A THOUSAND REPS
The middle is by no means an average; on the contrary, it is where things
pick up speed. Between things does not designate a localizable region going
from one thing to the other and back again, but a perpendicular direction, a
transversal movement that sweeps one and the other away, a stream without
beginning or end that undermines its banks and picks up speed in the middle.
—Deleuze and Guattari
The unacknowledged status of reproductive labour has traditionally been
connected to socialist-feminist responses to capitalism, identified as a site
from which protest against the system as a whole can be activated, without
necessarily questioning the logic of reproductive labour itself—as a form that
reinforces a single, heteronormative mode of creativity. Replicative modes of
production take this critique one step further. At its most abstract, replication
can be understood as a queer, cybernetic form of production that does not
rely on the exploitation of its (hetero-) Other to generate new forms.
Sexual reproduction is typically combinatorial. Genes are chosen from a
predefined set and recombined in order to produce offspring. In contrast,
replication is a synthetic and deviant mode of production from which totally
unexpected and novel forms may emerge: flawed, noisy, erroneous,
deformed and miscreant. This shift from extensive, quantitative combination
to intensive, qualitative differentiation generates something that is strictly
unknowable in advance, folding ultimate unpredictability and risk back into
creative production at the very moment when metricized forms of social
control threaten to shut such processes down.
At its core level, the logic of reproduction is the production of identity via
negation. It produces at once an image, an ego, and a unified ‘one’ that
identifies itself by first understanding that it is not the ‘other’. That ‘other’ that
is a void, that ‘other’ that is empty of subjectivity, that cannot represent itself
but only be represented, that ‘other’ which is nothing because it has nothing
—a little hole. Tethered to the ideology of reproduction, individuation relies on
asymmetrical sexual difference as its basic operator. It is fundamentally
static, structured as a repudiation of the void and the interval—that which is
no longer what it was and not yet what it may become—and sublimed into
representation. Beyond, between, or below (to write ‘on the contrary’ is to fall
prey to reproduction and its indefatigable dialectic), replication is nothing but
this void. It does not reproduce or represent itself as an integral identity and it
does not need something that is nothing to grasp itself against, as something.
It is already multiple and on the move. It produces recursively by folding itself,
re-pli-cating. Mutant, autonomous, ubiquitous—yet logically invisible. It will
never resolve into representation until the heat death of the universe
exhausts its recourse to available energy and forces it to remain still. It is the
heat death of the universe, encoded retrochronically, in the restless
movement that lures all matter towards dispersion. But this ending is not an
inverted beginning, no matter what it looks like to the ego. It is motion itself. If
reproduction is constituted by re-producing the origin (the invisible regime of
pure production), then to subvert it is to refuse the linear temporality it
invokes. The only way to begin is to refuse to begin.
So we refuse to begin.
‘NO’: a rejection of reproduction that is always departing from itself.