Responding and calling: for collaboration and/in counter-accounting for social justice

Kelly Dombroski (2016) stages her commentary on Debt to Society as a Māori ‘call and response,’ in which she is the ‘guest,’ responding to a call ‘over a distance into Joseph’s space’; and she is also the ‘responding caller,’ whose engagement with the book involves an inquiry/invitation to the book and its author to step forward and help close the distance (p. 604).¹ The goal of the ritual, for Dombroski, is that we might come together for a ‘meeting,’ which would be further call and response. Dombroski thus makes explicit the dynamic shaping all three of the reviews featured here as well as a number of others: the reviewers identify and explicate the relation between the work under review and their own theoretical and methodological approaches, sometimes their disciplines, always their intellectual and political commitments and projects. The three reviewers here, and in my experience most (though not all), take up the task with generosity, seeking out means of approach and possibilities for connection, translating across differences in disciplinary terminology and domains of investigation. Ultimately, the question of whether we can communicate in a meaningful way, yields to a question of collaboration: can the text under review help move the reviewer’s project forward. As the author of the reviewed book, I too watch with some trepidation for signs of successful (or failed) communication, take pleasure in the possibilities for engagement that the reviewers work to create, and feel a sense of satisfaction when it seems that my work might be enabling to or collaborative with social justice knowledge projects initiated by others.

But as Dombroski makes clear, even with the best of intentions, the effort to meet – for further call and response – through call and response can fail. The ‘call’ (my book) might be parochial geographically, of relevance only to the US (to what extent do the social/cultural/economic processes with which I’m concerned manifest themselves in similar ways elsewhere, or not?), and insensitive to or unconcerned with the specificities of other places. It might also be parochial intellectually; surveying my intellectual ‘ancestors,’ Dombroski describes a work by Xin Liu that takes up related issues in the context of China that I do not discuss or cite and with which I was previously unfamiliar (p. 604). The absence of the citation might indicate a limitation of my work; but Dombroski’s sharing of this relevant text, and through it a related social process occurring in another site, exemplifies the value of call and response itself (now I know of Xin Liu’s work and can go read it and think about the connections between the processes in China and those in the US, with which I’m most familiar).

Another potential obstacle Dombroski identifies is that prior commitments and understandings are actually a matter of identity for each of us, such that an encounter with a different perspective may set off knee-jerking rather than hearing and substantively engaging. Dombroski makes a deliberate effort to hold at bay her own knee-jerk resistance to the idea that debt might be productive. To do this, she uses J. K. Gibson-Graham² and the Community Economies framework, which aims to find ‘glimmers of possibility where something other than capitalism might be produced,’ to find a way to join my effort to imagine appropriating and transforming the accounting procedures that constitute debt–credit relationships (p. 606). She thus invites me to take a fresh look at the Community Economies approach, which I have previously found a bit too romanticizing of community as an outside to capitalism. From Dombroski’s perspective, this connection as well as the direct attention to gendered financial subjectivities in Chapter 4 of Debt to Society open a possibility for collaboration between our projects. And she concludes by picking up where my book leaves off, looking for practical ways to engage and transform the imposition of particular regimes of accounting and accountability being introduced in her university.

The difficulty of negotiating collaboration across challenges to our scholarly and/or political identities is clearly at play in Barker’s review (2016). From start to finish, she positions herself as working in alliance with the argument of my book and ultimately finds that what she identifies as an anthropological theorization of debt (one that is crucial to her own view) is compatible with the view offered in Debt to Society: we are on the same page in recognizing

economies as embedded in social systems or, to use Joseph’s term, social formations and are thus able to [and maybe, more importantly, committed to] examine the ways that cultural inscriptions and economic processes circulate in tandem and engender unjust social and racial formations. (p. 615)

And in keeping with this sense of shared project, Barker moves beyond Debt to Society by offering discussions of contemporary ‘debtors’ prisons’ and representations of gendered financial dynamics.

However, Barker also notes a disciplinary gap between us in that she argues that I have attributed a view to David Graeber that he, as an anthropologist, would never hold. She suggests that I’ve mischaracterized his stance in Debt: The First 5000 Years as positing debt as destructive of community (2011). She claims that his critique is only of debts as constituted by neoclassical economics (subtended by liberal political theory), which involves commodification of people; ‘for anthropologists,’ she says, debt is understood as a social bond and, among anthropologists, unequal and violent dynamics of premarket societies are well known and thus are not idealized as ‘community.’ Barker asserts (and I certainly agree) that Graeber’s goal is not a critique of ‘capitalism per se’ but rather a critique of the ‘moral confusion’ of people with commodities. She doesn’t define commodities but does associate ‘commodification’ with equivalence and quantification:

Resisting the commodification of persons does not necessarily imply resisting abstraction … it does imply, however, rejecting the notion of people as commodities, of a world ruled by equivalences, of a world ruled by number. (p. 612)

And thus, she joins Graeber in deploying an interconnected set of terms, terms that in my view implicate abstraction and quantification, as (apparently) pejorative opposites of personhood.

Are we talking past each other due to differences in disciplinary terminology or disciplinary axioms? Or do we have a substantive difference, not bridgeable by translation across disciplinary perspectives? It is a primary project of Debt to Society to deconstruct the opposition between particularity and abstraction. The argument proceeds, in part, by recognizing that commodities, by (Marx’s) definition, join particularity and abstraction, quality and quantity, in a dialectical (and thus contingent, contradictory) process. In this view, the commodification of persons is not so much a moral confusion, though it might be morally objectionable, as it is a core component of capitalism. Moreover, in this Marxist view, the commodification of labor (as waged labor power that generates value), of affect, of life itself,³ entails ways of knowing and not knowing (e.g. fetishism), of defining and understanding what it means to be a person (Hennessy 2008). These ways of knowing have been elaborated, formalized, and defended through the economic and political theories Barker discusses; but those theories and their ways of knowing persons are inseparable from capitalism. If we find these ways of understanding and treating people to be unjust, oppressive, exploitative, then we can’t bracket ‘capitalism per se’ from our analysis. This may be another way of saying that, in order to fulfill a commitment to examine the processes that ‘engender unjust social and racial formations’, a different view of the relation between cultural and economic processes might be useful.

Todorova (2016), who self-identifies as committed to the project of heterodox economics, finds common ground with Debt to Society in a shared effort to advance an understanding of ‘debt-credit as social process.’ That is, for her (for us), economic process is not ‘embedded in’ or circulating ‘in tandem with’ social process, as Barker puts it, but simply is social process. This indistinction, she explains, works against the reification of debt, that is, against understanding debt as ‘an abstract thing and a result of abstraction’ (p. 618). Moving in step with the Debt to Society argument, Todorova points out what is at stake in recognizing that, therefore, quantification/depersonalization is not exactly the problem, nor re-personalization quite the solution: ‘debt-credit as social process’ generates persons as differentially creditworthy, differentially vulnerable to debt (this is the productivity of debt to which Dombroski refers).⁴

As Todorova points out, the term used in Debt to Society for the procedures by which debts and credits are attributed – by which differential debt- or credit-worthiness is realized and hierarchical relations between debtors and creditors are articulated – is accounting. I do this, Todorova recognizes, in order to suggest that these performative representational activities, these knowledge projects, are sites for intervention and struggle. We might design and produce different accounts that constitute different debtor–creditor relations and thus different social relations. And here, again, she sees common ground with the project of heterodox economics, which has challenged accountability standards in the academy, as well as mainstream understandings of economic value more broadly. I very much appreciate Todorova’s explanation of this transformative counter-accounting project as an ‘undertaking.’ For her, ‘“undertaking” allows for different norms of valuation’ (p. 620); for me, in her use of it, undertaking also connotes an ongoing creative project of striving for new modes of accounting that might contribute to constituting less oppressive, more just social formations.

As Taylor Nelms has pointed out, this ‘undertaking’ is ‘not just the technical problem of inventing new accounts/accountings/accountabilities or of finding new ways to use old accounting techniques and technologies. At stake is also the re-mobilization of that dialectic of particularity and abstraction’ (personal communication). Rather than mobilizing narrative against number, looking for the individual humans behind the statistics, the challenge is to construct accounts (using whatever combinations of narrative and number and so-called ‘data visualization’) that call on us to look beyond the fetishized empirical outcome of an algorithm, a calculation, toward an analysis of social processes, an understanding of the racist, sexist, and exploitative logics that produce particular debtors and creditors. Can we undertake to develop accounts that not only reflect different ‘norms of valuation’ – as social and ‘green’ accounting projects have done, with varying levels of success – but articulate our relationships differently, galvanizing and hailing new collectivities? Near the conclusion of the book, I take inspiration from Randy Martin’s joining of ‘critical interdisciplinary studies’ with what he calls ‘the social logic of the derivative’:

Against claims for the intrinsic value of humanities objects and scholarship, Martin advocates instead for critical interdisciplinary studies that … derive value from multiple elsewheres. These interdisciplinary studies would, like financial derivatives, be valuable as sites of ‘engagement, affiliation, activism, and organizing,’ as technologies of abstraction that enable us ‘to recognize the ways in which the concrete particularities, the specific engagements, commitments, and interventions we tender and expend might be interconnected’ (Joseph p. 147, quoting Martin 2011, p. 159).

As Dombroski, Barker and Todorova engage Debt to Society by articulating connections with it that might be leveraged on behalf of transformative knowledge projects, I am optimistic.

Notes

1. Many thanks to Taylor Nelms for organizing and curating this review forum. And many thanks to Kelly Dombroski, Drucilla K. Barker, and Zdravka Todorova for their very thoughtful engagements with my book.

2. Although we might not have exactly the same ancestors, Dombroski suggests that we might find intellectual kinship through J. K. Gibson-Graham, whose work is very important to her. Although I don’t engage Gibson-Graham in Debt to Society, I do discuss their work (1996) in my first book (see Joseph 2002, pp. 149–151).

3. Here we can talk about chattel slavery or the extension of capitalist processes into the so-called social factory, as theorized by Virno, Negri, and others in the Italian autonomist Marxist school, and, before and alongside them, the theorization by feminist scholars of the importance of affective labor and the labor of social reproduction in capitalist processes (see Kathi Weeks 2007 for one important review of some of the feminist contributions and Leopoldina Fortunati 2007 for another).

4. The phrase ‘differential vulnerability to debt’ is meant to recall Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s definition of racism as ‘state-sanctioned or extralegal production and exploitation of group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death’ (Gilmore 2007, p. 28).