The Bonds of Debt: Borrowing Against the Common Good
The credit crisis has pushed the whole world so far into the red that the gigantic sums involved defy understanding. On a human level, what does such an enormous degree of debt and insolvency mean? In this timely book, cultural critic Richard Dienst considers the financial crisis, global poverty, media politics and radical theory to parse the various implications of a world where man is born free but everywhere is in debt.
Written with humor and verve, Bonds of Debt ranges across subjects—such as Obama’s national security strategy, the architecture of Prada stores, press photos of Bono, and a fairy tale told by Karl Marx—to capture a modern condition founded on fiscal imprudence. Moving beyond the dominant pieties and widespread anxieties surrounding the topic, Dienst re-conceives the world’s massive financial obligations as a social, economic, and political bond, where the crushing weight of objectified wealth comes face to face with new demands for equality and solidarity. For this inspired analysis, we are indebted to him.
Hardback, 200 pages
ISBN: 9781844676910
April 2011
$24.95 / £12.99 / $31.00CAN
Reviews
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[An] astute portrait of the recession ... on one rich canvas.
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[A] smart and easily understood book ... Dienst has a new and thrilling idea ... debt is exactly what bonds us and makes our kind of sociality possible.
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The most original thing about Dienst's reading of debt, a reading that is very close to the truth, is that it locates it at the very center of human sociality.
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Dienst throws new light on what it means for humanity to be tied up in the golden skeins of debt: we’re only now realizing what a huge change to human life, psychology and the fabric of everyday experience is involved in the creation of a financialized economy.
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Richard Dienst’s most radical proposition in this wonderfully clear and provocative little book is that we are burdened not by too much debt but by too little. Yes, we must discover ways to refuse and escape the regime of debt to the figures of power and institutions that rule over us, but we must also, and perhaps more importantly, recognize indebtedness as a basic human condition and create social ties that at once bind us to each other and free us. The combination of these two tasks is an exciting, even revolutionary, project.
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I spend my life studying the financial markets and I often wonder what it all ‘means.’ Dienst takes up that question in a thoroughly admirable way in this book. And as a bonus, it also includes a wonderful takedown of the odious Bono.
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Holds up debt as a hopeful idiom of identification through which we might build a new radical politics...an eminently readable collection of essays deserving of a large audience.
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Further notes on The Bonds of Debt
Stay updated on Richard Dienst's talks, reviews and other news by visiting his site Bonds of Debt
Listening to Zuccotti Park
From the beginning the protest on Wall Street has presented itself through a prolific array of Web outlets: Facebook pages, Twitter feeds, an immense Tumblr site, a nonstop Livestream video channel, multiple Youtube and Vimeo accounts, and three main websites (occupywallst.org, nycga.cc, and the original campaign page at www.adbusters.org.) Of course to say that the protest "presents itself" is already saying too much. Its strategy is multiplicity: whatever this protest is, it cannot be reduced to any single channel, any official voice, or any definitive agenda. Unlike all those demonstrations whose actions are designed solely to attract media coverage, Occupy Wall Street has managed to manifest itself and indeed to proliferate far beyond lower Manhattan without really presenting itself at all.
Instead, the occuption has thrived in the gap between airing grievances (which are many) and making demands (which would have to be few). Those who complain that the protest has failed to offer a clear program have failed to notice the precise ways in which such a program has been deliberately blocked or deferred. Meanwhile those who insist that the aims of the protest are quite obvious have overlooked not only the fact that its explicit aims keep shifting, but also that maintaining the occupation itself has been the only consistent aim all along. To ask "what is their message?" is misguided: there's no "their" there. Better many messages than the wrong one.
Greece, Cradle of “Debtocracy”
Richard Dienst is the author of Still Life in Real Time: Theory after Television and The Bonds of Debt, and a co-editor of Reading the Shape of the World. He teaches in the Department of English at Rutgers University. Here, in a special guest post for the Verso blog, Dienst comments on the film Debtocracy.
Soon after the 17 June 1953 workers' uprising in the DDR, Bertolt Brecht wrote a poem called "The Solution." He wanted to mock the official response to popular discontent: the Secretary of the Writer's Union had declared that the people had lost the confidence of the government and that they must earn it back by working twice as hard. "Wouldn't it be easier," Brecht suggested with pitch-perfect irony, "for the government to dissolve the people and elect another?"
Faced with nationwide general strikes, street riots in Athens, and jittery global markets, it is likely that Greek politicians are not the only ones who wish they could opt for such a solution. There must be presidents and legislators across the EU (not to mention bankers and investors around the world) who wish they could somehow dissolve the Greek people and replace them with a more docile, less demanding bunch, willing to work twice as hard for half as much.