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General Intellect
Paolo Virno Marx’s ‘Fragment on Machines’,
a section of the Grundrisse, is a crucial text for the analysis
and definition of the Postfordist mode of production. Written in 1858,
in the midst of a breathtaking series of political events, these reflections
on the basic trends of capitalist development are not present in any of
his other writings and in fact seem alternative to the habitual formula.
Here Marx defends what can hardly be called a
‘Marxian’ thesis. He claims that, due to its autonomy from
it, abstract knowledge – primarily yet not only of a scientific
nature - is in the process of becoming no less than the main force of
production and will soon relegate the repetitious labour of the assembly
line to the fringes. This is the knowledge objectified in fixed capital
and embedded in the automated system of machinery. Marx uses an attractive
metaphor to refer to the knowledges that make up the epicentre of social
production and preordain all areas of life: general intellect.
‘The development of fixed capital indicates to what degree general
social knowledge has become a direct force of production, and
to what degree, hence, the conditions of the process of social life itself
have come under the control of the general intellect and been transformed
in accordance with it’.1 General
intellect: this English expression of unknown origin is perhaps a
rejoinder of Rousseau’s volonté générale,
or a materialist echo of the Nous Poietikos, the impersonal and
separate ‘active mind’ discussed by Aristotle in De Anima
.2 Given the tendency for knowledge to become predominant,
labour-time becomes a ‘miserable foundation’: the worker ‘steps
to the side of the production process instead of being its chief actor’.3
The so-called law of value (that the value of a commodity is determined
by the labour time embodied in it) is regarded by Marx as the architrave
of modern social relations, yet it crumbles in the face of the development
of capitalism. Nonetheless capital continues undeterred to ‘want
to use labour time as the measuring rod for the giant social forces thereby
created’,4 with the aid of the organised
working class movement, because the latter turned wage labour into its
own solid reason for being. At this point Marx suggests a radically different
hypothesis for emancipation from the more renowned ones exposed in other
texts. In the ‘Fragment’ the crisis of capitalism is no
longer due to the disproportion intrinsic to the mode of production
based on the labour time of individuals, nor to the imbalances related
to the full workings of the law of value, for instance to the fall of
the rate of profit. Instead, the main lacerating contradiction outlined
here is that between productive processes that now directly and exclusively
rely on science and a unit of measure of wealth that still coincides with
the quantity of labour embodied in the product. According to Marx, the
development of this contradiction leads to the ‘breakdown
of production based on exchange value’ and therefore to communism.5 In Postfordism, the tendency described by Marx
is actually realised but surprisingly with no revolutionary or even conflictual
implication. Rather than a plethora of crises, the disproportion between
the role of the knowledge objectified in machines and the decreasing relevance
of labour time gave rise to new and stable forms of domination. Disposable
time, a potential wealth, is manifested as poverty: forced redundancy,
early retirement, structural unemployment and the proliferation of hierarchies.
The radical metamorphosis of the concept of production itself is still
tied down to the idea of working for a boss. Rather than an allusion to
the overcoming of the existent, the ‘Fragment’ is a sociologist’s
toolbox and the last chapter of a natural history of society.
It describes the empirical reality as it is seen. For example, at the
end of the ‘Fragment’ Marx claims that in a communist society,
rather than an amputated worker, the whole individual will produce. That
is the individual who has changed as a result of a large amount of free
time, cultural consumption and a sort of ‘power to enjoy’.
Most of us will recognise that the Postfordist labouring process actually
takes advantage in its way of this very transformation albeit depriving
it of all emancipatory qualities. What is learned, carried out and consumed
in the time outside of labour is then utilised in the production of commodities,
becomes a part of the use value of labour power and is computed as profitable
resource. Even the greater ‘power to enjoy’ is always on the
verge of being turned into labouring task. In order to take hold of the conflict of this
new situation we need to level a fundamental criticism at the ‘Fragment’.
According to Marx, the general intellect – i.e. knowledge
as the main productive force – fully coincides with fixed capital
– i.e. the ‘scientific power’ objectified in the system
of machinery. Marx thus neglects the way in which the general intellect
manifests itself as living labour. The analysis of Postfordist production
compels us to make such criticism; the so-called ‘second-generation
autonomous labour’ and the procedural operations of radically innovated
factories such as Fiat in Melfi show how the relation between knowledge
and production is articulated in the linguistic cooperation of men and
women and their concrete acting in concert, rather than being exhausted
in the system of machinery. In Postfordism, conceptual and logical schema
play a decisive role and cannot be reduced to fixed capital in so far
as they are inseparable from the interaction of a plurality of living
subjects. The ‘general intellect’ includes formal and informal
knowledge, imagination, ethical tendencies, mentalities and ‘language
games’. Thoughts and discourses function in themselves as productive
‘machines’ in contemporary labour and do not need to take
on a mechanical body or an electronic soul. The matrix of conflict and
the condition for small and great ‘disorders under the sky’
must be seen in the progressive rupture between general intellect
and fixed capital that occurs in this process of redistribution of the
former within living labour. Mass intellectuality is the prominent
form in which the general intellect is manifest today. The scientific
erudition of the individual labourer is not under question here. Rather,
all the more generic attitudes of the mind gain primary status as productive
resources; these are the faculty of language, the disposition to learn,
memory, the power of abstraction and relation and the tendency towards
self-reflexivity. General intellect needs to be understood literally
as intellect in general: the faculty and power to think,
rather than the works produced by thought – a book, an
algebra formula etc. In order to represent the relationship between general
intellect and living labour in Postfordism we need to refer to the
act through which every speaker draws on the inexhaustible potential of
language to execute contingent and unrepeatable statements. Like the intellect
and memory, language is the most common and least ‘specialised’
conceivable given. A good example of mass intellectuality is the speaker,
not the scientist. Mass intellectuality has nothing to do with a new ‘labour
aristocracy’; it is actually its exact opposite. In so far as it organises the production process
and the ‘life-world’, the general intellect is certainly
an abstraction, but a real one with a material and operative
function. However, the general intellect comprises knowledge,
information and epistemological paradigms, so it also sharply differs
from the real abstractions typical of modernity that embodied
the principle of equivalence. Whilst money, as the ‘universal
equivalent’, in its independent existence embodied the commensurability
of products, labours and subjects, the general intellect establishes
the analytical premises for any kind of praxis. The models of
social knowledge do not turn varied labouring activities into equivalents;
rather, they present themselves as ‘immediately productive force’.
They are not units of measure; they constitute the immeasurable presupposition
of heterogeneous effective possibilities. This change in the nature of ‘real abstractions’ entails that social relations are ordered by abstract knowledge rather than the exchange of equivalents, with significant repercussions on the realm of affects. More specifically, it constitutes the basis of contemporary cynicism (i.e. atrophy of solidarity, belligerent solipsism etc.). The principle of equivalence used to be the foundation of the most rigid hierarchies and ferocious inequalities, yet it ensured a sort of visibility in the social nexus as well as a simulacrum of universality, so that, in an ideological and contradictory manner, the prospect of unconstrained mutual recognition, the ideal of egalitarian communication and this and that ‘theory of justice’ all clung to it. Whilst determining with apodictic power the premises of different production processes and ‘life-worlds’, the general intellect also occludes the possibility of a synthesis, fails to provide the unit of measure for equivalence and frustrates all unitary representations. Today’s cynicism passively reflects this situation, making a virtue out of a necessity.
According to the tradition that goes from Aristotle to Hanna Arendt, thinking is a solitary activity with no exterior manifestation. Marx’s notion of general intellect contradicts this tradition: when speaking of general intellect we refer to a public intellect. We can identify at least two main effects of the public character of the intellect.
Accomplished under a capitalist regime, the end of the division of labour translates into a proliferation of arbitrary hierarchies and forms of compulsion no longer mediated by tasks and roles. The effect of putting intellect and language, i.e. what is common, to work, renders the impersonal technical division of labour spurious, but also induces a viscid personalisation of subjectification. The inescapable relationship with the presence of an other entailed by the sharing of the intellect manifests itself as the universal re-establishment of personal dependency. It is personal in two respects: first, one is dependent on a person rather than on rules invested with an anonymous and coercive power; second, the whole person, the very attitude of thought and action, in other words, each person’s ‘generic existence’ is subdued (to use Marx’s expression for the experience of the individual who reflects and exemplarily exhibits the basic powers of the human species).
1. Marx 1974, p. 706.
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