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There is an untold story of what happens away from the streets, the rallies, the skillshares, and the gatherings. When our attempt to hold onto the connection has failed, and dirty dishes become as destructive to movements as state co-optation. The wave of insurrectionary hope has reached a lull, and another world no longer feels possible.
That social fallout, which nobody warns you about, shows us that the revolution is about tearing down not just the hierarchical systems that control us but those within ourselves. When people caught up in a movement are unable to do that collectively, or when we have trouble being our best selves, the communities we attempt to build devolve into something else. Bonds are broken, and there’s a new layer of trauma you must deal with.
The way that we have internalized systems of hierarchy means that we hurt each other in familiar ways even when we claim to strive for the same political goals. We are hurt people, and in this world where we are born and taught violence, it is important to remember that no matter how much you try to deconstruct, the ways we have absorbed power dynamics mean that we do and will continue to cause others harm.
This is not an excuse for people to treat each other in fucked up ways, it just seems to be what happens. We throw political labels loosely; at this point, what do “radical” or “revolutionary” even mean? I regret ever allowing myself to be labeled these things. It’s almost like a self-sabotage, a level or an idea that one can never truly live up to. There’s a lot of back-patting when people christen themselves radicals or revolutionaries, and too little self-reflection.
Everyone comes into the movement with all of their previous baggage, feeling isolated and abandoned by this world, and is happy to meet people that make them feel like they are no longer alone in recognizing the madness. Like a church that has helped you find sobriety, you baptize yourself in radical thought, letting go of old sinful habits as well as the unenlightened. This is your new life, this is your new self.
There’s an inner change that happens the more you begin to deconstruct the assumptions embedded within our social arrangement. You begin to look differently at the people in your life and the things that once brought you joy. You lose yourself in a hypercritical takedown of the world, but you tell yourself it’s okay, because you’ve found people who are also growing and changing and deconstructing. The attraction of movements is like the pull of the moon, a strength that cannot be seen except by the end results of its magnetism. It draws in, creating waves that are filled with sand, shells, and various other life-forms. For a moment we are one, a part of something bigger than ourselves. Then the inevitable crash happens, and like currents we are pulled apart. Some return to the shore; some get dragged into the next wave; some drown.
Mass street movements like those that have gathered in the past decade have followed this pattern, all eventually collapsing under their volume. We are not all one, nor do we share the same struggle; “we” does not exist. Instead, resistance is a layered network of struggles, and we coexist within those layers. Just because a bunch of people can shut down a freeway together doesn’t mean our goals are the same, even if some of our identities overlap.
At the present, it is hard to imagine that my desire for liberation and autonomy will amount to more than just a collection of moments, instead of my full existence. This is why despair is so heavy. Participating in so many waves only to see regression has left me feeling washed up. There’s an idea that those who have reached despair have given up, and perhaps that is true to an extent. Being in resistance culture has changed and scarred me. It is not only the police who have left me with trauma, but relationships and experiences with others who were also participating in these various spaces. So much of resistance culture and rhetoric is about sacrifice and martyrdom. “Organize!” they shout. “We must sacrifice ourselves for a better future, and if you’re not organizing towards that, then what are you really doing?” This guilt-tripping reveals a weak analysis for how we value each other’s labors, and also shows how capitalism, ableism, and other systems of oppression still conceive what we consider to be activism™. It encourages burnout and rewards overextension while belittling anything less as a failure to do “real work.”
Like the nice guy from your grad-school program who tries to cover up his hurt feelings by concocting a general theory that explains why he never got a text after his one-night stand, the book portrays the Young-Girl as vain, frivolous, and acquisitive. She serves the traditional female role of reproducing the population and social order, but here, the social order is corrupt. Therefore, Tiqqun suggests, their intervention requires an ironic performance of misogyny. [...]
We believe that Tiqqun has mistaken its object. The real enigma of our age is not the Young-Girl, who, we submit, has been punished enough already for how commodity culture exploits her. It is, rather, her boyish critic. Forms of crypto- and not-so-crypto misogyny have proved startlingly persistent not just within the radical left but also in the bourgeois-left spheres of cultural production: the publishing world, the museum, and the humanities departments of liberal-arts universities. We propose that a particular type is responsible for perpetuating such bad behavior. Call him the Man-Child.
hahahha
The Man-Child has two moods: indecision, and entitlement to this indecisiveness..
The Man-Child tells a racist joke. It is not funny. It is the fact that the Man-Child said something racist that is.
[...]
The Man-Child breaks up with you even though the two of you are not in a relationship. He cites his fear of settling down. You don’t want marriage, at least not with him, but he never thought to ask you.
[...]
If the Man-Child could use his ironic sexism to build a new world, would you want to live in it? Would anyone?
amazing
Tiqqun offers an edgy update to such misogynist metaphors deployed for the purposes of demystification. At times, it speaks longingly of women who have not been utterly corrupted by capitalism. But when it learns what it knew all along—there is no outside; all human relationships have become reified—its disappointment at finding no one authentic to grow old with intensifies its vitriol. “It wasn’t until the Young-Girl appeared that one could concretely experience what it means to ‘fuck,’ that is, to fuck someone without fucking anyone in particular. Because to fuck a being that is really so abstract, so utterly interchangeable, is to fuck in the absolute.” Tiqqun’s language may be obscene, but its point is nothing new. The failure to see women as “anyone in particular,” or as subjects endowed with their own ends, has allowed men to fuck women over for centuries.
love the writing
Tiqqun can insist, despite all the evidence to the contrary, that the Young-Girl is “obviously not a gendered concept” because it knows that we know that it knows this. Tiqqun uses works of Continental philosophy in the same way that schoolyard bullies use in-jokes: as passwords that grant access to a protected inner circle. Tiqqun assumes that readers will assume that writers so well versed in texts that have spoken truth to power could not really hate women. The prestige of the theoretical vocabulary that Tiqqun’s members have mastered bolsters their credibility.
At the same time, Theory of the Young-Girl adopts a playful pose that prevents real Young-Girls, or any Grown Women who might find time to read books published by Semiotext(e), from calling them out. Because Tiqqun’s collage does not attribute sources, we can read any given passage in disavowing quotation marks, as a lightning bolt of original insight, or as both. Publishing anonymously is only a backup measure for evading responsibility. Lift out any one line to object to it—“Wait a minute, how has all the concreteness of the world taken refuge in my ass?”—and you would be sure to look foolish, even if you did know whom to ask.
[...]
Even when adopted by radical theory, this knowing posture is conservative. Knowingness is the attitude that allows sexism to persist in progressive institutions that you would expect to know better, precisely because you would. When casual sexism pervades leftist theory, one assumes it is ironic; when progressive institutions ignore gender politics, one assumes this is because struggles for equality have already been won, or must be deferred so we can attend to more pressing political needs. Intellectuals tend to show class allegiance, bracketing or ignoring casual sexism in their own circles. They project misogyny outward, onto Middle America megachurches and racialized others, or onto the powerful men that pander to those masses.
There are donuts in the break room, and I eat one. No one is talking to me or looking at me, as usual. I say almost nothing, almost all the time. Obviously, I recognize, in a grander sense, that I have a tendency to alienate myself and blow things out of proportion, and that these women are basically guiltless from a certain perspective. I fully recognize the concept of perspective. The donut is down in my throat, a disgusting bolus, after two bites.
I recognize so much that it bores me. [...] I know that the woman checking her phone in the corner, pretending I'm not here, is wrapped up in some distraction so utterly meaningless that it should, if she reflected on it, shake her to her core.
Back at my desk I sit and slowly collect money that I can use to pay the rent on my apartment and on food so that I can continue to live and continue to come to this room and sit at this desk and slowly collect money.
[...] Modelling work is controlled by agencies and clients in almost every way: how to look, walk, talk, shave, shop, eat, exercise, relate to others are all dictated on and off the clock. In this way, modelling work is an explicit distillation of the social controls usually implicitly experienced by workers. Modelling is a quite pure neo-liberal experience. As Wendy Brown points out in Undoing the Demos, individuals ‘are expected to comport themselves in ways that maximize their capital value in the present and enhance their future value […] though practices of entrepreneurialism, self-investment, and/or attracting investors’.
[...] models are often paid not in cash, but in ‘trade’, typically clothing or perhaps a handbag. In such cases, employers choose to hire dozens of workers for the cost of their own products, which models effectively advertise by wearing or using them in their highly ‘Instagrammed’ personal life. These ‘perks’ may offer a temporary feeling of approval or success, but they in no way offer greater power over one’s own working life.
Such scraps of luxury aren’t gifts, they are the tacit purchase of a model’s gratitude and loyalty.