Leveraging vulnerability: debts and promises

When I saw the first version of this paper a few weeks before, it was presented at the AAG meeting held in Detroit in April 2025, I recognized that there seemed to be two very interesting stories taking shape that were both novel and exciting. The first story is one that emerges from Furlong's long-standing interest in what she terms trickle-down debt (Furlong, 2011; Furlong, 2021). This is the story of how large-scale infrastructure projects and public utility companies in the Global South (systems providing poor populations with basic needs such as water, electricity and gas) get caught within a debt trap that forces them to push their debt down to consumers. Her focus, in this work, is on the debt relationship itself, particularly how it is securitized, compounded and ultimately leads to wealth transfers from South to North. Her underlying concern here is how basic needs infrastructure is imagined by creditors as an income generator rather than as something that should be financed as a public good. While Furlong's (2026) paper is also attuned to the impact of infrastructure debt on poor households, it seems to be channelling something slightly different. Specifically, she asks, how has a moral obligation (a social debt that should be paid by the state to its citizens), transformed into a financial debt and thus something to be paid by the poor, as if the poor owe the state for making good on its own social obligation? The question, I think echoes that by David Graeber (2011) when he asks, how is it that our most fundamental social responsibilities (our obligations to each other and our community) get rendered in terms of financial calculations, that is, in terms of debts? In submitting to such a narrative, as both Furlong and Graeber point out, an obligation becomes not so much a moral responsibility but a transactional burden; an obligation that must be submitted to an arithmetic process that will invariably spit out an amount the debtor owes. It is this economization of responsibility that is most interesting in this paper – that is, the terminology of debt transfigures and corrupts notions of social and moral obligation. The second interesting story happening in Furlong (2026) is the story of crisis and its unique role within the logics of capitalism. Here, Furlong eloquently suggests that the language of crisis belongs to the language of capitalism and only makes sense within its terms. Crisis, she argues, is a form of meaning-making, a narrative that sustains the normalcy of capitalist logics. In labelling various disruptions to capitalism as ‘a crisis’, she argues, capitalism is constituted as the normative order and instigates a broader social investment in its salvation. Even as Gibson-Graham (1996) remind us that capitalism is a narrative of coherence hiding a variety of incoherent productive practices, the language of crisis works to bury that incoherence even further, representing capitalism as a finely tuned system which is being disrupted. The argument as a whole pivots on how Furlong brings these two stories together. Her unique insight illustrates how the trickle-down effect of debt is mirrored by a trickle-down effect of crisis. When poor communities struggle to attend to their basic needs – to secure water, electricity or fuel – everyday is a potential crisis. Hence, we have the mobilization of Berlant's (2011) notion of ‘crisis ordinaire’ whereby capitalism is no longer presented as a stabilizing force but one that keeps humans perpetually exposed to the vagaries of its own idiosyncratic calculations. At one level, such arguments channel those of Benjamin (1986) and Michael Taussig (1992) who argue that the state of emergency is not an aberration but the norm. Yet, while Taussig is interested in instability as a form of social control, Furlong is after something different. The crisis ordinaire is no doubt a condition of a certain logic that begins with how states finance infrastructure: a logic that leads to citizens owing the state for fulfilling its social and moral obligation; a debt its citizens repeatedly fail to pay, and in doing so, must submit to ‘swallowing smoke’. But Berlant's crisis ordinaire is predicated upon a promise of a good life, the fantasy that submitting to one's exploitation will ultimately lead to a better future. I confess, I find it hard to see the promise in Furlong's story. What is the vision of a good life being promoted here? What promise is perpetuating this crisis ordinaire? To be clear, though, I see this as a limit in Berlant's framework rather than in Furlong's analysis. And it is one that Furlong seems to recognise as well. One of my long-standing problems with Berlant is their inclination to understand the origin of ideological fantasies as residing in capitalism itself rather than in the existential condition of being a precarious living being. For Berlant, letting go of a fantasy is an act of demystification, a recognition that one is attached to something that is not good for one's own flourishing. I would argue, however, that the reason we do not let go of our fantasies is not so much because we are seduced by their promise, but (more practically) because it is difficult to discern whether any other promise is any more secure. Every fantasy embeds a promise. Thus, every promise is equally dubious. Indeed, to state the point more directly: every imagination of a good and ordered life is a fantasy and (precisely because it is a fantasy), every such imagination will ultimately fail. This is not because of the nature and content of the fantasy itself but because of the nature and content of the world such fantasies attempt to address: a world that is perpetually and primordially insecure. To be alive is to be beholden to things we cannot control, predict, mitigate or manage. So, while I do not deny that some fantasies may be more promising than others, I understand why subjects may not be willing to let go of what they have simply because someone is promising to sell something better. I think recent events in contemporary American politics bear this out. In this sense, I am pleased to see Berlant's promissory Marxism tempered with a more sober existentialism. Drawing upon my own work with Mikko Joronen (Joronen & Rose, 2021), Furlong acknowledges that fantasies are an understandable response to a more foundational insecurity. In this sense, her arguments concerning the operationalisation of debt in Colombia parallel my own work on ‘negative governance’ in Egypt (Rose, 2014). While in Colombia, the utility company extracts payments by providing (or not providing) energy, in Egypt, the government controls a village by providing (or not providing) water and sewage. In either case, systems which are ostensibly designed to protect and facilitate human life are used to govern it. And while the form of governance may be different (it is political in Egypt while being financial in Colombia), they both function by leveraging human precarity, i.e., the fact that human beings (like all living beings) need things (water, sewage, energy, etc.) to live. Existential precarity is thus the source of these distinctive forms of sovereign power. Indeed, I would argue, it is the source of every sovereign power. Berlant, I think, never properly sees the existential demand that drives the seductive promises they disparage. Furlong, I think does see this demand more clearly. Thus, I see her work as offering a potential critique of Berlant's notion of crisis ordinaire rather than its exemplification; a critique that is not fully developed here but holds promise in its protean form. Without wanting to pre-judge such an ambition, it would be interesting to explore debt itself as a kind of promise, an obligation that is not so much ledger of exchange but what Levinas (1969) calls an ‘infinite obligation’, a debt that transcends any and every calculation. Such a perspective would, I think, illuminate the crisis imminent to every promise; the crisis that comes when we see every promise as offering a failed but necessary vision of governance, financial or otherwise. Indeed, if we take Furlong's point that the language of crisis is usually mobilised to protect (rather than subvert) the status quo, than perhaps we need to rethink what we mean by the status quo? Do we think of it as a capitalist system seeking to protect its own sovereignty or do we understand it as the precarity that gives rise to that system in the first place? Only by thinking of it in terms of the latter, do we open ourselves to understand the limited promise of promise and break the logic of debt as a marker that can be paid.