II Credit

Rights and Duties of the Consumer-Citizen

Today, then, objects appear under the sign of differentiation and choice -- but they also appear (or at least, all key objects do) under the sign of credit. When you buy something you certainly have to pay for it, but the choice is yours `free', and by the same token credit terms are proposed as a free gift, as a kind of bonus from the world of production. The unstated assumption is that credit is the consumer's right, and ultimately an economic right of the citizen. Restriction of any kind on the possibility of buying on credit is felt to be a retaliatory measure on the part of the State; to do away with such arrangements -- which is in any case unthinkable -- would be experienced by society at large as the abolition of a freedom. For advertising, credit is a decisive argument in the `strategy of desire', and its role is comparable in every way to any other quality of the object on offer; it is on a par in customer motivation with choice, `personalization' and the rhetoric of promotion, of which last it is the tactical complement. The way in which the model is anticipated in the series is paralleled in the case of credit by the enjoyment of objects ahead of time; the psychological context is the same.

In principle the credit system does not affect the serial object more or less than
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it affects the model, and there is nothing to stop anyone buying a Jaguar on hire purchase. In actuality, however, custom decrees that the de luxe model be paid for cash down; things bought on credit tend simply not to be models. There is a logic of status according to which the prestige of a cash purchase is one of the privileges of the model, while the constraint of periodic payments contributes to the psychological shortfall associated with the serial object.

A certain puritanism has long sensed some moral danger in credit, and placed on-the-spot payment among the bourgeois virtues. It must be admitted, however, that psychological resistance of this kind is gradually diminishing. Where it persists, it is merely a relic of a traditional notion of property, and largely confined to the class of small owners still faithful to the notions of inheritance, thrift and the family future. These survivals are sure to die out in time. Once property had priority over use; now the reverse is true, and the extension of credit, among other phenomena defined by David Riesman, marks the gradual transition from an `acquisitive' civilization to a practical one. Credit customers are gradually learning how to make use of objects in complete freedom as though they were already `theirs'. The difference, of course, is that while such objects are being paid for they are simultaneously wearing out: the final payment-due date is not unrelated to the `replacement-due' date -- indeed, as we know, some American firms strive to make the two intervening periods coincide exactly. There is always the risk, therefore, as in the event of defectiveness or loss, that an object will be, so to speak, used up before it is paid up. Even when credit seems to have been perfectly integrated into everyday life, this danger is the basis of an insecurity that was never experienced in connection with the `patrimonial' object. Such an object was mine: I owed nothing. An object bought on credit will be mine when I have paid for it: it is conjugated, as it were, in the future perfect.

The anxiety that attaches to periodic payments is very specific. It eventually sets in train a parallel process which weighs down on us day after day even though we never become conscious of the objective relationship involved. It haunts the human project, not immediate practice. An object that is mortgaged escapes us in time, and has in fact escaped us from the outset. It flees us, and its flight echoes that of the serial object ever vainly striving towards the model. This dual
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movement of things away from our grasp is what creates the latent fragility and ever-imminent disappointments of the world of objects that surrounds us.

In the end the credit system merely exemplifies what is a very general way of relating to objects in the modern context. Indeed, it is quite possible to live on credit without sitting amid a year's worth of credit invoices for car, fridge and television, because the model/series mechanism, with its obligatory orientation towards the model, is a handicap in its own right. This mechanism governs the realm of social advancement, which consequently becomes a realm of handicapped aspiration. We are forever behindhand relative to our objects. They are here before us, yet they are already a year away, located either in that final payment or else in the next model by which they are bound to be replaced. So credit simply transfers a basic psychological situation onto the economic plane; the obligation to follow a sequence is the same at both levels, whether it is economic, as with successive hire-purchase payments, or psycho-sociological, as in the systematic and ever-accelerating succession of series and models. In any event, we experience our objects in a predefined, mortgaged temporal mode. If there are now barely any restrictions on the use of credit, perhaps the reason is that all our objects today are apprehended as if they were obtained on credit, as debts incurred to society as a whole -- debts that are always susceptible of adjustment, always fluctuating, always prey to chronic inflation and devaluation. Much in the same way as our earlier discussion of `personalization' led us to conclude that this was far more than an advertising gimmick, that it was in fact a key ideological notion, so likewise credit must be viewed as far more than a financial arrangement, for it is nothing less than a fundamental dimension of our society and in effect a new ethical system.

The Precedence of Consumption: A New Ethic

A single generation has witnessed the eclipse of the notions of patrimony and of fixed capital. Until our parents' generation, objects once acquired were owned in the full sense, for they were the material expression of work done. It is still not very long since buying a dining-table and chairs, or a car, represented the end-point of a sustained exercise of thrift. People worked dreaming of what they might later
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acquire; life was lived in accordance with the puritan notion of effort and its reward -- and objects finally won represented repayment for the past and security for the future. They were, in short, a capital. Today objects are with us before they are earned, they steal a march on the sum total of effort, of labour, that they embody, so that in a sense their consumption precedes their production. True, these objects, which I merely make use of, no longer impose any patrimonial responsibility on me; they are bequeathed to me by nobody and I, in turn, shall bequeath them to nobody. They do, however, exert another kind of constraint, for they hang over me as debts as yet unsettled. If they no longer locate me in a relationship to a family or customary group, I am nevertheless brought into relation through them with society at large and its agencies (the economic and financial order, the fluctuations of fashion, and so forth). And I must pay for them over and over again, month by month, or replace them every year. This means that everything has changed: the significance these objects have for me, the projects they embody, their objective future, and mine. It is worth pondering the fact that for centuries generations of people succeeded one another in an unchanging decor of objects which were longer-lived than they, whereas now many generations of objects will follow upon one another at an ever-accelerating pace during a single human lifetime. Where once man imposed his rhythm upon objects, now objects impose their disjointed rhythm -- their unpredictable and sudden manner of being present, of breaking down or replacing one another without ever aging -- upon human beings. Thus the status of a whole civilization changes along with the way in which its everyday objects make themselves present and the way in which they are enjoyed. In a patriarchal domestic economy founded on inheritance and stable rents, consumption could never conceivably precede production. In accordance with good Cartesian and moral logic, work preceded its fruit as cause precedes effect. That ascetic mode of accumulation, rooted in forethought, in sacrifice, and in a resorption of needs that created great tension within the individual, was the foundation of a whole civilization of thrift which enjoyed its own heroic period before expiring in the anachronistic figure of the rentier -- indeed, of the ruined rentier, who in this century has perforce learnt the historical lesson of the vanity of traditional morality and traditional economic calculation. By dint of living within
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their means, whole generations have ended up living far below their means. Work, merit, accumulation -- all the virtues of an era whose pinnacle was the concept of property are still discernible in the objects that stand as witness to that time, objects whose lost generations continue to haunt the petty-bourgeois interior.

The Obligation to Buy

Today a new morality has been born. Precedence of consumption over accumulation, forward flight, forced investment, speeded-up consumption, chronic inflation (implying the absurdity of saving) -- these are the motors of our whole present system of buying first and paying off later in labour. Credit has thus brought us back to a situation that is in fact feudal in character, reminiscent as it is of the arrangement under which a portion of labour would be allocated in advance, as serf labour, to the feudal lord. There is a difference, however, for our system, unlike feudalism, reposes on complicity: modern consumers spontaneously embrace and accept the unending constraint that is imposed on them. They buy so that society can continue to produce, this so that they can continue to work, and this in turn so that they can pay for what they have bought. Witness the following American advertising slogans, noted by Vance Packard, which make the point very well: `Buy days mean pay days -- and pay days mean better days!'; `Buy now -- the job you save may be your own!'; `Buy your way to prosperity!' [139]

The illusionism is truly remarkable: society appears to extend credit to you in exchange for a formal freedom, but in reality it is you who are giving credit to society, alienating your future in the process. Of course the system of production still depends fundamentally on the exploitation of labour-power, but today it is strongly reinforced by the circular consensus or collusion whereby subjection itself is experienced as freedom, and is thus transformed into an independent and durable system. In every individual the consumer colludes with the production system while having no relationship to the producer -- the victim of the system -- that he also is. Paradoxically, this split between producer and consumer is the
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mainstay of social integration, because everything is done so that it can never take the living and critical form of a contradiction.

The Miracle of Buying

The advantage of credit (as of advertising) is indeed the dual dimension it bestows upon buying and its objective determinants. Buying on credit amounts to the total appropriation of an object for a fraction of its real value. A minimal investment for a profit out of all proportion to it. Payments are relegated to a dimly perceived future, and the object is acquired in exchange for a symbolic gesture. This transaction mirrors the behaviour of the mythomaniac, who for the price of a made-up story receives a quite disproportionate measure of attention from his audience. His real investment is minimal, while the benefits are extraordinary, for he acquires all the virtues of reality on the strength, practically speaking, of a mere sign. He too lives on credit -- in the shape of the credulousness of other people. Now this inversion of the normal way of transforming reality -- which proceeds from work to the product of work, and founds the traditional temporality of the logic of knowledge as of everyday praxis -- this premature reaping of benefits is nothing less than magical. Likewise, what the buyer consumes and appropriates thanks to credit, along with the object prematurely acquired, is the myth of magical functionality promoted by the only society capable of offering him such possibilities of immediate self-realization. Naturally, he will very soon come face to face with socio-economic reality, just as the mythomaniac must sooner or later confront the spuriousness of his claims. Once unmasked, the mythomaniac either collapses or takes refuge in another tall tale. The buyer on the never-never is similarly liable to run up against unmeetable payment-due dates, and there is a good chance that he will seek psychological reassurance in this situation by buying some other item on credit. Forward flight is usual with this kind of behaviour, and the marvellous thing is that no causal connection is ever made, either by the mythomaniac between the story he tells and the failure he eventually experiences (for he learns nothing from this cold dash of reality), or by the buyer on credit between the gratification he obtains magically from his purchase and the payments he must subsequently
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meet. In this respect the credit system is the acme of man's irresponsibility towards himself: the buyer alienates the payer, and even though they are in fact the same person, the system ensures, by separating them in time, that they never become aware of the fact.

The Ambiguity of the Domestic Object

In sum, credit pretends to promote a civilization of modern consumers at last freed from the constraints of property, but in reality it institutes a whole system of integration which combines social mythology with brutal economic pressure. Credit is an ethic, but it is also a politics. The tactic of credit works in tandem with that of personalization to give objects a socio-political function they never used to have. We no longer live in the age of serfdom or in the age of usury, but both these constraints have been incorporated in abstract and amplified form into the realm of credit. Credit is a social realm, a temporal realm, a realm of things by virtue of which, and by virtue of the strategy that imposes it, objects are able to fulfil their function as accelerators and multipliers of tasks, satisfactions and expenditures. They thus become a kind of trampoline, their very inertia serving as a centrifugal force which lends everyday life its rhythm -- its tendency to forward flight, its precariousness and disequilibrium.

At the same time, objects, on which domesticity once depended as a means of escape from the pressures of society, now on the contrary serve to shackle the domestic universe to the circuits and constraints of the social one. By means of credit -- which is a free gift and a formal freedom but also a social sanction, a form of subjection and a fatality at the very heart of things -- domesticity is directly colonized: it acquires a kind of social dimension, but in the very worst sense. The most extreme and absurd effects of credit are eloquent: for example, when car payments are so pressing that the buyer cannot afford petrol for his vehicle, we have reached the point where the human project, filtered and fragmented by economic pressures, begins to feed upon itself. A fundamental truth about the present system emerges here too: objects now are by no means meant to be owned and used but solely to be produced and bought. In other words, they are structured as a
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function neither of needs nor of a more rational organization of the world, but instead constitute a system determined entirely by an ideological regime of production and social integration. Indeed, private objects properly so called no longer exist: thanks to their multiple use, it is the social order of production, with its own particular complicities, which now haunts the intimate world of the consumer and his consciousness. This penetration also marks the fading of any prospect of effectively contesting or transcending that social order.

II: Credit

Note from page 160: 18. The Waste Makers, p. 17.