Abstract
There is an apparent inconsistency or paradox is this book, which advances stupidity as a form of resistance to the knowledge economy through the creation of knowledge as expressed in written—and therefore articulated, communicable, exchangeable, and commodifiable form. Yet this is not quite an absolute contradiction as it is a realistic paradox I can’t avoid. The paradox, however, is better framed as a tension that one must realistically grapple with. There is no surefire tactic of resistance. As such, stupidity remains an unproductive pedagogical process that sits alongside learning in a dialectical fashion. To grapple with this, return to Marx’s own pedagogy, which I extract from the difference between inquiry and presentation. I read the Grundrisse as an example of constellating pedagogies of articulation and stupor, of actualization and potentiality. This is a general line in which both are heterogeneously blocked together so that stupor infects the writing and blocks the grasping drive.
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Notes
- 1.
Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy (vol. 1), t28.
- 2.
Eric J. Hobsbawm, “Introduction.” In Karl Marx Pre-Capitalist Economic Foundations, ed. E.J. Hobsbawm, trans. J. Cohen, pp. 9–65. (New York: International Publishers, 1964), 10.
- 3.
Ibid.
- 4.
Louis Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, trans. Ben. Brewster (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971): 70.
- 5.
Fredric Jameson Representing Capital: A Reading of Volume One (New York: Verso, 2014), 7, 24.
- 6.
Ibid., 40.
- 7.
Negri, Marx beyond Marx, 9.
- 8.
Ibid, 8.
- 9.
Ibid., 13.
- 10.
Ibid., 61.
- 11.
Thomas M. Kemple, Reading Marx Writing: Melodrama, the Market, and the ‘Grundrisse’ (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), 207.
- 12.
Ibid., 18.
- 13.
Andy Merrifield, Marx Dead and Alive: Reading Capital in Precarious Times (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2020), 15.
- 14.
Louis Althusser, “From Capital to Marx’s Philosophy,” in L. Althusser & É Balibar, Reading Capital, trans. Ben Brewster (New York: Verso, 1991), 16.
- 15.
Ibid., 18.
- 16.
Althusser, “From Capital to Marx’s Philosophy,” 73.
- 17.
Ibid.
- 18.
Louis Althusser, Philosophy of the Encounter: Later Writings, 1978–87, trans. G.M. Goshgarian (New York: Verso, 2006), 39.
- 19.
Ibid., 40.
- 20.
Louis Althusser, “Marx and History.” In Louis Althusser, History and Imperialism: Writings, 1963–1986, ed. and trans. G.M. Goshgarian, pp. 144–155 (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2020), 144.
- 21.
To see how this plays out in the history of the communist movement, see Derek R. Ford and Collin L. Chambers, “Marx’s Pedagogies, the Party, and China: The Open Dialectic of Research and Presentation in Theory and Historical Praxis,” Rethinking Marxism, forthcoming.
- 22.
Joris Vlieghe and Piotr Zamojski, “Entering the World with Notes: Reclaiming the Practices of Lecturing and Note Making.” Educational Philosophy and Theory (online first): 4.
- 23.
Nina Berberova, The Revolt, trans. Marian Schwartz (London: Flamingo, 1990), 27.
- 24.
Ibid., 28.
- 25.
See Derek R. Ford, Inhuman Educations: Jean-François Lyotard, Pedagogy, Thought (Boston: Brill, 2021).
- 26.
Jean-François Lyotard, Postmodern Fables, trans. G.V.D. Abbeele (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 116, emphasis added.
- 27.
Althusser, Philosophy of the Encounter, 47.
- 28.
Margret Grebowicz, Why Internet Porn Matters (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2013), 37.
- 29.
This is why, after the introduction to Hungry Listening, Dylan Robinson includes a section that he asks the “non-Indigenous, settler, ally, or xwelítem reader” to skip. Dylan Robinson, Hungry Listening, 25.
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Ford, D.R. (2021). The General Line of the General Intellect. In: Marxism, Pedagogy, and the General Intellect . Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-83834-8_6
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