Finance-subjectivity : thinking through the consequences of the Global Financial Crisis in education

The 2008 Global Financial Crisis (GFC) was an international event that few of us understood at the time in terms of the consequences for education (see Cole, 2012). Subsequent analysis of the GFC has uncovered the complex contemporary workings of capitalism that demonstrate an increasing and yet fully established tendency toward the financialisation of social life. This tendency has tied up international capital flows in escalating forms of inter-related debt and credit structures. These escalating forms of finance had hidden the cause of the GFC the toxic sub-prime mortgage loans-which had been placed within finance packages, and were openly traded until any connection with grounded modes of exchange was annihilated. This chapter takes the processes of financialisation seriously for education and looks at their impacts in terms of finance-subjectivity. The concept of 'finance-subjectivity' will be developed in this chapter in relation to the work of Felix Guattari, who furnished a useful notion of semio-capitalism.