“Student poverty is merely the most gross expression of the colonization of all domains of social practice. The projection of all social guilty conscience onto the student masks the poverty and servitude of everyone.”
—Situationists International, 1966 (1)
Of all the transformations that have taken place in the American university during the post-1968 era, perhaps the most radical is the shift toward financing higher education through borrowed money. The 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) These 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 afforded 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 find the rise in student debt to be yet another symptom of the death of the welfare state.(3) While these accounts often present impassioned denunciations of student debt and argue for a return to state-financed 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 is a necessary nexus of forces of power and control under current configurations of capitalism. The 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 financial capitalism we have witnessed since the late 1960s.
1. The student is no longer a student confined 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 confined but a man in debt.”(4) This cryptic passage is a condensation of his powerful diagnostic of the unbounded financialization of life within societies of control. The debt Deleuze speaks of is, importantly, not only a financial 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 indefinitely deferred. Explicitly, financial 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)
