Background affects: theorising the indebted ordinary

Keywords: affect, debt, finance, everyday, subjectivity
Session Type: Virtual Paper
Day: Thursday
Session Start / End Time: 4/8/2021 02:10 AM (Pacific Time (US & Canada)) - 4/8/2021 03:25 AM (Pacific Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 15

Abstract

The paper argues that the affective architecture of debt operates just as much through moments of intensity – the letter of default, the pressure cooker of an advice session – as through a background hum in which individuals are engaged in ongoing practices of self-assessment, despair, desire and satisfaction. Drawing on in-depth interviews with indebted subjects, this paper investigates contemporary financial subjectivities through such forms of affective modulation that “run in the background”. In addition to those moments of intensity, it argues that indebted lives are composed through low-level affective states that include hypervigilance, dissociation and anxiety. It examines the deep entanglements of people, technologies and objects that produce these affective states, highlighting relations of obligation and codependency, and the forms of vigilance and anxiety these relations create.