Κρίση και τεχνο-διανοηση: η άνοδος του "γνωσιακού καπιταλισμού"

Abstract

This paper aims at presenting an explanation of the causes responsible for the weakening of the critical role of intellectuals in contemporary societies, despite the aggravation of crisis phenomena, characteristic of our age. Emphasis is given to transformations of contemporary, information and knowledge intensive capitalism and the multiple contradictions which accompany the *new economy of knowledge*. Not a minor one is that the new economic paradigm is incapable of serving truly as a development model for the major part of humanity in a state of marginalization. The explanation for the absence of a critical stance equivalent to what is at stake is sought for in the changing role of intellectuals within the new capitalism of knowledge. Increasing instrumentalization and subsumption of knowledge to the needs of globalised capital accumulation under the imperatives of market liberalization leads to an analogous instrumentalization and demobilization of intellectuals as active producers of critical discourse and to the subsequent boost of a techno- intelligentsia. The latter already occupies a central position both on the economic and the symbolic-ideological level.