“Put simply, Miranda Joseph’s Debt to Society argues that we are made by capitalist accounting practices.”
“Joseph’s “we” isn’t a 99-percent monolith but people who find themselves thrown into intimate relation because of the ways capital differentiates them by race, class, and gender.”
“She examines an unusual range of accounting practices—financial, legal, epistemological, social—with an eye for the complex ways they’re intertwined.”
“And her solution to violent quantification entails not the familiar lefty line of refusing abstraction altogether but rather appropriating quantitative practices toward more reparative ends, whether by hijacking evaluative metrics or reworking neoliberal discourses of personal responsibility.”
“Debt to Society’s dedication to careful elaboration makes it an ideal tool for critics, artists, and activists searching for ways to articulate connections between current movements for racial, economic, and climate justice without reverting to reductive populisms. Since its release in 2014, I have seen it taken up to historicize the co-construction of race and debt, explain capitalist waste in an eco-geographical context, and analyze the nascent solidarities suggested by Papas Fritas’s burnt art offerings.”
“It’s true, I use the term accounting to refer to a range of practices of representation: quantitative financial and managerial accounting, such as budgets, financial statements, and performance metrics, but also social accounting through statistics and narratives.”
“Some people might say I’m using the term so broadly it becomes meaningless.”
“For me, the point is that accounting is persuasive, performative, and socially constitutive, and we’re more likely to see that’s the case with some kinds of account-giving than others.”
“You also point out that this history is connected to the development of bankruptcy law. Because we used to have debtors’ prisons, right? But then certain debts get redefined as something to be dealt with outside criminal law. The book quotes testimony of businesspeople in early bankruptcy proceedings, and there’s this language of, “We’re not slaves, we’re not criminals, we deserve different treatment.””
“Wealthy businesspeople and their corporations are the ones who are most often allowed to declare bankruptcy. Who gets a clean slate, and who is held responsible financially and criminally for their past? In the history of laws dealing with debt, a distinction gets drawn between innocent debtors who have just fallen on hard times and allegedly fraudulent debtors.”
“The difference is supposed to be discernible through financial accounting; but social accountings—measures of who’s deemed trustworthy ahead of time—become a key factor in whether someone is subjected to criminal laws or to civil bankruptcy laws.”
“In my first book, Against the Romance of Community, I look at the assumption that community is opposed to capitalism—that it’s prior to, destroyed, or damaged by capitalism and, as a result, a force of resistance to it. I insist, by contrast, that interpersonal social relationships based on identity or tradition are always implicated in, shaped by, and enabling of economic processes.”
“Subjectivity, like community, is not independent of capitalism.”
“When Strike Debt says you are not a loan, I hear them denying the constitutive relationship between finance capital and subjectivity. They’re calling on a romantic notion of the person and interpersonal relationships as outside of capitalism.”
“Of course, they do that to prompt people to question their belief that their self and self-worth depends on being a responsible debt payer. That’s an entirely worthwhile endeavor in the context of an exploitative capitalist economic system. And in general it’s clear that Strike Debt understands that the problem is precisely that subjectivity is constituted by financial relations.”
“Yeah, I think that’s right. If there’s a romantic idea of people and communities as somehow prior to or outside of capitalism, then finance gets portrayed as abstract and distant and impenetrable, like it couldn’t actually be tied to people and their relationships.”
“But it is human, obviously. Financialized capitalism is the way we interact and are in relation with one another. It depends on and shapes racialization and class, gender, familial structures, kinship, sexuality.”
“Randy Martin and Paul Langley have done key work here, on what Martin called “the financialization of everyday life,” as have feminists like Fiona Allon and Leigh Claire La Berge, who are making crucial interventions about how social relations and culture are shaped by financialization.”
“There’s an important temporal dimension to this. Responsibility is often understood to be about obligations undertaken in the past. You don’t get to wake up each morning and figure out what’s the best thing to do today. You have to do the thing you said you were going to do yesterday, while somehow also planning for the future.”
“Whereas, in finance, responsible behavior is all about the present. A corporation has to respond to financial markets and manage its own stock price and decide what’s the right financial decision for today. Who cares what they said they were going to do yesterday? And planning for the future tends to happen on a very short-term basis. What would be considered irresponsible for an individual is actually the correct business behavior.”
“And these structures are relational. The vast amounts of money circulating in the form of financial securities depend on regular people being variously dependable monthly payers of relatively tiny amounts of money. I say “variously” because financial securities based on assets like mortgages are split out into more and less reliable income streams—so-called tranches. But broadly speaking, the basic structure requires consumers committing to monthly payments.”
“The other obvious place where the meaning and implications of responsibility differ is in the ways people are supposed to manage their lives. On the surface, the description might seem the same; we are all subjected to a ramped-up, entrepreneurialized version of the old Protestant ethic: work hard and save for the future.”
“But for the wealthy this means being financial entrepreneurs, exposing themselves to the vagaries of financial markets by borrowing for education (investing in their “human capital”) and investing for retirement, while poorer people are expected to labor, deprive themselves of things in the present, and save up to spend money later.”
“The culture-of-poverty argument is still so prominently deployed to scold poor people of color for doing their lives wrong—for having babies too young, for not saving for the future, for not being willing to work their way up. In that atmosphere of scolding, the poor (and in certain moments, the entirety of the 99 percent) are offered high-cost loans that promise to be life-building but turn out to be life-destroying.”
“There’s a recurring thing with interruptions in Debt to Society, especially those that are both necessary and a hindrance to building a socially respectable life. You talk about them in your own life—reading sort-of-work-related online news, buying a house, taking on administrative tasks at the University of Arizona—and say you’ve increasingly learned to tolerate them. Can such interruptions be more than tolerated? Can they make and enable new kinds of work?”
“Well, first, I’d say generally that interruptions in my own life- and career-building plans keep me real about the relationship of failure that most people have to all these entrepreneurial norms and the ways that daily life is about participating in reproducing exploitative systems.”
“More specifically, this book would never have happened if I hadn’t interrupted my work on it to engage in the administrative labor that’s increasingly expected of university faculty. I chaired the Strategic Branding and Budget Advisory Board at the University of Arizona, and that completely transformed my relationship to accounting, to budgets, to performance metrics.”
“One of my primary responsibilities in that role was for the performance metrics by which the university would be measured. I’m not trained in quantitative stuff, and my impulse as a critical theorist is to simply be negative about performance metrics of any kind. But being responsible for them and watching them being negotiated over years—seeing that they’re chaotic and always in play and being selected through political battles—completely changed my relationship to accounting practices. I became interested in engaging them at a much more granular level, to see if it’s possible to appropriate and transform them. While the book doesn’t offer much on that front in practical terms, I’m continuing to explore the idea and would love to hear from others who are engaged in different kinds of counter-accounting.”
“This seems related to the way you write about what it means to be complicit in the violence of accounting systems. Complicity’s often talked about as a thing to be refused. You take a different tack.”
“To me, complicity is relationality. Complicity is connections. Yes, we usually say complicity to mean we are upholding a system that’s doing something bad. But we’re also complicit in the sense that we’re tied to all the other participants that have different roles in that system. Seeing those connections is also seeing the possibility of solidarity.”