ABSTRACT
We understand nothing about impasses of the political without having an account of the production of the present.
(Berlant 2011, p. 4)
This chapter explores the increasingly uncomfortable everyday life of default.1 It analyses encounters between defaulting credit borrowers and the organisations designed to collect the outstanding debt, which we can group under a terminological umbrella: debt collectors.2 In later chapters we will look at their organisational work. However, if we move to into these organisations too hastily there is a danger of misunderstanding the character of the domain that is the object of so much of their endeavour. As the last chapter showed, the lending devices of consumer credit work in part by acting as ‘lures for feeling’, by easing the passage of borrowers into otherwise unrealisable modes of engagement with the world. The price paid for grasping these lures is partly financial, in the shape of the gradual application of interest to a loan. However, there is also an ontological price: the transformation of a person into a borrower. The borrower is a hybrid figure, an amalgam of a particular individual and a particular socio-economic technology. For many, this hybrid life may be uneventful: repayments proceed without incident and the borrower may ultimately succeed in uncoupling this aspect of their hybrid existence as a loan is paid off. For some, however, things take a different turn: the set of connections, of attachments, that were set into motion the moment a credit card was used, or a loan was taken out, becomes harder to coexist with. Repayment amounts start to exceed disposable income, penalty charges start to accrue, and payments start to be missed. If this continues, a new ontological shift occurs as the borrower becomes a defaulter. The result is to begin to confront a different set of lures, designed not to encourage borrowing but repayment. Oriented in particular around two technologies of mass contact – the letter and the telephone call (although these are increasingly being supplemented by electronic means: emails and text messages, for example) – they are also not formatted to ease life but to render it uncomfortable. Thinking with the lure helps in attending to the emergent and processual character of the relationships between entities. When it comes to describing how
these relations operate in and through the intimate and bodily domains of human experience, this can be complemented by an account of the role played by what we can call the ‘affective’. From this point forwards in the book, affect will be a central analytical category. As we will see in the next chapter, the importance of successfully harnessing the potential of affect has long been a concern of the collections industry (even if it does not refer to its interest in these terms). In this chapter I introduce why this might be the case, while putting affect into dialogue with some of the conceptual and methodological apparatus developed by the economisation programme and related work within science and technology studies. This includes examining the role played by devices of consumer credit collection, while being concerned with how aspects of a life in default come to form an association with one another, how they come to matter to each other and in what way.3 This means exploring empirically how the modes of implication of debtors’ involvements in the consumer credit market become charged, via the mutual grasping of debtors and technologies of debt collection in the shared space of the life of default. Exploring the lived character of default, as it is mutually constituted with and through range of material devices will help provide an answer to the question that I ended the previous chapter with: how are we to understand market attachment when detachment, even if desired, appears extremely difficult? Answering this question will involve bringing some further conceptual resources to bear on the problem. The first is a way of describing a specific movement of attachment. Here I draw on Deleuze’s account of the fold as a helpful way of pointing to what is at stake in the attachments surrounding debt default. The second is to put more pressure on the concept of market attachment, as it has been formulated by the economisation programme. What analytical possibilities does it offer? What does it foreclose? How does it relate to alternate understandings of what attachments are and what they do? It is with this second set of questions that I begin.
