Current account settlements

What is a human life worth? ? What if it was the combination of a biographical story and a series of bank account statements ? Isn’t each account book based on life variables, unexpected family or biographical events: whether children, the weight of loved ones, illness or moves or even dependency relationships, unemployment? suddenly, an unplanned expense ? We naturally prefer the life story to arithmetic, but isn’t the value of this story ultimately determined by the entry of an amount on the last line of the last statement, in the credit column, or worse , in that of the flow ? Ultimately, doesn’t the account of the accounts say as much as a microphone in the dining room? ?

We must thank Jeanne Lazarus for helping us to ask these kinds of questions, in the renewed perspective of work in the sociology of money, taking up the original questioning of Georg Simmel in his Philosophy of money and its American extensions in the work of Viviane Zelizer on The Social Meaning of Money. By observing the interactions at the counters of banks and credit institutions, the reader can see the social drama of money unfold. By listening to bankers and their clients, he can grasp the morality of money teaching its lessons: data steeped in choices or preferences at the heart of daily events. A bird’s eye view of the small choices made, the heavy constraints that determine the months to come, where ways of counting are layered, where we recount ten times in writing. In his diary, he sometimes notes “ the rest to live on “. There would therefore be account trajectories which reflect life trajectories and vice versa.

Bank crises

By going back the genealogy of the “ banking » of income and consumption, we can thus taste the source of the feeling of injustice which does not arise only from the inequality of income but from the variability of the rules of this institution, both commercial and social, which has become the bank. So see the money concerns, big or small, which make our relationship with the bank “ a torment of ordinary life “. How many times do we count in the month? ? To whom are we really accountable: to his age, to his risks, to his wife, to his reputation, to his daughter’s studies, to his sick mother, to his banker ? See the nasty little tricks, the dirty little violence, which make up the price of these worries: not only the price of the agios, the usurious rates, the forced use of credits revolving (we would say they are better revolver) ; but the moral price of the endless stories, of the endless justifications to be provided at the counters, at the “ advisors » whose advice corresponds term by term to “ products » banks that they must sell in numbers or risk finding themselves in what Jeanne Lazarus calls “ a banking crisis, like there are witchcraft crises “. And this moral price is all the heavier to pay as society as a whole persists in contradicting itself, to the extent that the triumphant hedonism which followed and preceded the rise of consumption and credit does not failed to invent a new morality.

If the morality of saving has lost the game, the vigor of saving practices clearly shows that hedonism remains the privilege of those who have the means: as soon as the banking crisis looms, we see the emergence of demand made on the poor to stick to the old ascetic morality. We know the song, if they are poor, it’s because they wanted it. If they are rich, it is because they deserve it. This hypocrisy is all the more cruel because it is hidden under the trappings of autonomy, an autonomy which does not mean freedom but the obligation to manage oneself as one manages a business, always keeping an eye on on his cash flow.

The investigation carried out by Jeanne Lazarus is based on a long period of observation in two banks, where, described as “ intern ”, considered as a “ quasi-employee “, the observer chooses empathy with the respondents with the aim of understanding and then making people understand the banking experience as a differentiated social experience, determined by the various capitals, in all the sociological senses of the term, that customers can mobilize. Supplemented by a survey in specialized credit establishments, interviews with bank advisors and customers, as well as a questionnaire survey, this rich material makes it possible to draw up several typologies of customers and employees, to the point where this ordinary social experience appears as a total experience, expressing in a very complete manner the properties of the agents and the future of these properties in the different circuits of money.

The place of money

However, are we justified in making money both a generalized equivalent of the social and a generalized communication medium of power? ? Of course, money perfectly matches the contours of the implacable constraints that result from inequalities of all kinds. ; certainly the banking of productive or consuming activities is an essential modality of their ever more thorough rationalization. Following the ancient work of Georges Bataille on The cursed parthowever, or those more current by Niklas Luhmann on The Powershould we not consider the divisions between social spaces where money reigns supreme and others where its presence remains incongruous or even undesirable? ?

Certainly the current period could easily be seen as a moment of acceleration in the mediating capacity of money, a period during which its power to cross established social boundaries further increases. But this paradox would not be one if we followed the perspective opened by Jeanne Lazarus on money as an essential modality of subjectification. If subjectivation by money, in the relationship to its forms and its institutions, favors generalized mobility, chosen or suffered, and plays with social boundaries, this in no way prevents or even accompanies all the better, the differentiation of the modalities of exercise of power in different spheres of social life and different institutions. Here symbolic capital reigns supreme, and there it is the euro (or the yen). Here hedonism is displayed without shame, there asceticism is required. Here law prevails, there force. These could in fact be the partly new forms of the incessant competition which divides and connects social beings. We cannot blame Jeanne Lazarus for not having taken charge of these questions: her investigation allows us to grasp this interminable battle, with its negotiations and its compromises, its small provisional victories and its bitter defeats, from which sometimes individuals cannot recover. not.

What’s left

Because “ put your life into account “, it is also to stabilize the sense of possibilities. Current charges and bills are subtracted from the salary. EDF and telephones, the food budget, loan repayments to arrive at a last line: STAY. It is on this remainder that subjectification is reflected, a power to act or on the contrary a astonishment: “ I am there “. The rest is a place, the last quantum that a society cannot touch, the last point of its position in social space, where “ the self » is cut off on an elusive line, in the sense of the interpretation of the Court of Cassation: “ the rest to live elusive “. Each month is a final warning, if the accounts are strangled, returning to the bank is essential. We will therefore have to fight at the wicket to defend this last square. of the self “.

Accounting entries are in this sense very subjective. If they provide access to a way of life, the ways in which individuals get by, the effects of social mobility, indicating a position in social space, they do not say the last word for those who look at them. . To understand this last square, you have to be on the other side of the counter, to hear how the accounts are told, how procedures are convened, how they are interpreted, fought, denounced. It is this test that is discussed in Lazarus’ work, a test in the sense of Boltanski and Thévenot, where the use of fair and unfair within the very heart of banking law and practice gives a tone of truth, or, to speak like Michel Foucault, a regime of truth about oneself and one’s place in social rankings. In his preface letter to Living CurrencyMichel Foucault credited its author, Pierre Klossowski, with having found the solution to the enigma of money by showing that prices were all calibrated to what is priceless, life itself. The bankers who flirt with young students by betting on their future resources talk about them as a lifetime valueand it is the weakness or strength of this value that is exposed at the counters, making each of us a living currency.