political theology, Vol. 17 No.

5, September 2016, 434–448

Debt Time is Straight Time

Linn Marie Tonstad
Yale Divinity School, New Haven, CT, USA

In this article, I examine certain features of contemporary capitalism with par-

ticular attention to the temporal, spatial, social, and person-forming aspects of
debt. Debt is difficult to dislodge because it mobilizes the individual and social
promise-making capacities of human beings so that the future is determined
by promises made in the past. I argue that the demonic, larger-than-life
powers of debt can be countered by queer prophetic performances that
create temporal and spatial contiguities between people who then become a
“we.”

KEYWORDS debt, performance, queer, time, space, capitalism

In this article, I examine certain features of contemporary capitalism with particular

attention to the temporal, spatial, social, and person-forming aspects of debt.1 I
argue that these features combine to make significant redirection of capitalist cur-
rents — that is, social change toward the better — difficult in ways that reflect
debt’s overdetermination of the present by the past and future and its capacity to
mobilize the future-determining (i.e., promise-making) capacities of human beings,
both individually and socially. Debt time is straight time, time in which the
present is determined by the past’s claim on the future, the time of — in Marcella
Althaus-Reid’s words — “‘nothing for free’ (or for grace).”2 I then turn to consider-
ation of how debt’s current powers can be dislodged or redirected. Figuring those
powers as larger-than-life, or demonic, I argue that the powers need to be met
with prophetic contestation. I thus outline a theologically inflected model of resist-
ance to and redirection of the modalities of debt-driven capitalism. With Althaus-
Reid, I connect sexuality, spirituality, and the economy by sketching queer prophetic
performance as a way to engage individual and social promise-making capacities in
directions other than those determined by debt. Rather than looking at prophecy as
foretelling the future, or as verbal denunciation of social injustices, I read prophetic
acts as bodied acts that generate new dreams against the forces that demand the
sacrifice of social hopes for a future that is otherwise. Prophetic acts mobilize the

1
I focus here on the subject-forming and temporal consequences of debt. Debt is an important contemporary economic
modality that I use as a synecdoche for its concatenated forces; other such figures (entrepreneurialism, managerialism,
and so on) are also operative currently.
2
Althaus-Reid, The Queer God, 104.

© 2016 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group DOI 10.1080/1462317X.2016.1211289
 DEBT TIME IS STRAIGHT TIME 435

“we” created and subjected by debt into temporal and spatial contiguities with the
dreams of others.
As I argue throughout, redirecting the powers of debt-driven capital requires forging
uneasy alliances. I strive to suggest specific ways in which people whose social identifi-
cations and economic resources are very different are nevertheless subjected to similar
economic forces — economic forces whose destructive capacities are far greater for min-
oritized subjects, but that do not leave most of the more privileged untouched. While my
arguments for the need to discover and create transtemporal and transspatial contigu-
ities do not appear until later, I write throughout from the perspective of a non-
substantial, non-ontological “we” that precedes its own creation.
In discussions of the global order of capital, there are risks at two extremes that
may be difficult to do justice to in a single piece of writing. At one extreme, one
might illuminate local dynamics to emphasize the differences between, say, the
effect of microcredit in a particular place in India, car loans in the Mississippi
delta, and the way hedge funds use leverage to procure profits for themselves at
rates that far exceed “ordinary” market economies. The danger is, however, that
such accounts may miss the homologies between these economies of debt, as well
as the ways in which they relate to each other — not in a single, unified and undif-
ferentiated global order of capital, but in a globalized capitalism nonetheless.
At the other extreme, there are dangers of dematerialization in discussing capitalism
as a global economic system and what strategies might change actually existing capital-
ism. A dematerialized account of global capitalism might miss the reality and salience of
the differences among the cases enumerated above, and the way they currently use and
intensify existing historical processes of sexuation and racialization. A dematerialized
account of strategies for change might identify a feature of actually existing capitalism
and show how a particular, perhaps ephemeral gesture3 displays the possibility of a
different future and a different sociality — yet the detailed work of connecting alterna-
tives and resistance to the extant socioeconomic order (with all its immanent differences)
may never happen. In this article, I err on the side of the former, in the hopes that the
analysis contributes in small ways to generate the “we” that does not yet exist.

Infinite demand
While many analyses of neoliberalism focus on its expansion of financial logics into
all spheres of life — also a pattern of intensification — the dramatic concentration of
income and wealth into the hands of the ever-fewer4 descriptively and analytically
3
Throughout, I am in implicit dialogue with José Esteban Muñoz, one of the most significant theorists arguing for utopic
queer performance. Yet I worry that he remains wedded to ephemerality in so strong a way that the materiality of social
transformation (and what makes it possible) sometimes disappears. Muñoz finds the seeds of an otherwise already
present in the here and now, and seeks (in line with Ernst Bloch) to avoid dematerialized utopian idealism. Nonetheless,
his preference for the ephemeral and non-evidentiary seems both in line with, and unlikely to disrupt, the “liquidity” so
strongly associated with financialized capitalism. See Muñoz, Cruising Utopia, 65, 70, 135. Uri McMillan takes on
debates regarding the ephemerality of performance in McMillan, Embodied Avatars, 15. On 168, quoting Shannon
Jackson, he emphasizes the materiality of performance even given its ephemerality.
4
Global income and wealth inequality far exceed even spectacular inequalities within any particular country. Even given
the dramatic increases in inequality in the United States over the past 30 years, its GINI coefficient of 41.1 in 2010 was
far lower than the global GINI coefficient of 65 (data.worldbank.org/indicator/SI.POV.GINI). On the GINI scale, 0 indi-
cates perfect equality while 100 indicates perfect inequality (one person has all the money). See Dienst, The Bonds of
Debt, 43–47.
436 LINN MARIE TONSTAD

captures a definitional feature of contemporary capitalism.5 Gérard Duménil and

Dominique Lévy characterize the new order by “greater concentration of income
in favor of a privileged minority” as well as ongoing reliance on “imperial hierar-
chies.”6 Financialization permits, promotes, and intensifies the dramatic concen-
tration of income and wealth in the hands of the ever-fewer; it is also responsible
for a significant component of the increase in the total value of the stock market
in the United States — total value that (via mechanisms ranging from stock
options and hedge funds to 401(k)’s and inherited wealth) also disproportionately
redounds to the credit of the rich.7 Jeffrey Nealon describes this “logic of intensity”
well: since capital already touches every part of the world, “any system that seeks to
expand must … intensify its existing resources … . This … is the homology between
the cultural logic of globalization and the economic logic of finance capital.”8 As
financial instruments — leverage, derivatives, collateralized debt obligations,
credit default swaps, and so on — dominate significant sectors of the economy,
the effects in other sectors intensify capital’s “ordinary” pressures materially.
Although productivity has increased by leaps and bounds in recent years, labor’s
share of income has dropped across the developed world.9 The rewards of pro-
ductivity are unequally distributed, but at the top of the economic order, the associ-
ation between hard work and outsize rewards is closer than ever. The top 1% of
wage earners captures ever greater shares of income: 20% in the United States in
2012, up from 8% in 1981, with substantial increases in most “developed”
countries.10 Karen Ho’s ethnography of Wall Street describes how investment
bankers “experienced an initial sense of shock at the extraordinary demands of
work … though over time, they began to claim hard work as a badge of honor
and distinction.” In the “meritocratic” feedback loop of analysis, “elite Wall Stre-
eters still experience a link between hard work and monetary rewards” that dis-
tinguishes them from other workers.11 Ho notes the effects of the BlackBerry
around 1999, which extended the potential workday into all hours and almost all
places12 — a move that has now extended to the much less well compensated.
The persistence of the meritocratic feedback loop at the top obscures its absence
elsewhere.
As the libertarian economist Tyler Cowen imagines the future, a smaller percen-
tage of people in the United States will lead extremely privileged lives, while the
rest will experience “stagnant or maybe even falling wages.” The rise of
MOOCs and the gamification of learning will allow the very self-disciplined
(especially in China and India) to rise to the top, reinforcing meritocracy: “The
wealthy class will be increasingly self-motivated[.] … [T]heir values … will shape
public discourse, and that will mean more stress on ideas of personal ambition

5
Philip Mirowski describes neoliberals’ view that inequality is “a necessary functional characteristic of [an] ideal market
system” and “one of [the market’s] strongest motor forces for progress,” Never Let a Serious, 63.
6
Duménil and Lévy, The Crisis of Neoliberalism, 8.
7
See Duménil and Lévy, Crisis of Neoliberalism, 62–5, 69–70, 101–24.
8
Nealon, Post-Postmodernism, 32.
9
See Figura and Ratner, “The Labor Share of Income and Equilibrium Unemployment” for information on the United
States and OECD, “Labour Losing to Capital” for information on OECD countries generally.
10
OECD, “Focus on Top Incomes and Taxation in OECD Countries.”
11
Ho, Liquidated, 74.
12
Ho, Liquidated, 91.
 DEBT TIME IS STRAIGHT TIME 437

and self-motivation.”13 The ideologically determined relationship between hard

work and success will intensify, while the gap between the very privileged and
the much less so will increase alongside, Cowen suggests. Rather than countering
the rapid growth in income inequality seen in the United States and Europe by way
of regenerating the postwar coalitions that arguably contributed to the heyday of
welfare capitalism, technocratic capital carries a different message: We need to be
productive, responsible, and self-controlled. Each of us is responsible for “himself”
as we find ourselves living under what one scholar terms chromonormativity, “the
use of time to organize individual human bodies toward maximum pro-
ductivity.”14 As Silvia Federici says, “[S]elf-management … becomes an essential
requirement in a capitalist socioeconomic system in which self-ownership is
assumed to be the fundamental social relation, and discipline no longer relies
purely on external coercion.”15 That development long predates the contemporary
form of capital. However, the kind of self-management required is changing. The
ideal subject of capital is no longer the “organization man,” but rather the flexibly
skilled subject that can learn from machines how to tell the machines what to do.
But the infinite responsibility the subject has for himself cannot be captured even
by such an imaginary. Before we are, we are in debt. We are born into the national
debt; we are forced into debt by precarity and prison; we choose debt as a means to
higher socioeconomic status; we fear the debt that follows medical emergency but
hope to be found worthy of the debt that permits the dream home.16 Debt makes
each of us responsible not only for our condition in the present and our decisions
in the past, but for our own futures as well. We need to protect ourselves from threa-
tening, risky futures by debt, such as the student loans that give us access to the edu-
cation that hopefully secures us the job with “fringe” benefits like health insurance
and retirement funds. Debts for us lead to profits for others. Taking on a mortgage
produces money and grows the economy because the money “is invented ‘out of thin
air’ … based on the fact that you have made a promise to earn it somehow in the
future.”17 The “nothing” on which significant profits depend, the money that finan-
cialization creates out of “nothing” (derivatives accounting, mark-to-market) is the
indebtedness of us all: indebtedness forced, chosen, willed, hoped-for, feared.
Our panoply of choices all lead to debt and demand, and to the demand that we
desire what is demanded of us. While society owes us nothing, we owe everything.18
The demands of late capitalism are infinite, and we may not set limits to what it
requires of us. Debt incarnates responsibility: the responsible self is the indebted
self; the indebted self is the only responsible self. What we have is borrowed and
already owed. Debt creation and debt protection drive politics, while protecting
creditors and enforcing repayment on debtors serve as primary aims of our sociopo-
litical order. What has been borrowed must be repaid: treasury bonds, student loans,

13
Cowen, Average is Over, 229–30.
14
Freeman, Time Binds, 3.
15
Federici, Caliban and the Witch, 149. While I use the language of “demand” throughout, that language signals not
that capital works on us from without but rather that these cultural and financial features leave us very little room to live
outside debt economies.
16
For just one of the many stories emerging from contemporary US-American landscapes of debt, see Kiel and Wald-
man’s analysis, “The Color of Debt.”
17
Lanier, Who Owns the Future?, 33.
18
Lazzarato, The Making of the Indebted Man, 29.
438 LINN MARIE TONSTAD

mortgages, credit cards, IMF loans, (some) bailouts. The economic order transforms
the subject into a debtor no matter what choices she makes, in analogy to Martin
Luther’s classic account of how the individual can choose freely between indifferent
alternatives but remains bound, in all cases, by original sin.
There is no alternative. The only road to the future runs through debt in all its
fixity. As a result, the present always arrives already subjugated to the past and to
the future. To the past, in which the debts that must be repaid were incurred. To
the future, which must be arranged to allow for repayment and security.19 We live
under economies of debt that ensure that nothing new (or good!) can happen to
us. As we enter into our lives, we find ourselves already indebted, at best able to
stay in a precarious balance where debt and demand overwhelm but do not
finally destroy us. We are always indebted, and always seeking to come out from
under that debt.
The infinite responsibility that each of us has for ourselves is reinforced. As Maur-
izio Lazzarato points out, “the debtor is ‘free’, but his actions, his behavior, are con-
fined to the limits defined by the debt he has entered into … You are [free] insofar as
you assume the way of life (consumption, work, public spending, taxes, etc.) com-
patible with reimbursement.”20 Debt serves as a site of constraint that restricts pos-
sibilities for different futures. Because of debt, any individual choice takes place from
a catch-up position: a portion of labor, income, wealth, time — every fungible
resource — is spent before it is received. Debt imposes scarcity and ensures that
there is never enough, no slack, nothing left over to expend or to keep in reserve
for unexpected crises. Debt entails losing the room for the sources and needs of cre-
ation: dead ends, play, and experimentation, other than — crucially — in the form of
ideas that can gain venture capital.21
Debt absolutizes what is by demonically gobbling up the possibilities of otherwise.
Richard Dienst describes the “monopoly of actuality, exercised … through the
power of teletechnology to shape the world in its own image, and … by the
power of money to decide what deserves to exist.”22 This monopoly of actuality
takes material form in the insistence on austerity measures following the recent
financial crisis.23 Wolfgang Streeck points out the importance of “investment
strikes” — or the threat thereof — in enforcing the fiction that there is no alternative
to the current order.24 If not this, then crisis and chaos. Any price we pay now will be
better than the price that will be extracted then — a price that, at the time of writing,
is being extracted from Greece. The psychological demands of investors (the need for
market confidence) take precedence over any needs (recast as desires) others might

19
Dardot and Laval, The New Way of the World, offer a telling quotation from a prior president of Intel, who says,
“Fear of competition, fear of bankruptcy, fear of being wrong and fear of losing can all be powerful motivators.
How do we cultivate fear of losing in our employees? We can only do so that if we feel it ourselves,” 294, quoting
Grove, Only the Paranoid Survive, 117.
20
Lazzarato, Making of the Indebted Man, 31.
21
In less precarious economies than our own, debt could fund rather than destroy creation. That it can seldom do so is
another pernicious aspect of contemporary debt economies.
22
Dienst, Bonds of Debt, 2.
23
See Streeck, Buying Time, 72–90. He comments, “Higher taxes to bring down public debt would also put to rest the
tawdry rhetoric according to which ‘we’ should not live at the expense of ‘our children’ — when the real problem is that
the ‘better-off’ live at everyone else’s expense by largely avoiding the social costs involved in the upkeep of their hunting
grounds,” 77–8 n. 59.
24
Streeck, Buying Time, 23.
 DEBT TIME IS STRAIGHT TIME 439

have. Any alternative we might dream of, we are told, is utopian, not real. The puny,
gaunt visions and dreams of a better future that we are allowed, are nothing much to
hope for.25
As our bodies are conformed to the normativity of the future as an extension of
the present, not even sleep offers an escape. In a recent book, Jonathan Crary
argues that the only free space we are left — the only part of our lives that has
not yet been monetized, financialized, made into part of the imperative to
produce and consume — is sleep. Sleep is our only protection: the one point at
which our bodies set absolute and regular limits for the subjection of all that we
are and have to the requirements of capital.26 Yet even this setting of limits is
denied us. While writing an early draft of this argument, I noted multiple separate
articles on sleep in the New York Times in the space of a few days. On March
30, 2014, Stephanie Rosenbloom noted the way that travel industry operators are
using the prospect of a good night’s sleep as a marketing tool. The article quoted
Russell Sanna of Harvard Medical School saying that “Sleep is the enemy of capit-
alism,” but Rosenbloom failed to notice the irony of the statement (except in
drawing an anemic connection between sleep, diet, and exercise as the elements of
health). In another NYT essay by Eve Fairbanks on 23 March 2014, sleep
becomes “an element of continuous functioning … just another zone of the day to
be farmed for productivity … We can now sleep in order to maximize our economic
value. And thus sleep becomes just another burden.” The very limits of human exist-
ence become further territories for conquest. Recognizing human limitation may
then not constrain but in fact promote the infinite demands we experience. Our
dreams wither before the infinite demands placed on us.
The debts that constrain us are never merely monetary obligations; they are gods
that we worship and they are gods that demand that we make our lives living sacri-
fices to their rapaciousness. Lazzarato points out that “debt produces a specific
‘morality’ … The couple ‘effort-reward’ of the ideology of work is doubled by the
morality of the promise (to honor one’s debt) and the fault (of having entered into
it). As Nietzsche reminds us, the concept of ‘Schuld’ (guilt), a concept central to mor-
ality, is derived from the very concrete notion of ‘Schulden’ (debts).”27 It is impor-
tant to note the moralistic nature of debt-repayment discourse for some, especially
poor or minoritized subjects. Meanwhile, the richest are not only afforded credit
with generous terms as individuals; their profit-making entities find their debts can-
celled, subsidized, and socialized. Thus the richest parallel the elect: grace is
extended to them, in contrast to the infinite burden of guilt placed on the poor.
Limited atonement becomes material fact.28
Debt determines us, whether as demand or desire. Jaron Lanier points out that
“much of the new money brought into the world has actually been a

25
Indeed, dreaming of a better future may be our constitutive sin/fault, as in Edelman, No Future or differently in the
many revanchist accusations against entitled workers for wanting too much and indebting future generations.
26
Crary, 24/7.
27
Lazzarrato, Making of the Indebted Man, 30.
28
As Gary B. Gorton says, in a time of severe financial crisis, “there are two choices: either don’t enforce debt contracts
or liquidate the banking system. No society with a market economy has ever (intentionally) chosen to liquidate its
banking system,” Misunderstanding Financial Crises, 99. Gorton suggests that letting Lehman fail — now generally
thought to be a mistake — was due to the insistence of economists and regulators that moral hazard required that
some bank be forced into liquidation (148–9).
440 LINN MARIE TONSTAD

memorialization of behavioral intent. It has been an account of the future as we plan

it rather than the present as we measure it … [W]e make promises to live by, …
choosing which promises to make, and how to keep them … Money is created in
response, because in making that promise you have created value.”29 The
“nothing”, the “thin air” from which profit comes, is our lives, our work, our
bodies, the material of our becoming. For “[o]nly people … [can] make promises
about what to do in the future.”30 On the social level, Dienst points out, our “col-
lective indebtedness [the national debt] can function as a mechanism of oppression
only because it marshals a variety of cooperative relationships into a productive,
constitutive force.”31 Our uneasy relations to each other as a “we” do not necess-
arily set us against what debt demands of us.
Yet debt is a form of promise-making, and such promise-making can (or could) be
a site of freedom and becoming rather than of demand, for blessed is “the one who
casts golden words before his deeds and always does more than he promises.”32
With the collapse of the transcendent horizon of human becoming, the promise
can become a site of transformation as affirmation of the past becomes the
ground on which an alternative future grows, not only or primarily for the sake
of the past’s redemption by “as it was, thus I willed it!” but in order “to compose
and collect into one all that is fragment and riddle and fearful chance”33; Zarathus-
tra knows he is a cripple.34

Debt time is straight time

Debt time is straight time. Debt time ensures that the new is never new, that
difference is never redirection, that rupture is destruction rather than creation.
As we are made straight by debt time, we are left without dreams. Or with
dreams that are nightmares. Or with soporific waking dreams that serve only
to fill in the time between orders of work; dreams that become the opium of
the people. So our dreams leave the spaces of capital untouched, ensuring that
the reproduction of the self-same is left undisturbed. Without intervention,
each of us is left alone to dream of our own individual escapes; but even those
dreams are denied us. For we are told that we must not even dream; we need
to wake up, face the world, be productive! We wake to a confrontation with a
hostile world. Our waking dreams are nothing but dust and ashes. The ideologi-
cal and temporalizing couple “promise-fault” is not restricted to the realm of the
financial; it structures also the dreams that are allowed us in the realm of sexu-
ality and in the realm of the religious.
The economic, the sexual, and the spiritual are deeply intertwined. The Argenti-
nian queer theologian Marcella Althaus-Reid teaches us that economics and theol-
ogy meet in the logic of heterosexuality, which is also the logic of either/or rather
29
Lanier, Who Owns the Future?, 32–3.
30
Ibid., 35. Dienst affirms a related point: “the functioning of any financial debt is grounded in its claim on some other
source of value,” Bonds of Debt, 58.
31
Ibid., 29.
32
Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 8.
33
Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 109.
34
In her otherwise very useful discussion of utopic demands, Kathi Weeks misses the importance of this point. See
Weeks, The Problem with Work, 199–205.
 DEBT TIME IS STRAIGHT TIME 441

than both/and, the logic of “‘nothing for free’ (or for grace).”35 Theology redistri-
butes bodies across different economies for profit: “Are there any free kisses in
the church or in theology? Christian theology proclaims the grace of God as a gra-
tuitous love given to human beings and creation. Yet, the free kisses from God seem
to be reduced to the private aspect of faith more than the public one … human
bodies become devalued things, and thus lovers in theology become devalued,
because high value and respect are given to things such as marriage for profit. Plea-
sure is profit in theology for bartering purposes … [but] outside meaningful non-
heterosexual relationships … lessons of love can be learned and more about the
love of God can be discovered.”36 “Heterosexual” thinking is the logic of either
or and this or that, of debt and demand, of willing and desirous sacrifice, of protec-
tion and expenditure (self-protection while always going beyond what is required),
of responsibility and play (the play that work “ought” to be for those whose work-
places participate most fully in the contemporary technological economy), of passive
straight “female” submission to a heterosexual male God. “Love your enemies”
transmutes into capitalism’s ability to prevent the eruption of another world war.37
Religious, sexual, and spiritual practices thus risk serving as escapes rather
than forms of transformation, as manifestations of an apparent and only per-
sonal freedom. As Althaus-Reid says, “with the global expansion of capitalism
… adjudicated sexual roles in society may have changed, and even the hierarch-
ical ordering of the world may have changed, but they still have a god-father in
common; that is, the politically ever-expanding patriarchal God who does not
recognize any kiss which has not been approved.”38 Such alternative socialities
may have no effect on the regulated and determined socioeconomic orders of
debt, promise, and fault; they have no effect because they obscure their connec-
tion with capital’s power — exercised through political, social, cultural, affective,
and economic channels — to ensure its monopoly on actuality. Participants in
(what purport to be) alternative sexual economies are seldom taught to
connect them with capital’s desirous regulation of their daily lives — or else
the connection may be explicit and supportive, as witnessed by branded floats
in gay pride parades upon which employees celebrate their employers. As we
find the present subjugated to the future and to the past, the present arrives at
each moment already determined by the dragging burden of debt. We feel these
demands in our bodies, even when we protest against them by seeking out spiri-
tual, religious, and sexual alternatives. But to the extent that those practices
remain on the margins of our lives and function as escapes from the economic
necessities of our lives, to the extent that they function as merely oppositional
alternatives to the current order, they have no power to release us from debt.
We need ways to break open the constraint of possibility, the inhibition of
alternative socioeconomic orders, debt creation and normalization, and the infi-
nite demands for responsibility for ourselves that are placed on us.

35
Althaus-Reid, Queer God, 104.
36
Althaus-Reid, “A Woman’s Right”, 96.
37
Lingis, Dangerous Emotions, 187.
38
Althaus-Reid, “A Woman’s Right,” 97.
442 LINN MARIE TONSTAD

Debt-space, debt time

The “monopoly of actuality” exercised by market and technological dominance can
become a self-sustaining narrative. Karen Ho challenges this monopoly in her cri-
tique of the abstractions that obscure the material, spatial ways in which “market
abstractions” are produced.39 Miranda Joseph examines the way abstraction and
particularization work hand in hand in “actually existing capitalism” to produce
the indebted subject.40 This is one of many flexible strategies through which
capital integrates and intensifies other forms of difference. Particularization and dis-
articulation are then not necessarily antidotes to the generic or expansive powers of
capital. The indebted subject is not precisely a generic subject. The indebted subject
is a particularized subject — Black, Arab, South Asian, college-educated, a GED
holder, a farmer, an agricultural laborer, queer, imprisoned — but all these differ-
ences are relatively indifferent to the debt-economies that integrate them by means
of such differences. Market mechanisms are not merely abstractive, abstracted,
and all-embracing; market mechanisms are also spatially and temporally located,
particular, and fragmented.
Karen Ho notes the crucial role of “spatial segregation” in “the intertwining stria-
tions that construct Wall Street’s culture of work and ‘smartness’ and upon which
their pinnacle notions of meritocracy depend.”41 She describes the spatial distance,
and therefore temporal duration, involved in traversing distances within and among
Wall Street institutions. The spatial organization of banks undergirds and reflects
their hierarchies in terms of prestige, compensation, and power.42 On the global
level, the fraction assigned to poverty (“one sixth”) “delimits ‘their’ deprivation
without acknowledging its proximity to ‘our’ way of life — an accursed share the
rest of us can live with.”43 Aihwa Ong describes neoliberalism’s capacity to
develop “striated spaces — or ‘latitudes’ — shaped by the coordination of
systems of governmentality and regimes of labor incarceration.” These systems
are “always situated … contingent and varied.”44 Debt-space is not homogeneous.
It is varied and particularized, yet particularization does not necessarily counter
debt-space’s organization of our material lives. That hot dog carts can be found
outside wealthy lawyers’ offices does not diminish the effects of debt in the hot
dog vendor’s and lawyers’ lives, but it also does not by itself encourage the hot
dog vendor and the lawyers to become a we that promises not to repay debts sym-
bolic and real. Spatial proximity is not enough: just as we must learn to inhabit the
same time, we must learn to inhabit the same space — to create spatial contiguity or
side-by-side relationships.
If debt time, as I have argued, is straight time, can other temporal modes of pro-
duction and affiliation be imagined? If debt time depends on promises made in the
past to subjugate the present and future, might other promising pasts (made avail-
able through the non-limitative, intergenerational relations that “homosexual

39
Ho, Liquidated, 34–8.
40
Joseph, Debt to Society, especially chapter 1.
41
Ho, Liquidated, 77.
42
See Smith, To Take Place, 54–71, for an illuminating if arguably too schematic discussion of spatially depicted and
mediated hierarchies in the temple visions in Ezekiel 40–8.
43
Dienst, Bonds of Debt, 52.
44
Ong, Neoliberalism as Exception, 21.
 DEBT TIME IS STRAIGHT TIME 443

production” sometimes promotes) redirect us toward other futures — futures

located in queer time? Dreaming and day-dreaming allow for Kathi Weeks’s
“utopian demand” that can teach us what a “different world” in which our
dreams would come to life would look like.45 To reeducate our temporal desires,
we need to “affirm what we are and will it, because it is also the constitutive basis
from which we can struggle to become otherwise.”46 This affirmation is no mere
acceptance of the past as it is enforced on us by the moral couplings effort-reward
or debt-obligation. Rather, it is “an active intervention into our ways of inhabiting
the past.” The utopic demand affirms a future in which the demand would no longer
be utopic, while also estranging us from the ethos that there is no alternative.47Guy
Hocquenghem writes, “Homosexual production takes place according to a mode
of non-limitative horizontal relations, heterosexual reproduction according to
one of hierarchical succession … another possible social relation … is not vertical
but horizontal.”48 Horizontal temporal relations can join with new spatial
orders to constitute a we. Franco Berardi notes that one of the reasons
workers’ struggles have tended to disappear historically (as exceptions rather
than lasting coalitions) is that “for struggles to form a cycle there must be a
spatial proximity of laboring bodies and an existential temporal continuity.
Without this proximity and this continuity, we lack the conditions for cellular-
ized bodies to become a community.”49 Spatial proximity is not enough by
itself — antiblackness in the United States is but one example proving the
point — but it is essential to the formation of coalitions and new forms of soli-
darity. Without side-by-side relationships, spatial and symbolic, and without
creating and becoming a we, we can neither understand “our” time aright to
diagnose it, nor shift the future into a direction other than the one marked out
by the insistence that there is no alternative.
With such relationships, the door is open for possibilities for redirecting the tra-
jectory of debt time that do not require “distance from dominant culture,” but
instead can take their own “imbrication with contemporary socioeconomic
forces”50 as a point of departure. The first step is to name the powers and in so
naming call them up and make them visible — materialization of the demons that
ride and haunt us, seeking to destroy us. The next step is to reorder our temporal
and spatial relations to each other to create a we that does not yet exist.

The promise of queer prophetic performance

Sleeping and waking cross each other: for we must wake from our dreams of dust
and ashes in order to read the signs of the times, and we must sleep so that we
can learn to dream new dreams. Between the space of sleep and waking, we encoun-
ter the memory of other times, a memory that may become grounds for a future that
is no future. Naming the signs of the times (knowing the time in order to escape its
45
Weeks, Problem with Work, 176.
46
Ibid., 201. Importantly, Weeks emphasizes that we are not to “refuse what we have now become after measuring our-
selves against the standard of what we once were or what we wish we had become.”
47
Ibid., 204–5.
48
Hocquenghem, Homosexual Desire, 109.
49
Berardi, After The Future, 92–3.
50
Nealon, Post-Postmodernism, 154, emphases removed. Nealon is referring to the poetic’s relation to the economy.
444 LINN MARIE TONSTAD

grasp, refusing the future in order to redirect it) is a prophetic practice. Althaus-Reid
says, “[I]f God is to be found in human relationships of economic and loving orders,
it is obvious that the right not to be straight in a capitalist society and church has the
goal of liberating God.”51 And who can set God free? We need a prophetic52 bodily
reordering in which the untimely one will arrive and tell us, or better show us, the
series of negations, intentional relations, and world-making activities that are our
best hope for living love in a time of capital. These hopes weigh less than the
Spirit of Gravity does on our shoulders (that always-already that the history of
Christian capitalism imposes on us); with them we may hope for an easier yoke
that would allow us to replenish our relations to ourselves and others.
Prophets dream for us and against us; they sound the alarm and they fall into
trances in which revelations are given to them. Prophets use speech, performance,
visions, dreams, and bodies to shift the relations between structures of authority
and embedded hierarchicalizations. Those manipulations, those reorderings of
apparently fixed elements of the world, reproduce but can also reconfigure visions
of orders of power.53 Most importantly, prophets contend with other prophets in
inexplicable bodied acts,54 and prophets contend with the prophets of other
gods.55 Prophetic contestation breaks open the “monopoly of actuality” that
insists “there is no alternative.”

“Blow the trumpet … sound the alarm!” “Your sons and daughters will prophesy, your
old men will dream dreams, your young men will see visions. Even on my servants, both
men and women, I will pour out my spirit in those days.”56

The passage from Joel points to the transgenerational and transgendered aspects
of prophecy, and to the importance of dreams. Late capitalism denies us dreams,
and late capitalism monetizes even our dreams. But prophets dream the dreams
that the rest of us are denied. Prophecies “have been a means by which the
“poor” have externalized their desires, given legitimacy to their plans, and
have been spurred to action.” For this reason, prophecy had to be “replaced
with the calculation of probabilities” — a calculation that depends on the postu-
late that “the future will be like the past.”57 We are seeking a future that is not
like the past.
Prophecy opens the possibility of the impossible beyond calculation and predic-
tion. Prophecy can connect the partially open future with the overdetermined
present to suggest strategies for redirection and recreation. Kirk Fuoss argues that
performance always involves contestation; if he is right, the same would apply to
prophetic performances.58 Prophetic performances may contribute to the develop-
ment of what Valerie Rohy understands as queer non-causality: a temporality
51
Althaus-Reid, “A Woman’s Right,” 98.
52
The understanding of prophecy I sketch in what follows is my own, but where relevant I discuss which parts of it I take
from scholars of performance.
53
Bell, Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice.
54
See for instance 1 Kings 13:11–32 and 20:35–38.
55
As in 1 Kings 18:17–40.
56
Joel 2:1 & 28–29, The Holy Bible.
57
Federici, Caliban and the Witch, 143. Federici explains that the body also had to undergo “fixation … in space and
time.”
58
Fuoss, “Performance as Contestation”, 98–117.
 DEBT TIME IS STRAIGHT TIME 445

“whose beginnings are found in the future.”59 Rohy describes the way becoming gay
may involve a circular causality that escapes linear historical determination. In the
case of Oscar Wilde, for instance, “Wilde’s homosexuality both causes the gay
male identity of the future and is caused by it.”60 Such alternative causalities may
break the effort-reward, promise-fault couplings of determinate historical time —
of debt time. If we become what is not yet possible, our becoming escapes the
past’s determination without negating it.
Queer performances that embody impossible futures may have the capacity to
vivify and illuminate extant alternative imaginaries while challenging the “mon-
opoly of actuality” exercised by debt time, especially if these queer prophetic per-
formances distinguish themselves from capital not by their freedom from it61 but
by practicing in relation to it. Performance can reeducate our imaginations (our
dreams) in ways that do not pretend — as attenuated or homonormative gay
culture sometimes does — that no other economic order is possible. We need to
relearn the connections between sexuality and the economic order that lesbian fem-
inists and black feminists recognized from the very beginning.62 We must enter
desire’s school for reeducation so we may learn to name the present for the sake
of a redirected future. In order to change our futures (to make them no future for
the time of financialized capitalism and hetero-same reproduction), we need — as
I have argued — spatial and symbolic side-by-side relations, we need to learn the
nature of our time (and times), and we need to create the worlds that we need to
learn to want through institution-building and the generation of publics.
Let me give just one example of a queer performance of that sort. A while back, I
went to a performance by Lois Weaver at La Mama, an off–off-Broadway theater in
the East Village in New York City. Lois Weaver co-founded the Split Britches
Company, a pioneering lesbian theater troupe, with Peggy Shaw and Deb Margolin;
Shaw and Weaver also co-founded the WOW Café Theatre nearby with Pamela
Camhe and Jordy Mark.63 Weaver appeared in character as Tammy WhyNot, a
country singer who gave it all up to become a famous lesbian performance artist.
The show was titled What Tammy Needs to Know about Getting Old and
Having Sex: The Concert Tour. The WhyNots — about a dozen elderly people
from the surrounding community — appeared as Tammy’s backup singers and
dancers. The sold-out theater holds perhaps a hundred people; eighty-some were
women, about the same number appeared to be lesbian or gay (the vast majority
the former), and about the same number were over the age of 60 or so, maybe
over 65. Tammy interviewed the WhyNots, asking about their experiences of
getting older and having sex, and as they told their fabulous stories of masturbation,
willed celibacy, daily sex, and loneliness; they sang and danced, and they formidably
vibrated with energy — the 80-something woman wearing a transparent black shirt
over a fabulous purple bra and leather miniskirt, the Cuban dancer in a short fringed

59
Rohy, Lost Causes, 99.
60
Ibid., 74.
61
Which would simply repeat the distinction of practices that contribute to the problem.
62
Sara Warner emphasizes that in the 1970s, issues as (apparently) diverse as “union organizing, nuclear disarmament,
peace, urban renewal, prison activism, immigration reform, the environment, rape, abortion, domestic violence protec-
tion, and birth control topped the list of lesbian causes.” Acts of Gaiety, xxi. As is well known, the intersectional analyses
offered by the Combahee River Collective and similar groupings paved a road others are only now walking.
63
For more on WOW Café Theatre, see Davy, Lady Dicks and Lesbian Brothers.
446 LINN MARIE TONSTAD

red dress, the people who had not been destroyed by a society that teaches even their
purported allies (queers) to despise them. During the 90 minutes or so the show
lasted, I felt my desires shift: I want to be like these women when I grow up! (as it
were).64 Even so fleeting an intimation of a social world filled with women who
live in ways different from those of dominant society, of women whose lives are
derogated by the futural orientation of our current order, left me feeling, and so
believing in, a different world — a desirable future in which I too will become old
like these non-ancestral ancestors, something to look forward (backward) to. As
Jill Dolan argues, “communitas and the utopian performative … create the con-
dition for action; they pave a certain kind of way, prepare people for the choices
they might make in other aspects of their lives.”65 The dreams that affective attach-
ments mobilize are not necessarily escapist; they can also be properly political. A
politics against debt is perhaps just as demanding as debt-economies are, although
in very different ways.
How do we leave behind the calculations of probability on which capital depends,66
and move to the impossible? I was raised in the Seventh-day Adventist church, attending
only church schools until I went to graduate school, with little exposure in childhood to
non-Adventists except as targets for possible conversion. Seventh-day Adventist tem-
poral rhythms are just a little bit different from “ordinary” rhythms: our practice of
Sabbath-keeping, most evidently, along with certain lifestyle practices — abstention
from alcohol and tobacco, tithing, conscientious objection, and predominant veg-
etarianism. My Adventist existence was heavily institutionalized — we spent our
money at vegetarian restaurants, our time in self-supporting communities, at hospitals
and Adventist health centers, and in church attending evangelistic series. Both spatial
and temporal continuities were created through a variety of global and temporal con-
nections that established systems of identification and affiliation with other Adventists
and Adventism’s imagined precursors (the Waldensians, Jan Hus, Anabaptists). Even so
insular an existence could not insulate from knowledge of the differences between us
and others — indeed, such differences were constantly reinforced. There are myriad
well-known negative side effects of the type of upbringing that I had, but for the pur-
poses of this argument I want to emphasize how much institutionalization is required
to make practices like these easier. We were constantly training for how to respond
to threats to our beliefs and way of life, fed a diet of stories of people who, when
asked to work on the Sabbath, left their jobs and were taken care of by God and angels.
Resistance to debt time requires practices that are no less all-embracing than
(although decidedly not identical with) those I have just described. Some Christian com-
munities share with some queer communities the advantage of having a long cultural
history of experimentation with alternative ways of life that render different choices
intelligible and even easy. For my parents to do what they did required that almost
every choice — whether to bring in the newspaper on Sabbath or save it for after

64
I am far from alone in having this sort of response to Weaver and Shaw’s work. Davy quotes Lisa Kron (now the writer
of the Broadway musical Fun Home) and Claire Moed on the life-changing staging of the impossible performed by the
Split Britches in their play of the same name in Lady Dicks, 7. As Jen Harvie says, “the Split Britches generated a
still-snowballing amount of criticism approaching the size of a polar ice cap (I exaggerate slightly).” See Harvie, “Intro-
duction,” 10.
65
Dolan, Utopia in Performance, 169–70.
66
See, for instance, Daston’s discussion in “The Domestication of Risk,” 237–60.
 DEBT TIME IS STRAIGHT TIME 447

sundown — be ordered toward living differently. While surrounding oneself with

people seeking similar ends helps a very great deal in sustaining these practices, entering
into them and maintaining them over a lifetime may require something like a faith that
believes in all seriousness that one day soon (perhaps tomorrow), we will look up, see a
small cloud (the size of a man’s hand) appearing in Orion, between the belt and the
sword, and say: this is our Lord, we have waited for him, and he will save us.
Given how difficult such a faith is to discover and sustain, what other resources do
we have to bring people into forms of life that seem impossible? Here, I suggest,
queer prophetic performances can mobilize us into a “we,” caused by a future
that does not yet exist and that is impossible under current conditions. As the drum-
beat of debt battens down the hatches of our visions of the possible, queer prophetic
performance reanimates the ghosts of those who live and love differently, the ghosts
that allow us to see the shimmer of an “otherwise” at the cuttingly sharp edges of
reality. Queer prophets are demon-killers and conjurers of possibility; queer pro-
phets can bring us out of the logic of heterosexuality (nothing for free, so nothing
for grace) and into the place where sexuality, theology, and the economy come
back together. Their myth-making figures our truth; their world-making casts
golden words before us that open up new affiliative horizons.

Acknowledgements
Thanks to Devin P. Singh and the two anonymous reviewers for their helpful com-
ments on an earlier draft of this article.

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Notes on contributor
Linn Marie Tonstad is an Assistant Professor of Theology at Yale Divinity School.
Correspondence to: Linn Marie Tonstad. Email: linn.tonstad@yale.edu
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