Bookmark: Reading Platform

A regular reading group focusing on texts and screenings ranging from Art, Culture, Politics, Philosophy, Anthropology and Sociology.

If you would like to suggest reading material and chair an informal discussion, or deliver a presentation, please make this known on the group page, or alternatively send an email to tomjamesholland@gmail.com.

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Bookmark #34 will look at Fragment on Machines & The General Intellect:

Following on from the last technologically oriented discussion about Google, fake news, the far-right, Breitbart and Boris Groys, for the next meeting we will look at the 'Fragment on Machines' by Karl Marx and the short essay 'General Intellect' by Paolo Virno. The Fragment on Machines underpins many theories on post-work and automation. Paolo Virno's approach in his essay is just one contemporary interpretation of Marx's text.

“The idea that there is a political conflict inherent in the development of the knowledge-based economy has its origins in a few prescient pages on technoscientific development in Marx's Grundrisse (a series of notebooks representing his first attempt at an all-encompassing critique of political economy). Here Marx uses the phrase "general intellect" to refer to the fundamental human capacities lying at the basis of all socially produced knowledge. The Italian autonomist interpretation of these passages – commonly known as the "fragment on machines" – begins in Toni Negri's Marx beyond Marx, published in French and Italian in 1979, a complex and pioneering work that's worth a serious read. However, a more immediately accessible reference point for the discussion of the fragment on machines can be found in an incisive and pragmatic text by Paolo Virno (General Intellect), initially written for the French journal Futur Antérieur in 1992, then reformulated for an Italian publication at the turn of the millennium. Marx's extraordinarily far-seeing text and Virno's succinct commentary offer the perfect entry-points for anyone seeking to understand what's at stake in the term "cognitive capitalism."

(Excerpt from Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities, Critical Theory Summer School reading materials.)

Follow the links below to the texts:

'Fragment on Machines', Karl Marx, Grundrisse (pp. 690-712)

'General Intellect', Paolo Virno

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