“The process of valorization,
in the imperial phase,
is no longer simply capitalist:
IT COINCIDES WITH THE SOCIAL”.
-Tiqqun, Preliminary Materials for a Theory of the Young-Girl
While I’m waiting for the fly-away bus from LAX, a lover calls my cell-phone and explains to me the plot of a Proust novel. This is not even my favorite lover, who I’ve just left for many months. On the phone I am a good woman. I listen and say softer things like my round stomach and some other girl’s good arms. Her white teeth and my brief hello.
I get home and take off my tight jacket: me-shaped marks from my me-shaped clothing. In Los Angeles where the clothing is all workout shorts my corsetry is shocking. In Los Angeles I am so girled, so imaged, nobody knows what I’m reading. In Los Angeles I name things. My skill is to name things. My function is to tell truths. Me-shaped. Gooey. Talc-like. Oblique.
In workshop, someone says, this character1 just keeps on weaponizing innocence. In workshop someone asks, has the character changed? No, but the character of it has. It’s a story, which is innocent in character, concerning a character who is storied in innocence. This is what I know: I do not possess innocence. Innocence possesses me. I feel its shape. I get all high and sensual and I feel its shape even more prominently. I know its shape. I utilize its shape; my deep and practiced understanding of the nature of innocence. To do this is to be utilized: I do this knowing that nobody was going to sell me gentleness. Gentleness was always-already waiting for me like a bitter and coquettish fruit— Yo, I showed up at this bar/club with nothing but my senses and leather. Ladies drink free. Drunks drink forever. In this body the young-girl is activated by reposado: a chemical process where material thing turns into canonized visual form. Free forever, dumb and gentle.
Tiqqun:
At each moment, [the young-girl] affirms herself as the sovereign subject of her own reification. The unquestionable character of her power, all of the crushing assurance of this flattened being, woven exclusively by the conventions, codes, and representations fleetingly in effect, all the authority that the least of her gestures incarnates, all of this is immediately indexed to her absolute transparency to “society”.
Precisely because of her nothingness, each of her judgments carries the imperative weight of the entire social order, and she knows it.
I wonder if the other young-girls with their good arms/white teeth ever look for the same blankness I wrap my toes around one morning when I haven't been home for three days and the light is low in cloudy mid-June and I have to say something about maturity but instead I say I wanna ride it, and there are papers coagulating into primeval gray discs in the bottom of the bag that's causing my shoulder pain, and my hope for seriousness or legibility is getting stuck in the drain with a million condoms and all the condoms in the world.
Haven’t they ever been called dirty little sluts in the backseat of a car during a warm summer evening and thought, oh, so I do have the power to exit and transcend this world of men which has writhed against the border of my skin, don’t I; I am a heretofore unwitting master-creator of useful empty signifiers! Aren’t I? Haven’t they ever felt in their own wet the melting ocean of the ice age that has been western cultural history ?? Or am I tripping. Aren’t I? Am I? I ask my bestie Faye, you know when a guy comes and then it’s like, he’s so stupid like a baby and you’re holding him because you’re his mother? She says, what.
The other young-girls also have words for their Substacks. Some are the same words as the words that are in mine. Words that are not metaphors for our eyes. One of the words is: Mommy! And that word is also not a metaphor. One of the other young-girls with a Substack is Yasemin, who says:
The phrase ‘teenage girl in her twenties’ is just extremely dumb but all the discourse on Twitter about it is nearly as grating. Because I do understand that it’s hefty to call yourself a woman when you don’t have a real job or you’re still in school or whatever. Maybe we should just put down the Olivia Rodrigo for a second and RETVRN to Britney. Being not a girl, not yet a woman is a much more classy way to word this experience. Personally though, I identify as an ingénue. Innocence is not infantile.
One of the other young-girls on Substack writes about the relationship she’s in with a film professor at my old school2. Maybe hers, too, I don’t know. Actually they’re not about that. Her posts are mostly about dealing with the trauma of childhood molestation. Sometimes they are about suicide, or depression. Anxiety; drugs. And they are words that are not metaphors for her eyes. All of our mouths, all of our girlish mouths. All of our mouths around all of our words and all of our mouths open. So, what? We were already vulnerable! We were always transparent! We were transparent little shards, we were ice before we melted ourselves like a tactic, we were heroin! We weren’t empty signifiers, we were neurochemical glassine strands! We were just producing… HAHAHA WE CAN’T EARN SOVEREIGNTY THROUGH REIFICATION ARE YOU STOOPID?? ARE U LITERALLY DUMB???? We hate Yale, Oxford, and the apartment of any serious person. We want boys for their vitality; laughter for its boyishness; drugs for the quick sticking-together of sensation with sense. Not necessarily in that order. Innocence is not infantile, writes Yasemin. I’m telling you what I know, being innocent of a certain knowledge…
Because I feel like it, I lift my skirt. A man passing by in a car says, thank you for blessing my night. This is the situation I always seem to be in. Blessed? Blessing. Creating, never sovereign. We, girls, are connected to God. And none of us are tenured professors at New York City research institutions. Despite doing all the goddamn social research. Despite being smarter every week on Substack than the men we wake up next to.
In another post, the girl’s acid-trip revelation is, “nostalgia is the cousin of pedophilia”. What was that about empty signifiers? I was focused on lack, I was focused on the absence of memory of the womb, I was tripping out on the Void, I was zoning out and drooling like a girl in a porno who just came. We, us girls and certain male twinks, are totalizing idols. There’s huge news: the skinniest girl on Instagram just declared that she has really bad scoliosis. That’s her secret! She has scoliosis! She posted the x-rays and everything. But of course every girl on the internet, including myself, is skinny. I think about this girl who is famous on Tik Tok (skinny) for attaching things like keyboards to her outfits with velcro. I like to imagine that she has read Nick Land. Actually what I imagine is that she hasn't, and I have, but I dress normally, and this puts the two of us in some sort of proximity. I imagine this because it is what has been taught to me, but really my desire is to push my nose against the buttons and laugh.
But who cares about my desire, desires, I don’t have them! I’m going backwards through my situation to reach ultimate innocence for you! For all of mankind! And it’s so beautiful. Ultimate lack— nothingness!!! No Thoughts!!! Us being girls on our Substacks. We’re interested in degeneracy. Degeneration, anorexia. Getting real small and real stupid. I don’t know anything, I just got here!!! I’m just a SMALL BABY!!!! Lolita. Lana— Lanita: When I get down I’m bonita, I belong to the history of not-women-not-girls who stake out as modifiers of and martyrs for the innocent, the glorious and beautiful innocent, that forever. Foreverness, I belong to history!! Formlessness, we are one! That’s why we’re all interested in trad. That, and it’s the discourse. And not just for the young-girls who are young girls.
The young-girls who are gay men have termed the cap of their salable innocence TWINK DEATH3. Girls are not the only ones whose youth is sexually important to the men who makeup mankind. The narrator4 in Tony Duvert’s Diary of an Innocent— the book which did indeed propel this entire essay into existence5— is interested in the sexuality of young boys. As was Duvert himself, at least according to his Wikipedia page. Diary of an Innocent was published in 1973, six years before Woody Allen’s Manhattan6. Both position youth and youth sexuality as a consumable anecdote to anxiety around the then novel postmodern impotence of the white man and what has been called “Western Culture”— something made possible by the ur-innocent power of the young-girl. Duvert’s globalism (the pedophilic events of the book take place in what we can assume to be a fictionalized North Africa, likely Morocco) depicts this well— he is at once comfortable as a foreigner (because he is white and French, lives independently, and is relatively wealthy; he buys many things for the families of his boys), and simultaneously admits that the boys “know things” he does not. He consistently characterizes the boys as knowing— even wise— in the context of this nonwestern place which problematizes Duvert’s concept of innocence. The drama of Duvert’s character lies in the conflation of asceticism and innocence: he has divested himself of home, family, and most normal comforts. His actions consist most primarily of writing about the boys: recording their actions and a remarkable amount of speculating about their lives outside of him.
He writes of one young boy:
He’d tried living as a hetero, then a hippie, a trendy yuppie, a rebel, a drunk, a delinquent, a fairy in a relationship, an honest and determined worker, a good son, a useful friend, without finding anything that worked, that was as rich in resources, as adaptable as the graceful image of an adolescent that he was no longer able to pull off.
Here Duvert is obviously writing about what we know as TWINK DEATH. The boy is not presented as innocent but in fact has lived many lives, perhaps more than the narrator can hope to. What makes the boy desirable to our narrator is not in fact his innocence, his innocence! What we might assume as the utmost asset of the young-girl, if we didn't know better. If we didn't know that innocence is not infantile. If we didn't text our bestie Afsana about Duvert and if she didn't say,
so it’s about the force of non-transition as a desire
The boy is not innocent of time. He is simply outside of time. We the youth, the young-girls, are not innocent only because less stuff has happened to us. Don’t make me laugh. We’re out here breaking time, no amount of pasts is enough. We cannot be innocent; we cannot be guilty. The young-girl is always an intervention into the form which makes up time. The young-girl belongs to the realm of forms, of form-changing forms, volatile forms. She troubles the oedipal, especially where she is a boy. She refuses transition— not-a-girl-not-yet-a-woman, she is a tool for atonement and existential reprieve, consisting of fascination, innumerable beautiful and baggageless pasts, and sugar, and spice, and hot, wet holes. Maybe she’s not interested in sovereignty, but— and I got ahead of myself, I’m sorry— but she does reify. This is her force I mean her momentum.
Duvert:
My life, then, consisted of living the intermissions of others, their brief lapses from being normal.
Did you know there are young-girls still, who are not metaphors? The world doesn’t love us for our innocence. The world loves us for our lack-of-that. The world doesn’t love us. Also according to Wikipedia, Duvert was found dead in 2008 in his apartment where his corpse had lain rotten-dead for at least a few weeks, presumably because no-body had cared to check to see if he was alive. Maybe this was his brief lapse from being normal, I mean the one that was finally his own.
Last year, Semiotext(e)7 published Love Me Tender by Constance Debré, part of a trilogy documenting her8 custody battle over her son after coming out as a lesbian and leaving her husband. In the plot of the novel, various books which the narrator owns are admitted into court for this proceeding, including Diary of an Innocent.
Debré:
Two days before the hearing, I receive Laurent’s written submissions, signed by his lawyer. He’s applying for sole custody with termination of my parental rights. He’s accusing me of incest and pedophilia, committed against my eight-year-old son, directly or through involvement of a third party. He’s written about my homosexual friends “who may or may not be pedophiles”. He’s included a picture of my son sitting outside on a terrace with one of my fag friends the day we went to get a soda together, a photo of a sign that reads “Danger! Hunting,” found in a field and kept on my desk, near Paul’s bedroom door. He’s quoted passages from books selected from my bookshelves, Bataille, Duvert, Guibert. He’s putting everything together, making his case, sowing doubt. My nine-year-old son has written a letter to the court saying that living with me is inhumane, that his dad says I’m insane, and he agrees. He says he doesn’t want to see me anymore.
The hearing lasts fifteen minutes, Laurent’s lawyer reads passages from Crazy for Vincent, as if I were Hervé Guibert’s narrator, as if Paul were the young boy he sleeps with in the book, the judge stares at the tattoo poking out from beneath my sleeve, she asks me why I’m writing a book and what it’s about, she wants to know why I speak to my son about my homosexuality, she says that these subjects are not appropriate for children, that it’s not a question of legality, it’s a question of morals, she’s sure I can understand, I am, after all, and intelligent woman.
Debré’s character is, in fact, a lawyer. But Love Me Tender is not about the court case, not primarily. The mood of the book— cool, tough, and devastated— affirms that for lesbians at least, innocence has been always-already foreclosed. Here is innocence as its most tangible incarnation: law. Here, the innocence of the child is manufactured in order to prove that it has been lost. The innocence of the child as violent political strategy. The innocence of the child as tool of social control. The innocence of the child is manufactured alongside its own loss, in order to destroy the innocence of our narrator. The court places a mask YOUNG-GIRL over this boy, a mask PEDOPHILE over his mother. In this ugly logic, the very existence of gayness, even as lesbianism, calls up the young-girl to do what she does, to trouble the oedipal, to break time— here, childhood— away from itself.
In Paris, Sammy interviews Constance Debre about the book. She says:
I don’t believe in a world of victims and the guilty. I don’t believe in innocence and am not interested in it. We are all victims and we’re all guilty. We are sinners and we are pure as the newborn. It is the human condition. Moreover, we are all the innocence and the guilt of one another. It is something complex but absolutely certain. This is much more interesting and beautiful than a world of victims and oppressors, which is a boring and dangerous lie.
A few months later, I crash for a weekend in Sammy’s empty house. Drunk, I text him Yr sooooo Chris Kraus rn, meaning he is being kind by letting me stay in his house and I am a young writer with delusions of grandeur. I open the 1998 Clamshell iBook I’ve brought with me and type on a Word document: SAMMY I AM DRUNK ON THE FLOOR OF YOUR HOUSE. THIS MAKES YOU EXACTLY LIKE CHRIS KRAUS AND ME EXACTLY LIKE ANY PUNK GIRL WHO IS WORKING ON HER BOOK IN LOS ANGELES. THERE NEEDED TO BE NEW MODALITIES. THERE NEEDED TO BE NEWNESS. WOMEN HERE CANNOT BE OVER THIRTY. OUR LOS ANGELES, MEDIATED BY FILMS; ACTORS ON STRIKE AND WRITERS NECESSARY; HOT GIRLS IN BARS; HOT GIRLS IN THE VALLEY; HOT GIRLS FROM THE VALLEY; ACTRESSES OVER THIRTY, SLOWLY DYING. ACTRESSES ON STRIKE FROM LIFE. HOT GIRLS UNDER THIRTY IN YOUR HOUSE. DRUNK ON YOUR FLOOR. WORKING ON THEIR BOOKS.
It’s months later and, either remembering or not remembering when I texted him Yr sooooo Chris Kraus rn, Sammy attempts to introduce me to Chris Kraus. Really, it is a small room with too many people and I exit it desperately, before I can speak to anyone. On the microphone, Kraus reads about a murder trial wherein the suspects are all teenagers. She had published both Duvert and Debré, and in a twist of false 1990s nostalgia, Sammy is Scully and I am Mulder. It’s all connected, I tell him. There is something in this project about innocence. He laughs, what did you call it? A “project?”
Maybe it is projection, that evergreen plague of young girls and certainly of fangirls. To read Kraus, and perhaps even more importantly, to read the women she published (Eileen Myles and Michelle Tea and Ann Rower and Kathy Acker, among others) is, like reading these substacks, to study a certain flavor of girlhood; to be revealed what I have called a Feminine Punk Knowledge. Gossipping, because gossip is innocence-as-style. Day-drinking out of a brown paper bag in Tompkins Square Park at least, this is obvious. Punk girl, young twink, un-artworlded skater, salable thing, coked-out partygirl, fried teenage runaway, us, us fucking Haromy Korrine characters, us New Innocents. Like the boys of Duvert, the girls of teenage murder trials, we are the authors of lack: men’s lack, Man’s lack, lack of bounds, boundaries (erotic or otherwise), our own lack-of-knowing. Because we were open, light when the world was brutish and malcontented. Because we were.
After the guy at the bodega by Thompkins doesn’t charge me for my modelo, I profess to God:
TO LIVE AN EFFICIENT GIRLHOOD I HAVE TAKEN EXTRA MEASURES TO BECOME WIDE. I CRACKED OUT THE MODEL. I FIXED THE GAME.
I trip over my own understanding of myth. O. Oops. Sometimes tripping, sometimes climbing. Someone in workshop says: I notice you never sit on furniture normally. In a poem, I am pressed comfortably down against/ the gentle dirt of openness and/ crawling on things at work. I’m hanging on in distinct intervals. Once on ketamine vision became material. I think that material can also become vision. Innocence is not infantile. The young-girl taken with her soft gel center of anonymity. What I always imagined was a wine dark city and me with my hair and my overcoat and my shoes. This is what I so vaguely imagined. And so it was. The fog is a jungle layer, smoke and wildfires from Canada and cigarettes and your passion fruit vape and sweat and the remnants of the sperm on the bowl of the overflowing toilet and the tequila I let drip down my chin neck bare chest. This is what it is to be technology.
Okay so we’re kids crawling over eachother naked. We’re kids crawling over eachother naked.
Okay so I jack off. I listen for the oven timer. Your girlfriend posts bad poetry. My feet are cold. The television blares. You text me. Obviously I’m beyond wanting. Wanting the innocence of boyhood is impossible and naive. But I do look with my girlish eyes at what I believe to be phenomenal. I, spectacle, look with my spectacled eyes at phenomena. I do that, duplicitous bitch I am. Bitchmutt of wisdom and sensation. I feel the eroticism of being. In the quiet night my girlness is the material of life.
CODA
Bronwen recounted a story to me, something that happened while she was living in my old bedroom and I was sleeping on the couch in that beautiful, horrible, inhospitable warehouse-loft where many of us crashed that year. I was newly twenty-one, I had just procured a job bartending at a nightclub, and I was in the first year of a Master’s degree which I knew I would not finish. I remember sitting cross-legged on the floor of the loft with my sharpies and my glue-stick and my scissors, cutting pages of Bataille and Baudrillard and Guattari into strips for a collage like they were old Seventeen Magazines. These were the moments I was happiest. I went out with men who I was sure were gay or otherwise sexually confused but I didn't care because I was so goddamn happy that I hadn’t killed myself in that tiny, horrible, unventilated, illegal windowless room, even though I had really wanted to. I was so happy I didn't want to anymore, and all I actually wanted to do was walk around in this amazing blue raincoat my beautiful artist friend had lent me out of a beautiful artists’ studio, long with a great collar and checked exactly to look like the background of an old version of photoshop. I wore these great see-through headphones and was very good at talking about things like cybernetic theory and object-oriented ontology and ecopoiesis. Even though I didn't really have a place to live, I felt that the whole world was in love with me. And I loved my beautiful artist friend and I loved Bronwen in that room above me. Bronwen had this older lesbian girlfriend, Erin. Erin had a short ginger haircut and a smile, too, that was out of an Archie comic. She was some kind of failed artist turned butch playboy. It was so retro. They would have a lot of sex and Erin would resent Bronwen for her youth and her beauty and her talent and Bronwen would giggle. Bronwen giggled a lot, and I loved to giggle with her and then we would be giggling. Bronwen recounted this story to me: one night Erin had gotten up to use the bathroom and seen me asleep on the couch, clutching the small stuffed puppy I had bought myself to help me when I was depressed. The puppy, affectionately named “Puppy,” was weighted with a sack of dried lavender petals that were supposed to calm period cramps if you put it in the microwave. Erin saw me on the couch with Puppy, returned to what was now Bronwen’s bedroom, and, apparently perplexed, asked her, “why is the little girl in grad school”?
Who is me, in “autofiction,” not unlike the characters on this blog, who are also all me.
It’s important that he is a film professor in New York City because I still watch and love Woody Allen movies, and my favorite part is when the young-girl goes, “you have to have a little faith in people,” and that’s the last word. In fact, the dialogue in another post on this girl’s substack nearly mirrors that scene:
“Because you say you want a partner but your new long-distance love interest is a 24 year old girl in rehab. You’re not going to have a life partner if you keep going for impulsive 24 year old ketamine addicts. They’ll age out of the system. They don’t know what they want to do with their lives, so they’ll do the collaborator-slave thing, and then they’ll want to do their own thing. I’m just trying to help you find a partner.”
Here we associate the historically fraught and complex term “Twink” with the youth and beauty (and youthful beauty, and beautiful youth) of the young-girl, so that we may also consider, within our conversation about loss-of-innocence, “Twink Death,” the social phenomenon in which a young gay man grows out of his marketability as a certain kind of youthful sexual object.
Yet another very-close “autofiction” narrator, I fear…
And which I did indeed recommend to Yasemin upon reading her Substack
In footnote 2 I mentioned that Mariel Hemmingaway (yes, Hemmingway)’s character has “the last word” in Manhattan, but maybe it’s better to read that as a filmic sibling to Sally Hardesty’s “last laugh” in 1974’s Texas Chainsaw Massacre, which spreads across her face manic and blood-stained in the back of a pickup truck, just narrowly drowning out the sounds of the chainsaw. Not a victory— for Hemmingway’s character, not Actual Wisdom— but some sort of dumb catharsis at the site of escape… something unconsciously “given” to the male predator as the girl watches herself move out of proximity to him…
Who also published the english translation of Diary of An Innocent, and Preliminary Materials for a Theory of the Young-girl— more on this later…
ANOTHER very-close narrator…