[D66] The Cybernetic Hypothesis

[R.O.]

"As an ethical position, the cybernetic hypothesis is the complement, 
however strictly opposed to it, of the humanist pathos that has been 
back in vogue since the 1940s and which is nothing more than an attempt 
to act as if “Man” could still think itself intact after Auschwitz, an 
attempt to restore the classical metaphysics on the subject in spite of 
totalitarianism. But whereas the cybernetic hypothesis includes the 
liberal hypothesis at the same time as it transcends it, humanism’s aim 
is to extend the liberal hypothesis to the ever more numerous situations 
that resist it: It’s the “bad faith” of someone like Sartre, to turn one 
of the author’s most inoperative categories against him. The ambiguity 
that constitutes modernity, seen superficially either as a disciplinary
process or as a liberal process, or as the realization of 
totalitarianism or as the advent of liberalism, is contained and 
suppressed in, with and by the new governance mentality emerging now,
inspired by the cybernetic hypothesis. This is but the life-sized 
experimentation protocol of the Empire in formation. Its realization and 
extension, with the devastating truth-effects it produces, is already 
corroding all the social institutions and social relations founded by 
liberalism, and transforming both the nature of capitalism and the 
possibilities of its contestation. The cybernetic gesture affirms itself 
in the negation of everything that escapes regulation, all the escape
routes that existence might have in the interstices of the norms and 
apparatuses, all the behavioral fluctuations that do not follow, in 
fine, from natural laws. Insofar as it has come to produce its own 
truths, the cybernetic hypothesis is today the most consequential 
anti-humanism, which pushes to maintain the general order of things, all 
the while bragging that it has transcended the human."

On 18-05-2020 19:38, R.O. wrote:
> 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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> Summary
> 
> 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.
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