Lauren Berlant Interviews Claudia Rankine in New Issue of BOMB

In the fall issue of BOMB, Lauren Berlant interviews Claudia Rankine, whose new book Citizen: An American Lyric, is just out from Graywolf (and nominated for a National Book Award, and reading tonight at the Poetry Foundation!). "We are both interested in how writing can allow us to amplify overwhelming scenes of ordinary violence while interrupting the sense of a fated stuckness," writes Berlant. That is so entirely on point for us today. They also discuss tone and spectatorship (particularly at the recent Kara Walker show), photographer Jeff Wall, and the images that run throughout the book:

CR One of the ways your book Cruel Optimism works for me is that it talks back to the unreadable or unbearable encounter. Like Baldwin, you offer pathways to consider, sidestep, and groove into disruption. The images in Citizen were intended to work in a similar way. I was attracted to images engaged in conversation with an incoherence, to use your word, in the world. They were placed in the text where I thought silence was needed, but I wasn’t interested in making the silence feel empty or effortless the way a blank page would. In your Sex, or the Unbearable, you say the experience of “any non-knowledge is not usually a blockage or limit but is actually the experience of the multiplication of knowledges that have an awkward relation to each other, crowd each other out, and create intensities that require management.”

The first image in Citizen is a 2007 photograph taken in a suburban subdivision in Flowery Branch, Georgia, of Jim Crow Road. When I first saw the image I wondered if it was photoshopped, but it’s an actual road curiously named after a James Crow (why not stick with James?), according to local lore. The photographer, Michael David Murphy, has a series entitled Unphotographable, in which he writes about photos that, unlike Jim Crow Rd., he couldn’t take for one reason or another—text stands in for the place of the image. In this case, his image stands in place of my text. The tangential relation of the images with the text, in a sense, mimics a form of “the public.” They are related and can be taken in, but, at times, are hardly touching, or they come up in a different context elsewhere in the text, before or after they appear. Jim Crow Rd. comes after a piece about being in middle school. Presumably the school is on a road; here is another road. All these roads make up the country.

LB I had wondered whether you thought something like that—that the images in Citizen could show what was exhausting/unbearable to witness once more in speech about the ordinary violence and world-shaping activity of American racism. A desperate desire is at work there for something to be self-evident, the force of which would change a situation. But Citizen lives meditatively enraged in a world where truth cannot be spoken to a structure. It emerges only in the spaces in which structure reveals itself in form—in each other, in other people’s storytelling, in aesthetic mediation, in indirection. One wishes that talking back (in an internal monologue or into the air, for example) at the television, grabbing its lapels with the screen grab, as you do, will do something, will shake up something structural and change it beyond the solidity of the snow-globe fantasy of the white good life (which insists that black subjects have good manners and remain convenient).

But in Citizen, “speaking truth to power” always amounts to a local encounter; therefore it always carries with it the pathos of the incremental, however powerful the representational act is. So it’s notable that in Citizen the linguistic event of conversation is always excoriating, even among friends, and not just white friends like me; whereas the image archive demands shortcuts to the real. There’s something consoling in the interruption by the image in your text, even when the image itself is a sudden punch. The image forces things to stop for a moment. It forces the reader to reinvent breathing so that the eyes can again focus.

We haven’t said yet how expressive the shocking whiteness of the paper you’ve printed the book on is—as if citing the Zora Neale Hurston sentence you reprint in the image of Glenn Ligon’s Untitled (I Feel Most Colored When I Am Thrown Against a Sharp White Background). The image resonance of the text, and the images themselves, create the ocular stress of an unfinished contextual shift.

Later, how she situates herself in the text:

I made a conscious decision to inhabit my own subjectivity in this book in the sense that the middle-class life I live, with my highly educated, professional, and privileged friends, remains as the backdrop for whatever is being foregrounded. Everyone is having a good time together—doing what they do, buying what they can afford, going where they go—until they are not.

Too good. Read the rest of their interview at BOMB--the issue (all content is now online) also features a great interview with Ariana Reines and Ben Lerner; and one with cover artist James Hoff, by Eli Keszler. "For me, when a work is done, it must be able to function as an object or composition outside of the conceptual premise from which it was hatched." At top: Michael David Murphy, Jim Crow Rd., Flowery Branch, 2007, C-print, dimensions variable. Courtesy of the artist.