University, body and general intellect: notes for a materialist analysis of the contemporary political economy of knowledge

Abstract

The article addresses the material function that the university, and within it the humanities, occupies in our time, in relation to the generation, appropriation and supervision of knowledge. To do this, its contemporary forms of corporatization, job precarization, commercialization and bureaucratization are addressed, and a materialist theoretical framework is developed that allows analyzing them in relation to the current structures of capitalist production. The theoretical framework is structured based on the concepts of general intellect (Karl Marx), body and technique (Paolo Virno), and experience (Walter Benjamin), and serves the authors to offer an analysis about the impotence that the humanities exhibit, when it comes to actualize some component of the material promise that some theorists identify in that public knowledge called general intellect. The article suggests that this helplessness lies in the promotion of a university work experience marked by the ambiguity of the technique (which oscillates between its absence and false presence), individual isolation, material and temporal precariousness, and the endemic generation of symptoms both physical as well as emotional in their workers (teachers and researchers). As a result, it is recommended to direct the analysis of these problems towards the difficult relationship that the university has with the general intellect.