Με αφορμή το βιβλίο «Αντι-οφθαλμός: μια φιλοσοφία της απόδρασης» οι εκδόσεις Affect και το Κενό Δίκτυο σας προσκαλούν σε μια παρουσίαση / συζήτηση με τον Adam Jones, συγγραφέα και φιλόσοφο και μέλος της συλλογικότητας Acid Horizon.

Πέμπτη 18/12/2025
στις 20:00
Ελεύθερο Αυτοδιαχειριζόμενο
Θέατρο Εμπρός
(Ρήγα Παλαμήδη 2)

Η ομιλία θα μεταφράζεται στα Ελληνικά. Την εκδήλωση θα ανοίξει ο Αλέξανδρος Γεωργίου από τις εκδόσεις Affect.

Τις περισσότερες φορές η αντίληψη του ελέγχου εξαντλείται στην έννοια της επιτήρησης σαν μάτι της εξουσίας, με τις αστυνομικές συνδηλώσεις που αυτη έχει, και χάνει έτσι τη διαδικασία παραγωγής της εξουσίας του ελέγχου. Με άλλα λόγια, η έμφαση έχει δοθεί συνήθως στην ίδια την εξουσία και όχι στο βλέπειν αυτού του μεταφορικού ματιού.

Τι θα γινόταν αν θέταμε το ερώτημα: τι σημαίνει ότι το μάτι της εξουσίας βλέπει; – ή ακόμα καλύτερα πώς βλέπει το μάτι της εξουσίας; Η απάντηση σε αυτό το ερώτημα είναι που για τους Acid Horizon αποκαλύπτει το διάγραμμα της εξουσίας – το διάγραμμα ως σχηματικό αποτύπωμα των μηχανισμών της εξουσίας.

Ο οφθαλμός ορίζεται στο κείμενο ως εκείνο το μάτι που αναγνωρίζει, και μέσω της αναγνώρισης ταυτο-ποιεί, δηλαδή κατατάσσει τα άτομα σε προκατασκευασμένες
ταυτότητες.

Οφθαλμικότητα λοιπόν είναι ακριβώς η πράξη της αναγνώρισης με στόχο την ταυτοποίηση, η συνθήκη της λειτουργίας εκείνης που αποτελεί προϋπόθεση της άσκησης της κυβερνητικής (cybernetic), της διακυβέρνησης, δηλαδή της άσκησης της εξουσίας στις συνθήκες της κοινωνίας του ελέγχου. Η πράξη αυτή δεν επιτελείται μονοσήμαντα από ένα κεντρικό «μάτι στον ουρανό», αντιθέτως απλώνεται σε ένα σύμπαν από μηχανισμούς. Περισσότερο από ουσία της εξουσίας ή υλοποιημένη οντότητα, η οφθαλμικότητα περιγράφει το modus operandi κάθε εξουσιαστικού μηχανισμού, είναι ο αφαιρετικός πυρήνας με βάση τον οποίο μπορούν να οργανωθούν διαφορετικές εξουσιαστικές διατάξεις, όπως και έχει γίνει ιστορικά και κατά περίπτωση.

Το βιβλίο αυτό αποτελεί μια σημαντική συμβολή στον τρόπο που αντιλαμβανόμαστε την κυβερνολογική του ελέγχου και τις προϋποθέσεις ώστε αυτή να διαμορφώνει τα υποκείμενα πάνω στα οποία ασκείται. Διασχίζοντας το πέρασμα από το Φουκώ του «Επιτήρηση και Τιμωρία» στο Ντελέζ της «Κοινωνίας του ελέγχου» και των Tiqqun της «Κυβερνητικής Υπόθεσης», οι Acid Horizon εντοπίζουν τη διαμόρφωση των τεχνικών ταυτοποίησης και ελέγχου στις κανονικοποιήσεις αυτών που αποκλίνουν: στο φυλετικό ρατσισμό, στο δυισμό του φύλου, στην νευροτυπικότητα, στην αγυρτεία. Από εκεί ακριβώς ανοίγεται και ένα παράθυρο για να φανταστούμε την ιδέα της απόδρασης, για να οργανώσουμε κοινότητες έξω από τις μορφές της κυβερνητικής διακυβέρνησης.

Διοργάνωση:
affect editions https://affecteditions.gr/
Κενό Δίκτυο https://voidnetwork.gr/

The post Ομιλία: «Αντι-οφθαλμός: μια φιλοσοφία της απόδρασης» Adam Jones (Acid Horizon, UK) appeared first on Void Network.

“First and foremost what we abhor on the whole is not just the image of some ultimate substance, some indivisible density; it is also and above all (at least for me) bad form.” Roland Barthes, Digressions

1. INITIATION

Little subversions make for big conformities.

2. PROVISIONAL DEFINITION

The man of the Old Regime is the figure of bourgeois subjectivity at the moment of its liquidation and hollowing out by cybernetic domination, which historically was issued from that bourgeoisie itself.  Defunct, bourgeois subjectivity survives itself indefinitely in the myth of the free, autonomous, strong individual, self-assured and sure of his world, a world that contains in its fenced-in yard a set of values and established experiences that our “individual” wholly inhabits, as well as the consumption of a certain number of cultural commodities that serve him as a system of references.  From being the object of social critique during the whole of the 19th century, and a good part of the 20th, the man of the Old Regime has now become the subject of such critique, in a reconstitution process internal to commodity domination which now requires the maintenance of the man of the Old Regime as a false alternative to the American way of life.  What we’re talking about here is a form of life, and not an attributable class of individuals: hence we are inferring him from our singular inclinations, no less than from the empirical summary of character traits, cultural practices, sediments of habit, and institutional skeletons that justify him.  The man of the Old Regime functions as a womb for socially produced, possible habituses; for us this isn’t about critiquing a “way of life,” but about putting ourselves on a plane of consistency that would allow reality to be read in terms of an ensemble of ethical and political confrontations between forms-of-life.  We are not going to dissect nor judge them, but merely take a material measurement of their lines of flight and the playing area they offer.  The man of the Old Regime is a special kind of Bloom whose guarded escape from the world is his sole and unique line of flight.

3. METHOD.

The walk-on role relationship that Bloom has with his own life, has no reason for it; that means that we can’t undo the tangle of “psychological” and social forces that constitute the essence of Old Regime humanity.  It would be as illusory as it would be useless to claim to be able to say what the Old Regime man “is,” so we’ll just content ourselves with describing what happens to him everyday.  A sociological analysis and criticism of the ideology there, one founded in a comprehension of the real interests and strategies pursued by individuals and in a will to dissipate the social effects of the interference with and travesty of these interests, in spite of the occasional clarifications it might offer, is just part of a struggle to outline this domain of habitus-incorporation, one that can’t be justified, not even subtly, as something taken up out of social self-interest.  The man of the Old Regime can only be handled with a formal description that would update both the defense mechanisms of his individual art of living while also updating our evaluation of the political institutions prerequisite for his persistence, namely the monopoly on public violence by what’s called the “state” authorities, and by their corollary, bourgeois publicity, which interrupts all the real consequences of thought.  The Old Regime posture can only ever exist as a particular internal modality of the New Cybernetic Regime, as a liberalness granted by the latter, and must be understood, in bureaucratic sociological terms, as a strategy for the distinction and affirmation of a non-bloomized habitus in an era when Bloom is a transcendental aspect of all critical theory on social being.  More than just a particular vision or theory of the world, the “discourse” of the Old Regime is an epistemological apparatus that decrypts reality by means of a system of classic and general categories (man, the passions, interest, history, action, negativity, difference, Spectacle, etc.), which always permits a warding off and neutralizing of all events by bringing them down to the safety of “been there done that.”  Moreover, it permits those Blooms that play more or less masterfully the Old-Regime-man role to silence their own singular implication in what’s happening to them; by thus splitting hairs about everything that happens, the man of the Old Regime pardons himself from ever thinking about his own real situation.  The passion for critique that animates him thus often expresses itself in a simple reflex of distancing: he doesn’t need to fabricate new concepts in order to think about any given event; he needs to do so in order to actively deny any and all events, by fitting them in with some already-known essence.

4. AN APPARATUS INCARNATE.

The man of the Old Regime is a responsive type; he’s perhaps the first in history to live in a state of total resentment, since he can’t resign himself to completing the inevitable labor of finally interring the habitus culturally associated with the bourgeois ethic on pain of indicting himself.  A real experience of the contemporary situation is forbidden to him, because – and in this sense he’s profoundly autistic – he speaks, or rather, he discourses about the present advances of the involutional process of capitalist subsumption and on the morals that sketch themselves out therein from above — from a bird’s eye view, carefully secured by safety tape of both the police and linguistic kinds.  In no circumstances can he let himself fully go into experience and be contaminated by such contemptible realities; rather he lays a blanket rejection on anything unheard-of, whatever is not validated by the classical forms of existence.  This is a question of his survival, pure and simple.  In effect, in the more or less long term, this attenuated form-of-life is doomed to disappearance, undermined by the evaporation of its conditions of existence and the unavoidable shrinkage of peaceful space for its expression.  Politically, this decline manifests itself in the terror this strange, frightened citizen lives in, nostalgically longing for the good old days of submission to the limited sovereignty of a Nation-State, a submission which he could plainly and fully fathom on sight, and from which he could always escape and take refuge in his inner conscience, a liberated zone, the homeland of the Self where self-ignorance could easily pass itself off as moral conscience.  Dispossessed of his little stock of anecdotes and violently removed from his natural milieu by the growing onrush of the Empire’s acephalous, non-contractual, inordinate sovereignty, the man of the Old Regime has been swindled by History, and, world-weary, has sent in his invoice; thus in France a few years ago we saw an Old Regime politico-intellectual party and movement crop up which attempted to bail out the water from a few good old myths like Republic, School, or Authority, in the shadow of which they hoped to be able to go on living.  But their coin has no more currency, and Sirius’ perspective doesn’t bring home the bacon anymore.  The man of the Old Regime, thus, is reduced by all this to bringing his theoretical neutralization and interference apparatus into existence biographically, an apparatus of “change-for-its-own-sake-ism” [bougisme], modernity, the dominant ideology of party-down youth-ism, progress, mobility, flexibility and clean slates; in brief, the ever-so pleasant globalization so dear to the “liberal-libertarians,” versus a certain number of properly valorized postures and concepts like critique, reflection, authority, slowness, conservatism, “tory anarchism,” the Republic so dear to the “Bolshevik-bonapartists,” respect for the past, traditionalism, literature, discursive masterfulness, etc.  But the part he pretends to play so passionately has in fact already been played out.  The assertions, positions, theses, and analyses that comprise the feigned confrontations he has in his world are always already known to all, and in no way serve to clarify reality but act as symbols of recognition, gauges of belonging, rhetorical guide-rails.  These are gimmicks; it’s the stuff of carnival fortune-tellers.  The static here comes from an eternal playing out, over and over again, of the old false opposition between conservatism/progressivism, terms that are never more than two variants of the same anthropological thesis – a thesis of pacification that postulates man as a living-social-being-in-society.  And the point of it all is to naturalize an apparatus that comprises one of the major controlled burns to hide the fact of human reality as civil war.

Who could still believe this world to be worthy of love? What good does it do to love what itself is devoted to hatred?  Even God can’t do it, and resigns himself to allowing Hell to go on existing.

Bernanos

5. GIMMICK

One of the favorite gimmicks of the man of the Old Regime is the declamatory affirmation of his militant exteriority to “this” world, his irreducibility relative to the so-called “mass” culture, the dominant bloc of alienation, perceived as the impassable horizon of all human positions; this reflex at bottom only expresses the fetishism of a chimerical foreignness to the world that seeks itself out for example in the practice of perpetual, pathetic, misanthropic – or even schismatic hygienic measures.  Owing to the heavy historical tendency to centralist pacification which has marked the French State for such a long while, and has produced the citizenist psychology we know so well – the psychology of subjects believing they can find freedom in the proper operation of a State that takes charge of all the “political” aspects of their lives – the Old Regime posture is reminiscent, in a preferential way, of a certain tradition very much our own, one that can be traced back to the “anti-monarchist” libertines, and has continued all the way down to the right-wing/royalist [Maurrasian – from Charles Maurras] and dietary situationism of today, by way of reactionary catholics, heideggerians of all obediences, anarcho-capitalists, “Hussars,” and other Sollerso-Celinians. [Phillippe Sollers/Louis-Ferdinand Celine].  In the last resort, old regime man will always try to make good on his back-up right, his right to an inward emigration.  Today all these fractions are part of a vast movement remaking the battle-fronts, all seeking to ally themselves with liberal-humanism so as to escape the historical confrontation between the Empire and whatever escapes it.

continue reading 
of the book:

CHAPTER 6-15
http://oldregime.jottit.com/6-15
CHAPTER 16-20
http://oldregime.jottit.com/16-20 
CHAPTER 21-30
http://oldregime.jottit.com/21-30 

source:
http://oldregime.jottit.com/1-5 

The post Tiqqun:”The Little Game of the Man of the Old Regime” appeared first on Void Network.

Unlike Mansoor, I do not think it is in their oversights that Weigel and Ahern deserve a rejoinder. From an anarchist perspective, at least for those of us who read Tiqqun with tremendous interest (without entirely aligning ourselves with some more or less imagined Tiqqunist position), what is striking about them is just how symptomatic their response is—how much it tells without setting out to be much more than a dismissal, a nice excuse not to read, or not to think about what you didn’t really read. (The dismissal is, it’s true, followed by a weak exhortation. But the exhortation feels tacked on and is unlikely to be the reason their piece made the rounds.)

Weigel and Ahern’s reading of Tiqqun reveals to us their political presuppositions and shortcomings; it also pushes us to make our investment in certain positions consonant with Tiqqun’s more explicit. Anarchist conversations can be different if anarchists are willing to read everything more symptomatically—Weigel and Ahern and Tiqqun, yes, but also our own bodies, our own lives. What follows, then, is not an attempt to defend Tiqqun, much less to show the right way to read them, and more of an outline of what I would like to discuss—a sketch of a conversation some of us are learning to have.

To begin, a summary of what is at stake in Preliminary Materials for a Theory of the Young-Girl (PM). First, it was included in the first issue of the Tiqqun journal (1999) and then published separately by Mille et une Nuits (2001). Second, there is a clear conceptual linkage between the Theory of Bloom (published in the same issue, and also republished separately) and these Preliminary Materials. Bloom and Young-Girl are figures that appear in both texts (as well as here and there in Tiqqun’s other writings). To enter into this topic I’ll cite an appraisal of Tiqqun for antagonist projects from the recent collection Impasses:

In Theory of Bloom and Preliminary Materials for a Theory of the Young-Girl the critical work proceeds through figures. Bloom and Young-Girl are figures. They are not concepts … they are not demographic designators. They figure social phenomena that emerge in the twentieth century. These social phenomena have to do with forms of experience and subjectivity. When we talk about these in the U.S. way, we usually use the impoverished lexicon of identity politics.

Bloom and Young-Girl are part of what Tiqqun attempted in this journal—to borrow the quaint title of another piece in that issue, a “phenomenology of everyday life.” The aim is to see what is learned if we can describe some aspects of what manifests (what is made to appear) in societies like ours as Bloom, or as Young-Girl. That is what they mean when they write that Young-Girl is a “vision machine” constructed with the aim of “making the [social] battlefield manifest.” The theory of Bloom is developed in a mostly philosophical mode; the materials for the theory of the Young-Girl are gathered as fragments and presented as preliminaries, as if work remains to be done—or must be left incomplete out of some unnamed necessity. I will return to this below. Third, Young-Girl “is obviously not a gendered concept.” I repeat this because it merits repeating; it merits repeating because it has not been understood. Young-Girl, as a figure, allows us to map out and detect ways in which apparatuses of power produce, grasp and model the libidinal sphere in every sense, including those desires which so naturally or culturally seem to cleave into the two-and-then-some of sexual difference or the immediate manyness of genders. Put differently, though the figure is not intended to render a gender visible, it does model something about how gender has come to operate, insofar as gender is a crucial aspect of certain forms-of-life well integrated into societies like ours. Our good liberals and bad radicals enjoy saying that once a sexual or gender identity has been claimed or reclaimed by someone, it is, at least to some extent, free of power relations, of domination.

We counter that the model (explicit for the liberals, implicit for some radicals) for the value of this recognition is and always has been recognition by the state and the granting of legal and moral rights, of new forms of personhood; that, when it is not the legal model, it is the model of creative consumption, in which I believe I am discovering and expressing my true self as I navigate commodity-space; and concurrently that to expand the field of the normal (i.e. more rights, commodities tailored to what I think are my needs) will never amount to the kind of disruptive liberation we anarchists are after. I will return to this matter as well. Fourth, Bloom and Young-Girl are in a complicated relation of partial resonance with a third text published in Tiqqun 2, Sonogram of a Potential. This piece argues for an “ecstatic feminism” along lines I find congruent with my reading of the Bloom/Young-Girl dyad. I will make passing reference to Sonogram, though I do not mean to absorb it entirely into the theoretical space of the first two. Sonogram deserves its own discussion.

Weigel and Ahern make several symptomatic mistakes, or force several misreadings, concerning the least ambiguous aspects of Preliminary Materials for a Theory of the Young-Girl. The first is that, after an initial reference, they refer to the book as Theory of the Young-Girl. But the book is not The, or A, Theory of the Young-Girl. To treat a text that presents itself as preliminaries, outlines, notes, “trash theory”, as a finished product, is to ignore the first and clearest sign its author or authors could give as to how to approach it. This is telling considering the amount of space they devote to inveighing against a supposed irony in PM. It does not seem to me that PM communicates in any single tone, and, if it does, it would be something less ambivalent, such as “hate [of] the Spectacle.” Second mistake: they repeatedly state (and base part of their criticism on the claim) that Tiqqun wrote anonymously. But obviously, Tiqqun did not write anonymously; they wrote in and as Tiqqun. (Inability to distinguish between true anonymity and the use of pseudonyms, heteronyms, shared names such as Tiqqun, and multiple-use names (e.g. Luther Blissett) suggests, again, willful ignorance of the most obvious clues to interpretation.) Weigel and Ahern not only assimilate pseudonymous to anonymous writing, but more strikingly claim that here such practices “abet sexism” (note legalistic language). Mansoor responds appropriately on this point, arguing that pseudonymity and non-attribution of sources are in fact “an attack on the politics of textual propriety, the law of the copyright and of the father.” To which an anarchist might add that it is no surprise that our academics insist on identification of authors and citation of sources, and that we like to write, read, and discuss writing that refuses that insistence.

Weigel and Ahern get one thing quite right: Young-Girl is a figure. But they immediately botch their response by assimilating the figural to the real, as if Young-Girl were an idea, a concept, of actually existing young girls. They are like those who read Anti-Oedipus and get confused or offended when they “realize” that Deleuze and Guattari think psychotics should be shuffled into the place of the revolutionary subject. Or like those who read Nietzsche on the overman and think it is an argument for a genetic homo superior. (To someone who responds to PM by asking “Wait a minute, how has all the concreteness of the world taken refuge in my ass?”, one might well answer: “Wait a minute, why are you so comfortably identifying with a figure of hyperconsumption?”) What does it mean, then, that Weigel and Ahern fail to mind the dash and so miss what is figural about the figure? It means that they are able to read obtusely, “ontically”, as Nina Power puts it, whenever they need to make the claim that there is sexism or misogyny afoot in PM. The figure loses all of its diagnostic and critical power when it is grasped so crudely. It is not a theory of young girls we are talking about here, so why read it all as though it is about girls or women? It is a satire, in some sense, but not a satire of or about women or girls. It is a satire, or really a détournement with dark satirical effects, about gender and power, about how power works through gender (not just as sexism), about how we cling to gender and so to the power that works through gender. Ariana Reines wrote a fascinating set of notes on her work on PM. Her opinion:

I’d like to point out for the Anglophone reader that although the introduction asserts that the “Young-Girl is evidently not a gendered concept,” and that the term is applicable to young people, gays, and immigrants, French is a gendered language; and that, moreover, the genderedness of French is not the only way to account for the fact that this book, as it accumulates, does become—in some sections more than others—a book about women. With everything biological and constructed the term women signifies. A book about us. It contains passages rife with heterosexist ressentiment and, occasionally, whiffs of (what seemed to me to be) female intellectual rage against the more vapid and conformist members of our sex.

Reines puts her finger on the risk that PM runs, the risk, precisely, of a response like Weigel and Ahern’s: the accusation of garden-variety sexism, or, worse, extreme misogyny. No, it is not a side effect of the French language; it had to run this risk to make its point. No, the possible “female intellectual” did not have to out and name herself to keep the text safe from such accusations; it would have botched precisely what makes it work. (“Tiqqun claims it has lady members…” write Weigel and Ahern. Identify yourselves for proper textual/political evaluation.)

A remark about what makes it work: the reason, I would suggest, that the book is called Preliminary Materials is that so much of it is a collection of détourned texts. (Reines: “You should know that when a passage in the text sounds like a women’s magazine, that’s because it comes from a women’s magazine”). Now, the practice of détournement was conceived by the Situationists out of desperation, as they were seeking to abolish (among other things) art as a separated sphere of life. Their analysis was that any new creation (painting, film) would either prefigure, or simply work as raw material for, future commodification—if it did not already and inescapably bear the commodity form. As a response they attempted creations composed of repurposed images or fragments, whose contrast and conflict would not just represent but enact the negativity they felt towards the world. “This combination of parody and seriousness reflects the contradictions of an era in which we find ourselves confronted with both the urgent necessity and the near impossibility of initiating and carrying out a totally innovative collective action” (Situationist International #3, 1959). That is why Weigel and Ahern are wrong to simply describe this part (most) of PM as “Situationist-ish collage.” A collage suggests a fanciful assemblage of images that go well together, like a grade school assignment to make a poster showing what you want to be when you grow up, which assumes the images of your prospective adulthood are already there, waiting for you to shop among them and creatively recombine them. Détournement, however, is primarily negative—it concerns what cannot be said, shown, or felt except by glaring, sometimes violent contrast of text and image. It shows or says that what you want to show or say can’t be shown or said—its negativity arises from the feeling that life is impossible, that you have no way of being who or what you want to be.

So if and to whatever extent this book seems to be about girls or women, those girls or women are to be understood, I would say, along the lines of such a negativity. A future theory of the Young-Girl must pass through the negative reference to woman, girl, femininity, femaleness, all of that, because it follows the articulations and investments of power apparatuses in societies like ours. “The ‘youth’ and ‘femininity’ of the Young-Girl, in fact her youthitude and femininitude, are that through which the control of appearances extends to the discipline of bodies” (PM). Reines’ other main point: sustained work with the text produced in her a disturbing somatization. “I mean it gave me migraines, made me puke; I couldn’t sleep at night, regressed into totally out-of-character sexual behavior.” I imagine this is because it produces its effects precisely by rubbing the most disgusting aspects of our culture of consumption and recuperation in your face—not just citations of sexism or misogyny but terrible evidence of your participation in them, the way that you are capable of embodying the Young-Girl. (Reines’ nausea as a symptom of the unnamed necessity that leaves the materials in a preliminary form.) That is the darkness of its satirical effects, the negativity at work in its détournement.

That said, one could go too far in thinking that the reference to girls or women is all there is to the figure. Does this not also become a book about young people? Yes, because the apparatuses also invest the “youth” of the young, the citizens and consumers of the future, and the unlucky faces of every perverse desire of the now. Why do Weigel and Ahern not discuss the Young- component of Young-Girl? The short answer is that they have a target in mind: the Man-Child (note that, since man-child is hyphenated in ordinary use, this expression elides whether or not it is a figure, the Man-Child, or just man-children here and there who are under discussion—precisely their confusion about the figure of the Young-Girl). To make their point, they must treat PM as an off-balance, sexist critique that requires its balancing answer. Mansour detects the imaginary of equality at work here, and aptly intervenes:

[They] rely on a brand of feminism that takes symmetry for “fairness,” “equity” for “equality,” as though those were not already part of the metrics on which our contemporary social relations are founded. … We are supposed to find our place, as good citizens, in the immense system of equivalence posing as equality. […]
What we need is not a program, especially one of equality when equality in the face of the uneven history, of women under patriarchy and capitalism, has served to subjugate us ever more under false promises of wealth and legal juridical recognition.

Here we could also listen to Sonogram:

There is no equality possible between men and women, nor between men and men or women and women. The smooth surface of abstract arithmetic that forms the basis for the illusion of democracy constantly cracks under the obvious weight of irreducible ethical differences, under the arbitrary nature of elective affinities, under the suspicion that the circulation of power is a question of qualities that become incarnate, that power passes through bodies.

All of which is to say that, while Weigel and Ahern state that Tiqqun’s theory “is at the tail end of a radical tradition that has largely exhausted its usefulness,” we might notice that Tiqqun, in PM and especially Sonogram, set out from an exhaustion or impasse within feminism. The latter text strongly modifies the term with the adjective ecstatic in view of that impasse, while the former bluntly states: “The triumph of the Young-Girl originates in the failure of feminism.” According to Tiqqun, the more liberal forms of feminism were easily absorbed into social institutions whose basic coercive function was not altered, whereas the more autonomist and radical forms faced the same sociocultural counteroffensive as the entirety of the revolutionary Left (in this sense it is instructive to read Tiqqun’s two histories of the Italian 70s, This is Not a Program and Sonogram, side by side). I’ll briefly add that the attention-grabbing complement to Weigel and Ahern’s (as Mansoor rightly puts it) brand of feminism, the conceit of the Man-Child, is, as a joke, a dud; as criticism, it is limited to the narrow range of dudes in humanities graduate programs (who may well be neurotic and annoying, but aren’t especially the locus of power in a society like ours). What is worst about this preconceived target, and the sloppy reading of PM that Weigel and Ahern seem to need to pass through to get there, is that “his” irony allows them to misconstrue the practice of détournement in PM, which would otherwise have been an obstacle to their literal, ontic reading. And it is in this reading and its easily “actionable” object (the desideratum of “fairness” feminism, which always knows how to act once it finds the inequality to be equalized) that the mild popularity of Weigel and Ahern’s piece lies. Who cares what some obscure group had to say about capitalism and identity? It is complicated and difficult reading. It is easier to denounce man-children—who, let me be perfectly clear, I have no intention of defending.
But some of us anarchists would rather understand what the obscure group had to say about capitalism and processes of identification, even and especially if it troubles such moral and political commonplaces as fairness and equality; even and especially if it risks the thought of the failure of feminism so as to learn a different kind of lesson from its history. Back to the figural, then. The anonymous commentator in Impasses underlines that Bloom and Young-Girl have a mutual source. “For the Young-Girl as for all other Blooms, the craving for entertainment is rooted in anguish” (PM). But Blooms sometimes resist, and part of that resistance may be to write their own theory (said theory is still “of Bloom” in the other sense of the genitive); Young-Girls, by comparison, do not resist; they consume and express themselves, they seduce and are seduced, and so their theory never comes together.

For example, Bloom figures a crisis of sexuation, and Young-Girl figures the hypersexuality that is offered as the resolution to that crisis. Asexuals versus the pornosphere… It is in this sense that the figure of the Young-Girl is a diagnostic and critical tool. Its aim is not to represent or replicate a reality whose banalities (including the banality of everyday misogyny) some of us know all too well. Its aim is to allow us to understand the deployment of a particular kind of apparatus that invests the seemingly natural or culturally familiar categories of age and gender as counter-measures to the potential for social disavowal named Bloom. “Young-Girls constitute the most lethal commando THEY have ever maneuvered against heterogeneity, against every hint of desertion” (PM). We begin by cleaving society, along psycho-political lines, into those that resist, flee, or are at least capable of it, and those that do not. We note that the former can become part of the latter; and we note that the categories of age and gender are deployed selectively, qualitatively, as part of that operation.

Two provisional conclusions. First: to discuss the figure of Young-Girl as Weigel and Ahern do—not only ontically, but also apart from its relation to Bloom—is to miss precisely what an antagonist might find useful in it. The writer in Impasses observes that Bloom is a figure of anomie, of anyone’s disinvestment in society and social norms and bonds. This happens first as a seeming alienation, an implosion of the self’s reality:

… Bloom correspond[s] to a sense of being unreal without trusting the path offered back to the real. A first approach to the Young-Girl is to grasp that it is the figure of someone who abandons that sense of unreality in favor of what THEY offer as the path back to the real. Overall this is to be understood as an effect of power, a re-binding to the social real.

This is the Young-Girl as “offensive neutralization apparatus,” according to PM. It is aimed not at everyone, but specifically at Blooms, at what is Bloom in anyone and everyone. “If Bloom’s desire reveals no ultimate truths about oppression or freedom, it does on the other hand permit or prohibit desubjectivation; it increases or diminishes collective potential” (Sonogram). If Bloom is the refusal, sometimes the impossibility of work, look in what company the Young-Girl appears, according to This is Not a Program:

… work also has a more directly militaristic function, which is to subsidize a whole series of forms-of-life-managers, security guards, cops, professors, hipsters, Young-Girls, etc.—all of which are, to say the least, anti­-ecstatic if not anti-insurrectional.

The anon in Impasses comments:

With the figure of Young-Girl we name the two principal contemporary forms of reintegration: identity and consumption as lifestyle. In their closely connected functioning, as identification with the Spectacle, the fundamental ambiguity of Bloom is betrayed, and the plans for exit are botched. The Young-Girl, Tiqqun say, is a model citizen; here citizenship is redefined as an explicit response to the threat of Bloom’s indifference to society.

The apparatus produces the phenomena that are found and figured as Young-Girl. Both aspects, Young- and -Girl, are vectors of commodification and reintegration, working together to generate permanent instability. Gender is part of the operation, but not gender alone. Age may undermine gender, and gender may undermine age. By this I mean that Young-Girl indicates the spurious empowerment of (some) women and (some) youth in societies like ours (the Spectacle’s “praise of femininity” (PM)), and at the same time the way that no position or identity thusly empowered is ever safe or stable. The paths to reintegration may almost always be described as modes of consumption: for young people, to consume what will make them pass as belonging to a world to which they are not yet fully adjusted (making them either mock adults or participants in subcultural pseudo/practice worlds); for women, to consume what will show their proper integration into society (as either an “equal” to men or belonging to a recognizable and recognized political protest ideology or grouping). “Blending into a fatal and complacent intimacy with things has become the mass activity for fetish-compatible Blooms” (Sonogram). The most criminalized, the most persecuted, the most vulnerable in all these games of power are precisely those who do not or can not be reintegrated, because they do not or can not participate in the necessary kind of consumption. Though we may have to fake it for the sake of survival.

Second provisional conclusion: to clearly distinguish between a moralistic, rights-and-recognition based, pro-identification politics and our anti-political alternative would be to rearticulate what is on the lips of so many people, especially young people, these days: that it is not only for seeming to belong to the wrong group that one is put down, shut out, yelled at, chased, beaten, and murdered, but especially for not seeming to belong to any group at all. So say those who today call themselves genderqueer or gender-nonconforming or other phrases that denote not identities but gaps between identities. So say those who for one reason or another are considered less than citizens of the Nation and bad subjects of (normal or other than normal) Sexuality. So say those for whom life in public and in private is lived as an interminable series of sex tests, gender tests, pleasure tests, body tests. One position would ask those of us who feel this way to answer the test questions, to settle on an identity, a name, a social zone, a project of seeking recognition and rights, and to wait for the crumbs to be handed out. Our anti-politics asks what there is left to do to live however we can and however we like, pushing aside every attempt to commodify the way we wear our outsiderness…

The tension is clear. Bloom is the figure of those who escape from identification—their potential rebelliousness, fragility, insanity, dangerousness, and so on. Young-Girl is the figure of those recaptured by identification in a process that makes identification seem liberatory insofar as it appears as their own and not imposed on them. “Reappropriating difference, which meanwhile has become biopower’s primary management tool, is obviously a lost cause” (Sonogram). And if age and gender are at work in this apparatus then what is at stake for us is, indeed, the question of gender. It is also what is glossed over by Weigel and Ahern: the question of youth. Like Mansoor, we are stridently anticapitalist and thus we respond differently to Tiqqun’s critique of social life in societies like ours than Weigel and Ahern. Far from a project of seeking equality or rights, we are driven to observe that almost any affirmation of gender—as natural, as socially constructed, as culturally specific, etc.—may be absorbed by the Young-Girl operation. That does not mean that any given one is or has been; but we are brought to admit that we need ethical criteria where none are to be found. Which is why some of us have been trying to elaborate more clearly (which may simply mean: practically) what the abolition of gender means. And though no one is speaking about the abolition of age, there is also an implicit negativity in our conversations towards the very path of life as it is set out for us. People used to, perhaps still do, talk about the liberation of youth.

Some of that is relevant here; but really the issue is that the age category itself makes increasingly less sense to those who have no discernible path to a stable adulthood, and those for whom adulthood can only be envisioned as a “comfortable” slow-motion implosion, for all of us torn from any acquaintance with a biological progression in our own bodies that is not also an awareness of the movement, pulse, gestures of power.

None of this is to say that what are clearly marked as Preliminary Materials for a Theory that, almost fifteen years later, has yet to appear, are sacrosanct or sufficient for an understanding of this tension, this terrain, this power. But it is to say that those who set out to criticize Tiqqun’s text without acknowledging such matters, or chalking them up to the rhetorical hyperbole of radical theory, are assuming precisely the normalcies and normativities that anarchists of our Tiqqun-reading stripe are out to destroy. “Because the only honorable departure from a minority status is not the achievement of recognition by the dominating majority or a change in force relations, but the deconstruction of the whole mechanism of recognition itself and of the idea of victory” (Sonogram). “A communization of bodies is to be expected” (PM).

source:
http://anarchistnews.org/content/mind-dash

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Raw Materials for a Theory of the “YoungGirl.” by Tiqqun

I did love you once.
-Hamlet 


i


Under the hypnotic grimaces of official pacification, a war is being waged.  A war that can no longer be called simply economic, social, or humanitarian, because it is total.  And though each of us senses that our existence has become a battlefield where neuroses, phobias, somatizations, depression, and anguish are but a kind of defeated retreat, no one can grasp the trajectory of the battle or understand what’s at stake in it.  Paradoxically, it’s because of the total character of this war – total in its means no less than in its ends – that it could be invisible in the first place.   


To open force the empire prefers underhanded methods, chronic prevention, and the spread of molecules of constraint through everyday life.  Its internal (endo) cop-ization clearly relays the general cop-ization, as individual self-control does social control.  The new police are imperceptible because they’re omnipresent.


ii


What’s at stake in the ongoing war are “forms of life,” which, for the Empire, means the selection, management, and attenuation of those forms of life.  The spectacle’s grip on the state of the public expression of desires, the bio-political monopoly on all medical knowledge-power, the containment of all deviance by an ever more psychiatrist-laden army, “coaches,” and other “facilitators” and counselors, the aesthetic-policelike filing away of everyone’s biological data, the ever more imperative and closer surveillance of behavior, the plebiscites’ proscriptions against “violence”: it’s all part of the Empire’s anthropological, or rather, anthropotechnical project.  It’s about profiling the citizens.  

Obviously, a pure politics of repression can’t do away with people’s expression of their “forms of life” (lifestyles) – not in the sense of a form of life as something molding a certain material, from the outside, without which it would be formless “bare life,” but on the contrary, a form of life in the sense of what gives rise to a particular penchant, an intimate movement in a given body in a given situation.  There’s a whole imperial project to  divert, fog, and polarize bodies with absences and impossibilities. Its reach is not so immediate, but it’s durable.  With time and by so many combined effects, the desired disarmament of bodies is obtained, in particular in terms of their immunities

Citizens are less the vanquished in this war than are those who, denying its reality, give up in it right off the bat; what is left to them in the guise of an “existence” is no longer anything but a life long effort to make oneself compatible with the Empire.  But for the others, for us, each gesture, each desire, each affect eventually boils down to the need to annihilate the Empire and its citizens.  It’s a matter of breathing, of the amplitude of passions.  We have time to go down this criminal road; nothing’s rushing us to seek out direct confrontations.  Rushing would even be a proof of our weakness.  Assaults will be launched, however, and that will be less important than the position they’re launched from, since our assaults undermine the Empire’s forces while our position undermines its strategy.  So, the more it appears to be accumulating victories, the more deeply it will sink into defeat, and the more its defeat will become irreparable.  The imperial strategy first of all consists in organizing blindness to forms of life; illiteracy to ethical differences; making the battlefront unrecognizable, if not invisible; and, in the most critical cases, disguising the real war with all kinds of false conflicts.


The retaking of the offensive from our side, then, requires us to make the battlefront clear again.  The figure of the YoungGirl is a gazing machine, designed for that purpose.  Certain people will use it to affirm the solidity of the hostile forces occupying our existences; others, more vigorous, will use it to decide on the speed and direction of their progress.  Everyone will make of it what they deserve.


iii


let’s be clear: the concept of the YoungGirl is obviously not a gendered concept.  the nightclub-going jock conforms to it just as much as the second-generation north african girl painted up to look pornstar old.  The spirited telecom retiree that splits his leisure time between the Cote d’Azur and the Parisian offices where he’s kept a foot in the door, and the metropolitan single too caught up in her career in consulting to realize that she’s already lost fifteen years of her life to it – both obey the concept.  After all, how would it be so easy to see the secret connection linking the plugged-in, puffed-up, civil-unioned humanity from the hip neighborhood and the petty-bourgeois americanized girl in the suburbs with her plastic family, if it were a gendered concept?     

in reality, the YoungGirl is only the model citizen such as commodity society has defined it since world war one, as an explicit response to revolutionary threats against it.  As such, she is a polar figure, guiding becoming more than predominating in it.  


At the beginning of the 20s, in effect, capitalism noticed that it couldn’t maintain itself as the exploitation of human labor without also colonizing everything found beyond strictly the sphere of production.  Faced with the socialists’ challenge to its dominance, it too needed to socialize itself.  It thus had to create its own culture, leisure, medicine, urbanism, sentimental education, and morals, and also create a disposition towards their perpetual renewal.  This would become the fordist compromise, the welfare state, family planning: social-democracy capitalism.  And now, submission by work, limited because the worker is still separate from his or her work, has been replaced by integration through subjective and existential conformity, meaning, at root, by consumption.  

from being merely formal, Capital’s domination has become little by little real.  the commodity society now seeks to find its best supports in the marginalized elements of traditional society themselves – women and youths first, then homosexuals and immigrants.



commodity society can now give an air of emancipation to those that in the past it treated as minorities, who were the most foreign and most spontaneously hostile to commodity society, not having been folded into its dominant norms of integration.  “the youth and their mothers,” acknowledges Stuart Ewen, “will supply the social principles of consumer ethics to the lifestyles offered by advertising.”  the youth, because adolescence is “a period of life defined by a relationship of pure consumption with civil society.” (Stuart Ewen, Captains of Consciousness ).  and women, because at the time it was the sphere of reproduction, over which women still held sway, that they needed to colonize.  Youth and Femininity, hypostatized, abstract, and recoded into youthitude and feminitude, are then elevated to the rank of ideal regulators of empire-citizen integration.  and the figure of the YoungGirl thus realizes an immediate, spontaneous, and perfectly desirable unity between those two variables.



the tomboy is indispensable as a kind of modernity, much more thrilling than all the stars and starlets so quickly invading the globalized imagination.  Albertine, found on the wall around a seaside resort, exhausts the whole collapsing world of [Proust’s] “in search of lost time” with her relaxed, pansexual vitality.  The high school girl makes her will the law in Ferdydurke.  And a new authority figure is born, one that out-classes them all.   


iv


Now, humanity, reformatted in the spectacle and biopolitically neutralized, thinks it’s defying someone by proclaiming itself to be made up of “citizens.”  The women’s magazines correct a nearly hundred-year-old mistake by finally making equivalent magazines available to men.   all the past patriarchal authority figures, from politicians to the boss by way of the cop, are YoungGirlized, even the last of them, the pope.  


there are many signs that the new physiognomy of Capital, merely sketched out in the interbellum period, has now been perfected.  “The ‘anthropomorphosis’ of Capital is complete when its fictitious character is generalized.  Then the mysterious spell is cast thanks to which generalized credit, ruling all exchange (from the bank check to the bill, from the work or marriage contract to ‘human’ and family relationships, the schooling, diplomas, and careers following the promises of all ideologies: all exchanges are now mere exchanges of dilatory appearances), hammers out, in the image of its own uniform emptiness, the ‘heart of darkness’ of all ‘personalities’ and all ‘characters.’  that’s how Capital’s people grow up, with all ancestral distinctions, all class and ethnic specificity seemingly gone.  that fact endlessly fascinates many naive people who still ‘think’ with their eyes lost in the past.” (Giorgio Cesarano, chronicle of a masked ball).  The YoungGirl emerges as the culmination point of this anthropomorphosis of Capital.  The valuation process, in the imperial phase, is no longer just capitalist: IT COINCIDES WITH THE SOCIAL.  The integration of that process, which is no longer distinct from integration into imperial “society,” and which no longer rests on any “objective” basis, demands of each person that she self-valorize endlessly.


The final moment of society’s socialization, Empire, is thus also the moment when each person is called upon to relate to herself as a value, that is, by following the central mediation of a series of controlled abstractions.  The YoungGirl, thus, would be that being that has no more intimacy with itself except as a value, and all of whose activity, in all of its details, will finally come down to self-valuation.  At each instant, she affirms herself as the sovereign subject of her reification.  All the unquestionable character of her power, all the crushing self-confidence of this blueprint-person, comprised exclusively of the conventions, codes, and representations fleetingly in force, all the authority that the least of her gestures contains — all that is immediately cross-indexed to her absolute transparency to “society.”


and precisely because of her nothingness, each of her judgements has the imperative weight of the whole organization of society — and she knows it.


v


It’s not by chance that the theory of the YoungGirl has come into being at the moment when the genesis of the imperial order is being completed, and when it has begun to be understood as such.  all things come to their end.  and the party of the YoungGirls will have to split up as well, in turn.


To the extent that YoungGirlist formatting becomes generalized, competition will get tougher and the satisfaction tied to conformity will decrease.  got to take some qualitative leap; got to take on new and unexpected attributes; got to get away to some still-virgin space.  a hollywood despair, a t.v. journal political consciousness, a vague spirituality of a neo-buddhist character, an engagement in whatever collective conscience cleaning enterprise gets the job done.  and so, feature by feature, the eco-YoungGirl is hatched.  the YoungGirls’ struggle to survive is then connected to the need to transcend the industrial YoungGirl, and the need to pass over to the eco YoungGirl.  contrary to its ancestor, the eco YoungGirl no longer displays a surge of some emancipation or other, but a security-crazed obsession with conservation.   The Empire’s been fundamentally undermined and it’s got to defend itself from entropy.  having arrived at full hegemony, it can’t do anything but crumble any more.  the eco-YoungGirl will therefore be responsible, “in solidarity,” ecological, maternal, reasonable, “natural,” respectful, more self-controlled than falsely liberated, in brief: biopolitical as hell.  she’ll no longer be miming excess, but, on the contrary, moderation, in everything.


at the moment when the evidence for the YoungGirl is so obvious it becomes a cliche, the YoungGirl is already transcended, at least in its primitive, crudely sophisticated mass production aspect.   It is this critical transitional situation we are going to leverage ourselves on.


vi


except incorrectly speaking – which may be our intention – the jumble of fragments that follows in no way comprise a theory.  they are materials accumulated randomly in encounters with, visits with, and observation of YoungGirls; pearls extracted from their newspapers and magazines; expressions gleaned in sometimes dubious circumstances, arranged into no particular order.  They are gathered here under approximate headings, as they were published in Tiqqun 1; a bit of order had to be given them.  The decision to put them out like this, in all their incompleteness, their contingent origins, with all the ordinary excess of elements that would have comprised a nicely presentable theory if they were polished, cleaned out, and whittled down, means choosing trash theory for once.  The cardinal ruse of theoreticians in general is that they present the result of their elaborations in such a way as to make the elaboration process itself no longer appear in them.  In our estimation, this ruse doesn’t work any more in the face of today’s bloom-esque attention span fragmentation.  We’ve chosen a different one. minds looking for moral comfort or for vice to condemn will find in these scattered pages but roads that will lead them nowhere.  in fact we’re not so much trying to convert YoungGirls as we are trying to trace out all the corners of a fractalized battlefront of YoungGirlization. And to supply the weapons for a hand to hand, blow by blow fight, wherever you may find yourself.


Void Network invites you to read all this influential book here:
https://younggirl.jottit.com/

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