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Making Debt Miranda Joseph University of Arizona Making Debt Miranda Joseph University of Arizona number of social theorists have argued that debt is now the determining eco- nomic and thus social relation, superseding relations of production or consumption as the socially formative economic dynamic. For instance, Maurizio Lazzarato’s recent book,A The Making of the Indebted Man, builds on Gilles Deleuze, “who [Lazzarato says] summed up the transition from disciplinary governance to contemporary neoliberalism in this way: ‘A man is no longer a man confined [as in disciplinary societies] but a man in debt [in a control society],’” to argue that “[d]ebt constitutes the most deterritorialized and the most general power relation through which the neoliberal power bloc institutes its class struggle.”1 Certainly, debt plays a particularly prominent role in the contemporary regime of capital accumulation, as debt-related financial instruments from sovereign bonds to securitized credit card debt, student debt, and mortgages are traded on global markets, while stripping assets from individuals in their roles as citizens and consumers. Miranda Joseph is Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of Arizona. She is the author of Against the Romance of Community (University of Minnesota Press, 2002) and Debt to Society: Accounting for Life under Capitalism (University of Minnesota Press, 2014). She received her PhD in Modern Thought and Literature from Stanford University in 1995. Sections of this article are excerpted from Debt to Society: Accounting for Life under Capitalism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014); a longer version of the discussion of David Graeber’s work appears as “Theorizing Debt for Social Change: A Review of David Graeber’sDebt: The First 5,000 Years,” Ephemera: Theory and Politics in Organization 13, no. 3 (2013): 659–73. The discussion of Jamaica Kincaid’sA Small Place included here was written for an MLA panel organized by Jennifer Wenzel; I am grateful to her for the provocation and to my co-panelists Melanie Heydari and Shazia Rahman, as well as the small but engaged audience, for an excellent dis- cussion. Many thanks to David Palumbo-Liu for the Occasion to develop the thought a bit. 1 Maurizio Lazzarato, The Making of the Indebted Man: An Essay on the Neoliberal Condition, trans. Joshua David Jordan (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2012), 81, 90. 2 occasion And debt plays a hegemonizing function: disciplining (or, even, accumulating) individual and collective subjects of capital by linking their sense of independence to normative participa- tion in particular social formations as they “freely choose to take on debt”2 under the constraints of that same double-edged freedom Marx ascribed to “free labor.”3 This hegemonizing function is starkly portrayed in the often-taught filmLife and Debt by Stephanie Black, based on Jamaica Kincaid’s A Small Place (about which more a bit later). In the film, the former Jamaican prime minister, Michael Manley, explains in an interview: Countries like Jamaica found that when they became free, they soon were in every kind of financial problem. They didn’t have the economic strength to make it on their own. They needed time to build economies that could then make it in the world. Comes 1973, there is a world convulsion caused by oil price increases. All of a sudden we are having to find sums of money we never dreamed of before just to make ends meet. What can you do?4 What you can do, it turns out, is “freely” borrow from the only willing lender, the International Monetary Fund, which extracts, in return for the loans, conditions that “open” the economy to the world market and destroy local food production while undermining social welfare provision and creating, the film suggests, dependency and ever-growing indebtedness. Given the role of debt in structuring social hierarchy, the efforts of the Occupy Wall Street spin-off Strike Debt to incite collective disidentification with financial debts are inspiring and often brilliant. Their apparently simple but ingenious slogan “you are not a loan” crystallizes, even as it rejects, how that portion of the 99 percent whose American dreaming has become night- mare, whose aspirations and expectations have been disappointed, identify with their financial debts. Highlighting the subjective and relational dimensions of the financialization that is such a prominent aspect of the neoliberal regime of capital accumulation, Strike Debt explains: “Debt keeps us isolated, ashamed, and afraid. Those facing foreclosure, medical debt, student debt, or credit card debt feel alone, hounded by debt collectors, and forced into unrewarding work to keep up with payments.”5 Strike Debt, maybe inadvertently, thus recognizes the internality of debt to social relations and subjectivity—as well as the internality of social relations and subjec- tivity to debt. Maybe “you” are a loan after all, or at least a debtor, as you might once have been a consumer or the embodiment of labor power. Credit and debt have been written into what I have elsewhere identified as the Romantic discourse of community, a discourse pervasive in the social science literature as well as in the popular imagination that situates community as the “other” of modernity and especially of capi- talism, which is generally understood to destroy community. The most prominent contemporary inscription of debt into a discourse of community has been performed by David Graeber in his 2011 book Debt: The First 5,000 Years,6 which has received a great deal of attention in academic, 2 James Heintz and Radhika Balakrishnan, “Debt, Power, and Crisis: Social Stratification and the Inequitable Governance of Financial Markets,” American Quarterly 64, no. 3 (2012): 387–409. 3 Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, trans. B. Fowkes (New York: Vintage Books, 1977), 271. 4 Life and Debt, directed by Stephanie Black (New York: New Yorker Films, 2001), DVD. 5 “Strike Debt Bay Area Announces Oakland’s First Debtors’ Assembly,” Strike Debt Bay Area (blog), January 15, 2013, http://www.strikedebtbayarea.org (accessed January 2013). 6 David Graeber, Debt: The First 5,000 Years (Brooklyn, NY: Melville House, 2011). joseph | making debt 3 activist, and popular media venues.7 His version doesn’t so much tell a story of decline of commu- nity as of its violent destruction and, moreover, extends the story into a historical past far older than even the most generous historical periodization of emergent modernity. Graeber has been credited as instigator and theorist of the Occupy movement, and his book clearly aims to support Occupy by encouraging detachment from the sense of moral obligation too many people feel to pay financial debts to financial institutions that feel no reciprocal obligation. Given the leading role that debt now appears to play among the strategies of capital accumulation (deployed to strip assets from variously targeted populations) and that our sense of moral obligation can only be accounted as an instance of what Lauren Berlant calls “cruel optimism,”8 or an attachment that will be self-undermining, Graeber’s effort to debunk the “myths” (of barter and primordial debt) that subtend our sense of moral duty with regard to financial debts is valuable and commendable. Like Marx (but not in explicit conversation with Marx), Graeber argues against the projection of exchange (Adam Smith’s trucking and bartering) into a mythical past that secures its place in human nature and thus naturalizes and legitimates contemporary relations that have been produced through a history of violence. And like Nietzsche (whose work Graeber does directly engage), Graeber rightly points out that conceptualizations of the social bond as essentially a relation of permanent indebtedness—in which we are always already in debt to the existing social order and/or its representatives—can serve to legitimate established power dynamics and social hierarchies. However, his analysis of—and, I fear, his and others’ efforts to generate collective opposi- tion to—our attachments to our debts is limited by the reaffirmation of yet another “myth.” In this myth, again and again, across the globe in different times and at different speeds, communal relations based on interpersonal trust are displaced by depersonalized calculation, and the par- ticular is disrupted or destroyed by being abstracted. This myth, like the ones he debunks, has some unfortunate implications, concealing rather than revealing what I am calling the dialectical processes of abstraction and particularization, potentially undermining the efforts to mobilize and galvanize a movement of the 99 percent. The first half of his book, Graeber states, is intended to answer “the central question . What does it mean when we reduce moral obligations to debts?”9 Or, as he puts it later, “How is it that moral obligations between people come to be thought of as debts, and as a result, end up justifying behavior that would otherwise seem utterly immoral?”10 This question incorporates his answer in that it presumes/establishes a dichotomy between interpersonal obligation and 7 See Chris Hann, review of Debt: The First 5,000 Years, by David Graeber, Comparative Studies in Society and History 54, no. 2 (2012): 447–61; Mark Kear, review of The Bonds of Debt: Borrowing against the Common Good, by Richard Dienst, and Debt: The First 5,000 Years, by David Graeber, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 2011, http://societyandspace.com/reviews/reviews-archive/dienst-richard-2011-the-bonds-of-debt/; Daniel Luban, “Indebted,” Dissent, Spring 2012, 102–6; and Thomas Meaney, “Anarchist Anthropology,”New York Times, December 8, 2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/11/books/review/anarchist-anthropology.html. 8 Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011). 9 Graeber, Debt, 13. The second half of the book, to which I admittedly give less attention here, presents the 5,000- year narrative referenced in Graeber’s title, Debt: The First 5,000 Years.
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