I intended to spend today (29 Dec. 2012) staring out the window and starting a list of all the reasons why kitties were superior in every single way to humans. However, my plan was pummeled to pieces when, through Facebook, I came into contact with Nina Power’s review of Tiqqun’s (trans. Ariana Reines) Preliminary Materials For a Theory of the Young-Girl. I am a boy. I like monster trucks and Arthur Rimbaud. But, even though I’m not a young girl, I still contain an awful amount of admiration for how Tiqqun (a French collective of theorists and artists) depicts the young girl, and I did not appreciate Nina Power’s patronizing, neo-liberal evaluation of it.
So, now, I am impelled to illuminate the wrongness of her ways.
Near the end of her review Power asks, “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?”
Nina, I don’t think there is a sole self. Democracy (and the grown ups who perpetuate it) have told me otherwise. They say that I am an autonomous, independent being. I have my own views, and I should be grateful for the right to voice my opinions because in other countries (like the ones where a large amount of the citizens sport turbans and burkhas) people aren’t as fortunate. But I don’t believe such stuff. There are no independent individuals. That’s bull crap.
Jasbir K. Puar, the contemporary queer theorist, is the antithesis of bull crap. In her book, Terrorist Assemblages, Puar argues that corporeal creatures (or, as Barack Hussein Obama calls them, “folks”) aren’t the self-determining denizens that democracy makes them out to be but a combination of natural and artificial materials. Assemblages are evinced in the suicide-bomber where the bomb skin fuses with the human skin to produce a “body weapon.” The boundary between the human skin and the bomb skin is extinguished. When the bomb explodes the body explodes as well. The two are interlocked. For Puar, an assemblage is an
inability to clear delineate a temporal, spatial, energetic, or molecular distinction between a discrete biological body and technology; the entities, particles, and elements come together, flow, break a part, interface, skim off each other, are never stable, but are defined through their continual interface, not as objects meetings but as multiplicities emerging from interactions.
The cacophony of biological and artificial materials that composes the terrorist’s identity is also applicable to identities that aren’t trying to blow up the most marvelous place in the world (a city that allowed Edie to be so glamorous), like young girls (like Edie). Girl are “powerfully drawn” to “popular culture” writes Caitlin Flanagan’s in her condescending but nonetheless amusing Girl Land. They find it “mesmerizing and enticing” — they are “immersed” in it. The young girl is a collection of telly shows, movies, internet sites, lip gloss, dresses, mini skirts, tights, stockings, leg warmers, sighs, tears, tantrums, boyfriends, ex-boyfriends, girlfriends, ex-girlfriends, cellies, sunnies, and, best of all, bows. “The Young-Girl lives at home amongst commodities, which are her sisters” writes Tiqqun. The young girl is a mobile movie. She’s endowed with a wardrobe, props, and tons of drama. I only want to exist in Poor Little Rich Girl (or Ciao! Manhattan or Beauty #2) too. But I still want to be a boy…
I don’t castigate Power’s criticism of the ambiguous way in which Tiqqun employ gender. Tiqqun say that any one can be a young girl, “and yet,” counters Power, “the book is preciously not called Theory of the Wizened-Pope.” I think it’s crucial to interpret the young girl as a young girl (like Edie Sedgwick not Edward Norton) since the young girl, as Flanagan points out, is at the apex of consumer culture. But I don’t see why Power bemoans the position that the young girl occupies. Just as assemblages in terrorist cells are evaluated based on their ability to blow up America/America-esque places, consumers in consumer cultures are based on their ability to consume. Practically everyone is a consumer! The fatty faggot Frank Bruni would have an utterly different identity without the New York Times, the food that he previously critiqued, his memoir . Also, Paul Ryan (I don’t care what anyone else says — he’s a handsome fellow) wouldn’t be Paul Ryan without football, his hunting weapons, the airplane that flies him from Wisconsin to Washington. In 2012, where America is to earth what Nazi Germany was, for a short period, to continental Europe, all subjects derive their identity from what they consume. Young girls are the most powerful because they consume the most.
Power wants a young girl who doesn’t speak through “the categories imposed upon her by culture.” But without these categories the young girl wouldn’t be able to speak — no one would. Interpellation (hi Louis Althusser!) is only possible when there is shared discourse. If you alter the culture, then you alter the interpellation, and the young girl ceases to be a young girl. This, though, is what Power advocates. She wants the young girl to “destroy the system.” She wants change. But change is a part of the system. The leader of the system — that community organizer with the birth certificate issues — talks about change quite a bit. Protesting and demonstrating (whether it be against Obamacare, against abortion, against DOMA, against [insert your cause here]) reinforces the system. Meanwhile, according to Tiqqun, the young girl is condemning “all physical violence directed against her aspiration of society’s total pacification. She and the dominant power are obsessed with security.” The young girl’s alliance with consumer culture and abhorrence for those who insist that she tame her consumerism is why she’s so powerful. America is not a democracy: it’s a totalitarian state run by endless amounts of products. The young girl’s infatuation with commodities puts her on the side of the tyrants. Power says the young girl is denigrated. But she isn’t. The young girl is a cute, sassy, stylish collage that helps the tyrants run the world.
Tags: caitlin flanagan, Edie Sedgwick, jasbir k. puar, nina power, preliminary materials for a theory of the young-girl, tiqqun
Too many words and even more yawn.
Arguing that “[p]rotesting and demonstrating […] reinforces the system” a) makes “the system” sound like a magical Mind of Its Own, and b) sounds like neo-liberal rhetoric that would serve to disengage sometimes-somewhat effective action.
What do you mean by “totalitarian”?
Um, and way too many typos. Copyeditors?
Proper spelling and grammar are tools of the masculine oppressor, what, don’t you know that?
Haha, of course, what was I thinking. Also demonstrations and petitions for change, apparently. It’s all the system folding in on and reifying itself endlessly—
yes, commenter with three initials, that is correct
Yes, nothing lies outside the system, nothing can be done, everyone should give up everything except for criticizing each other. And possibly biting each other—that brings about change, sometimes.
But change is also bad, being just another system.
that’s sort of cynical… one could go shopping and pick out a cute sweater
I am already wearing a cute sweater. I like biting.
Cute sweaters can only be good, you are right. I just lost one as a beloved relative dried it in the drier, if you can believe that.
…Bite the sweater?
in this instance, my use of totalitarian is supposed to bring to mind hitler’s germany and stalin’s russia. if you did not, in some degree, adhere to hitler’s naziism or stalin’s interpretation of lenin then you were expendable — you could be sent to a concentration camp, a gulag, or just plain murdered. i think that american consumerism operates in the same way. obama has launched four times as many drone attacks as george w. bush did (see “obama’s secret war” in the columbia journalism review), but since the casualties of these drones are pakistanis — middle east people who have not adopted capitalism — it’s not an atrocious occurrence. the same supporters who are outraged anytime a lgbtq is harassed or a women receives unequal pay have little to no problem when a middle east subject is killed.
i’d prefer straight-forward misogyny to these thoughtless theoretical justifications for misogyny
“Just as assemblages in terrorist cells are evaluated based on their ability to blow up America/America-esque places”
This is not the main point of what you wrote, but suicide bombers primarily murder people in the Middle East, not “America/America-esque places”. I understand the desire to believe the leftist fantasy about suicide bombers as oppressed people fighting against imperialist devils, but it has nothing to do with the reality of theocrats murdering scores of people (almost all of them Muslim) in pursuit of ends that have nothing to do with “liberation”.
But Hitler didn’t kill anyone with drone attacks, so he’s a better leader.
I aplogize if this is the height of moronic, but I am confused who is being “thoughtless[ly] theoretical”–SO or Power or Tiqqun?
re: “Young girls are the most powerful because they consume the most.”
i question this statement’s two superlatives: “the most powerful” and “they consume the most”
(i’ll admit that they are prime consumers-in-training, tho, primed for life unless something changes drastically)
i’d love to see some hard demographic data, some facts and figures, graphs and pie charts
i mean, where does their ‘earning power’ lie in the grand scheme of earning power, for instance?
I like how strong your ability to parse socio-economic physio-biology [is-edit]. Like, I completely don’t agree w/ a lot of it, but I really enjoyed reading because at least you’re thinking about these things in a very deep way, which means you aren’t really thinking about yourself. You are kind of worried about the whole world during this.
Thanks for the thoughts.
someone should write a post about how calling something boring is an important form of discourse control. i actually think that’d be interesting. or maybe boring.
Thank you thank you thank you!
SO and Tiqqun,
Young-girls are obviously the least powerful (just look at pay scales and rape statistics) and what they consume is at the behest of the patriarchy. If there is even such a thing as the young-girl, that is.
Dear Jackie Wang,
What do you mean by misogyny?
I look forward to your answer.
Have a lovely Sunday!
My fantasies aren’t leftist. I don’t think suicide bombers are oppressed. The Middle East countries that are most vulnerable are those who have adopted or have shown the willingness to adopt American/Western culture in some degree. To you, the suicide-bombers have “nothing to do with ‘liberation.'” But they’d counter that they’re freeing themselves and their country from capitalism.
In a public, mass-accessible forum, you’re using the name that the police can use to find you (I’m guessing) to say that “obama” is drone-striking Pakistanis, which information you cite from a well-known, (fairly) widely-read piece of journalism.
This dissemination is not remotely congruent with those that characterized–that were essential to–totalitarianism in “hitler’s germany and stalin’s russia”.
The fighting against ‘enemies’ and testing of military products in central Asia–you tell me which is superordinate–don’t seem to me to have much to do with central-Asian political-economic practices. What causes you to think they don’t practice “capitalism” (of some kind(s)) in Pakistan? –and do you really think the drone program in Pakistan is punishment for not adopting “capitalism”??
Is there a program or programs to murder people for not consuming capitalistically in America? (It seems to me to work more systematically and effectively the other way: people are killed intentionally because they’re consumers – of dangerous products made in dangerous ways and discarded dangerously when rubbished.)
One could say, ‘if I don’t buy medicine I can’t afford, I’ll die–so capitalism is killing me’. A great argument!: political economy — accumulation as an expression of power and at the expense of life.
Is that what you mean? — that capitalism is nascent or luxury-softened “totalitarianism”? –that to distinguish between the destructivenesses of corporate capitalism and “totalitarianism” is categorically to err?
–because, to me, assimilating even working-poor life in America to an extermination camp sounds less like drawing attention to likenesses and more like calling everything bad ‘fascism’.
Michael, I love your respponse; but my take is the piece of SO’s seems like an intensely first-person, eccentric, somewhat inscrutable position masquerading as omniscient, except masquerade is all wrong, as that implies conscious deployment.
I haven’t read the book or the original review (which both sound very interesting to me) so I’m likely very wrong, but this seems like you’re presenting a romanticization of the Young Girl. It seems like it’s also a certain type of Western, Upper-middle Class, White, Physically Attractive, Normed, Young Girl, not a universal Young Girl, which, as John said in a comment below, probably doesn’t exist. The Romanticized assemblaged Young Girl might have power, a la, Paris Hilton, Olsen Twins, etc. but as soon as you take away a qualifier, let’s say, white, or upper-middle class, the Young Girl begins to lose power, as a consumer and as a human with agency.
toni morrison’s the bluest eye has illuminating examples of young girls and they’re neither white nor middle class
“Fascism” is a very abstract term that can mean a multitude of things as Roger Eatwell shows in his history of the subject. Throughout this ordeal I have never used that term. I think totalitarianism and empires are intriguing. The Nuremberg Rallies and Walmart are very grand. I’m not concerned with right or wrong (morals are for grownups and GLADD). I am merely trying to figure out the world that I’ve encountered since leaving my mommy’s tummy. This world, obviously, is not an exact replica of the concentration camps but, as Theodor Adorno and other thinkers have pointed out, there are considerable similarities.
i’m talking about this assemblage of young girls who “are the most powerful because they consume the most.”
Morrison’s characters in The Bluest Eye are also examples young girls without power, who are raped, and serve white people.
paralysis by analysis…
Since someone is asking me the question that was asked of Jackie Wang, I will give my answer, which in no way should be confused with her answer. I do not speak for her. To equate Tiqqun’s Young-Girl with actual young human females is a move that Tiqqun itself attempts (tho fails) not to make; Tiqqun recognizes that this move is in itself misogynistic. Why? Because in actual fact human females are the least empowered grouping of humans imaginable (think of the young girls at the mall who buy trinkets, earrings and such, at shops like Claire’s, so she can become the object the entire culture is telling her to be, and then gets blamed for wearing those trinkets when she gets raped; speaking of rape read a few stories about being a woman in India; look at women’s salaries, etc etc), and equating them with the Young-Girl and then describing them as helping tyrants run the world, well, that’s the equivalent of saying that slaves are in cahoots with slave masters, rather than slaves … And **then** arguing that actualizing any possible agency that young girls might possess ALSO puts them in cahoots with their masters, well, young girls are damned if they do, damned if they don’t. Whatever happens, it’s their fault. That reads a lot like misogyny to me. That’s what I mean. I hope that answers your question. (Rereading your question, if you are asking for a definition of misogyny, you can find a dictionary as easily as can I)
I don’t say or imply that you used the term “fascism”. “Totalitarian”, too, can mean a multitude of things. By saying “more like calling everything bad ‘fascism’“, with the comparison being to the whole italicized phrase, I suggest that you use the term “totalitarian” in the chiefly emotive way that the term “fascist” used to be–maybe sometimes still is–used.
Only after I posted did I realize that this analogy could be misread and the word “fascism” become a Crux. Tee hee!
Explicitly how is America a “totalitarian” state in the ways that Nazi Germany, for example, was a totalitarian state? (I did bring up one difference that I take to be salient (and that you dismiss in the blogicle): no dissenting or critical expressions were tolerated in Nazi Germany.)
Disappointment with the simultaneous material abundance and cultural insipidity in America: sure, nobody’s more anguished about how stupid and ugly America can be than some Americans are–not even the Frankfurters.
But how does this parallelism obtain?: Nuremberg rally is to Auschwitz what Mall-Wart is to _______. Or is Mall-Wart not the premise of extermination, but rather, its conclusion??
You say that you’re “not concerned with right and wrong”. I don’t believe you. I think you find “patronizing, neo-liberal evaluation[s]”, “bull crap”, “capitalism”, and killing Pakistanis with drones to be “wrong”, and correcting “patronizing, neo-liberal evaluation[s]” and, generally, sassiness to be “right”. I think you agree that the point of figuring out the world is not merely the pleasure in figuring out the world, but to change it. I’m wrong, wrong, wrong?
Yes, Seth is saying that “young girls” are damned if they do, damned if they don’t: when “young girls” consume, they enable–willingly or not–their objectification, which they’re then often held responsible for, and when they resist consumption that would objectify them, their resistance is easily sponged up as commodified rebellion.
“Damned if they do, damned if they don’t” doesn’t mean “young girls” are to blame; it might mean that they’re trapped, compromised even when they’re conscious of being trapped and acting to dismantle those traps (both imposed from without and self-imposed).
That’s all true of everybody in the capitalistic system that obtains in America: participation, no matter how good it feels, condemns one to a role in a (luxurious) slave system, and participation in capitalistic consumption is easily sold as phony self-actualization–and even as emancipatory ‘resistance’ to that very capitalism.
I think Seth is wrong to sneer at the possibility of genuinely ameliorative resistance to and even transformation of an exploitative system of production from within, but what he’s saying about “young girls” seems to me otherwise true of everybody in Western capitalism.
What in Seth’s blogicle betrays a hatred of girls and women and/or female-as-constructed and/or femininity?
Is the fur coat in the photo Leopard, jaguar or cheetah? If it’s Edie–wow what a not so stunning shot of a stunner–then it’s very likely the coat ain’t faux. I find it sad, scary and amazing that an anorexic, bullimic (possibly: this is based on extrapolating from Ultra Violet’s autobiography of the 60s), indisputable drug-addict was so gorgeous. Does anyone know if there are pictures of her needle tracks? Once again I’m conjecturing, but it seems mucho plausible when one has been well documented as loving various amphetemines.
I like this!
Hi, deadgod. You ask: “What in Seth’s blogicle betrays a hatred of girls and women and/or female-as-constructed and/or femininity?” His reification of the Young-Girl, which singes out of young girls, just like Tiqqun did. With no mention of young boys, who are just as guilty (if guilty’s the word, which I doubt, actually; guilt implies “roads not taken”, so to speak) or anyone else. Imagine he had substituted “welfare queens” or “hipsters” or “NASCAR fans” or “urban intellectuals” or “Christians” for young girls, … You, on the other hand, emphasize that we are all complicit, that there’s nothing absolutely nothing special about the young girl. In fact, I agree with every single word you write, so if you don’t like the word “misogyny”, well, I’m willing to amend it, to unfair or something, but the actual effects of the unfairness demonstrated by Seth’s article had actual deadly effects on actual young girls IRL. Which makes it “as good as misogynistic”, so to speak.
Oh, and I too believe that his “sneer[ing] at the possibility of genuinely ameliorative resistance to and even transformation of an exploitative system of production from within” is wrong-headed. Occupy was on the scene right after Sandy, and their presence was definitely ameliorative; the Rolling Jubilee has bought up lots of medical debt, which was ditto. I am reminded of a little story Emma Goldman told in her Living My Life. As a good anarchist she opposed working for the 8 hr day as a distraction and worse, as 8 hr days would “enable” the system to survive with less resistance – until an old working man said to her, “What? It’s wrong of me to want a couple hours a day to spend doing something other than breaking myself to bits working?” At that point she dropped her doctrinaire attitude and began to fight for *everything* that made for a better life – including of course the overthrow of capitalism. Because she knew that even if she failed in the larger goal, well, it’s obvious.
In Minima Moralia, Adorno says Hitler acquired power through “concentrated terror.” The constant display of force — the SS, the army, the SA (before they became a political liability) — enabled their domination in the same way that a blockbuster movie captures its audience. To defeat Nazi Germany all America had to do was make a movie with greater special effects, which they did with superior weapons and larger armies. America continues to dominate by putting on spectacular shows like atomic bombs and super stores. Neither are concerned with human beings proper. What’s of primary importance is the humans potential to continue the world that they created.
“But they’d counter that they’re freeing themselves and their country from capitalism.”
Well, a suicide bomber couldn’t counter at all because they’d be dead. I imagine if they could return to defend their actions their defense would be about heaven and theocracy and hatred of Jews and the will of god and return of the caliphate. etc. There is nothing romantic or cool about Islamist terrorism.
As the a-gs would say, the only thing worse than capitalism is its barbarous abolition…
Can a way be wrong, or can it more likely only be one that some, or many, others dispute?
Identity is the primal form of ideology (Adorno), but “the Young-Girl’s ass is enough to give her a basis to feel an incommunicable singularity” (Tiqqun). Cf. http://gnomebooks.wordpress.com/2012/07/13/oblivionanism/
To follow up my previous comment and clarify its grounds a little . . . as I understand it the Powers style of systemic critique rejects the (Heideggerian) princple that “the saving power grows where danger is,” whereas this is the very essence of young-girl theory, in keeping with Agamben’s Coming Community: “the planetary petty bourgeoisie is probably the form in which humanity is moving toward its own destruction. But this also means that the petty bourgeosie represents an opportunity unheard of in the history of humanity that it must at all costs not let slip apply.” And it is precisely that ‘providential’ way of thinking that Powers wants to dismiss under the category of the ‘assertoric’.
It’s true that, in his strenuously fey way, Seth talks about teenaged girls and not boys, but if that’s a sign of “misogyny”, then all of feminist rhetoric that talks about women without committing as much space to talking about men is misogynistic cant.
I also doubt that Seth’s blogicle makes a separate ‘thing’ (res) out of a constitutive process or relation; in other words, I don’t think he’s manipulating a reifying sense or notion of ‘woman’, hostile or otherwise. He’s taking up a category of ‘objects’ handed to everyone as a matter of culture–teenaged girls–and, in his way, talking about what that category discloses or means or about how it’s used or functions.
As well as I understand the blogicle, it’s saying a pretty unobjectionable thing about ‘female humans’–namely, that they’re trained through rites of passage into adulthood to collaborate, on a hedonistic basis (that is, because it feels good, independent, powerful), in their emancipatorily self-defeating usefulness to accumulation.
I also think that “misogyny” is a term, like “fascism” or “hegemony” or “empire”, that’s analytically useful, but is used far too often theoretically thoughtlessly to win conversations.
Let me rephrase my question: what does Seth say that justifies “misogyny”?
I see a bit better what you mean by “totalitarian”.
Blockbuster movies aren’t successful–and they’re not sold to be–in the same way that Nazism was successful in ’30s Germany. Blockbusters don’t have to be: if one tenth of the people in America see a movie once at $5 per ticket, that’s a $150-million-gross smash (30 million x $5). And that’s a low ticket price and not counting repeat sales. To be blockbusters, movies just have to capture a slice of the market, however all-engulfing the ad campaigns for popular movies feel.
One could say, well, take ‘blockbusters’ not one at a time, but rather, as a kind. Even then, mass popularity isn’t as all-encompassing as it might feel.
(Of course, those who make high-budget flicks want every single person to be part of their commercial ‘totality’, but I think a film executive would admit their chagrin at how many people resist spending money on, say, The Hobbit.)
Again, to me anyway, it’s just a terrible analogy to say that what Cameron ‘achieved’ with Titanic, and how Western people shop generally, are done with anything like the violence of the herding accomplished by the Nazis among Germans by the late ’30s.
–and the assimilation of “atomic bombs and super stores”? Oh kay. Why not reason from the simultaneity of atomic bombs and doubled life-spans? or atomic bombs and protection from discrimination for homosexuality? or atomic bombs and widespread public criticism of nuclear weapons and energy?
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/jan/03/world-without-work
Does that sound like the work of a neo-liberal?
Those who interperet ‘Preliminary for a Theory of the Young-Girl’ as mysoginist are woefully MISSING THE POINT. It is not a gendered theory, which is spelled out for the reader right away. To read it as such is to misread. Tiqqun does not critique or attack a gendered subject, actually, they lay bare the absurdity of ‘subjectivity’ under Empire. Rather, what emerges is a form which is the perfect embodiment of Spectacular Consumption, that is to say, Nothingness. On the back cover it explicitly states that ‘theories made for war do not require unanimity’ and goes on to explain that such texts will be rightfully condemned by those who still believe in ‘society’ or who consider themselves a ‘citizen’. Tiqqun’s texts are meant to provoke, offend and devastate. They evoke If you aren’t struck with a profound metaphysical nausea during and after reading Tiqqun, you aren’t paying attention. There is a reason for the rejection of the term ‘book’ for ‘editorial virus’ when describing such texts. It is strategic writing that belongs to the most essential traditions of the avant-garde.
This text has nothing to do with the protozoan swamp of ‘Identity Politics’ that Americans still wallow in. The question lies in what to do with the outrage you feel after reading Tiqqun. Most will reject it for it’s negativity. Call it ‘nihlist’. However, there are truths revealed here that no one can completely ignore. They will gnaw at you.
Idiot.
Thanks, Andy. Glad you think so.
Seth doesn’t say anything to justify it, he just participates in it.
[…] Oelbaum – “A Rebuttal to Nina Power’s Infuriating Review of Preliminary Materials for a Theory of the […]
Bingo.
The Young-Girl is tyranny. All tyrants must bow to the Young-Girl (mothers) or they will not be tyrannical for long.
[…] found another critic sum this up nicely, building off of Power’s critique (although in true misogynist fashion […]