What in the hell …

General intellect is one of the terms I had in mind when I first set up this blog. The goal was to treat this and other terms as questions to ask rather than certainties to rely on. That’s the point of the title and the sometimes rather limiting format of every post being posed in the form of a question. It’s gratifying whenever I’m actually working on that that initial goal and especially so with regard to one of those terms I set out to try and really get my head clear on and ask questions about.

Here’s the definition I wrote for a project of my friend Stevphen’s. He put them on the interweb for the Leicester conference recently, that he was an organizer of:

“General intellect is a term used by Marx in the Grundrisse in a section referred to as “The Fragment On Machines.” In this section Marx speculates on the role of intellect, specifically scientific knowledge and technical expertise, in present and possible future versions of capitalist production. For Marx general intellect essentially resides in fixed capital, in machines and objective factors of production. Thinkers of the late 20th century onward have expanded the concept to refer to the role of intellect within variable capital, that is, skills and knowledges within the bodies and brains of workers and how these capacities relate to capitalist production and radical possibilities. In some accounts general intellect effectively means that the old Marxist project of seizing the means of production has already partially occurred: for workers such as graphic designers, translators, teachers, etc, important aspects of the material required for the performance of labor are owned by the worker in their own person.”

I’ve been working through the Fragment recently. Here I want to post some notes on some readings of the fragment and of the general intellect.

First, some speculations. I would love to someday try to write an essay called “General Will, General Intellect, General Ludd.” I like the title, and these are all things I would like to know more about and be clearer on. Someone says somewhere that the multitude doesn’t have or need a general will because it has a general intellect. This formulation is ambiguous and problematic. First, if placed in the context of the historical narrative of development and progress, like that posed by Negri, in which there’s an accumulation of intellect within production such that the general intellect either comes into being or enters into production, then the story implies that the multitude previously did have or need a general will (or, which is to say the same thing, the multitude qua entity that does not have or need a general will did not and could not exist prior to the moment of general intellect’s entry into production). The language of ‘entry’ is also problematic, as it implies a presence elsewhere prior to entering into production. Never mind that for now, though. Second, regardless of whether the point is one of general will’s historical surpassing or one of general will’s never having been or never having been needed, there is another ambiguity.

Consider the phrase “We don’t need or have a general will, because we have a general intellect” as compared with two other possible phrases: “We don’t need or have knives, because we have guns” and “We don’t need or have knives, because we have firm pacifist convictions.”
(Or, “We don’t need bus passes to get to work, we drive” as opposed to “We don’t need bus passes to get to work, we are on strike”). In the first there is a parallel between what we need or have, in the second there is a contrast.

The formulation of the multitude not needing a general will because it has instead a general intellect presumably means that the function of general will does not occur, is rendered unnecessary or blocked by the general intellect. My doubt here is to that I think to some degree the general intellect might still serve, at the theoretical level and, if it exists, within the processes of production and social life, a function quite like that of general will. It’s still got a generality to it, so to speak, which renders cohesive or bonds together. Which is to say, the multitude based upon the general intellect (in theory and, perhaps, as organization of the class) may look more like the people after all. Put more simply: how alike and how different are the general will?

This is, of course, not or not solely a question about some materially existing operative entity called general intellect. It’s a discursive object, one which is related to and bound up with attempts to understand and shape social and productive forms. That is to say, the question is for now primarily about how certain thoughts about or uses of the term is bound up with problematic ways of thinking and acting politically. This questioning aims to address a type of statism or prejudice for (and thus, presumably, increased risk of organizationally reproducing) the state or state-like forms.

It’s not altogether surprising that there should be this tension. As far as I know operaismo’s roots are in a heterodox but in relation to the state, politically speaking, still old fashioned marxism. The state is, at least early on, to be seized. The organizational form is some type of vanguard. The intellectual-political project is to find a hegemonic class sector in formation (and, to my mind, though it would take a lot of research to really substantiate this, this finding is also a project of producing some sector as hegemonic). Tronti uses the metaphor of the workers’ state to characterize the type of movement/collectivity he wants to see (the workers’ state existing now, under the capitalist state, disrupting and negating it immediately).

This tension also plays out in the discourses of militant research, workers’ inquiry vs conricerca, which Steve and I discussed at the Leicester conference as did Raf and Emmi. (Them all more than me, really.) Workers’ inquiry entails more of a split between researcher and researched people. There’s a sense in which the same dynamic plays out with regard to the accounts of general intellect and the working class, accounts which presume and produce a position of the theorist as universal intellectual, rather than specific intellectual. (Steve remarks in his piece in the book on Negri edited by Murphy and Mustapha that there’s a parallel between Bologna’s technicians and Foucault’s specific intellectuals, I’ll have to give that a look again and try to chase up the Bologna materials.)

General intellect as productive factor, via an implicit overstatement of the role of the technical composition in determining the political composition, provides a certain generality, a cohesiveness, to the class such that it can be represented as a unity, as a body. This body can then be divided into functions (like who writes the books, who translates the books into political program, who translates the program into slogans, who makes the banners and leaflets bearing the slogan, who marches behind the banner, who hands out and who receives the leaflets, etc). It is in some respects quite faithful to an early impulse within operaismo, at least within Tronti: the workers’ state existing in the present combating capitalism. This state is itself a city with an order of gold, silver, and bronze souled people, which is to say there’s a bit too much of The Republic in the radical republicanism that moves in some of these discourses.

General Ludd, then, if I were to write that essay, would be a different figure. A collective name that is relatively open and which attacks not to seize or constitute a state but to destroy. A figure of subtraction, composed/organized, against production and which shows that the capacity to act so is not derived from the capacity to labor but rather the reverse: the capacity to labor, sold as labor power, is a smaller set than the capacities of the bearers of the commodity labor power. A political composition which treats the technical as political as the enemy or tools of the enemy and so to be neutralized. (Composition here is more active, a political composing, the class composes itself or elements in the class organize themselves, rather than a determinate and solidly existing object. This is another way, I think, to start from the class for itself rather than the class in itself. That should be the theoretical starting point, a la Ranciere’s declaration. All of this makes me more sympathetic to the power of thought stuff in Ranciere and Badiou.)

And now, my notes.

First, Virno: “Notes On The General Intellect,” in _Marxism Beyond Marxism_, p265-272. Virno writes that in the Fragment On Machines Marx holds that knowledge becomes “the principal productive force, thus relegating repetitive and compartmentalized labor to a residual position.” (265.) This is “knowledge which has been objectified in fixed capital,” embodied in machinery. (266.) This is the general intellect.

In this situation “the worker now is situated alongside the productive process, instead of constituting its principal agent.” (266.) I’m not convinced this is so. The worker’s function is ineliminable, particularly given that the point of view is (or should be) the position of the working class.

Virno comments that at one time this part of the Fragment was read as a description of a subject, a powerful and antagonistic one. At the time of this piece’s writing (1990-91), though, it seems that we have seen “the full factual realization of the tendencies described (…) without any emancipatory - or even merely conflictual - reversal.” (267.) General intellect as precisely fixed capital, as that which functions to set labor power to work.

On this same page Virno talks about “the vanishing of labor society” and he sounds to me like he lives on another planet. “The reduction of labor time to a virtually negligible part of life.” For whom? I’m not the best at empirical data, a flaw I want to overcome, but my impression is not that work time has decreased. The point functions for Virno as one of contrast - work no longer serves as a source of identity. That’s fine, but I don’t see the need to render this a technical result. The identity that work used to serve as may have not been all that great or useful for communist (as opposed to Communist) purposes anyway, and it was surely politically constructed anyway.

Virno wants to derive this change from “actual time spent in labor and exertion [having] become a marginal productive factor.” I’m not convinced this is so. (The value in fixed capital is derived from the labor of those who built it. This is how fixed capital functions, it serves to impose work, to set labor power to labor, and in the same process transfers some of its value to the commodities produced. The value in fixed capital is also why idled machinery is a problem for capitals with a lot of fixed capital, this is discussed in the Fragment.) Instead, Virno writes that “Science, information, linguistic communication, and knowledge in general - rather than labor time - are now the central pillars on which production and wealth rest.” These are themselves products and processes of labor. They may not be measured and paid in terms of time spent, they may instead be measured and paid in terms of outcomes, but this doesn’t mean labor time doesn’t matter. Rather, it means they’re a form of piece wages rather than time wages. Time is still spent by those who develop these factors. The neglect of that is a glaring omission here and a regrettable departure from the worker(ist) point of view.

On 268 Virno writes “Labor time is the unit of measure in force but it is no longer the true unit.” I have no idea what this is supposed to mean. There’s no longer labor time spent? Labor time doesn’t matter? (To whom? It sure does to me.) Based on this so-called contradiction, according to Virno, worker movements of the 70s “claimed the right not to work.” I don’t know if this is so or not, but in either case it’s a mistake. This strikes me as exactly parallel to the arguments about a social wage or basic income today: there’s this objective condition such that it’s in capital’s interests to give it to us. I’m not convinced this objective condition and capital’s interest is really so (I comment on this in my response, sadly but typically riddle with typos, to the Cambridge thing at Mute). And if it is so, that doesn’t mean it’s in our interest or that it’s the best idea that it’s in our interest. To my mind, a right is fine if it’s a determination of power (like a contract, which codifies a balance of forces on the shopfloor - “you will concede to this or there will be reprisals”) but isn’t when posed as a unifying claim or based on a unified condition/common interest.

The “general intellect in effect organizes production and the whole ‘world of life’” (269), that’s a strange formulation. If production here means production of surplus values (ie, production of use values under capitalist production, such that they only matter for the end of surplus value) then this is again fixed capital. But then on 270 Virno writes that we have to critique the Fragment and see general intellect as also living labor. He writes “The nexus between knowledge and production, in effect, is not exhausted in the system of machines; rather, it is necessarily articulated through concrete subjects. Today, it is not difficult to enlarge the notion of general intellect far beyond the kind of knowledge which is materialized in fixed capital, to include also those forms of knowledge which structure social communication and which impel the activity of mass intellectual labor.”

There are several issues here. First, why today? The radiant halo of difference around the present here strikes me as produced in part by dimming the lights on the past. Virno gives an example of mass intellectuality on 271 as “the newly hired by FIAT, who are educated and already socialized before entering the workshop.” When was this ever not the case? The worker must know how to work in order to function for capital. Every worker, qua bearer of labor power, is at least to some minimum degree educated and socialized. This is always the case.
Second, what is meant by “labor”? This is an ambiguity which, I think, stretches back to Marx and runs throughout the tradition. Labor means working class people, labor means labor power, and labor means the activity of labor. That’s not helpful. I prefer to focus on labor as the use by the capitalist of the use value of the commodity labor power, which is to say, imposed work. In that sense, then, general intellect in labor is more like fixed capital - it’s the means used by labor to produce surplus value. Now, it may be the case that this means lies within the worker (that’s one of the arguments about immaterial labor) - capacity to speak, think, manipulate data, care, etc. But that’s also always been the case. Marx recognizes this to some degree in the Fragment:

“The saving of labour time (…) in turn reacts back upon the productive power of labour as itself the greatest productive power. From the standpoint of the direct production process it can be regarded as the production of fixed capital, this fixed capital being man himself.” (711-712.) That is, time that is ostensibly not work adds capacities to labor power which can be made use of by buyer of labor power. These capacities function within the person as basically fixed capital. It must be noted, though, that there is still time spent acquiring these capacities on the part of the worker, which capital gets for free or cheap (just like with like the ceding of land and with biopiracy, it’s an appropriation of others’ activities and one that is undercompensated if compensated at all, thus a further source of surplus value.) Also note that labor is still considered here the greatest productive power, despite all the comments about machinery being the productive factor and all that.

There’s another sense here in which the worker/fixed capital distinction gets blurred, which is partially present in Virno’s use of the word ‘impel’. One of fixed capital’s functions is to serve in the setting to work of the worker, to impel the worker to work. In this sense, then, knowledges and beliefs like “you can’t fight the boss” and so on, various ways in which people set themselves and each other to work, are a moment of the general intellect as well. (One could also say that foremen, time-motion study people, cops, etc, function as human fixed capital and that the knowledges they use are general intellect qua fixed capital but in a human form.)

Virno recognizes some of these distinctions in his remarks on mass intellectuality, described as “living labor in its function as the determining articulation of the ‘general intellect’. Mass intellectuality - as an ensemble, as a social body - is the repository of the indivisible knowledges of living subjects and of their linguistic cooperation.” He adds, “an important part of knowledge cannot be deposited in machines, but rather that it must come into being as the direct interaction of the labor force. One is confronted by a radical expropriation which can never resolve itself into a complete and definitive separation.” (270.)

Like I said before, this expropriation always happens, it’s the expropriation of unwaged labor as bound up with the uncompensated surplus value production. Note to self: compare this with Taylor as quoted in Sohn-Rethel, on shopfloor vs management knowledge, and the latter as not derived from so much as imposed upon the former.

This isn’t Virno but Marx (712), put here so I don’t forget it:
“the final result of the process of social production always appears as the society itself, i.e. the human being itself in its social relations. Everything that has a fixed form, such as the product etc., appears as merely a moment, a vanishing moment, in this movement. The direct production process itself here appears only as a moment. The conditions and objectifications of the process are themselves equally moments of it, and its only subjects are the individuals, but individuals in mutual relationships, which they equally reproduce and produce anew. The constant process of their own movement, in which they renew themselves even as they renew the world of wealth they create”

Capitalist production produces social relations in the form of capitalism. But also I quite like the emphasis on individuals. Individuals in relation, but still individuals, not aggregates. There’s a diremptive quality here, at least hinted at, that I like very much, contra the class in itself (the general).

*

Another way to put the reservations and objections I was fumbling for at the outset above has to do with the formulation of the ’social individual.’ One can take the individual as social, bound up with or in relation to others. A la Wittgenstein, there’s no private language, or sex as an intersubjective activity. Fair enough, and worth recognizing. This first sense is not what Negri at least understands by the term. The social individual is to do with immaterial labor and all of that - the entry of the general intellect into production (which does not mean the entry of the commodity labor power into production, in terms of the capitalist making use of a certain activation of intellectual capacities within labor power). The bigger question, though, for me is to what degree this social individual is a unity, more like the people than like the versions of multitude I like. On that note, Negri on the Fragment.

Negri deals with the Fragment on Machines on pages 139-150 of his Marx Beyond Marx. He calls the Fragment “the highest example of the use of an antagonistic and constituting dialectic that we can find, certainly in the Grundrisse, but perhaps also in the whole of Marx’s work.” (139.) It is here that “antagonism takes on the form of working class subjectivity” and “opens into subversion.” I’m not clear if this means at the level of thought (ie, within Marx’s work this is where articulation of subjectivity happens best (discovery of form) or if this is an argument about some point in capitalism where this taking on of form actually occurs (invention of form). The type of working class subjectivity and organization involved here is what my worries above are concerned with.

I like this bit: “circulating capital appears as productive capital by taking the form of planning and control of the reproduction of society.” (142.) Similarly, (143) “At this stage, the capitalist appropriation of society is total.” Control and appropriation have a finality to it to my ear, I don’t think that’s what Negri means though. Rather, all of society is bound up with - impacted by and impacting upon - capitalist production. The line, of course, refers to the Fragment on Machines, the stuff on the automatic system of machinery. This, then, would seem to apply not to capitalist production as such but to machine production. This is also the description Negri seems to give to what occurs in/after real subsumption. In this passage of Marx Beyond Marx he talks about real subsumption. That could be taken to mean that real subsumption begins w/ the time Marx is talking about (rather than with postfordism as Negri more recently says). Real subsumption is a term for future interrogation, I’ll leave it out for now.

Despite all of this, antagonism and separation remain within capital. Not suppressed but reproduced “at the highest level of power.” (143.) I don’t really know what to make of that. I also don’t know what to make of the separation/antagonism as internal to capital stuff. One version of this is the bad old marxist ‘internal contradiction.’ Another is the activity of the working class seeking to not be working class anymore via the abolition of classes. I like that one, but I don’t see why this should be described as internal to capital. Capital can’t eliminate this antagonism, of course, but “in” sounds to me like a containment, it just has a funny ring to me. On the other hand, if it means action at the point of production and all that, that’s cool. I’m into that. But that’s not so much an internal antagonism as an attack at the heart of capital.

More dodgy now:
“Some want to see, in this fierce demand by Marx for a communism that is liberation from exploitation, the mark of an individualism and of humanist compassion. Even if that were so, there is certainly no evil there. However, it is not the case. It is not the case because, if we stay at the level of categories, we must remember that the communist destruction of the law of value (or better, its overthrow and reversal) suppresses and denies the individual elements of individual productivity on which - from the capitalist point of view and the corresponding Marxist analysis - it is based. The displacement is here totally completed. To social capital corresponds the collective worker. (…) In the communist revolution, the individual is social.” (146.)

This sounds like a unity of sorts to me. First off, no one who has written a book on Lenin ought to approvingly talk about the suppression and denial of individual elements. Second, what’s the “corresponding” that goes on here? It sounds to me like a derivation of working class subjectivity from the arrangement of capital. (Subject from object, political from technical.) If so, that’s a mistake. And what is meant by “the individual is social”? Is this a showing up the ostensibly individual as always already social? Or is this a suppression and denial of the individual, a subsumption into a totality, a unity? Again, seems insufficiently diremptive to me.

On 147-148 Negri talks about the law of value being rendered merely formal. Effective, but empty. Irrational. This means “the end of the progressive and rationalizing function of explotiation.” (148.) I’d like to know what is meant by that. That’s not something I’d ever admit to. There is no progressive function to capital. Negri writes that now the “form of value is pure and simple command, the pure and simple form of politics” as part of its being “reduced to being only an empty form of capitalist command. Empty and efficient (…) and irrational (…) and cruel.” (148.) I’d want to say this was always the case. Capital is command as such, it did not become command. So I don’t agree with his take that this is “the culminating point of a process”. It’s a restatement of the capitalist form of social relations as such. I also have no idea how one can maintain a progressive function to capitalism. I think Dallacosta says this somewhere, I’m not sure, but it is to my mind obvious after reading Federici’s Caliban and the Witch book. Progress is bound up with this positing of unities stuff: “we’re better off now”, just not the parts of the we who are newly subordinated or who died en route to this better place. Which reminds me, along w/ everything else there’s a lot of feminist material I’ve been meaning to revisit and to read for the first time, like the Del Re piece here.

Dallacosta
http://www.generation-online.org/p/fpdallacosta1.htm

Del Re
http://www.generation-online.org/t/alisadelre.htm

It’s interesting that Negri so heavily emphasizes negation here (149 and 150). There is, by the by, an interesting discussion of Hegelian vs Deleuzian formulations at Steve Shapiro’s and at Jon’s. I’m attached to the negation language, myself, particularly like this lovely Trontian formulation of Negri’s: “subjectivity (…) does not try to imagine alternatives, but know how, as it deepens its separation, to destroy the [capital] relation (…) It is a continual and coherent recomposition of successive negations.” (149.)

*

Franco “Bifo” Berardi addresses the Fragment in “A Zigzag Starting From Marx,” in Polygraph 6/7. He talks about technological restructuring as capital’s defense against worker struggle via the stimulation of “the productive force of intelligence; thus, the relation between science and engineering was extolled especially in regard to the technologies of information and of the substitution of human labor with electronically operated flexible systems.” (107.) Again, though, science and engineering involve a labor, and there is a labor of operating the flexible electronic systems. That said, that these are a response to workers (a capitalist use of machinery) is tremendously important. But it’s the substitution of some laborers, not labor(ers) as such.

Bifo quotes Braverman, on the separation of conception and execution, which, Braverman notes, is a better name than the ’separation of mental and manual labor’. The point being that its decision making power, control over the shopfloor, that is at stake. Not thought. Workers can think, management doesn’t care, so long as they don’t have power.

Bifo’s not as good, though, he doesn’t follow Braverman enough:

“At first intellectual labor is separated from manual labor.” (108.) Then intellectual labor undergoes Taylorization (”its analysis, simplification, quantification, and machinic recomposition”, 108) in order to remove decision making power again - that being the point of Taylorism. Bifo describes this as “intellectual labor [being] subjected to the same ordering that it had imposed on worker labor”. Why the intellectual laborer/worker distinction? And was it really the same people who Taylorized so-called manual labor before who then got Taylorized? (Also note the synecdoche: manual labor, manual laborers - reduction of the workers to hands. The important point about manual labor compared with intellectual labor is missed here, though Braverman hits it: conception and execution. It’s not that it’s bodily or of the hands, it’s that there’s a instruction manual, a set of rules and procedures. This is about decision making power, and shopfloor power as a specific type of decision making power. Scripted call center work is just as manual, in the sense of narrowly procedurally delimited, as loading packages on a dock, and is more manual, in the same sense, than certain types of carpentry or auto repair, even though these latter are more of the hand, more manual in another sense, than scripted verbal interaction. The attribution of qualities to people based on the type of work they do, particularly qualities in terms of potentials to think and self-organize, is a Platonist and Leninist myth, a lie which founds a rather fucked order.)

This is good, though, contra Virno: “the hypothesis of a tendential disappearance of productive labor is not taking place.” (109.)

He continues: “What is taking place, rather, is a gigantic displacement: a reduction of that labor which is directly involved in the direct manipulation of matter (since this kind of labor is executed more and more diffusively by electronically controlled autonomatons). At the same time, an increasing quota of duties is assigned to the elaboration of data and hence to the programming and control of automotons. So it is that human labor is displaced from the phase of direct manipulation of materials to the phase of elaboration of programs which coordinate manipulation” (109.)

There’s more than one sense of reduced which could be involved: quantitatively, in terms of power of workers in the production process, and in terms of the importance of a sector in the circuits and cycles of capital. The first could also mean numbers of workers, amount of hours work, and speed of work, and doesn’t necessarily impact the second two, though power of workers on the shopfloor will make it harder for capital to restructure in ways workers don’t want. The second is simple, shopfloor control. Quantitative changes can be a mechanism to reduce shopfloor power. Importance is a different thing - steam engines manufacture, say, is less important today I assume than it was at an earlier point. Private prisons are, perhaps, more important. Etc. I think Bifo means the reduction in all three senses, in a way. Less workers in that kind of work, with less power over what their doing such that they can’t exert as much power against capitalism. I’m not sure to what degree any of this is the case and within what frame of reference (nationally? globally?). If it is so, it’s surely distributed in a very complex and varying way.

Bifo writes that the move toward general intellect in production, mental work, means that “the oppositional, historical, dialectical method” loses its efficacy in theory and in practice.

He adds: “The working class used to produce ideological and political behaviors, needs and aspirations to which were easily assigned a unified countenance and a dialectical, subjective definition. The working class used to produce dialectics as a form of self-comprehension and of cognitive appropriation of the world. Dialectics, though, loses its force as a cognitive method as soon as the centrality of industrial labor - the force intended to mechanically transform the world - disappears, and as soon as the functioning of social production starts to fragment along lines irreducible to a design of dialectical opposition. (…) it will never again be possible to think in terms of dialectical subjectivity and of subjective opposition.” (112.)

Industrial labor has not disappeared. And was the mechanical transformation of the world a missed opportunity, something that failed to pan out? Or was it a bad idea to begin with? This sounds, rather like Jon’s been discussing re: Negri, like an account of the dialectic having once been fine and now not working anymore. That doesn’t make sense and is actually a rather Hegelian narrative of historical surpassing.

Along the same lines, “While the labor processes involved in mechanical transformation are automated, other forms of activity are swallowed up by wage labor, and the expenditure of “life time” for socially compulsory and dependent purposes is extended to fields which previously were reserved for leisure, or for personal activities, or which in any case were not governed by mercantile and wage relations.” (113.) Not governed? Or differently so, via different mediations? Read uncharitably, this is an exclusion of traditionally feminine and unwaged labors. The personal is not political (and productive - or least it wasn’t so prior to automation.) That doesn’t make sense if that’s the claim. At the same time, the extension of the wage to forms that were unwaged is tremendously important and should be looked at closely.

I like this a lot, but don’t see why it’s pegged to these epochal transitions, a call for communism “as concrete, present, quotidian and lived abolition of the present state of things, rather than as historical finality or as a form of Ethical State to be realized.” (117.) Certainly, though we can still identify existing non-communism that concrete present communism would be in conflict with.

*

On the general will:
“despite Rousseau’s insistence to the contrary, his notion of sovereignty too contains a strong conception of representation. This is most clear in Rousseau’s explanation that only a “general will” of the people is sovereign, not the “will of all.” The will of all is the plural expression of the entire population, which Rousseau considers to be an incoherent cacophony, whereas the general will stands above society, a transcendent, unified expression. We should recognize in Rousseau’s conception that the general will itself is a representation that is simultaneously connected to and separated from the will of all. This relationship of unity, transcendence, and representation is illustrated by Rousseau’s distinction between the people and the multitude. The people is only sovereign for Rousseau when it is unified. (…) A population, however, can never really eliminate difference and speak with one voice. The unity of the people can be created only through an operation of representation that separates it from the multitude. (…) The rule of everyone in Rousseau is thus paradoxically but nonetheless necessarily reduced to the rule of one through the mechanism of representation.” (Page 242-243 in Multitude.)

This is what I am beginning to suspect at least some versions of00 general intellect also operates, in a sense. It provides a material precondition for speech and action - the class in itself, the technical composition - from which some people are excluded. It would be interesting to compare Ranciere on intellect and will here - intellects are incompatible, individual - no one can think for anyone else, and operations of doing so are nothing other than a distribution of who thinks and who doesn’t, which turns easily into who is permitted to think and who is not. General intellect, in at least one version, is a mechanism by which a common interest can be imputed (analog to imputed class consciousness), which implies but occults an interpreter of this interest. Against this, perhaps, the intellect of all?

Also on Rousseau, from Empire (85) in Rousseau “agreement among individual wills is developed and sublimated into the construction of a general will” which “proceeds from the alienation of single wills toward the sovereignty of the state.” This is later described as the “subsumption of singularities in the totality, of the will of all into the general will.”

Empire defines general intellect as “a collective, social intelligence created by accumulated knowledges, techniques, and know-how.” Its entry into production is a “radical transformation of labor power” which “redefined the entire phenomenology of labor and entire world horizon of production.” (364.)

Oh, I found the quote about there being no need for a general will when there’s a general intellect. It’s Virno, from “Virtuosity and revolution.” (http://makeworlds.org/node/34)
“The Many do not make alliances, nor do they transfer rights to the sovereign (…) they never converge into a “general will” because they already share a “general intellect.” The Multitude obstructs and dismantles the mechanisms of political representation.”

(This is kind of funny. Interweb sailing I found a bit I writ about a year ago, when these reservations were inchoate. This is why I’ve become more keen on attacks on notions of progress, because I never make any.

http://info.interactivist.net/~Nate/journal/466
“Someone remarks, who escapes me at the moment, that the multitude does not have a general will, because it has a general intellect. That is, the multitude has common powers of production and constitution – powers of thought, in Agamben’s sense of thought, powers of autonomous sociality. The general intellect is the central productive force of postfordist production. So the thing that makes the multitude so productive for capital is also what makes it so dangerous. And yet… maybe there’s something messianic here, something epochal as Angela puts it… Marx’s delirious vision, I’ll have to check, but I remember them being predicated on a historical shift in which general intellect becomes important. The multitude is the rule of the many over itself, against the rule of the one. And yet, to say this happens because of the general intellect? I’m not sure. It sounds like this is a theory of the exhaustion of the rule of the one, the end of the one, not a critique. More bluntly: it means that now, as good Leninists, we stop being the same type of Leninists there were in 1920, and adopt new tactics and strategies. It’s post-party and seizure of the state, not anti- these perspectives. Communism is possible only now, and libertarian communism likewise. I’m not convinced.”)

Getting more and more scattered, ugh. A lot of the Virno piece I quoted from is also found in his entry on general intellect in the Lessico Posfordista, online in English here. http://www.generation-online.org/p/fpvirno10.htm

In this piece, Virno writes “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.”

That’s excellent. And in no way specifiable to the present. It’s the specification to the present that operates the labor aristocracy positing function. Thus when he writes “The effect of putting intellect and language, i.e. what is common, to work, renders the impersonal technical division of labour spurious” and “the general intellect can affirm itself as an autonomous public sphere only if its bond to the production of commodities and wage labour is dissolved. One the other hand, the subversion of capitalist relations of production can only manifest itself through the institution of a public sphere outside the state and of a political community that hinges on the general intellect,” none of this is specifiable to the present but rather a statement of the problem for capital as such. (The distance between labor power qua commodity or labor power used by capital and the larger set of capacities.)

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Notes to self: take notes on the Lazzarato printouts off G-O, the final theses in Gram of the Mult, and the Sohn-Rethel on Taylor. V but even more so S-R are an interesting counterpoint - general intellect more as fixed capital and as a power over rather than a power of the multitude.