Picture of me being handed my diploma by Greg Prince,
then President of Hampshire College
The slogan "You will not replace us" gained broad recognition after the infamous "Unite the Right" rally in Charlottesville. It was the distillation of what has come to be known as "Great Replacement Theory" one of the pillars of the modern white supremacist movement. The idea is that the well documented demographic shifts which will make this country more diverse and less white, are not just the cumulative effect of different marriages, births, and migrations, but are some kind of grand conspiracy. Aside from the obvious racism, I have never understood the existential crisis behind this slogan; we all will die, and to some extent we all will be replaced.
Most of us are constantly being replaced. What I mean by this is go back to your college, and I bet you will find a new version of you. Did you have a punk rock show on college radio? Were you the person really into movies, who would debate Kurosawa versus Kobayashi, Godard versus Truffaut? Or where you really into your place on the [insert sport here] team? No matter what you did or who you are, someone probably already occupies that place. The same is true of high school, whether you were in the chess club or smoked under the bleachers, someone else is doing that now (but they probably vape). I would say this is a good thing as well. If what we did, and who we are, mattered to us at all, we should try to be replaced.
I realize that I am playing loose with the slogan here, eliding the real racial animus that fuels it, but I am trying to replace its imaginary crisis with a real one. The problem is not that we are being replaced, but that many of us find ourselves in conditions of non-reproduction. I use this term not in the sense that Chantal Jaquet uses it, as the ability of some people to transgress their class position, to escape the pressure of the reproduction of the relations of production. My use of the term is closer to what Annie McClanahan means when she writes about "reproductive rift." As McClanahan writes in Beneath the Wage,
"To understand these conditions, I have found it helpful to borrow the idea of "metabolic rift" developed in Marxist ecological thought. Metabolic rift theory describes how capitalism exhausts the two resources it needs most--nature and workers--by disrupting natural and social cycles of self-subsistence and social renewal. Separated from nature, workers can neither sustain themselves nor prevent the destruction of the natural world from which their sustenance once came. In parallel, service workers today experience what we might term a "reproductive rift": domestic workers are unable to afford housing child care workers are unable to afford child care; delivery gigworkers are unable to afford groceries. Thinking of these situations as instances of reproductive rift help us understand why organized service workers are not merely emphasizing their right to a "fair share" of their own reproductive output, but instead demanding wages to rising subsistence costs."
McClanahan primarily refers to this rift in terms of the immediate reproduction of the conditions of production, workers unable to afford the food, clothing, and shelter that they need to come back to work the next day, forcing them to rely on social networks, family, or additional work--gigwork, in order to survive. Of course this also extends to a larger sense of reproduction, the new workers that capitalism needs. People living in their basements, or with four roommates, or Ubering after shifts at a restaurant, are not having kids, not reproducing the relations of reproduction.
I am thinking of the reproductive rift in a manner what is both broader, encompassing the reproduction of future generations, and more narrow, I am thinking about the conditions that produced me. Occasionally, I will get the question, by students or graduate students, how I came to study the things that I did. Philosophers who write on Marx are still fairly rare, even rarer is the kind of intersection of Marx and late twentieth century philosophy that shaped my first book. So I often get the question, "where did you go to school." I cannot really answer that question, or cannot give them the answer they want. PIC, Philosophy, Interpretation, and Culture at Binghamton, where I did my graduate work, has long since been shuttered and closed, and now, on the day that I am writing this, I learned that Hampshire College is also closing. I give both of these institutions a great deal of credit in shaping the person that I became, at least in terms of education.
What both gave me was a great deal of freedom, and space to figure out what I wanted to study, and let me study things that I would not have been able to study. It is bizarre to me, now that I have been teaching for over twenty years, that I did a Div III, basically an undergraduate thesis, on Deleuze, Guattari, Freud, and Foucault. Even stranger, half the reason that I ended up reading that book, which I remember buying at City Lights, was that Margaret Cerullo had a blurb on the back, I am referring to the old, purple crayon editions. Although if I am giving shout outs to Hampshire faculty, I have to mention Meredith Michaels, who taught the philosophy class that made me want to study philosophy, and who chaired my Div III even though I think we both know that I was punching above my weight.
I could go on and on with nostalgia about Hampshire, but I will spare you that, dear reader. What I want to return to is this rift, of reproduction. It is not just me that I am worried about. In the past few years we have seen a few of the great figures of philosophy and theory pass, Fredric Jameson, who would have turned ninety one today, Antonio Negri, Paolo Virno, Asad Haider, Marina Vishmidt, and Joshua Clover, to name a few. Some of these deaths were tragic, lives cut short too soon, and some came after long lives, and they were no doubt horrible losses to the people they knew and lives they touched, but to the rest of us, to those who knew those people primarily through their books, essays, and lectures, the question that I think we should ask, or at least that I find myself asking, is what are we doing to reproduce the conditions of their production. Do we have the spaces and conditions to develop such critical perspectives? This goes beyond the unique learning space that was Hampshire and PIC, and into the general breakdown of higher education. I fear that the next Fredric Jameson is covering a five course load as an adjunct faculty member and will never get to write their The Political Unconscious. Or that the next Asad Haider will attend a university that has purged philosophy and critical thinking on race and identity from its curriculum. A free man might think of death least of all, but it seems to me that part of a meditation on life is thinking about how to sustain the conditions of critical thought and action that we rely on now.
"They will not replace us" is not slogan or a demand, but in some sense an accurate descriptive statement of where generations of thinkers, artists, and scientists stand, on platforms the stairs to which are being actively dismantled.
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