“The supposed liberation of women did not consist in their emancipation from the domestic sphere, but rather in the total extension of the domestic into all of society.” – Tiqqun, Preliminary Materials For a Theory of the Young-Girl
“The Young-Girl is happy to speak of her childhood with emotion, in order to give the impression that she has not gotten over it, that at bottom, she is still naive. Like all whores, she dreams of candor. But unlike whores, she insists that we believe her, and that we believe her sincerely. Her infantilism, which is ultimately just a childlike fundamentalism, makes her the wiliest vector of general infantilization.” – Tiqqun, Preliminary Materials For a Theory of the Young-Girl (emphases in original)
“If one man strikes another a blow, that other has a right to defend himself, and to strike a blow in his defence; but he has no right to revenge himself; and if, when all the danger is past, he strikes a blow not necessary for his defence, he commits an assault and a battery. It is a common error to suppose that one person has a right to strike another who has struck him, in order to revenge himself.” – Justice Coleridge, Regina v. Driscoll
“There is a difference between consent and submission; every consent involves submission; but it by no means follows that a mere submission involves consent.” – Simon Greenleaf, A Treatise on the Law of Evidence (emphasis in original)
“The Young-Girl appears as the product and the principal outcome of the formidable surplus crisis of capitalistic modernity. She is the proof and the support of the limitless pursuit of the process of valorization when the process of accumulation proves limited (by the limits of the planet itself, ecological catastrophe, or social implosion).” – Tiqqun, Preliminary Materials For a Theory of the Young-Girl
“By investing young people and women with an absurd symbolic surplus value, by making them the exclusive carriers of the two new kinds of esoteric knowledge proper to the new social order—consumption and seduction—Spectacle has effectively emancipated the slaves of the past, but it has emancipated them as slaves.” – Tiqqun, Preliminary Materials For a Theory of the Young-Girl (emphasis in original)
“Progress is not an illusion, it happens, but it is slow and invariably disappointing. There is always a new tyrant waiting to take over from the old—generally not quite so bad, but still a tyrant. Consequently two viewpoints are always tenable. The one, how can you improve human nature until you have changed the system? The other, what is the use of changing the system before you have improved human nature? They appeal to different individuals, and they probably show a tendency to alternate in point of time. The moralist and the revolutionary are constantly undermining one another.” – George Orwell, “Charles Dickens”
“If you hate violence and don’t care for politics, the only remedy remaining is education. Perhaps society is past praying for, but there is always hope for the individual human being, if you can catch him young enough.” – George Orwell, “Charles Dickens”
“When hatred of Hitler became a major emotion in America, it was interesting to see how promptly ‘anti-Fascism’ was adapted to pornographic purposes by the editors of the Yank Mags. One magazine which I have in front of me is given up to a long, complete story, ‘When Hell Came to America’, in which the agents of a ‘blood-maddened European dictator’ are trying to conquer the U.S.A. with death-rays and invisible aeroplanes. There is the frankest appeal to sadism, scenes in which the Nazis tie bombs to women’s backs and fling them off heights to watch them blown to pieces in mid-air, others in which they tie naked girls together by their hair and prod them with knives to make them dance, etc., etc. The editor comments solemnly on all this, and uses it as a plea for tightening up restrictions against immigrants.” – George Orwell, “Boys’ Weeklies and Frank Richards’s Reply” (1940)
“There is little mysticism without an element of transcendence, and, conversely, there is no transcendence without a certain degree of egocentrism.” – Jean Piaget, The Moral Judgment of the Child (trans. Marjorie Gabain)
“There is an adult in every child and a child in every adult. The difference in nature reduces itself to this. There exist in the child certain attitudes and beliefs which intellectual development will more and more tend to eliminate: there are others which will acquire more and more importance. The latter are not simply derived from the former but are partly antagonistic to them. The two sets of phenomena are to be met both in the child and in the adult, but one set predominates in the one, the other in the other. It is, we may say, simply a question of the proportions in which they are mixed; so long as we remember that every difference of proportion is also a difference of general quality, for the spirit is one and undivided.” – Jean Piaget, The Moral Judgment of the Child (trans. Marjorie Gabain)
“The most superficial observation is sufficient to show that in the main the legal sense is far less developed in little girls than in boys. We did not succeed in finding a single collective game played by girls in which there were as many rules and, above all, as fine and consistent an organization and codification of these rules as in the game of marbles. A significant example in this connection is the game of ‘Marelle’ (Engl., Hop-scotch) (also called ‘la Semaine’ or ‘le Ciel’) which consists in hopping on one leg and kicking a stone through various sections drawn on the ground representing the days of the week or anything else one likes. The few rules embodied in this game (not to put the other foot down, to make the pebble go into the right square with one kick, not to let the pebble stop on a boundary line, permission to rest in a special section called Heaven, etc.) show well enough how possible it would have been to complicate the game by constructing new rules on these initial data. Instead of which girls, though they are very fond of this game and play it much oftener than boys, have applied all their ingenuity in inventing new figures. For the game of Marelle exists in a multitude of forms; the sections drawn in chalk on the pavement succeed one another in a straight line, in parallel lines, in the shape of a spiral, a circle, an oval, of the pipe of a stove, etc. But each game in itself is very simple and never presents the splendid codification and complicated jurisprudence of the game of marbles. As to the game of marbles itself, the few little girls who take any interest in it seem more concerned with achieving dexterity at the game than with the legal structure of this social institution.” – Jean Piaget, The Moral Judgment of the Child (trans. Marjorie Gabain)
“The acquisition and practice of the rules of a game follow very simple and very natural laws, the stages of which may be defined as follows: 1) Simple individual regularity; 2) Imitation of seniors with egocentrism; 3) Cooperation; 4) Interest in rules for their own sake.” – Jean Piaget, The Moral Judgment of the Child (trans. Marjorie Gabain)
“The formal domination of Capital has become more and more real. Consumer society now seeks out its best supporters from among the marginalized elements of traditional society—women and youth first, followed by homosexuals and immigrants. To those who were minorities yesterday, and who had therefore been the most foreign, the most spontaneously hostile to consumer society, not having yet been bent to the dominant norms of integration, the latter ends up looking like emancipation.” – Tiqqun, Preliminary Materials For a Theory of the Young-Girl (emphases in original)
“At the beginning of the 1920s, capitalism realized that it could no longer maintain itself as the exploitation of human labor if it did not also colonize everything that is beyond the strict sphere of production. Faced with the challenge from socialism, capital too would have to socialize. It had to create its own culture, its own leisure, medicine, urbanism, sentimental education and its own more, as well as a disposition toward their perpetual renewal. This was the Fordist compromise, the Welfare-State, family planning: social-democratic capitalism. For a somewhat limited submission to labor, since workers still distinguished themselves from their work, we have today substituted integration through subjective and existential conformity, that is, fundamentally, through consumption.” – Tiqqun, Preliminary Materials For a Theory of the Young-Girl (emphasis in original)
“If the imperial perspective had a slogan it would be ‘All Power To The Apparatuses!’ It is true that in the coming insurrection it will most often suffice to liquidate the apparatuses sustaining enemies in order to break them, enemies that in times past would have had to be shot. At bottom, the slogan has less to do with cybernetic utopianism that with imperial pragmatism: the fictions of metaphysics, these grand barren constructions which now compel neither faith nor admiration, are no longer able to unify the debris of universal disintegration. Under Empire, the old Institutions are deteriorating one after the other in a cascade of apparatuses. What is happening, and what is the truly imperial mission, is the concerted demolition of each Institution into a multiplicity of apparatuses, into an arborescence of relative and unpredictable norms. The educational system, for example, no longer bothers to present itself as a coherent order. It is now but a hodgepodge of classes, schedules, subjects, buildings, departments, programs, and projects that are so many apparatuses meant to keep bodies immobilized. With the imperial extinction of every event comes the world-wide, managed dissemination of apparatuses. Many voices can now be heard lamenting such a dreadful age. Some denounce a pervasive ‘loss of meaning,’ while others, the optimists, swear every morning to ‘give meaning’ to this or that misery only, invariably, to fail. All, in fact, agree to want meaning without wanting the event. They seem not to notice that apparatuses are by nature hostile to meaning, whose absence it is their job to maintain.” – Tiqqun, This Is not a Program (emphasis in original)
“The West’s dualism has long consisted in establishing two antagonistic entities: the divine and the worldly, subject and object, reason and madness, soul and flesh, good and evil, life and death, being and nothingness, etc., etc. The latter established, civilization developed as the struggle of one against the other. This was an exceedingly costly way of going about things. Empire clearly proceeds differently. It still deals in these dualities, but it no longer believes in them. In fact, it merely uses each couple of classical metaphysics with the purpose of maintaining order, that is: as a binary machine. By apparatus, one should therefore understand a space polarized by a false antimony such that everything that passes through it and happens within it is reducible to one or the other of its terms. In this regard, the most immense apparatus ever created was obviously the East-West geostrategic macro-apparatus, which opposed term for term the ‘socialist bloc’ and the ‘capitalist bloc.’ Every rebellion, every alterity that happened to appear anywhere either had to pledge allegiance to one of these two sides or would find itself unwittingly thrown into the official enemy camp of the power it challenged.” – Tiqqun, This Is not a Program (emphases in original)
“A single discussion with a Marxist is enough to understand the real reason for his faith: Marxism serves as an existential crutch for many people who are scared that their world may not in fact be so self-evident.” – Tiqqun, This Is not a Program
“What is real in language are the operations it performs.” – Tiqqun, This Is not a Program
“Modern man, the classical subject, doesn’t represent a leap beyond the primitive, he is simply a primitive who has been made indifferent to the event of beings, who no longer knows how to heed the coming into presence of things, who is poor in world.” – Tiqqun, This Is not a Program (emphasis in original)
“One may always tell which way the wind blows by watching the direction in which a bird starts to fly.” – D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson, On Growth and Form
“The immediate affirmation of a need or desire—in so far as it implies a certain knowledge of oneself—ethically contravenes imperial pacification; and it no longer has the justification of militancy. Militancy and its critique are both in different ways compatible with Empire; one as a form of work, the other as a form of powerlessness.” – Tiqqun, This Is not a Program
“Of the entire putrid legacy of the workers’ movement nothing stinks as much as the culture, and now the cult, of work. It is this culture and this culture alone, with its intolerable ethical blindness and its professional self-hatred, that one hears groaning with each new layoff, with each new proof that work is finished.” – Tiqqun, This Is not a Program (emphasis in original)
“The logic of the present situation is no longer of an economic but of an ethico-political kind. Work is the linchpin of the citizen factory. As such, it is indeed necessary, as necessary as nuclear reactors, city planning, the police, or television. One has to work because one has to feel one’s existence, at least in part, as foreign to oneself.” – Tiqqun, This Is not a Program (emphases in original)
“No one believes in work anymore, but for this very reason faith in its necessity has become all the more insistent. And for those not put off by the total degradation of work into a pure means of domestication, this faith most often turns into fanaticism. It is true that one cannot be a professor, a social worker, a ticket agent, or security guard without certain subjective after effects. That they now call work what until recently was called leisure—‘video game testers’ are payed to play the whole day; ‘artists’ to play the buffoon in public; a growing number of incompetents whom they name psychoanalysts, fortune-tellers, ‘coaches,’ or simply psychologists get handsomely paid for listening to others whine—doesn’t seem enough to corrode this unalloyed faith. It even seems that the more work loses its ethical substance, the more tyrannical the idol of work becomes. The less self-evident the value and necessity of work, the more its slaves feel the need to assert its eternal nature.” – Tiqqun, This Is not a Program (emphases in original)
“Citizens, insofar as they are made to compensate more and more frequently for the failures of the welfare state, will be paid more and more overtly for their work in comanaging social pacification. A citizen’s dividend will therefore be established as a form of coercion to maintain self-discipline, in the form of strange, extremely tight-knit, community policing. If necessary, they maight even call it ‘existence wages,’ since it would in fact entail sponsoring those forms-of-life most compatible with Empire.” – Tiqqun, This Is not a Program
“Numerical precision is the very soul of science, and its attainment affords the best, perhaps, the only criterion of the truth of theories and the correctness of experiments.” – D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson, On Growth and Form
“I have come to think that boredom is the worst of all a tramp’s evils, worse than hunger and discomfort, worse even than the constant feeling of being socially disgraced. It is a silly piece of cruelty to confine an ignorant man all day with nothing to do; it is like chaining a dog in a barrel, only an educated man, who has consolations within himself, can endure confinement. Tramps, unlettered types as nearly all of them are, face their poverty with blank, resourceless minds. Fixed for ten hours on a comfortless bench, they know no way of occupying themselves, and if they think at all it is to whimper about hard luck and pine for work. They have not the stuff in them to endure the horrors of idleness. And so, since so much of their lives is spent in doing nothing, they suffer agonies from boredom.” – George Orwell, “The Spike”
“After breakfast we had to undress again for the medical inspection, which is a precaution against smallpox. It was three quarters of an hour before the doctor arrived, and one had time now to look about him and see what manner of men we were. It was an instructive sight. We stood shivering naked to the waist in two long ranks in the passage. The filtered light, bluish and cold, lighted us up with unmerciful clarity. No one can imagine, unless he has seen such a thing, what pot-bellied, degenerate curs we looked. Shock heads, hairy, crumpled faces, hollow chests, flat feet, sagging muscles—every kind of malformation and physical rottenness were there. All were flabby and discoloured, as all tramps are under their deceptive sunburn. Two or three figures there stay ineradicably in my mind. Old ‘Daddy’, aged seventy-four, with his truss, and his red, watering eyes, a herring-gutted starveling with sparse beard and sunken cheeks, looking like the corpse of Lazarus in some primitive picture: an imbecile, wandering hither and thither with vague giggles, coyly pleased because his trousers constantly slipped down and left him nude. But few of us were greatly better than these; there were not ten decently built men among us, and half, I believe, should have been in hospital. This being Sunday, we were to be kept in the spike over the week-end. As soon as the doctor had gone we were herded back to the dining-room, and its door shut upon us. It was a lime-washed, stone-floored room, unspeakably dreary with its furniture of deal boards and benches, and its prison smell. The windows were so high up that one could not look outside, and the sole ornament was a set of Rules threatening dire penalties to any casual who misconducted himself. We packed the room so tight that one could not move an elbow without jostling somebody. Already, at eight o’clock in the morning, we were bored with our captivity. There was nothing to talk about except the petty gossip of the road, the good and bad spikes, the charitable and uncharitable counties, the iniquities of the police and the Salvation Army. Tramps hardly ever get away from these subjects; they talk, as it were, nothing but shop. They have nothing worthy to be called conversation, bemuse emptiness of belly leaves no speculation in their souls. The world is too much with them. Their next meal is never quite secure, and so they cannot think of anything except the next meal.” – George Orwell, “The Spike”
“Citizens are those who, at the very heart of the general conflagration of the social sphere, persist in proclaiming their abstract participation in a society that now only exists negatively, through the terror it exercises over everything that threatens to abandon it, and in so doing, to survive it. The accidents and the rationality that produce the citizen all point to the heart of the imperial enterprise: to attenuate forms-of-life, to neutralize bodies; and the citizen advances this enterprise by self-annulling the risk he represents to the imperial environment.” – Tiqqun, This Is not a Program (emphases in original)