Sex and the (Anthropocene) City

Urban Vitality

There is a difference of vital tone. Those who regularly put into practice the morality of the city know this feeling of well-being, common to the individual and society, which is the outward sign of the interplay of material resistances neutralizing each other. But the soul that is opening, and before whose eyes material objects vanish, is lost in sheer joy. Pleasure and well-being are something, joy is more. For it is not contained in these, whereas they are virtually contained in joy. They mean, indeed, a halt or a marking time, while joy is a step forward. (Bergson, 1935: 50)

When Bergson says joy is a ‘step forward’, he opens the thought of a different economy. Rather than using or consuming less now for the sake of greater pleasure later (a pleasure economy of more or less), joy’s ‘step forward’ delays action and consumption not for an increase in some later time, but for some other value altogether, a shift in vital tone. The city, for Bergson, is a site for morality – acting well with others for the sake of pleasure and a collective neutralization of self-interest; but another dynamic might emerge that is spiritual rather than moral, and does not concern itself with survival but something else. Just what that ‘something else’ might be should be a central concern for the 21st century, where the moral dynamics of urban life that negotiate collective proximity for the sake of later efficiency can no longer be sustained. This unsustainability of the urban and urbane morality that has defined western humanity in its liberal and progressive mode is palpably out of sync with a deeper time, a time that is becoming evident in both the intensifying awareness of climate change and the temporalities of non-urban cultures that might (reading Bergson against Bergson) indicate a modality of joy rather than an economy of pleasure.

In this essay I want to create an assemblage of three problematic terms: sex, urbanity and the Anthropocene.

Sex

Sex, I will argue, needs to be considered as a force for the creation of relations, with those relations in turn creating relatively stable points (and sometimes bodies) that are constituted as being the forces that they are by the relations that have taken place. Sex is not what sexed bodies do or have; sexed bodies may emerge from the force of sex, but sex exceeds any of the bodies or qualified forces it generates. On this understanding, sex may be likened to desire, except that I would also extend sex to include forces and encounters that we would often not think of as desiring. Humans emerge from sexual forces – both the coupling of human bodies, but also the pre-organic forces that mingled in order for life to emerge. But humans will bring about their own end because of sexual forces: the human body’s modes of consumption, production, reproduction and engagement have evolved to become predominantly destructive of the human milieu. It makes sense to refer to such destructive encounters as sexual precisely because they are the consequence of the coming into relation of bodies, where the consequences exceed any life, intent or well-being of the bodies and forces concerned. (My notion of ‘sex’ is Freudian: there is a difference between function – or eating, touching and moving in order to further organic life – and libido, or a sexual force that may serve organic life but may just as easily not.) Sex, then, is a concept or a term that allows us to think of an entire terrain in a different mode from considering simply a collection of bodies with purposes and intents. Instead we might argue for an impersonal and pre-human sexuality – or the capacity of forces to enter into relation – from which life, sexed bodies and genders emerge. We might also say that sexuality is intrinsically and creatively destructive: the forces of sexuality may alight upon an object that serves the body’s organic needs (such that I eat in order to live, or have sex in order to reproduce), but the force that orients my body to another object is always underdetermined by the object: desire exceeds need, and in doing so opens up to a joy that cannot be reduced to the economy of pleasure that regulates the body’s survival and equilibrium (Laplanche, 1976).

On the one hand, we can see the city as serving the needs of the organism and as working against sexual desire; humans bond together for the sake of survival and self-interest, and organize around collective investments such as those offered by a common religion but also, and increasingly, by common objects – such as the range of commodities offered by the city. One of the many valuable strands of argument that runs through Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus concerns the originally collective nature of desire: it is not the case that there is a private sexuality, concerned with one’s body and organs, that then extends to a larger social body. On the contrary, privatization requires a series of complex stratifications; the most significant of these concerns the organization of the eye and its relation to pleasure and pain. In the primitive socius public rituals allow the eye to feel the pain of collective processes of scarring, tattooing, piercing, and flaying; the eye becomes increasingly interpretive, so that later punishments by the despot may be read as a debt paid for a past wrong. Deleuze and Guattari refer to Nietzsche to explain the way in which a broken promise (a crime that occurs at the level of voice) is managed by a supplanted relation between the eye and pain: before we have cities as systems of exchange something like an economy of debt as such must emerge, and this can only occur by way of an organization of the body in which social bonds became measured by units of suffering:

The equation injury = pain has nothing exchangist about it, and it shows in this extreme case that the debt itself had nothing to do with exchange. Simply stated, the eye extracts from the pain it is contemplating a surplus value of code that compensates the broken relationship between the voice of alliance that the criminal has wronged, and the mark that had not sufficiently penetrated his body. The crime, a rupture of the phonographic connection, re-established by the spectacle of the punishment: as primitive justice, territorial representation has foreseen everything. (Deleuze and Guattari, 1983: 191)

A city becomes a city with urbanity: when my living with others does not just produce a mode of collective identity, but also generates an accompanying style of distance. When the German Romantics referred to Socrates as being exemplary of ‘high urbanity' they did so precisely because his mode of personality was at once comprised of dialogue and encounter in an open space freed from the constraints of manual labour, and also because his conversational mode posed the question of whether the very style of the city and its terminology might be different (Behler, 2008: 50). Such urbanity goes well beyond philosophy and its history and marks what we often recognize as urbane in the present, where the city becomes a site for intensified individual variation. It is because I am living with others that I mark myself and my style as individual, even if doing so is only materially possible because of the others from whom I mark my distance.

Such urbanity begins to help us articulate what I would like to refer to as the ‘sex and the city' problem: urbanity is at once sexual insofar as it is the close coupling of bodies that intensifies the need to mark oneself by way of a distinct style; stylistic marks of distinction are the consequence of collecting bodies together. Nothing is more oriented to the other – nothing is more sexual – than a body's attempt to signal its distance from the other. Nothing is more urbane, stylish or sexual than being other than the same dull round, and yet the temporality of urbane difference and variation is only possible in a milieu of mutual self-distinction. We might also refer to this as mutual self-annihilation: urbane distance requires that I be other than any of the styles I adopt in order to mark myself as distinct. This can take highly trivial forms. The predominance of fashion in the city, which intensifies its speeds with the higher degrees of proximity and visibility, is at once an extension of the self – becoming who I am by marking out my terrain – and an absorption of the self in localized referential systems that have (increasingly) foreclosed attention to the milieus beyond the city. Is this not what has happened increasingly to the global city of the 21st century, in which mass media and the highly refined styles of branding of the local have enabled all bodies to take up and mark their own visual and verbal styles, but have done so by creating a single global market? Nothing sells better than a distinction from banal capitalism; and it is only the modern city with its proximate and intense markets that can create niche and seemingly individuating styles. What is marketed, precisely because of the global reach of capitalism and multi-national corporations, is an ever more intense demand for private distinction: such is the advertising pitch and branding of firms like Nike who present themselves as purveyors of unique and singular style. The same dynamic characterizes the market of knowledge, research and innovation that must produce itself as different by way of competitive distance. Urbanity, then, is a complex creation of increasing difference because of reduced distance, but also increasing sameness because of the market in difference: and we might also say that this concept of urbanity is at once sexual (effected as it is by way of relations that have nothing to do with the bounded living body’s survival), and tied to what has come to be known as the Anthropocene.

Here is how we might articulate the three concepts of sex, city and the Anthropocene: the concept of sex enables us to think about forces coming into relation, and in doing so those forces become qualified or relatively identified, but also bear the capacity to exceed and destroy the stabilities that they form. The concept of urbanity focuses on the distances, speeds and differences that are involved with bodies that enter into relation, and where the sense of relation creates ongoing positive and negative feedback. Bodies become the same in their strategies of striving to be different, constantly destroying, innovating and surpassing the styles through which they are composed. This sexual and urban propulsion for what might be referred to, broadly, as civilization is the Anthropocene. This is so not merely because it is the intensity of urbanity that marks the planet at a geological level, but also because the capacity to refer to this epoch by way of the notion of ‘anthropos’ requires that some conception of ‘the human’ emerges and enables the all-inclusive notion of a global or universal ‘man’ capable of existing geologically.

Again, I want to work with the Anthropocene as a concept (as an orientation for thinking). The Anthropocene is the inscriptive, archival or speculative concept par excellence, precisely because it poses a form of monument – and even a form of sex – that is counter-human. We imagine – from our present – that the earth will be readable, signaling that there was a species event. But this inscription or text, although it emerges from the proximity of humans, coming into being in order to inscribe, convey and sustain technologies, comes to the fore only if we imagine being read by something other than human. And is this not the epitome of sex, where one has a sense of oneself in relation to a non-present or virtual other? Did not the Anthropocene (as a global destruction following from hyper-consumption well beyond the species’ needs) come into being because of the sexuality of the drive, the capacity or drive to create relations, stabilities and archives beyond any organic body? And is not the concept of the Anthropocene enabled, in turn, by our capacity for thinking, speculating and imagining that may help us to live on, but is more probably there to allow us to view ourselves and pose questions beyond survival? Proposed as the way the earth will be inscribed after human non-existence, the Anthropocene figures a threshold. At a certain level of intensity the human animal no longer becomes a being within time and space but creates a distinct epoch. This is not only the case materially – where it is proposed after our existence that the event of us having been will be readable – but also ideally, where (today) the thought of our imminent non-being becomes a sexual event. Our desires can no longer reach out into an indefinite future; all our dreams of being a part of one grand cosmic life are jolted, and what we encounter – what creates us as the force of desire that we are – is a relation to our future non-being.

Sex, the city, the Anthropocene: these are concepts precisely because they allow us to think intensively – bringing events into relation that alter the very beings that we are. Ultimately, these concept-events enable us to theorize the human race (because of its sexual urbanity) as a race. That is, our sexual coming into being, by way of desires that exceed any supposed need or life of the organism, generates an initially tribal, then racial war in which the desire for consumption and distinction generates ‘man', the being who regards himself as always and everywhere the same, and in so doing produces himself as a race. Race, I would argue, especially in the conception of one grand equal race of civilization that has overcome its petty differences for the sake of individual self-definition, is a concept that is inextricably tied to the intensity of concepts, including the concept of ‘anthropos’ that has retroactively both intensified and implicated globalism.

A concept, considered philosophically, is not extensive (gathering together some existing set of things) but intensive: a concept is a movement that brings with it an orientation for thinking. The problems that are drawn in part from this force of concepts are distinct from questions with answers that might be true or false; problems are ways of working through a field of concepts and surrounding forces. With that in mind, here is how I understand the concept of sex, once it is brought into relation with the concept of the Anthropocene and the city. Sex understood after Freud, and especially after Lacan and Laplanche, is a deflection from something that we might call ‘life’: if organic life requires certain couplings in order to reproduce itself, including the attachment to other bodies, to sustenance, to light and to various other forces, then sex is the same force and coupling that no longer acts to serve life. I need a certain amount of sunlight to survive, but bathing naked in the sun is sensual insofar as it is the affect or intensity of the coupling itself and not what it does or yields that is sexual. I may need food to live, but spending four hours in the kitchen to produce the perfect choux pastry that I then do not eat but serve to my dinner guests is sexual, precisely because what now concerns me is not the substance itself but the substance’s capacity to elicit and intensify desire. In this respect literature and images are sexual (or, in Lacanian terms, the symbolic order is the order of the drive, and is anything but biological [Lacan, 1977: 102]): I need to speak, write and depict in order to live, but if I detach writing and imaging from the organic drive for self-maintenance or species maintenance then these forces become sexual. If this is so one might say that sex precedes life: it is not the case that there are living beings who come into relation in order to reproduce. Rather, there are contingent couplings, without any end or self in view, and it is from that ‘desire’ (without a subject) that beings and sex in the narrow sense emerge. It follows, then, that sex and race should not be considered as two distinct categories of political identity. What we come to know as sex and race, or the stabilization of bodies into sexed and racial identities, is the outcome of something like ‘sex/race’: it is from complex differential complexity – or the multiple genetic and somatic potentials that precede any living body – that distinct sexes and races emerge. One might say that sex emerges from race, for it is only after the genetic differentiation of kinds that sexed reproduction becomes a means for continuity with the variation required to keep species as relatively the same through time. But one might also say that race emerges from sex, insofar as it is the desiring relations among bodies that then form distinct groupings that – despite genetic difference – are recognized as relatively stable races.

If this is so, then I would suggest that one think of sex not as a natural or living force but as something that is intrinsically urban in two senses. First, it is the coming together of bodies – or the formation of territories – that at once furthers life, but that also surpasses or exceeds life. It may be that human bodies (like other organic life forms) gather into groups for the sake of the increased efficiency of collective labour and the other benefits that accrue from living in common; but it is also the case that the drive to couple exceeds any life-serving instinct, and that the means through which life is enhanced socially and politically become ends in themselves. In this respect one might say that the city or urbanity emerges when the life-serving instinct for collective labour and sociality detaches itself and becomes a drive. It is not hard to see how language and tribal forms of trust and cooperation would be life-serving, but it is also not hard to see how those forms that supposedly extend life can take on a force of their own.

If the city emerges from life then it is also the case that increasing urbanization deflects the city from the life drive; this is not only because – as the Anthropocene epoch evidences – the urban means for furthering life led to the industrialization that will destroy the conditions for life. There is a deeper environmental-ecological problem which has to do with the relation between the city and urbanity: the gathering together of bodies in common, to form a body politic, requires some ongoing material condition of inscription that will strengthen and maintain the city as a polity. But those same inscriptive forces – speech, writing, images – of which the city is composed also have the tendency to become urbane. That is, one might say that politics is only possible because of a speaking in common, but that such common forms of inscription can become stylized, sexualized, rendered into nothing more than spectacle. Such would be one environmental reading of the city and the polity: in the beginning is the opening of a common body oriented towards a life that is not that of the mere body but includes social, political and cerebral ends. (This is the reading of Hannah Arendt [1959] and, in different ways, Giorgio Agamben [1998: 2]: humans are not mere life but are capable of opening a space of thinking and reflection that distances itself from the life of bodily needs.) However, there is a gradual falling away of this political potentiality in late industrialization, alongside an increasing enslavement to spectacle and the manipulation of humans as mere life. On this reading, the sexualization of life, or the capacity for desires to extend beyond the life from which they emerge, would be secondary and pathological, and would require a return of speech and images back to praxis and self-creative action.

On another reading, sexuality precedes life, or certainly precedes and exceeds bounded and organic life: there is something like a pulsation or rhythm that occurs when a force takes on a certain direction or tendency. Deleuze and Guattari refer to this as the ‘refrain’ (1987: 300), but beyond their corpus one might cite a more general psychoanalytic conception of desire in which bodies and relatively stable forms come into being by way of the pooling or gathering or cathexis of a quantum of force that becomes the quality, kind or style of force that it is by this very process of desire or drive. It is because of the deflection and encounter of forces – because of a sexuality that is originally and essentially anarchic – that life comes into being. Life is therefore always already non-life, emerging from a chaos that is at once its condition and always its possible undoing. Cities are stabilizations of these drives, formations of something like a body politic, but they are also always in excess of the bounded whole they seem to form. This is evident both in the inscriptive event of the Anthropocene, where industrialization starts to mark the planet as having been the site of a human event, even if that layer of inscription is neither intended nor witnessed by the humans who are its cause, and what I will refer to in this essay as the ‘sex in the city problem’. In brief: cities emerge from an inhuman, pre-human and not necessarily living force of desire, and it is that process of desire that assembles bodies in common, allowing for increasing reflection and freedom, but cities will also be the milieu in which urbanity (or the captivation by style) codes and depletes human freedom.

The problem of sex and the city, or the relation between urbanity and the urban, allows us to think about the Anthropocene as a problem of aesthetics. It is because life is deflected from itself by way of sexuality, by way of desires and drives that have no interest in life forms, that cities are at once formed as stable and efficient wholes, but also create conditions for urbanity: here it is style, rhythm, refrain, image, or the desire of perception – being drawn to that which affects – that create relations that are not reducible to the efficiency of the body. One might say that this possibility of urbanity, or the emphasis on style over form, is the condition of freedom insofar as it is distant from urban management and efficiency. At the same time, though, it is this excessive freedom of style that is also destructive and unsustainable. There is a necessary and yet impossible relation between aesthetics and sustainability: without what has come to be known as the aesthetic, or the formation of desires by way of refrains, styles, mannerisms and inscriptive practices, there would be no ongoing culture, no urbanity and no freedom. And yet it is that very process of ongoing creation through style, inscription and the archive that allows humanity to become a catastrophic geological force.

Sex and the City

I want to focus specifically on what I will refer to – following Angela McRobbie – as the ‘sex and the city’ problem (McRobbie, 2011). It is this problem that at once seems utterly human – to do with the sexes and freedom – and yet requires us to think beyond the figure of self-deciding ‘man’. Writing on post-feminism, McRobbie argues that a certain simulation of freedom has framed contemporary representations of women who are now perceived to be ‘free’ insofar as they are agile consumers capable of achieving any amount of purchasing power, who form their free post-feminist identities through the world of capitalism and its unbridled desires. For McRobbie such a presentation of freedom attained through buying power precludes what she refers to as a properly political consideration of the conditions of freedom and identity. (By political McRobbie refers to forces that are not those of conscious human decision and intent and instead require a degree of historical and economic complexity.) What McRobbie articulates – I think – is one of the most profound philosophical questions of our time, a time in which freedom is bonded with consumption. What if the very figure of self-forming freedom were coupled with a mode of blindness? This, I think, has been the problem of feminist philosophy from the moment of its emergence with liberal political theory: how might free and rational individuals be mistaken about their freedom, and how is it possible that what we take to be freedom and power can be construed as a form of self-enslavement? In what follows I want to broaden this problem of sexual freedom to the concept of the Anthropocene. By sexual freedom I want to bring into a more explicit focus the problem identified by McRobbie: we are sexual beings whose bodies are bound up with a history of the division of labour, and this division of labour has also amounted to a division of cognitive labour. It is our sexual being, our being as desiring, coupled, reproducing and producing bodies that at once requires our freedom (or our going forth beyond ourselves to create technical and cognitive industries), and yet it is this same sexual desire that has also impeded both our being and the broader sexual or desiring life of which we are an expression.

It is this sexual nature of our being that ties philosophy to the city and to the condition of urbanity. If we consider sexuality to be the condition that requires the living being to extend beyond its borders in order to form itself through networks of desire and the delay of desire, along with images or figures of an anticipated future, then we might say that both the city and philosophy are desiring machines: the city is both a chastening of the individual body’s rampant desire for immediate consumption for the sake of a deferred end, at the same time as it is the intensification of consumer desire achieved by the city’s capacity for maximum efficiency, innovation and exploitation.

This interdependence between philosophy and the city has been articulated in a number of discourses and is expressed in a series of registers. According to Bernard Stiegler, human selves are the outcome of a technology of hypomnemata: the capacity to inscribe, store, share and exchange information at once relieves the individual of a personal memory burden but also renders every individual as always already formed and articulated through a collective and ongoing archive (Stiegler, 1998). It is through the technology of writing that an archive can be stored, and this archive in turn allows for a complex formation and individuation of the self through a dynamic tradition. When we read the works of Plato we are not just retrieving information from the past but are also brought into relation with the individual signature of the work; it is via the division of labour of the city and technology that selves are at once highly individuated and yet also threatened with becoming subjected to industrial production. In his recent work, Stiegler couples the tradition of collective individuation via the archive with a recent problem of a new relation between otium and negotium (Stiegler, 2011: 65). The time of leisure, contemplation and self-formation was set apart from the needs of life, or affairs of business. Philosophy, for Stiegler, has relied on this economy and yet failed to confront its condition of genesis from this division of labour. His key point, for the present, is that philosophy – precisely because of the conditions of the post-urban, global and hyper-industrial condition of production and consumption – has become unsustainable. It is now negotium that, in the spirit of capitalism, has become the end of life, with work itself not being the means for otium or the leisure of self-formation, but instead becoming an end in itself. The affairs of business or unbridled production are now the driver, such that techno-science becomes production for its own sake, with a forgetting or short-circuiting of the archive. There can be no desired future, precisely because imaginative and temporally projecting desires require some individuating archive that would give libidinal energy its singular forms. There is no longer a division of labour that would allow the formation of a leisured class of thinkers, but a mass enslavement of the entire body politic (which is no longer a body but a mass) to the needs of production and consumption.

Deleuze and Guattari have argued that the practice of creating philosophical concepts that operate intensively rather than extensively relies upon a certain Athenian historical creation of conversational friendship that is also adversarial, beginning with friendship but then releasing itself from communication. It may well be that philosophy’s concepts are intensive and create orientations for thinking that are virtual and irreducible to states of affairs, but this practice of concepts is only possible by way of contingent historical events. In their broader history of capitalism Deleuze and Guattari tie the very ‘discovery’ of abstraction to capitalism’s essence: all cultures operate by the relation and productive exchange of forces, but it is historical capitalism that formalizes and brings this truth of relations to the fore. There is something contingent about capitalism and its process of global urbanization, but that contingency nevertheless also enables humans to form some intuition of the virtual. They suggest, for all their criticism of capitalism as an increasingly reductive axiom that will subject all flows of life to the same differential of labour, that capitalism also bears the potential to bring thought to the truth of something like the essence of exchange as such, beyond the mythic figures that tie it back to specific or actual bodies: ‘Production as the abstract subjective essence is discovered only in the forms of property that objectifies it all over again, that alienates it by reterritorializing it’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1983: 281).

Philosophy is at once urban in requiring the proximity of bodies freed from immediate labour while also being meta-urban or urbane in directing its focus beyond the borders of the city to something like a universal rationale that would allow that city’s specific good to be the good for all. There is a long tradition (going back to Schlegel) of describing Socratic irony, or the mode of personality that distances itself from the city’s shared and conventional values, as high urbanity (Dane, 2011: 110). This high urbanity is at once dramatic, for the urban forum allows for the modes and means of exchange to be staged, displayed, exaggerated and stylized. At the same time one might also tie the city to a certain destructive aesthetic: the circulation, reproduction, archiving and mass consumption of styles that emerge from the distance of urbanity eventually lead to a mass homogenization of desire that in turn leads to ever more intense hyper-consumption. We should, however, avoid any form of nostalgia or yearning on this issue, for the supposed pastoral moment of pre-urban creation that would not yet be subjected to the urban force of industrialism is itself a possibility and creation of the leisured time of the city.

This suggests that the city provides the condition for its own virtual destruction, and that it is essentially – like all sexual forces – unsustainable. For it is the nature of a sexual force to be in excess of its own life: a body can maintain itself by fulfilling its needs, just as a city can maintain itself by reproducing its relations of production and consumption. But sexual bodies take the means of reproduction as desirable in themselves, and this is indeed the condition of the city. In Socratic terms, the conversational bonds that enable the ongoing operation of a community and urban whole also destroy that commonality by asking about the truth and sense of terms beyond convention, and beyond this specific city. Similarly, while the modern city is produced and required by the productive processes of capital and consumption, the city becomes the site where excess and consumption detach themselves from production. In the quite specific ‘sex and the city’ problem that McRobbie articulates in terms of post-feminist freedom, we might say that it is only by way of capitalism and technology that bodies are both freed from intense domestic labour and allowed the social mobility that will create new modes of urban female friendship outside of kinship systems and biological reproduction, at the same time as the very economic apparatus that enabled that physical liberation leads to a narrowing of psychic freedom, that is now oriented entirely towards the networks of commodity acquisition and (worse) the offering of women themselves as sexual commodities in order to keep the new industries of self-fashioning alive and flourishing.

It might be worth noting two far more specific points before we move on. I have suggested that the ‘sex and the city’ problem might be formalized as the relation between the conditions of freedom and freedom’s own curtailment: the material forces and networks that liberate bodies from negotium, allowing for otium (and contemplation and the formation of a collective body of wisdom that transcends the present), are the same forces that can capture the body, allowing the pursuit of business and consumption without limit to be the new end of life. There is something stridently ‘beyond good and evil’ in Stiegler’s approach which allows us to think archaeologically, or – to use Deleuze and Guattari’s phrase – to open a geology of morals. When McRobbie criticizes the presentation of post-feminist freedom as insufficiently political, it is because she sees human freedom and self-determination as having a complexity that entwines our decisions with forces of social, political and sexual production: what, she wants to ask, is the history and division of labour that allows for a self who determines itself via the commodity? When Stiegler laments the capture of desire by a flat and de-individuating system of exchange that is only an exchange of commodities, he is not looking back to a nostalgic origin when there was a genuinely reflective desire that liberated itself from the needs of life. On the contrary, the archive of philosophical questions and reflections that enabled the complex formation of human individuation – such as our capacity today to form ourselves through thinking, viewing, making, crafting and writing – relied upon a violent division of labour that created a proletariat enslaved to production, freeing a philosophical discourse of otium. Today’s task of an organology, for Stiegler, requires examining the way our writing hand, reading brain, viewing eye and comprehending ear emerged through a network of technologies: the eye evolving with the very screen that will also eventually lull the eye in a consuming and passive acquiescence. For McRobbie, political analysis requires us to couple bodies and desires with social and historical machines; for Stiegler, organology entails that we analyse the body of the present with the technologies that enabled both its complexity and mass homogenization.

I would suggest that both these political and organological confrontations with the present can be expanded to take in a geological dimension: the planet that is our milieu and condition for life also becomes – when it is imagined as this globe or environment that we believe to be ours – a figure for humanity as a global productive and consuming whole. And it is this figure of global capital – where humanity is free insofar as it is part of one network of exchange – that necessarily precludes humanity from discerning itself as a geological force that is marking, scarring and irrevocably altering the planet. Just as technology for Stiegler is a pharmakon that allows for the individuation and coming into being of the human while also allowing that same human body to offload its cognitive and mnemonic burdens onto an archive, so for McRobbie the capitalist production that liberates women from the private sphere of domestic enslavement creates a public space of nothing more than consumption and commodification. In turn we might say that as technology and commodification enable the figure of a global humanity to emerge, such that it is with the historical advent of capitalism that we are able intuit the ‘abstract essence’ of exchange from which all social forms emerge, it is also the case that the very same global market diminishes reflective freedom by localizing relations among individuals in terms of commodities.

The very potential for open exchange that allows relations among bodies to emerge is the same potential that will limit relations to relations of capital. In McRobbie’s version of the problem we might say this: it is division of labour that at once allows freedom to emerge, but this has always been freedom for some – those (men) who are liberated from mere life for the sake of a conversational public sphere. Now it might seem that this liberation from mere life is extended to all, as women enter the public sphere, but the supposedly free and open public sphere is both a sphere of commodities dependent on wage exploitation and a sphere of intense planetary exploitation drawing increasingly on the depleted resources of the earth.

In the film Sex and the City 2 this problem is given an imperialist and global dimension: traveling in the Middle East, the four women encounter oppression when their capitalist desires for sexual spending are dampened by archaic and patriarchal forces. Carrie, Samantha, Miranda and Charlotte embark upon a James Bond-style chase through crowded markets to seek refuge. The random room to which they withdraw discloses a small group of veiled women who, in a moment of sisterly recognition, disrobe to reveal a wardrobe of Prada, Gucci, Chanel and Jimmy Choo beneath their burkas. This scene is an allegory of the global city and its anchoring to a specifically figured sexual freedom: in this tale of how the West must win, it is the free consumption and circulation of commodities that not only represents liberation from the parochial but also allows for global recognition. Everyone speaks the same language of commodity desire. This scene requires political, organological and geological critique: the globe and its open space of freedom is a circulating system of commodity flows that (if we follow McRobbie) precludes the question of a freedom not to spend or not be defined via the commodities of sexual display. This universal market is, precisely because of its imperial reach, the creation of a homogeneous desire that allows the very technologies that rendered the human eye-brain-hand-ear into a network of complex individuals to also reduce the complexity and difference of self-formation.

What happens if we add a geological dimension to critique? The political dimension that asks about the costs of commodity freedom in a world of unequal distribution of wealth must, for Stiegler, be extended to a consideration of the distribution and cultivation of cognitive and libidinal investments. Adding geological critique, we might ask what the global, philosophical and urban development of the human species has cost the earth. It is not simply a question of asking by what right the human species has become the reflective and desiring ‘humanity’ that it is, given the ravages that flourishing has entailed for the planet. It is also pertinent to note that the global expansion of human desire has occurred by way of an intensification of the homogenization of the market of desires, such that there is increasingly less space for urbanity, of stylized distance from the urban networks of exchange.

It is precisely this commonality that, according to Stiegler, flattens desire to the point where individuation is no longer possible. Desire is so immediately and successfully figured and answered that a future is short-circuited. It is precisely by being answered so readily, easily and immediately – without question, difference or distance – that desire enslaves itself to what ought to have been its open means. And we might see this problem as articulated by Stiegler not as an unfortunate accident that befell desire and its enslavement to technology, but as a consequence of desire’s necessary relation to urbanity and techne. For Stiegler, techne or the ongoing, stabilized, evolving and supplementary extension of life is life, which is also to say that desiring life is always bound up with a certain non-life. Living can only be achieved by movements of connection, relation, attachment and extension, such that the formation of the organism requires a field of other forces and powers. For Stiegler, the study of the present requires an organology, or an inquiry into the multiple bodies, screens, images and archives through which individuation is achieved. The process of mass industrialization, whereby the connections and networks of desire become efficient to the point of closing off any future that is not determined by maximized production and mass consumption, has led to mass proletarianization. The city’s original division of labour, with some bodies being free enough to engage in leisured reflection, is giving way to the total orientation of all bodies to negotium.

We might even say that there has been an urbanization destructive of all urbanity: if every living body becomes taken up with the efficiency and productivity of negotium – to the point that all supposed leisure activities become otium – then there is no space or distance from the city that would enable the formation of styles at odds with the market. We can anchor this observation in the exemplary mode of Sex and the City: women are no longer cast aside in some private space of domestic labour that frees men for the civility and urbanity of the public sphere; for there is now one sphere in which the domestic scene is also dominated by an overarching network of consumption (the home of gadgets, conspicuous display of wealth, leisure time spent in further commodification with time spent on pay TV, purchased games, online shopping and even social media and networking entwined with advertising), and where the public sphere is a collection of individuals focused on individual consumption that is always the same as any other individual. The Sex and the City problem articulated by McRobbie is not only that freedom is bound up with nothing more than freedom to consume, but also that there is no space that is free from the exchange system of ‘negotium’. Her political critique asks us to look at freedom not as a quality of individuals but as dependent on a system of the division of labour, and then the sexualization of that division. Women are free to spend, and also to present themselves – via spending – as desirable sexual commodities.

Stiegler looks at the formation of human desire by way of the evolution of the technical objects through which we are defined and articulated, allowing us to theorize something like a global libido or process of sexual difference that may either proliferate into ever more expansive and complex circuits, or fall into disinvestment. If the objects of desire are always already given then there is no future, and a profound loss of sexual difference: there is nothing more than man as he actually is. We might say that what has enabled humanity to develop its capacity – an archive and a technology that has specific material conditions – is at once sexual/urban in its creation of a common body and increasingly desexualized in its domestication of all desires onto the figure of ‘man’. There is little, if any, sense of what desire might be if it were oriented beyond the polis, beyond the productive efficiency of a humanity that is oriented to nothing more than its own sustainability.

This structure of urban desire, or desire (insofar as it surpasses life) as urban, is intensified and transformed in the era of the Anthropocene. The technological conditions that enabled the practice of geology (or the examination of the earth’s strata) have enabled a thought experiment that would surpass any possible geology. How will the earth be stratified, or how might a future practice of geology read the earth once all current geological practice has been extinguished? We might say, again, that the exploitation of the planet’s resources and bodies that enabled the emergence of science are the same conditions that led both to the planet’s destruction and the reading of that destruction and – more importantly – the denial or free blindness that we have adopted to the ways in which we are increasingly bringing about the contraction and annihilation of all freedom, not merely human freedom. Or, put more simply: only a centralized, urban and divided body of labour can yield the free range of thought that would open questions of value and existence beyond the city (and these questions would include the modern concept of the Anthropocene), and yet these same conditions of the genesis of free thought are also those that have led to the planet’s demise, and to the intensified denial of the earth’s contribution to the history of desire. It is possible to form the concept of the Anthropocene only because of the free practices of knowledge that emerged from the city and its divided labour, and yet what the Anthropocene observes is the end and limit of those same urban intensities.

The Anthropocene does not designate a state of affairs in the world but creates a new way of thinking about the relation between time, thought, bodies and what might be imagined. My claim is that this new philosophical orientation is (like all philosophical orientations) intrinsically tied to sex and the city (or to desire and urbanity) and that the Anthropocene reconfigures the plane of desire and urbanity that is its condition.

By way of conclusion I want to return to the sustainability of the sex and the city problem: why does McRobbie, in a mode that is classically feminist, object to the false freedom of urban post-feminist consumption? Her claim is that such ersatz freedom is not political freedom, for it is a freedom tied to an already constituted or actual network of gendered bodies and objects and does not ask about the various contracts that have been entered into in order to form that polis. I would extend McRobbie’s critique and say that freedom so considered (as freedom to buy and freedom to be a sexual commodity) is insufficiently geological: it does not take into account the division of labour between human bodies and the planet, and does not attend to the sexual contract that is required by the intensity of consumption of the Anthropocene city. There can only be this current (late) witnessing of the Anthropocence because of an intensity of urban consumption and production; ‘we’ have irrevocably altered the earth’s biomass and have marked the earth with a strata that would be readable if there were anything like a geologically literate class in the world after humans. The conditions of urbanity at once require the division of sexual labour in a quite unremarkable sense: the distinction between a stable domestic sphere of reproduction, and an expanding public sphere of bodies increasingly divided into masters and slaves. But the very emergence of the human body, with its desire to further its own life beyond the time of its body, at once requires and precedes sexuality in gendered terms. We might say, as Deleuze and Guattari do, that all life is sexual, for even without sexed reproduction, life multiplies, differs and evolves only by not remaining within itself. Life operates by establishing connections with bodies, the consequences of which are incalculable, multiple and unforeseeable.

This is also to say that life is essentially intertwined with non-life: if life were to remain complete, unto itself, concerned with its own maintenance, then there would be no sexuality – no risk, no step beyond the present to that which may or may not yield life. In this respect we might say that the sex and the city problem of freedom lies in its counter-sexual tendency: desire already possesses its object, and has arrived at a closed calculation of expenditure. What has not been considered is the emergence of this sexual body as such: the human animal who, via the city and its archival capacity to develop technologies of the future, will develop speeds of consumption and production that will destroy its own conditions.

We might conclude by asking what a genuine desire of sex and the Anthropocene city might be. Can we free our desire from the question of sustaining ourselves, and achieve a heightened urbanity, where sex is no longer bounded by sexes and where living in common no longer seeks only to sustain the urban?