Absolute subsumtion: The political economy of the algorithmic sexuality

Sex is again liberated. It’s discursive dissemination through the social body generates always already outdated forms of its presentation. Its manifest image – a ‘framework in terms of which man encountered himself’ (Wilfrid Selars), allows for infinite irreducible discontinuity to remain the core of its conceptual machine. Sex appears now more than ever in the realm of the ever escaping ‘contingent- possibility-mechanism’ – a contradiction that maintains the basic flows within the sexuality market.

We have returned to the sex discourse of the classical era with a sexuality weaponized with an accelerating value-form. The bourgeois disciplining of sexual language and its practice, the domestication of sex for the purposes of reproduction, the medicalization and punishing of abnormal sexual behavior, all of these have been overcome for some time now. The ensuing encouragement of ‘the perverse’ with the aim of norming, controlling and keeping it into check, as described by Foucault in History of sexuality, is also over. What we experience today is the total mobilization of a variety of resources for the hyper-intensification of the sexual freedom. Neither the bourgeois putative morality, nor the disciplining apparatuses have any value-producing capacity for the Capital today. The exchanged value, the price that is paid in today’s market increasingly relates to a pure abstraction. Sexuality today represents the most sublime form of such an abstraction.

Contained in the form of the Young-girl – a cross-gender concept, the “living currency” (Klossowski) is the condensation of a set of advanced contemporary social relations managed by sexuality that is never there. The Tiqqun collective, almost a decade before the ‘social network’ came into being, in their “Raw materials for the theory of the Young-Girl” published in 2001, noted the rise of a new champion of the economy:

“Money is no longer the ultimate term of the economy. Its triumph has depreciated it. A naked king that has abandoned all metaphysical content, it has also lost all value. Nothing shows it respect anymore, in the biopolitical flock. Living currency has taken the place of money as a general equivalent; that which relative to which it is worth anything. It is its value and its concretion. The purchasing power of living currency, and a fortiori of the Young-Girl, has no limit; it extends over the whole of everything that exists, because in her, wealth enjoys itself doubly: as symbol and as fact”.

In their brilliant analysis of the process of commodification of the Young-girl, following Marx’s thoughts the process of differentiating in itself, they come to declare that the Young-Girl is absorbed by price, she is nothing beyond it. The centrality of the Young-Girl as the dictating order and locus of the relations of sexuality-distance/fixation and money-exchange/movement maintained a degree of operational sovereignty although remaining always already fully embedded in the territory of Capital.

Under the ‘eye of the algorithm’, the living currency does not live anymore. Instead, it has been fully integrated in the global datascape through the “despotic mega-machine of cognitive capitalism based on the accumulation of valorising information, extraction of surplus value of code and transformation of collective knowledge into the machinic intelligence of new apparatuses.” (Pasquinelli, 2014).