Virno on General Intellect
Feb 14 2008 11:13
I was reading On General Intellect and came across a paragraph that I just couldn't make sense out of. Someone knows what the f he's on about?
Quote:
Virno wrote: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.
Feb 14 2008 11:45
#2
Cheers Jospeh, it made it a bit clearer for me. Though I still don't get how general intellect can valorize capital in itself, which is what I would really like to know more about.
I haven't read his Grammar, does he deal with the general intellect there as well?
Feb 14 2008 11:58
#3
yeah he talks about it. i don't really get it either, because i think it's bullshit.
his argument in the book is basically that in response to an upsurge in militancy in traditional production lines (he's thinking the italian car factories circa 1968), capital was forced to restructure. so far a pretty standard autonomist claim about the primacy of class struggle. he then claims that the shift to 'post-fordist ' 'team working' etc requires a different kind of worker, one with the general abstract capacities of language and cognition, and that workers are required to co-operate and share knowledge while machines do the actual commodity production. (i think at this point he's taking the theories of bourgeois management gurus like drucker for reality, i think ricky gervais has a better appreciation of modern 'teamwork' 
)
thus he says contemporary labour is 'virtuosic' - a linguistic performance 'moved to the side of production' (drawing on marx's 'fragment on machines' in the grundrisse for theoretical support). furthermore, as these virtuosic skills are aqcuired and executed both inside and outside paid work, labour itself cannot be said to be productive, but the general intellect is. i think it's something like that anyway. the aufheben article does a pretty good job of debunking him i think.
Feb 14 2008 12:20
#4
Ok, thanks that puts his view on it in context. While I agree to some extent with his analysis, the belief that machines do the commodity productions is just BS as you say.
Do, you know when the aufheben issue will be available on libcom?
Feb 14 2008 12:45
#5
usually around the time the next issue is due in print, so probably october. if you're interested in the whole 'general intellect' debate nick dyer-witheford's 'cyber marx' and the aufheben review of it are both worth reading, and both in the library.
Feb 14 2008 12:58
#6
I've read Dyer-Whithford's book, I'm not sure about the aufheben review. Though, at the time I read Cyber-Marx I just read it as an autnomist narrative of capitalism up till "cognitive capitalism". I totally forgot that Dyer-Withford is seriously into the whole General Intellect, thanks for reminding me!
Virno is interested in the intersection of human nature and productive relations, so he bangs on a lot about the atomised, cynical, opportunistic character of the 'postfordist multitude.' he's one of the (post-)autonomists who claims the law of value (as in capital depends on living labour) no longer holds since there's a 'general intellect' of abstract knowledge, linguistic capacity etc which apparenty valorises capital in itself, with work and non-work blurring into one category of 'virtuosic activity.'
So above he's saying this alleged shift from accumulation based on commodity exchange and alienated labour to accumulation based on abstract knowledge causes a shift in our natures and political values, as equality is replaced by plurality and the proliferation of 'meritocratic' hierarchies, proletariat by multitude, leninist aspirations to statehood with a call for a 'republic' (emphatically not anarchism, which he derides), and it has to be said decent critical analysis with postmodernist bollocks. there's a crtique of Virno's 'a grammar of the multitude' in the latest Aufheben (#16).