Dedicated to Paolo Virno, in memoriam
If we shift our definition of the intellectual, decentering people (specific intellectual figures with names and faces) and focusing, instead, on apparatuses that embody that function, perhaps it would be easier to respond to the provocation of this issue of e-flux journal. It might also allow us to identify which intellectual artifacts could be politically effective today.
If we return to the definition of the “general intellect” developed by Marx in the Grundrisse (1857–58) and analyzed by McKenzie Wark as part of her contemporary reexamination of intellectual “sensoria,” there is a phrase worth sitting with. Marx speaks of the general intellect as the aggregate of knowledges that a society produces in a particular epoch and that congeals—or, as it is rendered in the Spanish translation, “coagulates”—in machines. I have always been drawn to this verb because it evokes imagery of blood. I find it useful because it allows us to conceptualize knowledge as a flow, as a torrent, that momentarily coagulates in concrete machinic apparatuses.
Etymologically speaking, coagulation is the process of thickening a liquid, of transforming it into a solid or semisolid state. I find this double metaphor compelling. First, it suggests that knowledge is a shared, general flow that bears the imprint of its era, that corresponds to what an era manages to think and bring to a momentary halt, yet will surely later resume its state of flux and torrent. Second, it suggests that this flow that irrigates a collective body lands and coagulates in a multiplicity of tools and machines. We could understand these as specific apparatuses, without allowing ourselves to assume that this capacity is only concentrated in fixed capital—those machines that, according to Marx, appropriate the knowledge produced by the “social brain.”
The machines in which collective knowledges are detained and take shape can become obsolete, since they are historical and dependent on conjunctural updates; yet there are always ways to set them in motion, to make them function anew, or to abandon them. Rather than asking if the social type of the intellectual has become obsolete, we could ask about the capacity of the machines of collective intellect to coagulate in step with the conjunctures in which we produce apparatuses that seek to escape capitalist fixation (even when that fixation is digital and disguised as fluidity). If capital operates by absorbing collective knowledges, what uses and strategies of diversion, of coagulation in other machines of cooperation, can we attempt?
The “general intellect” appears in the so-called “Fragment on Machines,” a text that, despite its brevity, has been intensely analyzed by the Italian operaista (workerist) tradition. Paolo Virno defined it as a “toolbox.” Marco Mazzeo, commenting on Virno’s reading, provides another beautiful image: The “Fragment” is like a message in a bottle thrown out to sea. It is prophetic because it anticipates a world of machines that relegate human labor to a supervisory function. However, if the time saved thanks to general knowledge is not materialized as communism, it will be realized as its opposite, under new forms of political domination and servile labor.
Virno had previously carried out another maneuver on the notion of machines to remove them from their fixity, from their ossification as capital, and to bring them to our present moment: He argued that the general intellect congeals in communicative machines, in gestures and behaviors modulated by social cooperation that are increasingly interwoven with the substance of language made flesh.
In this vein—of inventing a small apparatus of cooperation that involves bodies and languages—I want to reflect on a specific, situated experience, sustained over the last decade in Argentina, but that also has the capacity for translation across borders. I am referring to the drafting of the collective document for the March 8 transfeminist and internationalist strike that has been held every year since 2017, when hundreds of thousands of women, lesbians, travestis, trans people, and nonbinary people go on strike to render visible the connections between the exploitation of feminized labor and other forms of violence. This date builds on that of June 3, when we celebrate the anniversary of the founding of Ni Una Menos (Not One Woman Less) and the beginning of our journey to politicize feminicide and other violence against feminized bodies.
This document is written by a committee that emerges, on each occasion, from the general assembly that organizes the strike and demonstration. It is, we could say, simultaneously an archaic apparatus (a document) and a collective machine of enunciation amid the proliferation of individualizing apparatuses. The text must adopt a tone of proclamation, almost that of a manifesto, while also giving voice to the specific demands of each group and struggle participating in the organizational process.
I think this point is crucial: How to combine a general call, inscribed in a genealogy of past and present global struggles, with an absolute meticulousness regarding specific demands? It is not a question of striking a balance between the general and the particular. Rather, it has to do with how these struggles, demands, and grievances that are determined by situated conjunctures, with their details and nuances, allow us to connect with the ruggedness and complexity that other conflicts throughout history have undoubtedly possessed. It is also about how, year after year, a vocabulary, a process, and the lessons learned accumulate.
The work that it takes to arrive at the final document involves many hours, debates, disputes, jokes, and anecdotes. However, there is no way to coagulate the multiplicity of conflicts that populate our era today without that meticulous language that only a struggle can produce, acquire, and transmit to others. It also serves to show how the use of certain words, and not others, underpins collective decisions.
The documents are then read aloud in the plaza, from a stage; they are listened to with varying amounts of attention. This March, in 2026, the listening was powerful, prolonged, sustained. Transfeminisms have become a force of mass intellectuality precisely by putting words to what previously went unnamed, but also for doing so at a level of detail that allows for an enunciation that is synthetic without being universal, affirmed by the force of saying “No!” and the festive spirit of the streets, of human bonds, of the fight for cooperation that enables our persistence.
Collective writing produces a machine capable of giving space to struggles for land, water, wages, and housing, as well as to struggles against racism and sexual abuse. The writing builds a structural narrative, with poetry and slogans, dates and names. A new sensoria, to return to that word, mixing the barricade with the dance floor, community kitchens with worker-occupied factories, and experimenting with alternative forms of care in opposition to the heteronormative nuclear family.
Moments, glimmers, phrases connected to specific bodies, to conflicts that teach us, to ways of naming that allow us to enter unknown worlds, allow us to speak languages that transform our sensibilities in the face of specific forms of violence, allow us to share images that future generations will be able to call upon—all of these coagulate in this intellectual apparatus of collective intelligence.
A collective document is a fragment in which general intelligence coagulates, a message in a bottle, a toolbox. I like to use these three images to think about the way intelligence functions: fragment, message in a bottle, toolbox. All three are artisanal, but also machinic. They are old, yet renewable, possessing the force to mobilize. They are the product of collective work.
Anyone who works on the document, anyone who puts time and passion into it, forms part of these words: exercising the intellectual function, feeding the general aspect of intelligence, displacing the linearity of capitalist theft and its own machines of intelligence. The exercise of producing the document intervenes in the present, while also being prophetic. Within it lies a grammar of the multitude, one which is not devoid of conflicts. It is precisely this texture that is called upon to fulfill an intellectual function: the effort to deploy the words of struggles—their demands and dreams, their grievances and lexicons—and make it so that they enunciate how we do what we do, year after year.
