Debt to Society: Accounting for Life under Capitalism

242 Pages·2014·1.949 MB·English

by  Miranda Joseph

Debt to Society
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Debt to Society
Accounting for Life under Capitalism
MiranDa JoSeph
University of Minnesota Press
Minneapolis
London
Portions of chapters 1 and 2 were previously published as “A Debt to Society,” in
The Seductions of Community: Emancipations, Oppressions, Quandaries, edited by
Gerald W. Creed (Santa Fe: School of American Research Press, 2006); reprinted by
permission of SAR Press; all rights reserved. Portions of chapter 1 were published as
“Theorizing Debt for Social Change: A Review of David Graeber’s Debt: The First
5,000 Years,” at http://www.ephemerajournal.org. Chapter 4 was published as “Gender,
Entrepreneurial Subjectivity, and Pathologies of Personal Finance,” Social Politics 20,
no. 2 (2013): 242– 73; reprinted courtesy of Oxford University Press. An earlier version
of chapter 5 was published as “Accounting for Interdisciplinarity,” in Interdisciplin-
arity and Social Justice: Revisioning Academic Accountability (Binghamton, N.Y.:
SUNY Press, 2010).
Copyright 2014 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval
system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photo-
copying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
Published by the University of Minnesota Press
111 Third Avenue South, Suite 290
Minneapolis, MN 55401– 2520
http://www.upress.umn.edu
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Joseph, Miranda.
Debt to society : accounting for life under capitalism / Miranda Joseph.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-8166-8741-1 (hc : alk. paper)
ISBN 978-0-8166-8744-2 (pb : alk. paper)
1. Economics—Sociological aspects. 2. Accounting—Social aspects. 3. Finance—
Social aspects. 4. Capitalism—Social aspects. I. Title.
HM548.J67 2014
330—dc23
2014011998
Printed in the United States of America on acid- free paper
The University of Minnesota is an equal- opportunity educator and employer.
20 19 18 17 16 15 14 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
For Sandy
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contentS
introduction Modes of Accounting ix
1 Accounting for Debt: Toward a Methodology
of Critical Abstraction 1
2 Accounting for Justice: Beyond Liberal Calculations
of Debt and Crime 29
3 Accounting for Time: The Entrepreneurial Subject
in Crisis 61
4 Accounting for Gender: Norms and Pathologies
of Personal Finance 91
5 Accounting for Interdisciplinarity: Contesting Value
in the Academy 119
Acknowledgments 151
Notes 155
Bibliography 171
Index 189
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introDuction
Modes of Accounting
The credit score, once a little- known metric derived from a complex formula
that incorporates outstanding debt and payment histories, has become . . . so
widely used that it has also become a bigger factor in dating decisions. . . .
“I take my credit score seriously and so my date can take me seriously,” she
said. A handful of small, online dating Web sites have sprung up to cater
specifically to singles looking for a partner with a tiptop credit score. “Good
Credit Is Sexy,” says one site. (Silver- Greenberg 2012)
This excerpt from a front- page New York Times article is but one of
many bits of evidence of the penetration of credit and debt into our con-
temporary popular culture that I might have plucked from the day’s
media flow. Social theorists have argued that debt is now the deter-
mining economic and thus social relation, superseding relations of pro-
duction or consumption as the socially formative economic dynamic.
Maurizio Lazzarato’s recent book The Making of the Indebted Man
(2012, 90, 89) draws on Gilles Deleuze, “who 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 “debt consti-
tutes 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. No doubt, debt
plays a hegemonizing function: disciplining (or even accumulating)
individual and collective subjects of capital by linking their sense of
ix