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82 ▪ Chapter 3 in the permanent educational market, therefore, the classic demand for the right to an education, one that has been characteristic of student movements in recent decades, looses its incisiveness precisely to the degree that the guarantee of such a right is accompanied by a déclassement, or devaluation of knowledge and degrees.78 Therefore the battles surrounding access tend to reconfigure themselves, in the practices of the movements of students and the precarious, as struggles against the filters and blockages posed within the educational process (between general and specialized degrees, between these and post-degree programs or doctorate degrees, between one institution and another, etc.), which impede the free circulation of living labor/knowledge in lifelong learning and regulate the value of labor power.79 While it is true that from this point of view the italian situation displays some particularly severe qualities, it is equally certain that the trend has well-established transnational connotations: in France, for example, such déclassement was a central theme of the revolt against the Cpe in the spring of 2006.80 in the United states, the devalorization of labor power also passes through the debt that students take on through federal and private loans, frequently amounting to tens of thousands of dollars, in order to invest in their “human capital.” in italy, due to the different social structure and lower costs of education (to which correspond the lower earning potential for degree holders), the debt is primarily taken on toward one’s family, although the so-called prestititi d’onore (literally, “honor-based loans,” or student loans)81 are beginning to become more widespread: “honor” and “merit” are the keywords for the financialization of the student life. in the United states—where it frequently amounts to tens of thousands of dollars per person—it is by now referred to as a “new paradigm of early to middle adult life.”82 debt is the other face of credit, completing in this way the picture of the complete off-loading of risk from the company to workers , with the consequent internalization of the possibility of failure as an individual sense of guilt.83 Within precarity one’s relationship with time becomes, therefore, paradoxical and schizophrenic. on the one hand, with the surpassing of a full-time job for life, subjects can free the present from the future as normative code. on the other, this same code returns to heavily determine the forms of life in the Corporatization of the University ▪ 83 form of “risk,” on which to invest or to avoid: something “non-existent, invented, fictive,”84 therefore artificial, which nonetheless ties the biographies and the value of labor power. seen in this light, “the systemic connections between the production of knowledge and financial valorization” described by marazzi become clear: “[The Bologna declaration is the] application to educational processes of the principles that regulate post-Fordist flexible production, with the privatization of educational costs (increase of tuition and additional costs for specialization) and its deregulation tied to the needs of private industry sectors (competition between university centers of research-education). From this point forward education cannot but rhyme with precarization.”85 in this perspective, the analyses—albeit critical—of the inadequacy of the reform processes with respect to the “knowledge society,” ought to be at least in part reconsidered. it is true that there seems to be a strident contrast between the pretense of flexibility and the construction of rigid educational schemes, within which specialization, a fragmentary nature, and the rapid obsolescence of transmitted knowledge are dominant in the current curricular architecture.86 nonetheless, the risk here is interpreting the university system on the basis of its correspondence or lack thereof with an assumed rationality conferred to its explicit systemic mission. one can maintain that one of the implicit objectives of the reform process is precisely a form of education directed not toward a particular form of precarious employment or another, but to precarity in general. it passes through the imposition of powerfully disciplining techniques, ones that are abundantly exhibited by students and the precarious: from the acceleration of the times and rhythms of study, to attendance requirements, to education credits. precarization, in other words, presents itself as both the means and ends of the forms of control of contemporary living labor, as a technique and a permanent condition. Bologna’s conclusions are similar: post-Fordism or the so-called knowledge economy have produced the superfetation of a public and private education...

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