The mystique of the young girl

‘The YoungGirl’s “I” is as thick as a magazine.’ (Tiqqun, 2001: 9)

YoungGirl’s central argument can be summarised by two short quotations: ‘The YoungGirl is the place where the commodity and the human coexist in an apparently non-contradictory manner’ (Tiqqun, 2001: 17) and ‘The YoungGirl occupies the central kernel of the present system of desires’ (Tiqqun, 2001: 9). ³ Drawing on Guy Debord’s Situationist critique Society of the Spectacle (1967), Tiqqun assert that ‘Capitalism has made particular use of the YoungGirl in order to extend its hegemony over the totality of social life’ (p. 24), but the problem the YoungGirl particularly represents is apparent in her own labour at becoming a commodity. ‘Marx must not have been thinking of the YoungGirl’, Tiqqun write, ‘when he wrote that “commodities cannot take themselves to the market or exchange themselves among each other”’ (p. 18). Luce Irigaray’s (1985) use of the same passage from Marx to discuss the psychoanalytic erasure of female homosexuality might prompt us to notice that Tiqqun do not care at all about what girls do, or want. In fact, their theory depends on exactly this. For Tiqqun, despite the fact that it would be true for no girl or girl culture, ‘Whether from the countryside, the ghetto, or the expensive neighborhoods, all YoungGirls are equivalent as YoungGirls’ (p. 19). Tiqqun make the YoungGirl equal to money itself. In her, they claim, ‘human relationships mask commodity relationships that mask human relationships’ (p. 17).

Tiqqun sidestep all questions about doing girlhood/being girls by asserting that the YoungGirl is not necessarily a girl at all. People of any sex or age, they insist, can submit to this false ideal. But although they assert that boys can be YoungGirls (even the Pope can be one), the gender and age of this figure are definitive. She appears where childishness disappears (p. 14) and those zine-style insertions – ‘It’s my hair and I can do what I want with it!’ (p. 10); ‘I’m getting new boobs for my 18th birthday’ (p. 11) – leave no doubt that the YoungGirl is a girl. Most importantly, the harm she does is to a subject young girls never were. She’s a ‘freed slave’ seeking revenge in ‘an ironic epilogue where the “masculine sex” is the victim and object of its own alienated desires’ (p. 5). The YoungGirl becomes the ‘model citizen’ of ‘commodity society’ as ‘Youth and Femininity, hypostatized, abstract, and recoded into youthitude and feminitude, are then elevated to the rank of ideal regulators of empire-citizen integration’ (p. 4).

The significance Tiqqun attribute to the YoungGirl is clarified by their quotation from Baudrillard: ‘“Woman” is given to women to consume; Youth is given to youths to consume, and in this formal, narcissistic emancipation, their real liberation can be successfully prevented’ (as quoted in Tiqqun, 2001: 10). In its own context, Baudrillard’s claim follows from a broader argument:

Women, young people and the body – the emergence of all of which after thousands of years of servitude and forgetting in effect constitutes the most revolutionary potentiality – and, therefore, the most fundamental risk for any social order whatever– are integrated and recuperated as a ‘myth of emancipation’. (Baudrillard, 1970: 137)

It is easier to draw from Baudrillard than from Tiqqun an argument about what this means. Tiqqun’s aphoristic style is meant to offer us only ‘raw materials’ for a theory or ‘notes towards’ one. Any of their fragments can escape arguments against any other and none are held responsible for the rest. At one point, ‘Everything’s cool, nothing’s serious’ for the YoungGirl (Tiqqun, 2001: 9); at another the fact that she is nothing but ‘price’ ‘makes her sick to her stomach’ (p. 17). But through its contradictions, YoungGirl manages to be utterly coherent, sustained by the feeling that it is right; that there is some intractable contradictory problem of modern subjectivity that The Girl stands for. YoungGirl operates on the broad cultural assumption that the modern experience of inauthenticity and powerlessness is a girl thing and that all forms of dangerous complicity can be associated with girls and thus dismissed as not the behaviour of subjects at all. I think this is what American comedic critic Stephen Colbert (2005) would call ‘truthiness’: a truth-claim based on the exigent prejudice of feeling. The idea that girls are the weakest link against tyranny and the surest trap for the human condition just feels true. But it remains to ask why.

‘The YoungGirl’s triumph originates in the failure of feminism. The YoungGirl doesn’t speak; on the contrary: she is spoken – by the Spectacle … The YoungGirl’s sentimentalism and materialism are but two complementary aspects of her central nothingness, no matter how opposite they may be in appearance.’ (Tiqqun, 2001: 8)

However slippery she may be in other respects, Tiqqun’s YoungGirl has a definite periodisation, appearing in the wake of ‘World War One, as an explicit response to revolutionary threats’ (Tiqqun, 2001: 4). For Tiqqun, The YoungGirl is modernity, from its ‘biopolitics’ to its taxonomies in general. This periodisation helps select their favourite tools. They bounce off Joyce, repeatedly sample from Proust and Gombrowicz, quote Adorno and Horkheimer and lengthily from Kracauer’s 1930 essay on shop girls, ‘The Employees’, and they tie YoungGirls to the emergence of fashion as a drama of differentiation with conformity through Georg Simmel’s ‘The Philosophy of Fashion’ (1905) (Tiqqun, 2001: 15). Tiqqun’s YoungGirl generically stands for modern (Man’s) unfreedom. She’s an example of what Alice Jardine (1985) calls ‘gynesis’ in critiquing philosophical appropriations of ‘the feminine’ to understand the modern condition. Tiqqun acknowledge, in passing, that categories like ‘manliness’ and ‘femininity’ are also ‘insubstantial identities’; ‘convenient tools in the spectacular management of social relations’ and ‘fetishes necessary for the circulation and consumption of other fetishes’ (p. 15). But the purpose of their text is to insist that The Girl stands for gender. It might seem that feminists would be very cautious about this, and about installing The Girl as a figure of calculating complicity. But feminism has a highly problematic relation to such claims, which brings me to the continuity between Tiqqun and feminist critique of girl culture.

In Simone de Beauvoir’s ground-breaking The Second Sex, feminist theory begins in many respects by delineating girlhood – ‘La Jeune Fille’ – as a discrete stage of woman’s lived experience marking a newly sexualised phase of learning gender roles. In Beauvoir’s account, in strategically constituting herself as an object of desire, the girl is ‘an agent in her own subjection to something that looks like destiny and yet appeals to her own desires: she “looks forward” to a “plot … already hatched”’ (Driscoll, 2013: xii, quoting Beauvoir, 2009: 359). This becoming-object insists on The Girl’s ‘cultural significance’ at the same time as it requires girls’ desiring engagement with the process, an identification to which Beauvoir repeatedly returns. We can see the direct influence of this account on generations of feminists, including in recent texts like Angela McRobbie’s The Aftermath of Feminism (2008). Arguing that feminism has been ‘taken into account’ by a social field that can use feminist rhetoric to both obscure and justify systemic inequality, McRobbie is especially critical of a consumer culture that mythologises the liberated girl, even when it is not addressed specially to girls, as a way of supporting a fresh ‘post-feminist’ sexual contract.

Both McRobbie and Baudrillard suggest a consequence about which Beauvoir could hardly speculate, in which liberated woman ‘becomes more and more merged with her body’ in a consumer society defined by appearances (Baudrillard, 1970: 137, emphasis in original). Baudrillard actually makes this argument relative to ‘all the categories whose emancipation constitutes the leitmotiv of modern democratic society’ (1970: 137), but some important differences arise in applying this argument to girls. If The Girl is clearly also given to girls to consume, Tiqqun is right to suggest that this ideal is actually given to a whole social field. Insofar as they are closely associated with minority, and often literally minors, girls are widely deemed incapable of responsibly determining the significance of The Girl. The range of people, groups and institutions who conceive the girl’s ‘own existence as a management problem she needs to resolve’ (Tiqqun, 2001: 12) extends far beyond girls themselves. In fact she is categorically unauthorised to attempt such a resolution.

Tiqqun’s assertion that ‘The YoungGirl understands freedom as the possibility of choosing from among a thousand insignificances’ (p. 22) becomes continuous at this point with feminist arguments against the sexualisation of girlhood. For both, the popularity of particular forms and practices among girls becomes evidence of the pervasive reach of consumer identity contracted to a social totality. The YoungGirl as Spectacle becomes the same thing as girl culture. The YoungGirl

demands of each person that she self-valorize endlessly. … 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. (Tiqqun, 2001: 4)

‘It’s not the theory of the YoungGirl that is the product of misogyny, but the YoungGirl herself. Open any women’s magazine and you’ll see … When fools protest against the evidence that “the world isn’t a commodity” (and, by the way, that they aren’t either) they’re feigning a virginity that only justifies their powerlessness. We want none of that virginity nor of that powerlessness. We propose a different emotional education.’ (Tiqqun, 2001: back cover)

The greatest obstacle to a feminist reading of YoungGirl appears in the way Tiqqun talk about girls, and I want to turn to this obstacle with a clear sense that it is also a problem for feminism. For Tiqqun, girls’ bodies are less their own than are other people’s:

The YoungGirl’s body is but a concession that is given her more or less lastingly, which clears up the reasons why she hates it so much. It’s just a rented residence, something that she doesn’t really possess or usufruct, that she is only free to use. (p. 15)

For Tiqqun, the girl’s body is not only capital but sexuality itself. While ‘Sexuality does not exist’ (p. 14), the YoungGirl reifies that nothingness by giving it form. She is pre-eminently both seductive and virginal; perversely both untouchable and unresponsive. She is also ‘ontologically a virgin, untouched by any experience’, inevitably exciting ‘a desire to conquer and get off on her’ (Tiqqun, 2001: 9). This virgin opposition to experience not only allows her to be a commodity but allows her to mean sex whether she has it or not. While her ‘social labor’ is entirely seduction she also ‘comes to an end with seduction’ (p. 14). There is no point asking about the sex she might have or want (or does not, on either count). In defence of this desire which is everywhere for but not of girls, Tiqqun fall back on that claim that by YoungGirl they just mean any subject stripped of meaning by capital and its henchmen. Yet nothing about the girl-ness of the YoungGirl is incidental, including her sexualisation.

Tiqqun and I broadly agree with Michel Foucault’s (1984) account of the categorical reinvention of sex in modernity. One thing Foucault foregrounds that gets lost in some feminist accounts of girlhood is the importance of demarcating minority in new ways around the category of sex by simultaneously generationalising and gendering it. The modern idea of girlhood is not only a set of ideas about how one becomes a woman, but it emerged within legislative debates and related discourses on education, labour, psychology, and culture that also produced this modern redefinition of ‘sex’. As Danielle Egan’s and Robbie Duschinsky’s viewpoint pieces in this issue also suggest, few things today seem more central than sexuality to imagining girlhood as an identity, a process, or a set of disciplines. In a dominant public popular sphere, across its legislative, pedagogical, and leisure formations, girlhood is understood as naturally directed towards sexuality and yet categorically to be protected from sexuality.

Contemporary images of girlhood continue to pervasively represent the girl as a sexual category in this double-sided way. This does not make them unimportant, but it strips the sexualisation debates of an end-time rhetoric that justifies extreme fears and reactions (see Egan, 2013). Certainly some formations of the modern girl are a fetish warding off age, experience, and ‘the passage of time’ (Tiqqun, 2001: 8), but this is as much a problem when it appears as a protective shield around ideal girlhood innocence as in any other form. There is need for feminist intervention in the ways girls are made to represent both sex and gender, but it would better take the form of asking how it is that girls bear the symbolic burden of this representation for the social. We might ask, for example, how it is that a girl playing at or dressed as a woman articulates sex in a way a boy playing at or dressed as a man does not – and most of all what that says about the way we conceive and experience girlhood.

The core feminist critique of girls’ complicity in their own sexualisation is, somewhat paradoxically, also in Tiqqun’s sights. The insistence that ‘You shouldn’t devalue yourself like that!’ endorses the proposition that girlhood ‘is – above all – all about making [your]self valued’ (Tiqqun, 2001: 18). It’s ‘By a trick of commodity reason,’ Tiqqun point out, that ‘what determines’ this commodity-girl’s ‘value is supposed to be precisely what is non-commodity, “authentic,” and “good” about her’ (p. 19). For many feminists who would vehemently reject Tiqqun’s language of seduction and conquest, girlhood, appears as an opposition between Bad Girls (exemplifying commodified complicity with the system) and Good Girls (icons of unmarked essential innocence). These figures hail one another when only one is used. Embracing this gut feeling that The Girl is submission to unfreedom gives feminism a powerful point of narrative departure. But if we allow such overarching associations of girlhood with submission then, while we claim for feminism the glory of overcoming girlhood we diminish opportunities for both a feminism not at war with female experience and feminist girlhood. And we embrace the girl who has failed feminism’s necessary complement – a trope of mythic girlhood innocence underpinning both the erotic frisson associated with violating that myth and the impossibility of girls’ own experience and agency.

The attraction of YoungGirl for many feminists is its claim that girls are deluded, mystified, in their enjoyment of commodity culture produced especially for and about them. Imagining that such pleasure means they embrace their own commodification any more than academics or activists with the latest in smart technologies involves important assumptions about girlhood and gender. Feminism has not similarly dismissed maternity or sex as sites for feminist engagement, for example, because they are so often commodified. In fact, as with girlhood, it is the very importance of these social formations that makes them ripe for commodification and means they are not exhausted by it. The strength of Tiqqun’s intervention for feminists is their argument that

The YoungGirl’s education follows an inverse trajectory compared to all other kinds of education: immediate perfection, inborn into youth first of all, and then efforts to keep herself on the level of that primary nullity, and at the end failure, faced with the impossibility of going back in time. (Tiqqun, 2001: 10)

The desires that generate greatest concern in feminist critiques of girls’ sexualisation are generally of two types. First, commodified forms of young gender role-play deemed to be hyper-feminine, from ‘princesses’ or ‘fairies’ and associated images of girl-as-beautifully-innocent-ideal-object to those forms of ‘tween’ culture that seek to imitate ‘teen’ fashions and desires. And second, fashionable exposures of a sexualised body among adolescents, spanning pre-teen to young adult years. This can mean commodities marketed to girls that represent active female sexuality or girls’ representation of themselves as sexual selves – from styling to sexting. The challenge of not just facilitating alternatives but actively contesting these desires preoccupies a plethora of feminist websites, government reports, protest campaigns, and popular publications. These dangers are arranged around a contradiction given that prolonging the innocent-ideal-object game would seem to ward off the glamorous-adult-woman game. Protests that these practices sexualise girls are united by excluding girls from experience: from any sense that they encounter such images in the changing world of their own experience (see Renold and Ringrose, 2011) and from new experiences which would equip her for crossing the numerous lines drawn around her to demarcate differences between child, girl, and woman. They also ignore the historical alignment between girlhood and sexuality which extends to her ideal innocence and the fact that, far from being a history of ever-increasing submission, the proliferation of commodified girl culture is contemporary with the striking expansion of girls’ choices and expectations. Viewing this as a conspiracy between capital and patriarchy ignores the way girl culture both admits contradictions and assigns to girls the authority to negotiate them.

I think I could hardly have been more wrong about Tiqqun the first time around. YoungGirl has none of the feminist zine’s sense of being interpellated by the girl culture against which they protest. They claim to, but just as the YoungGirl remains a girl despite their protests, they remain a critical observer. The YoungGirl is a thing you might fuck, or get off on, but not an ‘I’ you ever felt called on to be, let alone feel at risk of being confused with. The love in this hatred is that of Vladimir Nabokov’s Humbert Humbert for his Lolita rather than anything to do with the person Dolores Haze might have been. We could compare YoungGirl to any number of Modernist experiments with The Girl, but Lolita is especially relevant as a story about obsession with young girls that incorporates its own necessity. Lolita’s reflexive prologue tells us that ‘“Lolita” should make all of us – parents, social workers, educators – apply ourselves with still greater vigilance and vision to the task of bringing up a better generation in a safer world’ (Nabokov, 1979: 7). The relationship between YoungGirl and Lolita extends past their critique of commodified girl sexuality to their erotic abstraction of the girl from her own experience. Tiqqun write that ‘to “fuck” with’ a YoungGirl, ‘a being that’s so completely abstract, so effectively interchangeable, is to fuck with (delve into) the absolute’ (p. 21). She is reduced to absolute Value, so that ‘One does not get off on a YoungGirl, or on her getting off; one gets off on getting off on her’ (p. 21). Tiqqun’s YoungGirl and protests against capitalist sexualisation of girls arm each other with the shared assertion that an innocence that trumps any experience is what defines girls. It seems obvious that no feminist account of girlhood should settle for getting off on The Girl’s innocence. Much protest against the sexualisation of girls risks exactly this, however, idealising the I/we who escapes exactly by exposing the untouchable perfection of the young girl.

In Aftermath, McRobbie recants her earlier interest in the tactical possibilities offered by popular culture, especially those interventions that laid the groundwork for girls studies by insisting on the importance of feminist engagement with girls’ lives and pleasures. They were, she fears, overly optimistic and lacked a sufficiently rigorous theory of social power (McRobbie, 2008: 2–5). But as a scholarly field, girls studies has always been dominated (including in McRobbie’s own work) by two thematic concerns: how gender is reproduced and the relationship between girls and commodities. Both resolve into a single dominant question about how much agency girls have when orienting themselves in the world. Girls studies at its best engages critically with the mythic work done by idealised figures of girlhood. The fact that Tiqqun, much discussion of YoungGirl today, and many concerned ‘reports’ on girls’ sexualisation, are together generally unaware of the decades of feminist work on girls and girl culture means they have little reason to hesitate in their sweeping generalisations. For Tiqqun, girls seem unlikely to speak back about who gets off on them and how. This should never be the case for girls studies, where it is imperative that we know ideal Girls are in practice inseparable from highly visible critiques, including by girls, and from a field of counter-images. The Tiqqun position incorporates an encompassing generic Girl into a metaphysical crisis at the coalface of capitalism, in the process disappearing actually existing girls, who are inseparable from the impact of feminism on their contexts and their desires.