An interstitial subject mediating between two modes of credit – those of the personal and the impersonal: the guarantor is an emblematic figure of an interface between cosy oedipal relations and those of international capital.

Renting an apartment or even a room in many cities presents a number of hoops to jump through, reflecting the power dynamic by which affordable homes are scarce and their owners can pick and choose who is lucky enough to hand over a large proportion of their income every month. Perhaps the most routinely uncomfortable of these hoops is finding a guarantor – a person with sufficient income or assets to collateralise your rental contract. The person who trusts you enough to stake their own conditions to help facilitate yours, to take on your risk. Where formalised systems of risk calculation can go no further, a more ancient form of credit – whose balance sheet resides in the psychic realm of kith and kinship networks – picks up the slack: thereby helping loved ones earn the privilege to rent a house, and on an aggregate level, underwriting a system of accumulation via the property market. 

To access a home for the non-asset owning might involve performative assurances of financial competency to friends or kin who are securitising their housing contract. The interpersonal ramifications of this are manifold, but one might imagine the bigger picture, in which the unpropertied must increasingly appeal to the propertied as a means to reproduce their lives: a situation where social and familial networks are increasingly load-bearing and strained as they become over-coded and deputised by an external logic of accumulation.

In a less competitive rental market, when a landlord might have once been exposed to the risk of a tenant defaulting on their payments, they can now have their cake and eat it: enjoying sumptuous increases in rents with the additional security of a guarantor to ensure this flow remains uninterrupted. With housing increasingly resembling a risk-free asset, this is made possible by the outsourcing of risk to kinship networks of the working classes. When the tenant faces an inability to work, this precarity might cascade to their friends/family who have signed up as their guarantor, collateralising social bonds and plunging additional people into financial hardship.

There is, however, the option to swerve all this tricky interpersonal flattery and enlist a surrogate guarantor. Many companies¹ offer a paid service to act as your housing guarantor, effectively forming an insurance industry around your non-payment of rent. This can come at a high price when compared with the au naturel guarantor (who due to social norms would be unlikely to charge interest to friends or family): when added to monthly rent, this effectively creates a premium for (economically-) marginalised people to access shelter. This repayment differential could therefore be seen as cleaving distinct subsections within the tenant underclass, by way of their access to interpersonal credit.

Perhaps guarantors herald a return to older ways. As the social welfare system across much of the West is continually degraded, the state recalibrates its responsibility away from housing people, leaving informal – which by default usually means familial – structures in its place. This shifting onus towards the family – away from the state and civil society – as a site of social reproduction is reminiscent of the 1601 Elizabethan Act for the Relief of the Poor:

“the father and grandfather, and the mother and grandmother, and the children of every poor, old, blind, lame and impotent person, or other poor person not able to work, being of a sufficient ability, shall, at their own charges, relieve and maintain every such poor person.”²

The guarantor form represents a transversal and internalised system of social and economic regulation. While it might be a relatively novel mass phenomenon in the rental market, it is tantamount to a relapse to an older form of patriarchal governmentality.

“This direct insertion of the family into the political sphere of the ancien regime had two consequences for the exercise of social power. With regard to the central apparatuses, the head of the family was accountable for its members. In exchange for the protection and recognition of the state, he had to guarantee the faithfulness to public order” […] “Consequently, the fact of not belonging to a family, and hence the lack of a sociopolitical guarantor, posed a problem for public order. This was the category of people without ties, without hearth or home, of beggars and vagabonds who, being in no way connected to the social machinery, acted as disturbers in this system of protections and obligations. There was no one to supply their needs, but neither was there anyone to hold them within the bounds of order. They were dependent on charity, on alms, a gift that honored the giver because he could not expect reciprocation, but did nothing to integrate the receiver and so maintained this floating population.”³

As ever, the question remains of what happens to the people with no recourse to any of these safety nets.

Michel Feher points to the guarantor as a newly forming subject of political consciousness–in a financialised economy, the derivatives market, along with ‘too big to fail’ institutions, offload much of the risk of investing onto others who are unwittingly bearing the socialised risk of their failings.⁴ In this picture, the general population are those whose fortunes are underwriting the risks of financial products, as we did for the subprime mortgage crisis of 2007/8: so we are, whether we like it or not, imbricated in a diffuse version of guaranteeing someone else’s profit from the housing market.