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While the general intellect continues to provide a rich resource for understanding post-Fordism and for theorizing resistance, there remains a neglected aesthetic dimension to the general intellect and the role that art can play in resistance based on it. This article develops the general intellect along these lines by drawing on two theorists who are rarely thought together: Paolo Virno and Jean-François Lyotard. The article begins by introducing the general intellect and Virno's reconceptualization of it as the general or generic intellect. It then introduces a relationship between art and the general intellect by reading Virno's theory of language, speech, and communication. From here, it goes to his theory of exodus, which is then read back through his linguistic theory to draw out the key role that subjective defection plays in the project. Although Virno doesn't spend much time discussing art, his brief remarks are used as an entry point to move to Lyotard's writings on music and art, where the author fleshes out an aesthetic dimension to the general intellect and the project of exodus. The argument focuses on the artistic gesture (the "art" in/of the artwork) and especially timbre as witnesses and eruptions of the potentiality of the general intellect that can never be properly actualized. By analyzing timbre as a fugitive force that desubjectifies those gathered around music, the author argues that it provides an example of the opening necessary for the subjective defection that inaugurates exodus. In this way, the aesthetic dimension added to the general intellect is the generic capacity to be affected and disindividuated.

Intro -- Foreword: "You must learn!" -- Acknowledgments -- Contents -- About the Author -- Chapter 1: Introduction: Beyond the Knowledge Economy -- Why the "Knowledge Economy"? -- One Initial Hypothesis of the University in the Knowledge Economy -- From Educational Analysis to Pedagogical Forms -- The Grasping Drive: The Exploitative and Oppressive Logic of the Knowledge Economy -- The Liberatory Potentials of the Knowledge Economy? -- Chapter 2: The Knowledge Economy and Its Critics -- From the Right -- Via the Center -- To the Left -- Chapter 3: The General Intellect and the Struggle over the Knowledge Economy -- The Knowledge Economy and Post-Fordism: Responses to Crises -- Post-Fordism and the General Intellect -- Valorizing Indeterminacy -- Chapter 4: The Educational Consensus: You Must Learn! -- From the Right -- To the Left -- An Educational Consensus -- You Must Learn! -- You Must Labor! -- Chapter 5: A Pedagogical Exodus: Stupidity -- From Ignorance and Arrogance to Stupidity -- Stupid Reading -- Human Stupidity: Unintended Endorsements -- Chapter 6: The General Line of the General Intellect -- Knowledge and Stupor in the Grundrisse and Capital -- Exodus and the General Line of the General Intellect -- Bibliography -- Index.

As social movements amplify across the globe, activists and researchers are increasingly interested in the pedagogies of revolutionary transformation. To provide a rich resource for political educators and organizers, this article formulates what we call an (un)communicative communist pedagogy that is oriented against communicative capitalism. We show that there is a taut connection between capitalism and democracy that consists of a shared logic, pedagogy, and aesthetic that revolves around communication, inclusion, and transparency. Without grasping this aesthetic connection, anticapitalist struggles are reduced to liberal reforms that end up reinforcing and deepening capitalist production relations. To break out of this trap, we block together several political, philosophical, and aesthetic theories that might otherwise be thought of as mutually exclusive. In particular, we return to Immanuel Kant and his theory of the beautiful and the sublime to make a case that connections between capitalism and democracy rest on an unexamined aesthetic of the beautiful. To sever this link, and thus to push democratic struggles for equality toward a communist horizon, we suggest a new alignment between radical politics and aesthetics of the sublime via the Communist Party. Importantly, we find in the work of Jean-François Lyotard the point of intersection between communist pedagogy and sublime aesthetics. In closing, we read this aesthetic communist pedagogy through a communist study group in the Jim Crow South. What we find is a different aesthetic relationship between self and world that is not prefigured in various forms of liberal reformism. Rather, an excessive surplus is discovered that presses beyond the boundaries of what can be known and what can be imaginatively figured, provoking a sense of ineffable sublimity or political opacity. We call this excess the aesthetic dimension of (un)communicative communism.