AR: You touch on a lot of political issues in Summer of Hate, from the prison-industrial complex to Abu Ghraib trials, going on to call out the art world’s shallow engagement with politics during the Bush years. What did the art world’s involvement with politics look like then? How has that changed?

CK: During those years the art world was very taken with Situationism and critical theory, but less so with current events in the US. The people involved, of course, were less glamorous. The art world has changed since then. I don’t think it’s become more inclusive. More like it’s absorbed other humanist disciplines — independent film, dance, experimental music, pedagogy, literature, sociology — that have lost their distribution networks and have nowhere else left to go.

I’ve just written about Rolling Jubilee in Lost Properties, a monograph that will be part of Semiotext(e)’s contribution to the Whitney Biennial. Rolling Jubilee came out of Strike Debt, an Occupy Wall Street offshoot. Their idea was to purchase bundled bad debt at auction and then forgive it. It’s a conceptual gesture, much more effective, I think, than any half-assed “critique,” because it confronts the abstract-but-devastating laws of debt and capital on their own ground. You could say it’s a work of conceptual art. 

AR: Catt, the book’s protagonist, wants to change something, certainly her life, but maybe something broader. She has loose ideals, like buying out squatters instead of evicting them and encouraging Paul to employ formerly incarcerated men. She seems well intentioned but confused. I wonder if you experienced any of that yourself during the process of writing. How did you want it to work politically, if at all?

CK: That is the problem, right? In this case, everything, including the trajectory of the book, is partial, but better than nothing at all.