By Atholl Hopkins
The experimental ‘Premiers Matériaux pour une Théorie de la Jeune-Fille’ was circulated both digitally and materially in the 1999 anarchist zine “Tiqqun” (issue 1). This experimental text, an intermedial and multimodal essay, advances a scathing critique of fin-de-siècle capitalism. Focussing on the heteronomous forces of consumerism, it builds this thesis through its ‘Jeune-Fille’ analysis of the archetypal docile subject [ii].
Situated in a longer subversive and creative lineage as a ‘héritier[] situationniste[]’, Tiqqun radically interrogated its complacent ‘end of history’ milieu. Namely, it throws into doubt this contemporary teleological theory that assumed the capitulation of the Soviet Union to market capitalism marked the ultimate triumph of the liberal democratic political form [iii]. To this end, the text applies Guy Debord’s concept of the ‘spectacle’, analysing how the Jeune-Fille subject is forged in a flux of images and consumption, driving the inauthentic commodification of the self from an alienating media-tion of experience [iv].
Put otherwise, the Jeune-Fille‘s engagement with the world, including the concept of the self, has been reduced to a mere performance or representation. Tiqqun exposes how experience and identity in the neoliberal age is only a mere consumptive reproduction of media motifs (and thus not a finalistic realisation of human freedom and authenticity).
I contend that this anonymous anarchist text destabilized the role of both the intellectuel and centralized media, amid the celebrity-intellectuel’s decline and the internet’s explosion. This reflects Tiqqun’s techno-medium context, hybridizing academic theory with popular-references through the zine for rhizomatic knowledge-sharing (characterised by divergent, non-linear and decentralized engagements) [v]. In other words, both content and form synergized here as an acephalous harbinger of a new digital age where the respected authorship of a recognized (institutionally-associated) intellectuel and traditional mediatic monopolies no longer held the same purchase.
Though revolutionary, Tiqqun drew extensively on scholarship to uphold its avant-garde form and theory through academic footholds across the Jeune-Fille text. Standing on the shoulders-of-giants, albeit with sparse citations, Tiqqun developed Foucault’s theorisation of ‘techniques-de-soi’: the way in which the self is produced within a socio-historical (discursive) formation of norms, values and self-governance [vi]. This underpins how, in the Jeune-Fille’s subjectification by heteronomous forces of consumerism and mediatization, there is no ‘affinité métaphysique’ with women or youth, only contingently a ‘historique’ tie to femininity [vii].
On a meta-level, Tiqqun self-valorises by following this academic genre convention of situating its intervention. Figure 2’s aphorisms illuminate this intellectual legitimization in its references to the Jeune-Fille’s connection to: psychoanalytic ‘introjection’, the ‘moi’, and ‘fétiches’; the Frankfurt School’s culture industry of ‘Horkheimer/Adorno’; and Debord’s Spectacle from the ‘déjà-vu’ of ‘représentation’ in lived experience [viii].
Figure 2: Typographically Experimental Section [ix]
These intertextual ties plug Tiqqun into a recognized Continental genealogy, patching together how the alienated Jeune-Fille typifies capitalism’s consumerist reproduction. Tiqqun bypassed both the constraint and recognition of mainstream publishing or academic authorship in its countercultural zine-distribution, not submitting to the demands of authorial identity in the personality cult of the french intellectuel.
Therefore, Tiqqun relied on this theoretical web to legitimize its text’s anarchist force. Quoting Barthes, it exemplifies the ‘anonymous’ interactions of an ‘intertextual universe’ detached from the auteur-intellectuel’s ‘agency’ [x]. With its largely uncited influences and unidentified creators, this zine undermined the role of the celebrity-intellectuel (whilst rifting off their academic reputation and extending their theories) and the centralized media in disseminating knowledge.
Tiqqun is a dense constellation of discordant references. Embracing the zine’s lack of strict editorial precision (without commercial pressures or rigid publishing guidelines in its assembly), this fostered daring creativity in its intellectual theorizing and artistic form. Notably, the zine-title refers to the Jewish notion of healing worldly justice. Likewise, its opening headings spell “A.Z.O.Th”: an alchemical substance used in Kabbalah for mystical enlightenment. These arguably convey the transformative potency of Tiqqun to counter false-consciousness in its scandalizing critique of the Jeune-Fille’s passivity, eclipsing the publishing standards of traditional-media’s dominance of knowledge-dissemination.
The text’s cover-image reproduces a 16th-Century woodcut-satire (Papstesel) from Luther: ironically an anti-Semite. Luther relied upon this novel printing-press technology to widely disseminate Reformation “propaganda”. This likewise parallels Tiqqun’s utilisation of fax-photocopiers to circulate their zine, in the techno-media’s affordances of decentralized mass-distribution.
Advancing their anarchist cause and undermining a mainstream-media monopoly, its rhizomatic distribution of enlightening material allows it to shock the viewer out of consumptive docility by exceeding fixed channels of knowledge-sharing. To fax and photocopy the zine is to transcend traditional constraints in the sharing of information; namely, of printing, dissemination, editorial policy, publishing rules or censorship, copyright and authorial identification.
Moreover, as indicated by its erratic mise-en-page, Tiqqun’s jumbled intertextuality subverts publishing conventions and typically lacks references or synthesis. The zine’s cheap DIY-production enables this form of ‘Premiers Matériaux’ which aims not towards a definitive thesis but ‘trash theory’: a barrage of unrefined nuggets to stimulate further thought. Accordingly, Tiqqun is schizophrenic (reflexive of the socio-historical shaping of desire in fragmentation and disarticulation) with its mélange of high-brow theory and pop-culture features : including quotes from women’s magazines, soft-pornography, and a dating-website advertisement.
Much of Tiqqun’s radical anarchist force emerged from this form-related praxis of constructing, distributing and engaging with the material zine itself; Tiqqun’s ‘dispersion de fragments’ is a ‘fusion’ from ‘les traces du ciseau’. This reflexively makes visible its direct engagement with mainstream-media sources in its generative theoretical ‘procédé’, subverting commercial media and publishing through appropriating its materials [xiii]. These collated and repurposed snippets also highlight Tiqqun’s Situationist lineage in the experimental technique of détournement: the ‘plagiaristic’ and ‘subversive’ re-appropriation of (consumerist) aesthetics into the pointed antithesis of anti-capitalist insurrection [xiv].
In fact, this disparate bricolage of mass-media mirrors the Jeune-Fille herself, ‘[t]out comme ces journaux […] qu’elle dévore’ [xv]. Tiqqun’s non-linear disjunctive flow mimics the formation of subjectivity under the chaotic fickleness of mediatic fluxes and the capriciousness of consumption trends. Tiqqun imitates how any attempts at novelty or ‘authenticity’ are constrained by spectacle’s ‘tired-out templates of consumerism’ [xvi]. This is the docile (Jeune-Fille) subject’s consumptive reproduction of mediatic tropes. Tiqqun’s overwhelming fluidity baffles the viewer with its avant-garde collage of disparate allusions, augmenting its theorisation of the alienated and untethered Jeune-Fille subject.
Figure 5: Dating Advertisement Détournement [xvii]
Tiqqun’s boldness of eclectic fragments and intellectual influences was enabled by the zine-form’s photocopy-faxing, anarchically disseminating it among radical organizations of trans-national activist networks and nascent digital political communities. This destabilized the dominance of the intellectuel and mass media over knowledge-sharing, rebelliously refusing their demands of the fame of a name in Tiqqun’s avant-garde strokes in anonymity.
Notwithstanding all this, Tiqqun only published two issues of esoteric significance; why still study it? Tracing its reception afterlife, there was an inflated interest in Tiqqun a decade later when one of its anonymous authors (Julien Coupat) was revealed in the popular-press, following his arrest for terrorism for another text: “L’insurrection qui vient” (the Tarnac Nine) [xviii]. Unforeseeably, this array of paratexts in the traditional-media, notably its condemnation by a Fox News commentator, reinvigorated the neglected Tiqqun with activist and academic interest. Paradoxically, given its anarchist rejection of authorship and commercial publishing, Tiqqun’s greatest influence came from eventually having its creators exposed in the traditional media and consequently being translated/re-published itself!
In summary, Tiqqun’s experimental zine techno-medium captured a destabilization of the auteur-intellectuel’s role in and tradition-media’s control of knowledge-dissemination. This interrogated the necessity (in the burgeoning internet epoch) of recognized authorship from an institutionally-associated intellectuel, typically donning university credentials. Tiqqun notably bypasses the commercial demands of their cult of personality: just think of the celebrity ubiquity of the names and images of Sartre, De Beauvoir, Bernard-Henri Lévy or Foucault .
In contrast, Tiqqun’s anonymously outlines a critique of consumer-capitalism through its Jeune-Fille theory by radically appropriating and undermining the (popular and academic) materials of commercial publishing. It creatively exceeded such conventional constraints of authorship and mass-media dominance in sharing knowledge. Yet it is hubristic to dismiss Tiqqun’s anarchist intervention in the politics of knowledge as outdated. Reflexively, our democratizing digital info/infra-structures are precarious, reflected ironically in my difficulty accessing the circulated materials of Tiqqun whilst researching this piece given recent cyberattacks on the Internet Archive.
Notes
[i] Dana Wemel, ‘Theory of the Young-Girl: A Visual Essay’, Cargo Collective, Written in 2001, available online at : <https://cargocollective.com/dnwngrt/Theory-of-the-Young-Girl> [accessed 28 October 2024].
[ii] Tiqqun, ‘Tiqqun 1: Organe conscient du Parti Imaginaire: Exercices de Métaphysique Critique’, The Internet Archive, Published in January 1999, available online at : <https://archive.org/details/Tiqqun1/mode/2up> [accessed 28 October 2024].
[iii] Sadie Plant, The Most Radical Gesture: The Situationist International in a Postmodern Age (Routledge, 1992), pp. 10-11 ; Alden Wood, ‘The Unrecyclable Ontology of Nihilism: Tiqqun’s “Annihilation of Nothingness,” Georges Bataille’s Conception of Death, and David McNally’s Living Dead’, The Word Hoard, issue 2 (October 2013), pp. 29-38 (p.32-33)
[iv] Guy Debord, La Société Du Spectacle (Gallimard, 1971).
[v] Michel Foucault and Giles Deleuze, ‘Les Intellectuels et le Pouvoir’, L’Arc, issue 49 (4 March 1972), pp. 3-10. ; Marshall McLuhan and Quentin Fiore, The Medium is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects (Penguin, 2008).
[vi] Tiqqun, “Tiqqun 1…”, p.102; Michel Foucault, “The Subject and Power”, in Power: Essential Works 1954-84, ed. by James D. Faubion (Penguin, 2020), pp. 326-364
[vii] Tiqqun, “Tiqqun 1…”, p.95. The question of misogyny is controversially debated in feminist scholars’ engagement with the text, see: Catherine Driscoll, ‘The Mystique of the Young Girl’, Feminist Theory, vol. 14(3) (2013) pp. 285-394. ; Stephanie Young, ‘Premiers Materiaux pour une Theorie de la Jeune-Fille: Some Notes on the New Translation’, The Poetry Project Newsletter (December 2012/ January 2013) pp.6-10 ; Heather Warren-Crow and Andrea Jonsson. Young-Girls in Echoland: #Theorizing Tiqqun (University of Minnesota Press, 2021). ; Nina Power, ‘She’s just not that into you (Review)’, Radical Philosophy 177, (Jan/Feb 2013) pp. 33-35.
[viii] Tiqqun, “Tiqqun 1…”, p.101.
[ix] Tiqqun, “Tiqqun 1…”, p.101.
[x] Brandon R. Kershner, ‘Chapter 12: Intertextuality’, in The Cambridge Companion to Ulysses, ed. by Sean Latham (Cambridge University Press, 2014), pp. 171-183 (p. 174). This Poststructuralist style is closely linked to James Joyce, to whom Tiqqun pays direct homage in their partner “Théorie du Bloom”: Tiqqun, “Tiqqun 1…”, pp. 23-45.
[xi] Tiqqun, “Tiqqun 1…”, pp.94-95
[xii] ibid. p.103
[xiii] ibid. pp. 96-97
[xiv] Sadie Plant, ‘The Most Radical Gesture…’ pp. 86-9.
[xv] Tiqqun, “Tiqqun 1…”, p. 97
[xvi] Adam Morris, ‘Drone Warfare: Tiqqun, the Young-Girl and the Imperialism of the Trivial’, The Los Angles Review of Books, 30th September 2012, available online at: < https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/drone-warfare-tiqqun-the-young-girl-and-the-imperialism-of-the-trivial/> [accessed 28 October 2024].
[xvii] Tiqqun, “Tiqqun 1…”, p.112
[xviii] Alberto Toscano, The war against pre-terrorism: The Tarnac 9 and The Coming Insurrection (Commentary)’, Radical Philosophy 154 (March/ April 2009) pp. 2-7.
[xix] Guillaume Gendron, ‘Tarnac : Nos “terroristes” c’est des gentils !’, Libération webpage, 8th February 2017, available online at: < https://www.liberation.fr/france/2017/02/08/tarnac-nos-terroristes-c-est-des-gentils_1547244/> [accessed 28 October 2024].
[xx] Tamara Chaplin, Turning On the Mind French Philosophers on Television (University of Chicago Press, 2007)
Further Reading
Adam Morris, ‘Drone Warfare: Tiqqun, the Young-Girl and the Imperialism of the Trivial’, The Los Angles Review of Books, 30th September 2012, available online at: < https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/drone-warfare-tiqqun-the-young-girl-and-the-imperialism-of-the-trivial/> [accessed 28 October 2024].
Alberto Toscano, The war against pre-terrorism: The Tarnac 9 and The Coming Insurrection (Commentary)’, Radical Philosophy 154 (March/ April 2009) pp. 2-7.
Alden Wood, ‘The Unrecyclable Ontology of Nihilism: Tiqqun’s “Annihilation of Nothingness,” Georges Bataille’s Conception of Death, and David McNally’s Living Dead’, The Word Hoard, issue 2 (October 2013), pp. 29-38
Brandon R. Kershner, ‘Chapter 12: Intertextuality’, in The Cambridge Companion to Ulysses, ed. by Sean Latham (Cambridge University Press, 2014), pp. 171-183.
Catherine Driscoll, ‘The Mystique of the Young Girl’, Feminist Theory, vol. 14(3) (2013) pp. 285-394
Dana Wemel, ‘Theory of the Young-Girl: A Visual Essay’, Cargo Collective, written in 2001 <https://cargocollective.com/dnwngrt/Theory-of-the-Young-Girl> [accessed 28 October 2024].
Douglas Morrey, ‘Manifeste conspirationniste, Parti imaginaire, Comité invisible: a genealogy of radical critique in twenty-first-century France’, Modern and Contemporary France (September 2024), published online at < https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/citedby/10.1080/09639489.2024.2388707?scroll=top&needAccess=true> [accessed 28 October 2024].
Guillaume Gendron, ‘Tarnac : Nos “terroristes” c’est des gentils !’, Libération webpage, 8th February 2017, available online at: < https://www.liberation.fr/france/2017/02/08/tarnac-nos-terroristes-c-est-des-gentils_1547244/>[accessed 28 October 2024].
Guy Debord, La Société Du Spectacle (Gallimard, 1971).
Heather Warren-Crow and Andrea Jonsson. Young-Girls in Echoland: #Theorizing Tiqqun (University of Minnesota Press, 2021)
Marshall McLuhan and Quentin Fiore, The Medium is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects (Penguin, 2008).
Michel Foucault, “The Subject and Power”, in Power: The Essential Works of Michel Foucault 1954-84, ed. by James D. Faubion (Penguin, 2020), pp. 326-364
Michel Foucault and Giles Deleuze, ‘Les Intellectuels et le Pouvoir’, L’Arc, issue 49 (4 March 1972), pp. 3-10
Moshe Idel, Old Worlds, New Mirrors: On Jewish Mysticism and Twentieth-Century Thought (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012).
Nina Power, ‘She’s just not that into you (Review)’, Radical Philosophy 177, (Jan/Feb 2013) pp. 33-35
Sadie Plant, The Most Radical Gesture: The Situationist International in a Postmodern Age (Routledge, 1992).
Stephanie Young, ‘Premiers Materiaux pour une Theorie de la Jeune-Fille: Some Notes on the New Translation’, The Poetry Project Newsletter (December 2012/ January 2013) pp.6-10
Tamara Chaplin, Turning On the Mind French Philosophers on Television (University of Chicago Press, 2007)
Tiqqun, ‘Tiqqun 1: Organe conscient du Parti Imaginaire: Exercices de Métaphysique Critique’, The Internet Archive, Published in January 1999, Available online at : <https://archive.org/details/Tiqqun1/mode/2up> [accessed 28 October 2024].