Affective life and cultural economy: Payday loans and the everyday space-times of credit-debt in the UK

Abstract

Analysing the affective geographies of digitally mediated payday loans in the UK, this paper advocates and exemplifies an approach to cultural economy that focuses on how economic worlds are affectively animated and lived. Supplementing the two versions of “culture” that cultural economy approaches have to date been organised around – culture as signifying system or culture as assembled effect – we propose a cultural economy of everyday space-times which is attuned to the affective composition of forms of living. Drawing on empirical work with 40 users of digitally mediated payday loans, we employ this approach to trace how their loans become part of three intersecting forms of living: relief, as a pressing concern is deferred to the immediate future; separation, as private spaces are created within ordinary life and obligations are felt as individual responsibilities; and pressure, as demands to pay intensify the sense that debt is spiralling out of control and already-ongoing precarity cannot be sustained. In conclusion, we pose further questions for a cultural economy approach orientated to the analysis of forms of living.