archive : s0metim3s

Here’s the spiel for a workshop, as part of “Seeing Through the Emperor’s New Clothes,” a conference on the GFC in September:

Economies of race, queer households and the crisis

For fascists, Keynesians and socialists of various persuasions, capitalism is bad when it extends credit to those who cannot – or, worse: will not – repay the debt. That is, capitalism is not bad because it’s exploitative, but because (in its expansive moments) it sets up crises of its own reproduction by not guaranteeing productivity (ie., exploitation) into the future. The repayment of debts, even if fictive, is the pivot of capitalism’s moral economy. And yet, the Global Financial Crisis indicated the extent to which that moral economy was inoperative – it signalled the power and threat of the minor within the highly strung circuits of financialisation. The suprime market was, for the greater part and as much as is known, composed of women – Latina and African-American women in particular, most of those recorded (in the language of demographics) as living in ‘non-normative’ arrangements or as ’single-parent households’. There was also some talk of undocumented migrants being given housing loans. We can talk about some of that in the session, about all of it, or more. If you’re inclined, there are some links to readings below.

What we would like to do in the workshop is have a conversation about households, genealogy and property. We would like to rethink politics not in the first instance as riot, demonstration or strike (though those can be fun and effective, at times) but in the ways we live. The questions here might be about the re-organisation of households as real estate, or the household as the new frontier of finance (eg, the NT Intervention, the political rise of the mortgage biblebelt, gentrification, Rudd’s “working family”). Or the nation-state as domestic economy and as (racialised, gendered) home, or the recent repatriations of migrant labour, or the familial-national politics of groups such as Nationalist Alternative. Or the legitimation of sexuality as the reproduction of property and its transmission (as with Gay Marriage, or the proper cultivation of children as future workers). Or the history of queer households, the meaning of “queer money,” and why the film Paris is Burning is about the political-economy of Houses and Passing. Or struggles over domestic unpaid labour and its distribution inside and outside the household, across borders and through migration policy. Or squatting and occupation, or how the expansion of financial products into the household was a response to an escape from the patriarchal-familial form of the Fordist household. Or about how the normative household and its meshing of sex, intimacy and genealogy (in race, nation, and legitimated offspring) authorises the partial distributions of the wage. There are a lot of threads to explore, if anyone cares to. But, above all, we would like to begin from the politics of intimacy and its architectures, that most seemingly unspectacular of matters that precipitated a crisis of global capitalism.

Here are some of the fragments, readings. Likely there are more to be added.

“Rethinking Neoliberalism and the Subprime Crisis: Beyond the Re-regulation Agenda,” Martijn Konings, Competition & Change, 13:2, June 2009:

Many critical commentators view the current crisis and the attendant legitimacy problems for free-market capitalism as an opportunity to make the case for financial re-regulation, i.e. a reassertion of public values against globalising markets. […] such assessments of the political possibilities offered by the subprime crisis rest on a misappraisal of its nature and, more broadly, the nature of the neoliberal era. […] the financial expansion of the past decades cannot be adequately understood in terms of the state’s failure to regulate financial markets. Financial growth has not involved the retreat of public institutions, the dissolution of social bonds or an emptying out of subjectivity, but has rather been a process whereby new organisational linkages were forged, particular norms and relations of institutional control were constructed and complex identities with thoroughly interlinked emotional households were created. Through a historical interpretation of the development of American finance since the New Deal, the paper outlines how the reconfigurations of neoliberalism have not reduced but enhanced the institutional capacities of the American state, as well as the leverage and power resources available to those who enjoy privileged access to the state’s organisational mechanisms. It then returns to the question of the political significance of the current crisis, suggesting that to seize on the change in ideological climate to advocate increased state control over financial life is likely to come down to supporting the restoration and fortification of an infrastructure of financial power that we criticised when it still went under the ideological banner of neoliberalism.

“Notes on the ‘Bailout’ Financial Crisis,” George Caffentzis, October 2008:

by taking ’sub-prime’ mortgages as the cause of the crisis, the working class demands for reliable housing and income security have been branded to be systematically ‘toxic’ to the credit system (to use the reigning metaphor of our day). The blockage of the credit route out of the long-term stagnation of the wage will have major strategic consequences. Since capital will not allow the US working class to be a class of rentiers (living off the ever increasing value of their stocks and of the equity on their homes), workers must return to the hard terrain of the wage in the coming era, however unpropitious it appears.

“In Praise of Usura,” Melinda Cooper and Angela Mitropoulos, Mute, May 2009:

[…] the question for those of us who do not concern ourselves with balance sheets is how this ostensible conflict between good and bad capitalism unleashes a redemptive, morally sanctioned violence to, as Obama remarked, put ‘people back to work’ or, on the other hand, declare them superfluous, parasitic or simply a barrier to more productive pursuits. Whether this legitimated violence unfolds in the form of what Tatjana Greif (in Reartikulacija) has referred to as the New Inquisition (against unproductive sex and gender indeterminacy) recently announced by Pope Benedict XVI in his pre-2008 Christmas address to the Roman Curia or, as with the emergence of the welfare state last century, in the expansion and proliferation of wars more officially declared and undertaken, the question is of the domestication of the crisis. There is no such thing as a non-violent counter-cyclical.

For Marx, the restoration of limits and boundaries does not mark the resolution of capital as such (as the moral critique of capitalism always imagines), but rather the retraction of credit which occurs once the expansive phase of capitalist debt creation has ceased to be profitable. Capital oscillates between the poles of credit expansion and credit retraction, is maintained in tension between the two tendencies in a dynamic that is neither dialectical nor progressive. As such the restoration of boundaries of all kinds is a periodic necessity of capitalist accumulation, as intrinsic to the capitalist dynamic as the expansive production of credit. Yet while Marx acknowledged that the moment of restoration, in its abstraction, can take on any number of geographical, contractual and productive forms (from the enclosures to the wage contract to the creation of the poor houses) he was unable to perceive the dynamics of restoration in its most intimate operations. In other words, in those moments when it claims to reimpose proper boundaries on the sexual transaction, to reconfine production within the household economy of familial reproduction, and sexual transit within the genealogical limits prescribed by the race, people or nation.

We are not, therefore, suggesting that Obama’s moral reinscriptions of the household be supplemented with real economic supports of a neo-Keynesian kind in the manner, for example, of the family wage. This, indeed, is one of the demands of Obama’s progressive Christian supporters, E. J. Dionne, and is one obvious direction in which demands for a living wage or basic income might unfold. Rather, we are interested in pushing the exercise in excess even further, in praise of a usurious economy from below that would begin with the most intimate of acts while breaking beyond their normative sexual and racial boundaries. Briefly put, how is it possible to live on borrowed time, to extend credit to oneself and others, while defaulting on the contractual arrangements one might have with the creditor? This is not an instance of declaring what is to be done, but of noting what is already occurring. Treasury Secretary Paulson was not so wrong in accusing the subprime class of being ‘speculators’. It is possible to separate the temporality of speculation from the obligation of debt, as long as living beyond one’s means (which means living beyond the conditions of scarcity imposed by the wage) is no longer limited by a deference to repayment.

As the foreclosures began, some defaulted on their debts while extending their own credit lines – the latter, often in the most practical of ways, by staying on after foreclosure and reconnecting energy. The merely private reocccupation of property could undoubtedly descend into the most reactionary of populisms - a survivalist protest against the federative, taxing state. But when the reoccupation extends beyond the limits of the private (whether in its strictly economic or infra-economic, familial and genealogical form) it enables connections of a more interesting kind. Some post-foreclosure squatting groups make a deliberate effort to separate re-housing from prior claims to ownership, therefore breaking with the moral pact between lineage, property and an authentic (i.e. non-usurious, repayable) debt. Generally, squatting networks have long been preoccupied with the question of how to reconnect and house without recourse to the identifications of race, class and sex that have a tendency to reform, even in the most marginal of spaces. In this regard, we could point to the queering of (some) European squatter spaces, the presence of undocumented women from Algeria in queer squats in France, or the regular traffic between queer, sex worker and undocumented squats of London, Oakland and Sydney. Moreover, the question of permanent occupation posed during the New School occupation - that of how to go beyond the ‘four sweating walls of privacy’ - assumes a wider conflict over genealogy, territory and property beyond simply that which is manifest in the universities or contained under the heading of cognitive labour.

[…] the financial crisis is an effect of usury from below, a consequence of speculative household consumption that extended beyond the limits which were tolerable to capital. And so, while it is a commonplace to speak of predatory lending, it is too easy, we think, to assume that those who took out the loans had no sense of risk or, rather, did not strategise within the cramped conditions of what was a monetised, racialised and gendered housing regime well before the advent of subprime loans. […] Disorganised from the perspective of social movement theory, and yet nevertheless effective, the subprime class rolled over their debts and lived beyond their means, generating surplus in the most unproductive of ways. The financial crisis signalled the existence of mass debt default and occupation, and was precipitated by the growing presence of usurious households. This unfolds as an experiment in the defamiliarisation of the nexus that binds intimacy, genealogy and productivity.