Mise en scène: The make-believe space of over-indebted optimism

Davey, Ryan

doi:10.1016/j.geoforum.2018.10.026

Cited by 18 publications

(11 citation statements)

References 18 publications

(23 reference statements)

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“…In Davey's research, many debt advice clients spoke of having left debt‐collection letters unopened, refusing to answer telephone calls, unplugging their landline phone, and even hiding out of sight. One person reported “barricading yourself inside your home” when bailiffs arrived (see Davey 2019). One over‐indebted Woldham resident, Frank, was in arrears on his loan repayments, water bills, and council tax, and (in an earlier life) had engaged in petty crime.…”

Section: Popular Responses To State Coercionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Everyday Authoritarianism: Class and Coercion on Housing Estates in Neoliberal Britain

Davey

Koch

2021

PoLAR

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In Britain, especially in the 2010s, neoliberal reform involved an extension of legal coercion into the domestic and community lives of marginalized citizens. On two postindustrial housing estates in Britain, working-class residents experience this "everyday authoritarianism" in areas that the liberal state typically constructs as private and purports to leave alone: the home and the intimate relations that frame it. Residents engage this legal coercion by adopting responses that range from defensive avoidance to co-opting officials to acts of vigilantism. By doing so, they negotiate the presence of an authority that is often out of sync with their own expectations for protection, and in some cases actively undermines their efforts to remain safe. Their pluralism can be framed neither in terms of an acceptance of state authority nor as a straightforward refusal to be governed. Rather, it reveals the contradictory ways in which marginalized citizens define their relationship to the state under contemporary conditions of class fragmentation. By adding detail on everyday life to meta-narratives of an authoritarian turn, this article theorizes the political potential and limits of people's daily engagements with the state for contesting the latter's authority. [class, coercion, liberal governance] Despite its ambitions of universal freedom, liberal governance has historically featured limits where it interfaces with authoritarian forms of rule. This is especially the case for those people deemed to lack the capacity for self-governance (Bennett, Dodsworth, and Joyce 2007). In Britain, class marks one such limit, along with-and intersecting with-gender and race. Liberal democracy not only historically enfranchised the propertyowning classes but also monitored, policed, and controlled working-class people in ways not known to their middle-class counterparts (Joyce 2013). Our fieldwork was conducted in the 2010s, with our focus on the recent period of British governance known as neoliberalism. In Britain, neoliberalism is generally seen as commencing in 1979 with the election of Margaret Thatcher as prime minister and her policies of privatization, welfare retrenchment, and accumulation by dispossession. During this time, the state came to subject many working-class people to evermore open forms of coercion (

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Section: Popular Responses To State Coercionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Everyday Authoritarianism: Class and Coercion on Housing Estates in Neoliberal Britain

Davey

Koch

2021

PoLAR

Self Cite

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“…This includes the analysis of how gendered spaces (Harker et al, 2019) and transnational migration (Bylander, 2020) shape the process of entering into and managing debt obligations. Several accounts have examined the spatial aspects of debtors’ subjectivities, uncovering the spatial imaginaries used by individuals to understand their own indebtedness (Anderson et al, 2020; Davey, 2019; Kirwan, 2020). The spatiality of debt has also been identified as an important aspect of resistance efforts against debt peonage and dispossession, like mortgage strikes and the #FeesMustFall movement against student debt in South Africa (Montgomerie and Tepe-Belfrage, 2019; Vidal, 2018; Webb, 2020).…”

Section: Debt Spatiality and Dispossessionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Debtor spaces: Austerity, space, and dispossession in Michigan’s emergency management system

Heil

2021

Environ Plan A

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In recent years, debt has become a major focus of geographic research as debt relations have become increasingly central to today’s financialized capitalist economy. This paper bridges two aspects of the debt literature: (1) the emergent literature on debt spatiality, which argues that space plays an active role in the creation and maintenance of debt relations, and (2) the broader literature examining processes of debt-driven dispossession (e.g., foreclosure, eviction, austerity, etc.). Recent literature in geography, led by Harker’s work on debt spaces, has argued that debt should not only be understood as a temporal relation (a promise of future labor) but a spatial relation as well. This literature has examined the active role of space in creating debt relations but has been less attentive to the ways in which debt is a key mechanism of dispossessive economies. Analyzing Michigan’s emergency management laws, a system of forced, localized austerity, I chronicle how the social production of space is central to dispossessive debt projects. I conclude by offering a new concept, debtor spaces, to characterize the socio-spatial formations which enable practices of debt-based dispossession.

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“…Unsurprisingly, this flowering of research on economic worlds and affect has foregrounded the various 'topologies' (Harker 2017) of credit-debt that animate post-crisis life. A range of work has, for example, shown how credit-debt is tied to the (re)production of a form of neoliberal individualism, inseparable from the affective promises of autonomy, freedom and control (see Hall, 2012;Langley 2008) but also entangled with anxiety and guilt (Lazzarato 2012), melancholia (Davies et al 2015), hypervigilance (Dawney et al 2018), optimism (Davey 2019) and other affects of indebtedness. Other work has focused on the Accepted Article specific market devices through which affective (de)attachments to credit-debt are assembled and maintained in the midst of post-crisis atmospheres and moods (see Deville (2015) on how 'market devices' -credit cards and collection letters -work affectively to (re)attach borrowers to their debts).…”

Section: Affect Cultural Economy and 'Forms Of Living'mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…People did find ways of trying to avoid demands, offers and reminders -changing their phone number, blocking numbers, ignoring and then deleting messages and so on. As such, they sometimes performed some of the ordinary acts of optimism that Davey (2019) describes in his work on the hope of debt avoidance. Davey describes a form and practice of 'indebted optimism' that involves "setting a scene" in which materialisations of debt were expelled, whilst attention was focused on desired sensory stimuli.…”

Section: Accepted Articlementioning

confidence: 99%

Affective life and cultural economy: Payday loans and the everyday space‐times of credit‐debt in the UK

Anderson

Langley

Ash

et al. 2019

Trans Inst Br Geogr

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Analysing the affective geographies of digitally mediated payday loans in the UK, this paper advocates and exemplifies an approach to cultural economy that focuses on how economic worlds are Accepted ArticleThis article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved affectively animated and lived. Supplementing the two versions of 'culture' that cultural economy approaches have to date been organised around -culture as signifying system, or culture as assembled effect -we propose a cultural economy of everyday space-times which is attuned to the affective composition of forms of living. Drawing on empirical work with forty users of digitally mediated payday loans, we employ this approach to trace how their loans become part of three intersecting forms of living: relief, as a pressing concern is deferred to the immediate future; separation, as private spaces are created within ordinary life and obligations are felt as individual responsibilities; and pressure, as demands to pay intensify the sense that debt is spiralling out of control and already ongoing precarity cannot be sustained.In conclusion, we pose further questions for a cultural economy approach orientated to the analysis of forms of living.

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Mise en scène: The make-believe space of over-indebted optimism

Cited by 18 publications

References 18 publications

Everyday Authoritarianism: Class and Coercion on Housing Estates in Neoliberal Britain

Everyday Authoritarianism: Class and Coercion on Housing Estates in Neoliberal Britain

Debtor spaces: Austerity, space, and dispossession in Michigan’s emergency management system

Affective life and cultural economy: Payday loans and the everyday space‐times of credit‐debt in the UK

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