Tiqqun Boeken

This early Tiqqun text has lost none of its pertinence. The Cybernetic Hypothesis presents a genealogy of our "technical" present that doesn't point out the political and ethical dilemmas embedded in it as if they were puzzles to be solved, but rather unmasks an enemy force to be engaged and defeated. Cybernetics in this context is the teknê of threat reduction, which unfortunately has required the reduction of a disturbing humanity to packets of manageable information. Not so easily done. Not smooth. A matter of civil war, in fact. According to the authors, cybernetics is the latest master fable, welcomed at a certain crisis juncture in late capitalism. And now the interesting question is: Has the guest in the house become the master of the house? The "cybernetic hypothesis" is strategic. Readers of this little book are not likely to be naive. They may be already looking, at least in their heads, for a weapon, for a counter-strategy. Tiqqun here imagines an unbearable disturbance to a System that can take only so much: only so much desertion, only so much destituent gesture, only so much guerilla attack, only so much wickedness and joy. -- Provided by publisher

"Concepts made for war do not call for unanimity. And it is only natural that they should be condemned for the ignominious realities they reveal. As for those who have shut their eyes to the sheer and massive fact of the Young-Girl, what difference could a little more blindness make? The Young-Girl is herself the product of misogyny, but the theory of the Young-Girl is not. Open up any women's magazine and you'll see for yourself. The Young-Girl is not always young and, increasingly not even a girl. She is but the figure of total integration into a disintegrating social whole. When morons, against all the evidence to the contrary, protest that "The world is not a commodity!" and, for that matter, neither are they, they are feigning a virginity that only proves their impotence. We want nothing to do with this virginity nor this impotence. We propose a different sentimental education."--P. [4] of cover.