Abstract
Miranda Joseph’s Debt to Society starts off quite well. Building on Lazzarato and others, she posits on the opening page that ‘debt is now the determining economic and thus social relation, superseding relations of production or consumption as the socially formative economic dynamic’ (emphasis in original). On the next page, Joseph opens up the concept of accounting—‘techniques for constituting and attributing credits and debts’—the modes of which ‘are deployed to create, sustain, or transform social relations’. She continues to discuss key Marxist, Foucauldian, and feminist contributions to the literature, while constantly paying attention to issues of race and discrimination in the United States (she compares the knowledge production attached to finance and debt to the one attached to racism). We are reading in anticipation of what’s to come.
Unfortunately, the book fails to deliver on its promising introduction. In the first numbered chapter (i.e. after the Introduction), the author excels in announcing what she will do (I join, I depart, I surface, I aim to articulate, I take, I offer, I begin to articulate, I have identified, I have argued—all in pp. 2–3), without actually saying what it is precisely that she argues or will argue. Chapter 1 turns out to be largely a critique of David Graeber’s Debt: The First 5,000 Years (2011) and is partly based on the author’s earlier review of the book. Although we agree with Joseph that Graeber’s book is a key contribution to the topic of debt, her long critical review of Graeber’s book seems only to point at how he failed to understand the socially generative power of debt, while romanticizing the idea of the “community”, the topic of Joseph’s earlier work (Joseph, 2002).
We are also not sure why Joseph privileges the critique of Graeber instead of other recent contributions to make her own argument beyond this chapter. In this respect, particularly astonishing is the lack of engagement with Lazzarato’s The Making of the Indebted Man (2012), which is rooted, like Graeber’s book, in Nietzsche. Lazzarato has pointed to the archetypical character of debt for any kind of social relation. Moreover, borrowing from Roitman (2003) to insist on how Graeber does not recognize the socially formative power of debt does not help Joseph to be clearer about her argument and scope. Although she’s clearly sympathetic with concerns for social justice addressed by social movements like occupy, one question remains completely unanswered throughout the whole book: how does her argument favor self-awareness and open possibilities for action?
When discussing mortgages, trust, credit scoring, and quantification—still in chapter 1—we wonder why Guy Stuart’s Discriminating Risk (2003) was not considered worth discussing. We will not attempt to summarize Stuart’s contributions here, but to us Stuart has discussed the connections not only much earlier but also much clearer. To Stuart, the mortgage market can be characterized by a constant drive toward uniformity. Although the language of appraisal changed over the years and the practices sometimes changed as well, the underlying logic of uniformity was a stable factor. Since not all information can be codified or standardized and because rules are never fully waterproof and often amendable, loan writers are in charge of making key decisions. On the basis of interviews with real-estate and mortgage-lending professionals complemented by a quasi-experiment, Stuart (2003, chapter 3) demonstrates how information regarding a potential borrower can be explained and used in different ways. He argues that credit scoring has not changed the essential choices that loan writers face and his quasi-experiment shows that two loan writers may judge one application differently. Whereas Joseph’s analysis appears largely a-spatial, Stuart explains how the drive toward uniformity through quantification does not result in uniform lending policies. The principle of uniformity can only be applied with the use of boundaries which can divide the city in different but seemingly uniform areas: ‘The practice of demarcating a neighborhood is, therefore, a form of market coordination—the greater the consensus on the boundaries the greater the coordination. The greater the coordination the greater the ability of the real estate industry to promote what it values—homogeneity’ (Stuart 2003: 155). Although Joseph frames intriguingly the temporalities of debt, she could have devoted more efforts to the spatiality of debt (especially considering the book is advertised as a geography book). Indeed, she only directly engages with space when pointing to the particularized discriminatory character of accounting that has favored the proliferation of predatory lending.
In the Introduction, Joseph is critical of approaches that see quantification as intrinsically bad, and she argues for a more open approach that does not glorify nonquantifying methods and practices over quantified ones. In short, numbers can be good or bad. So far, so good. But the numbered chapters of the book tend to leave the impression that Joseph is really very skeptical of any form of quantification. On page 31, building on Berlant (2007), she writes about ‘the fetishizing function of such numerical presentations’ condemning quantification tout court. Similarly, on page 30, she criticizes herself for having planned to open her chapter on imprisonment by citing some basic numbers on the incarcerated population in the United States. She cites the numbers anyway—‘The opening paragraph of an earlier version of this chapter included the following…’—and then argues that, although the numbers are correct, her ‘rhetorical strategy of deploying those numbers to indicate a crisis worthy of attention is a formulaic and potentially dangerous use of “the master’s tools”’. Yes, potentially dangerous but does that mean that it’s better to defer all quantification as formulaic? Joseph appears to answer yes. Yet, although she dismisses her original rhetorical strategy, her current rhetorical strategy—condemn the numbers as formulaic but cite them anyway—appears to say ‘not completely’. The fact that numbers can be formulaic and fetishizing, does not mean they have to be. In this respect, she could have tried to be more extensive in reviewing the literature on critical accounting to give the reader a better idea on how to use numbers without fetishizing them.
At times, Joseph’s argument seems to waver. It is not always clear how the literature or real-world examples are mobilized to support her argument. In the end, most of the book reviews a lot of interesting literature and examples, but the choice of what to discuss—and therefore what not to discuss—is often very implicit. We found chapter 3—‘Accounting for time’—particularly confusing. In large parts of the chapter it is not even clear how the author’s argument relates to either accounting or time, let alone to the connection between the two. We get to read about subjectivity, interpellation, Occupy Wall Street, Lauren Berlant’s Cruel Optimism and Slow Death, neoliberalism, usury laws, The New York Times financial advice pages, homeownership and the foreclosure crisis, liquidity, flexibility, the Enron case (yes, accounting is discussed explicitly here!), the Women’s Re-entry Network, poverty, consumption, race, and so on—and all these in exactly 30 pages. The subtitles (‘Begin’, ‘Begin again’, ‘Life: Time: responsibility’ and ‘Keep going (Starting over, again)’) also don’t help much to structure the chapter or to assist the reader in distilling the main argument of the chapter.
We were looking forward to reading the final two chapters on gender and the academy, and although the argument of these chapters was less wavering, we had the feeling that it was not very clear what the gender chapter adds to the existing literature. Indeed, Joseph links the reification of gendered norms to the “responsible” and “entrepreneurial” subjects of the Foucauldian tradition, recognizing that these processes of subjectification involve contradictions. However, she does not engage with the insights of this literature to try to further her argument, notably Langley’s conceptualization of the “uncertain” financial subjects, aimed at repoliticizing the debate on financialization (2007) and insisting on contradictions to favor dissent and alternative imageries. Here, we would have expected a deeper engagement with the debate on alternatives to financial subjectification, while she limits herself to briefly cite the slogan ‘strike debt’ as one of those ‘strategic interventions in the regimes of financial and statistical accounting as a point of departure’ (p. 118). Unfortunately, this point of departure does not indicate a clear direction or even a suggestion on how to practice and cultivate dissent and alternatives.
In chapter 5, on the academy, we were also somewhat disappointed to not read much about the actually existing accounting practices that contribute to making the neoliberal university. Yes, the author discusses auditing, but is this all there is to academic accounting practices? Unfortunately, this is where the book leaves off; there is no concluding chapter or something to that effect. After all the announcements of what the author would do or argue, and after reading five chapters on very diverse topics, it would have been very useful to include at least a few pages that integrate the different threads of the argument and explicitly tell the reader how they add up to something bigger.
Joseph appears to have gotten lost in the contradictions she willingly or unwillingly set up herself: she says that somehow she wants to “rehabilitate” quantitative methods but then does not produce concrete examples to achieve it; she wants to expand a Marxist framework with insights from feminist and queer critique, but too often ends up privileging purely deconstructive approaches like the one advanced by Berlant, not really engaging with politics/practice as other Marxist scholars of race and gender do. Joseph should be commended for her attempt to integrate highly different debates and to construct a parallel narrative between indebtedness and historical racism/systems of discipline, but her story lines miss an overarching framework that brings the different arguments together.