The Financialization of Student Life: Five Propositions on Student Debt

The Financialization of Student Life: Five Propositions on Student Debt Morgan Adamson “Student poverty is merely the most gross expression of the colonization of all domains of social practice. he projection of all social guilty conscience onto the student masks the poverty and servitude of everyone.” —Situationists International, 19661 Of all the transformations that have taken place in the American university during the post-1968 era, perhaps the most radical is the shit toward inancing higher education through borrowed money. he vast amount of unforgivable debt students have incurred since the 1970s signals the birth of a new regime that has come to shape the post-modern university. Each year the sum of student debt seems to grow exponentially: the graduating class of seniors in 2007 had an average debt of $21,900, an increase of 8% from 2006 and almost 100% from 1997.2 hese astounding statistics do not even take into account the debt that most students take on if they choose to seek graduate or professional degrees. Despite the gravity of the situation facing students, academia, particularly the humanities, has aforded surprisingly little attention to the problem of student debt. Of the recent discussions that do critique student debt, most are largely nostalgic for a notion of the “public” university and ind the rise in student debt to be yet another symptom of the death of the welfare state.3 While these accounts oten present impassioned denunciations of student debt and argue for a return to stateinanced education, they systematically lack a critique of the very mechanisms of late capitalism that go into producing the student-in-debt. One must emphasize the limitations of nostalgia for the public university when confronting the problem of student debt, noting that privatization is but one facet of a complex process. Instead, it seems that the student-in-debt Polygraph 21 (2009) 98 he Financialization of Student Life is a necessary nexus of forces of power and control under current conigurations of capitalism. he following propositions are gestures towards a broader exploration of how the student-in-debt is expressive of some of the most insidious mechanisms of control deployed in the transition from industrial to inancial capitalism we have witnessed since the late 1960s. 1. The student is no longer a student conined but a student in debt. In his 1990 essay, “Postscript on the Societies of Control,” Gilles Deleuze concisely updates Michel Foucault’s writings on disciplinary societies with the following remark: “man is no longer a man conined but a man in debt.”4 his cryptic passage is a condensation of his powerful diagnostic of the unbounded inancialization of life within societies of control. he debt Deleuze speaks of is, importantly, not only a inancial obligation between two contractual parties. When alluding to the status of debt in control societies, Deleuze refers to something like a form or structure of life that is bounded to capital while being indeinitely deferred. Explicitly, inancial debt is only an index of a form of life that is itself generated through debt. In this way, the debt within societies of control is a debt that can never be repaid, yet at the same time acts as a motor for constant “undulation,” movement, and adaptation.5 For Deleuze the most fundamental feature of the transition from disciplinary to control societies is the “breakdown of interiors”: “family, school, army, and factory are no longer so many analogous but diferent sites converging on an owner, whether it be state or private power, but transmutable or transformable coded conigurations or a single business where the only people let are administrators.”6 When looking at the crisis of the university in the post-1968 period, Deleuze’s discussion helps to articulate a process of reconiguration and dilapidation of institutional structures of coninement in excess of the discourse on privatization. In disciplinary societies, it does not matter who is the proprietor of an institution, be it the state or private industry: what matters is the form of power deployed. he crumbling of the walls of analogous conined spaces through which the disciplinary subject moved in the period of her life produces new channels for the “ceaseless control of open sites.”7 Ofering an alternative to the discourse on the university that laments the passing of the welfare state—one focused on the privatization of a public good—the concepts of both discipline and control can help us to situate the institution within forms of power that exceed the public/private duality. To illustrate a similar point John R. helin presents the argument that for most of the twentieth century the American university functioned as a “knowledge factory” modeled on industrial forms of business management that resembled the auto and steel industries.8 Furthermore, the inancial restructuring of the university in the early 1970s was conditioned by the general decline of industrial society in America.9 In disciplinary societies, the university functioned as an interiority, a “knowledge factory” one of the many “analogical” sites of coninement (factory, school, army, etc.) that functioned to individuate and discipline the subject within a delimited zone. In contrast, within control societies, Morgan Adamson 99 the university functions as a dispersive and modulating system within a larger network of control. As Deleuze writes, what diferentiates disciplinary societies from societies of control is that, “we’re no longer dealing with a duality of mass and individual. Individuals become ‘dividuals,’ and masses become samples, data, markets or ‘banks.’”10 Deleuze inds the methods of control in education to be exempliied by the model of “continuing education” and “continuous assessment;”11 in fact, he sees the introduction of a business model into the university system as precipitating a “move away from any research in universities.”12 Time has illustrated, however, that the opposite is true. Research remains crucial in shaping the role of the university in contemporary capitalism, though both the concept and function of research have been transformed. he breakdown of the interior that was the university also includes the breakdown of various interiors within the institution: the classical disciplines. he push towards interdisciplinary in the past thirty years is a symptom of the reconiguration of the university into a digital mode of business management. Interdisciplinary research, both fundamental and applied, maximizes proitability while allowing new lines of inquiry not molded on any disciplinary concern, but rather directly on the interests of capital. Universities introduce countless “interdisciplinary initiatives” as models for cutting costs and allowing direct corporate sponsorship of research. To gain any grant or award, one must constantly emphasize her interdisciplinarity, a term which has lost much of its radical content and points, rather, to the lexibility of academic labor. he “continuous assessment” that Deleuze associates with control societies manifests itself in the ceaseless demand that academic labor be able to form new and innovative assemblages of thought and to exceed the limits of particular discursive structures—those associated with the classical disciplines. Within this ever-changing context that rewards malleability, we ind the student to be no longer individuated within the mass, but one of these open sites of control, at every moment “plugged in” to global networks of popular culture, and, as I am arguing here, global inancial markets. Where Deleuze sees the workings of control societies in schools expressed by the demands of continuing education, I ind them to be most evident in the problem of student debt, particularly in the United States. he breakdown of the interior of the university has directly exposed those once thought to be in a liminal state, isolated from the concerns of the world, to the most callous practices of the global inancial system. At the same time, this debt ensures that intellectual futures are bound to the production of surplus value. We might say, then, a student is no longer a student conined but a student in debt. he form of life that is produced by inance capital is life that is in debt, but a debt that cannot be repaid, rather a structural debt. If institutions within disciplinary societies such as schools, factories, and hospitals resembled the nineteenth century criminal prison, we might say that within control societies, the whole of life takes on the agitated character of the debtor’s prison. 100 he Financialization of Student Life 2. Students are not simply one among many groups in American society that have been targeted by predatory lending; rather, since the early 1970s, students have been at the center of new experiments in the inancial management and control of life through debt. Students have been a type of testing ground for the bomb that is de-regulated inancial practices, the catastrophic efects of which global markets are only now beginning to feel. he history of the indebted student closely traces the ascendancy of inance capitalism in the late twentieth century. he global political upheaval of the late-1960s led to a widespread inancial crisis that forced, among many things, the United States to abandon the gold standard, efectively ending the terms of the Bretton Woods agreement. Removing the dollar from the gold standard not only saved the global inancial system from complete collapse, but also ushered in a reconiguration of capitalist forms, fully expressing a tendency characteristic of capitalism from its inception.13 While the structuring logic of capital since the early 1970s has been given many names—postmodernism, post-fordism, late capitalism, etc.—inancialization is the concept I ind to be the most useful in describing a process that deploys debt in order to conigure new relations of power. he liberation of global inancial markets from the constraints of the gold standard forced the international credit system into prominence, allowing capitalism to both adapt to and proit from the crises of late-1960s. It is from this historical constellation that the predominance of the “man in debt” emerges. In the Financialization of Daily Life Randy Martin charts how since the early 1970s technologies of consumer debt—access to easy credit—have increased “beyond the wildest imaginings of their architects in the 1920s,”14 leading to a population without savings, in “a perpetual present without a bufer for the future.”15 hough mechanisms of control through consumer lending have been pervasive since the early 1970s, inancial markets, with the consistent collusion of the federal government, have most rigorously targeted the student population. In 1972, merely a year ater Richard Nixon declared the end of the gold standard, the federal government instituted the irst federally based aid policy that utilized student-loan debt. he creation of Sallie Mae (Student Loan Marketing Association) was the beginning of the trend towards market-based solutions for university funding. While the federal loan program expanded the number of students attending the university, it quickly became the largest source of federally funded aid for higher education. Today Sallie Mae, a privately traded corporation since 2004, owns the university debt of over ten million Americans.16 As Jefery Williams notes in his essay “he Pedagogy of Debt,” the state-business partnership proved one that proits the inancial industry at the expense of students. Williams notes that Sallie Mae receives an average of 37% proit from its loans ofered through the federal programs due to the unusual structure in which the federal government actually insures student loans: “In other words, banks bear no risk, and the structure of federal loan programs provides a safety net for banks, not students.”17 Student debt is the only sector of the consumer credit market that is insured by the state; in this way, the state has played a key role in attracting banks to an otherwise risky population, students.18 he proliferation Morgan Adamson 101 of student debt is a direct result of the exposure of the student to predatory lending practices in which the role of the state is to protect and ensure proitability for investors. Student debt represents the fourth largest sector of consumer debt—ater home, auto, and credit card debt—and the amount that is borrowed annually through federal programs has reached $50.5 billion in 2004, up $30.6 billion from $19.9 billion in 1992, more than doubling the amount of money owed and number of indebted students in a little more than decade.19 hough rampant expansion of credit markets in the past two decades afected all sectors of consumer society, the intensive growth of student loan programs was unparalleled during this period.20 University infrastructure acts as a mediator between banks and students, deliberately constructed to facilitate this relationship with so-called inancial aid packages, websites, and oices that directly link students to sources of credit and allow them to take out massive loans with surprising ease. Furthermore, many public universities have direct ties to private banking institutions and allow branches to be located on campus, thus encouraging students to take out even more dangerous private loans to supplement their deicient inancial aid packages.21 he mechanisms of predatory lending and inancial control are inscribed into the very architecture and quotidian operations of the contemporary university. With all the contingencies aforded by federal programs, such as income-based repayment options and subsidized loans, student debtors lack the most fundamental right of the indebted class: bankruptcy. he 1976 bankruptcy laws passed by congress assured that student debtors have a singular status under the law, further illustrating the exceptional situation created for the inancial control over this population. Isolating the student by assigning her to a vulnerable legal status, the production of the student in debt is an experiment in the development and dissemination of techniques of inancial control. Unlike the victims of the bad loans that led to the recent sub-prime mortgage crisis, the indebted student class in America can never start over. 3. The inancialization of student life is an extension of the means of primitive accumulation deployed by contemporary inance capitalism. New technologies of inancial control targeted at the student, “Human Capital Contracts,” exemplify the unbounded scope of these means in an attempt to control all domains of student life. Whereas Marx writes that primitive accumulation, accumulation by “conquest, enslavement, robbery, murder,”22 is akin to the “original sin” of capitalist accumulation, Deleuze and Guattari argue that “primitive accumulation is not produced just once at the dawn of capitalism, but is continually reproducing itself.”23 Increasingly, Marxist thought from the later half of the twentieth century into the present has been revisiting the concept of primitive accumulation in order to illustrate its persistent relevance to contemporary capitalist forms.24 Far from only representing a historical stage in the development of capitalism, primitive accumulation should be understood as a technique for both managing crisis and bringing new raw materials—be they social practices, living entities, or territories—into the fold of capital. 102 he Financialization of Student Life David Harvey’s he New Imperialism argues for a renaming of this concept that wrests it from its teleological sense, calling it instead, “accumulation by dispossession.” Consistent with Marx’s association of primitive accumulation with the rise of the banking system, Harvey notes “inance capitalism is the cutting edge of accumulation by dispossession in recent times.”25 As the proprietors of much of the spoil inlicted on the third world, international inancial institutions such as the World Bank and the IMF are at the center of Harvey’s analysis of the relationship between debt and primitive accumulation. However, he does mention that primitive accumulation does not always necessitate an “outside,” or a non-capitalist mode of production to poach. Sectors of the economy that have “not yet been proletarianized,” including education, are areas ripe for the techniques of primitive accumulation to take hold.26 he implementation of student debt as a mechanism of inancial control has subjected the student population in America to a process of proletarianization. As a testing ground for new technologies of inancial control at the centers of capitalist accumulation, the student is an important igure for understanding the manner in which accumulation by dispossession functions within consumer markets. However, student debt is perhaps only the seed of new and more virulent forms of accumulation by dispossession that are presently encroaching on student life. In common parlance, the situation of indebted students is oten likened to indentured servitude.27 While this claim might appear to be hyperbolic, it indexes the growing sense that inancial institutions are engaged in forms of exploitation that exceed the bounds of what is permissible within the bourgeois framework of free labor. hough student debt is not necessarily a form of indentured servitude, it has produced a fertile ground for new and more menacing inancial technologies to emerge. he current crisis of funding in higher education, induced by economic restructuring, has led to a call for further market-based solutions to solve this manufactured problem. Perhaps the most disturbing trend is the push from within the inancial sector towards inancing higher education through “Human Capital Contracts.” First introduced by Milton Friedman in 1945, the Human Capital Contract creates “a inancial instrument that would allow investors to ‘buy’ part of a student’s future income.”28 he concept of human capital, developed by neo-classical economists in the mid-twentieth century, is a radical model of valuing human life that renders the knowledge, skills, and education of an individual as a form of ixed capital. Milton Friedman writes of education, “it is a form of investment in human capital precisely analogous to investment in machinery, buildings, or other forms of non-human capital. Its function is to raise the economic productivity of the human being.”29 A Human Capital Contract, then, treats funding a student’s education as an investment in ixed capital or increasing “equity,” and the returns come from the investor receiving a pre-determined percentage of the student’s income for a large portion of her working life. It is important to note that the Human Capital Contract is not a loan, though it might masquerade as one. It is a legal contract of a diferent kind, as it signiies the ownership not of a debt, but of a portion of the actual “human capital,” the knowl- Morgan Adamson 103 edge and skills acquired through education, possessed by the student. hough it is a departure from the practices of predatory lending, the Human Capital Contract is merely the grossest expression of the encroachment of inancial institutions on the life of the student. It produces between the inancier and the student a relationship that is akin to servitude. hough the trade in human capital pales to the direct violence of modiied and full servitude that have been utilized at diferent moments in the history of capitalist accumulation, it is useful to understand how the Human Capital Contract employs techniques of accumulation by dispossession through an implementation of a form of indenture.30 In fact, the predation inlicted by the student loan market has produced a situation in which selling one’s human capital on the market would appear to be a more viable option than loans. he modiied form of indenture that the Human Capital Contract creates is but one expression of a complex mixture of processes through which accumulation by dispossession functions, and through which the credit system opens up new speculative zones for investment. In Investing in Human Capital, Miguel Palacios Lleras, who is both a fellow at the University of Virginia and a co-founder of LumniTM, a company that invests in human capital, champions the ability of Human Capital Contracts to ix the “broken” system of inancing higher education, especially in developing countries. Palacios Lleras argues that Human Capital Contracts are far more attractive because it is the investor, not the student, who takes on the bulk of the inancial risk. In this sense, the student’s ability to learn and become a productive member of the Post-Fordist work force now becomes a risk factor for the investor. For Palacios Lleras, speculation on human capital as equity has the potential to produce generous returns: Equity is used for investments with high-risk proiles where the use of loans would be excessively costly, if not impossible. he use of equity suits risky investments better because investors compensate possible loss through signiicant inancial upside potential, well above the original value of the investment.31 In other words, the “inancial upside potential” of human capital allows investors to carefully calculate risk on the potential for increase in value of human capital they purchase, and to be inancially rewarded far beyond the interest on a loan if a student is able to perform above expectations. he promise of limitless potential, embodied in the human faculty to learn, makes the student an ideal object for this kind of speculation. Human Capital Contracts, according to Palacios Lleras, will bring students into the university system whose inancial proile and academic achievement had previously disallowed their participation. Much like the arguments used to expand student loan programs in the 1970s, the argument for Human Capital Contracts presents itself through a discourse that promotes “access to higher education,” eliding the fact that these inancial instruments are primarily geared towards the production of surplus value. hough the trade in human capital does not presently account for a signiicant 104 he Financialization of Student Life portion of either inancial markets or university funding, it is expressive of the tendencies of accumulation by dispossession already at work within student debt. hese tendencies, however, are taken to an extreme that challenges the limits of what is permissible within the conines of existing legal and ethical frameworks. Like the original designers of the Human Capital Contract, Palacios Lleras attempts to bufer himself from the charge that the purchase and trade of human capital is servitude by arguing that human capital is the ownership of the rights to future income not future activity.32 herefore, the trade in human capital “does not involve a suppression of an individual’s will.”33 Such a distinction seems limsy at best, as it ignores the underlying technique of human capital contracts which transforms human life into ixed capital. he coincidence of the emergence of human capital markets and the real subsumption of the capacities of humans into modes of production is not in itself remarkable—it is yet another space for the conquest of life under contemporary capitalism. hough evident in the explosion of modiied forms of servitude across areas of the hird-World, the rise of economies of servitude also seems to be taking place at the centers of capitalist production in open and legal forms. Utilizing the tools of risk assessment and management that drive inancial markets, the mechanisms of accumulation by dispossession have opened the ability to learn from inancial speculation. In a market where human capacity to think, speak, and produce afect is exploited, the student becomes a key site for experimentation with methods that allow the further extraction of proit from the human brain’s ability not only to perform, but also to develop these capacities. he Human Capital Contract treats the brain as an open question, a zone of limitless potential, while at the same time, attempting to squeeze the maximum amount of proit from the unfolding of the brain’s potential. Beyond the discourse of the subject, Deleuze highlights the importance of the brain in control societies as a “boundary of a continuous two-way movement between Inside and Outside, this membrane between them.”34 Purchasing the rights to the future of the brain’s potential, inance capitalism attempts to capture the potentials of labor power at this very site, the frontier where creative interaction occurs. In this sense, the development of the Human Capital Contract, while difering from student debt, is an extension of the modes of accumulation by dispossession that have been utilized to both control and proletarianize the student population. David Harvey writes that with accumulation by dispossession, “capitalism internalizes cannibalistic as well as predatory and fraudulent practices,” and that primitive accumulation “can occur in a variety of ways and there is much that is both contingent and haphazard about its modus operandi.”35 hough the inancialization of student life can take various forms, be they debt or the sale of human capital, all of the forms are indicative of a similar process through which capital is currently reconiguring the student towards its own ends. 4. Student debt is counterrevolution. In contrast to a strictly violent and suppressive movement, Paolo Virno deines counterrevolution as, Morgan Adamson 105 revolution in reverse, … an impetuous innovation of modes of production, forms of life, that, however, consolidate and again set in motion capitalist command … he counterrevolution enjoys the very same presuppositions and the very same (economic, social, and cultural) tendencies that the revolution would have been able to engage.36 he conquering of student life through debt is the capture of a site of revolutionary potential manifested in the late-1960s. What was previously a location of dynamism, innovation, new forms of social networks, creativity, and unpredictability, the student has now become a locus for experiments in inancial control, aiming to cultivate and capture these very attributes. Student debt promises that the energy formed in the life of the student will be channeled into the production of surplus value. It is truly a revolution in reverse in that it speculates on, and thus frames, not only the present direction of a student’s intellectual activity, but also the direction towards which future eforts will be channeled. he radical model of the student-worker developed by student movements in the 1960s has been countered with the student overburdened with inancial obligation, fully enmeshed in the world outside of the university, and increasingly isolated, overworked, and resentful. As Marc Bousquet illustrates in How the University Works, undergraduates have increasingly been beleaguered by work-study scams that seek to proit from the creation of low-wage, non-union positions that feed private industry.37 Rather than seeing college life as a liminal space within American society, Bousquet’s important claim, “students are already workers,”38 insists that students are deeply entangled in larger processes of exploitation and wage delation in America before they ever enter the work-force outside of the university. In addition to the great expansion of so-called work-study, however, the 1960s demand that students become connected with proletarian life has also been countered with the great burden of debt. hese responses to the demands of radicalized students are both negative and counter-revolutionary. he inancialization of student life is a reaction to the disturbances caused by a population that disciplinary measures had failed to contain. It is for this reason that new techniques of inancial control have been directed at the student population before moving, virally, into other sectors of the economy. Some examples include the targeting of low-income populations with predatory lending,39 denial of bankruptcy, and the use of public trusts for insurance on bad loans. In addition, lending activities that now reign in consumer markets are evidence that inancial markets are expanding the tools used in the deployment and management of student debt since the 1970s to other areas of the economy. Some examples of this include the recent sub-prime mortgage crisis, the 2005 changes to bankruptcy laws that beneit the credit card industry, and the purchase of bad mortgage assets by the federal government. Because students were a locus of revolutionary activity in the 1960s, they have become the object of the most counter-revolutionary tendencies of inancial capitalism: the drive to control all facets of life through debt. Innovations made in the management of this population must be seen as the inverse of the demands of revolutionary student movements from across the globe; 106 he Financialization of Student Life at the same time, students must also understand the deliberately induced poverty of student life in tandem with other counter-revolutionary measures that have been inlicted by international inancial institutions since the 1960s. he politicization of student debt redeines the terms of the struggle over the university by again putting the student at the center of these struggles. 5 In opposition to the ininite debt that structures sovereign power, debt in societies of control functions through the production of “the bankrupt,” an indeinite form of life. It is on this terrain that struggles over student life must take place. When Deleuze writes, “man is no longer a man conined, but a man in debt,” he is speaking of debt not only as inancial obligation, but also as a form of life of which inancial debt is only a symptom. As a igure fully imbricated in debt, the student is formed in and through the instruments of power that produce debt as a form of life. Deining debt and the manner in which it structures asymmetrical power relations, however, is a complicated matter. One could argue that within contemporary capitalism, life-in-debt is a historical remnant of the model of debt we ind in the Christian theological tradition—a tradition that holds the belief that life itself is conditioned by an ininite debt to a transcendent divine. Contemporary theorists such as Giorgio Agamben have found this model of primary debt adequate to our political situation. In he Coming Community, when speaking of the problem of original sin, Giorgio Agamben describes debt as an ontological given: “humans, in their potentiality to be and to not-be, are, in other words, always already in debt; they always already have a bad conscience without having to commit any blameworthy act.”40 For Agamben, then, ethics grounds the ininite debt of the human in its relation to an elusive, primary debt to non-being. In contrast to Agamben’s attempt to describe primary debt as an ontological fact, Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus, following Nietzsche, rails against such a presupposition. Instead, they claim that it is only with the introduction of the “Barbaric Despotic Machine,” the state accompanied by Christianity, that it becomes possible to conceive of debt as ininite. From the “inite blocks of debt” circulated in primitive economies, debt becomes, “an ininite relation in the form of tribute,” and “the entire surplus value of code is an object of appropriation.”41 Sovereign power is based on a system in which debt becomes an ininite process channeling the social “lows” into one unitary payment to a igure removed form circulation. According to Deleuze and Guattari’s account, the ethico-christian problem of debt—the primary debt of being—needs to be thought of as a material, historical, and political process of the appropriation of surplus from the standpoint of an always-historical form of fullness rather than a constitutive deicit. Ininite debt, then, is useful for thinking of a structure of lack that is an ater-efect of subjugation. hough ininite debt may ofer a beginning for thinking about the lows of credit and debt within late capitalism, I would argue that in the modern era a new modality of debt has been in the process of eroding the sovereign structures of power described above. Financial capitalism is perhaps the most adequate expression of Morgan Adamson 107 the outcome of this transformation. Instead of the subject of ininite debt, within inance capitalism, debt relations become manifest in the igure of “the bankrupt.” In the Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith uses the term “bankrupt” in an anachronistic manner. For Smith, one can “make a bankrupt,” but also, one can be “a bankrupt.” When speaking of the systems of bank credit in both Scotland and England Smith writes that, “if when a bill becomes due, the acceptor does not pay it as soon as it is presented, he becomes from that moment a bankrupt.”42 his more archaic use of word “bankrupt” is notable in that we can easily understand what it means to be in bankruptcy, or to say so-and-so is bankrupt; however, it is another thing to say that someone becomes, from the moment she is unable to pay, a bankrupt. Here a bankrupt is not descriptive, but nominal. How is it that a subject can be an event, a rupture, or a break? he bankrupt is a igure of insolvency and openly outward lows, “a trader who secretes himself ” according to the Bankruptcy Laws passed by Henry VIII in England in 1539.43 he term to “secrete” oneself here has the dual signiicance of both acting in secret in order to hide inancially irresponsible actions, but also literally to secrete his property in order to pay back his creditors. he bankrupt is a igure of debt that can only arise with modernity and the advent of the banking system. It is a igure whose embankments have been broken and who is in a process of liquidation. hough the bankrupt looks a great deal like the subject of ininite debt, it is also its limit. Rather than its wholeness being constituted by an originary, ininite debt to a sovereign igure removed from circulation, the bankrupt is constituted by an opening. Just as money no longer relects the value of the general equivalent, the bankrupt does not relect any transcendent igure, but is rather a nexus of forces. In this way, I would say that the debt of the bankrupt is not ininite, but indeinite. Ininite debt works through the myth of an originary git, one that can be paid in full only through death, hence Freud’s insistence, “thou owest nature a death.”44 he debt of the bankrupt cannot be paid through death, but rather operates on the indeinite character of life. he student-in-debt is an emblematic igure of “the bankrupt” precisely because she cannot declare bankruptcy, but, rather, must live a life conditioned by an indeinite debt. In the Ethics, Spinoza distinguishes the indeinite existence of life from the ininite power of substance. he indeinite is always associated with duration and extension of modal being, and in this way, indeinite life can always be measured.45 Ininity, for Spinoza, is an attribute of a monist ontology that does not exist within duration, but instead is manifested in intensity, that which cannot be measured, the fullness and plentitude of life as it is expressed through a non-transcendent notion of God. By operating on thought as an indeinite attribute of life, student debt places limits on the ininite expression of the common. By assigning measure to the life of the mind, student debt relegates it to an indeinite and controlled existence. It is at this conjunction, between the ininite life of the common as general intellect, and the indeinite life of the bankrupt, that we can begin to see the problem of student debt through a phenomenon that Paolo Virno calls “a publicness without public sphere.”46 Further expressing the collapse of the public/private distinction, for Virno, in postfordism, “the ‘life of the mind’ becomes, in itself, public;” at the same time, “if the 108 he Financialization of Student Life publicness of the intellect does not yield to a realm of a public sphere, of a political space in which the many can attend to common afairs, then it produces terrifying efects.”47 he student within post-fordism exempliies the tension that lies within “a publicness without public sphere.” Transforming the life of the mind into a bankrupt capitalizes on the openness and desire for common expression of thought, creating an indeinite mode of being through the instruments of inancial control. hat which was thought to be outside of intellectual life has become its deepest internal limit; inance has been folded into the life of the mind, becoming, more than ever, the unthought of thought. Overlowing business schools are but one manifestation of this process—every one of the ten million students who annually take on debt in America is contracted to devote a portion of the fruits of her intellectual labor to the banks. As a site where the expression of thought as common has great potential, the student must be seen as a key node in a struggle over the life of the mind and life as such. Binding the life of the mind to capital, either through debt or the new trade in the human’s generic ability to learn, is the advance of counter-revolutionary measures that place limits on the common character of thought as it is actively, politically, and materially conceived. Furthermore, we must be wary of liberal solutions to the problem of student debt that are either nostalgic for the welfare state, or let banks set the terms of the discussion. he struggle over the life of the mind cannot be won through a renegotiation of payment options.48 If student debt produces the bankrupt, then this igure is the inverse of the open expression of the common we seek, and the unbearable nature of indeinite debt, equal and opposite to the joy of collective resistance. ■ 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 Situationist International, “On the Poverty of Student Life,” in Situationist International Anthology, ed. Ken Knabb (Berkeley: Bureau of Public Secrets, 1989), 320. “Student Debt and the Class of 2007,” available on-line at www.projectonstudentdebt. org. he vast majority of research that has been conducted on student debt in the past twenty years has been in the area of education policy. Two good examples of this vein of research are: Derek V Price, Borrowing Inequality: Race, Class, and Student Loans (Boulder: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2004) and Condemning Students to Debt: College Loans and Public Policy, ed. Richard Fossy and Mark Bateman (New York: Teachers College Press, 1998). As one of the only scholars in the humanities who has written extensively on the problem of student debt, Jefrey Williams presents powerful arguments on the extensive negative efects of student debt on the student population and university education. However, at times, Williams’ analysis falls into a similar nostalgia for the welfare state as the authors mentioned above; this is evidenced in his article “Debt Education: Bad for the Young, Bad for America” Dissent (Summer 2006): 56. Gilles Deleuze, “Postscript on the Societies of Control,” in Negotiations, 1972-1990, trans. Martin Joughin (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), 181. As Deleuze writes in his essay on control, “disciplinary man produces energy in discrete amounts, while control man undulates, moving among a continuous range of diferent orbits.” Ibid., 180. Ibid., 181. Ibid., 175. Morgan Adamson 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 109 John R. helin, A History of American Higher Education (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2004), 318. Ibid. Deleuze, “Postscript on the Societies of Control,” 180. Ibid., 179. Ibid., 182. he end of the gold standard is used as a historical marker for the beginning of Postmodernism in Fredric Jameson’s Postmodernism, or, he Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (London: Verso, 1991), xx. It is used as a marker of Post-Fordism in Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s Empire, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000) 238, 266. Randy Martin, Financialization of Daily Life (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2002), 19. Ibid., 40. http://www.salliemae.com/about/ Jefery Williams, “he Pedagogy of Debt,” College Literature 33.4 (Fall 2006): 161. he type of insurance ofered to banks in order to encourage lending to students is now being expanded as the federal government is taking increasing responsibility for the “toxic assets” of banks who held defaulted home mortgage loans in the Troubled Asset Relief Program (October 2008) and the unfolding “Bank Bailout” under the Obama administration. “ACE Issue Brief: Federal Student Loan Debt: 1993-2004.” Report from the American Council on Education available at http://www.acenet.edu/resources/policy-research/. his fact is articulated most powerfully in the recent book by Allan Michael Collinge, he Student Loan Scam (New York: Beacon Press, 2009), which chronicles the ascendancy of Sallie Mae proits from the late-1990s to the present through the expansion of student loan markets and the further erosion of consumer protections in both federal and private student lending. Speciically, Collinge illustrates that Sallie Mae’s record proits are actually a direct result of fees and penalties inlicted because of the high rate of student loan defaults (37). According the American Council on Education, the amount of private loans, that is loans that are not regulated and insured by the federal government has increased at an exponentially during this period: “the College Board estimates that students borrowed almost $10.6 billion through these programs [private lenders] in 2003–04, a seven-fold increase from just under $1.3 billion in 1995–96.” Ibid., 5. Karl Marx, Capital: Volume One: A Critique of Political Economy, trans. Ben Fowkes (New York: Vintage Books, 1977), 874. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Robert Hurly, et al. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), 231. Here are just a few examples of this trend not mentioned in the body of my essay: Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation (Autonomedia, 2004), 7-17; Louis Althusser, Philosophy of the Encounter: Later Writings: 1978-1987, trans. G.M. Goshgarian (London: Verso Press, 2006); Jason Read, he Micropolitics of Capital Marx and the Prehistory of the Present (New York: New York State University Press, 2003); Michael Perelman, he Invention of Capitalism: Classical Political Economy and the Secret History of Primitive Accumulation (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000). David Harvey, he New Imperialism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005),147. By proletarianization, I believe Harvey is referring to the process through which viable, 110 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 he Financialization of Student Life and oten middle class institutions and populations are systematically pillaged by the interests of capital and mechanisms of accumulation by dispossession, creating degraded working conditions and poverty. he analogy between student debt and indentured servitude appears in a wide range of contexts, both academic and non-academic, including Jefrey Williams’, “Student Debt and the Spirit of Indenture,” Dissent (Summer 2008): 35-40; “he Monitor’s View: America’s Indentured Undergraduates,” Christian Science Monitor, December 6, 2006, Commentary Section; Diana Jean Schemo, “Private Loans Deepen a Crisis in Student Debt,” New York Times, June 10, 2007. Miguel Palcios Lleras, Investing in Human Capital: A Capital Markets Approach to Student Funding (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 41. Milton Friedman, “he Role of Government in Education,” in Capitalism and Freedom (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 100-1. A contract of indenture is generally a form of servitude that limits the terms of ownership to a temporally conined period. Ibid., 2. Ibid., 106. Ibid. Gilles Deleuze, “Control and Becoming” in Negotiations, 1972-1990, trans. Martin Joughin (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), 176. David Harvey, he New Imperialism, 149. Paolo Virno, “Do You Remember Counterrevolution?,” trans. Michael Hardt , in Radical hought in Italy, ed. Michael Hardt and Paolo Virno (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 241. Marc Bousquet, How the University Works: Higher Education and the Low-Wage Nation (New York: New York University Press, 2008), 125-156. Ibid. In the chapter “Students Are Already Workers,” 125-156, Bousquet takes the case of UPS’s consistent and widespread exploitation of the undergraduate labor-pool to illustrate the proletarianization of students. he targeting of underprivileged and minority groups by student loans is well documented in Derek V. Price’s, Borrowing Inequity: Race, Class, and Student Loans. Giorgio Agamben, he Coming Community, trans. Michael Hardt (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 43-4. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, 194-5. Adam Smith, he Wealth of Nations, Volume One (Homewood, Illinois: Richard D. Irwin, Inc., 1963), 238. Oxford English Dictionary Online available at www.dictionary.oed.com. Sigmund Freud, he Complete Letters of Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm Fliess, 1887-1904, trans. Jefrey Moussaief Masson (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1986), 343. Spinoza, Ethics, trans. G. H. R. Parkinson (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2000), 114, 175. Paolo Virno, A Grammar of the Multitude, trans. Isabella Bertoletti, et al. (Los Angeles: Semiotext[e], 2004), 40. Ibid., 37, 40. hough I have great respect for Rev. Jesse Jackson’s new push to reduce the interest rate of student loan payments to 1% (see http://www.reducetherate.org), I ind that this response elides the structural, counter-revolutionary character of any form of student debt.