preference, debt, and the individual

In the past year, as talk of weather and revolution swirls, debt has come to be one of the defining terms, one of the things that everyone is talking about. As Amanda Armstrong describes in her essay ``insolvent futures/bonds of struggle`` in the Reclamations issue Generation of Debt: University Default and the Undoing of Campus Life, ``debt is a collective phenomenon suffered individually`` (5), and it is to this collective individuality that I would like to turn my attention. In his post, Debt Collectors: the Economics, Politics and Morality of Debt, Jason Read, citing this line, describes how the most pressing task of organizing around debt is to do away with the residue of ``the responsible and isolated subject.`` Citing Maurizio Lazzarato`s writing on debt, Read  describes social ideas of collective morality remain (literally) at the heart of the subject under debt. In her post, Return of the Living Debt Sara Nelson takes up the idea that the politics of debt refusal involves understanding how debt structures the infinity of social relations, including the ``production of subjectivity.`` These writings importantly address ideas about how to organize and and take action, and in attempting to think about how debt as a particular and weighty instance of a ``collective phenomenon suffered individually,`` I`d like address what is perhaps another aspect--just how it is that this form of individuation can be thought. For his part, Read discusses how the morality of debt leads directly to the two primary forms of depoliticized individuation in the consumer (whose choices are writ in the logic of the market) and the citizen (whose ideas are based on the false neutrality of the state and its attendant concepts of equality and liberty). I`d like to propose that individuation, and in particular, the individual who suffers, as Armstrong describes, a ``collective phenomenon,`` can be thought through the idea of preference.


Preference, which perhaps immediately calls to mind models of rational and consumer choice, refers to both the qualitative and quantitative aspects of liking (and wanting). From the latin magis volo (malle), preference involves ``wanting more,`` adding to the faculty of the will the additional idea that wanting is also comparative, a means of degree. As Ann Smock describes in ``Quiet,`` an essay on Bartleby, preference (Bartleby`s infamous ``I would prefer not to``) refers not just to desire or to will, but to the repayment of debt, as Smock describes, as when one is called ``a man of preferences`` (71). Preference in this sense involves the choice of a debtor to pay whom he prefers first, or at all. Smock writes, “But if to prefer means to incline toward one thing rather than another—forexample, toward quietness rather than loquacity—it also means to pay one amonga number of creditors before, or even at the exclusion of, all others.Preference means the act of so quitting a particular debt first, or the rightto receive what is owed to you before any other creditor does.” What Smock highlights is preference’s double meaning a choice amongchoices (an inclination) and a choice over choices (a discrimination). And while most theories of preference and choice focus on the former, that is, on the idea that preference involves the selection of one thing from a set of many, this alternative model seems to suggest that dispensing with preference altogether, like dispensing with the individual, is as much a part of the problem as it seems to be a potential solution.

In her writing on preference, Hannah Arendt also enacts these two versions of preference, proairesis, which she associates with the liberum arbitrium, or free choice, and malle, as I noted above, which she uses to describe the capacity of an individual to make a private or individual interest matter in a collective, or political sense. The unfavorable view of Arendt for thinking about radical politics is perhaps based on what some see as her assumption of a liberal subject, but as we can see once we get into her writing, the subject as she understands it hardly resembles that problematic isolated and responsible individual that remains the object of political organizing. In one of the final chapters of the section ``Willing,`` in The Life of the Mind, which also contains her explication of preference as an early form of the will, Arendt describes the conflict involved in taking the will as a model for thinking about human activity, which is that it is always in the minds of philosophers rather than in ``men of action`` that it is thought. But rather than rejecting the findings of the philosophers, Arendt understands the complexity of this contradiction in terms of the ``I,`` that purported liberal subject who also inhabits the position of being primarily a spectator, but of having the desires, intentions, and indeed activities of actors.

And so Arendt writes about the individual, about the withdrawal from the world that constitutes thinking, and about the individuation:

Just as thinking prepares the self for the role of the spectator, willing fashions it into an ``enduring I`` that directs all particular acts of volition. It creates the self`s character and therefore was sometimes understood as the principium individuationis, the source of the person`s specific identity. / Yet it is precisely this individuation brought about by the Will that breeds new and serious trouble for the notion of freedom. (195)

What Arendt points to here is the illusive, and in other contexts, deluded nature of the ``enduring I`` and the irresistibility of this illusion of the individual as subject. For Arendt, the individuation is the result of a process in which the roles of spectator and actor are confused, and one thinks oneself to be acting as an actor, forgetting--momentarily, permanently, temporarily--that he is also a spectator. This point is one that David Graeber makes as well in his book Debt: The First 5000 Years, when he describes how we persist in thinking of ourselves as ``both master and slave simultaneously,`` which is the paradox that Arendt highlights in Nietzsche`s understanding of the will--a paradox that results in this subjective illusion. Graeber writes,

Just as lawyers have spent a thousand years trying to make sense of Roman property concepts, so have philosophers spent centuries trying to understand how it could be possible for us to have a relation of dominion over ourselves. The most popular solution--to say that each of us has something called a ``mind`` and that this is completely separate from something else, which we can call ``the body,`` and that the first thing holds natural dominion over the second--flies in the face of just about everything we now know about cognitive science. It`s obviously untrue, but we continue to hold onto it anyway, for the simple reason that none of our everyday assumptions about property, law, and freedom would make any sense without it. (207)

Graeber indicates that retaining such illusions about selfhood, and perhaps more specifically, about philosophical thought, serves only to bolster the normative paradigm of debt morality. In doing so, however, he importantly points out that the persistence of this untruth functions in ways that exceed the reproduction of society, and this gets at Arendt`s questions about how and to what extent individuals find it either ``necessary`` or irresistible to hold on to the production of this illusion. Arendt`s idea that individuation presents potential problems for freedom points to the exchange of freedom for necessity that she understands as a danger for the revolutionary project, and that she sees as being one of the key problems in Marx`s concept of revolution, which argues for the essence of economic necessity and for inevitability of history. I think it is really important to locate Arendt`s criticism in this double notion of necessity, and to think about how such necessity becomes redeployed in revolutionary and counter-revolutionary ways. Preference intervenes directly in necessity, because it involves the capacity to discriminate and to make discriminations about things that are seen to fall outside of our ability to inflect--such as truth, social norms, beauty.

Arendt`s idea about how collective phenomena are suffered individually thus proposes to invert the relation that most writings on debt take to be primary--that is, that the individual needs to be ``heavily worked on`` (and I take this phrase from comments at a recent conference I attended about how Arendt`s ``liberal model`` needs to be heavily worked). Arendt writes, to this end, ``In other words, political freedom is possible only in the sphere of human plurality, and on the premise that this sphere is not simply an extension of the dual I-and-myself to a plural We. Action, in which a We is always engaged in changing our common world, stands in the sharpest possible opposition to the solitary business of thought, which operates in a dialogue between me and myself`` (200). Far from assuming the model of a liberal subject, Arendt describes the limit at which individually felt experiences meet our so-called inescapable and ``real`` experience of each other and one another in the society.

Ultimately, Arendt’s idea that there is a lot to lose in incrementally surrendering freedom to necessity is related to her perception about the consequences of mistaking these choices as criterion for the so-called endpoint of revolution. Preference, which I`ve called malle, magis volo (wanting more), defines itself against ideas about a choice between options (liberum arbitrium) as a choice of means, but not ends. As malle, or magis volo, it initiates the more radical activity of preferring-as-discrimination: the ability to choose, or “prefer,” the interests that inform this choice over and against ideas commonly held in society. Preference is then literally the choice before a choice (as indicated by the German “Vorliebe,” and by the Greek term Arendt takes up, “proairesis”), something like the middle ground between the a priori and the prior, and as a model of this disjuncture, it points to how it is the misperception of these choices as criteria for action that threatens the freedom of society and that, in moments of unfreedom, the artwork functions to protect.