Abstract
In the 1980s, one of the main debates in the social sciences turned on the question of the social materiality of representation, language, and, more generally, the ‘discursive’. On one side of the debate were historical materialists, typically of a Marxian shade, who clung, to one degree or another, to long-standing conventions that largely relegated the discursive to a subsidiary social and explanatory status. On the other side were, inter alia, cultural studies scholars who insisted, by contrast, on the acute consequence of discourse. And, more or less in the middle, but successfully pulling both sides toward his moderating standpoint over time, there was the late Stuart Hall. Carefully summing up his accommodative perspective at the end of the decade, Hall (1988: 27) insisted that while it was clear that ‘how things are represented and the “machineries” and regimes of representation in a culture do play a constitutive, and not merely a reflexive, after-the-event, role’, it was essential, equally, to not ‘expand the territorial claim of the discursive infinitely’.
Hall’s injunction to be judicious with ‘the territorial claim of the discursive’ – to recognize that it has a claim but to recognize, too, that such a claim has very real limits – was brought to mind by reading Miranda Joseph’s interesting and enlightening new book on ‘accounting for life under capitalism’: Debt to Society. While she does not explicitly position it as such, Joseph’s book contributes forcefully to one side of an ongoing debate that effectively revivifies the aforementioned debate of the 1980s in recalibrated terms. In the face, once again, of often hostile resistance from scholars (still) wedded to more singularly ‘materialist’ explanations (e.g. Fine, 2003, 2005; Mirowski and Nik-Khah, 2007), other scholars have spent the past two decades arguing for the socioeconomic significance of the specifically calculative. Calculative practices – those that, among other things, ‘make the economy visible and measurable as economy’ (Miller, 2001: 379) – not only inform and shape the world around us, the likes of Michel Callon (1998) and Donald MacKenzie (2006) insist; they actively perform it. The quintessential example of such a performative calculative practice, moreover, is the one that Joseph focuses upon in her book: accounting; and indeed, Joseph (pp. 25–28) nods to the performativity literature in establishing the theoretical terms of her discussion. Her central argument is that different modes of accounting – by which she means assorted representative techniques for constituting and attributing different varieties of credit and debt – are pivotal to the creation and transformation of different sets of social relations.
Why, then, did Hall’s cautionary words return to me in reading the book? They did so because I worry that Joseph expands too far what, after Hall, we might call ‘the territorial claim of the calculative’.
It would only be fair to say that in many respects I am the very last person to question a study stressing the materiality, even performativity, of calculative practices (cf. Christophers, 2014a, 2014b) – least of all when such practices happen to be those of accounting (I am the author of a book (Christophers, 2013) concerned in large part with, essentially, the influence of national accounting treatments). But I am convinced that in drawing attention to the importance of such practices, two related exercises are vital. One of these is that which Hall identifies: to strictly circumscribe our ‘territorial’ claims, by which he means to explicitly identify the limits of the explanatory power of the representative/calculative and thus to not extend those claims beyond the point at which their purchase fades. The second, which helps foreground the first, is to contextualize those specific claims by reference to explanatory factors outside of the realms of the calculative, in the absence of which a balanced understanding of the phenomena under investigation is not possible (cf. Christophers, 2014c).
It is these two exercises that I missed in Joseph’s analysis. And, while this concern relates to the book as a whole, it is best exemplified in her fascinating discussion of ‘accounting for justice’ in chapter 2, where she goes back to the 19th century in an attempt to understand the relationship between financial accounting and juridical accounting – the notion of ‘debt to society’ used for the book’s title having emerged during the historical period when the criminal became ‘accountable’ not to a sovereign but to the society in which she lived (pp. 47–48). I will therefore focus on that chapter in what follows.
The bulk of chapter 2 is dedicated to chronicling historical transformations in (a) techniques of accounting for and of otherwise representing and regulating social relations of credit and debt, and (b) regimes of criminal justice. Joseph spells out her principal argument relatively early in the chapter. ‘We might take the use of the term debt in “a debt to society” to be metaphorical’, she writes (p. 36); ‘But the link between debt and prison is by no means simply rhetorical’. Rather, she maintains that what happened in the realm of credit-and-debt financial accounting made a substantive difference to what happened in the realm of criminal justice: The ‘processes joining accounting and criminal justice’ were, she insists, ‘intertwined procedures of social formation’ (p. 41). The same claim is reposited frequently in what follows (e.g. p. 43): ‘The transformation of criminal justice was intertwined with a transformation in the management of debtor-creditor relations’. Yet, on my reading, while Joseph repeatedly says this, she falls short of persuasively showing it. The changes in financial accounting and in criminal justice that she documents – and which, don’t get me wrong, are absorbing and instructive in their own right – ultimately remain largely parallel and certainly analogous but not quite, on the evidence presented, the ‘intertwined’ ones they are professed to have been.
A discussion specifically of post–Civil War US labor practices illustrates this problem and, moreover, the two more general ones identified above. Drawing on the existing secondary literature, Joseph observes that the emancipation of slaves ‘presented those who sought to control and deploy that labor force for profit with some challenges, depriving them as it did of an extensive array of techniques of physical coercion legitimated by ownership’ (p. 52). Part of the solution subsequently developed by farm owners, she argues, lay in techniques of management accounting: Accurate bookkeeping helped to discipline labor by legally validating fines or deductions from wages on various grounds. ‘Accounting’, Joseph concludes from this, ‘was thus a means of reenslavement insofar as it turned most Black farmers into debt peons’ (p. 53).
But is this not an example, perhaps, of expanding the territorial claim of the calculative too far? Accounting, to be sure, was part of an emergent apparatus of exploitation and control that ensured that ‘emancipation’ amounted to a hollow, cruel promise. But did accounting actually, materially, turn Black farmers into debt peons and thus constitute per se a means of reenslavement? Not only is this a very expansive claim, but its legitimacy is problematized by the fact that Joseph – recalling my earlier point about noncalculative explanatory factors – does not illuminate the other components of what she accepts was a ‘broad and multifaceted effort…to constitute those who had been “emancipated” as indebted subjects, obliged to docile hard work’ (p. 52). What were those other components and, more importantly, what were their interrelations and relative significances vis-à-vis accounting? And, perhaps most pointedly in this regard, did the ‘contract enforcement’ now implicated in disciplining labor really eschew all of the ‘techniques of physical coercion’ systematized during slavery (and which, had they been present, would likely have contributed substantially to ‘reenslaving’ those now ‘free’)? Surely not.
In sum, my concern, as someone convinced, like Joseph, of the materiality of the calculative, is with how we substantiate that materiality and with the degree of explanatory weight we accord to it. Joseph’s book tells a series of important narratives about modes of accounting, but the substantive connections to transformations of social relations – and thus the highlighting, precisely, of accounting’s materiality – are not as sharply drawn as I had hoped they would be (which is not to say that such drawing is ever a straightforward exercise). The hazard of overextending the territorial claim of the calculative is, clearly, particularly acute when the demonstration that the connections in question amount to more than analogies or parallels is inconclusive. And, when Joseph persistently insists – again, in chapter 2 – that the ‘elaborations’ she examines of ‘new financial and juridical regimes are, of course, not merely analogous but also rather deeply intertwined processes’ (p. 46), it is hard not to conclude that, with the ‘of course’, she is trying to convince herself as much as she is the reader.