that Aliens and Anorexia review, they were taking to task the notion of failure.

S:  There's something so taboo about a female admitting failure.

I:  And why is that?

S:  Well, I think it's because the true condition of the female in our culture is seen to be so corrupt and so dirty, that anybody who breaks the act of covering that up is really villainized.  That conventional academic feminism will do everything to escape from a point of quote, "abjection."  And I hate the word "abjection."  I mean, abjection being just real human experience -- pain. 

I:  So it's both an entrapment from a sort of academic feminist camp and a sort of general male cultural camp?

S:  Yeah.  Academic feminism of course wants to be better than we are, and I want us to be worse than we are.

I:  It's breaking the sort of good girl routine.  Those breaks are a kind of ... psychic investigation.

S:  Exactly.  To make conceptual use of that breaking point. And I think the emotion part too, I really needed to talk a lot in this book about emotion; and try and elevate emotion to some philosophical place.  Which even within the realm of high philosophy is not very often done.  But I needed for emotion to be a philosophical property, something tangible and real that can be worked with.

I:  And we haven't taken that on as --

S:  As public material.  Yes.  Because it's so privatized. And then people look at it and to explore it as narcissistic. And we need to claim it as big material.

I:  It's that fear of the private.

S:  And the personal as political thing of feminism of the '70s only went so far.  They didn't treat the personal as conceptual material.  When in fact the thing is to take it and move with it as some kind of philosophy adventure too.

I:  That's a great way of thinking about your books.  As philosophy adventure heroine stories.  [BOTH LAUGH]

S:  I always thought that way.  When I made my very first film when I was 23, I called it An Adventure In Lonely Girl Phenomenology.

I:  I was thinking of them also as sort of archaeological books; like I Love Dick, at first I didn't read it for a really long time because I thought: "Well, I know it, because I know the art world," and I was sort of: "It seems so insular."  But when I read it, I was completely blown away about how far it went, it became like I was on an archaeological dig and you have to keep going because you started finding all these things.

S:  Well, my commitment in writing the book was that I was going to use myself and my own experience as a case study.  So if I'm going to do that, then everything needs to be laid bare and come into it.  You need all the facts.  And one of the great ethos' of the art world is that everything is transacted under the table.  In a case study, you bring it onto the table so you can look at it.

I:  What’s your process like when you’re writing?

S:  When I write these books, I'm writing them in real time.  And I think that makes a great difference.

I:  So explain that -- to write a book in real time.

S:  To write a book in real time means that the most abrupt and startling associations might occur, but not necessarily in an avant garde conceptual, consciously juxtaposing way. And so when I write biographically about Thek and Vale, it's because I'm really trying to locate them in the present -- for myself, as people that I can sit with and talk to.  So both of the books happen very very much in the present time of writing. And if you're following a narrative line at all, the narrative that you're following is the person who is telling you the story. And that's also a theater idea.

I:  So what are you writing about in your next book?

S:  The third book has to do with Romania.  The Chris and Sylvère characters come back. And it's Chris and Sylvère in Romania on this hopeless, goofy mission to supposedly adopt a Romanian child.  And they're in Romania one year after the revolution in Temisfara.  And we find their efforts to adopt a child are about as sincere as the Romanian revolution. 

I:  When you wrote I Love Dick, had you gone through this? 

S:  Yeah, yeah, yeah.  The three books are really an unraveling of experience all kind of glommed together in a certain time, over a couple of years.  And it takes three books to open up this stuff and deal with it.  So in the Romania book, there's the Chris and Sylvère story of this couple, this strange, childless, middle aged couple, and all their little deals and all their infantilized couple behavior; but also the magnificence of their couple.  And then the story of Romania, which is a country with this tragic history.  And some of the Sylvère character, a lot of his own world view and behavior is colored by his having lived through the holocaust.  And I want to look at that more closely, just the legacy of political disasters across generations of people.

I:  How we don't escape them.

S:  No, they don't stop.  And they go from Sylvère down to the next generation, and maybe even the next. And the same I'm sure is true of Romania and the violence there.

I:  Absolutely, exactly.  Are you working on that now?

S:  That's what I'm going to start working on.  I'm just making little notes for it now.

I:  When you sit down to write, do you write it all at one time?  Or have you been sort of collecting notes for that book before?

S:  I write little parts.  I write them out of my notebooks.  And then when I sit down to work, I usually have these parts and I start with the parts.  I'm not one of those people who is always writing three hours a day.  I'm either on it or I'm not.  And then the time of the book becomes the time to make sense of all of that and find the through line of it.

I:  Well, what I find so interesting about the three books together is that it follows quite a few generations.  You mentioned Sylvère, who went through World War Two.

S:  Well, this holocaust stuff is amazing.  Have you ever read this book, Rilibok?

I:  No.

S:  By Sara Kaufman.  She was actually a friend and contemporary of Sylvère's, had been an academic psychoanalyst all her life, great career in France.  She, like Sylvère, was a hidden child during the War.  She never talked about it in her life.  When she turned 60, she wrote this thin little book, which was an account of that year-and-a-half of being a hidden child. And she killed herself right after the book came out. 

I:  Oh my God.

S:  And there are more and more Sylvères back there now.  People, 60 years old, 61, 62, who have lived with this in silence all their lives and realize that they've hardly been alive; the experience was so devastating. 

I:  How old was he when he was hidden?

S:  He was six, seven, eight, hidden with a Resistance family, a Catholic farm family.  And told that if he ever said his real name, the entire family would be killed.

I:  And then how did he come back to his original family?

S:  His family had hidden and stayed safe during the Occupation -- the immediate family.  The family in Poland, of course, forget it. 

I:  So that's a huge responsibility for a small child.

S:  Right.  The incredible guilt afterwards, the responsibility, just having to be absent from one's own experience.

I:  How long were you in Romania for?

S:  Oh, a very short time.  It was completely exhausting.  It's such an impossible place.  It's so desperately poor and backward and filthy.  We were very lucky we didn't get arrested.

I:  Why?

S:  Because we showed up there with no plan. 

I:  So you're writing your own books and you're publishing The Native Agents. And do you have other people who you're about to publish for Native Agents?

S:  Yeah.  In the Fall we're publishing the poet and writer Fanny Howe’s book Indivisible.  And we're publishing Bob Flannagan's The Pain Journal, which was his last work; which he wrote for the last year before he died, and chronicles the falling apart of his body with Cystic Fibrosis.

I:  But it is very funny and beautiful -- I heard him read from it.

S:  It's a fabulous book.  I've been working on that with Sherry Rose, his partner, who's been incredibly heroic in her presentation of this.  I mean, whether she looks good or bad in the work, she's committed to presenting it.

I:  So how many books do you try to publish a year or every couple of years?

S:  Well, we're now going to be exclusively distributed by MIT, which is going to make our books much more available and better distributed.  Now that we've made this change, we're going to publish at least eight books a year.

I:  Now who's "we"?

S:  Sylvère and I.  Between Foreign and Native there will be eight books a year.

I: Do the distributors pay your writers, or do you?

S:  No, no, no.  The whole basis of Semiotext(e) for 25 years has been: "If no one gets paid, then you can do what you want."  So you never wait for a grant.  You never wait for funding.  You just do it when it's time to do it.

I:  Do you do book tours?

S:  Well, kind of, in our sort of funky little amateurish way, yeah, we do.  [LAUGHS]

I:  So where do you go?

S:  Oh, I organized one once in California.  I brought Ann Royer and Eldon Garnet, and the three of us toured around and read.  And Michele Tee of course is a great tourer of her work.  She's in the group Sister Spit, and she's always on the road touring.  And other of the writers -- Eileen Miles, she's always touring. 

I:  And are you? 

S:  Oh, yeah.  I read whenever, wherever I can.  We read everywhere.  Bars, clubs, schools, museums.  [LAUGHS]

I:  Did you act in your own movies ...

S:  A couple times, yeah.

I:  I've a few of them, but I don't remember you in ...

S:  Yeah, I played the curator in Gravity And Grace.

I:  In the books you have brought up, that you have brought up sort of this notion of the truth of the self.  You investigate a kind of psychological dilemmas.  You investigate political dilemmas or social.  And then you do, particularly like through this [Simon ?], where you talk about her in this line between politics and a kind of religion or transcendentalism.  So that's interesting that you talk about Isherwood and his move towards Hinduism, and his move towards a kind of truth that's almost not attainable.  I mean, because that truth is just a process, and could be read in the same way as the Black Books.

I:  But you know, I even heard this story that Lacon, when he first came here, had a hard time being recognized; that it actually was Baudrillard that was getting ... I mean, I don't know if I have this story correct, but he had a hard time because he wanted to be in the psychoanalytic community when he came here to America, but they didn't take him seriously.  So he kept getting put in the philosophy sort of conferences or talks and things like that. And he kept trying to go talk to other people in the medical field, and they just wouldn't have him.

S:  But then it kicked in in a huge way within cinema studies and film and all of that, and all these feminists spending all this time reading Lacon.  I mean, Baudrillard had the same experience.  When he first came he was giving lectures to like five people.

I:  Well, this was why when I was asked to do this interview