Reply to my critics

Many thanks to Ugo Rossi for organizing this forum on my book and to the contributors for their engagements with it; I learned from all of them in various ways. I am deeply appreciative of the interest geographers have taken in my work throughout my career; and in turn, I have gained a great deal from geographers, seeking out occasions to be in dialogue, such as by participating in the annual meetings, regularly enough that I sometimes feel myself to be an honorary geographer. Trained in a program called Modern Thought and Literature at Stanford in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the period in which its faculty and students were avidly absorbing all they could of Cultural Studies as it was developing at the University of Birmingham, I’ve been institutionally located–through paycheck, teaching, conference participation, and publication–in Gender & Women’s Studies, American Studies, and LGBTQ Studies as well as Cultural Studies ever since. The appearance of the marketing tag “geography” (and only geography) on the back cover of the book, noted in Manuel B. Aalbers & Cesare Di Feliciantonio review here, was a surprise, though not an unwelcome invitation to potential readers. As Sarah Hall lays out here, geography is a capacious field, expanding its own porous boundaries through its interdisciplinary engagements. And one of the things I like most about this set of responses is that they surely emphasize the expansiveness of geography as a knowledge project, even as they elaborate and expand on the potential resonances of Debt to Society’s arguments and gestures, beyond its own limitations and beyond any narrowly defined discipline of geography.

Lisa Adkins identifies a key component of the project of Debt to Society: to situate debt and indebtedness as products of historical processes and forms of expression of social relations. She opens up the range of its relevance by connecting my arguments to key terms and debates in the discipline of sociology. Arguing that Debt to Society forwards a “substantivist” position, and deploys what sociology would call a “logic of embeddedness,” she takes the book as an invitation to examine the adequacy of that approach to debt. ¹ Adkins argues that debt and debt instruments must be seen not merely as constituted by but also constitutive and transformative of social relations. Adkins does not explicitly state whether she thinks Debt to Society recognizes the performative/transformative agency of debt (or, I would say, of the construction of indebtedness through particular modes of accounting, including debt instruments themselves). I believe that the activities of accounting through which debtor-creditor relations are inscribed play an active and not merely reflective role in relation to social hierarchies and categories and hope that is conveyed in the book.

I’m encouraged in that hope by the fact that Christophers’s primary argument is that Debt to Society attributes too much agency to accounting practices. Recognizing the location of this work in cultural studies and noting the materiality/discourse debate that was central in that field in the 1980s-1990s, Christophers argues for the territorial limits of representation. Posed this way, I might agree. But I don’t mean to be replaying this debate and coming down on the side of the extensiveness of representation or discourse. Rather than suggesting that everything “is” discourse (the caricatured version of poststructuralist arguments and especially of Judith Butler’s arguments that was commonly used in dismissing them in the 1990s), I am suggesting that practices of accounting do not merely represent but articulate relationships and thus are an important site where those relations are materialized.

Christophers’s other concern is that I assert that the liberal regimes of financial and juridical accounting are “intertwined” without showing more than analogy. Whether or not the evidence I mobilize demonstrates the inter-relationality I claim is a matter readers can assess for themselves. Christophers takes an “of course” as evidence that “she is trying to convince herself.” While I regret failing to delete that rhetorical crutch and can hardly answer in any definitive way a claim regarding my unconscious, I can offer an alternate hypothesis: the of course may have crept into the sentence as a consequence of my sense of the familiarity of the deconstructive move more than a gap in my own faith in my arguments. “Of course,” the analogizing between the domains, the metaphoric relation being performed in dominant discourse—in the common phrase “debt to society” itself as well as in texts of classical liberal juridical philosophy—indicates interdependencies and inter-relations.

Aalbers and Di Feliciantonio are far less attuned and sympathetic to the location, contribution, and style of the book. They acknowledge struggling to follow the argument and it does seem that they fail to understand what the book does and says. They especially dislike Chapter 3, which aims not only to describe but also perform the struggle to achieve entrepreneurial subjectivity (thus subheadings that name sections as various efforts to begin and begin again). They want the book to have more fully engaged scholars they have read and liked--Lazzarato, Stuart, Langley--but their list is inevitably vulnerable to the very critique they are launching in that it is missing those they found less interesting, less urgent given pressures of time and space, or simply do not know about due to the ways our works do and don’t circulate across disciplines, national borders, and oceans. That said, Langley deserved more space in the book; I learned a lot from his work along the way and could have more fully recognized his contribution to my thinking. I'm happy to have the opportunity to rectify both of these oversights here. No doubt, any moment in the book might have benefitted from deeper engagement with various relevant literatures, as the discussion of housing finance could have benefitted from greater knowledge of the work in geography and planning that includes Stuart, and for that matter Aalbers, among many others. But Aalbers & Di Feliciantonio do not ask me to give more space to scholars in carceral studies or critical university studies or to the feminist contributions to the history and anthropology of capitalism, all tremendously rich arenas of scholarship, relevant to various chapters in Debt to Society. ² Rather than an attempt to achieve absolute accountability to all the scholarship that exists, for me, citational practices necessarily reflect the conversations we are already in; and they might also reflect those we hope to join as we take the risk of reaching out beyond our comfort zones as well as the efforts we make to promote the work of others (thus the “critique up/cite down” rule of thumb).

Hall and Haiven both recognize the book as an invitation to further work. This corresponds well with my sense of the scope and limits of the book and my desires for the work it will do now that it can travel on its own. Hall suggests that geographers and, more broadly, scholars of cultural economy, might be encouraged by Debt to Society’s insistence on attending to power while thinking about finance to take up new projects that focus on different key terms and key relations, such as austerity and the relation between state finance and personal finance. Haiven notes that I gesture toward procedures for “counter-accounting” but don’t work out what that would really look like. Surely, this is in part due to constraints of my training and the constraints of life and career, to which I give some significant attention in the text (as Haiven hints, the style of some of the chapters is sometimes quite personal and confessional, an approach meant to mark my own complicity in the problems and challenges I describe). But at least equally, the project of realizing counter-accounting in practices must be collective and contingent. I have pursued a collaborative effort to redeploy data from a longitudinal survey of young adults’ financial attitudes and behaviors, working against the endless reproduction of gender stereotypes by repurposing statistical techniques to show that the financial gender of study participants changes over time (Serido and Joseph). In the context of my administrative practice, inspired by Randy Martin’s vision of “derivative value” discussed at the end of the book, I experimented with social network graphs to show the impact and interdisciplinarity of my gender and women’s studies department (I briefly describe this endeavor in Joseph 2015). Haiven offers meaningful assistance in giving substance to the gesture through his examination here of the achievements and limitations of national scale counter-accounting efforts in Greece and Spain. I encourage others to undertake and evaluate such efforts and to be in touch; a next step can be to share our efforts through conference panels, journal special issues and edited collections, and learn from each other as we struggle to make knowledge and social justice.