The financial crisis of 2008 and the subsequent "Great Recession" have often been seen as crises of debt and credit. Political economists have attempted to unravel the financial instruments - the subprime mortgages and collateralized debt obligations - at the heart of the crisis; but debt and credit raise central questions for culture and everyday life, as well.
How does debt work to discipline and degrade labor? What if we apply notions of debt to the natural world? Can national debts resolve state sanctioned violence? How does student debt shape education? How might we narrate and repay notions of intellectual debt? What is the relation between debt and memory and what are the narratives of debt that structure our everyday...>>
Going Into Debt
This dossier on debt draws from conversations among the Yale Working Group on Globalization and Culture about the cultural meanings of debt in relation to the histories of migration, nation-building and state violence, to discourses around nature and intellectual exchange, as well as to the narrative structures that construct and reframe the meanings of debt in daily life.
Contributors: Sigma Colón, Michael Denning, Amina El-Annan, Andrew Hannon, Eli Jelly-Schapiro, Hong Liang, Monica Muñoz Martinez, Andrew Ross, and Van Truong, with responses by David Graeber and Richard Dienst.
In addition, we have invited a series of artists and activists to contribute multimedia entries to the dossier, and invite you to peruse these as well. These multimedia features include Andrew Ross addressing Occupy Wall Street on student debt, an excerpt from Michael Truscello's documentary Capitalism is the Crisis, David Horvitz's crowdsourced art project to make his student loans disappear, and excerpts from The Aaron Burr Society's Free Money Movement.
How does debt act as a tool of labor discipline? As a catalyst of capitalist accumulation? As a method of labor degradation? I want to approach these questions by imagining a series of three lives, working lives, working lives in debt. Though nominally fictional, this inter-generational story is rooted in actual places, and in actual historical moments--spaces and times of significant import to the twentieth-century history of debt and credit in particular, and capitalism in general. Our first fictional life--let's give it a name: Davis Johnson--begins in the Caribbean, in the Bahamas, around the turn of the century. Pineapple PeonageThe grandson of a slave, Davis is working as a pineapple cultivator. The year is 1915, the time of the First...>>
Every winter millions of monarch butterflies migrate from the United States and Canada to forests in central Mexico. The sight of their arrival stops people and traffic not only by virtue of its uniqueness, but also due to the physical barrier created by the volume of butterflies crossing like planes aiming to land on the boughs of fir trees. This natural phenomenon remains elusive to scientists aiming to understand how these butterflies know the route to forests in Michoacán. Considering that they embark on this migration about every five generations, it is extraordinary that the beautiful winged insects who blanket many acres of forest are the great, great grandchildren of previous generations of monarch butterflies who undertook the same...>>
"Without memory, there is no debt. Put another way: without story, there is no debt."[1] That's how Margaret Atwood put it in her book, Payback (2008), in which she foregos the structures of finance in order to explore the more hidden narratives of debt as cultural construct. According to Atwood, many of our moralizing concepts around debt have been imagined through various religious and literary narratives about its sins and redemptions. Debt is understood as a human construct, dramatized through story, and for Atwood, it "mirrors and magnifies both voracious human desire and ferocious human fear.[2] Atwood's approach to debt, as human construct and experience, offers a meaningful way into thinking about the complicated crossings of desire and fear...>>
In the nineteen-teens, Concepcion García, a Mexican national, lived in Texas to attend school. In April 1919 she became ill, and attempted to return home. That same month Lt. Gulley of the U.S. Cavalry patrolled the U.S.-Mexico border. While crossing the river back to Mexico on a raft, Concepcion, her mother Maria, and her aunt found themselves under fire. Her father Teodoro looked on from the Mexican bank as Lt. Gulley shot and killed his daughter.[1] That same month a court-martial dismissed Lt. Gulley from military service for firing at an unarmed group. However, on the advice of the secretary of war, the US President reversed the findings. This action restored the lieutenant to active military service five months...>>
The establishment of Chinese sociology was transnational from the very beginning. During the early decades of the twentieth century, Europe and Japan were two major sources of Chinese sociological knowledge, but starting from the 1920s, Chinese sociology developed a close affiliation with U.S. sociology because of the shared concern with social problems and the applied interest in social reform. This short essay traces the production of sociological knowledge about China and examines Chinese sociologists' efforts of indigenization in the twentieth century. It asks what Chinese sociology owes for its very existence and how intellectual debt can be settled.Before 1930, as sociologists Talcott Parsons and Leon Bramson point out, American sociology, unlike European sociology, took the broad outline of the...>>
The German philosopher Ernst Bloch in his massive tome The Spirit of Utopia, devoted an entire section to what he called " Little Daydreams". Overflowing each page are mystical and impressionistic descriptions of phenomena like wishful thinking, social utopias, daydreams, hope, Marxism, technological utopias, art, utopian blueprints, fairy-tales and myth, excitement, travel logs, and various forms of religion. The longing for various things is what drives wishes and daydreams as well as negative or regretful dreams in the bourgeois world, he instructs us, and in the "Invention of new pleasure" section he writes, the bourgeois mostly dream about money. Sophie Kinsella's Confessions of a Shopaholic series are extended dreams about money--intertwined with dreams about marriage, about social status, about celebrity,...>>
Two thirds of American College graduates graduate in debt. Traditionally, student debt, like a home mortgage, was thought of as "good" debt, a wise investment in the future. [1] The current financial crisis has disrupted that common sense, and while it is possible to abandon a home that isn't worth the money you paid for it with a hit to your credit rating, student debt in the US cannot be discharged through bankruptcy.[2] There is no walking away from student debt. Student Protests Parliament Square, Westminster 2010 Photo by Flickr user bobaliciouslondon The United States University system, what we can call the Banking Model of Education, is becoming the model for the world. American institutions are opening campuses abroad...>>
Why are we in debt? And, why do we believe we are in debt? It is not a question of whether we are in debt: we are. In recent years, from Turkey to the United Kingdom, credit card debt reached North American levels, as a percentage of disposable income. As a journalist noted just before the financial crisis, "few American exports have proved as popular as credit cards." Below is the Federal Reserve's picture of the total consumer debt of Americans: according to one estimate based on their figures, every man, woman and child in the United States owes $7,800, a third in revolving credit card debt and two-thirds in installment debt, mainly student loans and auto loans. And...>>
It's important to begin with a reminder of the reasons everybody is talking about debt these days. The threat of "debt crisis" hangs over the world economy. The United States "has been living beyond its means," Greece "cannot pay its bills," Spain has "unsustainable deficits," and so on. When you hear it on the news, the term "debt crisis" usually refers to disturbances at the level of national economies (such as imbalances in government or trade financing) that become more or less urgent, more or less contagious. When the crisis reaches a certain fever pitch, debt itself can no longer be presented as a benign financial instrument and appears instead as a cancerous growth that must be quarantined and...>>
I feel I am at a bit of a disadvantage since Richard Dienst has said much of what I would wish to say, and much of it, at least slightly better. I agree strongly with his assessment. What these papers show is just how wide-ranging the concept of debt really is, everything from the feeling of guilt when one has missed a car payment, or of being bound to the company store, to the need to somehow recognize that which makes one's existence possible: whether that's the creation of a scholarly discipline, the unknown benefactor who made it possible to flee one's former country, or the ecosystems of the planet Earth. They also highlight the perils of using "debt"...>>
Introduction by Ashley Dawson: In 1970, an adviser to California Governor Ronald Reagan's reelection campaign commented on the state of public education: "We are in danger of producing an educated proletariat. That's dynamite! We have to be selective on who we allow to go through higher education." After his reelection in 1970, Governor Reagan followed through on this advice by dismantling the University of California's policy of free tuition. A similar campaign unfolded subsequently in New York, with President Ford using the fiscal crisis of the city in 1975 to force the City University of New York to terminate its 129-year-old policy of free tuition.In place of this model of public education as a human right, a new model...>>
Michael Truscello's new documentary, Capitalism Is The Crisis: Radical Politics in the Age of Austerity, which is excerpted above, can be viewed in its entirety here. It features commentary by Chris Hedges, Michael Hardt, and many more....>>
My student debt for a MFA from Bard College is currently $58,412.10. My attempt is to use the internet to get 100,000 people to mail the Sallie Mae corporation (who administers my loans), a check for 58 cents. And that by doing this, the collective activity of these small gestures will not only relieve my debt, but will overwhelm and flood their P.O. box in Atlanta, Georgia.>>
The Aaron Burr Society is dedicated to exposing the myths of Free Markets and Free Trade with absurdist, conceptual artwork operating in the public sphere.>>
Jody Zellen is a Los Angeles based artist who works in many media simultaneously making interactive installations, net art, drawings, photographs, public art, as well as artists' books that explore the urban environment and its representation. She employs media-generated representations as raw material for aesthetic and social investigations. Recent interactive installations include "The Unemployed" a data visualizationan interactive installation that is a data visualization of worldwide unemployment. It is currently on view at DIsseny Hub Museum in Barcelona.Click here to view video documentation.Click here for the interactive web version....>>
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