Abstract
Miranda Joseph’s Debt to Society: Accounting for Life under Capitalism tackles a necessary technology of capitalism: accounting. Her goal is to explore the process of abstraction and particularization that occurs when one counts one’s worth – value – and writes it onto a ledger. Such an endeavour is timely. Joseph’s book can be read as engaging the field of Science and Technology Studies (STS), the study of science outside its putative authority. The book implicitly reminds us that the stakes do not solely concern with totality as some Marxist scholars would argue. Yet Joseph does not ‘wish to take up the totality debate here’ (p. 14). As a result, she misses the opportunity to make an intervention into the study of capitalism. Consequently, she fails to remind us that totality comes at the expense of more significant micro-processes of capitalism such as accounting.
Chapter 1 begins with Joseph laying her theoretical framework that deals with debt. Joseph takes Althusser’s incitement that ‘ideology has no history’ (p. x) and likewise states that debt may have no history, but that indebtedness does. This dedication to taking finance seriously, as opposed to an ‘aberration’, is welcome. Debt can thus be seen as immanent (p. 2) since one person’s credit is another’s debt. Joseph is quick to negate any critique of abstraction as aberration, and the case for a naturalist pre-capitalist society is rendered one-sided. For Joseph, ‘the crucial point remains that concrete particularities are the products and bearers of abstract social processes’ (p. 14). Joseph is aware of the rejoinder to that argument: fetishization of the abstract and rendering it as vivified, reminding us that the claim that taking abstraction as concrete can also be misleading.
Chapter 2 discusses how calculation is deployed in the prison system. Locating mandatory minimum sentencing laws that began in the 1970s, Joseph discusses how accounting supplants the penitentiary system. Drawing on ‘critical accounting scholars’, Joseph proposes creative accounting that records particular elements which ought to emphasise justice. In other words, ‘rather than reject accounting, might we identify practices that would enable justice?’ (p. 58).
Chapter 3 tackles the question of how accounting imposes a temporal scheme. Drawing on Nikolas Rose, Joseph theorizes how the ‘entrepreneurial subject of neoliberalism’ invests in a future where one borrows now for a house, yet this debt of the past stays with one up until the future (p. 62). This ‘contradiction’ means that a crisis is in sight, yet Joseph rejects crisis theories in order to draw attention to how such practices are normalized. Locating the ‘neoliberal present’ is how Joseph settles her engagement with Marxist ‘crisis theory’ while hoping that ‘alongside the passing televisual crisis there is a crisis of a more Marxist variety … has reached its self-induced breaking point’ (p. 63).
In Chapter 4, Joseph explores how women and psychology play a role in abstracting women so that they are compliant household managers who are not spendthrifts. Joseph discusses how women are depicted in surveys as ‘shopaholics’ (p. 92) and how psychology is deployed to depict idleness and unemployment as part of ‘neoliberal depression’ (p. 105).
Finally, Chapter 5 discusses how as a result of neoliberalism, budget cuts at universities are happening under the guise of ‘interdisciplinarity’ through creative programmes that combine courses. Joseph ends her book with a plea that choosing to write and mark what ‘counts’ is increasingly difficult, making accounting public is one answer she proposes.
Yet Joseph neglects to mention what those historical processes of abstraction and particularization are materially. Her book features one sentence (pp. 19–20), about how debt is used to open up the economy in post-colonial states. One is left wondering how debt was introduced and particularized outside the West. By focusing on the West and the narrative of the ‘protestant ethic’ – albeit critiqued as the ‘Trojan horse for financialization’ (p. 73) – Joseph ignores the history of Double Entry Bookkeeping (DEB) and how it was first used in entities such as the English East India Company (EEIC). As a colonial corporation, the EEIC abstracted the violence of pillaging into revenue, deducting the costs of their mercenaries to produce profit for their shareholders. This means that Joseph’s book about ‘accounting’ and ‘life’ is markedly silent on examples that blur the boundary of the West and non-West. The point is not that she should have gone further to discuss the non-West, but rather can one write about accounting separating the West and the non-West? Since such accounting practices date back to colonial corporations, it becomes difficult to argue that DEB is the seed of capitalism (pp. 25–26). Such abstractions surely are performative and have particularized elements, yet missing from the story of capitalism is the material violence of colonialism. To demonstrate how Joseph separates the inseparable – the abstractions and particularizations as performed from their material elements – one example suffices. Joseph draws on Saidiya Hartman to demonstrate that post-emancipation accounting entailed the positing of Blacks as indebted subjects (p. 52). This historiography of a rupture with the emancipation is quite misleading, neglecting the rise of racialized bookkeeping – in the designation of slaves as collateral for cotton farmers taking out loans – since before the emancipation.
This focus on representation and law, more than numbers, allows Joseph to separate what she is exploring contemporarily – the financial crisis of 2008, criminalization of Black bodies, mass incarceration in the United States during the 1970s and the question of the pathologization of women through finance – as separate from the larger focus of capitalism. This rupture can be discerned from her use of the word neoliberal as a prefix to describe several processes which would normally be deployed to describe ‘capitalism’: ‘neoliberal present’; ‘neoliberal depression’; ‘neoliberal regime of accumulation’ (pp. 63, 97, 96). Had Joseph complemented her focus materially, perhaps her book would not have been described in a review by an accounting scholar as ‘Random Thoughts on Prisons and Gender Studies’ (Flesher 2015). This is what Bruno Latour has described analogously as the reaction elicited from scientists who read his work as anti-scientism (Latour 2004). To open up such complicated technologies, one should pay attention to material details to show how science’s own truth claims can be challenged. Joseph’s book, aware of how disciplines raid one another in the name of interdisciplinarity, does not live up to that standard of counter-empirical detail. It instead fuels the allegation that those who work on challenging totalities, technologies and a universalist history of capitalism are spreading heresy.