Equipping entrepreneurs: consuming credit and credit scores

Abstract

On-line products that make an individual's credit score an object of consumption and equip credit consumers with the capacity to improve their score are shown to exemplify two sets of dynamic tendencies to change in mass market consumer credit. First, as credit consumers are differentiated, sorted and targeted by lenders according to credit scores, they are no longer merely disciplined as individual bodies responsible for making repayments. Rather, and after Deleuze, they are “controlled” through the risk-based prices that they pay as an array of disaggregated “dividuals.” Second, the credit consumer is summoned-up as an entrepreneurial subject, in the terms of Foucault, a rational and hopeful figure. The credit consumer now appears as a subject who not only anxiously meets repayments, but who seeks rewards from managing uncertainties over future access to credit at competitive rates by investing optimism in the very mechanisms of marketized control that govern credit relations.