We all wanna b yunggurls sumtimes

Rózsa Farkas 'reviews' Tiqqun's Preliminary Materials for a Theory of the Young-Girl

This can’t claim to be a review. It’s a few brief thoughts on a resurged Young-Girl for #2012. I feel like I taste Young-Girl. My lips have uttered her name, over and over. Semantically so apt, scarily so easy.

I talk about her

here (p.25)

here

here (specifically in the printed essay for UNpublish)

& here

and probably around here and there as I go.

I love how the Young-Girl ‘is not a gendered concept’. But so is.

I love how it was written in ’99 yet seems so perfect for now.

I love how the Society of the Spectacle in the Young-Girl is the spectacle-made-social. hashtag twitter.

I love how I’m writing this but thinking about how I can make a gif of my body exploding into light.

Ok so now to try to stop these typed symbols from being Young-Girls (impossible). I’ve probably annoyed you already. But everything is Young-Girlified. That’s the point. Language, even when I make a proper paragraph below, it’s just in the Young-Girl category of 99%, ex-art school, emotion-fuelled paragraph. This is why the Young-Girl is only useful if we make like Mark Fisher and try to imagine OK what next.

The Young-Girl’s aptness puts one at risk of making easy flattened critiques on everything (like now). And then what: job done critique over?

No, apparently the Young-Girl will be destroyed

When the Young-Girl has exhausted all artifice, there is one final artifice left for her: the renunciation of artifice. But this last one really is the final one. (p.137)

Um, well, maybe. . . ?

I love how the Young-Girl ‘is not a gendered concept’. But so is.

the logic of virility will have vanquished women without their knowledge: by enclosing them, at the price of simple role reversal, in the submission/domination alternative, to the exclusion of all else. (p.49)

Listen: The Young-Girl is obviously not a gendered concept. A nightclub player is no less a Young-Girl than a beurette tarted up like a porn star. (p.14)

We are, and language is, gendered. And in French (the original language of the book), Jeunne-Fille is a ‘feminine’ word.

However, I do get it. Tiqqun talk about the Young-Girl as the product of post-war Fordism, whereby in the determination for continued exponentially increasing profits for manufacturers, the products themselves had to become ‘customized’. One size no longer fitted all. Why do you need more than one winter coat unless it is going to really help you externalize your identity. And why ‘need’ to externalize your identity unless you feel that your body, image, and sex is in fact on the peripheries of society.

So that, in brief, is why ‘Young-Girl’ – that’s where consumerism in its search for new territories began. Inclusion into society via consumption of it. First was women and youth, or as put by Tiqqun ‘Youthitude and Femininitude’. Bring on the working woman. Bring on the teenager.

And that’s where we must leave it, as hard as that may be, and see the Young-Girl as the colonization of every ‘alternative’ – rather things subsumed and/or the absorbing force of every relation under capital.

The extreme extent

of male

impotence, of

female frigidity

or rather

of vaginal dryness

can be interpreted

immediately as

contradictions

of capitalism

(p.128)

I love how it was written in ’99 yet seems so perfect for now.

When Tiqqun talk of Love being autism for two. When they talk of the violence behind every smile. When they talk of the Young-Girl as being the manifestation of the Spectacle into every necessity of life like eating, fucking, working, playing.

I think of public space, privately owned. I think crossing my legs cos I won’t pay to piss in a train station. I think of putting rubbish in a bin, and sky news spitting rubbish back out at me. I think of all my social relations, and how probably all of them have generated money for Mark Zuckerberg, invisibly.

What I mean to say is. Yes, in so many ways Preliminary Materials for the Theory of the YoungGirl was pretty on point.

I love how the Society of the Spectacle in the Young-Girl is the Spectacle-made-social. hashtag twitter.

Just as the ‘Happening’ became a commodified form of itself, so has friendship. When we play this out in public we Young-Girlify our social relations.

There is nothing in the Young-Girl’s life, even in the deepest zones of her intimacy, that escapes alienated reflexivity, that escapes the codification and gaze of the Spectacle. (p.48)

Tag me on Facebook.

It is through the Young-Girl that capitalism has managed to extend its hegemony to the totality of social life. She is the most obstinate pawn of market domination in a war whose objective remains the total control of daily life and 'production' of time. It is precisely because she represents the total acculturation of the self, because she defines herself in terms fixed by extraneous judgment, that the Young-Girl continues the most advanced carrier of the ethos and abstract behavioral norms of the Spectacle. (p.107)

Add me on twitter.

Just as it is suggested that by voting one party (or not) into power the electorate has a say in the actual laws that are passed. Just as people feel like because they can comment on the Guardian website under an article it means that people actually want to hear what they have to say. Just because I can choose my own profile picture (wherever) and customize the html of my Tumblr, it doesn’t mean that our ‘expressions’ of self via social media are not within a uniform structure that reinforces the biopowers it is a product of.

The Young-Girl displays spontaneous assent to everything that could possibly signify subjugation to necessity [. . .] Assent is given to these things only insofar as they block all individual expression. (p.104)

The Young-Girl is the perfect subject under Empire. And this is where I feel I see the Young-Girl as the Multitude.

I pertain to this in my ‘reading list’ (link at the beginning) ~ Hardt and Negri Young-Girlified the Multitude by leaving it as ‘revolutionary potential’. But what does revolution look like, and what is a structure outside of such an evidently now ingrained Spectacle. They said the Multitude was the peoples’ networked actions. But really I think we see that the representations of actions (#nodads #ows) have replaced this and the Multitude is colonized too. A buffed Young-Girl.

I guess what they’re saying is: the Young-Girl is biopower. And in the congealing of the Spectacle she has extended to all reaches of bare life.

Sometimes the Young-Girl is bare life, and sometimes she is death dressed up. (p.122)

She is not only the purest product of the Spectacle, she is the plastic proof of our love for it. (p.106)

YOUNG GUYS, YOUNG GIRLS

Talent wanted for getting out of this and playing
No special qualifications
Whether you're beautiful or you're bright
History could be on your side
WITH THE SITUATIONISTS

Ok. Got it.

I love how I’m writing this but thinking about how I can make a gif of my body exploding into light.

And it’s here where I form the title The Young-Girl against herself: The Young-Girl as an impossibility (p.121)

I’m no Young-Girl. My img is.

The violence of the Young-Girl is proportional to her delicate emptiness. (p.107)

The Young-Girl is a procedure of metaphysical sequestering, which is to say that one is never imprisoned by her, but always in her.

The Young-Girl is a summons to everyone to ensure they are worthy of the images of the Spectacle. (p.108)

And here, at the back of the book, a series of random but loosely connected images, like a well-oiled tumblr. The image is the Young-Girl. And They always knew.

Info

Tiqqun, Preliminary Materials for a Theory of the Young-Girl,Ariana Reines (trans.), MIT, 2002.