Special Issue: Geosocial Formations and the Anthropocene

Theory, Culture & Society

2017, Vol. 34(2–3) 39–60
Sex and the ! The Author(s) 2016
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DOI: 10.1177/0263276416654975
journals.sagepub.com/home/tcs
Claire Mary Colebrook
Penn State University

Abstract
In this essay I explore three concepts: sex, the city, and the Anthropocene. I argue
that the condition for the possibility of the city is the assemblage of sexual drives for
the sake of relative stability, but that those same drives also exceed the city’s self-
preservative function. Further, I argue that the very conditions that further the city
and that enable philosophical and scientific concepts to be formed (and that allow for
the Anthropocene to be discerned as an epoch) rely upon a geological politics that
enables new ways of thinking about what counts as the political as such.

Keywords
Anthropocene, city, Deleuze, Guattari, sex, Stiegler

Our only points of disagreement with Foucault are the following: (I)
to us the assemblages seem fundamentally to be assemblages not of
power but of desire (desire is always assembled), and power seems
to be a stratified dimension of the assemblage; (2) the diagram
and abstract machine have lines of flight that are primary, which
are not phenomena of resistance or counterattack in an assemblage,
but cutting edges of creation and deterritorialization. (Deleuze and
Guattari, 1987: 531)

In this paper I take three concepts – sex, the city, and the newly declared
Anthropocene – and read each term as having an intensity, tendency or
power beyond its actual form. If there can be two sexed bodies this is
because any body or living being emerges from a desiring and dynamic
relation among forces that yields different sexes. If there are cities, or
gatherings of bodies and buildings to form commercial, cultural and
political wholes, this is because – like sexuality – any apparent or

Corresponding author: Claire Mary Colebrook. Email: cmc30@psu.edu

Extra material: http://theoryculturesociety.org/
40 Theory, Culture & Society 34(2–3)

actual stability is made possible by a destabilizing and multiple dyna-

mism. This is not just to say that cities and bodies emerge from complex
processes, but that such processes are contrary, and that contrary
tendencies operate by way of thresholds. Here, I draw upon Deleuze
and Guattari’s work on concepts (1994) and on their broader history
of strata (1987): a concept is a philosophical (and temporary) stabiliza-
tion of multiple tendencies of thought. (The concept of the city comprises
both the notion of bodies assembling in common, accompanied by spaces
and practices of dissent; the history of thinking about urbanity and cities
is a history of conceptual tensions, just as much as any actual city is
composed from material tensions.) If philosophical concepts compose,
decompose and rearrange manners of thinking, sexed bodies and cities
are compositions and re-formations of practices and processes. Deleuze
and Guattari write about territorialization and de-territorialization both
at the levels of art/writing/thinking and at the level of physical/material
relations. It is not only that sexed bodies, like cities, are stabilizations of
dynamic and destabilizing tendencies, but also that one could see both
these events as stratifications of something that, following Deleuze and
Guattari, one might refer to as desire. Before bodies possess desires or
interests there are relations among quantities of force that, by way of
entering into relation, become qualified. The sexed body in the city is,
therefore, an expression of a broader, inhuman and pre-organic milieu of
desire. Organized bodies (such as cities), and bodies with organs (such as
sexed bodies) emerge from forces that might be referred to as desiring
insofar as they are not directed to preserving or sustaining any already
formed being. Here, then, is where one might tie the third concept – the
Anthropocene – to sex and the city: there is something urbane about
sexuality, and something sexual about urbanity, and these intersections
come to the fore in the concept and event of the Anthropocene. Cities are
not just gatherings of bodies for mutual self-interest, but are also invest-
ments in agonistics and self-transformation; one might say that what
makes a city a city is the intensity with which relations among bodies
exceed self-interest and self-preservation (or are sexual). By the same
token, a relation between two bodies is sexual (rather than bound by
organic preservation) to the extent that it is urbane – oriented to differ-
ences, style, flair or display, and not to reproduction. If the diagnosis of
the Anthropocene turns out to be correct, then the very thing that will
bring the human species and its modes of existing on the planet to an end
is sexual urbanity or urbane sexuality: not simply living, but living with a
certain excess that embraces an ongoing self-annihilation. One way of
thinking about the Anthropocene is to refuse the notion of the human
species in general as a geological force, and instead attribute the escala-
tion of ‘human’ life on earth to the high-consumption urban lifestyle of
late modernity. If this is the case, then one would need to extend the
relation between sex and urbanity to the problem of the threshold of the
Colebrook 41

Anthropocene. At what point do urban formations tend towards becom-

ing earth-system transformative? This question would require that one
think about the ways in which the sexual contract (Pateman, 1988) that
enables a public sphere and a certain type of city-state (focused on delib-
erative and reflective exchange) extracts energy both from the planet and
humans elsewhere. If philosophy emerges with urbanity and a leisured
but combative exchange among friends (Deleuze and Guattari, 1994: 5),
it can do so only by way of the distribution of labour enabled by cities
and the extraction of labour and resources enabled by empire.
To think the relation among the city, sex and the Anthropocene is
to operate both by way of thresholds and by way of speculation. If, in the
present, we are confronted with the Anthropocene as a threshold –
the point at which humans became a geological force – this gives us
the opportunity to think about the forces that entered into the composi-
tion of the current stratification of the earth, and how something like
‘man’ as a hyper-consuming but also self-universalizing life-form came
into being. How did a life-form intensify its modes of assembling to
become a geological force, and how did it generate the conception of
‘humanity’, such that it could then refer to that stratification with the
term ‘Anthropocene’?

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)

The city, for Bergson, was not simply a spatial locale, but demonstrated
a broader relation between intensity and life, or rather, life as intensity.
For Bergson, the difference between matter and life can be understood in
terms of proximity and delay: the more a body hesitates before it
responds to its milieu, the greater its degree of freedom. But that delay
is enabled, in turn, by the power of memory: there is no hesitation in a
simply material or mechanical response, but if my desire for (say) food is
stalled by a recollection not only of a madeleine I once tasted, but also all
the literature and philosophy I have consumed regarding Marcel Proust’s
story of eating a madeleine in Combray, then it is the past and the
archive that renders my present already social, and already part of a
42 Theory, Culture & Society 34(2–3)

broader time and milieu. (Bernard Stiegler has made a similar point by
way of Simondon; I become an individual by way of an archive of
memories, with such archives having their basis in philosophical practices
and a division of labour. It is this collective and dynamic archive that
generates a difference between being nothing more than one’s species and
emerging from species-determination to an open future [Stiegler, 2015].)
Morality, for Bergson, occurs in a transition from merely living
(or material life) to living with an orientation to an open whole. If I
am concerned with survival, then I might cooperate with others for the
sake of self-interest; if, however, that relation with others is intensified –
as in the city – then some sense of the whole beyond self-interest takes
over. What is experienced is not the simple pleasure of efficient consump-
tion enabled by collective and cooperative labour, but joy. Joy is imper-
sonal, and while it may emerge from competition and proximity with
others, it transcends that initial force for survival by producing a differ-
ent temporality. Pleasure is achieved by negotiating delay, or what
Bergson refers to as ‘halting or marking time’.
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
Colebrook 43

exceeds any of the bodies or qualified forces it generates. On this under-

standing, 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 destruc-
tive 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 pur-
poses 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
44 Theory, Culture & Society 34(2–3)

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 mea-
sured by units of suffering:

The equation injury ¼ 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 con-
templating 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)

The state form, according to Deleuze and Guattari, proceeds by reducing

the multiple flows of pain and debt to a single code and measure. Prior to
the modern city, the barbarian state is achieved by the elevation of a
single despotic body:

For the first time, something has been withdrawn from life and from
the earth that will make it possible to judge life and to survey the
earth from above: a first principle of paranoiac knowledge. The
whole relative play of alliances and filiations is carried to the abso-
lute in this new alliance and this direct filiation. (Deleuze and
Guattari, 1983: 194)

By the time we reach commodity culture and the modern city, desire and
the organs have been privatized, and it is the family and bourgeois indi-
vidual rather than the social form of the city that concern Deleuze and
Guattari. They have little to say, in Anti-Oedipus, about the stratification
that generates the private self, although they do define this ‘subject’ as
made possible by way of ‘racial delirium’: rather than all the differences
that compose the multiplicity of humans there emerges a single figure
of ‘man’ who is the universal and representative form of all humanity.
The state is achieved by a single system of mnemonics, writing, that will
eventually become something like ‘the signifier’, so that each individual
must read the archive of humanity in order to become a subject by way of
a history of inscription:

What changes singularly in the surface organization of representa-

tion is the relationship between the voice and graphism: it is the
despot who establishes the practice of writing (the most ancient
Colebrook 45

authors saw this clearly); it is the imperial formation that makes

graphism into a system of writing in the proper sense of the term.
(Deleuze and Guattari, 1983: 202)

How does the self become ‘the subject’ or a rational individual whose
private desires can be negotiated in a common space of exchange and
reason? For Deleuze and Guattari the answer lies in money, but not
because money facilitates exchange but because there must have already
been a subordination of relations to a single system, and it is this neu-
tralizing of flows and the establishment of a single system (or decoding)
that enables the private self of desires that are always already translatable
and substitutable in a space of commodities:

And that is what is concealed in the two acts of the State: the
residence or territoriality of the State inaugurates the great move-
ment of deterritorialization that subordinates all the primitive filia-
tions to the despotic machine (the agrarian problem); the abolition
of debts or their accountable transformation initiates the duty of an
interminable service to the State that subordinates all the primitive
alliances to itself (the problem of debts). The infinite creditor and
infinite credit have replaced the blocks of mobile and finite debts.
There is always a monotheism on the horizon of despotism: the debt
becomes a debt of existence, a debt of the existence of the subjects
themselves. (Deleuze and Guattari, 1983: 197)

At the same time, Deleuze and Guattari will argue later in What is
Philosophy? that it is in the city that there can be the types of quasi-friendship
that will generate the creation of concepts, and this is because it is in the city
that one can be freed from particular claims (claiming what is valid given
one’s expertise as this or that profession), and from communication. Rather
than communication and conversation, relations are no longer confined to
the city space in which they occur but create a virtual zone:

The idea of a Western democratic conversation between friends has

never produced a single concept. The idea comes, perhaps, from the
Greeks, but they distrusted it so much, and subjected it to such
harsh treatment, that the concept was more like the ironical solilo-
quy bird that surveyed [survolait] the battlefield of destroyed rival
opinions (the drunken guests at the banquet). (Deleuze and
Guattari, 1994: 6)

Deleuze and Guattari propose the city as a space where a certain

freedom from the earth generates a capacity to think in a manner that
46 Theory, Culture & Society 34(2–3)

opens a plane of immanence where thinking might occur as such, a plane

that will later be increasingly threatened by marketing:

But the more philosophy comes up against shameless and inane rivals
and encounters them at its very core, the more it feels driven to fulfill
the task of creating concepts that are aerolites rather than commer-
cial products. (Deleuze and Guattari, 1994: 11)

This space of reasons (such as today’s bourgeois public sphere) has a

prior history in which the multiple flows of desire are coded and sub-
jected to a single communicative system and economy. The private
thinker is possible because of a prior division of labour, which in turn
is possible by way of a violent system of equivalences, and yet the city
that enables communication and conversation, because of proximity,
also enables the creation of distances.
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
Colebrook 47

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 dis-
tances, 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 propul-
sion 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
48 Theory, Culture & Society 34(2–3)

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 thresh-
old. 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 impli-
cated globalism.
A concept, considered philosophically, is not extensive (gathering
together some existing set of things) but intensive: a concept is a move-
ment 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 under-
stood after Freud, and especially after Lacan and Laplanche, is a deflec-
tion 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
Colebrook 49

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
50 Theory, Culture & Society 34(2–3)

– 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 mate-
rial 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
Colebrook 51

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 simu-
lation 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
52 Theory, Culture & Society 34(2–3)

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 articu-
lated in a number of discourses and is expressed in a series of registers.
According to Bernard Stiegler, human selves are the outcome of a tech-
nology 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
Colebrook 53

– 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 philo-
sophical 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 irre-
ducible to states of affairs, but this practice of concepts is only possible
by way of contingent historical events. In their broader history of capit-
alism 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 con-
tingency nevertheless also enables humans to form some intuition of the
virtual. They suggest, for all their criticism of capitalism as an increas-
ingly reductive axiom that will subject all flows of life to the same differ-
ential 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 direct-
ing 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
54 Theory, Culture & Society 34(2–3)

consumption of styles that emerge from the distance of urbanity even-

tually 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 – unsustain-
able. 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 con-
versational 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 produc-
tive 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 phy-
sical 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 for-
malized 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 produc-
tion: what, she wants to ask, is the history and division of labour that
Colebrook 55

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 forma-
tion of human individuation – such as our capacity today to form our-
selves 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, orga-
nology entails that we analyse the body of the present with the technol-
ogies that enabled both its complexity and mass homogenization.
I would suggest that both these political and organological confronta-
tions 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 irre-
vocably 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 com-
modification 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 free-
dom 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
56 Theory, Culture & Society 34(2–3)

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 encoun-
ter oppression when their capitalist desires for sexual spending are dam-
pened by archaic and patriarchal forces. Carrie, Samantha, Miranda and
Charlotte embark upon a James Bond-style chase through crowded mar-
kets 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 com-
modity flows that (if we follow McRobbie) precludes the question of a
freedom not to spend or not be defined via the commodities of sexual dis-
play. 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 indi-
viduals to also reduce the complexity and difference of self-formation.
What happens if we add a geological dimension to critique? The poli-
tical 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
Colebrook 57

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 supplemen-
tary 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 move-
ments 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, con-
spicuous 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 con-
sumption 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 evolu-
tion of the technical objects through which we are defined and articu-
lated, 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.
58 Theory, Culture & Society 34(2–3)

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 emer-
gence 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
Colebrook 59

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 reproduc-
tion, life multiplies, differs and evolves only by not remaining within
itself. Life operates by establishing connections with bodies, the conse-
quences 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 mainte-
nance, 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 emer-
gence 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?

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Claire Colebrook is Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of Literature at Penn State

University. She has written books and articles on literary theory, literary
history, feminist theory, queer theory, poetry, and contemporary European
philosophy. Her most recent book is Twilight of the Anthropocene Idols
(co-authored with Tom Cohen and J. Hillis Miller).

This article is part of a Theory, Culture & Society special issue on ‘Geosocial
Formations and the Anthropocene’, edited by Nigel Clark and Kathryn
Yusoff.