“Semiotext(e) published translations of Tiqqun’s Introduction to Civil War and This is Not a Program between 2009 and 2011, and the anarchist press Little Black Cart books distributed Tiqqun 1 and Theory of Bloom in 2011 and 2012. Though their cops-and-robbers bombast sometimes raised our eyebrows, we read these with interest. Then, late last year, Semiotext(e) put out its next Tiqqun installment. Enclosed in a bright pink cover, and bookended with what looked like low-grade xerox collages of glossy magazine ads and soft porn, Preliminary Materials for a Theory of the Young-Girl confirmed all that we had begun to suspect.”
“Theory of the Young-Girl opens with a 10-page excursus sketching the “total war” that contemporary capitalism wages against anyone who dares oppose it. Echoing the work of Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze, Tiqqun argues that capitalism compels individuals to internalize its imperatives to live (and thus consume) in certain ways. Because the entire conflict is invisible, Tiqqun professes that “rethinking the offensive for our side is a matter of making the battlefield manifest,” revealing the processes by which contemporary society compels us to commodify even our intimate lives. Where can they best expose the front lines where capitalism is waging its invisible war? The “Young-Girl,” a figure Tiqqun invents to play both the exemplary subject of and the agent reproducing this system.”
“Tiqqun claims it has lady members and seems eager to reassure us that it does not hate us. “Listen,” Tiqqun writes. “The Young-Girl is obviously not a gendered concept … The Young-Girl is simply the model citizen as redefined by consumer society.” When early 20th century capitalism realized that, to reproduce itself, it would have to colonize social life, it particularly targeted the spheres of “youth” and “femininity”: the young, because they needed and wanted things, and did not yet work; women, because they governed social reproduction, i.e., had and raised kids.”
“The majority of what follows consists of a Situationist-ish collage that, in a series of vacillating typefaces and font sizes, presents the Young-Girl as a scapegoat as much as a victim.”
“Like the nice guy from your grad-school program who tries to cover up his hurt feelings by concocting a general theory that explains why he never got a text after his one-night stand, the book portrays the Young-Girl as vain, frivolous, and acquisitive. She serves the traditional female role of reproducing the population and social order, but here, the social order is corrupt. Therefore, Tiqqun suggests, their intervention requires an ironic performance of misogyny. The question remains: Why is misogyny their only option? And why are so many thoughtful people ready to accept that a layer of irony suffices to turns hateful language into the basis of a sound critique?”
“We believe that Tiqqun has mistaken its object. The real enigma of our age is not the Young-Girl, who, we submit, has been punished enough already for how commodity culture exploits her. It is, rather, her boyish critic. Forms of crypto- and not-so-crypto misogyny have proved startlingly persistent not just within the radical left but also in the bourgeois-left spheres of cultural production: the publishing world, the museum, and the humanities departments of liberal-arts universities. We propose that a particular type is responsible for perpetuating such bad behavior. Call him the Man-Child.”
“The Man-Child wants you to know that you should not take him too seriously, except when you should. At any given moment, he wants to you to take him only as seriously as he wants to be taken. When he offends you, he was kidding. When he means it, he means it. What he says goes.”
“The Man-Child thinks the meaning of his statement inheres in his intentions, not in the effects of his language. He knows that speech-act theory is passé.”
“The hipster and the douchebag may be subspecies of the genus Man-Child.”
“In the mid-1970s, Italian Marxist feminists attempted to integrate an account of “immaterial labor” into their critique of capitalist society. They argued that when a shop attendant smiles for a customer, or a teacher worries too much about her students, or a parent does housework, they perform real labor. No accident that their examples came from spheres traditionally occupied by women. Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt later used the phrase “affective labor” to describe the emotional exertion that white-collar jobs increasingly require. Employers in economically dominant countries now primarily demand “education, attitude, character, and ‘prosocial’ behavior.” When job listings ask for “a worker with a good attitude,” what they want, say Hardt and Negri, is a smile.”
“In the culture sector, economic precarity constantly reminds employees of their expendability and, therefore, the importance of their investing affect in their workplace. To gain even an unpaid internship or a barely paid entry-level position in journalism, publishing, museums, or higher education, dedication is a must. Many jobs that used to be meal tickets for starving artists are now considered covetable and require “love.” A college freshman recently told us: “I have a passion for marketing.” A journalist friend recounts how, when she was still in college, a magazine editor approached her at a party with the line: “Yo, you should be my intern.” We imagine her smiling, as if to flatter his delusion that there were any print-media jobs still worth sleeping your way into; in any case, she did get a gig there.”
“Women’s long history of performing work without its even being acknowledged as work, much less compensated fairly, may account for their relative success in today’s white-collar economy. This is, at least, the story of the heroine that the new Mancession Lit has created. Call her the Grown Woman. A perpetual-motion machine of uncomplaining labor, shuttling between her job and household tasks, the Grown Woman could not be more different from either fat-year brats like Carrie Bradshaw, or Judd Apatow’s lady Man-Children. The Grown Woman holds down her job and pays for her own dinner. The Grown Woman feels like a bad mom when she sees the crafts and organic snacks that other moms are posting on Pinterest. She wonders whether feminism lied to her, but knows she will inherit the earth. Could this be because she is better than the Man-Child at performing what current economic conditions demand? She is certainly more practiced. Who among us hasn’t faked it, if only to make him stop asking?”
“Tiqqun knows and says what the Lifestyle section does or cannot: Today the economy is feminizing everyone. That is, it puts more and more people of both genders in the traditionally female position of undertaking work that traditionally patriarchal institutions have pretended is a kind of personal service outside capital so that they do not have to pay for it. When affective relationships become part of work, we overinvest our economic life with erotic value. Hence, “passion for marketing.” Hence, “Like” after “Like” button letting you volunteer your time to help Facebook sell your information to advertisers with ever greater precision.”
“In the postindustrial era, work and leisure grow increasingly indistinguishable: We are all shop girls now. From this “feminization of the world,” Tiqqun writes, “one can only expect the cunning promotion of all manner of servitudes.” At times, Tiqqun speaks of this exploitation sympathetically. More often, however, they blame the Young-Girl for opening the floodgates by complying with her own exploitation, thus making it easier for control capitalism to make her attitude compulsory for everyone.”
“Though its anxieties are of the moment, Tiqqun lifts its language from a long intellectual tradition that uses “woman” as shorthand. You can trace this line to Goethe’s Faust and the “eternal feminine” or Friedrich Schiller’s “Veiled Statue at Sais,” where “a youth, impelled by a burning thirst for knowledge,” pokes around Egypt looking for a busty sculpture of Isis that he calls “Truth.” Nietzsche continues using “woman” as a metaphor for the metaphysical essence that philosophers looked for beneath the surface of mere existence. But he borrows the language of his predecessors only to show how their quest failed—proposing, for instance, in Human, All Too Human that “women, however you may search them, prove to have no content but are purely masks.” Nietzsche’s point is that the woman called Truth was always already a cocktease: Nothing except existence exists.”
“Tiqqun offers an edgy update to such misogynist metaphors deployed for the purposes of demystification. At times, it speaks longingly of women who have not been utterly corrupted by capitalism. But when it learns what it knew all along—there is no outside; all human relationships have become reified—its disappointment at finding no one authentic to grow old with intensifies its vitriol.”
““It wasn’t until the Young-Girl appeared that one could concretely experience what it means to ‘fuck,’ that is, to fuck someone without fucking anyone in particular. Because to fuck a being that is really so abstract, so utterly interchangeable, is to fuck in the absolute.” Tiqqun’s language may be obscene, but its point is nothing new. The failure to see women as “anyone in particular,” or as subjects endowed with their own ends, has allowed men to fuck women over for centuries.”
“Tiqqun can insist, despite all the evidence to the contrary, that the Young-Girl is “obviously not a gendered concept” because it knows that we know that it knows this. Tiqqun uses works of Continental philosophy in the same way that schoolyard bullies use in-jokes: as passwords that grant access to a protected inner circle. Tiqqun assumes that readers will assume that writers so well versed in texts that have spoken truth to power could not really hate women. The prestige of the theoretical vocabulary that Tiqqun’s members have mastered bolsters their credibility.”
“At the same time, Theory of the Young-Girl adopts a playful pose that prevents real Young-Girls, or any Grown Women who might find time to read books published by Semiotext(e), from calling them out. Because Tiqqun’s collage does not attribute sources, we can read any given passage in disavowing quotation marks, as a lightning bolt of original insight, or as both. Publishing anonymously is only a backup measure for evading responsibility. Lift out any one line to object to it—“Wait a minute, how has all the concreteness of the world taken refuge in my ass?”—and you would be sure to look foolish, even if you did know whom to ask.”
“Intellectuals tend to show class allegiance, bracketing or ignoring casual sexism in their own circles. They project misogyny outward, onto Middle America megachurches and racialized others, or onto the powerful men that pander to those masses.”
“The figures that Mancession Lit presents as adversaries are in fact symbiotic. In institutions that reward competence with more unpaid labor, the Man-Child needs the Grown Woman to take care of him, and she needs him to need her. Man-Child attitudes, of the kind Tiqqun adopts, perpetuate the “feminization of the world” in the places where we most ardently hoped to find alternatives. Even the messy style of Theory of the Young-Girl ends up creating more unacknowledged labor: the exegesis it requires. In his glamorous obscurantism, the Man-Child cries for a dutiful interpreter to come and tidy up.”
“We cannot refuse the hard work of thinking about difference, nor can we step into the Grown Woman role that late capitalism has devised for us. We cannot finally embrace the Man-Child; he is inertia itself. But we can look for new figures. Perhaps irony felt like a vehicle for radical critique in the late 1990s when Tiqqun was writing. Then, bullish readers who were confident that the West had reached the end of history needed to be shown all the shortcomings and hypocrisies of their golden age. Now, translated for the postcrash era in which everyone sees how badly our social contract has been broken, the gesture feels like a cliché designed to help its speaker avoid responsibility and risk.”
“The rhetorical strategy of Theory of the Young-Girl is to remain undecidable: Its self-ironizing speaker refuses to settle the question of whether the book is in fact sexist or just impersonating someone sexist in order to make its point. The trait that everyone has recognized as endemic among men, and many young women, of our generation is indecision.”
“Both postures spring from a fearful refusal to take a position, to make a choice among alternatives that feel compromised. The bourgeois Man-Child who refuses to “grow up,” refuses to mate, and refuses domestic labor resembles the radical who wants to bide his time until capitalism collapses from within. Perhaps the most extreme example of Man-Child politics is the Voluntary Human Extinction Movement, which proposes that doing nothing might be the only way left to save the world. And yet, it is hard not to see these apocalyptic scenarios as cop-outs, typical of the compensatory fantasies of a disorganized left that, having given up on actually existing politics, daydreams about nature’s taking over where it left off.”
“Doing so, Man-Children overlook the fact that social reproduction—the work of having and raising kids—is not mere replication. It can be creative. That is, it might offer opportunities for social transformation. What would Preliminary Materials for a Theory of Motherhoodlook like? Maybe instead of more smarter-than-thou critiques, we need more imagination, more courage. In place of obscurantism, clarity and organization. In place of indecision and irony, a praise song and a program. Tiqqun is at the tail end of a radical tradition that has largely exhausted its usefulness.”