[D66] The Cybernetic Hypothesis

[R.O.]

https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/tiqqun-the-cybernetic-hypothesis.pdf

The Cybernetic Hypothesis

  The Cybernetic Hypothesis

By Tiqqun

Translated by Robert Hurley
An early text from Tiqqun that views cybernetics as a fable of late 
capitalism, and offers tools for the resistance.

Distributed for Semiotext(e)

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An early text from Tiqqun that views cybernetics as a fable of late 
capitalism, and offers tools for the resistance.

The cybernetician's mission is to combat the general entropy that 
threatens living beings, machines, societies—that is, to create the 
experimental conditions for a continuous revitalization, to constantly 
restore the integrity of the whole.—from The Cybernetic Hypothesis

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.