Introduction

From conversations overheard on the bus or in the gym, to warnings voiced by macroeconomists and major financial institutions (Keen, 2017; Brazier, 2017); everything is, it seems, about debt. Looming behind the formidable spectres haunting Europe (ecological catastrophe, resurgent nationalisms) is a rising tide of indebted households. This chapter focuses upon the United Kingdom, where a perfect storm of measures has caused not only a ballooning of overall private debt levels, but moreover a fundamental change in the very meaning of ‘household debt’.

Yet, if everything is about debt, from our experience, debt is (almost) always about something else. This chapter is an attempt to make sense, as debt researchers also involved in advice work and housing activism, of the individual narratives of debt that we encounter and how they relate to shared experiences of benefit reductions, rising housing costs, and insecure work. It is as such an attempt to understand the broader implications of debt; how debt burdens seep into, and reshape, everyday experiences and intimate relationships.

We do this by focusing upon the temporal frameworks of debt. In this sense our work follows a series of prominent texts in the field of debt studies – most prominent among which are those of Lazzarato (2012, 2013) – in which it is the recompositions of past, future and present, the twistings of rhythms and habits, that are the key dynamics explaining what it means to be in debt. This emotio-temporal framing can serve, we argue, to uncover what is otherwise hidden in quantitative indications of rising debt burdens, suggesting as they do a linear expansion in the country's demand for credit, namely that the shifting dynamics of debt in the UK are fundamentally recomposing the ‘indebted everyday’.

Taking our cue from the work of Adkins (2016) and Konings (2015; 2018), this chapter challenges the dominant understanding of debt as imposing a ‘disciplinary’ framework of time upon the subject. Across two bodies of fieldwork – with the advice sector and with debtors – we trace not only the imposition, management and varied narratives of ‘disciplinary’ structurings of time, but also the ‘moments’ in which they crack, fragment or are suspended.