Speculative Technologies: Debt, Love, and Divination in a Transnationalizing Market

Four young women with love on their mind are waiting to learn about their future. It’s a summer afternoon in a neighborhood of Tuzla, a city in northeastern Bosnia. The waiting room is filled with old sofas, well loved and bent out of shape by a history of bodies getting comfortable, and the table in the middle is crowded with cups, upturned messily and leaking coffee tails. The mood is as inviting as the open seats: expectant, pleasurable, excited by the stories women share of previous visits. New arrivals are instructed on what to expect. One by one, women take their dry coffee cups to Zlata in the adjacent room. Coffee mud has painted the insides of turned cups with an intricate, biographically significant landscape, but Zlata apparently “reads” beyond the phenomenal, grasping what Jacques Derrida calls the very “possibility of an event dawning” (2005, 3).

Coffee mud is an appropriately murky medium for grasping what is not (yet), whatever may come to be under the circumstances of habitual uncertainty. The women are living in a precarious, transforming economy, where the market has been exploding since the end of socialism and the 1990s war, drawing masses into the business of trade and consumption. Thus inflated, the economy has been weathering a prolonged shortage of capital since the turn of the millennium. The popular market economy—everyday household provisioning and small entrepreneurship—is sustained by debt: informal lending and borrowing between intimates, kin, and clients and formal bank and microcredit loans. The clientele of Zlata, a coffee cup reader with a fabulous reputation for accuracy and reasonable price, however, are primarily concerned with forecasts for love affairs, illicit passions, urgent or wilting desires, marriage prospects, and such. A divining session just as often yields business advice, as the women at Zlata’s take it for granted that love and money, market and passion, longing and owing, in short, economic and affective relations are contiguous and intersecting.

Zlata’s vision is up to date on Bosnia’s economic trends. I have been casually visiting Zlata since 2006. In 2011, I found the cups much larger and the scope of her vision extended to keep up with the migration of economic opportunities, from regional, largely informal market trade to more transnational pursuits of fortune with American defense contractors (KBR and Fluor International) in Afghanistan and Iraq. Among those who seek her out—and recently, for reasons left unexplained, Zlata has received only women—many work for or are applying to Fluor International or else dating, desiring, marrying, and otherwise caring for men employed or seeking employment in Afghanistan and Iraq. A young woman, anxious about her protracted engagement, walked out of Zlata’s room with assurances about the date for her wedding and, just as exciting, news of her future husband’s job offer in Afghanistan. A later arrival, a mature woman and seasoned trader named Besima, has been visiting eagerly for several weeks, expecting an interview with a Fluor recruiter and, with perhaps more impatience, wondering about the twists and turns of a love affair emerging online.

Speculations

This is an essay about love, divination, and the debt market. Divination and debt are, clearly, speculative forms, while love, broadly speaking, is a central concern to both divining and debt enterprises in ways that are less obvious and locally specific. This text too is part speculative, part ethnographic. Starting with messy, abundant evidence that local practice effectively interlaces with the affective and economic, I ask what one speculative technology—forecasting the future from coffee mud—can tell us about another: contracting and extending debts.

If technologies, with a nod to Foucault (Martin, Gutman, and Hutton 1988, 17–19), could be thought of as matrices of practical reason, concerned with production, efficacy, and care of self and others, then thinking debt via an extended detour of divination and love explores speculation in a different mood. First, this is not the “scheming and projecting” of the financial speculator, the classic figure, whether in economic history (see Sombart [1915] 1967) or in contemporary critiques and media...