Is it possible that we might know something of the world, share what we know, decide together what’s best, and work toward a world that is free, fair, and might endure? If I were to describe the project that’s consumed my life, I might put it something like that. It’s why I’m drawn to the work of those oriented toward something similar, other travelers passing in the shadows of the fiefdoms of knowledge-as-power who might have their eye on such a horizon.
It doesn’t take long to realize that the administration of knowledge and communication, ranging from the sciences to the arts, is not arranged around such a perspective. Intellectual functions are subordinated to the reproduction or extension of existing relations of exploitation, domination, and control. The common task of knowing the world (as Alexander Bogdanov phrased it1) is subordinated to power’s demand that knowledge serve the ruling of the world.
Those who do their best to work for the common task of knowing the world, in and against power’s subordination of knowledge, I call “general intellects.” General, as in aiming beyond what the division of intellectual labor allots to us as workflow. Intellects, in the broadest sense of trying to weave together perceptions of the world, their affective resonance with lived experience, and concepts that exceed the particular and might work as connective tissue with the lives of others. Anyone can be a general intellect, a node in the creation of general intelligence. It’s just a matter of having a little surplus time to contribute as a gift to the common task.
The general intellect might be a starter-concept for thinking about what could take the place of the public intellectual—a figure connected to a certain moment in the parallel histories of modernity, capitalism, media, and the university, particularly in the Cold War era. He (so often “he”) brought critique and moral authority to bear on the big-picture issues of the day. Public intellectuals usually had credentials: They went to the right universities, were picked up by the right book publishers, circulated in the right journals, went to the right cocktail parties. They became a special class of talking head, converting the residual prestige of the world of the book into a sort of ballast of gravitas for the modern ship of state.
It seems a bit churlish to say this so soon after the death of Jürgen Habermas, but there never really was a public sphere (Öffentlichkeit). There never existed a free space in which to rationally debate and resolve issues of universal concern. And maybe it’s not such a bad thing to be living in the ruins of its simulation. Those who were never counted as free and rational actors entitled to partake in its soirées might not miss it much anyhow.
In proposing a common task rather than a universal discourse, I want to stress the differences among our forms of labor and experience, and how formative those differences are—as a strength and not a problem, as Audre Lorde insisted. Differences don’t always need to be antagonistic or hierarchical. Without pitting one thing against another, how might the project of a common task, rather than the presumption of a universal discourse, call for a particular kind of editorial practice?
In editing this issue of e-flux journal, I was looking for something like an aesthetic of juxtaposition. I put this issue together as, for want of a better term, an intellectual artist. It’s not grounded in a specific discipline, political outlook, or stylistic preference. Instead, I aimed to put together pieces for their contrasts, shadings, facets, where the gaps between what I commissioned would say as much as the texts themselves. A picture emerges that feels like the shape and texture of the times, and from points of view that are oriented toward the ongoingness of intellectual labor, variously conceived and practiced.
We’re living through an era in which “intelligence” is being redefined against our will by a new kind of power. What were once public archives have been appropriated by intelligence-mining machines flooding the market with simulated intelligence as a massive operation that de-skills entire populations. At the same time, the remnants of public education and general-interest media are being bludgeoned and eviscerated. The common task of knowing the world is getting farther and farther out of reach.
To my surprise, almost everyone I reached out to agreed to contribute. I hope you read them all and learn as much as I did about why decolonial movements are often led by intellectuals; why strategies of secrecy rather than publicness define key intellectual histories; why hospitality, anonymity, and collective knowledge production might be better tactics than intellectual celebrity; why the affective dimension matters; and how to avoid the closed loop of intellectual self-reference.
Lastly, let me thank everyone whose less visible labor made this issue possible: the editors, copy editors, web managers, and translators, not to mention all of the people around our named contributors who help us have some surplus time and ability to write. It takes all kinds of labor to even propose the common task of knowing the world.
See, for example, Alexander Bogdanov, The Philosophy of Living Experience, trans. David Rowley (Brill, 2016), 160. As Anton Vidokle pointed out to me, the “common task of knowing the world” is more associated with the cosmist philosopher Nikolai Fedorov. I’m more drawn to Bogdanov’s materialist repurposing of the concept and have stressed it in my adaptation of Bogdanov.