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She’s just not that into you

Fri, 12/28/2012 - 14:17 -- worker

From Radical Philosophy - by Nina Power

Tiqqun, Preliminary Materials for a Theory of the Young-Girl, trans. Ariana Reines, Semiotext(e), Intervention series 12, Los Angeles, 2012. 144 pp., £9.95 pb., 978 1 58435 108 5.

How best to describe the colonization of the body at this particular juncture of capitalist life? Much recent theorizing has focused on a kind of war of affects where depression, euphoria and other states of being are read not merely as signs or symptoms, but as directly produced by (and productive of) particular economic relations. Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi’s notion of ‘semio-capitalism’ has attempted to track the implica­tions of cyberspace and cybertime for the increas­ingly depressed mind and body of the contemporary subject. Herve Juvin in the recent The Coming of the Body (reviewed in RP 165, January/February 2011) has similarly attempted to describe what it means for contemporary life when the body has become the ‘bearer’ of all meaning, where every aspect of exist­ence is exchangeable and where nothing is hidden or hideable. While the trajectory of this kind of analysis is not exactly new, even where it occasionally remembers the vast feminist literature on embodiment, affect and labour from the 1960s onwards, there is something novel about the peculiar combination of consumerism, despair, visibility and immaturity that characterizes postwar life in its later stages. It is this ‘new physi­ognomy of Capital’, where ‘the generalized credit that rules every exchange … strikes within the image of its uniform emptiness the “heart of darkness” of every “personality” and every “character”‘ that Tiqqun address in this short, wilfully fragmentary text first published in France in 1999. The question of gender is raised here, there and everywhere – from the title of the book, to the extracts from magazines marketed to women that Tiqqun scatter throughout the text, to something much more nebulous and disturbing at the heart of their endeavour.

Theory of the Young-Girl is a text that both parodies and mirrors the misogyny that resonates at the heart of a culture that celebrates youth and beauty above all else while simultaneously denigrating the bearers – young women, overwhelmingly – of these purportedly desirable characteristics. The translator of the text, poet Ariana Reines, has written of the visceral reaction the task engendered. The translation, she writes in the online magazine Triple Canopy, ‘gave me migraines, made me puke; I couldn’t sleep at night, regressed into totally out-of-character sexual behaviour’. It is indeed a book that disturbs in its relentless depiction of the fully weaponized, consumerist body of a world in which ‘[although everyone senses that their exist­ence has become a battleground upon which neuroses, phobias, somatizations, depression, and anxiety each sound a retreat, nobody has yet really grasped what is happening or what is at stake.’ The language of colo­nization, immunization, meat and fluids seeps through the abstract framework of image-analysis, economic structure and ruminations on modernity: ‘the Young-Girl doesn’t kiss you, she drools over you through her teeth. Materialism of secretion.’ If parts of the text read like a theoretically inflected revenge manual for male nerds, one assumes that this effect is – on one level – intentional. The quotation from Hamlet that appears at the beginning of the text, ‘I did love you once’, hints at past betrayals, as does the claim that ‘the “male sex” becomes both the victim and the object of its own alienated desire.’ But who is this ‘male sex’ if everyone is required to permanently ‘self-valorise’, that is to say, to be a Young-Girl? What is left of the body, love, personality when all life resembles a cross between a spreadsheet and a horoscope? ‘Unhappiness makes people consume’ reads one aphoristic statement, and yet unhappiness appears to be all there is, even as everything shrieks of fulfilment and perkiness.

But why Young-Girl’? Who is she, and what kind of ‘theory’ is presented here? Stylistically, Tiqqun operate in the speculative void-space created by situationist-style and Agambenian portentousness – detournement meets poetic ontologizing. The style is assertoric, even where the claims made are highly evaluative. Hundreds of sen­tences begin ‘The Young-Girl is…’ This grinding repeti­tion is ameliorated only slightly by the use of varied font styles and the insertion of quotations not only from women’s magazines, but also from Baudrillard, Witold Gombrowicz’s 1937 novel Ferdydurke, spiritual instruc­tion manuals and texts on eating disorders. To imagine that Tiqqun are talking about ‘real’ young girls would be an ontic grotesquery, of course, as the Young-Girl is ‘obviously not a gendered concept’ and besides, the book is little more than ‘trash theory’. Tiqqun explain that every postwar consumerist subject, every ‘model citizen’, every bearer of power is the Young-Girl: ‘All the old figures of patriarchal authority, from statesmen to bosses and cops, have become Young-Girlified, every last one of them, even the Pope.’ And yet the book is precisely not called ‘Theory of the Wizened-Pope’. So what to make of the embrace of gendered rhetoric in the service of a theory of the ‘total war’ waged on the bodies of everyone? The political point is the claim that ‘the process of valorization, in the imperial phase, is no longer simply capitalist: IT COINCIDES WITH THE SOCIAL.’ Love has transformed from ‘Fordist seduc­tion, with its designated sites and moments, its static and proto-bourgeois couple-form, to post-Fordist seduction, diffuse, flexible, precarious and deritualized, which has extended the couple factory to the entire body and the whole of social time-space’. Tiqqun’s equation of the social with ‘youthitude’ and ‘feminitude’ is, however, oddly old-fashioned, harking back to stereotypes of women as fundamental bearers of sociability in the form of gossip: ‘Chatter, curiosity, equivocation, hearsay, the Young-Girl incarnates the fullness of improper existence, whose categories Heidegger identified.’ The Young-Girl is idle talk substantiated, inauthentic life made Queen: ‘Precisely because of her nothingness, each of her judgements carries the imperative weight of the entire sovereign order, and she knows it.’

So, to remain at the level of the inauthentic, the temptation to read ontically, for a moment, is this a book about women, or about ‘women’ (or, rather ‘young women’)? The translator notes: ‘the genderedness of French is not the only way to account for the fact that this book, as it accumulates, does become – in some sections more than others – a book about women.’ It is indeed impossible not to reify the critique as the book progresses, to map the claims onto real, if vague, images of particular kinds of bodies (‘The Young-Girl sees herself as the holder of a sacred power: the power of commodities’; ‘THE YOUNG-GIRL RESEMBLES HER PHOTO’; ‘There is surely no place where one feels/as horribly alone/as in the arms of a Young-Girl’). While Tiqqun focus on women’s magazines, much as Mary Wollstonecraft did two hundred years before, it is easy to expand their analysis to encompass develop­ments in social media that have taken place since the book’s original publication: the direct facial and self-valorizing imperatives of Facebook, the endless memetic re-postings of tumblr, fashion blogs, and so on. But what does this domination of the Spectacle really mean? The Young-Girl is ‘Living Currency’, Tiqqun claim, picking up on Pierre Klossowski’s phrase. Her arse is a war-machine: ‘The Young-Girl’s ass doesn’t possess any new value, but only the unprecedented depreciation of all values that preceded it’ But does the spectacular domination of Pippa Middleton’s posterior, say, really tell us anything about the economy? ‘In the time of the Young-Girl, woman becomes the metaphor of money’ claim Tiqqun, and a thousand billboards would surely agree: yet this cover story masks rather more dowdy truths – women may be the metaphor of money, but they don’t empirically have very much of it at the moment. Tiqqun come close at points to pinning the blame on the Young-Girl herself, even as the reader struggles in her mind to replace an image of a socially integrated teen with that of, say, Berlusconi (he is quoted here: ‘They have offended the thing I hold most dear: my image’), the Pope or any number of male authority figures. But the Young-Girl is above all alienation in the sense of being profoundly unhappy – that the book finishes with a discussion of anorexia is no accident: ‘She is a body without soul dreaming she’s a soul without a body’ Ano­rexia is ‘the desire to free oneself from a body entirely colonized by commodity symbolism’. The Young-Girl may be ‘against communism’ as one section has it, but she is well aware of the world she finds herself in. What, ultimately, would it mean to let the Young-Girl speak for herself and not through the categories imposed upon her by a culture that heralds her as the metaphysical apex of civilization while simultaneously denigrating her, or even the categories that Tiqqun mobilize to take her apart in a subtly different way? Behind every Young-Girl’s arse hides a bunch of rich white men: the task is surely not, then, to destroy the Young-Girl, but to destroy the system that makes her, and makes her so unhappy, whoever ‘she’ is.

Category: 

Comments

Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on

tl;dr

Submitted by daedlanth-anon (not verified) on

Seriously!?

Submitted by daedlanth-anon (not verified) on

I really shouldn't but I will.... step into this, FUCK!!!!

To me, women hold the heartbeat of life, an intrinisic clock and regulator, to men. I am guilty of chasing that tight, young ass. The problem for me, being a very immature male, is that my affections spawned a new reality of need. No longer are there two, but three. The matriarch eventually develops into a real force to be reckoned with. (WARNING) As a bit of self-respect, I will assert that my dearest does not have a harem of rich men trolling at her skirts..... The bygones become bygones. When it all comes down to it the woman will do exactly what she wants irregardless of what you think; unless you have bred with a very stupid woman.

Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on

wasn't sure if this was a troll until I got to "irregardless"

Submitted by daedlanth-anon (not verified) on

WHEW!

Submitted by anonymous on

The only reason you exist in this world is because of another mans sexually perverted desires. With out those disgusting thoughts, you will have never been conceived and will have no incentive to conceive another human being. That rule applies to everything that is living. Life would cease to exist the minute perverted minds turn off at an instant. Feminists would get their wish and a whole lot more than they bargained for. Trust me. It's not something you would want because we men are the driving force for your existence for if we were to stop playing our role in asking you out on a date, you would just sit there and do nothing and the human race would die. With out us, you would not be here. In a fantasy world we'd love to imagine that men and women are separate and independent but mother nature says we are interdependent and if the man doesn't do what he needs to do the human species will stop. Nature is a dictatorship. Don't fight it.

Turning into a feminist is like signing humanities death contract. SHAME ON YOU! I PROTEST!

A very cold position to hold. When's the last time you got laid? and no wonder you feminists are so miserable. Go out there, fun and stop questioning what makes you human and roll with it. And give us men a break for trying to get your number. At least we have the guts to come up to you to ask you out on a date which you obviously DON'T and probably never will even if the human race depended on it. :-(

The hierarchical role of a man is to chase after you while you just wait around simply doing nothing but looking cute. That is the way it's always been and still is and always has been even before capitalism. Spitting game to get laid has always been our role. Whens the last time you women have ever sat down and tried to think about what to say to us to get in our pants always in fear we might reject you knowing if you don't risk being rejected, you will never get anything and always be a big loser?

EXACTLY!!!!!

The only time men didn't have to spit game was back in the caveman days when all you had to do was clunk her over the head and bang her which in today's society would be considered attempted murder and rape. Forced sex which is no different from what animals do in the jungle. Notice how often the female is always trying to run while the male is trying to have intercourse.

I'm trying to analyse the human/animal condition with out political correctness getting in the way of making a proper analysis. Some of us men have a predisposition to getting lucky. Some of us are predisposed to not have so much luck. And that all depends on how we were raised culturally and socially. Our genetics play the biggest role in how much effort we have to put forward in getting what we need naturally, mentally and physically.

America is the hardest place to get laid and it has nothing to do with feminists but a "superficial materialistic class combo" where women are known to value a man by the size of his wallet which is all determined by what class he is in with the biggest wallet falling in the "upper class" category. The truth isn't always politically correct and is very painful and that is why we are living a lie where being in denial is the least painful and there for the politically correct thing to do.

Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on

the author's vague assertions of misogyny are not backed up by any of the given quotes, there is not even a real argument here about tiqqun or this text being misogynist, just vague allegations and an incomplete/inaccurate understanding of the original text. the reason it's 'young-girl-itude' and not 'wizened-pope-itude' is not because of some 'nebulous' misogyny but (in part) because of how the rise of the consumerist spectacle has enabled capitalism to reformat and reconstitute itself by drawing support from groups that previously posed problems due to their biopolitical characteristics, paradigmatically, but not limited to women and youth.

oh right, but radical feminists never throw the word misogyny around to improve their own political capital. anyone who would suggest such a thing is obviously a misogynist oneself.

Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on

the review is pretty much based on the fact that ariana reines felt like puking and had a near death experience when translating it.

Submitted by that girl (not verified) on

the only reason she translated it is bc she needed money/and had the connections blah blah. i laughed when i heard she would be translating it//bc its an indictment of a lot of the bullshit she propagates.

i haven't seen the translation--but they've done a great disservice to the ideas in the book by having someone who hates tiqqun , both ideologically and as irl ppl (allegedly), and just needed $$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$, translate it.

Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on

but yes, irony upon irony upon irony--of course this is the way it is presented to the anglo-saxon audience who is largely clueless and phobic about sex and 'gender', except as a commodity and revenge.

Submitted by billy truth (not verified) on

Feminists are to rape as neo conservatives are to terrorism. Feminists are to rape as zionists are to the holocaust.

Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on

This article is to mysogonists as I am to not giving a fuck about this crap.

Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on

Wow, what a bunch of horrible comments. My first opinion of Theory of a Young Girl was that I totally loved it. But I had already read TCI and was reading Theory of Bloom at the same time. I still haven't finished TYG but finished ToB mostly because I was more into it. There are obviously some parallels between Bloom and the Young Girl. Bloom is the neutral representation of the Young Girl, asexual but male by default. The Young Girl is gendered as such probably because of this.

It's also worth considering that Bloom is both the absolutely alienated subject whose very condition holds the key to rupture. Now replace Bloom with Young Girl in the last sentence, or even the entirety of the two books. Yeah, maybe this whole thing just occurred to me as I was typing this comment. So, Stay Tuned!

Also, the article by Nina Power:
As I have yet to finish Young Girl, I was surprised by the end of the article and it made me depressed a little. Most of the time, I feel like the victim and I guess most people do too, and I think that somehow the point is not to maintain appearance but exactly the opposite. Fuck no drama! Resist Bloom! But also, maybe in the future a gender queer version? It's sad when that horrible alienation drives people to so much despair, right?

Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on

Theory of Queen?

Submitted by gel-oberon 3 on

I read this last night and I think the young girl is the personality that fills the emptiness of bloom. The young girl gets it done in the empire and we must all become young girls sometimes to function in consumer culture. The empire extends all the way to the margins and even here we consume our anarchist commodities. Your anarchy is black mine is green and hers is red. Mine is feminine and yours is masculine. His is violent and theirs is pacifist. They take an idea and divide it into infinite options which creates the cognitive dissonance neccessary to obliterate the original copy. So now it's time for show and tell, what did you bring to share with us?

Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on

the young girl is like the image introjected into bloom in order to save it from knowledge of itself as bloom-being. it is the habit of relating to oneself as a commodity, which allows the valorization process to extend across all sociality. this is necessary in an age where the center of gravity of capitalist domination is no longer the means of production but the circulation of desires and affects.

Submitted by Grandpa (not verified) on

Bunch of post-modern gobbeydegook.

Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on

But isn't that what postmodernism asserts in the first place?

Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on

"Bunch of post-modern gobbeydegook."

Here, here....reading gobbeydegook out loud was the best thing about this giant waste of time

Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on

yea all of this is way too thinky. no more thinky think, only smashy smash. ALL HAIL IGNORANCE!!!

Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on

I dunno, between this and the EZLN nationalist troll, we've had some good ones this last month. Also I'm an anarchy so I can't really remember before last week.

Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on

or I could read that your comment says 2013 not 2012 before I reply, whoops, sorry.

Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on

To some extent you are right, but desires and affect owe much of their character to the mode of production. In essence, beauty is only the capacity to earn a profit. The irony of the ideology of materialism, however, is that it has the capacity to prove its own irrelevance, such as, for example, in the sense that matter and energy are different forms of the same thing. That conceiving of matter in any other way merely amounts to reconstituting the same construct with different language. The issue is only marginally relevant to the spcificities of theoretical physics. We may find all manner of particles out there, but if the properties of these particles themselves are contingent on the manner in which we observe them, or an indeterminate probability, or some other transgression against basic assumptions of the behavior of matter, then what exactly are we dealing with, if not social constructs?

Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on

not sure what the 90% of this that was about physics is trying to say, can we get back to the first two sentences? profit is the self-valorization of capital. the young-girl means that everyone is sort of supposed to think of themselves as the owner of themselves or of their persona as social capital which they are trying to valorize. the means of production no longer dominate the organization of society, except by their absence. very little is physically produced anymore and very little of that is necessary outside the perspective of manufactured desires, the only desires the younggirl has. beauty is not just the profitability of cosmetics and magazines, it is the instilled discipline of each person to appear beautiful for purposes of self-valorization: the body as site and product of labor. it is also the police-like mentality of adherence to a norm and of considering one's being as pretty much entirely constituted by the facts of one's existence (eg one's body as a physical object). the individual body as enterprise, as prison and as the last refuge of the western ideology of individualism.

Submitted by daedlanth-anon (not verified) on

Nothing is wrong with the site. I really like it personally. How many other places on the net have you found with as light of moderation as this? It is a commitment to freedom of expression.

The people on the site can be seen as a problem by some. My #1 dislike is the large cadre of anonymous cowards. My #2 dislike is the invective. My #3 dislike is the propensity for what I call "Anarcho-Frag."

Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on

4chan? Commitment to freedom of expression =/= commitment to providing a useful space to have any kind of a productive conversation.

Submitted by An Anarchist (not verified) on

Most people who post comments on this website are not anarchists. I don't mean this by whether they meet my "standard" of anarchists, but they themselves probably don't publicly identify or evenly philosophically agree with anarchism. I know people who post comments on here and they strongly disagree with anarchist ideals, etc. Unfortunately, I do know some anarchists who possibly post comments on here and the comment "what the fuck is wrong with this site" sounds like something I or another publicly identified anarchist would say.

Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on

"I know people who post comments on here and they strongly disagree with anarchist ideals"

No, you don't.

Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on

So I guess you're right. I don't know someone who posts comments on here and thinks Ralph Nader is the best anarchist choice for president of USA or anther person who supports Anti-State Communism but not Anarchy...nope.

Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on

I noticed often people complaining of anonymous messages. The last one I read (just above here) sent me into a spiral trying to justify why I prefer anonymous postings. I couldn't find the answer. Why? Because the answer is precisely why deadlanth probably gets annoyed. Because posting anonymously gives everyone a great flexibility in their approach to the rhetoric, freeing ideology from the yoke of theory. I don't have to be consistent because that other thing I wrote was a different persona and in any case, I didn't write it in the first place. I am anonymous not as the various voices of others, but my own voice as a variety of expressions.

In anonymity, we have the ability to be Stalin in the morning, nihilists in the afternoon, fuck shit up in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming Stalin, nihilist, fuck-shit-upper or critic.

haha

Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on

The ability to remain anonymous is important and that is why the state makes it difficult in the streets and increasingly more so on the web (at least for tech-illiterate like me).

Yes you can make up a million and one names but a name is an identity and an identity is a lead back to the person you created it. They can put a name to a face far easier than some random comment amidst a mass of anonymous comments.
They also use the sites we visit as a means of character assassination both in the court room and in the press. It doesn't always matter that you don't say heavy shit, all they need to is imply that your habits make you a suspect that is capable, whether or not it is true.

So with that said...Fuck you Bed-Pan, you're not an anarchist and I shit where I want!!!

Submitted by jzprimitivo (not verified) on

Yeah, I suppose that we will actually take on this nightmare as long as folks remain
unwilling to stand up and speak out openly.; Sure, let's remain anonymous forever.
That wil no doubt be what it takes.....?

Submitted by gel-oberon 3 on

Anonymity enables people to express dissenting opinions without getting their asses kicked for it. Next time I go to a gathering of anarchists I don't want anyone asking me who I am on @ news and punching me in the nose for something I said on here. I think this is a good forum and wading through stupid comments and trolls is the price you pay for freedom of speech and the occasional gem of wisdom and truth that is to be found here.

Submitted by Anono (not verified) on

I thought this article was pointless and boring, and then I read the comments, and my standards for what is pointless and boring dropped so low that I almost went back and read the article.

Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on

Real anarchist!

I don't mind endless criticism. Never make a positive assertion, though. This is anarchist thought in purest expression. The destruction of everything that holds us down, which is everything.

Including my stupid comment, but I doubt the above is that radical! I'm sure they think somehow their view is beyond their biting satirical critique...I assure you, I am not.

Submitted by anon3 (not verified) on

How many arguements can we have about who the real anarchists are? Anarchists are not a gang- the goal is to fight the establishment.

Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on

Anarchists are a hive mind of various perspectives which condition individual experience into the role of destroy, smashy smashy, make total the first thing I said. In other words, Anarchism is about fucking shit up, and if not, you're not an anarchist. Physically, ideologically, intellectually, psychologically, genderally, classly, capitalistically, comunistically, the anarchist only is a destruction machine, because it is the machine built by capitalism that hates capitalism and also the knowledge of domestication and socialization as the source of our misery and inspiration for their actions.

And when the basis of this society has been thoroughly uprooted, it's always good that a gang of vanguardists, probably Leninists but could be anyone really, is always standing at the helm ready to take charge. Ok.

Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on

Left-communists are just not that into anarchism - except as a host for their parasitism. They dissin you and using you! And you let them!! FUCK YOU!!!

Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on

This Dworkian idea that all sex is rape is actually the inverted ugly face of masculinism itself. Isn't the masculinist creedo to break a ho. Isn't the whole concept of male female sexual relationships built on the principle of coercion, on denying women personal autonomy, the concept that if one isn't assertive, aggressive, or forward enough they will never get laid. Isn't that simply the masculinist conception of the world, and turned inside out to resemble feminism. Isn't essentially every act that reinforces this idea reinforces both. Isn't the guy that said feminism is to rape what neo cons are to terrorism correct? I wouldn't go so far as to denigrate the entire philosophy, as that indicates the spouting of dialectic as gospel truth, without giving it much thought, to the complexity of the system itself. But definitely in terms of Dworkins conception, it makes sense that Dworkin exists because this sort of masculinism exist, and the extent to which one exists is precisely the extent to which both exist, albeit in some form, in the form of the violated Young Girl, who cannot fathom any sexual interest as anything other than patriarchal, even when coming from women, because they all involve coercion.

People often tell me that I have to love myself in order to love someone else. No. They are wrong. My hatred for this world emerges out of a profound fascination and love for myself. Out of the love that comes back in hate as its opposite. The world hates me because I love it so much but when I say I hate this world, it is only because so obviously this world hates itself.

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