General Stupidity as a Missing Component of General Intellect

• In Event: Knowledge Socialism and the Rise of Peer Production: Collegiality, Collaboration, and Collective Intelligence

Abstract

Contemporary Marxists have tended to look toward Marx’s writings on the general intellect to both understand our contemporary era of capitalism in which forms of immaterial labor are increasingly central and to propose how we can work toward a communist future (e.g., Virno, 2001; Hardt & Negri, 2009; Means, 2018). While there is much merit in this approach to these two tasks, in emphasizing intellect they have neglected what I argue is another knowledge relation that’s crucial to the communist project: general stupidity. This has the potential to keep Marxist literature trapped within democratic communicative capitalism (Ford, 2019), as it reinforces the creation of subjects who feel compelled to constantly express themselves in intelligible ways, which is a primary mode of accumulation today.
In this paper I develop the notion of general stupidity by turning to the later writings of Jean-Francois Lyotard, Margret Grebowicz, and Andy Merrifield. From Lyotard I introduce the notion of stupor as that which is outside of and beyond knowledge but that must be kept in a necessary relation to knowledge. Grebowicz and Merrifield help me further flesh this out by turning to the human-animal relationship (with whales in Grebowicz and donkeys in Merrifield). I look at whales and donkeys as those who can teach humans to embrace stupidity. Next, I make finalize the link between stupidity and communism by arguing that stupidity is the “zero-level” (Dean, 2019) of knowledge necessary to construct communism.

References
Dean, J. (2019). Comrade: The zero-level of communism. Stasis, 6(2), 100-117.
Ford, D.R. (2019). Politics and pedagogy in the ‘post-truth’ era. London: Bloomsbury.
Grebowicz, M. (2016). Whale song. London: Bloomsbury.
Hardt, M., & Negri, A. (2009). Commonwealth. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Merrifield, A. (2008). The wisdom of donkeys. London: Bloomsbury.
Virno, P. (2001). The grammar of the multitude. New York: Autonomedia.

Author

• Derek R. Ford, DePauw University