The Political Economy of Knowledge. The TINA phenomena in the Policies of Education, Innovation and ICT for the Post-Lisbon Era
Author: Francesco Maniglio, franmgl@gmail.com
Department: Journalism 1
University: University of Seville, Spain
Supervisor: Francisco Sierra Capallero
Year of completion: 2014
Language of dissertation: Spanish
Keywords:
Political Economy of Knowledge
, Cognitive Capitalism
, Post-marxist theory
, European Union
Areas of Research:
Economy and Society
, Communication, Knowledge and Culture
, Language and Society
Abstract
The transformations of capitalism in recent decades seem to have resulted in an almost complete agreement. The consensus arises from the fact that the main aspect of this specific historical configuration would be constituted by the economic and social logic, in which the creation of knowledge assumes the role of the protagonist. This explains the succession of theories - such as the new growth theories, technology gap approach, endogenous growth - that look at the new age with the conviction of having liberated us from the limits of scarcity, promising wealth and abundance thanks to the infinite possibility of the immaterial production. Furthermore, there are also those who state that the capitalist era is inevitably going through a new economic paradigm, supported on the Collaborative Commons, that is beginning to transform our ways of living. Those who see the time of the end of work, the escape from wage labor; those who claim an era in which the specificity of work on command has ended, those who see in the precarious class the new social cooperation, the emergence of a constituent multitude, an expression of desires that are the sign of each existence that anthologically live in a commonwealth.
In this cognitive explosion there are also those who see the end of the modern narration, the end of colonialism, the collapse of the monocultural knowledge under the blows of the the global southern knowledge, post-des-de-colonial, of the emerging, and above it all emancipatory, knowledge. Undoubtedly, however, the consensus on the role of knowledge is always peaking, the future prospects of the new generations are subjected to continuous division and fragmentation of knowledge and work: between profit greedy margins, the increase of the exploitation and the erosion of the welfare and the rights.
This thesis analyzes the European governance as one hegemonic movement (T.I.N.A.) that continues since the seventies, in the direction of total subsumption of life under capital, seeking, at the same time, to sugarcoat the pill by satisfying the needs of freedom and emancipation that the subaltern classes have manifested. Needs that soon have become the apologies without limits of neo-liberalism: the need of new knowledges has changed into differential inclusion of mental work, the want of autonomy changed into the form of pseudo-autonomous work, the need to choose and build personal destinies has become the imperative of flexibility, the precondition of precariousness and unemployment. A thesis that describes a Europe where the capital continues to appropriate arbitrarily of what is public, private or common, continually expanding its capacity to transform our lifestyles in profit and misery.
