Producing control and consuming resistance: the information system of consumer credit

Dana Desoto

The project draws from and hopes to contribute to a small, yet burgeoning field of inquiry at the nexus of culture and economy dealing with the nature of money. Money, as a concrete abstraction of value, works as a signifier in culture and economy in ways that can be rhetorical (McCloskey, 1998), geographic (Martin, 1994), symbolic (Simmel, 1978) and fictitious (Roberts, 1994). In any characterization, the signifier of money does not refer to anything but itself (Corbridge & Thrift, 1994) as it flits from information system to information system in a frantic bid to stay ahead of its own contradictions and crises. I believe this conceptualization of money is at the heart of what is alternatively termed "new capitalism" (Fairclough, 2002 and Jessop, 2004), "hypercapitalism" (Graham, 2002) or "postmodern capitalism" (Harvey, 2001). Inasmuch as this involves the study of abstraction and systems of signification and persuasion, this is a study of communication. Furthermore, consumer credit as a system of information is fundamentally a system of economic epistemology. The study shows that through a material articulation of consumer information, the consumer is removed (consumer surveillance), rendered (credit report/score) and reconstructed (score feedback) as past and present activity are used to commoditize future activity. In this system of control, consumers are remade in a process of knowledge gathering and dissemination directed by the interests of capital accumulation (Gandy, 1993a). Inasmuch as this study of consumer credit involves the investigation of information systems, knowledge production, and processes of meaning, it is a study of communication. Finally, the examination of consumer credit's system of information centered on a discourse analysis meant to uncover the symbolic/material dialectic in the linguistic practices/actions stakeholders employed in the dialectical hegemony of consumer credit (Mumby, 1997b). By looking at the organizational rhetoric in FACTA testimony, I delineated the operation of control and resistance in this conjuncture and demonstrated how symbolic language relates to material practice in the discursive construction of consumer credit. Inasmuch as the study of consumer credit's hegemony involves the interrogation of discourse, the symbolic/material dialectic and communicative action, it is a study of communication.

Producing control and consuming resistance: the information system of consumer credit

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