Borrowing on the Fringe: The Fate of the Risky

Abstract

With the deployment of sophisticated risk technologies, the question arises as to the fate of the “excluded,” that risk residuum deemed to lack the responsibility to pay for their own risk; “what to do about those not in a position to aspire (legitimately) to the seductions of commodities—the unemployed, the incompetent, the criminal and the dispossessed?” (O’Malley, 1994: 213). It seems that no matter how risk is drawn, deployed, or acted upon, it creates a permanent bifurcate division between those that are tolerably risky and those that are not. Even with the proliferation of risk-pricing techniques within which the risk of default loss is compensated by higher interest rates and the development of a viable subprime market wherein higher risk consumers may be profitably targeted, the very continuance of risk as a conceptual and technological tool within consumer credit presupposes a residuum. These underclass consumers are, it seems, fated to remain beyond the reaches of a mainstream credit market so dependent for its profitability on the capacity of free consumers to govern the permanent cycle of desire, fulfillment, disillusionment, and new desire so intimated and facilitated by credit. As acutely observed by Valverde (1996: 361), liberalism’s claim to universal freedom has always been tempered by its absence in reality, demonstrating not so much its hypocrisy as an essential aspect of its constitution. Similarly, for Bauman (1988), freedom is a permanent relational state, defined against that which is unfree and coerced.