Pasqualesadly, the rush to monitor and measure goes well beyond the SCS. A
global educational technology industry has pushed for behavioristic
testing and ranking of students, schools, and teachers. The same mon-
itoring technologies may also dominate hospitals, nursing homes, and
daycare facilities. Wherever there is “soft” care to be done, untrammeled
by the Taylorist impulse to measure and manage, methods like the
SCS may spread. Reputational currency is a way to rebrand repression
as rational nudging.
Yet if we are worried about failures in this circuit—from chil-
dren raised on YouTube videos to teachers who cheat to get an
edge on high-stakes exams—the answer is not to double down on
performance-based ranking systems designed to shame supposed
shirkers. Rather, it lies in paying good wages to teachers and caregiv-
ers, merging the spheres of society and economy that schemes such as
the SCS split. Leaders must put their money where their mouths are,
rather than guilt-tripping or penalizing their subjects into a zero-sum
rat race for reputational currency.
Caregiving, which is notoriously underpaid labor, is especially vul-
nerable to neoliberalism run amok. Mike Kelley, an artist and sculptor,
illustrated the discomfort society often feels when it bothers to stop
and think about what it might mean to “repay” those whose work is
to love and care for us. In More Love Hours Than Can Ever Be Repaid
(1987), one of his eeriest and most affecting pieces, he assembled a wall
hanging out of knitted afghans and handcrafted stuffed animals that
he had purchased at thrift stores. The handicrafts exist in an uncanny
netherworld. Care was poured into them, feeding affections and cathexes.
They meant enough for someone to stitch them together and give them
away—but not enough to be kept by the recipient.