Post-operaismo has rejected Marx’s original formulation of the general intellect. Virno redefines it as ‘the linguistic-cognitive faculties common to the [human] species’ (2004: 42). This redefinition is necessary, he says, because:
Marx conceives the ‘general intellect’ as a scientific objectified capacity, as a system of machines. Obviously, this aspect of the ‘general intellect’ matters, but it is not everything. We should consider the dimension where the general intellect, instead of being incarnated (or rather, cast in iron) into the system of machines, exists as attribute of living labor. The general intellect manifests itself today, above all, as the communication, abstraction, self-reflexion of living subjects. It seems legitimate to maintain that, according to the very logic of economic development, it is necessary that a part of the general intellect not congeal as fixed capital but unfold in communicative interaction, under the guise of epistemic paradigms, dialogical performances, linguistic games. (Virno 2004: 65)
For Virno, the general intellect is the novel social capacities of networked human beings, which include communicative interaction, abstraction, dialogical performances, linguistic games, cooperation and communicative competence (2004: 65) as well as an ‘infinite variety of concepts and logical schemes’ (2004: 106). We might also add affect, which fellow post-operaismo thinkers Hardt and Negri depict as a characteristic quality of work in the era of the general intellect (2001: 292). In post-Fordism, capital depends on these capacities of labour, which it cannot control or emulate. Thus, ‘a decisive role is played by the infinite variety of concepts and logical schemes which cannot ever be set within fixed capital, being inseparable from the reiteration of a plurality of living subjects’ (Virno 2004: 106). The notion is that in the era of the general intellect, human labour enjoys a renewed array of powers which capital cannot displace with machinery.
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inhuman power