Even if knowledge is abstract, transmission of information is material

As real subsumption of knowledge occurs, two historical moments can be considered. The first represents the immediate association between the value of knowledge and matter. The second, which appears in different historical moments in the form of proto-intellectual property(private), unveils the steep decline of the value of knowledge, making its production and reproduction relatively easier. For instance, Johannes Gutenberg’s advancement of a novel printing technology, or the Internet, which presupposes the digital revolution, both imposed a vertiginous decline in value throughout their contemporary intellectual productions. Discussions over intellectual property usually focus on the intellectual dimension and disregard its material dimension (as if they were two separate things). However, regardless of Gutenberg’s invention or the Internet, it is not information or knowledge in-itself that presents a significant variation of value, but knowledge in-and-for-itself within the process of production of books and computers (hardware, server, modem, etc.). While the intellectual side of property gives it content, its material side gives intellectual appropriation the basis for its existence and/or actualisation. They are both void in-themselves; it is only in a relationship of mutual determination that property-intellectual-property can attain an existence in-and-for-itself—in this case, in-and-for-themselves.

Although Alexandra George seemingly acknowledges the intrinsic materiality of a thought that as an ideational object is in one’s head, brain, and mind, she abstracts the objective body’s corporality presupposing it “lacks physical form” and is thus boundless (George, 2012, p. 92). In reality, an individual’s mind may suffice to retain, develop, and transmit a multitude of ideas, thoughts, and knowledge; for instance, even the complexity of entire musical performances can be recorded in one’s mind, allowing one to execute it thoroughly. Alternatively, as Jared Diamond has shown, hunting-gathering peoples, instead of possessing libraries and other means of knowledge objectification and accumulation, were themselves walking encyclopaedias (see infra). Therefore, it is nonsensical to consider knowledge as something immaterial, incorporeal, and abstract. On the contrary, its very existence presupposes materiality.

However, a composer—even if she has the brilliance to compose and store music in her head—requires another form of materiality to enable the transmission and social actuality of her [their] music, regardless of other people’s heads, ink and paper, or audio(-visual) recording in a tape, CD, vinyl, hard drive, etc. With science, this becomes even more relevant because scientific endeavour presupposes constant debate, reassessment, critique, testing, etc. The privatisation of knowledge, however, blocks these ontological conditions. Knowledge becomes constricted to be operationalised within the logic of capitalist production. Its formal subsumption occurs under pre-capitalist and extra-capitalist relations. Based on formal subsumption, “a technologically and otherwise specific mode of production arises which transforms the real nature of the labour-process and its real conditions—a capitalist mode of production” (Marx, 1988, p. 104f). This is the condition for the emergence of the real subsumption of knowledge by capital. The current phase in which intellectual property gained apparent independence from property reveals a deepening in the twofold contradictions. The totality of property appears to be of two independent forms opposing each other; the social character of capitalist production seems more contradictory as knowledge becomes separately subjected to privatisation. The next chapter addresses these ontological dimensions.