Coda
The Living Indebted (on Students and Sabotage)
Contemporary debt, this book has argued, no longer appears as a form of exchange that reinforces social cohesion.1 In an age of securitization, speculative risk, and default, credit cannot function as a form of balanced obligation or mutuality. To be in debt today—to owe one’s livelihood to the willingness of a bank to extend credit, to owe the roof over one’s head to a lender who can take one late payment as cause for eviction—is to be caught in an endless cycle of discredit and dispossession. Thus, in the twenty-first century, credit and debt are no longer two reversible perspectives on the same circular exchange (money passing from lender to borrower and back again); rather, they represent two fundamentally antagonistic subject and class positions. Today, most of us number among the ever-growing hordes of the living indebted. While the previous chapters have sought to show the different ways this widespread condition of indebtedness has taken cultural form, they have also tried to remind us that debt itself is not cultural or representational, that it is not merely made of words or a matter of perspective. Though we think through debt at the level of culture, we nevertheless live it—and can only hope to contest it—on a more strictly material plane. With that in mind, I conclude by moving from the realm of cultural representation to the realm of political action to highlight the practical and tactical actions and affiliations that remain available to those of us for whom a life of debt is not the only life we wish to know. Consider, for instance, just one way that the aesthetics of uncanniness and horror (as discussed in Chapters 3 and 4) uncannily prefigure a more material genre of housing violence. Soon after the foreclosure crisis began to wreak havoc on homeowners and renters alike, reports emerged about the willful destruction of homes being foreclosed. Sometimes these incidents were merely the collateral damage inflicted when dispossessed owners attempted to remove objects of possible salable value from the home: appliances, electrical fixtures, copper piping, 185
