Debtor publics: tracking the participatory politics of consumer credit

Abstract

In the context of apparently ubiquitous relations of debt, it has been argued that the debtor possesses a unique, revolutionary potential. Why is this potential seemingly as yet unrealised? Where might nascent debtor publics be found? And what conditions, what infrastructures, might facilitate their emergence? In answering these questions, this paper argues that there are spaces where emergent "counteragencing" debtor publics can be detected -however, these are organising less around the issue of (consumer credit) borrowing than default. By analysing a prominent online debtor's forum in the UK -the Consumer Action Group debt collection industry sub-forum -the paper argues that such spaces contain important insights into the politics of credit markets and debt default, collective practices of calculation, and the formation of publics.

Financial Coaching and the Nudge: Examining Local Spaces of Market Agencement

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Experiments in Relational Finance: Harnessing the Social in Everyday Debt and Credit

“…By ‘reverse engineering’ (Taylor, 2015) the complex, fragile chains created by financialization, and by building political infrastructures to enact social indebtedness, Strike Debt demonstrates that people can use social redesign in finance to do more than deepen the grooves of well-worn extractive financial pathways. In making explicit social indebtedness to others, the group shows that it is possible to interrupt the amortization of daily life by capitalist finance and to create what we might call, following Deville (2015), ‘debtor publics’.…”

Untitled

“…Maria Jarosz i Ewa Nalewajko piszą o jakości i stylu debaty jako powierzchownej, nierzeczowej, hasłowej, emocjonalnej, kon-Prakseologia nr 159/2017 moralnymi po globalnym kryzysie gospodarczym (Fourcade 2013;Roitman 2014), zwłaszcza zaś badaniami wzajemnych relacji dłuż-ników i wierzycieli (Graeber 2012;Lazzarato 2012) oraz "publiczności dłużnej" (debtors publics) [Deville 2016]. Klasycznym odniesieniem w badaniach nad relacjami życia gospodarczego i moralności, również w tym tekście, jest pojęcie "ekonomii moralnej" (moral economy) E.P.…”