Debt to Society: Accounting for Life under Capitalism by Miranda Joseph, and: Knowledge Ltd: Toward a Social Logic of the Derivative by Randy Martin (review)

When the news broke in September 2017 of the insolvency of Documenta 14, the world-renowned art exhibition that takes place in Germany every five years, the story quickly assumed the familiar dimensions of a morality tale, with the fiscally responsible Germany bailing out the overspending of yet another Schuldenland (an offensive term for “debtor country”). Under the leadership of Polish artistic director Adam Szymczyk, Documenta 14 had expanded from its traditional small-town location in Kassel, Germany, to Athens, Greece, a move blamed for leaving the exhibition nearly $8.3 million in the red and almost forcing an early shutdown. While German media bemoaned this profligacy, and urged the return of the festival to its former status as a driver of tourism to regional Germany, the curators and artists who participated in Documenta 14 (full disclosure, I was among the signatories of a letter in defense of the curators) quickly hit back, pointing out how the media framing of the budget scandal ironically proved one of the major goals of an exhibition titled Learning from Athens: that a morality-infused language of debt inhibits politics through a calculus of accounting and accountability, and reduces the social function of art to a tourist production subject to expectations for constant economic growth.

This sordid episode of “shaming through debt” (Schuld means both “blame” and “debt” in German) provides a vivid example of the topical relevance of two books in performance studies: Knowledge Ltd: Toward a Social Logic of the Derivative by the late Randy Martin, and Debt to Society: Accounting for Life under Capitalism by Miranda Joseph. They both appear in the wake of David Graeber’s swashbuckling bestseller, Debt: The First 5,000 Years (2011), a book that forcefully disrupted the just-so stories that neoliberal apologists love to tell about the origins of capitalism in virtuous market exchange (rather than the horrors of debt, slavery, and accumulation through dispossession). Fans of Graeber’s committed prose, not to mention participants in the Occupy Wall Street and Strike Debt campaigns he is widely credited with inspiring, would do well to also immerse themselves in these two, perhaps less populist, but ultimately, imaginative and hopeful works of leftist thinking. Those looking for a more robust intersection between performance and politics than either the protest rally or occupation camp (however needed such tactics are now and will be in the future) will also find in these books a rewarding set of provocations.

Joseph in particular has offered a persuasive sympathetic critique of Graeber in her opening chapter, “Toward a Methodology of Critical Abstraction,” one so lucid that it should by all rights be assigned as required reading alongside Graeber’s Debt, in the same way as her earlier essay, “The Performance of Production and Consumption” (1998), has become a necessary text to be taught alongside Peggy Phelan’s “The Ontology of Performance” (1993). In both cases, Joseph restores dialectical thinking through her reading of a radical text that strives to glamorize an outside of capital relations (local knowledge for Graeber, the “live” for Phelan), without acknowledging how that idealized outside term exists in supplementary relation to terms of the hegemonic order (debt for Graeber, social reproduction for Phelan). Deeply sympathetic to these styles of radical will, Joseph is nevertheless dedicated to a queer feminist materialist practice of “critical abstraction,” one that does not celebrate the local, the live, or the unmediated for its own sake. She instead lays the groundwork for the conceptual and ethical imperative of a performance studies that can operate at either end of the spectrum, in terms of scale, complexity, and abstraction.

In a text that mirrors the systematic rigor and sobriety of...