The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it.

– Marx, Theses on Feuerbach

I decided to look into the history of the workers’ movement, to find out the reasons for the continual mismatching of workers and the intellectuals who came and visited them, either to instruct them or to be instructed by them. It was my good fortune to discover that this relationship wasn’t a matter of knowledge on one side and ignorance on the other, nor was it a matter of knowing versus acting or of individuality versus community.

..

…Emancipation starts from the principle of equality. It begins when we dismiss the opposition between looking and acting and understand that the distribution of the visible itself is part of the configuration of domination and subjection.

It starts when we realise that looking is also an action that confirms or modifies that distribution, and that “interpreting the world” is already a means of transforming it.

…this is what emancipation means: the blurring of the opposition between those who look and those who act, between those who are individuals and those who are members of a collective body.

⁃ Jacques Rancière, The Emancipated Spectator

The philosopher of the future is the explorer of ancient worlds, of peaks and caves, who creates only inasmuch as he recalls something that has been essentially forgotten. That something, according to Nietzsche, is the unity of life and thought. It is a complex unity: one step for life, one step for thought. Modes of life inspire ways of thinking; modes of thinking create ways of living. Life activates thought, and thought in turn affirms life.

– Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy

This post is a continuation of my previous one on the usefulness of capitalism as a concept. From the quotes above there are several key themes to be explored. The first being the relationship of theory and practice, thought and action, and the tightly-linked second theme is the role of the intellectual. I want to make it clear from the start that when I will be discussing intellectuals or non-intellectuals I have Rancière’s axiom of the equality of intelligences firmly in mind (more on that later), so I’m not talking about certain classes of people (intellectuals) contra some other class (working class). I’m not implying that there are people more adept at the work of thought, and others more oriented towards practical endeavours, what I am concerned with rather is the relationship of the labour of theory to the labour of practice, which Rancière and Nietzsche assert everyone performs to varying degrees.

When I argue that capitalism is not a useful concept, this begs the question of what are theoretical concepts useful for, and to whom? This question is another angle on the question of the relationship of thought and action, theory and practical life. Deleuze has answered both these questions, the former in his last major book ‘What is Philosophy?‘ (WP) and the latter in one of his earliest books, ‘Nietzsche and Philosophy‘ (NP). 

In NP, Deleuze speaks of the dual, interconnected movement of thought and life, a step in thought, a step in life. Both movements inform and are necessary to, their counterparts. “Life activates thought, and thought in turn affirms life”(NP, 19). This ties directly to the above assertion of Rancière that there are no pure intellectuals or pure practical workers, every moment of existence is infused with both the practical labour of life, and the interpretative labour of thought. This is why, per Rancière, there is no unequal relationship between intellectuals and workers, as neither types of people reducible to their community (or class), and both must act and and interpret what they encounter (the sensible, the use Rancière’s term).

This fundamental unity and immanence of thought and life makes it possible to ground the question of the usefulness of concepts, along with the key Deleuzian insight of Nietzsche: useful for whom? The worker, the intellectual, the collectivity, the individual? Again, Rancière, by subtracting the distinction between intellectual and worker, individual and collective body, frames the ‘for whom?’ question within the question of emancipation and democracy. Concepts are not only useful to a particular individual, or certain class/collective, they are spread through individuals and communities, each applying their intellectual powers of analysis, synthesis and interpretation in order to create new concepts or modify existing ones. So why then are concepts useful, what criteria can be applied for judging the usefulness of a concept? On what grounds can I make the claim regarding the usefulness or not of capitalism as a concept? There is the purely utilitarian, political measure: how well does this concept enable me to understand my daily reality? How does it help to guide my actions and discover a greater degree of freedom within the material constraints of my mortal existence? On closer inspection this is far from a ‘mere’ utilitarian notion of usefulness, as the freedom to be found by attaining a greater understanding of the forces which constrain and define many aspects of my lived experience – many of whom are impersonal and over which I have no control – could be considered the loftiest of the goals of critical theory, if one considers freedom and emancipation to be values of primary importance. This knowledge of one’s powerlessness, of one’s ignorance, once reserved for the master teacher, upon whom students were dependent on to impart to them this understanding, is, per Rancière’s axiom of the equal potential for intelligence, not limited to the master, but is demonstrably available to everyone: the worker as aesthete, as intellectual, as individual.

I keep returning to Rancière’s axiom because it is so useful and generative. This assertion on the equal potential of all for all types intelligence is not a scientific statement on the nature of human intelligences, nor is it an ontological claim about human nature. Aptitudes and natural capacities towards certain kinds of intelligence exist, not to mention that, this is key, material constraints of time and space and the requirements of survival, or the modern pressures of specialisation (either driven by the labour market or simply the explosion of human knowledge) means that there do exist today people more trained and practised in one or another form of intelligence. While Rancière specifically mentions two types of intelligence, pratical labour and contemplative intellectual work, he is not making any scientific claims on the types of human intelligence, and many other forms of intelligence could conceivably exist. Rancière’s axiom is a normative principal par excellence. It makes a normative claim on the equal contingent potential (as opposed to actually existing conditions) of all to engage in the activity of intellectual work, and asserts that none by virtue of their education, profession or status, can claim privileged access to the intellectual knowledge of ‘one’s own ignorance’. By assuming this normative axiom, and keeping it ever present in mind, its usefulness is twofold. Firstly, it assists those engaged in intellectual labour in maintaining a humble stance in regards to the intelligence of other individuals, as it prevents one’s explorations in theory from developing an explicatory didactic position towards those presumed to be less advanced in intellectual labour. By maintaining this fundamental openness to the appearance of novel and useful concepts, and avoiding the superiority complexes of the master, the second element of its usefulness becomes apparent, that is, it assists in avoiding cliche and what Deleuze calls ‘images of thought’, ruts in one’s thinking. In short, by rejecting the position of master explicator, one avoids the result of explication: stultification. The principle applies upstream as well as downstream. It gives one both the right and legitimacy to question the canon of critical theory and create one’s own concepts. It also keeps one humble and open to the new concepts of others, matter what their social standing or educational lineage.

This is all good and well, the equality of the intellectual and the worker, the simultaneous movement and immanence of thought and life, of experience and interpretation, of action and contemplation, but how do we deal practically with the issue of specialisation, and work towards a healthy and productive relationship between those specialised in critical intellectual thought, and those specialised in other professions, namely the wage labourers that the left has long made its objective to liberate? I want to point out the lineage of Italian autonomism/workerism, which Viewpoint has some some fantastic articles on (here and here). Their methodological innovation, termed coresearch, attempted to build new knowledge together with the worker. This was built on the autonomist belief that “that within the body of the working class there was already, whole, the knowledge of liberation, the awareness of solidarity, of cohesion, of rebellion. We were convinced that conflict as a form of social identity lay within the genetic inheritance of the working class”. It was a form of radical, bidirectional ethnographic study and interaction between worker and researcher. Romano Alquati was a critical thinker who was one of the first to recognise the cybernetic turn, the political importance of the control of information, and that the changes that the increasing demands of workforce specialisation required a new relationship between intellectual and worker, as well as new strategies of resistance as the proliferation of specialisations often created the conditions for business to pit different types of workers against each other, thus weakening collective bargaining power. Another key discovery of Alquati and the autonomists was the rising importance of the technical or knowledge worker, this seems to have been forgotten today as the technical worker perches uncomfortably in the classification of traditional class distinctions.

The method pursued by Alquati, therefore, entailed rendering matters reciprocally comprehensible, through an open process able to develop the collective capacities of an “acting-together” that values the competencies of all members in a collective. This long-term practice made possible the transformation of the existing – in particular, of social relations tied to political domination – alongside a place of counter-cooperation by researchers possessed of different capacities for research. Against the knowledge that capital uses to govern, coresearch develops a counter-knowledge.

It is interesting to note how humility, openness to novelty, and the axiom of equality can lead to real theoretical innovation. Even if the autonomists most certainly did not know about Rancière, his themes of intelligence and equality can be seen to be amply validated by the historical events of 1960s-70s Italy.