- Cruising the Real Estate of Empire:Chris Kraus's Road Novels
What do you do with a KerouacBut go back and back to the sack with JackHow do you know when Jackhas come?You look on your pillow andJack is gone …
Barbara Burg (qtd. in Kraus, I Love Dick)
Shortly after Chris Kraus's Summer of Hate was published in 2012, fellow writer Sheila Heti interviewed Kraus for Believer magazine. The interview covered the expected topics of literary influence, being a female writer, and US politics, before taking a surprising turn when Heti asked Kraus if she had any "real estate advice" for her. Heti explained, "I think it's ingenious to try to make money in a separate realm from your creative work, as you've done. Not only because it makes sense on a financial level, but because you absorb a world that you wouldn't otherwise absorb." While demurring from offering concrete advice, Kraus enthusiastically responded:
Yes. It's tremendously interesting, and people are less petty there than in the art world, because it's just about numbers. At one point, instead [End Page 67] of ge ing a tenure-track job, I decided to make real estate investments and operate these properties as lower-income, affordable housing. Buying and fixing, and then renting and managing, was a way of engaging with a population completely outside the culture industry. Kind of like in gay culture, where hookups are a way of escaping your class. (emphasis added)
What Kraus presumably has in mind is something like Samuel Delany's vision of the "interclass contact and communication" offered by the economic and social practices of cruising.1 We might call this a fantasy of cruising by real estate. Yet the final "kind of" is doing an awful lot of work here, effacing the fundamentally parasitic relationship of landlordism by recasting it into a social or theoretical form that subverts heteronormativity and upsets class hierarchies.
Equally strange is Heti and Kraus's insistence that real estate falls outside the sphere of culture industry and is separate from Kraus's creative work. The occasion of the interview, after all, was the publication of a novel about an artist who attempts to develop lowerand middle-income properties in Phoenix, Arizona, suggesting that in fact Kraus's creative practice at least draws on her business. Summer of Hate is not unique here: Kraus's novels consistently turn to real estate. I Love Dick (1999) circles around the primal scene of her own displacement from New York's Lower East Side, itself driven by a nexus of galleries and developers;2 and Torpor (2006) extends the discussion of art making and gentrification to Berlin, the deindustrialized town of Thurman, and to Kraus's own real estate practices in Los Angeles.3 Taken together, Kraus's work offers one of the [End Page 68] most remarkable and sustained literary exemplars and evaluations of the entanglements of art and real estate in the subjectand spacemaking practices that have undergirded American empire's neoliberal phase. "In our time," Fredric Jameson has argued, "all politics is about real estate. … [P]olitics is essentially a matter of land grabs, on a local as well as a global scale" (13). Kraus's work delineates precisely why and how this has worked since the 1980s.
How to explain this surprising disconnect between the discussions of art and real estate in her novels and that found in her interview? This disjuncture can best be understood in generic terms. Dan Sinykin has argued that under the conditions of what he calls the "conglomerate era" of literary publishing, "two distinct trends … mark contemporary fiction: literary genre fiction [… and] autofiction" (473–74). Like many other critics, Sinykin places Kraus's work under autofiction (Bewes; Noys). Autofiction is an important genre for Sinykin because it "displays … the anxieties of authorship" at the center of conglomerate-era publishing (463). Paul Crosthwaite has extended Sinykin's argument, suggesting that autofiction explores and negotiates the tensions "between complicity and critique; co-option and autonomy" that are reflective not just of literary publication but of the "intertwined logics of literary and financial...