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1
I focus here on the subject-forming and temporal consequences of debt. Debt is an important contemporary economic
modality that I use as a synecdoche for its concatenated forces; other such figures (entrepreneurialism, managerialism,
and so on) are also operative currently.
2
Althaus-Reid, The Queer God, 104.
© 2016 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group DOI 10.1080/1462317X.2016.1211289
DEBT TIME IS STRAIGHT TIME 435
“we” created and subjected by debt into temporal and spatial contiguities with the
dreams of others.
As I argue throughout, redirecting the powers of debt-driven capital requires forging
uneasy alliances. I strive to suggest specific ways in which people whose social identifi-
cations and economic resources are very different are nevertheless subjected to similar
economic forces — economic forces whose destructive capacities are far greater for min-
oritized subjects, but that do not leave most of the more privileged untouched. While my
arguments for the need to discover and create transtemporal and transspatial contigu-
ities do not appear until later, I write throughout from the perspective of a non-
substantial, non-ontological “we” that precedes its own creation.
In discussions of the global order of capital, there are risks at two extremes that
may be difficult to do justice to in a single piece of writing. At one extreme, one
might illuminate local dynamics to emphasize the differences between, say, the
effect of microcredit in a particular place in India, car loans in the Mississippi
delta, and the way hedge funds use leverage to procure profits for themselves at
rates that far exceed “ordinary” market economies. The danger is, however, that
such accounts may miss the homologies between these economies of debt, as well
as the ways in which they relate to each other — not in a single, unified and undif-
ferentiated global order of capital, but in a globalized capitalism nonetheless.
At the other extreme, there are dangers of dematerialization in discussing capitalism
as a global economic system and what strategies might change actually existing capital-
ism. A dematerialized account of global capitalism might miss the reality and salience of
the differences among the cases enumerated above, and the way they currently use and
intensify existing historical processes of sexuation and racialization. A dematerialized
account of strategies for change might identify a feature of actually existing capitalism
and show how a particular, perhaps ephemeral gesture3 displays the possibility of a
different future and a different sociality — yet the detailed work of connecting alterna-
tives and resistance to the extant socioeconomic order (with all its immanent differences)
may never happen. In this article, I err on the side of the former, in the hopes that the
analysis contributes in small ways to generate the “we” that does not yet exist.
Infinite demand
While many analyses of neoliberalism focus on its expansion of financial logics into
all spheres of life — also a pattern of intensification — the dramatic concentration of
income and wealth into the hands of the ever-fewer4 descriptively and analytically
3
Throughout, I am in implicit dialogue with José Esteban Muñoz, one of the most significant theorists arguing for utopic
queer performance. Yet I worry that he remains wedded to ephemerality in so strong a way that the materiality of social
transformation (and what makes it possible) sometimes disappears. Muñoz finds the seeds of an otherwise already
present in the here and now, and seeks (in line with Ernst Bloch) to avoid dematerialized utopian idealism. Nonetheless,
his preference for the ephemeral and non-evidentiary seems both in line with, and unlikely to disrupt, the “liquidity” so
strongly associated with financialized capitalism. See Muñoz, Cruising Utopia, 65, 70, 135. Uri McMillan takes on
debates regarding the ephemerality of performance in McMillan, Embodied Avatars, 15. On 168, quoting Shannon
Jackson, he emphasizes the materiality of performance even given its ephemerality.
4
Global income and wealth inequality far exceed even spectacular inequalities within any particular country. Even given
the dramatic increases in inequality in the United States over the past 30 years, its GINI coefficient of 41.1 in 2010 was
far lower than the global GINI coefficient of 65 (data.worldbank.org/indicator/SI.POV.GINI). On the GINI scale, 0 indi-
cates perfect equality while 100 indicates perfect inequality (one person has all the money). See Dienst, The Bonds of
Debt, 43–47.
436 LINN MARIE TONSTAD
5
Philip Mirowski describes neoliberals’ view that inequality is “a necessary functional characteristic of [an] ideal market
system” and “one of [the market’s] strongest motor forces for progress,” Never Let a Serious, 63.
6
Duménil and Lévy, The Crisis of Neoliberalism, 8.
7
See Duménil and Lévy, Crisis of Neoliberalism, 62–5, 69–70, 101–24.
8
Nealon, Post-Postmodernism, 32.
9
See Figura and Ratner, “The Labor Share of Income and Equilibrium Unemployment” for information on the United
States and OECD, “Labour Losing to Capital” for information on OECD countries generally.
10
OECD, “Focus on Top Incomes and Taxation in OECD Countries.”
11
Ho, Liquidated, 74.
12
Ho, Liquidated, 91.
DEBT TIME IS STRAIGHT TIME 437
13
Cowen, Average is Over, 229–30.
14
Freeman, Time Binds, 3.
15
Federici, Caliban and the Witch, 149. While I use the language of “demand” throughout, that language signals not
that capital works on us from without but rather that these cultural and financial features leave us very little room to live
outside debt economies.
16
For just one of the many stories emerging from contemporary US-American landscapes of debt, see Kiel and Wald-
man’s analysis, “The Color of Debt.”
17
Lanier, Who Owns the Future?, 33.
18
Lazzarato, The Making of the Indebted Man, 29.
438 LINN MARIE TONSTAD
mortgages, credit cards, IMF loans, (some) bailouts. The economic order transforms
the subject into a debtor no matter what choices she makes, in analogy to Martin
Luther’s classic account of how the individual can choose freely between indifferent
alternatives but remains bound, in all cases, by original sin.
There is no alternative. The only road to the future runs through debt in all its
fixity. As a result, the present always arrives already subjugated to the past and to
the future. To the past, in which the debts that must be repaid were incurred. To
the future, which must be arranged to allow for repayment and security.19 We live
under economies of debt that ensure that nothing new (or good!) can happen to
us. As we enter into our lives, we find ourselves already indebted, at best able to
stay in a precarious balance where debt and demand overwhelm but do not
finally destroy us. We are always indebted, and always seeking to come out from
under that debt.
The infinite responsibility that each of us has for ourselves is reinforced. As Maur-
izio Lazzarato points out, “the debtor is ‘free’, but his actions, his behavior, are con-
fined to the limits defined by the debt he has entered into … You are [free] insofar as
you assume the way of life (consumption, work, public spending, taxes, etc.) com-
patible with reimbursement.”20 Debt serves as a site of constraint that restricts pos-
sibilities for different futures. Because of debt, any individual choice takes place from
a catch-up position: a portion of labor, income, wealth, time — every fungible
resource — is spent before it is received. Debt imposes scarcity and ensures that
there is never enough, no slack, nothing left over to expend or to keep in reserve
for unexpected crises. Debt entails losing the room for the sources and needs of cre-
ation: dead ends, play, and experimentation, other than — crucially — in the form of
ideas that can gain venture capital.21
Debt absolutizes what is by demonically gobbling up the possibilities of otherwise.
Richard Dienst describes the “monopoly of actuality, exercised … through the
power of teletechnology to shape the world in its own image, and … by the
power of money to decide what deserves to exist.”22 This monopoly of actuality
takes material form in the insistence on austerity measures following the recent
financial crisis.23 Wolfgang Streeck points out the importance of “investment
strikes” — or the threat thereof — in enforcing the fiction that there is no alternative
to the current order.24 If not this, then crisis and chaos. Any price we pay now will be
better than the price that will be extracted then — a price that, at the time of writing,
is being extracted from Greece. The psychological demands of investors (the need for
market confidence) take precedence over any needs (recast as desires) others might
19
Dardot and Laval, The New Way of the World, offer a telling quotation from a prior president of Intel, who says,
“Fear of competition, fear of bankruptcy, fear of being wrong and fear of losing can all be powerful motivators.
How do we cultivate fear of losing in our employees? We can only do so that if we feel it ourselves,” 294, quoting
Grove, Only the Paranoid Survive, 117.
20
Lazzarato, Making of the Indebted Man, 31.
21
In less precarious economies than our own, debt could fund rather than destroy creation. That it can seldom do so is
another pernicious aspect of contemporary debt economies.
22
Dienst, Bonds of Debt, 2.
23
See Streeck, Buying Time, 72–90. He comments, “Higher taxes to bring down public debt would also put to rest the
tawdry rhetoric according to which ‘we’ should not live at the expense of ‘our children’ — when the real problem is that
the ‘better-off’ live at everyone else’s expense by largely avoiding the social costs involved in the upkeep of their hunting
grounds,” 77–8 n. 59.
24
Streeck, Buying Time, 23.
DEBT TIME IS STRAIGHT TIME 439
have. Any alternative we might dream of, we are told, is utopian, not real. The puny,
gaunt visions and dreams of a better future that we are allowed, are nothing much to
hope for.25
As our bodies are conformed to the normativity of the future as an extension of
the present, not even sleep offers an escape. In a recent book, Jonathan Crary
argues that the only free space we are left — the only part of our lives that has
not yet been monetized, financialized, made into part of the imperative to
produce and consume — is sleep. Sleep is our only protection: the one point at
which our bodies set absolute and regular limits for the subjection of all that we
are and have to the requirements of capital.26 Yet even this setting of limits is
denied us. While writing an early draft of this argument, I noted multiple separate
articles on sleep in the New York Times in the space of a few days. On March
30, 2014, Stephanie Rosenbloom noted the way that travel industry operators are
using the prospect of a good night’s sleep as a marketing tool. The article quoted
Russell Sanna of Harvard Medical School saying that “Sleep is the enemy of capit-
alism,” but Rosenbloom failed to notice the irony of the statement (except in
drawing an anemic connection between sleep, diet, and exercise as the elements of
health). In another NYT essay by Eve Fairbanks on 23 March 2014, sleep
becomes “an element of continuous functioning … just another zone of the day to
be farmed for productivity … We can now sleep in order to maximize our economic
value. And thus sleep becomes just another burden.” The very limits of human exist-
ence become further territories for conquest. Recognizing human limitation may
then not constrain but in fact promote the infinite demands we experience. Our
dreams wither before the infinite demands placed on us.
The debts that constrain us are never merely monetary obligations; they are gods
that we worship and they are gods that demand that we make our lives living sacri-
fices to their rapaciousness. Lazzarato points out that “debt produces a specific
‘morality’ … The couple ‘effort-reward’ of the ideology of work is doubled by the
morality of the promise (to honor one’s debt) and the fault (of having entered into
it). As Nietzsche reminds us, the concept of ‘Schuld’ (guilt), a concept central to mor-
ality, is derived from the very concrete notion of ‘Schulden’ (debts).”27 It is impor-
tant to note the moralistic nature of debt-repayment discourse for some, especially
poor or minoritized subjects. Meanwhile, the richest are not only afforded credit
with generous terms as individuals; their profit-making entities find their debts can-
celled, subsidized, and socialized. Thus the richest parallel the elect: grace is
extended to them, in contrast to the infinite burden of guilt placed on the poor.
Limited atonement becomes material fact.28
Debt determines us, whether as demand or desire. Jaron Lanier points out that
“much of the new money brought into the world has actually been a
25
Indeed, dreaming of a better future may be our constitutive sin/fault, as in Edelman, No Future or differently in the
many revanchist accusations against entitled workers for wanting too much and indebting future generations.
26
Crary, 24/7.
27
Lazzarrato, Making of the Indebted Man, 30.
28
As Gary B. Gorton says, in a time of severe financial crisis, “there are two choices: either don’t enforce debt contracts
or liquidate the banking system. No society with a market economy has ever (intentionally) chosen to liquidate its
banking system,” Misunderstanding Financial Crises, 99. Gorton suggests that letting Lehman fail — now generally
thought to be a mistake — was due to the insistence of economists and regulators that moral hazard required that
some bank be forced into liquidation (148–9).
440 LINN MARIE TONSTAD
than both/and, the logic of “‘nothing for free’ (or for grace).”35 Theology redistri-
butes bodies across different economies for profit: “Are there any free kisses in
the church or in theology? Christian theology proclaims the grace of God as a gra-
tuitous love given to human beings and creation. Yet, the free kisses from God seem
to be reduced to the private aspect of faith more than the public one … human
bodies become devalued things, and thus lovers in theology become devalued,
because high value and respect are given to things such as marriage for profit. Plea-
sure is profit in theology for bartering purposes … [but] outside meaningful non-
heterosexual relationships … lessons of love can be learned and more about the
love of God can be discovered.”36 “Heterosexual” thinking is the logic of either
or and this or that, of debt and demand, of willing and desirous sacrifice, of protec-
tion and expenditure (self-protection while always going beyond what is required),
of responsibility and play (the play that work “ought” to be for those whose work-
places participate most fully in the contemporary technological economy), of passive
straight “female” submission to a heterosexual male God. “Love your enemies”
transmutes into capitalism’s ability to prevent the eruption of another world war.37
Religious, sexual, and spiritual practices thus risk serving as escapes rather
than forms of transformation, as manifestations of an apparent and only per-
sonal freedom. As Althaus-Reid says, “with the global expansion of capitalism
… adjudicated sexual roles in society may have changed, and even the hierarch-
ical ordering of the world may have changed, but they still have a god-father in
common; that is, the politically ever-expanding patriarchal God who does not
recognize any kiss which has not been approved.”38 Such alternative socialities
may have no effect on the regulated and determined socioeconomic orders of
debt, promise, and fault; they have no effect because they obscure their connec-
tion with capital’s power — exercised through political, social, cultural, affective,
and economic channels — to ensure its monopoly on actuality. Participants in
(what purport to be) alternative sexual economies are seldom taught to
connect them with capital’s desirous regulation of their daily lives — or else
the connection may be explicit and supportive, as witnessed by branded floats
in gay pride parades upon which employees celebrate their employers. As we
find the present subjugated to the future and to the past, the present arrives at
each moment already determined by the dragging burden of debt. We feel these
demands in our bodies, even when we protest against them by seeking out spiri-
tual, religious, and sexual alternatives. But to the extent that those practices
remain on the margins of our lives and function as escapes from the economic
necessities of our lives, to the extent that they function as merely oppositional
alternatives to the current order, they have no power to release us from debt.
We need ways to break open the constraint of possibility, the inhibition of
alternative socioeconomic orders, debt creation and normalization, and the infi-
nite demands for responsibility for ourselves that are placed on us.
35
Althaus-Reid, Queer God, 104.
36
Althaus-Reid, “A Woman’s Right”, 96.
37
Lingis, Dangerous Emotions, 187.
38
Althaus-Reid, “A Woman’s Right,” 97.
442 LINN MARIE TONSTAD
39
Ho, Liquidated, 34–8.
40
Joseph, Debt to Society, especially chapter 1.
41
Ho, Liquidated, 77.
42
See Smith, To Take Place, 54–71, for an illuminating if arguably too schematic discussion of spatially depicted and
mediated hierarchies in the temple visions in Ezekiel 40–8.
43
Dienst, Bonds of Debt, 52.
44
Ong, Neoliberalism as Exception, 21.
DEBT TIME IS STRAIGHT TIME 443
grasp, refusing the future in order to redirect it) is a prophetic practice. Althaus-Reid
says, “[I]f God is to be found in human relationships of economic and loving orders,
it is obvious that the right not to be straight in a capitalist society and church has the
goal of liberating God.”51 And who can set God free? We need a prophetic52 bodily
reordering in which the untimely one will arrive and tell us, or better show us, the
series of negations, intentional relations, and world-making activities that are our
best hope for living love in a time of capital. These hopes weigh less than the
Spirit of Gravity does on our shoulders (that always-already that the history of
Christian capitalism imposes on us); with them we may hope for an easier yoke
that would allow us to replenish our relations to ourselves and others.
Prophets dream for us and against us; they sound the alarm and they fall into
trances in which revelations are given to them. Prophets use speech, performance,
visions, dreams, and bodies to shift the relations between structures of authority
and embedded hierarchicalizations. Those manipulations, those reorderings of
apparently fixed elements of the world, reproduce but can also reconfigure visions
of orders of power.53 Most importantly, prophets contend with other prophets in
inexplicable bodied acts,54 and prophets contend with the prophets of other
gods.55 Prophetic contestation breaks open the “monopoly of actuality” that
insists “there is no alternative.”
“Blow the trumpet … sound the alarm!” “Your sons and daughters will prophesy, your
old men will dream dreams, your young men will see visions. Even on my servants, both
men and women, I will pour out my spirit in those days.”56
The passage from Joel points to the transgenerational and transgendered aspects
of prophecy, and to the importance of dreams. Late capitalism denies us dreams,
and late capitalism monetizes even our dreams. But prophets dream the dreams
that the rest of us are denied. Prophecies “have been a means by which the
“poor” have externalized their desires, given legitimacy to their plans, and
have been spurred to action.” For this reason, prophecy had to be “replaced
with the calculation of probabilities” — a calculation that depends on the postu-
late that “the future will be like the past.”57 We are seeking a future that is not
like the past.
Prophecy opens the possibility of the impossible beyond calculation and predic-
tion. Prophecy can connect the partially open future with the overdetermined
present to suggest strategies for redirection and recreation. Kirk Fuoss argues that
performance always involves contestation; if he is right, the same would apply to
prophetic performances.58 Prophetic performances may contribute to the develop-
ment of what Valerie Rohy understands as queer non-causality: a temporality
51
Althaus-Reid, “A Woman’s Right,” 98.
52
The understanding of prophecy I sketch in what follows is my own, but where relevant I discuss which parts of it I take
from scholars of performance.
53
Bell, Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice.
54
See for instance 1 Kings 13:11–32 and 20:35–38.
55
As in 1 Kings 18:17–40.
56
Joel 2:1 & 28–29, The Holy Bible.
57
Federici, Caliban and the Witch, 143. Federici explains that the body also had to undergo “fixation … in space and
time.”
58
Fuoss, “Performance as Contestation”, 98–117.
DEBT TIME IS STRAIGHT TIME 445
“whose beginnings are found in the future.”59 Rohy describes the way becoming gay
may involve a circular causality that escapes linear historical determination. In the
case of Oscar Wilde, for instance, “Wilde’s homosexuality both causes the gay
male identity of the future and is caused by it.”60 Such alternative causalities may
break the effort-reward, promise-fault couplings of determinate historical time —
of debt time. If we become what is not yet possible, our becoming escapes the
past’s determination without negating it.
Queer performances that embody impossible futures may have the capacity to
vivify and illuminate extant alternative imaginaries while challenging the “mon-
opoly of actuality” exercised by debt time, especially if these queer prophetic per-
formances distinguish themselves from capital not by their freedom from it61 but
by practicing in relation to it. Performance can reeducate our imaginations (our
dreams) in ways that do not pretend — as attenuated or homonormative gay
culture sometimes does — that no other economic order is possible. We need to
relearn the connections between sexuality and the economic order that lesbian fem-
inists and black feminists recognized from the very beginning.62 We must enter
desire’s school for reeducation so we may learn to name the present for the sake
of a redirected future. In order to change our futures (to make them no future for
the time of financialized capitalism and hetero-same reproduction), we need — as
I have argued — spatial and symbolic side-by-side relations, we need to learn the
nature of our time (and times), and we need to create the worlds that we need to
learn to want through institution-building and the generation of publics.
Let me give just one example of a queer performance of that sort. A while back, I
went to a performance by Lois Weaver at La Mama, an off–off-Broadway theater in
the East Village in New York City. Lois Weaver co-founded the Split Britches
Company, a pioneering lesbian theater troupe, with Peggy Shaw and Deb Margolin;
Shaw and Weaver also co-founded the WOW Café Theatre nearby with Pamela
Camhe and Jordy Mark.63 Weaver appeared in character as Tammy WhyNot, a
country singer who gave it all up to become a famous lesbian performance artist.
The show was titled What Tammy Needs to Know about Getting Old and
Having Sex: The Concert Tour. The WhyNots — about a dozen elderly people
from the surrounding community — appeared as Tammy’s backup singers and
dancers. The sold-out theater holds perhaps a hundred people; eighty-some were
women, about the same number appeared to be lesbian or gay (the vast majority
the former), and about the same number were over the age of 60 or so, maybe
over 65. Tammy interviewed the WhyNots, asking about their experiences of
getting older and having sex, and as they told their fabulous stories of masturbation,
willed celibacy, daily sex, and loneliness; they sang and danced, and they formidably
vibrated with energy — the 80-something woman wearing a transparent black shirt
over a fabulous purple bra and leather miniskirt, the Cuban dancer in a short fringed
59
Rohy, Lost Causes, 99.
60
Ibid., 74.
61
Which would simply repeat the distinction of practices that contribute to the problem.
62
Sara Warner emphasizes that in the 1970s, issues as (apparently) diverse as “union organizing, nuclear disarmament,
peace, urban renewal, prison activism, immigration reform, the environment, rape, abortion, domestic violence protec-
tion, and birth control topped the list of lesbian causes.” Acts of Gaiety, xxi. As is well known, the intersectional analyses
offered by the Combahee River Collective and similar groupings paved a road others are only now walking.
63
For more on WOW Café Theatre, see Davy, Lady Dicks and Lesbian Brothers.
446 LINN MARIE TONSTAD
red dress, the people who had not been destroyed by a society that teaches even their
purported allies (queers) to despise them. During the 90 minutes or so the show
lasted, I felt my desires shift: I want to be like these women when I grow up! (as it
were).64 Even so fleeting an intimation of a social world filled with women who
live in ways different from those of dominant society, of women whose lives are
derogated by the futural orientation of our current order, left me feeling, and so
believing in, a different world — a desirable future in which I too will become old
like these non-ancestral ancestors, something to look forward (backward) to. As
Jill Dolan argues, “communitas and the utopian performative … create the con-
dition for action; they pave a certain kind of way, prepare people for the choices
they might make in other aspects of their lives.”65 The dreams that affective attach-
ments mobilize are not necessarily escapist; they can also be properly political. A
politics against debt is perhaps just as demanding as debt-economies are, although
in very different ways.
How do we leave behind the calculations of probability on which capital depends,66
and move to the impossible? I was raised in the Seventh-day Adventist church, attending
only church schools until I went to graduate school, with little exposure in childhood to
non-Adventists except as targets for possible conversion. Seventh-day Adventist tem-
poral rhythms are just a little bit different from “ordinary” rhythms: our practice of
Sabbath-keeping, most evidently, along with certain lifestyle practices — abstention
from alcohol and tobacco, tithing, conscientious objection, and predominant veg-
etarianism. My Adventist existence was heavily institutionalized — we spent our
money at vegetarian restaurants, our time in self-supporting communities, at hospitals
and Adventist health centers, and in church attending evangelistic series. Both spatial
and temporal continuities were created through a variety of global and temporal con-
nections that established systems of identification and affiliation with other Adventists
and Adventism’s imagined precursors (the Waldensians, Jan Hus, Anabaptists). Even so
insular an existence could not insulate from knowledge of the differences between us
and others — indeed, such differences were constantly reinforced. There are myriad
well-known negative side effects of the type of upbringing that I had, but for the pur-
poses of this argument I want to emphasize how much institutionalization is required
to make practices like these easier. We were constantly training for how to respond
to threats to our beliefs and way of life, fed a diet of stories of people who, when
asked to work on the Sabbath, left their jobs and were taken care of by God and angels.
Resistance to debt time requires practices that are no less all-embracing than
(although decidedly not identical with) those I have just described. Some Christian com-
munities share with some queer communities the advantage of having a long cultural
history of experimentation with alternative ways of life that render different choices
intelligible and even easy. For my parents to do what they did required that almost
every choice — whether to bring in the newspaper on Sabbath or save it for after
64
I am far from alone in having this sort of response to Weaver and Shaw’s work. Davy quotes Lisa Kron (now the writer
of the Broadway musical Fun Home) and Claire Moed on the life-changing staging of the impossible performed by the
Split Britches in their play of the same name in Lady Dicks, 7. As Jen Harvie says, “the Split Britches generated a
still-snowballing amount of criticism approaching the size of a polar ice cap (I exaggerate slightly).” See Harvie, “Intro-
duction,” 10.
65
Dolan, Utopia in Performance, 169–70.
66
See, for instance, Daston’s discussion in “The Domestication of Risk,” 237–60.
DEBT TIME IS STRAIGHT TIME 447
Acknowledgements
Thanks to Devin P. Singh and the two anonymous reviewers for their helpful com-
ments on an earlier draft of this article.
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Notes on contributor
Linn Marie Tonstad is an Assistant Professor of Theology at Yale Divinity School.
Correspondence to: Linn Marie Tonstad. Email: linn.tonstad@yale.edu
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