Two sets of theoretical issues are at stake in the concept and problem of reproduction today.¹

1. How are we to theorize the relationship between the concepts of production and reproduction within the 'total social process'? And, more specifically, what temporalities do they involve?
2. What is the relationship between the concept of reproduction within the history of the life sciences, on the one hand, and social and economic theory (and especially Marxism and Gender & Race Studies), on the other? Furthermore, how does the concept of reproduction help us to theorize the relationship between the Marxist critique of political economy and Gender & Race Studies themselves?

The two sets of issues are connected since the first question 'How are we to theorize the relationship between production and reproduction within the total social process?' - raises the matter of the extent to which what has become known as Social Reproduction Theory² is (a) to be considered a necessary 'supplement' to, or additive expansion of, Marx's account of capital accumulation within a more general theory of capitalist societies, or (b) requires a more fundamental theoretical revision of Marx's account of the total social process which would incorporate both Social Reproduction Theory and Marx's account of capital within a more overarching theoretical framework, mediating them more systematically within a refigured conception of history.

Connected to this question is that of the extent to which it makes sense to talk of a 'theory' of social reproduction, rather than something more like a general-theoretical framework constituted by concepts which require constant (re-)verification, modification and reinterpretation in relation to the results of empirical research, as its object, the total social process, constantly changes. Ultimately, what is at stake here, then, philosophically, for Marxism at least, is the extent of the applicability to socio-historical analysis of various of the systematic theoretical resources of German idealism; or, conversely, the extent to which those resources tend to foreclose the open historical dimension of such analyses. These are questions of methodology, and methodological self-understanding, under the general 'modern' conditions of the necessarily unfinished character - the often radically unfinished character - of systematic theoretical undertakings in general. In this context, let us recall that what we have as the circa four thousand published pages of Marx's Capital, Volumes I-4, is a still largely draft version of Book I of what in 1858 was projected as a six-book Critique of Political Economy; the four-volume structure of which was only settled towards the end of the composition of the first edition of Volume I, in October 1866. The ascent from the abstract to the concrete, it seems, is a journey on which no single individual will ever arrive. This has significant implications for our understanding of the theoretical meaning of the basic categories of Marx's mature thought.

Before we get to Marx, though, let us begin with the apparent duality of the fields of usage of the term 'reproduction' in the life sciences, on the one hand (from mid-eighteenth-century natural history, through biology to evolutionary theory and beyond), and in economic contexts, on the other (from Quesnay and the Physiocrats through to Marx and his late-twentieth- and early-twenty-first-century interpreters). For in so far as the Marxian critique of political economy is to retain a meaningful relation to the materialism of the conception of history on which it was grounded, ongoing mediation of those two fields (life sciences and social and economic analysis) will be required. This mediation takes place primarily within the conceptual space of the problematic of reproduction.

Buffon's natural history

The duality yet interconnectedness of 'biology' and 'economics' is a product of the history of the academic division of labour and the transference of terms between disciplines at the moment of their formation, which continue to structure the theoretical meanings and functioning of the term 'reproduction' today. In the literature, the modern theoretical use of the term 'reproduction' is generally traced back, genealogically, to what is taken to be an emblematically first significant usage in mid-eighteenthcentury natural history, in French, in volume 2 of Buffon's Natural History (1749). Following but significantly extending Abraham Trembley's 1744 use of the term to refer to the regeneration of limbs in crayfish claws and of polyps, Buffon used 'reproduction' to replace the Aristotelian 'generation' (meaning, broadly, 'to come into existence') to produce an account of what Buffon himself called 'Reproduction in General'.³ In extending the more literal Latinate usage of 'reproduction' (from reproducere and reproduction, meaning 'to produce again', in the sense of copy) in this way, he thereby replaced 'generation' with a word the received meaning of which was broadly the very opposite of the way in which 'generation' had been understood.

The issue here is thus not etymological but historical-semantic: that is, it does not concern the recovery of, or truth to, some 'original' meaning condensed into the historical structure of the formation of the word, but rather new usages that carry new conceptual meanings by virtue of their place in new arguments, which become established and disseminated, in large part, via the cultural authority of particular texts - whether such usages be etymologically based or not.

In Buffon's case, this replacement was made possible by the way in which new observations and theories of 'generation as re-generation' (Trembley's crayfish claws and polyps) undermined the theological presuppositions of a previous, Christianized Aristotelian biological concept for which generation was (on François Jacob's canonical account at least) 'always the result of a creation, which, at some stage or other, required direct intervention by divine forces', and so was 'to some degree a unique isolated event'.⁴ Instead, generation as 'reproduction' or 'the power [common to animal and plant] of producing its likeness' (Buffon's words) - combining old senses of production and reproduction within a new conception of reproduction - understood the process more naturalistically, as a 'chain of successive existences of individuals, which constitutes the real existence of the species'. Reproduction is the real existence of the species. 'Reproduction' thus became the name for nature's 'methods' of 'renewing organized beings'.⁵ The focus shifts from the individual to the species as the 'chain of individuals', thereby introducing a new temporality of the succession of generations as the medium of species as natural facts.⁶ Subsequently, even more generally, reproduction would thus become conceived as 'the defining "aim" of life'; something it remains for Darwinian molecular biologists today.⁷ To put it in the classical terms used by Étienne Balibar in his essay 'Reproductions': a combination of a naturalized genesis (coming into being) and poesis (a making, in the case of animals usually through sexual relations) are added to the sense of reproduction as mimesis (a copying) to replace the theological conception of genesis of the Aristotelian 'generation'.⁸ As a result, life itself (that is, 'organized beings') acquired periodicities or repetitive cycles which require the production of new individual beings.

In its general modern sense, then, reproduction has its genealogical starting point in the transition from a largely theological natural history (within Aristotelianism's Christianized conceptual space) to the beginnings of modern biology, and also, it should be added, in parallel, within the modern history of medicine, where the emphasis on the sexual character of reproduction is more pronounced.⁹ In the case of humans, this medical context introduced a conception of reproductive practices, with an ineliminable social and political dimension, opening up the possibility of technologies for the modification of such practices. This was crucial to the emergent concept of 'population' - the totality of the results of human sexual reproduction within a given territory posited as the object of possible governmental intervention - which, for Foucault, marks the constitution of modern economics as part of a wider bio-political paradigm.¹⁰

Production

'Production', on the other hand, in the sense of 'bringing forth' (literally, pro-ducere) some new thing - contained now within the new concept of reproduction - is a term that was initially closer to 'generation' than reproduction had been, and indeed remains closer to generation than it does to the naturalized sense of 'reproduction' within which it is contained. The difference being that with 'production' the sense of the 'coming into being' or 'bringing forth' of individual things was understood as always a result of some 'action, process or effort'. In this, its late medieval coinage in English followed its Stoic Latin usage. Production is a Stoic concept. According to the lexicographers, 'production' first acquired a distinctively modern usage, earlier than 'reproduction', in a context of drama, in the late sixteenth century, in its meaning of 'bringing a performance before the public'¹¹ - it is still used like this, of course - before increasingly being used in an economic context to mean 'the process of making or growing goods to be sold'¹² or more broadly of 'goods available for use'.¹³ More specifically, in this economic use, it refers to methods of turning raw materials into finished or semi-finished products: that is, 'making something out of something already existing.'¹⁴ In this respect, it is contrasted with 'creation' (for which the model was God's creation ex nihilo) and thereby also with the Christianized 'generation'. This opposition between creation and production is one that Lamarck, for example, would come to stress, at the outset of the nineteenth century, in his theory of evolution.¹⁵

The standard modern, economic usage of 'production' can, in turn, be contrasted with Kant's innovative, alternative modern use of 'production' in the first edition of Critique of Pure Reason (178I) in his account of the 'productive imagination', where a mysterious spontaneity is identified as the source of the 'productive act' of transcendental synthesis in general; which is more akin to the creativity of the divine act of generation than to anything 'economic', although here it resides in the 'unknown' depths of transcendental subjectivity itself.¹⁶ This further but differently distances the meaning of 'production' from 'reproduction' in its modern, post-Buffonian sense. Indeed, in Kant 'production' appears in explicit opposition to reproduction, in the differences between the productive and the reproductive imaginations, where the latter, associated in particular with the 'synthesis of reproduction', in the first edition of Critique of Pure Reason, retains its more literal Latinate sense of re-production as a form of repetition.¹⁷ This is Kant's transcendental version of the Lockean theme of memory as the ground of the continuity of consciousness. This sense of a 'reproductive' repetition as the means for the establishment of temporal continuity will be equally central to Marx, at a social level, in Capital, as the methodological starting point for his central concept of accumulation as 'expanded reproduction'.

It is through the contrast between the concepts of productive and reproductive imaginations that Kant introduced what would become a specifically modern concept of artistic production, via his associated account of genius and the 'original exemplar', thereby philosophically inaugurating the whole onto-theological Romantic tradition of creativity in the arts; the misplaced liberal-individualist version of which we continue to suffer today, in ever more ideological waves, from art schools through curatorial discourse to management theory.¹⁸ In the late-eighteenth to early-nineteenth-century context, not only was a Romantic artistic 'production' differentiated from craft/techne, but craft itself was increasingly supplanted within the economic concept of production by a conception of work based on wage-labour. Wage-labour alienates the labouring subject from command over the structure of their production (production becomes a name for the labour process), once it is subjected to the quantification of time as a determinant of its value, measurable in units of 'linear' or chronological time. We can thus begin to see the emergence of two different temporal regimes, associated with the concepts of reproduction and production, respectively, with the temporality of production nonetheless functioning as an elaboration of one aspect of the temporality of reproduction itself.

| REPRODUCTION | PRODUCTION |

| :-- | :-- |

| Succession | Linearity, Quantifiability |

| Periodicity (generational lifespan) | |

| Repetition | |

| Cyclicality | |

FIG. 1

However - and this is the important bit - when the term 'reproduction' was first introduced as a concept into mid-eighteenthcentury economic theory, at the moment of the birth of 'economics' as political economy, it was not merely in its literal, Stoic sense of 'production again or anew', but rather as a result of a quite specific transfer of Buffon's natural-historical usage.

Quesnay's natural economy

The transfer of the concept of reproduction from Buffon's natural history into the field of economics first appears in the second, 1759, version of the famous Tableau économique of Buffon's dinner companion, the Physiocrat François Quesnay (fig. 2), a decade after Buffon's use of the phrase 'reproduction in general' in volume 2 of his Natural History.¹⁹ It refers there, in a naturalistic-economic usage (prefigurative of an certain ecological imaginary), to 'the renewal of nature in an economy of circulation and replenishment'²⁰ focused on the annual replacement of what consumption had destroyed. Later editions of Quesnay's early medical writings (he was the physician to Louis XV), preceding both the Tableau and Buffon's Natural History, had used the term 'reproduction' in Trembley's physiological sense of regeneration,²¹ but in the 1759 Tableau 'reproduction as regeneration' acquired a specifically social sense, to refer to 'everything produced by a society in a given year' (that is, new goods), which was to be matched against everything consumed.²² This socio-economic use was, on the one hand, a simple extension of its naturalistic use, since economic production was taken to follow natural laws, but it was also explicitly 'governmental' since, on the conjointly medical and agricultural model that formed the practical context here, knowledge of these laws was understood to allow for beneficial intervention to improve the human condition. It was Quesnay's exclusive, physiocratic focus on land as the source of all wealth that made both this displacement and a focus on the production of value possible. For Quesnay, we might say - and this is my central point here - transferring Buffon's definition of the species to the economy: reproduction is the real existence of the economy. This is the crucial secret proposition of the Economic Tableau; crucial, that is, in its implications for a 'reproductive' reading of Marx's Capital.²³

!img-9.jpeg

FIG. 2 Quesnay, Tableau économique, 'third edition', 1759. Hagley Museum and Library.

Marx's critique of political economy

In Capital, Volume I, Marx takes up Quesnay's concept of reproduction into what Marx calls 'Simple Reproduction' (the title of Chapter 23), or at least, he claims to find the source of his own analogous but distinctively different concept of reproduction there, in Quesnay freed from the Physiocratic naturalism of value. In chapter 19 of Capital, Volume 2, Marx ascribes to the Physiocrats 'the first systematic conception of capitalist production.'²⁴ For Marx, though, rather than a real state of affairs, 'simple' reproduction - the return to the starting point of a process of circulation in which the value component at the outset and conclusion remain the same - is an analytical model from which to explain, by contrast, the specificity of capitalist production as a process of 'accumulation' through 'expanded reproduction'. For Marx, 'expanded reproduction' is the technical meaning of capitalist accumulation, of which, for Adorno, 'the new' is the 'aesthetic seal'.²⁵ In capitalist societies, the new is thus not opposed to reproduction (repetition) but is its specific medium. Here reproduction is not the reproduction of nature (as in Quesnay) but the reproduction of the value-content of production. This involves a new temporalization of production:

Whatever the social form of the production process, it has to be continuous, it must periodically go through the same stages [Stadien] always anew [stets von neuem]. A society can no more cease production than it can cease to consume. When viewed, therefore, as a constant connection [einem stetigen Zusammenhang], and in the permanent flux of its renewal [dem beständigen Fluss seiner Erneuerung], every social process of production is at the same time a process of reproduction.²⁶

Furthermore:

If production has a capitalist form so too will reproduction. Just as in the capitalist mode of production the labour process appears only as a means towards the process of valorization, so in the case of reproduction it appears only as the means of reproducing the value advanced as capital, i.e. as self-valorizing value.²⁷

Reproduction is the real existence of capital.

Marx breaks this down into three main phases:

The transformation of a sum of money into the means of production and labour-power is the first movement undergone by the quantum of value which is going to function as capital. It takes place in the market, within the sphere of circulation. [Note: capitalist production begins in circulation - PO.] The second phase of the movement, the process of production, is complete as soon as the means of production has been converted into commodities whose value exceeds that of their component parts, and therefore contains the capital originally advanced plus a surplus-value. [Third] These commodities must then be thrown back into the sphere of circulation. They must be sold, their value must be realized in money, this money must be transformed once again into capital, and so on, again and again. This cycle [Kreislauf], made up of successive phases, forms the circulation of capital.²⁸

Production is one of three phases internal to the circulation of capital: not the first one, as people tend to assume, but the middle one of three.

So why am I citing these chunks of Capital, Volume I? For two reasons. First, to introduce just some of the main temporal terms that make up the conceptual structure of Capital, whereby Buffon's general concept of reproduction is further elaborated with respect to flux, renewal, circulation and its phases (FIG. 3).

REPRODUCTION

Succession

Periodicity (generational lifespan)

Cyclicality

Repetition

Flux

Renewal

Circulation

Phases

FIG. 3

You can see how it quickly becomes quite complicated from just a few selected passages.

Second, and more importantly, because what we can glimpse here, still within Capital, Volume I is the theoretical primacy of reproduction over production within Marx's famously 'productivist' critique. This has fundamental consequences too numerous to enumerate here. This primacy derives from the naturalistic basis of Marx's materialist conception of history - the need of human beings to reproduce themselves as natural, biological beings - that is, from the sense of reproduction as 'the real existence of the species' introduced by Buffon, and extended via its displacement by Quesnay into what I have proposed is the basic meaning of his Tableau Économique: namely, 'reproduction is the real existence of the economy'. In Marx's materialist conception of history, reproduction as 'the real existence of the species' takes place socially through reproduction as 'the real existence of the economy'. Indeed, this is its basic premiss: namely, that it is the social production of the means of life that distinguishes 'humans' from other animal species, once the collective production of the means of life generates new needs for the production of the means of production themselves. It is this 'production of new needs', according to Marx and Engels in The German Ideology, that is 'the first historical act'.²⁹ It inaugurates a new temporality: a social temporality that is also 'historical' in its expansion of human needs. The social appears here as an ontologically emergent aspect of human life, an evolutionary, species-specific response to biological imperatives. Note: it is not solely the collectivity of the 'production' of the means of life that is required (it can be said that other primates do this: the object of 'primate sociology'), but also the inauguration of a developmental dynamic of the production of new needs out of the differential means of socially fulfilling existing needs. However, and this is my point here, the primacy of production as a differentiating feature of the human is internal to the more basic primacy of reproduction - the continuation of biological life, on both a daily and a generational basis - that is fulfilled here under specific social conditions. This expands the concept of the economy, anthropologically, to include all the conditions for the reproduction of human lives.³⁰ Methodologically, the crucial term here is 'condition'. I'll come back to this.

Marx recognized this, but then, within his self-understanding of the methodological limitations of Capital as a reconstruction of the dynamic structures of the capitalist mode of production based on an immanent critique of political economy, he came, crucially, systematically, to exclude certain of these social conditions: both 'internal' and 'external' to his model of capital, based on the economic history of Britain as a capitalist society. Here is the exclusion:

The capitalist process of production, therefore, seen in connection or as a process of reproduction, produces not only commodities, not only surplus-value, it produces and reproduces the capital-relation [Kapitalverhältnis] itself, on the one side the capitalist, on the other the wage-labourer.³¹

The last part of this sentence involves an equivocal identification of (i) the reproduction of the social relation itself - a relation of power and exploitation - which is a consequence of the relation of 'separation between labour-power and the conditions of labour,'³² of which the wage-form is one form (slavery within capitalism would be another), with (ii) the both daily and generational reproduction of the lives of capitalists, of wage-labourers, and also, but crucially unmentioned, the lives of all unwaged others required for such reproduction. That is, not simply the 'structure' but its embodied 'bearers' (Träger) in an extended reproductive sense. Marx fails to incorporate the necessary labour of unwaged others, explicitly or systematically, into his account of capital, although the conceptual space for such an account lies dormant within his concept of reproduction, as the reproduction of the conditions of the capital relation.

From the anthropological standpoint of the continuation of the species through the reproduction of its individuals (sexually, albeit sometimes in a technologically assisted manner, IVF, etc.), we need to include (i) wage-labourers (including those unemployed, in the relative surplus population), (ii) capitalists (whose personal consumption decisions are by no means irrelevant), and (iii) all unwaged reproductive labourers: classically, within families (as feminists have pointed out since the I970s) but also those unwaged 'productive' labourers (generally but not exclusively in ex-colonies) upon whom particular processes of production depend for the components of their productions. This is the constitutive moment of colonial and post-colonial relations in not simply the formation but the reproduction of European capitalism; and subsequently its problematically global forms.³³ These are labourers whose labour tends to be most rigidly structured by racial and gendered differentials, dependent in large part upon the cultural heritage of patriarchal religions as well as colonial relations.

It was Althusser, most famously, who picked up on the extended consequences of the first, 'structural', meaning of this sentence of Marx's from the end of chapter 23 of Capital, Volume I, regarding the reproduction of the social relation itself. 'The Reproduction of The Relations of Production' is the title of chapter 9 of his 1970 manuscript 'On the Reproduction of the Apparatuses of Production' (published belatedly, in 1995, as On Reproduction).³⁴ This text is historically important for its rejection of the so-called productivism of the analytical primacy of the productive forces. However, still in thrall to the topography of base and superstructure, despite their rethinking in terms of 'levels' or 'instances' within a theoretically novel conception of the 'social whole', Althusser explored this concept primarily via that of the ideological state apparatuses, within an expanded concept of the state. The book of which the manuscript was to have been a part was to be called 'On the Superstructure'. It focused on law and, especially, in competition with the sociological problematic of Pierre Bourdieu and Jean-Claude Passeron, in the wake of May 1968, 'the capitalist school'.³⁵ Today we would certainly have to include 'the capitalist university'. State education, along with the media, being understood to have displaced the family and the church as the primary mechanisms of socialization, unwaged labour within the reproductive function of the family was thereby occluded from this particular debate, as was the context of post-colonialism.

From the standpoint of our interests here, it is important to note that all of these sites of reproduction, outside of the waged labour-process itself, have their own temporal rhythms, associated with different forms of everyday life and culturalhistorically structured stages of life and life practices - about which there is a huge literature in the sociology of time.³⁶ They are also important political determinations of wages themselves, in their cultural-historical aspects, of which gendered and racialized differentiations are predominant. Nor should we consider the multiplicity of social reproductive practices at stake here as being in any way self-contained or simply correlated to identities. Rather, from the standpoint of post-Kantian concepts of experience we can say that 'experience' is the existential articulation of the pluralities of temporalities of reproduction through and within which any particular human individual lives. These articulations are generally multiply contradictory, pulling in different directions, demanding constant mediation in various ways (think of your own lives); in the same way that the different sectors of the economy are relationally dynamic in its inherent tendency towards crises of disproportionality. Politics, we might say, is the attempt to actively intervene in the structures and relations of temporalities of reproduction, which include those of production itself as its middle segment.

Reading Capital, temporally

In conclusion, I would like to make two brief points about the implications of this analysis: one concerns temporal readings of the relations between the first three volumes of Marx's Capital; the other is more broadly methodological and follows from that reading.

Ever since Stavros Tombazos's groundbreaking 1994 book Le temps dans l'analyse économique: Les Catégories du temps dans le Capital,³⁷ there has been a tendency to accept that each of the three volumes of Capital corresponds to a particular socioeconomic temporality, defined topically by the subtitle of each book: Book I. The Process of Production of Capital; Book II. The Process of Circulation of Capital; Book III. The Process of Capitalist Production as a Whole - or, The Complete Process (der Gesamtprozess) of Capitalist Production might be a better translation. This gives us: (i) a linear temporality of production; (ii) a cyclical temporality of circulation, reproduction or circuits ('circulation time', 'turnover time' and the 'times of reproduction' - simple and expanded); (iii) the time of the complete process. In line with the 'Capital logic' school of Hegelian interpretations of Capital, Tambazos calls this third time 'organic time'. This extends his mapping of Book II of Capital onto the treatment of reproduction as part of the category of 'life' in Hegel's Science of Logic, to the temporal structure of the life of an organism. This is a powerful and productive reading, but there are several problems with it, two of which I will mention here.

First, as we have already seen, within Marx's exposition in Volume I, production is already a part of reproduction: the second phase in a three-phase circulation of capital. Its 'quantitative linearity' is thus always already a moment or segment or a cycle. Hence the repetition of 'simple reproduction' across Volumes I and 2; and also the appearance of 'The Working Period' and 'Production Time' within Volume 2 (chapters I2 and I3), rather than Volume I. In fact, there is a constant criss-crossing of production and reproduction across the first two volumes of Capital, within the more general category of circulation. (Two chapters in Volume 2 even have the same title of 'Circulation Time', chapters 5 and I4.) When you look in detail at the internal structures of Volumes I and 2 of Capital, it is less a 'systematic dialectic' on the model of Hegel's logic than a wild and wonderful blend of systematicity and unresolved organizational chaos (though this might also be said, at times, of Hegel's Science of Logic itself).

Second, the treatment of the temporality of the 'complete process' as 'organic' is highly artificial and deeply dubious. This is not only because the game of mapping Hegel's Logic onto Marx's Capital, at the level of the whole of each, is a badly misplaced formalism, but because, while the organicism of the category of 'life' in Hegel's logic makes sense as part of his overall system (on its way to the system transition from logic to nature), capital is a social form - a social relation, in fact - which is the product of particular, enormously complicated social histories. And whilst it may appear 'structural' in its analytically idealized 'simple reproduction', the developmental tendencies of capital are based on a logic of surpluses and crises which are the products of practical, conflictual socio-political responses to situations for which the medical model of the 'health of the organism' concerning profit, different forms of money capital, crises and ground rent (the contents of Volume 3) is wholly inadequate. The key word shared by the titles of all three books is process: a process that is presented as complexly structured, complexly contradictory and empirically open-ended.

What, then, does this mean for the systematic aspect of the presentation? First, it means (as Althusser saw) that it is radically non-Hegelian at the level of the whole; although (contra Althusser) Hegelian logical structures are deployed regionally to expound particular relations. As Jacques Bidet has put it: Hegel's logic has the productive status of an epistemological obstacle in Marx's critique of political economy.³⁸ The relevant Bachelardian category here is less 'rupture' than 'obstacle'. This reopens the exposition, methodologically, at the level of the whole, to conjunctural articulations of a more methodologically Kantian serialism of conditions, the relations between which are constantly shifting, not only historically, but also politically, as the spatio-temporal dynamics of capital itself expand and contract. Reproduction is the primary explanatory theoretical category, but its antithesis, 'non-reproduction' - as some call failures of reproduction³⁹ - is equally political important. This leads Marx to a new set of temporal categories, in his discussion of crises across Volumes 2 and 3 of Capital: minimally, (fig. 4):

| REPRODUCTION | PRODUCTION | NON-REPRODUCTION |

| :-- | :-- | :-- |

| Succession | Linearity, Quantifiability | Interruption |

| Periodicity | | Disjunction |

| Cyclicality | | Disproportionality |

| Repetition | | Crisis |

| Flux | | |

| Renewal | | |

| Circulation | | |

| Phases | | |

FIG. 4

Not only is 'production' internal to 'reproduction', but reproduction contains within itself, as a permanent and repeatedly actualized threat, the possibility of non-reproduction: the going out of existence of those individuals the successive chain of which constitutes the 'real existence' of the species and the economy alike.

Endnotes

Footnotes

1. 1. This is a lightly revised version of a lecture delivered to the 2024 Graduate Conference of the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy (CRMEP), Kingston University London, 'Care, Commons, Reproduction', 24 May 2024. ↩

2. 2. See Tithi Bhattacharya, ed., Social Reproduction Theory: Remapping Class, Recentrering Opposition, Pluto Press, London, 2017. ↩

3. 3. M. de Buffon, Histoire naturelle, générale et particulière avec la description du Cabinet du Roi, Volume II: L'imprimerie Royale, 1749, ch. II, 'De la Reproduction en général', pp. 18-41; Count de Buffon, Natural History, General and Particular, Translated into English and Occasional Notes by William Smellie, Volume 2, ch. 2, 'Of Reproduction in General', 2nd edn, W. Strahan & T. Cadell, London, 1785, pp. 16-38; For the significance of this moment within a broader semantic history, see Nick Hopwood, 'The Keywords "Generation" and "Reproduction"', in N. Hopwood, R. Flemming and L. Kassell, eds, Reproduction: Antiquity to the Present Day, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2018, pp. 287-304. ↩

4. 4. Francois Jacob, The Logic of Life: A History of Heredity (1970), Princeton University Press, Princeton, 2022, pp. 19-20; cited by Hopwood, p. 288. ↩

5. 5. Buffon, Natural History, vol. 2, p. 16; translation amended in line with that by J.S. Barr of the excerpt published in John Lyon and Phillip Sloan, eds, From Natural History to History of Nature: Readings from Buffon and his Critics, University of Notre Dame Press, Notre Dame IN, 1981, p. 170. ↩

6. 6. Arguably, this notion was already implicit in John Ray's introduction of the concept of species as a systematic unity in his Historia Plantarum of 1686. For the development of Buffon's concept of species, see Paul L. Farber, 'Buffon and the Concept of Species', Journal of the History of Biology, 5(2), Autumn 1972, pp. 259-84. ↩

7. 7. Hopwood, 'The Keywords "Generation" and "Reproduction"', p. 288. ↩

8. 8. Étienne Balibar, 'Reproductions', Rethinking Marxism, 34(2), 2022, pp. 142-61, p. 142. ↩

9. 9. There is now a large feminist literature in the history of medicine on this topic. See, for example, Ludmilla Jordonova, Nature Displayed: Gender, Science, and Medicine, 1760-1820, Longman, London and New York, 1999. ↩

10. 10. See Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1977-1978, trans. Graham Burchell, Picador, New York, 2007, especially lectures 2-4; The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978-1979, trans. Graham Burchell, Picador, New York, 2008, lectures 2 and 3. For the argument that Buffon's model for 'reproduction in general' is actually vegetal, rather than animal, as a result of his overarching interest in the theorization of 'life', see Stella Sandford, 'The Vegetal Model: Buffon's General Theory of Reproduction', forthcoming in the journal Philosophy and Biology. ↩

11. 11. Cited in the Oxford English Dictionary in a usage from 1585. ↩

12. 12. 'Production', Cambridge Dictionary. ↩

13. 13. 'Production', Merriam-Webster Dictionary. ↩

14. 14. Susanne Lettow, 'Generation, Genealogy, and Time: The Concept of Reproduction from Histoire Naturelle to Naturphilosophie', in Susanne Lettow, ed., Reproduction, Race, and Gender in Philosophy and the Early Life Sciences, SUNY Press, New York, 2018, pp. 2-43, p. 24 . ↩

15. 15. Ibid., p. 22. ↩

16. 16. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason [1781; 1787], trans. Paul Guyer and Allen W. Wood, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1998, A115-125, B150-152. ↩

17. 17. Ibid., A100-103. ↩

18. 18. See Peter Osborne, 'Creativity as a Transdisciplinary Concept', in Pier Paulo Bellini, Marco Stefano Birtolo and Rebeca Andreina Papa, eds, The Creative Gesture, Palgrave Studies in Creativity and Value, Palgrave Macmillan, London, forthcoming 2026. ↩

19. 19. François Quesnay, 'Appendix B, The "Second Edition"', in Quesnay's tableau économique, ed. Marguerite Kuczynski and Ronald L. Meek, Macmillan, London, 1972. For a comprehensive account of the background and context of this transition, critically appraising the recent literature on the subject, see Elisabeth Wallmann, 'All Production Is Reproduction: Physiocracy and Natural History in Eighteenth-Century France', History of Political Economy, 54(1), 2022, pp. 75-108. ↩

20. 20. Hopwood, 'The Keywords "Generation" and "Reproduction"', p. 295. ↩

21. 21. Wallman refers us to the 2ndeditions of Quesnay's Essai physique sue économie animale (1747) and Traité des effets de la l'usage de la saignée (1750). ↩

22. 22. Wallmann, 'All Production Is Reproduction', p. 8o. Quesnay first used the term this way in his 1757 Encyclopédie entry 'Hommes', which, although unpublished for a century and a half, circulated at the time among his intellectual circle in France; as did the first three versions of Tableau. For an account of the relations between the early versions of Quesnay's Tableau, see Charles Löic and Christine Théré, 'A Note on the Early Versions of the Tableau économique', History of Political Economy, 55(1), 2023, pp. 145-72. ↩

23. 23. Despite the (unattributed) borrowing of her title from Marx - 'every social process of production is at the same time a process of reproduction', see below - Wallman makes no reference to Marx, Marxism or the social reproduction theory that form the current context for the revival of interest in this late-eighteenth-century French moment of the Physiocratic formation of the modern discipline of political economy. ↩

24. 24. Karl Marx, 'The Physiocrats', in Theories of Surplus Value (Volume 4 of Capital), Part I, trans. Emile Burns, Lawrence & Wishart, London, 1963, ch. 2, pp. 44-68; Karl Marx, 'The Physiocrats', in Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume 2, trans. David Fernbach, Penguin Books/New Left Review, London, 1976, pp. 435-8, p. 436. ↩

25. 25. Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume 1, trans. Ben Fowkes, Penguin Books/New Left Review, London, 1978, chs 24 and 25; Capital 2, chs 20 and 21. It is symptomatic of the structure of repetition here - but also a methodological tension that Capital 1, ch. 23 and Capital 2, ch. 20 have the same title: 'Simple Reproduction'. Re. the 'aesthetic seal', see Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor, Minnesota University Press, Minneapolis, 1997, p. 21. ↩

26. 26. Marx, Capital 1, Ch. 23, p. 711, translation amended. Karl Marx, Das Kapital: Kritik der politischen Ökonomie, Erster Band [4th edn, 1890], Karl Dietz Verlag, Berlin, 2008, p. 591. ↩

27. 27. Ibid. ↩

28. 28. Marx, Capital I, ch. 23, p. 709, translation amended; Kapital I, p. 589. ↩

29. 29. Karl Marx and Fredrick Engels, The German Ideology (1845-6), in Collected Works, Volume 5, Marx and Engels: 1845-1847, Lawrence & Wishart, London, 1976, pp. 31 and 42-3. ↩

30. 30. Cf. Georg Lukács, The Ontology of Social Being 2: Marx's Basic Ontological Principles, trans. David Fernbach, Merlin Press, London, 1978, p. 5. ↩

31. 31. Marx, Capital 1, p. 724, translation amended; Kapital 1, p. 604. ↩

32. 32. Ibid., p. 723. ↩

33. 33. See Morteza Samanpour, 'How to Incorporate Colonialism into Marx's Capital', in Peter Osborne, ed., Futurethoughts, CRMEP Books, Kingston upon Thames, 2024, pp. 166-92. ↩

34. 34. Louis Althusser, On the Reproduction of Capitalism: Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses [1970/1995; 2011], trans. G.M. Goshgarian, Verso, London and New York, 2014 . ↩

35. 35. Bourdieu and Passeron's 1970 book on the French educational system was itself entitled On Reproduction, translated by Richard Nice as Reproduction in Education, Society and Culture, Sage, London, 1977. Bourdieu's introduction effectively accuses Althusser of having stolen its ideas, since Bourdieu presented parts of it in Althusser's seminars. ↩

36. 36. See, in particular, the journal Time & Society, 1992 to the present, published by Sage. ↩

37. 37. Published in English as Stavros Tombazos, Time in Marx: The Categories of Time in Marx's 'Capital', Brill, Leiden and Boston MA, 2014. ↩

38. 38. Jacques Bidet, 'Hegel, an Epistemological Support/Obstacle', in Exploring Marx's 'Capital': Philosophical. Economic and Political Dimensions (2000), trans. David Fernbach, Brill, Leiden and Boston MA, 2007, pp. 183-92. ↩

39. 39. Chantal Jaq, Transclass: A Theory of Social Non-Reproduction (2014), trans. Gregory Elliott, Verso, London and New York, 2023. ↩