Content area
Full text
Abstract
The early Marx's concept of the general intellect - collective social knowledge embodied in machinery - has often been taken as a paradigmatic starting-point for social ontology. This paper considers Virno's reading of the general intellect in terms of a distinction between the common and the universal, and the critique of this reading by real abstraction theory. Drawing on Agamben's discussion of the potential intellect, and on Marx's own emphasis on the embodiment of knowledge, I suggest an alternative reading of the ontology of the general intellect, which emphasizes the mutually constitutive relation between thought and matter.
The task of producing an ontology adequate to social and political reality is never entirely distinguishable from the task of describing that reality. For this reason, any effort to understand how metaphysics is transformed by the social will fall under suspicion of wanting to substitute itself for an understanding of the social. This suspicion will be justified to the extent that such a social ontology aims at providing a grid to classify social and historical transformations, rather than an arena in which those transformations' demand for correspondingly new forms of thought can at least be heard. In practice, however, this distinction is not easy to make. If the task is worth pursuing, it is not only because an ontology which cannot account for the social is descriptively incomplete. Any theory of the social which thinks itself insulated from the capacity of the social to undo theory is equally partial.
Of those theories which have taken this challenge seriously, a significant strand has taken its cue from Marx's idea of the 'general intellect.' In the part of the Grundrisse later referred to as the "Fragment on Machines," Marx seeks to describe the economic transformations brought about by the incorporation of scientific and technical knowledge in the production process. The framework for this analysis, from the point of view of the labor process as a real transformation of natural goods, is a tripartite one: material of labor, means of labor and living labor.1 The first is the material inputs which are physically used up and transformed into the product; the second includes tools, buildings and other instruments necessary to production, but which are not used up; and the...