This is book number 12 in the Semiotext(e) / Intervention Series series.
Complaining of Fashion Week overexposure, Chris Kraus recommended this to me. I now play guerilla girl warfare with its slogans, defacing salon Vogues and Cosmos across the city with words like, “The Young-Girl is the privileged vehicle of socio-commodity Darwinism.” Radical chic!
— Fiona
Capitalism has morphed our bodies and minds into a desirable commodity. There is no choice but submission. The ways in which capitalism wields itself parallels in the same manner the ways that our identities physical and mental now wield themselves. Minds now self identify as some ad marketing campaign, concocted and culled from a collected ethos of what it now means to exist and have presence and meaning. Making the self tradeable as a good through spheres and networks of humanity. "Preliminary Materials for the Theory of the Young-Girl" is written in the language of an ad man. Short, easily digestible statements deliver this radical new message of how life is mimicking the identity and agency of capitalism and commodity.
— AmesThe Young-Girl is not always young; more and more frequently, she is not even female. She is the figure of total integration in a disintegrating social totality.
—from Theory of the Young-Girl
First published in France in 1999, Preliminary Materials for a Theory of the Young-Girl dissects the impossibility of love under Empire. The Young-Girl is consumer society's total product and model citizen: whatever “type” of Young-Girl she may embody, whether by whim or concerted performance, she can only seduce by consuming. Filled with the language of French women's magazines, rooted in Proust's figure of Albertine and the amusing misery of (teenage) romance in Witold Gombrowicz's Ferdydurke, and informed by Pierre Klossowski's notion of “living currency” and libidinal economy, Preliminary Materials for a Theory of the Young-Girl diagnoses—and makes visible—a phenomenon that is so ubiquitous as to have become transparent.
In the years since the book's first publication in French, the worlds of fashion, shopping, seduction plans, makeover projects, and eating disorders have moved beyond the comparatively tame domain of paper magazines into the perpetual accessibility of Internet culture. Here the Young-Girl can seek her own reflection in corporate universals and social media exchanges of “personalities” within the impersonal realm of the marketplace. Tracing consumer society's colonization of youth and sexuality through the Young-Girl's “freedom” (in magazine terms) to do whatever she wants with her body, Tiqqun exposes the rapaciously competitive and psychically ruinous landscape of modern love.