Indebted Subjectivities: Juggling with Consumer Credit

Personal debt is as old as human history. Yet consumer credit, as we know it today, is a modern phenomenon. Decline of the idea of the welfare state and increasing financialisation of everyday life have brought most of the individuals to a point where borrowing money is inevitable to survive. In the credit system, as Marx put it on his Comments on James Mill, “it appears as if the power of the alien, material force were broken, the relationship of self-estrangement abolished and man had once more human relations to man”. However, credit in which the man himself, instead of metal or paper, has become the mediator of exchange, is the economic judgment on the morality of man. This so-called moral connotation of credit paves the way for building a neoliberal "governmentality" upon men. Hence, consumer credit has emerged as an important aspect of neoliberal policy. As French philosopher Gilles Deleuze put it, “man is no longer man enclosed, but man in debt.” Indebted man, instead of being a mere puppet of neoliberal governmentality, struggles to equip himself with tools and tactics to handle consumer credit. Hence indebted man is in a constant challenge to build up a subjectivity in his daily life. Indebted subjectivities are those stories of men juggling with consumer credit in a highly financialised neoliberal world.