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towards a theory of a young girl

continental philosphy

  • islamic notions of agency: god has provided a path and your agency is how far you go down it
  • is a girl visiable? Is she nothingness made real? Or do we have to stalk the girl through its shadows
  • a young girl is someone that works to reproduce capital, a commodity that creates the conditions for more commodity consumption
  • from france tiqqun

The vanquished in this war are not so much citizens as those who, denying its reality, have capitulated from the outset: what THEY allow the vanquished, in the guise of “existence,” is now nothing but a lifelong struggle to render oneself compatible with Empire. But for the others, for us, every gesture, every desire, every affect encounters, at some distance, the need to annihilate Empire and its citizens

  • the girl is a memetic concept that obesses over labels
  • “perfection” as an selling point
    • “You will achieve perfection without changing who you are” is such a good sales pitch if the buyer can be made to believe it
    • this is why the girl wants to be accepted for who she is, not who she can become

Critques

Further Materials Towards a Theory of the Man-Child

Critques of the Critque

My Critque

The critical issue with this essay is its treatment of misogyny. It does not bother defining misogyny, but goes on to treat it as a wholesale concept, leaving the reader to fill in whatever forms the authors speak about.

The young-girl (YG from now on) is certainly not a liberatory figure, but the authors identify the young girl as a passive figure, with “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.”

However, the book makes great strides to state that the girl is vain, but she holds tremendous agency in being vain. Capitalism and self creation are bound up in the YG, and she acts in service of it.

Take the following lines from the book itself:

  • Seduction as war. THEY speak of “bombshells” using a metaphor derived less and less from aesthetic discourse, and more and more from that of ballistics.

  • 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 constitutes the most advanced carrier of the ethos and the abstract behavioral norms of the Spectacle.

  • Once the translation of highly differentiated human life into money became impossible, THEY invented the Young-Girl, who restored to devalued money its value. But at the very same time she downgraded money, made it a secondary factor, the Young-Girl regenerated it, returning to it some substance. And it is thanks to this ruse that money survives.

Is this a passive and frivolous figure? In my reading, this is a terrifying figure, an actor so wholly devoted to the maintenance of a system she seduces and becomes the agent.

Yet this, obviously, requires a definition of agency. For this, we can look to Messer-Davidow:

“Individualist models, which attach agency to a ‘self,’ vary not only in terms of the qualities that constitute the ‘self,’ such as boundedness and unity, but also in terms of the elements included in its agency—for instance, power and action in the Islamic model, or volition, decision, and action in the Western one. According to the Islamic model, God determines and reveals the path of action; agents do not need to choose a path, but they do need power to go down the determined one. Islamic agency, then, is exercised as the personal power by which individuals go down the path to a greater or lesser extent. By contrast, according to the Western model, agents choose a path of action.

Choice, Harre notes, implies the ‘realizability of more than one path. Decision is called for because possibilities of action seem to branch. Agency, then, is exercised in a choice between branches, and the focus of morality is on those choice-points and the reasons and motives for choosing one or the other.’ Harre contrasts the elements of Islamic agency to those of Western agency. The doctrine of human responsibility is formulated in terms of power, not of freedom; of capability to do, not freedom to choose; of the capacity to do what is required, not the freedom to decide for oneself what is desirable or proper. God determines in advance the proper path; man may fail to move along it.”

It should be clear what my point is, I believe the authors of the essay fundamentally only look at the book through the lens of Western (read: protestant) forms of agency. However, if you are to take a step back and look at the YG as a figure, she chooses to reproduce capitalism, she chooses to fashion herself more. What is empty is not her, but the memetics, which the authors miss in service of their argument on misogyny.

Joan Wallach Scott, in Sex and Secularity, writes:

What interests me in the deployment of the rhetoric of emancipation and equality is the way in which sexual desire has been singled out (reified) as the defining universal feature of the human, eclipsing other attributes such as hunger, spirituality, or reason.

In the place of the equality of abstract individuals (historically coded as masculine), we now have the equality of sexually active individuals (represented by a feminine or feminized figure); agency is located not in the reasoning mind but in the desiring body.

This is the fundamental concept of modern leftist politics, including the politics the authors of the essay subscribe to. Note that misogyny in the essay is inherently posed as opposition to emancipation: they read the YG as a passive figure, and therefore misogynistic. Because the YG is an object of desire that reproduces other objects of desire, she has no agency in the western leftist sense, for she effectively does not reason.

This is an absurd view, in my opinion, as this logic would mean that religious people have no agency. The Western leftist does not understand pious Islamic women, for in the eyes of the Western leftist, why would a woman intentionally choose a religion that binds her?

Saba Mahmood, in her seminal work The Politics of Piety writes:

Women’s participation in, and support for, the Islamist movement provokes strong responses from feminists across a broad range of the political spectrum. One of the most common reactions is the supposition that women Islamist supporters are pawns in a grand patriarchal plan, who, if freed from their bondage, would naturally express their instinctual abhorrence for the traditional Islamic mores used to enchain them.

This notion relies on outdated notions of false consciousness, that somehow, underneath everything, obviously women would choose to be liberated on western terms. Saba’s work is critical and seminal for this reason, for she teaches us that walking the Islamic notion of agency as described before is still an agency, Saba herself comes to this realization in her reflection upon her work.

I had approached the study of this movement with a sense of foreknowledge of what I was going to encounter, of how I was going to explain these women’s ‘intransigent behavior’ in regard to the ideals of freedom, equality, and autonomy that I myself have held so dear. Over time, I found these ideals could no longer serve as arbiters of the lives I was studying because the sentiments, commitments, and sensibilities that ground these women’s existence could not be contained within the stringent molds of these ideals. My prejudices against their forms of life (or, for that matter, theirs against mine) could not be reconciled and assimilated within ‘a cosmopolitan horizon’ (Mehta 1999, 22); the unseemliness of differences could not be synthesized. Nor did I find myself capable of factoring this difference into my old calculus of what in their behavior had more ‘feminist potential’ and what was hopelessly irrecuperable. This language of assessment, I realized, is not neutral but depends upon notions of progressive and backward, superior and inferior, higher and lower—a set of oppositions frequently connected with a compelling desire to erase the second modifier even if it means implicitly forming alliances with coercive modes of power.

Back to YGs. I am making the claim that capitalism stands in for religion for YGs in this model, that YGs choose to exist, and even thrive, underneath the system of capital. This is why she can be described as a “war machine” by Tiqqun. The YG is similar to a shark, an apex predator in her environment alone. If that is not considered agency, then we must be in the position to say that the vast majority of Muslims do not have agency, something so absurd and culturalist on the face of it.

A curious note about the essay is its treatment of gay men and people of color. Gay men, who are mentioned repeatedly in the book itself, are completely absent in the essay. “Queer” shows up once, next to “people of color” in a list:

In many workplaces, including academic departments, this means that race becomes the “job” of people of color; sexual politics the “job” of people who are female and/or queer and/or transgendered.

The fact that this is presented as sheer fact, that somehow the state of being queer and being a person of color is elidable with femininity is interesting. YG is presented as misogynistic and anti-women, but the authors of the essay deny even that agency to queers and people of color! Queers and people of color are denied even the agency to resist the YG, instead they are cast in the essay as a footnote, tokens in service of the argument. Funnily enough, Tiqqun tackles this problem

The formal domination of Capital has become more and more real. Consumer society now seeks out its best supporters from among the marginalized elements of traditional society-women and youth first, followed by homosexuals and immigrants.

To those who were minorities yesterday, and who had therefore been the most foreign, the most spontaneously hostile to consumer society, not having yet been bent to the dominant norms of integration, the latter ends up looking like emancipation.

I am reminded of Fisher’s essay, Exiting the Vampire Castle. The vampires’ castle is a structure that serves to reproduce guilt and prevent action against capital. He specifically points out this phenomenon:

I’ve noticed a fascinating magical inversion projection-disavowal mechanism whereby the sheer mention of class is now automatically treated as if that means one is trying to downgrade the importance of race and gender. In fact, the exact opposite is the case, as the Vampires’ Castle uses an ultimately liberal understanding of race and gender to obfuscate class. In all of the absurd and traumatic twitterstorms about privilege earlier this year it was noticeable that the discussion of class privilege was entirely absent. The task, as ever, remains the articulation of class, gender and race – but the founding move of the Vampires’ Castle is the dis-articulation of class from other categories.

To me, “Further Materials’ ’ engages in the vampire castle. It serves to reproduce guilt repeatedly in the invocation of misogyny and describes the work as “edgy” (when did edgyness become bad? Weren’t queer and squatter movements always considered edgy? If you call something edgy, doesn’t that mean you’re mainstream?).

“Further Materials’ ’ is a product of modern leftism, which, having moved into the mainstream, now takes on the role of the Protestant deacon, who inspires only guilt. However, it is clear that Tiqqun is born out of the miasma of post-Catholic anarchist culture in France. We are to believe that the usage of the term of the “Young-Girl’’ and its descriptions are misogynistic, which only begets the question: are we only left with neutered terms like “biopower” and “bare life”? Are theories that use sexual/gendered terms all fundamentally misogynistic/misanthropic in some way?

Held against this standard, all of us will fail, except for the most anodyne of concepts, rendering us actionless. On this, Fisher says:

The second law of the Vampires’ Castle is: make thought and action appear very, very difficult. There must be no lightness, and certainly no humor. Humor isn’t serious, by definition, right? Thought is hard work, for people with posh voices and furrowed brows. Where there is confidence, introduce skepticism. Say: don’t be hasty, we have to think more deeply about this. Remember: having convictions is oppressive, and might lead to gulags.

Tiqqune’s work is described as ironic repeatedly by the essay authors, but is this not humor? Can we not accept that the theory of capital (which actually the authors of the essay say nothing about) deserves a real treatment? Western liberalism having flattened the labor market between the genders, extends this line of thinking to create the idea that a normatively positive, modern, asexual, territorialized identity as the antidote to the ills of the normatively negative, pre-modern division of labor. Again, back to western notions of agency vs Islamic ones.

“Preliminary Theories” is interesting because it invokes such readings of misogyny in people, as if that somehow disqualifies its critiques of class relations and the overbearing system of capitalism we live in. I think critiques on the level of misogyny miss the point, because these critiques act exactly in the manner of the vampire castle: misogyny is used as an excuse to disregard the text, which has very real treatments on the state we live in. Look not at the critiques of capital, look how the text is supposedly sexist so we can disregard it! Capital is already difficult to fight without our fellow leftists strangling us in the cradle with purity tests.

I am not saying we should treat “Preliminary Theories” like gospel. It is a collection of fieldnotes, incomplete from a holistic theory, and it uses that to reveal its excesses. However, it is purely because it is field notes that it has value. The authors of the essay would like us to think that we need to think more, with “maybe instead of more smarter-than-thou critiques, we need more imagination, more courage. In place of obscurantism, clarity and organization.” My field notes on research were hasty and weird, and if I had opened them up to the public I would’ve gotten critiques that my field notes were islamaphoic, racist, misogynistic, or privileged. This is because the fieldnotes do not capture reality, they capture a snapshot, and a rough. The anthropologists feelings, after poor sleep, after 50C nights, after just all the bullshit you see in the field is all part of the fieldnotes. “Preliminary Theories” is an invitation, not a gospel, and judging it as if it were a complete work is silly. Judging it without seeing past your own normative notions of agency is absurd. We must not give in to the vampire castle, we must do the work of reclaiming sexuality from the grips of capitalism, and understand that the ultimate liberatory project is the understanding of one another. It is wild that a leftist would critique another leftist work for being “edgy”. Where were we 20, 30 years ago on the squatter movements? On queer rights? Those of us who live in the margins were always described as edgy. Humor, irony, and the ilk must not be reviled as “unserious” or “smarter-than-thou”, because without these we are left with a staid, corporate form of liberalism, sexuality fully colonized by capitalism. We must try and understand the world and other modalities of living.

Spare Notes

  • Is the usage of a sexual term an ironic performance of misogyny? On this, is it ever possible to discuss concepts with gendered terms?
  • Feminization of labor
  • Why is edgy used as a derragotory term here?
  • This is a misidentification of concepts, the girl is actually endowed with huge amounts of agency in YG theory? But rather as an Islamic notions of agency, how far down a path you go. Messer Davidow choice
  • Notably, again this patriarchal role of life is protestant specific. I do think it is a bit of a cop out, but the authors are suffused from the french perspective. Politics of piety - mahmood

The girl as described by Tiqqun is certainly not a liberatory figure, and but the fact that it engenders so much belief in its mysogyny, a category so thoroughly suffused with captalistic endeavor is interesting. The young-girl, who conjures up images, is asehtically appealing like the instagram influencer, but is unaesthetically appealing to a modern feminist, whose role is to separate.

We must do the work of reclaiming sexuality from the grips of capitalism, we must move past the vampire castle of guilt, the liberatory project is one of understanding one another. Humor, irony, and the ilk are not to be reviled as “unserious”, but rather to be taken as they are.

But this logic is actually inverted. The young figure as presented is hardly a passive figure, she is a foot soldier in the Empire. In so far as herself, she chooses to accelerate into the arms of capital. I would never deny agency to Muslim women, in the same way that I would not deny agency to Mahmoud

This is the entire goal! New dark age, can there be no theory that arises? Held against this standard, we are left to impassivity, we are forced to rely on constructing something from first principles, if we deem everything to be fruit of the poisonous tree.

We must exit the vampire castle, this type of leftist criticsm, based on guilt and inheriatnce of guilt, having moved into the mainstream, now exises the original people who built it.

https://booknotesblog.substack.com/p/preliminary-materials-for-a-theory

  • book notes