AMBER HUSAIN
Amber Husain is a writer and academic, currently working on the artistic and political history of the mind-body under late capitalism. Her essays and criticism have appeared on New Left Review, LA Review of Books and the London Review of Books blog, and in Radical Philosophy, The Believer and The White Review. Described by Chris Kraus as “one of the most sweeping assessments to date of neoliberalism’s psychic toll”, her first book, Replace Me, published by Peninsula Press in November 2021, is an essay that examines how the anxiety of being replaceable has come to dominate contemporary lived experience from the workplace to our health, our politics and personal relationships.
Interview by Jan-Peter Westad
Jan-Peter Westad Replace Me opens with a description of your first permanent job as a publishing assistant. It’s equally entertaining and depressing the way you describe the uninspiring work alongside the constant reminders from “Nicole from HR” that you should be happy with your lot even though you could be replaced at any moment. Was this the experience that first got you thinking about ideas of replacement?
Amber Husain I think it was. It was made very explicit that entry-level employees were replaceable and I remember the intense frustration and bemusement of having this presented as something not only normal but inevitable. As soon as I started to think about the various ways replaceability has screwed people over through history, the more it became clear that this was more of a weapon than an innate quality. I started to think about how the ways we imagine replaceability in the present, from the profound to the completely mundane, feed in to a particular kind of late-capitalist psyche defined by fears and fantasies of replacement. There’s a prevailing ideology that makes people feel that they have to make themselves irreplaceable not only in order to survive in the workplace but also to form a sense of identity. I then started consciously noticing on just how many levels these fears of replacement operate.
JPW In the book, the body is one important level where this anxiety manifests.
AH Exactly. It seems that fear of replacement often arcs into fantasies of endless replaceability or regeneration played on by tech and wellness industries. In the book I mention the historical transplantation of animal gonads into wealthy humans, who thought the younger tissue might rejuvenate them. Today we have people queuing for teenagers’ blood, but also meal-replacement brands like Huel, which promise to make your life more efficient by removing the need to eat actual food. It interests me how a lot of dumb Silicon Valley life hacks revolve around this idea of replacing existing things with more efficient, bloodless alternatives. There’s this illusion of “progress”, which is a language tech companies like to encourage, used to justify people’s efforts to become increasingly exceptional through these kinds of products. Meanwhile, this privatised idea of progress often goes hand in hand with the idea that if everybody and everything is replaceable, then somebody else will take your place in this fixed order if you don’t perform. Which is the opposite of progress, and can act as a genuine barrier to real social change.
JPW Not only barriers. You also show how fear of being replaced could explain more negative and dangerous social movements.
AH This fear of being replaced definitely feeds some very nefarious impulses, not just of individualism but, for example, nationalism. Bodily purity becomes racial purity.
JPW You make a fascinating comparison between autoimmune diseases and anti-immigration movements: both misidentify threat (the latter via fears of being replaced), and end up retaliating in a way that backfires. Would it be fair to say we’re experiencing some of the symptoms of this problem in the UK today? The shortage of HGV drivers post-Brexit, for example.
AH Absolutely. For the vast majority of people, this kind of thinking is completely self-defeating whether on a national level or in terms of individual experience.
JPW Alongside contemporary matters, the book returns to Greek philosophy and mythology. I particularly enjoyed your use of the ship of Theseus question, which asks whether an object that has had all its parts replaced remains fundamentally the same. You make the point that while Theseus’ name survives in legend, the ship’s crew are lost to history, becoming analogous with replaceable workers of today. In its continued influence, it seems to me that classics are in a way irreplaceable in Western thought and culture. Was this something you were thinking about when writing the book?
AH I hadn’t thought of irreplaceability in quite that sense of sacred or canonical, but I think it’s a brilliant observation. I brought in Theseus’ paradox to draw out how something that’s been framed as a matter of metaphysics can be more usefully thought of as a question of politics – who or what we decide is replaceable or irreplaceable rather than which parts are philosophically “essential” to a given whole. In terms of my use of classical thought elsewhere in the book, this was a bit tongue-in-cheek. You often see the Greeks invoked as a kind of lazy way of legitimising ideas that probably shouldn’t still be around. I make some parallels between Greek mythology and the reality of the 2010s as a way of suggesting that yes, there has been a very longstanding (and pre-capitalist) relationship between power and replaceability, but this doesn’t make that relationship natural or inevitable. The Greeks were very preoccupied with fate and liked to cast a lot of grotesque things as “the will of the gods”, and in archaic literature there’s a very ordered form that arguably doubles down on this idea of a cosmic symmetry in all the gross, violent things people do to each other. So I wanted to suggest some of the ways in which we make myths in the present in a similar way (like there being no alternative to the order of replaceability constructed under capitalism). For example, replaceability may still be gendered, but under capitalism this is formalised and naturalised, not least through the division of labour.
JPW You also draw on your own individual experience throughout the book, including certain very intimate subjects. Given that your argument looks at the tension between personal exceptionalism and the erosion of self under capitalism, what was your thinking behind writing about yourself?
AH Because the book is about desire and psychic processes, there’s a sense in which each of its observations had to start with an experience in some way. It’s not that I think any of those personal experiences are particularly interesting in and of themselves. There is an economy of personal stories of which I think people are rightly wary. The impulse behind drilling into experiences and writing about them was maybe an attempt to try and confront some of the tension between my own fears and fantasies around replacement and then what I would call my political principles, or more explicitly held beliefs. It was a way of asking why am I such a compliant neoliberal subject and what can be done about this? Not that I go around asking myself that question all the time... The second part of the question, which has to go beyond the personal, is important I think. It’s one thing to try and expose the coercion and reshaping of our thoughts and desires by political forces, but it’s quite another thing to try and think really hard about the possibility of transformation. It’s even harder to think about what form that transformation could take when we are so motivated to fall in line, and be competitive and self-preserving in every aspect of our lives. I’m very conscious that with writing, which is obviously not the same as activism or organising, it’s easy to end up luxuriating in the contradictions between what you feel and how you think things should be. I’m not so into that, but there is a place for not trying too hard to conceal the personal impulse behind writing about ideas.
JPW One suggestion you give as a first step is to try “forgetting the idea of being special”. Could you explain what you mean by that?
AH I’m glad you brought that up because it is a funny phrase which could potentially be misread. It’s a phrase I borrowed from an essay by Paul B. Preciado who is using it in the context of the migrant crisis. There’s an extent to which it is a horizon rather than something we just decide to do; I’m not walking around remembering that I’m special. For me, a revolutionary consciousness or subjectivity can only be achieved through action, and it is very much a relational thing. It’s something people have to do, but not something we can just do by ourselves. That’s what I mean by forgetting the idea of being special. Then there are also times when this forgetting does become a feeling, even a desirable joyful feeling rather than a sacrifice; for example, during protests that might be huge in scale and carry this carnivalesque feeling, an atmosphere of collectivity, or in local party politics, which can be wildly unglamorous, but which in that sense offers up another productive way of not feeling special.
JPW You write that another potential response to the anxieties around replacement is to discover a way of being “where your hopes and intentions for life are identical to those of others”. Do you see any signs of this being realised in the near future?
AH I don’t know about the near future, but definitely in the future. The book is partly about the many ways in which neoliberalism has suppressed the desire for transformation or makes any transformation on a scale larger than the individual feel impossible. I don’t think there is a neoliberal consensus anymore; you could argue we are living under something worse and more authoritarian, which may be making protest literally, legally harder, but that has also maybe given way to more of a desire or need to fight back. And while the movement against this is not necessarily concentrated in party politics, that does not mean that it’s gone away. There is evidence of organisers thinking longer term and working harder to come up with new forms of direct action, which is definitely exciting.
JPW Perhaps surprisingly, love is posited as another means to overcome the fear of replaceability.
AH There was a point when my editor suggested that love might be one of the answers. And I said, “Don’t be ridiculous; it’s not love. Love is the most possessive and backwards emotion you could possibly have!” But I changed my mind as I engaged with thinkers like Alexandra Kollontai and Gillian Rose, who have tried to identify the political force of love in very interesting ways. The more I tried to nail down situations where I have felt a force of desire much stronger than the self-interested, competitive desires that we are trained to have, the more I realised they do all involve a kind of love. Love can both involve and enhance the solidarity that comes from being on the same side of a struggle. ◉