Accounting for Difference

Is the financial crisis behind us? A host of politicians, economists, and statisticians would have us believe that, indeed, we are in "recovery." Never mind that the economic and racial disparity that caused the crisis has grown exponentially since 2008. We might say that recovery of the financial industry looks less like an addict who has finally come to terms with the toxic effects of his addiction than a boxer who, after near-defeat, revives himself before the ninth bell and continues swinging. As we transition from the moment of asking, what is the crisis? to wondering, what was the crisis? we might feel a strange sense of loss—regret for having missed opportunities for real change and nostalgia for the idea that this might be the terminal crisis of neoliberal capitalism, as so many leftist prophets proclaimed at its outset. Faced with the anticlimactic nature of our so-called recovery, how might we make sense of having lived through such tumult?

Miranda Joseph's Debt to Society: Accounting for Life under Capitalism tenders a refreshing account of the crisis. By way of the rich and diverse theoretical engagements in the book, we come to understand that the crisis was, if nothing else, an event for thought, an opportunity to reckon with our fundamental categories and presuppositions as thinkers of culture and capitalism. Central to the book is the concept of accounting, defined as "techniques for constituting and attributing credits and debts—as they create, sustain, or transform social relations" (x). Joseph develops accounting as a tool through which to analyze a range of persistent and emerging social practices thrown into relief by the crisis. However, the book does not offer a definitive account of the crisis; it is instead itself an "account" of living through the crisis that plays on the double meaning of "accounting," derived from the Middle French acompter (to count), as both "to render a reckoning" and "to prepare or present an account of [financial] transactions."¹ The account offered is not of life in general, but a life, the life of a U.S. scholar, administrator, political activist, homeowner, and so on. As readers, we are never given a privileged vantage point from which to survey the true meaning of the crisis but rather accompany Joseph as she struggles to make sense of her own various and complex positions. Foregrounding an embedded viewpoint in each chapter, the book offers the best of a genre of feminist epistemology sorely lacking in so many grand narratives coming out of the crisis (I take David Graeber's Debt: The First 5,000 Years to be the self-fashioned antithesis of this method, a point I will return to later). By bringing together the subjective and the quantitative valences of accounting, Joseph generates a mode of accounting that is able to transduce abstract financial logics and personal experience. Thus, accounting emerges as both a concept and methodology that grounds itself within a materialist tradition of thought capable of attending to the nuances of subject position and difference in a way that more objective or synthetic accounts cannot. Through its own politically situated account, Debt to Society opens onto the affective dimensions of living through the crisis, the entangled and uncomfortable spaces that we must occupy if we are to be truly accountable to the situation at hand. While offering numerous contributions to the converging fields of critical financial studies, prison studies, and universities studies, the book, at the same time, performs the methodological approach to these topics it advocates.

Though much of the writing on the financial crisis has focused on financial debts and the asymmetrical power relation between creditor and debtor, Debt to Society aims for more and thus significantly expands our understanding of financial debts by situating them within larger networks of accounting and accountability that undergird all aspects of life under capitalism. Each chapter presents a distinct topic for investigation—debt, justice, time, gender, and interdisciplinarity—and uses the concept and practice of accounting to bring unexpected insights to each. One...