i t l /-f- ' ! ~';:, /"'J I f r ~-- .-_ c.- • . - I <. I !' THE BONDS OF DEBT I I f • f I RICHARD DIENST VERSO London • New York - Acknowledgments I am grateful to the friends who helped me write this book: Vince Leitch, Bruce Robbins, John McClure, Richard E. Miller, Susan Willis, Henry Schwarz, Saree Makdisi, Cesare Casarino, Patricia Clough, Ross Dawson, Ramsey Eric Ramsey, Diane Gruber, Step hen. Pluhacek, Heidi Bostic, and Jeremy Glide. Thanks to Aleksey Kasavin for making the index. I would also like to thank Reynolds Smith and two anonymous readers, who read the whole manuscript and offered excellent feedback. I've been fortunate to be able to discuss this work with audiences in many places (including several times at Rutgers and the CUNY Graduate Center), and I thank all the organizers and audiences for their engagement. Many thanks to Sebastian Budgen, Mark Martin, Jane Halsey, and everyone at Verso. For her help in writing, not-writing, and everything else, I cannot thank Karin enough. I am especially grateful for the generosity of my teachers: the late Masao Miyoshi, who got me started, and Fredric Jameson, who kept me going. I dedicate the book to them. f r· I r Introduction: All That We Owe Who will write the history of these troubled times? For many years now we have heard one overriding story, the official story, rehearsed day by day before global audiences. By its reckoning, the inexorable forces of capitalism are remaking the world once and for all, their victory ensured three times over-by the allure of their wares, the threat of their arms, and the blessedness of their cause. Every setback or sign of resistance has been portrayed as one more reason to finish the job. In the wake of a tumultuous twentieth century and in the face of mounting uncertainty, the self-proclaimed victors of history keep declaring that there is really only one zeitgeist blowing us along: the spirit of total commerce, pitched at the most encompassing level possible, capable of bringing everything to market and bringing the market to everyone. As long as the economic prescriptions are followed, any kind of political system can join the cause, so-called dictatorships and so-called democracies, strong states, weak states, and failed states. No time for losers: the recalcitrants and reprobates simply have to join up, drop out, or be left behind. From now on, the newly rehabilitated angel of history promises nothing but good news to those who heed its call-or so we are told, incessantly, even when there is nothing but bad news to tell. The official story was never true, but it remains powerful. Although their victories have never been as decisive as those of ancient gener­ als and golden-age imperialists, the rulers of our era do exercise a special kind of dominion. Above and beyond the monopoly of 2 THE BONDS OF DEBT INTRODUCTION: ALL THAT WE OWE 3 violence claimed by the major states, there has emerged a new kind of main historical plot is being written in the prolific and obscure scripts command, a monopoly of actuality, exercised on one hand through of capital. That is why the official version of this history will not be the power of teletechnology to shape the world in its own image, I written by "the victors" but by the creditors, for whom every human and on the other by the power of money to decide what deserves accomplishment or aspiration becomes subject to henceforth inter­ to exist. 1 The effective horizon of this control oscillates somewhere minable wrangling and hoarding. In a world where basic decisions between the news cycle and the business cycle; moment by moment I about everything from fisheries and crop rotations to pharmaceuti­ it translates everything it knows into the present tense. It seeks its cals, nuclear power, and old-age pensions are ruled by extraterrito­ glory not only in ratifying its mastery over what happens today; it rial economic reason, the most basic circuits of social life-alliances, meticulously amortizes what used to be and assiduously discounts obligations, and solidarities-have been hotwired to disseminate what is yet to come. The past is worth saving only if it is worth saving corrosively antisocial energies. Any expression of collective possibil­ right now, and the future, insofar as it has not already been paved ity and promise, beleaguered in the best of times, must struggle to over or scheduled for expiration, will just have to take care' of itself. make itself heard in an atmosphere filled with endless chattering in Cut loose by destabilizing flows of capital and caught by ever tighter praise of immense wealth. nets of competition, people everywhere live more fraught, more In a moment like this, the most fateful world-historical figures bewildered, more defensive, more pressured lives. Market ideology, are not captains of industry or globetrotting entrepreneurs, let working its way deeper into the textures of social life, becomes some­ alone heads of state, but central bankers, fund managers, insurance thing more absolute: a legitimation of every present indignity for brokers, and the legions of traders and fixers swarming behind the sake of unnamed opportunities to come. Market logic, elevated them. They do not presume to rule this world by themselves, trust­ to the status of a natural law, demands that everybody should live ing in their own righteousness; each wants merely to carve out within the circle of free choices and calculable consequences, even the most profitable niche, manage one or two variables, guess the while inventing a full range of techniques to deprive nearly every­ trends, beat the averages, take a cut, charge a fee, and let the rest of one of effective freedoms, channeling rewards immediately upward the world go its way. They do not care for policy or planning, except while dumping bad consequences onto those least able to bear them, where it might jack up or bite into their profits. They are gener­ somewhere else and sometime later. Through the vigilant manage­ I ally indifferent, even ignorant, about the global syslem they help ment of expectations and the peremptory refusal of alternatives, our to animate. Their sense of history is calibrated by the split seconds common life is split up into countless schemes for survival. of arbitrage, the volatile turnover of portfolios, the slipstreams of So while the spirit of our age still celebrates military strength and I interest, the fitful jockeying over exchange rates, and the implac­ technological invention-if only because warfare and high technol­ able arithmetic of the actuarial tables. In striking their deals and ogy are still crowned with the highest spiritual justifications-the I hedging their bets, they aspire to achieve a kind ofbootstrap tran­ t scendence, suspended for as long as possible between "too soon" I Jacques Derridahas written ofthe "monopolization of actuality" in his interview/ and "too late:' long enough to seize a good chance but not long essay, "Artifactualites; in Derrida and Bernard Stiegler's Echographies: de la television enough to face the fallout or the blowback. Nobody who can wield (Paris: Galilee, 1996). Although the exact phrase does not appear there, the phenom­ enon had already been analyzed throughout the work of Guy Debord. the power of capital wants to be stuck in the stubborn temporality If t' 6 THE BONDS OF DEBT itself keeps shifting from economics to philosophy, from psychology to sociology to anthropology and elsewhere. Even these disciplinary markers do not really touch upon what we already think we know about debt. It seems obvious that everybody lives in a state of indebt­ edness, yet people sometimes speak as if it were a state that can and Once in a Lifetime should be avoided, as if debt were something we could simply do without. At the same time, people tend to take the need for indebt­ edness for granted, striking a bargain moment by moment between the force of circumstances and the way things ought to be. One way or another we try to shape our own debts into a personal footprint, a At first nobody knew what to call it. Everybody agreed that a "crisis" mixture of wanting and waiting, ofhaving and giving up. had broken out, but then again there is always a crisis going on That is why it seems a mistake to try to pin down either the concept somewhere, and this one seemed different. The stock markets were or the experience of indebtedness in a single definition. It is certainly sliding, central banks were scrambling, and politicians were trying true that credit card companies rely upon vague feelings of guilt to to figure out how to take sides against a looming disaster that would collect their bills, and that contemporary nations impose financial engulf them all. The media mouthpieces, having no idea what was obligations upon all of their members in the name of individual free­ going on, began to speak in tongues: brokers' stoicism, bankers' self­ dom-but it seems impossible to decide where practical calculations pity, and populist rage all at once. As the mood darkened and the end and moral imperatives begin, just as it seems impossible to say experts began to tussle over which dire scenario was unfolding, it where a sense of autonomy and self-sufficiency stops and a recogni­ became clear that a recession was already going on. The next step had tion of the needs of others begins. Instead of opting for one discipli­ to be at least a "slump;' probably a "crash;' and maybe a "depression;' nary language over another, it seems better to trace the outlines of the but there were lurking doubts as to whether even those labels went question in several different ways, in various theoretical idioms and I far enough.