Spreading Stupidity: Intellectual Disability and Anti-Imperialist Resistance to Bio-Informational Capitalism

• In Event: Bio-Informational Philosophy and Postdigital Knowledge Ecologies

Abstract

Capitalism is by its very nature dynamic. As a social relation between labor and capital, between the dispossessed and expropriators, capitalism is a constant struggle over not just the production of value, but the conditions of life itself. The latter is the reason why capitalism, to exist as a proper mode of production, had to not only dispossess people from the means of subsistence—and therefore to produce a class compelled to sell their labor-power—but also to dispossess us of our skills and knowledges by transferring them to machinery (dead labor, or fixed capital). Bioinformational capitalism can be seen as a further step in this process, with capitalist innovations ‘that control, change and experiment with the material basis of life’ (Peters 2012: 98). This material basis is more than our social relations and ways of life: it is our very biology.
Faced with this configuration of capitalism, some critical theorists and activists find an antidote in open source or common ownership over knowledge and information. At first blush, this seems appropriate as it works to reduce or eliminate the private ownership of the contemporary means of production. Yet this path, as we show below, is not only inadequate but on its own can also work to reinforce the underlying pedagogical logic of bioinformational capitalism, or what we call, following Melissa Gregg (2018), productivist pedagogy. Gregg uses productivist pedagogy to refer to apps, self-help books, and other media that assist in raising personal productivity, but leaves the pedagogical aspect of productivist pedagogy unexamined. We conceptualize productivist pedagogy as an orientation to the world that positions the unknown as that which not only can but must be known, the opaque as that which must be articulated, the mute as that which must be spoken. Bioinformational capitalism clearly approaches the material and biological life in this way: the body is a puzzle to be solved.
We are aware that to resist in the coming age of bioinformational capitalism, we will require new knowledge ecologies. This knowledge must be socialist: able to resist the dominance of productivist and imperialist pedagogies that are saturated with capital, and now bioinformational capital’s aims. This knowledge must also be stupid: able to refuse bioinformational capital’s lust for visibility and access to the working class biology. Stupidity is able to resist primarily because it can’t be quantified, articulated, or rendered transparent. To express the importance of this refusal, we visit concepts of colonialism and disability, and feel the oppression experienced under bioinformational capitalism. Disabled and colonized struggles animate the importance of protecting anti-value: and using anti-value in the struggle against oppression. In this paper we propose a theory and practice of stupidity as anti-value: a socialist and anti-imperialist form of resistance.

References
Gregg, M. (2018). Counterproductive: Time management in the knowledge economy. Durham: Duke University Press.
Peters, M. A. (2012). Bio-informational capitalism. Thesis Eleven, 110(1), 98-111. https://doi.org/10.1177/0725513612444562.

Authors

• Derek R. Ford, DePauw University

• Megha Summer Pappachen, DePauw University