PRELIMINARIES
15 “the Young-Girl is simply the model citizen as redefined by consumer society since World War I, in explicit response to the revolutionary menace. As such, the Young-Girl is a polar figure, orienting, rather than dominating, outcomes.”
15 “At the beginning of the 1920s, capitalism realized that it could no longer maintain itself as the exploitation of human labor if it did not also colonize everything that is beyond the strict sphere of production. Faced with the challenge from socialism, capital too would have to socialize. It had to create its own culture, its own leisure, medicine, urbanism, sentimental education and its own mores, as well as a disposition toward their perpetual renewal. This was the Fordist compromise, the Welfare-State, family planning: social-democratic capitalism.”
15 “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.”
16 “Hypostasized Youth and Femininity, abstracted and recoded into Youthitude and Femininitude, find themselves raised to the rank of ideal regulators of the integration of the Imperial citizenry.”
1 THE YOUNG-GIRL AS PHENOMENON
26 JULIUS MOSES “Highly visible physical imperfections, even if they have no effect on aptitude for work, weaken people socially, transforming them into the involuntary invalids of work.”
27 – 28 “the entire significance of boy-bands and girl-bands comes from making a show of the very fact of making a show. The lie consists, here—by means of crude irony—in presenting as a lie what is on the contrary the truth of the Young-Girl.”
29 “The old age of the Young-Girl is no less hideous than her youth. From one end to the other, her life is nothing but a progressive shipwreck in formlessness, and never an irruption of becoming. The Young-Girl wallows in the limbo of time.”
32 SIEGFRIED KRACAUER “The rush to the numerous beauty salons springs partly from existential concerns, and the use of cosmetic products is not always a luxury. For fear of being withdrawn from use as obsolete, ladies and gentlemen dye their hair, while forty-year-olds take up sports to keep slim.”
33 “The incompressible agitation of the Young-Girl, in the image of this society at its every point, is governed by the hidden demand to render effective a false and pathetic metaphysics, whose most immediate substance is the negation of the passage of time, and the obscuring of human finitude.”
34 “The Young-Girl appears as the product and the principle outcome of the formidable surplus crisis of capitalist modernity. She is the proof and the support of the limitless pursuit of the process of valorization when the process of accumulation proves limited (by the limits of the planet itself, ecological catastrophe, or social implosion).”
38 “The Young-Girl knows everything as devoid of consequences, even her own suffering. Everything is funny, nothing’s a big deal. Everything is cool, nothing is serious.”
39 “The Young-Girl adopts above all the point of view of psychology, about herself as much as the course of the world. This is how she manages to present a certain consciousness of her own reification, a consciousness that is itself reified, as it’s cut off from all gesture.”
41 “In love more than anywhere else, the Young-Girl behaves like an accountant, always suspecting that she loves more than she is loved, and that she gives more than she receives.”
42 “The Young-Girl occupied the central node of the present system of desire.”
42 “The Young-Girl’s every experience is drawn back incessantly into the preexisting representation she has made for herself. All the overwhelming concreteness, the living part of the passage of time and of things are known to her only as imperfections, as alterations of an abstract model.” INEVITABLE
44 ?? “I’m so happy I could give a shit about being free!”
44 “The Young-Girl is steeped in déjà-vu. For her, the first-time experience is always a second time in representation.”
44 “Naturally, nowhere has there been a “sexual liberation”—that oxymoron!—but only the pulverization of everything that slowed the total mobilization of desire in view of the production of merchandise. The “tyranny of pleasure” does not incriminate pleasure, but tyranny.”
47 JEAN-TRISSOTIN BAUDRILLARD “Women are given Woman to consume, the young are given the Young and, in this formal and narcissistic emancipation, their real liberation is successfully averted”
2 THE YOUNG-GIRL AS TECHNIQUE OF THE SELF
49 “The Young-Girl is the Young-Girl’s ideal.”
49 ?? “Tired of macho guys? Why not try an objectified man…”
56 “Contrary to what is true of traditional societies, which recognized the existence of abject things and exposed them as such, the Young-Girl denies their existence and dissimulates them.”
59 SILVIO BERLUSCONI “They have offended the thing I hold most dear: my image”
59 “The Young-Girl always-already lives as a couple, that is, she lives with her image.”
3 THE YOUNG-GIRL AS SOCIAL RELATION
63 “Every relation with the Young-Girl consists in being chosen anew at every instant. In this it imposes the same contractual precarity as work does.”
70 “As identities without substance, “virility” and “femininity” are but useful tools in the Spectacle’s management of social relations. They are fetishes necessary to the circulation and consumption of other fetishes.”
71 “The fiction of sexuality presents the truth/appearance, sincerity/falsehood alternative in such a way that all that is not sexuality is rejected as falsehood.”
72 “The Spectacle seeks to awaken the Young-Girl sleeping in everyone. This is the uniformity whose phantasm it pursues.”
4 THE YOUNG-GIRL AS COMMODITY
81 “The Young-Girl is the most authoritarian commodity in the world of authoritarian commodities, the one that nobody can fully possess and that nevertheless polices you and can be withdrawn from you at any moment.” MISOGYNY / MALE PRIVILEGE
81 “The vitrified aspect of the face of the Young-Girl must me explained by her status as commodity: She is the crystallization of a certain quantity of labor spent to put her in accordance with the norms of a certain type of exchange. And the form of the Young-Girl’s appearance, which is also that of a commodity, is characterized by the obscuring, if not the voluntary forgetting, of this concrete labor.”
83 “In our time, the Young-Girl is the commodity most in demand: the human commodity.”
83 “The eye of the Young-Girl carries within it the effective entering-into-equivalence of all places, all things, and all beings. Thus the Young-Girl can consciously reduce everything that enters her field of perception to something she already knows from alienated Advertising.”
84 “Where the Spectacle reigns, the value of the Young-Girl is immediately effective: her beauty itself is felt as executive power.
In order to conserve her “scarcity value,” the Young-Girl must sell herself only at the highest price, which signifies that she must usually give up selling herself. Thus, as we often see, the Young-Girl is an opportunist even in abstinence.”
86 “The whore represents the most eminent saintliness that the world of commodities can conceive of.”
95 GEORG SIMMEL “As long as free love doesn’t become widespread, a certain number of young girls will always be needed to fill the function that prostitutes fill today.”
95 “The currency of coitus is self-esteem.”
96 “The time freed up by the increasing perfection and efficiency of the instruments of production did not result in any decrease in “labor” time, but in the extension of the sphere of “labor” into the totality of life, and especially in the constitution and maintenance of a sufficient stock of living currency, of available Blooms and Young-Girls, to give birth to a parallel and pre-regulated sexual marketplace.
The ghostly nature of the Young-Girl echoes the ghostly nature of participation in this society, for which the Young-Girl is also the remuneration.”
6 THE YOUNG-GIRL AS COMPACT POLITICAL APPARATUS
97 “How could capitalism have managed to mobilize affects, molecularizing its power to the point of colonizing all of our feelings and emotions, if the Young-Girl had not offered herself as intermediary?” INEVITABLE
97 “Seduction is the new opium of the masses. It is the freedom of a world without freedom, the joy of a world without joy.”
98 “By sentiment, by physiology, by family, by “sincerity,” by “health,” by wants, by obedience to all social determinisms, by all means, the Young-Girl protects herself from liberty.
Behind the appearance of a laughable neutrality, the most formidable of political oppression apparatuses is on view in the Young-Girl.”
98 “Domination has discovered a bias more powerful than the simple power of constraint: directed attraction.”
99 “Under the domination of the market, seduction immediately presents itself as the exercise of a power.” INEVITABLE
99 “The Young-Girl has neither opinions nor positions of her own. She takes shelter as soon as she can in the shadow of the victors.”
99 “The “modern” kind of labor, in which a certain quantity of the labor force is no longer taken advantage of, but rather the docile exercise of certain “human qualities,” suits perfectly well the mimetic skills of the Young-Girl.
The Young-Girl is the cornerstone of the system maintaining the market order, and is at the service of all its restorations. Because the Young-Girl wants to fuck in peace.”
100 “The Young-Girl is the ideal collaborator.
The Young-Girl conceives liberty as the possibility of choosing from among a thousand insignificances.
The Young-Girl aims for the regulation of all the senses.
In the world of authoritarian commodities, all naïve praise of desire immediately becomes praise of servitude.
There is no slave of semiocracy who does not also get a certain power out of it, the power of judgment, blame, or opinion.
The Young-Girl embodies the way in which capitalism has reinvested all of the necessities from which it had liberated men, reinvested them in an unrelenting adaptation of the human world to the abstract norms of the Spectacle, and in the elevation of these norms. Both share the morbid obsession of remaining, at the price of frantic activity, identical to themselves.
The narrow control and excessive solicitude displayed by this society toward women expresses only its desire to reproduce itself identically, and to master its perpetuation.”
101 STUART EWEN “The American Academy of Political and Social Sciences, in a publication on the role of women in modern America (1929), concluded that mass consumption had made of the ‘modern housewife…less of a routine worker and more of an administrator and entrepreneur in the business of living’”
101 “The Spectacle keeps the body at bay through the excess of its evocation, just as religion evoked it by excessively prohibiting it.”
104 “In the world of authoritarian commodities, the living recognize within themselves, in their alienated desires, the enemy’s demonstration of power.”
7 THE YOUNG-GIRL AS WAR MACHINE
109 “–How many cops does it take to make a Young-Girl crack a childish smile?
–Even more, EVEN MORE,
EVEN MORE…” LIMITED
110 “With unfeigned bitterness the Young-Girl reproaches reality for failing to measure up to the Spectacle.”
112 “The Young-Girl delivers conformity to all of the fleeting norms of the Spectacle, and also offers the example of such conformity.”
113 “It is not their “instinctive drives” that imprison people within the Spectacle, but the laws of what is desirable which THEY have inscribed into the flesh.” LIMITED
8 THE YOUNG-GIRL AGAINST COMMUNISM
114 “The Young-Girl privatizes everything she apprehends. Thus, a philosopher is not a philosopher to her, but an extravagant erotic object, and likewise, a revolutionary is not a revolutionary, but costume jewelry.
The Young-Girl is an article of consumption, a device for maintaining order, a producer of sophisticated merchandise, an unprecedented propagator of Spectacular codes, an avant-garde of alienation, and also, an entertainment.”
117 FRANZ KAFKA “Evil is whatever distracts”
9 THE YOUNG-GIRL AGAINST HERSELF: THE YOUNG-GIRL AS IMPOSSIBILITY
122 “For the Young-Girl as for all other Blooms, the craving for entertainment is rooted in anguish.”
130 “Bloom’s desire, and consequently the Young-Girl’s, is not for bodies, but for essences.”
10 PUTTING AN END TO THE YOUNG-GIRL
132 “Everyone seeks to sell him or herself, but nobody manages to do so convincingly.”