Introduction Dead Pledges
What is a “dead pledge”? Despite its gothic connotations, it actually names something that is probably quite familiar to many readers: a mortgage contract. The name for a contract on a real estate loan comes from the French mort gage. From this surprising etymology, we might exhume any number of meaningful lessons: about the terrifying nature of debt; the strange ontology of property; the uncanniness of ownership; the implicit threat at the heart of the credit contract. Dead Pledges is an attempt to show how these and other difficult lessons about debt are encrypted across contemporary culture. Looking at how debt has been represented aesthetically and conceptually in a period of crisis, this book aims to connect debt’s cultural representations to its material and political consequences. Casting credit’s certainty into doubt, reckoning with the problem of unpayable debts, and revealing the hidden violence of the credit economy, credit-crisis culture reminds us that debt is a matter of life and death: not just for individual borrowers but also for the economy as a whole. Debt has certainly become the defining feature of economic life today. Since the mid-1970s, US consumers have been using credit to pay not only for housing and automobiles but also, and historically unprecedentedly, for education, health care, groceries, clothes, and all manner of other daily necessities. By the third quarter of 2008, when US and global markets suffered their worst crisis since the Great Depression, US households held $13 trillion in debt, more than thirty times what they held in the mid-1970s.1 Meanwhile, the US economy had grown increasingly dependent on the borrowing of households, corporations, and the federal government. This borrowing not only funded consumption but also provided opportunities for the financialization of debt-based assets. When this financial market collapsed—when a vicious cycle of falling wages and increasing debt led to a rise in debt defaults, causing a decline in the value of the assets backed by those debts, causing in turn more defaults—the results were 1
