I came across a pamphlet style collections of aphorisms in the library, Preliminary Materials Toward a Theory of the Young-Girl, a recent translation (2012) published by Semiotext(e) from the original French publication by Tiqqun in 1999. Tiqqun was the name of a French philosophy journal which ran for less than three years, made famous after one of its members was arrested for sabotaging the TGV, the French high speed rail, by hanging metal hooks on the overhead electrical cables.
"The Young-Girl’s ass is a global village"
It seems like this kind of material, as well as a lot of anarchist / Marxist modern theorizing is meant to provide the groundwork for another popular uprising. One of the biggest obstacles is that people don’t feel un-free - Foucault called it biopolitics or biopower, a situation in which people who are being exploited end up internalizing the conditions of their exploitation as natural or desirable (maybe I’m stretching the concept here). Zizek claims that it’s because we don’t have the language required to articulate our unfreedom. So this group’s work aims to articulate exactly what is our unfreedom, how we internalize the language of consumption and the market economy. (But why does there need to be such a deep reason for inactivity and acceptance? Don’t people just get dull to bad conditions? You can stay in an abusive relationship for years if it’s relatively stable.)
The Preliminary Materials for a Theory of the Young-Girl particularly aims to examine our social relationships and the way that we can speak of them in terms of value, calculation, and holding people to account.
It is also a text which aims to rescue feminism from its co-optation by consumer culture which sells the identity of marginalized groups back to them as a substitute for meaningful thought and action. Under this market-driven feminism, equalizing the gender or ethnic ratio of all industries is a good in itself - women should represent half of the police force and half of the boardroom, half of the world’s dictators should be women! These triumphs quickly become absurd and fizzle out as the system of exclusion and domination continues, just with T&A.
The language of the “sexual marketplace” is pretty popular in the pick-up artist / incel vocabulary, and by selecting various pieces from fashion magazines, films, popular culture, we can see that this way of socializing extends far beyond its extreme fringes which have been held entirely culpable for it - aren’t they the symptom rather than the cause? The sexual marketplace surrounds us, and people are encouraged to trade themselves as commodities within it, strategically withdraw themselves in order to hold onto their value. There is no genuine social interaction, only strategy in such a marketplace.
Bubbling, youthful, effervescent, joyful, sparkling, light, carefree. These are the desired characteristics of the young-girl figure, who is not particularly a girl, but embodies the “feminine,” and she is revealed to be not a person but a tradeable, valuable commodity created to function as an economic engine. Any person who is not just selling an item but themselves, who views their person as equivalent to their brand exemplifies this form of existence. A job where appearance is key is an example of this too - trade show models being the most obvious, but no public figure is exempt, even the serious appearance of a politician is part of this.
But the young-girl is not a living human being and nowhere does she exist in the flesh, but it is true that as many as possible are competing to be her ultimate imitator. She is the apex of an accumulation driven market economy racing to its own extinction.
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