“Today I am worth”: K. Lorraine Graham’s Graph

In The Making of the Indebted Man, Maurizio Lazzarato presents “the increasing force of the creditor-debtor relationship” in the world remade by financial capitalism since the late 1970s (23). “Debt acts as a ‘capture,’ ‘predation,’ and ‘extraction’ machine on the whole of society,” he writes (29); “the creditor-debtor relation concerns the entirety of the current population as well as the population to come” (32). If, in the last chapter of Debt: The First 5,000 Years, David Graeber exculpates contemporary working-class debtors, subject to decreased wages and plied continually with credit opportunities, for incurring debt to live life above the level of mere survival, floating consumption as conviviality or social participation, Lazzarato perhaps more absolutely deindividuates debt, for in this neoliberal epoch it always already profoundly conditions any given economic circuit, whether one’s transactions are mediated by payment plan or not.[1]
 
One concern that emerges from these excerpts from K. Lorraine Graham’s Graph – with its unstinting demonstrations of the subject’s inextricability from debt, the degree to which debt saturates social relations – is the strange morphology of economic non-agency in debt culture, the extended mutations of (the alibi of) the sovereign subject of contractual exchange.  In this contemporary working class universe, a work “ethic” has become even less about sacrificing for the future than about a futurity already intractably mortgaged to or sold out for a still-precarious present: how to maneuver among seemingly non-negotiable vectors of hyper-exploitation that not only enjoin and profit from labor, but require life itself to be rented?  As Graham lays bare the intricacies of this ruthless system, she puts on display the surplus exactions of (gendered) affective labor, but more so the affect and social judgment generated around each reticulation of an ever-complexifying debt network.  What Graph finally portrays is not canny, street-smart manipulations of what exactly must be rendered – would-be debt-defying feats – but the very impossibility of being a “good” subject of debt, of navigating labyrinths designed to be so difficult to negotiate that the debtor, regardless of fidelity to dues, is dug continually deeper in arrears.
 
Take, for instance, Graham’s appropriation text (outright expropriation of pre-fabricated language or sublet?), comprised of select search results for the phrase “is not easy” combined with those for the term “austerity.”  Here the grotesquerie of the neoliberal suffocation of the welfare state posed as natural fact meets the sleazy, faux-sympathetic come-on of coping mechanisms for hire: Graham pinpoints and plays up the debt-service industry’s massaging rhetoric—“we’re here to help”—with its promise to understand rather than condemn the debtor who must pay by exposing herself if she is ever to get out of the hole, as it lures her to meet the class antagonism of debt redeemingly re-branded as life challenge.  Graham’s reframing perfectly captchas the paradox of the creditor’s invocation of bygone civility in the very act of describing a most uncivil insistence: “You can write us a letter and we will stop contacting you.”  If its inclusion of protest (“thousands of people in Lisbon protest austerity measures”) opens onto a possible opposition to working with austerity—indeed, of profiting from it—the piece also exemplifies the affective dynamics that overtax working-class virtues, preying upon vulnerability, an aversion to being beholden, and the willingness to pull the belt tighter, even as the debt economy works over labor only to extrude it. “In capitalist logics of askesis,” as Lauren Berlant observes, “the workers’ obligation is to be more rational than the system, and their recompense is to be held in a sense of pride at surviving the scene of their own attrition.” Or as Graham says: “Life is not easy for any of us, but what of that?”  Another appropriation text, on “office automation,” reads as a counter-exemplar of actor network theory: the repeated imposition of the word “automation” in discourse cribbed from corporate ad copy serves to mystify precisely which tasks the technology will perform, as human causality continually slips logics in these triumphalist formulations.  Such deskilling, dehumanizing efficiency strategies make workers mere mechanized adjuncts to operating systems: “Use office automation hardware and make action-based systems a habit. Automation design systems through supervision and labor that uplifts humanity.”  More chilling, though, is the managerial class-position in which the system stands.
 
Graph offers up its mediated representations of class epistemology through compassionate but unsparing insight into damaged identity.  In a move akin to conceptual writing, Graham’s devastating opening list poem – auto-populated by a bank statement – contrives a post-lyric for an unforgivingly evacuated precariat subjectivity: the place of self-expression has been usurped by monetized predicates of self-worth, glaringly posting their I’s proximity to economic disaster on an unremitting daily basis.  In verse reduced to the self’s bottom line, Graham reveals the brutal economistic lens seemingly internalized by the post-lyrical subject (if such flatness can signal interiority), yet her initial volley complicates that reduction insofar as it presents the self as an elusive value-field: “Value: One’s self cannot be anywhere.”  If this suggests the essential dislocation of the contemporary self, traceable only through the virtual flux of the electronic transfer of funds, it also points to the ways in which the self-as-value is continually re-generated through motion, circulation, and exchange: earnings and expenditure.
 
And yet Graham’s depiction of this volatility does not give onto a sense of more wholesome, alternate circuitries; it is rather the courage of ressentiment that frames minor but nonetheless loaded resistances. Indeed, it is the voicing of class resentment, barred from public discourse in a culture that worships and exculpates wealth, that Graham stages as a form of affective resistance.[2]  “‘Don’t be the partner that follows’”: the universality of tough love and the feminist advice dispensed by a graduate advisor is undercut by the uncounted benefits enjoyed by its purveyor (no need to follow when one receives free plane tickets to visit).  Graham’s persona spits unabashedly in the face of entitlement by reversing its epistemic hegemony: “Her employer was astonishingly perceptive though wealthy from birth. Money from birth is a lack.”  Here debt is, for once, transferred up.  That persona similarly expresses scorn for the wealthy patron at the “fancy yacht club restaurant” on whom she, as “horrible waitress,” “[dumps] a rack of lamb with blackcurrant coulis.”  The affective labor demanded of the hospitality worker is refused (so, too, any unwaged guilt or shame in the aftermath), as is a sense of debt for a ruined pair of “travel pants.”  This bad debtor, who wishes to be a better waitress only to earn better money, espouses an “antiproductivism” that “allows us to see work as a form of violence,” spurning the sentimentality, moralism, and drive to self-improvement that forced work seeks to incur (Berg 162).[3]
 
Readers of Leslie Scalapino will recognize citations of her work in several of these excerpts, as well as Graham’s own homage to Scalapino’s style and to her preoccupation both with class disparity and with representing (Buddhist) phenomenology, dislocations of agency, and uncannily decentered subjective awareness of those dislocations.[4]  In composing Graph, Graham researched Scalapino’s correspondence in the UCSD Archive for New Poetry, while reading Zither & Autobiography and The Return of Painting, The Pearl, and Orion: A Trilogy. The latter incorporates descriptions of some of Scalapino’s first jobs, such as indexing (Graham, “no subject”). Though Graham had initially thought to “trace an economics” in Scalapino’s texts, what emerges are framings of her brief investigations into the dehiscence of agency and intention in social exchange, into the primal indebted condition of human vulnerability and mortality, and into the scene of writing considered as (non)action: “Going out for a walk because she felt sick and lonely and had to go out…She just sat at the juice stand, shivering with sunstroke. The man there suspicious, wanting her to move on from her appearance”; “She knew she could die, that she would. Actions are nothing – this is impossible.  Have used them up – and writing isn’t anything.”  Scalapino is present, too, in Graham’s affecting, disjunctive text on social security payments, in which a series of statements linking the speaker’s future monthly social benefits to salary, years worked, age at time of retirement, disability, etc. is interlaced with fragments of flat, jagged, Scalapino-derived narration of conflictual incidents (e.g. a mugging), marked by metanarrative temporalizing of events and interpretations of agency within them.  Despite the actuarial complexity of Social Security, its account of a lifetime of paid work can only be a massively impoverished summation, given, for instance, its failure to reflect so much affective labor: the debt repaid by the nation-state is hardly what is owed, a disjointedness here embodied in form.
 
Instead of a more frontal stridency, Graham’s work operates through telling elision, and especially through a flattened tone filiated much more strongly with Scalapino than with other contemporary experiments in affective neutralization;[5] often, however, this yields an elegant, paradoxical equipoise, as in her final poem:
 

 

I have no spouse. I have no children. I do not intend to ever have a spouse. I do not want to ever have children.

 
This persona may be responding to an interviewer (sizing up the applicant, one imagines, as suitably hyper-exploitable live-in help), yet even if she speaks without such pointed solicitation, one wonders whether these statements express preference or coercion: has precarity robbed this subject of coupledom and reproductive futurity, such that evincing negative desire towards it can only express a weak agency rebounding from the system’s prior refusal?[6]  Or does she queer and resist the highly gendered “social necessity debt” (Berg) by opting out of the affective, symbolic, and political economy of the Child?
 
As potent in its ambivalences as in its clarities—“My birthday is June 11, and I’d appreciate a phone call or a card”—Graham’s Graph x-rays debt culture’s warping and crumpling of affective life and its implosion of life potential as peculiar to the post-2008 situation of the American working-class, in the expanded, variable modalities that class has come to assume precisely through the debt economy.  Graph not only directs a keen, critical gaze at scenes and facts of gainful employment, even the wage nexus itself; most crucially, it exposes the obscenity that those who are most exploited are also those rigged to owe, and those forced to pay, the most.  Thus Graham affords us greater purchase, and perhaps even leverage, on capital’s uneven distribution of risk and liability downwards to those already most vulnerable: Graph protests what capital takes without paying, and gives credit where credit is due.