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Recording from the Marx & Pittsburgh School Conference, organized by The New Centre for Research & Practice & The Centre for Philosophy of Education at the Institute of Education, University College London.
ABSTRACT: In this paper, I will explore the relationship between value, technology, and intelligence in the context of the discussion around the Marxist notion of the general intellect. My intention is to complement and critique the popular Post-operaist reading of this notion, characterised by emphasising the side of living labour/knowledge versus that of technology/fixed capital/dead knowledge. I will focus mainly on Paolo Virno’s understanding of the general intellect, which places linguistic faculties as at the forefront of what collective intelligence is. Virno’s post-Operaist reading of the general intellect depends on the idea that a certain dimension of living labour cannot be fully subsumed or materialised as fixed capital and which escapes the clutches of the value-form. In his case, this excess is constituted by a de-semantified and onto-phenomenological understanding of language which retreats from any consideration of actual linguistic practices and their practical implications for collective intelligence. While staying with Virno’s proposal to rethink the concept of the general intellect in linguistic terms, I will shift the discussion to a different register, from his onto-phenomenological philosophy of language to an understanding of linguistic practice informed by the Pittsburgh School’s pragmatism. By drawing from this tradition, I will attempt to thematise what could be described as the space of reasons of the general intellect. By leaning on Justin Evans’ recent theorisation of capitalism as a space of reasons and of value as a normative concept, I will show another way in which the linguistic practices of living labour itself can be said to be already mediated by the value abstraction.
