Everyday debt and credit

Deville, Joseph and Seigworth, Greg (2015) Everyday debt and credit. Cultural Studies, 29 (5-6). pp. 615-629. ISSN 0950-2386

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Abstract

Lived relations to credit and debt can steadily sink into the everyday in ways that are often missed in analyses that attend to the more immediately visible and eventful aspects of financial existence. How might one address those less remarked-upon, extra-‘ordinary’ lived moments of credit and debt: moments that can come, when all is added up, to say much more about the weight of the day-to-day and, thus, offer – by their very intimacy – the surest potential for their own transformation? Encounters between the monetary and the mundane transpire in all kind of ways, through all manner of instruments/practices, arrangements/assemblages, moralities/affects, rhythms/routines and across vastly different contexts and registers (familial, communal, gendered, racial, national, global, etc.). We argue that only by adhering closely to the empirical contents of one's immediate situation, as always crossed by the abstractions of theory, does it become possible to grasp in all its temporal and scalar diversity the ‘big picture’, a totality that might begin to unite these fragments and moments that otherwise escape continuously into the background. Our contributors speak from out of very specific sets of circumstances, histories and intimacies: with essays that take the reader into the decision-making practices at Portuguese retail banks, the mortgage worries of residents in new-build homes in Warsaw Poland, American military families and their struggles with debt management, the lives of mamapreneurs working a ‘fourth shift’, the tactical use of credit and debt in the slums of Buenos Aires, the bookkeeping practices of merchants in a Russian small town, the troubling subterranean history of today's philanthrocapital, Hungarian home borrowers' sense of futurity, the stylistics of household consumption in Chile, the appetites that drive financial apps, leverage's force-affects on space and time and the complicated hopefulness of the Rolling Jubilee. Together, these essays provide an empirics of indebtedness traversing the diverse social, affectual and material terrain of the everyday. This editors' introduction draws from their coordinates and atmospheres to enact a way of thinking across them: a way to gather up the residual, the unnoticed, the moment and the whole, in order to capture ‘something more’ of everyday debt and credit, not only as it passes but also in what it portends.