Contemporary Social Science

Vol. 6, No. 2, 255–271, June 2011

Neoliberalism, working-class subjects

and higher education
Valerie Walkerdine∗
School of Social Sciences, Cardiff University, Cardiff, Wales, UK

This is a moment of post neo-liberalism in which aspiration and the constant working
on qualifications is seen as a central trope of current modes of governance of higher
education, alongside the contrary evidence about working-class students’ access to
universities in the UK and elsewhere. It is claimed that working-class children lack
aspiration, which they appear not to have gained despite all the attempts and govern-
ment policies. This paper explores the issue of working-class students going on to
higher education by thinking about the centrality of fantasy and imagination, using
the work of Felix Guattari to bring together working-class imagination and imagining
the university of the future.

Introduction
When I originally presented what became this paper at the CHEER seminar on
Higher Education, the then Labour government stressed the central importance of
lack of aspiration as an explanation of poor performance in working-class commu-
nities. However, while there is ample evidence to support the fact that upward mobi-
lity is now more difficult than it was in the 1960s (Blanden, 2005; Blanden & Gregg,
2004; Blanden et al., 2005), nevertheless most explanations of working-class failure
with respect to higher education tend to be focused on qualities within individuals,
families and communities, hence the importance of aspiration.
In 2008, the then Department of Children, Schools and Families produced a
booklet called The Extra Mile: How Schools Succeed in Raising Aspirations in Deprived
Communities (2008). In its introduction the booklet pays particular attention to
what they call generational poverty, that is families who have been poor for

∗
School of Social Sciences, Cardiff University, Cardiff, Wales, UK. Email: WalkerdineV@cf.ac.uk

2158-2041 (print) 2158-205X (online)/11/020255–17 # 2011 Academy of Social Sciences

DOI: 10.1080/21582041.2011.580621
256 V. Walkerdine

generations. Such families, they argue, suffer serious material deprivation which
means lack of material supports to education but also face ‘a cultural barrier of low
aspirations and scepticism about education, the feeling that education is by and for
other people, and likely to let one down’ (p. 2). History has taught them, the
booklet states, that education does not work for families like theirs and so they have
a cultural attitude that is anti-education. However, while in the past work in heavy
industry, which required low levels of education, was plentiful, jobs in the 21st
century require higher-order skills. ‘A successful education in the sixth form and uni-
versity will be the norm’, they state, ‘not the alternative.’ Even this sentiment seems
positively enlightened in the face of the proposed cuts in higher education.
However, what concerns me here is the way in which the Department of Children,
Schools and Families (now renamed Department of Education) still stresses the
lack of aspiration as the central tenet and the need to raise it. I want to suggest that
the situation is far more complex than this. In this paper, I present the central impor-
tance of fantasy and imagination to working-class students hoping to go to higher edu-
cation. Obviously imagining what the university might be requires us to think beyond
present policies. In presenting the centrality of fantasy and imagination over aspiration
as a way of understanding working-class transitions, I am wanting to go beyond a neo-
liberal agenda of work on the self, which stresses the centrality of a biographical
project of the self (Rose, 1999). In understanding this shift, I want to critique the
rationalism inherent in the idea that the work on the self demanded by liberal govern-
ance means that working-class students lack the will or ability to see something else
and work towards it. Far from this, I suggest that such students may not lack a way
of fantasising a set of desires for the future, but are not well supported in education
to mobilise these into an imagination which can be acted upon. I wish to present
the work of Felix Guattari as one way of thinking about the creative power of imagin-
ation in relation to overcoming anxiety and thus the possibility of movement forward
into new geographical and imaginative spaces for subjectivity, which could include
higher education.
As many have argued, the shift into neo or advanced liberalism and globalisation
stresses motivation, aspiration and personality as central psychological markers of
the appropriate kind of care of the self (Walkerdine & Bansel, 2009; Rose, 1999).
This means that the individual must understand the need to refashion themselves con-
stantly in order to be employable. However, in industrial communities, aspiration,
understood as the desire to better oneself, could be understood for many as antitheti-
cal to mutuality and solidarity, which stressed mutual strength and support through
sameness. This means that aspiration for some young people, especially men, in de-
industrialised and other working-class communities, represented a problem as it
seemed to them to imply a disloyalty to the traditions of masculinity and also appeared
that practices in which they were shamed for taking work which was embarrassing or
feminine. Like Paul Willis’s (1977) lads, decades earlier, these young men had not
engaged at all with school learning (Walkerdine & Jimenez, 2010). Similarly, work
on the intergenerational transmission of poverty has stressed the role of poverty in
blocking aspiration and the place of resilience in propping up this concept (Atree,
 Neoliberalism, working-class subjects and higher education 257

2006; Boyden & Cooper, 2007). However, as in the previous work, aspiration is a
concept which is assumed, rather than discovered. Boyden & Cooper (2007) argue
that the move to a resilience model was to emphasise how some people could
‘escape’ and therefore be shown to have strengths and be understood as competent
social agents. We can understand the New Labour Department of Children,
Schools and Families position as a combination of a deprivation and resilience
approach. To get people out of poverty and into higher education, according to
their approach, the systematic intergenerational deprivations and cultures need to
be addressed through the development of aspiration, an aspiration to leave, to do
better, which is supported by community role models and innovative pedagogies.
Thus, intergenerational poverty establishes itself as a block to change and to entry
into higher education but it is one that can be addressed.
In the de-industrialised community that I called Steeltown, the loss of the work and
its associated mode of masculinity has had a particular impact upon some young men,
who could not imagine the possibility of taking other work, usually glossed as femi-
nine, which involves mostly low-paid service work, such as industrial cleaning,
pizza delivery or shop work (Walkerdine & Jimenez, 2010). Older men and women
in the community found it very difficult to accept that the young men might take
work which they classified as feminine and gave them a hard time, by doing things
such as ridiculing and refusing to speak to them. What was unaccounted for in this
was that the whole community was suffering from the loss of those modes of being
and relating which had made sense before and which had kept it safe. This is not
some simple lack of aspiration, but a complex cultural, economic and psychosocial
phenomenon, which needs to be addressed as such (Walkerdine & Jimenez, 2010).
This leads me to suggest that what we need here is a much more complex and
nuanced approach to working-class academic performance and higher education.

Shifts in identity—loss of relations which make sense

In 1991, I made a documentary with a group of women professionals who had grown
up working-class in Britain in the post-war period. ‘Didn’t She Do Well’ centred on a
discussion between the women about their move through education and into the pro-
fessional middle class. An overwhelming theme of this transition was an uncertainty
about identity. As one woman says, ‘I know who I am in this place, I know who I
am in that place, but I don’t know who I want to be, just for me.’ Of course as
Giddens (1991) argued, the idea of a sense of identity ‘for ourselves’ made no
sense in a moment of greater fixity of social location. However, it is compatible
with an approach to class and higher education which stresses the possibilities of
freedom and choice afforded by neoliberalism (Rose, 1999; Walkerdine & Bansel,
2009). But what this woman is also saying is that she understands what she has to
do to be accepted as a subject differently within different locations. That different
classed locations demand different and often opposing things from subjects is
perhaps easy to understand, but it is often rather overlooked when it comes to the
transition to higher education. This is not a matter of aspiration at all, but a
258 V. Walkerdine

recognition that subjectivity is produced in complex ways within social locations and
that movement across these locations in terms of status can be unsettling at best and
terrifying at worst. Skeggs’s (1997) work on respectability makes it perfectly clear how
hard it is for working-class women even to enter an upmarket department store, so it is
not difficult to imagine how much harder it might be to enter a university. Layton
(2006) demonstrated that middle-class Americans got ‘the heebie jeebies’ when
they went into stores coded as working class, and felt full of distain and repulsion at
the shoppers there. As one young middle-class young women said in a project on
transition to womanhood in 1990s Britain (Walkerdine et al., 2002) ‘you can spot
class a mile off’. It is presented in dress, speech, manner and numerous other ways
of being and behaving, as television programmes such as Ladette to Lady demonstrate
(Walkerdine, in press).
Classed experience in these terms is deeply embodied, affectively lived and per-
formed within specific practices. Making the transition to higher education is about
these issues rather than aspiration. In foregrounding the role of fantasy and imagin-
ation and thinking about working-class transition to higher education, I want to
begin by visiting one example of a young working-class woman from the transition
to womanhood study (Walkerdine et al., 2002) who wanted to be a judge. Sharon
wanted to be a judge, a desire known about by her family and indeed her tutors at
the further education college she was attending. Her family felt that they knew and
recognised this ambition.
Sharon had not done well at school, but perhaps buoyed by the idea that a woman
could do anything she wanted, this was her ambition. However, while her tutor at
college was supportive, she was nowhere near achieving the A levels needed for a
law degree. Thus, we have a fantasy, indeed, the imagination of somewhere and some-
thing else but without the means to make it into a real possibility. This itself was
typical in the study of the difference between support given at school to working-
and middle-class girls. However, in addition to this, Sharon revealed that she was
having a relationship with an older man and was making love without contraception.
Her mother knew about this practice and said of pregnancy, ‘if it happens, it happens,
cross that bridge when we come to it, sort of thing’. In many ways, both Sharon and
her mother present the idea of pregnancy and motherhood as a known and normal
possibility. But more than this, if Sharon got pregnant, something she is not going
out of her way to be but on the other hand is making no attempts to avoid, this
chance event serves as a brake on her ambition to be a judge. Of course, we cannot
know exactly what Sharon felt about this but we can say that engaging in two opposing
practices—trying to get academic grades to go to university and to ultimately be a
judge versus pregnancy and motherhood, supported by her family, shows how
complex it is and indeed how exciting yet frightening it is, to contemplate a change
from the family experience.
Thus, while we can say that Sharon had an ambition, this ambition was a fantasy
which she was pursuing in a complex and conflicted way. In this sense, it was not her
ambition or aspiration that was the problem, but like the young men from Steeltown,
the complex relations and practices with which this was embedded. To understand
 Neoliberalism, working-class subjects and higher education 259

this more clearly I suggest that we have to address the relationship between fantasy and
imagination. I propose that it is imagination and fantasy which are important in think-
ing about working-class academic achievement and transition to higher education. In
the rest of the paper I will explore this by making reference to my understanding of
the work of the radical psychoanalyst Felix Guattari (1992, 2000).

Using the work of Guattari to think about fantasy and imagination

In my own experience, watching Hollywood films served as a driver for my imagin-
ation (Walkerdine, 1997), but it is not uncommon for professionals with a working-
class background to talk of a television programme or other media product which
shaped their fantasies of the possibility of something else. This would hardly be sur-
prising in a world in which such possibilities for another kind of life are endlessly
paraded across our screens. However, as I have already suggested, it is one thing to
have a fantasy of being different or differently located in a life more interesting, excit-
ing, glamorous for example, and quite another to make the transition to another kind
of life through higher education. Indeed, a sense of power and agency accompanied
efforts to support middle-class girls through education, together of course with
money and resources. In our longitudinal study of working- and middle-class girls
(Walkerdine et al., 2002), one striking difference between working- and middle-
class girls at primary school was the expectation that middle-class girls should be
clever and the mobilisation of resources to help this. Often working-class girls
might fantasise but seemed to lack any idea of how to act on a fantasy, how actually
to move from the wish to being able to work out how to do something different.
I want in the rest of the paper to refer to the trajectory of one working-class girl from
this study who did go on to higher education and who started off with a fantasy of
wanting to have the same life as students in an American university drama seen on tel-
evision. Nicky actually manages to move from this fantasy to produce the work needed
to get to university, to be successful and in fact to have a research career.

Schizoanalytic cartographies
Guattari developed a method which he called a Schizoanalytic Cartography, which uti-
lised the concept of Existential Territories. It is a central concept in his work because it
moves from Lacanian psychoanalysis, which stresses the move to the Symbolic Order
and discourse and utilises but goes beyond object relations approaches (which works
with affective relations in infancy, for example) to infancy by attempting to understand
the embodied and affective character of being in location and is then used centrality to
think about the possibility of movement and change. I want to explain this concept as it
forms a central component of his work and provides the ground for understanding
the possibility of change. To understand this concept, we need to think about the
ways that he combines and moves beyond and critiques object relations psychoanaly-
sis. He designates four aspects of experience: the ground where one is, the turbulence
of social experience, blue skies thinking, that is the realm of ideas and daydreams.
260 V. Walkerdine

It is the place in which language collapses and we are confronted by skin and sen-
sation—the place of sensory experience, of affect, thought about specifically by object
relations work on infancy (Walkerdine, 2010). So we have to think of the way in which
we inhabit a space and time, through our affective and sensory experience of it. This
could be a neighbourhood, a home but it could also be the experience of a ‘bottomless
black hole’ (Holmes, n.d.). According to Holmes, it is the experience of pacing, wan-
dering, finding one’s territory. In this, he makes a reference to Situationism in which
Guy Debord (1995) worked with the idea of the drift in which we might understand
the psychic geography of a place through our actual wandering through it. Central to
Guattari’s view is the way in which our territories attempt to mark out our own bound-
aries in an existential sense. It is this issue which is crucial because our existence as
separate beings in object relations terms is understood by reference to an experience
of primary process which allows us to feel held and as though we have a continuity of
being (Bick, 1987; Walkerdine, 2010).
How do we mark out ourselves, our space, how do we come to affectively mark the
boundaries of our affective bodies? This is the place, he says, in which subjectivity
emerges.
Territories of existence . . . drift in relation to each other like tectonic plates under conti-
nents. Rather than speak of the ‘subject’, we should perhaps speak of components of
subjectification, each working more or less on its own. This would lead us, necessarily
to re-examine the relation between concepts of the individual and subjectivity, and,
above all, to make a clear distinction between the two. Vectors of subjectification do
not necessarily pass through the individual, which in reality appears to be something
like a ‘terminal’ for processes that involve human groups, socio-economic ensembles,
data-processing machines etc. Therefore, interiority establishes itself at the crossroads
of multiple components, each relatively autonomous in relation to the other, and, if
needs be, in open conflict. (Guattari, 2000, p. 25)

Thus, the basic building block for thinking about subjectivity within Guattari’s work is
the concept of existential territories. If we take the above quote, we can see that vectors
of subjectification passing through individuals is very close to the Foucauldian notion
of subjectification (Henriques et al., 1984) and the understanding of subjectivity as a
relay point or vector of positions discussed by Henriques et al. and Walkerdine
(2007). However, Guattari’s use of and development of psychoanalysis is quite differ-
ent from the Lacanian-inspired framework used by Henriques et al., as I will go on to
explore. We should not assume that subjectivity is co-terminous with the particular his-
torical form inscribed in psychological discourses of development (Walkerdine, 1991).
So, vectors of subjectification are those forces which define and position subjects as
in Foucault’s approach. We can see that these do not necessarily pass through the
subject in that they define what a subject should be within any particular discursive
practice (cf. Walkerdine, 1984). For Guattari, the subject is a terminal for processes
that involve human groups, socio-economic ensembles, data processing machines. So,
what we see here is that these groups, ensembles and machines are what is primary
and interiority is what establishes itself as at the crossroads of these, which may sit
alongside each other or be in conflict with each other.
 Neoliberalism, working-class subjects and higher education 261

The use of psychoanalysis in relation to this proceeds in a kind of phenomenological

way but without ‘the systematic reductionism that leads it to reduce the object under
consideration to a pure intentional transparency’ (Guattari, 2000, p. 25).
However, Guattari relies considerably on taken for granted concepts which come
from object relations. In particular, he has an account of part objects. And he
makes explicit reference to the skin (see quote above). Central to much object
relations work on early experiences in infancy rely on an understanding of sensory
experience given that infants do not have language. It is this work which works at
the level of the Real and which Lacan thought unreachable by psychoanalysis
because beyond language. However, much work on early experience makes the link
between this, autism and psychosis, and it is this tendency which Guattari dwells
on and extends in his work. In that work, it is the experience of being held and con-
tained by the body of the other which is so crucial. This is experienced in the form of
sounds, lights, shapes, the nipple in the mouth, the breast, the skin, the arm enfolding,
of being picked up and put down, etc. Thus, it is in this light that we can understand
the way that Guattari dwells on the central significance for existential territories of
what he calls the refrain. He advocates an idea of rhythms and refrains which consti-
tute the affective basis, the feeling basis of one’s existence. In this he refers to Proust’s
In search of lost time, where there are evocations of feelings as memories, i.e. the
memory of dipping a biscuit in tea, the uneven feel of paving stones. These are the
rhythmic and refrain-like traces so that any discursive chain bears the traces in
terms of content and forms of expression. It is only through these repetitions that
incorporeal universes of reference, whose events punctuate individual and collective
histories, can be generated and regenerated. In other words, it is the rhythmic,
ritual, affective aspects of our existential paths which map onto what can be said
(the subject of enunciation in his terms) and the discursive positions that keep us in
place. Thus, psychoanalysis has a place in understanding this interiority.
He wants, he says, to use psychoanalysis differently, by taking the work out of a tie to
an individual and collective past and directing it towards the future, to the virtual. The
unconscious, he says, remains bound to archaic fixations only so long as there is nothing
which engages it and can form an investment in a future. Thus, if we understand the
existential territory as the embodied affective place or in fact places in which a sense
of existing is produced, we can see that Guattari retains some aspects of the idea of pos-
itions in discourse or in discursive practices but goes way beyond them by concentrating
not on discourse but on the basic sensory experience of being located and of moving
through the space and time of the locations. Thus affect becomes central: we experience
our existence through our embodied experience of being held in particular moments,
times, spaces. We have also noted that Guattari understands this in terms of the issue
of how one moves forward and into the new rather than getting stuck in the old.
Thus, the idea of a schizoanalytic cartography, the idea of tracing the possibility of
becoming Other, of moving forward, of being different.
The schizoanalytic cartography is a map of movement through time and space
including the cartography of a dreamed-of future. It is in this way that schizoanalytic
cartographies can extend beyond the existential territories to which they are assigned.
262 V. Walkerdine

Thus, it is a question of opening up the territories to new futures, without prior

recourse to assured theoretical principles, the authority of a group, etc., i.e. a clear
path. So, transversal subjectivity (that is, subjectivity crosses various territories) for
Guattari involves a relationship between existential territories and incorporeal uni-
verses. The territories are singular, idiosyncratic, sensible and finite and the universes
are non-coordinated, trans sensible and infinite. During a process of ‘chaosmic
unfolding’ (that is, the possibility of opening up to new virtual possibilities) the
subject oscillates between the two. So change (and development in his sense) is
about being able to move beyond a personal world of constraints, limits and coordi-
nates (the existential territories) to universes in which those things disappear and
one is carried along on something new, one is able to open oneself up to something
new ‘I am no longer what I was before, I am swept away by a becoming other,
carried beyond my familiar existential Territories’ (Guattari, 1992, p. 93).
To understand this we have to think about what he calls the power of waking
dreams, that is, the imagination. Guattari draws heavily on the idea of imagination
and daydreams to think about what he calls the move to incorporeal universes. To
understand this we need to think about the importance of imagination to object
relations psychoanalysis and then to understand how Guattari works with these con-
cepts and transforms them. Freud postulated the idea of hallucination and splitting as
something which first occurred in infancy. How, he asked, could an infant who had
gestated for nine months in a constant environment cope with having to be separate
and to experience lack of warmth, food and human comfort, even if at first for brief
periods? He surmised that the infant formed a fantasy which he called a hallucination
of the mother’s breast, the source of food, in order to stave off or split off from the pain
and terror of separation. Freud understood this in energetic terms as a discharge of
tension. It was Melanie Klein who introduced the idea that this process was also
about what she called object relations, in particular the sensory experience of the care-
giver’s skin, the holding, the nipple in the mouth, the touch of the breast, the smells
and sights and sounds of caring. It is these ‘objects’ which Klein introduced and which
in fact Deleuze and Guattari make much of.
Subsequent analysts in this tradition build upon the importance of sensory experi-
ence of the Other and the environment to build an account of infant sensory and
prelinguistic experience. This is what Guattari alludes to with his account of the ritour-
nelle—refrains. If unconscious fantasy is central to psychoanalysis and to the idea of
the defences we see immediately the central significance of the split—the fantasised
place or image in which one is safe, split off from the painful world of reality. That
is, it is a way to manage pain. It is here then that we need to understand the splitting
of psychosis and the centrality of the attempt to escape terrifying pain and sensations.
Segal (1986) documents this well when she makes a distinction between ‘as if ‘and
‘what if’’ fantasies. The point is that the latter involves the possibility of testing
reality which can be modified and is therefore a form of play. The daydream in this
form is a form of imagination. Thus, he adapts and extends object relation work in
his account of existential territories and incorporeal universes. The move to an incor-
poreal universe is the work of imagination in which one creates the possibility of
 Neoliberalism, working-class subjects and higher education 263

movement to another place. It is this which allows us to think of Guattari’s work in

relation to development, but not in any way linked to fixed stages and in a way
which absolutely incorporates the specific characteristics of specific territory, that is
a place but more than this—our sensory and affective experience of that place.
Related concepts are de and re territorialisation. De-territorialisation is the move
towards and incorporeal universe through the act of imagination. But, what Guattari
(and Deleuze) warns, is that it is fantasy which can take one back towards a re-
territorialisation which does not open up but closes down. To understand this, we
have to recognize that it comes from his work with psychotic patients. The tendency
to split off a painful reality and enter into a world of fantasy in order to feel safe. Thus,
it is not surprising that many moves outwards or to make changes often result not in
opening something up but in closing it down, because of making a move to a new
territory which repeats some of the traps of the old. Thus Guattari makes a strong
distinction between de and re territorialisation.
Guattari, also wants to get beyond this structuralism. He also adapts Winnicott’s
notion of the transitional object in which an object (e.g. a comfort blanket) can
help a child as it were carry part of the mother with it and help it feel safe while
playing without the mother having to be present. This play is creative, it is the link
between the inside and the outside and is the central basis in Winnicott of the possi-
bility of creativity and so change and newness. These objects can in fact be groups or
other relations (Guattari mentions faces and landscapes) that make one feel safe and
anchored while trying to change. This is I think what Guattari means in terms of being
able to move from the existential territories to the incorporeal universe. This is what
makes the person feel safe as they move forward. We should not in Guattari’s terms,
simply associate it with the mother, but with the process and possibility of change. He
calls this process ‘fixing into being’ and ‘only relates to expressive subjects who have
broken out of their totalizing frame and have begun to work on their own account,
overcoming referential sets and manifesting themselves as their own existential
indices, lines of flight’ (Guattari, 2000, p. 30).
However, as he notes, this is risky because too violent a deterritorialisation could
destroy the current holding together (assemblage is the word he uses) of subjectivity.
The deterritorialisation must be gentle in order to find a process ‘whereby assem-
blages can evolve in a more processual fashion’. He says that an a-signifying
rupture is at issue but that lack of expressive support can lead to the possibility of
remaining passive, leading to anxiety, guilt and psychopathological repetitions. In
other words, people cannot change unless they feel held, otherwise the change is
too frightening and it implodes and this creates the possibility of a catastrophic
falling apart of the subject. But in a positive sense, the rupture can call forth incorpor-
eal objects etc that make their presence felt as if they had always been there. They are
catalysts (existential catalytic segments) which then act as new existential refrains,
rhythms etc that re-anchor subjectivity.
So even negative and destructive fantasies sometimes need expression in order to
re-anchor existential territories that are drifting away, as in the treatment of psychosis
( Guattari, 2000, p. 38).
264 V. Walkerdine

These said Guattari, are linked to a cycle of transformations whose consistency and
dynamics make up an assemblage (individual, family, group, project, workshop,
society), The aim is to appropriate existing models in order to construct our own
cartographies, our own reference points and methodology for life and so the future.
So, he says that groups, acting on their subjective territories, can put together exper-
imental formations, cartographies, following the compass points of their own desires.
So, we are in a situation and this is full of affect—we can be engulfed by this, by the
sensations and so of anxiety. This is the schiz, the split, break, rupture, which is
capable of destabilizing the ego and opening up a ‘chaotic void of subjectivity’.
This can either resolve itself into verbal expression or retreat into anxiety. So, the
cartographic method attempts to map the material situations, places, practices etc
that can draw subjectivity out of its chaos, which unfold into social flows and projects
that are themselves reshaped and shifted through time and other encounters. This is
the temporal flow which leads to deterritorialisation.
So,
schizoanalytic cartographies map out the existential and social parameters within which
desire comes to problematise itself in thought and to release its otherness in expression—
thereby helping to create a new context and to launch a new cycle of transformations.

Using Guattari’s concepts to think about Nicky’s move to higher education

Nicky is a white working-class young woman of 21 who was one of the participants in a
study of transition to womanhood in 1990s Britain (Walkerdine et al., 2002). I am
using work undertaken by Andenas, Haavind, Kofoed and Walkerdine to which I
am indebted for this analysis, which maps the existential territories through which
Nicky travels across time and space. By doing this, we will show how the tensions
or schiz operated both within and across territories.
Nicky, as we have seen, first imagines going to university after watching an Amer-
ican television programme, according to her interview. While not doing so well at
school, she commits to working very hard to get the grades that she needs to go to uni-
versity and to avoid that location, glossed as ‘working in a burger bar’.
The starting point for this analysis is Nicky’s existential situatedness in Seatown,
where she has been living with her parents and sisters up to now. She is at the point
of leaving the Family Home and move to a university city in the North of England.
We foreground the existential territories and affects connected to the territories, in
order to gain insight into processes of transformation and changes, and development
as a directed, and open ended process. The analytical strategy has been to look for
affects connected to the existential territories, first of all the Family Home in
Seatown and the Student Flat in the university city, and then to explore what the
affects do to the participants Nicky and her parents, and how they handle it.

The schiz
Nicky talks about her Family Home as a place to be relaxed, to be safe and normal. It
is a place to be comfortable, and it is a place where she belongs:
 Neoliberalism, working-class subjects and higher education 265

I am more comfortable at home than wherever (with friends at College or at work),

especially, I’m more comfortable with my family. I can relax better with my family. I
don’t have to worry about looking stupid or saying stupid things, although Kerry will
pick me up and tell me about them. I forget about how people think about me.
Outside of the house, outside of the family, I’m a bit more, well I’m very careful about
what people think of me as well.
But there is something that ‘conflicts or unsettles her existence’, a sense of the family
home being a place with too much protection:
’Cos as I say my parents were very protective of me and I just needed to feel that I could
do things by myself, and prove to them as well as myself that I was able to do that.
When Nicky leaves Seatown, her family’s home town, and moves to the university
town and into a flat with other students, it can be seen as a reaction to the schiz
within the existential territory Family Home.

Imagination about another existential territory offering other possibilities

The Student Flat in North is a real existential territory, to which Nicky moves when
she starts her university studies. The flat has, however, existed for a long time as a
virtual territory. It was university life as shown in American television programmes
that provided Nicky with the idea of going to university:
I suppose I just got the idea (about Uni) from all those American programmes you watch
on telly about University life. I just wanted to know what it would be like and to give
myself the chance of doing it. I’ve always wanted to go to the Uni. I don’t know why. I
have to do a bit better for myself.
The virtual territory in the television programme enabled Nicky to open up to some-
thing new: ‘swept away by a becoming other, carried beyond her familiar existential
Territories’ (Guattari, 1992, p. 93). The fantasy of going to university was made
even stronger by two possible territories to avoid: the Burger Bar and the Mental
Home. To Nicky the Burger Bar, which is a real bar in Seatown, represents a place
to get stuck if you just let go:
’Cos a lot of people my own age in my family a bit younger, a bit older or, all they’ve done
is, well a lot of them have dropped out of school early and gone and got themselves a job
that’s got absolutely no prospects to it, like working in a Burger bar or something. And I
just did not want that for myself. I wouldn’t see myself spending the rest of my life stuck
in a Burger bar. I just knew I had to get out and do something a bit better.
The second territory to avoid is the Mental Home, underlining the personal importance
and seriousness of continuing on the education track and keep staying in Seatown:
so if I’d failed both my A levels and my GCSEs I probably would be in mental—mental
home by now (laugh) no it’s important to me that I get good marks and that I get—it was
important to me, it always has been important to med that I got to university—that has
always been my ultimate goal for as long as I can remember. So yeah, if I’d failed them it
could have been bad.
The Student Flat is a territory loaded with desire. In Nicky’s imagination, this is a
place where she can be independent—stand on her own feet. But it is also as a
266 V. Walkerdine

place where she is less protected, which is connected to the gaze of people she does not
know.
Nicky finds her territory from the television programme and then tries to hang onto
this to mark out her boundaries in an existential sense. ‘Her dreams and fantasies of
what could be are enacted in the world of what is possible, and are both imagined and
then created’ . . .. Having a job from 14, in order to save money that will enable her to
concentrate on working with her studies when she becomes a student, instead of
having all kind of different jobs that will distract her is one of this enactments,
another is her choice of going to college, which is an untrodden and unknown path
in Nicky’s family.
The way to this territory is, however, not envisioned as a clear path. For instance,
her ideas about what subjects to study evolve gradually, which means that she did not
choose the necessary courses while at college. Accordingly, she had to go to the Open
University to take the courses that were needed for the subjects she wanted to study at
university
Nicky did not want to go to just any university; she wanted to go to a university in
the North. She talks about a long-term love relationship to the North, a place that was
actually introduced by her family:
I knew that I liked the North, because we’ve got family up there, and we used to do quite a
few visits, a couple of times a year. So I knew that I liked the North. If I had a chance I
would settle up there.
Nicky’s parents find it hard that she is going so far away, and it was quite problematic
the first year:
I think it upset my parents that I wanted to move so far away from home. I mean New-
castle . . . they would have preferred it if I’d moved to somewhere like London. And then I
could have come home for visits and that.
To Nicky the geographical distance is a crucial point and part of the project, necessary
to ‘stand on her own feet’, underlining that her line of flight is not only about getting
an education:
I wanted to be a long way away so I could stand on my own two feet. That was one of the
big things about going to University, being able to do what I wanted. ‘Cos as I say my
parents were very protective of me and I just needed to feel that I could do things by
myself, and prove to them as well as myself that I was able to do that. But they found
that a bit difficult to accept at first.
This is a tension, then, a new schiz which has to be acted upon. But still there is an
affective synchrony between Nicky and her parents the first year at university:
The first year at University was hard for myself and it was hard for them I know. They
were coming to terms with me finally moving out. I did actually turn around to my
parents and say before I left ‘well I might not be coming back after I finish University’.
I tried to make them understand that I might, this. . . . I was moving out, and my
Mum didn’t like that very much. I don’t know if my Dad did. My Dad doesn’t say
much (laughs). So I suppose that changed me.
To Nicky it is not about making a decision against her parents, rather making them
understand what she really wants. Endless verbal discussions and confrontations have
 Neoliberalism, working-class subjects and higher education 267

not been the way of resolving the problem. Making the geographical distance do some
of the job has been quite successful, and both parties, Nicky as well as her parents,
have seen that she is able to do things by herself. They gradually became used to
and accepted the new situation: . . . once they realised that was what I wanted they
said ‘well OK’.
Still, some of the parental practices are the same, as seen when Nicky comes home
for vacation:
Although they do still, when I first come home from University, for the first couple of days
my Mum tries to smother me a bit (whispers—laughs). I suppose that’s to be expected.
But even though her parents behave in similar ways as they did before she left for the
North, it is different. When Nicky returns, it is as a student, who has shown that she
can do things by herself, and who understands her parents a bit better. Accordingly,
the same is not just a repetition, but also points to change. It signifies inertia and
change, at the same time. And she tells about an increased reciprocity between
herself and the parents.
Umm, I find it a bit different now I’m at University, being away from home for most of
the year, and then coming back and, sort of, being told what to do (laughs). It takes a bit
of getting used to. But, yeah, I think I get on with them better now that I’m a bit older
than I did when I was like, 14, 15 or so. I understand them a bit better now I think.
And they know that I like to be independent and they’re trying to give me a bit of
room now. I get on a bit better with my Dad. He used to be a bit strict when we were
younger, especially on me, since I was the eldest.
According to Nicky, both parts work on the relationship:
We’re trying to understand each other a bit better. Yeah, I think I get on OK with them.
My parents treat me more like an adult now. Which is what I wanted, so that’s a big
difference.

Belonging
What is (also) at stake here, is the affects connected to belonging. First Christmas
holiday at home, after the move to the North, was really important, according to
Nicky, not the least for her sense of belonging:
Christmas has always been quite important in our family. I think the first year that I’d
come back from the first term at university it was I was different. I don’t know why it
was different, but my parents were a lot more—I don’t’ know—maybe they saw me in
a different light, I don’t know why, but they said at the time I was very different when
I came back. And in the beginning it was very hard to relate back to my parents and
home. When I came back that year. I don’t know I felt I had a—it was very strange,
I felt I belonged more at university during that time than I did at home and when
I came back it was very hard to readjust. But by the time I went back to university
again I was more happier in myself. I mean the first term was good but I felt I was a
bit alienated from home and then when I went back again I felt as if the family was
still there and it was still important to me. So that Christmas sort of cleared things up
a bit in myself. (Interview II)
Nicky is aware of her parents’ despair of losing her:
268 V. Walkerdine

My parents are very, or were very worried when I first went to university that I was going
to lose interest in the family now that I’ve made all these new friends and had a different
sort of life for a while.
Even though Nicky wants to be independent, to stand on her two feet, to reduce the
overprotection from her parents, she is concerned that her education shall not harm
her belonging to her family:
(Do you think that when you’ve got your degree it will, do you think you’ll move into a
different class to you Mum and Dad, and maybe your wider family?) I don’t know. I think
I’ll always be, I mean it’s where I was brought up, it’s how I’ve been brought up and it’s
the way I think now. I hope it won’t make that much difference. I don’t think I’d ever see
myself as better than my parents because that’s. . . . No I don’t think so. I mean, maybe
I might get a better chance to do things, a better job or something. But I know if I stuck
my Dad in an office he wouldn’t be happy. He’s much happier banging away down in the
cellar so it wouldn’t make a great deal of difference to my Dad. I like to think it wouldn’t
make a great deal of difference to the rest of my family what I was doing. Well, I hope not
anyway. I know it won’t make any difference to Kerry (laughs). (Interview I, p. 33)
you’re not treading a well trodden path are you?) (Laugh) no I suppose not—for my
family I suppose I’m doing something that’s completely outside what everyone tends
to do. Um I don’t know why that is, I don’t know why I wanted to, and I don’t know
why I’m so different from the rest ’cos I mean that sense—it’s not always been a good
thing, because like I said I’m cut off from the rest of them and I don’t understand
them very much and they don’t understand me—no I wouldn’t say I’m—
She sees the efforts of her parents, keeping the family together. The whole family went
on vacation to the Gran Canaria:
Um that that holiday was very important to my parents. They felt I suppose that everyone
was moving away from them. Or at least Kerry and I were and the family holiday was
something they had planned for ages. And it was very important that everything went
well. I mean I suppose it did on the whole. It was a good holiday. Um but I think my
parents felt happier about the family when they came back from that one. Felt as if we
weren’t going to go off and leave them and chuck ’em away and it was good for bringing
the family back together again, because I suppose, 3 years at university I suppose you do
drift away in some sense. And Kerry is was going through a bit of an anti family stage, and
Nicky just started her funny stage there, so it was good to bring everyone back together
again and sort of like say Well we’re all different, we’ve all got different opinions on every-
thing but we’re still a family. And I think—
Nicky’s imagination about the Student Flat is a place pointing forward educationally,
and a place where she feels comfortable. Comfortable is about belonging, about
knowing people she spends time with, thereby overcoming her anxiety about the
gaze of others. She has gradually succeeded in making this dream real.
When Nicky arrived in the North, she first lived together with other students
without having a say about whom to share housing with. Next year she moved to a
second flat, with people she had met quite early during the first period. She is not
quite sure what the other people in the flat think of her, but she feels comfortable:
It’s quite a mixed flat really because Janet and Manar, are quite quiet people, whereas
Roya is very, very outgoing, very outgoing (laughs) and then Liz is sort of in the
middle, and for the most time I’m a pretty quiet person. But if I feel comfortable with
people I act a bit stupid, which I suppose everyone does (laughs).
 Neoliberalism, working-class subjects and higher education 269

It’s a good flat, I feel quite comfortable there and I think we’ve all mixed together quite
well, and it feels a bit more like home now that I’ve actually moved into somewhere like
that, so I can act more normal in the flat, a bit more like I can at home. It’s not, it’s a bit
different at Uni, because I actually live there, and the people I live with I’m very comfor-
table with. Although we’ve only known each other a year, we’re pretty close all of us.
To Nicky being comfortable is the crucial affect. But even though she now feels
comfortable in the student flat up north, she still feels most comfortable in the South:
(Where do you feel most comfortable, do you think?) Um I suppose I feel most comfor-
table in the south. But I prefer the North. (. . . why?) Um I don’t know. South is home.
Um, I’ve lived there all my life apart form 3 years here and every time I get closer sort
of from London downwards I feel as if I belong down there more than I do up here.
And it just feels nice heading back down the country. When I come up North it feels—
it feels good, I like being up here, I like the people, um and I feel comfortable up here
but it never feels as if I actually belong up here. Um . . . I like the North, but um the
South is home still.

Prerequisites for new openings without falling apart

Nicky’s efforts are directed to create an existential territory that points forward edu-
cationally, and where she can feel comfortable. What have been the prerequisites for
opening up for these new possibilities of being, for new Incorporeal Universes, as seen
in Nicky’s case? What we have seen so far: (1) a schiz, (2) an imagination about
another existential territory with other possibilities, (3) a desire connected to this ter-
ritory and (4) an experience of own efforts making a move in the directions where the
virtual existential territory becomes a real one. We’ll now have a look at (5) a sense of
being held. Guattari argues that change can be very problematic and lead simply to
reterritorialisation unless people feel held. Otherwise the change is too frightening,
it implodes, and this creates the possibility of a catastrophic falling apart of the
subject.
The university project is Nicky’s own, and her parents are unfamiliar with higher
education and the kind of life associated with students. Nicky’s parents support her
in a way that is within their reach, and what Nicky talks about is emotional support:
I knew they (my parents) would have helped me if they were able to, and they did, sort of
like when I got my prospectus for University, they sat down and went through them with
me and I sort of told me what I was looking for, and they tried to help me out that way.
But apart from that there wasn’t really much practical advice they could give, ’cos they
hadn’t been in the same situation themselves.
They’re just glad that I’ve got something that I’m happy with. They knew I wasn’t happy
at school. They’ve always been there. They’ve been good. They just stood by me.
Still, it’s difficult for them to understand her efforts: They have no real idea of how
much it takes.
What we are able to understand by mapping the trajectory from Nicky’s first fantasy
to her imagination and efforts to go to university is a complex ‘psychogeographical’
journey. In mapping those elements from her interviews that speak of her fantasies,
of her imaginary places and of her comfort, we are able to see how she sets out to
270 V. Walkerdine

move to a new location, to make it feel comfortable and to make a transition into
higher education, even though she did not do well at school. Nicky is fortunate to
get a great deal of support from her family, even if they do not fully understand
what she wants to do. But we also see the complex relations within the family begin
to take shape. Her mother who sometimes wants her little girl back, for example. In
this attempt to utilize the concepts derived from Guattari, it is possible to understand
the move of Nicky from home to university as one which is affective, spatial and tem-
poral. The movement itself can be further analysed to understand the ways that it
combines fantasy, imagination, action and movement. It would be possible to map
classed journeys of many students in the same way. We would potentially then
begin to understand the points at which things stick, are unable to move or return
to territories which are so like those left behind that change becomes impossible.
The young men in Steeltown, for example, cannot make any move that feels safe
either to them or to others in the community. As Guattari argues, one cannot make
moves if one feels existentially threatened. The existential refrains which provide
the building blocks to our sense of continuity (cf. Hey & The London Feminist
Salon Collective, 2004) have to be mobilized in order to move (with) them. I
would submit that none of the young people I have mentioned lack fantasies about
the future they dream of, but the complex supports and resources needed, together
with the entangled affects within the relational matrices (Walkerdine & Jimenez,
2010) in which they exist, makes the moves they need to make, very difficult
because unsafe. I have mentioned earlier that in many projects that I have undertaken
involving class and education, it is very common to see a difference between working-
and middle-class children, not in terms of ability but in terms of confidence and the
support they are able to call on. For example, in one pair of girls from the 4/21 study
(Walkerdine et al., 2010), while having similar non verbal IQ scores at 10, the way that
two girls, one middle class and one working class, were treated was utterly different.
The middle-class girl who was not doing very well, was supported by teacher and
parents (‘we have tried all kinds of things to tempt her to do maths’, for example)
and this girl eventually went to university. I would argue that everything around her
facilitated that transition and the possibility of change. Everything was mobilized to
make it safe. On the other hand, the working-class girl was not expected to achieve
much and indeed, in academic terms, did not. My film ‘Didn’t She Do Well’, which
I mentioned above, showed amply how frightening and unsafe it can feel to move
from a working-class home into higher education, no matter how much one fantasises
and desires it. Thus, I take from Guattari the fact that we need to find ways to support
young people in making the transitions towards their dreams safe enough for them to
feel able to move forward into new incorporeal universes. In imagining the university
of the future, we need to pay serious attention to supporting the imagination of those
who are led to think that dreams only come true in fairy tales or good fortune.
Guattari advocated the development of imagination with both psychotic patients
and political groups addressing social change (Guattari & Rolnik, 2008). Such an
approach surely challenges the marginalization of the arts and the rationalism of
work on the self to mobilize the power of dreams of difference.
 Neoliberalism, working-class subjects and higher education 271

Notes on contributor
Valerie Walkerdine is Research Professor in the School of Social Sciences, Cardiff. She is currently
researching issues of neoliberalism, un/employment, gender and community in the Welsh valleys;
and is the Coordinator for the ESRC National Research Methods Network for Methodological
Innovation on Researching Affect and Affective Communication. Her latest book is Children,
Gender, Video Games: Towards a Relational Approach to Multimedia (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007).

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