Wednesday, 18 May, 3pm-5.30pm (CM0.012), Keele University
Issues of debt, indebtedness, default, and bankruptcy
have become key to understanding the dynamics of contemporary social life since
the global economic crash of 2008. In the current post-crash period, when the
state has fallen back on austerity in order to manage the fall out of massive bank
bail outs and future proof the neoliberal system from total collapse, the
individual must be able to take care of themselves because social security is
no longer an option. In the age of austerity, welfare no longer makes sense. It
is unproductive and costs far too much. In light of this situation the
neoliberal individual becomes responsible for costs that might otherwise have
been covered by the state (education, health, and so on) in a period where
faltering economic growth means that the burden of not only being a neoliberal
individual, but also making ends meet starts to become unsustainable. Where
credit was good in a period of sustained economic growth, because it allowed
the individual to realise their neoliberal consumer identity and become through
things, in the austere society debt weighs heavy on neoliberal individual, the
debtor, who now lacks in the face of the creditor that demands repayment. In
the recent past it was good to live in the red, but now credit is harder to
come by and even harder to manage the moral politics of neoliberal society
explain that people should aspire to living within their means. In the context
of this shift, there is little doubt that the behaviour of the neoliberal state
has been ethically questionable. In the past individual credit was good because
it drove consumption and supported growth, whereas today debt is bad and
somehow representative of morally dubious conduct, even though the global
economic system remains absolutely reliant on processes of financialisation. It
is precisely this shift from the credit to the debt society, and the
consequences of this development, which is captured in recent works by Maurizio
Lazzarato, David Graeber, and others on the topic of indebtedness and
bankruptcy. It is also this move and the consequent writings of the above
writers that inspired this workshop that comprises three papers on the social
and cultural politics of the contemporary debt society.
Workshop
Schedule
3pm-3.20pm: Mark Featherstone – Ecologies of Indebtedness
3.30pm-4.10pm: Mark Davis - Futureproof: The Cultural
Politics of Indebtedness in Neoliberal Societies
4.20pm-5.00pm: Ole Bjerg
– Debt Drive and Compulsive Money
Creation
5.00-5.30pm: Questions
and Answers
Abstracts
Ole Bjerg (Copenhagen Business School)
‘Debt Drive and
Compulsive Money Creation’
Slavoj Žižek's concepts of desire and drive provide a model to distinguish
between 'normal' engaged behavior and 'pathological' addiction. While desire is
structured around the pursuit of an object onto which the subject projects
different fantasies of enjoyment and redemption, drive has moved beyond the
realm of fantasy and thus also beyond the realm of subjectivity as such. The
proposition I would like to raise is that contemporary financial capitalism is
no longer even structured around the desire for money but has moved into a
state of debt drive. Political initiatives in the wake of the financial crisis
such as bank packages, quantitative easing, austerity politics seem to have
given up even on the fantasy that we can move out of the crisis. Ultimately,
they all boil down to the compulsive repetition of the same failed act of
creating money out of debt.
Mark
Davis (University of Leeds)
‘Futureproof: The Cultural Politics of Indebtedness
in Neoliberal Societies’
Maurizio Lazzarato
teaches us that debt is fundamentally a promise – a promise of future
reimbursement. As such, in order for debt to exist, there must first be the
creation and production of a subject who is able to make and to keep that
promise (‘homo debtor’). We can therefore start to understand the neoliberal
economy as one that is always projected into a future that has been emptied of
its radical potential, pre-determined by decisions made today.
In this paper, I locate
these ideas through a (very) brief tour of the history of economics, in search
of alternative visions of a future that is not forestalled by debt, and then
assess Lazzarato’s claims in relation to a recently funded project looking at
the financial decisions of indebted graduate students in precarious labour
market positions. The challenge for a cultural politics of neoliberalism is how
to wrestle back the utopian possibility of the future such that indebted
subjects can imagine a world beyond the next set of monthly repayments.
Mark Featherstone (Keele University)
‘Ecologies
of Indebtedness’
In this paper I explore the impacts of debt through the
lens of Felix Guattari’s three ecologies of the mental, the social, and the
environmental in order to reimagine the meaning of indebtedness in a form of
globalisation defined by exhaustion and depression. In the first part of the paper
I trace the origins of the contemporary debt society through a discussion of
global socio-economic change before moving on to consider the impacts of the
near collapse of this social form in the period following 2008. In the second
section of the paper I expand my exploration of these impacts through
consideration of the ways in which unmanageable indebtedness destroys the
future on the level of both societies, which fall into exhaustion and a kind of
decrepit post-modernism, and individuals, who come to occupy a space of lack
and melancholia by virtue of their inability to live up to the modern ideal of
what it means to be a person. Finally, in the third part of the paper, I think
about the ways in which the realisation of what Will Davies et al call
financial melancholia may open up a space for a new ecologically sustainable
understanding of indebtedness based on an ethic of the inherent interdependence
of people, or what Gerald Raunig writes about in terms of the category of
dividualism. In this respect the central point of my paper concerns the attempt
to rethink the bad, or unsustainable, ecology of financial indebtedness, which
leads to individual, social, and environmental despair, through an ethics of
default and bankruptcy. Here, I suggest that the unsustainability of debt
premised on the ideal of living in the black may open out onto the possibility
of a new vision of the necessity of dividual interdependence, where self,
other, and world come together to create a sustainable ecology of living in the
red characterised by a recognition of vulnerability, responsibility, and
irreducible indebtedness.
