Genealogies of Philosophy: Aaron Jaffe

“Theory is not inherently healing, liberatory, or revolutionary. It fulfills this function only when we ask that it do so and direct our theorizing towards this end” – bell hooks

The past year has brought latent global inequalities into sharp relief, with those already economically and politically marginalized suffering ever-intensifying disadvantages. What role can philosophy play in all this? Theoretical work in the context of crisis may seem a world removed from social realities, even indifferent to them. Additionally, academic life places demands on us which may stand in tension with our normative commitments, say, to a critique of a culture of competition as well as structural inequalities at our institutions and in our societies at large.

In speaking with Aaron Jaffe, I wanted to understand how we can think about the relationship between our work as philosophers and the social world in which we are embedded. Is theory inert in the face of social and political struggles? Aaron walks us through how he came to think that (social) theories should be deeply committed not only to rooting themselves in the realities that they aim to explain but also to liberation from those realities if and when they are oppressive.

Sidra: You hold an academic position, and you are also politically engaged. At times I see a tension between my own political and ethical commitments and the requirements of (competition-driven neoliberal) academia. How do you see this tension? 

Aaron: I think the tension you are pointing to is absolutely real. It’s something that anybody with a social conscience needs first to acknowledge and then find ways of handling. If you don’t acknowledge it, you’re going to become maybe a tenured professor who thinks that they’re accomplishing revolution through the seminars they teach and that’s deeply confused. I think that the first step is to be honest about that tension.

Sidra: So how do you see the relationship between theory and practice?

Aaron: I try to think of the relationship between theory or philosophical work and my practical engagement with the world in a couple of different registers:

There are things I do in philosophy that are about activism but which in no way directly contribute to it. I can understand what a motive or an impulse towards freedom is in Adorno when he discusses das Hinzutretende in Negative Dialectics. I can think about it and write about it without in any way contributing to real social relations. The philosophy of freedom, broadly speaking, is interesting and philosophically valuable, but it is at a remove from practical struggles. That needs to be identified and at least acknowledged. Too many people think that their philosophical work about freedom aims at freedom.

[In my own case] when I teach, I teach in a way that’s probably a little different than the approach of people who don’t have commitments to creating more zones of freedom or [to fostering] liberatory potentials. I care deeply about my students’ relations to each other within the classroom, about their access to ideas about freedom, about the possibility of achieving just social relations, and about the articulation and development of their potentials. I think that my relationship to those normative commitments really shines forth in the classroom in ways that wouldn’t be the case if I weren’t in some ways committed to activism. 

Sidra: Can you give us an example from one of your classes?

Aaron: I was teaching a writing seminar class last year in the Fall as a core requirement in the liberal arts department. We looked at some of Ursula Le Guin’s fiction and how it tied indigenous resistance to deforestation, colonial ravaging, the profit motive and the despoiling of natural habitats. And that was happening at the exact same time as the coastal pipeline was being resisted by the Wetʼsuwetʼen people in Canada. And when they had their papers due, I divided the students into four different groups: media, logistical support, education, and fundraising… I had them decide together how they would support the movement of the Wetʼsuwetʼen and [encouraged them] to imagine the perspective of somebody trying to resist the incursion of their lands. 

Otherwise in the classroom I start every semester by saying: look, this needs to be a respectful place. If you don’t feel comfortable in the space, you’re not going to feel okay challenging other people’s ideas or risking ideas that are a little controversial or not firmly held by yourself. So, let’s collectively take some time now to decide what a respectful place would look like for you. Each class comes up with something slightly different.

Sidra: The Juilliard School, where you work, is renowned for producing some of the best performing artists in the world. Tell us what it is like to teach there.

Aaron: It’s weird to see some of my students on TV (“hey, I remember the paper you wrote!”). But more than that, I rarely have to tell a Juilliard student that the grade they got isn’t as high as they wanted because they didn’t put in enough work. Each one of them knows what a tremendous amount of work it takes to be excellent at what they do. There is very, very little grade grubbing!

Students at Juilliard are also extremely dedicated. When they see the energy that I bring to ideas, when they see that I care, they’re like: OK, he’s just like a violinist, but for ideas or for philosophy. I think there’s mutual respect around the [different] ways we nerd out really intensely.

The last thing I’ll say is that sometimes there’s pressure, because if Hamlet needs to memorize his lines, then he’s going to do that rather than read the section of the Phenomenology [of Spirit] I’ve assigned. Sometimes there’s friction between the reasons for which students came to Julliard primarily and the liberal arts and philosophy classes that they [take].

Sidra: Reflecting on your own student years, who did you meet during that time that played a significant role for your thinking and your practice?

Aaron: I think I’d like to go back to my very first year in grad school, the philosophy department at the New School for Social Research [where I met] Jonathan Pickle who was student advisor [at the time]. Jonathan was an extremely patient, kind, and dedicated person. He [led a] reading group on Marx and Marxisms that I [attended]. That’s how I became increasingly interested in left leaning and radical political philosophy. Jonathan [had] a seriousness with ideas, but also a deep concern for the human beings he was in touch with. He really cared about the right things.

A [second person] without whom I don’t know whether I would have stayed in philosophy was Clare Martin, the secretary of the philosophy department. She recognized how students [were feeling]. If we were feeling a little pressured, she called us to her office and said, “hey,” with Southern twang, “how are you doing? How is your family?” She made human connections and built community in what could be an arid landscape. 

Philosophically, I’d like to point to two people at my graduate program. The first is Dmitri Nikulin, who is a professor of ancient philosophy. The way that he thought and [his] rigor in approaching ideas was astounding. It opened up a new horizon of seriousness to me. I didn’t understand, having come from an undergraduate curriculum, just how deep reading could go. The other is Cinzia Arruzza who arrived when I was already a PhD student. She combined academic rigor with practical commitments. She remains a model for me for how to do both really well.

Sidra: Let’s talk about your book, which came out last year, Social Reproduction Theory and the Socialist Horizon. Which experiences or political engagements led you to write it? 

Aaron: I had been very active in the International Women’s Strike that had been emerging since Trump was elected. We tried to develop a politics that was not just a recruitment ground for Democrats or for the idea that Hillary Clinton should have won. We tried to develop a notion of [an inclusive] feminism that [for instance] included Palestinian and trans women’s rights and broader socialist commitments such as support for social provisioning for all those who need it. We were able, at least in those first couple of years, to get thousands of people into the streets.

Some of the early articulators of Social Reproduction Theory really understood [social reproduction] through a gendered [feminist] lens. The thought was that if we’re paying attention to the powers through which we make and remake ourselves, we need to be aware of the fact that those powers are developed through care, through support, through love, and those are highly gendered forms of working. Social Reproduction Theory became the philosophical lens and was, in fact, practically applied in the organizational work that we were doing.

Sidra: So what was it about the International Women’s Strike, specifically, that you found compelling?

Aaron: I’m always looking to be an internationalist. The US is a global superpower that has tremendous influence in places beyond its borders. If we’re going to be serious about pursuing freedom or justice, we need to take an international view of the stakes and consequences of US power. The oppression and austerity that women experience in declining social democracies has a lot to do with their domestic capitalist society competing for profits with US capital, with bilateral trade agreements imposed by the US, with anti-imperialist or anti-colonial resistance against US military bases. I’m thinking of Okinawa or Puerto Rico. There’s a tremendous amount of anti-imperialist energy that is frequently led by women around the world.

Sidra: What is the central argument of your book? 

Aaron: I argue that Social Reproduction Theory is a good social theory to come to grips with our current situation. I explain the entailments of Social Reproduction Theory based on what a coherent understanding of its commitments should be. And I unpack philosophically what Social Reproduction Theory is committed to and then show how the results of that are a horizon of liberation or what I call a socialist horizon of emancipation. That’s a mouthful — I explain it in my book in the following way: 

[R]eal emancipation entails overcoming not just the logical relation at the basis of capitalism—not just an economic order. It also requires overcoming the manifold social and more grounded, embodied determinations of the class relation as well. Trying to do it the other way around, and conceiving of emancipation at a remove from the lived, embodied experiences of those who are suffering moves social theory too far away from practical needs.

I’m trying to show more hidebound Marxists that Social Reproduction Theory is nothing to be afraid of. And I’m trying to show people that Marxism is worth their time and attention if they are committed to, or just might be interested in, the idea that society is something we produce and continuously reproduce and that we do that work through the powers we have. I’m trying to speak to two different audiences while being sensitive to each of them and avoiding simplification.

Sidra: How do you work through the relationship between the theoretical and the practical in your book — the somewhat abstract logic of Social Reproduction Theory, on the one hand, and lived experiences on the other?

Aaron: I begin each chapter with an extended quotation from working class women who participated in a recent strike. I use that quotation, what they say about themselves or their experience, to motivate the chapter’s theoretical developments. Their stories helped motivate the need for theory.

I think the job of theory, especially social and normative social theory, is to help make sense of our lived experiences. I think if it holds together as sense-making but can’t be applied to our lived experiences, then it’s a well-functioning machine in the clouds. And [while] that might be interesting for engineers of well-functioning machines, my goal is to make sense of what’s happening down here and to gain some clarity and hopefully some further commitments to pursuing goals of liberation.

Sidra:  Can you share an example from your book? 

Aaron: One of the people who was active in the Women’s Strike in 2017 was a street vendor. Making sense of her experience as a street vendor selling goods in New York (while facing police repression) really required [one to] appreciate that she was a woman, and that she was a worker, but also that she was an immigrant with a certain kind of legal standing in the US. Heleodora said:

We must continue to struggle. I invite all women migrant workers to fight. Do not be afraid … I want all these women workers to study and eventually for there to be a way for all these women to continue to train themselves and improve their future.

She had to work together with other people similarly situated to [defend herself] against police coercion in order to satisfy her life’s conditions. So [her voice] at the start […] really helped motivate the idea that Social Reproduction Theory can pay attention to and needs to pay attention to multiple axes of identity, multiple experiential forms of being working class. The way [the people we spoke to] made sense of their actual commitment to struggle, both in terms of how they lived and their political work, motivated the theoretical commitments [in my book].

Sidra: There seems to be a link between Social Reproduction Theory, with its attention to axes of oppression, and intersectionality. How do you see their relationship?

Aaron: Social Reproduction Theory was developed in the 60s, 70s and then more recently as an attempt to unify Marxism with feminism. Ashley Bohrer’s recent book Marxism and Intersectionality does an excellent job of tracing out how early intersectional theory evolved in relation to Marxism and vice versa. 

I do think it is possible to combine Marxism and intersectionality. If we want to understand how societies produce and reproduce themselves over time, we’ve got to pay attention to our powers and our capacities for doing so. And those are deeply classed.

Now, the way that I’d introduce intersectionality into that analysis is to say that our class is not just some abstract notion of proletariat on one side and capitalist on the other. We need to take the abstract logic of class relations and flesh it out with the lived experiences that actual proletarians undergo. Those will always be gendered, racialized, based on different social recognitions of ability, and much more.

So I want to say [that] class is central to understanding how our capitalist society is continuously reproduced, but also that what we mean by class has to be more than conceptual — it has to take into account the lived realities of many oppressions.

Sidra: Let’s take the example of precarity. Employment here in the Netherlands is increasingly characterised in terms of precarity — short term contracts with very little security. How can Social Reproduction Theory help us understand precarity?

Aaron: Precarity is very well suited to the profitability demands of capital and has existed for a significant amount of time. What Social Reproduction Theory can tell us is that precarity is disproportionately borne by people who are already oppressed under capitalism. People who exist in precarious jobs are disproportionately the people who are racialized, gender minorities, lack immigration status, and legal standing to exist in a country. I’ll bet you dollars to doughnuts that this describes the Dutch context too. Social Reproduction Theory is well-suited to address not only the fact of precarity but its various social manifestations. 

In addition, I will say that Social Reproduction Theory has a long history of paying attention to the fact that it’s usually women who are deeply involved in the day to day reproduction of labor power, often in an unwaged way [doing domestic work]. So [while] precarity is often used to think through the situation of easily fireable workers, I want to expand the category to the person who is dependent on somebody who does receive a wage. A woman who is dependent on a partner who receives a wage is in a precarious position. She might not be able to leave. She might not be able to afford her own apartment…

Sidra: In addition to taking into account multiple facets of lived experience, do you think Social Reproduction Theory requires a genealogical approach? I’m thinking, for instance, about the conjunction of colonialism and current patterns of oppression.

Aaron: I think [genealogy is] tremendously important. If I say that class relations need to be fleshed out with different lived experiences of oppression…then I [also] need to have a story about where those different forms of oppression have come from. I need to be able to tell how they aren’t just shot from a cannon, but that they’re produced and socially reproduced through [the] dominating social relations [across] history. 

One of my projects right now is to think carefully about the concept “primitive accumulation” that describes the transition to capitalism. [What] accomplishes the transition to capital isn’t just the bald fact of having accumulated stocks or quantities of commodities but a deep imbrication with histories of colonialism, imperialism, racial subjugation, and gender domination.

The forms of violence that accompany the transition to capitalism have an ongoing history or legacy. Even though I think the period of primitive accumulation is over because the transition to capitalism is over, the violences through which that process was accomplished, to borrow a phrase from Saidiya Hartman, have afterlives. These afterlives of the transition to capitalism still inflect, in continuously unfolding and compounding ways, different forms of domination today. 

Sidra: Turning to more recent events — what did you make of the storming of Capitol Hill?

Aaron: I don’t think what’s happened in the Capitol is terribly surprising. We’re living in a period where the instability that’s been baked deep into the organization of US social relations is coming to the fore in violent ways [and in] ways that are hard to ignore. What happened at the Capitol is a symptom of deeper unmet social needs, which frequently find avenues for release, scapegoating, or psychic identification with the strongman. 

I also think we have seen something true about US social organization, the fabric of American life. I’m [therefore] deeply suspicious of responses that say “this is not us” or “this is not who we are.” In fact, it is. 

Sidra: Before we conclude, your thoughts about the future. What should it look like according to Social Reproduction Theory? 

Aaron: In the very short term, we should seize all of the empty hotels and give room to live to the homeless. We should occupy all of the empty houses that people have been evicted from and give families and individuals safety. We need to modify the rules so that everybody who needs to have access to good living conditions [can have access to them] in the longer term. This is a kind of baseline that is necessary for social reproduction and one that the COVID-19 crisis highlights to an extraordinary degree.

I don’t think as a single person, situated in the way that I am, that it is my prerogative to imagine the concrete details of a utopia, of what liberation should look like in general. I think liberation needs to be approached from the lived experiences of those who are being dominated in compounding ways that harm their living personality. So, my utopia would be giving equal and full standing to dominated social voices and to move towards what liberation would look like for them.

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This is an instalment of Into Philosophy.