ABSTRACT
Fair is foul and foul is fair . . . The three Witches, chanting together, Macbeth, Act I, Scene I
The business of extending credit has always also been the business of collecting debt. Their indelible connection is not, however, necessarily obvious. Take the monthly credit card statement as an example. As I outlined in the first chapter, part of the apparent function of this device is to (potentially) ‘restore’ some of the calculative apparatus that was absent at the point of transaction. By regulators in particular, it is idealised as a device that should enable the borrower to assess a specific slice of their past life in order to help them to manage and contain future uncertainty. But the credit statement is also something else: part of its role is to act as a collections device. Even if it is not explicitly framed as such, its monthly arrival can nonetheless be seen as a routine deployment by the creditor, of a collections technology into the homes and everyday lives of debtors. After all, alongside its account of a borrower’s past borrowing practices, it contains a quite explicit demand: that a minimum amount should be repaid to the creditor, by a given date. Seen from within the debt collections industry, this indelible relationship between lending and collection can seem very self-evident; as Helen, a director at Alpha, the contingency collections agency that we visited in the previous chapter, put it to me: ‘your credit card company every month sends you a statement, that’s collecting their debt, you’re paying them. Just because we tend to do it when it’s gone into arrears or default, [it] isn’t any different’ (emphasis added). On one hand this is a conclusion that is self-serving: Helen tries to depoliticise consumer collections by including it under the umbrella of consumer lending more generally – an activity that is understood by many as routine and everyday. But, on the other, her assertion can simultaneously be read as (re-) politicising consumer lending. From the vantage point of the collections industry, therefore, the consumer lending business is also a collections business. Credit card statements from this perspective are not only mundane conveyors of account information, but also soft collections letters. This argument could be
extended to include a range other apparently mundane devices: for instance, the direct debit – a technology for automatically taking repayment from a borrower’s bank account on a monthly basis – or the text message from a creditor to a borrower informing him or her that a repayment is due.1 Consumer lending, a financial technology often associated with the promise of pleasurable consumption, is thus never disconnected from the more unpleasant business of debt collection. We should be cautious before accepting a redistribution of the politics of debt default that simply shifts the issue from one part of the credit industry to another – I will return to this question. However, for present purposes, it is at least important to recognise that the work of collections is distributed across both creditors (those legally owed a particular debt) and the self-defined ‘debt collections industry’. As we have seen, this is an industry that has claimed to possess privileged knowledge about the art of collecting ‘problem’ debt (that is when more mundane collection technologies have failed to elicit a repayment). Consumer credit lending and collection should thus be considered as involving a set of very particular, very interconnected, practices within a larger consumer credit assemblage. This chapter has two broad aims. The first is to explore this interrelationship further. Over and above how they are perceived from the outside, what, precisely, are the differences between the forms of collection respectively enacted by the consumer credit lending industry and the consumer collections industry? And how, and through what mechanisms, are differences produced and similarities obscured? In addressing these questions, much of the chapter focuses on a central component of the collections trajectory: the creditor’s own internal collections process. In this internal collections trajectory and, in particular, in the branding work that has been practiced as part of it, we can begin to identify more clearly the generative capacity of the difference between creditor and collector. In order to do so, some scene-setting is necessary. The chapter, therefore, also highlights important recent changes in the relationship between creditors and collectors. The chapter’s second aim is to shed further light on the calculative effects of specific collections technologies. We have already seen how a defaulting debtor’s calculative capacities are shaped by the arrival of collections devices, intersecting with the unfolding of their embodied daily lives, in a process that I have called the ‘capture of affect’. The last chapter showed how these devices become harnessed together as part of strategically deployed collections trajectories. In the process, I examined the role played by one collections technology in particular: the collections telephone call. This chapter tells much of the story of the relationship between the creditor and collector the collector through a second collections device: the collections letter.2 This will enable a more precise analysis of the generic function of collections letters, which I argued in Chapter 2 can be seen as ‘lures for feeling’ to the debtor. With this in place, we can begin to focus on what role these lures play in shaping a debtor’s calculative possibilities, as well as in performing the
distinction between creditor and collector. It is in the space of intersection between these two organisational entities that the debtor is made most aware of the ontological shift that will be repeatedly returned to over the course of the collections process: between the debtor as customer – desired, entreated, and (put simply) ‘good’ – and the debtor as, simply, debtor – obliged, needed, and ‘bad’. It is by looking here that some of the strangeness of the collections industry begins to reveal itself particularly clearly. It is a world, to return to Macbeth’s witches at the beginning of this chapter, where fair at times becomes foul. Before coming to this, it is important to be clear about how exactly the contemporary relationship between the creditor and the collector has come to be formatted. Chapter 3 looked at how the consumer debt collection industry has built up an increasingly self-confident identity over the course of the twentieth century. It is this that has allowed it to claim possession of the distinct forms of expertise required to collect defaulting debt. Creditors, meanwhile, have been largely happy for the collections industry to do so, given that it has tended to see the collection of defaulting debt as a somewhat peripheral concern. This is, however, often no longer the case.
