As students take on more and more loans to fund their education, their education changes form. Anyone who teaches at a University is perhaps aware of the chilling effect that student debt has an intellectual inquiry and education. Students do not ask themselves the questions: what interests me? And what discipline or field do I show talent for? But ask instead: what will get me a job? What will the market demand? Debt is the future acting on the present. The idea of future debt, of the cost of student loans, acts on the present, determining choices and limiting possibilities. Debt is mode of governmentality, a way to restrict and curtail actions; a mode that is all the more effective in being internalized.

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Student debt can be understood as a transformation of the educational experience and the university, one that uses the power of the state, taxation and the allocation of funds, to restructure the university from below. Indebted students, students desperately seeking wages adequate to their debt, are less likely to demand courses and programs engaging in critical thinking, let alone engage in the political activism that made the “student” a political transindividual individuation, defined by its liminal position between home and work, immaturity and maturity. Debt produces students who are desperately try to match their actions to the mercurial job market, rather than rethink society and their place within it. The politics of debt are produced from above, but the effects are felt from below in the daily actions of not only students, who ask only “how can this course get me a job,” but also an increasingly precarious adjunct teaching faculty forced to tailor their teaching to whatever can get them work. 

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It is very difficult to say “we” debtors, in the way one could say “we” citizens or “we” workers. Part of debt passes beneath us, in the calculations, quantifications, and aggregations that make up our digital self, our virtual identity, and is this respect we cannot even say “I.”

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debt is seen less as a collective condition, as part of a new regime of accumulation and a new governmentality, than as an individual fate.

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we should not spend too much time mourning the lack of the worker as an identity organizing Occupy Wall Street, or hold out hopes for unions to be revitalized. Such actions can only lead to reforms, to better wages and more work, and would return us to the division of worker and student, waged work and unpaid reproductive work.

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debt is dependent upon a new technological regime of surveillance and data sharing, is part of a political strategy of neoliberal governmentality, and perpetuates a subjectivity of isolation and anxiety. 

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Work, even the work at a given office, call center, or distribution site, is no longer that of a “we,” of a collective identity, but is individualized into temporary contracts, continual performance reviews, and dispersed incentives. To call this an “I” with all of its connotation of independence and autonomy, is not entirely accurate. As with debt the balance sheet of any one’s particular performance and hard work remains completely outside of their efforts.

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This is a situation in which any lateral connection, any connection with other workers, students, or even other customers of insurance, that is not networking, not oriented towards maximizing one’s potential is unnecessary or avoided. It is perhaps more accurately described as class decomposition than composition, as students and workers are isolated and fragmented into individuals and aggregates of fragmented bits of intelligence and knowledge. The identification is not between other individuals, any collective, but with capital itself, with the enterprise. The worker becomes an entrepreneur of the self, and the student an investor in one’s own human capital. It is perhaps in this sense that “corporate personhood” should be taken as issue: it is not that capitalism would be better if we could some how just return it to individual’s exploiting individuals, but capitalism functions by modeling a person that aligns his or her striving, with its functioning.

I love this last paragraph in particular. But it makes me wonder whether anyone would ever claim that this situation is true of their own actions. Do we need a more subtle language for our descriptions of these experiences? Or is the manifesto tone a necessary part of the genre? I am interested because it is a problem I have all the time with my own writing – and my own problems with writing are the reason I am doing a blog post right now rather than my conference paper for next week!

One of the many thoughts this piece prompted for me was a sense of the varied force and scale of the student debt problem in different national political cultures. If #occupy has effectively mobilised awareness of the debt issue in the US and in Europe, our government-led student loans system in Australia presents another front for analysis. The funding of universities here involves particularities that matter, even while our campuses reflect in practice some of the same tendencies shaping the experience of university life elsewhere (thanks again for these ideas, MFD).

What I suspect is even more important is the role our education system plays in the wider region of Asia, and how this does or doesn’t equate to the same kinds of imperial legacies of Anglo-American capitalism. We have already seen inklings of what an #occupy movement of international students would look like in the streets of Melbourne. Have these connections been made in the wave of more recent commentary? (Scholars like Brett Neilson have been writing about transformations in worker/student relations for some time.) Ultimately it is my parochialism, my lack of understanding of the routes our “international” students take to enrol in our courses, that makes me pause before disowning the traditions I am now implicated in perpetuating as faculty. Because who am I to know – how does my own employment situation even encourage me to know – what difference a Western education might make in a range of other countries? This seems to me one of the more crucial philosophical questions raised by these times.

I guess another way of saying all this is: where is Asia in the global economy, of knowledge and its debts, imagined by #occupy?

Bousquet raises similar issues to those addressed in Andrew Ross’s latest book when he writes:

Higher education has played a crucial, innovative role in the new order of the global workplace, trading on the willingness of most of us to discount our labor-time in exchange for a little dignity and partial autonomy. It isn’t just faculty work that’s being spoiled; most people’s work is being ruined in similar ways.

What’s particularly interesting is how Bousquet charts some of these changes in relation to managerialism:

the tenure-track faculty now retain professional status in at least partial relation to their managerial function—they manage a vast range of parafaculty (adjunct lecturers, tech support, undergraduate tutors, graduate teaching and research assistants). Just as much legal work is done by paralegals supervised by lawyers, and physicians increasingly function to manage non-physician medical practitioners, nurses of various grades, students, nurses’ aides, technicians, secretaries, and other personnel.

And the economies of corporate campuses:

The smoothly-functioning campus is a post-Fordist company town, with a churning pool of self-subsidizing cheap labor that takes loans to spend in the company store, voluntarily poses for company marketing materials, pays for the privilege of serving as a “brand ambassador” for the campus, and so on.

These are problems I hope we can think through at the State of the Industry conference in November. Well worth reading Bousquet’s book in preparation for those discussions.

The reactions I’ve been getting from the talks so far – beyond incredulity at the Bogan Gifts application on Facebook – show degrees of identification with the thoughts of workers in my study. A number of the older academics seem to recognise the participants’ acceptance of a gradual increase in work demands and the ways that technology allows work to enter into spaces and times that were previously free of its presence. In this context, in response to these comments, so what if some industries have always had blurry divisions between paid hours and off-the-clock? The point is that companies of all kinds now use this model as the basis for efficiency regimes on a massive scale because they have found a workforce that no longer feels the need to differentiate between what is paid and what is not.

Here it is precisely academics with tenure that have a case to answer, more so than the freelance journalists Mel speaks of (but who could equally do with some labour consciousness). The bulemic work practices freelancers face and the entrepreneurial effort required to generate ongoing opportunities have more in common with research-only contract jobs than the generation of long-term teaching staff who have largely been protected from the competitiveness of the portfolio career.

That said, these latter jobs have become subject to an incredible amount of self-auditing with the uptake of neoliberal management techniques that encourage autonomy and flexibility as long as ALL the work continues to be done. It is not simply coincidence that in so many cases this work consists of entering information into an array of online databases quantifying outcomes or Microsoft Office documents that are downloaded, edited, repackaged and uploaded in response to thousands of solicitous emails politely requesting urgent compliance.

These are some of the specificities worth mentioning before we dismiss the role of technology in any of these issues. It should not be necessary to point out that people simply do not have the time to negotiate intimacy rules and terms of access with 189 Facebook “friends”. What inspired my previous anecdote was a wider frustration I was feeling – perhaps even channelling, in response to discussions with others – to do with the kinds of autonomy I want to enjoy and sustain beyond the industrial demands of my job. They are questions of etiquette and politeness that pertain to any era of professional life and are about respecting people’s legitimate attempts to carve out small semblances of non-work space so that daily life is tolerable.

There may be some people who find pleasure or even glamour in blurring the boundaries between friendship and professional obligation, but I imagine we each have a limit point where we would like to be treated as human. At least in my definition, this still involves being being assumed to have a life outside of work – and wishing the same for others.