Alexander R. Galloway

Tiqqun

Activists explore the possibility that a new practice of communism may emerge from the end of society as we know it. Society no longer exists, at least in the sense of a differentiated whole. There is only a tangle of norms and mechanisms through which THEY hold together the scattered tatters of the global biopolitical fabric, through which THEY prevent its violent disintegration. Empire is the administrator of this desolation, the supreme manager of a process of listless implosion.--from Introduction to Civil War Society is not in crisis, society is at an end. The things we used to take for granted have all been vaporized. Politics was one of these things, a Greek invention that condenses around an equation: to hold a position means to take sides, and to take sides means to unleash civil war. Civil war, position, sides--these were all one word in the Greek: stasis. If the history of the modern state in all its forms--absolute, liberal, welfare--has been the continuous attempt to ward off this stasis, the great novelty of contemporary imperial power is its embrace of civil war as a technique of governance and disorder as a means of maintaining control. Where the modern state was founded on the institution of the law and its constellation of divisions, exclusions, and repressions, imperial power has replaced them with a network of norms and apparatuses that conspire in the production of the biopolitical citizens of Empire. In their first book available in English, Tiqqun explores the possibility of a new practice of communism, finding a foundation for an ontology of the common in the politics of friendship and the free play of forms-of-life. They see the ruins of society as the ideal setting for the construction of the community to come. In other words: the situation is excellent. Now is not the time to lose courage.

Introduction to Civil War

An urgent critique of the biopolitical subject and omnipresent Empire. Historical conflict no longer opposes two massive molar heaps, two classes—the exploited and the exploiters, the dominant and dominated, managers and workers—between which, in each individual case, it would be possible to differentiate. The front line no longer cuts through the middle of society; it now runs through each one of us... “—from This Is Not a Program Traditional lines of revolutionary struggle no longer hold. Rather, it is ubiquitous cybernetics, surveillance, and terror that create the illusion of difference within hegemony. Configurations of dissent and the rhetoric of revolution are merely the other face of capital, conforming identities to empty predicates, ensuring that even “thieves,” “saboteurs,” and “terrorists” no longer exceed the totalizing space of Empire. This Is Not a Program offers two texts, both originally published in French by Tiqqun with Introduction to Civil War in 2001. In This Is Not a Program, Tiqqun outlines a new path for resistance and struggle in the age of Empire, one that eschews the worn-out example of France's May '68 in favor of what they consider to be the still fruitful and contemporary insurrectionary movements in Italy of the 1970s. “As a Science of Apparatuses” examines the way Empire has enforced on the subject a veritable metaphysics of isolation and pacification, “apparatuses” that include chairs, desks, computers; surveillance (security guards, cameras); disease (depression); crutch (cell phone, lover, sedative); and authority. Tiqqun's critique of the biopolitical subject and omnipresent Empire is all the more urgent as we become inured to the permanent state of exception that is the War on Terror and to other, no less intimate forms of pacification. But all is not lost. In its unrelenting production of the Same, Empire itself creates the conditions necessary for the insurrection to come.

This Is Not a Program

Call

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.

The Cybernetic Hypothesis

The last man, man of the street, man of the crowd, man of the masses, mass-man; that¿s how THEY represented Bloom to us at first: as the sad product of the time of the multitudes, as the catastrophic child of the industrial era and the end of all enchantments. But even there, no matter the name, there¿s still that shiver; THEY shiver before the infinite mystery of ordinary man. Each of us feels a pure force growing behind the theatre of our qualities, hiding out there; a pure force that we¿re all supposed to ignore.What¿s left is the necessary anxiety we think we can appease by demanding of one another a rigorous absence from each other¿s selves, and an ignorance of a force which is common, but is now unqualifiable, because it is anonymous. And the name of that anonymity is Bloom.

Theory of Bloom

Theses On the Terrible Community

Tiqqun 1

Elementi per una teoria della Jeune-Fille

UNO considera repugnante hablar de guerra civil. Y cuando a pesar de todo esto UNO lo hace, es para asignarle un lugar y circunscribirla en el tiempo. Es así en «la guerra civil en Francia» (1871), en España (1936-1939), la guerra civil en Argelia y puede ser muy pronto en Europa. Se notará en este caso que los franceses, siguiendo su natural afeminado, traduzcan la americana «Civil War» por «Guerre de Sécession», para mostrar mejor su determinación a tomar incondicionalmente siempre partido por el vencedor, siendo así también en el caso del Estado. No podemos desprendernos de esta costumbre de otorgar un comienzo, un fin y un límite territorial a la guerra civil, en resumen, de hacer de ella una excepción en el curso normal de las cosas antes que considerar sus infinitas metamorfosis a través del tiempo y el espacio, sino elucidando la maniobra que recubre.

Introducción a la guerra civil

Bloom [blum] n.m. – c. 1914; origen desconocido, acaso del ruso Oblomov, del alemán Anna Blume o del inglés Ulysses – 1. Stimmung final de una civilización inmovilizada en su propio lecho, que sólo consigue distraerse de su naufragio mediante la alternancia de frases cortas de histeria tecnófila y largas playas de astenia contemplativa. Era como si la masa exsangüe de asalariados viviera en el Bloom. «¡Muerte al Bloom!» (J. Frey) 2. Fig. Forma de vida crepuscular, vacante que, por lo general, afecta a los humanos en el mundo de la mercancía autoritaria: bloomesco, bloomitud, bloomificación 3. por ext. Sentimiento de ser póstumo. Sentir el bloom 4. Acta de defunción de la política clásica 5. Acta de nacimiento de la política extática 6. Hist. Aquello cuya asunción determinó la formación de los distintos focos del Comité Invisible, conjura anónima que, mediante sabotajes y levantamientos, acabó liquidando la dominación mercantil en el primer cuarto del siglo XXI. «Cuando pasa el tren, los espectadores se quedan petrificados.» (K.)

Tiqqun

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